Yearn (33 page)

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Sara spent the next morning at the gym with her trainer/life coach. As she ran on the treadmill the memory of her call to Hugh, along with the accompanying sense of mortification, gradually faded, almost as though she were literally sweating her need for him out of her body. But afterward, in the changing rooms, she found herself painfully aware of the other women's bodies—all of them younger and fitter—as she changed back into her clothes. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror looking flushed and overweight. In that moment Sara was convinced she would never attract another man. It was a terrifying thought. To prevent herself from slipping further into depression, she averted her eyes and left.

Back home, her housekeeper was waiting with a deliveryman. Rosa, a deeply religious Catholic Filipina with a shrine's worth of religious icons stashed in her bedroom, stood with her arms crossed, staring disapprovingly at the man, who seemed a little embarrassed.

“Is there a problem, Rosa?” Sara asked, her heart sinking. It was ridiculous to be intimidated by one's housekeeper, but she was.

“This man, he has brought some art he tells me you purchased, Mrs. Le Carin.” She pulled Sara aside and continued in a stage whisper: “It was filthy pornography! I told him, wrong address! Wrong address!” Rosa glared at the deliveryman while crossing herself as if he were some kind of infectious demon.

“Where is it now, Rosa?”

“In the dining room, on the table.”

Throwing her coat off, Sara strolled into the dining room. The large white porcelain sculpture had been placed unceremoniously onto the table and sat shrouded in a large tea towel. It looked like some strange domestic offering. Sara whipped the tea towel off. Rosa gasped.

“Madam, this thing should stay covered; it is not proper!” Behind her the young deliveryman grinned at Sara, who was having trouble keeping a straight face.

“Why is that, Rosa?” Sara innocently asked.

“Because it is un-Christian!”

Sara walked slowly around the table. With the light catching on the petals, the piece had taken on a pleasing luminous quality.

“Un-Christian? I think not. After all, the Holy Mother might have been a virgin but I'm positive she had genitals,” Sara replied sweetly, and deliberately wide-eyed.

Muttering grimly in Spanish, Rosa crossed herself again, then flounced out of the room. Sara didn't bother stopping her. She tipped the deliveryman five pounds, then found herself alone with the piece. She stared at it, then had the uncomfortable feeling that it—or at least the sixteen or so vaginas perched at the end of each flower stem—was staring back at her. It was a disconcerting sensation.

“Madam?” Startled, Sara jumped. Behind her Rosa stood defiantly dressed in a coat with a Hermès head scarf (a hand-me-down from Sara) knotted sternly under her chin. “I have to go to church now, madam,” she stated in a tone that seemed to suggest the visit was nonnegotiable.

“Is it Sunday?” Sara asked, knowing full well it wasn't.

“No, but I have rung ahead and Father Keelan is expecting me. I feel as if my soul needs . . .” Her eyes slid toward the sculpture, then back to Sara. “. . . purging.”

“Indeed, I have always thought of Father Keelan as a kind of celestial plumber.”

Without waiting for permission, Rosa was gone.

Sighing, Sara turned back to the artwork. She couldn't leave it on the dining table. As attractive as it was, she suspected some of her more conservative dinner guests would be put off eating. And yet conversely it might prompt some of her more liberal guests to indulge in pleasures other than culinary. Two years ago Sara would have found the image of an orgy initiated on and around her dining table both amusing and more than a little intriguing, but now the thought just reminded her again of her own celibacy.

Saddened, she picked the piece up and carefully carried it out into the reception hall, where she placed it on the Empire side table. She moved back to get a clearer view. There seemed to be a hundred china vaginas reflected in the large oval gilt mirror that hung above the side table; it was an interesting effect.

She stepped out the front door, then stepped back in. The sculpture was the first thing that caught her eye. It dominated the whole entrance hall. “What kind of message would that give my guests?” she wondered. The first impression one had of the piece was fragile beauty, but there was something a little odd about it that compelled one to look again. This time one always noticed the genitalia. She imagined the piece might be more appropriate for, say, the entrance hall of some lesbian power monger like Annie Leibovitz, or failing that a female politician who was a defiant feminist, although when she stopped to think about it no one came to mind—not even Margaret Thatcher.

