All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

Why could not God arrange it so that desire dries up after we’ve raised our children? Why does he burden us with these gross emotions?

  Superstitiously she considered that possibility. Might God punish her by depriving her of all passion? And all power to excite passion in men?

  Not likely. So she didn’t have to worry about her request being granted. Hence she did not formally withdraw it.

  And why doesn’t he make men less crude in their approach to affection? Madame, may I take off your clothes and ogle and make sport of you? Only an hour or two of my precious time? Tonight please. At your apartment. Wear lace.

  Ugh!

  The response in the back of her brain which had almost exploded as an instinctive reply, though of course she could never say it, was, “I would love to be standing here with ‘a lot less clothes on’ and be admired by your appreciative and kindly eyes. Thank you for the wonderful compliment. But this is not the place to talk about such a possibility, is it? Supper? Well, in a public place where I might be reasonably safe”—a mildly provocative smile—“yes, I would enjoy that.” Sophisticated, unthreatened, grateful. The kind of reply of which she might have been capable if she had become a slightly different person long ago—a poised and experienced woman of the world.

  Classy, responsive, but still noncommittal.

  It would drive the poor dear man mad with longing, which is just what he doesn’t need now. And I don’t need it either.

  Still, I almost said it. And I would have turned a corner down a new street that I’ve never walked before. Irrevocably turned that corner.

  I will never do that. Never.

  It is so cold. Ought we not store up all the precious moments of warmth that we can give and receive? If the universe is cold, and I often think it is these days, then what harm can the warmth do? And if the universe is a blast furnace of love, as that poor young priest says it is, then our warmth would merge with it …

  Well, that’s neither here nor there. I turned down a proposition and there’ll be no more from Dan Carlin. I am indeed a virtuous widow. I humiliated him. Rid myself permanently of him.

  She dried her eyes, redid her makeup, drew a deep breath, and prepared to return to her desk. I’m glad, she thought, that I’m having lunch with Deirdre. I won’t tell her what happened of course, but she’s always fun.

  That turbulent daughter-in-law of mine who is my only confidante.

  Did he say “elegant”? No, of course not. That was my imagination. No one thinks I’m elegant, fully dressed or not.

  Still impressed with her own virtue, she did not peek into the mirror to consider the possibility that a man might rate her as “elegant.”

  He was not in the waiting room. Either in Nick’s office or gone. I hope I don’t have to face him again today.

  As she pored over the computer sheets and answered an occasional phone call—with her brightest and happiest voice—she confessed contritely to herself that she had hurt the poor man badly. He had not meant to be insulting or chauvinist. He had stumbled into saying the wrong thing. Or at least saying the right thing the wrong way. Her anger had been directed at herself for permitting her head to be turned by a few smutty words. So she had punished him. Well, that was his own fault for saying what he did. And she could not apologize without making matters worse. That was that.

  She left for lunch with Deirdre promptly at twelve, muttering a prayer of gratitude that she had escaped before he emerged from Nick’s office.

  Deirdre was already at the table. She watched her mother-in-law cross the dining room, with the pug nose in her pert, mobile little face turned up even higher than normal.

  Why is everyone critically appraising me today?

  “Wow!” Deirdre kissed her. “The heads are really swiveling today when Peggy Walsh walks in!”

  “Deirdre!” she said reprovingly.

  “What happened to make you look so satisfied with yourself? Some rich, handsome geek proposition you?”

  “I really don’t think that’s an appropriate comment,” she said stiffly, knowing that whatever the contentious little brown-haired, brown-eyed child’s virtues were, they did not include restraint in her spontaneous remarks.

  “Come on, Mom, you’ve always been a classy broad. And now that you’re working out and looking radiant like you do today, you leave a trail of sexual allure wherever you walk. Like a mare in heat. All the men and half the women in this place turned to watch you. And it’s not just that blue knit dress, though it helps. Not bad for an old gal. Not at all.”

