Men and Angels (23 page)
He was coming out the door now; he was walking toward her. She had waited so long to see him, she wanted to see him so much, that for a moment she didn’t recognize him. She stood still, afraid to move forward, afraid that this man who appeared to be her husband was the mere invention of desire. Then she felt herself pushed forward. The pleasure of touching the body that was, indeed, her husband’s sang in her ears as if she had come up too quickly from beneath the sea. The children ran against him, clinging to his legs. She wouldn’t move away from him to give them more access. She had to hold him; she kissed him ten times on the face. She kept kissing his shoulder, disbelieving her good fortune. How handsome he was. The facts of his body came back gradually to her. How odd it was that a body so well known, so deeply loved, could allow itself in absence to be even partially forgotten. It was a surprise to her how slight he was, how fine and straight and light his hair was; only his eyes—light blue with gold or silver in them, never, even when he smiled, relinquishing a kind of sadness—were entirely familiar. His beauty was a simple joy to her; she allowed herself to bask in it as if it were any natural phenomenon: sunshine or fragrant air. She was sure the people near him must have been refreshed simply by sitting with him on a plane.
“We’re insane,” he said, kissing her hair, leaving his hands free to pet the children. “Why did we leave each other for one day? I didn’t think it was possible to miss anyone as much as I missed you.”
“I’ve missed you, I’ve missed you,” she kept saying, not knowing now how she had done it, lived without him, lived without his voice, his body. Walking beside him, leaning into him, carrying one bag for him while he carried the other, she understood that these months she had kept her body’s life shut down. Now she flowered; some heavy weight lifted, her head was light with effortless goodwill. The children chattered the three hours back to Selby. She was silent. She kept leaning over in the car, kissing the top of his arm, putting her head on his shoulder. Soon he would be gone again. She mustn’t think of it. For three weeks she would have him near her. He took her fingers, kissed them, put them carefully on her lap. The children would be asleep soon. Then all that dark night, she would have him to herself.
She was in the bathroom with Michael. He was shaving; she had just come from the shower and was standing to the left of his shoulder, in front of the mirror, taking pins out of her hair. The slightly overheated air, the dampness in the atmosphere, the smell of soap, created a breathy hopefulness in the room, and Anne could look at herself with a simple, physical happiness. Her shoulders still weren’t quite dry; she touched them with pleasure. Laying her face against Michael’s back, she kissed him over and over. All night they had held each other, and now the day would be theirs. They would go into stores; they would buy things for the children; they would have lunch, sitting across from each other in a restaurant, touching each other’s hands. In the evening, they would have people to dinner. She would sit at the opposite end of their dining room table, and he would watch her with a slow, sexual pride as people lifted glasses, forks, sharing their happiness.
The children were shy with their father; she sent them out late in the afternoon, when the too-early darkness made the air exciting, to take a walk while she cooked. The heavy smells of winter cooking hung in the house, everything was charged with a false, seasonal excitement, but under it all was the jet of sexual love once more heating things, making her feel what all those months had been absent. She’d found it easier to be with Laura when Michael was there; he had asked her simple questions, natural questions, that Anne, fearing either an answer she wouldn’t want to live in the house with or a wound too near the surface, hadn’t asked. So she’d learned the name of Laura’s hometown, that she had a sister, a high school education only and no hopes for more. With Michael near, Anne felt less open to access, several sheets protected her from Laura’s yearning. Marriage muffled, it protected, it made it much more difficult to be generous because you were always kept back a little from the lives of others, and so from feeling their need. She was able to be in the kitchen with Laura now, to accept her help with dinner, with none of the anxiety she’d felt a week ago. Possibly, she thought, Michael’s visit would make their relationship normal; he would teach her how to be with this girl who, he’d reminded her, was unsettling simply because she was so hard to categorize. When Michael told her Laura was all right, she was able to believe him. Laura even seemed happier with him around. When he came home with the children and changed his clothes, all of them sat in the kitchen, doing something to help with dinner, and Laura sang Christmas carols along with the rest of them as if she actually once, too, had lived in a family, had had a home.
