Sunday evening Nell locked herself in her bathroom. She had a date that night, and she wanted one half-hour of uninterrupted solitude in which to get ready. She had settled Hannah and Jeremy in front of the TV with a pizza, milk, and a giant sack of fresh peas in the pod, which the children would crack open and eat like peanuts from a shell. She had asked Jeremy to answer the phone if it rang and threatened them both with death or worse if they got into an argument loud enough to reach her ears. Then she gathered up her paraphernalia and locked herself in the bathroom.
Actually, the lock was a joke. Years ago, when Jeremy was three and Hannah one, Jeremy had managed to lock himself in the bathroom by turning the key in the old-fashioned brass lock. He shut the door, turned the key, took it out, then could not figure how to put it back in.
“Be a brave boy and don’t worry,” Nell had called to him through the door after fifteen minutes of attempting in vain to instruct him in the art of inserting keys into locks. “I’ll call Mr. Milton and ask him to come over and open the door. You just sit down and wait, honey.”
Even at three, Jeremy was a resourceful child. “Okay, Mommy,” he said cheerfully. “I can play with my bath toys while I’m in here. And if I get hungry, there’s lots of candy in here to eat.”
Nell’s hair had nearly stood on end. “Jeremy! Jeremy, no. You must not eat anything that’s in the bathroom.”
“But, Mommy, I can see some candy in a bottle—”
“Jeremy!” Nell screamed. “No! That is medicine. That is not candy! Don’t eat it or you’ll get very sick!”
Jeremy was quiet for a while. “Well,” he said, “can I drink the pretty red stuff? You gave it to me when I had a cold. You said it made me well. I could—”
“No, Jeremy,” Nell said. “That red stuff is medicine, too. Don’t drink it. It only works if you’re sick, and you’re not sick now, and if you drink it you’ll be very sick. Honey, be a nice boy for Mommy and promise you won’t eat or drink anything. I’ll get Mr. Milton over here right away. And if you promise not to eat or drink anything, I’ll—I’ll take you out and buy you a big ice cream cone.”
Jeremy was silent again. Nell waited, leaning against the locked bathroom door. The silence grew more ominous. Nell knew that Jeremy was in there weighing the power he had now to disobey his mother while she couldn’t get her hands on him against the wrath he knew would fall if he did disobey and she finally got through the door.
“Jeremy?” Nell said, her voice threatening.
“I won’t eat anything,” Jeremy said at last.
And he hadn’t. But Nell had been unable to reach the handyman, and it had been almost two hours before Nell found a friend with a skeleton key who managed to get the door open. By then both Nell and Jeremy were nearly hysterical. Nell had thrown the key in a river, as glad to see it sink as if it were a gun. Then the children had been so little and so connected to her that she could not envision a time when she could lock any door against them. For years she took baths, brushed her teeth, and put on her makeup with them crawling or toddling or rushing in to ask her a question or show her a toad or demand that she arbitrate an argument.
But now they were older and could be left alone, and Nell had put a hook and eye lock on the door herself. It wasn’t strong: one good blow and the door would fly open. But it was powerful symbolically. She could get in to her children if she had to, but they could not get in to her. They would turn the handle, push, hear their mother yell, “Go away! I’m taking a bath!” and then they would actually go away. Of course they could still stand outside the door and call to her. It often seemed they waited until she was locked in the bathroom to ask her questions. She could wander the house for hours, cleaning, vacuuming, dusting, she could sit on the sofa and try to engage them in conversation, and they would get restless and ignore her. But once she had locked herself in the bathroom, they positioned themselves at the door and whined out their questions: “Mom, where’s my hairbrush—pink barrettes with the hearts—sneakers—boy baby doll?” The list was endless. Often they were clever at asking questions that needed her to be physically present to answer. “Mom, have I done this math problem right? I can’t get it and it’s due tomorrow,” Jeremy would call. “Mom, is this how you French braid?” Hannah would ask. And often, especially, questions such as, “Mom, do you think I should put a Band-Aid on this cut or just let it bleed?”
The children would turn the handle and push the door so that it opened the one and one half inches the latch allowed. They would stand outside the door and jiggle the handle and sigh until Nell screamed at them. Then they would sulk off with their feelings hurt, only to ignore her when she finally rose from the tub. Nell would sink into the solace of her bath and try to pretend she did not hear the cats scratching and buffeting and mewing at the doors.
The cats disapproved of Nell shutting herself off even more strongly than her children did. If Nell laid out a dress on the bed, then shut herself in to bathe, Medusa, the female cat, would often go sit on the middle of the dress and shed. Nell was sure the cat had the ability to shed at will. She had actually seen Medusa do it to the trouser legs of men the cat didn’t like: Medusa would jump on a man’s knee, sit there a minute, then yawn and jump off, casually leaving the man’s slacks covered with long, fine hairs.
Usually, Nell warned her dates about the cat: “You may not want her on your lap,” she’d say. “She sheds terribly.” But there had been two or three times when Nell knew exactly what the cat was doing and didn’t move to stop her. Those times Nell had disliked the men as instinctively as Medusa had. Then Nell had sat across the coffee table from the man, sipping her drink, talking politely, and smiling at Medusa with affection, while Medusa lay on the man’s legs, her slanted green eyes narrowed in smug slits as she stared, smiling a cat smile conspiratorially back at Nell, and kneaded the man’s trousers, and purred, and shed, and shed.
Nell and Medusa were about as close as creatures of different species could get, but still there were times when Nell wanted to be alone, and this was one of them. Nell had put both Medusa and the gentle male cat, Fred, outside when she fed the children this evening. She was organized for this bath. She needed the time not just to soak and relax and get clean, but also to think. She often did her best thinking in the bathtub. A kind of comforting magic happened to Nell when she bathed. She’d run the water so hot it was almost painful and put in so much bubble bath that when she sank into the water, the white and iridescent foam closed over her from head to toe, a blanket of bubbles. Heat, steam, and silence radiated around Nell’s naked body like the rainbows rounding through the bubbles. Nell would lie back, her head propped against the tub’s edge, and drift into a state of complete relaxation. And whatever problem she brought into this wet heat with her seemed less significant when she finally rose, dripping and pink-skinned, from the bath.
Now she lay submerged in hot water and wondered whether or not she should stop seeing Stellios, her current lover.
It was strange. It was even humorous, taken the right way, taken, say, with a good friend and a bottle of wine, how Nell had felt, as soon as she was divorced, so optimistic. She had felt: Well, now I’m ready for real love! She had been as hopeful, as naïve, as an infant. There had been a halcyon summer, when Marlow was still paying the bills and she didn’t know enough to worry about money yet, when she had lost the weight she’d gained from having the children by being nervous over the divorce—the weight had just fallen away easily, to her amazement—when she looked radiant, better than ever in her life, and felt that way, too. She had thought that now she was ready for the real thing. She had thought that now she would do things right. She had never thought that now she was set up to get hurt—or to hurt someone else.
One May evening, when the children were visiting their father for the weekend and Nell was in this blessed blissful stupid state, she had gone to the Andersons’ for dinner. They sat on the slate patio, Katy and John and Nell, enjoying the warmth of the evening and discussing the great hole in the backyard that was soon to become the Andersons’ new swimming pool. A young man in blue jeans and a work shirt and a red cap that said BUDWEISER came around the corner of the house. He was Steve Hansen, the contractor who was putting in the Andersons’ pool, and John got up to greet him and talk with him about the progress of the pool.
Nell leaned back in her lawn chair, sipped her gin and tonic, and looked at Steve. It had been years since she had studied a man’s body so completely, with such relish. Steve was short, lean, hard-bodied, and tan. He wore a thick silver ID bracelet on his wrist, and the sun glinted off it and off the golden hairs each time he moved his muscular arm. His shirt was damp at the armpits and back with sweat, and his jeans hung low on his hips, stretched taut over his thighs. He had straight blond hair that hung shaggily from under his cap. From time to time he glanced over at Nell: his eyes were a brilliant blue. John Anderson gestured and talked, leaning with one hand on the back of the lawn chair. Steve just lounged into his own body, comfortable and sweaty and strong. He had a tool belt slung low on his hips. Nell couldn’t take her eyes off the man. Katy, watching Nell watch Steve, finally said in dulcet tones that sounded merely kind to a stranger but were weighted with meaning to her husband: “John, why don’t you offer Steve a drink?”
