Nell (11 page)

There had been a dinner party during the last year of Nell and Marlow’s marriage that Nell would never forget. It had been at the home of the president of the college where Marlow taught. It was a sit-down dinner, complete with silver, crystal, Wedgwood, and place cards. Twelve other people were there, gathered around the long lace-covered table, six other university professors and their wives leaned toward one another in the candlelight, engaging in charming and erudite conversation. Jeremy was four, Hannah two. Jeremy was sick with bronchitis, and Nell had been up for three nights in a row with him. She was too tired to come to this dinner party, but she knew she had a responsibility to Marlow to attend; it was an important party, an honor even to be asked, and she knew she owed it to Marlow to be as lovely and witty and winning as she could. She was seated between a professor of Greek and a professor of architecture. Marlow sat across the table from her, two seats down; from time to time he gave her a smile of approval. She had managed, with the art of makeup, to hide the brown circles beneath her eyes. She had managed, with a loose and flowing gown, to hide the flab around her hips. Now she was doing her best to disguise her exhausted and flabby mind.

“I read in the university paper that you just gave a speech in New York,” Nell said to the professor of architecture. She was so pleased with herself for remembering this, for thinking of a topic that would interest and even flatter her companion. “What did you speak on?”

“I was comparing Le Corbusier and Alberti,” the professor said.

“Oh,” Nell replied. She only vaguely knew who Le Corbusier was and hadn’t heard of Alberti at all. “Well,” she plunged ahead, bravely, wanting to let the professor talk, “what do they have in common?”

“For one thing,” the professor said, “they were both interested in the classics at an early age. For example, they were both interested in Plato when they were young.”

“Oh,” Nell said. “How strange. Surely you don’t mean Play-Doh. Play-Doh wasn’t around at that time, was it? You must mean clay.”

The professor stared at Nell. “Klee?” he said. “What does Klee have to do with
the classicists?”

Nell stared at the professor; the professor stared at Nell. Then Nell burst into a whoop of laughter. “Oh dear,” she said. “How embarrassing. You meant Plato, and I thought you said Play-Doh.” The professor looked at her, sternly uncomprehending. “Play-Doh,” she said. “It’s a kind of modeling clay that children work with.… Well, you know, I have small children at home and I guess I’m at that period in my life when I think of Play-Doh more easily than Plato.” She smiled at the professor, thinking surely he had had little children at one time himself and that she could charm him in this way.

But the professor managed only the grimmest of smiles in return and turned, with ill will and exasperation, to his salad. Nell thought then, and agreed with herself later, that the professor had been a pompous, compassionless, humorless old goat. But her opinion of that man had not saved her from Marlow’s judgment. He had overheard the entire exchange and did not find it at all amusing. It seemed to him only another sign of Nell’s failing intellectual capabilities.

Much later, years later, Nell told her friends about this episode and they dissolved into tears of helpless laughter, laughter of commiseration, for any mother in the world had gone through at least one similar experience. But that night Marlow was not amused.

“Nell, how
could
you,” he said, taking her mistake as a personal insult, just as he took her exhaustion and weight gain as a personal betrayal. He judged her very harshly by the end of the marriage, but that was not the worst of their marriage; the worst was that he had judged her at all, that he had judged her from the very start. There were so many women he could compare her to—his first wife, his other lovers, the women he directed or taught—there were always so many ways in which he could compare her and find her wanting. So it happened in Nell’s life that not until she wandered into bed with a contractor from a chance encounter in a friend’s backyard, not until she was thirty-three, not until she was so very far into her life!—not until then did she realize what she had been missing sexually all her life. Why, she had been very nearly frigid. She had not acted that way, but she had felt that way, and when she discovered this, she thought, oh, what a little fool I have been.

