Fruit of the Month (15 page)

After lovemaking they showered, separately. Washing, she allowed herself to think of what her life might be like if she were to spend it with the poet. She envisioned her lover careening through space and through time, herself hanging on or charging after him in wild pursuit, her hair uncombed, the bills unpaid, falling breathlessly on top of him in bed after bed in a long line of furnished apartments, burdened only by the weight of his ancient Smith Corona. Where would they live? Africa. France. New Guinea. New Mexico. When they had money they would spend it with abandon. When they didn't, they wouldn't miss it. He wouldn't want children. He needed “to be free.” They would never marry. Well, maybe in old age. But by then he would be dead, she was certain, killed in a small plane crash or during one of his crazy exploits, eaten by a lion, shot by a firing squad in some undeveloped country. She would ship him home to bury him, her suitcase crammed with obituary clippings ringing with praise for his numerous published works. But she would be the only person at the funeral. In the end, she might assemble a small volume of “posthumous poems in progress,” including several disclaimers, apologies, her own well-meant attempts at editing.

The poet got a letter one afternoon. She heard it fall through the mail slot to the floor in his living room—an urgent swish, like an intake of breath. He was sleeping. Asleep, his face assumed the contours of a child's face, smooth but somehow blurred, as if the features had been filtered through a layer of peace. Just to look at him you wouldn't guess he was so talented a lover. He was small, delicate, blonde. In bed he was energetic, magnificent really. Maybe he had read that book, that bestseller,
How to Make Love to a Woman
. She had searched for it once on his shelves but hadn't found it. There were poetry books, critical anthologies, biographies, journals, and crowding the edges of the shelves a collection of wonderful objects. Shells. Carvings. Small stone pipes and empty bottles. Candles. Restaurant ashtrays. A tray of matchbooks. A ceramic bowl filled with unstrung beads composed of a material that she could not identify—pearly in color, smooth as teeth, but when she scratched one with her fingernail a white, chalky substance appeared underneath it. He was a sensuous man. These were all things you wanted to touch when you looked at them.

She watched him sleep, and listened to the smooth, relaxed pace of his breathing. But she could not dull her awareness of the letter in the other room. Finally she climbed out of bed and went into the living room to look at it, wrapping his robe around her. There it was, the neat white rectangle of paper, lying at an angle on the floor. She picked it up and scanned the address. The handwriting was a woman's, a precise, looping script. And on the other side, a local address, and the name of the girl who had sewn the quilt.

She did not wake her lover. She dressed in silence, put the letter in her pocket, and left the apartment.

Then, hurrying through the dusky streets, she saw a van drive past and then stop and back up. The driver honked and rolled down the window on the passenger side. Would she like a ride? Barely glancing at him, she shook her head no and kept walking, suddenly nervous. She buried her chin in her coat collar and stared ahead at the sidewalk. Years earlier, as a child, she was approached by a man in a large, pale blue car, who offered to drive her the few blocks to her house. She said no, as she had been trained to do. At home, she related this small but important event to her mother, who stood at the window, picking at the fiber of the curtains. Now she thought of all the women murdered by strange men in strange cities, in the backs of vans. Where would he have taken her, to dispose of her? She thought of Forest Park—the bike trail in the woods, abandoned in winter, and of the small ponds shadowed by willows. Maybe they would find her, maybe they wouldn't. Maybe in the spring: a bicyclist, stopping to admire some ducks in the pond, sees a hand poking out of the water, pale white, muddied, on the third finger the glint of a wedding band. Or maybe the murderer had made off with the ring, had chopped off the finger—after she was dead, of course—removed the ring, wrapped it in a handkerchief, and pawned it. They would find the soggy letter in her pocket, and trace it to her lover, who would become a prime suspect in the case. Traces of his frozen sperm would be discovered inside of her. He would be tried, convicted, imprisoned. Would he have access to a typewriter? But her husband would be satisfied. She imagined him alone in a smaller apartment (no longer eligible for married student housing), fixing his dinner, reading the paper, sleeping, waking, walking to work, walking home, his unvarying habits left intact along with a new one, the habit of grief, which he accepted tamely as he did the others.

