“More light.” Suzanne was pitifully eager for any ideas that might help. Rachel had concrete suggestions about improving Beverly’s situation: get her a computer with an extra large screen. One with big keys. Then she can communicate more easily when she’s tired and she can find stimulation on-line.
To Suzanne’s surprise, Beverly did not reject the idea. “Can learn!” She hit her chest with her left hand. “Learn!”
Then suddenly the preparations were all made, the time was used up and Rachel left for New York, where she was meeting Michael to fly to Israel together. It had been hanging over Suzanne for months, for weeks, for days. All at once the day, the hour arrived and she saw off her daughter. Rachel looked so small and vulnerable heading for the plane. She appeared very serious, with a briefcase in one hand, pulling a carry-on with the other. Rachel had worn that same expression since she was a toddler making mud pies and sand castles in the park. Suzanne could see Rachel with her sturdy little legs stuck before her in a V looking at a doll in her lap with that full measuring stare. Rachel had been born good-natured and serious, in equal measures. That night, Suzanne wept again, intermittently. Beverly held her hand in her good hand. “Will…do…fine.”
“She may. I don’t know if I will. I’m closer to Rachel than to Elena. Rachel always preferred to be with me rather than her father. We never had the same kinds of bitter gouging fights I’d still have with Elena if I let it happen.”
“You love, both…diff…rent ways.”
They had a rare moment of communication, even if the content was simple reassurance. Rachel was too young to marry. Why couldn’t she wait? Why did she want to join her life to that rather innocuous stiff young man?
Suzanne often found her own house uncomfortable lately. Elena’s music, Beverly’s needs. She hired a woman to come in for Beverly eight hours a day Monday through Friday, to take her out for a walk when weather permitted, make her lunch, whatever. One of Beverly’s main problems was boredom. She was not about to park herself in front of the TV and watch soap operas all day. She would watch the news and CNN for a while, even a cooking show occasionally. Suzanne found that ridiculous, as Beverly had never cooked anything more complicated than a hot dog. Her usual style was to open a can of soup. Spaghetti was pasta boiled too long with a can of tomato sauce or tomato soup dumped over it. Maybe cooking shows were like sitcoms to Beverly, a series of jokes.
Suzanne was helping Jake find an apartment. The move was happening. He would be here most of the time for the next few years. He was fully capable of finding his own housing, but it distracted her from her continuing funk over Rachel. It was mildly amusing to look at places to live, and probably she would be spending some evenings and weekend afternoons there, so she might as well help in the search. Both of them put in such long hours, and had so many meetings to attend, that working on the apartment problem was a convenient excuse to spend time together out of bed.
“All right, I’ll be on the board. But it may be pretty nominal, Jake. I haven’t got days or even hours to give.”
“You might find it more interesting than you suppose.”
It was Jake she found interesting, and if the price of peace between them was to go on his board, she did not like it, but she acquiesced. The sex was strong. She enjoyed surprising herself and sometimes surprising him. It was Tuesday and she had an appointment at three, but she was free until then. They had looked at two places, one ridiculously overpriced and the other, possible but small, cramped. “But I don’t need much space,” he said. “I travel light and I live lightly. Some books, a bed, a computer on a good desk, music and a little kitchen and I’m set. I’d rather live in a smaller place I can afford.” He was tight in surprising ways, she noticed. He hated to waste money. Maybe that came from running a political organization on erratic contributions. He had the recycling habit. When he wasn’t using the computer and actually had to write on paper with a pen, he used the backs of circulars and form letters. When something broke, her impulse was to discard it and his was to tinker with it. The too small apartment was in Brookline ten blocks from her house. “You want to stop by my house? I think we can grab a little privacy.”
It was eleven-forty-five when they arrived. “I think it would be nice to take Beverly out for lunch today,” Suzanne said to the West Indian aide, Sylvia. Sylvia was just a few inches taller than Beverly but had eighty pounds on her. She was a broadly built woman with light brown skin and hair cut really short. She was skilled at getting Beverly to do what was needed. Suzanne handed Sylvia two twenties and Sylvia set about to bundle Beverly out to the Greek place, the diner, or the Jewish deli, as Beverly chose. It would take them at least an hour and a half, including the time to toddle down the block.
They had just got into bed in the otherwise empty house when Suzanne heard voices and footsteps. After they made love, when they got up to shower, she looked out and saw Jim’s car in the yard. Marta seldom came back during the week. Monday through Wednesday were booked-solid days, so she usually didn’t get in till seven or eight. Suzanne opened the back door and softly climbed the steps partway to listen. Yes, it was Elena’s voice. What were they doing back at Marta’s in the middle of the day?
He could have forgotten something (then why was Elena with him?). They could be having lunch (why wouldn’t they eat someplace nearer his office?). They could be having a personal conversation about some problem at the office (with all that laughter and then long silences?).
She motioned Jake to silence as they crept out to his rented car, parked at the curb. “I have the most awful sinking feeling that Elena is doing a number with my best friend’s husband.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Jake said, “She’ll never forgive you if you’re wrong.”
“I’ll never forgive her if I’m right.”
