“We must do something,” she said. “I think I should treat it as an illness. A fever, or something; try to live with it until it breaks. And maybe later,” she said hopefully, “I can just keep Everett as a friend.”
He suddenly felt very sad for her. This way of dealing with so powerful an attraction would never have occurred to him. Not in the bad old days of hurting her all the time, especially. Then, he’d been so glad he was a man, and could make the first inquiry, the first move. The women had waited for him to do so, he thought, like little rabbits. Not one of them, pursued hard enough, had said no.
Except for her. But then even she had given in and he had thought her no different, eventually, than the rest.
“But I’m not any different!” she’d said once when they were discussing his infidelities. “You hurt us all, but this clumsiness isn’t entirely your fault.”
He knew some variation of her women’s condition lecture was coming next, and waited for it.
“Women are trained by society not to go after a man they might want, but to wait for him to want them. That’s why there’s such a demand for new and better, more sweet-smelling and powerful perfumes. Women have been brainwashed to think they’re like flowers and have no feet, and that men are bees. Waiting stationary like that makes them anxious. When a man flies by they grab at him eagerly. He’s thrown off balance by the sheer awkwardness of it.”
“Is that why women always want you to do something for them, then,” he said. “Fetch this, carry that. Because they’ve lost the use of their feet?” He really loathed this about women. The way they made you pay for your pleasures by pressing you into service. If they couldn’t talk you into staying around they could at least send you to the store. And how many errands he had run! It made him tired just to think of it.
“Well,” she said, thoughtfully, “after dark you men are the only ones fairly safe on the streets.”
But now she was in love with someone else.
“Why are you telling me?” he asked.
“I tell you everything,” she said, turning over, curving her back along his body, positioning herself for sleep.
It was the first sound sleep she’d had in weeks. Since the demonstration at which she’d met Everett. Unfortunately she dreamed she and Everett were together in a white antique convertible that kept breaking down when it came to dark stretches of road and along these dark, hidden stretches he kissed her enough to melt the car.
She did not get better. The “fever” did not break. Partly this was because Everett continued to call her very often. His jolly, irreverent voice on the phone the most exciting event of her day. She amused him. A woman’s point of view of society, boldly expressed, was every bit as hilarious to him as a homosexual’s. She educated him, furthermore (and humorously, of course) about the fastest-growing group of his constituents. Women. Usually single. Usually poor. Usually of color. Usually with kids, and no male influence around. But not always.
Once, for instance, he’d been extolling the virtues of a “good woman” he knew (later she was to teach him how “good woman” meant different things entirely to women and men), whom he described as long-suffering, hardworking, quiet-spoken, loyal and submissive, but above all, devoted, and before he could add that this good woman was his wife, she’d murmured “Sheepdog.” After he’d finished nervously laughing he’d identified the woman as a distant cousin, blah-blah-blah, who had once been one of his crack campaign organizers. Needless to say, this exchange gave him food for thought that night as he shared a rushed and boring dinner with his wife.
I am free, she thought. Her name, by the way, was Orelia. I have my work—she was a clothing consultant and designer, and extremely good at it—my apartment, a car, grown children, my figure, and my health. And I am in a pleasant relationship with a loving companion who frequently understands me. Being in love is not free. I will stop it at once.
She couldn’t.
“I don’t even know why I like him,” she wailed to John one evening over a gloomy dinner. “He doesn’t know half the things about women I’ve taught you. God! To think of going over all that ground again.” It would exhaust her final reserves of energy and kill her dead as a nit, she just knew.
She made him laugh, but he could see she was worrying herself sick. She hadn’t lost weight—if anything she was eating more, less selectively—and her skin was breaking out. She also was not centered in the least. Nor graceful. Nor—looking at her old denim jacket and gardening jeans—very well groomed.
