“No, I …” Sarah began. “There are drapes,” she said.
“Off to the side, where you have your garden, there are whale bones if you dig deep enough. I can tell you a lot about this town.”
“My husband wants to move,” Sarah said.
“I can understand that, but you’re the real drinker, after all, aren’t you, not him.”
“I don’t drink any more,” Sarah said. She looked at the woman dizzily.
Genevieve was not pretty but she had a clear, strong face. She sat down on the opposite side of the room. “I guess I would like something,” she said. “A glass of water.” Sarah went to the kitchen and poured a glass of Vichy for them both. Her hands shook.
“We are not strangers to one another,” Genevieve said. “We could be friends.”
“My first husband always wanted to be friends with my second husband,” Sarah said after a moment. “I could never understand it.” This had somehow seemed analogous when she was saying it but now it did not. “It is not appropriate that we be friends,” she said.
Genevieve continued to sit and talk. Sarah found herself concentrating desperately on her articulate, one-sided conversation. She suspected that the words Genevieve was using were codes for other words, terrible words. Genevieve spoke thoughtlessly, dispassionately, with erratic flourishes of language. Sarah couldn’t believe that they were chatting about food, men, the red clouds massed above the sea.
“I have a friend who is a designer,” Genevieve said. “She hopes to make a great deal of money someday. Her work has completely altered her perceptions. Every time she looks at a view, she thinks of sheets. “Take out those mountains,’ she will say, ‘lighten that cloud a bit and it would make a great sheet.’ When she looks at the sky, she thinks of lingerie. Now when I look at the sky, I think of earlier times, happier times when I looked at the sky. I have never been in love, have you?”
“Yes,” Sarah said, “I’m in love.”
“It’s not a lucky thing, you know, to be in love.”
There was a soft scuffling at the door and Martha came in. “Hello,” she said. “School was good today. I’m hungry.”
“Hello, dear,” Genevieve said. To Sarah, she said, “Perhaps we can have lunch sometime.”
“Who is that?” Martha asked Sarah after Genevieve had left.
“A neighbor,” Sarah said, “one of Mommy’s friends.”
When Sarah told Tommy about Genevieve coming to visit her, he said, “It’s harassment. It can be stopped.”
It was Sunday morning. They had just finished breakfast and Tommy and Martha were drying the dishes and putting them away. Martha was wearing her church-school clothes and she was singing a song she had learned the Sunday before.
“… I’m going to the Mansion on the Happy Days’ Express …” she sang.
Tommy squeezed Martha’s shoulders. “Go get your coat, sweetie,” he said. When the child had gone, he said to Sarah, “Don’t speak to this woman. Don’t allow it to happen again.”
“We didn’t talk about that.”
“What else could you talk about? It’s weird.”
“No one talks about that. No one, ever.”
Tommy was wearing a corduroy suit and a tie Sarah had never seen before. Sarah looked at the pattern in the tie. It was random and bright.
“Are you having an affair?” Sarah asked.
“No,” he said easily. “I don’t understand you, Sarah. I’ve done everything I could to protect you, to help you straighten yourself out. It was a terrible thing but it’s over. You have to get over it. Now, just don’t see her again. There’s no way that she can cause trouble if you don’t speak to her.”
Sarah stopped looking at Tommy’s tie. She moved her eyes to the potatoes she had peeled and put in a bowl of water.
Martha came into the kitchen and held on to her father’s arm. Her hair was long and thick, but it was getting darker. It was as though it had never been cut.
After they left, Sarah put the roast in the oven and went into the living room. The large window was full of the day, a colorless windy day without birds. Sarah sat on the floor and ran her fingers across the smooth, varnished wood. Beneath the expensive flooring was cold cement. Tanks had once lined the walls. Lobsters had crept back and forth across the mossy glass. The phone rang. Sarah didn’t look at it, suspecting it was Genevieve. Then she picked it up.
“Hello,” said Genevieve, “I thought I might drop by. It’s a bleak day, isn’t it. Cold. Is your family at home?”
“They go out on Sunday,” Sarah said. “It gives me time to think. They go to church.”
“What do you think about?” The woman’s voice seemed far away. Sarah strained to hear her.
“I’m supposed to cook dinner. When they come back we eat dinner.”
“I can prepare clams in forty-three different ways,” Genevieve said.
“This is a roast. A roast pork.”
“Well, may I come over?”
“All right,” Sarah said.
She continued to sit on the floor, waiting for Genevieve, looking at the water beneath the sky. The water on the horizon was a wide, satin ribbon. She wished that she had the courage to swim on such a bitter, winter day. To swim far out and rest, to hesitate and then to return. Her life was dark, unexplored. Her abstinence had drained her. She felt sluggish, robbed. Her body had no freedom.
She sat, seeing nothing, the terrible calm light of the day around her. The things she remembered were so far away, bathed in a different light. Her life seemed so remote to her. She had sought happiness in someone, knowing she could not find it in herself and now her heart was strangely hard. She rubbed her head with her hands.
Her life with Tommy was broken, irreparable. Her life with him was over. His infidelities kept getting mixed up in her mind with the death of the boy, with Tommy’s false admission that he had been driving when the boy died. Sarah couldn’t understand anything. Her life seemed so random, so needlessly constructed and now threatened in a way which did not interest her.
“Hello,” Genevieve called. She had opened the front door and was standing in the hall. “You didn’t hear my knock.”
Sarah got up. She was to entertain this woman. She felt anxious, adulterous. The cold rose from Genevieve’s skin and hair. Sarah took her coat and hung it in the closet. The fresh cold smell lingered on her hands.
Sarah moved into the kitchen. She took a package of rolls out of the freezer.
“Does your little girl like church?” Genevieve asked.
“Yes, very much.”
“It’s a stage,” said Genevieve. “I’m Catholic myself. As a child, I used to be fascinated by the martyrs. I remember a picture of St. Lucy, carrying her eyes like a plate of eggs, and St. Agatha. She carried her breasts on a plate.”
Sarah said, “I don’t understand what we’re talking about. I know you’re just using these words, that they mean other words, I …”
“Perhaps we could take your little girl to a movie sometime, a matinee, after she gets out of school.”
“Her name is Martha,” Sarah said. She saw Martha grown up, her hair cut short once more, taking rolls out of the freezer, waiting.
“Martha, yes,” Genevieve said. “Have you wanted more children?”
“No,” Sarah said. Their conversation was illegal, unspeakable. Sarah couldn’t imagine it ever ending. Her fingers tapped against the ice-cube trays. “Would you care for a drink?”
“A very tall glass of vermouth,” Genevieve said. She was looking at a little picture Martha had made, that Sarah had tacked to the wall. It was a very badly drawn horse. “I wanted children. I wanted to fulfill myself. One can never fulfill oneself. I think it is an impossibility.”