Three Women (9 page)

She knew she should not become involved with him, and she was unable to resist. His desire simply encompassed her and she burned. She still could not imagine why he had selected her among all the women who flirted with him, even after he and she were involved, even right in her presence. But he found in her exactly what he was looking for. She was not a virgin, but she might as well have been, for his touch consumed her. She was besotted with him. She adored him, even as part of her studied him more cautiously than he ever realized.

One thing she was not too besotted to figure out was that he was not, as the rumors said, a peasant who had taken up arms. He was the son of a family with considerable money. He had been educated in private schools abroad, as was the custom in his family. Yes, he had become a radical and yes, he had fought the government. She did not doubt he had put himself in danger. But he was never short of money. What he lacked was comfort. He had decided to move in with her almost immediately, and he expected to be taken care of. In spite of her feminism, she did not doubt for a moment that she must cater to him. He was semidivine. His skin was satin. His eyes were those of a proud predator. His stance was that of a conqueror. She capitulated; she collapsed. She brought him his coffee with sweetened warm milk in the mornings while he lay in state in bed. She picked up his clothes where he tossed them
and did his laundry. She cooked only food he liked or purchased it ready made. He was surprised at first how poor she was, and that he had to give her money for his accustomed luxuries of cigars and wine and pastries. She saw all this clearly and with a wry grimace at the same time that she was melting under him and fluttering to fulfill his every whim. So it went until she was four months pregnant.

She felt guilty, that was the one absolutely sure thing: guilty because of Beverly, guilty because of Elena, guilty because she had fallen in bed with Jake like a twenty-two-year-old. Actually she didn’t feel particularly guilty about that, she just thought she ought to. She smiled at her computer screen. Secretly she was rather pleased at her adventure. The only person who knew was Marta. After all, when most people go to bed with a new lover, they have to tell SOMEONE. Her someone was Marta. Only little girls and adolescents were supposed to have best friends, but maybe unmarried women could have them too. She was sorry that Jim and Elena had been upstairs, because she wanted nothing more than to sit down with Marta and tell her about Beverly in great detail, to confess to Marta how frightened she was and how confused about what to do next. But since she could not tell Marta, once again she collapsed into telling Jake—her late at night and first thing in the morning confidant.

Beverly

Beverly was talking to a worker at a machine in the jeans factory in South Carolina. The machinery was all going, the air was heavy with dust, and the boss was threatening her. She had to get out. She would meet the workers outside. But she could not move. Her legs would not obey her. The thugs the bosses had hired were coming after her with billy clubs and wrenches, but she could not move. Her legs were too heavy. She was falling.

She was at Jones Beach lying on a blanket with Ralph Caputo. He was rubbing suntan oil into her back in sweet sensuous circles. Now he was putting something wet on her back. Maybe she was in the water. The water was warm as a tub. But the water dripped along her sides and then it was cold. “Please, Mrs. Blume, am I hurting you?” Why was Ralph calling her Mrs. Blume?

Beverly came out of the haze slowly as the pain in her head abated. She could remain conscious longer at a time. She figured out she was in the hospital and gradually she remembered the stroke. She thought Suzanne had been there and Rachel and Elena. She wasn’t quite sure. Her dreams were vivid, making it hard to tell what had happened and what she had imagined as she kept sliding under. They had her on intravenous, but at least they had taken the disgusting tube out of her mouth and throat. Some of the time, she just lay in the bed and cried—cried on her good side. The left side remained loyal, but her right side had betrayed her. She finally got through to the nurse with the bushy perm that she wanted her purse. She could look at herself in her purse mirror. Her face was drooping as she had thought, but not as badly as she had feared.

She could hear and see perfectly well. The doctor who asked the same questions five times kept inquiring if there were blurry spots in her vi
sion. No, no, no, she shook her head. On the right side, her head had a tendency to flop on her neck. She had become a rag doll. If only she were ambidextrous the way her friend Nell had been. Nell had had her arm broken in a demonstration back in the Vietnam years, but she had been able to write with her left hand. Well, she would just learn to print with her left hand.

