The Saving Graces (3 page)

Poor Stephanie, I agonized all the way home. What would happen to her now? What if she went back to Spider Man? If I could find her somehow-she lived in Tenley Circle, she went to Wilson High, she was fifteen years old...
What made me think I could help her? All I'd done was tell her about myself, my alcoholic mother, my screwed-up family. Mrs. Phillips was right about everything. I deserved this disgrace, and much more.
Well, I would get more. The worst punishment hadn't started yet, but it was about to. As soon as I tried to explain all this to Curtis, Isabel.
I've been reading a book by a woman who believes that, in her most recent past life, she was a Nazi sympathizer. She collaborated with the SS, she says, spied on her neighbors, and made herself rich (or rather himself rich; she's positive she was a man in this life) by shameless war profiteering. She bases this conviction not only on past-life regression therapy, but also on the circumstances of her current life. Poor woman; she's a quadriplegic; she lost the use of all but her facial muscles in a horrific automobile accident when she was sixteen. She says the suffering she endures now is in payment for the sins she committed in Germany in the 1940s.
Karma. What goes around comes around.
I have never been hypnotized or regressed, and if I've lived past lives, I've lost track of them. But I would not rule out the possibility. Skepticism is a luxury I don't indulge anymore-I leave that to the young and immortal. But if it's true that the yin and yang are always counterbalancing each other, I'd like to think they're doing it within me now, in this life. I even knowwhere I'd place the fulcrum for the most perfect equilibrium: at the center of my forty-sixth year. Before and after that dubious milestone, the halves of my life fall away like wings, like a heart broken in two. I am reborn.
Here in the third year of my new life, I try to balance the old one with hope and love, sympathy, warmth and superfluous kindnesses, gratuitous outbursts of delight. There is so much to counterweigh (although nothing so heinous as the erstwhile Nazi's sins); I only hope I have time. It would help if I could live to ninety-two. Forty-six and forty-six.
Among good friends, ten years isn't much of an age difference, and yet sometimes I feel as if the Saving Graces and I come from different centuries. I'm not quite fifty; technically I'm a boomer. My father was a missionary, though, and I spent half my childhood in Cameroon and Gabon, the other half in Iowa. Then, too, my husband's job kept us stationed in Turkey for the first six years of our marriage; our son was born there, in fact. These are the most obvious explanations for my lifelong uneasiness with the popular culture, but I think something else is also at work. Something in me. Terminal unhipness, Emma would call it. That's as good an explanation as any.
We're all productive, tolerably sane, functioning adults, we Graces, with no more emotional baggage- well, except for Rudy-than you would expect in a random sample of aging yuppie women. And yet our childhoods were disasters. Some more than others, of course. Rudy could write a book; Emma probably will write a book. Lee's family and mine have in common an outward appearance of normalcy, a very different reality inside. Occasionally we four play the intriguing "What keeps us together?" game, and the fact that we all survived our childhoods is mentioned early and often.
I wonder if I could have survived my cancer without their loving-kindness. Survived-yes, probably. But only that: barest survival. Nothing, no other experience has ever leveled me to such an extent. I believed I would never recover, that I was forever changed. And I was, but not in the way I expected. I'd read all the pamphlets and books on the disease, as many as I could find. The first-person stories of women who claimed that cancer changed their lives, turned them into different people, was a blessing in disguise-oh God, these stories infuriated me. I felt cheated and betrayed, lied to, and deeply, personally offended. And now- now I'm one of those women. It's been two years since I lost my breast, and I hear myself uttering the very same sentiment that used to make me grind my teeth: "Not that I'd wish it on anyone, but it was good that this happened to me. It's turned my life around." Well, it needed turning around. It had taken a little detour, my life, occasioned by, among other things, the discovery of my husband's chronic unfaithfulness. I don't know why, but I've been thinking about Gary quite a lot these days. I've been wondering if I was right to turn his last act of betrayal into the catalyst for our breakup. If we were still married and it happened today, would I forgive him? I believe I would. I hope so. Because I'm not the same person; I don't have that anger inside me anymore. Thank Cod. Oh, but what would Lee say if I told her this? Or Emma, or Rudy? It doesn't bear thinking about! The only bright spot in the long horror of my divorce was their friendship, the way they rallied around, united in loathing Gary. In the space of one women's group meeting, they went from being rather fond of him to wishing him dead, and at the time I found that enormously comforting.
