An Emergence of Green (4 page)

The hand relaxed. Carolyn smiled. “I’ve always liked Carrie better than Carolyn but no one’s ever called me that.”

“Carrie, if that had happened to me I’d feel exactly the same as you.”

Carolyn’s eyes traversed the length of Val’s body. “It wouldn’t happen to you.” She smiled again, an impish smile that struck Val with its attractiveness. “No one would push you into a pool.”

“When I was growing up, it would’ve made so many things easier to be a regulation-size woman like you—I’d have given my soul.” She added, “I still would.”

“Why? It’s so different today. Today you’re just a tall, strong woman. What’s wrong with that?”

“Our culture. It’s fine to be a very tall, thin fashion model—a decorative woman. Otherwise you’re abnormal, bizarre. Height’s a competitive advantage men still claim as solely their own. I got married when I was seventeen. I needed to prove I wasn’t too tall to get married. Poor Andy was nineteen, he thought marrying me would prove he was a man. If he wasn’t too sure about it before, he was less sure afterward. You can’t imagine how it feels to hear laughter directed at you. And neither of us with the ego strength to withstand those stares, the derision. We were married seven weeks.”

“That’s terrible, Val. Those were awful times. But now you’re accomplishing something of value. Many people never do anything with their lives. You have a
talent.
”

Val looked at her sharply. This conventional woman sitting on her white sofa in her secure, affluent world could have no concept of how much that talent had been the saving presence in her life. “How would you know?” she said good-naturedly. “You’ve never seen my work.”

The voice was shy: “I can tell. You have substance. And your work must, too. Could I ask what kind of things you paint?”

Val was touched, and pleased. “I think my work is generally expressionist, although that’s not inclusive.” Carolyn looked attentive but blank, and Val changed the subject. “I have an idea how you can enjoy your pool without feeling nervous at all—without even getting your hair damp. Will you be here tomorrow?” 

Carolyn took a strand of hair, sliding her fingers along it. “I was going to get my hair cut tomorrow.”

“You really are petrified of water,” Val said sympathetically.

“No, I really do need to get my hair cut.”

“You do? Why? It would look wonderful to your shoulders or below.”

“You think so? I’ve worn it this way for years. Paul…maybe I’ll think about it. Anyway, it can wait, I’ll be here tomorrow. What do you have in mind?”

Val grinned. “Wear your bathing suit. And trust me.”

Carolyn looked at her with eyes that were wholly green. “I do trust you. Do we have it settled about the air conditioner? You’ll take it?”

“Thanks. You’re a godsend.”

Carolyn tried on the bikini she had bought the week they moved into the house. Frivolous, Paul had termed the two pieces of fabric, a bright green floral pattern she thought reflected the fresh daring newness of California. She had intended to buy one more pleasing to him but then procrastinated, the experience of their first night increasing her aversion to the pool. Every weekend after that first night, and often during the week, he had coaxed her until she donned the bikini and climbed gingerly down the masonry steps at the shallow end to splash without pleasure while he leaped off the diving board and thrashed about as if his alacrity could instill enthusiasm in her. Inevitably her passivity affected him; she was finally able to bury the bikini in a drawer, confident she would rarely have to exhume it. Only once, during a Sunday afternoon barbecue for his staff, had he asked her to wear it, his purpose transparent: to show off his young wife to the men he worked with.

Her thoughts turned to Val Hunter. Masculine, Paul would call her; one of those dykey women spawned by the women’s movement. But, she reflected, sexual preference was pretty clear here, wasn’t it? Even if Val Hunter wasn’t with anyone now, she had married not once but twice and had a son. And she, Carolyn Blake, was longtime married. And anyway, there wasn’t the slightest hint of sexual interest from Val Hunter and you could always tell, couldn’t you?

The bikini fit perfectly, and she felt reassured. She put the bikini back in the drawer.