So Steve had stayed. He had joined them on the patio and had been introduced to Nell. They sat with the spring sun warm on their skin, sat in lawn chairs sipping gin and tonics, idly chatting till the light began to fade from the sky.
Later, Nell would not remember a word of that conversation, but she could close her eyes and instantly feel the sun on her skin and see the slice of lime floating in her glass, that tart green half moon of fruit trapped in the ice and liquid like a fact caught in the midst of bewitchment. She had not gotten drunk. She had only sipped at the drink. Mostly she stared into her glass, because if she looked at Steve, she felt a flush come up her neck and cheeks, and if she looked at Katy or John, she broke into a foolish grin that was usually completely irrelevant to whatever topic of conversation they were discussing. She just stared at the lime in her drink and felt wonderful. Felt alive and acutely aware of the man sitting next to her. She was experiencing the most wonderful grown-up lust.
Steve was a quiet man. Marlow had always been so dramatic, theatrical, even grandiose, expressing even the most banal statement with passion; Nell as a young woman had admired him for that. But then as time went by it seemed that most of the men Nell knew were this way. Many were actors or were connected with the theater, and they all had such style, they all prided themselves on their flair. But Steve had an unexamined stillness about him that fascinated Nell. His answers were simple and direct, and he had a good, short laugh. He was contained, as if content with himself and his secrets. As the evening went on, Nell felt a lust for the man mount inside her until it was nearly intolerable. Each time she looked at the man she felt an excruciating pleasure seize her, and soon she could not control her imagination. It rampaged inside her mind and body: she would glance at Steve and imagine kissing his tanned neck, kissing down into the collar of his blue shirt, licking his chest—Nell would quickly glance back into her glass. She was agitated yet forced to sit serenely—she was a grown and cultivated woman, after all, not a child, not a savage. But she was very nearly drooling in the presence of this calmly and powerfully sexual man. When he finally rose and left, Nell was trembling, exhausted. She had not experienced such an intensely sensual experience since she’d given birth to her babies and nursed them. She didn’t know if she had ever reacted so physically to any man before.
“I wonder if he gives off a scent or something,” Katy had said as soon as Steve was gone.
“Huh?” Nell said.
“Well, God,” Katy went on, “how else can you explain it? He’s so sexy. He’s like some kind of animal. He makes me just want to jump him!”
“It’s always nice to know you get on well with the help, Lady Chatterley,” John said.
“Oh give me a break,” Katy said to her husband. “You’re always lusting after Nell’s babysitters, you have no room to talk. But, seriously,” Katy said, turning back to Nell, “what do you think?”
“I think … I think he’s gorgeous,” Nell said. “I think he’s just—uhh.” She could not think of a word appropriate to that man.
“Well, goody,” Katy said, rubbing her hands. “Something to cheer our little Nelly up!”
“Katy, he didn’t even notice me,” Nell said.
“Nell, no one doesn’t notice you,” Katy said. “He noticed her, didn’t he, John?”
John was putting the steaks on the grill. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Sure.”
“Oh, men,” Katy said. “They’ll never have the right instincts, no matter how well they learn to cook.”
But in fact it was John who set Nell up with Steve. While Nell and Katy were thinking up elaborate plots and ruses—Nell, for example, could never ask Steve over to estimate the cost of putting a pool in her yard, the yard wasn’t big enough for a pool and she could never afford it—while Nell and Katy were lewdly laughing over the puns and innuendoes possible in asking a man to dig her yard, while they were trying to be sneaky and creative, John simply said to Steve the next day: “Why don’t you ask Nell out? She’s divorced and she’s nice and I know she’d accept.”
Steve called Nell that night and asked her out. Nell accepted, then called Katy, silly with excitement. Katy got excited, too: “God,” she said. “A contractor for you, Nell. This is just like Shoot the Moon!”
They went out to a movie Friday night, then to a bar. They drank beer and talked. Steve was twenty-five, eight years younger than Nell. He was divorced, too, and had a little boy, four. He lived on a small farm west of Boston; he had two horses. He didn’t try to sleep with Nell that night, but he did ask her to come riding with him that Sunday. And at the door he kissed her so deftly that Nell’s body went warm all over, she went right into an adolescent swoon.
By the time Sunday came, Nell was out of her mind. This was her first date since her divorce, her first man other than Marlow in ten years—if she slept with him, the only man other than Marlow in her life. She was terrified.
She’d been awake most of Saturday night, watching out the window at the sky; she was afraid it would rain Sunday and the ride would be canceled. She was afraid the babysitter would get sick. She was afraid her children would come down with a serious illness. She was afraid she’d fall in the bathtub and break her leg. She dreamed of the sexual pleasure of riding horses with Steve and perhaps kissing him in the meadow, then going back to stable the horses—perhaps they would embrace and in their frenzy they’d make love in the barn, on the hay! Nell had never done that. She was so glad to be divorced and free for new experiences—she felt young, she felt young enough to think she could fly.
It did not rain. The sitter came. The children stayed healthy all day. Nell did not break a leg. She wore jeans and sneakers and tied her hair back, but not severely, and drove out to Steve’s farm. It was a glorious, warm spring day, a perfect apple blossom day. Steve saddled up a horse named Maud for Nell, and together they rode out into the field. They trotted, cantered, walked; they stopped now and then to admire the view. When they looked at each other, it was very much like kissing, and under the sun, out in the meadow, they smiled at each other, making a tacit agreement.
They rode for an hour. As they rode, Nell remained aware of Steve’s intense sexuality, but slowly she became aware of something else. She had not been on a horse for a long time, for years, and it took all her strength and concentration to ride and post on Maud and not look like a bouncing fool. When they were finally back at the barn and Nell slid off her horse, she landed on legs made of rubber. Pains shot up her thighs and through her pelvis. She looked at Steve, so near her, so masculine and strong, as he hauled off the saddles, tossed them on their hooks, tended to the horses, his muscles bulging through the cloth of his shirt. She looked at him and wanted him, but knew that if she felt anything between her thighs except warm bath water she would cry out in agony. She almost did cry out in frustration.
“How’re you doing?” Steve asked.
“I’m really feeling it,” Nell said, rubbing her rear.
“So am I,” Steve said, misunderstanding her.
He came over and took Nell in his arms and kissed her for a long time on the mouth. He moved his hands up and down her back, her bottom, her legs, pressed her gently against him. Nell did not know if she was shaking because of the horse ride or the man. She and Steve were almost exactly the same height, so that they matched, all up and down, their legs touching, their pelvises pressed together, and then Nell felt a wonderful oblong of hardness pushing through the fabric of Steve’s jeans against her body. She had never slept with any man but Marlow. She began to shake, to quiver. Her legs went weak and would not hold her. Her body became a riot of conflicting sensations because of her desire and because of the pain of her body from the horseback ride. She was all warm and sweet between her legs, but at the same time the muscles in her thighs and back cramped and each slight shift of her legs sent a stabbing pain around her pelvis. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“Steve,” she said finally, pulling away from his mouth, “I’m sorry. I have to go. I have to go home.”
Steve took her face into his hands. “What?” he asked. “What’s wrong? Nell, what’s the matter?”
She could not bring herself to tell him the truth. It was too embarrassing. She already felt strange and at a disadvantage, being eight years older than Steve: she didn’t want him to think she was physically decrepit, already falling apart. She pulled away from Steve and, walking on legs that sent jabs of pain shooting up into her crotch, she hurried to her car. It took all of her dignity and will power to force her legs into a normal walk: if Steve hadn’t been there to see her, she would have wobbled, splayfooted and quaking, across the drive to her car. No, she would not have done that—she would have crawled. By the time she got in the car, tears of pain and embarrassment and frustration were in her eyes.
Steve hurried to the car and leaned down to the window. “Nell!” he said. “I don’t understand. Did I upset you? What did I do? I didn’t mean to come on so strong—”
It was such a relief to Nell to have her bottom, legs, and back supported by the cushioned seat of the car that she nearly cried out. Her traitorous legs quivered, out of her control, and she hoped Steve didn’t see them. She wondered if she would even be able to drive the car. “It’s not that,” she said. “You didn’t come on too strong; I wanted you to come on so strong.”
“But—” Steve looked at her, baffled.
“I’ll call you,” Nell said, and started her car and fled. She had spent that evening and every evening for the next three nights sitting in a warm bath of Epsom salts, taking aspirin, glaring at her wobbly, ridiculous weak legs.
