She knew now what it had been. In Brazil, his sexual excitement had blocked out every other facet of his personality, like a radio jammer. But that kind of excitement, based in the alien and exotic, had inevitably faded once they’d returned to his normal mundane world. In Stockbridge, his insatiable craving for her body had drained out of him with the speed and irreversibility of water out of a cracked swimming pool. And when it was gone, there was nothing left.
Jack didn’t care for her, it seemed, had nothing in common with her, neither liked nor disliked her, was absolutely indifferent to her presence. There was no longer any sex at all between them, and her few efforts to rekindle his passion had been such humiliating failures — how gently and kindly he had excused himself from performance — that she’d quickly given that up, but then had no other way to try to reach him. He had returned to a previous research job at a Massachusetts medical laboratory, and the people and events of his work were absolutely all that held any interest for him. He didn’t actively object to Maria Elena’s presence in his house, cooking his meals and doing his laundry, but if she’d left he would have found another maid without a second thought. In fact, it would probably be easier for him to have a maid who wasn’t inexplicably all over his bedroom every night.
In a way, it would have been easier to understand and live with if Jack had found another woman, but he had not, and might never. He was a kind and gentle man, but he just simply wasn’t much of a physical creature. His job absorbed his interest. His on-site chat with co-workers was all the social life he seemed to need, and that was it. His sudden spurts of sexual excitement must be terribly rare, surprising and pleasing while they were going on, but then gone without a memory, without a regret.
That was the worst of it; Jack couldn’t even seem to remember what it was about her that he’d liked. And she knew now that it was only that deep polite indifference at the core of him that had made him agree to marry her, that had permitted her to succeed in her machinations. Oh, how clever she’d been!
If only she could talk to the first wife, that mystery woman three thousand miles away in Portland, Oregon. Had the same thing happened with her? Had Jack suddenly noticed her body, gone into that frenzy, worn it away inside her, and then reverted to his natural phlegmatic self? (Except, of course, that a child had resulted that other time.) And had the wife at last been unable to stand for another instant that bland polite indifference?
How would an American woman react to such an existence? Maria Elena was at a total loss. Nothing in her experience showed her how to handle a passionless man. In her world, passion was a major constituent, for good and for ill. When she and Paco had come together, it had been like storm systems colliding over a jungle, and when they’d parted, the storms had been even more fierce. They’d drawn blood, both emotionally and physically, and if Maria Elena was eventually battered into an acceptance of Paco’s hateful view of her, it was nevertheless the result of a war, not the result of an ice age covering the Earth.
And when she had sung, and the public had responded, that had been passion, too. She had been for a while the latest in a tradition of forceful South American performers, almost a cross between the emotional intensity of an Edith Piaf and the showbiz intensity of a Liza Minnelli, but propelled by a purely Iberian torrent of feeling. How powerfully she had been able to sing about sorrow and loss, then, before she had known them. How far she was from singing now.
She had brought with her from Brazil the memorabilia of that career, the albums, the rolled-up posters, the magazine articles, the photos, all stacked in two cartons stored away in the Stockbridge attic. She thought of them up there sometimes, thought about listening to one of the albums — Live in São Paulo, for instance, with its almost terrifying roar of audience response — but she never did.
Frustrated, shamed, alone, Maria Elena clung at last to the wreckage of the idea that had caused her to be united with John Auston in the first place. Somehow, she had to find the people who owned the factories, the people who were indifferent to or ignorant of the horror they brought into the lives of less powerful human beings in less influential parts of the globe. Somehow, she had to reach them and convince them to change their ways, reverse their policies, stop the slaughter. But who were these people? How could she find them? How could she make contact with them? How could she make her argument compelling to them?
Finally, there had been no route open except to repeat her earlier political phase in Braziclass="underline" join the protestors. It gave her a way to fill her days, it gave her a way to use her untapped passion, it gave her, at least at moments, at least the illusion of accomplishment. She wasn’t doing what had to be done, but she was doing something.
But even there, satisfaction was elusive. Her grasp of English, adequate in every other respect, was too clumsy for the slippery nuances of political discourse. Even this demonstration; it apparently wasn’t opposed to the nuclear plant as such, but to some sort of research going on within it. What did Maria Elena know of science? Nothing; only its leavings. Still she persisted, because something is better than nothing, because movement at least distracted from the emptiness of her life, and because maybe she was doing some good. Maybe she was.
But it didn’t really work, it didn’t really distract, and it certainly didn’t fulfill. She picketed in front of the U.N., signed group letters to the New York Times (that usually weren’t published), contributed toward the cost of advertisements on environmental issues, showed up to help swell the ranks of protests, traveled to Washington on buses chartered by action groups; and always she was alone, always just a little to the side of the group, slightly lost, slightly out of sync.
And all of it culminating in this embarrassment today. This was the worst so far, to be bloodied in front of television cameras, to give the bastards of the media exactly the kind of false violent story they preferred, the kind of story they could use to avoid and obscure the real story. Then, still dazed from that inadvertent blow to the head, she’d permitted herself to be taken away from the action, away from where she should be, to sit here in this car full of strangers. “I am Maria Elena Auston,” she said. “And I thank you, but I really shouldn’t leave my friends. They’ll worry about me.” Which wasn’t at all true, a reality she resolutely ignored. “If you could just let me out,” she went on, “I’ll walk back.”
They all argued that: the handsome young man who’d pulled her out of the picket line, the pleasant young woman driving, the very thin man in the passenger seat in front. They said her head was cut, was still bleeding, had to be seen to. “We’re just a couple of miles from the hospital,” the young woman said, and the thin man said, “That’s very true.”
“I don’t want to take you out of your way. Please, I’ll just get out—”
The thin man laughed, then coughed, then turned to smile at her, saying, “It is not out of our way. I am afraid I live at the hospital.”
Now she actually looked at him and listened to him for the first time. He spoke English with an accent, possibly a stronger one than hers, but very different. Polish? And he was so thin, the shape of his skull was absolutely visible through the translucent blue-gray skin of his face. Knowing what the truth must be, she nevertheless said, “Are you a doctor?”