The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart (12 page)

“You okay?” he’d asked.

And with a directness that would never cease to amaze him, no matter how long he knew her, she said, “I have cramps, and I’m starving to death.”

“Why,” he’d said, “that’s great news; the cramps, I mean.” It was every month to the girls he dated.

She looked at him as if he were a fool.

“It isn’t great news?”

She said nothing. Her head had slumped into his side.

By the time she came to, John and one of his classmates had lugged her upstairs to John’s room and she was stretched out on the sofa.

“Where am I?” she asked, wryly.

“My room.”

“Won’t they kick you out if you have a girl in your room?”

“Not if she’s my sister, and not if she’s starving.”

He held a bowl of Campbell’s chicken soup under her nose.

To which she said “Oh.” When she’d drunk it down she burped, like an infant, and fell sound asleep.

It was an odd feeling, having Orelia there. Several times during the night he woke just to look at her. She’d put on one of his undershirts and his bathrobe, and her short, bushy hair surrounded her thin face like a cushion. He’d heard there were
women who starved themselves for the sake of being thin but she was the first one he’d met. The next morning, when he woke up, she was gone. He didn’t see her again until the last week of school. By then she was rail thin, and there was a cool, distant glint in her eye.

And then a couple of years later they were surprised to find each other again in a youth hostel in Brussels. She was heading for Paris, he for Berlin. They’d spent the night together, two young Americans lonely and far from home, and she’d seemed in need of comforting; but distracted, too, her thinness by now rather frightening, and she’d listened complacently, after they’d made love (John incredulous that her joints bulged conspicuously in arms and legs) to his announcement of his upcoming marriage.

“I’ll never marry,” she’d said with a sigh of relief, as if that were at least one obviously stupid thing she was sure she’d never do.

But then many years later still, he’d heard she’d married. Someone with a profession (John had by then given up law, with the same lightening of spirits with which he was to, subsequently, give up pre-med, psychology and accounting), money and a big stone house.

Sad to say, shameful to say, too, but though quite often happy in his marriage to Leonie—a smooth, upper-middle-class black Vassar woman, and an irresistible Christian to boot—there were many, many times when, even though he had never seen it, his thoughts and his heart drifted toward the big stone house. But they were poor. He, in particular, was poor; Leonie came from money—there were famous singers and musicians in her family tree; there’d be money for her when her people died. They lived
poor, too, on principle. They both taught, both wrote—mainly pamphlets on various social ills—and with the arrival of their children, a girl first, then a boy, their life seemed happy and full. He did not ask why then was he so often in a marijuana and alcohol daze.

But after ten years he found himself, as if after a long sleep (though his life had been crammed with people, ideas, events, as everyone’s is) stumbling up the steps of the big stone house.

Orelia, wearing a long black dress and amber beads that glowed in the shadowy entryway, let him in, introduced him briefly to her own three children who were flying by, and led the way into the mahogany wainscoted lower sitting room.

“And how are you?” he’d enthused, looking furtively about for signs of the husband.

“I think I’m okay,” she said, and then, bluntly, offhandedly, “I’m getting divorced.”

All thought of the bogus survey of salary levels among black Columbia alumni that he was supposed to be conducting fled. All he could think was: I am too poor to offer this woman anything but a casual affair. Which, after a glaringly brief mumble of inquiry and sympathy, he did.

“Atrocious timing,” she’d said, frowning. “My husband has cancer, the children don’t know yet, and I’m terrified.”

And then followed the years of watching her from a distance, joined only by letters, as she struggled to free herself, her children, even her husband. And at last it was done, somehow. The house sold and the money divided, the children prepared for a different lifestyle, her husband once again healthy and prosperous. A new job invented for herself, a new city. With John following her steps almost exactly, but one year behind, so that by
the time she was finally free, he was just on the verge of discussing, with Leonie, the possibility of moving out.