Poor Steve. He had misunderstood it all. Nell never did tell him just why she had left that day, because she couldn’t. When they did talk about it, Steve told her that he knew she had been scared by the power of their desire for each other—and how could she tell him it had been not lust but agonized legs that had driven her away? She could not humiliate him or herself with the truth.
And in fact it had not been a bad thing that she had driven off in tears, because it made Steve feel responsible to her, considerate of her; he thought she was emotionally more fragile than she was. Oh, she had been fragile—she had been terrified. She had been so terrified that she would not let him have a light on the first time they went to bed together. They made love in total darkness, because Nell was so afraid that if Steve saw her stretch marks, he would say, “Oh my God!” and get up and leave in disgust. But a strange thing happened to Nell with Steve, one of the strangest things that was ever to happen to her in her life. It was a turning point for her, a milestone.
Because Nell had driven off crying, Steve decided that she was sensitive and virtuous and delicate—and she was, in truth, all those things. She had never slept with a man before Marlow, and she had never been unfaithful to her husband, and in the months since their divorce and the few months before that, she had not made love with any man. So she was in fact sensitive, virtuous, and delicate. But she was also wild with lust. She would have gladly jumped into bed with Steve that Sunday afternoon if it had not been for her ridiculous legs. But Steve did not know this and so he set out to court her, to show her that he did not think of her as just another casual piece of ass. It was a very endearing thing for him to do. On their next date, he took her out to dinner and did not try to do more than kiss her when he brought her home. The date after that, the night they did go to bed with each other, he fixed dinner for her himself in his own house. And by that time this strange thing had happened to Nell: She had come to realize that he was not her intellectual equal, and so she stopped being afraid of his judgment. And that made the most enormous difference in her life.
All of her life Nell had been at the mercy of the judgment of men. Because she was pretty, because she so often “won” in the open and hidden competitions among women, she had assumed that she was one of the lucky ones. It wasn’t until after her divorce from Marlow that she realized how crippled she really was, how she could not make a move in her life without considering how she would be judged by men. Of course this was magnified in her youth when she was chosen cheerleader, voted homecoming queen, cast as lead in plays; it was magnified a thousand times when she walked out onto an empty stage before male directors to audition for a part. They actually were judging her. Perhaps she had thought, unconsciously, that marriage to Marlow had put a stop to all that, but in fact it had only had the opposite effect. Marlow had judged her every day of their life together and always found her wanting. He had judged her professionally; he had judged her personally. As she grew older, he casually compared her to younger actresses; as she grew more involved with the business of running a home and family, he found her more and more wanting intellectually. With every year that passed between them, Marlow found more and more to judge Nell by, more to condemn her by. She could act, but not as well as any number of the new students in Marlow’s classes. She was attractive, but not nearly as attractive as almost every other woman Marlow saw: look at Nell at thirty-three, how her breasts now sagged from nursing, how her stomach was no longer taut and smooth, how it puckered at the navel! She was a good enough mother, but hear how she yelled at her children, listen to them cry! And she had once been intelligent and well read, but now—well, it was ridiculous really, wasn’t it? After all, she found time at night, after the children were in bed, to read mysteries and light novels; why couldn’t she read Pirandello, Brecht, Albee, why couldn’t she keep up with what was happening in the theater, keep up her mind?
There had been a dinner party during the last year of Nell and Marlow’s marriage that Nell would never forget. It had been at the home of the president of the college where Marlow taught. It was a sit-down dinner, complete with silver, crystal, Wedgwood, and place cards. Twelve other people were there, gathered around the long lace-covered table, six other university professors and their wives leaned toward one another in the candlelight, engaging in charming and erudite conversation. Jeremy was four, Hannah two. Jeremy was sick with bronchitis, and Nell had been up for three nights in a row with him. She was too tired to come to this dinner party, but she knew she had a responsibility to Marlow to attend; it was an important party, an honor even to be asked, and she knew she owed it to Marlow to be as lovely and witty and winning as she could. She was seated between a professor of Greek and a professor of architecture. Marlow sat across the table from her, two seats down; from time to time he gave her a smile of approval. She had managed, with the art of makeup, to hide the brown circles beneath her eyes. She had managed, with a loose and flowing gown, to hide the flab around her hips. Now she was doing her best to disguise her exhausted and flabby mind.
“I read in the university paper that you just gave a speech in New York,” Nell said to the professor of architecture. She was so pleased with herself for remembering this, for thinking of a topic that would interest and even flatter her companion. “What did you speak on?”
“I was comparing Le Corbusier and Alberti,” the professor said.
“Oh,” Nell replied. She only vaguely knew who Le Corbusier was and hadn’t heard of Alberti at all. “Well,” she plunged ahead, bravely, wanting to let the professor talk, “what do they have in common?”
“For one thing,” the professor said, “they were both interested in the classics at an early age. For example, they were both interested in Plato when they were young.”
“Oh,” Nell said. “How strange. Surely you don’t mean Play-Doh. Play-Doh wasn’t around at that time, was it? You must mean clay.”
The professor stared at Nell. “Klee?” he said. “What does Klee have to do with the classicists?”
Nell stared at the professor; the professor stared at Nell. Then Nell burst into a whoop of laughter. “Oh dear,” she said. “How embarrassing. You meant Plato, and I thought you said Play-Doh.” The professor looked at her, sternly uncomprehending. “Play-Doh,” she said. “It’s a kind of modeling clay that children work with.… Well, you know, I have small children at home and I guess I’m at that period in my life when I think of Play-Doh more easily than Plato.” She smiled at the professor, thinking surely he had had little children at one time himself and that she could charm him in this way.
But the professor managed only the grimmest of smiles in return and turned, with ill will and exasperation, to his salad. Nell thought then, and agreed with herself later, that the professor had been a pompous, compassionless, humorless old goat. But her opinion of that man had not saved her from Marlow’s judgment. He had overheard the entire exchange and did not find it at all amusing. It seemed to him only another sign of Nell’s failing intellectual capabilities.
Much later, years later, Nell told her friends about this episode and they dissolved into tears of helpless laughter, laughter of commiseration, for any mother in the world had gone through at least one similar experience. But that night Marlow was not amused.
“Nell, how could you,” he said, taking her mistake as a personal insult, just as he took her exhaustion and weight gain as a personal betrayal. He judged her very harshly by the end of the marriage, but that was not the worst of their marriage; the worst was that he had judged her at all, that he had judged her from the very start. There were so many women he could compare her to—his first wife, his other lovers, the women he directed or taught—there were always so many ways in which he could compare her and find her wanting. So it happened in Nell’s life that not until she wandered into bed with a contractor from a chance encounter in a friend’s backyard, not until she was thirty-three, not until she was so very far into her life!—not until then did she realize what she had been missing sexually all her life. Why, she had been very nearly frigid. She had not acted that way, but she had felt that way, and when she discovered this, she thought, oh, what a little fool I have been.
When Steve took her out to dinner, Nell noticed that he did not know the difference between a Chablis and a Beaujolais. It did not bother her that Steve did not know this; it did bother her that she had noticed this, that this piddly fact had registered on her consciousness. The evening was full of just such tiny incidents. Nell hated herself for it, but she could not keep herself from silently remarking on the fact that he did not use the subjunctive, that he knew everything about the Indianapolis 500 and nothing about Broadway. The night he invited her out to his farm for dinner, she was touched by the trouble he had gone to, how he had set the table with place mats and cloth napkins and put flowers in the middle of the table. But she also learned, during the course of the meal, that he thought Jerry Falwell and Clint Eastwood were great men, that he found women’s lib amusing, that he thought Burt Reynolds was a great actor, that Kenny Rogers was his favorite singer, and that his favorite TV show was Little House on the Prairie. He loved Mrs. Ingalls because she was so good and pure and patient. Steve showed Nell around his house. He kept guns. He hunted in the fall and stocked his freezer with venison. He needed a gun on his farm, he told Nell, to shoot any wild animal that intruded. Every now and then a rabid fox or raccoon wandered onto the farm and had to be killed before it got into the pigs’ pen. And occasionally a wild dog would come and try to attack the pigs. He also killed any stray cats that tried to hang around his farm; he didn’t have the money or time to bother feeding them. Also, sometimes the cats got in and killed the chickens or got their eggs.
“You shoot cats?” Nell asked, incredulous.
“Just wild ones,” Steve said. “Just strays.”
