A Good Woman

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘In a fight?’

  ‘No. What makes you think that? I try not to have fights.’

  ‘Well, how then?’

  ‘Told you. At work.’

  ‘In the office?’

  He looks at me as if I have just landed from another planet.

  ‘On the construction site. A pile of breeze blocks.’ He makes a careening motion.

  ‘I didn’t know you’d started.’

  ‘Started what?’

  ‘The building work. You should have waited. We would have had an inauguration ceremony. Ceremonies are important.’ Now that I know he hasn’t been left for dead on an empty lot, I am angry again.

  ‘What’re you talking about? I’m working on a construction site downtown. How do you think I make my living? Going to parties? Started again three weeks ago. Ran out of money and had to start again.’

  Now he is the one who is angry and I am ashamed, aghast at my own blindness.

  ‘Those damn suits you told me I needed didn’t help.’

  ‘You should’ve said.’ I hand him a drink.

  We look at each other for a moment and suddenly he starts to laugh. ‘But I’m really sorry about last night. Carmen told me your message was furious. I’ll write our hostess a note of apology. You can dictate it.’

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Only when I move.’

  ‘So you can’t write.’

  ‘Wrong hand. But I can’t work for another few weeks. So I’m all yours.’

  ‘Do you need money?’

  ‘Accident insurance.’ He is suddenly stiff.

  ‘What about dinner then?’

  He smiles softly. ‘Now that sounds tempting.’

  ‘With Tom. We’re meeting in an hour.’

  His face closes. ‘No, just remembered. Can’t really cut… Got to get back.’

  I call Tom and cancel.

  Three weeks later, after much persuasion, I persuade Sandro to allow a photo to be taken of him on the construction site and to be interviewed. The feature comes out under the headline: Construction Worker - Architect of Dreams.

  In April we hold a fundraising party. On the strength of the guest list, we convince a hotel to give us a banqueting room and a less than elaborate buffet. The walls are covered with photographs of the project. The mayor, after a little stringpulling by Harold Peele, agrees to speak and is flanked by celebrities. Carmen talks about the training programme. Sandro gives the closing address. He is good, very good and in his bow tie and dinner-jacket, he looks as luminous as his words. I watch the guests while he speaks and I have that little zing of adrenalin which tells me it’s going to work. We already have our first two promises and once they have voiced their donations, others begin to follow. Jose and Valeria stand by the target board and with only a little self-conscious drama place green stick-on exclamation marks next to the rising hundreds as the pledges are made. Cameras flash, applause sounds and mounts, and by the end of the evening we have raised sufficient funds for the first chunk of the scheme. Sandro voicing thanks, to our firm and myself, not least, faithfully promises that each of the contributors will have their names etched into the wall of the building.

  We are ecstatic. In the emptying room, Steve hugs me, hugs Sandro and Carmen and Valeria and José. I hug everyone, including our five model youths who are here in their green suits. But when I hug Sandro, something odd happens. Maybe it’s because he holds me too close. Maybe it’s because my dress leaves my back bare. Maybe it’s just the general excitement, but we don’t quite let go in time and a little circle of silence forms around us as the others watch and we still can’t quite let go.

  Sandro takes me home. He doesn’t speak. He grips my hand tightly at every red light. It is I who burst into sporadic babble, tell him how wonderful he was, how wonderful everyone was, how he must make sure to keep a photographic record of the progress of trainee labour and building work, how the campaign has to be kept on the boil, how in another eight months another fundraising drive will have to be organised. I am breathless with my babble and the pressure of his hand and the something which has lodged itself between us. When I sneak a look at his profile, it is remote. Remote in beauty, I think, and chatter some more to cover the remoteness.

  When the door of the loft closes behind us and he looks at me for the first time since we left the crowds, I, too, grow silent. He pulls me towards him and kisses me. It is a deep, hungry kiss and though I am not aware of much else, I am aware that it has waited a long time in both of us and that before it is over we are both all but undressed and he is gazing at me from those soft dark eyes.

