Morning (29 page)

A half hour passed intolerably slowly. The two women cleaned the living room, dining room, and kitchen, chatting all the while, dissembling. Just when Sara thought she could stand it no longer, that she would turn to Annie and let tears streak down her face while she bawled out her worst fears, there was a sound at the door and Steve came in.

“Hi,” he said. “Where’d everybody go?”

“The clock struck twelve,” Annie said, grinning. “They all turned into pumpkins.”

“What took you so long?” Sara asked, keeping her voice casual. She wanted to scream the words at him.

“Well, I had to take the babysitter home,” Steve said, “and then I stayed a few minutes to talk to Mary. Poor kid. Bill has such a temper.”

“I know,” Annie said. “Even when he’s not in a bad mood he’s scary. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him be really pleasant.”

“I guess he thinks that artists are exempt from ordinary rules,” Steve said.

“Was he home? Is Mary going to be okay?” Annie asked.

“No, he wasn’t home, and Mary said he probably wouldn’t wander in until early
in the morning. He’s got drinking buddies he hangs out with. She’s fine. She’s not afraid of him, she just gets tired of him sometimes.”

On the way home in the car, Sara waited for Steve to say something else, to give her a fuller explanation. Surely he owed her that. He knew how she felt about Mary. And he had been gone a long time. But he said nothing. He drove in silence, occupied with his thoughts, and his silence was like fuel to the flame of anger that burned in Sara’s stomach and finally blazed up when they entered the house.

“Did you kiss her?” Sara asked, her voice accusing and grim.

“What?” Steve said, looking surprised.

“Oh, come off it,” Sara said. “You heard me.” Cramps spread in waves across her body and down her thighs. She could feel the heavy blood pushing its swollen way through her. Just so was her anger mushrooming its way upward from her body, expanding into a black cloud of wrath she could no longer contain.

“No, I didn’t kiss her. Jesus, Sara,” Steve said. He walked away from her, up the stairs to their bedroom.

Sara followed, feeling her body shaking with rage. “Well, did you hold her? Comfort her? Did you ‘comfort’
poor Mary
?” Her voice was twisted with sarcasm.

Steve sat on the foot of the bed to take off his shoes. “No, I didn’t comfort her,” he said, his voice even and martyred. “I did talk to her. I mostly listened to her. She’s unhappy.”

“And she thinks you can make her happy. Right? Right?” Sara stood in the doorway, glaring at her husband. One part of her mind lifted up and away from her body, and, hovering somewhere in the north corner of their bedroom ceiling, stared down at Sara in amazement. Where did this harpy come from? What did she think she was doing?

“Sara, I’m tired. I wish you would just drop it,” Steve said.

“You go off and leave the party, leave me alone at the party, with all your friends knowing you’ve gone off with your old lover, you go off alone with her for over half an hour, and you want me to just act like nothing happened?” Sara said. Suddenly her anger became all confused with fear and she began to cry.

“Oh, Sara.” Steve sighed. “I hate all this so much, don’t you know it? I hate it when you’re jealous. Why can’t you trust me? Why can’t you believe me? I love you. I don’t love anyone else. I don’t love Mary. I just feel incredibly sorry for her. But I wouldn’t
do
anything with her. It’s just stupid of you to be jealous this way.”

Sara crossed the room and sat on the bed, as far away from Steve as she could get and still manage to find purchase. She huddled up against the headboard. “I can’t help being jealous,” she said. “When I see the way she looks at you. I saw her with you tonight. The way she took your hand and put it on her stomach. The way you smiled at her. The way she smiled at you.” She looked up at Steve, who sat at the end of the bed, his elbows on his knees, his head lowered into his hands. She waited, but he said nothing. His silence goaded her on. “Did you feel the baby move?” Sara asked accusingly. “Did you like touching her? Did you wish she were your wife and that were your baby?”

Steve didn’t answer. He only sat, head obscured in his hands.

Sara stared, tears streaking down her face. Then, startling herself, she grabbed a book from the bedside table and threw it across the room. It thudded against the wall and fell to the floor. “Goddamn it!” she screamed. “If you’re going to go off alone with your old lover, the least you can do is talk to me. If you want me, that is! If you don’t, then at least have the decency to tell me. Or I swear I’ll leave. I’ll pack my bags and leave and you’ll never see me again. That’s what you would like, isn’t it? Then you could be rid of me, and you could marry Mary and have babies with her. She could give you all the children you need.”