Nell knew at that moment that this was not the man for her life. If she had been in college, she would have said something righteous and insulting to Steve: “I don’t want to have anything to do with a kitten-killer,” she might have said. But she was not in college. At that moment in time she was a thirty-three-year-old woman who had not been to bed with a man in months, a woman who was standing next to a man whose sexuality exuded from him and twined around her and pulled her to him like vines around a tree. A flash of memory rescued her, made the decision for her. When Steve came to pick her up that evening, she had not been ready. He had waited for her in the living room. When she came down the stairs, she had found him sitting on the sofa, with Medusa purring in his lap. Steve had been calmly stroking Medusa; Medusa had been nudging her head into his chest, into his crotch, kneading him with her claws, snuggling into his body. Medusa had not shed on him. Her instincts had been to get close to the man—and Nell’s were the same. She decided to forget the stray cats and go with Medusa’s instincts and her own.
Still, all those petty facts about Steve—that he shot stray cats, used incorrect grammar, and was less sophisticated and educated than she—all those little pieces of knowledge added up to a great gift for Nell. They added up to freedom. She knew that for once in her life this man could not hurt her; if she could laugh at him or even slightly, secretly, deride him, then he could not hurt her. And so she was not afraid of losing him and she was not afraid of his judgment, and when she finally went to bed with him, she had the most wonderful time she had ever had in her life.
Because Steve thought that she was so delicate and frightened, he took care to be a considerate and gentle lover. He spent a long time lying on his double bed with Nell, caressing her, stroking her, kissing her, lifting her hair up and licking her neck, whispering to her not to be afraid. Nell was shivering all over again, and this time with real desire. When he was finally inside her, there in his dark bedroom where no light shone, not even a candle, so that he could not see her expression or body, could only feel her flesh and responses, then she was able to give way to her desire more completely than ever before in her life.
She had always been so afraid with Marlow, right from the start, that she would do something wrong, that she would look odd or not come quickly enough or not be passionate enough or be too passionate—she didn’t have any idea about how to make love. She had always, with Marlow, pretended, until she was incapable of doing anything else.
But as she lay with this strange young man’s body moving against her, she became aware of these things: that Steve did not love her and so he could not stop loving her. He had promised her nothing and so he could not betray her. She did not love him and so he had no power in him to damage her. He had not committed himself to her and so she would not have to worry that he would ever leave. If he judged her, it did not matter, for they were in the dark and she could not read his face and she trusted him to be kind enough never to let her know if he held her in any contempt. All this knowledge gave her the courage to say at a certain point in their lovemaking: “Please, if you can, don’t stop now.” And a little while later to say, “Oh, oh, please, could you not stop again?”
As they lay in bed together afterward, flat on their backs, their hands crossed to lie on each other’s bare stomachs, Nell wondered if this meant that she was in love with him. Even though she hadn’t done a lot, she had certainly read a lot, so she considered herself fairly sophisticated. She knew everyone slept around these days; it didn’t mean anything. But at heart she was still a romantic. She still wanted to love the person she had sex with: it was called making love, after all. Also, it was pretty hard to believe that a person could have this kind of ravishing transcendent pleasure with just anyone. And she felt so very fond of Steve as she lay there next to him, naked and sweaty and exhausted and triumphant and fulfilled. She felt such affection for him because he had made her so replete. She decided that if she did not already love him, perhaps she was on the way. He seemed to be returning the favor, for when at last he drove her home, he held her to him closely at the door and kissed her hair. He treated her gently, with care.
They saw each other almost constantly for three months. He came over after work and ate dinner with Nell and Hannah and Jeremy. He mowed Nell’s lawn on Sundays and did other handyman work around her house. In turn, she fixed him wonderful meals. He climbed thirty feet up into a tree, barehanded, to hang a rope-swing for the children; Nell and the kids stood stunned with awe to watch his strength and courage and agility. When he swung down the rope to the ground and landed with a thunk near Nell, his arms bulging with muscles, his shirt full of his powerful chest, Nell nearly smashed her body into his. But the children were there, so she refrained. That night they made wonderful love together, and Steve went on and on inside Nell until Nell, her hair tangled and damp, her body frenzied, cried out, “Oh God, Steve, I love—” She turned her head to one side and bit her bare arm. “I love this,” she finished weakly. She was not sure what she meant. She knew that she thought of Steve when she first awoke in the morning and smiled herself to sleep with memories of his body at night. She knew she really was pretty much obsessed with him. While dressing herself or the children, the slight brush of a soft garment against her bare wrist would make her catch her breath. She would stand there a moment, so caught in the vivid memory of their mutual desire and their sweet obeisance to that desire that everything else seemed a dream. She knew that if she went a day without seeing him, she missed him. This was not what she had ever felt for Marlow. It was closer to the emotions she felt in high school, when she was dating quarterbacks and tennis jocks, although she had never slept with any of those boys.
She had taken to watching Little House on the Prairie in the evenings when Steve was there. She had even begun to think it wasn’t that bad a show, and she tried to push out of her mind the knowledge that Marlow, in his intellectual scorn, had called the show Little Shack. When she and her children and Steve were all snuggled together on the sofa, all those touching bodies, all that responding skin, why then Nell was as happy as she had ever been in her life. She didn’t actually watch the television. Covertly, she stared at the hairs on Steve’s arms, at the long curve of thigh muscle beneath the cloth of his jeans. She and Steve didn’t talk much. But when they did, they were very courteous with each other, even gallant in their conversation. Nell began to think that maybe they were really in love. She even began to wonder if they could have a life together.
On Labor Day Steve asked her to come with him to a picnic some friends of his were having. Nell was delighted. She hadn’t yet met any of his friends. For three months they had pretty much kept to themselves. She found a babysitter. She went to a secondhand store, the Like-New Shop, and found a loose and silky shirt, which she wore with a pair of jeans and sandals. She dressed casually, thinking that Steve’s friends would be casual, and she was right. They were not only casual, they were what her parents would have called uncouth.
The picnic was at the “farm” of one of Steve’s friends. It was a thirteen-acre piece of land with a small house and a big shed full of tools such as hydraulic drills and winches. There was plenty of beer in cans in a trash barrel full of ice, and chips were set out in bowls on a picnic table. Nell stood awkwardly looking around at the possessions of the owner—they were all out in sight, spread all over the land: a broken bulldozer, an old pickup truck without wheels, a goat in a pen, a pig in another pen, some spare tires, some motorcycles, some mounds of dirt erupting all over the property, looking like Indian burial mounds without the grass. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. Two groups quickly formed: the men by the beer, the women by the chips.
The men were the sort Nell lusted after briefly when stopped at a service station or for road work. They were truckers, road construction workers, factory laborers. They wore jeans, drank beer, smoked pot, talked sports, laughed loud, and looked good. They looked very good. Nell didn’t know how they thought, for she was quickly relegated to the group of other “girl friends’—she was by far the oldest. She stood sipping her beer, leaning against the picnic table, listening to the women talk. She was fascinated, not by what the girls had to say, but by their intense absorption in their topics. Nell knew that she often had clever things to say, but she never tried to dominate the conversation in any group, thinking that monologues were rude and often boring, that it was kind to draw others out. But these girls had no such qualms.
“So I said to him,” said a skinny brunette who was chewing gum and smoking and flicking her hair and ashes with enviable flair, “ ‘I put my money in the tip bowl and I told you already I put all my money in the tip bowl, so what are you trying to do, make me out to be some kind of a liar, huh? I don’t go for this kind of insult, you know.’ And so he says, ‘Cheryl, I’m not trying to say you’re a liar. I’m not trying to insult you. I’m just trying to figure out how come the money in the tip bowl don’t balance with the checks.’ So I says, ‘Well, that’s not my problem, it’s yours, and anyway, I think this is some kind of stupid and unfair system you’ve got going here anyway, you know, because I don’t go for this putting all our tips in the tip bowl and then dividing it up at night. I think we ought to be able to keep the tips we get. We earn them.’ So he says, ‘I know that’s how you feel, so that’s why I suspected you were probably the one who didn’t put all your tips in the tip bowl out of spite.’ So I says, ‘I don’t appreciate this kind of insult at all, you know, I am not a spiteful person.’ You know I’m not a spiteful person, don’t you, Donna. God, would you call me a spiteful person? I am not a spiteful person. I would never do anything dishonest out of spite. By this time I am really getting steamed, you know, I am really getting pissed. So I’m standing there with my arms folded, kind of like this, and looked at him right in the face and thought, okay, Twerp, I’m mad at you, now what are you gonna do? So he says …”
Nell stared and listened for a long time, engrossed. There seemed to be no end to such stories, no punch lines, not even a satisfactory solution. But the women continued to listen and respond and talk with a mixture of passionate interest and lazy indifference. No one tried to draw Nell into the conversations. They smiled at her, though, and when it came time to eat, they handed her a paper plate with a hot dog on it, but they didn’t try to get to know her or make her feel at ease. Nell was relieved when the conversation stopped so that the women could watch and scream while the men took turns jumping over mounds of dirt with their dirt bikes and motorcycles.