She was still intact inside. She could think, she could understand what the patronizing nurses said to her as they addressed her as if she were feebleminded or a child of four. She wanted to scream. She tried once, but nothing came out of her mouth but a weird inchoate banshee moan. The effort made her drool. She clamped her lips tight. She would not drool. She would communicate, somehow, somehow. She was still herself, but she was stuck inside a body that no longer obeyed her. She had never made a mind/body split the way Christians and Platonists did, but here she was in a body that no longer seemed to fit. Her body had gone on a sit-down strike against her mind.

That guy, Ralph Caputo, they had beat him up when he was organizing women in a sweatshop in Brooklyn. The thugs bashed his head in. He was paralyzed afterward. He couldn’t talk straight. That’s why she’d been thinking of him, for she was like him now, broken, useless. Her friends would gradually forget her. Everyone would say, poor Beverly, she’ll be missed; but not for long. Nobody was missed long. A new person filled the space. How often had she thought of Ralph in the past twenty years? She had gone to see him a few times out of remembrance of their good times in the sack and in the field together, but then she too had forgotten him—until she became him.

They lifted her on a gurney like a bag of trash and wheeled her to a machine and stuffed her into it. She felt as if she were about to be cooked. Nobody explained anything. They just treated her as if she were not conscious, alive, involved. She lay in the machine wanting to scream again, claustrophobia bringing her close to panic. By the time they let her out, she was convinced they had stored her in one of those sliding trays in a morgue, except for the noises the machine made. Her hearing was just fine.

Three doctors came in and chatted with the nurse around her bed, discussing her. They were talking about her the way a vet might talk about a dog’s injury in his presence, without any sense that she could
comprehend. She felt that any moment one of them would recommend she be put to sleep, which wouldn’t be a bad idea. If life was to go on like this, death would be preferable. Of course that was a fantasy. They’d rather stick more tubes in her and do tests for the next ten years. They wouldn’t suddenly say, Okay, old lady, do you want a way out? Yes, sir mister doctor, yes!

Rachel appeared suddenly, her light hair blown wild by the wind. “Bubeleh, can you understand me? It’s Rachel, your granddaughter.”

Beverly nodded wildly. At last someone was talking to her and not about or at her.

“But you can’t speak yet? I was here last week, remember?”

Beverly nodded. She did sort of remember. She made a talking motion, like a turkey gobbler with her left hand and motioned toward herself. Rachel understood. “Well, I’m here with Michael, my boyfriend, but they won’t let him come in to see you.”

A boyfriend? If he came with her, he must be interested. No guy just casually dating a girl would go up to New York with her to hang around a hospital where her grandmother was stored. She made a gesture from charades at drawing Rachel out.

“Oh, you want to know about Michael. He’s wonderful. We’re going to get married, but that’s a secret, I haven’t told Mother. I know she’d carry on how I just met him. We have so much in common, Grandma. We haven’t decided whether to get married before or after we go to Israel for our rabbinical studies next year.”

Beverly pointed to the mirror and then made the motion of drawing out.

“What does he look like? He’s tall and thin and very serious. He has marvelous hazel eyes. His family are Conservative, verging on Orthodox. His grandfather was a rabbi in Germany before the family escaped in the thirties, but his father was in the garment business. His father still wants him to come into the business.”

Beverly snorted. After spending most of her life organizing in the garment business, she did not have a high regard for garmentos, men who subsisted off cheap labor here and now abroad. Always somewhere women and girls were sitting in a dim room full of dust sewing jeans and dresses, hour after hour, year after year for pennies and the profit of those men. Better he should be a rabbi.

The nurse came in and made Rachel leave just as things were getting interesting. She was dying to ask Rachel where he was from, were they sleeping together, everything. Rachel went back to Philadelphia, Suzanne appeared, and the tests went on. They prodded and poked every part of her body. They drew enough blood to make her anemic. “Your blood pressure is still dangerously high, Mrs. Blume.” What got into that young doctor? He actually addressed her. Improperly trained. He didn’t understand she had become a rag doll. She beamed at him as best she could and nodded wildly.

Finally they took her off the intravenous. Some kind of therapist came to teach her to eat, as if she had not been eating all her life. However, after they had been at it together for half an hour, she was willing to recognize that she had to learn to eat all over again. She could not use a knife properly with her left hand, and she had a tendency to spill the food over herself. She was a one-year-old, not even a toddler. She could not talk, she could not walk, and she was just learning to feed herself. Food had a tendency to accumulate on the numb side, where she couldn’t tell there was anything tucked into her cheek and threatening to slide down and choke her. All she was taking now were liquids and very soft foods like Jell-O and cream soup. She imagined eating roast chicken. She imagined a steak, although she had never been a big meat-and-potatoes woman.