To this day, I haven't told the Graces the whole story of his infidelities. Too embarrassed, I guess; it's shameful, Gary's behavior, and some of the shame has stuck to me, as if part of the blame were mine. Perhaps it is-I'm sure it is. But I'll never forget and I'll always be grateful for their savage, righteous fury when I told them how I discovered his first peccadillo. It happened on the night of our nineteenth wedding anniversary-which, in retrospect, seems fitting; as long as I've known Gary, he's always had terrible timing.
He took me to a new Turkish restaurant in Bethesda-a little gift of nostalgia for the good old days, when we were first married and lived in Ankara. I was surprised and touched. We drank raki and ate skewered lamb with eggplant, and went home and made love on the couch. Most unlike us, but Terry was in Richmond on a glee club overnight, and for once the house was ours. I fell asleep afterward, and woke up in the dark. Carrying my clothes, I wandered upstairs, feeling cozy and smug because' my marriage was nineteen years old and I still had sex on the sofa. Gary's voice, low and confidential, came to me from the half-closed bedroom door, and I paused on the landing, nothing but curious.
Who could he be talking to on the telephone at midnight? In that voice?
Betty Cunnilefski -a name that didn't amuse me in the slightest until much, much later. She worked as an administrative assistant in his office. I'd met her once, recalled her vaguely: small, wispy, beige, the sort of woman you see dining alone in restaurants, who's careful to keep the cover of the book she's reading facedown on the table.
Gary confessed everything that night in a rush. He wouldn't see her again, he swore, and he'd have her transferred to another office. Even in the midst of my hurt and anger, I felt a small pang for Betty-who, true to his word, Gary moved to a different department within the week. And presumably never saw again. I believed him at the time, he wept so convincingly, begged my forgiveness so sincerely. He seemed almost as shocked as I was, and unable to explain why he'd done it. Which was just as well, because if he'd claimed he was lonely, misunderstood, sexually deprived, drunk, seduced, in midlife crisis-any excuse would have ignited the silent, seething volcano of anger in me. I was barely aware of it, frankly thought myself incapable of it. And Gary would have been flabbergasted if he'd guessed at a fraction of it.
It took three years for the volcano to erupt. Betty may or may not have been his first mistress, but she wasn't his last. How did he get these women? That's all I want to know, now that the fury has burned itself out. Gary is short, jowly, on the stocky side; he has a full beard, and still plenty of salt-and-pepper hair. He's bullchested, thick-necked, and short-legged. In bed he's ramlike, a barterer. Fine if you like that sort of thing, but over the years I grew to hate it. Behind a friendly smile, he's really quite cool and measuring, predatory. He flirts energetically and ineptly; it's impossible -was impossible-to imagine him scoring with any woman. But he does. What is it about him?
For one thing, he's an earthy, passionate man- that's why I fell in love with him. And for another, he chooses needy, lonely, awkward girls, the pathetic sure things of this world-girls exactly like I used to be. I can't say if it's deliberate on his part, and therefore cruel and calculating, or only blind, unerring instinct. I've never been able to decide. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. I want to forgive.
This is not altruism, not saintliness. There's no room inside for bitterness anymore-it's that simple. At the risk of sounding fatuous, I'll make an observation that life is full of Bettys. I don't know whom I have to thank for this new, sanguine attitude, and it's amusing to think it may be, in part, my minister father's Lutheran God. But only in part. I'm equally drawn nowadays to what Emma calls woo-woo, meaning crystals and rocks, the Tarot, reincarnation, past lives, astrology, numerology, meditation, hypnotherapy-anything and everything under the rubric of New Age (anything spiritual other than orthodox Protestantism, according to Emma). I believe in them all. My friend's scorn knows no bounds, and yet she teases me so gently, so affectionately. It's a lovely form of play between us. Emma and I are closer than we've ever been.
