My Dearest Friend (30 page)

By Friday, when Otto’s past visit had been squeezed dry of any real hope and Laura had heard about some dinner party where he cuddled with Sonya or a trip the two took over Christmas or spring vacation to Cozumel or Montreal, Laura would plunge into a dreadful depression. Fridays were miserable days. Laura would weep and weep.

No matter what Daphne said, no matter how brilliant a plan she put forth for Laura’s future, the Friday sessions always ended the same way.

“Well!” Laura would say finally, lifting her head and tossing her hair and lighting a cigarette. “
This
Sunday will be different! This Sunday I will—” And she would list what she would do: wear a dress with a slit in the side to show off her great legs, or short shorts; make Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte, Otto’s favorite cake; let Mrs. Kraft answer the door and stay out of the room for a while—then make a dramatic entrance.

When Daphne tried to talk to Joe about Laura, he grew impatient. He rolled his eyes. “What’s the matter with the woman?” he said. After a few months, it got to be a private joke with Daphne and Joe:

“Laura still suicidal?” Joe would ask over dinner.

“Yes.”

“What a surprise.”

“Well, do you think she should move back to Germany?”

“Not if she prefers living in the States.”

“Do you think she could get a job?”

“Of course she can get a job. Any idiot can get a job.”

“Maybe a job would take her mind off Otto.”

“What will take
your
mind off Laura?”

Daphne learned not to talk much about Laura. It made them both seem so dull, she knew, like a scratched record, the same things repeated ad nauseam.

But in May, when the world was luxuriant and luscious with flowers and fragrance and warmth, Daphne had an idea. The Millers were eating on the patio again; she had grilled hamburgers and they had turned out perfectly, thick and juicy on their onion-seed buns. She had crumbled some of the hamburger meat into little bits and put them, along with crumbs of cheese and slices of banana, on Cynthia’s high-chair tray. Cynthia loved catching the food between her fingers, feeding herself, then sucking her fingers. Birds sang around them, and flowers bloomed: it was bliss. Daphne and Joe had found each other again sexually, too—that was part of the idyll.

“I’ve had an idea!” Daphne said. “I’m so unimaginably
stupid.
How could I have gone through this terrible winter without thinking of it? Joe, we have to have a cocktail party. Or a dinner party. Just a few married couples, so it isn’t too obvious, and Laura, and every single man at the college.”

Joe groaned.

“Really, now!” Daphne said. “Really, Joe, come on. This is exactly what Laura needs. She’s just going to curl up in a ball mourning that gross Otto the rest of her life unless we help her. She’ll come to our party, and when those bachelors get a good look at her …! Think of it! She’ll never be lonely again.”

Joe groaned again. Then he reached across the table and stroked Daphne’s cheek. “You are an incurable romantic. You are Mitzi Gaynor singing ‘A Cockeyed Optimist.’ But we should have a party. We owe a lot of people. And it’s a good time of year. All right. Let’s do it.”

“Oh, God, Joe, I’m so excited!” Daphne said.

The next few weeks Daphne’s head was filled with visions. It was the same fantasy with variations. Laura meeting a young professor: their eyes would connect across the crowded room, they would walk toward each other, talk, smile, and leave the party early to go make mad passionate love. Or: Laura meeting an older professor, one with some elegance and savoir faire, who would appreciate her European charm. He would woo her with compliments and make a date to take her to the best restaurant in the area. Or … The possibilities, the fantasies, were endless.

The night of the party could not have been more conducive to romance. It was a cocktail party so that more people could be invited, but Daphne had put a pink paper tablecloth on the redwood picnic table and laden the table with food: a huge ham, sliced thin, with interesting mustards and breads and pickles; cheeses; meatballs simmering in chafing dishes; deviled eggs stuffed with caviar; vegetables and dips for the dieters; stuffed mushrooms; a silver platter piled high with seedless green grapes, strawberries, apple slices, and plums. The round glass-and-metal table they used for outdoor dining was large enough to hold the ice bucket and glasses and bottles of liquor and soft drinks. Daphne hung brightly colored Japanese paper lanterns from the trees and the sides of the house and put short fat candles inside colorful paper bags on the lawn. The backyard glimmered like a fairyland. It looked magical—something wonderful could happen here!

