The Longings of Women

by Marge Piercy

  “Of course. Why live in Boston if you don’t eat seafood? I’ll bring a bottle of white wine.”

  She remembered that there was still the little wine cellar under the stairs, unless Nick had raided it. She had not been using it heavily. Actually, she discovered, he had taken over half the bottles, but she found a nice chardonnay and wedged it in beside the spare tire in the trunk, where it should chill on the way.

  The weather had turned. Instead of a white Christmas, it was a grey and runny one. It had rained the night before and the temperature was sitting around forty. Everywhere snowbanks wept and puddles lined the clogged gutters. It was a sloppy mild day.

  When she crossed the Sagamore Bridge, the weather cleared. Suddenly the ground was bare, although the Cape had more snow than Boston the week before. Battered grass emerged from the slush. The sky glinted a hard dark blue, busy with gulls rushing to some rendezvous or dinner. She almost turned around, wondering what in hell she was doing, but the idea of going back to the house where she felt utterly deserted would be a defeat, and what would she say to Zak? I changed my mind. I decided embarking on an affair would not be a great way to spend a day in which I was feeling sorry for myself, so I am reneging.

  Was that what she was doing? She admitted it might well be, although she refused to decide. Still, she had been thinking about him a great deal. There were no other suitors. It was a choice between something and nothing; but solitude was a reasonable choice. After all, she had not exactly been sitting around learning to knit and purl during the past months. Her life was full, even if her bed wasn’t. She was gambling, she who preferred security, the known, who had grown up despising people who took wild chances and depended on wild cards. Yet she was contemplating something way out of line.

  Then there was sexual curiosity. She had been with only two boys before Nick and never anyone since she had met him. Her entire sex life consisted of an eighteen-year-old, a nineteen-year-old and Nick. She did not want Nick to be the last man she had ever been to bed with, but she did not want to pick someone up in the age of AIDS. The likeliest possibility was at the next big conference she attended, but she had always considered conference liaisons smarmy. Besides, she was always busy networking with other women. She really should not become involved with anyone in the case, but he was not a central actor. And she was not contemplating restructuring her life. A sort of friendship with sex, was that possible? A decoration rather than a core.

  It was the kind of aberrant choice, a leap into another way of loving, that Phyllis had chosen. Zak was younger than Leila; he might well want a younger woman and another family next year or the next. It was unprofessional to become involved with him. It was also an opening, a lively possibility.

  The day looked inviting here, unlike Cambridge. She had crawled from under a soggy wet wool carpet into bright air. Even if all she did was go for a walk, it would be worth it. From Shoot Flying Hill on Route 6, she could see dark water shining, the sea vibrating ionic possibilities unknown to life in the warrens of the city—even cozy, tree-lined warrens like her neighborhood. Sexual possibilities vibrated like ions under that brilliant sky.

  She arrived at his little wandering side road in good time. Without snow, the woods looked more like October than late December, except for the angle of the sun, low and ruddy through bare branches of the oaks. He was outside, wearing a buffalo plaid jacket and swinging a maul, splitting logs. She called to him, and he strolled toward her, grinning. “Gorgeous day.”

  He took her on a walk through the pitch pines and scrub oaks toward the ocean. The path shone white even in the ruddy light. The trees grew shorter and more contorted. She thought of old Hasidim dancing. Finally they crossed a narrow asphalt road, followed it perhaps a hundred yards and then took a path through barberry and poverty grass over a dune, along a hollow and up and over to the ocean. She would never grow used to seeing it suddenly, much higher than she ever expected. It had eaten away the beach almost to the foot of the clay cliffs. “At high tide this time of year, there’s no beach left.” A path was worn into the clay until it gave way to sand and they scrambled down. The clay gouged by winter storms looked like elephant hide.

  It was chilly on the beach. She buttoned her coat to the neck and stuffed her hands in her pockets. The air electrified her. Her head tingled from the inside. Side by side, they strolled along with waves the color of iron filings lunging and crashing beside them while puffs of foam landed at their feet. “It’s strange, being back here after so long. Of course I left for college, only back summers. But everybody I grew up with, they’re all here,” he said.

