The Saving Graces (20 page)

   "It's like she's gone blind except for that, it's all she can see. And I believe her when she says she'll never give up. Why don't they adopt a child, Rudy? Why? No, she's driven, she's on a course, she's so caught up in the world of baby-making she can't see anything else." "I know. What was she saying about her parents?" "I have no idea. Just something else to keep her mind on one track. I wish we could do something." "But what?" "Nothing. There's nothing to do." "Just be supportive," I said.
"Yeah." She looked over at me. "Hey, Rude. That was a nice thing you said to Isabel." "Oh, well. I don't know. I just tried to put myself in her place and figure out what would be the scariest thing. If I thought I might be dying. And it was being alone. So I wanted her to know she never would be." "Is that the scariest thing?" "To me. I think." A candle in a glass hurricane shade burned on the table between our two bunk beds. Between it and the moonlight, I could see Emma clearly, stretched out in her old blue UNC nightshirt, pressing a finger into the top of her white thigh-checking to see if she'd gotten too much sun this afternoon. "To me," she said, "the scariest thing is oblivion. Being, and then not being. Even if everyone you ever knew Was with you at the end, everybody holding your hand and telling you it was okay and they loved you and all that, you're still alone at that last second. Wherever you're going, nobody's going with you." "Wow. That seems so morbid." "No, it isn't. Why? You can't tell me you don't think about that stuff." "No, I think about it." But I'd been much better lately. "Could you believe Lee thought we were drinking in the car yesterday?" I guess that sounded like a non sequitur, but after I said it, the connection came to me.
"Well, you know Lee. If you're having that much fun, you must be drunk." "I haven't been drinking much at all lately," I told her. "Last night was the most I've had in weeks.
"I noticed. Any reason?" "Well ... I guess I just feel a little stronger. More comfortable in my real life." "How come?" "I don't know. Well, one thing, Eric and I have been doing really good work. Hard work, but it's felt like we're really getting somewhere for a change. He says it's not unusual to go along for a long time without any progress, and then all of a sudden - breakthroughs." "Like diet plateaus." "Exactly." "Oh, like you'd know," Emma scoffed. "Eric-he's very gentle, isn't he? Patient. He doesn't mind going slowly." I thought I heard a second meaning. "You mean I'm not getting anywhere. He's not doing anything. Really, you think therapy's a waste of time." Emma rolled her head on the pillow to look at me. "I used to think that," she said-surprising me; I thought she'd deny it. "But now I'm thinking Greenburg may actually be smarter than I am:' "Oh, Emma, the ultimate compliment. He'll be thrilled when I tell him." We smiled in the dark.
"Hey, Em." "What." "You know that landscaping course? Remember the-"
"Sure I remember." "Well, I've decided I'm going to go ahead and take it."

   She sat up. "Oh, Rudy." "It starts in September." "That's fantastic. What did Curtis say?" "Um. Well." She sank back down, but still facing me. "You didn't tell him yet." "Not yet. I've sort of been waiting for the right time." "Okay. So, Rudy, what do you think about the fact that you haven't told him because you know he won't like it? I mean, what kind of-" "I know what you mean. You sounded so much like Eric when you said that, Emma, it's spooky." "Well, what's the answer?" "The answer is-I don't like it. I don't like what it says about me or Curtis." "Or Curtis. I like that." "We have to confront some things, I know that. I need to tell him what I'm thinking. It's one thing to tell Eric, or you. I need to tell him." She leaned toward me. "This is new, Rudy, this is good. This is something really different with you." "I know. About time, don't you think?" She didn't say anything. Once in a while, Emma's tactful.
"It's not just drugs, either." "Excuse me?" I stuck my feet up on the mattress overhead, pushing on it, flexing my knees, "I'm taking this-antidepressant." New antidepressant, I might have said. "And it's true I haven't felt depressed, but I don't think that's the only reason. As Eric says, just because the crazy pills are working doesn't mean you're crazy." That line had never struck me as particularly funny before, but Emma laughed so hard I had to shush her.
