A HEADACHE this morning, and that dull sense of dread and insatiable appetite that is a hangover. Still, I got Chad's laundry done, packed his suitcase, made breakfast by 6:00 A.M., and Jon and Chad left for the airport. When I said I wouldn't be going with them they seemed—relieved?
Fine, let them go alone together. No one has to worry that I'll cry at the curb, that I'll mope on the way home.
"Bye, Ma," Chad said so casually that it was as if he were off to soccer practice, and he'd be home by lunch. "I'll call you when I get there," he said, and kissed my cheek.
I saw, watching them from the back porch as they were backing down the driveway, that they were laughing.
At me?
Another slate gray day, but a little warmer, and the breeze seems to have something in it—a dampness, or a spray, it seems, of spit, something living, bacterial even, an impulse, a compulsion toward life, no longer simply a frozen denial of it.
After they left, I went back to bed and had a dream:
I took an apple out of the crisper and bit into it. It was soft, like a sponge. Salty, warm, it made me gag. It tasted the way I imagined an animal's heart, or a man's testicle, would taste if you ate it, but I couldn't help it, I kept eating.
Why?
A sense of duty? A longing for adventure?
A hunger? A repulsion?
The whole time I was eating it (and I ate the whole thing—seeds and core and stem and all) I was gagging, and wondering.
THIS afternoon in my mailbox (I checked one last time before I left to go home) a piece of white Xerox paper, a heart drawn in the center of it, and, written in tiny block letters:
DO YOU EVER THINK
OF ME? WHEN I
THINK OF YOU, I THINK OF YOUR SOFT
BROWN HAIR AND WHAT IT WOULD
BE LIKE TO PRESS MY FACE
INTO IT, KISS YOUR
NECK, AND FINALLY
BE ABLE TO TELL
YOU ALL MY
DESIRES.
Stupidly, I'd unfolded it in the hallway. I should have folded it back up right away when I saw what it was and taken it into my office to read it, but, seeing it—the heart, the careful tiny lettering—I was frozen before it, I was turned to stone there at my mailbox in the main office with Beth only four feet away from me at her desk, and half a dozen people either coming or going, and Sue reaching around me to get her own mail. "Sherry," she said.
When I could finally glance away from it, I saw that Sue was reading the piece of paper in my hand. "Jesus," she said. "This guy's serious. Sherry?"
"What?" I asked, and she burst out laughing.
"Good lord, Sherry, you siren. You man magnet!"
Finally I was able to fold it back up. She followed me back to my office door where, twice, I dropped my keys trying to unlock it. She laughed, loudly, again, then said, "Your hands are shaking! Come on, do you know who this is? Are you holding out some vital piece of information from your best friend?"
I whispered back to her, "I don't want to talk about this in the hall."
"Oooh," she whispered back. "You do know something."
When I'd finally managed to get the door open, I cleared some books from a chair so she could sit down, and told her, "I do think I know who it is."
"Well, do tell!"
Sue:
I have loved Sue for twenty years, as long as I've loved Jon. We first met at a part-time English instructors' meeting, where she made a joke about the department chair's taste in clothes. "It's like she's trying to spontaneously combust. Everything she wears is made from petrochemicals."
Sue herself was wearing a crinkled tie-dyed skirt, sandals. It was late August. Her hair was a solid golden mass down her back, all the way to her waist. Her teeth were so white they looked like paper, and this was before everyone had those teeth, before tooth-whitening systems were sold in drugstores. Hers were simply brilliant because she was pure, and young, and didn't drink coffee or red wine or smoke cigarettes. She did, already, carry the bit of extra weight around her hips, which would turn into this middle-aged softness, and which would be exacerbated by driving everywhere she went and being too busy with the twins to exercise.
Back then, she was a runner and a cross-country skier. A smell always wafted off of her of evergreen, as if she'd brought northern California with her to the Midwest in her hair when she'd moved here.
Today, she looked tired.