Such an unusual woman
, she thought enviously. Yes, there was that height and the problems Val Hunter had spoken of, but such bearing she had, such carelessness about her clothes, how she walked, how or even where she sat. Utter indifference about her appearance—not a trace of makeup, her hair scarcely combed…Bold opinions, easily and confidently given…

Again there was the elusive memory pulling at the edges of her mind, the image of Val Hunter somehow beckoning to her past. Tantalized, Carolyn struggled fruitlessly to remember.

She leaned down to kiss Paul good night, pressing her lips to his forehead. He shifted in his armchair, glanced at his watch. “So soon?”

She eased herself into his lap, sliding her arms around his neck. “It’s just an hour before you come to bed too, honey. Just an hour. I never go sound asleep, you know that. Wake me up.” Kittenish and flirtatious, she stroked his hair and breathed into his ear. “You’ve done it often enough in eight years.”

His eyes looked intently, soberly, unyieldingly into hers. “I love you,” he said. “I love you more than anything in this world.”

“And I love you, Paul darling. Give this a chance,” she pleaded. “Just a chance to see if we can…adjust. Please?”

His mouth was tender on hers, his hands gentle around her waist. “You think about it too,” he said. “Think about whether this is really what you want.”

Awakened by the insistent low buzz of the alarm, he stretched across the bed to switch it off. He had refused to move the clock to the night table on his side of the bed; he would not formalize Carolyn’s new hours. He buried his face in her pillow, smelling faint delicate scents of her, remembering their lovemaking.

He pulled on a robe and went into the kitchen, poured steaming coffee from the automatic coffeemaker, and carried the cup back to the bathroom. No longer would he sit at the dining room table with the paper and his coffee; he used to do that with Carolyn. And the newspaper, which she now read before he did and left folded beside his coffee cup, he would take to the office with him.

He spread shaving cream over his face, his thoughts straying back to the first days of his marriage when Carolyn would come into the bathroom in the mornings to sit without speaking on the lid of the toilet, knees under her chin, to watch him shave. In those days she had been fascinated with every aspect of his maleness, scrutinizing how he tucked his shirt in and fastened his pants, how he knotted his tie, even how he arranged his genitals inside his shorts.

He had enjoyed her fascination even while understanding that it was not meant directly for him. There had been few men in her life. When Carolyn was nine her stockbroker father had tidied up his affairs, including deeding the house to his wife, cashed his last commission checks, cleaned out exactly half of the family bank accounts, and vanished—Mexico, Carolyn’s mother believed—making no subsequent effort to contact his wife or only child. Carolyn’s mother soon sold the house and moved into an apartment next to her sister and brother-in-law and their two daughters. These cousins of Carolyn’s had become her closest companions—but then they had gone away, the family moving up to Evanston before Carolyn turned twelve.

Although she could speak freely and without apparent pain of the desertion of her father, it was at least as great a betrayal as that of his own mother, of which he never spoke; and he had always understood the disconnectedness in Carolyn. He understood the tenuousness of her roots—and was aware that she did not. Now she lived on the farthest coast from even these roots. Her mother, a vague, nervous, washed-out physical caricature of Carolyn whose fine-edged lucidity made him uneasy, had been in a sense further removed from Carolyn—she had recently remarried. Not only did he understand Carolyn’s disconnectedness, he welcomed it; he wanted all her sense of belonging and permanence to come from him.

He was proud of this marriage, his second. He had read that divorced people more often than not repeated their mistakes, seeking out similar marriage partners. Carolyn could not have been more different from Rita.

He thought of Rita seldom—and then with relief and gratitude that she was gone from his life leaving no residue other than memory. Her age, he supposed, had been the most grievous problem. Women, after all, no matter how malleable they seemed, how willing they professed to be in the areas of compromise, were set in their personalities without hope of change once they got into their twenties; and Rita had been twenty-five, he twenty-three.

