“And in the meantime?”
“I see the children as often as I can. Whenever Roger doesn’t stop me.”
Dolores’s throat was full of pain, but there wasn’t a tear in Mary’s eye. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Certainly if she has to live this way it’s better that she be calm about it, accept it.
I couldn’t, though.
“The trouble is, they’re so young, they don’t understand. And Roger turns them against me. Elise is only five, she doesn’t see what’s happening, but Linton is nine. I can see what it’s doing to him. He’s angry with me, feels, I guess, that I’ve abandoned them. And then, Roger tells them I’m crazy, it’s been his sole line of defense all along. And they start to see me that way. You know if you start with the notion that someone is mad—anyone at all—they begin to
look
mad. Whatever they do seems insane. If I drop something, or I forget something, they look at each other and roll their eyes. Of course, they live in a far more orderly household. Roger has a housekeeper. I have to juggle this”—she waved at the kitchen—“with a full practice and studying for the exam. I read all night, or nearly. I get only five hours’ sleep a night. But it’s all right, actually, I don’t mind.”
“Reading the books the judge damned you for.”
“Yes,” she laughed. “Extraordinary, isn’t it. Anyway, every time I have them, it takes me a day or more just to get them to accept me, to act normal. Linton baits me, taunts me. He’s unhappy. He doesn’t understand that I want to be with them. He doesn’t understand that it isn’t my fault.”
Dolores nodded heavily.
“So I try, but I have them only two days, three at the most, and then they go back with him. And I don’t see them for another two weeks. Three now, thanks to the lovely judge. And then I have to start all over again.”
Dolores put her head in her hands.
Her children! Her children!
She raised her head. Her fists were tight, her teeth were clenched.
“I’d kill. I’d kill.”
Mary smiled at her with pity.
“Can you poison his food? Arrange an accident? Get a voodoo doll?”
“I can’t even pray for him to die,” Mary said quietly, “because you see, the children love him. He’s good to them, he really is. Now. I shudder to think what will happen when they get older. But now… they’d be desolate if he died.”
Dolores stared at the table. She wanted to be out of here. She examined Mary’s pretty softly-lined pink-and-white face, her wispy long hair, her expressive, moving hands. Dolores searched for weakness, for something she could blame. Her storytelling
had
been a little incoherent, hadn’t it? Maybe Roger was right, maybe she was crazy. Maybe she didn’t really love her children.
Dolores looked at herself. She wanted to blame Mary, wanted to find something she could pin the blame on. She wanted to be able to say: this could never happen to
me. I
would never allow myself to get into such a position. She brought this on herself.
Knowing, of course, that this could happen to any woman, that it was just a question of luck. Some of us lose our children.
Her eyes filled with tears.
Mary sat calmly, smiling sadly at her. As if I’m doing her fucking feeling for her. Goddamned good manners. Well, I can have good manners, too.
She rose. “Mary, if there’s anything I can do, please ask.”
“Of course.” Mary rose too. “Do come down for dinner some weekend when Gordon’s here, will you? I’ve told him about you. I’d like you to meet him.”
“Lovely.”
They embraced each other lightly, touched cheeks lightly, in recognition, in mutuality, in acceptance of a kinship far deeper than nation.
A
ND DRAGGED HERSELF UPSTAIRS AND
poured some of Victor’s Scotch in a glass and hauled herself to her bed and fell on it. Just lay there, head propped up on the pillows, sipping. Her breath was coming in heavy sighs, almost shudders. She felt as if she’d been beaten about the heart and gut.
The old salt pool. Can’t get out of it. Every time I try, something heaves up from the bottom and drags me down again. My own private Loch Ness monster.
Terribly tired. Wanted to sleep, her body wanted to sleep. Forever. Never to have to wake up again, never to have to feel again. It was possible, of course. It was not difficult to kill yourself if you were determined to do it. She thought of it often, it was a good thought Knowing you
could
end this corrosion of your innards, knowing that if you lived another day it was through your own choice, made life seem less oppressive.
