Suzanna Blair

Peter Taylor had just said: “In Jesus Christ we are forgiven, accepted, and loved. And the abundance of His grace has set us free from sin and free to love.”

The words caught Suzanna Blair’s attention, pulled her up out of her reverie, and made her long to raise her hand and interrupt the sermon, demanding to know if Peter Taylor really meant that—and if God really meant that.

Free from sin. Free to love. She believed in Jesus Christ, and in God; was that enough? If she rose now and said to the congregation of people gathered about her that she loved God and believed in Jesus Christ, but she also loved a woman, would her neighbors reply that she was free from sin and free to love?

Perhaps. Or perhaps they would drive her from the church, from the town, from their hearts. There was no way to know in advance. For Suzanna, it was as if her life had become a house of many rooms, and at the center of this house was sexual love, a clean, fragrant, pure, and perfect chamber. But danger shadowed the windows of that room, and lurked at the doors.

It was necessary to shutter off her life from the eyes and judgments of her community. For the first time ever she had to hide herself. Always before, she had gone through her life happy in the normal companionship of the world; she had always greatly enjoyed the common cheerful rolling around of life, as if she and other people were brightly colored marbles in a game with easy boundaries. Now she had gone outside those bounds, and she did not feel smug or superior; she felt afraid. But she was so much in love, and so happy in that love, that she felt she could not choose to give it up—so what was she to do? She sat quietly in her pew, staring up at Reverend Taylor with what she intended to be a face showing composure and sincere interest, but she was not listening to what he had to say. In fact, she felt that whatever he could say would be irrelevant to her problem. She had not come to this church to hear his sermon. She had come to present herself before God, to say with her presence: Look at me. See who I am, how I love. Help me, please.

Love had never been a problem for her before. She had been born into a lucky family; her parents had loved each other as well as most parents can, and she and her brother and sister had always been close. Remembering her youth, Suzanna searched the patterns of her life for some portent of the woman she was to become—a lesbian—but could find nothing of significance. As a child, she had played with dolls more than trucks, but she had climbed trees, and been good at games, too. As a teenager, she and her sister had kept their favorite stuffed animals on top of their pink-gingham-covered beds, and hid their forbidden packs of Kool cigarettes under the mattress. In high school, Suzanna had played on the girls’ field hockey team, but she had also been president of the Pep Club, and secretly vain of the way her body curved in the short pleated blue-and-white skirt and tight blue sweater with the big gold S that the members of the Pep Club wore to the football and basketball games.

She had been neither rich nor poor, brilliant nor dull, beautiful nor homely. She had been normal, and too content in her normality to spend time examining it. When she was seven, she had vowed to marry her father when she grew up. When she was eleven, she decided instead on Elvis Presley, and when she was thirteen, she thought it didn’t matter if she ever saw Elvis Presley if only Ronnie Goodwin, the sixteen-year-old who had moved in at the end of the block, would offer her a ride in his maroon-and-gray Chevrolet.

She had fallen truly in love for the first time when she was seventeen, with a boy named David Kittredge, a tall ambling boy who had brown eyes and red hair and freckles all over his body. He was a year older than Suzanna, and captain of the basketball team. They had passed each other in the halls at school but had never spoken to each other. The summer before Suzanna’s senior year at high school, just three weeks before school was to start, Suzanna met Dave at Stowerby Lake, where he worked as a lifeguard. She was babysitting four-year-old Jackie Ellison that day, and was sitting with the little boy at the water’s edge, intently building a sand castle with him. She had not been aware of Dave’s approach; just suddenly planted before her in the sand were his two bony white naked feet. She had been stunned, and had followed the long skinny line of his sunburned body up and up until she saw his face grinning down at her. He was wearing only blue swim trunks, a white lifeguard hat, and a whistle around his neck on a chain. His skin smelled of Coppertone oil.

“Hi,” he said simply, and in the middle of that hot humid day, Suzanna had shivered into goose bumps. The connection had been as quick and definite as that.

“Hi,” she said. Dave squatted down on the sand beside her to chat, and that night he took her out for a Coke. In a week they were going steady, and in three weeks, just before he went off to college, she slept with him because she loved him so.

He loved her, too. He came home whenever he could, which meant a three-hour drive from Boston, and wrote letters to her two or three times a week, in spite of the fact that he hated writing. But he was far away, and at college, where there were all sorts of parties, dances, beer fests—eventually he broke off with her, telling her he still loved her, but that he needed to be able to date other girls. Suzanna had been nearly inconsolable, and had finished out her senior year in high school wishing only that Dave would ask her to marry him. Her parents had to force her to enter college, she had so little energy or imagination for anything but Dave. But Dave did not ask her to marry him. He told her again and again he still did love her but wanted to have some fun. So she had listlessly gone off to college—and once there, had been weak with relief that she hadn’t married Dave.

For her college days turned out to be full of a sort of gambling joy—there were so many men! Every day she awoke exhilarated with the possibilities ahead of her, and each time she walked down the long corridor of Jardine Hall, she smiled to herself to think that each classroom she passed held a different set of men to flirt with, date, and kiss. She didn’t sleep with as many men as she would have liked to, because the birth-control pill was not yet readily available and she had to worry about getting pregnant. Then, too, she did not want to be cheap and easy, so she slept with only the few boys she felt really in love with. But she delighted as much in the preliminary challenges and temptations, in all the shimmering, unpredictable stages of romance. She liked the way that, during the course of an evening, a boy she was interested in would hold her closer and closer against him as they danced, until their hips touched and his hand moved down from the middle of her back to the small of her back to the rise of her buttocks. He would carefully press her more firmly against him, and she would nestle her face against his shoulder and press her hand against the back of his neck with a corresponding gentleness that let him know it was okay.

When she was a sophomore, Dave finally asked her to transfer colleges and marry him, but she was at the stage he had been at two years before: she was too busy having fun. She couldn’t, in fact, imagine being married. She wanted to finish college, teach elementary school, and live a life flitting from one man to another. Her young love for Dave had been so painfully intense and overwhelming that she wanted years of antidote: she wanted freedom and frivolity. She moved through her college years as though at a casino of romance, and enjoyed it all. If a man stopped dating her, she took it in stride, because her relationship with Dave had taught her, if nothing else, how to deal with that sort of grief—she immediately began dating other people, which always proved a quick and certain remedy. And she broke a few hearts herself, unwittingly, and one of them, in the end, was Dave’s. When she graduated from college, Dave came to the commencement ceremonies, and afterward, he asked her once more to marry him. She stood before him, still in her black robe, holding on to her flat mortarboard against a spring breeze, and said no. As they looked at each other, she realized that she had come to care for Dave in an almost fraternal manner. The passion, on her side, was really gone. She was sorry she did not love him, because she liked him so. But she could not conjure or force up the emotions that had once so suddenly exploded within her, and for the last time she and Dave kissed, and parted. He went to Oregon to work as an engineer.

Suzanna went to Londonton, to take a job teaching first grade. Londonton was only a two-hour drive from her hometown, only a one-hour drive from her college, so she always had visitors and seldom was lonely. But teaching made her feel grown-up, responsible. She began to admire the reliable lives of the teachers and parents of her first-graders; she wanted to live accordingly. When one of her old boyfriends, who had become a stockbroker in Boston, came to see her one weekend to ask her to marry him, she almost accepted, in spite of the fact that she didn’t love him.

But she was glad she hadn’t, because three days later she met Thomas Blair. He was a newly tenured professor at the local college, and single. They first saw each other in the Grand Union grocery store, where they were each pushing a huge metal shopping cart filled with pathetic little quarts of milk and cottage cheese, tiny cans of vegetables, and plastic sacks with two lonely apples. Tom came around a corner too fast and accidentally slammed Suzanna’s cart with his.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, and took a good look at her, and smiled.

“That’s all right,” she said, taking a good look at him, and smiling back.

