I feel so empty without the baby. I’m continually hungry. Nothing fills me up. Yesterday I ate three-quarters of a raisin bagel as I walked down Bleecker Street. In the middle of the day. Then I had half of a banana, the better part of a vanilla yogurt, and a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich when I got home. I was still hungry but by dinner I was afraid to eat anything else so I just sat with Mark while he ate. I even picked at the sautéed zucchini on his plate. If this keeps up I’m going to look like Anita Ekberg before the month is out. What’s wrong with that? I can hear my mother ask. Anita Ekberg is my father’s idea of the perfect woman, a standard my mother comes pretty close to meeting.
Last night I dreamed I was sucking Brian’s cock, spitting the come into a brandy snifter. When I woke up I was starving and furious with Mark. I felt his arms around me and pushed them away, yanked some of the blankets over to my side. I hate it when he hoards the blankets. I was thinking about what I could eat for breakfast. He kissed my neck, my back, his cock hard against me. I pushed away from him but I started to get excited. I climbed on top and straddled his hips.
“You’re wet,” he mumbled.
I was thinking about Brian. How much I wanted to touch him, hold him. For long, indefinite periods of time. My mouth all over him, my hands. I wanted to lick him, suck him, tongue his nipples. Brian’s nipples are smoother than Mark’s. His whole body is smoother. Paler. He’s more a boy somehow, though he’s only eight years younger than Mark. I wanted to feel him between my legs, to ride him, rock him.
He knows.
“Maybe that wouldn’t be good for you right now,” he said the other day. We were in the adjunct’s office. “You’ve been so upset.”
“Don’t you want me?”
“Terry, it’s not that.” He closed the door, put his arm around me, and kissed me, his tongue kind of tentative and exploring. I held to it with my mouth. It was almost enough.
I explained that maybe for a while I just needed him to hold me with sexual intent. He’s the first man I’ve ever tried to get into bed and it’s harder than I thought. He always has some kind of excuse and it always has to do with me, but I think he’s just protecting himself. I’ve studied language, so why it took me so long to realize “I’d really love to” is a long day’s haul from “I will” I still can’t figure out. I guess it’s bad to want something too much. It somehow leaves the other person out of it. Mark used to quote this line from Nietzsche—something about in the end one loves only one’s desire and not what is desired. I hate it when he says stuff like that. Mark, I mean. I had the quote lettered onto a T-shirt for his thirty-third birthday. Above the quote I had the guy put a picture of Moe. I have to find that.
Mark slapped me on the ass. “Where’d you go?” he asked. He held my hips and circled me over him, lifted me up and down his cock. Our pubic hair is almost identical in color and texture. It’s hard to tell us apart. Once I braided us together. “Now you have to marry me,” I said. “Now we’re inseparable.”
I didn’t want to look at Mark, think about him. I looked at the framed picture of Curly above the nighttable. He looked so innocent, so sweet. I can’t imagine that Curly ever hurt a woman. Had an affair and then lied about it. Made her think she was pregnant when she wasn’t.
The other day Mark said he thought I blamed him for suggesting it. I said it wasn’t true, but it is. He said didn’t I think he’d have feelings about it, too. That I wasn’t the only one who was disappointed. Disappointed. The same word Eric used.
Mark came. I barely felt him. I pushed away and got up before I came myself. The first time I ever did that. He didn’t say anything. I felt a little crazy inside. My pelvis in a welter, I thought in the bathroom, brushing my teeth. I liked the sound of it. Pelvis in a welter. I knew I’d be nuts all day if I didn’t come, but I was going to Yvonne’s in a couple of hours.
I saw her. I saw Yvonne. At first I didn’t realize it was her. I’d been thinking about her so much that when I was looking right at her I must have thought she was in my mind. She looked different from the way she looks when she’s teaching. In the first place, she was naked. We were both naked. We were in the locker room at the NYU gym. I’ve been swimming for an hour a day instead of my usual half hour, to make up for the extra calories I’m taking in. I do some c.v. for twenty minutes—bike or Stairmaster—then I swim.
I don’t know what Yvonne was doing there. I’ve been going to that gym for five years and I’ve never seen her. I don’t think she’s an alum though I’m going to check her credentials in the Columbia bulletin. Anyway, the strange thing is that she was right there, naked—except for these big greenish earrings—talking to this blond woman I’ve talked to a number of times. Once the blond woman had asked if she could smell the bottle of Neutrogena sesame oil I was using and I let her try some. It was strange to think of her knowing Yvonne. Talking to her as though they were friends.
