by Mary Gordon
He met Valerie O’Keefe in freshman year at Haverford; she was the roommate of his roommate’s girl. Valerie felt what every woman did about Dan: that he liked her, that he wasn’t asking questions to make a fool of her, or as filler until the moment when he could make a dive for one of her breasts. She knew that she could happily, freely read with him the poetry of Garcia Lorca, the essays of Thoreau; they held hands on the buses to Mississippi. They kissed in dark places or behind trees; once they kissed lying down together at the shore of the lake where her family owned a cottage. Val was surprised by Dan’s desire, her surprise made him ashamed. In marriage they could give each other pleasure, but Dan felt always the force of his wife holding something back, something he couldn’t name, place, or describe, but guessed was there for other women, other men.
But in the arms of Sharon Breen, whose desire for him seemed to him the same as his for her, Dan felt himself allowed into one more part of life. Another door he’d feared closed to him because of the flawed history that marked him an outsider, was now open. He felt blessed, anointed, miraculously reprieved. Astonished, he saw himself the lover of a beautiful receptive woman, who wept after orgasm, begged him to hold her, make love to her once again, whose body he understood, whom he believed when she said: “No one has made me feel like this.” His pride made him feel what he’d never felt with a woman. Fully adult. He thought he made her happy. He was right, she loved him, and, to his surprise, bloomed underneath his fattish body, its chest covered with red hair that she called gold. He wanted to give her back the pleasure he had had, to make her feel that she could open up and flower, then collect, grow still in her success, and rest. He felt he could.
He waited to see what would happen. It couldn’t go on, the daily lovemaking at six o’clock, when the office had finally emptied, saying they couldn’t leave, how could they leave each other, but then leaving, going on to the rest of their lives. Dan felt he’d tainted each part of his life that had, only a month ago, been nourishing. He would leave Sharon and go to his grandparents’, sit in the dark crowded living room, watch the news, curse Nixon with his grandmother. He stopped by his grandparents’ each day after leaving Sharon, wanting, really, to put his head on his grandmother’s lap, smell the overwashed smell of her apron, hold the hands he’d as a child played games with: this finger, and this and this.
At work Cam’s pretending not to see grew up like a wall between them. At home he hid from the flaring heat of his children’s lives and Val’s efficient managing. He saw himself a boy running from locked door to locked door. They had been right, he thought, those people who had warned against pleasure. He had followed pleasure, and it had brought him here, desperate, and once again without a home.
Both he and Sharon knew that something would happen to change things. It was almost as if the incompleteness of the situation was fatiguing; later he wondered if Sharon had done what she had done out of boredom, as someone might dive into a lake during a thunderstorm because she couldn’t endure one more second waiting for the weather to break up.
She told her husband about Dan, one night when they had been comradely, unsexual: the childhood friends that they always were to each other in some way. It seemed then that she could simply tell him, and everything could go on as it had. Only there would be no need for the burden of her deceit. He would understand that Dan gave her something she had always dreamed of but had never thought could be hers, something that had nothing to do with him: they were husband and wife; in a year or so, she would stop things with Dan and have a baby. She imagined that Jerry Breen would be momentarily saddened, then permanently ennobled: she would love him more than ever, things would be better than anyone had dreamed.
But the moment she had got the words out, she saw what she had done. Jerry let out a hissing breath, as if his body tried to make sense of a blow. He pulled the car to the side of the road and turned the engine off. He didn’t move. She told him they had to go on, go home now, she would stop with Dan if it meant this much to him, she had been horribly mistaken, could she take it back? But he wouldn’t move. She was afraid that she had killed him, so she sat in the dark with him silently, comforted that at least she could hear his breath.