Eric also says laughter is cathartic and cleansing, that it's good for the body and the soul, and when it's real it's better than sex. How many hours, I wonder, over the -last thirteen years have I shared helpless, snorting, side-aching laughter with Emma? If I'm crazy now, what if I'd never met her? - Another thing about shared laughter is that it comes from trust. Which must've been why this popped out of my mouth next: "We didn't have sex for the whole month of December." "December-last year?" "Yes." "You and Curtis?" "Well, who else?" "Um..." Emma stared at me, feeling her way. "Any particular reason?" "Well, that's the thing. If there was a reason, I don't know what it was. I hadn't done anything he could've been punishing me for. He never-he just wouldn't- we never did it, that's all. I didn't say anything. I know I should have, but I didn't. I didn't even tell Eric." "You never said anything at all? To Curtis?" "No." I winced. How embarrassing. How cowardly of me. "And then on New Year's Day-we did. As if nothing had happened. So afterward I said, 'Well, happy New Year,' or something, you know, sort of suggestive, so Curtis could say something if he wanted to. But he-he just looked at me very coldly, so. . . So that was the end of that, and since then we've been fine, normal. Sexually." "Sexually." "Yes." "But not otherwise." It's funny how it's easier sometimes to talk about your sex life, as intimate a subject as that is, than it is to talk about how the rest of your life is going. "Oh," I said, "it's just a combination of things. Different things adding up over-a long time. No one specific thing. Just some thoughts I'm having, and thinking of talking to Curtis about. Soon." Emma sighed. "Like what? Give me an example. So we can say we're having a conversation here." "Well, for example. Tonight on the videotape. That part when we were all standing around outside my house, getting ready to leave for fitness camp. That shot of Curtis kissing me good-bye." "Yeah, that was a little weird." They'd picked me up last, and we were giddy and excited, anxious to get on the road. Each of us had weight-loss goals, but part of the plan was to stop en route for one last glorious, fattening meal at a country inn we'd found listed in a guidebook; that way, we theorized, we'd be at our heaviest for the camp's first-night weigh-in. So we were silly and giggly, already looking ahead, already gone, you might say. I should have known, and in the back of my mind I probably did know, that that kind of inattention or obliviousness on my part hurts Curtis's feelings. Well, more than that, it actually scares him. He needs me to be aware of him all the time. He needs to be the center. Otherwise, it's as if he doesn't quite believe he exists.
And so-anyway-when he kissed me, it wasn't that sweet, private peck husbands and wives exchange when they're in front of people who they know are watching. You know the kind I mean - "Bye, honey," "Take care," "Love you," with lips touching briefly, maybe a quick, hard hug. Playful and tender, but pretty impersonal as kisses go. No, this wasn't like that. At all. Without even drawing me away a little from the group, and knowing Lee was filming everything, Curtis put his arms around me and gave me a long, slow, movie kiss, very passionate and erotic and forceful -when I tried to stop, -he wouldn't let me go. He made every thought in my head revert back to him. He did it on purpose. Kissing me, taking control of me like that, was his way of saying, "Think about me," to me, and "She's mine," to the Graces. In a way, it was worse watching it on film tonight, years later, than it had been when it happened. Because now it matches up with a lot of other memories. Similar ones, and some of them are even more disturbing.
"I think," I said slowly, "I don't want to be possessed anymore. And I used to." "Possessed? No, I know what you mean," Emma said, "it's just... an odd word." "I suppose. But I'm afraid, too, of anything changing. I hate change." "Sure about that? Sure it's not Curtis who hates change, and what you hate is challenging him? Upsetting him?" - - "Hm." Food for thought. - - "Well, you're going slowly, but that's okay, that's probably good. Like losing weight on a diet-again, not that you would get that analogy. Just as long as there's movement. We have to assume your shrink knows what he's doing." "I've been smoking in front of him," I said.
"Who? Eric?" "Curtis." "Get out." - "Not in the house when he's there, because I think that's rude, but when he's gone. But I don't gargle or spray room freshener on the curtains afterward so he won't know-none of that. And I smoke right in front of him when we're outside or in a restaurant or a bar. Eric says it's great. Well, he says it's terrible, he hates it that I smoke, but he likes it that I'm not hiding it from Curtis. Much healthier, he says." "Well, I guess so. Yeah. It's actually very brave of you, Rude, in a perverted sort of way. Rotting your lungs while you stand up for yourself. Personal growth through emphysema." "Care for a fag?" "Sure." We lit up.
"I never did this when I was young," I told her.
