All of her shy apprehension was draining away from her, she felt physically ill with jealousy. She had seen his wife getting out of their car late one Thursday afternoon two or three weeks ago, dressed in sandals and red satin jogging shorts, the kind with the upside-down tulip cleft at the sides. The recollection made her feel inadequate and unsure of herself, a too-easy blusher. A face, she thought (trying to cheer herself up with a bad joke) that too much wears its heart on its sleeve. She also understood that Declan was only looking at her as he had planned to look at her before coming down from upstairs and so wasn’t really seeing her. As for the breathing exercises he was now standing up to recommend to her, she couldn’t at all attend to them, and when he told her he’d made arrangements to go away for two weeks to China, where he would be visiting acupuncturists in Shanghai and Beijing, “and also for a bit of a holiday,” she thought yes, I was expecting this, I just didn’t know it was coming so soon.
She climbed the stone steps up into the day, dead-hearted, and was surprised to see a new visitor waiting in an old Volkswagen Beetle parked under the elms. A gypsyish young madonna in a bright yellow skirt, she was sitting smoking in
the open doorway of her Beetle, watching the world go by from it, barefoot and pleased with herself in the hot sunlight.
Claire’s car was parked out in the open sun, a little way off from the rectory. She said hi to the madonna, and the madonna, her eyes cool with a younger woman’s appraisal, answered in a deep voice, almost a man’s voice, “Hi there.”
In the furtive second glance Claire stole at the girl under cover of picking a leaf off the windshield of her car she saw that she had a disfiguring birthmark. At first glance she had taken it to be elm-shadow; this time she saw that it had a mulberry stain to it. But it was huge, it ran down the right side of her face and down her neck to bloom at her throat. Too big to be a birthmark, it must have been caused by a burn. Unless it was the symptom of some awful medical condition. The young woman did not seem to be cowed by it though.
Claire drove bumpily down the lane to the highway, and once she was on the road again she thought about Declan’s wife, her perfection. But wasn’t there always something surprisingly unsurprising about such perfect women? Less perfect women had their good days and bad days, their faces flew open or brimmed with feeling, they could look hurt, they could look euphoric, they could look a thousand ways, they were flawed and variable, there was even a proverb that saw right through the kind of perfect beauty Declan’s wife possessed, an Italian proverb (Italian or Spanish): A woman who is always beautiful is never beautiful. But she found herself wanting to believe it more than she really did believe it, because driving back to the city she wasn’t able to think of Declan’s wife with anything but envy. She also thought of Declan’s power to make a woman inventive. Because this was where his power did come from, with
women, at last she could see it, he would come into a room, and a woman would think, This man is going to force me out of myself in some way, he’s going to force me into invention, I must love him. Even a woman as physically unimpeachable as his wife was in all likelihood capable of being frightened by him into invention. And she pictured the legions of other women who were probably in love with him too, and it seemed to her that if she ever could have an affair with him it would be a relationship made truly romantic by its prohibitions, it would be the modern version of the love of the woodcutter’s son for the king’s daughter.
But meditations on her jealousy and the other women he saw got her somewhere she hadn’t expected to get. It was as if the thought of jealousy and other women (“other women” by now including his wife) had a life of its own and had hopped and skipped its way to its own conclusions, and one of the conclusions it had hopped to was that there had been something fishy about his story of lying on the rug and crying in the arms of his wife. Not that she didn’t believe it had happened. She believed it had happened, but now she saw the reason. And the reason had to do with the intensity of his emotional bond to her
self
. This was why he had started to cry in the first place. By crying (and crying in the arms of his wife, no less) he had absolved himself of the guilt he felt for loving one of the women who came to see him, and in the process had even managed to keep himself away from the love object or whatever it was she had become to him now. With this thought something in her heart eased, turned hopeful. It threw a whole different light on everything he had said to her, on everything he had done. Now she could re-run the whole puzzling scene
over again and pick out small bits of evidence that her hurt feelings hadn’t allowed her to spot earlier. Now she could even see that there had been something very watchful and even cunning about the way he had told her the story about lying in the arms of his wife. Now she could see that he had been using it to make her jealous, to use her jealousy to goad her into some action that would force them to confront each other at last, out of the true and desperate feeling of their true and desperate hearts.
