My Dearest Friend (35 page)

She had come over to Daphne’s that first day, her eyes swollen with tears. Daphne didn’t want to let her in the house, but Laura had Hanno by the hand, and Daphne had Cynthia on her shoulder and was afraid of frightening the children.

So the two mothers of small children, the two women Joe Miller was sleeping with, put Hanno in front of the TV and Cynthia in her playpen. Then they went into the
dining room and shut the door. This final deed they did with accord.

“What are you doing?” Laura had sobbed. “Joe came to my house last night. He says you are violently angry. I don’t understand. How can you do this to me?”

“What am
I
doing?” Daphne had asked. She had had no love left in her for Laura. She wanted to kick her friend.

“You’re ruining everything!” Laura had said. “How can you be so selfish? You of all people should understand. I am so lonely! You are my friend, you
love
me. Don’t you want me to be happy? Why can’t you let go of Joe nicely? You have Cynthia. You have your teaching. You love your teaching! You don’t need Joe, and I do.”

“You’re crazy,” Daphne had said. “You’re a crazy, selfish bitch!”

“No, I’m not!” Laura had said. “I’m your friend—”

“Laura! You betrayed me. You manipulated me. You are taking my husband, my daughter’s father. Don’t you know I hate you? I hate you. I’ll never forgive you!”

“I can’t believe you’re saying this things!” Laura had said, her English giving way under her emotion. “Why won’t you listen to me? Why won’t you understand?”

“Laura, just get out. Get out or … I’ll hit you. I swear to God I will.”

“You’ll calm down,” Laura had said. “You will get over your anger. I know you will.”

What still made Daphne angry, and always would, was how Laura saw herself as the injured party, because Daphne had not loved her enough to want her to have happiness with Joe. Even after all these years it was painful for Daphne to remember that spring, when she and Joe had met only for legal purposes, to sign divorce papers, to sign at the closing of the sale of their house. Joe married Laura as soon as the divorce was final, and they moved to California, where Joe took a job with a university. Daphne told the community college she wanted to teach full-time there, but their enrollment dropped that year and they said regretfully that they didn’t know if they could offer her even a part-time job. When Fred Van Lieu offered her the job as secretary in the history department, she had taken it, glad for some way to make money, for some way to order her jagged life.

Her life was still jagged. She was still jagged, and torn.

What could make her whole? Could anything make her whole?

Not an affair with a young married man, that much was certain.

In the middle of the night, in the midst of sipping Scotch and knitting, Daphne fell
asleep. She awoke in the morning, her entire body aching from its cramped bed, and from cold, for the fire had gone out in the night and the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was the ashy-gray hearth. The afghan she had been working on had slipped to the floor. Besides, it was far too small to cover her yet. She would need many more nights to knit. And she knew she would have them, these long nights alone.

Jack had been awakened this morning by a call from Carey Ann. The weather in Kansas City had taken an unseasonably mild turn, as it sometimes did in the Midwest, and today and tomorrow would be warm and sunny. She was going to leave Alexandra with her parents and Beulah and spend a few days at Christie’s farm just outside Kansas City, riding her old horse, Jelly Roll, which she had sold to Christie when she married Jack. In order not to upset her parents, she had promised to extend her stay in Missouri by several days. Jack understood, didn’t he? Oh, Carey Ann said, she was so happy to be back home.

“Home,” Jack had said. Just that one word.

“What?” Carey Ann asked. She waited, letting the space between them flutter. Then, “Oh, Jack, come on, you’re not sulking again, are you? Jack, look. Why do you get so upset when I say I love it here, around my friends and family and the places I’m familiar with? I love you too. I love you
best.
I’m coming back to you soon.”

The same old argument. The same old thing. Jack was so angry at Daphne for not sleeping with him and so angry at himself for trying to get Daphne to sleep with him that he couldn’t be very civil to Carey Ann. Which did make a kind of sense: if she hadn’t left him, he wouldn’t be wanting to sleep with Daphne. Here he was, teaching a specialty he didn’t like in a department with a chairman he didn’t like, and where was his loving supportive wife? Halfway across the continent.

