Terms of Endearment (52 page)

“I quite well might tell him just that,” Aurora said.

Emma realized she quite well might. “No, stay there,” she said. “I’ll do it-Emma did get out, but it took another three months. She destroyed it by meeting Hugh’s standards sexually—she trumped him with his own card. An equal was not what he wanted, and as her head cleared and her confidence came back she felt less and less need to please him. His response to her became more and more sardonic, more and more contemptuous. He kept himself in perfect shape; his cabinets were full of health foods and vitamins and he scorned Emma because hers weren’t. At first he chose an easy target for criticism, namely her figure. He reminded her that her behind was too big, her breasts too small, and her thighs too flabby. Emma shrugged it off. “I’m not a narcissist like you,” she said. “Even if I exercised ten hours a day my figure would be indifferent.”

She knew he was working his way up to dumping her, and she felt relieved and also quite content to let him do the work. He was waiting to hurt her in some way, she knew, so she was on her guard. It was clear from his eyes that he had every intention of leaving a scar. One day while they were dressing she mentioned something about her children. “God you have ugly brats,” Hugh said. Emma was bent over and his large sneaker lay just in front of her hand. She whirled and hit him in the face with it as hard as she could. His nose smashed and blood immediately flooded onto his beard and began to drip down his chest. She threw the sneaker down. Hugh couldn’t believe it. “You’ve broken my nose, you crazy bitch,” he said. “What do you mean?”

Emma said nothing.

“You’ve broken my nose,” Hugh repeated as blood continued to flood out. “I have to teach tonight. What do you think I’m supposed to tell people?”

“Tell them your girl friend hit you in the nose with a tennis shoe, you conceited little drip,” Emma said. “Don’t ever criticize my children.”

Hugh began to hit her and she was almost as bloody as he was before she got out, though most of it was his blood. She had to
leave her shoes, but fortunately she managed to get into her bathroom without any of the kids seeing her. She lay in the bathtub and soaked out the whole affair. Feeling the sneaker connect had been very satisfying.

For a few weeks after the fight she was able to look at life with a clear eye. It was as if she had been purged, temporarily. Flap, she knew, was of no further use to her. He was too lethargic to change, and Janice had become dependent on him. He would never muster the strength it would take to break off the affair—not that Emma really wanted him to. He had forced her to remove herself from him, and she had. She didn’t mind making him breakfast and attending to his laundry; it was far easier than keeping him up to snuff emotionally. She was glad to leave that task to Janice; there would be no problem with Flap unless Janice for some reason decided to dump
him.

For a time Hugh made himself obnoxious. He hated Emma for breaking his nose, but he hated her even more for breaking off the affair. He had been ready to get rid of her, but it seemed that she had gotten rid of him first, and that was intolerable. It felt like rejection, and he couldn’t stand rejection. He wanted her back so he could dump her properly. He began to call and to show up on her doorstep at odd times. Emma refused to let him in, but he succeeded in rattling her. His calls were mean—he was looking to hurt her if he got the chance. It was midwinter, and Hugh’s sullen persistence made her claustrophobic. On impulse, she persuaded Flap that she needed to get away, and not to see her mother, for once, but her friend Patsy—now living in Los Angeles and evidently quite happy in her second marriage. Her husband was a successful architect.

Flap agreed, and Emma went. Patsy had become Patsy Fair-child. Her husband was a very good-looking and apparently nice man: tall, tense, hardworking, and witty on the rare occasions when he spoke. Patsy’s son by her first marriage was eleven, and she had two lively daughters by her second. She herself looked great, and she had a wonderful modern house in Beverly Hills.

“I knew it would turn out this way,” Emma said. “As Momma would be the first to point out, your life is everything mine isn’t.”

Patsy looked at her shapeless, dowdy friend and didn’t bother
to deny it. “Yes, I like it here,” she said. “I owe it all to Joe Percy—you remember, my friend the screenwriter? He made me come out one time when I was miserable—you remember when I cut my hair? That was when I met Tony.”

They talked most of the night, in a splendid room with a slanted roof. The lights of Los Angeles were brilliant below them.

