Braided Lives (46 page)

“Seeing? You mean friends?”

“You don’t think for one minute that’s who I mean.”

“I haven’t been seeing any men besides friends, if that’s what you’re asking me.”

“Being faithful to me?” He grins. “What do you think that will get you?”

In a flash of annoyance I answer with dangerous honesty, “Nothing much but I’ve been busy. I haven’t had the time to spare.”

“I fucked Sue a couple of times.” He sits up watching me. “The sex is just the way it was. A trifle dull.”

Peter never kisses or cuddles as much as I like. Tonight I miss that more than I usually do either because we have been apart long enough for me to lose taking his habits for granted or because I have really missed him. I feel untouched. I want to be held and caressed even more than I want sex itself. Peter, however, is not in a tender mood. His eyes stay open as he watches me. Again it occurs to me that I disappoint him. Perhaps he has been daydreaming about me in the past month with the aid of those photographs that are much closer to what he wants than I am. We were doing well back in June. He had begun to warm toward me, to loosen. His family is not good for him, and not being able to get a job he wanted has shaken his confidence. I try to force contact by making conversation, to slow down his progression toward fucking. “It was lovely to swim together. You’re sure in the water—powerful.”

He laughs. “You sure aren’t. You’re clumsy. How did you learn to swim? From imitating a paddleboat?”

I draw back, scalded. I have no idea how I look in the water, having never considered swimming an aesthetic performance, like dancing; certainly growing up in center city Detroit I had little practice.

“And that bathing suit. It must once have been red, huh? It looks like a barn that needs painting. Did you borrow it from your mother?” He’s having fun. Being witty puts him in a good humor as he nibbles on my shoulder.

“If you don’t like that one, get me another.” I try to keep the bitterness from salting my voice. “I’m open to improvement in the bathing suit department—say of Jacobson’s?”

“My little gold digger,” he mutters. “I’d have to pick it out, wouldn’t I? You have no taste. You’d confuse a dishrag with a bathing suit.”

They say you have no taste when what they mean is you have no money and no status objects bought by money. I grow inert. His hands claw at me metallically, the feeds of a machine.

“I think you wear those preposterous clothes to try to trick me into outfitting you,” he says, prodding. He wants me to grow upset and deny his charge vehemently, as I usually do. “That weird milkmaid dotty dress. Nobody wears clothes like that.”

“My dress? I thought you’d like it.” My bathing suit is old, but my dress I found just last week in the Nearly New Shoppe, a full-skirted peasant with a scoop neckline in a blue-and-white paisley. It is a quintessential summer dress to me, easy fitting and sensual. Not knowing what he sees wrong with it makes me feel lost.

“I know what I like—some hot sex. If not one way, then the other,” he says in a loud jolly voice, turning me onto my belly. I think he means to enter my vagina from the back, but instead he falls over me pushing against my buttocks, thrusting hard. While I am pinned under him, he forces his prick into my ass.

“Ow!” I try to shake him off.

“Come on. It’s no good fucking the other way. Just lie still. I’ll do the work.”

“It hurts!”

“Only when you tense up. If it doesn’t hurt the other way, it won’t hurt this way. Don’t be a prude. I’ve done this a dozen times with Sue.”

It hurts; it hurts a lot. I feel dry and torn. Every stroke rubs me raw. Also I feel disregarded, as if my cunt is being bypassed with contempt. I feel extraordinarily used, lying there with a thumping within me that feels partially familiar and partially odd. I am no longer sexually excited. I am angry and bored and in pain. It wasn’t my choice. He didn’t give me a choice.

After what feels like half an hour he comes, flooding me. I remember being forced to have an enema in childhood: that sense of being full in the colon where fullness feels wrong. He goes off to shower while I lie feeling extremely sorry for myself. When he comes out of the bathroom I pass him to run the water for a bath and he gives me a quick embrace as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. I stay in the tub until the water has cooled to tepid. I don’t want to leave the bathroom. I don’t want to have to talk to him.

When I finally edge by to pick up my clothes and put them on, he is lying in his madras bathrobe watching the Tigers play the Cleveland Indians.

“I didn’t like that,” I say.

“I did.” He grins. “Come on, you liked it fine. You just think you shouldn’t.”

“No, I didn’t like it. It hurt. You didn’t ask me first.”

“You never did that before?”

“No.”

“Well, I got one of your cherries, then.” He laughs shortly, in a good mood. His eyes are on the pitcher as he winds up. The images from the television set are reflected twice on his glasses. I want to have a fight with him but I feel torn in my body and my esteem at once, and it is hard to fight satisfactorily with someone who is watching a television program. I march over and interpose myself.

“I’m upset. Can’t you see that?”

“I can’t see through you, that’s for sure.” He sits up on the edge of the bed, scowling.

Suddenly I have no stomach for the fight; I feel too raw. I turn and start out of the bedroom, hoping he will come after me and make it less demeaning. Apologize. Make up. Instead he calls after me, “You left your drink on the counter. When you get it, bring me a refill.”

I am in no hurry to oblige him. I wander around the beige and terra-cotta living room with its Danish pieces, the coffee table from his old apartment at home. All the photographs in their aluminum frames including me glorified. I am not comfortable here. I want to go home.

I take orange juice from the refrigerator and pour the martini into it to make it palatable to me. Then I pour him a drink from the pitcher into a clean glass from the open shelves over the counter. As I sit at the counter with my drink, idly I pick up pages of a letter lying there in plain view. Then I stare. Then I begin to read, for the handwriting is immediately familiar.

Dearest Peter,

I am already missing you desperately.

I stop and read the date. August 12. Last week.

Dearest Peter,

I am already missing you desperately. Desperately. I know you are angry because of my decision. But it isn’t a decision, my darling, so much as a matter of holding the fort a bit while you reach
your
decision. I can’t go on like this.

