Seven Loves Page 3

  While Vera had read her the menu and tried out Spanish phrases on her, May had gone through a lot of the Chianti. Listening to Vera had filled May with an old, maternal pride and boredom. In the morning Vera would be leaving with another nurse-practitioner and two nuns for six months at a clinic in Guatemala. “Hope they don’t arrest us. We’ve got a suitcase of narcotics. Made me think of Nick, when I packed the stuff.”

  Vera was like that. She did not fear the dead. She always walked right up to the subject of her brother and gave it a light, familiar, sisterly slap. You would not know she was the one in the family who had crouched on the grave before the stone was set in place, and battered the dirt with her fists.

  In the dark restaurant May had had a hard time making out her daughter’s face. Vera was the beauty of the family. May tried to focus on the dark eyes before her. Who would guess that behind the long lashes with their starry shadows lay a cockpit, all the switches on.

  In the early part of the evening May had had herself in hand: she would neither whine about Vera’s departure nor start in on the past, in an eagerness to prove to Vera that life had had the same uprooting pull when she was Vera’s age. A little younger, even. Vera was forty-two. Unmarried. “Knowing my own nature,” Vera said, in the confiding always brought on by her leavetakings, “it would be unfair to marry. I mean it. I can stand to be alone later.” Vera was not weak. She put her chin in the air. Ah, May thought, your grandmother did that very thing. The inch-long hair is all very well, but it’s the same chin, the same face. If you added freckles—my mother’s face.

  “I won’t be alone, though,” Vera continued, tearing off bread and sopping up olive oil. “I’ll have my friends.” Women of her generation gave friends the status once reserved for husbands and family; they stuck together and would not let each other down in old age. So Vera said. “So smile, Mom,” she said, looking up.

  Come, come, May would have replied, in her confident years. You won’t always be forty-two. Use your imagination.

  The candle flame returned to a point because Vera’s nail-bitten, restless hands had finally stopped their gesturing and settled on the tablecloth. Once May would have picked one of them up, breathed the olive oil and kissed the skin, no longer perfectly smooth—but if there was a mark of her seventies it was that she was altogether less sure of herself. Being with either of her daughters now gave her the kind of shock you got in a foot that had been asleep. Suddenly Vera was here, across the table from her, unaged in spite of having cut her hair close to the scalp and dyed it a darker, less becoming red, with the same obliviousness, the stock of girlish energy intact, and here too, in May, was that old unrest, that slow propeller stirring up maternal pride and impatience while little sparks of torment leapt out of oblivion and faded back.

  Friends, Vera had said. Not just family. Friends could feel all this, and stay bound together. For in friendship the element of pain was missing. Is that it? May thought. And is pain the key element of love? And if not pain, then what? That was when she plunged into the story of her love affair.

  “Hold it.” Vera snatched up the check. “I have to admit that I know this. I do, I know about this from Laura. She told me. I hope you don’t mind. I don’t see why you told her and not me.” But she was yawning, she had to get on the plane in the morning ready to put on earphones and listen to Spanish sentences for many hours. “But go on,” she said generously. “Tell me all of it. You told Laura, and I know she’s the good sister, but now tell me.”

  Out on the wet sidewalk May took care not to stagger from the wine. “The funny thing was that the man was like me. He wasn’t very set on accomplishing anything. Oh, he accomplished whatever they asked him to, he could do it. But he was a dreaming man. He had had parents like mine, doers, both of them—I mean he had grandparents. That’s who raised him. Strong people. But he was always looking back. Whereas your father looked ahead. Your father was . . . my opposite in many ways.”

  “No shit,” Vera said.

  She didn’t really have to worry, with Vera, as she had with Laura—Laura who studied what happened around her and had written a book about it, and followed it with another—about having to account for anything, any pain that might have been caused.

  Vera frowned and said, “Wasn’t the school boycott around then?”

