It was surprising even to her how much she hated him. She had not hated him while they were married, or even after he punched her. She had sympathized with him, recognized that he was doing his best, understood the burden his own childhood placed upon him. She had seen his frustration and his fear. She had glided from day to day, giving him exactly what he asked of her, no more, no less, and agreeing with him that this was a virtue. But after she moved out, and without apparent relationship to his actions, she had come to feel such an aversion to everything about him, from the way he said certain words — like “and” or “drawer”—to the distribution of gray hairs over his temples, to the brown spot in the blue iris of his left eye, that she was amazed at herself. When she chatted with her divorced friends at the gym (there were two of them), she had nothing to say about the odor of his feet or his table manners or his drinking habits. This was how she knew that, compared with them, she really hated him — it was as if for twenty-two years she had been cataloguing the details of her antipathy every time he told her to pay attention. The same traits, when they appeared in the boys, did not bother her, though. Paul was a system unto himself, and it was the system she scorned. Her lawyer said that she should cultivate indifference, but it was hard to do so, because Paul wouldn’t let her divorce him.
She had written him a letter — very cajoling in tone — in which she asked him what he imagined their future together would be, since she could not voluntarily return. His letter came back within the week. After the usual passages about marriage as a contract and a sacrament and an obligation, he had continued: “I still can’t believe that you meant to do this. It strikes me as some sort of enormous mistake, or cosmic joke that will soon be set right. I sensed nothing. It’s like I woke up in a different world. If you do not come to your senses, then I feel that I have to accept that I was crazy then, or I am crazy now, one or the other.” Claire could see this, black flashing to white, white flashing to black — her own feeling of sympathy, if not love, converting to antipathy, likewise, his assurance that he knew what was what converting to disorientation. But it had been a year and a half. There was a kind of willfulness to his continuing disbelief that made her hate him more.
Andy thought she should see a psychiatrist, Lois thought she should open a shop, Minnie thought she should travel, Lillian thought she should keep a journal, Henry thought she should go back to school, and Joe said they had plenty of room at the farm, obviously thinking that she might easily find herself homeless in the big world. Someone somewhere, she was sure, thought she should join a convent. The only advice she had taken was keeping a journal. She bought herself an old-fashioned sales log for a business, and wrote about objects, like her set of dry measuring cups that she had gotten for her wedding from some aunt of Paul’s whom she never met. There were also four gold-rimmed dessert plates with portraits of fruit that she had never used. She wrote down whatever came to mind about these items, maybe for a page, and then put the book on the shelf next to the toilet. Sometimes she wrote while on the toilet, which gave her a certain satisfaction. She imagined her brain as space like a cave, not very large but expandable — each word she wrote (and her handwriting was quite neat) worked in there like a tiny finger, pushing some edge, some membrane, a little further back, opening up the space and letting light in. Sometimes she wrote down the question “What next?”
But she could never answer it with anything more profound than “grilled cheese” or “a bath” or “Cosmos,” which was a book she was reading about two pages at a time. She had bought a bunch of bestsellers, including Shelley Winters’s autobiography. Shelley Winters was sixty-one. Another book she bought was about investing, Crisis Investing: Opportunities and Profits in the Coming Great Depression. According to this book, she was supposed to take her money out of the money market and put it in gold, which was these days always between $475 and $500 an ounce; this would give her about thirty pounds of gold, but no income. She thought this was an investment that would strongly appeal to Dr. Paul Darnell, but it didn’t appeal to her. However, she did write a little section in her journal about her wedding ring, which she now kept on a string hanging from the window latch. Writing about it gave her a pleasant sense of understanding gold, even of possessing it, which was close enough to buying some for now.
—
LILLIAN HAD BEEN SITTING quietly in a corner. She’d never been to this house before, an imposing Colonial on Q Street, and the party was a large one. She had been admiring the paintings, which were realistic, but strange — a donkey standing in a kitchen, a toddler sitting on the crest of a slate roof, holding an apple. When the woman sat down, Lillian struggled to remember her name — Irene — and smiled in her usual friendly way. Irene started in immediately. She leaned toward Lillian and said, “Oh, darling. I have been thinking about you. You’ll never guess what happened to me.”
“I can’t im—”
“So bizarre. I felt a lump right here.” She touched the underside of her left breast. “And, of course, I went straight to the doctor, and he felt it, too. So I was terrified! I went home and told Jason.” Yes, Irene’s husband was Jason. Maybe he worked in the State Department? A rumpled, handsome fellow. “And he was terrified, too. He was so nice to me, all that evening. Very attentive.”
Lillian smiled in a sympathetic way.
“I mean, he put me to bed and brought me tea and you name it. The next morning, he took me for the biopsy, and he sat with me in the waiting room until I went in for the procedure, which they said would take an hour and a half.”
“It’s time-consuming. They have to be very precise,” said Lillian.
“Well, of course,” said Irene. “Anyway, I came out, and Jason was nowhere to be seen. I was a little — oh, I don’t know. So I walked out on the step and was sitting there, sort of dazedly staring around, and here comes this little Toyota, kind of beat up, and it stops at the curb, and out gets Jason, and he goes around to the driver’s side and kisses the girl who was driving goodbye!”
“Good heavens!” said Lillian.
“Yes! He had been seeing her for months! I am telling you, it was the turning point of my life!”
Lillian’s glance strayed, in spite of herself, to Irene’s chest.
Irene said, “Oh well! The biopsy was negative. Everything fine, in spite of all my worries, but I have been thinking of you and your trouble ever since Miriam told me about it all.”
Wouldn’t want that to happen to anyone, thought Lillian.
“But you’re feeling better now. You look lovely. I just wanted to tell you that.”
In the course of the eleven months since her operation (radical mastectomy, fourteen lymph nodes, chest muscle, plus radiation, the new miracle drug tamoxifen, everything, it seemed), she had heard more about the breast-cancer adventures of women she barely knew than she had ever thought possible. The mother who had died at thirty-seven. The grandmother who lived to be ninety-eight, and at her age they didn’t do operations, because cells divided so slowly anyway. The woman who had something called DCIS in one breast, then lobular ten years later. The lumpectomy during pregnancy (this was the worst one, of course). It was someone new every week or so.