Terms of Endearment (51 page)

On visits to Houston she demonstrated a strong preference for Rosie and Vernon, both of whom adored her beyond words. She treated General Scott rather offhandedly, although she liked to poke at his Adam’s apple and try to figure out why his voice was so scratchy. He told her he had a frog in his throat and she believed it and was always commanding him to make the frog jump out.

With her grandmother she was generally cool, though now and then the two of them flung themselves into an amorous tussle. Aurora contended at once that Melanie was outrageously spoiled, and she contended it the more vehemently when Melanie rejected her efforts to contribute to the spoiling. She would allow Vernon to trot her on his knee for hours, but the minute Aurora picked her up she became a terrible wiggle-worm. What she loved about her grandmother was the jewelry she wore, and she was always pulling off Aurora’s earrings or trying to persuade her to let her wear her necklaces. Sometimes, when the two of them were feeling friendly, they sat on Aurora’s bed and Melanie got to try on all her jewels in the jewel box. It amused Aurora to watch her tiny golden-haired grandchild bedeck herself with all the jewels she herself had managed to accumulate, the relics of the passions of her lifetime, or of her own whims—mostly the latter, for, as she frequently lamented, none of her loves had been talented gift givers.

“Me put it on,” Melanie said, reaching up for whatever Aurora might be wearing. She loved the amber and silver necklace above
all else, and as often as she was allowed traipsed around with it hanging just below her knees. Most of her traipsing was done in pursuit of Rosie, whom she totally adored.

“Lord, it breaks my heart to think of this child growin’ up in Nebraska,” Rosie said, watching her poke oatmeal in her mouth.

“It breaks mine to consider what will happen to whatever men are around when she grows up,” Aurora said.

“She can’t be no harder on ’em than you’ve been,” Rosie said.

“Possibly not, but men were tougher in my day. They were brought up to expect difficulty.”

“Don’t talk,” Melanie said, pointing her spoon at Rosie. She was quick to note that people were always talking to her grandmother, and it didn’t please her.

“Talk to me,” she said a moment later, holding out her dish for more oatmeal.

“Can’t be much wrong with a kid that’s got an appetite like she has, can there?” Rosie said happily, hurrying to the stove.

Aurora buttered a croissant and Melanie immediately stretched out a hand for it.

“Not much,” Aurora said, and ate the croissant herself.

F
OR A
time after Melanie was born Emma felt free. She had done something right, or so it seemed to her, and she rather contentedly sat back and watched Melanie pull the family together. There were even moments when she felt some solidarity with Flap once again; but they were only moments, and the period of grace didn’t last. For one thing, Melanie seemed a finality, in a way. Emma felt that she had delivered what she could deliver. In a few months she began to feel lost again. She told herself it was silly, but at thirty-five she had the persistent feeling that nothing remained for her to do. Everything left was a repeat, and, past a point, she didn’t like repeating.

Then there were times when she felt that even had she been happy she would have had to become unhappy in order to live in Kearney. She had become accustomed to the Midwest. The people there were unfailingly courteous, and she had come not to mind their practicality, their gracelessness, their lack of imagination.
All that went with the landscape, in a way, yet she could not get across the courtesy into real friendship with anyone. The landscape was meant for loneliness, it seemed. She took long walks along the banks of the Platte in the keen, strong wind—and the wind seemed to her the dominant thing, the eternal thing about where she lived. It was what the plains had instead of beaches, waves, and tides; the wind was her ocean while she lived in Nebraska, and though the natives all complained about it she loved it. She could lean against it almost; she liked to hear it sighing and roaring at night when only she was awake; she didn’t mind it. The summer calm and the occasional winter calm were what she minded; then in the stillness she sensed her own lack of balance. When the wind died, she felt herself falling; only the falling was not something taking place in a dream. It was taking place while she was wide awake.

Also in Kearney Flap fell in love. It was prosperous country, relatively speaking; and also it was more remote from the twentieth century than Des Moines. The students there got crushes on him still, but it was not so easy for him to march them off to bed. The town was too small for that, and the girls too inexperienced. One of them would have gotten pregnant, and Flap would have been finished as a department head.