She thought she didn’t trust John. Because he’d had affairs and only told her when he thought (mistakenly, as it turned out) she’d find out. But John felt strongly that on some level she did. He was grateful she confided in him, although it made him suffer—he thought it must always make you suffer when someone you loved was in love with someone else—because it meant they could suffer together, and when the “fever” broke and Orelia was well they could look back on her “illness” as one more adventure they’d shared. And they’d shared many.
By Christmas, three months after she’d told him, she was a wreck. Crying. Biting her nails. Losing sleep. He came across lists on her desk with headings of: “Good Points.” “Bad Points.” In the “Good Points” list, she had written: “Makes me laugh (though sometimes uneasily). Dresses beautifully. Incredible energy.” On the much longer “Bad Points” list were: “Calls women ladies and kisses them automatically instead of shaking hands. Thinks having babies is easy and something all ‘real’ women look forward to. Thinks women vote for him because he ‘charms’ them. Thinks his wife’s adoring look is caused by adoration instead of astigmatism … ugh.” There was little sparkle in her own eyes and none in her voice.
So John took her away to an island off the coast of Baja, a sanctuary he’d discovered when he’d needed to reknit his own soul after years as a journalist covering the criminal Vietnam-American war. And there in an inn on a cliff overlooking the clear blue water, unreachable by phone, he tended her as carefully as though it were her back that was breaking instead of her heart. Because he understood very well what was making her sick. For the first time in her life she had fallen in love at the same time that she had the experience necessary to know it would never work out. The fighter in her hated the necessity of giving up without a trial, and the lover in her feared imminent death.
Most of their days on the island were sunny and hot. They rose late in their airy suite with its ceiling fan revolving lazily overhead and were brought breakfast on the terrace. Fresh fruit and juice, toast, eggs and the local cheese. For days she gazed wearily out to sea. (She was wondering how they laid undersea telephone lines and how and whether they worked.) It was five days before she commented on the freshly cut flowers that appeared each day, magically, in their rooms. Seven before she admitted enjoying her swims, or drives and walks with John. They cuddled incessantly, as if they were both ill—and in effect they were—and when, in the second week, they began to make love again it was with the gentleness and tenderness and passion that made her smile during lovemaking the way she used to: her merry eyes closed, teeth just showing, skin glowing with delight, so that she reminded him of the little sun face one of his children had liked to draw when he was happy. By the third week she was nearly keeping up with him playing tennis, and her skin had cleared.
He continued to cuddle her, feed her interesting fruits and nuts from the market, order special treats from the kitchen, choose the colors of the daily cut flowers himself, and make love to her as if their lives depended on it. Because of course their life together might. Cuddling for long hours on their bed, seeing the waves of the ocean cresting from their open french doors, Everett Jordan—his look, his voice, his ignorance, his way of making her smile and groan, everything that had so entangled her feelings—faded. She began to see John again. His kindness and sensitivity. His stability and intelligence. His innate gentleness. She felt as if she’d been away from him on a very long, very bad and unnecessary vacat
ion, and easily falling back in love with him on their remote island she wondered how and why. He was wonderful!
She felt like this all the way home. Even as she bounded up the stairs to her apartment, riffling frantically through her purse for her keys because through the door she could hear the phone, ringing and ringing.
Charms
There were days when John thought perhaps Orelia did not love him at all anymore. Sometimes when he kissed her and said “I love you,” she said nothing, or mumbled “I love you, too,” as if it were another language, foreign to her mouth. She said it, but he didn’t feel it. But this morning, for no reason he could think of, except she had slept well and it was a bright, optimistic day when they woke up, she turned to him, smiled, looked at him carefully, and said “You’re beautiful! And I love you.” John had taken her into his arms and buried his nose in her neck. “Do you? Do you really?” he’d asked. And she had laughed, squeezed him, and leapt out of bed to do her exercises and spray water on the plants.