They talked, in fact, for three days as Patsy drove Emma around the city. She took her to the beaches, took her up the coast to San Simeon, and, on the night before Emma was to return to Nebraska, dutifully gave a party for her, complete with movie stars. Anthony Fairchild had built homes for some of them. In party clothes the Fairchilds were a brilliant couple-more brilliant than some of the movie stars. Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw were there, and Ali McGraw’s husband; there were several men in Levi’s who were apparently executives; there was a tiny French actor, and some man who seemed to be a neighbor. He and Anthony Fairchild talked politics while everyone else laughed at one another’s jokes. Emma had never been more conscious of her dowdiness, and spent the evening trying not to be seen, which was easy, because no one was looking. Except for the merest politeness, she was assumed to be a non-person and ignored. Peter Bogdanovich and Cybill Shepherd came in late, and Joe Percy, Patsy’s old screenwriter friend, got drunk early in the evening and fell asleep in the corner of one of Patsy’s vast couches.

When the guests had gone Patsy brought a blanket and covered him up. He mumbled and she sat down and hugged him for a while.

“I don’t remember him having such bags under his eyes,” Emma said.

“No, he has no judgment,” Patsy said. “Women have ruined him. He has a room here, you know. The whole guesthouse, in fact. It’s just that pride drives him out once in a while. We’re one another’s company. You’ve seen what hours Tony works.”

Flying back, Emma got lost in reverie, trying to imagine herself living as Patsy lived, in a grand house that was always clean, with kids that looked like they had been raised on toothpaste and soap. She worried about Hugh, but he stopped being a problem.
He had taken a new girl friend. It was easier than dealing with Emma, who, after all, might only be perverse enough to reject him again.

“How does Patsy look?” Flap asked. He had always been a fan of Patsy’s.

“Better than all five of us combined,” Emma said, contemplating her shabby small-town brood. Only Melanie was going to make it into Patsy’s class, looks-wise; that much was clear.

W
ITH HUGH
no longer a problem, Emma felt more clear-headed than ever. By great good fortune, almost the greatest of her life, a nice person presented himself at her door, in the form of Flap’s young graduate assistant, a lanky, gentle boy named Richard. He was from Wyoming, not terribly intelligent but extremely sweet. Also he was very shy and honorable; it took Emma several months to get him in love with her. It was very difficult for Richard to believe that a grownup lady would want to sleep with him in the first place, and very hard to accept that he himself would sleep with somebody’s wife. It was a terrible fall from grace, and also, since Emma was Dr. Horton’s wife, he felt fairly sure it would result in his failing to get his M.A., which would upset his parents very much.

Emma didn’t rush him. She was extremely careful, and waited out his many retreats and hesitations. If there was ever a person she didn’t want to hurt, it was Richard. He seemed not terribly older or more grown up than her own boys—in fact, Tommy could outread him—and she was painfully aware that she might not like it if an older woman such as herself suddenly laid hands on one of her own boys.

Yet, for the first time since Sam Burns, she was immediately confident of her capacity to be good for someone. Richard was planning to teach high school in Wyoming. He had not seemed to have had much attention in his life and hadn’t learned to expect any; consequently he was all response. She coaxed him out of being intimidated by her; taught him to give his own enthusiasm a chance. Soon he would have abandoned his graduate studies, or anything else, to please her. They never quarreled—had nothing
to quarrel about. He kept a certain meekness in regard to her, even after they had been lovers for over a year. It was a measure of his regard, and it made Emma feel her age. Watching Richard, she began to understand the appeal of youth. He had a shy smile, uncynical eyes, long tense legs. He was eager; he brought a freshness to any action. He had never been seriously disappointed, had not grown critical, and had no reason to dislike himself. To Emma he was fresh as dew—he never saw her as the sagging, heavily used woman she felt herself to be.

She had such light, nice times with Richard that she even began to feel sorry for her bedraggled husband, who was looking wearier and seedier every month. He could have had a nice easily impressed girl who might have been able to make him feel he was someone special, and instead he had stuck himself with a woman more neurotic than his wife.

Flap knew vaguely that Emma must have a lover, but he was in no position to inquire. He couldn’t manage Janice, and he began to talk to Emma again, and even to take an interest in his children, as an escape. He had even begun to have the vague suspicion that Janice had a lover, and he didn’t feel up to confronting even one infidelity, much less two.

