My Education (15 page)

“No,” I conceded. “You can, actually.” But it wasn't my disapproval of her fleeting charade that preoccupied her.

“I guess I'm entitled to my little escapes now and then,” she was saying, whether speaking of this evening, or the whole of our affair, I couldn't tell.

“What do you have to escape from?”

“I think you've met my husband.”

“He doesn't seem so awful as to call for escaping,” I said, so surprised as to argue against my own interests—for not only was this the first time she'd disparaged him to me, it was the first time she had mentioned him at all, since the night in the pergola. Did I think he had vanished forever, or wish that he would? It was far worse than that. I still admired Nicholas, as much as anyone I'd ever known. My esteem for him was hopelessly mixed with my ardor for her. And at the same time, the two felt so confoundingly separate that Martha's speaking to me of her husband was somehow perverse.

“I suppose he just took you to bed a few times,” she went on. “It's once you've been sleeping with him for a while that it's really soul killing.”

“What?” I cried.

“The inattention,” she said, misconstruing my question. “The remarkable absence. He's right there, but there's nobody there.”

“I never slept with Nicholas! Never. Not even sort of. Never anything like that.”

“For goodness' sake, don't freak out. Can't you see that I wouldn't have cared if you had? In fact—” She broke off. “Am I driving you home?”

“In fact, what?”

“Nothing. It's nothing to do with you. Am I driving you home?” But she couldn't withstand my silence. It was a power I was learning to use, in our voluble passion. “In fact, I would have been glad,” she said finally. “If it had made him happy.”

“You would have been
glad
,” I repeated, incredulous.

“If he was glad. I would have liked him to be happy. I would have liked to be happy, myself.”

“I don't understand.”

She looked at me frankly, while bending the wheel toward my part of town. “I don't want you to understand,” she said after a moment.

“Take me home with you,” I suddenly insisted. “I'll hide in the morning. I'll hide the whole day. I'll climb down the drainpipe. Just let me sleep in your bed. I want to come, and make you come, and fall asleep and not have to put on smelly clothes and walk home in the dark.” I couldn't know if her desire, or her guilt, from having made that admission to me, played the larger part in her consent—for her face in desire, and her face in the unease of guilt, often looked much the same. When we came to the desolate light near the Hobo Deli, instead of crossing toward my neighborhood she took the left turn, toward hers.

“I didn't know you when I hoped you were his lover,” she clarified, as the car started climbing the hill. “You were the latest of his female TAs. He tended to go to bed with them. Though never for long.”

“So that stuff with the petition was true.”

“That was bullshit,” she said, with a surprising flare of loyalty. “The so-called harassment? Neurotic virgins who were fixated on him. He never touched an undergraduate. Never so much as looked at them—that was their actual grievance. But with his TAs, the affairs were consensual. And sanctioned, I guess you could say. We never made an explicit arrangement. I tried, once. Quite a long time ago. I suggested that we have an open marriage.”

“Might as well not have the marriage at all.”

“God,” she said. “You are young.”

I winced as if she'd hit me. “Don't talk down to me.”

“No, you're right. Your reaction might have nothing to do with your age. Nicholas was also repulsed when I made that suggestion. He preferred to have poorly kept secrets.”

I remembered her warning-off speech.
I haven't been an exemplary wife but that's over, that chapter is closed
. At the time I had hoped she was bluffing: in my selfish and shortsighted hunger I had hoped that exemplarity continued to elude her. Now I feared that it did. “So how many affairs have you had before me?” I asked coldly. “Is this just your latest ‘escape'?”

“Please don't,” she said.

“Don't what?”

“Don't . . . drag us into the quagmire of what ought to be. Just let it be.”

“Oh, that's very Alyssa,” I sneered.

“Alyssa isn't my type. Regina. Just let us be for a while.”

“I love you!” I raged.

“I know,” she said, which made me that much more shrill and combative.

“You
know
?”