There was something in Tom that reminded her of Dave—he was tall and skinny like Dave, and moved with the same jock grace. But Tom had dark hair and brown eyes, and where Dave had been cute and appealing, Tom was downright handsome. In those days Suzanna was still slim, and her thick brown hair was cut in a flattering pageboy. She and Tom liked each other’s looks. They moved off from each other, each in different directions of the grocery store, and they attempted to direct their attention to boxes of macaroni and paper napkins. But they were very much aware of whether or not the other was in the same aisle. Suzanna was furious at herself for breathing so loudly and because her boot squeaked. Then she didn’t see him for a few moments and assumed he had bought his groceries and left. She was disappointed, but plodded along down the dairy aisle, pushing her cart listlessly, and there he was. He came hurtling around the corner again, and almost rammed into her a second time.

“Look,” he said, “excuse me, I don’t mean to be rude, but can I speak to you? My name is Thomas Blair, and I teach English at the college, and I’ve just moved to town. I’m single and healthy and have no police record or illegitimate children, and I’d like to know if you would join me for dinner tonight. That is, if you’re free. That is, if you’re not married, or engaged to someone bigger than I am.”

How charming he was! She had to laugh at the thought of someone bigger than he, and she was flattered by the way he rushed his words as he spoke to her, as if he were really nervous at confronting her. He had hunched up his shoulders while he talked, like some awkward boy, as if he had no idea how handsome he really was. Of course she went out to dinner with him that night. They talked, they laughed. Suzanna was entranced. And Tom did not hide the fact that he wanted to make her like him. He kept saying things like: “Would you like me to open the car door for you or not? I don’t want to offend you, if you’re a feminist, but I don’t want to seem rude.” And he smiled as he spoke, such a smile that Suzanna wanted to say, “Oh, let me open the door for you!” He was thirty years old, a professor with tenure at the college, a man who had just published a book of essays on Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt; yet when he walked Suzanna to the door that first night he was as ingenuous as a child.

“There’s a party tomorrow night at a friend’s house,” he said. “Would you go with me?” He stood before her, shoulders hunched up again, both hands shoved into his jeans pockets.

“Yes, I’d like that,” Suzanna replied.

“Great! I’ll pick you up at eight!” Without taking his hands out of his pockets, he leaned forward quickly and kissed her—on the cheek—grinned like a little boy, and raced back to his car.

Suzanna let herself into her apartment and leaned against the door with her hand against her cheek. Nothing could have seduced her more than that shy breathy kiss.

The party the next evening was at the home of a junior member of the History department. Suzanna knew she should be glad for the opportunity to meet so many people her own age here in Londonton, but as she followed Tom through the crowd of people to the kitchen to get a drink, she resented all the others. She wanted to be alone with Tom. Everything was very casual: the sink was full of bottles of beer stashed in ice; the kitchen table held paper cups, several gallons of cheap wine, and cheese and Triscuits on paper plates. People were leaning against the refrigerator and stove and walls, talking and laughing, and they all seemed so glad to see Tom. He introduced her and everyone responded pleasantly, but it was obvious that it was Tom’s attention they wanted. She could understand why. Tom seemed to know just what tone to take with each person, just how to joke or flatter each individual, and it was perfectly natural for him to stand close to people, to wrap a friendly arm around a woman’s waist or a man’s shoulder. He was a toucher. People touched him back.

Suzanna made her own way around the house, meeting people, chatting, and she felt at ease, but she was always aware of just where Tom was, and whom he was with. He was so popular! He was so handsome, so endearing—so sexually appealing. She stood in the living room listening to a perfectly nice woman give her tips on the best shops in Londonton, but out of the corner of her eye she saw Tom settle back on the sofa next to a pretty red-haired woman. The two leaned into each other, nestling conspiratorially. Suzanna felt all the emotions of her high school days revive: jealousy, possessive lust, a sense of urgency. It was more a need for protection than a desire to manipulate that made her welcome with unusual warmth the attentions of an unmarried history professor who presented himself before her. She was as charming to him as she could be, and soon they were leaning up against the living-room wall, shoulders touching, their own conspiracy established. Then Suzanna began to feel a steady beam of attention focused on her as definitely as a light. She turned to glance at Tom and saw that he was staring at her with steady intensity. Surprised, she flashed him a proper party smile, but he did not smile back. He continued to stare at her, until she felt caught in that stare, surrounded by it, a fly in honey. The smile slipped from her face; she felt stunned. She felt that she and Tom were caught in a moment of truth: their mutual consuming desire. Next to her the history professor stopped talking in the middle of a sentence, while the redhead leaning against Tom gave him a playful pinch on the arm to remind him of her presence, then turned to see what in the world had so captured his attention. Still Tom stared at Suzanna, and Suzanna at Tom, spellbound. She felt her face go warm and rosy—with wine, with desire, with embarrassment at being so obvious in a public place—but before she could turn away, Tom rose from the sofa and came across the room to her. By then half the party had fallen silent and watchful.

“Let’s go,” Tom said, and put his arm around Suzanna’s shoulders and led her to the door.

Suzanna could not speak. They did not even think to tell the hosts good-bye.

They went down the three long wooden steps of the porch and two feet more before Tom pulled Suzanna to him in a kiss so passionate that all reality gave a little shudder: this was real, this was a point of crisis. She was relieved—she had not misinterpreted his look. She pressed her body against him, and he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her forehead, cheeks, lips, neck, shoulders. He ran his hands down her sides and up the front of her jean-covered thighs; he slid his hands up inside her loose pullover sweater.

“We can’t do this—here!” Suzanna gasped. “Tom, people can see us!”

Indeed people could see them. As they turned to hurry toward Tom’s car, Suzanna caught a glimpse of several of the party guests openly staring from the windows of the house. She didn’t care. She didn’t care what anybody saw. She only wanted to be in bed with Tom. They went to her apartment because it was closer, and fell into bed with an urgency that made them clumsy, and they laughed at their own clumsiness, and Suzanna’s heart filled with joy at this: their friendly easy laughter in the midst of powerful lust. When they had finished making love, they laughed again, to see each other so disheveled, Suzanna still wearing her necklace and earrings, Tom still in his socks and shirt and tie.

“My goodness, what a performance we gave your friends tonight!” she said, smiling as she unbuttoned his shirt. She did not know then how her words would come to haunt her in the years to come.

For Tom turned out to be, in spite of his Ph.D., a bit of a fool. It took Suzanna a long time to realize this, and in the meantime she married him and they had two children and established a life together. Tom was as addicted to popularity as an alcoholic to alcohol. The need for it ruled his life. For him life was always a drama, and he was not happy unless he was the star. This made him a hard worker, an excellent classroom instructor, and a great help to the college trustees, who could watch him charm the alumni into generous donations. But Tom was not as brilliant as many of his other colleagues, and since charm was not a quality essential to good research, he found time and again that his colleagues’ papers were accepted by academic journals and his own were not. Over the ten years of their marriage, Tom’s hair thinned, exposing a rather knobby forehead, and he accumulated unwanted weight—he was aging physically, as who does not? But he continued to be encircled by eternally youthful, muscular students and new young faculty members, so he felt his aging even more strongly by contrast. In public he continued with his winning ways, but in the privacy of his home he grew sullen. He did not need to charm Suzanna anymore; she was his already and for good, his wife. He cared for her in his own way, and was grateful to her for all that she provided: love, a home, a pretty life. He liked bringing students home to dinner so they could admire his house with its wood-burning stove and solar greenhouse, his study with its books and stacks of correspondence, his children with their rosy cheeks and sturdy bodies. But of course nothing could compare with the scene he and Suzanna had first set: their desperate passion in the living room and front yard of a faculty member’s house for all the world to see. Nothing really compares with sex for drama.

He could have had affairs with some of his students; he was offered opportunities, and some of his colleagues would have envied him. But he did love Suzanna enough to stop short of hurting her in this way. Instead he slowly grew to begrudge her because she was growing older also, and heavier, and because she was a mother, tied down to the worries of running a house and keeping people well fed and healthy. He resented her for providing the commonplaces that he could not have lived without. It was not very long into their marriage that he began to turn the full force of his petulance against Suzanna, as if she were responsible for redressing the grievances he suffered.