Richard was as awed by literature as he was by sex, and discovered a new great writer almost every week. Emma could not resist tutoring him, and with her help his grades improved. As usual, it was her mother who called her attention to the flaw in her arrangements.

“I’m sure he’s a fine lad,” Aurora said. “My dear, you are so very impractical. This is first love for him, remember? What are you going to do when he wants to carry you off to some very cold town in Wyoming? You’re not happy being the wife of a college professor, what chance do you think you’d have with a high school teacher? These things have to come to some resolution, you know.”

“I think the pot’s talking to the kettle, on the kettle’s money,” Emma said. “What have you ever resolved?”

“Don’t be impertinent, Emma,” Aurora said. “Marital arrangements don’t happen to interest me, that’s all.”

“They interest me less and less,” Emma said.

“The point is that they interest men,” Aurora said. “My men are too old to make much of a fuss, no matter what I do. Young men are not so easily put off.”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Emma said. It was a statement she used more and more often. The illusion that talk was a means to change had left her, and she felt cloudy in her spirit when she found herself talking too much or too hopefully about what was going to happen.

Luckily, though, she made a friend in Kearney. She had felt so isolated from the college community, partly by Flap’s affair and partly by her own disinclinations, that she had not supposed she would be making any friends. She had Richard and her kids, and she expected to read a lot. But then one day at a P.T.A. meeting she met a big gawky Nebraska girl named Melba, the wife of the high school basketball coach. Melba was all teeth and elbows, but she was irresistibly friendly; the two of them quickly became fascinated with one another. Melba seemed to have vast unused energies, despite having five boys, all under twelve. She had many nervous habits, one of which was stirring coffee constantly while she sat at Emma’s kitchen table. She only stopped stirring long enough to take large gulps. There was something slow and Nordic about her. In her way she was as awed by Emma’s ordinary two-story house as Emma had been by Patsy’s mansion in Beverly Hills. She thought Emma led a romantic existence because her husband taught college; she was fascinated by the fact that Emma’s children read books instead of throwing balls around constantly, as her boys did.

Emma, in turn, was intrigued to discover that there was someone whose domestic situation was on a lower level than her own. Melba’s husband Dick had no interest in anything but drinking, hunting, and sports—his general disregard of Melba made Flap seem almost oppressively considerate. Emma often felt like telling Melba that it was all relative, only Melba wouldn’t have known what she was talking about. Emma soon found that she couldn’t resist titillating her friend, and she confessed her affair-dangerous as that was.

“You mean a young guy?” Melba said, crinkling her large forehead as she tried to imagine it. She tried to put herself in Emma’s
place, tried to imagine sleeping with someone other than Dick, but it didn’t work. She couldn’t imagine anybody. All she could imagine was Dick killing her when he found out. In a vague way it worried her that Emma would pick a young guy, but it was so different from anything she might do that her imagination never got a good grip on it. All she knew was that if Emma was doing it it must be very romantic. From then on she referred to Richard as “your Dick.”

“Richard,” Emma said over and over again. “I call him Richard.” But Melba never made the switch. In her world all Richards were Dicks.

It was a minor flaw, though, for no one was better-hearted than Melba. She would offer to keep the boys at the drop of a hat, if Emma even looked like she might be getting sick. The only problem there was getting the boys to go, for her boys regarded Melba’s boys as uninteresting louts—a judgment with which Emma agreed. With Melanie, Melba was less sure of herself. She seemed to regard Melanie was an exceedingly delicate creature.

“That kid’s about as delicate as a truck,” Emma said, but it didn’t matter. Melanie found Melba scarcely worth the charming. Melba’s whole life, it seemed to Emma, was spent hoping that the prices of things at the supermarket wouldn’t go any higher. If they went any higher her husband would gripe at her for buying them, and yet they had to eat something. She was like a big walking ticker tape of commodity prices; when she walked into Emma’s kitchen the first thing she said was, “Pork’s gone up twelve cents. Twelve cents!” And yet she seemed to be a happy woman—Emma never heard her complain about anything
except
prices—and her energy was extraordinary. Emma watched her shovel snow one day, and she cleared a driveway almost as quick as a snowplow would have. “Emma, you don’t exercise,” she scolded. “I don’t think you could shovel out a driveway if you had to.”