Three Women by Marge Piercy
“Jake?” They shook hands, rather shyly. She asked, “How was your trip?” Then forgot to listen to his answer. His handshake had been firm, his hand warm, almost hot.
Afterward she could not remember anything they said on the way to the restaurant. When they sat down at a table, he said, “You shouldn’t be nervous with me. I haven’t bitten anyone in several years. And I have been tested for rabies.”
That cut through her mental fog. She was beginning to feel desperate. They had not had a real conversation yet and she felt herself frozen into mechanical jabber. She was an experienced and competent litigator, seldom at a loss on her feet. She had pulled more than one case out of the fire with a brilliant closing, but here she was unable to make coherent contact. She had somehow expected him to be a vegetarian, but he said he ate just about anything. “Except ham and anchovies. I don’t know why. A childhood antipathy.”
She pulled herself together. “Have you ever spent time in the Boston area?”
“Is that like doing time? Sure, I went to Brandeis as an undergraduate. I was born on Long Island and then my family moved to Worcester. But it’s been close to twenty-five years.”
“It’s a big leap from the Bay Area. Climate, culture, how people relate. Different ocean, different orientation. You face west, we face east.”
“I thought if you had time, you might take me on a tour and let me look around. Not the tourist things. But neighborhoods. The kind of places I might live and shop and eat and hang out.”
“I’m free,” she said, although she had planned to work on her brief. “We’ll improvise.”
The food was good, and he had an appetite. As she began to relax, she began to eat. There was something about his voice, deep and resonant and quirky, that moved her. She liked hearing him talk. She asked him about his recent trip to Antarctica. He told her about acres of penguins. The breath of a whale—fishy, warm, that touched his face when she breached beside the small boat. Sterile mountains beautiful and grim. It was summer there in January, and the sun barely set, glittering blindingly off the ice. But often it was overcast and the wind cut through his clothes. He kept getting windburn. His eyes had a steadiness and intensity that made her keep catching on his gaze as if it were barbed. His hands were large for his size but finely shaped. He had presence. Of course: he was an organizer, a macher, a leader. Why should she be surprised that in the flesh, he radiated strength, energy like radiant heat? As they were leaving, he said, “Let’s take a walk around here, if you’re willing.”
They walked along the Charles together. The sun was out, the snow had melted the week before, and the temperature was above freezing. It was not yet spring, but it promised spring. The Charles was free of ice. Families of mallards paddled along. There was even a rower pushing the season.
“It’ll be a shock for you to go through winter again.”
“I lived up in the mountains for a couple of years. We had fierce winters. We were snowed in sometimes for a week.” He made a gesture up over his head. “That was my mountain man phase.”
“But for the last fifteen years, you’ve been living in Oakland, and you haven’t seen a snowflake or an icicle or a sleet storm.”
“Actually, in Antarctica,” he said mildly, “I saw quite a lot of ice. Besides, even at home, I did go through a couple of earthquakes and a fire that just missed my house by three blocks…. Are you trying to talk me out of this move?” He sat down on a bench in the sun and motioned her beside him. He turned to her then, taking her by the shoulder. “What are you afraid of?”
“In general? Death, accidents, disease, something happening to my daughters—”
“All right, let’s go at this another way. What do you want, Suzanne?”
“I want things to continue. I like my work. I like my house. I like my friends.”
“Everything just the way it is. No changes.”
“Well, life is never like that, is it? I’d like Elena to find her own place to live. I’d like my mother to make an effort to see me as I am, I’d like my dean to stop patronizing me—”
“And what do you want from me? Anything?”
“I don’t know,” she said in a much softer voice, almost choked. “What do you want?”
“I’ll show you.” He took her hand and stood. He kept her hand as they walked. “For two years we’ve been talking, we’ve been flirting, we’ve been sharing our minds. I don’t want it to be less real now. I want it to be more real.”
“I’m not…perhaps who I’ve seemed to be…I don’t…have affairs, go out with men, that sort of thing.” She was deeply, poignantly confused. She knew him and she didn’t know him at all. He was a close friend, an intimate confidant, a stranger.
“Obviously you’ve been with men in the past. Your daughters weren’t the result of virgin birth. You told me about their fathers.”
“I can’t believe how much I told you.”
“Believe it. Why not? You have some idea who I am.” With her arm tucked securely in his, he walked briskly back in the direction of the Square.
“It was easy in my office, alone there in the mornings, typing messages on a screen. I’m sure I came across as far more at ease, far more…sophisticated, far more interesting than the woman you see. I’m dynamite in a courtroom but so awkward right now I feel like a twelve-year-old.”
“You’re out of practice. But I’m not a set of skills to be mastered, not a brief to be prepared. I’m just a man who’s interested in you.”
