Authors: Nancy Thayer
Indeed people could see them. As they turned to hurry toward Tom’s car, Suzanna caught a glimpse of several of the party guests openly staring from the windows of the house. She didn’t care. She didn’t care what anybody saw. She only wanted to be in bed with Tom. They went to her apartment because it was closer, and fell into bed with an urgency that made them clumsy, and they laughed at their own clumsiness, and Suzanna’s heart filled with joy at this: their friendly easy laughter in the midst of powerful lust. When they had finished making love, they laughed again, to see each other so disheveled, Suzanna still wearing her necklace and earrings, Tom still in his socks and shirt and tie.
“My goodness, what a performance we gave your friends tonight!” she said, smiling as she unbuttoned his shirt. She did not know then how her words would come to haunt her in the years to come.
For Tom turned out to be, in spite of his Ph.D., a bit of a fool. It took Suzanna a long time to realize this, and in the meantime she married him and they had two children and established a life together. Tom was as addicted to popularity as an alcoholic to alcohol. The need for it ruled his life. For him life was always a drama, and he was not happy unless he was the star. This made him a hard worker, an excellent classroom instructor, and a great help to the college trustees, who could watch him charm the
alumni into generous donations. But Tom was not as brilliant as many of his other colleagues, and since charm was not a quality essential to good research, he found time and again that his colleagues’ papers were accepted by academic journals and his own were not. Over the ten years of their marriage, Tom’s hair thinned, exposing a rather knobby forehead, and he accumulated unwanted weight—he was aging physically, as who does not? But he continued to be encircled by eternally youthful, muscular students and new young faculty members, so he felt his aging even more strongly by contrast. In public he continued with his winning ways, but in the privacy of his home he grew sullen. He did not need to charm Suzanna anymore; she was his already and for good, his wife. He cared for her in his own way, and was grateful to her for all that she provided: love, a home, a pretty life. He liked bringing students home to dinner so they could admire his house with its wood-burning stove and solar greenhouse, his study with its books and stacks of correspondence, his children with their rosy cheeks and sturdy bodies. But of course nothing could compare with the scene he and Suzanna had first set: their desperate passion in the living room and front yard of a faculty member’s house for all the world to see. Nothing really compares with sex for drama.
He could have had affairs with some of his students; he was offered opportunities, and some of his colleagues would have envied him. But he did love Suzanna enough to stop short of hurting her in this way. Instead he slowly grew to begrudge her because she was growing older also, and heavier, and because she was a mother, tied down to the worries of running a house and keeping people well fed and healthy. He resented her for providing the commonplaces that he could not have lived without. It was not very long into their marriage that he began to turn the full force of his petulance against Suzanna, as if she were responsible for redressing the grievances he suffered.
She continued to love him, but her affections of necessity took on a maternal tone. In what came to be the last year of their marriage, she dreaded all social occasions because of the risk involved. If Tom felt he had been sufficiently admired and appreciated, he came home happy, and made love to Suzanna with something close to élan. But if he felt slighted in any way, his mood turned black the moment tot in the car to drive home, and nothing could cheer him up. Then he would rail against Suzanna, against the boredom of their marriage, the weight on her hips, the pressures of providing for a family which kept him from doing significant research.
One fall almost exactly ten years after they first met, Suzanna and Tom were at a
dinner party, and everyone was rather silly with wine. Yet Suzanna was alert and worried, for at the end of the dinner table, next to Tom, sat the newest member of the English department, a young woman who was a guest lecturer in creative writing. She had just published a book of short stories which had received literary acclaim, and she was young and slim and actually very beautiful, with long blond hair. And Suzanna could see from her end of the table that this new young woman was not adoring Tom at all; she was polite to him, but just not interested. Suzanna watched Tom’s motions grow wider, larger, in his desperation. She heard his voice grow more hearty.
“Will you go away for Thanksgiving vacation or stay in Londonton?” the man across the table from the blond woman asked.
“I’ll probably stay in Londonton,” she replied, smiling. “My family’s all in Arizona, too far away to travel for just four days.”