Still, he didn’t really want to be unfaithful to Carey Ann. He didn’t want to hurt her. He just wanted … What? Some affection he wasn’t getting. That was all. Something warm and embracing in this hard world.

“Have a good time, Carey Ann,” he said, defeated, and hung up.

It was too cold to run outside today, and the dirt road was rutted and slick with ice. He’d run in the gym track, and then work like a fiend on his lesson plans for next semester’s courses. Jack pulled on his jeans and a wool sweater, stuffed his running gear into a canvas bag and his papers into his briefcase, and headed his car away from Plover.
He felt both regret and relief as he drove down the mountain, farther and farther away from Daphne’s home, as if he were leaving the scene of an almost-committed crime.

On his way to the college he stopped in the local bookstore to check on his textbook orders. He decided to buy himself a thick new novel to read that night, a treat for himself, whatever he wanted, but as he looked through the fiction section, he found himself growing crankier and sadder, as if the books exuded a poisonous gas. All these damned writers writing! Where did they get the time to write, the money to survive and support their families while they wrote? Half of them no doubt were gorgeous young women who slept with their writing instructors or editors or both, who had fathers or boyfriends to support them. But the other half, the men, how did they do it? There weren’t enough hours in the day for Jack to do his courses well and spend some time with his family and still have the mental stamina to write a novel. Would there ever be a time when he could write? Standing in the sunny bookstore, Jack felt Time touch its icy skeletal finger to the back of his neck, a kind of gleeful poke. And he knew that years would go by, years and years and years, and he would be gray and withered and his thoughts would be gray and withered, before he would have time to write his novel.

He left the bookstore without buying anything. Cold air whacked him in the face and lungs; it was a hostile day, and he leaned forward against the wind, holding his muffler over his mouth, thinking of Carey Ann wearing a sweatshirt, riding her horse over the rolling Missouri hills.

Peabody Hall was warm and well-lit, and as he climbed the stairs to his cell, laughter and voices and the hum of machines drifted out to him. Once settled at his desk, he leafed through his books, comparing approaches for next semester. He stopped a while to take an ironic and sly pleasure from Lord Chesterfield’s famous letter to his illegitimate son, Philip:

Right on, Chesty, Jack thought.
Women.
Then he went back to his saner self. This essay would provoke discussion; and then they could go back to Defoe’s essay on the education of women, which was advanced and liberated for that day and age, and would make his class more tolerant of and disposed toward reading
Robinson Crusoe.

Jack kept hard at work all day. Perhaps his anger and his frustration were fueling him, but ideas for his classes came fast and easily now, so that he scribbled and typed and forgot to eat lunch. When he finally leaned back in his chair and rubbed his neck, he saw that already the sun was setting in the sky—but they had just passed the winter solstice; it was only about four o’clock. He grabbed up his papers and went down the hall to see if any secretary was around. Someday everyone in the department would have word processors to work on; this much had been promised, but until then, it would be a secretary who would have to transmit his scribbles into crisp Xerox-copied order.

Now, as he walked through the warren of offices, he heard very little. These days, with no students here, everyone went home early, eager to snuggle up with a spouse or at least a hot video and forget the dreary life-denying day. Jack’s stomach rumbled inside him and his shoulders cramped. He’d have a good workout in the gym, buy a feast at the local deli, then hide out in his house like a teenager, drinking beer, eating, watching anything and everything on the tube.

He passed the history-department offices, Daphne’s realm, which already were dark and empty. He crossed the hall and entered the main office of the English department. Through the windows the sky stretched out forever, gravestone gray. The golden points of lights that glimmered in the distance seemed worlds away. Daphne was at the main desk, working at a computer, wearing a dress in cherry-red wool. She turned and looked up at him and smiled, no embarrassment, a purely friendly smile.

“Hi, Jack. If you’re looking for Hudson, I’m afraid you’ve missed him. He’s just left. Everyone’s left but me, I think. It’s that kind of day. Half the office has flu and the other half is coming down with it. I have to finish a paper for Fred Van Lieu, and my computer’s down, wouldn’t you know it. Hudson said I could use this one. His secretary’s not in today.”

