Unaccompanied Women Read online

  Though I couldn’t see them without peering underneath the table, I knew her shoes were of calf leather, medium-heeled, the toe rounded just a bit, a design of some sort—a scroll, a feather, a sweet bow—etched into the vamp by an underpaid Italian still living with his mother. She wore trousers, men’s trousers to fit her slim hips, tailored to accept the slight but determinedly female tummy. I knew that when she rose, her trousers would fall into just the right break, skimming to good effect her long and limber legs, covering just enough but not all of the Italian shoes. God, if I looked like that in pants, I’d pay all that money, too. My trousers come from CP Shades, where all pants are made with elastic waistbands.

  I decided to take the plunge, deliberately choosing courtroom language: “So, what’s on the docket?”

  Meredith was quick to answer, “Why did you do it?”

  I stalled. “Do what?”

  “Invite someone else when you’d already invited me.” Boy, did she have eye contact. I was feeling just a bit pierced.

  “Because it was Graham. Because he could come that week, and if we were ever going to see each—” Meredith’s face made it clear that pleading my case would do no good, but I stumbled on. “I regret making you angry; you have every right to be angry, but . . .” Hell, I was not going to lick her Italian boots. “I do not regret the week with—”

  Meredith cut me off. “I don’t think I was so angry. I was more hurt. I still am.”

  Get over it, I wanted to say but didn’t. “I’m sorry. Graham is special. The circumstances—”

  “And I’m not?”

  Oh, please. “Yes, you are special but in a different way.” Meredith looked skeptical, and I wanted to shout, For crissake, Meredith, can’t you see how you and Graham are different and special, both of you at the same time? I wanted to say but didn’t, Listen hard, Meredith, great fucking beats great shopping all to hell.

  “I guess our systems of friendships are different,” Meredith said. Her salad remained untouched, her eyes were still glued to my face. I could feel my cheeks melting.

  “Systems are vulnerable to blips,” I argued, “and Graham is a very big blip. Graham is a goddam meteor shower!” My voice rose, and Meredith’s mouth made a moue, her way of reminding me of her distaste for crude language and loud voices. I persisted, albeit quietly. “In fact, I don’t have a system of friendship; I have friends.”

  Meredith gazed down into her soup. “Well, then, . . .”

  One last try. I leaned across the table and almost whispered, “I regret hurting your feelings, but it seems to me that a long friendship like ours ought to include forgiveness. I had hoped that with the passing of time your hurt would ease.”

  “It hasn’t.”

  Meredith’s soup bowl was empty. She had managed to eat it all—spoon pushed away, not toward—without spilling a drop. Shreds of my Niçoise decorated my bosom. I was bespattered with egg yolk, tuna, several lettuces, and an olive. La salade, c’est moi.

  Outside the café I said, “Talk to you soon.” Meredith was silent, and I knew that my friendship with this prickly, sensitive, funny, smart woman was at an end. I had been found guilty before the court convened. Throwing myself on the mercy of the judge, admitting that I had willfully and with callousness aforethought brought hurt to my friend, then asking forgiveness, had wrought only stern silence.

  “You’re a lot of fun,” Meredith told me at the corner of Grant and Pine, “but you are undependable, unpredictable, and irresponsible.”

  The elephant in our living room was, of course, sex. Months after our failure even to budge it, when instead we had succeeded in making the elephant even bigger, when it grew and grew until it had no choice but to stomp to bits all the furniture in the joint, I concluded that my real crime against Meredith was that I had broken my promise—implicit but integral to our friendship—to remain celibate in our later years. She had spoken briefly, years before, of a man she had met on her trek to Nepal, a man she loved, she thought, but who left and married another. Since that betrayal, she wanted nothing to do with men. I had joined her there—we were alone together—and now look what I had gone and done. I had done a very serious and unforgivable thing, just as the men in her life—the married man, the trekker in Nepal—had done.

