Unaccompanied Women Read online

  Neither does this: Gerald sags. His shoulders droop. The corners of his mouth turn down. The lines in his face fall from his forehead straight down onto his cheeks, which sag into his chin. He looks like Deputy Dawg. I remind myself that I have nothing against Deputy Dawg, So don’t draw conclusions so fast, Jane. Not everyone can look like Graham. We order dinner. Immediately Gerald tells me about himself. “I have had an entirely uneventful life—two uninteresting marriages, several dull children grown and gone, thirty years of the same job in the same office in the same town.”

  I protest: “Your marriages can’t have been completely without interest!”

  “But they were.” His eyes seem to be focused on my left collarbone.

  “And your children!”

  “I was never fond of babies. They got worse as they grew. I don’t see them anymore.”

  I bet not.

  “I’m a nonpracticing Jew,” he tells me. “I grew up in Cleveland, had a terrible childhood, just terrible.”

  I’m damned if I’m going to encourage him to tell me all about it. I look at my watch to get the test results. The test is this: At the beginning of a meeting with a man, I check the time and measure how long it takes him to ask a question or make a statement about me. We are mid-curry—T minus one hour and counting—when Gerald speaks: “You’re not at all what I expected.”

  I want out, and then he says, “You’re softer. Are we getting along, do you think?” I decide to stay, though I do not think we are, in fact, getting along. “Of course,” he tells me, “what you wanted all along was love, that’s what you were looking for.” Gerald does not intend this as a topic of conversation, for he does not wait for me to agree or disagree. He says, “In Cleveland I was an only child.”

  Gerald has drawn conclusions about everything: his childhood, his job, his marriages, his children, even me. There is nothing for him to explore, to learn from; no wonder he droops. The check comes. “We don’t have to go,” he says as he places a 5 percent tip on the table. “Okay, then, I’ll walk you to your car. We might see each other again.”

  “You don’t have to walk me to my car,” I say, since no, I am thinking, we will not see each other again.

  And then Gerald asks the only truly important question of the evening. He looks into my eyes and says, “Do you ever get lonely?”

  I answer quickly, “Why do you think I’m here?” I shrug and walk away into the evening, lonelier than ever.

  I am spoiled. What my ad in The New York Review had brought me was heartbreak, yes, but also joy and companionship and intellectual stimulation and real, true conversation. Had I met Gerald before my adventures, I would have found him fascinating, scintillating, even inspiring. Oh no, I wouldn’t. But maybe I should have tried harder, maybe I should have encouraged him to roll out his childhood. After all, Jane, who do you think you are to cut this sad man off at the knees? A little patience, a little kindness wouldn’t kill you. And besides, it is quite possible you are turning your East Coast men into saints, like what happens to some people when they die and their loved ones, left behind, reconstruct them in their memories as perfect. Jesus, am I grieving? Well, kind of. Hell, I’m going to have to put another ad in! This time I’m going to have to limit the geography to the Bay Area, since I no longer have the money to fly to New York whenever I get horny. Dammit, I know what touching feels like, what kissing feels like, what conversation feels like, and I’m still hungry. But I’m not starving, not yet anyway.

  However, first things first: Pinned on the door of my cottage is a note from my landlord: “Please call in the morning. I need to talk to you.”

  My landlord is perfect. Actually, since she is a woman, I suppose she is my landlady, though the linguistic distinctions between male and female are fast disappearing: People who strut and fret about the stage are all “actors” now, the term “actress” being what? Demeaning? Because it refers to a female? In the medium of print, gender specification is rare, all subjects referred to by their last names only. I can’t figure out why writing a “Ms.” or a “Miss” or a “Mrs.” in front of the actual name has fallen out of favor. Is calling everybody by only the last name supposed to make everybody equal? Seems to me it just makes everyone confused, which I guess is okay as long as everyone is equally confused. However, I digress. My landlady is named Paula. She is small and pretty and young—somewhere in her early forties—and lives with her second husband on the other side of the garden I have come to think of as mine. Real ownership, of course, negotiated at the end of her first marriage, belongs to Paula. Paula and her new husband are a quiet couple, pleasant. And happy, I believe, to have me living in their backyard and paying a healthy rent. For four years I have been the ideal tenant: quiet, prompt with my monthly check, and careful about recycling—paper in the green tub, cans and bottles in the blue. Every so often my son comes to visit, as do a few friends; no one stays very long, space being limited, and ten P.M. finds me lights out, sound asleep. One would hardly know I’m here.

