Away from Home (8 page)

For a moment Margie, standing before the mirror, was breathless with the realization of how important she was, and of how unimportant she was. It was as if she could see the whole meaning of life revealed. For that moment the chatter of the bridesmaids seemed as hushed as the whisper of their taffeta skirts. There was no one in the room for her except herself, and her reflected strange self, and those billions of brides with veiled eyes, taking measured steps into the heart of the measureless universe.

Her father was standing at the doorway of the room looking at her, and there were tears in his eyes. Margie ran to him and put her arms around his neck. “Look out for the veil!” her mother cried, and then it was all over; she was Margie preparing for her wedding and these were her parents and friends, and there were still many little things to be done before the ceremony, like being sure that the right person had the ring, and the plane tickets, and that Great-Aunt Fanny would be given a seat down front because her hearing was not what it used to be.

They went to the Virgin Islands for their honeymoon, for two weeks in a luxury hotel. It was the beginning of May and the weather in the Caribbean was bright and hot. Margie and Neil lay on the beach under the sun, putting suntan oil on each other, went skin diving with masks around the coral reefs under the transparent sapphire water, and strolled through the narrow old streets of the town, hand in hand. It was on her honeymoon that Margie Davidow fell in love with her husband for the first time. The feeling was so new and so unexpected (because she had thought she loved him all along) that it came to her as a shock. She had never felt this depth of tenderness and admiration for anybody. She had never before been alone with one person for so long a time, and with Neil she was never bored. Being with him all day, every day, gave her a dependence on him she had never known before. She almost could not bear to have him out of her sight, and since they did not know anyone else in St. Thomas he never was out of her sight for more than half an hour. The only thing that was strange, the only moments when she was completely and frighteningly alone, were the nights when they were the most together.

She had expected the act of love to hurt her at first, and it did, but for longer than had ever been written in her pristine books. It was mainly because she was tense, and the more she tried to hide this from Neil the worse everything became. Many girls Margie’s age come to their marriage technical virgins, but Margie was completely one, body and mind. She was pleased and embarrassed that everyone in the hotel knew they were a honeymoon couple. Her pretty new clothes, her self-concious pretense at casual worldliness, gave her away. The hotel manager even sent them a bottle of champagne the first night. Margie saved the cork, in her suitcase. On picture post cards, which she sent to her friends in New York, she wrote her married name with a flourish, and then looked at it, not quite believing all this was really her.

It was in St. Thomas that Margie discovered banana daiquiris, that they were sweet and deceptively mild, that they did not taste like liquor (which she detested), and that if she drank three before going upstairs to bed she could feel a pleasant numbness and the stirrings of desire. It was easy to fool Neil about the banana daiquiris because he could not drink more than one, claiming they were too sweet and a girl’s drink. To him they seemed a minor vice, like chocolates. Fortified by the banana daiquiris, Margie lay in her husband’s arms, stroked his face, and thought how wonderful it was to be cherished. She liked to be near him, and at those moments if she had known what reactions to pretend to be having she would have gladly done so. She would have given anything to be able to make him think he was giving her pleasure. But it was impossible to imitate a pleasure she had never known.

When they returned from their honeymoon and moved into Neil’s apartment Margie purchased a blender to make the banana daiquiris and furtively bought a book about the art of married love. She bought the book on Forty-second Street and Broadway, terrified that someone she knew might come upon her and discover the shameful purchase which as much as admitted that things were not going as they should. The book, a modern one, told her that woman’s delight was overrated in other books and that it was not necessary to enjoy love-making every time.
Every
time! Margie thought. There were no stage directions for imitation. It was about this time that she began to look carefully into the eyes of her married girlfriends when they lunched at Schraffts, trying to find out their secret, certain that she was alone with hers. Sometimes, ripping at the paper doily delicately with her fingertips, she almost asked a question that might give her away, and then stopped in time.