At the time, she had seemed the ideal woman. Attractive, with a healthy glowing vivaciousness, her primary appeal had been a maternal caring for him; she had flattered and praised and encouraged and catered to him, even eased some of that pain he had carried with him since boyhood, that great wound opened in him by his mother.

But Rita’s volubility allowed for no silence, and her unflagging energy became a draining suction. Sex especially was a swamp in which he felt inextricably mired. She needed lengthy intercourse for orgasm, and each time he had to hold on and hold on while she gasped almost almost almost until mercifully she came and he could have his own orgasm, more agonized release than pleasure. Each time he would lie utterly spent while she babbled praise and love, her grateful hands holding his head pillowed into her big soft breasts, until he dropped into black sleep.

Occasionally she wanted to give him fellatio, which he detested but surrendered to out of a shameful sense that he should want it, enduring the act by squeezing his eyes shut to excise the vision of her pendulous breasts as she bent over him, the sight making him feel as if he were being serviced by a whore. Steeling himself, he would reciprocate, a suffocating ordeal of wetness and nauseating odor, while she emitted little shrieks and her body flopped on the bed like a beached fish.

There was no peace anywhere in his life. After he had been married four years and had begun to acquire his first professional success, she wanted to have a baby. After all, as she nagged insistently, she was approaching thirty. Unable to hear the thought of another demanding voice in his life, he put her off with granite determination. She retaliated by pouting and then withholding sex, and when he did not bother to conceal his indifference—indeed, his relief—the acrimony between them reached irrevocable heights. They divorced with outward amicability but with dark hatred between them. A scant, embarrassing three months later, Rita remarried.

The restoration of his single status soon evolved from relief into awkwardness. At work he was now odd man out, automatically excluded from talk of wives and children, a misfit at company functions involving employees’ families. He was soon led to understand in subtle ways by men above him that those who blended best into the corporate echelon met certain criteria of conformity. Marriage gave evidence of stability; marital responsibilities created career commitment; married meant normal. Single, on the other hand, meant alienation from the mainstream, potential independence in the workplace. Whatever his professional abilities, a single man was a potential corporate maverick. Single meant not-quite-normal.

Understanding more and more of the intricacies of corporate politics, he studied the wives of the men around him and congratulated himself on his single status. Aside from his own innate talents, he could gain advantage and increased career opportunity by marrying the right kind of woman, and he was lucky to be free to choose a new woman.

He met Carolyn at his cousin Joan’s wedding reception. A freshman classmate of Joan’s, eighteen years old, possessed of laughable ideals and the endearingly foolish belief that the world was filled with nobility, she was elusive and shy and unaware of her loveliness. He was enchanted by her, drawn to her in an amused and tender protectiveness new to him. The tranquility in her, her central chord of stillness, was like a nourishing oasis in his life. And young as she was he felt challenged by her, by her quality of reserve, an ambiguity he could neither encompass nor fathom.

With single-minded calculation he laid siege. When he learned she was seeing two other young men he was suddenly charged with fear. That he would fall in love with her had not been in his calculations; the possibility that he might fail to win her terrified him.

He knew his maturity was an asset, his sophistication an advantage. Attempting to overwhelm, he deluged her with large and small attentions: dinners, the theatre, flowers, cards, notes, gifts. Physically he was affectionate, but careful not to press after his initial overtures met resistance. Her reticence, entrancing after the clamorous and exhausting demands of his marriage, only deepened his love. At the same time he sensed that the old-fashioned quality of their courtship appealed to her idealism, her romantic nature.

He met her mother, who clucked over him in birdlike eagerness, approving of his professional accomplishments—at twenty-eight he was already senior salesman, eighteen thousand a year plus bonuses plus company car—and his conservative appearance, his seriousness, his maturity, his prospects. Although divorced, he was childless and alimony-free.

He chose the day Carolyn passed all her freshman finals for his marriage proposal. When she did not reply, only looked at him, he was so fearful that he could scarcely control his voice as he added that of course he would want her to continue with college full time until she graduated.