She continued to love him, but her affections of necessity took on a maternal tone. In what came to be the last year of their marriage, she dreaded all social occasions because of the risk involved. If Tom felt he had been sufficiently admired and appreciated, he came home happy, and made love to Suzanna with something close to élan. But if he felt slighted in any way, his mood turned black the moment tot in the car to drive home, and nothing could cheer him up. Then he would rail against Suzanna, against the boredom of their marriage, the weight on her hips, the pressures of providing for a family which kept him from doing significant research.

One fall almost exactly ten years after they first met, Suzanna and Tom were at a dinner party, and everyone was rather silly with wine. Yet Suzanna was alert and worried, for at the end of the dinner table, next to Tom, sat the newest member of the English department, a young woman who was a guest lecturer in creative writing. She had just published a book of short stories which had received literary acclaim, and she was young and slim and actually very beautiful, with long blond hair. And Suzanna could see from her end of the table that this new young woman was not adoring Tom at all; she was polite to him, but just not interested. Suzanna watched Tom’s motions grow wider, larger, in his desperation. She heard his voice grow more hearty.

“Will you go away for Thanksgiving vacation or stay in Londonton?” the man across the table from the blond woman asked.

“I’ll probably stay in Londonton,” she replied, smiling. “My family’s all in Arizona, too far away to travel for just four days.”

“Ha, Thanksgiving!” Tom bellowed. He leaned his arms on the table, as oblivious of the spoon he knocked to the floor as if he were drunk, and leered. “Imagine the plight of the poor Thanksgiving turkey—he only gets eaten once a year.”

Tom laughed at his own lewd joke, but the blonde only stared at him with complete deadpan disdain, then looked away. After a brief awkward silence, everyone else at the table broke into the sort of nervous babble that follows a social gaffe, and the moment was over. But Suzanna was chilled with apprehension. It was the first time that Tom had stepped over the line and tried to get attention in such a stupid way. And of course he knew he had been stupid; that made it worse.

They fought that night—or Tom fought, while Suzanna cried. She knew she had no power to help get the spotlight back to Tom; she was not beautiful, and she was getting older, she was just a nice elementary-school teacher, not destined ever to be famous or distinguished. She liked her life, but feared that her marriage was doomed: she could do nothing more for Tom. And she was tired of nurturing him. In a way he had become a full-time emotional invalid. This life they were leading did not bring out the best in either of them.

But they had been married for ten years, and their daughter Priscilla was five, their son Seth only three; they were a family. So it was with mixed hopes that Suzanna at last brought out the crucial word. Divorce. Perhaps, she suggested, they should get a divorce. She hoped that Tom would agree, because she wanted to be free of him and his everlasting needs; but she also hoped for the impossible—that Tom would be so devastated by the very thought of divorce that he would promise to change, that he would change.

She had only to watch his face as she spoke to see just which hope would be fulfilled. Tom looked away from her; his eyes went sly. And she could see how he calculated the different possibilities in his mind. On the one hand, he would lose his wife, his children, his pretty home. But on the other—divorce! At last, at least, a drama! He would be invited to dinner by sympathetic women. He could sleep with young slim blondes without any censure. And if he made an ass of himself, he did not have to bear Suzanna’s tolerant insights; he could be miserable alone, in privacy.

“Well,” he said, raising his eyes to Suzanna, “yes. I think you’re right. I think it’s best if we get a divorce.” He tried to speak with the necessary solemnity, but he could not suppress his joy at the thought of a new life, a new adventure, and as he stared at Suzanna, a huge, uncontrollable smile spread across his face. Suzanna turned away. She sank down onto the sofa and began to cry. It hurt to see him so happy at the thought of living without her. But later, as the weeks passed, it was the memory of that smile which set her free.

Tom moved through the divorce with the ease of a duck through water. This was his element—drama, phones ringing, long sincere discussions over drinks with sympathetic colleagues, hearty greetings of good cheer from people in the community who had only nodded at him before. In fact, this private crisis seemed to perk up the town. Happily married couples felt their bonds reinforced by the contrast of their tightly knit lives with the Blairs’ rapidly unraveling one. Divorced and single women, even college students, suddenly recognized Tom as an intriguing and sexual object now that he had come out from under the proprietary mantle of his marriage. The world was just a little more exciting. More parties were given. Tom, seeming younger by virtue of his new bachelorhood, bestowed on those around him a temporary sheen of youthfulness, like a child’s chin shining yellow when a buttercup is held near. For a few months people gave, instead of the usual staid cocktail parties, rock-and-roll parties, masquerade parties, disco parties. Couples turned off the television and lay in bed at night analyzing the Blairs’ marriage and their newfound duties as friends: Could they invite Suzanna and Tom to the same party? Or should they plan two separate parties? What exactly were their responsibilities? Their new self-importance made them unconsciously fond of Tom, and slightly cautious and resentful of Suzanna—they were afraid she might act sad and depress everyone. But they felt expansive around Tom, and in turn buoyed Tom up, so he was able to see himself as a ship tossed on a turbulent sea, and all the while he was quite safe in his own small pond of life.

For Suzanna it was not so simple. She had first of all to worry about the children, to explain the divorce to them, to wrap her energies around them protectively, to remain alert to any signs of trauma. Tom saw Seth and Priscilla only on Tuesday nights, when he took them out to dinner at Howard Johnson’s, where he was almost certainly joined by some other family who found the trio brave and sweet. He gave Suzanna the house when they divorced, and enough child support to make them moderately comfortable, but he was, as he was the first to admit with charming honesty, just not very good at dealing with little kids, and Suzanna was left with the burden of emotional care. When she drove them, each morning at seven-thirty, to the local day-care center so that she could go on to her job at the elementary school, she would often pass Tom as he flashed by in his new peacock-blue warmup suit. He had taken up jogging, and did calisthenics and laps at the college gym and pool each day, getting back in shape. Suzanna would watch him go by, a handsome, newly lean man, and then she would look at herself in the rearview mirror of the car. She was beginning to have gray streaks in her hair, and she did not foresee the time when she would ever have the energy to teach, take care of her children as she wanted, and exercise her body back into a youthful shape.

For a few months she was depressed—despairing. She had to leave a large spring-break party because Tom had appeared with a marvelous-looking very young girl at his side; she could not bear it. But her children remained healthy, and Suzanna’s friends rallied around, and then men began to ask her out, and her life began to take on that tingling feeling of a limb that has been long asleep now coming back awake. There were not many men to date—it wasn’t like college had been—because there simply were not many single men in Londonton. Still, she felt those old gambling joys returning. Once more when she went to a concert or party or restaurant or even to the post office, she felt the possibilities of the event—she might meet someone.

She decided to work on her master’s degree in order to raise herself up on the school pay scale. The college in Londonton did not offer graduate courses, so she had to go to the state university thirty miles away in Southmark. But she decided that was fine. She would like the quiet lonely drive which gave her time to think, and the sense of going off to someplace new, where there would be ideas—and people—she had not encountered before. The class met on Saturday afternoons. Suzanna wrote this schedule on her kitchen wall calendar, and it seemed that the calendar and her life took on a new weight of importance.

The first day of class, however, she was as much frightened as excited. She walked from the parking lot to the large stone building that housed her class, oblivious to the natural beauty of the rolling countryside around the college and to the brisk fall air. She was aware only of the young lithe students who passed her on the walk, and she realized how much of her recent life had been spent in the company of little children or their parents. The people at the college were exotic to her by virtue of their age, and she shrank a bit to see them, feeling by contrast old, plump, and pale. And when she entered the building, the old first-day fears returned full-force: she was afraid she would be late, or early, or that someone would see her studying the classroom numbers so seriously, and snicker at her.

When she thought she had found the right room, she plunged in and took a seat in the first row. To her relief, she spotted a woman much like herself seated next to her.

“Is this Introduction to Interpersonal Psychology?” Suzanna asked.

“God, I hope so,” the woman said. “I feel as insecure as one of my second-graders.”

They laughed and struck up a conversation, and Suzanna began to relax. Looking about her, she saw there was a mix of students—young and old, male and female, bored and nervous. It was going to be okay. Suzanna took a deep breath and prepared herself to concentrate now on the subject matter.