“Come on, Regina. You ‘love' me, you want to come set up house? You ‘love' me, you want to be Joachim's other mommy? You want to pay half my mortgage? You want to bake little pies every day? What is this bullshit? What more do you want? You
have
me. Quit the ‘
gimme
.'”

“What ‘
gimme
,'” I whispered, my throat walls grown thick.

“Your ‘I love you' is like ‘
gimme, gimme
,'” she said, pulling into her driveway. She turned off the engine and we listened to its
tick-tick
dying noise as if marking the hours before dawn. Then she seized my hand and at her touch I yanked her close, a tug-of-war stalemate across the gearshift of the Saab. “I want you here, too,” she whispered. “I want you sleeping with me, in my bed. I want that even though it's insane, and my life goes to pieces if we get ourselves caught, I still
want
it. Can't that be enough?”

•   •   •

Love bestows such a dangerous sense of entitlement. That first morning, waking up beside Martha in her own fragrant bed, dense with pillows and finely spun fibers and waffled goose down and with Martha, her body unsheathed, hotly pressed against mine, did I marvel at such change of fortune? Did I store up delicious sensation, against a day it might only exist in remembrance? Did I recall all my mornings awaking alone, so this contrasting morning was all the more sweet? No. I exulted, I reveled, I buried her flesh beneath tireless kisses, but I also felt arrogant justification. I felt I was finally where I belonged.

And I felt this despite being told that I must be clandestine; despite Martha's leaving the room very early to wrest from Lucia her smug satisfaction at reaching the baby's crib first when he stirred; despite Martha's urgent reminders, which never relaxed, that I stay in the room until fetched; despite how she pulled the door shut as if wanting to bolt it; despite my confinement sometimes lasting hours, until the nanny transported the baby far enough from the house that I might make my tawdry escape—and not only despite all of this, but exactly because of it. Because the great risk was all Martha's, and all undertaken for me. What did I risk but squalor—for the injunction to silence forbade me from taking a shower—and boredom—for I was even reduced, while I waited for her, to reading that unloved copy of
The Last of the Mohicans
she'd chucked on the floor? The answer, my only real risk, was that hers would become unacceptable to her. But to this I was blind, even though it lay clearly before me, the same way I was blind to the bright little bottles and bowls and spoons of an infantile breakfast that lay in plain sight in the kitchen dish drainer, once Martha had freed me at last from the bedroom and was hurrying me out the door.

Only days could have passed in this way though they felt like luxurious weeks. One morning the quality of my awaking was so different I lay in momentary confusion, unsure where I was. The door to the bedroom stood open. A light draft I'd never felt in that room, where my body had shed so much vigorous sweat, slightly chilled me. Her bedside clock said twelve-thirty
P.M.
A note by the clock added:
Everyone's out for the rest of the day. Come down whenever you want.

I pulled on a T-shirt and jeans and stepped into the hall. The house was perfectly quiet. I didn't feel that slight alertness of the air that can tell us, even through a deep silence, that some unseen person is sitting nearby. Five other doors lined the hallway, only two of which I could identify, for they were the two, side by side at the hall's farthest end, we slipped past late at night when we crept like thieves into the house: one the baby's, Joachim's, and the other the nanny's, Lucia's. Like the door at my back they stood open, emanating a calm emptiness. Irresistibly compelled, my swift footfalls silenced by carpet, I went and looked in. I'd never done this before. I'd always lacked opportunity, but it was true I'd also lacked curiosity. A riot of color in one, very clean but tight-packed. Tufted hot pink bedspread such as it was inconceivable Martha would buy, with many figural wildly colored pillows in a similar vein heaped on top, posters as from a travel agency hung on the walls, bedside table bristling with photographs of grinning toothy children in imitation-metal frames. The other room used such a different palette as to seem a different planet. Robin's-Egg Blue, Cappuccino, and Leaf would have been fitting names for the paint. Wood crib restrainedly flounced with a pattern of monkeys. Small colorful wood sculptures which perhaps were expensive playthings, placed haphazardly over the carpet. All these impressions in a single furtive glance. I turned to face the other three closed doors again. Martha's bedroom was opposite the head of the stairs, which suddenly seemed a strange place for her bedroom to be. Still the house lay in deep silence. Like Bluebeard's wife I walked the full length of the hall to the opposite end and pushed open a door.