“That’s the guy you went out with once last year, right?” Yvonne said. “The one who doesn’t eat meat.”
I’d really only seen her lecture on Yeats, so it was odd to hear her talking about such everyday stuff—to think of her conversing with someone I knew. Although when you think of it, why should it seem odder than her fucking my husband? Her voice sounded different from the way it did in class or on the telephone. It was a little voice. A little squeaky voice. Well, not squeaky, really, but I couldn’t believe Mark would go for that little voice. The high pitch. Mark says I have a deep voice for a relatively short woman. He says he loves my voice.
“Is he going with you?” the blond woman was asking Yvonne.
I was at the end of the aisle by the mirror and my locker. I leaned back out of view. Yvonne, as far as I know, had never seen me, but I didn’t want to take any chances. Just in case someone had pointed me out to her at that opening in October. Mark, or even Glenda, that bitch. Besides, if she’s been to the loft or the gallery she might have seen a picture of me.
“No. No, he can’t,” Yvonne said.
The thought that she was probably talking about Mark made me get that shaky, hypoglycemic feeling. I leaned against the locker. She could, I thought, as easily be talking about a dog. I wanted her to talk about Mark. And I wanted desperately for her not to. It’s conceivable, I thought, that she could even mention me. I was scared. I was thrilled. I wanted to hear my name cross her tongue. I wanted to hear her talk about me. Wonder about me. Express shame, remorse, curiosity, jealousy. The dreams I’d had of her rushed back to me, our Opium smell. I stole her bottle of Opium last week. It felt like a mythic thing to do. Something Medea would do.
I was listening hard, but I was in such an erotic panic, watching her move, watching the body my husband had made love to, had maybe only fucked, had maybe made love to and fucked, that I could barely hear. She turned to her locker. Her body was still wet and a little red from the shower. So was mine. I tipped my bottle of Neutrogena sesame oil and began to rub it into my skin, watching her all the time. It was exam time so the locker room was relatively empty. We were just about the only women in the place, though I heard voices from a few rows down, the hiss of the showers going.
I was rubbing oil into the same leg over and over. The panel of light above me had gone out and I had to move down a row to use the mirror. If I’d gone to the nearest mirror I would have been within a few feet of them and I didn’t trust myself.
Dear God, keep me calm, I whispered. Then I remembered I’d sworn not to say “God” anymore. I moved back.
Yvonne has a beautiful body. Her skin is nearly the same color as Brian’s, which strikes me as funny. She’s pale, with little moles here and there. Her breasts are small, her nipples not very prominent, but they’re inviting. Her belly’s flat. She almost looks like a girl except for those earrings she wears, which are too big for her. They look like garbage can lids with streamers hanging from them. When you’re under five-foot-five large earrings like that tend to make you look like a Christmas tree. She had one foot up on the wood bench and I looked up her legs into her cunt. She rubbed baby oil (I made a note to check Mark for that smell) along her calf and blocked the view but I waited. Her pubic hair isn’t as curly as mine and lays flat against her mons. I thought of Mark fucking that body. Thought of his hands holding her ass (she has a nice ass), his tongue slithering through that pubic hair into the folds of her. I wonder what she tastes like. I know women taste different from one another, just like men do. Sarah always says so. So does Mark. I’ve only once had my mouth to a woman’s vagina and it was too fast and scary to remember much of anything. I remember thinking it was like a cat licking itself, it was all so familiar.
Yvonne was so close to me I could have smelled her if I was blind and had so trained my sense of smell. I memorized her body as I dressed, catching snatches of conversation. I mean I heard everything they were saying, but they were talking in snatches the way women do when they’re getting dressed, checking the mirror, tracing an eyelid, turning to see how they look from different angles. I liked watching Yvonne watch herself in the mirror. For a moment I believed I could have enjoyed watching her fuck my husband.
As I reached for my clothes I realized I was holding her panties and I almost laughed. I wondered if she would notice. Part of me wanted to put them on and walk over to her and ask a simple question, say about the hours the gym would be open during Christmas break. At the last minute I chickened out. I thought she might recognize the panties. I’ve lain on her bed in them, seduced my husband in them, taught my classes. Each night I rinse them and hang them in the kitchen window to dry and wait for Mark to notice. It’s like hanging out a flag.
I fingered styling gel through my wet hair and waited for it to dry. Yvonne leaned into her mirror, patting eye cream below her eyes. A Lancôme sample. I recognized the tube.