  “I’m not a sex object, Deirdre.” She focused her attention on the menu. I was offered a little warmth today and instead I chose the cold. I listened to words and missed the meaning. I was asked for a slice of bread and I gave a stone. I chose the old pain rather than run a new risk. Not that much of a risk either. Not really. Foolish old bitch. Slammed the door shut on the poor man. Permanently.

  “Hell you’re not.”

  “That part of my life is over, dear. I don’t want to discuss it.”

  “If God wanted to pull you out of the sex game”—Deirdre raised her hands like a street peddler negotiating over two pounds of apples—“He wouldn’t have given you such pretty boobs.” She rolled her eyes appreciatively. “To say nothing of the rest of you.”

  Deirdre and Rick had become religious as the result of some program in their parish. The young woman’s approach to the God she had discovered or rediscovered was unique, to say the least. Her God seemed to have sex on the mind a lot of the time, if not all the time. (An observation which, when repeated with protest, had caused the young priest at the Cathedral considerable amusement.)

  “Deirdre! Please! That’s altogether too personal!”

  “Come on, Mom.” It was practically impossible to offend the girl. “You want me to say you don’t have a cute figure? What’s the matter with your generation anyway? We’re made with bodies, right? And hormones? Don’t tell me that you don’t have any. Why fight it? If you don’t like the way you’re put together, complain to God, not that it will do you any good. Personally, I’m glad He gave me a body. I’d be even gladder if mine was as outstanding as yours—and you not taking care of it much until now—but I’ll make do with what I have.”

  “I don’t think we should talk about such things.” Dear God, can I possibly be that much of a prig—not that it’s going to stop her. Or even slow her down.

  “I should be so lucky when I’m an old dame.” A tiny hand reached across the table and squeezed Peggy’s. “No bullshit, Mom; you’re a threat to traffic these days. You must drive all those male lawyers and clients out of their frigging minds. Send them up the walls of their offices with great fantasies. The old biological imperative or whatever. What’s Peggy like with her clothes off? Is she any good in bed? Wouldn’t it be fun to find out?”

  “Deirdre!”

  “Nothing wrong with thinking it”—the wise old child winked, utterly untroubled by her mother-in-law’s dismay—“so long as they don’t mess around.”

  “Most women my age—”

  “You’re not”—Deirdre waved her hand—“most women your age. Hey, you don’t have to do anything with it; that’s up to you. But, face it, you’re a knockout and you’re going to attract men. Nothing bad about that.”

  “I didn’t use to be—”

  “You are now.” She jabbed her index finger at Peggy. “And don’t try to pretend you’re not. Men daydream about you in bed with them, even younger men. Real young men, my age.” She beamed mischievously. “Can’t blame them. Luscious old broad. If I were a man”—she considered her mother-in-law critically—“I think I’d want you in my bed.”

  Sometimes Peggy suspected that her daughter-in-law’s apparently spontaneous outbursts were carefully prepared homilies.

  “Thanks, darling.” Her face was on fire. “That’s a very kind, if rather, uh, clinical compliment.”

  “Clinical, shit. That’s the way men think, God bless ’em for it, should yo
u ask me, which I know you didn’t. If things had to wait till we got around to being stirred up, it would take a hell of a long time and then where would we be? A lot less fun and games, let me tell you. But like I say, I should be so lucky when I’m an old dame. The thing is”—good little terrier that she was, Deirdre never let a bone out of her mouth—“it’s not just working out, though that starts the juices flowing again, it’s that you’re beginning to let yourself be happy. That makes you devastating.”

  “You mean shedding ten pounds.”

  They laughed together and relaxed.

  “So I’m proud of you.”

  “The loss never goes away and maybe the grief doesn’t either, but you have to be happy for others and for yourself.”

  “That’s what life’s about.”

  “I knew that all along. It took time to work it out.”

  “Classy old dame.” A touch of fingers this time. “Naw, that’s not the right word. Let me see, graceful? Well, yeah, but not quite right. I got it! Elegant! Today, Mom, you look elegant. And sexy as hell.”

