My Dearest Friend (12 page)

Daphne huddled in her chair and cried. The old release. She was a lonely woman, a woman who had been left and left again, a woman who was growing old. She was a
lonely woman wrapped in a cotton quilt sitting in a rocking chair crying in the moonlight, and no one heard her cry. And never, not even in all the romances she had ever read, did someone come to the rescue of such as she.

Down the road in their A-frame, Jack and Carey Ann were fighting. Again. Still. It had started in the car, when Jack had asked pleasantly (hopefully), “Well, did you have a good time?”

“Oh,
sure,
” Carey Ann had replied, her voice low with sarcasm.

Jack sighed. He hated it when Carey Ann’s voice got like that. “What does that mean?”

“What do you think it means?” Carey Ann replied, and before he could answer, she had said, “Let’s just be quiet till we get home, okay? Alexandra’s just about asleep and I don’t want to wake her up.”

So they had ridden home in silence, silently fighting every mile of the way. Carey Ann had hunched over against the door, as if afraid his arm might touch hers, inflicting injury or disease. Her face was stony. When they came to the house, she didn’t wait for Jack to come open the door and help her and Alexandra out, which he usually did, which he enjoyed doing. She awkwardly nudged the door open with her elbow, then kicked it open the rest of the way, crawled out, and walked past him into the house.

Jack poured himself a beer and one for Carey Ann too while she put the baby into her crib. He was sitting on the sofa in the living room when she came out. “Here,” he said, indicating with his hand the beer, the cushion next to him. “Sit down. Let’s talk.”

Carey Ann picked up the beer but didn’t sit down next to him. She chose the chair across the room next to the stone fireplace. She sat down and crossed her legs and swigged her beer and swung her leg back and forth in a maddening little rhythm and stared into space as if she were all by herself riding on a subway.

“All right,” Jack said finally, “now tell me, what’s wrong? What didn’t you like? Who didn’t you like?”

“What didn’t I like?” Carey Ann asked, turning to look at him—to glare at him. “Who didn’t I like? Everything, everyone, that’s what, that’s who!”

“Well, I thought there were a lot of nice people there—” Jack began.

“Fuddy-duddies!” Carey Ann said. “Jack, they were
all
fuddy-duddies!”

“Well, I know some of the older ones—”

“Oh, I’m not talking about the older ones,” Carey Ann said. “I don’t care about them. I’m talking about the ones our age. That Madeline Spencer. For example.”

“She seemed very nice. And her little boy is just Alexandra’s age,” Jack said, wondering what on earth Carey Ann could have against Madeline Spencer, who seemed to him to be an awfully nice woman.

“Well, did you notice her hair? Did you even notice it? How it just hangs there on each side of her head? It’s just so
limp,
and she wasn’t wearing any makeup and she had on horrid shoes like retarded people wear, and her little boy wouldn’t let Alexandra play with the teddy bear—”

“Madeline did say it was his special bear,” Jack said. “You know, like a blanket, a security thing.” When Carey Ann went silent, he said, “I thought the two of you were getting along fine.”

“Oh, she wasn’t so bad, but the others with her. You didn’t hear them, you were talking to the men. ‘And what do you do, Carey Ann?’ ” she mimicked. “And when I said I took care of Alexandra, they said, ‘I mean what do you
really
do?’ Like being married and having a family isn’t
really
anything. They’re all so
serious,
Jack, talking about how hard it is to be a faculty wife here and not be able to ‘pursue their interests,’ and making cookies for the students during exam week, and hospital committees and stuff. They’re so
earnest.
”

Jack looked at his wife, feeling hopeless. What could he say? How could he defend his colleagues and their spouses? In fact, they
were
a pretty earnest bunch. They had had to be to get their Ph.D.’s and be asked to teach by this college. He could see, too, how they might look pretty drab to his wife, all his colleagues with their thinning hair and horn-rimmed glasses and pimples and pipes. They were all like he was, riddled with worry and concern: how to support a family on a minuscule amount of money, teach a bunch of aggressively bright students who were paying a fortune to be taught by them, and write profoundly original essays that would bring critical praise—and tenure.

“…  doesn’t anyone here know how to have fun?”

