Stepping (6 page)

But Caroline, sitting up in her bed across from Cathy, suddenly volunteered, “Oh, Cathy is
always
picky about food, even at home. Mother says she’s an exasperating child, and Gram says she’ll never get a husband.”

I felt as encouraged as if my sternest professor had just interrupted my
presentation to say, “
Very
good point, Mrs. Campbell.” I smiled. I relaxed.

“Well, I was a picky eater when I was young, too,” I said. I sat down—on the far end—of Cathy’s bed. “I never used to eat pineapple, but I love it now. But I don’t think I’ll ever love sweet potatoes.”

“
I’ll
never love spinach!” Caroline said, wriggling her nose and entire body with enthusiastic hate.

“And
I’ll
never love onions!” Cathy piped up.

It seemed I had hit on a favorite topic. We sat for almost an hour that night, the two little girls and I, discussing gleefully turnips and coconut and cod liver oil, and other things that we would never love. I was secretly pleased that neither girl named me.

Charlie had to come in and break it up and insist that the girls go to sleep. I was glad. They had been getting silly
—
“
I’ll
never love poop with mustard!”—but I hadn’t known at that time that sometimes with little kids you have to stop silliness as quickly and firmly as letting down a garage door. For a while, wanting to please, not knowing how to escape, I had been their captive. But as I left the room I was content. At least, I thought, at least we’re all friends now. At least there won’t be any more of this sneaky fighting.

I had a lot to learn.

Two

October third in Helsinki, Finland, and two rather remarkable things have happened. First, it snowed here today. Not heavily enough to cover the still green grass, but enough, with the wind, to make walking the children to the Park Auntie’s very uncomfortable. I felt guilty leaving them there, especially since Lucy has a cold, but they were so glad to be outside, running around, getting dirty, that I had to let them stay. It was best for the children in all ways, I decided: they need to be outside, and I love—thrive on—this short time alone in the apartment. Sometimes I write letters or scribble in these little children’s workbooks which I found at the grocery store, sometimes I do housework, always I do laundry in the tiny machine in the bathroom and hang it to dry on our two-foot-square balcony or on the cords strung above our tub. And always I think, think, think. When Charlie and Adam and Lucy are here, I shut part of my mind off and act like a good wife and mother. Only when I’m alone do I open that secret door and let my fantasies and desires clash and clatter with my reason.

The second remarkable thing that happened today is that I received a long-distance phone call. The overseas operator had an accent, and I kept misunderstanding, kept saying, “No, no, Dr. Campbell is not here now,” before I realized with a jolt that the call was for me.

“Zelda?” It was Stephen’s voice coming as clear as if he were in the next room instead of thousands of miles away. “Zelda? Is that you? Is Charlie there? Can you talk?”

“Yes,
yes
,” I cried when I managed to get my breath back. “I mean, yes, it’s me; no, Charlie’s not here; yes, I can talk. Why are you calling? Is something wrong?” And I suddenly had a vision of our beautiful old farmhouse, now rented to a visiting mathematician, in flames.

“No, no, everything’s all right. Everything’s fine. I just
miss
you. I miss you terribly. Zelda, this won’t work. It’s all wrong.”

A surge of joy passed through me at the words, and I felt wonderfully warm, wonderfully happy, And oddly triumphant, too: I hadn’t missed Stephen at all these past
three weeks. I had thought about him during the times I unlocked the crazy closet in my mind, but I hadn’t missed him desperately, I hadn’t pined.

“Oh, Stephen, I miss you, too,” I said. “But we agreed—nine months is not a very long time to think over such a major change in all our lives—”

“Nine months is
too
long,” Stephen said. “Nine weeks is too long. I don’t need to think any more. I know exactly what I want. I want you.”

“Oh, Stephen, think of Ellen. Think of Charlie; he’s your friend. Think of all the children—”

“They’d survive, we’d all survive. There’d be a month or so of crying and screaming, and then life would continue as usual. Can’t you see that it’s worse this way, living with Charlie and Ellen when we love each other?”