  We never make it up the rickety curved staircase to the bedroom that first time. We fall instead onto the blue sofa and only at the last moment do I drag up from somewhere the presence of mind to reach into my bag for a condom. He doesn’t seem altogether pleased, but he puts it on himself, won’t let me touch him there. He has no tricks, Sandro, but when he is in me, I moan with the pleasure of him. He is all strength and depth and a slow, slow dance.

  Later, in bed, he tells me he loves me and I smile and curl into him and stroke the tawny smoothness of his skin and tell him he doesn’t need to say that. ‘But it’s true,’ he tells me solemnly. ‘I love you.’ I am still smiling when I wake up to streaked daylight and find him gone. I know he can’t wait to get to the project, to tell everyone, to begin. I find myself whistling a silly tune as I dress. I feel strangely young again and I have a mad whim to go up to East Harlem and see him, touch his lips with my fingers.

  At noon, he rings me at the office and asks me, a little shyly, if he can see me later, about nine, since there is so much to do. ‘I’ll fix some dinner,’ I suggest, but when he arrives, dinner is forgotten. Sometime in that long night, he murmurs, ‘You’ve made me Maria. Recreated me. Like a goddess.’

  I am not good at gravity. I joke instead, tell him I don’t require worship, but it comes to me over this and subsequent nights that Sandro’s love-making is a kind of worship.

  When I make an impromptu visit to the site, some days later, it is I who feel worshipful. The street is abuzz with noise and activity. Dust and rubble may be everywhere but it feels purposeful. Scaffolding has gone up; cement mixers are turning; youths in green overalls are everywhere. A large placard announces the Project. From somewhere above me, I think I hear Sandro’s voice and I look up to see him perched on the roof. I wave, blow him a kiss. Perhaps for the first time in my life, I have the sense that I have contributed to something real.

  I do not see Sandro every day. We are both working flat out, he, to make maximum use of the good weather, I, to catch up on what was left to one side during the frantic last month of the Hundreds campaign. But imperceptibly, his clothes move into the loft and at one point, with only a fractional hesitation, I give him a key. It makes things easier when I have to be out late of an evening. Though Sandro accompanies me often enough, particularly since I have made it clear to him that he needs to cement the contacts he has already established as well as make new ones. Sometimes, at these gatherings, when I look across the room and see Sandro making profligate use of his charms, I have to rush over to him and touch him to make sure he isn’t some fantasy I have dreamt up to assuage both desire and vanity.

  One afternoon in July when my part of New York has begun to close down, Sandro rings to ask whether I’d like to meet him at the Project Office after hours. When I get there, he is alone and we fall into each others arms.

  ‘You know, Maria,’ he murmurs. ‘I’ve wanted to give you something for a long time. I’m so grateful to you. For everything. But I’m always so broke. I thought… Maybe… Come.’ He takes my hand and leads me round to the back of the mission, down some steps into a kind of storage room. But what I see in the half-light are not old tables and heaped chair, though there is a campbed made-up in a corner. Instead I am surrounded by desultory figures hewn out of stone, roughly chiselled - men, women, at prayer, angels with stumpy wings, like funereal masonry but unfi
nished, the shapes still trapped in stone. Despite myself, I shiver.

  ‘Natural air-conditioning down here,’ Sandro wraps his arm round me. ‘What d’you think? This is the one I imagined in the loft.’ He points to a muscular kneeling man, arms lifted skyward, but pulled down by the weight of the outcrops at his base. ‘Then, after I met you, I did that one.’ He gestures towards one of the angels I have already glimpsed. There is a grace about the figure, it’s half open cloak, but its wings are too heavy for flight and I have a vision of its toppling under their weight. It is only after a moment that I realise the figure is meant to be me, but I have been silent for too long and now Sandro says, his voice grim, ‘You don’t like them.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ I squeeze his hand. ‘It’s just a lot to take in. They’re so strong. You know what it’s like with art,’ I pause let the word hang, begin to ply him with questions about the statuary. I learn in the course of much that is less interesting, that Sandro’s father was a stonemason, that he died when Sandro was thirteen, that Sandro inherited his tools. At the end of this, I say to Sandro that I would like the male figure very much.

  ‘You’re right,’ he answers a little despondently, ‘the one of you doesn’t really work.’