  “Do they think it’s funny that you’ve returned? Are you a success or a failure to them?”

  “They don’t think in those terms. And they don’t find it odd at all that I should be back. It’s as if I finally came to my senses. Maybe I have. Nobody ever gave me oysters in L.A. In fact, I’ve been given lobsters and I can get all the fish I can cook. Basically, I’m the vet, I’m useful, I fill a slot.”

  “I grew up in Strawberry Mansion, in Philadelphia. I can’t imagine moving back. My mother left there as soon as she could afford to.”

  “I know that neighborhood. It’s Black now—”

  “It was then, too. How come you know where I lived?”

  “I studied to be a vet in Philadelphia. I liked the city, actually. I liked going to school there.” They arrived back at his house chilled. He made cocoa.

  “I haven’t had this since David was little.”

  “It does taste like childhood, doesn’t it? The better part of childhood. The worst part tastes like a handful of frozen mud.”

  The sun was dipping toward the little pond at three o’clock. She helped him bring in wood. It was getting cold fast, the air solidifying and heavier. Something looked at them from across the pond and then was gone, something large and grey about the size of a large German shepherd. “What was that?”

  “Coyote.” They finished bringing the wood in.

  “Is that the one you had in the animal hospital?”

  “Still mending. We have coyotes every place on the Cape. They’re bold. Sometimes they come right up to the house in the daytime.”

  “So at night you hear them howling?”

  “We have silent coyotes, as far as I can figure out. I’ve heard foxes bark, but I’ve never heard the coyotes make a sound. They’re like spirit dogs. You see them and then they’re gone. I found a fox with its throat torn out by one two days ago. Made me feel bad.” He was working on the fire.

  If she had not seen the animal, she wondered if she would have believed him. She was beginning to understand that Zak tended to be accurate. She suspected that unlike Nick, he might never invent or exaggerate a story to make dinner-party conversation. “Do you ever see deer?”

  “Often at dawn. But I never tell any of my old buddies, because they all hunt. They’re always asking me if I’ve seen any deer, and I always lament how they’ve disappeared since I was a kid.”

  She rubbed her hands to bring the warmth back. “I have the feeling when you talk about your childhood that, for years, you never thought about it.” She curled on the couch with a blanket wrapped around her. “Maybe you had a rap about growing up on the Cape, friend of the fisherfolk, but you didn’t think about it.”

  He was feeding logs into the fire. Finally he shut the glass doors. “It’s a great place to grow up, but you’re right, I put it out of my mind. I was the glamorous vet to the stars—anyhow, to people on the fringes of media. I was making twice what I make here and spending three times as much.” He rose gracefully and slid his arm around her. “Upstairs, the heat is on. It’s warm in my room. I could warm you up.”

  She had not expected his pitch to come so early. She had expected plenty of time after supper to decide, and David to serve as a perfect excuse for returning home, if she chose. But he was shrewd. He was not going to let her pretend that the question of whether to get involved was not hanging over them all of the t
ime like a big question mark over the head of a character in the Sunday comics. She had driven a hundred miles and two hours to be with him. There was no excuse today about Sam or Becky or Cathy. She had simply come to see him.

  For answer she gave him her hand and stood. “We’ll try it,” she said, her voice emerging so softly she was not sure he could hear her.

  He did, for he smiled suddenly, a warm surprised smile that deeply creased his cheeks. “Well, don’t say it as you might agree to try sky diving. I’m sure we can make it moderately pleasant! And afterward, you get to eat oysters.”

  “Aren’t we supposed to eat them first?”

  “First things first.” Hand in hand they climbed the stairway. It was warmer on the second floor, as he had promised. She could not entirely lose a guilty feeling. Twenty-five years had passed since she had intimate contact with a man other than Nick. She could remember her two previous lovers, but not with any vividness. They had simply vacated her mind and her imagination when Nick took hold of her.