Now the piece seemed to be mocking her. Had she made a mistake in buying it? Encircling it with her arms, she carried it slowly into the adjacent sitting room, where, after crouching down, she placed it on a low coffee table. Now she had a bird's eye view and from this angle the piece looked a little like white coral, thick branches dividing into smaller branches and so on—all tipped with the inevitable crumpled flower.

She collapsed on the couch and touched one of the “buds” carefully, the smooth surface of the porcelain cool under her fingertip. Like a young girl's the bud/vagina was barely unfurling. Such innocence, such simplicity. The hallway clock striking four brought Sara back into the present, her gaze still fixed on the bud/vagina. It seemed to personify all the youth and beauty she now felt she'd lost. A sudden desire to smash the whole sculpture to bits swept through her. Not trusting herself, she gripped the arms of the chair and allowed the sudden fury to dissipate before carrying the piece upstairs to her bedroom.

There, after pushing aside her wedding photograph, she placed it on the circular table that sat in the large window alcove opposite her bed. Again the sculpture seemed to dominate, and Sara realized that the only time she would escape the sight of it was when she was lying on her back in her bed. Could she live with it? It reminded her of her own aesthetic failures, the inevitable comparison people always made between her and her mother, and how she was always doomed to disappoint. The sculpture was a ringing alarm clock, an alarm clock of birth, sex, and death, chiming out the passing of the years. Again a growing panic rumbled up below her rib cage as her internal monologue grew wilder and more irrational. She glanced back at the sculpture. For a minute she thought she saw the lips of each vagina open, quivering in the golden summer light, whispering viciously: Sara, you are going to die an old maid! Childless, sexless, and withered!

Sara picked up the business card for the cosmetic surgeon and began dialing the number. At the other end a well-spoken man answered the phone. Silence stretched like a spider's web from her end of the phone to his as Sara lost the courage to speak. Abruptly she put the receiver down.

I will not live with this oppression, I will not, she told herself as she searched for the large, heavy shoehorn—an old-fashioned object with a heavy silver handle—that she kept in her. She was moving toward the sculpture ready to smash it when suddenly the doorbell rang. She froze for a moment, forgetting that Rosa was out at church. The doorbell persisted, an angry buzz that echoed up through the spacious house. Whoever it was wasn't going away. Slowly Sara lowered her arm. The buzzing felt as if it were now drilling behind the back of her eyes. Swearing (in French), she ran downstairs, across the hallway, ready to tell whatever salesman or religious busybody it was to bugger off, then somewhat breathlessly opened the front door.

Stephen stood in the doorway with a huge bunch of pink lilies and tuber roses tied tastefully with white ribbon. Without asking to be let in, he pushed the flowers into her arms and walked into the house.

“I brought these, to celebrate.”

Hiding her surprise at his arrival behind the huge bouquet, Sara followed him into the reception room.

“Celebrate?”

“Well, the sculpture's arrived, hasn't it?” he asked eagerly. “I promised to help you install it.”

“Oh, that's right.” Sara was finding it hard to sound enthusiastic.

“Should I come back? Is this a bad time?”

“No, it's fine. I'm just finding it difficult to know exactly where to place the piece. The theme is somewhat dominating, you know, in a domestic setting. Not that there isn't a place for eros in the domestic, but something so . . . implicit, so . . . intimate . . .” She placed the flowers on a sideboard and turned to find Stephen looking at her quizzically. It was obvious he hadn't the slightest idea what she was talking about.

She led him up to the bedroom, feeling his gaze brush across her legs and buttocks. She was trying desperately not to be distracted by his proximity, proximity she found undeniably erotic.

They both stood in front of the piece in silence. Stephen appeared awed, whereas Sara now felt like throwing miniature knickers over all the blossoms. Stephen's eyes slid down toward the heavy shoehorn now sitting next to the base of the porcelain sculpture. He picked it up, weighing it thoughtfully, then looked over at Sara, eyebrows raised. She shrugged apologetically.