Anne had invited Hélène for dinner on Michael’s second night home. She arrived an hour early. She could almost mar the surface of the evening; she could almost make a parody of it, with her clapped hands, her cooing, her saying to Anne: “But what a genius you have for family life. I can’t imagine you would want another work. It is for people that your gift is. Why, the change in Laura is extraordinary. She tells me she has never in her life been so happy.”
Then she had to pull Michael from the center of them all, talk to him about the college, hear the news of her friends, so that the weight of the room shifted and everyone looked toward them with a deprived, hungry imbalance, longing to be let in. She was giggling, she was coming at Michael’s face with a series of playful slaps; she was telling him how everyone in Toulouse was made for him.
“Speaking of which I got a telephone call, a telephone call, my dear, from Charlotte Mistière. Purporting, she has said, to wish me
joyeux Noël,
but one knows how parsimonious she is. The real reason, of course, was to inquire of your health. It is a genuine conquest you have made, my friend, and with the most prestigious hostess in the town. At forty, her dinners have put out of joint all the older noses of the town dowagers. She is famous for them.”
“She’s been quite kind to me,” Michael said.
Something rose up in the air, something sharp, elusive, it swam back and forth between Anne and Michael like a dark fish possessed of rows of clever teeth, not yet visible. Michael was uncomfortable. Anne could see it; she knew him better than anybody in the world. Twice, three times in the seventeen years she’d known him, he had blushed. He was doing it now; he pulled his sweater down over his hips like a schoolboy.
The hard object in the air flew apart, broke into tiny pieces that were hooks, embedded themselves in her skin and disappeared there. Was that it, did Michael have a lover? Charlotte Mistière. Would she have to think of that as the name of the woman she shared her husband with? No one would be surprised to hear it; he was a young man, a handsome man, he was away from home. She must put it out of her mind. It was true or it was not, and she would have no way of knowing. She could never ask him. For that was what they had agreed upon: if either of them had an affair, the other would not be told. They’d made the decision three years ago when Michael’s best friend from college had come to Selby for a week’s colloquium and had propositioned Anne. Michael had had an evening class; she’d come home late with Roger after a wine-and-cheese party. She’d had too much to drink. They’d been making fun of people; they were laughing the way they had the last time she’d seen him, in a Cambridge apartment. They were laughing, then they were kissing; it had all happened terribly fast. “Come to bed with me,” he said, “I’ve wanted to go to bed with you for fifteen years.”
The thought of it had made life seem brimful and swimming. She could do it; she could love her husband, she could have a lover. She would talk to him about it, no one would get hurt. In her mind she imagined that Roger would come to town once every few months, and they would have a night together. But it wouldn’t mean she loved Michael less; it would just mean life was richer.
They drank more wine; they did more kissing. She sent Roger home and said she would speak to Michael when he came in. Dizzy with wine, she told her husband her wonderful news. His reaction shocked her. He brought his hand down, flat on the surface of the table, like the blade of a wide knife. The wineglasses jumped; small wet pools formed beside them. “Do it or don’t do it, but don’t talk to me about it,” he had said. “Don’t ask me if it’s all right. It’s not all right.”
And he had walked up the stairs, to their bed. All night he’d slept as if he slept on the edge of a cliff, as if to move one inch closer to her would be like falling into a dangerous ocean.
In the morning she woke, feeling like a murderer. Guilt settled in her spine like molten lead, rose up and spread behind her eyes. It had marked the end of their young marriage, what she had done, having drunk too much, in just one evening. It hadn’t been the end of everything; life came in, covered the bare patch of torn-up earth with the architecture of family life, but she’d had to live with the knowledge that she had done damage to the person in the world whom she most loved. That knowledge led to a resolve: she would never be unfaithful to him. And, months later, when they were able, finally, to speak of it, they’d promised each other, if they were unfaithful, they would keep it to themselves.