Suzanne appeared, talked, worried, fussed. Disappeared again. The nurses gave her pills, injections, more tests. The therapist who was teaching her to eat now made her try to stand. She promptly fell over like a toy horse with a broken leg. Thump. They caught her, but she banged her good arm. She did not look forward to the times they hauled her out of the room, no longer on a gurney but now in a wheelchair she was picked up and placed in. She hated to see the other stroke sufferers all waiting for X rays, for CAT scans, for yet more tests. She knew that she looked as bad as they did, and that made her want to weep and bang her head. They were all helpless, hauled about and pestered.

She lay in the bed, too weary to lift her hand. Her left hand. She was terrified when she had the energy to think of what would become of her. How could she do her work if she couldn’t speak? How could she even buy food? What would her friends want with her? How could she do any political work?

Why me? Why me? She cried and then grew angry with herself. Really, she was sounding like one of those people who demanded the world make personal sense. If something happened, it was part of the divine plan. Accidents, catastrophes all had to mean something. Yeah, they meant pain. The days flowed into one another and the long gray nights. Suzanne had gone back to Boston with Mao in a carrier.

“That was two weeks ago, Mother,” Suzanne said. “I took him to Brookline two weeks ago.”

At least he would be all right. Poor boy. He would not understand what had happened. The janitor had found him in the rubbish starving and injured, and now he would think he had been deserted again. If she was to die, as they said she almost had that first night, would that be so bad? It was living on in a broken body, dumb and crippled, that terrified her. It was surviving this catastrophe, the betrayal of her mind and her body. It was enduring in the prison of her mind, unable to speak, unable to walk, like some poor animal run over in the street and lying in the gutter mangled beyond recognition, but still feeling, still in pain, caught hideously between living and dying.

Twelve Years Before

Elena

Elena was bored. She saw high school stretching on forever. Each day was infinite. Each class drained the blood from her. It was like eating dust all day. She did not know which class she hated more, algebra or biology. The only classes she liked were Latin, Spanish, English, and gym. She liked gym because they were dancing. She loved to dance. Languages were always fun, like playing dress up in words, and she was the best. In English she got to write about her feelings, and she had plenty of those to spare. Her teacher liked her. She wanted to pat his bald head and scratch behind his ears. He perked up so when he looked at her. She had been growing again. She was as tall as Chad now though still shorter than Evan. When she walked down Washington or Tre
mont, men were always calling to her out of cars, making rude noises, as if she were a dog that would come to a whistle.

Sam said that she should be flattered, but if some man twice his weight leaned out a car window to call him a sweet ass, he wouldn’t think it was so cool. When she walked with Chad or Evan, they left her alone. It was always better to be with them. Her mother said to her, “I know these friendships seem all-important to you now, but high school friendships dissipate with time. You probably won’t go to the same college. You’ll develop different interests. You’ll start going out with boys and you’ll make new friends.” Her mother was worrying that she was spending too much time with Evan and Chad. Brat Rachel had told Mother that one or both of them were always around, which simply wasn’t true. They were at Evan’s more than anyplace else, because nobody was ever home there.

“What do you think will happen to us?” she asked them. They were all lying on Evan’s bed.

“Nothing,” Chad said. “What happens to anybody? They get older and stupider.”

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Evan mocked in a fruity voice.

“Dead,” Chad said. “Stone dead.”

Chad had gradually filled them in on his situation. When his parents divorced, his father had won custody. He had persuaded the judge that he was more responsible and better able to provide for Chad and give him a strong male role model. “I suppose,” Chad said, lying with his head propped on his arms, hands clasped on the back of his neck, “that I’m supposed to develop that strong role model from his rows of fancy shoes, or perhaps his suits, because I sure do see his clothes a lot more often than I see Dear Old Dad. Not that I’m bitching, you know. If I never saw him, so much the better.”