One day she had lunch with her matron of honor, Sue, who had been married for a year. Sue had accomplished what they call “marrying well,” and she looked it in her new, expensive dress and alligator handbag. It was also a love match, and Sue was much envied among her friends.

“We’re trying to have a baby,” Sue said. “You know, I’ve been making up names for imaginary children for years. I’m dying to have one.”

“You’ll probably be a wonderful mother,” Margie said.

Sue sighed and stirred her soda with the straws. “I’m getting so
tired
of trying,” she said quietly.

For a moment the significance of what her friend was saying did not quite get through to Margie, and then suddenly it hit her with the force of a physical blow.
Tired of trying!
But what you did when you were “trying” was supposed to be that wonderful lost trip away from the world. Margie opened her lips, almost ready to confide, to pour out all the bewilderment and fear of loneliness, and then she closed her mouth so tightly that she gritted her teeth. She would die rather than confess a failure that would point disgrace to Neil, imply disloyalty to him and their bond together. She scooped up the bits of paper doily she had torn and deposited them in the ashtray. “I
hate
doilies,” she said vehemently. “They’re so
messy
.”

It was at the beginning of her second year of marriage that Margie began to have strange, disturbing sensations, a burning and fluttering, a shortness of breath. She first noticed it in the spring, when she and Neil went to the Memorial Day dance at the country club. She was dancing with the husband of one of her friends, a young doctor who had been away in Ohio doing his internship in a hospital there, and had just returned with his wife and child to set up his practice in New York. He was a little older than Neil, but he looked younger, almost collegiate. Margie had seen him only once before, at her friend’s wedding, and now she realized for the first time that he was a very attractive man. There was a kind of intimacy and joy in the way he danced with her, nothing actually forward and yet there was a complete awareness of her as a pretty woman. A few brave couples were dancing on the terrace, although the late May night was chilly, and Margie and her partner were among them. It was dark, and she could hear the sound of the wind in the trees and the soft shuffling of feet on cement above the music that came out through the opened French doors.

“Cold?” he whispered, smiling down at her.

“No.”

Suddenly Margie felt a weird fluttering constricting her heart. Her lips seemed to swell, to burn, to fill with the pulsing of her warm blood. For a moment she had the wild impulse to reach up and kiss this man full on the mouth. She pulled away from him with a violent physical effort and shivered.

“You
are
cold,” he said. “Come on, we’ll go inside. Some doctor I am, making you catch pneumonia.”

That night when Neil wanted to leave the dance early Margie immediately agreed, although usually she tried to linger. All the way home beside Neil in the car she held on to the feeling she had struggled with on the terrace, ecstatically and guiltily; nursing it, holding it inside her like a great, stirring, growing flower. At home, he made love to her. And in the middle of it she looked up at his face in the semidarkness, the face of the man she respected and loved, and she thought how ridiculous and grotesque their posture was, like two people in battle trying to kill each other. She wished that he would hurry, get it over with, finish. And waiting for the telltale sigh that showed he was through, Margie for the first time hated herself and wondered in terror and guilt why the feeling of being a woman never arose to the touch of this man who deserved it more than any man in the world.

After they had been married for two years Neil had the opportunity to go to Brazil to represent the South American branch of his firm. He discussed it with Margie and she agreed quickly. She wanted to get away. Perhaps in a strange and tropical place, away from all the memories of her childhood, she might find her real self. Perhaps she could have a new life. At any rate, it was what Neil wanted, and she wanted whatever might make him happy, for she knew that this new restlessness in him was mainly the fault of something in her which he was only now dimly beginning to perceive.

CHAPTER 3

“You look like a little boy playing cowboys,” Helen Sinclair said. Her tone was light but she felt hurt, and under the lightness there was a note of cruelty. “You pack those dirty old clothes and those leather boots and your eyes light up.”

“It’s great,” Bert said.

“I wish you’d take me.”

“You wouldn’t like it. The Interior’s no place for a woman. It’s primitive, the hotel—and it’s always
the
hotel—is unimaginable, and there are only men at the mine.”