It had seemed mature then, and sensible. But now she found it dreadful. How could she go through this time she had so longed for if she suspected Michael of having a lover and could never know the truth. Suddenly all she had taken pleasure in stood up and mocked her. What a stupid thing it was to shape a life with things like holidays, bolstering things up with them, spreading things around them. Making of them some sort of sanctuary so that nothing untoward might happen there. Was it for the children? Yes and no. For the idea that life might be scooped up and made dense with the pressure of a festival, a festival she now saw only as oppressive and absurd? She felt ridiculous to have looked forward to it, to have imagined it was a time when life could be held back. She saw the weeks ahead, the meals, the presents, the parties, the clothes, as a sheet of black glass before her eyes, blank and cold, impossible to break through or to get around.
Michael went on talking to Hélène; the children were cutting cookies. Perhaps she had invented everything; the hooks under her skin might have been of her own construction. Surely if Hélène thought Michael was having an affair, she wouldn’t have hinted it in the kitchen. Anne watched her, begrudging her her poorly applied eye shadow, her new acrylic sweater in its inorganic shade of red. Was it possible that this person, so universally acknowledged to be good, was making mischief? Or was she, as Michael said, a genuine innocent simply passing on the great regard, the seasonal good wishes of a new, devoted friend?
Anne felt entirely alone in the room, and then it came to her that she was not; she was being watched. Laura was standing at the counter, absently tearing lettuce into a wooden bowl. Laura’s eyes were on her. She, too, had seen the thing, the sharp, solid thing, rise up in the air, she had seen it fly apart, she had seen that the hooks had penetrated. From sheer irritation, Anne knocked the vinegar cruet to the floor; the red liquid spread out quickly past the hillock of glass shards. In a second, Laura was beside her with a sponge, kneeling next to her, helping her, smiling with forgiveness, as if one of the children needed comforting for a mistake. She wanted to shout at Laura as if she were a voyeur at the window. She wanted to scream: You have no right; this is not your place; this is my life. Your understanding of it, what you think of as your understanding, is a theft, a lie, you will never know anything about me. But that was out of the question; it was something she would never do or say. She thanked Laura and, feeling she had to protect Michael from something, walked over to him and put her arm around his waist.
Driving to her parents’ house on Christmas Day, she thought of how she liked it now as she never had when it had been her home. Perhaps that was true for everyone, she thought. A necessary discomfort was engendered by those houses, which, like good and liberal parents, understood that at a certain point the children must heap scorn upon them. Having sheltered those young lives, having circled around them, kept out cold, let in light, did those houses close in purposely upon the young so that they could do, joyfully, that incomprehensible thing: leave home and run to the outside world, as if that were the place where they were safe?
They stopped at a diner for lunch. In the window she noticed a sign:
CHRISTMAS SPECIAL: TURKEY DINNER $4.95
. She knew Laura might easily have been one of the people in a place like that at Christmas. So it was a good thing that Laura was with them. It was one of the ways you made up for good luck, paid back the unpayable debt, by being kind to the unlucky. Nevertheless Anne resented her presence. She had been a witness to Anne’s suspicions about Michael, and as long as she saw Laura, Anne couldn’t bury her thoughts about her husband.
She knew that her position was ridiculous whether Michael had a lover or not. If he didn’t, she was the suspicious wife. If he did, she was still ridiculous, the wronged wife, the other familiar figure of melodrama or comedy.
She remembered her mother’s ideas about male sex. You must never, her mother had told her, allow them to take even the first step, because once they are aroused, they can’t control themselves. It couldn’t be true, and yet the wisdom of the ages gave support to it. But Michael was no more libidinous than she; they matched desire for desire. Sometimes she took the lead, sometimes he. But had she taken a lover, people wouldn’t have said of her, “What could you expect?” It wouldn’t have been imagined that sexual deprivation was a physical problem that she had to tend to, like an ingrown toenail. People would have judged her—harshly, kindly, depending upon their approval of her lover and their affection for her and for Michael. With women, sex was never judged as a merely physical event.