Heat slammed up her body. She could think of absolutely nothing to say. Yes, she had entertained fantasies about Jake, but the best thing about them had been that they were fantasies. They cost her nothing. They did not make her vulnerable, being as easily put away as Rachel’s paper dolls had been, into a box covered with gold foil that had held chocolates. But this fantasy was out of its box.
“When you listed the things you want, you never mentioned love. Most people would. I would. Why not?”
“I suppose because I’m a realist.”
“And you don’t let yourself want what you don’t think you can have?”
“Something like that. Or something I think might harm me.”
“I won’t harm you. Intentionally. We all step on each other’s toes now and then.”
The heat of his hand on her arm made her imagine the heat of his body. He had remarked at lunch that he had a high metabolism and burned up food. His body felt like a little furnace glowing in the chilly air.
She felt giddy. This was all unreal. It was intoxicating and flattering and outside of her real life. He would go back to California and she would go home and it would be sealed into itself, whatever happened, whatever. For some reason, she felt safe now. She relaxed. He put his arm around her as they approached his hotel and she did not draw away. She felt like laughing aloud. Nobody would believe this was Suzanne the Sensible being led along to his hotel room, which was obviously where they were headed. This man had emerged from her computer and he would vanish back into it. Lately she had been having occasional hot flashes and she had missed a couple of periods last year, including one in December. Her gynecologist told her it was the onset of menopause. Change of life. Perhaps one aspect of that change was hallucinating this man whose arm was around her waist, whose hip occasionally bumped hers as they walked, as they crossed Mass. Ave., as they entered the lobby of the Inn.
She felt ridiculously pleased and excited, even aroused as they went up in the elevator and walked along the corridor open on one side to the central atrium, then around a corner to his room. It was neat. He had his laptop set up and several folders on the desk. No clothes lay around, no wet towels.
He put his hands on her hips. “We’ve both been moving toward this for two years. Don’t be coy with me now, Suzanne. Don’t you want to know how we are together? Haven’t you imagined this time and again?”
“Of course,” she said honestly. She did not add that imagining was all she had expected.
He kissed
It had been so many years since she had put anything in her mouth besides food and a toothbrush, she was surprised how quickly her old skill at giving head came back to her. She ran her tongue around the head of his prick, then took him in her mouth. She still felt giddy. He was going down on her before she suddenly thought of contraception. She hadn’t been on the pill in over a decade. Lectures she had given her daughters about unprotected sex came back to her with a sudden rush. “Uh…do you have a condom?”
He showed her the packet and she helped him put it on. He hurt her a little, although he entered slowly and she was wet. It was hard to separate the pleasure from the pain, the sharpness from the urgency. He settled into a steady rhythm and she bounded up to meet him, thrust for thrust. He was waiting for her and she concentrated. As excited as she was, she did not think she could come. She was too nervous with him. After several minutes, she faked an orgasm, as she had remembered doing with Sam. He moved then into a harder rhythm, building toward his own climax, and as he pounded into her, the almost forgotten rush of warmth and power and pleasure began building in her until she exploded just before he did. Afterward she felt like laughing, because she had made much less noise during her real orgasm than she had when she mimicked pleasure.
They lay for a while loosely holding each other. Then they showered and she began his tour of neighborhoods. It was clear they would make love again later. Have sex, at any rate. Although she felt close to him, she did not trust the intimacy. Nor did she fear it. Some women went on spa vacations to feel better. She was having a one-day affair.
7
Beverly
Beverly got Elena when she called. “So how come the only beauty in the whole family is answering the phone? How come I’m so lucky?”
“Only you’d say so, Grandma. It’s my good luck to get you. So how are you doing? Did you get it on with that writer guy you were interested in?”
“I’m bumping along, what else can I do? I haven’t had any luck with him yet, but I haven’t given him up for dead. So how’s the restaurant?”
“I was fired.”
“Those kind of jobs, they’d just as soon get rid of you as exploit you. Hang around too long and they figure maybe you’ll get something on them. The fish is rotten. The kitchen is full of roaches.”
“All of that!” Elena laughed. “I got evicted and so I moved home. I’m looking for work. You know, Mother doesn’t really like having me around. I’m always in the way. I always was.”
“Elena, nobody can not love you! You and your mother, you just never understand each other. You’re more like me, you’re spontaneous and you get into trouble and you have a big mouth and men are always wanting things from you. She never does anything off-the-cuff. She’d have liked you to make a reservation six months ago. Mother, I plan to be fired next February and then I plan to be evicted, so you can expect me around the first of March.”
“Grandma, you have the wickedest tongue. So how come you called?”
“I’m raising money for some tenants fighting eviction—”
“Ah, you want to put the bite on Mother.”