When Steve took her out to dinner, Nell noticed that he did not know the difference between a Chablis and a Beaujolais. It did not bother her that Steve did not
know this; it
did
bother her that she had noticed this, that this piddly fact had registered on her consciousness. The evening was full of just such tiny incidents. Nell hated herself for it, but she could not keep herself from silently remarking on the fact that he did not use the subjunctive, that he knew everything about the Indianapolis 500 and nothing about Broadway. The night he invited her out to his farm for dinner, she was touched by the trouble he had gone to, how he had set the table with place mats and cloth napkins and put flowers in the middle of the table. But she also learned, during the course of the meal, that he thought Jerry Falwell and Clint Eastwood were great men, that he found women’s lib amusing, that he thought Burt Reynolds was a great actor, that Kenny Rogers was his favorite singer, and that his favorite TV show was
Little House on the Prairie
. He loved Mrs. Ingalls because she was so good and pure and patient. Steve showed Nell around his house. He kept guns. He hunted in the fall and stocked his freezer with venison. He needed a gun on his farm, he told Nell, to shoot any wild animal that intruded. Every now and then a rabid fox or raccoon wandered onto the farm and had to be killed before it got into the pigs’ pen. And occasionally a wild dog would come and try to attack the pigs. He also killed any stray cats that tried to hang around his farm; he didn’t have the money or time to bother feeding them. Also, sometimes the cats got in and killed the chickens or got their eggs.

“
You shoot cats?
” Nell asked, incredulous.

“Just wild ones,” Steve said. “Just strays.”

Nell knew at that moment that this was not the man for her life. If she had been in college, she would have said something righteous and insulting to Steve: “I don’t want to have anything to do with a kitten-killer,” she might have said. But she was not in college. At that moment in time she was a thirty-three-year-old woman who had not been to bed with a man in months, a woman who was standing next to a man whose sexuality exuded from him and twined around her and pulled her to him like vines around a tree. A flash of memory rescued her, made the decision for her. When Steve came to pick her up that evening, she had not been ready. He had waited for her in the living room. When she came down the stairs, she had found him sitting on the sofa, with Medusa purring in his lap. Steve had been calmly stroking Medusa; Medusa had been nudging her head into his chest, into his crotch, kneading him with her claws, snuggling into his body. Medusa had
not shed on him. Her instincts had been to get close to the man—and Nell’s were the same. She decided to forget the stray cats and go with Medusa’s instincts and her own.

Still, all those petty facts about Steve—that he shot stray cats, used incorrect grammar, and was less sophisticated and educated than she—all those little pieces of knowledge added up to a great gift for Nell. They added up to freedom. She knew that for once in her life this man could not hurt her; if she could laugh at him or even slightly, secretly, deride him, then he could not hurt her. And so she was not afraid of losing him and she was not afraid of his judgment, and when she finally went to bed with him, she had the most wonderful time she had ever had in her life.

Because Steve thought that she was so delicate and frightened, he took care to be a considerate and gentle lover. He spent a long time lying on his double bed with Nell, caressing her, stroking her, kissing her, lifting her hair up and licking her neck, whispering to her not to be afraid. Nell was shivering all over again, and this time with real desire. When he was finally inside her, there in his dark bedroom where no light shone, not even a candle, so that he could not see her expression or body, could only feel her flesh and responses, then she was able to give way to her desire more completely than ever before in her life.

She had always been so afraid with Marlow, right from the start, that she would do something wrong, that she would look odd or not come quickly enough or not be passionate enough or be too passionate—she didn’t have any idea about how to make love. She had always, with Marlow, pretended, until she was incapable of doing anything else.

But as she lay with this strange young man’s body moving against her, she became aware of these things: that Steve did not love her and so he could not stop loving her. He had promised her nothing and so he could not betray her. She did not love him and so he had no power in him to damage her. He had not committed himself to her and so she would not have to worry that he would ever leave. If he judged her, it did not matter, for they were in the dark and she could not read his face and she trusted him to be kind enough never to let her know if he held her in any contempt. All this knowledge gave her the courage to say at a certain point in their lovemaking: “Please, if you can, don’t stop now.” And a little while later to say, “Oh, oh, please, could you not stop
again?”

