Short Stories and a Sequel, “Rabbit Remembered”: Licks of Love

The Women Who Got AwayPierce Junction was an isolated New Hampshire town somewhat dignified bythe presence of a small liberal-arts college; we survived by clusteringtogether like a ball of snakes in a desert cave. The Sixties had taught usthe high moral value of copulation, and we were slow to give up on anactivity so simultaneously pleasurable and healthy. Still, you couldn’tsleep with everybody: we were bourgeoisie, responsible, with jobs andchildren, and affairs demanded energy and extracted wear and tear. Wehadn’t learned yet to take the emotion out of sex. Looking back, thenumbers don’t add up to what an average college student now manages in four years. There were women you failed ever to sleep with; these, inretrospect, have a perverse vividness, perhaps because the contacts, inthe slithering ball of snakes, were so few that they have stayed distinct.“Well, Martin,” Audrey Lancaster murmured to me toward the end of a summercruise on a boat hired out of Portsmouth in celebration of somebody orother’s fortieth birthday, “I see what they say about you, at last.” The “at last” was a dig of sorts, and the “they” was presumably female ingender. I wondered how much conversation went on, and along lines howspecific, among the wives and divorcées of our set. I had been standingthere by the rail, momentarily alone, mellow on my portion of CaliforniaChablis, watching the Piscataqua River shakily reflect the harbor lightsas the boat swung to dock and the loudspeaker system piped Simon andGarfunkel into the warm, watery night.My wife was slow-dancing on the forward deck with her lover, Frank Greer.Audrey had materialized beside me and my hand went around her waist as ifwe might dance, too. There my hand stayed, and, like the gentle buzz youget from a frayed appliance cord, the reality of her haunch burned throughto my fingers and palm. She was a solid, smooth-faced woman, sonearsighted that she moved with a splay-footed pugnacity, as if somethingshe didn’t quite see might knock her over. Her contact lenses were alwaysgetting lost, in somebody’s lawn or at the back of her eyeballs. She hadmarried young and was a bit younger than the rest of us. You had to loveAudrey, seeing her out on the tennis court in frayed denim cut-offs, withher sturdy brown legs and big, squinty smile, taking a swing and missingthe ball completely. Her waist was smooth and flexible in summer cotton,and, yes, she was right, for the first time in all our years ofacquaintance I sensed her as a potential mate, as a piece of the cosmicpuzzle that might fit my piece.But I also felt that, basically, she didn’t care for me, not enough tocome walking through all of adultery’s risks and spasms of guilt, allthose hoops of flame. She distrusted me, the way you distrust acompetitor. We were both clowns, bucking to be elected Funniest in theClass. Further, she was taken, doubly: not only married, to a man calledSpike, with the four children customary for our generation, but involvedin a number of murky flirtations or infatuations, including one with mybest friend, Rodney Miller–if a person could be said to have same-sexfriends in our rather doctrinairely heterosexual enclave. She had a niceway of drawling out poisonous remarks, and said now, to me, “Shouldn’t yougo tell Jeanne and Frank the boat is about to dock? They might getarrested by the Portsmouth fuzz for public indecency.”I said, “Why me? I’m not the cruise director.”Jeanne was my wife. Her love for Frank, in the twisted way of things backthen, helped bind me to her: I felt so sorry for her, having to spend mostof her hours with me and the children when her heart was elsewhere. Shehad been raised a French Catholic, and there was something noble for herabout suffering and self-denial; her invisible hairshirt kept her torsoerect as a dancer’s and added to her beauty in my eyes. I didn’t likeAudrey mocking her. Or did I? Perhaps my feelings were more primitive,more stupidly possessive, than I knew at the time. I tightened my grip onAudrey’s waist, approaching a painful pinch, then let go, and went forwardto where Jeanne and Frank, the music stopped, looked as if they had justwoken up, with bloated, startled faces. Frank Greer had been married, to awoman named Winifred, until rather recently in our little local history.Divorce, which had been flickering at our edges for a decade while our vast pool of children slowly bubbled up through the school grades toward,we hoped, psychological health, was still rare, and sat raw on Frank, likethe red cheek he had been pressing against my wife’s.Maureen Miller, in one of those intervals in bed when passion had beenslaked but an awkward half-hour of usable time remained before I could indecency sneak away, once told me that Winifred resented the fact that, inthe years when the affair between Frank and Jeanne was common knowledge, Ihad never made a pass at her. Winifred, sometimes called Freddy, was anowlish small woman, a graceful white owl, with big dark eyes and untannedskin and an Emily Dickinson hairdo atop a plump body that tapered to smalland shapely hands and feet. If my wife held herself like a dancer, it was her lover’s wife who in fact could dance, with afeathery nestling and lightness of fit that had an embarrassing eroticeffect on me. Holding her in my arms, I would get an erection, and thus Iwould prudently avoid dancing with her until the end of the evening, whenone or the other of us, in an attempt to persuade our spouses to tearthemselves apart, would have put on an overcoat. Otherwise, I was not attracted to Winifred. Like the model for her hairdo, she hadliterary ambitions and a dogmatic, clipped, willfully oblique style. Sheseemed in her utterances faintly too firm.