An immense corner bedroom, with two walls of windows, framing fine views of trees. Floating at an angle, an enormous wood bed with tall headboard and footboard, a twist of quilts hanging off to one side as if someone had fled, gotten tangled, yanked free in great haste, and then left the quilts half on the floor. A chest, lamps, books, wastepaper basket with waste, chaise with a robe crumpled on it, door standing open to a large walk-in closet within which I could see a pale ranking of shirts, and below, a dark army of shoes. Unopened dry cleaning box on the floor. Here and there, something—a camisole, a pair of leather flats—I knew was Martha's. Not much. She'd taken her most needed stuff when she moved down the hall. In one corner, a club chair with a small shelf beside it containing perhaps fifty palm-size books bound in crumbling red leather with their nearly illegible titles stamped in flaking gold onto the spines:
All's ell at nds Well lfth N ght Th ercha t of enice e Me y Wi es f Wi ds r O hel o

I stepped back and closed the door noiselessly. Two doors remained, both of them closed. Behind one was his study. I didn't need to open the door to know just what it looked like.

I showered and dressed, and when I went down the stairs she was there, in the breakfast nook, reading. I didn't know why I felt angered, and somehow deceived, that she'd been sleeping with me in her guest room. Perhaps I felt foolish for not having realized it sooner. She tented her book on the table when I slid in beside her. Those upstairs rooms into which I had trespassed had followed me down, bearing witness in silence, so that it did not feel surprising when Martha said, “Joachim's with Nicholas. Lucia's taken him over.”

“Over where?” Though I knew we were alone, our voices sounded too loud.

“At the moment, the Holiday Inn.” She studied me for reaction to this and despite not receiving a protest went on, “You must have realized his canoe trip was over.”

“I hadn't been thinking about it,” I claimed, which was narrowly true. I'd been making a furious effort to not think about it.

“Did you lose track of time? I would have liked to but it's something I can't seem to do anymore.” She stared across the table and through the far wall as if her lost capacity to lose track of time lay there, just out of reach. “I don't know when that ended. It was after my marriage, but long before having the baby. I started to always know what time it was, practically to the minute. I stopped wearing a watch and I've never been late.” Again she looked in my face as if expecting I'd argue with her, and I remembered the day we'd met in the coffee shop, and her lateness, which she was telling me had been deliberate. As if her thoughts mirrored mine she added, “At least, not because I've lost track of the time. While Nicholas never has the remotest conception of what time it is. I called up the ranger last week, on the day he was due to come into the lodge, to leave a message for him to call me. He was amazed I remembered his schedule—he could barely remember himself. I asked him to put off coming home. A short-term separation.” Perhaps she'd been afraid I would crudely exult at this sudden announcement, because she added, harshly, “It's not because of you.”

“Is that a reassurance or a warning?”

“Neither,” she said. “Just a fact.”

We were sitting with shoulders and thighs pressed together in the snug little space, but less like lovers than like accidental seatmates on a train. “Either way it's a cruel thing to say,” I said, meaning to sound very calm and, I thought, succeeding. “If it's not because of me then why is it?”

“Regina, I don't have problems in my marriage because of you. I have you because of problems in my marriage.”

“
That's
sophomoric.”

“I think you might have meant sophistic. Even if you didn't, you're hardly old enough to call me sophomoric. I might have to ask for identification.” But there was nothing joking in her tone, and I lost what composure I'd had.

“Why not say what you were too much of a coward to tell me before? I'm your
escape
, just like acting eighteen at a roadhouse and smoking a joint. When you're all done with me you'll just flick what's left into an ashtray—”

“Can this really be true? I've told my lover we have more time together, and all she does is scream and cry and complain.”