Again Nell watched, fascinated, but now also a little embarrassed. Here she was, less than an hour from the city of Boston, with its ballets and operas and libraries and museums and theaters, standing with a bunch of young women, watching a sort of impromptu dirt bike rally. The men got on their bikes and at first seemed to spend a lot of time just competing to see who could make the most noise revving up. Then, one by one, they went shooting off into the field. Nell could see that it took great strength and a certain athletic skill to get those bikes over the dirt mounds—the men had to pick up the bikes, weighted with their own bodies, and somehow heft or launch them over the mounds. They would go flying up and over the mounds and land with a huge thud on the ground on the other side, then spin away in a turn with a great deal of screeching of wheels. While they were waiting for another turn at the mounds, the men drove their bikes back and forth in front of the women at a terrifying speed, leaning with their bodies so that the bikes tilted at alarming angles to the ground, screaming around in unnecessary hairpin turns, hoisting their machines back and forth over the ground as if they were wrestling with monsters. The men, Steve included, had such determined expressions on their faces; they looked so serious about all this. Nell decided finally that they were all engaged in some unadmitted fantasy: They thought they were on CHiPs or The Dukes of Hazzard. It did seem as if everyone at this picnic was somehow engaged in a bizarre sexual ritual involving the newest technology and the oldest ceremonies: men showing off their power in front of adoring women. Finally, Nell was only embarrassed and sad for everyone there. The only consolation she could find was in knowing that no one else could tell how she felt—and if they did know how she felt, they would only, in turn, feel sorry for her. They would think that she was the strange one. These people were so assured, so confident in their actions.
But when Steve finally shut off his bike and got off, slightly swaggering, to walk over to Nell and take his beer from her—she had been holding his can of Pabst for him like some medieval admirer holding a jouster’s colors—Nell felt a cold wash of knowledge rush down the inside of her torso, chilling her blood, stilling every sexual response she had felt toward this man. She could not feel sexually desirous of a man she was embarrassed for. The minor mistakes he had made in grammar or sophistication did not really matter; they had only freed her from his judgment. But this bike-jumping business, well, it changed things for Nell. It ruined things. She thought Steve looked so silly jumping a bike over a pile of dirt—why not go around it? And the men took it all so seriously—they might have impressed Hannah and Jeremy, perhaps, and they certainly impressed the other women at the picnic, but they did not impress Nell. She only wondered how on earth she had gotten to such a place.
“You know what I’ve been doing to strengthen my thigh muscles?”
It was Steve talking. He had taken the beer from Nell, slapped her bottom with hard affection, then gone back to the other men. But Nell was within hearing distance, and she went alert at this question of Steve’s; she hoped he wouldn’t say that making love to her had strengthened his legs.
“I go out to my dad’s farm and ride his cows,” Steve said. “Both my horses are too easy; I can’t get any challenge out of them. I just climb on the cows bareback with a rope around their necks and hang on … those mothers really move.”
Nell stared at Steve as he walked off talking to the other men. She saw that he was still the same man she had lusted after: he was still tanned and tough and powerful and handsome and hard. He was all those sexy things. But Nell’s mouth twitched and she took a drink of beer in order to stop a grin.
“Hey, Susan,” Steve called to a blonde in a halter top and cutoff jeans who was standing near Nell. “Did the McCarthys sell you and Tom that pig?”
“Oh, yeah,” Susan answered. “Yeah, and we got a good price. But the bastard wouldn’t deliver. We had a hell of a time getting it home on the bike.”
Nell couldn’t help herself. She didn’t know Susan, but she addressed her directly. “You brought a live pig home on a motorcycle?”
“Well, yeah,” Susan said. “Tom’s pickup broke. We’re gonna feed this pig all spring and summer and butcher it this fall. We had to get it home somehow.”
“Well, well, how did you do it?” Nell asked.
“It was hard,” Susan admitted. “I couldn’t hold on to Tom and hold on to the pig at the same time. Now of course if we had had two pigs, Tom could of put them each in a bag and put one on each end of the handlebar. That would’ve balanced out nicely. But with just one pig, even a baby pig on a handlebar, well, it throws the balance off, especially around curves. So finally Tom just stuck it inside his jacket. It scratched him like crazy, but we got it home.”
“Well,” Nell said. She didn’t know what to say now. “Well, that’s good,” she said.
“We’re raising chickens now,” another woman said, and Nell eased her way out of the group. On the pretense of getting another beer, she walked away slowly and stood by the picnic table with her back to the women. Pigs and motorcycles, she thought; well, there had probably been stranger combinations. These were young people she was with, young people starting their lives in the best way they knew how. Nell did not feel superior to them, but she did feel different. And uncomfortable.
She sipped her beer and looked at the group of men who were now leaning against their trucks, drinking beer, talking, passing around a joint. Every one of the men was as handsome, in one way or another, as Steve. They were all hard, masculine, muscular, tough, sexy young men, full of health and laughter. Perhaps they weren’t all as kind as Steve, but she imagined that almost any of those young men would be as good in bed as he was. They were young studs. They were not like the men in movies, the road crew men and contractors who secretly read Camus or had degrees in English literature but did manual labor for philosophical reasons. They were honest-to-goodness working class men who loved their beer, their motorcycles, their farms, and who aspired not to travel to Europe but to Indianapolis to see stock car racing. They didn’t read books, attend concerts, see plays, and they wouldn’t be impressed by anyone who did. These were Steve’s friends, and this was his real world. Nell knew that if she continued seeing him, she would have to see more and more of this world. The two of them couldn’t stay in bed all the time.
After the picnic, they rode back to Nell’s house on Steve’s motorcycle. She had ridden with him twice before, feeling both terrified and amused about it. Jeremy and Hannah had been wild with jealousy to watch their mother go off on the back of a bike, and Steve had given each child short rides up and down the block while Nell held her breath with fear. She couldn’t understand what it was about motorcycles that attracted men so. Was it that they liked having all that power between their legs? Didn’t they already have enough? Nell rode with her arms wrapped tightly around Steve’s waist and her eyes squeezed closed. It made her ill to see the road and houses fly by so fast and to know there was nothing but air between her body and the hard cement or glaring metal of a car. She knew that when she was in her twenties, she would have loved this, would have found it romantic, but now as her hair and shirt fluttered back from the wind, she could only think of the scene in the movie Isadora when Isadora Duncan threw her long scarf over her shoulder as she sat in a low convertible and the wind suddenly whipped it behind her into the spokes of the tire and broke her neck.
She was tired when she got home. She felt much older than she had when she started for the picnic. Well, she thought to herself, people have affairs like this all the time: older women, younger men. She had read about it, seen movies about it; she could do it, too, couldn’t she?
She couldn’t.
She couldn’t shake from her mind the image of Steve and his friends hauling their motorbikes over the dirt mounds. He came in the house with her and talked to the children and hung around in the kitchen while Nell fixed Hannah and Jeremy dinner, but now everything Steve did irritated her. The children were tired because their babysitter had been a young one who loved to play outdoor running games with them. It was eight o’clock, late for their dinner. They were tired, they were cranky. Nell stood at the sink, slicing fresh tomatoes to go with the cheese sandwiches she was grilling for them.
“Go wash your hands,” she said to them over her shoulder.
“Ah, Mom,” Jeremy wailed. “My hands are clean enough.”
“Do what your mother tells you and don’t talk back,” Steve said, and flicked his finger hard against Jeremy’s head, just above his ear.
Jeremy whipped around in his chair to glare at Steve, startled. Then, before Nell could do anything, he jumped up from his chair and left the kitchen. Hannah sat, stunned, staring at Nell and Steve.
“Hannah,” Nell said evenly. “Please go wash your hands now.”
Hannah quietly got up from the table and left the room.
Nell turned to Steve. “Don’t you ever lay a hand on either one of my children again,” she said, her voice murderously low.