Remorsefully, she walked more quickly, eager to be home when he got there. But at the sight of the overpass that would take her to the university she paused, bewildered. She hadn't looked at the driver, had she? Maybe he was someone she knew, who knew her. After all, that part of the city provided cheap living for students. Maybe the driver had been a student, a graduate student, a graduate student in her husband's department, a friend of her husband's, who recognized her, who would mention to her husband that his wife was taking chances, walking alone in the dark in that part of the city, refusing his offer of a safe trip home. At dinner one night, her husband would ask, “But what were you doing
there?”

She would need to have an answer on hand. Of course, it would be better to anticipate the question, to provide him with the answer before he had to ask. She turned around and ran five blocks back into the city, to a bakery she knew would be open. But she had no money. She ran to her lover's and banged on the door until he opened it. He was eating his dinner. It was nearly six o'clock. “I need money!” she said. “A few dollars. I can't explain!” He grinned, and unfolded some money from his wallet and gave it to her. At the bakery, she bought a loaf of braided bread sprinkled with poppy seeds, and two small dessert tortes. She held the warm package close to her body as she ran. The sky was black, the moon was out. Her husband was cooking hamburgers when she got to him. “I bought this to surprise you,” she said to him. “I'm sorry I'm late. I thought you would like these.” She nearly believed what she said. She gave him the package. “Thanks!” said her husband. He kissed her, and together they sliced up the bread and ate.

Later, after dinner, she went into the bathroom and locked the door. Her husband was on the telephone with another graduate student, discussing a gel he had run on some turtle cells. She could tell he was excited, in that calm way he had, pausing briefly here and there as he spoke, tapping the eraser of his pencil on the spine of a textbook. She tried to match his composure. By poking the sharp point of the nail scissor beneath the flap of the envelope, she was able to open it without causing any damage. The letter was short, typed on sturdy blue paper. She was shocked that it was typed—it resembled a fragment of poetry, It read:

Of course, she had intended to reseal the letter, with rubber cement, and to drop it in his mail slot one day when she knew he would be in class. But she couldn't. She tore it into pieces and flushed it down the toilet along with a small amount of urine.

She told herself she did this to save him—he was in love with Jeanne, he would allow her to come back into his life and destroy it. They would have the baby, settle down. He would put his poetry aside and find a steady, paying job. He would work his way up, becoming the manager of one of those chain bookstores he despised. She had a vision of him shining his shoes before going to work, neglecting to wipe the polish from his hands before kissing the baby good-bye, leaving, on the baby's diaper, a brown smudge that he would mistake for excrement. He would make himself late for work, changing the baby's diaper and puzzling over the fact that it was still fresh and clean. Eventually, to coincide with the birth of a second child, he would enroll in night school, in business administration. In the bookstore, passing the shelves of new poetry books with their slender, multicolored spines, he would avert his gaze. He would hate himself.

When she saw him again, she was giddy. He interpreted the giddiness as passion. That month, she got her period earlier than usual. Her husband didn't like to make love to her when she was bleeding, but the poet didn't mind. Afterward, she would look at her blood on him and imagine she had done something terrible to wound him.

On campus, she found herself searching for Jeanne, for the small camel's hair coat and the fake leather boots that looked elegant but inexpensive. At last, on the first of December, she came across her in the snack bar, holding, with both hands, a half-pint of milk, sipping it through a straw. Sitting alone at the large, round table, with her books and coat and pocketbook piled on the other chairs, Jeanne looked smaller than ever, pale and thoughtful. Her nose was red. It was cold outside, or maybe she had been crying. On her tray was the crust of a sandwich and a packet of tissues. When she stood up to go, she did not look pregnant. But she had trouble with her coat; the sleeves of her sweater bunched up when she tried to put it on, so she had to take it off again and grab the ends of the sleeves with her fingers. Then she put on her gloves, fake leather that matched her boots. But she looked so graceful! What would become of her? When she left, the room seemed suddenly to grow noisier.