In the unflattering overhead light of my office, I could see that the little pouches she'd always had under her eyes had turned, now, to real bags with deep creases beneath them and a bluish fluid filling them. Since fall, it seemed, she'd gained another ten pounds, which she didn't have room for, and hadn't bought new clothes to go with them. The buttons of the white blouse she was wearing were straining against her flesh, and even the sleeves of it were pulled tight across her arms. Her hair, which she'd cut short long ago, looked badly dyed—hennaed—and dry and gray beneath the reddish brown, making her look as if something—rust, blood?—had been sprayed on her from a low-flying plane as she was walking under it.
When, I thought, looking at her in my office, did we get old?
Certainly, it seemed a long time ago that we stood together in one corner of the Writing Center laughing about the department chair's polyester dress (all geometric designs, tied up with a patent-leather belt) but not that long ago. That afternoon in the Writing Center, the late-summer sun had been pouring in through the plate glass windows. There was a gentle dust settling in long angular streams on the tables and chairs and on the hair and arms of the part-time English instructors. The smell of autumn—its textbooks, its ditto fluid, its calendars and red ink—was in that dust, all implication, suggestion, that the future was on its way, but, outside, the sky had been entirely empty and blue. Not a cloud anywhere. The carpet, then, was orange, institutional. In a few years it would be replaced with mauve carpeting, which would not seem, at first, to us, as institutional as the orange, but then would become the color with which every institution replaced its orange carpet. Twenty years ago—and it felt, perhaps, like a few years.
Or even less than that.
But, I thought, looking at Sue's arms, those years were a part of us now.
They had settled in our bodies.
We had not, of course, felt them passing, because they hadn't. They had instead accumulated. We were wearing that passed time.
And, still, through the mystery of love and friendship, Sue also hadn't changed for me at all. She'd remained the young woman who'd sat in the backseat of my car with me when I got the news (through campus security, coming for me to the door of my first-year writing course) that my brother was dead, and who, the next year, wore a chain of daisies in her long blond hair as maid of honor at my wedding.
Before Sue, I had never particularly wanted or needed to have female friends. The girlfriends I'd had in high school and college—I let them go without much interest, just a slow loosening, a gradual forgetting. But here Sue still was, my best friend. I'd never even chosen her as a friend. There was simply a bond formed between us that first day in the Writing Center, and here we still were, serving out the comfortable terms of it.
"Well," Sue said, leaning forward. "Tell me. Who is it?"
"Bram Smith," I told her. "He's a part-time auto-mechanics instructor."
Sue lifted her eyebrows. I couldn't tell if she was skeptical or simply surprised.
"Bram Smith?" she asked. "That unbelievable stud?"
"I don't even know who he is," I told her. "Is he the one with the dark hair, the—?"
"Yeah," Sue said, as if humoring me, as if she knew I perfectly well knew who Bram Smith was. "The one with the muscles, Sherry. The one with the dimple. The sexiest man who has ever set foot in this godforsaken place. The one every woman here with any estrogen left in her system at all has been fantasizing about for three years. The one who looks like every sexy cartoon ever drawn of the devil. Don't play dumb with me, Sherry. You know perfectly well who
Bram Smith is."
"No," I said. "I mean, I've seen him, I guess. Now that you ... describe him."
Sue snorted. "Right." A half smile. She looked away from me.
"Honestly, Sue," I said. "It was Chad's friend Garrett who told me it was him, that he'd been talking about me in his class."
"Well," Sue said, standing up, smoothing down the wrinkled front of her linen skirt, no longer smiling. The sun from my window was gray but mottled with a bit of yellow, as if it were shining through clouds that had been washed into thin patches. It fell on Sue's chest where it was exposed by the too-right blouse, and the skin there looked, I thought, damaged. (When, I thought, had that happened?) Thin. Spackled with brown. I remembered a low-cut black dress she'd worn to a New Year's Eve party, how all the men seemed to gravitate toward the hors d'oeuvres table near which Sue stood, flirting with the one she was going to marry and with whom she would have twins. It had looked painful for those men when they had to tear their eyes from that slit of white flesh revealed by her dress.