“Shut up, Sara,” Steve said. “Please just shut up.”

Sara was so astonished that she did go quiet. Steve had never said anything like that before. She rose, went into the bathroom and changed her pad, which was soaked with blood, rinsed her face with cold water, trying to regain some kind of control, then calmly went back into the bedroom. She took her suitcase from the closet and opened it on the bed. She would leave him. It was all over. She couldn’t believe it was happening.

“Sara,” Steve said. “Look. There’s something you should know. Christ, Sara, would you stop packing and sit down and listen to me?”

Sara looked at Steve. His face was strangely contorted. She didn’t think she had ever seen him look quite so sickened. She sat down on the bed, looking at Steve, not touching him.

“When Mary and I were going together,” Steve began, then stopped. When he spoke again, his voice took on the cramped tone of a man holding back tears. “When Mary and I were going together,” he said again, slowly, “she knew I didn’t want to marry her. I had told her, often, that I wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment with her. I was always honest about that. You have to believe me. I never led her on. I told her I didn’t
love her anymore. But we kept on—going together—now and then, out of, oh, habit or convenience, I don’t know. Anyway, I got her pregnant.”

Sara’s heart was scalded with pain. The fire of all her anger turned back on her now and she burned at the stake of this new knowledge.

“It was an accident,” Steve was saying. “On my part, at least. I mean, I thought she was using birth control. We had talked about it, and she didn’t like me to use condoms; she said she would be responsible for it, she said she was on the pill. Then one day she came to me and said that she was pregnant, that she had done it on purpose, that she had been off the pill for months and hadn’t told me, that she wanted to get pregnant, she knew she was trapping me, but she wanted to marry me, she loved me enough for both of us, it would work out.”

Grief, misery, anguish, jealousy burned through Sara, blistering and scorching her heart.

“I told her I wouldn’t marry her.” Steve was silent awhile then. “I told her I absolutely wouldn’t marry her. I told her I didn’t love her, that we didn’t have that much in common, that I never wanted to touch her again now that she had tricked me—I said some pretty awful things to her that night. I called her a conniving stupid bitch, I called her … awful things. I told her I wouldn’t marry her. That I didn’t want to see her again. I told her the only thing I would do for her was to pay for an abortion.” Again, the silence. Then, his voice lowered, Steve went on. “She went to Boston and had the abortion. I gave her the money for it. And I never spent any time with her alone after that—and then I met you. So you see, Sara, if I had wanted children so damned badly, I could have had them. But I wouldn’t marry a woman just for children. I didn’t marry you for children. I married you because I love you, because I want to spend my life with you, however it works out. I can’t believe you could doubt that for a second. It makes me feel sick at my stomach when you say the things you say.”

“Oh, Steve,” Sara said, and moved across the bed, kneeling behind him. She wrapped her arms around him, leaned against his back and nuzzled her forehead against the back of his head. “Oh, Steve, forgive me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m so jealous. I didn’t know. I didn’t suspect. And I’m so nutty with not getting pregnant, it’s turning me into a crazy woman. Steve, I’m starting my period
again
. And I feel like such a failure.”

To her wonder, she felt Steve’s shoulder shaking. “I sometimes think,” Steve said, and she realized that he was crying, “I sometimes think it’s my fault, Sara. Oh, shit. I
didn’t want to have a child aborted. I felt like a monster. A murderer. But I couldn’t marry Mary, it would have been hell for us both, it just wouldn’t have worked. I didn’t love her. But I didn’t mean to get her pregnant, and I’ve always felt guilty that I was the cause of an abortion. And I sometimes think … that this is my punishment. That we can’t have a baby, that I can’t have a baby with the woman I love, because fate, or something, God, whatever, is punishing me for causing an abortion.”

Sara could feel Steve’s body shaking and tensing as he fought for control. She kept her arms wrapped around him. When she could find the power to speak, she said softly, “Oh, Steve, it doesn’t work that way. It really doesn’t. You’re not being punished. It’s not your fault. It’s not really my fault, either, it’s not anybody’s
fault
, it just is. Oh, Steve, I love you. Don’t cry, oh, darling, don’t be sad. You didn’t do the wrong thing. You did the right thing. Steve, I’m so glad you told me all this, I know it was hard for you, but it will help me, don’t you see how much it will really help me? I won’t be jealous again like I was, I promise you that. It’s made things clearer for me, it was all blurry and suspicious, you and Mary, but now I can understand. Oh, Steve,” she said.