Chad missed his mother, but he wasn’t permitted to say so. He was in therapy with a guy he despised. His father had interviewed him first. Charles the elder—they had the same name, but Chad refused to be Junior and had called himself Chad since he was ten—worked as a financial consultant. “He gets people to let him play with their money. Things like rare coins and annuities and investments. He gets the world’s most boring magazines. All he talks about are ways to make money.”

Chad was only supposed to see his mother every other Sunday and sometimes on vacations. She lived in a tiny apartment in Medford with the dog he hadn’t been allowed to keep. They made appointments to talk on the phone when Charles the elder was out. She was a secretary again, as she had been when Charles the elder married her. Chad insisted they come with him one day instead of going to school. It was his mother’s birthday, and he wanted them to meet her. He said he’d take them to lunch. When they cut school, Evan wrote notes for them, because he could imitate all the handwritings, Charles the elder, Evan’s mother, and Elena’s mother, Suzanne. Suzanne had this terrible sloppy scrawl that Elena could never read, that Evan said was the easiest to fake.

They took the green line to Park Street and then walked to a restaurant where they were meeting Chad’s mother. Elena picked her out at once, at a corner table. She was tall for a woman and fair, but she had a perennially worried look. She rose to meet them, flustered, her hands seeking each other on the table. “Chad, are you sure it’s all right to do this? I don’t want you to get in trouble with your father. I don’t want the judge to find out and your father to drag me into court again and reduce our visitation. We have to be careful.”

“He never knows where I am, Mom. And he never remembered your birthday, so there’s no way he’s going to know it’s today and even ask.”

“But what about school. You’re supposed to be in school.”

“It’s all right, Mom. It’s taken care of.”

It was funny, Elena thought. With his father, Chad was a sullen little boy, just a kid. But with his mother, he spoke in a lower voice, reassuring, in command. He was the man. Elena wondered if she would feel less incompetent if her mother weren’t so take-charge. He even ordered for his mother, telling her what she wanted. It was cute.

“Are you Chad’s girlfriend?” she asked Elena.

“Just sort of,” Elena said. “My mother thinks I’m too young to date.”

“You look very mature for your age.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m so glad Chad has friends at his new school. Even before the divorce, we were always moving. Every time Chad and I would start to like a place and I’d get to know the neighbors and we’d make a few
friends, Charlie would see someplace he liked better or he would take a job with another firm or he would get fired and we’d have to move.”

Her hair was blond and very short. Elena thought she dressed better than most mothers. She had a nice blue wool dress, simple and long. Tall women could wear slim long things like that. She tried to imagine what she would look like in that blue dress, for she almost never wore dresses. She was surprised how attractive Chad’s mother seemed. She knew the woman had little money, but she spent it well. Elena liked her better than she had expected to. She understood why Chad preferred her. She was soft and quiet to be with. She didn’t butt in. She wished her own mother were more like that. Chad’s mother was soothing and flattered them. She thought she understood better than Evan did why Chad was crazy about her. Evan just saw a sad middle-aged woman who couldn’t even figure out what she wanted to eat for lunch. No, Evan didn’t get it. But she did. The next day, she let Chad know, and he was grateful, she could tell.

Chad lived way over in Back Bay on Beacon Street on the side toward the Charles River. The buildings were taller there and they didn’t match. Chad’s father had the top floor of a six-story building that was supposed to look like some of the older row houses, but didn’t really. Some days a housekeeper was there, Mrs. Garcia. They never went near the place when she was working. Besides, it was a longish walk. It was furnished with chairs and sofas and tables that all seemed too big, as if made for a giant, in dark woods and with carving on the chairs.

One Thursday Chad wanted them to come over. First he showed them his room. It looked out on the river. He had a Nintendo and his own TV and stereo. He put on Ozzy Osbourne. Suzanne would only have one TV in the whole house, and she acted as if watching it would produce instant brain rot in Elena and Rachel. Elena perched on the window ledge, admiring the view. It was early spring, but there were sailboats already. He took them into his father’s bedroom and opened the top dresser drawer. “Look at this.”

It was a revolver, with a black handle and a shiny body.

“Your father has a gun in his drawer?”

“He has lots of guns. But this is my favorite. It’s a classic. Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum.” Chad sighted along it and Elena ducked out of the way. “It’s not loaded,” he said. “He doesn’t keep bullets in them.”
He rummaged in the drawer and pulled out a heavy little box. “These are the cartridges. Want me to show you?”