“Hell, Nell,” Steve said. “I scarcely touched him. I didn’t hurt him. He’s gotta learn to mind his mother.”
“It’s no business of yours what he has to learn,” Nell said. “He is my son, and I will discipline him and you have no right to touch him. Don’t you ever do anything like that again.”
“Well, Jesus, how come you’re getting so hot under the collar?” Steve said, backing away from her, looking exasperated and hurt.
The children came slinking back into the room then and silently sat down at the table to eat.
“Look, Steve,” Nell said. “I’m awfully tired. Why don’t you go home. We can talk later.”
Steve paused, stared at Nell, his face full of confusion. She knew she was hurting him, surprising him with her sudden lack of warmth, and she regretted it.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll call you.” He started to move toward the door, then stopped and turned to Jeremy. “Jeremy,” he said. “I’m sorry I snapped you in the head. Your mom told me never to touch you like that again. I was only trying to remind you to mind your mom. But I’m sorry if I hurt you or hurt your feelings. Okay?”
Jeremy took on the sort of shifty-eyed look he always got when confronted by adults with a touchy situation. “Okay,” he said.
“I’ll call you,” Steve said to Nell, and went out the door.
“Fine,” Nell said, but did not have the energy to say it loudly enough to be sure he heard.
She sat down at the table, where her children were eating their sandwiches in silence, and she leaned her elbows on the table and put her head in her hands. Steve had so many of the wrong instincts—and so many of the right ones. If only he hadn’t apologized to Jeremy, how clear-cut things would be for her.
“I’m sorry Steve hit you, Jeremy,” she said. “I told him not to do it again, and I’m sure he won’t.”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Jeremy said. “He didn’t hurt me.”
“Don’t look so sad, Mommy,” Hannah said.
“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “We like Steve.”
Nell stared at Hannah. Oh shit, she thought, they like Steve. But she said, “You’re two good kids.”
She put the children to bed, then took a long, soaking hot bath. The silence and heat relaxed her, and soon she was chuckling to herself over the events of the day, thinking how Katy would laugh when she described the picnic and the pigs and the motorbike contests to her.
As she was getting out of the bathtub, just reaching for a towel, there was a knock at the door. She hurriedly dried, slipped into her robe, and went down the stairs. Her long hair was wet at the ends from the bath and clung to her shoulders and back; she could feel it through the robe. She was too tired to care much who could be knocking. It was Steve.
“I’m sorry if I got you out of the bath,” he said, leaning on the doorframe. “I just felt so bad when I left earlier, I thought I’d come back and talk with you about it.”
“Oh, Steve, that’s nice of you,” Nell said. “I’m sorry I was so grumpy. Come on in. Do you want some coffee?”
They went into the kitchen. There was a moment when Nell, at the stove in only her robe, barefoot, wet-headed, heating the singing kettle for instant coffee, turned and saw Steve seated at the kitchen table, idly looking at the evening’s newspaper, and she felt at home. This was a familiar and comforting way to be: a man and a woman, intimate in the kitchen of the house. And Steve had not changed. He was sexy and he was kind. She was relaxed. She wanted to go to bed with him.
“Nell, I’m sorry I made you mad by hitting Jeremy,” Steve said. “But then when I got home, I started thinking about it. Started thinking you and I better talk about it. You know, your kids could use a man around now and then. And you know, well, we’ve been going together for three months now, and—” he stopped.
“And what?” Nell said. She had fixed the mugs of coffee for herself and Steve and now she brought them to the table, moving slowly, almost dreamily, in a sort of warm trance of sexuality. She was so lazy-minded from her bath. She felt her clean soft skin under her comfortable robe. She saw Steve’s strong body there, solid on the chair. Soon they would be in bed together. In a few minutes she would be lying naked with his body against hers. She was not really listening to his words.
“And I think we should talk about a few things,” Steve went on. “I’m beginning to be pretty serious about you, you know. I don’t have much to offer you, but—”
“Jesus!” Nell said. She tripped over the leg of a chair and spilled hot coffee down her robe. “That’s hot! Ouch. Damnit! Steve, here, take your coffee. I’ve got to go change out of this robe.”
She set both mugs on the table, her mug still sloshing over with brown liquid, and she fled from the kitchen, up the stairs. She quickly changed into jeans and a sweatshirt, and the entire time she was thinking, “Oh no, now what am I going to do?” It sounded very much as though Steve were on the way to proposing marriage, or at least some serious arrangement, and she knew she wasn’t ready for that.
Now, years later, that evening with Steve was one of the evenings of her life that Nell tried to forget. Or rather she tried to forget the details and tried to hang on to the moral, which was: For God’s sake, be careful! Steve had thought he was in love with her. He had thought she was in love with him. Had thought he would make a good father to her children. Had thought they might someday get married.
Nell had explained to him as kindly as she could that it was just too soon for her. She had been divorced such a short time. She liked Steve, and she loved being in bed with him, but she wasn’t sure, in all honesty, if she was in love with him. She thought it was too soon, too early, for her to really fall in love.
“Well, I don’t know how you can carry on in bed like that unless you love me,” Steve said.
“I don’t either,” Nell said. “But come on, give me a break. After all, we both carried on that first night together, and we weren’t either of us in love with the other one then.”
“Oh yeah?” Steve said. “That’s what you know.”
They had fought. Nell had cried. To their mutual and awful dismay, Steve had cried. Not much, but enough to make him go red in the face with chagrin. Finally, they agreed not to see each other anymore.
“I really thought I was in love with you,” Steve said. “I really thought you were in love with me. I can’t see you anymore knowing you just think this is all some kind of half-assed temporary thing.”
He had left angrily, and for good. Nell had cried some more. She had sat in the kitchen and held Steve’s mug in her hands and put her mouth where she imagined his lips had been and cried.
But in her heart of hearts she knew she was a traitor, for among the hot muddle of emotions was a pure clean breeze of relief. She had gone on too long not introducing him to her friends, afraid he would embarrass her or feel inferior. She had gone on too long sitting through Little House on the Prairie shows with him when she would have preferred to read a book. She had gone on too long using him, as she had heard men use dumb blondes. At the Labor Day picnic, she had tried, and failed, to meet one of his friends with whom she could feel at ease. She had grown hot and impatient and bored and scornful at that picnic, watching the men on their motorbikes. She could never have a long-term relationship with Steve; she could never marry him.
But how horrible it was that she had hurt him. How incredibly insensitive she had been not to see that he thought he was falling in love with her. She thought all those young men just slept around casually with anyone, without ever taking it seriously. It had not given her any kind of pleasure or satisfaction at all to see Steve in tears. It had been as painful for her as seeing one of her children humiliated; it had been a wretched, excruciating moment. She thought of Steve going home alone to his farm, lying by himself in his double bed with the venetian blinds pulled shut against the night and his muddy boots dropped in the middle of the floor. She thought of how foolishly men handled their misery, hiding it in the dark, away from the eyes of others—that was what Steve would do, she was certain. He would not seek solace from his friends. He had already been hurt enough by exposing his emotions to her. She thought of how his face crumpled when she said she agreed that it would be better if they didn’t see each other again, and at the memory of his face like that, Nell’s heart crumpled inside her, a wastepaper heart, a useless heart, crushed in the fist of circumstance.
She had never meant to hurt that proud man. But she had hurt him, and she had done it as unwittingly as any fool. She was not a heartless bitch, but she might as well have been; the result was the same. She sat in the kitchen until three in the morning and disliked herself every minute of that time.
And that was her first time around.
Just months after her divorce from Marlow, she had met and enjoyed and hurt and lost Steve. Wow, Nell had thought, how does all of this happen? Who’s in charge here? she wondered, and supposed that where love was concerned, no one was.
That fall she dated no one. Men asked her out, but she was too wary. She didn’t want to hurt them; she didn’t want to get hurt herself. And she was busy with her babysitting, too tired at night to simulate intelligence and charm. She just got her own children to bed and got in bed herself with a good book.