“I’ll only be gone five days,” she was saying. She closed her eyes and sprayed her face with toner. “I leave next Thursday.”
Gone. I moved a little closer. I willed the blond woman to ask her questions, show some interest. Pump her.
“I’ve never been to St. Croix,” the woman said.
Yvonne said something, but someone in the next aisle turned on a blow-dryer so I missed it.
St Croix. So she’d be gone. That’s probably why her name wasn’t on the guest list for the gallery Christmas party I saw on Glenda’s desk. I wanted to know if anyone would be staying at her place but it didn’t come up. It’ll be easy enough to find out.
“You coming tomorrow?” Yvonne asked.
“Same time.”
“Okay. I’ll meet you. I have a week to get in shape.”
She looked in pretty good shape to me. I watched her get into the pantyhose I remembered were Donna Karan. She pulled on a teal green cashmere sweater I’d considered stealing but hadn’t, a black wool skirt I didn’t recognize. Every edge was tucked, every piece in place. Not a string loose. I could guess her workout clothes were the same. If I had to bet, I’d guess she did the bikes or Stairmaster. That she had new white sneakers, sweats impeccably laundered and pressed. Not a ragged edge on the T-shirt. I figured I could meet them the next day and see for myself.
“Are you staying downtown?” the blond woman asked, slamming her locker shut.
I couldn’t hear what Yvonne said. It hit me then that she was only a few blocks from the gallery. How could she be this close and not drop in? I swore to myself, swore to God, I would not follow her. I didn’t think I could take it. Besides, I still hadn’t put my clothes on and they were ready to leave.
But I checked Mark later for the scent of baby oil.
The next day I got there a couple of hours early just to watch. I didn’t know how long they worked out and I wanted time with them. I figured I’d stay the whole day at the gym if I had to, to see them change, figure out her routine, watch her shower and dress. And I needed to get in at least twenty minutes on the bike and an hour of swimming.
I’d forgotten to eat lunch, which I saw as a good sign. I’d brought several of my students’ papers with me to read. It was the end of the semester, I had a backlog of papers I needed to read, and I was ready for a break. I have to admit I’ve been falling off. Winging it. Thank God I’ve memorized as many poems as I have because I’ve stopped preparing lectures.
They came at 2:00, not long after I got there. Yvonne was in jeans with the same cashmere sweater. I guess that’s one of the staples. Maggie is the other woman’s name. When they arrived I was straddling the bench, reading a student paper on love and betrayal in Yeats’s poems. It’s interesting how many of them have chosen to write on themes of betrayal, loss, and the beloved.
Yvonne lifted her blouse, unhooked her bra—one of those white lacy kinds that hooks in the front. I’ve seen it in her drawer. She slid her pants down over her hips and I could see her doing it for Mark. Mark loves to watch women undress. “Take off your clothes,” he used to say to me in perfect imitation of Daniel Day-Lewis in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I’ve seen that movie three times. I love the way Tomas watches women, but my favorite part is when Tereza and Sabina are naked together. When Tereza is photographing Sabina, then Sabina Tereza. How Sabina seduces Tereza into her own nakedness. I love the way Tomas becomes almost secondary. An afterthought.
“Take off your clothes,” I imagined myself saying to Yvonne. I’d tried it on Brian the other night, but he’d resisted, saying, yet again, he thought I was too upset. I hate men sometimes.
“Take off your clothes,” I whispered. “Take off your clothes.”
Yvonne is a methodical undresser. I could bet she takes her clothes off in the same order every time. Maybe everyone does.
“Do you think I look fat?” she asked Maggie, stepping up onto the bench—not three yards down from where I sat—and looking in the mirror. She turned to look at herself from behind. She frowned. It almost made me love her.
Maggie let out a puff of breath for answer. “Right,” she said. “Enormous.” She didn’t understand.
No, you look good, I wanted to say, you look beautiful.
I stretched my legs out and leaned my chest down on my knees. I was afraid to keep looking. I wanted to be naked with her again. I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to tell her I was Mark’s wife just to see how she’d react, to see the way her expression would change. I pulled off my clothes and threw them in the locker. I almost did it too, almost went over, but I got scared. I was afraid I’d blow it. I was looking at the slight impression the zipper of her jeans had left along her abdomen when I noticed Maggie looking at me. It wasn’t a shocked look. No, it’s pretty common for women to watch each other’s bodies in the locker room. Even to comment on them if the situation’s right.