Daphne wore a low-cut summer dress and tied her hair up with a scarf. Finally she had lost the weight of pregnancy and birth. The classes at the Y had gotten her back into shape, an even better shape, very hourglass. Joe was attentive; whenever he was near her, he put his hand on her arm or waist affectionately; proprietorially.

Laura looked wonderful. These were the days when hippies influenced fashion,
and she wore a paisley minidress with a matching paisley headband and dangling earrings. Daphne heard one of the faculty wives say to Laura, “Darling, your legs are a sin.” “They are?” Laura exclaimed, alarmed. “No, no, you’re taking me wrong,” the woman said. “I mean they inspire lust in all our husbands. And envy in all the wives.”

Daphne watched Cynthia at one moment (was the babysitter really keeping the baby away from the burning candles?) and her friend at the next. Laura was approached by many men. Of course, they had not invited Otto and his Sonya, so Laura was, Daphne thought, as free to flirt as a teenager at her first dance. But where were Laura’s expansiveness, vibrancy, wonderful low laugh? Every time Daphne watched Laura, Laura looked stiff and somber.

So when the party was finally over and all the guests had gone, Laura, instead of going off to dinner with one of the men, or going off for another drink, or taking someone back to her house, or any variation on the themes Daphne had envisioned, remained behind, alone. She helped Daphne and Joe clean up, then sat at the kitchen table with them while they had a makeshift dinner of party leftovers. It was late. The party had gone on forever. The babysitter had put Cynthia to bed and gone home.

Joe said, “Ladies, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to pass out,” and with a mocking smile at himself, weaved off to bed.

As soon as he was out of the room, Daphne leaned forward over the kitchen table.
“Well?”

“Well?”

“Well, Laura! Did you … meet someone nice?”

“I met many nice people.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. You know what I mean.”

Laura was stirring a huge pile of sugar and quite a lot of milk into her coffee. This seemed to claim her entire attention. Finally she looked up at Daphne.

“I am grateful for what you tried to do. I know you were hoping I would meet someone special. And there were some nice men. But, Daphne, they all seem so young, or frivolous, after Otto.”

“But why not enjoy someone young and frivolous for a while? I mean, Laura, you don’t have to look at every prospective man as a future father for Hanno. This is the time in your life when you should just have some fun.”

“Meaning sleep around.”

“Well, yes, why not? Yes!”

Laura sipped her coffee. “I don’t think I want to sleep around. I don’t think I would be comfortable with it.”

Daphne eyed her friend appraisingly. “You surprise me. No, really, I’m serious. You are so … sensual, Laura. You love the things of the senses so much—everything around you, you make appealing. Your food, your clothes, your house—”

“And that makes you think I would like to sleep around?”

“That makes me think you would like sex. Oh, come on, Laura, think about that Hal Dodson, what a gorgeous man he is. Don’t tell me he doesn’t make your juices flow.”

Laura looked amused and superior. “What a way of putting it. Listen, for this conversation I need some brandy in my coffee.”

Daphne accommodated her friend, poured some in her own coffee, then settled back in her chair. “So?”

“We’ve been needing this talk when booze makes us honest,” Laura said. “You’ve been driving me crazy all year now. Telling me just to go out and get laid.”

“Really, I haven’t put it quite so crudely.”

“But that is what you mean. If I had gone off tonight with that Hal Dodson, you would have been happy? If I had gone to his house and slept with him?”

“Yes. Happy and envious. I’ll admit it.”

“Daphne, he’s much younger than I. We couldn’t possibly ever get serious about each other.”

“So what? Why not have one night of pleasure?”

Laura smiled at Daphne, a slow, almost seductive smile, looking up through her lashes as she sat with her head tilted down. “Because,” she said softly, “it would not be pleasure for me.”

Daphne just stared at Laura, waiting.

“I know I’ve said how good I am in bed with Otto, innovative and so on, and that is true, Daphne. I am good in bed for a man. But I’m not so good in bed for myself. Oh, here it is in graphic vulgarity for you. Maybe this will take that puzzled look off your face. Daphne, I almost never have orgasms. It is very hard work for me even to try. To tell you the truth, I really don’t like sex. When I hear you raving on about how you feel about Joe or how you lust after Hal, I know my body just operates differently from
yours.”