  There is, among women, an unwritten rule: Never dump a woman for a man. Men have no such rule. Why do we? Perhaps it serves as protection for women against the greater power of men; it ensures that we will not be left unguarded and alone and in the lurch whenever a man strides by. Of course, this rule is broken all the time, but when I did it, I knew full well that I was going against the code of my gender. I also knew that breaking rules, whether or not they are stupid, has consequences and results in punishment. Way down deep, beneath the desire, beneath the joy in Graham’s visit, a doubt niggled. Graham was long gone, back in New York; and whenever I forced myself to be realistic, I saw no future with him. Who, then, would I talk to, shop with, laugh with? At the rate I was going I would have no one, only memories.

  The Feather River Canyon, where Graham and I spent our week, is quite possibly the most beautiful place on earth. The water sparkles as it rushes down mountains, cuts through rock, ripples through meadow. The sunlight through the trees dapples everything, and the sound of the water cools even in the late summer. I knew then that when things got tough, the memory of that time at the lake would rise clear and sweet and set itself against hurt and loss. It would soften despair; it would restore hope.

  It was the same for Graham. In an e-mail he wrote, “The week we spent in the Sierra remains dearer to me than almost any other time of my life. It has a rare perfection to it. It rises up so easily in memory and it is perfectly polished, radiant, and it always makes me happy.”

  Meredith, you are wrong: E-mail can convey things important and beautiful.

  In the end, hard as it is to believe even for me, it is Graham who will fit Byron’s description of friendship. He will see me through hard times and good times; he will pluck me from the slough of despond more than once, he will insist that I can write and that I must. He will be, in Byron’s words, “often tried and never found wanting.”

  But oh, Meredith, I miss you.

  After the book came out, almost two years after our fateful and final meeting, I looked for her at every reading I did. Surely she would show up at one of them, surely she would send a note. But of course not. She must have been terribly offended, not just at what I had gone and done but that I had written about it. Where were my manners?

  In January of 2004 my telephone rang with news of Meredith’s death from liver cancer. She died at home, leaving no family behind. At her bedside, at her request, was her fellow trekker, a man who had left her for another. I wonder who got her house.

  CHAPTER 3

  betrayal

  Remember me when I am gone away,

  Gone far away into the silent land;

  When you can no more hold me by the hand,

  Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

  —from “Remember,” CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

  HOUSE. 2 BDRM, 1 bath, eat-in kitchen, garage, front and backyard, view, $137,000. That was 1973, when my son and I lived in that little house. Today the same house would sell easily for eight hundred thousand dollars, and I couldn’t afford to buy it. Actually, I couldn’t afford to buy it even then, and so my dad, like all good dads with money, promised to provide me with the down payment. He was a surgeon then, and on the day the actual check was to be handed over, he was practicing his profession in the operating room at the hospital way back in Ohio. I phoned. The hospital operator, hearing my name, said, “Oh hi, Jane, I’ll connect you,” and into the operating room I went over a loudspeaker. My dad said hi, as did his nurses and the anesthesiologist. I explained the situation—I needed real money now, and was he going to give it to me? Some murmurs among the operating team, and then my father said, “You can close now.” “I can?” I cried. “Thank you, thank you!” Everyone in t
he operating room twenty-five hundred miles away erupted into laughter, all except, I’m pretty sure, the patient. A jollier morning in the OR was never had. As a surgeon’s daughter I should have realized my father meant for his assistants to go ahead and sew up the patient, but at that particular moment I was not a daughter or a woman or a mother or a teacher; I was a person about to go into escrow, a role that obliterated common sense, practicality, and all aspects of reality that did not include home ownership. My dad was true to his word—the money got to me, I loved him even more; and for some happy years my son and I shared this little house with our little gray cat, Bessie, who relieved herself in all corners of the house save the one that held her cat box, and our mongrel dog, Tear, so named because he tore everything up. For short we called him Terrible.

  From 1976 until 1997 I owned and lived in another, rather grander house made of redwood and glass, decks front and back looking out onto two acres of live oaks and madrone, where wild irises and forget-me-nots bloomed in profusion each spring. A house that, as the years went by, needed work. I didn’t have the money to do it, so I sold the house and, with my son happy and successful in his own life, moved cheerily to my rental cottage in Berkeley. It was small, three hundred fifty square feet, but boundlessly charming: It had its own flagstone patio, apple tree, and rose bushes, and two sets of French doors that opened onto all this loveliness. I learned early on not to notice my landlord’s house only a few yards away, on the other side of the garden, and in the spring and summer the leaves on the apple tree, and the wisteria that wound itself around the trellis that marked my patio, all but hid “the big house.” At Christmas I strung lights along the trellis. It was pretty. A friend who came to visit every so often from her four-thousand-square-foot house in the suburbs said, “You’re living my life.” On no occasion, however, did she suggest a house exchange.