Dr. Madeline Meade taught the psychology course. When she entered the room, the class stopped talking and came to a casual but focused attention.

How beautiful she is, Suzanna thought.

She was tall, long-legged, slim. She was wearing loose cotton khaki trousers, a white cotton shirt, a navy blazer, small gold earrings, several gold bracelets and rings. Her light brown hair was held back from her face with two tortoiseshell combs. She wore no makeup. Her eyes were blue and striking, her cheekbones high and prominent, her smile dazzling. She moved about the front of the room, introducing herself and the course, writing on the blackboard, leaning on the desk, and Suzanna, watching, felt a physical thump in her lower abdomen, as if she had been hit. Her body went still, and alert.

It happened very fast. Suzanna Blair, who until that moment had never entertained the idea of loving a woman, fell in love with Madeline Meade that day. Of course she did not realize it at first. She only noticed what exquisitely long and slender hands the professor had, and how lean and graceful her body was; but then Suzanna had grown up in the practice of noticing other women’s bodies and comparing them to her own, continually surveying the competition. She did not think that she had fallen in love—she did not think at all. She was just so completely alive in the present moment, and completely happy to be able to look at this woman, to hear her voice, to see her gestures. The two hours ended so suddenly; Suzanna felt dismayed. She wanted to approach the instructor as some of the other students were doing, ask a question—any question—but she could think of nothing to say, and so she gathered up her books and notebooks and left.

After that, an amazing thing happened: her life took on the floating, inconsequential quality of a dream. Nothing could affect her. She was not furious when her children fought or angry when a neighbor’s dog ruined the last of her garden. She was not tired or hungry or anything at all except an automaton who moved through the necessities of each day until she saw Madeline Meade again. Then the world became clear and real. Everything in her daily life was equal in value except the need to be in class: that was primary. So she seemed serene, because she was always waiting.

She studied furiously and worked on her course paper as if it were a document with the powers of saving or costing her life. Still she did not articulate to herself just what it was she felt. She moved through a life now that was marked by the time of the next class.

She could not sleep, but she didn’t jump out of bed to bustle around accomplishing tasks; she just lay there. More remarkably, she could not eat. It was not a matter of choice, of dieting; she could not swallow. Her throat closed as tight as a fist against food. She did not stop to wonder what was going on. She just kept moving forward. She was always thinking: three more days, six more hours, two more hours, until I will be in class. For that was the way she thought of it: in class. The class seemed to be the important thing, as if the room and all the people in it were magnetic and charmed.

But one evening toward the end of the course, Dr. Meade entered the classroom, leaned on the desk, smiled at her students, and told them that the following week she had to be gone for several days to deliver a paper in San Francisco. Dr. Hower would be substituting for her. When Suzanna heard this, something plunged inside her; she felt bleak, bereft. She did not know how she would summon up the energy to get out of her chair and out of the room and to her car. Madeline Meade’s announcement forced a discovery that brought despair: the time would come when this course would end and Suzanna would no longer be able to schedule her happiness according to the days of attending class.

So it was not, in fact, the class or knowledge that she loved. Nor was it the novelty of being a student once again, nor being in the company of interesting adults. She could have all those things with her next class, the one she was scheduled to take on new techniques in elementary education.

That day broke her dream-life open. Suzanna walked out to her car holding herself tightly as if she had been wounded. More than anything, she needed and craved privacy so that she could admit to herself just what it was she felt. She was a normal woman, used to discovering the secrets of her soul through conversations with friends. This was different: she had to do it on her own. There was no precedent for a secret as threatening as this. She drove home, paid the babysitter, talked to her children, moved through the house normally, but as she stood in her kitchen cutting up bananas and apples for her children’s snack, she was in a fury of fear and delight as the seditious knowledge began to spread through her. She gave her children their snacks, sent them to their rooms to rest, and told them she was going to take a bath.

She went into the bathroom, shut and locked the door, and began running the bath water. Then she turned and looked into the mirror.

For a long time she studied her face, not in the superficial way she checked her face before going out in public or in the critical way she searched the superficialities of her face for stray eyebrows or dry skin. She looked into her own eyes and let herself acknowledge the truth: she had fallen in love with a woman.

But after all, what could be done about it? It was silly, once she admitted it. Love a woman? What a humorous idea.

Suzanna mocked herself in the mirror. She pulled her mouth to one side in derision. She turned away from the mirror and stepped into the tub and forced her body down into water that was so hot it seemed to purify. She lay back, stretched out full, with mounds of white bubbles covering her like an iridescent blanket. She stared at the blue bathroom tiles, at the sedative white ceiling, and thought.

She had heard the words: lesbian, homosexual, gay. They had meant nothing to her, they were just words used to describe people so far beyond the pale of her life that they had no relevance to her whatsoever, no real existence at all.

Yet now she could remember a scene from her childhood. She had been about fourteen, and her father had taken her with him on a day trip into Boston. It was one of those almost miraculously rare times when both her brother and sister were invited somewhere else and she had her father to herself. They rode together in the family car comfortably, talking. Suzanna read a book in the reception room while her father conducted his business in an inner office, and then they drove back home. It was a two-hour drive, and a hot day. On the way home, they stopped at a roadside café. Her father ordered coffee and Suzanna a hot-fudge sundae.

Sitting at the counter was a strange creature: a woman with hair chopped short as a man’s, wearing gray trousers and a shirt, with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the left sleeve of the shirt, exposing a very muscular arm. The woman was fat and homely and sinister in appearance. “Yaaaah,” she was saying to the man sitting next to her, “they’re all turds, every one of them.” Suzanna had stared at the woman—she looked so freakish, and most horrible of all, she wore a pair of men’s wing-tipped shoes.

Finally Suzanna’s father noticed the direction of her gaze. “Don’t look at her,” he said. He was embarrassed, so embarrassed that Suzanna sensed that something sexual was involved here. “That woman’s sick. She thinks she’s a man. She’s—a homosexual. She loves women.”

So that was it. Women who loved women were sick; they were unattractive to men, disgusting, and one should look away.

But then another image surfaced. Suzanna remembered it from a text on the modern novel which she had studied in an undergraduate course. Virginia Woolf. She had been in love with a woman named Vita Sackville-West; they had been lovers. Virginia Woolf had not been ugly or dumb or unable to attract the love of men. In fact, she was beautiful and brilliant and married to a man who adored her. On the other hand, she had not been exactly a model of sanity and the normal life.

What kind of woman loved a woman? Suzanna wondered, and as the bubbles from her bath began to dissolve, she saw her body pink and real beneath the water and her thoughts raced. What kind of woman loved a woman, what did it mean to love a woman—how did one love a woman? Did she want to touch Madeline Meade?

Oh, yes, she did. She did. Very much.

Suzanna rose from her bath shaking and frightened. She wanted to touch Madeline Meade, and she wanted Madeline Meade to touch her with her long, elegant hands.

That night, Suzanna could not sleep, but fell in and out of dreams of Madeline’s hands. When she rose on Sunday morning, she was dizzy from lack of sleep, but strangely refreshed and eager; it was as if some reservoir of energy had suddenly cracked open inside her. She went to church, but did not hear the sermon. Instead she sat staring up at the minister as if entranced: she was trying to decide whether or not God played tricks in love.

She made it through the day by doing laundry, housecleaning, baking, all her weekend chores, but once again she found she could not sleep at night. She was exhausted, but alert, she could not rest, her mind was vivid with dreams of Madeline Meade’s hands and face and voice. When she awoke on Monday morning, she did not know how she would make it through the day, she was so tired, yet so tense, but as she stirred her coffee in the kitchen, she considered her calendar and saw that that afternoon, after school, both Priscilla and Seth were invited to a birthday party. They would be gone for two and a half hours. She smiled a mad smile at the kitchen door where the calendar hung, and a lovely desperate daring drove her into the day. She taught. She dressed her children in party clothes and dropped them at her friend’s house. Then she drove to Southmark very carefully, but very fast.