“I don’t believe this,” Daphne said. “I don’t believe this.”

“My
dear,
you know so much about me. But you do not know the deepest things. I’m telling you now. You know how poor I was as a child in Germany. I’ve told you the story of my mother holding my hand and crying because I was hungry. I vowed that would never happen to me. I would never let my child go hungry. So I did what was necessary. I found a wealthy man and married him and made him happy. Well, for a while, ha.
That
is what all that ‘sensuality,’ as you call it, was about. That’s what all women’s charms are about, when you come down to it, you know. Making the home alluring so the man will stay in it and bring us some money. Give me more brandy.”

“You’ll be sick if you drink any more, Laura,” Daphne warned, but Laura reached across the table and poured brandy into her empty coffee cup. “At least let me give you a glass.”

“This is good for you, you know,” Laura said, after taking a large swallow. “You are such an idealist, such a dreamer. You need to know some things. You need to admit some things. Face facts. All women are whores, in a way, aren’t we? We need to keep our men happy so they will support us.”

“Laura, you’re drunk. You’re saying awful things.”

“Oh, come on, Daphne, sometimes you irritate me so much! You like to hide from the truth in your romantic literature. Your poetry. Men are basically animals. They are different from women, they’ll sleep with any woman who offers, while a woman has to work very hard to keep a man in her home.”

“Laura, you’re just cynical because of Otto. Not all men are that way.”

“
Every
man is that way. Every man, Daphne.”

The two women stared at each other. Then Laura said it.

“I could make your Joe sleep with me, you know. I could. I could get any man to sleep with me.”

Daphne felt chilled and shivery and sick.

“That doesn’t mean marry. That doesn’t mean love. That just means have sex. Men are promiscuous. We are all only pretending otherwise for the sake of civilization. Oh, look at your face, you look like a child and I’ve just stepped on your dolly. Sometimes you are just a baby.”

“Well, you make me very sad. I’m very sad for you. If that’s how you feel.”

“Don’t be so superior.”

“I’m not! I don’t mean to be. Laura, truly I am sorry for you. That you don’t think men can be faithful. That you can’t just enjoy sex—”

“And you can. Enjoy sex. You are the great sex queen.”

“I didn’t say that! What’s gotten into you?” Daphne felt the night and the conversation and her friendship with Laura slipping away past her control or imagination.

She rose from the table. “I think I see a light in the backyard in one of the paper sacks. I’m going to go out and check it. I want to be sure I’ve extinguished all the candles. I’ll be right back.”

It was after midnight, but the early-summer night was bright with stars and moonlight. The air was fragrant and warm and slightly humming with insect noises and small animal rustlings. She had kicked off her high heels and walked through the grass, which was dewy now against her feet. No candle was burning; she knew that. She had only needed to get away for a moment, to think. But in case Laura was watching, she walked to the end of the yard and bent over a paper bag and looked in. She took a deep breath of the clean night air, then turned to go back to the house.

Halfway to the house, she saw Laura coming down the lawn toward her. Laura had not kicked her heels off and she seemed very tall and as thin as a taper. Behind her, the kitchen glowed with light, so that Laura’s face was shadowed and unreadable. To Daphne’s surprise, she came right up to Daphne and drew her against her, folding her in an embrace.

Holding Daphne against her, she said, “I have made you angry, and I never want to do that. You are my best friend. I need you.” Laura was crying now. She leaned against Daphne, her arms wrapped around her, and her words came like puffs of breath against Daphne’s temple. “I’m sorry if I offended you. You must not hate me. Don’t hate me. I love you so much, Daphne.”

“I don’t hate you, Laura,” Daphne said. “I love you too.”

“Oh, Daphne,” Laura said, and kissed Daphne firmly on the mouth.

Shocked, Daphne drew back, pushing herself away from Laura.

“Oh, God, I’m so drunk,” Laura said. “I must go home. I am so drunk.” She began to walk up the lawn toward the side of the house, headed toward the front, where her car was parked.

“You shouldn’t drive, Laura,” Daphne said. “Not drunk.”

“You’re right,” Laura said, and, veering off, made it to the long lawn chaise. She collapsed onto the striped crisscross of fabric. “I’ll spend the night here.”