  As I fall asleep in the heat of that evening, my hand on Sandro’s chest, it occurs to me I know next to nothing about him. Yes, I know oodles about the project. Yes, I know that Sandro is uncomfortable about the fact that I earn so much more money than he does and he prefers to eat in so that he can bring groceries up to the loft. Yes, I know that he comes from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks. Yes, I know his body intimately and perhaps through that a little of his being. And now I know about his father. But about Sandro’s life itself, I know very little. I am not unhappy about this, I reflect. I look forward to the surprises.

  Later that week I debate with Sandro about the benefits of escaping from New York heat to the Cape for a brief and much needed holiday. He can’t leave and he is glum at the prospect of my going.

  ‘Look,’ he says suddenly shy, ‘I’ve had this idea. I thought you might write a book. A handbook. About PR. With all the millions of details. For people like us. Use the Project as an example. It wouldn’t harm us and it would help hundreds of other groups. And you could start now, during the quiet season.’

  I gaze at Sandro and know that if he touches me I won’t go anywhere and that he doesn’t need this idea to persuade me. I also think the idea is in itself an interesting one.

  ‘I could write in a nice cool hotel room overlooking the sea,’ I tease him.

  ‘But you won’t have me there to advise you.’ Sandro is serious, doesn’t take well to teasing. ‘It’s got to be clear and simple.’ He puts his arms around me, lifts me out of the sofa. ‘Stay, Maria. Please.’

  I stay. I map out a possible book and start to write a few brief sample chapters. I test them on Sandro, who true to his word, puts questions, clarifies. I enjoy the process. I work everyday, often from home. Friends ring occasionally, Grant amongst them to check on my state of mind, but mostly I write. And shop for groceries to make dinner for Sandro. He comes almost every night, only sometimes ringing to say he’s so tired, he isn’t human, or he really has to spend the evening with the team. I don’t mind. I’m happy. It comes to me that this is what marriage must be like when it’s good. And then it comes to me that if I have thought that, then maybe the time which friends have always warned me about has come too, and after all I am ready to settle down. Or more simply, I have found the right partner. Like a sentimental seventeen-year old I never was, I start to daydream a mingled future for Sandro and me.

  Come September and the rhythms change. I am busy again, but I try to keep some evenings for the book, which Steve, too, now tells me, is not only a brilliant idea, but will help the Agency. He reads through the chunk I have written, zaps up my prose and shows a section to a few publishers. By the end of the month, I have a not insubstantial contract. I offer half the advance to Sandro who turns away from me as if I had hit him.

  ‘But it was your idea. And the idea is half the labour,’ I plead with him.

  ‘Put it towards my share of the rent.’

  ‘What? For the next five years.’

  ‘If that’s what it is.’

  There is something bothering Sandro, but I don’t know what it is and he won’t tell me. Only at the end of the month does he confess to me that three of his initial trainees ran off with an expensive load of materials and tools at the end of August, that he has had to replace them with outside labour, that the Project budget is askew. I urge him to swallow his pride and go and talk to the consultant architects and devise ways of putting things back on course. And there must be insurance. Sandro, I have begun to realise, is not particularly good with money. Probably his mother didn’t have him sit with her from a young age over the books like mine did. In fact, I know she didn’t. I have learned after much resourceful questioning that Sandro’s mother died a year after his father and that his elder brother overdosed not long after. It was not a model middle-class family. But I value Sandro’s achievements all the more for that, as I never hesitate to tell him.

  In November, just before I have to leave for London on a business trip, I hand over the completed book to Steve for editing. Steve takes us out to celebrate in style and I don’t know whether it is Steve’s presence, or the champagne, but we are all as buoyant as we were on the night of the fundraising dinner. Later, too, Sandro’s love-making is as hungry and intense as it was on that first night.

  ‘I should leave more often,’ I smile at him, just as he says, ‘Wish you weren’t going…’ When he looks at me like that, I don’t want to leave him either.

  When I come back from London he has filled the loft with flowers and he holds me very tight. Remarkably, too, he has cooked dinner for us, set the table with candles, a white cloth.

  ‘I love celebrations,’ I say as I hand him the stacks of presents I have bought.