The college, as she approached it, looked larger and brighter to her than usual; it seemed to beckon and shine. Desire had now possessed her completely, and it also made her dull. She had no thoughts except that she must speak to Madeline Meade. She did not worry about her children, her parents, her friends, her God; she was intent on one thing only. She did not even stop to wonder whether or not she, Suzanna, was lovable. She only knew she had to see this woman, to present her with the knowledge of her love, and to see where life would take her then.

Madeline was in her office, seated at her desk, talking on the phone. She was laughing. Suzanna stood with mute appeal in the doorway until Madeline looked up, noticed her, smiled, and mouthed, “Come in.” Madeline pointed to a chair, and Suzanna sank down into it. The actual presence of this woman she loved did not frighten or calm her; it only made her feel more strongly the need to get this thing done and said before the hidden knowledge broke her apart.

When Madeline hung up the phone, Suzanna said, “I need to talk with you. May I close the door?”

“Of course,” Madeline said.

Suzanna shut the door, sank back into the chair, then faced her professor and said, “I think I am in love with you.”

Madeline’s expression did not change. Finally she sighed. Then: “That’s very flattering. I’m not sure how to respond. This sort of thing happens, you know, between students and professors, or patients and therapists. I think what you mean is that you admire me, because I am a professor, because I teach—”

“No,” Suzanna said. “Please give me more credit than that. This is not a schoolgirl’s crush. I do admire you. But I love you. I want to touch you.”

Madeline hesitated. “Well, then,” she said. And she stretched out her hand across the desk, her long slim hand with fingers wearing two thin silver rings, her wrist dangling gold and silver bracelets, her arm elegant and easy in its gesture.

Suzanna gently placed the palm of her hand against the palm of Madeline’s hand, and with that most delicate pressure, her entire body went warm and wet; her mouth filled with saliva.

Suzanna held Madeline’s hand—their flesh touched. “I love you,” Suzanna said. She did not feel courageous or frightened; she felt completely alive.

“You know,” Madeline said, smiling, “this could get complicated. I think we should go get some coffee, and walk together, and talk.” She withdrew her hand.

“I’ve horrified you, haven’t I?” Suzanna said. “But I can’t apologize.”

“No, you haven’t horrified me,” Madeline said. She rose from the desk and crossed the room and opened the door. She looked sad. “Please. Let’s go get some coffee.”

They said nothing as they walked over to the student union; they did not speak until they were seated in a booth with their coffee cups in front of them.

“Now,” Madeline said, “listen to me. I do not take what you’re saying lightly. But it’s all a little bit crazy, you know. I don’t know you very well, even though I’ve enjoyed having you in class. You’re a good student. You’re smart. You’ve got good instincts. Still—Suzanna, you’re a mother. You’re part of a community. You teach little children. You need to think of all these things.”

“I can only think of you.”

“What makes you think that I could love a woman?”

Suzanna was stunned. “I—I didn’t think you could. I guess I didn’t consider that at all. I mean”—and she smiled—“that I’m a woman. I mean you know I’m a woman. I’m not making sense. I mean that I only thought that I love you, and that you are a woman, so this is—strange—for me to feel this way. But I don’t know, I didn’t think—could you love a woman? My God, I know so little about you. I’ve assumed from what little you’ve said about yourself in class that you’re not married, but—oh, God, are you in love with someone? Are you living with a man—someone?”

Madeline smiled. “I want to be so careful,” she said. “You must be so careful. If I tell you things about me, then we will be making some kind of relationship, and there’s real danger there. Please, listen to me. It does not matter whether I’m living with someone or whether I can love a woman. It does matter that you were married to a man, you have little children, you teach in public schools. Please stop and think of those things.”

“Oh, I do think of them. I love my children—I love my life. But I am divorced. And now I love you, and I can’t stop. Couldn’t we—couldn’t we have an affair?”

“I can’t answer that now. I think you should take some time to consider the implications of what you’re saying, and to imagine all the possible consequences. You must be aware that homosexual love is not acceptable in this society.”

“But—”

“It was once viewed as a disease, an illness. Now it is considered only a sordid aberration.”

“Please—”

“Do you want to be called a lesbian, a homosexual, a queer, a dyke? Do you want to be thought of as weird, an outcast? Do you want to have a judge take your children from you? Do you want your children called names by other children because of what you’ve done? Could you live with yourself? I’ll tell you, an affair is one thing, but a homosexual affair is something completely different. It can destroy your life forever.”

“But do you think you could love me?”

“Oh, Suzanna. I think you are beautiful. You seem good, intelligent, and full of grace. If I didn’t admire you and care for you a little already, I wouldn’t be so frightened for you. You should be frightened. You must be careful.”

“Then you are not saying that you could not love me.”

Madeline grinned. “You are persistent.”

Suzanna smiled back. “I am obsessed.”

The two women were quiet for a moment, caught up in a strong and mutual steady current of desire, and their smiles both widened slightly as they understood the fierce and subtle acknowledgment of their state.

Then Madeline turned her head aside and said softly, “Obsessions seldom cause people anything but grief.”

“I want to kiss you. I feel desperate. I long for you.”

“Suzanna, aren’t you frightened?”

“No. Yes, of course. But I can’t help this. I’m frightened, but I’m also so full of joy to be sitting here, looking at you, to be hearing your voice, to be telling you that I love you.”

“Have you loved a woman before?”

“God, no. I’ve never even thought of loving a woman before. No, this is strange for me, and yet it seems completely right. Have you ever loved a woman?”

“I think you should go home and think about all we’ve said.”

Madeline rose abruptly, tossed her Styrofoam coffee cup into the wastebasket, and walked from the room. Suzanna had no recourse but to follow.

“Go home now,” Madeline said.

“Please. I want to kiss you.”

Madeline stared at Suzanna a long moment. “All right, then,” she said. “Let’s go to my office. We’ll shut the door, and we’ll kiss, and then you can see how you feel about this love of yours. You can see if you do not feel repulsed and disgusted to be a woman kissing a woman.”

Suzanna walked beside Madeline back to her office, and all the while she felt as though she were burning; she could not get her breath. Her professor walked rapidly, and the easy elegance with which she usually moved had diminished; her body had gone tense.

Inside the office, Madeline shut the door and turned to Suzanna.

“Well?” she said.

Suzanna had thought that Madeline was much taller than she, but as they stood facing each other, she realized that Madeline’s superior height was due in part to her slimness, which gave an illusion of height, and in part to the shoes she wore. When Suzanna went to Madeline, she had to look up, to take her professor’s face in both hands and gently bring her facedown; and so they kissed.

“Wait a moment,” Madeline said, and she stepped back and took off her shoes. Now she was only slightly taller than Suzanna. “This is better,” she said. This time when they kissed, their bodies touched, up and down.

“Oh, dear,” Madeline said at last. She put both her hands on Suzanna’s shoulders and pushed her away, but gently. “This will never do,” she began.

“Yes!” Suzanna cried.

“Wait, I don’t mean that. I mean it will never do here, now. Not on the college campus. Not while you are my student.”

“I’ll drop your course.”

“Don’t be silly. There are only three weeks left. You’ll need this credit, and I can assure you you’ve already earned an A for the work you’ve done. We have to wait.”

“I can’t wait.”

“Listen to me. We hardly know each other. Let’s spend the next three weeks just talking. We can be together this way. We can have coffee and talk. We can become friends.”

“I want to be your lover,” Suzanna said. “I don’t want to wait.”

“Why? Are you afraid it won’t last?” Madeline asked. “Do you think that what you feel will disappear in three weeks?”

“No—no.”

“Then we have to wait. And you have to do some serious thinking.”

Another student knocked on the door then. Suzanna wanted to scream at him to go away, but he had an appointment with Madeline. It was Suzanna who had to leave, and she hated it. She walked to her car, drove home, thinking all the while of Madeline’s soft mouth, of the pressure of Madeline’s breasts and curves and hips and legs as they had been pressed against her own. She was so aware of her own body that mere breathing, mere shifting in the car seat as she drove, seemed physical acts full of exotic and sensual possibilities. She felt reincarnated or transformed, and her new body seemed as luminously edged as the William Blake drawing she had seen on the cover of textbooks: everything within her, body and soul, was inspired.

