My Dearest Friend (34 page)

It was only at the end of the evening, in the car on the way home, that a sense of awkwardness fell between them. Perhaps it was the silence in the car after the noise of
the bar; and the air was so cold it seemed hostile after the bar’s smoky warmth. The moment she sat down on the icy car seat, Daphne had the strangest urge to slide across and snuggle against Jack for warmth. It was just a quick welling-up of animal need.

But of course she wouldn’t do that. Daphne could tell Jack was nervous now—she was older than he was, and had been a divorced woman long enough to notice the signs of a nervous man. Jack kept fiddling with things, the heat gauge, the radio, the backwindow defrost, and the bright lights: every now and then he switched the wrong thing and the windshield wipers, which were unnecessary, came flashing across their vision. “Sorry!” he said each time, almost yelling.

Oh, dear, Daphne thought, how am I going to make him comfortable? The drive back to Plover would take the better part of forty-five minutes, and most of it along dark country roads. The bright streetlights of Greenfield were a help; it made them feel as if other people were still around, but once they hit the long black stretch of Route 2, they were as stranded with each other as two astronauts on the moon. Or two teenagers on their first date.

Daphne had not forgotten his kiss during the fall. Well, how could she? It was the only real kiss she’d had in about two years. She said to herself: Jack is thirty-one. You are forty-six. You could truly be his mother. She said to herself: Jack is married. You know what you think of women who mess with married men.

Still. The mind by nature is made to fade when faced with the powers of the body, like the moon fading in the sky when the great sun rolls over the horizon. What has seemed rational and clear by silver light in a black sky suddenly is impossible even to find when the sun takes over so completely, blazing through the senses. This was what Daphne was feeling within her body now, a sunrise. Gently a heat came rolling up inside her body, spreading its rays to every part, so that her limbs and fingers and skin, which for a while had seemed numb to her, now tingled with life. Desire, quick and dense and pervasive, streaked through her abdomen and legs.

Men’s bodies. Women could talk all they wanted about liberation, but they would never be free of the love of men’s bodies, and no liberation could ever be as sweet as union with a man one loved. David had been older than Jack when he and Daphne became lovers, and although he played tennis and golf, he had developed an alcoholic softness around his chest and belly. Still, the hair on his chest and abdomen had pulled her gaze down his torso like a summons every time, another one of nature’s tricks,
pointing the way to that magical package between the legs. The vulnerable balls. The cunning penis, shaped like the arrow that pierces the heart. When David had been drinking a lot, he was impotent, and they came to accept this and not attempt anything. Then his penis would hang, a tough useless weed in his crotch. But when he hadn’t been drinking, it swelled up like steel, and this was why Daphne loved David, why women loved men, because they were soft and hard at once, silk skin over brick muscles, rampant penis over fragile balls, rigid prick thick with cream.

Jack was so young. His body, she had noticed—she had thought of it often—was firm, from youth and from his running. His thighs were long and hard and hairy, bestial. His black hair, still thick, and his skin, still firm and taut, made Daphne remember young Joe, potent with youth. Even at his best, David had not come more than once a night, but when he had been in his twenties and early thirties, Joe had been able to rest and rise over and over again. Jack would be able to too. Daphne wondered about things: was Jack’s pubic hair wiry or straight and lank? His hair was dark, would his penis be purple or pink in tone? Men’s penises were different in spite of what magazines said, or so Daphne had found in her brief experience. Jack was fairly short. Would his penis be?

“Would you like some music?” Jack asked, breaking into her thoughts.

“That would be nice,” Daphne said, feeling her face go hot with guilt. How long had she been sitting there in silence, thinking of penises? Frantically she searched her mind for some topic of conversation that wouldn’t seem artificial at this moment, but she could think of nothing. She felt like a teenager on a date, as paralyzed by sex as a cobra by a flute, waiting, waiting, hanging in the air.

The car lights flashed on the road signs welcoming them to the state of Vermont.

“I find I like living in Plover,” Jack said. “I like leaving the college behind so completely, going into a different state in more meanings than one. Then, going up into a mountain, too, the wilderness, after all that civility, provides a great relief.”