  ‘I wanted this to be a special evening,’ he murmurs, smooths my hair. It is then that I notice the odd light in his eyes.

  ‘Is everything alright, Sandro?’

  He takes my hand. ‘I wanted to ask you to marry me tonight.’

  ‘Is that a question?’ My stomach performs a happy somersault.

  ‘But she won’t let me. She won’t give me a divorce.’ He is looking above my head.

  I stare at him. ‘Who won’t let you?’

  ‘She won’t. My wife.’ He groans, buries his face in his hands.

  I gaze at those large hands I know so well in incomprehension. I see grooves, roughened knuckles, the pallor of scrubbed nails. My voice comes out in a different octave. ‘Are you telling me that all this time you’ve been married Sandro? That you’ve hidden it for over a year?’

  I scrape my chair back from the table, topple a wineglass in the process.

  ‘It’s not how you think, Maria.’ He is behind me. ‘I hardly talk to her anymore. She’s a Catholic. She won’t divorce. I only go because of Juanito.’

  His hand falls on my shoulder, restraining me and I turn round to face him. ‘Juanito? There’s a child, too?’ I feel I am choking. I don’t know why I feel like this. Duplicity is hardly new to me. Yet I feel it. Sandro has lulled me into different hopes.

  ‘A boy. He’s almost four.’ He looks at me miserably. ‘He loves me. I have to go there. See him.’

  ‘And you never told me.’

  ‘I thought if I told you, you would stop seeing me… I thought I could tell you once I was divorcing, could marry you.

  I am sitting on the sofa now and he buries his face in my lap. He is weeping. Silent sobs which make his shoulders heave. I don’t know how long he weeps, how long we sit there but suddenly I find I am stroking his hair and my lips are moving. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Yet it does matter. The lie sustained over all those months matters. I can taste it when I wake up in the mornings. It tastes bitte
r, foul, treacherous, like rotten fruit. Made more rotten by the knowledge that the notion of marriage had ripened in my mind, as perfect and fragile on its branch as an early cluster of golden pears.

  Nonetheless I tell myself that I have known for months about Sandro’s pride and deep secrecy, and this is simply another in the series of instances. And though I no longer trust him altogether, his pleading, his evident misery, his need, his fear of losing me work on me as much as the ignorant chemistry of our bodies. I can neither chastise him, nor send him away, and I half believe him when he tells me his wife will eventually change her mind.

  Sometimes, in those dark early winter weeks, when I wake in the night alone, I find I am crying. With Sandro, I am jaunty, lighter than ever. ‘Don’t worry, I tell him. I don’t care about marriage. Never have.’ And then I ply him with questions about the Project, which is going well again, everything almost on target, a new tough female accountant in place, a foreman so good Sandro almost feels redundant.

  One night in bed, it cannot be long after my return, I extract the story of Sandro’s marriage from him. He stares at the ceiling as he tells me and it comes in painful fits and starts, but it is a predictable enough story of teenage sweethearts and shotgun marriage followed by miscarriage.

  ‘Then, after Juanito came…’ Sandro tells the ceiling, but cannot manage even to tell it and buries his face in the pillow.

  ‘What?’ I prod him softly.

  ‘She didn’t want me anymore.’ Sandro’s voice is strangled.

  ‘It’s not unusual.’ I am matter-of-fact. ‘So you don’t sleep together?’

  ‘Not after you and I…’ He grips my arm. There is a wild look in the face he turns on me.

  ‘Well that’s big of you,’ I laugh. Perhaps I shouldn’t have laughed.

  Though it goes on, there is a difference in our love-making in those weeks. The passion is still there, but there is a savagery to it, an edge of desperation which cuts and scars. I don’t think I am altogether aware of it at first. What I am aware of is the change in Sandro when we go out. And we go out a lot that month. It is the festive season and the invitations come as fast and furious as Sandro’s moods. He suddenly turns silent at parties, stands at the edge of a group and watches me with stormy eyes. I can feel him following my every gesture, my every turn and smile with a malign vigilance. He begins to criticize my clothes, tells me a decolletage is too low or a skirt too tight. When we come home, he asks me questions about the men I have spoken to, laughed with; he grills me about whom I have slept with in the past, maybe the present.