To avoid that danger he began to see a woman only ten years his junior, a young woman who taught drawing. She was liberated, for Kearney; she had studied in San Francisco, had been married and run out on. She was a local girl of good family—indeed, the best family in town—and the community had long ago granted her the right to a mild bohemianism. She painted; she taught the life class. She and Flap were on three faculty committees together which gave them ample reason for meeting. She was intense, didn’t talk much, and withheld herself for six months. She had studied modern dance and taught a local Yoga group; her figure was admirable and she moved well. Her name was Janice, and Flap would have left Emma in order to sleep with her, had it been necessary. Janice didn’t require that, but she did require that he be in love with her. He told her he had been in love with her for a year, which was as true as not; three weeks after the affair was consummated he was so in love with her that
he confessed it to Emma. Melanie was in his lap at the time drawing blue circles on a napkin with one of his felt pens.

“Why are you telling me?” Emma asked quietly.

“But you must know anyway,” Flap said. “Can’t you tell by the way I act.”

“Don’t let her draw on the tablecloth, please,” Emma said. “You always let her ruin my tablecloths.”

“I mean it,” Flap said. “Can’t you tell by the way I act?”

“No, if you must know,” Emma said. “I can tell you don’t love me by the way you act. That’s not necessarily anything I can hold against you. Maybe you just loved me as long as you could—I don’t know. But knowing that you don’t love me is not the same as knowing that you love someone else instead of me.

“It’s a different hurt,” she added, snatching the pen from Melanie just before she started on the tablecloth. Melanie looked darkly at her mother; it was astonishing how dark her eyes became when she was angered. She didn’t howl, having learned that it did no good to howl at her mother. She had inherited her grandmother’s talent for silences, and she got off her father’s lap and marched silently out of the room. Flap was too distracted to notice.

“Well, anyway,” he said. He was growing a mustache, to please Janice, and it made Emma feel the more contemptuous of her taste. With a mustache and his bad clothes he looked awfully seedy.

“Tell me what you want,” Emma said. “You can be divorced, if you want to. I’m not going to stand in the way of anyone’s passion. Go live with her if you want to. Just tell me what you want.”

“I don’t know,” Flap said.

Emma got up and started making hamburgers. The boys were due home soon.

“Well, will you tell me when you decide?” she asked.

“If I can decide,” he said.

“You better decide,” Emma said. “I’d rather not start hating you, but it might happen. I think I’m going to need a decision.”

Flap never made one. In truth, he was more scared of Janice than he was of Emma. She had a capacity for hysteria that
Emma lacked, and he mistook hysteria for conviction. When she screamed that she would kill herself or him if he stopped seeing her, he believed it; and in any case, he had never had any intention of stopping. Janice knew that well enough, but she liked to create scenes. She wasn’t in love with Flap and she didn’t particularly want him to leave his wife; but she wanted all the rituals of passion, and scenes were necessary. In time their passion became dependent upon her attacks.

In contrast, Emma withdrew. She expected to be left; after a few months she even hoped to be left. If nothing else, it would be nice to have more closet space. But then she realized that Flap wasn’t going to leave unless either she or Janice forced him to. He was being very polite and rocking no boats. Emma gave up on him then. She allowed him his house and his children; he didn’t want her, so that was no problem. She generally watched the
Late Show
and went to sleep on the couch anyway. She made no scenes. Scenes upset the children too much, and in any case there was nothing left to make a scene about. What had been, for a time, a marriage was lost; the fact that two long-related people were continuing to share a house meant little.

She knew she should probably force him out, but he was so sluggish, so entrenched in the children, so possessive of his habits, that to do so would have taken a major commitment of fury and energy. Emma didn’t have it. The kids took all her energy, and she seemed to have no fury. She had exhausted her capacity for disappointment in Des Moines; what Flap was doing seemed cowardly, but it was right in character. She no longer wanted the bother of trying to make him better than he was; she just wasn’t that involved.

What she did do was retreat completely from campus activities. She refused all invitations, ignored all functions, spurned all faculty wives. Since she was a department chairman’s wife, that made awkwardnesses for Flap, but Emma didn’t care. When speakers came to the campus, she didn’t go hear them; when teas were held, she didn’t attend.