She tried to imagine describing the afternoon to Libi. But she could all too easily imagine what Libi would say. “And that’s supposed to prove that Farrell loves you? Oh, please.”
So answer me this then: If he was as innocent as he tried to make out, then why did he bother to tell me he’d been crying in the arms of his wife?
Because he’s unprofessional, that’s why.
But it was none of my business!
So?
So that’s the clue.
Oh, please. Or, more simply and even more woundingly, “Please.” And both of these pleases translating to: Please don’t torment yourself with such silly hopes.
But then that’s the trouble with passionless people, she thought, thinking of Libi and just in time paying enough attention to the traffic to brake for a red light, they lack imagination so much it’s pathetic. And so of course it’s only natural that they live for the pleasure of being able to say to the people who have real feelings “Are you sure you aren’t just imagining things?” It’s because they can’t bear other people’s happiness, or their unhappiness either, she thought, that they disapprove so much of what they call, in their mincing, incredulous voices,
“the imagination.” She remembered all the times she had wanted to grab Libi by the wrist and say to her in a hard little voice, “I know the way he looks at me. I was there and you weren’t, so please don’t tell me I don’t even have the right to see it the way I see it.” And, besides, when she looked all around her, at the lives of the married people she knew, they seemed just so dull, more filled with resentments than pleasures. It’s the future I need to be saved from, she thought, and I need to be saved from it by love.
G
reen was the colour for this particular fall, at least in this boutique: corduroys and velvets in hunter green, forest green, Nile green and bile green. Even the sales clerk, a sour and quiet girl who was, really, much too sour for her gentle Renaissance clothes, was wearing green velvet: a quilted green velvet jacket, its pearl buttons drooping from the gold sticks of their delicate stems.
But then fall is the medieval season, thought Claire, and she couldn’t help but feel the deep solemn thrill of it as she made her way past the racks of serious Shakespearean colours: blood and plum, forest green and burgundy. And claret, too, for the dresses whose sleeves were cut to show slits of peony silk. So that when Libi said, “For God’s sake, Vornoff, let’s go up to the next level, we’re caught in a time warp down here,” she felt a little regretful to be leaving a place that was so religious about the romance of dresses.
Jazz was playing up in the brighter light on the upper level, and in the first shop they came into there were carousels of lime tops and white pants for cruises, and long rows of palm-tree
wrap dresses in glazed lime or indigo cotton. Libi went over to a hill of sweaters that had been tumbled onto a high table next to the windows. She picked out three and brought them to Claire, and in a voice hushed at the prospect of ownership she said, “Feel these, this oatmeal one is made out of wool from the Scottish Highlands and this one has insets of chocolate suede, isn’t it terrific?”
Claire held the sweater with the suede insets to herself in front of one of the mirrors, then crossed the floor to a wide table piled high with a silky spill of striped tops, spotted jackets. She pulled a leopard-print jacket out by its sleeve, then said in a low voice to Libi, “I’m going to try this one on, just for the hell of it.”
In the change room, she slipped on the silky jacket and saw a transformation take place: the way it was cut, in panels, made her look sexy, a woman of the world. She would have to have it, never mind the price. She shoved her hair up as if she planned to step into a bath, vamped at herself in the mirror. It was on sale too, as if it had been ordained that she should find it and buy it.
When she came out of the change room, she looked for Libi, then saw her come walking quickly over to her, grim with a shopper’s efficiency, a white linen skirt folded over one arm like a napkin. And when she said to her, “Lib, where can I pay for this?” Libi pointed the sales clerk out to her. “Over there. The lady in the bumblebee top,” and she pulled Claire along by the cuff of her windbreaker to lead her to the island where the cashier was waiting for them up on her platform, the silk shirts Libi had chosen lying in a heap next to the cash register, then they both stood and humbly waited while the clerk, a
wrecked-looking blonde in a black leather mini, her face a middle-aged cowboy’s face, her body an anorexic adolescent’s — it was from working with Declan that Claire now saw people’s heads and bodies as improbable cartooned combinations — calculated the cost of the morning.
“Yes indeed, my dear Vornoff,” said Libi as they were walking along Sussex, looking for a place where they could have a cappuccino and maybe soup or a muffin, “your little jungle jacket is very, very trash glam. You can now quite honestly call yourself a true fashionista.”
