Once Upon a Time, There Was You (14 page)

She takes a drink of tea, and the last bite of the beet dish that she made herself for an early dinner. Then she begins typing again, quickly.
Are you eating dinner and reading this ad?

No.

When I was a little girl, I used to want a bracelet that would prick me if I were doing something wrong. A kind of external conscience. But then one day when I was on the swings at my elementary school, it came to me that I was full of envy of Cynthia Hamilton, whose shoe box for Valentine’s Day was stuffed to the limit. And I was full of rage at Mrs. Monroe, my math teacher, for being a math teacher. And I was full of guilt for having found a dollar on the floor of the church we attended which I knew was intended for the collection plate but
which I kept for myself. I thought, if I had a bracelet like I wanted, my wrist would get so perforated, my hand would fall off
.

Irene sighs. Maybe Val’s right. Maybe she should stop with the wacky ads, and try to be sincere. Although she was sincere about wanting that bracelet! And she is sincere in suggesting that maybe a conscience that punishes with physical pain isn’t such a bad idea!

She starts yet again. She writes:
Woman in search of …
The cursor blinks. In search of what? A forty-three-year-old man? She doesn’t think so. Jeffrey Stanton told her over what turned out to be a lengthy lunch that he was very much attracted to older women, always had been. He used to fall in love with his teachers routinely, one quite seriously. When he was a senior in high school, he had a torrid affair with his fifty-year-old art teacher. “Fifty!” Irene said.

“That’s when women start getting interesting,” he said. He told her he dated almost exclusively older women.

“Hmm,” Irene said. Part of her was flattered; part of her was thinking,
Boy, is this guy screwed up
.

“May I ask you something?” she said. “It’s kind of personal.”

“Please,” he said, putting down his fork to give her his complete attention.

“Do you do this because you’re afraid of having a relationship with someone your own age?”

He answered her in what seemed to be an honest way, saying, “I’ve asked myself that question. But I don’t think so. I think it’s that the character of women has changed. I don’t particularly like the so-called modern woman.”

“I’m a modern woman!” Irene said, offended.

“You’re a modern woman with an old-fashioned heart,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

She supposed she was.

“Look,” he said. “I don’t want to talk you into doing something you’re uncomfortable with. I just thought we kind of hit it off. I’m … between relationships, as they say, and I’d really like to spend more time with you. I think you’re interesting and I think you’re beautiful.”

Tears sprang to Irene’s eyes, and she blinked them away, embarrassed. Then she laughed. “Sorry,” she said.

“Been a while since someone’s told you that?”

“Been a long while.”

“But you are, you know. You’re beautiful.”

“Well. Thank you.”

“You don’t believe me.”

She looked at him, full of things to say but unable to formulate a single sentence. Did she find herself beautiful? Of course not. And yet sometimes she thought she looked nice. Sometimes she thought she looked really nice.

“When I say you’re beautiful, you think,
Not anymore
. Right?”

She shrugged. “It’s the truth. One doesn’t hold on to beauty.”

“Is that what you think?”

“Well … 
yes
.”

“Are you familiar with the Japanese word
shibui
?”

Irene shook her head no.

“It refers to a certain kind of aesthetic. It’s about balancing simplicity with complexity, and it’s about being aware of subtle details. That way, you don’t get tired of what you see. It’s also a way of constantly finding new meaning in beauty. Which, incidentally, is not compromised by the years going by, but enhanced by it.”

“Well,” Irene says. “I think the concept works with inanimate objects, maybe.”

Jeffrey got out his wallet and Irene thought,
That was fast
. She
thought she’d offended him. But it wasn’t that. He pulled out a small photo of a painting. It was of an older woman, maybe in her early sixties, nude, sitting in a chair, a blue silk robe pooled at her feet.