  “Thank you, dear … now tell me how are my son and grandchildren.”

  “Yeah, they’re great as always. The guy improves with time, you know? Great raw material. Needs a little polish now and then. Fact is we had a big fight last night. His fault this time, so help me, a hundred percent … well, maybe sixty-five. Don’t look nervous, Mom, it’ll be fine tonight, better than ever.”

  “I do admire how you two handle conflict,” she said, perhaps too primly.

  “Handle, shit … yeah, we’d like to order. I’ll have the spinach salad and my sister here will do the fruit, with cottage cheese, of course. Decaf for her and iced tea for me. What was I saying, oh yeah, fighting with the guy. Look, the way I figure it, God has really done a nifty thing with us. I mean, He could have made us so that we only get one chance, know what I mean?”

  “I’m afraid not.” Her heart was beating rapidly because she knew that the little imp child was about to say something very important, perhaps decisive for the rest of her life. And, truth to tell, she did know very well what Deirdre meant.

  “Well, like if the guy and I fight, which we do a couple times a week, what happens? The next day or that night when we’re going to bed, we kiss and make up, well, usually a little more than kiss, know what I mean? It’s not like, one chance, and if you blow it, that’s that. I mean, you know, we take second chances for granted. You blow something, like I do all the time, so there’s another chance real soon. Next week at the latest. It doesn’t have to be like that. Pretty clever of God to give us second chances, you know? Nothing ever lost till it’s really lost.”

  “Pure grace.”

  “Right.” She grinned crookedly. “Well, sometimes not all that pure, but still grace.”

  The temperature had slipped below the zero mark while she and Deirdre were eating. The wind was howling down off the lake and down Madison Street as she returned to the office on LaSalle Street from Fields. Three blocks each way, six blocks altogether, three-quarters of a mile. If she should walk home, that would be another mile. More virtue.

  But it was so cold.

  Back in her office she sat at her desk, still shivering. A blast furnace of love—that’s what the young priest at the Cathedral had said. How could a God who was a blast furnace of love expel her into the cold?

  She considered the appointment book but did not open it.

  To be angry at God, the priest had replied, is to acknowledge his power and his love.

  The cold was better than the warmth, less risky.

  Windchill factor forty below at least.

  She had felt that windchill for more than a year. Now she was being lured deviously back toward the risk of the furnace.

  No. I will not be tricked again. I will stay in the cold.

  Can I get away with that?

  Absently she opened the appointment calendar to Nick Barry’s appointments for the coming week. An apology? The door she had slammed shut might still be ajar. Possibly? Maybe? Nonsense, of course it was. Next week at the latest? She smiled complacently to and at herself. How clever of the blast-furnace God to give us tough, loving little daughters-in-law like Deirdre.

  And second chances.

  Andrea

  The first time I saw her—I remember the date well, July 22, 1946—in the railroad station cafe in Tucson, I thought she was a ghost.

  Hoagy Carmichael was singing “Old Buttermilk Sky” on a wheezy jukebox.

  “She’s dead.” It was a fleeting impression, recorded in a brain dazed by habitual depression, a lifetime of bizarre romantic fantasy, months of terrifying nightmares, and a night-long drive across the desert: milk-white skin, pale blue eyes, slender ethereal body, slipping past the chairs and the tables, with a heavy cardboard piece of luggage in one hand. She approached the counter and sat down across from me so quietly that no one seemed to notice her. She had to order her coffee twice before the waitress was aware that she was sitting at the counter.

  She looks like she’s from beyond the grave, I thought, and then tried again to dismiss the impression.

  She was too young and too pretty to be a ghost, I told myself. Ghosts don’t have dark red hair shaped like a crisp halo around their high, intelligent foreheads. They don’t have gracefully swelling breasts and they don’t move lithe young bodies with unself-conscious grace.

  Why not? my gloomy imagination wondered.

  She laid a dime on the sloppy counter next to the coffee cup which had been slapped down in front of her with such vigor that some of the dismal liquid spilled into the saucer.