  Until . . . Now, just wait a minute. In my own defense, even with the amazing change in what you might call my lifestyle, no caterwauling whatsoever has gone on in my little rose-covered cottage. The lights are still off by ten, and I recycle with zeal. However, one cannot disguise a six-foot man who stands on the patio in the morning, stretching and yawning at the day ahead. And I suppose that from her window she must have seen that there was more than one—though not at the same time, Paula! So far, though, she has said nary a word about the visits of Graham and then John. But this note pinned to my door signals something new, and I am scared. Moral turpitude: Is that in my lease? I scour the document and find nothing that prohibits sleeping around, although right there on page 3, item 16, is “Quiet Enjoyment: Tenant shall not . . . interfere with the quiet enjoyment of any . . . nearby resident.” Oh boy, how quiet was our enjoyment? I fear I’m about to find out.

  That night, all night, I imagine myself once again on trial, found guilty, and sentenced to a life on the streets. So once again, to gain some semblance of control over what will surely be my undoing, I write out my fear and anger. Since I really have no quarrel with Paula or her husband, not until tomorrow anyway, I select as the target of my rage the powers that be in Washington, D.C. Maybe once I write it, I’ll be able to get some sleep. The letter I write is about being old with very little money and no place to go. It is about me and who I was before my writing adventures earned some money. But I suspect it’s not just about me; it’s about other retired people, too.

  I am seventy years old and retired. I want you to know how life is for one of us no longer viable in today’s economy. It is frightening. Why is my life so uncertain? Why is my future so dark? Why, at age seventy, after forty years of work, am I unable to count on my government to keep me safe from abject poverty, catastrophic illness, and the fear that I will spend my last years living in my car? It is not dying that troubles me; I have known from the beginning of my life that I would die. It is how I will get to my dying—how cold and how hungry and how sick?—that keeps me awake at night.

  In the morning, in the clear light of day, I read what I have written and send it anyway to the op-ed page of The New York Times, where it doesn’t get published. Oh, well, it helped me pass the time, kept me company in the dark night of my soul, until morning, when there she is, my landlady, sweeping her back steps, and she is not smiling.

  “My husband has taken a position with a firm in Virginia,” she tells me. “I will be putting the house on the market shortly.”

  So I’m not going to be evicted, not by this landlady, anyway. I am safe for the moment; I breathe a sigh of relief. But dammit, the change that is nigh has shattered my illusion of security. God Almighty, who will buy this place? I can see it now: hordes of small children climbing and falling out of my apple tree, backyard barbecues smoking up my French doors, dogs trampling my compost heap. Worse, the new owners will have it within their legal power to toss me out in favor of a blood relativ
e, or at the very least to raise the rent.

  When seen in the light of my midnight letter and the ensuing notification of my landlady, getting a date, enjoying dinner, agreeing on a movie to see, talking and listening to a man, even bedding him, seem frivolous. Well, thank god for frivolous, for it lifted me, for a time anyway, out of the depths of despair into the light fantastic: What difference did it make if my money trickled down to nothing over the years? At least I had a car to move into; I should be grateful. So I packed my bag and went to New York, where, as long as I could pay the hotel bill, I was guaranteed a room and a bath with hot and cold running water. I feel safe in New York.

  CHAPTER 6

  other women

  come a little further—why be afraid—here’s the earliest star (have you a wish?)

  —E. E. CUMMINGS, from Sonnet XLVIII

  AMARTINI IS A pretty thing, gently lapping the rim of a glass made just for it, silky and shiny, almost transparent. In the steady hand of a pretty woman, a martini can be beautiful. It is and she is, for I am happy. I am in New York.

