Away from Home

by Rona Jaffe

  When the doorbell rang she started. Neil wasn’t using his key any more; he was just like a stranger. She put on more lipstick and ran to the door, running her tongue over her front teeth to be sure there was no lipstick on them. On the way she turned out one of the lights.

  Neil looked pale. He had hardly any color at all. It was she, Margie realized, who was surprised and disappointed in him, not he with her. He glanced at her admiringly. She smiled at him, and felt a warmth and security. But there was something missing too. She felt … lonely with him. She felt there had to be a great deal of talk between them before she could get back that whole feeling she had always had when she was with him. But she had needed to talk to him; that’s why she had called him and made him come here.

  He sat on the couch and crossed his legs. He was completely and immediately at home.

  “Would you like some coffee? A drink?”

  “Some Scotch maybe. Not strong. You?”

  “I’ll do it.” She mixed the two highballs at the bar, feeling acutely Neil’s eyes on her back, the hostess in her own home, not their home but hers now alone. She made her drink stronger than his.

  They sat side by side on the couch with a space between them. Neil leaned forward to light her cigarette. She smiled at him. “I’m glad to see you,” she said.

  “I’m always glad to see you.”

  “Are you happy?”

  She saw the happiness arise in his face, just at her mention of it. She knew then that he was, and that whatever she and Neil had between them was now deep and loyal friendship, but that alone. It made what she wanted to say to him easier.

  “Yes,” he said, trying to sound tentative so as not to hurt her more.

  “I’m glad. I am. I’m glad. You deserve to be. Are you still going to marry her?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  She looked at her fingers. “Mort wants to marry me,” she said.

  “Mort Baker? Why, that … well!” Neil said. The shocked look on his face gave way to pleasure, because he genuinely liked Mort, and then to puzzlement. “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you.”

  “Well, you don’t have to ask me if you can get married.”

  “No, it’s not that. You know.”

  He took her hand gently between both of his. “I’m going to give you a lecture,” he said. She looked up at him, frightened. “No, listen,” Neil said. “I had it in mind to tell you this a while ago, but I didn’t think it was the right time. You know I love you, Margie—in our way—you know what I mean. You’re so sweet and innocent, and I never want you to become tough and, well, a slut like some married women are. They’re always looking for new affairs, new lovers. Or they go from husband to husband, always looking for something, because they’re conventional enough to get married in order to sleep with the guy but not too conventional to get divorced if it doesn’t work out all right. I want you to be happy.”

  “Tell me what to do,” Margie said. “Tell me, Neil.”

  “I never thought I’d be telling any girl this, particularly not you,” Neil said. “I’ve changed my thinking a lot in the past few years. I think both of us made a mistake. But I don’t want you to become tough. I couldn’t stand to see that. I want you to promise me something. If you love Mort and you think he’ll make you happy I want you to marry him, but first I want you to go off and live with him for a while. Promise me that.”

  “I will,” Margie said softly. She sighed and moved closer to Neil and put her head on his shoulder. She felt a great relief, as if for the first time in her life she was loved by many people with a love that demanded nothing—no perfection, no artifice, no dependency. She felt love springing out in return, out of gratitude and a sense of her own freedom. Perhaps everything would be all right for her. “I love you, Neil,” she said, without embarrassment.

  “I love you too. I wish you had been my sister.”

  “I wish so too. Maybe we can adopt each other.”

  “Do you love Mort?”

  At the mention of his name her heart began to jump and she felt odd. She drew back and smoothed her hair. “I think so,” she said thoughtfully. She wanted to say more then, she felt braver, she wanted to say yes. “It’s all been so quick. Maybe it’s only infatuation or shock.”

  “It doesn’t take long for things to work out,” Neil said.

  She smiled at him. “I know.”

  He stood up. “I have to go back now. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, late in the day.”

  “Thank you for coming over.”

  She walked beside him to the door. There they both stopped. She wanted to try the words out on her tongue while he was still there to listen to them, to force honesty out of her. She wanted to hear what the words would sound like. Perhaps then she would know if they were true. “I think I’m …” she began, and then she couldn’t say it. It wasn’t because the words were not true. It was only that if this growing excitement and longing and tenderness she was beginning to feel toward another man was real, she didn’t want to talk about it to Neil. It was so different from the way she had ever felt about him that she felt as if she had cheated him.

  In Buzios, at the tip of Cabo Frio, there is a hill where you can stand at a certain hour of twilight and see on one side of you the setting sun and on the other the rising moon. For a long time they both float high in the sky, one on either side of the hill, both the same size and shape when the moon is full, one white, one orange. Then the sun goes into the sea, and for a while the edge of the blue water is streaked with orange. At the top of this hill is a small church, painted white with blue doors. Below are the scallops of coves and beaches, some edged by a line of the square shacks of the fishermen’s families. The grass of this hill is scrubby and stiff, buffeted eternally by warm, salty winds.

  Standing silently on the top of the hill you could believe that your luck would change. All your life you were told—and you believed—that you could not have the sun and the moon both; you had to choose. Yet here they were, both, equal. Not one rising and the other quickly disappearing but hovering together motionless and suspended, larger and brighter and more beautiful than you ever imagined either could be. In the magic and silence of this place you feel sure that everything will be different for you from now on.

