Unaccompanied Women Read online

  Having grown up properly in Sweden, where talking about sex was as normal as having it, Ilse found herself nonetheless amidst a nasty divorce, her husband a chronic drinker and womanizer. I was launching myself into the world of sexuality Ilse had just left, though, as you will discover, she was not gone for long.

  “I think what you are doing is great,” said Ilse in her husky accented English when I told her on one of our walks about placing my ad in the personals. “This Robert fellow, tell me about him.” She tossed one long leg over the fence and, once settled on the other side, watched amusedly as I scuttled beneath it. “You have feelings for him?”

  I had a lot of feelings for Robert. And lots of regrets. I told Ilse about Robert’s impotence, his back ailments, his stomach upsets, his Viagra, his . . . his . . . I told Ilse I loved him, he didn’t love me, he had brought me to life, he had canceled it, he was my friend, I missed him.

  “Do you have to be lovers? Couldn’t you be just friends?” Ilse asked.

  “I’ll try.” And I did. I wrote to Robert: “I need your friendship and your caring about me even if there’s nothing beyond that.”

  “I can’t imagine your spending your birthday anywhere but in New York and with me,” he wrote back. I went.

  “How did it go?” Ilse asked on my return, ten days later.

  “It’s harder to be friends than it is to be lovers,” I said grimly.

  “You should give me Robert’s e-mail address,” she said.

  I did.

  In my absence Ilse had been busy. She had gone to Sweden to visit her family. “Sit me next to a sexy man,” she had told the flight attendant. The flight attendant did. At the end of the long flight Ilse and Lars left the plane together and headed for a week’s retreat on a nearby island. “I am not in love,” said Ilse purposefully on her return. “I do not make mistakes like that. It was purely sexual.” She was telling me how to do it. She went on to describe a marathon of lovemaking or sex-having—“Twelve hours, twelve hours, and he didn’t come”—that left me openmouthed and gasping.

  “Was there something wrong with him?” I wanted to know.

  “No, no, no, he did not permit himself to ejaculate.”

  “What about you?”

  “Yes, yes, yes, I came over and over again.”

  A thought struck me. “Ilse, I think you had tantric sex.”

  “And what is that?”

  I wasn’t sure. I knew only that it had something to do with postponing orgasm, only I wasn’t sure if both people had to postpone before it could be tantric, or just one and then they could take turns, or what. Also, from what I had read, in tantric sex there is a lot of breathing and staring. Ilse seemed to have benefited from both. She was radiant.

  “All the sex I have ever had is nothing compared with Lars, and I cannot imagine having anything like it in the future,” she told me. “I told this to my friend Bill, who said, ‘Nonsense,’ but I am right.” While Ilse was my only confidante in matters of sex, love, and betrayal, I was not hers; she confided also in Bill during the daily phone call he made to her.

  Ilse and Bill, a colleague of Ilse’s husband at the university, had met each other during the early years of their respective marriages. They became friends and remained friends as their respective marriages unraveled and ended in divorce. “Only friends,” Ilse insisted. “I do not like the idea of sex with my good friend Bill.” I suspected that Bill thought otherwise.

  “Yes,” said Ilse, as we puffed our way uphill. “Call it what you will—tantric sounds fine, though what’s in a name . . .” Lars had come again, so to speak, on his way to a conference in Los Angeles. Her voice trailed away as she breathed deeply and stared up into the clouds above.

  “What does your friend Bill say about all this?”

  “He says there is satisfaction closer to home, not really such a comfort to me, I don’t think.”

  But Lars had come and gone back to Sweden, leaving Ilse with a taste for the good life. So Ilse went online. She sent off a photograph of herself standing in a field of daisies—where the hell she found all those flowers, I’ll never know, Sweden maybe—her long blond hair blown back, her long legs splayed, barefoot, into the grasses, her skirt hiked up to midthigh. She looked sensational.

  Ilse was off and running, lots of dinner dates, a few sleepovers, but nothing, nothing to compare with the Lars who never came back. Our Friday morning walks continued, taking on a new urgency.

  “Do you still have feelings for Robert?” she asked one morning.

  “I’m getting better,” I said. “I think I can do a friendship with him soon.”

  “I am sure he would like that,” she said.