“Well, at least there aren’t any women.”

“You think I’d go five hours by plane and nine hours by jeep just to find myself a girl?”

“That would have to be quite a girl.”

“Women can never understand how men like to go off just with men sometimes,” Bert said. “You complain to me how it gets on your nerves to have to sit with the girls and jabber at the golf club for an afternoon; can you imagine what that does to us?” He was smiling, so she knew he was half teasing. Still, it annoyed her.

“What could be so terrible about the hotel? It has screens, doesn’t it?”

“Screens? What are those?”

“Then I’d take citronella. What else do they have—cockroaches?”

“As big as canaries.”

“I’m used to them. In fact, I’m getting to like them. It doesn’t have bedbugs?”

“Bedbug City.”

“You’re teasing me. Aren’t you?”

“A little.”

“Well, why do you have to be so nasty?”

“Because I don’t want you to go, that’s why,” Bert answered cheerfully.

“
Why?
”

“You don’t come to the office with me.”

“The office is different,” Helen said. “It would be rather boring for me if I didn’t know what was going on. I wouldn’t be bored in the jungle.”

“You would, after you’d used up your whole roll of color film. This is what the men do: work, drink, gamble, fight. That’s all. What would you do?”

Be with you, Helen wanted to say. But it sounded stupid. She could be with him at home, in a lovely apartment on the beach, so why did she have to go for five hours in a rocky plane and nine hours in a spine-punishing jeep over jungle roads to be with him in the company of mud, dust, flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches, and quite possibly bedbugs? Because that side of her husband was a mystery, she thought; and even when she tried to imagine sleek, civilized Bert in a place like that, even when she watched him pack the rough clothes and boots, she could not quite imagine what he would be like. It was a side of his nature that was forever forbidden to her, by his choice, and although she was sure it would reveal no mystery that was not partly evident in the whole man himself, yet it was a tantalizing mystery because Bert forbid it to her. My husband, Helen thought, and yet, a week out of the month he has a secret life.

“When do you have to go again?” she asked, in a voice this time washed free of cruelty, this time only wistful.

“After the New Year. You have me for two whole weeks.”

“Oh, Bert. I wish …”

“What?”

“Nothing. I wish a lot of things.”

He looked exasperated, and she could tell he was deciding whether to humor her or try to change the subject. This look of his was new, but already she had seen it often enough so that it was familiar to her. Somehow it hurt her more than any remark of his could have; whatever he did or said she couldn’t bear him to be condescending. “We’re going to a party tomorrow night,” he said finally. “A real Brazilian party, given by a Brazilian for Brazilians. I thought you might like that.”

“I’ll love it,” Helen said. But she hardly heard him. She smiled at him, and he seemed satisfied—no, relieved—and he went quickly into the part of their apartment that was reserved for his work. The library. We even have a library now, Helen thought ironically. We’re rich.

This curiosity to enter the intimate places of her husband’s mind was a new thing with her, brought on by the loneliness and strangeness of life in Brazil. A year before, in Westport, she had driven Bert to the station in the mornings to catch the seven-fifty-two, kissed him lightly goodbye, and turned her head toward her own new day. His absence from her was a kind of vacation in the old days, a time to catch up on all the womanly things she never seemed to have time for. But now, in Brazil, a land where a married woman’s only occupation was being a woman, she was tanned, coiffeured, massaged, neat, rested; and nervous. She knew that she looked more like a woman than ever before in her life, and an attractive one, but she felt less like a woman than she ever had in Westport and she did not know why.

More and more, she noticed, she was beginning to relive the past, and she knew this was neurotic but she could not stop. It worried her; middle-aged women like her mother hashed over the past all the time—it was almost a sign of aging—but a
young
woman of twenty-eight … I
am
young, she told herself without conviction. I am! But why did the early and cherished recollection return of Sunday mornings in their first apartment in Riverdale before the children were born; when she had a life here, when she was still young, when she was loved?