  The sun goes into the sea, but it is not very dark because of the moonlight. And then you think, No, I was wrong too; you can’t have either one. Not to keep, not to hold, not even to touch. And if you could take hold of them, what would you do with them? They are thoughts to make you shiver, because you always want too much, you always pretend, and you really know all the time that it isn’t your luck that has to change but your dreams.

  Margie Davidow stood at the top of the hill with Mort Baker and looked at the sky and the sea. Below on the beach the fishermen were boiling their nets. The nets were very large and brown, the color of old kelp. The smoke from the troughs rose up into the branches of a big sea grape tree that arched above them. In the two troughs was some sort of brownish dye to keep the nets from rotting and tearing apart in the sea. When the sun went down all Margie could see was the dim smoke rising and the cool, silvery curve of the sand. The fishermen were singing. Mort’s car parked there looked anachronistic. It was not cold but she shivered.

  Next to the ocean or a lake she always felt closer to the meaning of life. It was simply that the ocean overwhelmed her; it was so much nature, so old, and so strong. She wondered if people who had not been brought up in a city like New York felt this way. The sound of the water touching the beach went on and on, very lightly and quietly. The sky seemed immeasurable and she felt cold. Her own life seemed so small to her at this moment, and yet she knew at the same time that she was with someone who cared very much what she would do within the next days because it might mean to him a change in the pattern of his entire future. Her life might be small and virtually meaningless when she stood here overlooking the ocean and thinking about the world, bu
t she had learned in the past weeks the feelings of loneliness and need, and of pain that could neither be explained nor shared away. Whatever happened to her was important; she could not escape that by philosophy or stoicism or by trying not to think about it at all. Her destiny seemed so simple: to love. To give love; not even so much to receive it, but to be able to give it freely when it was needed. It was the destiny and meaning of a woman—so simple, and yet for her so fragile and so perilously almost out of reach.

  In the night winds that rushed all about her on this hill her private suffering, the ache of loneliness in her throat, the fear that made her heart begin to pound almost audibly, seemed washed away so that although they were not gone they were less. The pull of the wind and the sounds of the sea and the fishermen’s voices seemed more important because they were eternal. And what of me? Margie thought. To live dully the endless days without loving, and finally curl up and die with all that ungiven love still withheld and dying too?

  The week before she had come here she had gone to the beach every morning with Mort and to dinner with him every night. Neither one had touched the other, not even with a tentative gesture. He seemed so easy about it that it was almost like the old days when she and he and Neil were all together. And then she began to feel the slow, straining pull toward him, the longing that seemed not something new but mysteriously, something experienced before and forgotten. And then the night they had made their plans to leave for Cabo Frio the next morning, Margie had suddenly remembered what it was. She was almost astonished at the sly duplicity of her own feelings that had deceived herself. Suddenly free, suddenly about to be alone with him and far away from Rio and all their friends, she remembered. This was the feeling she had always struggled with and hidden from herself when she was with Mort and he had been living in their apartment. She was free to touch him now, to do anything—but free? The word was ironic, for her, and she did nothing. She was still the complex creature of desire and ignorance, and so she waited for the morning and the trip to Cabo Frio, and gave him no sign, and she wondered what would become of her.

  She knew only one thing. She was beyond the stage of coming away from this emotion fresh and untouched; she was committed. If they left each other now, if their week at Buzios failed, if they could not reach each other, it would leave a wound that would be a long time healing. He had already reached her. There was no turning back, but she wondered if she could go ahead to an ending where they both were free to love.

  Then, early that morning she and Mort had driven to the ferry that took them from Rio to Niteroi across the bay. She stood by the rail and watched Rio growing smaller, white buildings in a haze of heat. Seagulls flew above the choppy water and there were things floating: rolls from a picnic, white and bloated from the water like tiny dead bodies. The cars on the ferry were steaming hot in the sun. Mort bought Paulista grapes from a man who had two wooden crates of them on the ferry and they ate the grapes standing side by side on the prow and tossing the seeds into the wind. From Niteroi they drove the car to Cabo Frio and then to Buzios, arriving in the afternoon. Even before they came to the beach house, while they were still driving along miles of endless tan dirt roads where cows wandered in front of their car and the foliage was low and dusty, Margie felt as if they had come to the end of the world.

  Mort’s friend’s house was a white stucco box set in the middle of a sand dune. You could see the water from all its windows, and when you opened the gate beyond its tiny sand-choked garden you had to run only a few feet down to the edge of the surf. The wind banged all the shutters open and closed. Some flagstones had been set into the sand in the garden, making a terrace. There were white wooden chairs and a table with a red umbrella, seashells for ashtrays, and some old, curling society magazines weighted down by stones so they would not blow off the table. The house had a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and two bedrooms. One of the bedrooms had a double bed.