  And so I wrote Robert about the difficulties of writing my book, though really what I wrote about were the difficulties of being me without him: “Right now I am so in need of your common sense, your intelligence, your clarity; you are the only person I have known who listens to me in just the right way.”

  As you can see, this was not a letter of friendship; it was a letter of pleading. I was nowhere close to being able to be a friend to Robert. Damn, it was almost two years since Robert and I began the tarantella, and I was still spinning.

  And so on our Friday walks I talked to Ilse about Robert, and she told me about Lars and about Bill and now, with her amazing success online, about Ted and Clifford and Arthur and James and George. Finally, fed up with my whimpering, she decided on a bold stroke. “I am going to introduce you to my friend Bill. He has had enough bimbos; it’s time he met somebody with brains.”

  I was hopeful. After all, three thousand miles and many dollars were significant hurdles. Though my East Coast lovers had offered to help me with plane fare and hotel costs, I turned them down: It didn’t seem right to accept Sidney’s offer and then scamper off to see Graham—or vice versa. So now, hell, I was broke. I had to stay home! I was just about where I had been at the beginning—celibate and sad.

  Ilse, Bill, and I went out to dinner, just the three of us. I sat on one side of the table; Bill and Ilse sat on the other. It was clear who belonged with whom. I remarked on this to Ilse on our next walk. “Don’t be foolish, he will call.”

  When devils will the blackest sins put on,

  They do suggest at first with heavenly shows,

  As I do now

  —lago, in Othello

  Bill called and proceeded to put on a heavenly show. We went to concerts. Bill gave me presents, Bill called me frequently on the telephone, which, given his daily habit with Ilse, must have interfered with his normal life, which had something to do with mathematics and NATO. I didn’t care; it was nice to receive his kind of attention from someone close by, someone whose phone number was, like him, toll free. One evening as we sat on my couch, Bill said what became the first sentence of my first book: “Do you think you’re a nymphomaniac?” That night we went to bed.

  Now, why did I do that? I wasn’t in love with him. I liked him well enough: He was amusing, smart, educated, rich, and a good kisser. Well, why not do that? Seemed the natural thing to do, he seemed to want to—more than I did, and—Jesus, when will I learn that one doesn’t have to sleep with someone just because that person has been nice to one? Maybe I am a nymphomaniac, except I don’t believe there is such a thing. I think that word was made up by men who use it to keep control of their women. So I’m not one, though self-control has not been my forte for some time now. But I learned a lesson by way of Bill: I needn’t give myself away out of politeness or gratitude. At least I thought I had learned this lesson, and certainly should have, for that night with Bill was A Long Night’s Journey into Day, a loveless, exhausting, seemingly endless conjoining that ended when both of us finally fell asleep, neither one satisfied, only mystified. Next morning, like the dutiful nymphomaniac I wasn’t, I fixed eggs. He ate them, then walked down my garden path without a word.

  Time and Bill passed. I did not lament his passing, but I was puzzled: Why would he put himself (and me) through
such a night without at least giving himself (if not me) the satisfaction of release? Finally it came to me: Bill wanted to perform, not for me but for Ilse. Bill wanted me to tell Ilse that, like Lars, he had staying power, he could be tantric as all get-out. Bill wanted me to pimp for him.

  Ilse called. “How was your evening with Bill?” she asked, as if she had been prompted by someone known to both of us. “Okay,” I said, and shut my mouth. My revenge on Bill would be silence.

  And so I returned to missing Robert and reading Graham’s letters and talking to Sidney on the telephone, and John, too. But by god, I was determined to be a good friend to Robert and not spoil everything with goopy love talk he could not return. So we wrote and wrote. One day Robert sent an e-mail: “Now that we are friends, perhaps you can advise a foolish old man who has fallen in love with a beautiful woman almost half his age.”

  Robert and his e-mail. Robert and his long-distance courting. Robert and his falling in love—again. Can you guess who this “beautiful woman almost half his age” might be? No wonder Robert had sold his house in Aspen and written me his thoughts about moving farther west. Clearly he had moved west, or Ilse had moved east; clearly they had met and . . . I got drunk. I phoned Ilse and screamed, “Who else do you want? Graham? John?”