That fall turned into winter and the bills came in and Nell began to worry about money. She began to dream of money. She dreamed literal dreams about figures and dollars and columns of numbers. She dreamed convoluted, disguised money dreams, terrible dreams in which she sold the children she babysat to robotlike men who came knocking at her door for money, wild nightmarish dreams of walking black windy city streets with Jeremy at one hand and Hannah at the other, all of them crying with hunger, and she could see Jeremy’s toes sticking through his sneakers and Hannah’s elbows sticking through holes in her sweater. Nell would awake from these dreams sweating and panicked, her heart pounding an urgent drum-call in her chest: Fire, Help, Emergency, SOS, DANGER. She was tired all that fall and winter, and frightened. Jeremy got pneumonia. Marlow was in Europe, a guest professor at the Sorbonne; he was on half salary at the college and could keep up with the legally decreed child support payments but could give her no more. He was too far away to help, even to take the children for one night so she could have a rest. He was in many ways a great distance from her plight and the children’s. She was really alone.
Every morning that winter she would wake at six, dress, start the coffee, and begin to receive the babies and little children who were dropped off to her. As the weeks passed, Nell began to take on a maternal role in the lives of the parents as well as the children. They would come in, drop off their babies and the litter of bottles or potty chairs or Pampers, and complain. The best ones complained of tests they had to take for degrees, jobs they had to do, bosses who were mean. The worst ones complained of exhaustion from organizing charity luncheons and even the terror of a husband discovering a love affair. Nell listened to them all with goodwill and gave them sympathy and a cup of coffee and sent them on their way, then dealt with their children. More and more children began to come. More and more money was added up in her notebook. Finally, Nell could breathe a little more easily about the bills, although it was always a struggle and she was never far from panic. It was only late that spring, when the O’Learys lured her to work in the boutique, that she had any real sense of financial security. Along with the sharp, biting anxiety about money, a deeper, more thrumming fear set itself up inside her. Was this it? Was this how her life was to be? She was thirty-four! She was unloved, and she seldom left her house except to go to the grocery store or the library or the druggist. She did not have the life she deserved, the life she had planned. She was lost and could see no hope of change.
Women would come to her house to drop off their children for the day, women with violet boots made in a leather so buttery Nell wanted to bite them. Women with clever, stylized coats, women with fur coats. Women who took their big diamond engagement and thick gold marriage rings off and slipped them inside their purses, casually, as they went out Nell’s door. Women who left their babies to go have facials and manicures and pedicures and lovers. Nell wore her navy blue corduroy jumper and a variety of old turtlenecks. The children didn’t care what she looked like, and someone was always peeing down her front anyway. Nell watched all those women leave her house and looked at herself and her life with a growing dismay. She did not have enough money to go out to lunch with friends or to the movies. All her money went toward paying the oil and electric bills, toward food, toward clothes for her children. She began to keep sterner accounts of the time she babysat. She had charged people by the half hour; now she charged them for each additional fifteen minutes, and even five minutes counted toward an additional fifteen. People were so cavalier about her time. They knew she liked the children and that she wasn’t going anywhere else anyway, so they were sometimes hours late picking up their children. But they paid their bills without complaining.
It was in February that Nell met Ben. Careful Ben. He was such a reserved man, such a really icy character, that Nell was certain she could never hurt his feelings. He was recently divorced and seemed to simply want the company of a reasonably pleasant woman. He took her to movies, concerts, ballets, plays—he took her out to dinner, and she did almost love him just for that. It seemed she had never known such joy as that of being seated in a quiet, candlelit restaurant with a good wine set before her in a goblet and fat shrimp on ice in front of her and a thick sirloin steak on the way. When Ben took her to bed, she lay there licking her teeth and remembering, bite by bite, the food they had eaten earlier in the evening. Ben was an uninspired lover and, after the first few times, almost an uninterested one. He just sort of climbed on Nell and came and got off again and never paid much attention to how she might feel about it all. Nell didn’t know what to give Ben in exchange for the pleasures he gave her. Sex didn’t seem sufficient; he didn’t seem to enjoy being in bed with her nearly as much as she enjoyed eating the dinners he took her to. She tried harder each time she was with him to be animated and charming, to compliment and entertain him; if she couldn’t make him happy, she thought at least she could keep him from being bored. But she never thought about Ben when she was not with him. She never longed to see him. She never said one word of endearment to him or pretended that their embraces moved her very much.
So she was startled when, after only three months of dating, Ben asked her to marry him. She was so startled she almost laughed in his face. She didn’t, of course, laugh in his face, but she did refuse his offer of marriage; she did tell him that she did not love him. And it seemed to her when she looked into his eyes that night, when she looked through the thick lens of his glasses into his eyes, that she could see something glittering there, like the change of light at the end of a long hall when an opened door is pulled shut. She saw that she had hurt Ben. It was a comfort to her to know that at least he was a man incapable of being deeply hurt. After that night, he went off on a cruise in the Caribbean and they didn’t see each other again.
That was the second time around.
After that, Nell became even more careful about going out with men, about sleeping with men. One year she dated no one at all. Then she became lonely, so lonely that she thought she would pay money, take money from her children, to have some man just put his arms around her. And she did a forbidden thing, a thing she thought she would never do: She slept with another woman’s husband. Mark had a reputation for sleeping around, as did his wife. Nell checked all this out in advance. He was the type of man who got his kicks from sleeping around, and there never was any question of love or marriage between him and Nell. That was a great relief to Nell. She almost felt like someone who met him once a week for a game of squash or tennis, so unemotional was their contact with each other. But he got bored with Nell after a while and moved on to sleeping with someone new.
During the five years after her divorce, she fell in love, too, once or twice, for a week or two or a month or two, or thought she did. She was hurt, she was left, she tried not to think about those times. The only consolation was in their brevity.
She would have gotten bitter after a while if she had not had so many other friends who were going through the same sort of thing: falling in love with the wrong man, trying to trust and being forsaken, over and over again. One drunken night she and a friend who had recently been left by men decided that their lives were really nothing more than a cosmic comedy act for bored gods. The Boob Sisters Fall in Love … And Fall in Love … And Fall in Love … And Fall in Love … Laughter saved them, friendship saved them, and Nell was at the point in her life when she believed in little else save laughter and the friendship of women. She began to regard people like John and Katy Anderson, people with happy marriages, as mortals who had been blessed with miracles, part of the miracle being that they didn’t know how miraculous their lives were.
For the past three and a half months, Nell had been dating Stellios Xouris, the man who had provided for Nell the experience she had been secretly expecting all her life.
It had been early January, a Saturday—Nell’s day off and her one chance to do a week’s worth of errands. It had snowed and melted and frozen over already; the air was cold and gray and the streets a sheet of treacherous, slush-covered ice. Nell had a cold. She was wearing jeans, boots, a grungy old sweatshirt under a grungy old sweater, her parka, and a wool cap. There was no man in her life. One of the cats had thrown up odiously on the hall rug, which was wool and too heavy for her washing machine. Nell begrudged the expense of having the rug cleaned; she hated having to lug it to the cleaners and she wanted someone else to take care of this particularly repellent task. She was wearing no makeup, but her slight fever had made her eyes bright and her cheeks rosy, and as she passed the hall mirror on the way to the car, she regretted the absence of some man to notice and admire the flare and glow of her hair and face, her hot prettiness on this cold, drab day. She yelled to her children that they must keep cleaning their rooms, that she’d be right back, and set off in her car for the dry cleaners on Mass. Ave.
Something had broken: a gas line, or a water line, or something. Half a block on each side of the dry cleaners was torn up, and three men were cursing and mucking about at the edge of the sidewalk, throwing broken cement around. The entrance to the dry cleaners was an obstacle course of slick ice and jagged chunks of pavement. Nell had parked her car two blocks away, grabbing the first available spot she saw. She had lugged the heavy rug this far—now, suddenly, the impossibility of negotiating it over the broken curbing hit her like a tragedy. She thought she would die right then and there—a stupid, mediocre death brought on by one too many inconveniences in her life.
As she stood at the edge of the work area, trying to decide whether to try to negotiate her way through the cement, shovels, pipes, and picks or to just drop the rug and leave it there forever, one of the workmen looked at her. He stood up and walked over to where she was standing.
“You want to go to the cleaners?” he asked, his speech heavily accented.
Nell looked at him. Automatically but unemotionally, she noted that the worker was tall, slim, dark, and handsome.
“Yes,” she replied, glaring. She felt anger flare up inside her because he was young and strong and good-looking, the type who’d throw cement around, build up his muscles, then impress some pretty young woman at a bar tonight and have only pity or disdain for a poor exhausted working mother like Nell.
“Wait!” he exclaimed. “You must wait!”
While she stood, startled (was he an inmate loose from an asylum, out on a work permit, perhaps?), the man began to build a path for her, a bridge of cement blocks over the slush and dirt.