“Well, I won’t say no,” she said, not altogether graciously, one nightwell after midnight when Jeanne suggested that I walk Winifred home,through a snowstorm that had developed during a dinner party of ours andits inert, boozy aftermath. Couples or their remnants had drifted offuntil just Winifred was left; she had a stern, impassive way of absorbinga great deal of liquor and betraying its presence in her system only by a slight lowering of her lids over her bright blackeyes, and an increase of pedantry in her fluting voice. This was beforethe Greers’ divorce. Frank was absent from the party on some mysteriousexcuse of a business trip. It was the first stage of their separation, Irealized later. Jeanne, knowing more than she let on, had extended herselfthat night like a kid sister to the unescorted woman. She kept urgingFreddy, as the party thinned, to give us one more tale of thecreative-writing seminar she was taking, as a special student, at ourlocal college, Bradbury. Bradbury had formerly been a bleak littlePresbyterian seminary tucked up here, with its pillared chapel, in thefoothills of the White Mountains, but it had long loosened itsecclesiastical ties and in the Sixties had gone coed, with riotous results.“This one girl,” Winifred said, accepting what she swore was her lastKahlúa and brandy, “read a story that must have been very closely based ona painful breakup she had just gone through, and got nothing but the mostsarcastic comments from the instructor, who seems to be a real sadist, orelse it was his way of putting the make on her.” Her expression conveyeddisgust and weariness with all such trans-actions. I supposed that she was displacing her anger at Frank onto theinstructor, a New York poet who no doubt wished he was back in GreenwichVillage, where the sexual revolution was polymorphous. He was a drearysour condescending fellow, in my occasional brushes with him, anddisconcertingly short as well.These rehashed class sessions were all fascinating stuff, if you judgedfrom Jeanne’s animation and gleeful encouragement of the other woman totell more. A rule of life in Pierce Junction demanded that you beespecially nice to your lover’s spouse–by no means an insincereobservance, for the secret sharing did breed a tortuous, guilt-warmedgratitude to the everyday keeper of such a treasure. But even Winifredthrough her veils of Kahlúa began to feel uncomfortable, and stood up inour cold room (the thermostat had retired hours ago), and put her shawl uparound her head, as if fluffing up her feathers. She accepted with a frown Jeanne’sinsistent suggestion that I escort her home. “Of course I’m in nocondition to drive, this has been so lovely,” she said to Jeanne, with ahandshake that Jeanne turned into a fierce, pink-faced, rather frantic (Ithought) embrace of transposed affection.Winifred’s car had been plowed fast to the curb by the passingrevolving-eyed behemoths of our town highway department, and she livedonly three blocks away, an uphill slog in four inches of fresh snow. Shedid seem to need to take my arm, but we both stayed wrapped in our ownthoughts. The snow drifted down with a steady whisper of its own, and thepresence on the streets, at this profoundly nocturnal hour, of thechurning, scraping snowplows made an effect of companionship–of a widerparty beneath the low sky, which was glowing yellow with that strange,secretive phosphorescence of a snowstorm. The houses were dark, and myporch light grew smaller, receding down the hill. In front of her owndoor, right under a streetlamp, Winifred turned to face me as if, in ourmuffling clothes, to dance; but it was only to offer up her pale, oval, rather frozen andgrieving face for me to kiss. Snowflakes were caught in the long lashes ofher closed lids and spangled the arc of parted dark hair left exposed byher shawl. I felt the usual arousal. The house behind her held onlysleeping children. Its clapboard face, needing a coat of paint, lookedshabby, betraying the distracted marriage within.There was, in Pierce Junction, a romance of other couples’ houses–themerged tastes, the accumulated furniture, the framed photographs goingback to the bridal day and the premarital vacation spots. We loved beingguests and hosts both, but preferred being guests, invasive andinquisitive and irresponsible. Did she expect me to come in? It didn’tstrike me as at all a feasible idea–at my back, down the hill, Jeannewould be busy tidying up the party wreckage in our living room and restinga despairing eye on the kitchen clock with its sweeping red second hand.Tiny stars of ice clotted my own lashes as I kissed our guest good night,square on the mouth but lightly, lightly, with liquor-glazed subtleties ofcourteous regret. Of all the kisses I gave and received in PierceJunction, from children and adults and golden retrievers, that chastecrystalline one has remained unmelted in my mind.When I returned to the house, Frank, surprisingly, was sitting in theliving room, holding a beer and wearing a rumpled suit, his long face pinkas if after great exertion. Jeanne, too tired to be flustered, explained,“Frank just got back from his trip. The plane into the Manchester airportalmost didn’t land, and when he found Freddy not at their home he thoughthe’d swing down here and pick her up.”“Up and down that hill in this blizzard?” I marvelled. I didn’t rememberany car going by.“We have four-wheel drive,” Frank said, as if that explained everything.