Chapter Seven

Friday

When I woke up the next day, I was alone in the bed. Arching my head back to look at the clock, I saw that it was already after eight. I was surprised that I had slept through so much of the morning routine. I yawned and stretched and got out of bed.

It looked as if Steve had already gone to work. Barbara was in her bathrobe, sitting alone at the dining table. She held her head propped against her fist, her other hand holding a cup of coffee. She looked like she had been crying.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, approaching her.

Her eyes flicked up at me and then back down to the table. “Sit down,” she said.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, sitting down across the table from her.

“I don’t know how to say this to you,” she said, not looking at me.

“What?”

Her eyes darted up to me and then away again. “I don’t want you to stay here anymore.”

I felt a thick hot shard of pain in my chest, and my eyes filled with tears. “Oh,” I said, feeling small and cold and empty. “Oh.”

Her voice rose, plaintive and indignant. “I really like you, Nona. I think you’re a sweet person, a wonderful person, but you can’t just come into our lives the way you did and just stir everything up.” Fresh tears were streaming down her face, and I felt my own tears overflow my eyes.

“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen,” I said, through my sobs. I felt scalded by her anger and her pain.

“You show up at the door like a kitten out of the rain, homeless and hungry and adorable. How could we not open our home and our hearts to you?”

“You’ve been wonderful. I—”

“He’s in love with you!” she cried, rising from the table and dashing into the living room.

“He loves you, Barbara,” I called back. “And I love both of you.”

She was at the easel. “Look at this!” she shouted, turning it around so that the portrait of me he had painted the night before faced me. “He loves you! He painted this after you made love, didn’t he?” She was shouting.

“You all but told us it was all right with you!” I shouted back.

“I was wrong!” she shrieked, tearing at the portrait with both hands. The easel fell, and the pad of watercolor paper slipped off. The weight of the pad tore the page with my portrait, and she let it drop. In her crib, Serena started crying.

Barbara and I looked at each other for a moment without moving. Then Barbara ran over to the crib, stepping on the painting on her way.

When she returned, her baby in her arms, she was calmer. “Let’s sit down,” she said very quietly, walking toward the couches.

We sat down on the couches, facing each other. She opened her robe and, this time without showing her breast, lowered the strap of her nightgown and brought Serena to her nipple. She closed her eyes for a moment, and then opened them and looked directly at me. “I was wrong. I thought I was beyond the sort of possessiveness and jealousy of my parents’ generation. I thought I was liberated. I thought I could let Steve satisfy his fantasies and his desires in a safe way. I thought it would make up for the fact that we haven’t had much sex lately. I thought it would be fun. I thought I might like making love with a woman. I don’t know what I thought.”

She shook her head. “Maybe if we were Mormons, I’d have no problem sharing my husband with another woman. But I think even the Mormon men didn’t go to bed with more than one wife at a time, and the wives didn’t go to bed together by themselves. And we’re not Mormons. And none of us can handle this situation, not really.”

She paused and looked at me, giving me a chance to speak, but I was silent. “And what about you? What did you imagine you were doing with us? Did you think you were going to become a member of our family? Did you think you’d become Steve’s second wife? My sister? Our daughter? What?”

She stared at me until I felt compelled to speak. “I don’t know,” I said. “It just happened. One thing led to another. I didn’t know where it would go.”

She spoke very softly. “It wouldn’t go anywhere. It couldn’t go anywhere. You can’t be a part of our life, and we can’t be a part of yours. And I’m really sorry, because I think you’re a sweet person, and I really liked you, and we might have become very close friends.”

The pain in my chest had grown heavy again, and I was weeping: For the pain I had caused her, and for the loss of her love, and for myself. “I thought we were very close friends.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “We were lovers. But we didn’t know each other well enough to be very close friends, not really.” Deftly, she shifted Serena from one breast to the other without exposing herself to me at all. “We’ve only known each other seven days. Seven days!”

“It seems like I’ve known you and Steve all my life.”