To which Leonie had replied that perhaps they needed to pray. And pray they had, for a year. He could never thank her enough for forcing him to do it, since in the intensity of prayer, which for the first time he took seriously: Please God, let me make the right decision, and not destroy my wife and my children. Please God, let me spend a few years at least with Orelia: he faced his drinking and his marijuana addiction squarely, and rooted drugs out of his life. For Leonie, too, the year of prayer had a positive effect. It helped her to let go. (No feminist, she, the very notion of braving life without a husband, no matter how earnestly he petitioned for release, was anathema to her.) As did the money from a trust fund her family had thoughtfully set up for her and the children for just such an occasion of loss. Though John suspected it was not his going away but his death they had been preparing for.

And so, after innumerable fears, false starts and stops, after much, as he liked to say, mocking Goethe,
strum und drang
, he had “won,” as he thought of it, a few years, at least, with this charming creature, Orelia.

How would they live? Where would they? What work would they do?

“I will support myself, and live in my own space. You and your children, my husband and his children, will sometimes be welcome.” This, from Orelia, which settled quite a bit.

John continued to teach, college-level, now. Slightly better paid. Orelia’s business was very slow. She was black, a woman, the service she offered only vaguely understood. She named her company Genuine Illusions. They struggled. They ate a lot of
what a friend called
le cuisine de pauvres
, the food of the poor: beans, noodles, suspicious-looking cuts of meat. John lived in a garret. But they were happy.

In fact, they became two of those irritating people who begin a remarkably large number of sentences with the words: “We are blessed …” and “I love …” Said with big irritating smiles that made friends want to hit them.

Except that friends felt happy around them, too. For one thing, they were totally without guile, and any fight or disagreement they had, they never considered hiding; and their love for each other, so total and so cherishing, made their friends think automatically of protecting them from any possible damage caused by their own injudicious tongues. It was clear that they thought of themselves not as a couple with private problems, but rather as a private twosome with any couple’s problems. And those problems, generously shared, always seemed more interesting to them than whether they could endure having their friends know “the worst” about them.

For instance, when Orelia, while professing love for John, and obviously feeling it too, still managed to become infatuated with a woman she met at a music festival, their friends, some of whom were, in truth, borderline homophobes, were informed of this. Nothing had “happened”; she’d touched the other woman’s face (and breast); she’d been too frightened at the strong attraction she felt to go on. But there it was.

Some of their friends thought John should leave her; they felt Orelia’s attraction to another woman invalidated her as a woman, and called John’s manhood into question as well. Some thought Orelia was using her relationship with John as a screen behind which to … but this view could not be maintained in the presence of so much kissing and cuddling between the scrutinized
pair. In fact, though much concerned and humanly fearful of losing her, John loved Orelia’s spontaneous access to her own feelings, and her lack of shame in expressing them. And even as she struggled with her feelings for “the other woman,” as they both referred to her, she did not withdraw from John. If anything, she depended on him to help her sort it all out.

Then too there had been the times when John fell off the wagon and back into his old habits of marijuana and drink. It did not seem to occur to them that this was anything but possibly a universal problem: that people slipped into drugs and alcohol when life frightened and appalled them. For John’s repurification, Orelia and some of their Native American friends had organized a day of prayer and a sweat. It worked.

A short time after it became clear that Orelia was gone, women began to invite John to their homes for dinner. Soon he was seeing a lot of a woman named Belinda, who taught in his department. She was a divorcée with two children, Ansel, four, and Louise, twelve. At first it was simply awkward, and no matter how warmly she welcomed him each visit he felt like an intruder. Belinda and the children lived in a tiny, neat apartment near campus, with walls so thin he could hear every word of the children’s prayers when she put them to bed. After she turned off their lights she came in and flopped down beside him on the scruffy sofa, and leaned her elegant dark head on its back. If she were Orelia, he thought, she’d kick off her shoes and put her feet on the coffee table. No. Not on the coffee table; in his lap. But Belinda kept on her pumps.

Their affair had started when John, thinking of Orelia, asked Belinda if she’d like a foot massage.

Looking questioningly at him out of large, tired, startled eyes,
she slowly raised one foot and then the other into his lap. Carefully, he eased the pumps off her feet and began automatically, as he did with Orelia, to rotate her toes.

