We embraced warmly, as always, and she put her hand on my back as we entered the theater. “You look
fabulous!”
she said. “I know you haven’t had a face-lift, because I saw you only a few weeks ago, but you look years younger! A new cosmetic?”
I laughed and shrugged off her question: I didn’t want to launch into my problems until we could really talk.
The play was splendid, and we left the theater feeling liberated, the way you do after exposure to good art. We cabbed down to Orso, where I ordered vitello tonnato and cappellini with tomato and basil; Marsha wanted caprese and risotto with portobello mushrooms. I waited until the white wine we ordered was poured, before I said, “I’ve met a man.”
Marsha, her glass halfway to her mouth, stopped dead. She stared at me. “You have?”
I nodded.
“Really!” she breathed.
Marsha had been married to the same man for thirty-eight years. She had hinted about flirtations, even affairs, in years past, but not recently. If she felt an occasional twinge of regret at opportunities forgone or no longer proffered, she never admitted it to me.
She smiled broadly, extended her glass. “Well, cheers! That’s wonderful, Hermione! Tell me, tell me! Where, when, how, who?”
I clinked glasses with her and launched into a description of George, our meeting, his persistence and intensity.
“He sounds madly in love.”
“Doesn’t he? But he doesn’t follow up. I mean, he asks to see me every day, but only stays for an hour. He makes dates and breaks them; he promises to call but doesn’t.”
Her kind forehead furrowed. “It does seem to have happened awfully fast. Do you believe in it? His…enthusiasm?”
“My head doesn’t. My head is on vacation. But my heart and my body believe it.”
“Ohh,” she lamented.
“Yes.”
We sipped our wine.
“I wonder if he’s like that fellow Teddy Warden, the one Phyllis was sort of involved with for a while—remember him? He pursued her passionately for months, then, when she finally agreed to a relationship, he suddenly went off on an assignment in Europe that dragged on for months…In fact, I don’t know if he ever came back. Do you remember that?”
I nodded glumly. I didn’t care for the comparison. I looked away and stared around the restaurant. We ordered cappuccino. She must have caught my mood.
“Or maybe he’s like Martin,” she suggested.
“Martin? Oh, Martin Goldberg!” I liked that much better. “Yes!”
Martin Goldberg had been married for years to a brilliant biologist, Elaine O’Hare. She developed cancer some years ago. After she was treated it went into remission for a year or two. But it returned and spread throughout her body. All her friends gathered around her, buoyed her with love for the entire year of her final illness. And throughout her illness, Martin tended her with utter devotion; he was so loving and kind and devoted that all Elaine’s women friends fell in love with him, even the lesbians.
“Yes,” I repeated. “But his problem was guilt at admitting he could love anyone but Elaine. There was a strong attraction between him and Annie even before Elaine died. I saw it. I think Elaine did too. I think it pleased her. She knew he’d be all right without her.”
“And he and Annie are happy together now, aren’t they?”
“Last I heard, she was having some trouble adjusting to marriage. You know, she’d lived alone for twenty years after her divorce from Jack Steele. Said she’d forgotten how men expect to be waited on.”
“Umm.”
Marsha had solved this problem, I knew, after years of struggle. Stanley no longer expected her to cook his dinner every night—or even be home for dinner—and a third party (female) cleaned their house and did their laundry. But they had a high income: Marsha was a highly paid technical writer, and Stanley was a physicist.
“Your fellow might have had a bad experience with some woman,” Marsha ventured.
“Umm. I don’t think George is grieving over anybody,” I said glumly.
“His behavior—his insistence—his
attraction
to you does seem to have arisen terribly fast,” she suggested apologetically. “For people our age, I mean. It sounds adolescent, somehow. You know, kids get crushes, but…how old is he?”
I tried to conceal the grimace I felt growing on my face. “Oh, younger than I, but in his mid-fifties, I’d think. Not a kid.”
She gazed at me appraisingly. I began to feel self-conscious: What was she seeing? Did I suddenly look much older? Had I been looking older for a long time and she just noticed it? Hadn’t she said I looked fabulous, when we met at the theater? Of course, that didn’t mean anything. Women always said that to each other. It was a euphemism for I’m happy to see you, I’m glad you’re still alive. Did she think I was a silly fool?