“I wouldn't actually have . . .”

“But you were thinking about it?”

“I might have got a little carried away, I suppose. I might be having some self-esteem issues and the piece is . . . well . . .”

“A little confrontational?” he asked.

“In the cold light of day, very confrontational.” She took the shoehorn out of his hand. As she did so she had the definite impression that one of the vaginas actually winked at her. Sighing, she dismissed the image from her mind. Stephen walked around the piece slowly.

“I guess the question is, does it belong in the bedroom?”

“I've tried everywhere else—the dining room, the hallway, the sitting room . . .”

“It is a statement piece.”

“Sort of in the ‘yes, I am woman' school.”

“Well, you are female, Sara,” Stephen noted unnecessarily, at which point Sara wished she wasn't horribly aware of Stephen's beautiful tanned hands, the fingers of which appeared to be caressing the “petals” of one of the flowers—a disconcerting sight for Sara, who had now surrendered to the notion that she might indeed be on the point of wishful hallucination, perhaps some bizarre side effect of celibacy.

“A female currently suffering from major penis envy,” she announced, abandoning any semblance of etiquette. She collapsed on the ottoman placed at the foot of the bed. Stephen left off caressing the sculpture and walked over to the side table. He picked up the printout she'd abandoned by the phone and glanced down at it, then grinned. Mortified, Sara felt as if she were suddenly pinned to the ottoman by chagrin.

“Are you sure it's penis envy?” He held up the image of the porn star's vagina. “Or am I missing something about your sexuality here?”

Sara leapt up and snatched the printout from him.

“Oh, I'm heterosexual. It's just that between that bloody thing over there”—here she gestured toward the sculpture—“and all the images of perfectly neat young women, I'm feeling very inadequate.”

To her surprise he burst out laughing. “And all of this because of one small sculpture,” he managed to say between guffaws.

Sara was speechless, then, to her own horror, all of the tension, the loneliness, the humiliating memory of the call to Hugh, her own aching sense of sexual futility mounted up and then collapsed on top of her as she threw herself on the bed. Covering her face, she burst into loud sobbing. Within seconds Stephen was sitting with his arms around her.

“Shh, shh . . . it can't be that bad,” he murmured, rocking her like she was a child. Sara buried her face into his shoulder; the cashmere of his Ralph Lauren blazer soft against her cheek, the scent of him enveloping her like some delicious blanket.

“It is, it is. . . .” Her voice was ridiculously small between the sobs. “All my life I've bought beauty, all because I've always known that's the only way I'll get close to it. . . . Even my husband, Hugh Lander—”

“You were married to Hugh Lander? My God, now he
is
gorgeous!” Stephen exclaimed, unable to keep the admiration out of his voice, at which Sara burst into louder sobbing.

“Sara, stop . . . stop, listen to me. . . .” He held her face up to his, holding his gaze steady until gradually she calmed down.

“Look over there, at the piece. If you look carefully, beyond what you think you're looking at, you'll see that those . . . flowers are not perfect. Quite the opposite, they are all individual, all flawed. Some of the petals droop, some are longer than the others, some buds are bigger, almost bulbous, some are hardly there at all, but they are all uniquely different. And that's what beauty is—bespoke, if you like, individually crafted. And beauty doesn't wither with age. It changes but it doesn't get less.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I don't believe it, I know it. Want to know what my last boyfriend looked like? He was sixty, overweight, and balding, but he was the most captivating man I've ever known. And you know what? He left me.”

“Really?” She looked up at him, incredulous, but he averted his eyes. She could feel him retreating emotionally, and for the second time she had a glimpse into a vulnerable core he kept so well hidden under all the immaculate grooming and presentation.

“Really. The bastard broke my heart, but I'm still alive. Now, can I get you a drink or something? I could sure do with one.”

“In the bedside cabinet there's a bottle of cognac and some glasses.”

He got up and poured them both a drink, then carried them over to Sara. He pressed one into her hand, then held his glass up for a toast.