Is this what’s called jealousy? I guess. Who knows? For me it was also a kind of — I don’t know, a kind of exploration. As though I wanted to push past whatever I thought I was, into regions of unknown pain, frontiers of humiliation. Look at me! — the cowgirl of sorrow.
Sometimes I thought of beaches: Robert and me at the beach, sun shining on sandbars — another life. Robert leaning back on his elbows, his skinny-muscly legs crossed at the ankles, images of sky and water in his dark glasses. Dream-women walking in the sand, walking right there in his sunglasses — he always did like a pair of long legs on a woman. Like yours. At the beach he would look at them admiringly. I never minded — well, maybe a little. More than a little. And both of us liked to look people over, it was a thing we did well together. “Your type,” I’d say, nodding toward some leggy bimbo in a string bikini. Robert would laugh. Sometimes I worried about my legs, that they weren’t long enough. “Long enough for what?” he said once. Typical Robert.
Was it your legs? Was it that simple? Two inches taller and a girl gets it all? Maybe there was something you did with your legs, some special way of walking across a room, or. . or something. A technique you practiced: a secret craft. That was it. Or maybe it was your body itself that had a secret — some special feature — some unusual development — that no man could resist. I liked the idea of a secret — something hidden— because then you were lifted into the realm of magic, where you defeated me unfairly — where nothing was my fault.
Or maybe your nasty little secret was that you talked a different way in bed — talked dirty, as they say. Is that what golden girls do? I imagined the words coming from your mouth, words I never used because to me they were sharp stones flung at bodies. And Robert would never. . In the night I whispered them aloud: Cunt. Cock. Fuck. I was oddly soothed by them, as I said them over and over again: Cunt. Cock. Fuck. Fuck me, Robert, I imagined you saying. Come on, Robert. Fuck me. That’s what it comes down to, I said. Cunt. Cock. Fuck. I spoke them louder and louder. They thrilled me and hurt me. I had the confused sense that I was saying goodbye to something. My childhood? But I was a forty-seven-year-old woman! I felt tears on my face.
Late that same night I put on my robe and prowled around downstairs, exhausted and awake. I sat on the porch, but the sound of crickets was like a burn on my skin. In the kitchen I filled a glass with ice cubes and pressed it to my forehead. I walked into the dining room. That afternoon Robert had tightened a screw in a drawer pull. The screwdriver was lying on the hutch. I picked it up and went over to the table.
Here it is, under the cloth. An ugly mark, don’t you think? Like a scar. As I gouged the mahogany with that screwdriver, I thought of many things — the time, long ago, when Robert and I made love on the table, the time when we were happy and lighthearted — but most of all I thought of you. I imagined the table was your face.
You look shocked. You shouldn’t be. It’s only a table, after all. Besides, these little expressions of yours — shock, dismay — I’m sure they’re very appealing to men—who like to be shocking— but when you’re talking to me, you really ought to drop it. It just doesn’t do you a bit of good.
Robert was terribly upset, the first time he saw the mark. He wanted to know why.
Why, Robert? Why? He might as well have asked me to walk down the street with him holding hands.
Now I eat my meals in the kitchen. I don’t like this room anymore. Oh, let’s get on with it, shall we? I haven’t even shown you the upstairs.
STAIRS
I like this old stairpost, don’t you, with this whatchamajigger on top: a bowling ball, it looks like to me, though Robert said it reminded him of the top of a barber pole — or a bald old professor. Just follow me. The handrail’s a little nicked; nothing a bit of furniture polish won’t fix. Those three photographs were taken by my father — Mexico — photography was his passion, though he sold insurance. Here’s the step where I stumbled. Second from the landing. This one right here. Fell right down all those steps and landed on the floor at the foot of the stairs, down there by the hall closet. I could’ve broken my neck; Robert was impressed. Have you ever fallen down a flight of stairs, out of sheer — I suppose it was sorrow. A sorrowful fall. I remember everything: a feeling of just letting everything go, that sense of release, it was almost exhilarating, like floating up in the air, except that my head was banging against the banister and my body was a big awkward lump with arms and legs sticking out all over the place. At the bottom I lay there thinking: so that’s what it’s like, falling down stairs. One leg was bent in a funny way and my skirt was partway up. I wondered if anyone could see my underpants. Vanity! — take it from me, even half dead we’re stuck with it. So there I was, lying with my skirt up, aware of looking like some woman trying to seduce some man. Then I tried to remember the last time I’d made love to Robert. It seemed a long time ago. But was it really that long? And then out of nowhere I thought of Tom Conway. It’s astonishing what a person will think of, lying at the bottom of a stairway. Tom Conway. I’ll tell you about Tom Conway. But not now. Just three more steps after the landing. Robert said we ought to buy a statue and put it right there in the corner. A statue in magnificently bad taste — you know, white marble nymph emerging from bath, one hand modestly covering her pudendum. Instead: tah-dah! Emerson’s Essays. Murder on the Orient Express. Animal Architecture. Can you believe it?
UPSTAIRS BATH
This is the shower. We had a new head installed five — six years ago, walls and ceiling painted. I ought to spray the damn walls to stop that speckling, but I never do. Those tiles are original with the house; a little grout wouldn’t hurt over there.
At some point after Robert’s confession — it must have been late summer? early fall? — I began to take lots of showers. I’d stay under till the hot water ran out, sometimes three times a day. If I wasn’t going to die — and I realized, with astonishment— and disappointment — and a kind of outrage — that I was not going to die — then at least I was determined to be clean. It was as if by seeing you — as Robert so charmingly put it — he had made me dirty. Explain it any way you like: I needed to be clean, shining; a temple virgin; a little girl. Sometimes I took a long bath, and showered right after.
That medicine cabinet came with the house — one of the many home improvements we never made. You see the filigree work on the mirror. And here’s something funny: funny peculiar, as a particularly obnoxious colleague of Robert’s used to say, not funny ha ha. Every time I stepped out of the tub, I would see myself in that mirror. Of course I’d always seen myself in that mirror, but it struck me for the first time how I saw only my top half. It was a mermaid mirror. Yes, I was a mermaid — nothing below my waist. Of course by this time Robert and I were no longer making love, as the saying goes. So it made a weird kind of sense that when I looked at myself naked in the mirror, after stepping out of the tub, I had no lower half. That was one of your cruelest thefts: stealing my bottom half. I suppose it was just as well, since nothing any longer pleased me about my body. And this was strange, because — but haven’t we spoken of this already? You’ve really got to excuse me if I repeat myself. So many things in my head, going round and round! But you see, I’d always been easy enough, in my mind, about my body. I mean, I always did fill out a sweater pretty well — that kind of thing. Of course my legs—but that’s another story. Still, all in all. Not that I ever loved my body, for God sakes — or sake, as Robert would say. God’s. Pause. Sake. It was just that I accepted it, the way I accepted my — oh, I don’t know, my nose. There it is: a nose. Look at it as long as you like, it’s still just a nose. Hey there, nose! You know, there are people who spend their entire lives doing nothing, I mean nothing, but worrying about their noses. Then they die, and go to a heaven full of angels with perfect angel-noses, and for all eternity they do nothing but worry about their noses. That was never my way. But now, thanks to you, I found myself worrying about my body. It was wrong in every way, an immense. . wrongness. Too this. Too that. Too — oh, everything. I hated it all. For the first time in my life, at the tender age of forty-seven, I became an adolescent.