"Did what?" "You know." Propped on our elbows, facing each other in our narrow bunk beds, stretching over occasionally to share the ashtray on the floor, we looked like teenagers on a sleepover. "Had a best girlfriend. Told secrets in the dark. Snuck cigs. I just never had this." "Because you were too fucked up," Emma said matter-of-factiy. "Your family screwed you over, but now you're getting over it. Now you're getting well. Slowly." "You think?" "Yes, I do." She said it so adamantly, I pulled back, out of the candlelight so she couldn't see my face. The fledgling hope on it. I didn't want to look pathetic. "Hope so," I said.
"Oh yeah, I see it happening. Smoking in front- of Curtis, my God. Whoa, Rudy, you are a wild woman." She wasn't being sarcastic. "That is flicking fantastic." And to think that Curtis once asked me to stop being friends with Emma. "For your own good," he'd said. How despicable, when you stop to think about it. I couldn't tell Emma about that, it was too embarrassing, I felt ashamed for Curtis. It was proof, I had realized afterward-Eric helped me to see this-that Curtis had been pretending all along about Emma, making me believe he liked her in spite of her antagonism. Not in a good way, either. Not the way Emma bites her tongue and-doesn't say what she truly thinks of him. She does that for my sake. She does it out of respect, and tact, and love. Curtis pretends because he's dishonest. It's another way he possesses me.

   Emma yawned. We put out our cigarettes, blew out the candle. - "We always talk about me," I said sleepily.
"I know." She already had her eyes closed. "It's because you're such an egomaniac." I snorted. "It's because you make me ask everything. You never volunteer, I have to drag it out of you. Oh, I forgot to tell you-Lee asked me what I thought about inviting Sally to join the group." "Did she? She told me she was going to. What'd you say?" "I said I was all for it." "What?" I laughed.
"You jerk," Emma grumbled, settling back down; she'd almost hit her head on the top bunk when she sat up. "Tell me what you really said." "I said the same thing you did, that I didn't think it was a good time because of Isabel." Emma got comfortable again. "Think Lee was disappointed?" "No, not at all. I don't even know why she asked me. Just to be evenhanded, I guess. But that friendship's cooling off, you know." Which reminded me. "How come you told Lee you'd stay down here two more days?" Emma opened one eye. "That doesn't sound safe and sensible to me, Em. In fact, that seems positively out of character." "You think I'm safe and sensible?" "Well, compared to me." "Oh. Compared to you." Even in the dark I could see her smile. - Tonight Lee had begged us-one of us, two, all three, she didn't care-to stay over until Tuesday and then drive back with her- and Henry. Nobody volunteered. We kept asking why, and finally she admitted it: she'd fallen out of her infatuation with Sally Draco. She had invited the Dracos down to the cottage months ago, but now she didn't want to spend two whole days in the exclusive company of Sally, with no one but the husbands to break up the intimacy.
"Why don't you like her anymore?" Emma had asked-trying to sound nonchalant.
"Oh, I don't know, no real reason," Lee had said. "There's nothing wrong with her, I just don't feel quite as comfortable around her as I used to. That's all." Well, I don't either, but then, I never did. Maybe it takes one to know one, but I think Sally has big problems. And Emma's probably the least of them.
Isabel and I couldn't help Lee out, we both had to be home on Sunday. I could see Emma was thinking it over, but I couldn't have been more surprised when she said, "Okay, I'll stay if you want. I brought some work, I can do it down here as easily as at home." I'd stared at her; she wouldn't look at me the whole time Lee was thanking her, telling her again it was no big deal, Sally was fine, nothing wrong with her, this would just make things easier. Isabel never said a word.
"So, Em," I said again, "why did you say you'd stay? Don't you think that's dangerous? Don't you think,- seeing Mick with Sally for all that time and everything, don't you think it might. . . hurt? Hey, Em," I whispered. "Are you asleep?" Maybe, maybe not. She didn't answer. - 19.

   Emma.

   Rudy and Isabel got a late start back on Sunday afternoon. As soon as they left, I went for a walk on the beach. I should've stayed and helped Lee tidy up the cottage - Mick, Sally, and Henry Were due within the hour. But I didn't. Why not? It wasn't laziness - I didn't want to be there when they drove up. I couldn't face standing beside Lee at the deck rail, looking down, waving and grinning, "Hey, how are you, you made it!" Also, I wanted Mick to have some warning. He wasn't expecting me, and his face can be so transparent; it would be bad enough if he looked too glad to see me, but worse if he looked. . . what's the word? Speculative.