  She has asked the bartender for two olives. She sits at the bar, legs crossed at the knee, twirling the toothpick gently. Then she lifts the toothpick to her mouth and, with a purse of her lips, makes the first olive disappear. She smiles at the bartender, turns to the book that lies open next to her.

  I am four seats down. I ask the bartender for a sauvignon blanc, martinis belonging to my past, when I was pregnant and martinis were the only liquids I could keep down, a time long ago when the olives were small. This being the age of huge—hamburgers, cars, athletes, breasts—one oughtn’t to be surprised that olives, too, are on steroids. When the bartender brings my wine, I ask how much it costs, thus labeling myself a bumpkin from the country. “Three hundred and fifty dollars,” he says, and I say “Good. Let me know when I hit a thousand.” I explain to him, but loudly enough so that the pretty woman, now into her second olive, can hear, that I am in competition with a friend back home in California for the title Who Paid the Most for a Glass of Wine on Her Visit to New York City. My friend is ahead: On her last visit she paid fourteen dollars somewhere on the Upper East Side; however, I am still in the race, and this evening, if I can get the bartender to tell me the actual price of this glass of wine, I may zoom ahead.

  The woman smiles at my story and closes what looks to be a new book, a book of Renaissance paintings, which suggests she has come from the Metropolitan Museum just across the street. Me too, that’s where I’ve been this blustery winter day, visiting Sargent’s The Wyndham Sisters, three elegant beauties in a portrait so large it cannot travel. Except for last year, when it went to Boston’s MFA, which is okay with me since I was not in New York then and didn’t inhale sharply, as I did when, on another visit, it was gone—for purposes of cleaning, it turned out. On every visit I climb the stairs to the American Wing, pull up a chair, and visit Lady Elcho, Mrs. Adeane, and Mrs. Tennant, daughters of the prestigious British family. There they are, posed in their father’s library, their mother’s portrait on the wall behind, their white silk dresses billowing onto the ivory of the divan on which they sit, shimmering like the peonies that flank them. They are the picture of elegance and grace, and in fact were known in their aristocratic circle as The Three Graces. The expressions on their faces, not entirely inscrutable, allow for viewers like me to make up stories, to ask questions about them, to wonder: Were they happy? Why did the youngest die first? Of what? I sit and wonder and admire.

  A guard comes toward me, and I figure I am doing something wrong. “Excuse me,” he says, “you’re a regular visitor here, aren’t you?” I nod. “Are you by any chance related to the Wyndham family?” Me? In my baseball cap and backpack and hiking boots? I shake my head. “I just wondered,” he says, clearly disappointed, then continues: “A man, quite elderly, lives in Manhattan, comes to visit the woman on the left. He says when things get too confusing, he comes here and talks them over with his grandmother. That’s her.” He points to Lady Elcho. “And then the one on the right, Mrs. Tennant, well, her family has been here to visit. They live in England.” Now he wrinkles his brow and points to Mrs. Adeane, Madeline, seated in the middle, her two older sisters on either side. “She’s the puzzle. Nobody ever visits her, so I thought maybe you came for her.” I shake my head sadly and murmur, “I wish I were her family.” “Well,” he says, shrugging his shoulders, “so do I, because I want to retire. I’m due for retirement, and you know, I just can’t go till somebody comes for her.” I assure him that, after this, I will come especially to see Madeline. “She died young, you know,” I tell him. “She may not have had time to leave us a family.” Reluctantly I exit the American Wing and trudge across the street to the Stanhope and its fine bar.

  The Wyndham Sisters would not have known martinis; it would take almost fifty years before the martini was invented. If they had imbibed at all, they would have sipped sherry, and they never ever would have perched themselves on a bar stool and talked to strangers. Still, there is a grace and loveliness about this woman, too, whose glass is now denuded of olives. She smiles at me and says, “And why are you here in New York?”

  “Partly business, partly pleasure. I’m a writer.”

  “What sorts of things do you write?”

  “If I tell you, I’ll have to move closer.” The bartender hands me another sauvignon blanc. “You’re only up to seven hundred,” he says.