“Ha, Thanksgiving!” Tom bellowed. He leaned his arms on the table, as oblivious of the spoon he knocked to the floor as if he were drunk, and leered. “Imagine the plight of the poor Thanksgiving turkey—he only gets eaten once a year.”
Tom laughed at his own lewd joke, but the blonde only stared at him with complete deadpan disdain, then looked away. After a brief awkward silence, everyone else at the table broke into the sort of nervous babble that follows a social gaffe, and the moment was over. But Suzanna was chilled with apprehension. It was the first time that Tom had stepped over the line and tried to get attention in such a stupid way. And of course he knew he had been stupid; that made it worse.
They fought that night—or Tom fought, while Suzanna cried. She knew she had no power to help get the spotlight back to Tom; she was not beautiful, and she was getting older, she was just a nice elementary-school teacher, not destined ever to be famous or distinguished. She liked her life, but feared that her marriage was doomed: she could do nothing more for Tom. And she was tired of nurturing him. In a way he had become a full-time emotional invalid. This life they were leading did not bring out the best in either of them.
But they had been married for ten years, and their daughter Priscilla was five, their son Seth only three; they
were
a family. So it was with mixed hopes that Suzanna at last brought out the crucial word. Divorce. Perhaps, she suggested, they should get a divorce. She hoped that Tom would agree, because she wanted to be free of him and his everlasting needs; but she also hoped for the impossible—that Tom would be so
devastated by the very thought of divorce that he would promise to change, that he
would
change.
She had only to watch his face as she spoke to see just which hope would be fulfilled. Tom looked away from her; his eyes went sly. And she could see how he calculated the different possibilities in his mind. On the one hand, he would lose his wife, his children, his pretty home. But on the other—divorce! At last, at least, a drama! He would be invited to dinner by sympathetic women. He could sleep with young slim blondes without any censure. And if he made an ass of himself, he did not have to bear Suzanna’s tolerant insights; he could be miserable alone, in privacy.
“Well,” he said, raising his eyes to Suzanna, “yes. I think you’re right. I think it’s best if we get a divorce.” He tried to speak with the necessary solemnity, but he could not suppress his joy at the thought of a new life, a new adventure, and as he stared at Suzanna, a huge, uncontrollable smile spread across his face. Suzanna turned away. She sank down onto the sofa and began to cry. It hurt to see him so happy at the thought of living without her. But later, as the weeks passed, it was the memory of that smile which set her free.
Tom moved through the divorce with the ease of a duck through water. This was his element—drama, phones ringing, long sincere discussions over drinks with sympathetic colleagues, hearty greetings of good cheer from people in the community who had only nodded at him before. In fact, this private crisis seemed to perk up the town. Happily married couples felt their bonds reinforced by the contrast of their tightly knit lives with the Blairs’ rapidly unraveling one. Divorced and single women, even college students, suddenly recognized Tom as an intriguing and sexual object now that he had come out from under the proprietary mantle of his marriage. The world was just a little more exciting. More parties were given. Tom, seeming younger by virtue of his new bachelorhood, bestowed on those around him a temporary sheen of youthfulness, like a child’s chin shining yellow when a buttercup is held near. For a few months people gave, instead of the usual staid cocktail parties, rock-and-roll parties, masquerade parties, disco parties. Couples turned off the television and lay in bed at night analyzing the Blairs’ marriage and their newfound duties as friends: Could they invite Suzanna and Tom to the same party? Or should they plan two separate parties? What exactly were their responsibilities? Their new self-importance made them unconsciously fond of Tom, and slightly cautious and resentful of Suzanna—they were afraid she might act sad and
depress everyone. But they felt expansive around Tom, and in turn buoyed Tom up, so he was able to see himself as a ship tossed on a turbulent sea, and all the while he was quite safe in his own small pond of life.