“Well, Carey Ann, maybe when we get to know some of these people a little better—you know, this was a faculty affair at the college, so everyone had to be on good behavior.”

“Oh!” Carey Ann wailed. “I don’t want to get to know any of them! And they don’t want to get to know me!” She took a deep breath, and then, to Jack’s dismay, she
burst into tears and crumpled in the chair. “Oh, Jack, I’m not blind. I may be pretty but that doesn’t mean I’m a complete fool. I saw the way some of those women looked at me, and I know I was underdressed, but at least I looked pretty, and women out here don’t care anything about looking pretty. I can’t imagine ever talking to them about … oh, my hair, or what kind of dress to buy, or anything at all! Do you know what one woman said? I went up to her because she had a little baby and I thought we could talk about babies, but she started telling me all about how her husband was studying ‘quarks.’ What the fuck is a quark? I thought she was joking so I laughed and she got such a stuck-up look on her face like she was so much better than I am. Oh, Jack, are there such things as quarks?”

Jack rose then and went over and put his arms around her. He brought her with him back to the sofa and sat and held her while she cried. “It will get better. You’ll make friends. I know you will. You’ll be a great faculty wife, you’ll see.”

“A great
faculty
wife?” Carey Ann raised her head and stared at Jack in dismay. “You want me to be a great faculty wife? Oh, Jack, sometimes I don’t think you know me at all.”

“What do you mean?” He was trying to be careful.

“I mean, I don’t want to be a faculty wife! I know you, and no matter what you think you feel, if I get all old and limp-haired and saggy and intelligent, you’ll stop being in love with me.”

Jack thought a moment, racking his brain for the perfect answer. “No. I would be in love with you even if you were old and limp-haired and saggy and intelligent,” he said.

Carey Ann was quiet for a moment and Jack thought she was trying to decide whether she had just been insulted or complimented. “Oh, honey,” she said at last, and hugged him. “Sometimes … sometimes I just feel so … young or something. Like I don’t know what to do around those people. Jack, I try, I want you to know that, I really am trying. Like I was really polite to that Daphne Miller tonight even though she insulted me and Alexandra.”

“I told you, Carey Ann, she—”

“Oh, let’s not go into that again, I don’t want to talk about that again, I’m trying to say something here,” Carey Ann said. She reached up and put her hand, gently, softly, over his mouth. At the same time she kept her arm around his waist and leaned her hips in against his. “All my life I never had to change,” she said. “Then I met you and all I
seem to have to do is change. Get married, get pregnant and all fat and swollen, have a baby, move halfway around the world from all my friends … oh, Jack, and now you say you want me to be a faculty wife.”

“Well, I am a member of the faculty. And you are my wife.”

“You know Daddy always said he’d support us so you could write.”

“And you know I’ve got more pride and sense than to accept that offer.”

“Yes, I know.” Carey Ann sighed. “Men.”

Jack moved his hands down her back to rest on her buttocks. “Women,” he replied.

They were kissing when Alexandra began to cry. Honestly, Jack thought, does that child have some kind of built-in sensory device?

“Let her cry,” he said. “She’ll cry herself back to sleep.”

“Jack! I couldn’t let the poor little thing do that!” Carey Ann said. “Let me go just a minute. I’ll just rock her back to sleep.” She pulled away from him.

Jack watched some late news, waiting for his wife, but when she didn’t come down, he took off his shoes and tiptoed up the stairs to their room. The hall light shone on their queen-size bed, where Carey Ann lay in one of her lacy nightgowns, and Lexi lay in the curve of her arm, crooning softly to herself, trying to ward off sleep, fighting to stay awake. When Lexi saw her father enter the room, she grinned mischievously. Looking at Carey Ann, reclining, made Jack desire her terribly, and feel base for this desire, and feel wretched because he could tell that tonight his desire would not be fulfilled—and because she did not equally desire him. He could almost feel his penis shrinking into his body, unloved, rejected, disappointed. As he went into the bathroom to wash up for bed, he felt his sex against him, a small bobbing sack laden with displeasure and resentment and frustrated desires, like some heavy symbolic object in an ominous ancient tale.

