A Parallel Life (2 page)

“I ask myself over and over why I do this,” he said, raising his foot and touching my right nipple with his big toe. We sat facing each other in the Jacuzzi in one of Jack's friend's places in a big condo complex close to downtown—convenient for us both. Jack received a key in exchange for being able to get the friend off of an assigned risk policy after a drunk-driving arrest.

“You think I haven't wondered about it myself,” I said. I was getting antsy. I had to be back at work in half an hour. My hair was wet and I'd forgotten to bring a dryer. “I look at it this way. I have affairs on my lunch break because I can take only so much of sitting around with my colleagues talking about wallpaper for the kitchen, menopause, or who's getting the best assignments.”

“I'm serious,” he said. “Do you think this is the sign of insanity? Why is it that I'll see a woman and be drawn to her so much I'll do anything to get to know her? Like you. I liked the way your glasses slipped down your nose and the way you kept pushing them up. I loved the inside of your hand. It looked so soft that I wanted to touch it. And you were wearing that plaid skirt. It was such an ugly skirt that it made me want you just like I'd want girls in high school when they wore those ugly plaid skirts.”

“I don't want to think about it. I just accept it.” I eased out and sat on the rim. He slid his hand over my wet ass and down to my knee. “I have important things to decide this afternoon. We're all chipping in for Shelly Novack's baby shower. Would you get her a playpen or a high chair?”

“We could just be friends, you and I,” he said. “We'd have coffee downtown from time to time. Maybe a lunch. A walk by the creek in the park.”

I wrapped a towel around myself. The Jacuzzi was on a ridiculous little deck with a view—if we wanted to open the louvers—of the county administration center, built in the fifties, and the new jail, a Postmodern version of an Art Deco version of something Assyrian. “I don't want to be just friends.” I ran my hand through his hair and lifted it. It was thin but so lacquered it stayed up. “When you decide to be just friends, I'll find someone else.”

He sighed and closed his eyes. He wanted me to feel sorry for him—for us. I went into the bedroom and began to dress. Maybe my hair would be almost dry by the time I got to work. I ran a comb through it and rubbed it with a towel and combed it again, ignoring the mirror. My hair was curly and I wore it short, the perfect hair for someone who's not going to be able to keep her head off pillows in the middle of the day. It was easy to resist looking at myself in the mirror. I was thirty-nine and the wrinkles had landed and were charting their territory. I had never been a beauty but I had decent features and good teeth in a pleasant, slightly too-long face. I looked like everyone's sister's best friend.

“We're good together,” he said, coming up behind me and putting his nose in my damp hair. I could feel his cock against me.

We were, too. Better than I'd expected. When we made
love the very first time everything worked like gears meshing neatly. With Bill there were always problems now—mostly mine. I can find no fault with Bill. He's a better lover than most of the men I messed around with. In fact, I can say from some experience that men who mess around are usually not great lovers. The great lovers are men who love—not the performers who have all the tricks. And Bill loved me. He really did. I loved Bill. I had trouble desiring him. Maybe you can only desire what you don't have.

In high school the nuns told us that it was our obligation to make love to our husbands, that we should never refuse them. I reached up and pulled Jack's head against my neck. He licked the spot beneath my ear and I turned and pushed him away, my hand squarely on his bare chest. “Back off,” He laughed and raised his hands in surrender. The ease of this was good.

That was late October. After some long pleasant November days, a bad winter began. On Thanksgiving, Bill came down with bronchitis that lingered until Christmas, and then right after New Year's, Amy hit a curb on her new bike and fell and broke her arm. While waiting outside the X-ray room in the hospital, I ran into Jonah coming out of the elevator.

I'd met Jonah at his garage sale two years ago. I was looking for an Exercycle for Bill. As I drove up, a young couple were loading a sofa onto the back of their pickup. “I just sold the love seat to that an hour earlier,” he said, trying to laugh. He was a tall overweight young man with a jerkiness to his gestures caused not by palsy but nervousness.

