The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart (11 page)

“We must do something,” she said. “I think I should treat it as an illness. A fever, or something; try to live with it until it breaks. And maybe later,” she said hopefully, “I can just keep Everett as a friend.”

He suddenly felt very sad for her. This way of dealing with so powerful an attraction would never have occurred to him. Not in the bad old days of hurting her all the time, especially. Then, he’d been so glad he was a man, and could make the first inquiry, the first move. The women had waited for him to do so, he thought, like little rabbits. Not one of them, pursued hard enough, had said no.

Except for her. But then even she had given in and he had thought her no different, eventually, than the rest.

“But I’m
not
any different!” she’d said once when they were discussing his infidelities. “You hurt us all, but this clumsiness isn’t entirely your fault.”

He knew some variation of her women’s condition lecture was coming next, and waited for it.

“Women are trained by society not to go after a man they might want, but to wait for him to want them. That’s why there’s such a demand for new and better, more sweet-smelling and powerful perfumes. Women have been brainwashed to think
they’re like flowers and have no feet, and that men are bees. Waiting stationary like that makes them anxious. When a man flies by they grab at him eagerly. He’s thrown off balance by the sheer awkwardness of it.”

“Is that why women always want you to do something for them, then,” he said. “Fetch this, carry that. Because they’ve lost the use of their feet?” He really loathed this about women. The way they made you pay for your pleasures by pressing you into service. If they couldn’t talk you into staying around they could at least send you to the store. And how many errands he had run! It made him tired just to think of it.

“Well,” she said, thoughtfully, “after dark you men are the only ones fairly safe on the streets.”

But now she was in love with someone else.

“Why are you telling me?” he asked.

“I tell you everything,” she said, turning over, curving her back along his body, positioning herself for sleep.

It was the first sound sleep she’d had in weeks. Since the demonstration at which she’d met Everett. Unfortunately she dreamed she and Everett were together in a white antique convertible that kept breaking down when it came to dark stretches of road and along these dark, hidden stretches he kissed her enough to melt the car.

She did not get better. The “fever” did not break. Partly this was because Everett continued to call her very often. His jolly, irreverent voice on the phone the most exciting event of her day. She amused him. A woman’s point of view of society, boldly expressed, was every bit as hilarious to him as a homosexual’s. She
educated him, furthermore (and humorously, of course) about the fastest-growing group of his constituents. Women. Usually single. Usually poor. Usually of color. Usually with kids, and no male influence around. But not always.

Once, for instance, he’d been extolling the virtues of a “good woman” he knew (later she was to teach him how “good woman” meant different things entirely to women and men), whom he described as long-suffering, hardworking, quiet-spoken, loyal and submissive, but above all,
devoted
, and before he could add that this good woman was his wife, she’d murmured “Sheepdog.” After he’d finished nervously laughing he’d identified the woman as a distant cousin, blah-blah-blah, who had once been one of his crack campaign organizers. Needless to say, this exchange gave him food for thought that night as he shared a rushed and boring dinner with his wife.

I am free, she thought. Her name, by the way, was Orelia. I have my work—she was a clothing consultant and designer, and extremely good at it—my apartment, a car, grown children, my figure, and my health. And I am in a pleasant relationship with a loving companion who frequently understands me. Being in love is not free. I will stop it at once.

She couldn’t.

“I don’t even know why I like him,” she wailed to John one evening over a gloomy dinner. “He doesn’t know half the things about women I’ve taught you. God! To think of going over all
that
ground again.” It would exhaust her final reserves of energy and kill her dead as a nit, she just knew.

She made him laugh, but he could see she was worrying herself sick. She hadn’t lost weight—if anything she was eating
more, less selectively—and her skin was breaking out. She also was not centered in the least. Nor graceful. Nor—looking at her old denim jacket and gardening jeans—very well groomed.

She thought she didn’t trust John. Because he’d had affairs and only told her when he thought (mistakenly, as it turned out) she’d find out. But John felt strongly that on some level she did. He was grateful she confided in him, although it made him suffer—he thought it must always make you suffer when someone you loved was in love with someone else—because it meant they could suffer together, and when the “fever” broke and Orelia was well they could look back on her “illness” as one more adventure they’d shared. And they’d shared many.

By Christmas, three months after she’d told him, she was a wreck. Crying. Biting her nails. Losing sleep. He came across lists on her desk with headings of: “Good Points.” “Bad Points.” In the “Good Points” list, she had written: “Makes me laugh (though sometimes uneasily). Dresses beautifully. Incredible energy.” On the much longer “Bad Points” list were: “Calls women ladies and kisses them automatically instead of shaking hands. Thinks having babies is easy and something all ‘real’ women look forward to. Thinks women vote for him because he ‘charms’ them. Thinks his wife’s adoring look is caused by adoration instead of astigmatism … ugh.” There was little sparkle in her own eyes and none in her voice.

So John took her away to an island off the coast of Baja, a sanctuary he’d discovered when he’d needed to reknit his own soul after years as a journalist covering the criminal Vietnam-American war. And there in an inn on a cliff overlooking the clear blue water, unreachable by phone, he tended her as carefully as though it were her back that was breaking instead of her
heart. Because he understood very well what was making her sick. For the first time in her life she had fallen in love at the same time that she had the experience necessary to know it would never work out. The fighter in her hated the necessity of giving up without a trial, and the lover in her feared imminent death.