Doomed. Doomed. It’s me who’s Lot’s wife. She didn’t even have a name, and she didn’t have anything to say about anything. She stands there forever gazing down at the cities of the plain as the smoke rises, the brimstone falls. Stands there in Zoar, a word that means “scarcely anything.” Yes, scarcely anything. Her husband, two daughters, a pack on her back. The daughters don’t have names either, even though they screwed their father and continued his line. But not yet, not then. Still virgins. Only men have names in this story.
Lot’s wife has trudged out of Sodom behind her husband, carrying what she can on a pack on her back: scarcely anything. The girls are there too, dawdling. Lot is smacking them on the rear to hurry them up. The old woman sighs, what is he doing now? This man, this very good man who is her husband. The night before this very good man had offered his daughters,
her
daughters, to the crowd of angry men pounding at the door. The men wanted the strangers Lot had brought home from the town gate, acting like a big deal, liked to feel important. He said the two men were angels. Angels already! The crowd wanted to bugger and roll the strangers. This good man had offered them his daughters instead. The strangers, he said, were more important than his daughters. Angels! Devils is more like it. Terrorist spies. Because look now, look!
Oh, but she’s really too far off to see the cities burn. All she can see is the smoke. But she sees, she sees, in her mind’s eye. She sees and she hears. She sees the marble pillars of the temple crack and disintegrate, she hears the crack, the terrible crash as the roof caves in and dust rises and blanks out everything. She hears the licking sound of the flames swiftly devouring the houses, the screams of children, the cries of dogs running on fire. They’re being burned up, her two married daughters. They should be here, in Zoar with her, but their husbands laughed at Lot and his angels. What if he’d said terrorists: they might have believed that. But now they are burning, her Miriam, her Sarah, her five grandchildren. She sees the little ones running in circles, hiding their heads in their hands, crying
Mama!
Miriam is gathering Ben-ami in her skirt, she has little Piti in her arms, she is searching for Sarah, calling to her. But Sarah can’t move, she was always timid, she is calling for
her, her,
calling
Mama! Mama!
Her children cling to her legs, whimpering. Miriam shouts that they should head for the palm grove, for the well, for someplace wet, someplace maybe safer. But Sarah can’t move, and Lot’s wife sees her drop, right there, on that spot, calling
Mama!
Lot won’t look.
He has commanded her and the girls not to look. But she doesn’t care what he says. Last night she divorced him in her mind. What should she worry about now? She should go on living on this earth? With
him?
After this? For it was those very men, his friends, his angels, who had brought this fire and brimstone, who were at this very instant murdering her Miriam, her Sarah, the five little ones, oh, my little Piti with the great black eyes!
Is it any wonder she turned into a pillar of salt? Nameless to this day, unimportant in the great male sweep of history, one who looked back, one who dared to see, one who dared to feel.
The old man and the daughters crept up to the hills and hid out. The story goes they waited until he was asleep and then crept to him and screwed him. What a crock. Impossible that he didn’t know what they were doing. Trying to save their father from that fate worse than death: dying sonless. Story told by men, dishonest. Lots of daddies liked to diddle their little girls. And what can you do with a pillar of salt when you’re horny?
She got up a little shakily and headed for the kitchen for more Scotch. Get drunk. Haven’t been drunk in years. Victor’s influence, blame Victor, she told the walls, throwing her arms out wide in a sweep of irresponsibility.
Fury. It was fury that was destroying her. But it wouldn’t go away. She stood stock-still in the middle of the kitchen and closed her eyes. She felt like a pillar of tears that wouldn’t come out, petrified into salt.
There was a noise, a click, and she turned. Victor was coming through the door. He looked at her and smiled. She stared at him.
“Did I frighten you? I called, for a couple of hours, but there wasn’t any answer. Then I had to run for my train. Is something wrong?”
He came in, hung his coat on the hall rack, and entered the kitchen. He stood looking at her. “Lorie? Are you all right?”
He wavered in front of her eyes. What was his name? Lot. Yes. Must be, since I’m Lot’s wife. But I have a name. He doesn’t know it though, he calls me something else.
He approached her slowly, he put his hand on her arm. “Lorie?”
“Go away.”
He let his hand fall, but stood there looking at her. “Are you sick?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“It’s my heart.” She walked to the table and sat beside it, clumping her glass down.
He sat opposite her. He took her hand. “You’re sick in your heart.”