After a while Steve pulled away and went into the bathroom. Sara caught a glimpse of his face, which was red and blotched with emotion and embarrassment. She turned off the lights and took off her clothes. When he came back, she reached for him as he got into bed and put her arms around him like a mother around a child. It seemed to Sara that she had never loved him so much and so completely.

At the same time, an evil demon of self-pity inside her taunted in a whining nasty tone: So you see?
He
can make babies. He has proof. You are the one who can’t make babies. You are the one who is failing. Now you know beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Chapter Ten

In early November, Sara went up to Boston to meet with Linda Oldham of Heartways House. HH was starting a new line of romance novels, contemporary stories about women who had careers and talents and who would actually be allowed (although discreetly) to make love with a man instead of only panting and fainting and being fragile. Linda wanted Sara to oversee the series, and Sara agreed as long as she could stay in Nantucket. She would come in to the office at least twice a month for meetings. She would have a great pile of manuscripts to sort through and she would be in charge of setting down the guidelines for the series. It was a challenge for Sara, and she was excited about it; this was work she could believe in, for she did believe that the best world of all for women held both work and romance.

After the meeting with Linda, she took a taxi to Cambridge and walked up the winding slate walk to Fanny Anderson’s house. It had been a mild dry fall, so that the trees bristled and clicked with leaves that had become sere and crisp but had not yet fallen. Sara stood at the front door but did not knock. She looked around, at the gold chrysanthemums rimming the walls of the house, at the lawn sloping to the wrought-iron fence where leaves that had fallen caught in bunches between the rails. At one time, she had been slightly afraid of this house, and it had held an air of mystery for her. Then it had become a place that excited her, challenged her; and now it welcomed her, it held her own secrets as well as Fanny’s.

Stone-faced Eloise opened the door when she finally knocked: this much had remained the same. The heavy blue curtains were pulled tightly shut in the living room, and a bright fire gleamed from the fireplace, filling the room with warmth and light. The cats were in their usual cold-weather spots, stretched in front of the fire. Fanny was on the sofa, her favorite spaniel next to her, its head in her lap. As Sara entered the room, she saw that Fanny was unusually agitated. Her smile trembled and she stroked the dog’s head and ears with quick, nervous hands.
Oh-oh
, Sara thought,
what could have gone wrong?

At first they talked about the easy things, plans for Christmas and the weather, Sara’s new job for Heartways House. But after Eloise had brought in the tea cart, Fanny
said, “Sara, dear, I have a problem.” Even in her distress her words came with the slow lilting ghost-of-a-Kansas drawl. “Well,” she laughed, “foolish me, I suppose most people wouldn’t think of it as a problem. And that exacerbates it.” She laughed again, stroking her spaniel’s silky head. “You see, I’ve had this letter,” she said. “From England. From my publishers there. They say
Jenny’s Book
has won an award. Quite a bit of money and a great deal of prestige. The Shelburne Prize.”

“Oh, my God, Fanny,” Sara said. “That’s absolutely fabulous. That’s wonderful. Well, good Lord! How marvelous. The Shelburne Prize is really a feather in your cap.”

“Oh, yes, I know it is, I suppose,” Fanny said. “But you see there
is
a problem. The letter states that in order to receive the award I have to attend an awards ceremony. I have to accept it personally, and be prepared to give a small speech. In England. In January.”

“Well, you can do that!” Sara said. “Good heavens, Fanny. England! The Shelburne Prize!”

Fanny stared at Sara. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it and looked down at the dog in her lap. She stroked the dog in silence.

“You can’t mean you’re thinking of not going?” Sara asked, almost shrieking. “Oh, Fanny!”

Fanny looked up. “Well, my dear, I did tell you that I haven’t left this house for four years. I have explained to you how I feel about going out. And this would be not only going
out
but going abroad. And going back. It is quite conceivable that I will run into people I used to know when I was in London. Old acquaintances, old colleagues—even old lovers. I really don’t know if I can face all that.”