He refused to sleep in the bed beside her. In the morning, he didn’t go to his job at Friendly Frost Appliances; he went to his mother. Rita Breen was Irish-born. She made corsets in the back room of her house and sold them to portly, old-fashioned women who kept up in their persons an out-of-date physical pride. She’d taken the stiffness of the product she manufactured and built her nature on it. Unbending, she kept her husband and her sons in terrified and grateful places, fixed far below the one she settled on herself. She was ashamed to see her son forced to weep, and she felt he had been violated in some tribal, public way. It seemed to her that the reparation for this should also be tribal and public. She drove him first to the parish priest, who approved the course of her action. She took him next to Sharon’s parents, who accepted what was told them in grim silence, and assured the Breens their daughter would not be sheltered in her old home once again. Then she took him to Valerie’s house in Stony Brook; she told her son the other injured party had the right to know; it would be unfair to Valerie, Rita Breen said, that one part of the puzzle, hers, should remain incomplete.
She left him at Val’s house; she didn’t get out of the car. She drove to a luncheonette and had a tuna sandwich and a cigarette. In half an hour, she came back to get him, honking the horn, refusing to come in. Jerry got in his mother’s car; his talk with Val seemed to have bucked him up.
“She said that everything would be all right,” he told his mother. “She said it would be seen to somehow, that we shouldn’t worry.”
But Rita Breen was still unsatisfied. She drove her son to the office, where Jack Morrisey, and Cam and Dan and Sharon were at work. She came up the stairs with Jerry; she said she didn’t think he was a match for them, three lawyers, and himself not even with a college education, and too forgiving in his nature: he’d be scalped.
At the sight of Sharon, sitting at the front desk, Jerry broke down in tears again. “I suppose you know why we’re here,” Rita Breen said, and of course Sharon did. She showed them into the conference room and shut the door. Her cheeks burned and she didn’t know whom to go to. Obviously, they had come to see Dan. But she felt Cam should be there. She felt that only Cam could stand up to Rita Breen.
But how could she get Cam from her office to the conference room? They’d never taken Cam into their confidence; it would be terrible to tell her now. She knocked on Dan’s door. He greeted her with a look that was so full of pleasure that for a moment she forgot why she was there. But then he saw that she was troubled, and she only had to say: “Jerry and his mother are in the conference room. I guess we have to speak to them.”
He held her for a moment and said, “It’s all right, it’s going to be all right,” but neither of them believed it. On the way to the conference room, they ran into Cam, who’d buzzed Sharon and was prepared to be annoyed that she wasn’t responding. She saw Dan’s and Sharon’s faces, which shared, perhaps because they both were so fair, a kind of transparency: when there was trouble, it showed; nothing in their features was designed to hide distress. The three of them went into Cam’s office. They explained the situation.
“All right,” she said. “All right.” She started walking. “They can’t do anything to us. They have no right to be here. Don’t worry. This is the twentieth century. And I have a lot of friends among the criminal classes. We can always have her shot.”
She led the way into the conference room. She began speaking as she walked in the door, closing it aggressively, aware that Mary Dolan had a good idea of what was going on and hoping to make her afraid to speculate further.
“Mrs. Breen,” she said. “I believe you think you have something to say.”
For a moment, Rita Breen lost her bearings. Cam sat across from her, and stared hard at her hands, having noticed tha
t Rita Breen bit her nails and hoping to make her feel found out and therefore at a disadvantage. It worked, until Jerry began to cry.
“Don’t think you can push us around,” Rita Breen said, turning her eyes to Dan and Sharon: she hadn’t yet the courage to look straight at Cam.
Jerry’s infantilism and Rita’s protectiveness made Cam impatient. “What exactly do you want to happen now?” she said.
They were silent. It was as if they hadn’t thought of it: all that had occurred to them, to Rita Breen particularly, was to make a scene. No subsequent, resulting action had crossed any of their minds.
Cam pressed her point. “Well, there are several alternatives. Would you like financial recompense, Jerry? Is that what you have in mind? Recompense for loss of rights of consortium, it’s called, there are precedents. Or you could sue for, I believe it’s called alienation of affections. Or perhaps you’d like a divorce on the grounds of adultery. Of course that would involve private detectives, you need to have direct proof. Any of that appeal to you, Jerry?” she said.