“I know,” Daphne said, grateful for his easy tone. “You really feel that you’re getting away from it all, going into another world.”

And as they drove, the wilderness did enfold them, the wooden bridge thumping responsively under the car’s wheels, the road becoming dirt, the trees and bushes closing in above and next to them, narrowing the road, stretching out to scrape the sides of the car, nature closing in.

Daphne had left a light burning in her cottage. Jack stopped the car next to her old
Jeep, turned off the engine, and looked at her expectantly. She knew he wanted her to invite him in for a drink. She wanted to invite him in for a drink, and more.

“Thank you,” she said politely. “For driving.”

“Daphne,” Jack said. His voice was hoarse. He reached his hand out and pulled her to him and kissed her on the lips. One hand he kept on the back of her head, holding her to him, the other hand he put on her neck, running his thumb under her chin.

Daphne shivered under his touch. He smelled new and clean, as fresh as washed cotton drying in the sun, and his kiss filled her body with light. She pushed him away.

“No.”

“Let me come in. Let me spend the night with you.”

“No. It would be wrong. You know it would be wrong.”

“Please.”

It was growing cold in the car. They could scarcely see each other. But they could smell and hear each other, and it was like being drugged by the gods. Daphne’s body turned toward Jack’s as if he were the sun.

“Just come in for coffee, then.”

“All right.”

But once they were inside the house, enclosed in its warmth, Jack took Daphne in his arms and pulled her to him. He put his hands on her buttocks and pressed her hips against his. They were the same height and matched nicely all up and down. Jack was kissing Daphne, her mouth and eyes and neck, and nudging into her, and never in the world had she wanted anything more.

No. Several things in the world she had wanted more. Long ago, for example, she had wanted her husband not to be sleeping with her best friend.

“Jack,” she said suddenly, shoving him away, backing off, closing her coat over her breasts and holding it there. “Stop a minute. Listen to me. We can’t do this. We mustn’t do this. You love Carey Ann. You can’t do this to her. You can’t do this to your marriage.”

“I want you. I’ve wanted you for months.”

“I want you too. But human beings can’t go around just taking what they want. Listen, Jack, I’ve seen this movie before. I’ve been in this spot before—but on the other side, looking in. I’ve been where Carey Ann is, I’ve been a new wife with a little child, and my husband had an affair, and it ended our marriage, and it was awful, Jack. Jack, it
was
evil.
And I can’t be a person who does the same thing.”

“Carey Ann wouldn’t know. She probably wouldn’t even care. She’s so preoccupied with everything else. Everything else matters but me.”

“Oh, I know that’s what you think!” Daphne began to move across the room, further away from the pull of Jack’s power. “But I know it’s not true. You do matter to her. She would die if you had an affair. She’s just so young, Jack, she’s got to get herself organized, she’s working on that. You have to stand by her. You can’t go off screwing around whenever you feel ignored.”

“I don’t go off screwing around. I’ve never screwed around on her. Why are we talking about Carey Ann? I want you. I want to go to bed with
you.
”

Oh, he does know how to say the right things, Daphne thought. How nice it was to hear that: Jack wanted to go to bed with
her.
She had imagined this, lying in her lonely bed on winter nights. She had imagined how it would be to have Jack, small, dark, intense, young, firm Jack lying on top of her, skin against skin, the feel of his muscles, and how he would sound, needing, and then being satisfied. She had imagined it all, and now she could have him, and she wanted him. Who, after all, would know? Who would care? No one at the college would suspect this—Daphne was so old, and a secretary. Gorgeous young Carey Ann would never think to wonder about her husband with Daphne—Daphne knew this, knew it every time she saw Carey Ann look her way. So it would be only she herself who would know, and couldn’t she finally devise her own consequences?

Jack was walking closer to her now. He had unzipped his parka and she could see the hollow of his neck, she could almost feel the sexual burn of his late-night whiskers against her throat.

She moved back, away from his pull. She shook her head. She was afraid she was going to cry. Oh, God, she thought, don’t let me be maudlin. If I’m not going to have any pleasure, let me at least have some dignity about this.