  The original plan was to move into this darling little place, put what money I had made on the sale of my house into the market, watch it grow, and then buy a house, smaller and in Berkeley instead of in the suburb where my son and I had, more or less, grown up. A sensible plan; lots of people have made this plan and lots of people have made it work. Not me. Changing times, changing real estate markets, made my plan no longer feasible. Not long ago at a reading, and not for the first time, someone in the audience asked, “How has your life changed?” My answer is always the same: “I still live in three hundred fifty square feet, and I still go to the laundromat every week. In all other respects my life is unrecognizable from what it was only a short time ago.”

  Renting’s okay, most of the time. Home owning has never held any appeal for me. I know lots of people who dream of standing on the deck or roof garden or front stoop of their very own home, master of all they survey, ignorant of problems to come: leaking roof, rotting moldings, broken sewer pipes, warped floors, god it never ends. Nope, not for me. Neither has owning a car been of any importance to me. So I am content to drive a twelve-year-old Honda; and even though I don’t care about it all that much, it is mine, fully paid for, and no one can kick me out of it. My cottage is a different matter: I could get kicked out, I could be found an undesirable tenant; more realistically, new owners could buy and boot me, replacing me with an odious mother-in-law. They could also raise the rent. Both are legal possibilities.

  When I placed my life-changing ad in The New York Review, I had reason to worry. What if someone answered and came to call, pushed his way through the wooden gate into the garden and to my cottage on the other side of it? My landlord, though not at all nosy, wouldn’t be able to not notice that the caller was male. And what if I had sex and emitted screams? Or groans? Well, I just had to take my chances.

  Young Graham came, strode through the gate, and fitted his six feet quite comfortably onto my futon, with room to spare for me, though not at his feet. Apparently my sounds of ecstasy did not travel beyond my patio, for no one, not my landlord, not my neighbors, took notice, except to avert their eyes and bid a good morning as we took a morning walk.

  Alas, Graham went home and, though he wrote and called, oh my goodness I missed the feel of him. In his e-mails, sometimes two or three in a day, he was curious about my life and sympathetic to the problems that came my way or that, perhaps, I brought upon myself. Sometimes he would give advice: “Human company is a campfire . . . a small flickering ward against darkness, but you only want to get close enough to toast marshmallows. Any closer, and you get that unpleasant smell of burning hair.” Always he signed his notes “Love, much love and more.”

  So my life was not exactly manless. John, my New England recluse, did not die as we both had feared he would. He, too, had answered my ad and, despite my misgivings over the photograph he sent—he looked like a fugitive in a witness protection program—I had taken my life in my hands and driven the country roads to his cabin in the woods. Kind, funny, and a great reader, John turned out to be wonderful in and out of bed. At the end of my visit John readied himself to go to the hospital for tests of his one remaining kidney, hence my fear that we might never meet again. But his kidney turned out to be healthy, and John and I became fast friends. He wrote, he phoned, he visited, and once he had squeezed his long frame into my cottage and onto my futon, he stopped apologizing for the smallness of his cabin in the woods.

  Sidney the Outrageous, another of my New York men, a man who on our first meeting and in full view of everyone ordered me to put my (sweatered) breasts on the table—in the café of the Morgan Library, of all places!—I came to value for his lifelong love of musical theatre, his lifelong residence in New York City, and his lifelong compassion for the poor, those left to the mercy of local and national politicians. Sidney called me religiously, once a week, and we talked on and on about world events, about the theatre, about whether or not now was the right time to have our cataracts removed.