As they lay in bed together afterward, flat on their backs, their hands crossed to lie on each other’s bare stomachs, Nell wondered if this meant that she was in love with him. Even though she hadn’t done a lot, she had certainly
read
a lot, so she considered herself fairly sophisticated. She knew everyone slept around these days; it didn’t mean anything. But at heart she was still a romantic. She still wanted to love the person she had sex with: it was called making love, after all. Also, it was pretty hard to believe that a person could have this kind of ravishing transcendent pleasure with just anyone. And she felt so very
fond
of Steve as she lay there next to him, naked and sweaty and exhausted and triumphant and fulfilled. She felt such affection for him because he had made her so replete. She decided that if she did not already love him, perhaps she was on the way. He seemed to be returning the favor, for when at last he drove her home, he held her to him closely at the door and kissed her hair. He treated her gently, with care.

They saw each other almost constantly for three months. He came over after work and ate dinner with Nell and Hannah and Jeremy. He mowed Nell’s lawn on Sundays and did other handyman work around her house. In turn, she fixed him wonderful meals. He climbed thirty feet up into a tree, barehanded, to hang a rope-swing for the children; Nell and the kids stood stunned with awe to watch his strength and courage and agility. When he swung down the rope to the ground and landed with a thunk near Nell, his arms bulging with muscles, his shirt full of his powerful chest, Nell nearly smashed her body into his. But the children were there, so she refrained. That night they made wonderful love together, and Steve went on and on inside Nell until Nell, her hair tangled and damp, her body frenzied, cried out, “Oh God, Steve, I love—” She turned her head to one side and bit her bare arm. “I love this,” she finished weakly. She was not sure what she meant. She knew that she thought of Steve when she first awoke in the morning and smiled herself to sleep with memories of his body at night. She knew she really was pretty much obsessed with him. While dressing herself or the children, the slight brush of a soft garment against her bare wrist would make her catch her breath. She would stand there a moment, so caught in the vivid memory of their mutual desire and their sweet obeisance to that desire that everything else seemed a dream. She knew that if she went a day without seeing him, she missed him. This was not what she had ever felt for Marlow. It
was closer to the emotions she felt in high school, when she was dating quarterbacks and tennis jocks, although she had never slept with any of those boys.

She had taken to watching
Little House on the Prairie
in the evenings when Steve was there. She had even begun to think it wasn’t that bad a show, and she tried to push out of her mind the knowledge that Marlow, in his intellectual scorn, had called the show
Little Shack
. When she and her children and Steve were all snuggled together on the sofa, all those touching bodies, all that responding skin, why then Nell was as happy as she had ever been in her life. She didn’t actually watch the television. Covertly, she stared at the hairs on Steve’s arms, at the long curve of thigh muscle beneath the cloth of his jeans. She and Steve didn’t talk much. But when they did, they were very courteous with each other, even gallant in their conversation. Nell began to think that maybe they were really in love. She even began to wonder if they could have a life together.

On Labor Day Steve asked her to come with him to a picnic some friends of his were having. Nell was delighted. She hadn’t yet met any of his friends. For three months they had pretty much kept to themselves. She found a babysitter. She went to a secondhand store, the Like-New Shop, and found a loose and silky shirt, which she wore with a pair of jeans and sandals. She dressed casually, thinking that Steve’s friends would be casual, and she was right. They were not only casual, they were what her parents would have called uncouth.

The picnic was at the “farm” of one of Steve’s friends. It was a thirteen-acre piece of land with a small house and a big shed full of tools such as hydraulic drills and winches. There was plenty of beer in cans in a trash barrel full of ice, and chips were set out in bowls on a picnic table. Nell stood awkwardly looking around at the possessions of the owner—they were all out in sight, spread all over the land: a broken bulldozer, an old pickup truck without wheels, a goat in a pen, a pig in another pen, some spare tires, some motorcycles, some mounds of dirt erupting all over the property, looking like Indian burial mounds without the grass. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. Two groups quickly formed: the men by the beer, the women by the chips.