  He had been right; it was a romantic place. The nearest house was a fisherman’s shack far down at the other end of the beach. There was a cove with gray rocks for sunning yourself. It was three o’clock in the afternoon when they arrived, and hot. Mort put her suitcase in the bedroom with the double bed and dropped his suitcase on the floor of the bathroom. All he had brought with him was a dark-blue plastic Varig airlines bag. It was filled with bathing suits, men’s toilet articles, books and magazines. As soon as she had been in the house five minutes Margie realized that, as she always did when she went to the beach, she had brought too many clothes.

  The door to her (their?) bedroom had an old-fashioned hook and catch. She locked it and put on her bathing suit very quickly, hoping that she would be all dressed and the door opened again before Mort had an opportunity to discover she had locked it. She felt very self-conscious and foolish for being so shy, and her hands shook so much she had trouble tying the knot of her bra.

  They swam in the water that was cool but not too cold, and lay on the gray rocks in the sun. A Portuguese fisherman came by once in an old canoe with a little naked boy. The little boy jumped into the water from the canoe and paddled around like a puppy, his black hair streaming into his eyes.

  “You never see the fishermen’s wives or daughters swimming here,” Mort said. “They aren’t allowed to wear bathing suits; it’s supposed to be shocking. But the children wear nothing.”

  “You mean the girls can’t go swimming when they grow up?”

  “Some do now. The city people came here and changed everything. A few years ago they would have been shocked to see you in what you have on. But by now they’re getting used to it.”

  “How awful to live on the edge of the sea all your life and not to be able to enjoy it,” Margie said.

  “The water doesn’t mean the same thing to them that it does to us. It’s just the places where they work.”

  She had found a smooth rock, just long enough for her to lie on it, and she was lying on her back in the warm sun. She closed her eyes. So here we are, she thought, and the sunlight was not hot enough. That morning before they left a cablegram had arrived from her mother, who had just received her air-mail letter about separating from Neil.

  YOU OLD ENOUGH MANAGE OWN LIFE, the cable said, at a dollar a word. DADDY AND I SORROWFUL BUT REALIZE MANY DETAILS UNWRITTEN. OLD SAYING EVERYTHING WORKS OUT FOR BEST. HURRY HOME. WE LOVE YOU. MOTHER.

  The cable was folded in her purse. It had made her feel homesick, but through all the rush of memories and pictures of her parents, her childhood home, the two people who would accept her back again and love her because she was their daughter, she did not want to go home. She wanted to be here. And here she was. It frightened her. Here she was, of her own choice, and it was her own gamble. She could imagine her mother’s horror, her father’s fury. Some men think that any divorced woman is fair prey, she remembered her mother saying indignantly about someone else, a forty-year-old woman, hardly an innocent child. Margie opened her eyes and glanced at Mort beside her on another rock, stretched out in the sun, his eyes closed, almost asleep. Fair prey? She felt such a wave of affection and attraction for him that she reached out and touched his bare chest. He opened his eyes immediately.

  “You’re a lovely man,” Margie said.

  But when they came back from the beach she took a shower with the bathroom door locked and dressed in the bathroom. He had warned her that there was a shortage of water, and of course no hot water at all, so she could not stand under the shower for long. The shower water was pleasantly cool and she rubbed all the sand off with soap quickly and rinsed the salt water out of her bathing suit. Even though during water shortages all water had to be brought from the town in huge metal tanks, there was a shiny new white porcelain bidet and a large white sink beside the stall shower. It was like a garden made of plastic flowers.

  The beach house came supplied with an Indian servant, who slept somewhere behind the house in a garagelike shack and arrived at mealtimes to cook and serve. He was a thin, dark little man wit
h a beaked nose and a very sweet look in his eyes. Mort had brought the food from Rio. There was filet of beef, feijao and rice, squares of boiled pumpkin with melted butter, salad, chilled Spanish wine, cold Brazilian beer, crackers with three kinds of cheese, tiny cups of strong black coffee, and brandy. There was too much wind to eat outdoors on the terrace so they ate in the living room beside the huge glass sliding doors that looked out over the beach and sea. It was still light.

  “I want to take you to see something before the sun sets,” Mort told her, so after they ate nearly all of the food and drank all of the wine and beer, they took the bottle of brandy in the car with them and drove to the place where there was the hill with the church on it and you could see the sun set and the moon rise at the same time.

  So here we are, Margie thought again, and she still could hardly believe it. On the hill, in the moonlight, she shivered. The fishermen’s voices were soft and rough, like the smoke that lifted softly into the leaves of the dark tree. She could no longer see the tree, but she saw how the smoke fanned out and separated into the blue-black sky. There were thousands of low, glittering stars. She could see the shape of the constellations but she did not know where one left off and the other began.

  “There’s the Southern Cross,” Mort said. “You can’t see it in the States.”

  “Where?”

  “There, where I’m pointing. See the big star? And the next one?”

  “I see it!” She felt excited, like a child seeing the mystery of the heavens for the first time. She had seen the stars and tried to trace the shapes they made many times before, at camp, on her honeymoon in St. Thomas, but they had never seemed so near or so brilliant. She could even see the little far ones, the pinpoint ones, scattered in between the large ones in hundreds of thousands. “You can’t ever see the Southern Cross in America? Never?”