  As they climbed the stairs and then went side by side down the hall, their arms around each other’s shoulders and their hips bumping together with a sort of chumminess, she felt huge and awkward. What was she doing? But Nick was with his twenty-five-year-old soon-to-be-wife and mother of his baby-to-be. When Nick thought of Leila, he did not think of sex; he thought of real estate prices and tuition payments to be split. This man looked at her, a large ungainly academic who had never been beautiful and was no longer young, and wanted her.

  His bedroom had probably been made from two old rooms, for set into the old flooring was obvious new work making a stripe down the center. Two dormer windows opened on the little pond, where a tall gaunt bird was stalking on the far side among the reeds, silhouetted against the tamped-down sunset, turning his head warily about, then stilting on. “Is that a heron?”

  “The great blue heron. It’s always a blessing. They have such a holy prehistoric look. I don’t even try to sneak up on him.”

  The room was red and blue, two predominantly terra-cotta Hopi rugs on the floor, plain dark blue draperies, a red-and-blue velvet patchwork spread, a heap of pillows. He obviously read in bed, for the back was a bookcase jammed too full. The bed was king-sized with the headboard-bookcase and the low carved foot of beautiful light wood.

  “Leila, are you frightened that I won’t like you, frightened that you won’t like me, or frightened that you will?” He stood near the bed holding her by the shoulders.

  “That about covers it.”

  “You could worry I have AIDS.”

  “You can see how long I’ve been away from the meat rack, the whole dating game. That thought hadn’t occurred to me yet.”

  “No, I like nice sane professional women who can talk to me afterward and don’t require much saving. Who already know how to do things. I’m tired of running a finishing school. I’m finished. I’m not a high-risk partner. I never cheated on my wife.”

  “I think that’s admirable.”

  “She didn’t.” He sighed and pulled her to him. “Enough self-pity. Let’s please each other.”

  His body was entirely different from Nick’s. It felt wrong for a moment, as if she were embracing David, because he was more David’s size. But David was taller than she was. Zak was almost exactly her height and heft. She had always enjoyed the feeling Nick gave her of being a small woman, but she found she liked too the sense that she and Zak were evenly matched, paired like horses who could pull the same weight and went at the same speed.

  Obviously he liked kissing, and even after they had moved to the bed and lain down, all they did for a long intense electric time was kiss. Her breath began to catch in her throat. His hands on her really felt her. Sex for a long time had been fraught with questions and betrayals and fears. This felt simpler. This reminded her of how it used to be for her, long ago, before David was born and before Nick took up with other women. Then sex had been a kind of conversation of the bodies, a luminous exchange of pleasure in which she had felt equal, cherished, confident, even radiant. Long ago. No matter what came of this, if anything, to experience desire again, to be simply with another body moving against her was a small but precious miracle.

  Pausing to get undressed felt awkward. She turned away from him, embarrassed at baring her body. She did not look like the nudes in the movies, bone thin and with skin taut as a film of plastic pulled over a stick. She was a strong sturdy woman who walked a lot and ate reasonably. Her skin was good, but she bulged there and dipped here. Hers was a well-used body that did not conceal its history. She wished he had waited until after supper, until full dark.

  She was still standing with her back to him, fussing with her clothes on a chair when he came up behind her and turned her to face him. “Leila, what’s wrong? Come to me.” He held her close, resting his cheek against hers. Her breath hissed as she felt skin on skin. She felt his erection against her and let out her breath slowly, almost dizzy. How had she used to breathe and make love at the same time? “You turned shy on me. Come on, let’s get into bed before we freeze.”

  Gladly she slipped under the quilt and held tight to his body. He was taut and hard-muscled. It was not that he felt youthful. He had a belly and his chest was coarse with curly hair, but his chest, his arms, his upper back were firmed by all the wood chopping, and his legs were lean from walking. She liked touching him. She liked the way the skin of his back felt to her exploring hands. She liked the way his body fit around hers.