  May saw with a flash of rancor how her daughter would recast everything, making it into a political, deliberate thing. A thing forbidden in their day, and chosen because forbidden, that the two of them, May and her lover, had undertaken. Some act, on the order of the sit-ins that had begun around the same time. The way Vera always said, of her grandmother’s fervent unionism, “genteel.” The way she had pointed out, in her SDS days, the roles cast for them all, middle-class people in the United States.

  “This was before that,” May said. “That was . . . I can’t remember.” Memories had a way of excluding context, growing more and more concrete. The low-necked sheath dress, not the election, the song in the elevator, not the school system. The little maypoles, not the truth. Very little of the truth goes a long way.

  For Vera’s benefit she said, “When it started I thought it was physical. But as it turned out, he was a soul mate.” That word of old. But even a word like that was no surprise to Vera, who said, “I’ve had that, with gay men. Watch it—curb. So hey! What was his name? Laura never told me.”

  “Nathanael.” Now she had said it. Now the whole thing lay in wait, silent, mountainous, though such things were no longer mountainous, and Vera was hurrying her for the dates, the places, the moment of exposure, the outcome. May had a moment of horror at herself. “You know I would never have talked like this while your father was alive.”

  “I know.”

  Nathanael. “God has given,” in Hebrew. Her best friend, Leah, had told her that.

  Has given. In English, the perfect tense has a heartbroken sound. Is that right? I never taught my juniors that. Who could say they wouldn’t have understood, some of them? Some of them had lives already frozen into the perfect tense, hardly room to move past seventeen or eighteen.

  Like Nick, her own son.

  Or the boy who wrote her the one page about the Sharpeville massacre, with his blunt pencil: “They go out next thing they dead.”

  Has given. A sound of wandering in an aftermath. I have come, you have forgotten, he has lost. God has given, and you, what have you done?

  “And you, now, you’re from Seattle,” he said thoughtfully, with his head turned so he looked sideways at her. Seattle. That seemed to excuse her from history.

  “Yes.” She took a gulp of whiskey sour. He was drinking scotch and soda, setting it down on a small wet marble table that rocked on its base.

  Why did you sit down with me? Of course he would not say that. It was important, though, to establish her innocence—not of history but of liberalism, of any off-center intentions where he was concerned, anything sexual, anything racial.

  I sat down because of the way you looked at me at dinner, as if you knew me. Now you’ve turned the look off. But if I see it again, I’ll know. What would she know?

  His slightly bulging eyes met hers. His whole face was formed of swells marked off with grooves, like big kernels of corn, under the dark, freckled skin so taut it looked as if it might split open. A large, heavily molded face. His hair was silver at the edges. He was good-looking now, but what a handsome old man he would be. And she traveled years with him, right in front of him.

  If he’s doing the same thing he’ll see a pasty old scarecrow, she thought. Or maybe I’ll be fat when I’m old, smoking by myself with my fat feet out in front of me. Or at the movies, buying popcorn. No, I won’t be one of those old censors, I’ll always go to the movies.

  Half the people in the bar were smoking, but something prevented May from lighting a cigarette in front of him. She wanted him to like her. The school where he was principal had been written up in the Chicago Tribune because it was the kind of school people wanted to re
ad about. The article said his methods were a reassuring sign that the upheavals in education were going to stabilize. Though he didn’t think so, he told May. Nothing was going to stabilize. Trouble was on the way.

  Nathanael, his name was. He had a wife and family, all boys. How many boys? Though May knew that, she had the article. Six. Oh! One already twenty-two, three in their teens, two little ones. How old, the little ones? Three and one. Oh! “I mean, so many years of having them!” she said quickly. At that the rolled eyelids squinted a little. He put down his glass and threw his fingers out and down in a card-fanning gesture, rather an impatient, commanding gesture, catching her as she formed the ingratiating smile one offered at the mention of a stranger’s family. Stupid, she said to herself. Keep quiet. Of course she had meant the pregnancies, six of them to go through over twenty years, not the surges between man and woman, not those, that spaced a family. A woman would have known what she meant.