Suddenly, there was her house, a small, yellow Colonial, with autumn flowers, chrysanthemums and daisies, against the outer walls. There was her front door, with the brass knocker her husband had installed, and her daughter’s doll forgotten on the front step. There was the entrance hall she had papered and decorated and swept, and there was the large wooden-framed mirror in the entrance hall. This was a lovely, normal house, but there in the mirror was Suzanna, a woman she no longer knew.

She stood in front of the mirror, confronting her image, staring at her own face. Back in her own home, she felt disoriented. She was afraid. She walked to the mirror and touched the glass reflection.

“You are Suzanna Blair,” she said. “You are a mother and teacher. You love a woman. You love Madeline Meade. You love a woman.”

She was overcome by a terrible shaking, much like the trembling that had possessed her after the birth of her children. It was the shaking that follows severe physical shock. She shook so hard that her teeth chattered. She wrapped her arms around herself but gained no steadiness.

She went into the kitchen and leaned against the sink. Everything around her looked so endearingly normal, and she thought: I have made this room cozy and comfortable—I am capable of many things. She ran cold tap water into a glass, and looking down into the glass as if God were invisibly waiting for her there, she said, “Listen, God. You’ve got to help me. If what I feel is wrong, you’ve got to let me know. I’m afraid.”

But there was no sound in the kitchen save the tiny ticking of the stove clock and the whispery movements of the cat who came to sit by the cupboard door, looking at Suzanna with inscrutable eyes.

“Well,” Suzanna said, and brought the glass of water to her lips. But the slight touch of the glass to her opened lips stunned her and the cold water that entered her mouth seemed to reawaken the desire that now lay sparkling, ready, within her. From now on every sensual pleasure would remind her of Madeline, and of the joy that shot through her when Madeline’s mouth met hers. Suzanna touched her lips with her fingertips, and stood trembling, bemused, fascinated, until some inner instinct brought her to look at the kitchen clock, and she realized it was time to pick up the children from the birthday party.

The next three weeks she met Madeline ten times for coffee in the college union. She told Madeline about her life, and drew small bits of information from Madeline about her life. Madeline had gotten her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. She was thirty-two years old. She spent her summers in England. She was working on a book. Madeline told Suzanna many details about the research for her book, an anthology of psychoanalytic literature written by women. She told Suzanna little about her personal life, yet it seemed they had so much in common. For when Suzanna would recount an incident about Seth and Priscilla’s squabbling, Madeline would laugh and remember a similar childhood experience, or a case study, which would in turn remind Suzanna of a joke or a book or a memory, and their words and thoughts and ideas would tumble out together so that very quickly their experiences seemed joined. It was as if they rapidly built a mutual edifice with these words, a house familiar and comfortable to both of them, so that when they saw each other, they were immediately at home—safe, yet excited, for there was so much else to create and explore.

There seemed to be no inequality in their relationship, for Madeline had a Ph.D. and the prestige that gave her, but Suzanna had children and a different kind of knowledge. They were different but equal; there was to be no hierarchy, dominance, or submission. They built their domain about them with instinctive balance, just as within themselves they balanced eagerness and courtesy in their speech. They inundated each other with words: it was, for this period of time, their only way of touching.

The semester finally ended. Madeline left Southmark to spend the Christmas vacation in New York with friends. She promised to call Suzanna when she returned, and she promised that then, after the vacation, if Suzanna still wanted to, they would spend some time alone together in a private place.

Suzanna took Priscilla and Seth to her parents’ home for Christmas. Her parents told her that her divorce obviously suited her: she had never looked better. It seemed to Suzanna that her nervous system had somehow speeded up, as if hoping that if it worked faster, time would pass faster, too, and so she found herself always racing at the edge of her emotions. She burst into tears when she saw old friends, when carolers came to the door singing “Silent Night,” when the children saw what Santa had brought them Christmas morning. She ate and drank too much. She played in the snow with the children until they begged to go inside and rest. Finally the holidays were over, and she and the children returned to Londonton.

The day before she started teaching again, Tom showed up at the house. He was tan and healthy from two weeks in Bermuda, and he played a bit with the children, and informed Suzanna that he had taken a job at another college at the opposite end of the state, three hours away. Suzanna smiled, wished him well, and thought to herself that this seemed a stroke of luck, for with Tom gone from town she would have a freedom she hadn’t felt before.

Madeline came back from New York early in January. She called, and invited Suzanna to her home for a drink. Suzanna was nearly ill with anticipation, but she found that once she was actually there, inside Madeline’s house, with Madeline physically present, she did not know how to begin. For once she had trouble talking. She was terrified and shy.

The women discussed their holidays from opposite ends of the sofa. Madeline spoke of the plays and galleries she had been to in New York, Suzanna of her parents and children. They drank wine, then more wine. Suzanna told Madeline that Tom was moving away. Madeline was curious, more curious about Suzanna’s marriage, in fact, than Suzanna was; Suzanna had suddenly come to look upon her past and her husband as if they had no more substance than a dream.

“Oh, please,” Suzanna said at last, “won’t you ever tell me about yourself? Have you ever been married? Have you ever loved another woman? Have you ever loved a man?”

Madeline smiled. “Yes,” she said.

“Yes? Yes, what?”

“Yes, I’ve been married, I’ve loved another woman, and I’ve loved a man. My life has been different from yours, Suzanna. You are in a transitional state now, but I think that most of your life you have enjoyed the company of people and their established patterns. I mean, you like to teach, you like your children, you have your friends. I prefer solitude, travel, books, ideas. No one has ever meant—very much—to me. My marriage was very brief and sad, but”—she smiled—“not too sad. What I’m trying to say to you is that yes, I can go to bed with you. I can be your lover for a while, since ‘lover’ is the term that’s used. But I can’t promise you anything more than that. I can almost certainly promise you that I won’t be monogamous, faithful, whatever. Oh, I don’t mean that I treat these things lightly. But I may not be capable of treating what is between us with the seriousness you would like, and you should decide now if it would be worth it to you, given the way I am.”

Suzanna sat watching Madeline, who now slowly paced the room as she talked, and she thought how beautiful the woman was, slim, elegant, reserved. Everything about her was disciplined and somehow bounded, edged. By contrast, Suzanna felt bulging, limp, and eager. She was astounded by her own courage when she simply rose, went toward Madeline, and took her in her arms.

“Please, let’s not talk anymore,” she said. “It’s all right, you know. I’m not a child.”

They stood in the middle of Madeline’s living room, with the curtains pulled shut and the lights on full; they held each other and kissed and embraced. Suzanna ran her hands over Madeline’s hair, over her shoulders and arms and back. Then, trembling, she touched Madeline’s breasts. She put both her hands on the cotton shirt that covered Madeline’s breasts and simply laid them there gently, as if afraid that this touching might cause their flesh to flame up and harm one or the other. But Madeline only sighed, acceding. Suzanna ran her hands down Madeline’s fine slender waist, down her hips, and pressed her palms against Madeline’s thighs. Still they kissed. Madeline touched her fingertips to the tips of Suzanna’s breasts, and Suzanna’s heart knocked so strongly throughout her body that she swayed and nearly fell.

“I think I’m going to have a heart attack,” Suzanna whispered into Madeline’s hair.

“This is what bodies are made for,” Madeline said.

Then she smiled and began to unbutton Suzanna’s shirt. Her hands on Suzanna’s bare skin were cool and light. Still standing, the women took off each other’s clothes: shirts, belts, jeans, underclothes. They stood before each other naked.

“How different we are!” Suzanna cried. She realized how unusual it was to see another woman’s body naked. She was short and round and fleshy; Madeline was lean and bony, so that her breasts seemed impertinent. They held each other then, and skin touched skin so sweetly it seemed a coming home. In Madeline’s bedroom, they lay on top of the thick violet comforter and explored each other’s bodies with their hands and lips.