The garage was practically empty. Bolt-together metal
shelves held a few quarts of motor oil and nothing else. Jonah scanned the space like a man peering into the water for some sign of bubbles from objects that had just disappeared from view.

“Give me a good price on the Exercycle and you can close shop.”

“Twenty bucks,” he said quickly, as if it were something he'd be glad not to have to deal with again.

“Sold.” I opened my handbag.

He seemed surprised. “It needs a new chain.”

“My husband's handy,” I said.

“Some are.” He turned away from me. Both the washer and dryer were disconnected and pulled from the wall. A dusty crew sock hung from the cold tap. “I guess I'm done.”

I handed him two tens and smiled my best-friend smile and then decided he didn't need a best friend. I looked up and, as they say, established eye contact. It took him a minute or two to decide what to do as he folded and refolded the tens. “I've got some cold beer in the fridge,” he said finally, checking up and down the empty street.

“Sounds good.” I followed him into the garage and he lowered the door. In the kitchen we sat on the floor and drank a couple of supermarket-brand beers. Next, on a mattress on the floor in a bedroom surrounded by overflowing cardboard boxes, we made love—very nicely. Then he sobbed and showed me a stuffed bear he'd been sleeping with since his wife left.

I saw him maybe a dozen times after that. I helped him set up the kitchen in his new apartment and then I said good-bye for good. He was beginning to think something real was going on.

Jonah,” I said, dropping an empty diet Coke can into the trash.

“Ellen?” He still looked nervous, but he'd lost weight. Maybe he had a girlfriend. I hoped so. We caught up quickly. His mother had had surgery, an aneurysm repair, that morning. She was doing well. I told him about Amy's fall. It struck me that he didn't seem to have realized back then that I had children. When the orthopedic surgeon came over to tell me about Amy's X-rays, Jonah blushed and took two steps backward and bumped into a gurney.

Her break wasn't simple. Her arm had somehow twisted in the fall and the fracture had spiraled. They wanted to keep her until the next day. I spent the night in a chair at her side. In the dim room with the monitor lights colored like those on the Christmas tree still standing in the corner of our living room, Amy rode her bed gallantly like a small traveler on a space ship. From time to time I got up and placed my cheek against her narrow chest to feel it swell, its twin balloon lungs unfailing beneath ribs fragile as a bird's.

At dawn, Bill, looking pale—still not completely well, arrived to relieve me. I lifted my head and breathed foul overnight hospital breath in his direction as he bent to kiss me. He was a lovely man and his presence made me glad. I'd been dreaming about getting naked into a yellow taxi with Jack, who was wearing an overcoat from which his own bare legs stretched.

Because of someone's vacation, I found myself spending the next two weeks working afternoons and evenings with only a one-hour break from four to five. Mornings
were Jack's busy time so we had to struggle to get together—still we managed at least twice a week between eleven and one when I began work. In the middle of January, Mr. Boudreau, my mother's landlord, phoned me from Oakland to tell me that she had started screaming at the other tenants again. I took off a day and drove down to her apartment, a pleasant sunny place only a block from Lake Merritt. She didn't want to let me in, but I talked her into slipping the chain.

“You're here because he called you, but I can tell you that I don't need admonishing,” she said, turning her back to me and walking into the kitchen. I smelled burnt coffee. Her muttering rose and fell as she turned off the gas and poured coffee into the cup. She managed to sound like those messages over the loudspeakers in airports from which only an occasional word is intelligible. “Sugar,” I heard her say, then “outlaw,” then “cockroach.”

“Mother.” I touched her shoulder. She ignored my hand. “Mother, you're not taking your medicine.”

“The hell with that damn medicine,” she said, pouring milk into the cup and stirring it as she turned to face me. She was sixty-four and still trim—a fading blonde with blue eyes that seemed to capture and hold light. She'd been beautiful. Her wedding picture could still take my breath away. In it, she rose from swirls of satin as if emerging from a shell. Her right hand rested inside the grip of my father, who managed, despite his navy lieutenant's uniform, to look like a rogue. “You and your sister—neither one gives a damn about me. I don't know why I let you in. You're Little Miss Fine and Dandy, and all you've ever thought about is yourself.”