  Like the weight-guessers at carnivals, if you let yourself, you could receive a sort of wavering outline of a person’s situation. You could sense the movement of another life, shadowy figures, house, automobile, comings and goings with that illusory purpose of other lives. You could sense a burden. Kitchens, bedrooms in which faint voices made demands, promises. Six sons, each with a life to lift up and carry. Reproved, she sat back.

  But the man had relented, he was chuckling. “My wife would agree with you.” The cheeks pushed up firm creases around his eyes, in bunches like stems. Probably it was time to take her eyes off his face. The livid mark in the nail struck her as something he might have chosen to wear. She looked at it intently, feeling no peril.

  It was her turn. She taught English, she had two daughters, nine and going on thirteen. Her husband was a doctor. Oh, a doctor. She flushed. She would not say, But he wasn’t always a doctor. He was poor, to begin with. She did say, “It took him forever to finish his training because the war came.” How long ago, that parting from Cole, and what a girl she had been. The whirlwind of mobilization stirring her despite her objections to war: truckloads of soldiers suddenly visible on the highways, warnings up and down the coast about fire balloons, the submarine that came out of nowhere and shelled Vancouver Island. The sight of Cole in his uniform. Thank God her mother did not live to see this war, a daughter’s fingers on shining insignia, caressing. A girl daily offering the heavens her wild bargains for his safety.

  “That’s how I ended up teaching. I had wanted to . . .” Then she gave up. What had she wanted to do? It might be the look on the man’s face was pity.

  But in the next hour, submerged intuitions came to her and she recovered herself, made herself out a kindly-clever woman, in the scoop neckline of that year, a woman whose red dress and dark eyebrows might be seen to offset the blondish, fading hair and skin, and the silly pin they had fastened onto her dress at the banquet.

  At last she made him laugh. When he laughed he didn’t throw back his head as she had been doing, but bent it over his drink and rumbled as if he would permit himself just this level, curtailed amusement. She was describing her principal: her school was run by a theatrical woman, a fatedly stupid woman, whom May made funnier than she had ever thought her until that moment. He shifted in his chair; he was on his third drink, she her second. Her fingers and toes, her inner arms and thighs, had begun to hum.

  Some bulk, some—girth, she told herself, looks good on a man. Yes, in middle age it gives off warmth. Cole shouldn’t try to be so thin. She felt a stab of love for Cole. It was the hour when he would be sitting down at the piano to work the day out of his muscles, his skin red under the eyes where the surgical mask had been taped. Laura would be cooking his dinner, Vera stomping through the house with her ruined homework.

  “Fallout,” Nathanael was saying, in answer to some question she had dreamed up about his job. “I get the fallout.”

  “Fallout,” she said, screwing up her face. They had all let a word pass in the blink of an eye from awful revelation to figure of speech. That was what she tried to tell her juniors. She could see on their faces the look that said they had been forewarned about her class. She would talk about the bomb, she would make them write a paper about atmospheric testing and dead sheep. It was too late: the real fallout had already blown into all of them, the world over. There were meetings about testing and May went to them, running off leaflets on the mimeograph machine in the school office, where that was seen as a harmless habit so long as you paid for the paper. But really she was just like everybody else, she kept at bay any thought of real fallout, a rain of poison from the sky, no shield from it.

  She preferred sitting at the dining room table with her red pen, reading to Cole from her students’ papers. “The Ancient Romans invented the arch,” she would read, as Cole ran his thumb up the keyboard. “They let girls maried when they forteen.” Cole ran down the keys, struck a flat chord. “But they beleved in slavery.” When the telephone rang both girls would jump up to get it, but it was always Leah. Leah, who taught math across the hall from May, was getting divorced. Hers was the first divorce in the school, the first involving anybody May knew. Nobody knew then what to expect, whether it was normal for a middle-aged teacher, even one with grown children, to get her ears pierced and begin reading Jung, and sell off the house and furniture that were hers by right.