“Nobody’s talking about money,” Rita Breen said.
“No, Mrs. Breen?” said Cam, standing. “What are we talking about?”
Rita Breen seemed to remember. She stood up, across the table from Cam.
“I just think people should know what’s been done,” she said. “I just don’t think people should get away scot-free.”
Cam saw that Rita Breen was getting brave. “If we don’t make much of a fuss, everything will die down and things can go on as they did before,” Cam said.
“You’re saying you want them to get away scot-free.”
“Well, Mrs. Breen, I’ve asked you. What’s your solution?”
Cam could see inspiration spread over Rita Breen’s face. She pulled at the waistband of her cotton skirt. Cam thought she saw her tugging at her corset.
“I said, I just think everyone should know. I’m taking Jerry over now to see your grandparents.”
This was more than Dan could bear.
“You won’t do that, you can’t,” he said.
Rita Breen wore a look of triumph. “I’m going to right now. Try and stop me.”
She walked out the door, quickly, before she could be stopped. Like a comic parade, Dan, Cam, and Sharon followed her and Jerry. They said nothing as they passed Jack Morrisey and Mary Dolan, who looked as if they knew everything. On the sidewalk, Cam grabbed Rita Breen roughly by the arm.
“If you go near my grandparents’ house I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” said Rita Breen with a sour smile. “Sue?” She walked down the sidewalk, swinging her hard, rectangular pocketbook, letting it bump against her leg.
Cam’s car was parked behind the office; she, Dan, and Sharon piled into it like policemen chasing robbers. They were determined to get to Vincent and Ellen’s first.
“You stay in the car,” Cam said. “I’ll tell them.”
Vincent was not at home. As plainly as she could, Cam explained the situation to Ellen.
“Foolishness from beginning to end,” Ellen said. Then she remembered it was Dan who’d been attacked. “If that cute bitch with her hen’s-ass mouth comes over here thinking she’s about to shock me, or I’m about to stroke her poor boy’s brow, she’s stupider than even I think she is. Going to the parish priest. I’m sure she made him feel right as rain. She’ll be sorry she set her foot in this part of town when I’m through with her.”
Ellen walked to the front porch wiping her hands on her apron. She was standing on the porch when Rita Breen walked up the path.
“I know what you’re here for, Rita Breen, and you can take yourself off my property or I’ll have the police on you for harassment.”
“I didn’t want to upset you, Mrs. MacNamara. I just thought you should know the goings-on in your own family.”
“If I want the news I’ll listen to the radio. Now, get out of here, and fast, or you’ll spend the night in jail.”
Dan and Sharon watched this from the back seat of Cam’s car where they sat holding hands. It made neither of them happier, Ellen’s performance; it didn’t make them feel vindicated, or protected, or redeemed; their gratitude and pride in her made their shame unbearable. Sharon saw that Ellen kept her back straight until the Breens were out of sight. Then she saw that Ellen leaned on Cam a moment to walk into the house. She thought then that she should leave Dan forever, since what they had done had made Ellen turn a corner; they had made her old.