  “Oh, Jane,” she answered. “I am so sorry. Nothing is more important than our friendship.”

  “Bullshit!” I screamed, and hung up. I wrote to Graham, not for the first time or the last, one of what he came to call my dui’s—“discoursing under the influence.” They looked something like this: “Dear Grwahm, I asm miseroiabike.”

  Some weeks later, in what would be his last e-mail, Robert wrote, “Never have I felt so betrayed as to have been introduced to Ilse. I know you have no interest in that or in me. But I felt I should tell you that.”

  So I am to blame. Robert is miserable, and it’s my fault. I am delighted. I am so delighted over the misfortune of the man who couldn’t love me and the woman who took him from me that I do not answer his e-mail. I am cured. Gee, in only two years.

  The person I still miss is Ilse. Finally I had a friend with whom I could talk about sex and intimacy and being in love and getting hurt—all the things I would never have dared bring up in Meredith’s presence. Ilse was levelheaded and funny and straightforward and . . . selfish and greedy and . . . how can one person be all these things? ’Twas a man who did it. Maybe Meredith was right; maybe life is easier, nicer, without men in it. Well, it’s too late now; I can’t go back.

  IT WOULD BE almost two years before I saw Ilse again. Ilse is nothing if not persistent: She e-mailed and phoned. I was unresponsive to both. Then, one day she called and before I could hang up told me that Robert was dying from a brain tumor. “He would very much like to see you,” she said. I felt sad that he was dying, but I felt no responsibility to make his death easier; I felt nothing, really, except a warning deep inside, something like TROUBLE AHEAD. AVOID ACCIDENTS. SLOW DOWN. So I said to Ilse, “No.” “Then come for a walk with me,” she said. “Okay.” Surely, enough time had passed so that I could pick up again what had been so precious to me—Ilse’s friendship.

  We walked our usual trail, uphill and downhill, and then back at Ilse’s rental, a big high-ceilinged rambling house—3 bdrms, 2.5 baths, fireplace, decks, washer/dryer—she handed me the poems Robert had written over the previous two years. She had bound them together, along with photographs he had taken of flowers, pictures that in their sexuality were much like the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe. Ilse said to me, “I don’t know what to do with them, where to send them, even if—I think some of them are very, very good—but how to get them published . . .” So that was it. I looked through the poems quickly; some were very good, all were very sexual. Ilse’s name appeared throughout. “I know my name comes up often,” she explained, “but they’re not really about me.” Who, then? I wondered. I closed up the poems and the photographs, turned to Ilse, and said, “I want nothing to do with these.” Ilse summoned up real tears and said, “He’s going to die, and what will I do with these? It is so sad.” I answered, “Go to the library; ask the librarian.” And, for the last time, I stomped up the wooden railroad ties that formed the steps through her garden and went home to my landlord’s garden, where I was safe for a while at least.

  AS I THINK BACK, a lot of high school stuff went on: stealing a best friend’s boyfriend, trying to patch up a torn and dirty friendship, being sorry, being angry, screaming over the phone, sobbing into the pillow. What’s different is that, unlike anguished teenagers, we people in what some idiot named our golden years don’t have as much time to get over it. When we are injured, we hurt just as much as we did when we were young, but as we age, we heal much more slowly. The time for picking oneself up and getting on with life gets shorter and shorter; maybe that’s the reason so many people in their later years avoid the risk of new relationships; maybe they have learned Sartre’s lesson: Hell is other people.

  Not all of the other people, though. Throughout all this I wrote to Graham, telling him of tantric sex and love, and he wrote back: “I have always thought that certain tantra practices were an all too perfect metaphor for the emotional unavailability of so many men.” I wrote him about friendship and betrayal, and he wrote back: “Perhaps you just mention the bad apples, but some of your friends sound as if they should be demoted.” And without prompting he wrote, “I like the Jane of the page just as much as the Jane of light and air.”

  It is wonderful to have someone on your side, and even more wonderful when that someone is smart and sexy. Graham’s e-mails keep me steady and warm. I am not at the end of my wits or my life, as long as he is in it.