  Matt called, too. Matt was the man who got away, the man whose letters were funny and informative and full of learning, the man who refused my offer to come visit him in the frozen wilds of Wisconsin, the man I never expect to meet. He’d call, always late at night, and we’d have a party, me on wine, Matt on his marijuana and manhattans. “Jane,” he’d say at some point in every phone call, “we’ve got to meet. We both love New York, we both admire Margaret Fuller, you’re almost as funny as I am; we’ll make some kind of plan soon.” Once my book was published, Matt had a wonderful idea: “You know,” he told me round about midnight, “if your book does well, we could afford a pied-à-terre in New York.” We talked on and on about where, about how much we could afford. What a glorious fantasy! Suddenly it came to me: “But, Matt,” I warned, “if we shared an apartment, we might have to meet!” “Well now, Jane,” he said, quick as a bunny, “we wouldn’t be there at the same time.” Oh.

  So I was not pining away for want of male attention. But I was pining, less and less, I hoped, for Robert, the very first to answer my ad, the first to call, the first to write, the first to invite me to live with him in his apartment in New York overlooking Central Park, the man with whom I fell in love, the man who didn’t love me back. I did live with Robert on several occasions, the first for more than three weeks. We talked about books constantly, books we bought from a sidewalk vendor, books that lined the walls of his apartment; and when we grew tired of the sound of our own voices, we roamed the bookstores, went to the movies, to the ballet, to the opera. Retired from his position as a professor of medicine and as skillful a lover as I had known up to that time—there had been three in sixty-seven years, none of them anything to write home about—Robert did his best, I suppose, to make the reality of me fit the fantasy the two of us had created in our late-night phone calls, in our e-mails. But despite our best efforts at pretending, and my stubborn refusal to let go, finally I had to get the hell out of there and salvage what remained of my life. It is a most painful experience to watch love turn to like, turn to disinterest, and finally turn to dislike. I watched the man I loved do exactly this, until, as blind
as I tried to keep myself, I finally saw what I needed to do. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said to Robert. “It’s clear I’m no longer welcome.” Robert nodded in agreement and next morning said to me, “I just want to remind you that you said you were leaving today.” I began to throw my clothes into my suitcase. “Have you decided on a time?” he asked. “Now,” I said. “But wait!” he cried. “We were going to the movies at four! Can’t you wait until after that?” If I had had any doubts about the wisdom of clearing out, “movies at four” dispelled them. I left. But leaving is not forgetting. Would I never be free of this man I had so loved? Ilse, my new best friend, promised to help.

  Unlike Meredith, Ilse—born and reared in Sweden, where sex is considered a normal activity available to everyone—talked about sex easily, and I talked back. Ilse was fifty-two when we became close friends; I was sixty-six. Ilse was six feet tall. I wasn’t. Every Friday morning we walked the hills behind Berkeley. On our walks Ilse customarily wore a burgundy leather skirt, skinned onto her until just above the knee, a black turtleneck pasted onto her torso, and, on her fingers and wrist and neck and ears, a full set of jewelry, gold, how much of it real I couldn’t tell you, but some, I’ll bet. On her hiking feet she wore an old beat-up pair of docksiders.

  Keeping up with Ilse was not easy, and not just on the trail. She read widely and spoke quickly and authoritatively; she expected you to answer back. Her knowledge of music was wide ranging, her love for it deep. She was a wonderful cook, a gorgeous gardener. And something else: We were both renters, Ilse having left her house, in return for a sizable alimony, in the care of her husband and his mistress.

  Often our walks made it necessary to climb a fence. Some private landowners had taken it upon themselves to try to keep us out by means of a chain-link fence, a locked gate, barbed wire, that sort of nonsense. When we encountered such an obstacle, we overcame it differently: Ilse stepped up to the fence, hiked up her leather skirt, threw one long leg over the top, swung the other one over, et voilà, she was on the other side. I, in contrast, lay down on the ground near a spot where there was adequate space between the barbed wire and the dirt below. Pushing the wire up, I slid myself underneath and rolled to the other side. Once there I brushed my sweatshirt and Levi’s free of dirt and weeds, et voilà. Then we were off cross-country, onto the fire trails and the cow paths, through the manzanita and live oaks, pausing every so often to gaze at the crystal-clear reservoirs sparkling below.