“But I can’t do it now, Stephen, I just can’t. I have to have more time to think, I
have
to.” My wonderful warmth slid away. I wanted to cry, “Don’t make me plead, don’t make me beg, don’t make me ask yet another man to let me do what I want and need to do. You’re ruining it.”

“I’m coming to Helsinki,” Stephen said.

“What? What?” I screeched, and in the transatlantic time lapse our voices suddenly echoed and crossed over one another.

“I said I’m coming to Helsinki.”

“What? What?”

“There’s a conference in New York I can say I’m attending. I know someone there who will cover for me. I already have my reservations. I’m arriving at eleven-thirty in the morning, your time, on BEA #270, on November twenty-ninth. Can you meet me at the airport, or arrange a hotel for me?”

“Stephen, I can’t handle this! You can’t come here.
Please
.”

I must have sounded desperate enough; there was a long expensive silence, and then Stephen said:

“I promise I won’t make a scene. I won’t try to force you. I won’t even discuss the future. I just want to see you, be with you. I’ll stay only two or three days. We’ll eat together, hide in my hotel, talk if you want to. I just want to
see
you, Zelda, I want to touch you again. Low key. No pressure. Is that all right?”

I was weak with fear and delight and sorrow. “All right,” I said. “All right.”

“Goodbye then till November twenty-ninth. Write me, Zelda, here at the university.”

“I will. All right. Goodbye.”

“I love you, Zelda.”

“Goodbye.”

* * *

“Oh, I love you, I love you, Chocolate eyes, Chicken Feathers,” I would say to my dark-eyed son, to my fine-haired, fair-haired daughter. “I love you, I love you, I LOVE YOU!” I would shout at them in ecstasy, wrestling with them on their beds, nipping at their sweet flesh. “I could eat you up!”

“I love you, Charlie,” I would say to my husband so many times during our lives together. And I meant it.

I loved, too, three or four women who were important to me, who were more than friends or mentors. I loved my parents, I loved my two surviving grandparents, who sat blithering away in rest homes. I loved, in a way, my stepdaughters.

But now, for the first time in my thirty-four years, I loved unmistakably, best of all, finally, at long last, ME. It was a great feeling.

I wasn’t so sure about Stephen. Perhaps I loved him, perhaps not. That was one of the things I was trying to sort out. How much of it had been a challenge, how much of it was gratitude, how much of it was simply that I hadn’t slept with a man other than Charlie for over thirteen years?

We had met Stephen and Ellen several times at university parties, and it turned out that Stephen was the new head of the English department. Ellen had—actually, of course, Stephen had, too, but one always thinks of children as what the mother has because she is home with them—children Adam’s and Lucy’s ages. Adam and Carrie, Ellen’s four-year-old daughter, even knew each other at preschool. Charlie, who doesn’t make friends easily anymore, finding books a more valuable way of using time, liked Stephen because Stephen knew so much about books. I liked Ellen because she was so
beautiful to look at and because she was like me, a woman who had had “a career” but was now a dedicated mother, happy to have children but finding home life rather confining and dull in spite of the ecstasy. We started doing things together, we even spent one lovely Christmas Eve together, and the friendship of the whole Hunter family was a light in our family’s life.

Then Stephen called one September day a year ago to tell me that one of their teachers had had a heart attack, and to ask me if I wouldn’t like to teach two courses at the university. Just freshman literature and composition, with mediocre pay, and he could easily get a graduate student if I wasn’t interested, but he had heard me say so often how much I missed teaching … I felt like someone drowning must feel when he’s suddenly caught and hauled up to the air.

I taught Monday-Wednesday-Friday afternoons, and I loved it. It was terribly exciting, each day of it, walking around the classrooms, laughing with the students, trying to dance and jiggle and jangle up the air so that those kids learned something and had fun learning it. I was a good teacher. I had been before, years before, but I was older now, and it was good to know that my abilities hadn’t left me, good to know that even if the big, tall, cute basketball stars no longer tried to flirt with me they still paid enough attention to learn how to write a decent essay. I knew I was a good teacher, I knew it in my bones. part-time for the spring semester, and no one at home complained. My teaching somehow energized me for the rest of my life; I smiled through my housework, sang to my children, began to feel more creative in bed.