“Put that down,” Evan said. “This is stupid. Who wants to get shot playing with a gun?”

“I wouldn’t mind it,” Chad said with a big grin. “But I know what I’m doing.”

“Famous last words,” Evan said.

“Charles the not so great taught me how to shoot. It’s one of the few things we can stand doing together.”

“You mean he takes you hunting?” Evan made a face. “Like bravely blowing holes in bunny rabbits?”

“I won’t do that anymore. No, we just go target shooting at a range.”

“My mother has a gun,” Elena said.

“How come you never showed it to us?” Chad asked.

Elena had never thought of it as anything to show. “She keeps it locked up. She’s always been terrified I’d play with it when I was little, or Brat Rachel would get into it. She and this lawyer friend of hers go target shooting, like your dad. I don’t even know where she keeps it. It goes out of the house in a green bag when she and this woman Marta go off, like on Saturday morning.”

“How come your mother has a gun?” Evan asked. “I mean, I can’t imagine my parents having a thing like that in the house.”

“She and her friend at the firm they’re in do a lot of domestic violence cases, and sometimes the husbands or the boyfriends come after them. Besides, they enjoy it, her and her girlfriend, going shooting. Like they’re playing macho.”

“I like guns.” Chad leveled the gun at the wall. “When I’m shooting at targets or skeet shooting, I pretend it’s his head. Pow!”

“You really hate your father.” Evan sat down on the bed, caressing the black velvet spread. Evan didn’t care about guns any more than she did. She knew the velvet bedspread made him think about sex.

“He’s really hateful.” Chad remained standing.

“I don’t hate my parents. I’m not close enough to them to have any strong emotions. They’re like, my landlords, you know. Nobody I feel much about, but they take care of repairs and keep things running.”

“Look at this.” Chad pulled open a drawer in the nightstand next to the bed and pulled out a pistol. “This is just a .22 Ruger, but he’s had
it for years and he’s fond of it. He has a warm feeling for his guns he never had for my mother or for me.” Chad put the Ruger back in its drawer. He flourished the Smith & Wesson and then put it away too.

Evan had always been in control, of her, of Chad. But today with the guns, Chad was taking control. He was running things his way. He opened the locked door of his father’s study with a credit card. “Do you have your own credit card?” Elena asked, surprised.

“Sure. But it has a really low limit. Just eight hundred dollars. That’s really a crock. Anyhow, I saw this in a movie. Isn’t it cool? Come on. This is Charlie’s office. See, that’s his shotgun from when he used to go hunting. The last time he went was with a bunch of other investment sharks, to a game farm where like they have tame tigers you get to murder for fun. It’s a Remington 12 gauge. Aren’t you surprised how much I know about guns? That’s his liquor cabinet. Want anything?”

“How about a scotch?” Evan said. “I’m going to ask my parents for a Visa card too. Great idea. I bet they’ll give it to me.”

“He drinks only single malt. You’ll like it.” Chad handed the bottle to Evan, who took a swig and almost choked. Sometimes when they could get it, they drank beer or wine, but they almost never had hard liquor. Chad however could swig it without blinking. He must have practiced, she thought. She took a careful sip. It made her eyes water. Chad then took a small sip. She was watching his throat to see how much he swallowed. Then he handed off the bottle to Evan. “You can hold on to it,” he said. Evan was drinking more than both of them put together. After a while he lay down on the leather couch. Chad pointed at his father’s big TV. “I’ll show you what he watches in here.” He loaded it with a tape.

“Is that pornography?” Elena asked. She had never seen any.

“What do you think it is, Roadrunner?” Chad laughed. “Sit on my lap.”

Evan was out of it. It was as if they were alone. They had never been alone together. Chad was different with her this time, slower. He kissed every part of her body. After the first ten minutes, the tape ran on, but they didn’t look at it. She was convinced he had got Evan drunk intentionally. Afterward she realized that afternoon, the afternoon of the guns, everything changed. That was when Evan lost control of the three of them, and Chad came out on top. That was the first time that Chad
had sex only with her and not with Evan too. It was the first time she had sex only with Chad. It felt almost as if she was being unfaithful to Evan, doing it with him passed out on the couch. That was when everything began to be different, the way it was until the end.