You must speak to her. I can’t deceive her day in and day out. The last three weeks has been more than I can endure. It has to be your choice and you must go ahead and make it, but you also have to be honest with her and tell her about us.

I feel deceived. I feel like a fool, disregarded and thrust aside. I read slowly, my eyes moving through syrup. I have forever to read Donna’s letter to the man she obviously loves.

My therapist is supportive of my feelings. He says it’s very healthy that I wouldn’t go to bed with you just yet. He says it would be very destructive for me to do so without some kind of emotional commitment on your part. Remember how badly it turned out for us when we rushed ahead violently before!

Before. When? Suddenly I know. Not exactly how or what but I know that when Donna wanted to move out on me in the winter, that was the secret subtext. Peter, Peter and Peter. The room is slowly revolving on a turntable. The pages fall from my hand to the floor like outsized snowflakes but they do not melt. I walk out the sliding door onto the balcony and stand there, the humid air thick as feathers in spite of the breeze off the river. I don’t belong here. At all.

I don’t go back and read the rest of the letter. Instead I return it carefully to where I found it. I have read enough. I trudge back to the bedroom. “Peter.” He does not look at me.

“Where’s my drink?”

“I think we’ve run out of gas. I didn’t like tonight and I don’t feel good about you.”

Now he faces me with a slight grin. He gets up to turn the sound off on the baseball game. “What makes you say that suddenly?”

Now I know what I had subliminally suspected: he left the letter there for me. “It isn’t sudden.” I won’t trust him with the information that I read Donna’s letter, for he might use it on her. “All evening we’ve been trying to make each other be somebody different. I want you to be open and giving. You want me to be soft and malleable.”

“It’s clear, isn’t it?” he asks eagerly. “That I don’t love Jill. Only what Jill could be. And you could!”

“Would you mind taking me home?”

“After the game,” he says. “It’s the top of the seventh.”

Alberta’s clan summers near me. She married late but well. Manny and Alberta still listen when the other talks and still watch each other across rooms. Manny’s specialty is labor law and he has come and gone from the government with the changing administrations over the last twenty years—in with the Democrats and out with the Republicans. Alberta’s base remains New York with her law firm and their kids, so that some years they have lived together and some years they have lived mostly apart, but they have persisted.

Alberta has matured well. She is a big woman, buxom but not fat. She and Manny jog, sail their little boat and play softball with the kids. Her hair is long and iron grey, her skin olive and smooth still. She talks louder than she used to because she has trouble with her hearing, dating from an antiwar demonstration in New York when the Tactical Police suddenly attacked our line of march and clubbed her unconscious. I always talk to her left side when I can maneuver around.

Summers, her house on Gull Pond is full of her three children, the oldest nineteen, the youngest fourteen, their friends, friends of hers and Manny’s, her parents, Manny’s mother. We meet at Newcomb Hollow when I finish work for the day and walk toting our beach chairs till the crowd thins. Then we sit talking, staring out to sea, while around us her family chaos breaks and subsides. We share private walks and improvised picnics, always with more kids than we counted before. Summers are our less political times. The rest of the year we talk
once a week in spite of the long-distance rates, sometimes on business and sometimes for pleasure.

Thus in March on a day the damned weather had turned and pissed on Josh and me with a wet nasty snowstorm right after we plowed, when the phone rang later at night than I like to answer it, I wasn’t surprised as she boomed at me, “Kiddie, it’s time to go to Washington again. Faster than inflation we got to move. Those bastards are planning to kill us.” She read me the text of a proposed constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion and then the draft of an ad to be run in protest.

“I’ll call Theo,” I offered. “But in the morning. You New York slickers don’t respect the hours country mice keep.”

“Violins, please—fiddles? Faddle. You don’t like the statement, I can tell.”

“I’m not crazy about it.”

“Oh. And what’s wrong with it?”

“Too much dead rhetoric. I’ll work on it in the morning.’

“I figured you’d feel called upon to rewrite it. Can’t you do it tonight?”

“Brain rot sets in with sunset, Alberta. After supper, I turn into a pumpkin above the shoulders…. Years ago, I had a lover who called me that. You never knew him.”

“What were you, then, five? I saw your ex yesterday.”

My tongue curled with that sour wash of disappointment. “Ah, with the heir to his wife’s fortune?” Trying for the light note and failing, not from loss or sorrow but pure disappointment of trust and hope pulverized.

“No, with two big bags from Zabar’s, actually. I ducked into the Bagel Wheel to avoid him—he always looks so hangdog when he sees me…. Jill, never mind. He’d been a sourpuss for years. Josh loves you a lot more than he ever did. It shows.”

“But for how long?” I moaned and felt ashamed. “I thought I was done fretting about men. For years my passions were literature and politics—and tomatoes. Never underestimate tomatoes as a suitable object for passion…. What time can I call you in the morning?”

After I hung up, I couldn’t sort out if I felt depressed because of contemplating how after fourteen years of intimacy in open comradeship, my life had been torn open; or if I was depressed because of contemplating how the forces of the right were planning to tear women apart. Two steps forward and one step back and sometimes two steps back and then one sideways feinting dodge and then a leap forward. I know we must take the long view. Still I do not know a feminist who began married who ended married, at least to the same man. So who said it was going to be easy? Never me.

Like my old cat, I have lost a few teeth in battle. Like my young cat, I am crazy to play and have my belly rubbed. I have given myself in love now new and dangerously and I give myself into battle as the forces of reaction darken the skies and the heat loss of the world seems to quicken. A cold late spring nonetheless
comes. After all, I know about cycles and epicycles. I know what happened to the various safe and dangerous choices my friends made the first time around.