A Private Sorcery (21 page)

She grew serious thinking about it. “No, I really haven't. I mean, I've noticed men the way you notice a garden or a piece of furniture and I've thought what a handsome face or whatever. But I can't say that my mind has gone further than that.”

The way Saul looked at her left her wondering if there was something wrong with her. But it was true. Not that she wasn't acutely conscious of bodies. All day long, it was the central piece of her work, analyzing bodies and how and what they convey. Their balance of perfection and imperfection. But she no more thought about touching them than she did the façades of the buildings she studied as she walked home each night.

Beersden raises the back of his chair. He buries a foot in the sand. “You must be relieved that you didn't have children. That makes it so much harder to split up.”

“No,” she says slowly. “It makes it harder for me. It makes it unlikely that I'll ever have a child. Given my age, I'd have to get divorced, meet the right person, get married and then get pregnant all in the next five years.”

She sees how foreign this is to him. He has children. They are what keep him from even considering divorce. For a moment, the emotional situation between them seems to her like a physics diagram with vectors shooting off in different directions. If she continues to not tell Beersden about Saul, it will be, as Saul had in fact finally convinced her, an expulsive force between them. If she tells him, it will draw them together. Drawn closer together, a conflict would be introduced: Beersden would then be pulled between the pact this would entail with her and the pact he made long ago with his wife.

After he leaves, she walks along the water's edge until the soreness in her legs and the sounds of the surf finally lull her into a state in which she can concentrate on what had bothered her this afternoon. It was not simply Beersden's anxiety about their being seen. It was not even primarily his feeling guilty about betraying his wife. It was more basic yet. It was his feelings for her. Falling in love doesn't capture it. That suggests something more joyous and also more ephemeral. No, this was an entirely sober matter tinged with grief. Before, they had shared being smitten with one another—a loose feeling, garments easily put on, easily taken off. Now everything feels cold and waterlogged. Already, she imagines, he is anguishing about the moment Monday morning when he will drop her at her door and they will again be apart.

She wants to flee. It's a hateful feeling, wanting to flee from someone's need.

This was not the bargain
, she imagines protesting.

The bargain
, she can hear him slowly repeating.

It's dusk, the dark wet sand packed so hard that only her large toe leaves an impression.
Yes, the bargain
.

W
HEN SHE GETS BACK
, she goes biking with Ruth.

“I hate this time of year,” Ruth laments. “Leaving the country, closing
up the cabin. Then there are the students. They go nuts the first six weeks of classes. Obsessing about whether to keep their courses or use the drop option. One kid told me last week that she had never written more than fifteen pages and didn't think there would be any topic on which she'd be able to write more. When I tried to explain to her that the page specifications were simply guidelines to suggest the scope for the paper, she insisted that she had to know how much she'd be docked if the paper was less than twenty pages. Well, I said, if you've fully reviewed the literature and thoughtfully addressed the topic, I don't really care if it's ten. She almost had a nervous breakdown right there in my office. I finally suggested that this might not be the course for her, after which she got furious and complained to the dean.”

They're carrying their bikes down the stairs to one of the lower levels of Riverside Park, a gracefully proportioned stretch of promenade but a place where a person can easily feel trapped with no steps up to street level for blocks on end. More than once, Rena has stopped to assist a frightened baby-sitter who's wandered with baby and stroller down to the promenade only to realize there's no upward path in sight.

“Then there are the Jewish holidays. Every year, I remind myself that no one is making me go to my parents' house. Every year, I arrive and it's the same thing: the dining room table set for twenty-two with the special china and my mother in the kitchen frenetically instructing her cleaning woman on how to put the carrot slice on top of the gefilte fish. My sisters all dolled up in these dresses the likes of which I swear I never even see here in the city, chartreuse and lime green, fitted like a glove with big buttons everywhere, going on and on about the name of the designer, it could be Donald Duck for all I know, and what a steal they got it for at Loehmann's and, I'm not kidding, they can spend half an hour debating the virtues of the Long Island Loehmann's versus the one in Paramus. All the while, my mother giving me this sourpuss designed to convey, Ruthie, you're breaking my heart, here I am letting your girlfriend come to my holiday table and you can't just for your mother wear a little dress?”