“I think you should let me find you a place close by me so I can check on you.”

“The cockroaches are terrible here, but do you care? They talk to each other. They'll be here when we're all gone. When we're all in hell, they'll be strutting around. La-de-dah.”

“There are some very nice apartments only a few blocks away from my house. You could walk to the stores. The girls could drop in on you and run errands for you.”

“Your father was a bastard and you're his daughter, and your daughters will wind up riding off on the backs of motorcycles.”

“You should be taking your pills,” I said. “There's no need for you to get so agitated.” She turned away as if I wasn't there and began to mutter again, her voice rising and falling in pitch, dopplering in and out of my consciousness.

I checked through her trash and then brought it down to the dumpster. I pulled down all the bottles in her medicine cabinet. Then I examined the linen closet. She'd emptied the pill bottle into an old bath-salts jar, where the tiny tablets lay half dissolved in some sort of liquid. Shampoo? I phoned her doctor and asked for more. I told him she was having a rough time. He said he'd raise the dosage but there was nothing he could do if she didn't take them. Of course not. I got her into the car and drove to the drugstore where I picked up the prescription and bought her magazines—
Vogue
and
Bazaar
—and a Coke and watched her take the pill. Then we drove up to Tilden Park, where we could look down on the blue stretches of the bay with the winter-green land rising from it. She stopped muttering and leaned back, closing her eyes. If only someone had nothing to do but drive her around.

We went to a Chinese restaurant downtown. She used a fork and hurried food into her mouth as if she were
starving. I ordered beef and vegetables to take back. She'd never liked to cook. Her freezer was stuffed with TV dinners.

I took off the next day too and called Jack. We drove to the coast in Jack's car and walked on the beach. January can be the kindest time at the coast. We sat against sun-warmed rock and watched the seals crawl up onto the sand. I tried to talk to Jack about my mother's problems, but he gave back only the most perfunctory comments, which made me angry with myself. He was smarting from some social insult by a client who hadn't asked him to a cocktail party at the country club. I wondered why I was trying to talk to Jack when Bill understood everything so well and usually could make me feel better.

We went to a motel and drank Irish whiskey in bed in a room with gold-flecked wallpaper and a purple carpet. As if to make up for having been so distant on the beach, Jack made love actively, but it felt forced and I didn't have an orgasm, which he decided to take as an affront.

Now that I look back on that time, I wonder how our affair lasted as long as it did. Even though I liked him, almost everything Jack did struck me as wrong headed or pathetic. He harbored relentless social ambitions. He bragged about how he'd gotten the best of almost everyone. He was a gun notcher. A keeper of scores. He wore chattery sports jackets and a gargantuan class ring. He drove a Mazda RX. jax rx said the plates. He really wanted a Porsche. He thought of Las Vegas as a vacation possibility. We had nothing in common but our time together and a certain bald lust. I had a list made up of things to hold against him. He was uneducated, he had lousy taste in clothes, and he cheated on his wife.

“I'm going to be busy this next week,” I said as I got out in front of a vacant storefront around the corner from the library and emptied sand from the pocket of my jacket.

“Me too,” he said and screeched away from the curb without looking back.

The following Friday my mother called. In a calm voice she told me that she had started saying the rosary. “I began on Tuesday with the Sorrowful Mysteries. I know you're supposed to alternate with the Joyful and Glorious Mysteries, but I just don't feel like them right now. I pray every evening right after the ten o'clock news.”

I told Bill about this latest development. “That's very sane,” he said. “Maybe we should all pray after the ten o'clock news.”

“But you don't believe in God,” I said. “You could only pray ironically.” He was a mathematician who spent his days writing instructions for computers. His atheism had been a most attractive quality to me when I'd met him in Berkeley. His walk across the paving of Sproul Plaza had possessed a buoyancy that I attributed to a freedom from a belief in original sin. He hadn't thought of himself as stained from the start. He'd been a dangerously thin, fairhaired young man from the Midwest preoccupied with learning, and he seemed uncomplicated in ways I had not believed possible.