“Jack,” she said again, holding both hands out as if warding off a monster. “Please don’t come any closer. I want you to leave now. You know I’m attracted to you, but I just can’t go to bed with you. You’re married, and I can’t go to bed with you. I can’t do that to you.”

“But what do you care about my marriage?” Jack said. He looked so puzzled. “You’re not even Carey Ann’s friend!”

“No. I’m not. But I’m your friend, Jack. I’m your good friend.”

“I don’t need you as a friend,” Jack said angrily.

“Please. Go.”

He stared at her. Then, looking bitter, he turned and stalked across the living room and went out the door, shutting it so hard it shook the little cottage. Daphne stood paralyzed, her back nearly against the wall, listening to the sounds of his car starting up and murmuring away through the snow-covered bushes.

Victory,
said her mind, but her body said,
Defeat.
And her body would make her pay. She would not sleep tonight. Her house was as quiet and now seemed as cold as a block of ice. Nothing moved, no sounds, only her body desiring, and all that heated sunrise in her loins and limbs had vanished with Jack, leaving in its stead the touch of the grave, moonshadows, cemetery streaks slipping against her skin. Sex was life and heat; loneliness was this: invisible sleet sliding just under her clothes, chilling her to the bone.

Daphne sank down onto the floor and cried, doubled over, cramps in her abdomen, pain like thirst in her mouth and breasts. It had been two years since she had been with a man. Why was she doing this to herself? Where was the sense of it all?

Dickens, who had been watching quietly from in front of the cold fireplace, waddled over now and stood next to her, staring intently at her, slowly wagging his tail. He seemed to think that Daphne, bent over on the floor as she was, was playing some kind of game.

“Oh, Dickens!” Daphne wailed, and looked up at him with tears streaking down her face.

Dickens pushed his head forward to smell her breath, then sneezed, and went back to lie down in front of the fireplace. He was getting old, after all, and besides, he had seen this before. Not exactly this, but this much agony.

All the times Hudson had driven Daphne home, or stopped by for a drink, or come to help with something heavy, and stood talking in his gentle blink-eyed giraffe way, his need for Daphne steaming from him like a scent, filling her with equal need … and then Hudson would leave, and Daphne would sit on the sofa, clutching herself, like a diver who has started down into great depths, then been forced to surface too fast.

Yes. She had been here before. At least one gained this much with age and experience, one gained the memory of coping and thus knew the first steps to take in going on.

She would not sleep tonight, or not easily. She would be restless and unable to read, and—Daphne looked at her watch; it was only a little before midnight!—it was too late to call Pauline for a helpful talk. Not too late to call Jack, though, who, Daphne imagined, was at this moment fixing himself a strong drink. She would have to wrestle with herself as with a devil to keep from calling him or going there; he was so close, and no one would see.

A drink. A strong drink to numb. Music? No. Too sensual. TV? No, it would not be powerful enough tonight. Action: build a fire, find some mending, get out some knitting—now Daphne knew why women all over the world knit away like psychotics. If she had knit every time she yearned for a particular or general man’s body, she could have knit a house by now. “Idle hands are the devil’s playthings.” Did she have that right? It sounded vaguely obscene.

Daphne went through the kitchen and shed and out the back door to the cold night to get some wood she had piled against the wall. She left the door open as she carried in three loads. The hell with her oil bill, she was such a wild and reckless thing. Finally slamming the door against the bitter night, she knelt at her fireplace and built an extravaganza of a blaze. Dickens jumped up at the “whoosh!” the fire made as it caught, then turned around several times and lay back down to sleep. Daphne made herself a big Scotch with ice and dug out her knitting—she was working on an afghan for the sofa. She’d be through with it in no time at all.

What if the phone rang? What if Jack came back and knocked on the door? As she settled down with her feet up on the sofa and the fire blazing, her imagination tugged at her senses. But she would resist even that, in case she weakened. Oh, how would she fight this desire?

Well, there was always memory.

Joe had thought Daphne was unreasonable to be so furious because he was leaving her for Laura. He
had
to do it—why wouldn’t she understand? Laura had been hurt that Daphne was so upset.