Most of their days on the island were sunny and hot. They rose late in their airy suite with its ceiling fan revolving lazily overhead and were brought breakfast on the terrace. Fresh fruit and juice, toast, eggs and the local cheese. For days she gazed wearily out to sea. (She was wondering how they laid undersea telephone lines and how and whether they worked.) It was five days before she commented on the freshly cut flowers that appeared each day, magically, in their rooms. Seven before she admitted enjoying her swims, or drives and walks with John. They cuddled incessantly, as if they were both ill—and in effect they were—and when, in the second week, they began to make love again it was with the gentleness and tenderness and passion that made her smile during lovemaking the way she used to: her merry eyes closed, teeth just showing, skin glowing with delight, so that she reminded him of the little sun face one of his children had liked to draw when he was happy. By the third week she was nearly keeping up with him playing tennis, and her skin had cleared.

He continued to cuddle her, feed her interesting fruits and nuts from the market, order special treats from the kitchen, choose the colors of the daily cut flowers himself, and make love to her as if their lives depended on it. Because of course their life together might. Cuddling for long hours on their bed, seeing the waves of the ocean cresting from their open french doors,
Everett Jordan—his look, his voice, his ignorance, his way of making her smile and groan, everything that had so entangled her feelings—faded. She began to see John again. His kindness and sensitivity. His stability and intelligence. His innate gentleness. She felt as if she’d been away from him on a very long, very bad and unnecessary vacation, and easily falling back in love with him on their remote island she wondered how and why. He was wonderful!

She felt like this all the way home. Even as she bounded up the stairs to her apartment, riffling frantically through her purse for her keys because through the door she could hear the phone, ringing and ringing.

There were days when John thought perhaps Orelia did not love him at all anymore. Sometimes when he kissed her and said “I love you,” she said nothing, or mumbled “I love you, too,” as if it were another language, foreign to her mouth. She said it, but he didn’t feel it. But this morning, for no reason he could think of, except she had slept well and it was a bright, optimistic day when they woke up, she turned to him, smiled, looked at him carefully, and said “You’re beautiful! And I love you.” John had taken her into his arms and buried his nose in her neck. “Do you? Do you really?” he’d asked. And she had laughed, squeezed him, and leapt out of bed to do her exercises and spray water on the plants.

Now, as he tinkered with the washing machine, which was leaking, he thought of how much he had missed her when she went away two years before. She had accepted, for six months, a consulting job halfway across the country; the time
had seemed endless to John. He had spent a lot of time in her apartment in the city, sitting in her bed and feeling like crying. Sometimes, watching TV from her big wooden bed, quilts pulled up to his chin, he’d fantasized her cheerful (or glum, it wouldn’t matter) face, poking into the room, and felt the vibration of her voice in the air. Several times a week he came simply to be in her apartment, to smell its faint scent of her, to see the stacks of letters that arrived regularly from her friends. Seeing her name, Orelia Moonsun, soothed him. Of course they talked on the phone, nearly every night, but it wasn’t the same as seeing her, holding her, and hearing her sensuous or mischievous laugh in his ear.

The washing machine needed a part; he’d found the problem and now held it, a rusting valve, in his hand. He called to ask Orelia if she’d like to go into town with him to fetch it, but she was at the kitchen table busy with some drawings.

Spread out all around her were sketches of a house showing different angles, with lots of cutaways, so you could see where a new room, window or greenhouse could be joined. This particular house was an old Berkeley brown shingle in the flats, and the owner wanted to add a space off the second floor that would permit something of a view.

“It will be strictly an illusion,” Orelia said when she first showed the sketches to John. “But a nice one. His view will actually be of a long row of his neighbors’ backyards, but the addition will be from the one angle that will make them seem to be an uninterrupted garden.”

Finding these special angles for her clients was a great satisfaction to her, and also to those who sought her services—more and more as time went on—for when you entered an Orelia Moonsun redesigned house, no matter where you were, you
had the instant illusion of being someplace better. Someplace greener, more spacious, more airy and free.

She herself could never live, really live, in the city, but for those who could or must, hers was the eye to show them how it might be done. She could create a forest out of one tree, a mountain out of a hill, and a meadow out of a handful of flowers and a bush. It was because she needed to leave the city and find a place in the country that she’d gone off on the consulting job. She hated to travel, but the amount of money offered was just enough to make a down payment on some land they’d seen that supported a small house. It had been hard for her to leave him, John remembered, as he drove off to the hardware store; they had both cried.

They’d cried only partly because they would miss each other. They cried because it was so good between them finally: good friends, good sex, good companionship, even good food (they were cooking more together and going out less); they felt the risk the long separation might mean. But she had gone off, because she felt she had to, by train—she refused quite utterly to fly except when she had to cross the ocean—and he had waved after her as the bright blue-and-white Amtrak train left the station.

Then he had returned to her apartment, to her bed, where he had been so happy, where so many discoveries of various kinds had been made, and he had thought, as he often did, of the rather curious way they had met. She’d had cramps. She’d said she had cramps. Anyway, it was the lifetime ago when he was a hostile pre-law student at Columbia (hostile because the very books he must read oppressed his spirit, they were so dully exacting) and he was sitting on a bench in the sun. Orelia had come reeling down the walk, wearing a heavy gray coat, vaguely
Russian, buttoned to the chin; the color, herself, of ashes. She fell onto the bench.

There were few black students at Columbia, and none, he had thought, as beautiful as she, but she carried the books, wore the jeans, the leather Frye boots, that were the insignia of Columbiana. On closer look he noticed she was perspiring and that her hands were trembling.