“Of course, you too have been”—she wiped her lips with her napkin, searching for the kindest word, I thought—“precipitous. You know, you don’t know anything much about him, do you?” Her voice was cool, measured.
She did think I was a silly fool.
This was my warm friend Marsha?
She put her napkin down with a kind of finality. “Well, you can only see what happens, can’t you? It just feels a little unreliable to me. I hope he doesn’t end up hurting you, my dear.” She reached her hand across the table and placed it on mine, sympathetically.
That wasn’t what I wanted her to say or do. “Umm,” I mumbled, hating her, even if she was one of my best friends. I went home that night feeling battered—by Marsha, not George. Jealous, that’s what she is, I thought. Nothing like this has happened to her in years. She can’t stand that it happened to me. To think that Marsha would let jealousy destroy our friendship! It was devastating.
When I got home, there was a message from George on the machine, saying he’d been “dragged to lunch” by the dean. Chagrined, I thought that what he called coercion I called a better offer. He wanted to know if we were still on for the movies tomorrow night. He wanted to take me to see
Thelma & Louise,
which he’d seen with some of the editors the night before. The women had loved it, the men hated it, except for him; he wanted my reaction. The movie started at seven-thirty: he’d pick me up at seven. He didn’t leave a number at which I could reach him, but said he’d call the next morning.
Why had he gone to the movie with other people if he was intending to see it with me? Why hadn’t he left a number? Why did I always have to wait for him to call me? Suppose seven o’clock was too early for me? Suppose I’d already seen
Thelma & Louise?
What did he mean, the women had loved it? What women?
He wanted to keep control of things firmly in his own hands, I thought. I could probably call the Columbia School of Journalism and track him down, but that might offend him. Besides, I was willing to cede control to him, if he’d just be a little more…communicative. I decided to leave the telephone bell on next morning, even though this would interfere with my work.
The next day, ten people called before 9:00 a.m. George was not one of them. My irritation grew, hour by hour—irritation and anxiety. I felt helpless, a passive victim, and I cursed myself.
He finally called late Thursday afternoon, to say he was running late and could not after all come to my apartment. Would I meet him at the theater, Broadway and Eighty-fifth, at seven-fifteen? Again I felt absurdly let down, bruised, but I brushed away the feeling, concentrating on good cheer.
I saw him as I got out of the cab, before he saw me, and my hurt vanished. My heart leaped out of my body and flew to encompass him. Of course, I forced my body to walk to him in dignity.
He was wearing a white suit and a red-and-white-striped shirt and was leaning against a mailbox on the corner in front of the movie house, waiting for me. His stomach hung over his belt, and his head dropped onto his chest; his whole body sank in hollow dejection. I longed to wrap my arms around his head and stroke his hair and lean my cheek against his and whisper that he was loved and could rest in that love.
I walked toward him, and while I was able to restrain myself from putting my arms around him, I could not restrain myself from touching him. I reached out and fixed his collar, which was folded up.
“What are you doing?” he barked.
I jumped a little. “Just fixing your collar,” I apologized. “It’s bent up.” Vowing I wouldn’t touch him again, I told myself not to take this personally. I recalled a lover I’d had years before, a beautiful young man with skin the color of golden mustard. He didn’t object to being touched during sex, but he quite peremptorily stopped me from stroking him as we lay side by side afterward. I tried to believe that his upset had to do with his feelings about his color, not me. I tried not to take it personally.
Still, I never saw him again.
I brushed away my downheartedness, and we went in and found seats. He talked about the movie: it was great, fantastic, hilarious, he said. Later, as we left the theater, I told him I agreed with him—except I added that it was heartbreakingly true. I looked at his face, expecting him to be pleased that he’d pleased me, but he showed no emotion. We walked out into a mild summer night.
We made our way to a little Italian restaurant just a couple of blocks north of the theater. George wanted to sit at an outdoor table. I thought it was going to rain, but I did not say so. This was unlike me. I usually said what I thought. But something about him silenced me. I was so pleased he’d indicated a preference—it didn’t matter what for—that I simply bowed before it.
We discussed the movie; we discussed other movies.
“What’s the best movie you ever saw?” he asked.
“Oh, if I had to pick one—Bergman’s
Cries and Whispers,”
I said.