“Yes. It bleeds. There’s no cure for it. And it won’t go away, even when I ignore it.”
“Sweetheart, have you been drinking?”
She nodded.
“Have you eaten anything?”
She shook her head.
“I think you’re sick in your belly, too. It’s after eleven.” He got up and took some eggs out of the fridge and scrambled them. He made toast. Dolores stumbled around the kitchen making herself another drink.
“I don’t want that. I’m not hungry,” she said petulantly. But when he set the food in front of her, she gobbled it, she scooped it up. When she finished, he took her hands in his.
“Now. What’s wrong with your heart?”
“I told you. It bleeds. All the time. Goddamned bleeding heart.”
He lifted her up and put his arm around her and walked her into the bedroom. He undressed her and slipped her nightgown on over her head. He helped her to the bed and pulled up the covers and sat down beside her.
“What are you doing here anyway.”
“There was a meeting called out here, last-minute thing. I told them I’d be coming out tomorrow, and didn’t book the Randolph. So we could have a night together.”
“I’m glad,” she said and reached for him and held him. Then she pushed him away. “But you came here without calling! You’re taking me for granted! How could you be sure I wouldn’t be entertaining one of my other lovers?”
He smiled at her sadly. “If you were, I’d sleep on the couch. I did call.”
“Oh, I was down at Mary’s.” Tears sprang into her eyes. “Oh, Victor!”
“Wait. Wait a minute!” He jumped up and ran into the kitchen, came back with a tall Scotch, and sat down again. He took her hand. “Now tell me.”
“It’s Mary. She told me the story of her divorce. It did me in.”
“
Her
divorce did
you
in?”
“Yes, you see, that’s why I can’t. There are things I can’t do, and I know it. I can’t drink. And I can’t listen to these stories. Like people who bruise if you even touch them, you know? Their skin turns purple if you just press your thumb on their inner arm. Well, I have a soul like that, it’s raw. The only thing that can help it is getting angry, but who am I going to get angry at? I can’t go and bash Roger over the head. There’s nothing I can do with my anger, you know? It just sits around steaming. And eventually, it turns into this.”
“Into what this?”
“This: the way I am now.”
He stroked her head. “It’s all right—the way you are now.”
“No, it’s not. You don’t know what it feels like inside.”
He held her against him, smiling a little, kissing her hair.
“Mary used to be married to Roger Jenkins,
THE
Roger Jenkins, the physicist, you know?” She pulled away so she could see his face. He nodded. His face was a little stiff. He doesn’t want to hear this. Doesn’t want to be dragged through it. Damn it, I had to listen to him, he can listen to this.
“Well, turns out this Jenkins, the great man, let out his excess energy not on the squash court but on his wife’s body. He began by just sort of pushing her, the way Anthony used to do to me when I tried to leave the house during his tantrums. But Roger moved on to bigger and better things: slaps across the face, bloody mouths, a little arm-twisting. One night, after they came home from a party, they’d been married about eight years then, he was furious about something, and he punched her as she got out of the car. He knocked her to the garage floor. Then he bent down and picked up her head and smashed it down on the floor, over and over. She passed out.
“When she came to, he was gone, the garage was dark. He’d just left her there like that. She was bleeding and she felt sick, but she was afraid to go into the house. She believed he’d meant to kill her, and would if he saw her. She got herself up somehow and crept out of the garage and walked to a public phone and called a cab. She went to her mother’s house, then to the hospital. She had a concussion. She said she’d fallen. Didn’t want to damage the Great Man! Damned fool.”
Victor lay back on the bed facing her, and lighted a cigarette.
“After she got out of the hospital, she stayed with her mother. She had no money, no job. She’d given up her medical practice when Linton was born, and had chosen to stay home with the children while they were small. Linton was four then, Elise was only an infant. When she was better, she went to see her children. Roger had hired a housekeeper with orders not to let her in.
“She got a job, saved some money, and took him to court. But all that took time. She rented a house as near to Roger’s as she could—she couldn’t really afford his neighborhood. And when she could, she’d walk there to see the children if they were outdoors. She went as often as she could. Roger brought charges against her for harassment. Harassment! Her
own
children!”