Suzanna said, “I want to touch you first. I want to show you that in spite of everything you don’t need to be a teacher to me.” And she lay stretched out against her lover, and kissed her lover’s mouth, and moved her hand in a meandering line from the hollow of Madeline’s throat to the rise of her breasts, down the smooth flat stomach, to the swell of pubic hair. She placed the whole of her hand between Madeline’s legs, and pushed her legs gently apart, then parted the swollen rise of flesh and touched the mauve and hidden clitoris. Madeline was so wet between her legs with thick liquid. Then Suzanna did the forbidden thing: she found the eager rounded rim and slowly slid her two longest fingers into what she could not see—that tiny silk-lined cave, which was now slithery with juices. Suzanna explored, fascinated, she moved her wrist, her fingers, and took care to be gentle, and at last, with a little shove, she touched with the ends of her fingers a minute protrusion which hung stalactite-like and soft inside Madeline’s vagina: it was her cervix.

“God,” Suzanna said, “how interesting women are!”

Madeline said, “Don’t stop.”

What could she not find to do? The possibilities seemed infinite, and Suzanna wanted to do everything at once. She slowly spread her two fingers apart, and Madeline’s vagina responded; it went wide, then wider. Suzanna raised herself onto one elbow and looked. Madeline lay stretched beneath her, totally given over to the experience, naked, vulnerable, displayed. Her eyes were closed and she had flung one arm over her face as if to hide. A flush had crept across the top of her breasts and up toward her neckline; her nipples were distended; her pelvis arched. There is no more satisfying sight than that of a lover receiving pleasure—and there are no more satisfying sounds. Such subtle changes in touch or angle or movement or rhythm could bring such low and luscious moans—and then, without warning, such gasping for breath. Madeline’s eyes opened, she stared at Suzanna, a demand, an entreaty, then clasped her eyes shut and grasped the sheets with both hands as if to keep herself from falling off the edge of the world. Suzanna gently turned and moved her hand until Madeline’s vagina clenched itself in helpless spasms around Suzanna’s fingers. With her own hand she could feel her lover’s ecstasy spread in waves throughout her body, like rings circling out from a stone cast into water. She withdrew her hand, which was fragrant and sticky, and brought her body down against Madeline’s body. Both women were shimmering with sweat as they lay together. Suzanna smoothed Madeline’s hair. Madeline lay silent, and slowly her breathing returned to normal.

“Well,” she said when at last she opened her eyes, “you’re right. You don’t need me to be your teacher. But still—roll over.”

There is, Suzanna found, the most exquisite variety to a body. A tongue, which can lick light and wetly flat across the skin, can become sharp, bone-like, a precise point. When a lover cares, there is almost no end to the eloquent transformations the hands are capable of. When there is love, the pleasures of the body flow through with the urgency of music, and what was once a dull and everyday set of bones and organs and skin becomes buds, froth, blossoms, becomes undulating fabric, becomes a giant bell. Madeline climbed Suzanna’s body, she caressed Suzanna until her whole being went tintinnabulous with joy. She was relentless and imaginative with Suzanna, until at last she collapsed next to her on the bed. Both women lay against the sheets with their limbs intertwined and their hair damply trailing over the pillows. They were as limp and redolent and delicately drawn out as convolvuli—as morning glories.

The bedroom reeked of sex. Madeline sat up and pulled the tumbled covers up about their shoulders, then lay on her side so she could see Suzanna’s face.

“Well,” she said. “Well. Now we’ve begun.”

It was hard to be a woman in Londonton. It was easy enough to be a married woman, a wife and mother, but in spite of the propaganda of liberation, it was still implicitly assumed in Londonton that the primary qualities of a good woman were chastity and humility. After their divorce, Tom moved to another town, but he appeared back in Londonton often for parties or college dances, and each time he brought with him a different woman. How he was admired for this ever-expanding collection of lovers! For of course it was always made apparent that the current woman slept with him. One weekend he might arrive with a young blonde, and the next weekend with an older brunet, and a weekend after that with the young blonde again, and all of this only delighted the people of Londonton. But women in the town were not allowed the same privilege of implied promiscuity. The kindest thing that was hoped for them was that they would somehow manage to get married again, fast. Liza Howard was considered a woman to be spurned because she slept with married men, and yet those very men were the darlings of every social occasion.

Suzanna learned all this because, as the months went by, she found it necessary to camouflage her relationship with Madeline by appearing to be involved with men. Once at a party at Pam and Gary Moyer’s, she had met Gary’s half brother, who had come up for a football weekend. She liked the brother, whose name was Chad, and was pleased when he asked her to go to dinner with him the next night. In fact, she slept with him, and enjoyed his presence so much that she let him stay the night. But he was only twenty-four, thirteen years younger than Suzanna, and no sooner had Chad left than Suzanna was deluged with gossip about herself—in her best interests, everyone said. How could she let a man spend the night—she shouldn’t do that to her children. And what was she doing with a man so much younger than she, it was a little embarrassing, wasn’t it? It made her seem cheap to have picked up that boy at the Moyers’ party, cheap and … lascivious; and those were not qualities admired in first-grade teachers.

“My God!” Suzanna would want to yell (but never would). “I’ve been dating those men for you!” By you, she meant the entire town, which had miraculously transformed itself into one all-seeing eye and one eternally whispering mouth. Nothing escaped the town, and everything was judged. Suzanna fed the town the red herrings of her little escapades with men in order to distract them from what was growing more and more important in her life: her love for Madeline.

The months went by, and Suzanna loved Madeline, and Madeline loved Suzanna. This frightened them both, and they both kept attempting affairs with other people in order to make their love seem frivolous, but this never worked. The months went by and the two women continued to find that they were happy in each other’s company, and slightly lamed alone, as if they had so quickly grown part of each other’s bodies. They took such sheer pleasure in each other’s company. They fit each other.

For a while, Suzanna had feared that perhaps it was only the thrill of the forbidden that was driving her again and again to Madeline’s bed. For there was certainly that thrill. Lost in the wet and fragrant landscape that lay between her lover’s legs, that even at its most spread and exposed promised with its intricate convolutions that it hid more than it revealed, Suzanna would marvel. She would think: I am making love to a woman! I am touching a woman! But after two years, the shock value had disappeared, and their lust was no longer fueled by novelty or desperation. In fact, the lust finally burnt itself out. Oh, it flared up from time to time so that Madeline might call Suzanna in the middle of the day to say, “I must come see you, now.” But it was not the distinguishing quality of their relationship. All the other lovely properties were there, flourishing and growing—devotion, caring, concern, interest, compassion, conversational delight, goodwill, laughter. Suzanna and Madeline might sit in bed, naked and cross-legged, delicately teasing the nipples of each other’s breasts; they might lick the juices from each other until their own faces grew hot and sticky; they might occasionally spend whole nights building the ecstasy between them until their backs shimmered with sweat and their breasts were sore and they fell apart panting. But that was the way of all lovers, and they knew it. What they had found went beyond that, and encompassed friendship as well as lust. More than the nights of love were the days of love, when they took simple pleasure in preparing a meal together, in lying side by side reading books, like any normal married couple who had the luxury to read in bed because sexual needs were satiated, and would be satiated again and again.

Almost two years after they had first slept with each other, they were down in Suzanna’s basement at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night. By this time Madeline had come to be a welcome part of the household. The children liked her and thought nothing of it when she sometimes spent the night. They thought of her as a good friend of their own as well as of their mother. This Sunday night she and Suzanna were putting the finishing touches on two small, intricate dollhouses that the women had made from scratch for Seth and Priscilla at Christmas. They had been inspired to this task by the pleas of the children, who had seen a quaint miniature tree house in a toy store. That tree house had been priced at over two hundred dollars. “Hummph!” Madeline had said. “We can do better than that ourselves!”

She had bought the boards and saws and paint, and Suzanna had dug up bits of fabric, old swatches of rug and curtain, and together the two women had constructed the houses—the Rabbit Home for Priscilla and the Raccoon Home for Seth. Now they were sitting on newspapers, wearing old paint-streaked shirts, very carefully trimming out the windows and doors. Suzanna looked up for a moment, and saw Madeline there near her, her tongue pushed to the corner of her mouth in concentration. Madeline was intent on her task, and the thought of what that focused intensity could bring when they were in each other’s arms made Suzanna shiver. Suzanna had not realized before that it was possible to have both in love: ecstasy and companionable ease.