“Of course you will. Down the pike. The thing to do is try to figure out what’s really happening. All lawyers are part detective, or want to be.”
She sighed. “I was happy a few minutes ago. I really was.”
22
Elena
Elena noticed it the third week she was working there, the way Jim looked at her, how often he looked. She was surprised and not surprised. She was used to men looking at her with that kind of interest, but she had never paid much attention to him before. He was the old guy upstairs in the house where she hadn’t wanted to move. Marta was always giving her little hints about life and education and the future that were really depressing. Their son, Adam, was a pain in the ass, covering everything she had been supposed to do and never did. Now he was at NYU studying film, like all the grind-hard kids from high school who thought they were the next Quentin Tarantino. Adam was seven years younger than she was, but he always acted as if he knew everything better.
Jim had been like an uncle, someone you could borrow twenty bucks from or get a ride someplace, the guy who wouldn’t tell on you if he caught you smoking on the porch. She doubted she had ever looked at him carefully. He had pale gray-blue eyes like glacial runoff, eyes of tremendous intensity. He was in great shape. He ran every day. He worked out. He kept himself lean.
What she first liked about him was that Jim was no workaholic like her mother, like Rachel, like their nerdy son Adam, like Marta. Jim was a goof-off like her. She had never realized that. He had patients, sure, five on a busy day, sometimes just a couple, but he didn’t really give a fuck. Once she grasped that, she loved the job, in spite of the disappointing grungy office over a tropical fish store and next to a bowling alley in Brighton. When she had first seen the office with its beaten-up furniture, two tiny rooms that hadn’t been painted since World War II, she had wanted to turn around and flee. Now she understood: he didn’t care if the office turned some patients off. He didn’t really give a damn. Some days he played on the Internet. They shared cool sites. She began to look at him with deliberate interest, a kind of itch, like who was he really and what was going on with him? He let himself have fun. He liked to take it e
asy and chill out, even in the office. He had an eye for women, she could tell. She was sure he had girls on the side. Vaguely she remembered something from years before: Rachel had told her about Jim and a student. She could hardly write Rachel in Israel and ask her, but there had been something, she knew it.
She was tired of the gonzos she had met at the restaurant, that she met at the gym. They were either lawyers like her mother or just as bad, buzz saws with penises. Or they were losers like the swimming pool salesman, nothing much going on, just boring. Or kids who had no clue. Jim did not seem to be dying to get his hands on her. What he seemed to want when she came into his office between appointments was to talk with her. To really talk. He talked about how he lost his teaching job. It had been a student and they had been in love, but it hadn’t worked out. Her parents pulled her out of school and he got fired. Sure he had kept it from Marta. It was easy. She was so wrapped up in herself and her law practice, she barely noticed what was going on with him.
She told him what really happened at the restaurant, how that guy had grabbed her and she had belted him. She told him about her friend Courtney getting AIDS from a bad needle. She told him about Kevin walking off a cliff when he was stoned, and her swearing off drugs, finally.
His eyes were beautiful, icy, intense. Wintry with all the blaze of winter sun. Sometimes she found her gaze dropping from his, just because of his intensity. She liked it. That intensity felt familiar, felt right. It wasn’t until the first time he embraced her, as they were about to leave the office one evening after she had been working there for two months. He slid his arms around her and held her to him. That was all he did for about three minutes, just held her. She could feel his erection, but he did not make a move on her. Finally she pulled his head down and kissed him.
It was as she was kissing him that she understood the power, the compulsion of it: it was how he felt, his body against hers. He was tall like Evan, he was lean like Evan, and the way he held her made her think of Evan, freshly, blindingly. There was that same intensity, the way they talked with each other. Never had she thought she would find it again, a twin soul, her other, her brother. Love struck her like lightning during that first kiss, the way it should, the way it must. She was shocked with love, smoldering.
For two weeks after that all they did when they could snatch a moment was kiss and talk, make out and talk. She was melting. She was dissolving. At night she could not sleep for imagining sex with him. Instead of feeling like a jaded sophisticate, burned out and bored, she felt as if she had become fifteen again. She told him about Evan and Chad, the whole thing. He knew the general story, but from Marta’s point of view, the story she had been made to tell in court, how she was just a poor innocent drag-along. How the bad boys had done her in. She told him the way it really was and then the year afterward, when all she could do was lie there for two months and then get up and go through the motions. How Suzanne had ripped her out of her old life, old school, old friends. She was waiting all the time to die. She had collaborated in Chad’s death and she had been supposed to die next, but she had chickened out and Evan had been shot because of her, because of her cowardice, getting out of the car and running. That was why the state trooper shot Evan.
Marta had defended her. It was sickening, but her mother and Marta kept telling her she had to keep her mouth shut. She could not tell the truth. The big lie was that she was a weak-willed girl under the influence of two guys who had made her run off with them. They had fed her drugs and forced her into sex with them. They were evil and she was a poor misguided lamb led astray. Chad was the ringleader, Evan was the follower, and she was the victim, blah blah blah. She had hated Marta as she sat in that courtroom. She was underage anyhow. In the eyes of the law she was a child. In her own eyes, she was a guilty old woman who had lived too long and was too scared to die.