  CHAPTER 4

  in which our heroine becomes a sexpert

  WHEN I LOST Ilse, when I lost Robert, when my money ran out and I had to stay home, where once again I felt lonely, where I would do anything for company—even sleep with Bill—I decided to bring everybody back alive. I would write them—all of them—into a book. I would dig through the rubbish of my life and make a rose, a star, an apple beyond compare, and I would call it A Round-Heeled Woman, a phrase Robert had used when we were still talking, a phrase I tucked far back in my mind where no senior moment could touch it. So when Robert turned away, when Graham stayed forever young, when Sidney pulled up the drawbridge whenever I got too close, I heard a voice, insistent and persistent: “I can write about this.” When the wonders of New York threatened to overwhelm me, I listened to that voice and I wrote. My journals were full of writing, along with tears of happiness, of wonder, and of pain. So now, Jane, I’m pretty sure I said to myself, let’s sort through this mess, see if we can make some sense of it. Suddenly, closer to seventy than sixty, I was no longer retired. I had a brand-new profession: I was a writer. I had given up one impossible profession, teaching, for another impossible profession, writing. Good Lord, would I never learn?

  Writing, however, failed me in the wake of 9/11. Sidney, from his apartment in midtown, got through on the telephone and assured me he was safe. No word from Graham, none at all, no e-mail, no phone call, silence. I paced the floor and drank too much wine and phoned him at his office and at his home and wrote e-mail upon e-mail to him, and after two weeks of this, two weeks after 9/11, I flew to New York to find him, certain that if I looked in just the right place he would be there safe and sound. What was I thinking?

  I could not write, even with my journal open and my pen touching its paper, what I saw at Ground Zero. I had trusted writing to lift the heavy darkness within me, but when I read the words I put on the page, I was ashamed at so paltry a rendering of what I was seeing, smoke and flame still rising from the bowels of hell. Writers have compared Ground Zero to Dante’s Inferno, but it was worse, for in New York, unlike in Dante’s hell, there was no poet to lead us up into the sunlight. I closed my journal and cried. Surely the end of the world had come.

  Late that night in my hotel room, my pillow sodden with tears, my cell phone ran
g. It was Graham. “I’m all right,” he said. And then I really cried.

  Next day we met for lunch. I was overjoyed to see him alive, though clearly he was not well. Having been on the sidewalk only a few blocks from the Trade Center at the time of the explosions, his face was the color of the ash that had filled the air. He coughed throughout lunch; and while he proclaimed that soon he would be his old self again, now he was distracted, jumpy, and ill at ease. Nothing I said could help calm him or amuse him or interest him. He remained polite and distant. Lunch was short and sad. What was I to do? There seemed to be no reason to prolong my stay in New York; Graham was in no mood for a picnic in Battery Park, for a walk along the water’s edge; indeed, taking pleasure in anything at all seemed out of place, trivial, inappropriate. He was in no mood for me either, and I feared that in some important way I had lost him. I had come to New York to raise him from the dead if need be, and here he was, a ghost of his former self. In the months to come I would learn that the root of his distractedness lay beyond 9/11. It would wreak its own kind of devastation on me.

  Like people everywhere in the world after the cataclysm that was September 11, I was awash in feelings of hopelessness, uselessness, despair. And so, on my return to Berkeley I walked the few blocks from my cottage to the American Red Cross center to give blood. There were many of us there; all the chairs were occupied, the technicians busy. When I finally got a technician, it was a young Chinese woman. Judging by her accented English, she was undoubtedly new to this country, and heavily made up as if she wanted to be American overnight. Still, beneath the foundation and the blush, the rouge and the lipstick, the eyebrows plucked and the lashes extended, she was pretty. She complimented me on my veins, stuck the needle in one of them, and said to my left hand, “Squeeze,” so that my blood would run faster. She left to help others squeeze. Everyone else in the rather large room was reading. For the first time in my entire life I had brought nothing to read. I reached into my purse, praying that my Penguin book, the best deal going today at $.95 USA/$1.49 Canada, was somewhere at the bottom of that mess. It was not. Instead I pulled out my little green notebook, a miniature journal, which leaves my purse only when I’m writing in it. In it are notes for the book I had written, called A Round-Heeled Woman, the book I had finished, the book that had yet to find an agent or a publisher, the book that was an albatross in my life. I wouldn’t even have opened that little notebook had anything else been available. The technician came to check on me.