He was outraged. “What?” It turned out he’d never heard of it. He seemed to feel I was trying to humiliate him.
“You’ve never heard of it?” I was incredulous.
“We don’t get those egghead films in Louisville.”
I doubted that, but not out loud. Change the subject.
“So. Tell me about your life. Have you ever been married?”
“Four times,” he said brusquely.
“Really! Me too,” I confessed.
“Really?” He seemed dismayed.
I nodded.
“Four divorces?”
“Two divorces. Two of my husbands died. What about you?”
“Four divorces, but from one woman twice. My second wife was also my third wife. I married my first wife when I was young, in the service.”
“Is that supposed to mean you were too young to know what you were doing?”
“Yeah.”
“Umm.”
“And you married the second twice?”
He grimaced. “She was gorgeous,” he explained.
I studied him.
“And the fourth?”
“She was young—too young, I guess. She was great with my kid, my daughter. I thought Liddy needed a mother, and I thought she’d be a mother to her. But she walked out on me, just walked out. I never knew why. She just left.”
As he said this, his voice edged into rawness. I would come to recognize this tone, which appeared only when he spoke of this last wife. Although she had left him over five years before, he was still apparently smarting from it. I wondered at pain that long-lasting. Maybe Marsha was right about him.
“So you have a daughter?”
His face lighted up, and for the first time, he spoke easily. He had raised his daughter himself. Liddy was a joy and a delight to him, bright, had done well in school.
“How did it happen that you got custody?”
“Her mother was crazy,” he said. I would have challenged such a statement from any other man, but I said nothing. He adored Liddy, he had loved raising her, and she was terrific. She had done well at Radcliffe and then gone off and joined the Peace Corps. She was working in Ghana now; she loved Africa. She was doing good works. He was proud of her. She was twenty-four. She was great.
I smiled. “She sounds it. I have kids too—four of them.” He expressed no interest in my kids. We were midway through our pasta when a sudden downpour drenched us. George handled our damp remove indoors—a test for most men, I think—with good temper. Still, once our watery dinners lay on a dry table before us, we could not face finishing them. We sat with dripping hair, shivering in the air-conditioning. I ordered a decaf cappuccino; he ordered coffee. I gazed at him and thought he looked a little tired. The evening was over, I felt. But we sat making conversation for another half hour, the way lovers do at the very beginning of an affair, when they are reluctant to part. At least, that was how it seemed to me. It was good, I told myself. Especially since, as we were saying good night in front of my building, he asked:
“You want to have lunch tomorrow?”
The entire world seems to be heating up these years—at least, compared to my youth. It was hot and muggy that Thursday night, but I didn’t turn on the air conditioner because I dislike its noise. I turn it on only when there is no other way to sleep. Again I could feel myself starting to have a bad night. I lay naked on my cream satin sheets, while fantasies of George and me together played in my imagination. My body was hot, every one of my pores was open and parched, panting, noisily demanding nourishment. And what they wanted was George’s hands on them. My poor starved body. My hands felt huge and empty, tingling with emptiness; they wanted to be on his body.
Then he was there, transported by magnetism. We had only to look at each other, only to
think
about the other, for our breath to come more quickly. Hot, with quick, shallow breaths, we turned our bodies toward each other. When they met, we jumped with electricity.
Each of us instinctively understood the other’s body, knew where to touch: the soft places behind the ear, on the eyelids, in the crook of the neck and arm and leg, on the upper thigh near the groin. We moaned. Kissing, our mouths were unwilling to let go. Electric charges ran from mouth to groin to toes in each body in which body in both bodies. We pressed against each other, we could not get close enough to each other, we wanted to be inside each other, but we held off. We got hotter and hotter, we twisted and squirmed, we pressed and kissed and stroked, and only after a long time, when the tension was unbearable, did I rise up and sit astride him, and when I put him in me, he cried out in relief, and I rode him, slowly, slowly, bending to kiss his chest, his eyes. But we were both too hot, we couldn’t wait, and before we wanted to, we exploded, hot liquid spouting out of us, we both screamed in pained ecstasy, I kept crying out, kept going and going, and he kept going for me, until I was completely spent and fell on his chest, he with his arms around me, my cheek on his breast, our bodies still together.