I looked from that damaged skin back to her face.
Could I be reading her expression correctly?
Was she jealous?
"I've got to go," Sue said. "I'll be late to get the boys." She opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. "Good luck with all this, Sherry," she said. "Keep me posted."
***
ANY WORD from your lover today?" Jon asked when I walked in the door.
I said, "Yes. As a matter of fact there was."
He put his newspaper down on the ottoman and looked at me.
The sunset in our picture window lit him up, made him glow—robustly, handsomely. Jon, I thought, at least, has not changed much. There's some gray in his hair now, and a few lines around his eyes, but, if anything, these things have made him more attractive. Women have always looked at Jon when we walked into a restaurant together. The demeanor of the mothers of Chad's friends always changed when we joined their semicircles at an event—posture improved, stomachs sucked in, a lighter laughter, more batting of the eyes. And, if I showed you a picture of him twenty years ago and a picture today, you would know instantly that this was the same man, and that the decades that had passed had been fairly kind ones, that life had been mostly good to him, that he was a physically vital man and would remain so for many years.
"Tell me," he said.
I took it out of my purse, the note, and handed it to him.
Jon looked at it for what seemed like much longer than he needed to read it, and then looked up. "Holy shit," he said. "We aren't just talking some kid with a crush here. This is serious stuff."
"Are you upset?" I asked. I thought of those months, so many years ago, of my infatuation with Ferris Robinson, how, when I confided in Jon, he had been titillated at first, then angry, and then sad, and then desperate, and then giddily attentive, and then had grown so cold I thought our marriage was over. "Are you angry?"
"Frankly," Jon said, standing up, walking toward me, stopping in front of me, putting his arms around my lower back, "I'm a little embarrassed to say that I'm almost unbearably turned on."
He pressed his body against me. He had an erection.
LAST night, after we made love (or was that making love?—Jon, pushing me onto my side, then onto my stomach, putting himself in me from behind, saying, You think this is what jour mechanic wants to do? grabbing my breast, cupping it, pinching the nipple hard enough that I gasped, then orgasmed so quickly it shamed me) he fell asleep, but I lay awake a long time.
Too long.
I woke up exhausted.
In the morning light, the kitchen looked hazy—everything haloed with that glow that comes from exhaustion, and a kind of dull ringing deep in my ears. I thought, briefly, about calling in sick, but I'd missed my classes last week, having taken the time off to spend with Chad. If I missed again today, they'd be confused, my students. The ones who were doing poorly might throw in the towel altogether. The ones who were doing well would feel betrayed. Another crappy absentee teacher. I had to go.
I drank a cup of coffee black, standing in my bare feet, wearing my bathrobe, at the kitchen window. Before Jon left for work, he bit my neck and said, "You be good today."
In his dark suit, he'd looked so handsome, smirking at me as he stepped through the back door into the driveway, that I had a sudden recollection of the thrill of seeing him for the first time, at that bar, and how I thought (maybe because he was friends with the wild bunch who'd introduced us) that he looked a little dangerous. Too handsome. The kind of man you'd have to worry about losing to some other girl, some flashier girl. He'd be, I thought then, the kind of guy who would be constantly pursued. Or, he would, himself, be the pursuer. Surely, I thought, he knew how beautiful he was, and the power it gave him. What man wouldn't abuse such power? Those blue-green eyes. The solid build.
Tail chaser, my mother used to say about certain kinds of men. It was derogatory and appreciative at the same time, coming from her. She liked a man with spunk. Milquetoast was the kind of man with whom you didn't want to waste your time.
But, as it turned out, Jon wasn't dangerous.
As it turned out, Jon was the safest man in the world.