I guess it was a gorgeous day. Lots of blue sky and white clouds, lacy surf, gulls and sanderlings, shells. Sand. The tide was moving in, not out, I know because I saw people dragging their blankets back and pulling up their umbrellas. But on the whole I was oblivious; I could've been walking along the streets of downtown Poughkeepsie. "Don't you think it might hurt?" Yes, Rudy, I think it might. Why didn't I consider that sooner? I guess because love is not only blind, it's a masochist. Since Lee's party I'd seen him one time, at his studio. And talked to him once on the telephone. Both were intense, unsatisfying affairs, everything between us unspoken, everything unshown. Believe it or not, I do not thrive on trouble with men, and I'm not one of those women who choose the same dysfunction, whatever it might be, in man after man and obliviously revel in it. No, my pattern is to pick a different dysfunction every time, discover it, and run away as fast as I can. So why am I tormenting myself with Mick, who isn't- dysfunctional at all? Why does he keep calling me? We're not reckless people-why are we doing this?
If you cut through the backyards of the three cottages between Lee's and the shore, you can avoid the road entirely, which is convenient if you're barefooted. Lee has forbidden this shortcut because it's "illegal," but when she's not with us we take itanyway. I was one cottage away from Neap Tide II (what is a neap tide, anyway?) when I heard a peal of Sally Draco's loud, high, enthusiastic laughter. That's when I knew I'd made one of the biggest mistakes of my life.
- I couldn't see them yet, just hear them, Henry's slow baritone drawl, Lee's voice clear and clipped, Sally's higher, shriller, wound up tighter. I paused, listening for Mick's, and finally heard the low, noncommittal sound of his laughter. - What had I done? I didn't belong here. They did: they belonged to each other. Too late-no escape. A pall of loneliness settled on me, and I shivered under it, wretched and bleak from the knowledge that I deserved everything I was going to get.
Nobody noticed me, even though I stomped up the outside wooden steps to the deck. Too busy talking and laughing. No-somebody noticed me. I started back in surprise, as if a small animal had suddenly darted across my path. A child-Jay, Mick's little boy-I'd forgotten all about him. Had Lee been expecting him? He sat cross-legged on the porch floor, pointy-kneed, yellow-haired. He looked up, not startled at all, from the absorbing task of tying knots in a kite's tail. Blue eyes studied me with serious, shy curiosity for a few seconds. As soon as I smiled, he looked over his shoulder at his parents. Social help! you could almost hear him calling. "There you are," Henry boomed, finally seeing me. Everybody turned around. I went forward, smiling, smiling, "Hi, how are you, how was your trip," kissing Henry, hugging Sally when she made me. Mick, Mick I waved to, a playful little hand salute from six feet away. I barely looked at him, kept him in my peripheral vision only, as if he were the sun. But I saw he'd gotten his hair cut, and it made him look younger, practically callow. It was a bad cut; his white scalp showed through on the sides. And he looked too pale, his face strained, the stubble of his beard blue-black against his white skin. Had he been ill?
"I'm so glad you decided to stay," Sally bubbled. She actually took both of my hands and looked me in the eyes. "How are you, how have you been?" The panicky thought occurred that she knew everything and she was torturing me. How are you, how have you been -1 don't give my mother straight answers to those questions. "Fine, fine," I said, trying to match her intensity. "Is this your little boy?" That worked: she dropped my hands and called him, "Jay, come say hi to Emma." Oh, poor kid. Why do people do that? Just what Jay wanted to do, come over and meet some old lady friend of his parents. He scrambled up and dragged himself over, dutifully mumbling, "Hi," and sticking out his hand to shake while staring at my knees. Mick put his hands on his son's skinny shoulders, and the kid leaned back against him, relaxing. He looked just like his picture, which is to say, angelic. And superficially like his mother because of the fair hair and light eyes, but there was also something dignified and noble about the shape of his head, and that could only have come from Dad. Not that I'm prejudiced.
"Suit- up, everybody, we're off to the beach," Henry announced, to Jay's delight.