“Hi,” Maggie said, nodding.
“How’re you doing?” I asked. I tried to sound casual. “We have the place pretty much to ourselves, huh?”
“Yeah,” Maggie said. “I love end of the semester.”
“Do you teach here?” I asked.
She pulled on her sweats. Yvonne was doing the same. Navy blue shorts. White T-shirt. Clean and pressed. Impossibly white sneakers.
“No,” she said, “alumni.”
“Me too,” I said. I wanted to get in the fact that I taught here, too. Draw Yvonne into the conversation. Impress her.
“I just joined,” Yvonne said. “I teach at Columbia and can work out there for nothing but I like being downtown these days.”
Sure you do, sweetie, I thought, and tried to keep my face natural.
“What do you do? Bicycle?” I asked. ’Course she did. Probably reads one of those murder mysteries while she’s at it.
The whole encounter makes me shake now, but I truly started to feel almost ordinary as I talked to her.
“Those are pretty big earrings,” I said. “Do you work out with those on? It looks pretty dangerous.”
“I always forget,” she said, and took them out.
“You look really familiar,” I said. “Do you live down here?”
“Uh-uh,” she said, tying her laces tighter. She did it carefully, didn’t yank and choke.
“Huh,” I said. It’s what people say when they feel like they have to say something but have nothing to say.
We said a bit of this and that and then they were gone. I’d managed to find out how long they spent on the bikes and made sure I got down in time to meet them again.
“Looks like we’re on the same schedule,” I said. I shook the water out of my hair. I’d been swimming for only half an hour, but figured I’d make the rest up later.
And then we were both naked. Maggie was in the shower. I usually don’t talk much to the women around me at the gym. Once you’re on someone’s schedule and you begin to talk you’re almost obligated to talk to them every time. I hate that. Even when I’m using the same mirror as another woman I usually just smile and stay focused on putting on my mascara. But Yvonne was different, and I had the feeling I wouldn’t be seeing a lot of her. She didn’t seem the sort who would come like clockwork. We were both in front of the same mirror. Yvonne had her back to me and was applying lipstick to her lower lip. Scarlet Memory. She held her bottom lip stretched across her teeth and traced the familiar color without one false move. She was an expert.
“I figured out where I know you from,” I said. It was out of my mouth before I could think. Even then I knew I could easily backpedal, say something about the MLA conference, or simply be mistaken.
We were standing by the mirror. She looked at my reflection as she pressed the bottom and top lip together to spread the color. She smiled. There were still tiny drops of water down her back and her hair was in a towel. I leaned into the mirror and traced eyeliner across my left eye.
“I remember you from Daisy Lewis’s opening.”
She looked like she was trying to remember the name.
“Oh,” she said, “at Holder.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Is Daisy a friend of yours?”
She was brushing her mascara on. After the lipstick. I thought most women put on their lipstick last.
“Not really. My husband owns the gallery.”
Just like that. I said it. Like I was saying that my eyes are brown or that tomorrow is Thursday. She held the mascara wand in front of her eyelashes. I hadn’t noticed before that there were goosebumps along her arms and back, but now I could see the light bumps along her shoulder. She has pretty shoulders.
“I don’t know why, but I remember seeing you there. Isn’t that funny?”
Now I think this is what I said, because I got so excited talking to her that I can’t really remember exactly. I was standing next to her, looking at her face in the mirror, about to reach into my locker and put on her panties.
“God, you must have a great memory,” she said. Pretty cool. I could barely detect a quiver. As a dramatic touch, I pulled the Scarlet Memory out of my bag. I must have been nervous because I had to keep wiping the excess off from under my lip.
“I do,” I said. “I used to think it was just for words—you know, poems, stories—I’ve memorized half of Yeats”—she looked surprised—“but more and more I realize it’s for faces, streets. I guess I have a good eye. I take things in. Mark always says so. And I have to say I was bored by the work, so I spent the night talking people up and looking at the crowd. I remember you.”
Right. A face for what had only been a name. Yvonne. Yvonne laughing. Smiling up into Mark’s face with that unmistakable look of rapt adoration. The way she giggled and held on to his arm as she reached down to fix the strap on her shoe. Mark bopping her over the head with a rolled stack of announcements. And me right there, on the other side of the room, watching.
“The work wasn’t very interesting, was it?” Yvonne said. “Typical minimalist stuff.”
“Yeah. Not my favorite thing the gallery has put up. I think it looked better on the slides.” I wondered if we were just going to talk about art.