Daphne thought that friendship carried with it an enormous responsibility. She had not always thought that, she had learned that. As a girl she had wanted a lot of “friends,” but as she grew older she became more careful—not unfriendly, and many people in Westhampton would call her a friend—but more cautious about becoming intimate. It seemed to Daphne that true friendship involved a form of intimacy, in some cases an intimacy different from but more naked than that of marriage, for there were things you would tell a friend that you would never tell your husband. Things about former lovers, or jealousies or fears or fantasies or even just foolish feminine thoughts about your thighs. Or the time when you, married, were at the grocery store during another routine day and a young man in line looked at you and then smiled at you and then offered to carry your groceries for you and tried to talk to you, so that for one moment in the middle of a day during which you only thought: Dry cleaning, get the tires checked, go to the bank, groceries, you suddenly thought: Oh, I am still an attractive woman! how nice, how nice, if I were free and single I would be able to get to know that handsome man who is now getting into his Porsche; if that happened, and of course it did happen, you could not tell your husband. It would seem as though you had somehow been unfaithful, flirtatious—cheap; he would be angry, or, worse, he would look scornful (Christ, my wife’s thrilled because some creep in a
grocery
store talked to her; where’s her sense of dignity?). When all the time you had been looking at your grocery list and at the items piled in your cart and wondering whether or not to buy a candy bar and had looked up to see that man studying you, with interest in his eyes. When this happened, you could not tell your husband, but you could tell a friend, and you needed a friend who would understand this appropriately, who could understand because it had happened to her too, so she would not think that you derived pleasure from it because you didn’t love your husband. It was so nice to have a friend who was your equal in experience and who shared your values; and it was so rare.

And it was such a responsibility. When you met a person, and the chance to become a real friend arose, there were decisions to make immediately: Do I want to know this person’s secrets? All of them? Do I want to tell her mine? Do I want her to help
me—and then will I be obligated? Do I want to help her?

But of course finding a true friend was in many ways like finding a lover, or rather, not just a lover, but a true love. Chemistry was involved: it often happened at once, out of your conscious control, your body went ahead and did it for you, you liked the person at once, that was it. You met your friend and could tell her everything, hear everything, help and be helped.

That was the way, strangely enough, that Daphne felt now about Jack Hamilton. She had never felt that way about a man before. Her friends had always been women. And she could not pretend to herself that she wasn’t also sexually attracted to him—very much so. But there would never be any question of an affair; he was so much in love with his wife, and Carey Ann was so flawlessly beautiful, a walking centerfold of a girl, and Daphne was so much older, she was fifteen years older than Jack, and twenty-two years older than Carey Ann—she was old enough to be Carey Ann’s mother! Oh, how embarrassing even to have sexual thoughts about Jack Hamilton. But there was no doubt that the instinct was there, the surge, the joyous, even gleeful sense of discovery every time she saw Jack Hamilton, and it was true that when she came home from work every day she felt buoyed up and cheerful rather than tired, anticipating the moment when Jack would come jogging through the tunnel of trees up to her front door for a quick drink and a friendly chat.

Her friendship with Pauline White had not come hot and quick, in an explosion; it had been more of an accretion, like a tree growing its rings of years. The last time she had felt this sort of triumphant fireworks sort of friendship had been when she had met Laura.

That had been in 1966. Almost twenty years ago! Daphne was twenty-seven and Joe was twenty-nine, and had finished his doctorate in English literature and had been hired to teach at Westhampton, in the very department where Jack Hamilton now taught, where Hudson Jennings still taught and was now chairman. Daphne and Joe had just moved to Westhampton from Amherst and had bought their first house and were stunned with what seemed to be the beginning of their real grown-up life. They weren’t wealthy, but they could eat something more now than tuna-fish casseroles and they could unpack their wedding presents. They hadn’t even seen a lot of the loot for four years; it had been packed away in storage while they lived in tiny rented apartments. They hadn’t realized they had so much.

They were barely able to buy a little old “colonial” in a good neighborhood; they
were able to afford it because it had been owned by an impossibly old brother and sister and the sister finally died, leaving the brother to sell the house and move to a rest home. The outside of the house, which was red brick with blue shutters, was fine, but the inside hadn’t been painted or redecorated for thousands of years.