Ruth sets her bike on the walkway and climbs on. “I feel like I'm in
a
Saturday Night Live
skit: Weirdo Lesbo Daughter Goes Home to Huntington. Maggie says I should count my lucky stars. In Randallstown, Mississippi, where she grew up, she swears nine out of ten people don't know what the word
lesbian
means. Her mother, she says, once gave her a piece of paper with six words on it—words like
sodomy
and
fellatio
and
labia
—and asked her if she could explain what they meant.”

“What did she say?”

“She says she looked at the list and at her mother, who's never even been to Biloxi, and then folded the paper in quarters, put it in her pocket and said, ‘Mom, there are some words you're better off not fussing with.' My mother likes to tell Maggie and me how she consulted with the rabbi in their synagogue. ‘Now, of course,' she told Maggie, ‘we are Reform so they're more open-minded there, but that's why Ruthie's father and I joined. Our rabbi explained that love is love in God's eyes, he doesn't stop to check the anatomy. Isn't that a cute line? Doesn't stop to check the anatomy.' That, I have to give my mother credit for. She never hides what she calls
you girls' relationship
. Not wearing panty hose, though, that's a serious matter.”

“Does Maggie wear a dress?”

“Maggie doesn't have to wear a dress. She's got eight inches on any of the women in my family and that white Swedish hair and those watery blue eyes. She sticks on a pair of silver earrings or wraps a scarf around her waist, and my sisters go nuts trying to figure out if this is Soho chic or street vendor junk. It drives them crazy that Maggie walks around with twenty pounds of meat on her bones, perfectly comfortable to have hips and thighs. In their eyes, this is a tragedy, like defacing Michelangelo's David.”

They cross Ninety-Sixth Street and head south another five blocks to the hippo park, a children's playground where plasticine hippos wallow in imaginary rubberized mud. Children crawl in and out of the hippos' mouths and pet the iron turtles perched on top. Toward the river, there are beds of flowers and people walking their city dogs: teacup schnauzers and golden terriers and beauty parlor poodles. Everywhere there is squealing and the insistent voices of parents alternately cajoling
and prohibiting.

They park their bikes and sit on two of the empty swings. Ruth pushes herself off and pumps her legs until she attains a goodly height. Rena rocks back and forth, her toes in the dirt. She watches as Ruth stops pumping and the swing shortens its arc.

“I've been blathering on,” Ruth says, “and I haven't heard anything about you.”

“Well …” Rena kicks the dirt, uncertain why she is hesitating. Ruth brings her swing to a halt.

“I've been having an affair.”

Ruth looks Rena squarely in the face. It's a look that Rena knows others find disarming but that she has always found reassuring: an availability to hear the truth, a refusal to respond with anything less than frankness.

“Someone I met where I'm working. One of the lawyers there. A musician who went to law school after his wife had twins.”

“He's married?”

“Yes. I feel terrible about that, about his wife. And for him, it makes the whole thing have too much weight.”

She's aware that she's not even getting at the half of it. “I don't know. When I was young, I thought sex was sex. If you were two consenting adults and no one got a disease and no babies were made, it seemed like it was no big deal. Now I find myself thinking that sex must be like one of those Kantian imperatives that Leonard and Saul are always talking about. Something that in its nature is fundamentally different.”

Outside the gate surrounding the swings, two toddlers tussle over who is going to climb onto a tricycle. “You have to share,” a woman says in a singsong mother's voice.

“Maybe human beings are just not cut out to have sexual relations recreationally,” Rena continues. “Maybe we've evolved to have emotions that won't let it work. Someone inevitably falls in love. Unless you couple permanently, someone inevitably gets hurt. I know this sounds like one of those reactionary sociobiologists, but I can't get it out of my mind that I'm doing something that's wrong to the bones.”