I could tell her how purely delighted I am to see God in so many new places. The dual burdens of conventionality and rationality fell away when I realized I might die, I really might die. Now I'm free. Free and forty-nine, and so grateful to be starting life over again. Yin and yang. I've gone back to school, I've moved from Chevy Chase to Burleith to Adams-Morgan - a progression that speaks volumes all by itself. I color my hair. I might take a lover. Waking up in the morning isn't a tedious and dutiful act, it's the start of a possible adventure. I've recreated myself. No, that's not it. I have been recreated, by a new definition of mortality forced on me by circumstances. And it was worth it: all I had to give in return was a breast.
The deal of a lifetime.

5.
Emma.Bad news doesn't hurt as much if you hear it in good company. It's like-if somebody pushes you out a fifth-floor window and you bounce off an awning, a car roof, and a pile of plastic garbage bags before you smash onto the pavement, you've got a pretty good chance of surviving.
This analogy is too unwieldy to go on with, plus I can't decide whom to equate with the plastic garbage bags. So I'll just say, the night I found out Mick Draco was married, I thought of my three best friends as fall-breakers extraordinaire.
We were having dinner on a Thursday, our regular meeting night, at La Cuillerée in Adams-Morgan instead of at Isabel's apartment because her stove was broken. "My short story got another rejection," I had just announced to Rudy, Lee, and Isabel, and I was in the process of laughing off their concern and sympathy, even though it felt like balm, so they wouldn't know how wrecked I was-when all of a sudden Lee looked past my shoulder and said, "Mick Draco." I froze, disoriented-five minutes ago I'd been fantasizing about him. Lee read my mind, I marveled, and then, following her gaze, I glanced around and saw him. An X-rated dream come true.
She said his name again and waved, but since Lee's the kind of person who would rather eat a cockroach than raise her voice in a public place, he didn't hear her. But-Lee knew him? Flustered, I stood up and shouted, "Hey, Mick!" and he whipped around, grinned, and walked over to our table.
I had been thinking about him for the last four days, ever since our brief, pre-interview meeting in the seedy coffee shop across from his grungy art studio on Eighth Street. He'd told me he lived in nearby Columbia Heights, but still, suddenly seeing him in this middling-trendy French bistro on Columbia Road threw me off.
He still looked good, though. Still straight and lean and not too tall, my favorite body type. And he still had dark, silver-streaked hair, a big, intelligent head, and light brown eyes that warmedwhen he saw me. "It's that guy I told you about," I had time to whisper to Rudy, before he loomed over us with his hands in his pea jacket pockets, smiling and glad, a little nervous, a little self-conscious. And then I thought, Shit- he'll take one look at Rudy and /~rget my name. That's what men do- I've gotten used to it, I'm philosophical about it. Tonight, though, I wanted to stuff a bag over her head.
Lee said, "Mick, hello, it's nice to see you. I've been meaning to call Sally. Do you and Emma know each other? I had no idea." Sally, who's Sally, I thought while Lee introduced him to Rudy and Isabel. But then I knew. The little wife.
Oh, perfect, the story of my life. And it wasn't even going to make for a good joke, no funny routine about the date from hell or the newest hilarious bedroom blunder by one of my famously inept sex partners. No, this just hurt. I was blindsided, totally unprepared for how bad it felt. Do you think this was peculiar of me? Immature or unstable? I mean, to react this strongly to the married status of a man I barely knew? Well, so do I. I can't explain it. It's never happened before.