But in the restaurant they talked about Libi and Rolf’s move to Regina while they spooned up a salty soup whose disks of fat floated among weedy black herbs and tendrils of chicken, a vile soup that tasted no better than chicken-flavoured hot greasy water. “My mother’s been visiting us for the last five days,” Libi told Claire. “I forgot to tell you. To help us pack. Which she’s more or less been totally useless at.”
And when they got to Libi’s house there Mrs. Turnbull indeed was, pitted as a stone beneath her military wedge of grey hair and sitting in a white wicker rocker up on the verandah, holding a heavy book on her lap. She called down to Libi to ask her if it was time for tea.
“Uno momento, Mother dear, I just have to try on my spectacular new togs.”
Claire sat in one of the wicker chairs next to Mrs. Turnbull and looked sideways at her book (
The Great War
), then aimed her glance down at Mrs. Turnbull’s orthopaedic shoes. They were tan shoes with tiny pinprick holes in them, like digestive
biscuits. Then she looked down at her own feet in her tired sandals and thought, I don’t want to get old! But she also thought: The other beautiful thing about the leopard jacket is that it can be worn either tucked in or left out, and when it’s not tucked, it will be as elegant as a spotted short silky coat.
As soon as she decently could, she excused herself to go into the house to look for Libi. The whole place smelled of cold coffee and carpets. She passed by the cats as she walked through the front room. One of them was asleep on a windowsill, but the other, sitting alertly up on the sofa, studied her for a moment, then blinked at her in a way that made her feel she’d been photographed. Something about the blink, its perfect noiseless click.
She went on down the hall to the kitchen, where she was met by a single word: Declan. Since she’d started seeing him again it was as if they were conspiring in some guilty thing that could never be mentioned. Someone had left a beret on the kitchen table, parked next to a teacup. She thought it must belong to Rolf. She went back down the hall. “Lib?”
“Upstairs!”
So then it was up the cramped stairway to find Libi in her new white skirt pulling her new shirts on and off, her eyes in her mirror the skeptically listening eyes of a person being told a story she considers somewhat outlandish but is deciding to reserve judgement on until the story is done. But then she was glancing back at Claire with a nearly imploring look: “Is this a mistake? Tell me the truth now.”
Claire said no, no. She sat down on the bed. “It’s terrific, you look really great in it …”
But the atmosphere in the room was claustrophobic and she was made even more uneasy by the flashes of what she could
see of Libi’s pale breasts squeezed together in the stitched rosy cones of her satin brassiere. She tried not to look while at the same time her not looking made her remember the little squirms of ignited forbiddenness she used to feel as she was watching her mother dress or undress (her mother pulling off the pale swish of her nightgown to reveal the plump and half-tanned grandeur of her breasts) or the way she, the toddler pervert, would lie odalisque-style on the end of her parents’ big bed to watch her mother begin to draw on, with a nearly professional glamour, her shining nylons. All of this dressing being almost as exciting as all the
un
dressing, all the unzippings and unhookings until the final thrilling unhooking: the breasts unlocked to spill out, warm pinkish moons tipped by what looked like brown gumdrops. Which made her wonder if she would remember this day after Libi was gone, if it would take on a kind of memorial glow, Libi yanking the new shirts on and off, Libi taking her into the hushed little cathedral for dresses.
“I’m going to miss you so much,” she said to Libi. And it was true, she would. Why then was she also so longing for her to go?
On the bus home, Claire glanced back at the other passengers and saw a boy and girl who were clearly new lovers. The girl playfully pushed at the boy, hugged him, whispered to him, ostentatiously let her head collapse against his shoulder. While the boy couldn’t seem to lose his melancholy listening air as he shyly kissed her behind one of her ears, everything about his face and the way he was standing seeming to say, “I would do anything in the world for you, but please don’t embarrass me
in public,” and then he was bashfully breathing her in as he hid his face in her hair while farther down at the back a man in a navy raincoat sat pressing his lips together as if to prevent an escape. Indigestion? But then Claire saw that his eyes were welling with tears and that he was biting his lips in order to contain spillage. She looked quickly away, humbled, having been brought up short by the discovery that it could still come as a surprise to her to see that others also suffered.