“I want to marry you,” Suzanna said to Madeline. “I really do. I want to marry you and share my house with you and my life with you and my children’s lives with you. I want to invite friends to dinner, and you and I will both be hostesses. I want—”

“Sssh. Don’t,” Madeline said. “It’s childish to wish for the impossible. You’ll only hurt yourself.”

“But I want it so much!” Suzanna said.

“You have too much to lose,” Madeline replied.

That was true. There was no argument, there was no solution. Both women bent their heads and resumed painting in silence.

After two years of living in such happiness that it was like moving about in rarefied mountain air, Suzanna had decided to confide her secret to some of her friends. The first friend she told lived not only in another town but in another country; she responded to Suzanna’s letter by writing: “C’est merveilleux! Je pense que l’amour est si rare qu’on doit le prendre comme un cadeau de Dieu.” And Suzanna thought her friend was right: it was marvelous, and love was so rare that one should take it as a gift from God. This gave Suzanna the courage to confide in a friend who lived in town. Lana was divorced and had had a series of unfortunate affairs with men. She was a feminist and a bit of a radical. Suzanna had counted on her approval. But Lana had surprised her with vague censure. “I don’t know,” Lana had said, “there’s something about this that frightens me. I think this sort of thing could undermine society, and we already have troubles enough. And then, of course, you must think of the children—”

Of course, the children. Always the children. Why, Suzanna thought, were women thought unfit to raise and nurture children because they touched their hands to a woman’s body rather than to a man’s? For it had come down to that basic and particular event.

Lust between women was of the same quality as lust between the sexes. There was not one whit of difference. Lesbian love was no more violent or gentle than heterosexual love; it is the individual who makes the difference, not the gender. There were in Londonton two sisters who never been married, the Misses Toomeys, and they went everywhere together; why could not Madeline and Suzanna do the same? They kept every bit of sexual expression confined to the privacy of a bedroom, behind locked doors, or far away from the children at Madeline’s house. Carnality did not steam off their bodies or glow about them as they walked. They cooked dinners together, ate and joked with the children, strolled down tree-lined streets to buy ice-cream cones, and never in those two years did the children wake in their dreams with fears or do any other thing to indicate that they knew that their mother loved Madeline except as a friend. They came to love Madeline, too.

Tom did not know about Suzanna’s love for Madeline, and Suzanna was terrified that he would find out. After two years of collecting what was almost a harem of women around him, Tom had recently announced his engagement to a girl of nineteen who sold airplane tickets in a travel store. Tom had told Suzanna about this one weekend when he brought Priscilla and Seth back from a visit—it was a three-hour drive from Tom’s house to Suzanna’s and the two parents had fallen into the habit of stopping in for a cup of coffee before facing the grueling drive home. This weekend, Tom had told Suzanna he was to marry, and suggested that it might be wise if the children came to live with him. He missed them so. It might be good for the children to live in a home where a father figure and a mother figure lived together, instead of Suzanna’s home where they seldom—according to what the children had told him—saw a man.

Suzanna did not know if a threat had been implied in Tom’s speech, but she was frightened. I must start dating men! she thought, all in a frenzy, but Londonton was so small that there were few men for her to date. And she really didn’t want to date: she was thirty-seven now, and found the little games necessary to dating embarrassing and tiresome. She was a grown woman, and she found her life quite full. She loved taking care of her children and her house, spending time with Madeline, working on her master’s degree, teaching at the elementary school. Her life had reached that rare and satisfying balance of pleasure and gratifying work. But her work was jeopardized, also, by her love, and this seemed such a hopeless tangle to her: that the same parents who came to her time and again to tell her how wonderful she was with children, how much the children loved her, how much they had learned from her, what a wonderful teacher she was, what a wonderful person she was—these very same parents would recoil from her in horror and drive her from the children’s sight if they knew she loved a woman.

What was she to do? Suzanna had begun attending church the month she first made love to Madeline. She went simply to present herself before the face of God for punishment or rebuke or whatever He willed. She thought she would make it clear to Him, by coming before Him regularly this way, that she was ready to do His will, if He would make it clear. For example, she had thought, when she was first so furiously given over to the throes of lust, that one of her children would be hurt. It seemed logical, and then there would be a clear and simple message—but it did not happen. Seth and Priscilla thrived. Suzanna’s work went well. Tom was happy with the divorce and his new wife; the roof did not fall in, the ground beneath Suzanna’s house did not shudder and split, no plague arrived, the children stayed healthy and were not hit by cars or bitten by dogs—so what was Suzanna to think?

Oh, God, is this a trick? Suzanna would ask. She was continually weighing the happiness she felt with Madeline with the ferocious judgments handed down upon lesbians in the local and national news. It began to drain her more and more—the pretense that she was not in love and was therefore not happy, and the secret-keeping from her friends and community. But she was afraid, for her life and for her children’s happiness. There were women in the town who would not hesitate to destroy her without even attempting to understand.

Last summer at a church picnic she had been standing behind Judy Bennett, watching Seth and another little boy scrabble with each other over a Frisbee. They tusseled, and Seth, being stronger, won, and instantly the fight was over and the other boy ran back to catch the Frisbee that Seth tossed to him, and he threw it back to Seth. They went on playing. But Suzanna heard Judy Bennett say to Pam Moyer, “Oh, look at the Blair boy. He’s over there, trying to take a toy from little Bryan Haskell. Well, what can you expect from a child like Seth—he’s the product of a broken home, you know.” Tears had shot into Suzanna’s eyes. She had wanted to pummel Judy Bennett in the back, to scream in rage and frustration, to shake and shake the woman until her body broke open and compassion entered in. But she had only walked away, trembling so violently she thought she might faint. If Judy judged that little boy so harshly because his parents were divorced, what would she do to him if she knew his mother loved a woman?

People were still skeptical of women who were divorced—but not of men who were divorced. People were still frightened of women who were divorced, as if they held some kind of primitive and tainted power. Women not sanctified by the presence of a husband seemed by no choice of their own to appear to married women with an almost witchlike aura; and women who loved women were considered fallen past witchery and into the black outlands of evil.

But perhaps that was an exaggeration, for Suzanna had friends now who knew her secret and, beyond being happy for her happiness, did not care. These people saved her life.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Ursula Aranguren would say whenever Suzanna got carried away with her fears. “Everyone has a gay relative by now. If Madeline moves in with you, this town will buzz like a hornet’s nest for maybe a week or two, and then turn its attention to something else. We’re sophisticated people, after all. Life is too short to squander—live your life!” But Ursula Aranguren did not have children. She could afford to be remarkable.

“I have to admit,” Leigh Findly said, “when you first told me, my first reaction was fear—I think I thought you might make a pass at me and I wasn’t sure how to handle that. Not to insult you, Suzanna, but you’re not my type! And then I was—wary—for a while. I suppose I thought you might start showing dirty movies in your home or, well, proselytizing. But after all these months, well, I feel fine with you, perfectly comfortable. I’m beginning to understand: you don’t love a woman, you love a person.”

For that was it. Suzanna loved a person, and that person loved her, and the gender of that person was not the point. As the months went by and the emotions deepened past lust and wild exhilaration, Suzanna came to feel that perhaps this person—Madeline—was the person she could spend her entire life with, for kindness and generosity and good humor and mutual respect were all there. They could even argue and resolve the arguments without damaging their estimation of each other or crimping their loose and dear companionship.

It was society, this town, that could provide the hurt that would come, to them or to Suzanna’s children, and nowhere in this town was a group of potential judges gathered in greater numbers than in the very church where Suzanna sat. Her position seemed impossible. She wanted to rise from her pew, to speak her defense before the community, to beg for their charity and support. But she could not do this one thing: she could not trust her neighbors.

She saw no hope. She sat beneath the shining whiteness of the sanctuary’s dome and wondered if she must live in terror all her life.