"Mick's son Jay goes to the Center," Lee was saying, sparkling her black eyes at him, obviously pleased to see him. "That's how I met Sally." Another jolt: a wife and a kid. In Lee's day care center, no less. I put on a big smile and told everybody how I knew Mick. "We just met a few days ago. Mick's going to be the star of an article I'm writing about midlife career changes." Rudy and Isabel made interested noises. He didn't pick up on it, so I said, "He used to be a patent attorney, and now he's an artist." He moved his hands around in his pockets and muttered, "Struggling, would-be artist," with a crooked smile.
Shy-he was shy. Oh, God. That's my other weakness. I have two: men who are shy, and men who are smarter than I am. He hadn't been shy before, though, not when it was just him and me in the coffee shop. And now he wasn't blinded by Rudy, either; in fact, he kept glancing at me while he and Lee made small talk. Isabel sat quietly and watched, not saying anything. Absorbing it all.
Technically we were having a meeting, so nobody asked him to sit down with us. I was glad-why torture myself until I had to? When the conversation got sparse, he told Rudy and Isabel it was nice meeting them, told Lee he'd tell Sally to call her. Sally. I've never known one, but I had no trouble picturing her. Sally would be a natural blonde with a wholesome, perky outlook. She'd wear an apron when she baked special, complicated but healthful cookies for her men. That's what she'd call them-"my men." Mick backed up a step, looking directly at me for the first time. "So, Monday," he said.
"Right. Monday." "Would you like to get some lunch first?" "No, can't, let's start in the studio like we said." My voice sounded snippy-how stupid. He hadn't done anything wrong. He didn't wear a wedding band, but he hadn't lied, hadn't even done that shuffle-dance men do to imply that they're single without saying it. If this was anybody's fault, it was mine, for making an assumption based on nothing but wishful thinking. Rookie mistake. I could've sworn foolishness like that had been bled out of me years ago.
We all said good-bye, and Mick went off to join a stoop-shouldered man with a white ponytail at a window table. I watched them out of the corner of my eye while Lee chattered about Sally; how nice she was, how they were thinking of taking ballet lessons together. The moment came and went when I could have blurted out that my heart was broken-in a humorous way, of course. I still have a few secrets I keep from the group, but this kind of thing, man trouble, isn't usually one of them. Why didn't I speak up? Lee knowing the wife made it sticky, that was one thing. The other was Isabel. Her divorce isn't that old, and adultery is still a touchy subject with her.
Not that I was contemplating adultery. God, no, I hate cheating, cheaters, infidelity, the whole sleazy package. But still. Something about Isabel, quietly sitting there with her gentle face and her Buddha smile, something in her that's fine, not judgmental, kept me from making any cynical, self-effacing quips about the crush I had on married Mick Draco.
We'd saved Rudy for last, as usual, because her fifteen-minute allotment has a way of stretching to thirty, forty, forty-five. Nobody minds; it's just better to plan ahead. She told a long, funny story about losing her job at the Help Hotline.
"Well, I knew you'd laugh," she said to me. "But I'm telling you, it wasn't that funny." "You really gave her Greenburg's phone number? Oh, Rudy." "Why not? He's a family therapist, he counsels adolescents. And if ever a girl needed-" "Because it's a violation of the rules," Lee said in that tolerant, teacher-to-student voice she uses a lot on Rudy. She doesn't use it on me, because if she does I use it right back. Only I exaggerate, make it sound even more irritating, which is saying something.
"I know," Rudy said, "but-" "Places like that aren't allowed to recommend individuals, Rudy. Didn't they explain that? Wasn't there any training before they let you start answering phones?" "Yes, there was training. They told us all about not recommending individual doctors or clinics or hospitals, not even programs. I know it was wrong, but I couldn't help it. If you'd heard her" - deliberately, she turned from Lee and me to Isabel-"you'd have done the same thing." Isabel smiled. "I hope I would have." "But you can't do that," Lee insisted, "because then the hot line becomes nothing more than an advertising service. Just think of the potential for abuse." Isabel sat back, fluffing her soft cap of ash-blonde curls-a dye job, she looks fabulous these days, not a minute over forty-five. "Rudy," she said mildly, "how many charitable organizations do you volunteer for?" "Right now?" She counted. "Four." "Really. What are they?" "Literacy, Sunday Soup Kitchen, humane society, and story hour." "Story hour-" "At Children's Hospital."