“Go to these parties with your mistress,” she said. “It’ll titillate people, and God knows they need it here. I hope I never see a plate of goddamn chicken macaroni again.”

“What’s that got to do with it?” Flap wanted to know.

“Why, it’s been the great staple of our social life, honey. Can’t you remember?” she said. “Cheap wine, cheap prints, cheap furniture, dull talk, depressed people, tatty clothes, and chicken macaroni.”

“What are you saying?” he asked.

“That twelve years as a faculty wife is enough,” she said. “You’ll just have to forge ahead without me.”

In that mood she made a bad mistake. Flap had a colleague who seemed to hate academics as much as she did. His name was Hugh; he was a youthful forty, cynical, a Joycean. He was recently divorced, and Flap brought him home from time to time. He liked to drink and talk about movies, and Emma rediscovered that she too liked to drink and talk about movies. He had a dry wit, and his put-downs of fellow academics and of university life in general were hilarious. When Hugh was around, Emma found it possible to laugh herself out. Some of all that she was holding back got laughed away. It was an immense relief. Hugh had a cold twinkle in his blue eyes and a pouty lower lip; one day he showed up in the middle of Melanie’s nap—he was a father himself and had a fine sense of domestic timing—and seduced Emma in Teddy’s bunk bed. Emma had suspected it was going to happen, but she was not prepared for the aftermath. Hugh coolly informed her that she hadn’t satisfied him.

Emma was very startled. “Not at all?” she asked.

“No,” Hugh said. “I think you’ve forgotten how to fuck.” He said it pleasantly while lacing his sneakers. “Let’s have a cup of tea,” he added.

Instead of throwing him out, Emma fell for it. She took his criticism to heart. After all, how long had it been since she’d given sex any real attention? Flap had been largely indifferent to her for many years, and Sam Burns had been too much in love to require much polish. Besides, she had long been accustomed to repressing both her hopes and her physical feelings; the maintenance of her home life required it.

Still it was a startling criticism; she was very flustered by it.

“Don’t let it worry you,” Hugh said, still pleasantly. “It’s all there. Things will pick up.”

The picking up was done at his house, which was only three blocks away and on a perfectly reasonable route for walks. His wife had fled to the east. In time—not much time—Emma knew why. Hugh’s eyes never lost their cold twinkle. Emma wanted out almost before she was in, but for a time she was caught. It wasn’t right, but it was something. She soon saw that Hugh’s contempt for the university was only a pose; he fit in perfectly. Sex was his real study, and the university provided him a comfortable base. His bedroom was a kind of classroom. He trained Emma critically, as if she were a dancer. For a time it seemed rewarding; she accepted the fact of her ignorance and was an eager pupil. Then it stopped seeming rewarding; she felt taken over. Her orgasms were so hard they felt like blows. Hugh often got phone calls from people to whom he was curt. He didn’t want Emma listening, and he didn’t like it if she lingered past a certain hour. She began to feel shamed. She knew it was masochistic to see a man who had no affection for her, and yet she did it. After a time she felt she was practicing a form of hatred instead of a form of love. Hugh had turned pleasure into humiliation. She didn’t know how he had done it, nor how to get away from him either.

Cautiously she attempted to talk to her mother about it.

“Oh, Emma,” Aurora said. “How I wish you’d not married Thomas. He’s not been adequate. My lovers have not been geniuses, by any means, but at least they’ve all meant me well. Who is this man?”

“Just a man. A teacher.”

“You’ve got those children to raise, you know,” Aurora said. “You just get out of it. Things that are truly wrong never get better. They inevitably get worse. The only way to stop anything is to stop at once. Deciding to stop next month means you haven’t decided to stop. Why don’t you bring the children and come here?”

“Momma, the boys are in school. I can’t come there.”

Aurora controlled herself, but not easily. “You’re not a balanced person, Emma,” she said. “You’ve always had this self-destructiveness. I don’t think you’ll get out. Perhaps I ought to come there.”

“And do what? Tell the man he has to stop seeing me?”