Several years later, in Virginia, in the small, pleasant college town where both she and her husband are teaching, she finds herself talking with a friend, a woman whose life is remarkably similar to her own, and she surprises herself by explaining to this friend the details of her love affair with the poet, how it began, progressed, stalled, and ended finally when they both left St. Louis. What surprises her most is the disparaging tone of her own voice, her ironical assessment of the poet's love-making abilities. He was perfect, she says. “But too perfect. As if he'd read everything in a manual, like painting by numbers, like he was reading my mind, because he always knew exactly what I needed, when to start, when to stop, what felt good, what didn't, what felt great. After a while it all began to seem very mechanical, like he was some kind of genius robot. Do you know what I'm saying?”

But her friend does not. Fixed on her face is a puzzled expression, the beginnings of a mistrustful smile. She offers tea. They brew some and drink, staring into their cups in silence. The friend's husband is a linguist, and the friend herself is a lecturer in the Spanish department, where she is a graduate student. The four of them work hard at what they do, too hard maybe, holed up in their separate offices, their four typewriters clacking. They joke that they live like monks, working even on Saturday nights, sharing, at two in the morning, their hot pots of coffee. In summer, when the other couple leaves town, she writes them letters, typing on the backs of the monks' drawings, which she has stored in a trunk because the edges are torn and they are fading. Oddly, the very last one, the one from the month of December, is her favorite, a simple water-color, Jefferson Plum. The twin globes of burnished fruit hang from a fragment of twig adorned with ordinary leaves. And the background is depthless, a flat, stony gray. The sight of the fruit hanging in the center of it suggests nothing but a perishable loveliness in the face of blankness. It still makes her think of Jeanne. Whatever happened to her? And the poet, what happened to him?

When they parted, he was flourishing. He had mailed some poems to a literary magazine and they had been rejected. “Those pinheads,” he kept saying. “Those worthless pieces of junk they publish.”

Still she scans the tables of contents in the literary magazines, as well as the
Books in Print Author Index
, for her exlover's name. One day, she finds the name Larry Oliver, but the book is a mathematical treatise with an impossible title. She orders it anyway, through interlibrary loan. There is no picture on the flap, which means it couldn't be the poet's, who wouldn't publish a book without his picture on it. And its pages are filled with outlandish equations. When she brings it home, her husband discovers it. “What are you doing with this?” he asks. “One of my students left it in class,” she says, and she takes the book away from him abruptly as if it might betray her.

She has learned to admire, even to enjoy, her husband's quiet, easy style of lovemaking—his patient need, his attentive gaze, his subdued adoration of her body. Clearly, he intends to please her, so she is pleased. She thinks of time-lapse photography, the gentle unfolding of a bud into flower. And he is capable, too, of surprising her. He has been asked to write a book about turtles; he has accepted the offer. “I can take a sabbatical,” he explains. “We can go somewhere. We may as well go somewhere interesting. Where would you like to go?”

“Tahiti,” she says.

He believes her. “We'll need access to libraries,” he says. “An English-speaking country would be best. Or we could stay in the U.S. There are so many parts of this country I'd like to see. We could go to the Pacific Northwest. Or New England. You can finish writing there. We could live in London! We have to think about this!”

“Yes,” she says. She doesn't know what to think. She thinks of sailing round the world on a houseboat, but she doesn't know if such a thing is possible. And she imagines the two of them settling in a foreign city while continuing to live exactly as they did in Virginia—walking to the library, walking home, making do with a primitive kitchen. Maybe, she thinks, she should not take her husband seriously. He will never follow through with such a plan. He will lose heart at the very last minute and they will have to cancel all of their arrangements. But she is patient with him, and when he returns from town with an armload of travel brochures she takes the night off to look through them, exclaiming with him over the pictures.