"Not me," I demurred. "I've had enough sun for one day." This brought on the usual incredulous laughter and jokes at my expense. Henry was especially inventive, calling me "fish white" and comparing my complexion to that of Casper the friendly ghost. "That's okay," I told him, "I'm used to the scorn of the ignorant and deluded, who won't be laughing so hard when they drop dead from melanoma." But the real reason, of course, was because I didn't care to witness all that wholesome family fun, the laughing and splashing and cavorting, just one Kodak moment after another. When everybody finally went away and left me alone, I mixed a gigantic gin and tonic and drank it in the shower. I wouldn't mind drowning, I thought lugubriously. I could slither down the drain with the water and the soap scum and disappear, and nobody would even miss me.
I sobered up in time for dinner. Six of us piled into the Pattersons' station wagon and drove to Brother's, where we pigged out on barbecue and fried fish and potatoes and mountains of mayonnaise-drenched cole slaw. I sat across from Sally, who never stopped talking. Her hair was a new, expensive-looking shade of pewter blond, striking with her high-arched black brows and huge blue eyes. She would be a fascinating woman if she'd just close her mouth. She had an obsessive habit of looking at everyone after she said anything, no matter how commonplace, compulsively checking our facial expressions, monitoring our reactions. A false laugh punctuated almost every utterance, as if she had to announce in advance, this is going to be funny. I wondered if she could possibly be high. Probably not, but she was wound up like a spring, trying too hard, shrill.
Maybe they were fighting. Beside her, Mick sat in virtual silence, smiling with strained politeness. But solicitous of her, somehow. I still couldn't look at him directly, but I could see fatigue in the way he held himself, even the tilt of his head. No, they weren't fighting, I didn't think. This was how they lived.
"Mick might get a job," Sally announced. I jerked my head up at that. She gave the nervous laugh and leaned playfully against his stiff arm. I caught his eye for a second and saw dismay. "You know, a real job, one that pays actual money." Lee shifted with embarrassment. Sally's discontent was uncomfortably transparent. Then, too, public talk about personal finances broke a cardinal rule in Lee's etiquette book. But she stared at Mick expectantly-we all did.
He said lightly, "Yes, I've been thinking of taking a part-time job." "You wouldn't stop painting," I said. - "No." He flashed me another lightning-quick glance before we both looked away. "No." "Too bad you don't plumb, you could come and work with me," Henry said in a hearty voice that dissipated the tension. "What kind of a job are you looking for?" "Night watchman," Jay piped up.
Mick laughed, and jay grinned up at him in surprise. "That was a joke," father explained to son. "Like working at McDonald's." "Oh. But you could carry a gun if you was a night watchman." "Were," Sally said automatically. She laughed the fake laugh again. "jay wants Mick to work for either the zoo, McDonald's, or the rodeo." "Or the air force," Jay put in. - "While I," she went on, "would be thrilled if he hired on as a Kelly Girl. Anything for a steady income. Ha!" I stirred cold french fries around and kept my head down. The stiff-sounding silence stretched to infinity. What galled me was knowing he probably didn't even blame her. She'd convinced him that he'd failed her, but she couldn't come out and say it, she could only snipe. - "They're raising the rent on my studio," Mick explained presently, as if no awkward moment had occurred. "It's still all outgo and no income for me, so I'll probably hook up with my old law firm, do some part-time research for them on patents, claims, that sort of thing." He looked straight at me. "It won't be so bad." Oh, but his paintings, his beautiful paintings. I felt sick. And scared, and furious at the injustice. And if I hadn't known before that this was love, I knew it now, because the truth is, his paintings still don't make a lick of sense to me. - By the time dinner ended and we drove home, the thought of spending several more hours in Mick and Sally's company was intolerable. Tough luck, Lee, you're on your own. "Are you okay?" she asked when I said I was going to bed early. "Sure, fine. I think I got too much sun." A good distraction; that's -always worth several minutes of good-natured ribbing. Good-natured on my part. I said good night and disappeared.
Then I lay in bed and listened to them talking and laughing on the porch above me. Sometimes I could hear the words, usually just the cadences. Rising and falling, opinionated and tentative. I felt like a child, sent to bed at the height of her parents' cocktail party. Jay, speaking of children, was sleeping on a cot at the foot of Mick and Sally's bed. I could have offered to let him sleep with me in Rudy's: empty bunk. But I hadn't. Guess why.