Now she was given a second chance, after all these stupid wasted useless empty years. She talked to Jim about wanting to die. He listened, really listened, and then he took the story and made it change. He made her a heroine who had tried to save Evan and Chad. He made her a faithful friend who, when she could not save them, was willing to go with them into the land of shadows, but the police arrived too soon. Chad and Evan died of their own weaknesses, their inner demons. She was only the pretext for their immolation. Now she must find her own way. She was not to blame for the weakness of others, but she needed to believe in her own inner strength.
Jim told her about the death of his daughter, only two months after they got her home from the hospital. His second child. He knew Marta was not to blame but could not help blaming her. Something had obviously gone wrong during the pregnancy, when she had insisted on working until the day her water burst. The girl, Annette, had been fragile, born prematurely. Then she was dead in her crib, sudden infant death syndrome, it was called, as if that explained anything. It just said, your baby died and we don’t know why.
Elena and Jim held each other. He seemed afraid to go much further than kissing and stroking her hair and holding her face between his hands. He kept saying he was too old for her. The more he protested, the more fiercely she argued.
She was half wild with desire for him. She told herself it was like poison ivy of the brain. She could think of nothing else. She waited until a Monday afternoon when everybody was out of the house except Beverly and Sylvia. Then Sylvia took Beverly to the speech therapist. Jim was upstairs working on his book. She just went quietly up and put her arms around him as he sat at the computer. She was not wearing a bra or panties, just a loose rayon dress, cut low and slit up one side. When he stood and began to kiss her, she put his hand on her breast. Her breast was burning to be touched. She kneaded his back, pulling his shirt loose from his pants, then slid her grasp down to his firm buttocks. He felt good, lean and sleek and hot under her hands. He was breathing hard now. Yes, she would have him. When they were undressed, she knelt and kissed his penis. “Put it in me. Just do it now. I can’t wait any longer.”
They made love on the couch in the living room. She groaned and thrust up her hips, feeling him enter her. This was love they were making, something different and new again, something special, something holy. He kept saying, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
She kept saying the same thing. Then she added, “I want to belong to you. I want to be yours.”
“I want you to be mine.” But when they were showered and dressed, he said, “We must be very careful. If we pay too much attention to each other, one of them will guess…. You’re on the pill, right?”
He was too cautious, but she could wait.
“I feel out of control with you,” she said. “I haven’t felt that way in years. Always I’ve been the one driving the car. I couldn’t trust any of them enough to let go.”
“I understand,” he said, “and your trust honors me. We have to cut through all these roles of control and the fear of it and be vulnerable and open to each other. To be naked.”
The next time, she got him to make love on the bed he slept in with Marta. It was obscene to think of them together. Marta had no right to him, for she did not love him. They were always fighting, Elena could hear them in the evenings if she shut off her music and listened. They argued about money, about their son, Adam, about accountants and doctors, about the dishwasher and roof repairs. If they had ever loved each other, it was long, long over. They were just used to living together. They were each other’s bad habit. But Jim wanted her as strongly as she wanted him, because they were really one. They were one will, one life, one body. She saw that, even if he didn’t; and sometimes, already, he did.
23
Beverly
Beverly liked her new computer. She had resisted using one for years, for she could not see incurring the expense for no good reason. At first she had thought they were a fad, and then she thought she was past learning about them, since technical stuff had never been her strong suit. Now just to learn something new was a reassurance her life was
not completely over, that she was still alive upstairs. It was hard. She forgot more easily than she ever had, and concentration was difficult and strenuous. At least the computer opened up rather than closed down her world, shrinking since the night of her stroke.
Even with the large keys to type with, she was slow. The mouse was easier. Suzanne set her up on E-mail and showed her the Internet. She didn’t think any of her old friends did E-mail except Lucy, who had taught at CUNY for twenty-five years and had a computer before any of them. She carefully typed out a note on the computer to Lucy at Eighty-fifth Street, asking her if she was on E-mail. Sylvia would mail it for her. Beverly wanted to E-mail somebody. She asked Suzanne at breakfast the next morning. Suzanne printed out a list of the E-mail addresses of politicians.
Later that morning, Beverly composed an E-mail to the President about the problems of Medicare coverage. She wrote about all the people she had seen in the hospital and in the rehab center and what happened to them and how awful it was that people couldn’t be covered at home, where they were much better off than in a nursing home-dump, and it was less wasteful of money and resources. She wrote the letter for forty-five minutes. Then she hit “send” and went to bed. She was exhausted. But she was happy.
Now she could send the same letter to the senators from New York and the two from Massachusetts. She would find out the name of the representative for Brookline and send him one too. She was no longer helpless. She would collect useful E-mail addresses and harangue them all. It seemed much more intimate than writing a letter. She felt as if she was going right through their defenses, past their secretaries and assistants, straight into their faces. Tomorrow she would compose a letter on immigration policies. Then welfare. Then minimum wage. Suzanne showed her a site where she could monitor proposed legislation. She would have plenty to tell them all.