When we walked down the sidewalk together, he always insisted on placing me on the inside so I wouldn't be splattered with mud, or hit by a car. After Chad was born, Jon installed smoke detectors. Not just a few, but a smoke detector in every room. Even the .22 in the garage, even the shooting of the squirrels off our roof, was his attempt to keep his family safe. Never once in twenty years had it ever crossed my mind that my husband had lied to me, or had anything to hide, or had even had a thought he'd chosen not to share with me.
No, if he ever looked at other women, it must have been when I wasn't in the vicinity.
Surely, he did look. All men looked at other women. Joggers, bikers, college girls waiting at the bus stop in short skirts.
But I couldn't imagine it.
Jon's loyalty seemed so fierce that it was impossible to picture him, like every other man on the planet, following with his eyes, from behind the anonymity of his steering wheel in a passing car, the line of spine and hip and leg exposed by shorts and a halter top on a summer day crossing the street.
Did he look at other women?
Does he?
And if he doesn't—does such loyalty come at a cost?
Or, is it the loyal one, anyway, who pays the price for such loyalty?
Maybe the object of that loyalty—me—would be the one who paid. Maybe the price was finding yourself married for twenty years to a handsome man, a perfectly lovely man, in a marriage without tension, in a life without apprehension, or mystery, or surprise. I always knew, after all, what Jon would say when I asked him if he loved me. I always knew that he would walk in the door every night at 5:45, after an oddly stimulating day designing computer software ("I love my job," was the only thing he ever really said about his job, and the only thing I really knew about it) and say, "Hi. Sherry? Are you home?" Or, if I came home later than he did, that he would be waiting for me in the love seat with his newspaper.
But, last night, for a moment, entering me from behind, grabbing my breast too hard in his hand, he was the stranger he was pretending to be.
And, maybe, that was what he was trying to achieve—the status of a stranger. (You think this is what it would feel like to get fucked by your mechanic?) Have I, perhaps, become as little of a mystery to him over these years as he has become to me? Is that why it turns him on to imagine me through a stranger's eyes, or a stranger inside of me?
Do I seem as safe (and dull) to him as he does to me?
Should I be flattered that he's so excited by another man's attention, or insulted?
I WORE the silk dress again—although by late morning there was an east wind, and I could feel it streaming through the cracks in the windows as I got dressed for work. It rattled them in their frames.
Yesterday, with the sunlight and the warmer te
mperature, a fly, dead between the glass and the screen all winter, came back to life. (Or seemed to come back to life: Is that possible, do flies hibernate, or die and resurrect?) This morning it was buzzing when I woke up, tossing itself frantically against the storm window, making a fuss. But by the time I was out of my shower, that wind had started up, and the cold front could be felt coming in, and that fly was fading, and then by the time I'd bothered to open the curtains, its bumping into the glass had stopped, and it was crawling slowly, despondently, through the dirt at the bottom of the sill—and then, by the time I was dressed, it appeared to be dead again.
Well, spring crept out for a moment and retreated, but I was determined to wear a spring dress. I shivered in it as I started the car, which was so cold that the engine sounded, grinding to life, as if it were deciding whether or not to start, whether or not it was interested in pulling out of the driveway in this cold. But it did start, and the heater began to work quickly, blowing sashes of heat hard into my face through the vents with the smell of the dust gathered there a little at a time over the many miles traveled—72,735 of them on the speedometer this morning—and being spewed back at me in the form of warmth.
I turned the radio to the classical station, but it wasn't classical music. It was, instead, some kind of half-modern symphony, the soulless straining of violins and synthesizers in disharmony.
A gray frost on the dead grass.
The trees were bare and black against it.
The snow had melted just enough to expose the shoulders of the road, littered with fast-food bags and cigarette packs.
April may be the cruel month, but March is the dirty month. The garbage month. The white had turned to the color of ashes, receded enough to reveal the litter that was there all along, but there were no leaves or flowers yet to distract the eye from the trash piling up around us on every side—our own trash, of course, but seeming to be nature's trash, the trash of the gods, so much of it.