Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

Girls tunes. My husband knows and likes you, the more since he enjoys acting grandiose and liberal about our mutual ex-husband. But it is clear that in the labyrinth of his Mediterranean male brain, this visit is a foreign female caprice. It’s woman’s work, my work, and aside from opening a wonderful 1982 Barolo, and making a few obligatory flirtatious comments on your unchanged beauty, he’s leaving me to it.

I’m sorry I have to bore you like this, I say, as the phone rings for the fifth time. I didn’t expect it. I promise that if you stay tomorrow night, we’ll go out, we’ll take you to one of the grand old Piedmontese restaurants, with their magnificent heavy pastas and polenta and boiled and fried meats. It’s white truffle season, I add, almost pleadingly.

You’re sitting with a full glass of wine that looks like a globe of ruby. I don’t mind, you say, I’ve never seen a writer at work before.

I have to turn around and get a look at you. Droll again?

Much later, I finish, and go upstairs to find you in Theo’s room, sitting in the dark beside her bed. I kiss Theo, and she grins at me blankly from the borderland between sleep and waking, and tells me that you checked her Latin for her. I feel a pang of jealousy, and a sudden illumination—it occurs to me for the first time that the two of you, a few years ago, did indeed have a real life together, of homework and bedtimes. I used to feel that my daughter melted into mist when she left for her father’s house. Now, for a second, I feel strange, insubstantial, standing at my daughter’s bedside with you, as if we are twin fairy godmothers. And suddenly I wonder what it is, apart from the bare physical fact, that makes a mother. What it is, for that matter, that makes a wife.

The baby gets me up twice during the night, but I’m awake anyway, thinking of you up in the guest room under the eaves, with British Vogue on the night table, and an anemic ivy plant snaking down the wall. Are you awake too? My husband huddles at the other side of the bed, as if he knows that I’m not present for him.

I’m thinking of the many times you have passed through my life. First in anecdote, as R, courting me, naïvely—how men live to regret this—confided far too many details of his earlier loves. And you were the earliest of all. An image: a small California town, citrus groves on the edge of the desert, and you and R at fifteen, eerily similar in unisex bell-bottomed jeans and Pre-Raphaelite hair, feeding the ducks under monumental palms in the park. Hand in hand, venturing inside the gigantic troubling maze of romance that we all enter so lightheartedly and find so hard to leave. A snapshot from that time used to prick my heart cruelly. I’d sneak it out of the box where R kept old pictures, and study your face, as you sat in Polaroid murk, cross-legged, arms clutched in the wary position you’ve never lost, gazing apprehensively at somebody out of the picture.

I knew about your childhood troubles, your fragmented family, and envied you even that. I could not summon up an aura of melancholy even faintly equal to that which you wore so seductively, like one of those girls who looks well in vintage clothes. You were the kind of girl Smokey Robinson and Linda Ronstadt had in mind as they sobbed out their lyrics. And then there was the fact that the adolescent romance between you and R had foundered in college, giving you the consummately enchanting quality of absence, the perfume of the vanished woman.

So many things I knew about you, as if we were best girlfriends. The fights, the reconciliations, the devastating letters, the elegiac lovemaking in a hayfield in France.

When I finally met you, at a beery Oakland reunion of college friends, I was happily married. You, the ex-girlfriend, were annoyingly beautiful, but you wore a pair of designer high heels that dispelled any uneasiness on my part. A romantic legend, I thought, would not need a pair of flashy shoes. I felt your power was neutralized. And I liked the way you kept dipping your head, checking me out through your thick Welsh eyelashes.

Years later, when R and I had moved to Rome and I, in a moment of epic distraction, left R, I wasn’t entirely surprised to find you suddenly, mysteriously, back in his life. You came to Europe on a visit, and decided to stay on; but this, and that swift, subsequent marriage are merely the facts. You had perpetually been present, as a kind of mist that coalesced into a presence after I departed. Theodora, who was five, came back from her father’s house one day, speaking in a portentous voice of “the other,” and that was you. You had always been the other.

We all socialized nobly for a time in Rome, in our cramped expatriate circle: I’m thinking particularly of a time when the three of us shocked a Pakistani friend by sitting in a giggling row at Theodora’s school Christmas concert. And of a rather elegant Thanksgiving dinner I gave where you came in a loose Jean Muir dress, and my friends came sidling up to me and hissed delighted speculations as to whether you were pregnant.

You knew so much about me—as much as I knew about you. I could see the knowledge flickering uneasily in your eyes. You couldn’t quite dislike me.

Then one afternoon I came to pick up Theodora, and realized that for you things in your new Italian life, in that brief marriage, had reached one of those obscure points of no return we all have experienced. Your face was a study in controlled desperation. Caught in my own role, I could say nothing. But I wasn’t surprised when the phone call