“You know, I teach Yeats,” she said.
“Really,” I said. “Where?”
I have masturbated on this woman’s bed. Worn her clothes. Written in her books.
“Oh, of course. Columbia. You said before. My short-term memory lags sometimes,” I laughed. “I teach Yeats, too.”
She really is hard to read. Good WASP upbringing. Do not betray your thoughts. We had a pleasant little exchange about teaching and Yeats, the new collection of letters to Maud Gonne. That kind of thing.
“You really love Yeats,” she said at one point. I had a feeling the moment was important, but then Maggie wandered back.
Yvonne and I were almost dry by then but still naked. Maggie was dripping. A tampon string hung between her legs. She pulled out the Neutrogena.
“I put it on when I’m wet,” she said. “Just like you said.”
Something I remembered from my sister Carla’s compulsive magazine reading and tidbits of beauty advice.
“What’s your name?” Yvonne asked.
“Tereza,” I said. I wonder if this is becoming pathological.
“Oh,” Yvonne said. “I’m Yvonne and this is Maggie.”
We all smiled. Maggie began to put on her makeup. Yvonne and I towel-dried our hair. I’d chosen a locker nearer to the ones they’d used the day before, gambling on the fact that most people gravitate to the same spot day after day. Do something twice and it’s a habit. That’s how I am, anyway.
We talked about end of term, student plagiarism, the art world. It was almost bizarre. In the spaces where we weren’t talking I hummed and sang. Some country song about cheating hearts and stolen lovers. It made me feel like a director creating a scene. Then we’d talk some more. Nothing unusual, but something felt strange to me and for a while I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then I realized what it was. Yvonne and I were flirting with one another. Maggie was busy dressing and Yvonne and I were completely focused on one another. Her attention was drawn. I don’t think it was my imagination. She was curious. She was looking at me, comparing. I wonder if she sees the similarities. I’d noticed in the mirror that we are almost exactly the same height. I was glad I wasn’t wearing any more of her clothes.
I wrung out my bathing suit over the tiles and looped the straps around the combination lock.
“I wish I could swim,” she said abruptly.
I began to pull on black tights and my boots. I felt shy in front of her, wearing her underwear, so I tried to dress quickly. My winter coat had half fallen out of the locker onto the floor. I shoved it back in with my foot.
“You can’t go to St. Croix and not go in the water,” I said, zipping my skirt. “That’s crazy.” Neither of us noticed that she’d never mentioned her trip to me.
“Could I learn in a week?” she asked in a flirtatious kind of way. Her left hip was pushed slightly forward, her head tilted.
“I could teach you,” I said. It occurs to me this is tantamount to Medea telling Jason’s new wife she’d take her shopping for a new brocade robe. “But not in a week.”
She stood looking at me as if she were afraid to turn around and dress. Shy all of a sudden. Both of us shy and ashamed. Exposed, but not knowing how exposed. There’s a light down on her arms, no rings on her fingers, which she held at an angle on her narrow but shapely hips.
“You have a good body for swimming,” I said. Then I noticed a faint bruise at the very top of her thigh, near her pelvis. Like a thumbprint.
Leave a mark on me, I used to say to Mark while we were fucking. Leave a mark. I want to see you on me. We developed a game in which he’d mark me—the mark of Mark, he called it—somewhere different each time. Nothing obvious or brutal. Nothing that hurt really. Or just a little. Enough for me to feel him there. Later I’d have to remember where it was. Then I began to mark him, leave my impression—a toothmark, a sucked spot on his neck. Terry the Terror, he called me. Marking my terror-tree. He’s always played with my name like that. When I get scared he says I’m terri-fied. Sometimes he calls me Terrible Terry. Well, it’s possible he’ll find out just how terrible I can be.
I jumped up, bent over and began brushing my hair. I don’t know if it was the rush of blood to my brain or what, but I felt really funny—like I was going to pass out. I sat on the bench.
“Are you all right?” Yvonne asked.
“Dizzy,” I said. “I feel terrible all of a sudden.”
“Push your head down,” she said. She bent my head to my knees.
The hiss of showers and occasional laughter and voices sounded through the locker room. I felt like I was under water. Yvonne’s cool hand on my neck, her fingers gently rubbing the tense cords. Water drops from our wet bodies spotted the floor. Her bare foot, a callus on the third toe. A shaving nick just below her knee. I could smell her baby oil, my Opium.
“Maybe you need to eat something,” she was saying. “When was the last time you ate?”