Now, as he tinkered with the washing machine, which was leaking, he thought of how much he had missed her when she went away two years before. She had accepted, for six months, a consulting job halfway across the country; the time had seemed endless to John. He had spent a lot of time in her apartment in the city, sitting in her bed and feeling like crying. Sometimes, watching TV from her big wooden bed, quilts pulled up to his chin, he’d fantasized her cheerful (or glum, it wouldn’t matter) face, poking into the room, and felt the vibration of her voice in the air. Several times a week he came simply to be in her apartment, to smell its faint scent of her, to see the stacks of letters that arrived regularly from her friends. Seeing her name, Orelia Moonsun, soothed him. Of course they talked on the phone, nearly every night, but it wasn’t the same as seeing her, holding her, and hearing her sensuous or mischievous laugh in his ear.
The washing machine needed a part; he’d found the problem and now held it, a rusting valve, in his hand. He called to ask Orelia if she’d like to go into town with him to fetch it, but she was at the kitchen table busy with some drawings.
Spread out all around her were sketches of a house showing different angles, with lots of cutaways, so you could see where a new room, window or greenhouse could be joined. This particular house was an old Berkeley brown shingle in the flats, and the owner wanted to add a space off the second floor that would permit something of a view.
“It will be strictly an illusion,” Orelia said when she first showed the sketches to John. “But a nice one. His view will actually be of a long row of his neighbors’ backyards, but the addition will be from the one angle that will make them seem to be an uninterrupted garden.”
Finding these special angles for her clients was a great satisfaction to her, and also to those who sought her services—more and more as time went on—for when you entered an Orelia Moonsun redesigned house, no matter where you were, you had the instant illusion of being someplace better. Someplace greener, more spacious, more airy and free.
She herself could never live, really live, in the city, but for those who could or must, hers was the eye to show them how it might be done. She could create a forest out of one tree, a mountain out of a hill, and a meadow out of a handful of flowers and a bush. It was because she needed to leave the city and find a place in the country that she’d gone off on the consulting job. She hated to travel, but the amount of money offered was just enough to make a down payment on some land they’d seen that supported a small house. It had been hard for her to leave him, John remembered, as he drove off to the hardware store; they had both cried.
They’d cried only partly because they would miss each other. They cried because it was so good between them finally: good friends, good sex, good companionship, even good food (they were cooking more together and going out less); they felt the risk the long separation might mean. But she had gone off, because she felt she had to, by train—she refused quite utterly to fly except when she had to cross the ocean—and he had waved after her as the bright blue-and-white Amtrak train left the station.
Then he had returned to her apartment, to her bed, where he had been so happy, where so many discoveries of various kinds had been made, and he had thought, as he often did, of the rather curious way they had met. She’d had cramps. She’d said she had cramps. Anyway, it was the lifetime ago when he was a hostile pre-law student at Columbia (hostile because the very books he must read oppressed his spirit, they were so dully exacting) and he was sitting on a bench in the sun. Orelia had come reeling down the walk, wearing a heavy gray coat, vaguely Russian, buttoned to the chin; the color, herself, of ashes. She fell onto the bench.
There were few black students at Columbia, and none, he had thought, as beautiful as she, but she carried the books, wore the jeans, the leather Frye boots, that were the insignia of Columbiana. On closer look he noticed she was perspiring and that her hands were trembling.
“You okay?” he’d asked.
And with a directness that would never cease to amaze him, no matter how long he knew her, she said, “I have cramps, and I’m starving to death.”
“Why,” he’d said, “that’s great news; the cramps, I mean.” It was every month to the girls he dated.
She looked at him as if he were a fool.
“It isn’t great news?”
She said nothing. Her head had slumped into his side.
By the time she came to, John and one of his classmates had lugged her upstairs to John’s room and she was stretched out on the sofa.
“Where am I?” she asked, wryly.
“My room.”
“Won’t they kick you out if you have a girl in your room?”
“Not if she’s my sister, and not if she’s starving.”