But Sharon and Dan didn’t separate. It would have been possible, after Ellen’s victory, that everything could have gone back nearly as it was before. Sharon would have had to find another job, but she and Dan could have stopped seeing each other; she could have gone back to Jerry; no one outside their families knew anything about it, except Jack Morrisey and Mary Dolan and Father Lynch, who would use their information for silent punishment, but keep it silent all the same. But Val wouldn’t take Dan back. Or, rather, she insisted upon giving him away. She wasn’t outraged by his infidelity, she’d been unfaithful first, and realized how little it could mean. It was that in seeing Dan choose Sharon, who was beautiful and sensual and lush, she understood how wrong she was for him. She realized that beside him she would never feel quite like a woman; he needed somebody who was, like him, slightly overfull. Sharon’s physical being supported all the ideas Val had about men and women. She didn’t blame men for it: who wouldn’t prefer Sharon’s voluptuous, dreamy abundance to her own tense, highly wrought spareness. She perceived, too, that Sharon was weaker than she; she convinced herself that Sharon needed Dan more than she did, and therefore she should give him up. The weakness of women had always been a sacred idea to her; her mother had been an invalid; Val had seen her own energy as a failure to come up to the female ideal. She saw how lovable it was, this idea of woman’s weakness. She understood what had come of it, the cluster of ideas that grew up around the picture of the vulnerable woman, the inventions it inspired: fashions to encase, enclose the soft bones that surround the emptiness at the center, sanctuaries, stories, operettas, tragedies, things she never would want given up, the rituals of adoration, of protection that were so touching and so beautiful they must be true. She saw herself a skeleton: functional, dry. She had produced two children freakishly, the goose who laid, because it had been called for, golden eggs. She could use what she was to protect these children, who, having come from Dan as well as herself, would need protection. She would not take them away from him, but she could no longer live beside him. She made him see that she wasn’t angry, but that he could no longer live beside her in the house. It was jarring, their contiguity; it was a false picture. He belonged with Sharon now, it was impossible that he could go on living in the house, beside her, as if they belonged together, as if that were right. To Dan she said only, “It’s better if you move out.”
Dan had no recourse; if she had said he had to go, he felt he should. She never told him all the reasons she had for his leaving; she grew harder, colder, every day, until both of them understood that life together was impossible.
Jerry Breen had moved out of the apartment; Sharon was there alone. It was unnatural that Dan stay away from her; they came together in sadness, in shame, but they made a shelter for each other and a place where each could live.
After a month of living in the apartment that, after all, belonged to Jerry Breen, Dan made the dispiriting search of the unhoused adulterer for an abode. He spoke to bored and surly building managers in apartment complexes horribly designed to seem opulent. I have two children, he would tell them. Maybe in the summers this could be good for them: the swimming pool. They’d seen it all, the building managers, the children in the summers, on the weekends, bored and anxious and impatient to go home.
In those days, Dan walked around like a man recovering from a gunshot wound. Sometimes he and Sharon would rouse themselves from their miasma of shame and lethargy, punctuated by tentative withholding sex, and go out to a store to shop for furniture or
linens for the new home they felt themselves forced to make. She could see how, beside Dan, she appeared desirable, enviable, even to other men; sometimes her pride in him filled her veins with joy like a transfusion of fresh blood. She could pretend that they were starting out together on a wonderful adventure, that Dan would be hers now, forever; this wonderful man would be hers. Almost, then, eating cheeseburgers in the shopping-mall luncheonettes, they could feel they had not been shot dead.
But then he’d see something—a tricycle in a store window, a horse that could be made to buck by the insertion of two nickels, a child the age of one of his—and he’d feel himself a danger and a poison, he would look at Sharon and think: Sooner or later, I will poison her too. He visited his children in the house that was no longer his. Darci at five had grown already into her real nature: ardent, tense, alert. She was vengeful, terrible, when he prepared to leave. He would drive away, seeing in his mind’s eye her sullen and destructive tantrums behind the closed door of her room. But Staci, who was only four when he left, had a notion of him as only absence, a language the others in the family spoke easily that she had never learned, a blank door she would never open, never even approach.
It went on like this for two years, the time of the subpoenas, the divorce (his friend Joe Murphy represented him, but could not hold him back from giving away too much). It made him feel slightly less monstrous to see that his wife and children lived like the others on the street, the ones with real fathers who planted grass on the mean, unhopeful lawns and in the winter shoveled the thin sidewalks. After two years, the divorce became final; Sharon’s divorce, much simpler, had come through a year before. Dan asked her to marry him, but she refused. They’ve been together for twelve years; he’s asked her to marry him many times. Each time he asks her, she thinks of Ellen, turning her tired back on Rita Breen, and she feels that she has no right to a legitimate place in the MacNamara family.