“Well, she can afford it. She makes more money than the rest of the family combined. Look, I’ll call back tomorrow evening. Where is she?”
“Taking some guy to the airport. I don’t know where she met him, maybe at some conference?”
“Suzanne has got herself a boyfriend?”
“I been trying to figure that one. He didn’t sleep here. Frankly I think he’s just a friend of a friend, whatever. But she got decked out to see him.”
“Let me know. How about yourself, my beauty girl?”
“Nobody I give a shit about, frankly. Just guys.”
“Wait till you get to my age to be disillusioned. By now either I already did a thing with every old geezer I meet, or I might as well have, because I know his whole story from his ex-wives and ex-girlfriends. Or I had one just like him in ’fifty-five.”
“I want something more special, something purer, something more intense. Something that matters, Grandma. Not a guy like a Diet Coke, not a guy like a hamburger. I want to be moved. I want to be forced to care. I want to love, really love, again. Do you think I’m too burned out?”
“No, precious. You’re full of fire. You just need someone strong and right for you.”
The next afternoon, Beverly went up to the Bronx to walk the picket line with her friends in the union. They were good kids. They worked so hard and they got so little. Her heart went out to them. She talked with dozens of them, some in Spanish, some in French as best she could, the Haitians, the brothers from Mozambique. It was a cold raw day with a wind that felt like it was peeling the skin off her face. They had bitter coffee in a plastic container, and one of the women went off for sandwiches and chips. After she had marched the line for a couple of hours, her knee began to give her trouble. After two guys from the American Nazi party had beat her up in Central Park years ago at an antiwar rally, her knee had never been the same. They liked to target the women, especially to gang up on women they guessed were Jewish.
She had to stand on the subway going home as it was already rush hour, and she just stayed on the express to Ninety-sixth. When she got to the top of the steps, she felt dizzy. She dragged herself along the twelve long blocks to her apartment past the unisex beauty parlors, the theater that showed Spanish-language films, the shoe shops, the hardware store, the nail salons, the gym, the travel agencies. She was too tired even to stop and pick up something to eat. She thought about chicken from the take-out place but she didn’t have the energy. Maybe she had something she could defrost. She was beat. If that Chino-Cuban place that had been on the corner still existed, they would have delivered. She was struck by how as she went through the streets of her neighborhood, she marked distances by landmarks that no longer existed. Oh, that’s a block from where the New Yorker bookstore used to be. Yeah, she’s upstairs from where Murray’s Sturgeon was before he moved. Turn left at where the Thalia was. A map of ghosts.
She let herself drop on the couch in her apartment. Mao came and lay on her chest. He felt heavy, but she was too tired to push him off. In a way it had been nice to have Marta and Jim here. She enjoyed the gossip about Suzanne, things Suzanne would never tell her. She enjoyed having an independent relationship with Suzanne’s best friend, and she enjoyed having a good-looking man like Jim around. Still, the apartment was small. Although the couch opened into a double bed, there was only one bathroom. She was not much of a hostess, but she did run out for bagels and lox and cream cheese, and make them coffee. It turned out Jim was no longer drinking coffee. Beverly sighed. People increasingly seemed to define themselves by what they didn’t do: didn’t smoke, didn’t eat fat, didn’t eat meat or anything palatable. Didn’t wear leather. Didn’t drink. Didn’t. If you ever said you loved something, they would say you were addicted to it. What a boring bunch of people the next generation had turned out to be. Jim was a handsome man, a little younger than Marta, but he kept himself up. Since he’d lost his teaching job and become a therapist, he spent a lot of time at the gym. She had never known anybody who worked out the way people did now. Guys were never hesitant in the old days to take off their shirts. Everybody f
Two boys in the neighborhood had drowned last September, jumping into the river to swim in their clothes. Men did that more often these days, because they were getting to be as vain and ashamed of their bodies as women. They were embarrassed to strip to their underwear. They might not look like an underwear ad from the subway, Calvin Klein and his ghouls. So they went swimming in their clothes to cool off, and the waterlogged oversize pants dragged them to their deaths.
But Jim was proud of his body. He liked to show it off. For a while he had practiced distance running, but then he had taken up weights instead. She really liked him, but she didn’t see the point in wasting all that time heaving and grunting around a gym, paying out good money to pretend to be a teenager. He was some kind of therapist, she had never gotten it straight. The truth was, she thought all therapists did was persuade people that problems were theirs, not the system’s. Why blame General Motors or Coors or General Dynamic, if you could blame Mommy? Jim had been a college teacher, but in a budget crunch, he had been laid off. Like so many. She’d never had a profession beyond being an organizer, although she had worked at a great many jobs. But none of them had meant a thing besides a paycheck and a chance to do some political work. Sometimes, just a paycheck.