  “I’ll have another, too,” the woman says, “when this is gone.”

  She moves over, I move over. We introduce ourselves—she is named Shelley—and I tell her about A Round-Heeled Woman and how New York has provided me an interesting sex life.

  “Me, too!” she exclaims. She is brimming over, she is truly on the edge of her bar stool. She tosses back the last of her martini and whispers, “I’m a mistress.” I am clearly interested, so she continues: “Actually I’m from Florida. I teach art in a magnet school there, and my lover”—she giggles and explains that all this has happened sort of recently, that never before and right out of the blue—“he flies me to New York once or twice a month, and we have wonderful, wonderful sex.” And then, “He’s married.”

  “Oh,” I say, and add him to the list of married men who cheat on their wives.

  “He loves and respects his wife, but they don’t have sex.”

  I add him to the list of married men who claim not to have sex with their wives. This is a very long list. Some of the names appear on both.

  “His name’s Steven; he’s older than I am. I’m fifty-two.”

  “You look terrific,” I tell her.

  “Do you like this suit? Steven gave me a thousand dollars and told me I needed a suit. What do you think?”

  “It’s gorgeous.” And it is. Amazing what a thousand bucks can buy. I shift to a more comfortable position on my bar stool and peer at the drinkers seated at the tables behind us. The light is low, the drinkers appear to be interested only in each other; the mood is easy, companionable, discreet. I turn to Shelley and whisper, “Did you buy new underwear when you became a mistress?”

  “You bet I did!” Shhh! “I marched right into Victoria’s Secret and told them to fix me up.” She lowers her voice. “I’m wearing a bustier right now, right under this suit.”

  “Isn’t it uncomfortable?” I wonder. Whalebone for corsets has long been out of fashion (that’s what Save the Whales was all about). But in the pictures I’ve seen of bustiers—“How do you pronounce it?” I ask her. “Boos-ti-ay.”—those corsets that harness the torso are held firm and tight with stays of some sort that aren’t made of ribbon—more like steel, probably plastic today—nonbendable stays like those that hold the sails flat on sailboats. Anyway, though in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue the model’s breasts peep prettily over the top of her bustier, somewhere it’s gotta hurt, especially when you sit down. Where does your belly go? Not to mention your hips. Do they peep not so prettily beneath this contraption? Or are they just crushed into silen
ce by stays of steel? And yet, here she sits, dimpling over her second martini. “Actually, it’s really comfortable. And look.” She slides her skirt up and then down quickly. “Did you see? I never ever wore garters or stockings like this. My god, this is fun!”

  And so is she. I ask her how they met. She is a-bubble. “We literally ran into each other in a coffee shop and, and . . . Sex with him is wonderful. He knows what to do—he’s sixty-five—and he knows the words to go with it. That’s the amazing part; he knows just the right words, and he isn’t shy or embarrassed to use them.” She looks down at her lap. “He’s had many mistresses, you see.”

  I nod my understanding and agree that she is a lucky woman; after all (and I don’t say this aloud), he might have chosen someone younger, probably did at some point, maybe will again. Or maybe he’s smart. Maybe he knows Benjamin Franklin’s advice to a friend about mistresses: “In all your Amours, you should prefer old Women to young ones.” (Italics his.) Franklin, having preferred the sixty-one-year-old Minette to the young lovelies of Paris, explains, “Because when Women cease to be handsome, they study to be good . . . There is hardly such a thing to be found as an old Woman who is not a good Woman.” And lest the man be troubled by sags and wrinkles, Franklin advises putting a basket over her head, “the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever.”

  I doubt Steven puts a basket over this pretty fifty-two-year-old head. She continues: “I was married for twenty-six years, still am legally. My husband was a crook when I married him, though I didn’t know it then, and got crookeder and crookeder until they put him in jail, and he still won’t give me a divorce, and oh well, we had sex in the beginning, I had orgasms, but it was work! I worked for every one I got!” She smiles dreamily into her glass. “And now it’s pleasure, pure pleasure.”