For Suzanna it was not so simple. She had first of all to worry about the children, to explain the divorce to them, to wrap her energies around them protectively, to remain alert to any signs of trauma. Tom saw Seth and Priscilla only on Tuesday nights, when he took them out to dinner at Howard Johnson’s, where he was almost certainly joined by some other family who found the trio brave and sweet. He gave Suzanna the house when they divorced, and enough child support to make them moderately comfortable, but he was, as he was the first to admit with charming honesty, just not very good at dealing with little kids, and Suzanna was left with the burden of emotional care. When she drove them, each morning at seven-thirty, to the local day-care center so that she could go on to her job at the elementary school, she would often pass Tom as he flashed by in his new peacock-blue warmup suit. He had taken up jogging, and did calisthenics and laps at the college gym and pool each day, getting back in shape. Suzanna would watch him go by, a handsome, newly lean man, and then she would look at herself in the rearview mirror of the car. She was beginning to have gray streaks in her hair, and she did not foresee the time when she would ever have the energy to teach, take care of her children as she wanted, and exercise her body back into a youthful shape.
For a few months she was depressed—despairing. She had to leave a large spring-break party because Tom had appeared with a marvelous-looking very young girl at his side; she could not bear it. But her children remained healthy, and Suzanna’s friends rallied around, and then men began to ask her out, and her life began to take on that tingling feeling of a limb that has been long asleep now coming back awake. There were not many men to date—it wasn’t like college had been—because there simply were not many single men in Londonton. Still, she felt those old gambling joys returning. Once more when she went to a concert or party or restaurant or even to the post office, she felt the possibilities of the event—she might meet someone.
She decided to work on her master’s degree in order to raise herself up on the school pay scale. The college in Londonton did not offer graduate courses, so she had to go to the state university thirty miles away in Southmark. But she decided that was fine. She would like the quiet lonely drive which gave her time to think, and the sense of going off to someplace new, where there would be ideas—and people—she had not
encountered before. The class met on Saturday afternoons. Suzanna wrote this schedule on her kitchen wall calendar, and it seemed that the calendar and her life took on a new weight of importance.
The first day of class, however, she was as much frightened as excited. She walked from the parking lot to the large stone building that housed her class, oblivious to the natural beauty of the rolling countryside around the college and to the brisk fall air. She was aware only of the young lithe students who passed her on the walk, and she realized how much of her recent life had been spent in the company of little children or their parents. The people at the college were exotic to her by virtue of their age, and she shrank a bit to see them, feeling by contrast old, plump, and pale. And when she entered the building, the old first-day fears returned full-force: she was afraid she would be late, or early, or that someone would see her studying the classroom numbers so seriously, and snicker at her.
When she thought she had found the right room, she plunged in and took a seat in the first row. To her relief, she spotted a woman much like herself seated next to her.
“Is this Introduction to Interpersonal Psychology?” Suzanna asked.
“God, I hope so,” the woman said. “I feel as insecure as one of my second-graders.”
They laughed and struck up a conversation, and Suzanna began to relax. Looking about her, she saw there was a mix of students—young and old, male and female, bored and nervous. It was going to be okay. Suzanna took a deep breath and prepared herself to concentrate now on the subject matter.
Dr. Madeline Meade taught the psychology course. When she entered the room, the class stopped talking and came to a casual but focused attention.
How beautiful she is, Suzanna thought
.
She was tall, long-legged, slim. She was wearing loose cotton khaki trousers, a white cotton shirt, a navy blazer, small gold earrings, several gold bracelets and rings. Her light brown hair was held back from her face with two tortoiseshell combs. She wore no makeup. Her eyes were blue and striking, her cheekbones high and prominent, her smile dazzling. She moved about the front of the room, introducing herself and the course, writing on the blackboard, leaning on the desk, and Suzanna, watching, felt a physical thump in her lower abdomen, as if she had been hit. Her body went still, and alert.
It happened very fast. Suzanna Blair, who until that moment had never entertained the idea of loving a woman, fell in love with Madeline Meade that day. Of course she did not realize it at first. She only noticed what exquisitely long and slender hands the professor had, and how lean and graceful her body was; but then Suzanna had grown up in the practice of noticing other women’s bodies and comparing them to her own, continually surveying the competition. She did not think that she had fallen in love—she did not think at all. She was just so completely alive in the present moment, and completely happy to be able to look at this woman, to hear her voice, to see her gestures. The two hours ended so suddenly; Suzanna felt dismayed. She wanted to approach the instructor as some of the other students were doing, ask a question—any question—but she could think of nothing to say, and so she gathered up her books and notebooks and left.