  Why can’t ghosts be gorgeous? I asked myself, not quite ready to give up my grotesque fantasy. I was driving from San Diego to Chicago in one last romantic binge before I settled down to college and law school and River Forest affluence. What would be more appropriate than to meet a pretty ghost on the first leg of the trip?

  From the perspective of four decades I can understand why someone would think I was asking for trouble.

  “It’s fifteen cents.” The slovenly waitress wiped the counter indifferently with a dirty towel.

  It was already hot in the station. My guidebook said that in summer the usual thirty-degree variation in Tucson temperatures continued—between eighty and a hundred and ten. And during the monsoon, it added helpfully, humidity added to the discomfort caused by the heat. Monsoons, I thought, happened in India. And whoever heard of a humid desert?

  I had a lot to learn about this country I was exploring for the first and probably the last time.

  The young woman reached into her worn purse and almost furtively searched for another coin. She withdrew a second dime, one of the tarnished “war dimes,” and laid it next to the first. The waitress scooped them both up and replaced them with a nickel.

  An elegant hand reached out to reclaim the nickel and then, it seemed to me shamefully, retreated, leaving the tip for the waitress, who would certainly not be grateful.

  Sexual desire, which had deserted me somewhere between Hollandia and Okinawa Jima, made a faint, furtive, and very tentative reappearance. She was dead tired, lonely, a little frightened, and broke.

  I had ten crisp hundred-dollar bills in my wallet and a checkbook which could duplicate that many times over. Perhaps I could help.

  Her brown skirt and white blouse were wrinkled—all night in coach—and shabby. The leather on her low-heeled shoes was cracked. Her hair was rumpled. Yet she drank the coffee, black the way it should be, with natural elegance. And she was young, painfully, desperately young; certainly not twenty yet, which from the heights of my almost twenty-four made her virtually a child.

  With a child’s innocence softening the lines of weariness on her gently curving face. And a hint of pain which no child ought to have suffered.

  Four decades later I can still feel the sting of need which accompanied my sentiments of tenderness.

  Then I saw the thin gold wedding band, little more than Woolworth je
welry. To my shame it must be confessed that the recognition had no impact on my sexual longing.

  “Your husband in the service?”

  Startled, she glanced around, uncertain that I was speaking to her.

  “He was on the Indianapolis.”

  A sentence of death. No wonder the terrible pain in her soft blue eyes.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She nodded, accepting my sympathy. “I hope he died on the ship before the sharks got to them.”

  “What did he do?” Navy talk to cover the awkwardness and the sorrow. Somehow my intentions became, if not completely honorable, at least more respectable than they had been.

  “Radar.” She reached into her purse. “He said that electronics training would guarantee a job after the war. Even better than civil service.” She opened a cheap wallet to show me his picture. A towhead in high-school graduation pose. “He was only nineteen.”

  “Classmate?”

  “Year ahead. I was a junior when I married him.”

  Just barely legal age. In some states. Probably had not graduated from high school.

  “I’m sorry.” What else could I say?

  “What kind of plane did you fly?”

  It was my turn to be startled. How did she know that I was a pilot?

  “F6F.”

  “Hellcat. What ship?”

  “Enterprise.”

  She raised an auburn eyebrow. The Big E was a legend. “Lieutenant?”

  I spread my hands in fake humility. “Gold oak-leaf type.”

  She smiled and Tucson disappeared for a couple of moments. “Impressive.”

  “Survival.”

  I wanted to tell her everything. She would understand. I hated the killing and the dying. I missed my friends who had crashed into the Pacific—Saipan, Leyte, Yap, all those other places which had even now blurred in my memory. But I also missed the roar of engines, the surge of power as my Grumman lifted off the deck, the sky dark with our fleets of planes, the excitement of battle, the triumph of return, the fierce yank of the arresting gear as I touched down on the deck, then the horror of counting noses.…

  “A trip across the country before you settle down?”