“Here.” He gestured at last. “For you. You must not trip and fall. And I will carry your package for you.”
“Oh no,” Nell said, more alarmed than anything else. What about his foreman, she wondered, wouldn’t he be angry that his worker left the job?
“Please,” the young man said, extending his hand. “I must. You are a princess.”
Well, Nell thought, at last. Someone’s finally noticed. She smiled at the man, surprised, pleased, delighted—and not for one minute doubting his seriousness.
During her childhood she had had a favorite fantasy: somehow it would be discovered that her kind, ordinary schoolteacher parents had adopted her and that she was actually the child of the grand monarch of some lovely foreign country. When she rode in the backseat of her parents’ Ford station wagon, she had pressed her face against the window, hoping that someone on the street or in another car would see her and cry out, “Stop! That’s my daughter!” She would be rescued and restored to her proper parents and rightful place as a princess. It was a purely irrational fantasy, filled with detailed images of the glittering, beribboned gowns and bejeweled tiaras she would wear as princess—but lacking the explanations of why she had been taken from her parents in the first place, how she had come to live in the unprincesslike locale of Des Moines, Iowa, or exactly where her new realm was located on the map—all that was vague, a blur of circumstances that didn’t interest her much.
As she grew older, though, the fantasy changed, became more rational, more focused. She was not born a princess—that was a stupid dream. No. She would become a princess. She would meet and marry a prince. Grace Kelly had done it, after all. It truly happened in the real world.
But it didn’t happen to Nell. Realism finally prevailed, and by her late teens she had traded the princess fantasy for the actress dream. Still, those old yearnings never really went away. Nell knew there weren’t many women alive who, nurtured on Cinderella stories in the crib, didn’t secretly envy and identify with Lady Di, even in their wise maturity.
Stellios’s words were magic, the ultimate seduction. He could see past the jeans and smelly rug to the truth: Nell was a princess.
“Thank you so much,” she had said, letting him take the rug from her. “It is heavy,” she added, flashing a dazzling smile, “although it probably won’t seem so to you.”
He followed her into the cleaners. The owner took a blessedly long time to appear after the bell on the shop door announced their arrival, so Nell and Stellios became friends and exchanged telephone numbers.
Stellios courted Nell with diligence and flourish. He brought her blossoming flowers in the dead of winter, bottles of sweet wine, records recorded by men with smoldering dark eyes singing sentimental ballads. He continued to treat Nell with courtesy even after he realized she was not, in spite of her education and large house, wealthy. And Nell continued to see him even after he confessed to her that his dream was to marry a wealthy American woman. She had no doubt that he’d succeed. He was handsome, gentle, quick-witted. She wished him well.
Stellios had been born in Greece and had grown up there, yet in many ways he reminded Nell of Steve, the young and very American man Nell had dated just after her divorce. Like Steve, Stellios was a manual laborer, a young, hard, strong, sexy, uneducated, rather simple man. Nell was beginning to think that perhaps this was the sort of man she was destined to meet for the rest of her life. She met so many of these types, young muscular jocks who coached Jeremy’s baseball team or painted her friends’ houses. She wasn’t sure what to do about this—wasn’t sure she wanted to do anything about this. This sort of man provided for Nell the temporary pleasure of companionship without that dreadful specter of Serious Intention lurking in the background. She never had to think whether she would give up some part of her freedom in order to make the relationship last—she knew it wouldn’t last from the start. So she was relieved rather than threatened to know that there could be nothing permanent between her and Stellios.
Back in Greece, Stellios had been engaged to a young woman who suddenly ran off with another man; rather than commit suicide or murder—for Stellios was passionate and sincere in his actions and emotions—he had fled to America. Now he lived with one of his mother’s aunts, surrounded by loving and watchful relatives. Nell had been to dinner at the Xourises several times and the assemblage of cousins and Greek friends had been pleasant to her, easily affectionate. But they had made it quite clear that Nell was not the right woman for Stellios—she was several years older than he, and divorced, with children—! She was, in their eyes, a kind of tramp, whose body would provide for Stellios a smooth and pleasurable final passage from his native country to the new one. The men at the Xouris house touched Nell. They hugged her when she arrived or left, patted her bottom or arm, and complimented her effusively. They told her she carried herself like a queen. The women stood in the background, judging Nell with their eyes.
So Nell had thought she was safe enough with Stellios. They provided pleasant company for each other, with no chance of involvement, no chance of pain. They really were good for each other, for a while. Nell helped Stellios improve his language and his manners without embarrassing him; she taught him useful things like how to light and use a charcoal grill and how to dance without clapping his arms above his head or waving them in the air. In turn, Stellios was a charming escort who complimented Nell intelligently, noticing the things she wanted a man to notice—a new dress, a new way of wearing her hair, her slender ankles. He was sensitive to her moods and rubbed her back when she was on her period. She had been perfectly content to enjoy his company and was prepared to watch him move on, when the time came, with no regrets at all. There wasn’t a doubt in her mind that every day while he worked for the city road crew, digging here and there on the streets of Cambridge, he said to each promising woman he saw: “Please. Let me carry that for you. You are a princess.” It was only a matter of time, Nell knew, until a man as handsome as Stellios met another woman who knew in her heart that she was a princess and would let Stellios become her prince.
But recently Stellios had been acting strangely—serious. He was acting as if he were in love with Nell. He was beginning to bring her roses, ice cream sundaes, dreadful (he didn’t know they were dreadful; he liked the TV ads) perfumes. He was playing up to the children more and more, playing ball with them, even going up to kiss them good night at bedtime. And he was looking at Nell with a different expression on his face. He had even mentioned living in the house: “If I lived here, I’d tear out the fireplace and put in a wood stove. They’re more efficient.” Nell knew what he was up to; he was trying to believe he was in love with her. And she did not want him to be in love with her. They had so little in common except goodwill toward each other. He loved sports, was baffled by drama and music; he loved to go to amusement parks and ride the roller coaster—oh, they really had nothing in common, except, perhaps, loneliness. She knew Stellios better than he knew himself. She knew he wanted to believe he loved Nell so that the pain of his fiancée leaving him would be lessened. She had thought they would help each other, that she would, simply by being his lover and friend, help him in his desolation. But now she saw that it would be no help and perhaps even more harm if she continued the affair with him.
But she didn’t want to end the affair, either; he was the only man she was seeing these days, the only man on the horizon. In the past five years she had learned very well to do most things alone: She could manage the house, hold down a job, keep two children healthy and happy, take sustenance from her friends, and live a pretty pleasant life. But in spite of all her intelligence, in spite of all her love of books and drama and movies and friends, she still took the most pleasure from an intimate association with a man. It was not just the sex, although that was of course a great part of it. It was all the other things: she liked the sound of men’s voices, the male presence they exuded, like a scent of sage or bayberry, around her house. She liked the way they always surprised her with the way they thought; so different from the way she and her friends thought. She thought of women as having fiction minds and men as having nonfiction minds, and she liked having men around in the same sort of way that she liked looking at Time magazine or the evening news. She might not agree with everything that was said, but it opened up her world to know such viewpoints were there.
It would be the kindest thing to do to break things off with Stellios before he got more involved, more liable to hurt. But the summer was coming, the lovely season when laziness and sensuality spread through her limbs like a lazy stream through a meadow. The evenings would be long; she did not want to sit on her porch and sip strawberry daiquiris alone every night. The summer was coming, when men took off their flannel shirts and sweaters and went around in cutoff jeans and T-shirts, when she could see the hair, the sweat, the muscles of their arms and legs and backs.… The summer was the worst time to be alone. She knew that. She had spent summers alone, lying in bed at night, drinking iced tea and reading a mystery and trying to ignore the soft summer breeze that blew gently in her window and played across her skin. She did not want to hurt Stellios, and she did not want to be alone in the summer. It seemed to her that as the years had passed she had compromised greatly with life, she had learned to ask for less and less and less. Now she did not even ask for love or the security of marriage, now she only asked for—for what? For a little more pleasure in her life.
She did not know what to do. She did not understand why nothing in her life would be uncomplicated. She worked so hard; why could nothing come or stay easy? She lay in her bath a long time, waiting for the heat to soothe her, waiting for some answer to come. She lay there until all the bubbles evaporated into the air and the water cooled to lukewarm and she was left looking down through transparent water at her foolish fleshy body, which never could seem to learn not to ask for more.