  When he first touched her between the legs, she felt a twinge of pain, almost a burning like an infection. It was as if the excitement were too keen, too raw. But the pain passed and the excitement grew. She felt as if each of them had in mind a scenario designed to show off their skills, but that they had scarcely begun moving toward tonguing each other when impatience or massive desire took them both over. She simply pushed him into herself and they started fucking. Within a minute he slowed, probably to keep control, and they continued and continued. Her body remembered old feelings, old tricks. She felt a rising quickening in herself, as if her body enlarged to fill the entire bed, the room, the universe. Unbelievably, because she had never come the first time in bed with any of her previous three lovers (with the first, she had never come at all), she found herself feeling the lava rush of pleasure, intense, with a twinge of pain again as if her body had half forgotten how to be pleased. She did not come strongly, but she was astonished that she was sure enough of him, relaxed enough, to come at all. Then he moved up in her, drew her legs around his hips and began driving for his own climax. Her thighs ached with stretching, for she had not had sex often enough in the past six months or longer to keep the muscles limber.

  They lay side by side in contented silence as various animals jumped up to settle around them. A tail whopped on the coverlet. A cat purred near her ear. She wakened with a start in a dark room. The bedside clock read four-thirty. For a moment she did not know if that was A.M. or P.M., but then she realized that she had only dozed for fifteen minutes.

  “Ah, you’re awake,” he said, reaching out a lazy hand to pat her shoulder. “This is one time I don’t think it’s an insult to put someone to sleep. You want to share a fast shower? Then I’ll start supper.”

  He did not want her to help, but settled her in the living room with the Kronos Quartet on his CD playing sort of African music. She declined wine and had coffee. She felt cosseted, curled up in a rocking chair with the music and a book about seabirds anchoring her. The experiment seemed to have been successful. She did not feel guilty. She felt smug and clever, as if she had worked out some unanticipated way of enjoying herself. Really, she was thinking like the eighteen-year-old she had been who imagined she and her boyfriend had invented sex, unable to believe her parents had ever enjoyed this act or that all those aging fogies did it too.

  After supper she would drive back to the city, not to escape Zak but to be home for David. She was sure Zak would understand. David would be with her onl
y two more days, and then it was off to Ikuko. Oddly enough, she did not mind nearly as much right now. She was suddenly far more tranquil about almost everything in her life.

  FORTY-ONE

  Mary

  With so many of her people gone, Mary had little work. However, she had places to stay. She would be owed money from dog walking and pet feeding when her clients returned. She figured that going in and out of the house much was asking for trouble. She was content to lie low and watch TV. She even made a pot of soup, something she hardly ever got to do. She drank hot tea all day long. She took two long warm baths a day, soaking her weary achy body until it shone. She tried a little of each bubble bath, gel and oil. Damask rose was her favorite. She washed her hair, laundered her clothes, polished her shoes and cleaned her galoshes. In damp cold weather, everything got wet and never dried out, till she smelled like a garage floor.

  At times she let herself pretend she lived in the Anzio house. They had gone to Pittsburgh, where his mother lived The day after Christmas, they were due back, but the Baers were leaving. She would clean up carefully early tomorrow morning and decamp. The malls would be mobbed, and she could hang out.

  Today, Christmas, she must see Beverly. She had bought Beverly wool pants at Goodwill. The lining was torn, but Mary had spent the evening mending it. She had fixed the pockets too, so they would hold a lot. The pants were dark red and really warm. She would also bring Beverly a couple of chocolates from a party at the Millers’. She had discreetly hidden treats as she was cleaning up, including most of a plate of only slightly stale tiny sandwiches—canapés such as she had put out in her days as a Bethesda hostess. That had been her supper, although the pâté had given her indigestion. Her stomach must be more delicate these days. When she was younger, she could eat anything, no matter how fiery or spicy, and not even belch. Jim used to say, Mary has an asbestos tummy.

  Catering must be a nice business. All that food to snack on. Marry a professional man, they told her when she was growing up; they should have said, be a caterer, buy a property and pay it off fast. Never mind the rest. Get a job around food and a roof over your head that belongs to you and you alone. Now that was advice no romantic young girl would ever heed.