Jack looked at Daphne. “I need a draft of this syllabus typed up,” he said. “Just one copy. But it can wait. No hurry.”

“Sure? I could type it up for you after I finish Fred’s.”

“No, no. I can wait.” Was it his imagination or did Daphne feel as awkward as he
did?

“Is that it?” Daphne asked, leaning over the desk to look at the sheaf of scribbled papers in his hand. “Listen, I’ll leave a note for someone to type it up tomorrow. Otherwise it will get lost in the shuffle. Let me get a folder for it.”

Daphne rose from her desk and crossed the room to take a file folder from the supplies shelf. She moved through Jack’s field of vision like a cardinal flashing its colors, its signal of intense bird-bright heat in a cold world. Daphne stretched her arms, reaching for the file folder, and the red wool dress rose too, holding to her form. Cherries, roses, apples, wine: health and heat against the grave. Jack went to her and put his arms around her. In response, she dropped her arms to her sides and lowered her head slightly, as if in surrender, and he kissed the back of her neck many times, nuzzling kisses, breathing in her scent as he kissed her. Daphne stood there, seeming passive, but he could feel her response against his body, he could feel how she was melting against him, and he pressed his torso against her back, and she leaned back into him, still holding her arms quietly at her sides.

Jack moved one hand down to press against her crotch. With his other hand he slowly stroked the front of her neck and then her shoulders and then finally, slowly, he moved his hand and arm down to the shelf of her breasts. Through the layers of wool and brassiere he felt her nipples harden. He hardened in response. Her breasts were as soft as pillows, but heavy, bulky. He held them in his hands and was surprised at their warm mass. He thought of her white flesh beneath the red dress. He moved his hands from her breasts to raise her skirt.

Such good luck. Daphne was wearing high boots with knee-high cotton socks, and a long slip and underpants, but no panty hose. So when Jack had slid the dress up in a bunch around her hips, he could feel the warm bare skin of her thighs, and her cushiony buttocks, intersected by the triangle of silky underwear. Her skin was as smooth and as white as milk. He slid his hand around to her belly and Daphne shuddered against him and caught her breath. She was leaning against him, still passive, letting him do what he wanted, sighing. Jack slid his hand down so that his finger slipped into her pubic hairs, which were wiry and coarse to feel in contrast to her smooth skin. He raised one hand to fondle a breast, with the other deftly crept between her legs and discovered that what he guessed was true: white luxuriant Daphne was made of cream. She cried out, a low-caught cry, and tried to turn in his arms.

There was a noise from somewhere behind them. Someone was strangling? Jack turned slightly and saw Hudson Jennings standing there, clearing his throat wildly. The suddenness of it—his superior there, the embodiment of propriety—sent alarm zinging through Jack’s body, which was still, even now, pressing for sexual satisfaction. A strange clanging of feelings set off within Jack’s body, and he wanted to laugh and at the same time slug someone. God damn Hudson Jennings!

Daphne was struggling to get her dress down. Her face was as red as her dress. Jack backed away from her, taking deep breaths. He leaned against the office wall, not looking directly at Hudson.

“This would be a fine scene for our students to come upon,” Hudson said coldly.

“It’s vacation,” Jack said, his voice embarrassingly husky.

“And that excuses this display?” Hudson said, not really asking a question.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Hudson,” Daphne said. “You could at least have had the dignity and kindness simply to shut the door and go away and leave us alone.”

Jack felt his eyes bulge from his head like a cartoon character’s. How did Daphne dare talk to Hudson that way? He looked sideways at Hudson to see how he was taking it. Hudson was nearly vibrating with anger.

“Mr. Hamilton, I’ll see you in my office at nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” Hudson said, looking at Jack. Hudson turned to Daphne. “And you, Mrs. Miller, may consider yourself dismissed. I’ll have Paula deal with the paperwork; I believe you have some sick leave and vacation time coming to you.”