She looked at me thoughtfully. “This must be a difficult time for you, waiting to find out what you’re doing with your life.”

“That’s not why it happened,” I said, wounded by her psychologizing.

She seemed fully self-possessed now. “This is what I want you to do, Nona. I want you to find somewhere else to stay. And then I want you to pack your things and leave.”

“Right now?”

She nodded her head slightly. “I know this sounds cruel, but yes. We need to make a clean break. It’ll be for the best.”

I couldn’t say anything for what seemed like a long time, and then I felt something pass through me. I knew that it had all been inevitable. I must have been crazy—we all must have been crazy—to think otherwise. “All right.”

I wiped my tears on my arm and stared at her for a moment. She didn’t look angry anymore, but remote and inaccessible. “May I go to the bathroom first?”

“Of course.”

She stayed on the couch with Serena while I used the bathroom and while I got dressed and while I dug out my address list with my list of names in New York and sat down next to the telephone.

The last name on my list was Uncle George, my father’s older brother, a large, gruff man who lived in Brooklyn. I had not seen him in more than six years, and he had always frightened me a little. His name was on my list not because I had considered asking him for a place to stay, but because my father, who knew a lot about emergencies, had always assured me that Uncle George was good in them. With Barbara sitting across the room, I felt reluctant to call any of the other friends of friends on my list. I imagined her imagining me coming into another couple’s lives and wreaking the havoc I had wrought on the Andrews.

My father had given me two phone numbers for Uncle George, his home and the bar he owned. Not knowing the hours a bar owner worked, I called him at home and woke him up. But once I had established who I was, he insisted that I come to Brooklyn and stay with him.

“Okay,” I said, looking across at Barbara as I hung up the phone. “I’ve found a place to stay.”

“Good,” Barbara said, evenly. “I’m glad for you.”

She continued to sit on the couch as I got up and emptied the drawer she had lent me into my small suitcase, as I dug through their hamper for the clothing I had put in it, and as I gathered my music stand and my flute and my music from where I had left them next to the window, not too far from where my ruined portrait lay on the floor, and as I put the keys she had given me on her dining table.

Everything I had come with was finally assembled in the entranceway, next to the dressing area. I walked back into the main room and looked down at Barbara, who was cradling her sleeping baby in her arms.

“I’m ready,” I said quietly.

She looked up. “All right.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m truly sorry.”

She nodded. “I am, too.”

“What are you going to tell Steve?” I asked.

“That’s no concern of yours, Nona,” she said softly.

“Would you tell him I said I’m sorry?”

“I’ll tell him that.”

“Please don’t think badly of me, Barbara,” I said. “I didn’t mean to cause you any pain.”

“Good luck, Nona. I hope you have a good life.”

“Thank you,” I said, and turned and gathered up my things and left, quickly, before I broke down again.

Afterword

There was one conversation I had with Barbara that I’ve saved to describe out of chronological order. It took place on Monday morning. After we’d finished with breakfast and got dressed, Barbara headed upstairs to work, and I took out my journal and sat down on the couch. At the head of the stairs, she looked back down at me. “What are you writing?”

“I keep a journal.”

“Are you writing about us?”

“I write about everything that happens in my life.”

“You’re not going to make it public, are you?”

“I’m not planning to. It’s just for me.”

She nodded. “I used to keep a diary, when I was a teenager. I wonder what happened to it. I think my mother probably threw it out.”

“That’s terrible.”

“It wasn’t important. I didn’t write much in it. It didn’t seem there was much going on in my life.”

“I try to write every day, if I can. Otherwise I seem to forget too much.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment. “If you change your mind and publish any of it, promise that you’ll disguise us, that you’ll change our names and everything.”

“I promise,” I said, and of course I have.

After the disastrous beginning I’ve described, my life in New York worked out well. Uncle George was a widower with two grown children, and he had an entire house to himself. I stayed with him all through music school, working as a waitress in his bar. I never saw Barbara or Steve again and, despite occasional temptation, did not go to bed with more than one person at a time for a long, long while.

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