Around eleven o'clock, I heard footsteps descending the outside stairs and crunching off down the sandy driveway. I got to the window too late to see which couple it was, but a few minutes later I heard Henry's voice upstairs. So I knew. Mick and Sally. They'd gone for a walk. Full, romantic moon tonight. And they had a child in their bedroom, so...
You deserve it is not a solace -when you're suffering the scalding agonies of sexual jealousy. Every sixty-second click of my travel clock felt like a bullet in the brain. I struggled against picturing them twined together on the cold sand under the blue moon, but once the image gelled it was indelible. She's lovely, she is, especially when she shuts up, and he's a passionate man, I know that for certain, no matter that he's never touched me.
Eleven-thirty-four, the clock read when Lee and Henry tiptoed down the hail and closed the door to their room. At eleven-forty, I got up and-went into the bathroom I was sharing with the Dracos. Ostensibly to swallow a Sominex but really-I amazed myself, what a surprise-to look in Mick's shaving kit. Just look in it. See what he took on trips. A pathetic, embarrassing way to be close to him, but I had lost all shame.
Shaving stuff; he used Mennen soap and a Gillette razor, no aftershave. An ace bandage. Comb, but no brush. Nail clippers. A-bottle of generic aspirin, a tube of Chap Stick, a roll of Turns. Sun shades, the kind you clip onto your regular glasses. No condoms. Dental floss. Some Neosporin. Brut stick deodorant. Crest toothpaste and an Oral-B brush. No condoms. Matches and safety pins and a -lot of old Band-Aids at the bottom of the bag.
Why no condoms? Three possibilities. One, she took care of the contraception in the family. Two, they were trying to -make a baby. Three, they didn't have sex anymore.
Far and away, I liked number three best.
- Sally's flowered makeup case sat on top of the toilet, but I didn't touch it. In spite of the condom discovery, I'm telling you it wasn't information I was looking for. I just wanted to see his things. Really. Pitiful, I know, but I wanted to run my thumbnail along the teeth of his comb, check out how many aspirins he had left, sniff his shaving soap. See- if there was an underarm hair on his deodorant. I don't care-laugh. I tell you, I was gone.
At eleven-fifty-six, they returned. They took turns in the bathroom, and by ten after twelve they were in bed with the door closed, the light out. No, I wasn't peeping through the keyhole, I could see it go out in the reflection on the pine tree outside our side-by-side windows.
Silence.
Now I could really obsess.
It's not easy to admit that imagining your beloved in the arms of another is not only unmitigated torture, it's also titillating. Sorry, but it is, it's sexy. Why not? Emotional anguish and- physical arousal don't always cancel each other out. No, indeed. The anguish only makes the arousal sharper. Darker. And relieving it yourself, if you're reduced to that, only makes you feel worse, even more alone and-superfluous. Expendable. In the gray, nauseating hour before dawn, I thought about packing my things and leaving, but the logistics defeated me. I'd have to steal a car.
When I finally went to sleep, I fell into a coma and slept half the day away. This is a pattern with me, I see; the night after I threw Peter Dickenson out of my apartment-years ago; don't even ask-I went to bed and slept around the clock, a dead woman. Nothing wrong with that; safer than drugs or booze, much cheaper. Call it nature's Nembutal.
I woke up and stumbled upstairs-the common areas in the cottage are on the second floor, bedrooms on the first-to find the house empty. Good, I thought, until the third cup of coffee and the second cheese and tomato sandwich; then my company began to seriously bore me. I put on my bathing suit and headed for the beach.
How quaint-the men were playing Frisbee while the women watched. I endured the inquiries about my health and, after I assured everybody I was fine, the jokes about my shiftlessness. To catch the shade from Lee's umbrella, I spread my towel sideways behind hers. Sally lay next to her. I got all my stuff arranged-book, lotion, sunglasses, hat, rolled-up towel for a pillow-and stretched out on my stomach. And joined the women watching the men.
It was a three-sided game, Henry and Mick at the ends and Jay in the middle. The men flung the disk at each other with muscular, grunting, Olympian hurls, lobbed it softly and gently to the child with scrupulous accuracy. There's something reassuring about watching men play games with children. When they're patient and delicate, when they make allowances, when they compromise and camouflage their own superiority-in other words, when they behave like women-it reinforces our illusion that they're civilized.