In a short while she had begun to cry.

“No one ever did that before,” she said, wiping her tears and settling into the pleasure. It always amazed John that there could be so many inept, thoughtless lovers in the world, but he did not comment on this now. The heat in her feet seemed dramatically to increase, until his hands were hot and sliding more and more up her very shapely legs. When he reached her knees—a ticklish spot sometimes on Orelia—Belinda raised herself and met him halfway in a kiss.

Oh, shit, he had thought.

Whereas with Orelia he was treated as an important and crucial part of her life—as she muttered over her work, often not looking all that attractive as she did so, and clearly not caring what he thought about that—John was thrilled to find Belinda eager to make him all of hers. She shopped with his wants foremost in mind. She cooked expressly to please his palate. She dressed in outfits that revealed the luscious curves of her body, and when he showed an interest in lingerie from Victoria’s Secret, she ran up an enormous charge for it on her credit cards. In bed she did everything she possibly could to make him happy. They did not talk much, and she did not seem interested in the work she did at school. But they did not need a conversational life, or so he thought.

It wasn’t her fault that he could not forget Orelia, and that even after making the most tender and involved love with Belinda, his thoughts returned instantly to the anticipation of her next phone call. She would be eager to tell him about a new
book she’d read, a play she’d gone to. She’d want to talk about how, in the city she was now in, she could make a fortune redesigning houses, because all the houses she saw were so dark, so closed in.

“Nobody on the East Coast”—where she was—“remembers they used to live in trees!” she cried.

“That’s because they actually lived in caves,” he’d replied.

To which she’d said, “Right.” After a long pause.

On weekends he and Belinda took the children to the zoo, to scientific exhibitions, to museums, to the beach. He imagined how they must appear to the people around them: a happy married couple and their two kids.

Unfortunately, this image was one shared by Belinda herself, and he began to feel her attachment to it the nearer the time approached for Orelia to come home.

Belinda knew Orelia; not well, but they’d met at the occasional (and Orelia muttered, unavoidable) campus affair. She knew Orelia and John had a life together. She even liked Orelia: liked a middle-aged (Orelia was several years older than Belinda, and looked it) woman who’d reorganized her life; left home and husband, arranged a new life for her children, started her own company. But at the same time, she resented her because she had John, with whom, since the night he’d massaged her feet (and to whose extraordinary ability to comfort and soothe her, she was by now addicted), Belinda had fallen in love.

Oh, shit. John was saying to himself more frequently than ever.

Belinda was not a bad woman, he thought, even as she began to express a lot of verbal fault with the absent Orelia. She
had heard Orelia was a man-hater. That she browbeat John. She didn’t believe a woman who loved a man should leave him behind for six months.

“She couldn’t take me with her,” John joked. Then saw the hurt in Belinda’s eyes. “She has dreams of living in the country.” He shrugged. He listened patiently to Belinda’s complaints about Orelia, and sometimes even tried to feel self-pitying, as he studied himself from Belinda’s point of view. However, he couldn’t stop thinking how tired Orelia sounded some evenings when he talked to her on the phone, her clear homesickness almost made him weep. He found himself beginning to regret the intimacy of this new relationship.

Belinda, whose former husband, a judge, never came to see his children, did not support them, or even, apparently, care that they were alive, insisted that John notice her children’s growing dependence on his presence.

Oh,
shit
. He moaned, to himself.

“The kids think you are just great!” Belinda said, hopefully.

And John began to feel extremely guilty, even as he continued to take them to baseball games and to the movies and to the ballet.

In the end, two weeks before an exhausted, delighted to be back Orelia returned, he’d done a despicable thing. He’d simply left Belinda and the kids after dinner, as he had for the past five months, waving and smiling and blowing kisses, and never, except in formal settings—school affairs, church—set smiling eyes on them again. He continued to see Belinda every week on campus, and he saw the look in her eyes. One day she stopped him as he was getting into his car:
“Why?”
she asked.