“This was my greatest love,” he told her. “She represents what I’m trying to explain to you. She had a beauty that resonated because of what was inside. That’s really important in trying to understand
shibui
. It sounds simple, like a cliché, really; but it’s true: a woman is most beautiful when she is herself. The Japanese call it a beauty with ‘inner implications.’ It’s not a show-off kind of thing, some peacock display of clothes and makeup and demeanor. It’s quiet. Subtle. And here’s the most interesting thing:
Shibui
relies on the ones looking at a person or an object to make something for themselves out of what they see; in that way, it makes an artist out of the observer. It’s counterintuitive, I suppose, a kind of two-way equation. I wish I could explain it better.”

“No, I think I understand.” Irene looked at the wash of sun on the side of the woman’s face, the prominent knuckles of her hands. And then, of course, her breasts, her belly. And for the first time, she saw an aging woman’s body in a different way, having nothing to do with competitiveness or fear or revulsion or herself. She looked simply at the fact of it: skin, bone, eyes. Lines, angles, planes. Light and shadow. And yes, beauty. The woman’s hair was completely gray, but quite long and thick, parted on one side, wavy.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Cancer.”

“Oh,” Irene said, and she looked again at the painting, seeing more, this time. “I’m sorry. How long were you together?”

“Eight years.”

“That’s how long I was married.”

“That’s how long we were married, too.”

“She was your wife?”

“She was my
life.
”

Irene looked at the painting again. “Who did this?” she asked, and Jeffrey said, “I did.”

“You paint?”

“Another surprise, huh? There’s more to me than managing people’s portfolios.”

By the end of the meal, she’d agreed to go to the opera with him, to a performance ten days away. Irene liked that it was relatively far away. It would give her time to get out of it, should she change her mind.

Whatever she decides, her conversation with Jeffrey has made her think she should keep herself in the game, and so here she goes again, dropping yet another line in the water.

Irene carries her plate and fork into the kitchen and puts them in the dishwasher. On the way back to the bedroom, she passes the hall mirror and stops to regard herself. Is it really the company of a man she wants? She thinks about the girl she used to be: lying on her belly beside a narrow creek, her hand cupped in the water to catch the tadpoles, her summer shirt riding up in the back. Holding her mother’s hand as they climbed the wide steps to the library, then settling deliciously into bed that night, surrounded by books holding stories that would take her away. She remembers straddling the top rail of the backyard fence to play cowgirl, one of her mother’s scarves around her neck, the black velvet hat she wore to church transformed in her mind into a Stetson, a folded towel serving as a saddle.

She remembers going to junior high on the first day of classes, wearing a black tight skirt for the first time, with a hot pink blouse that refused to stay tucked in. In high school, playing Ike and Tina Turner in her bedroom at a volume so low she could hardly hear them, because her father found the singers vulgar.

In college she met Val, for which she will be grateful every day for the rest of her life. Then after school came her years as a speech therapist, when she dated everyone from doctors to men who worked construction to coffeehouse musicians. Every time she met a man she liked, she would tell Val, and every time a relationship crashed, she would tell Val. And relationships crashed continually.

But then came John. And then Sadie: the cool gray morning she delivered her daughter, the strange awkwardness between her and John afterward, the way they seemed not to know quite what to do with each other, though clearly each was independently besotted with their child. How frank was the tenderness and joy in John’s eyes when he looked at his daughter, how different it was from the way he looked at his wife. “Good job!” he told her after Sadie was born, and he clapped her on the shoulder. The people in the delivery room just stared, expecting, Irene supposed, that what he should have done was at least embraced her. Well, he didn’t. Nor did she embrace him, not then, anyway. She did hug him before he left the hospital that night, but even in that embrace was an impenetrable distance. Somehow, even at the height of their love for each other—and they did love each other, in those days—they could not cross the divide.

Once, early on in Irene’s marriage, when she told Val that she and John never said “I love you” to each other, Val said,
“Why not?”
And Irene said she didn’t know. “Well, just say it!” Val said, but Irene didn’t. And didn’t. And didn’t. She never did, and neither did he. They did other things, they offered gifts both tangible and not, but neither spoke those words, except to Sadie. About a year before they divorced, when she and John went briefly for marriage counseling, the therapist ferreted out of them that neither had had parents who expressed love, at least not verbally; neither had grown up hearing “I love you.” The therapist
asked John and Irene to face each other and say the words. They faced each other, and neither spoke, neither was willing to go first, and finally Irene laughed, and John did, too. “Okay,” the therapist said, unamused. “I’ll pick one to go first. Irene, tell John you love him.”