I would have taught again this fall, but instead Charlie was awarded the Fulbright research grant, and here we all are in Helsinki. I keep telling myself that I’ll always be able to teach again, that this is a great opportunity to enjoy another culture, that we should travel while the children are young. But the desire to teach is yet another thing that flutters behind the locked doors of my mind and shakes me by the shoulders when I let it out. I once intended to be a university professor, to head a department of English. I am not sure now whether it’s Stephen I want or his job.

It was exhilarating to teach again after so long, and Stephen was always there, complimenting me, reporting on my good work, helping me—it was easy to grow fond of him. And all the more delicious because he was a man that few people could touch. He
was a slim, handsome, New England prep school type who had graduated from Yale. He had published a lot, in all the right places, and he moved through the world with the unruffable ease of a man who is thoroughly competent at his job and has money in the family as well. His wife was another jewel in his crown; she had been an actress on Broadway and now gave her advice to the university and little city theaters, although she refused to act because acting took too much out of her and she wanted to save her energies for her family. Stephen Hunter had everything, and he knew it, and now he wanted to create a great, unique innovative department of English, and he channeled everything into that. His smile for secretaries, professors, students, administrators, was charming but brief; he wanted to get on with it. He had a lot to do. People began to think him snotty or overly ambitious, icy, inhuman. I was only a lowly part-time instructor; I enjoyed the envy of others who saw Stephen stop to sit on my desk to chat and laugh with me. I thought he was joking with me on Monday about a new freshman text because we had all taken our children sledding on Sunday. I thought he spent time discussing the department with me because I had good ideas. Certainly many of them were implemented. I thought he was an intelligent man discussing work with an intelligent woman. I was as saddened as I was pleased when it all turned out to be something different.

One March morning I had a frantic phone call from Ellen.

“What am I going to do, Zelda?” she wailed. “Carrie’s come down with the flu. She’s really sick. Her temperature’s been over a hundred and three for hours now and she can’t keep anything down and all she wants to do is sit on my lap. And I promised Stephen I’d have an intimate little dinner party for whoozit—that big-deal critic who’s flying in today. I made a chocolate torte yesterday, it’s in the fridge, but I can’t possibly get around to making a whole dinner today. And no one would want to eat here anyway, the entire house smells like vomit.”

“Surely Stephen can take whoever it is out to dinner on an expense account,” I said.

“No, no, not the first night,” Ellen said. “He’s really hot shit, and we’re supposed to treat him like a king. He’s some lonely old widower who lives alone in New York City and loves to be babied when he travels. Stephen really wanted his first night here to be a
home spread.”

“Ellen,” I said, “are you talking about Levin? Samuel Levin? Good Lord, Ellen, if it’s Samuel Levin, I’ll have the dinner here! Who all’s supposed to come? I’ll take the kids to a sitter’s and make a stroganoff and salad and you can give me your torte for dessert and we’ll all be happy!” I was thrilled at the idea of having Samuel Levin in my house and glad to help Ellen. And as it turned out, Stephen thought I’d done it to help him.

My part of the dinner was a success. Marita Nyberg and Dan Smith, the two English department people other than Stephen, were as pleasant and complimentary as any two people could be. Even Charlie was his most cordial. But Samuel Levin had grown old and odd and bitter and cold, and after spending the winter hidden in his apartment writing diatribes against the critics who had criticized his work, couldn’t thaw out enough to act even polite. He was a wall of ice for the first half of the evening, until he had enough booze in him—all of our scotch and three bottles of wine—and then he began raging and railing vehemently, while the rest of us sat stunned, pretending to listen.

“Jesus,” Marita whispered to me as she left, “he’s doing the Hall lecture tomorrow night and not leaving till the next morning. Who’s gonna take care of him and listen to more of that shit tomorrow night? Not me!”

As it turned out, only Stephen and I volunteered to take Levin out to dinner Tuesday night after his lecture. No one else would go, not even for a free meal. Carrie was still sick, so Ellen couldn’t go, and on my side Charlie simply wouldn’t go.

“That was enough for me,” he said as we did the dishes after my dinner. “I’ll babysit tomorrow night and you can listen to that old madman let off his gas.”