“Because he's married?”

“More than that. Because he needs to be with his girls. Not just for them—for himself, too.”

Ruth twists her swing like a corkscrew and then lifts her feet until she winds back to center. “You're leaving something out.”

“What's that?”

She looks at Rena with pained bemusement. “Your husband. Saul.”

W
HEN SHE LEAVES
work the following morning, it's drizzling. A cold mist creeps into her hair and under her collar. She walks west to Sixth Avenue and waits for the Riverside Drive bus. Once on Riverside, the bus picks up speed. They pass the majestic firemen's monument, the wind caught in the ever-flying flag, the park gleaming in the rain. Shortly after her move, mimeographed sheets from the Landmark Preservation Society, ordered by Leonard, had arrived in the mail describing the history of her block: a pasture until late in the last century, the white five-story townhouses designed to emulate a certain Parisian Beaux-Arts district where ladies kept their own coaches and there were special cabinets to store eighteen-inch gloves.

It's nearly seven when Rena gets off the bus. She thinks of Beersden in Brooklyn pouring cereal for his twins. Rachel's the purple girl, he'd told her, Becky the pink one. Rachel gets the purple bowl, Becky the pink. All day long they follow this dictum, Rachel with her purple lunch box, Becky with her pink backpack; Rachel with her purple washcloth, Becky with her pink pajamas.

During the first few weeks with Beersden, she'd entertained the idea that the rules of sex—yes if you're married, no if you're not—were equally childish and arbitrary. Not that her mother had discussed any of this with her; it would have seemed preposterous given Eleanor's own life. Still, the rules had been as omnipresent as in any family where they were preached. They were the principles that Eleanor had violated, the reason she and Rena lived in two rooms over Nick's Ristorante, the reason Nick could throw Eleanor's underwear and Rena's dolls out the window and then padlock the door. The reason Ascher had been told by the party organization after someone had found out about them that
he had to choose between the campaign and her. They were the principles that not only Beersden but, as Ruth had pointed out, she too had broken.

It has come as a surprise and, Rena has to admit, a bit of a disappointment to see that Ruth has no more of a solution to this dilemma of the deeper ethics of sex than she does. If you overlook that she sleeps with a woman instead of a man and that all of this occurs without a wedding band, her sexual dicta are basically conventional: you sleep with and only with the one person you have committed to love.

Rena exchanges hellos with Pedro, just arriving for the day, and presses the elevator button. With Beersden, she'd dumbly thought that sex would be the alchemy through which loneliness could be transformed into comfort, but incompetent witch that she is, she's created only a pot of misery.

The white tip of a cane pokes out from the elevator door. Her heart sinks. Although she's continued their Tuesday reading sessions, other than the day painting with Leonard she has not bumped into Santiago in the building.

“Good morning.” She pauses, then adds, “It's me, Rena.”

“What a pleasure to see you! Well, of course, I cannot see you, but to hear your voice.”

“You're out early.”

“My daughter woke me. She called at four-thirty.” Reluctantly—because all she wants is to get into her bed with a book, to not think about Beersden and his daughters, but afraid of falling further out of grace with what she thinks of loosely as the cosmos, of letting selfishness prevail—she guides Santiago to the lobby love seat.

“Is there a problem with your daughter?”

“With her, it is always the same. She needs more money.”

For the first time, Rena feels flummoxed by Santiago's blindness, which does not allow the usual vague facial expressions of sympathy to speak for themselves. “That must be hard.”

“No. It is not hard. What use do I have for money? It just makes me sad that at forty-six she still lives like this. Not that my Bernardo was so much more practical.”

“Saul, too. Before the drugs, he never got into trouble with money only because he was never interested in buying anything. When I first moved in with him, there was mayonnaise in the refrigerator two years past the toss date. The sheets were like cheesecloth.”

“My Helen used to say the life of the mind is no virtue. It's the life of a child. Sometimes, now, I think she was right.” Santiago sets his lips. With nowhere to look, he has only silence to damper his words.