“I love you,” she said, obediently.

“Look at him when you say it,” the therapist said, and Irene looked at John and said, “I love you.”

“Now you, John,” the therapist said, and John looked at Irene, took in a breath, and said quickly, “I love you.”

“How did that feel, saying those words?” the therapist asked.

Neither answered.

“Irene, can you say how it felt?”

“Um,” Irene said. “It was …” She wanted to say it was nice. But she also wanted to say the truth, because they were in trouble then, and she thought, if ever they were going to be out of trouble, they’d need to tell the truth. And so she said, “It was like the words were these big wooden blocks, and they were hard to get out of my mouth.”

“John?” the therapist said.

“It was sad,” he said.

“Sad?” the therapist said.

John looked over at Irene, and she looked away. That was their last time to go for counseling.

Irene comes back to her desk chair and looks around her bedroom, idly massaging one elbow. How did she get here, living in this two-bedroom flat in San Francisco, California? She would never have predicted this for herself. But then it seems to her that life is learning that you can never quite fully put in to one port, for the way that things are always changing, including oneself. Oh, in some respects, people stay irrevocably themselves (truth be told, Irene would still like to be a cowgirl, never mind that the
skills required are not her own), but mostly the only thing one can rely on is unreliability.

And so for now here she is: a fifty-six-year-old divorced woman, writing ads to ask for something that is not what she really wants. What she really wants is to feel a part of the world in a way she has never quite been able to do, to feel
among
and not apart from. She pushes her glasses up onto the top of her head and rubs her eyes. “No more,” she says, her voice seeming overly loud in the empty room. She shuts off her computer, closes the lid, and vows not to waste her time doing this again. But she knows she will. There will come one of those empty times, one of those lonely evenings when she looks at the clock and despairs of it being only 7:10, and she will once again sit under the lamplight in her robe, trying to sell herself in a neighborhood newspaper.

She hears a sound at the front door and smiles. There’s Sadie; she didn’t call as Irene asked her to, but at least she’s home safe—and a day early! But the sound is a knocking, and therefore is not Sadie, unless Sadie lost her keys. Irene goes to the door, looks out the peephole, and sees Henry standing there, his arms crossed tightly over his chest. She moves quietly away. She’ll pretend she’s not home. But he has seen or heard her, for he knocks again, saying, “Come on, Irene. I know you’re there.”

Reluctantly, she opens the door. “What.”

He raises his brows, regards her obliquely. “You’re not even going to invite me in?”

She steps aside, and he goes into the living room and takes off his jacket. “Cold outside,” he says. Irene stands stiffly as he lowers himself into one of the armchairs, places his jacket over his lap just so.

“Oh, sit
down
,” he tells Irene, and she perches stiffly on the edge of the sofa. She wishes she weren’t in her nightclothes.

“Look, I’m
sorry
,” he says. “It was a little tense at that party.”

“It’s tense at every party, Henry. Every party, every event, everything we do.”

He nods gratefully. “Right. So you can understand—”

“No, I mean,
you
make everything tense. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

He sits staring at her, arms crossed and one eyebrow raised, as though she’s a painting he’s about to negatively critique. Finally, he says, “Are you really quitting?”

“Yes, Henry. I’m really quitting.”

“Even if I give you a raise? And increase your hours?”

The phone rings, and Irene excuses herself. Finally! She hopes her daughter has a lot to tell her, so she can beg off to Henry. But it’s only a marketing call, and Irene bangs the phone down and returns to the living room.

“Well! I guess you’re mad at more than me. Aren’t you?”

“I’m worried about my daughter. Who was supposed to call me hours ago and hasn’t yet.”

“Where is she?”