He held a bowl of Campbell’s chicken soup under her nose.
To which she said “Oh.” When she’d drunk it down she burped, like an infant, and fell sound asleep.
It was an odd feeling, having Orelia there. Several times during the night he woke just to look at her. She’d put on one of his undershirts and his bathrobe, and her short, bushy hair surrounded her thin face like a cushion. He’d heard there were women who starved themselves for the sake of being thin but she was the first one he’d met. The next morning, when he woke up, she was gone. He didn’t see her again until the last week of school. By then she was rail thin, and there was a cool, distant glint in her eye.
And then a couple of years later they were surprised to find each other again in a youth hostel in Brussels. She was heading for Paris, he for Berlin. They’d spent the night together, two young Americans lonely and far from home, and she’d seemed in need of comforting; but distracted, too, her thinness by now rather frightening, and she’d listened complacently, after they’d made love (John incredulous that her joints bulged conspicuously in arms and legs) to his announcement of his upcoming marriage.
“I’ll never marry,” she’d said with a sigh of relief, as if that were at least one obviously stupid thing she was sure she’d never do.
But then many years later still, he’d heard she’d married. Someone with a profession (John had by then given up law, with the same lightening of spirits with which he was to, subsequently, give up pre-med, psychology and accounting), money and a big stone house.
Sad to say, shameful to say, too, but though quite often happy in his marriage to Leonie—a smooth, upper-middle-class black Vassar woman, and an irresistible Christian to boot—there were many, many times when, even though he had never seen it, his thoughts and his heart drifted toward the big stone house. But they were poor. He, in particular, was poor; Leonie came from money—there were famous singers and musicians in her family tree; there’d be money for her when her people died. They lived poor, too, on principle. They both taught, both wrote—mainly pamphlets on various social ills—and with the arrival of their children, a girl first, then a boy, their life seemed happy and full. He did not ask why then was he so often in a marijuana and alcohol daz
e.
But after ten years he found himself, as if after a long sleep (though his life had been crammed with people, ideas, events, as everyone’s is) stumbling up the steps of the big stone house.
Orelia, wearing a long black dress and amber beads that glowed in the shadowy entryway, let him in, introduced him briefly to her own three children who were flying by, and led the way into the mahogany wainscoted lower sitting room.
“And how are you?” he’d enthused, looking furtively about for signs of the husband.
“I think I’m okay,” she said, and then, bluntly, offhandedly, “I’m getting divorced.”
All thought of the bogus survey of salary levels among black Columbia alumni that he was supposed to be conducting fled. All he could think was: I am too poor to offer this woman anything but a casual affair. Which, after a glaringly brief mumble of inquiry and sympathy, he did.
“Atrocious timing,” she’d said, frowning. “My husband has cancer, the children don’t know yet, and I’m terrified.”
And then followed the years of watching her from a distance, joined only by letters, as she struggled to free herself, her children, even her husband. And at last it was done, somehow. The house sold and the money divided, the children prepared for a different lifestyle, her husband once again healthy and prosperous. A new job invented for herself, a new city. With John following her steps almost exactly, but one year behind, so that by the time she was finally free, he was just on the verge of discussing, with Leonie, the possibility of moving out.
To which Leonie had replied that perhaps they needed to pray. And pray they had, for a year. He could never thank her enough for forcing him to do it, since in the intensity of prayer, which for the first time he took seriously: Please God, let me make the right decision, and not destroy my wife and my children. Please God, let me spend a few years at least with Orelia: he faced his drinking and his marijuana addiction squarely, and rooted drugs out of his life. For Leonie, too, the year of prayer had a positive effect. It helped her to let go. (No feminist, she, the very notion of braving life without a husband, no matter how earnestly he petitioned for release, was anathema to her.) As did the money from a trust fund her family had thoughtfully set up for her and the children for just such an occasion of loss. Though John suspected it was not his going away but his death they had been preparing for.