  Nathanael described his own school, to which the Tribune had sent a photographer to set up the shot that appeared in the paper over the caption “No-nonsense father of six raises six hundred.” The picture had him at the lockers with a tough-looking kid in a T-shirt who had a bandaged hand. It was obvious, wasn’t it? Was it? The kid was the son of a wealthy Jamaican lawyer. “A-plus student, first name Holmes. On his way to Brown.”

  May had fallen into a daze of friendliness. Her bare arm on the table felt graceful to her, her finger with its clear-polished nail slowly blending the condensation on the glass. She was filled with pleasure at the melting season outside the hotel, in the city of Chicago, where the spring wind sucked the draperies against the glass and corrugated the lake she had seen from the plane and again that afternoon at the aquarium. A bigger, more serious lake by far than the one at home, this one with a sea’s dull roar, throwing spray high in the air as the women boarded their buses in the aquarium parking lot. They were teachers and the wives of teachers. The men at the conference didn’t go on these sightseeing excursions.

  May’s feeling was that she had met no one in years for whom she felt such an immediate strong liking, if she ever had. From a certain sag in her movements she knew she had had too much to drink, but it was more than that. Sympathy welled up in her for everyone else in the hotel bar. Oh, that woman can’t stop talking, she thought, at the sight of a gesturing woman with a double chin. She just can’t, and the man is tired of her, he’s younger, the waiter is waiting for them to leave, waiting to get out of here to his real life, it’s all so simple, so plain.

  In the middle of Nathanael’s brown irises, around the pupils, floated uneven circles the color of gasoline. At a certain point she looked closely and felt them burn her.

  Whatever it was, it had nothing tentative about it once it got going. It was the same for him, he told her later. Between them an unseen wire had begun conducting heat. They should have stepped clear of it and gone on their way. If they had had any experience, any caution, they might have risen casually from the table and said, “Well! This has been very nice.” She could have held out her hand, at least to touch him once, and made some flattering admission such as “I’ve been enjoying myself a bit too much. Oh, if my students could see me! Obviously I can’t sit in a bar half the night anymore.” But it wasn’t alcohol, it was the taut, invisible thread, unmentioned, growing warmer as they missed, one by one, the remarks that might have spared them.

  He did drink. Drink was a carefully controlled area of difficulty for him, normally. He didn’t mean to use that as an excuse, he wasn’t letting himself off the hook. No, he had been through AA a time or
two but it didn’t stick, with him. He didn’t drink a lot, he never went crazy, the students never saw a sign of it.

  He had a wonderful wife, a teacher. Last night, the first night of the conference, he had drunk his first glass of scotch in six months, at this same unsteady table. He did it because he was away from his wife. It was his wife who kept things under control, held him steady. Of course tonight he was disgusted with himself for having taken the drink, and that made it easier to have another one. That was when May in her red dress had asked if she could sit down.

  Oh, so it was her doing? So women could just overpower him, away from home?

  Parts of his face seemed to swell. Quite suddenly you could see the high school principal. “Never. You can believe that or disbelieve it.” She did believe it. Never before that time had this man sat alone with a woman not his wife and given the silent, frightening promise that had made itself felt between them. “Until this, tonight,” he added. He seemed to be leaning forward, but he wasn’t. Whatever you say next, she thought, we’ll do.

  In the morning she couldn’t have said what they had talked about in the bar. All the long evening at the table with him she had been away, if she faced it squarely, away altogether. On the loose, as Leah had said. Alert for the pause that went on a beat too long, the look that should have cloaked itself immediately in talk but did not, for his flat, almost tired, not-very-carefully-worded suggestion when it came. Not even suggestion but acquiescence, as if she were the one who had proposed it! When for all the years of her marriage to Cole—Cole, her mind cried out faintly and sentimentally—even during her crushes, she had never even considered another man.

  Nevertheless she was poised for it when it came. Poised as well for the sheathed casual trip past booths of teachers from the conference, her high heels sinking in the carpet. To the elevators and up, separately. His room, because he had no roommate.