Moment of silence while we took that in. There's an old black lady who plays slide guitar on the corner of Fifteenth and G. Sometimes I drop a dollar in her cigar box as I'm rushing past. Except for some Christmas checks, assuming I'm flush, that's the extent of my charity work.
Isabel didn't press the point. She didn't have to. Lee stopped lecturing and I stopped laughing. Rudy, sweet, oblivious Rudy, asked the waiter for more water. She didn't even know Isabel had made a point.
Rudy caught me beaming at her. "What?" she said, smiling back.
"Nothing." I really love Rudy's squinty-eyed smile. Twelve years ago, on the student side of the reference desk at the Duke University library, she must not have smiled much, because otherwise I'd have noticed. We were only nodding acquaintances then, harried grad students who knew but never really registered on each other. Nowadays we love to marvel about luck, timing, providence-fate, if we're drinking-and what a tragedy it would've been if we hadn't moved to D.C. the same year, and then, clearly a miracle, joined the same book club.
"What did you first see in me?" We never get tired of asking each other that question, although we word it more artfully, less baldly. "You laughed at all my jokes," I always say; "nobody else in that group had any sense of humor whatsoever. Plus you've got a terrific laugh." True, but an even truer reason is because Rudy always said out loud the things I was only thinking. She had words for everything, and they fit with my inner life, meshed with my deepest feelings, as if she were me. It was as if I'd met my double. I'm her best friend, but she attracts other people for the same reason. I don't know if it's all the years in therapy, but Rudy has a way of saying the unsayable and making it sound normal and human. Forgivable.
When I ask what she saw in me, she says, "You were so funny." That's nice; I like making people laugh, and I don't need a therapist to tell me why. "And you were honest. And sort of snotty, but in a good way, not really mean. A smart-ass with a heart of gold." It's the nicest thing anybody's ever said to me.
Over dessert, my mind wandered. Also my eyes. Mick Draco had incredible shoulders. Draco -it's Greek, isn't it? But the bump in his nose looked Roman. I put on my glasses. He had a mole at the flared end of his right eyebrow. And the neatest, tidiest hairline, something so clean about it, even though his straight, streaky hair was too long. (For fashion; not too long for him.) He laughed at something his friend said. I couldn't hear the laugh over the restaurant din, but it made me smile in sympathy.
Lee smiled back at me.
I took off my glasses and pulled myself together. Mick Draco's a dead end. And I'm a bust at the man-woman thing. Half a lifetime of trying and failing to connect with the opposite sex for longer than a year or two can't be discounted or called "finding myself" anymore. I'm never going to find myself, because I'm a loser.
"What would I do without you guys?" I interrupted Rudy to ask, out of the blue, in the middle of the crème brfilée. Everybody smiled at me fondly; Isabel glanced at my wineglass-just checking, a tolerant, motherly gesture. "No, I mean it. If my luck was as rotten with women as it is with men, I'd have to shoot myself."
Rudy gave me a little pat on the shoulder and went back to a story she was telling about her shrink. But, you know, it's true. I might die an old maid, but I'll always have my pals. God knows there are worse things than living alone. Most men are only speed bumps anyway, aggravating distractions scattered along life's otherwise pretty nice highway. You might run into a good one every long once in a while, but even then he's usually got something wrong with him. Good women, on the other hand, are everywhere. You can pick and choose, find the best ones, start a club, and have friends for life.
Walking out of La Cuillerée, Lee turned at the door and waved good-bye to Mick Draco, but I didn't. I sailed on out, didn't even glance his way. I was over him. Thanks to my friends, I had it all in perspective. Saved by the Graces once more.
Then, too, I'd be seeing him again on Monday.