Fruit of the Month (16 page)

Several months go by and the two of them, engrossed in their work, forget to mention the sabbatical. She feels responsible for this, afraid that her husband has sensed her reluctance. He is careful with her. He buys her another calendar. But this is a wilderness calendar, filled with photographs of wildflowers, and the slick, bright images fail to interest her. In fact, just looking at them makes her miserable. She becomes distracted. She blames her distraction on the gift. Daily, she phones her friend, the Spanish instructor, and complains that she can't concentrate. So when finally she comes upon the poet's name, in the alumni magazine from the university they went to, she is unprepared. At first, she skims past it without recognition. Then, later, folding up the magazine to stuff it into the garbage, she pauses, reopens it, skims it again. Larry Oliver, she reads, lives in Boston with his wife, Monique, and their two children. He is a market analyst.

How many times does she read this? She sits down at the table with a cup of coffee and the magazine open before her. Monique, she repeats. The name is French. She imagines a slim, fashionable woman with feathery hair and no English. Perhaps he has learned to speak French. But the children, of course, are bilingual, if they are talking yet at all. Perhaps they are twins. She imagines two infants, swaddled in disposable diapers, each with a rosebud mouth pressed noisily to one of Monique's perfect breasts.

“So tell me,” says her husband, as she is climbing into bed with him one night, “what you are thinking.”

He has begun, recently, to play this game with her. “What are you thinking?” he will ask. “Nothing,” she always says, because of course he only asks when he knows she is thinking of nothing, when she is sweeping the floor, or washing dishes, or fooling with the dial on the radio. She likes this game—it is playful, a private joke.

Now she looks at him, smiling. His beard needs a trimming. In the glow from the reading lamp several clumps of hair stick out in all directions. She turns off the lamp.

“I was thinking,” she says, “about taking our sabbatical in Boston.” She kisses him hard on the mouth.

Nuns in Love

On her way home from work Cynthia passes a convent surrounded by a high brick wall interspersed with locked gates. Through the parallel bars of these gates she can see the rather drab, unimpressive convent grounds and a building nestled in evergreen trees. With its flat roof and rows of plate glass windows, it resembles an office building; on the dull rainy days of this season a fluorescent glow emanates from behind the glass. Placed along some walkways are several slatted wood benches that no one ever seems to sit on, and in the flower beds are shrubs instead of flowers, miniature shrubs with flattened tops. Pigeons march throughout, staining the walks and benches with their droppings.

There are few nuns to be seen on the convent grounds, but this is to be expected—nuns are by nature reclusive. Besides, the gates are widely spaced and offer only glimpses of the goings-on behind the wall. Cynthia once heard laughter rising from the other side of it, a high peal of laughter like the shriek of a hyena, but there was no way of knowing for certain whether the laughter came from a nun. She imagines that the nuns spend most of their time indoors, performing scholarly duties or other activities of a routine nature, always thinking about God and about how much they love him. She does not know which confuses her more, the notion of God, or the notion of love, or the notion of loving God. All three seem impossible, burdens that no girl in her right mind would inflict upon herself.

This afternoon Cynthia sees two nuns coming toward her on the sidewalk. One is sitting in a wheelchair that the other is pushing, but both are young and animated, with bright rosy faces. In their eager conversation they appear not to notice her. Just as Cynthia steps off the sidewalk to avoid bumping into them, soaking her sneaker in a puddle, the nuns stop abreast of a gate to slide a laminated identification card into a metal box. The gate opens noiselessly and the nuns pass through it. Cynthia watches as they wheel down the walkway between the stunted gardens, shooing pigeons with their skirts. Tonight she tells her new friend Richard about the two nuns, embellishing them for the sake of entertainment. In her story the nun in the wheelchair wore rainbow-striped socks with toes.

“At least I think they were socks,” she ad-libs. “I couldn't see that far up. It's possible they were hose.”

Richard, with a look of pained humor as if the thought of a nun in panty hose embarrasses him, gazes at her over his fondue pot. Ever since she met him, just three weeks ago, he has tried to impress her with ingenious and elaborate meals; tonight there's a platter of neat cubed beef and six ceramic bowls, each filled with a sauce of a different color. With a long-handled fork he demonstrates how the beef is speared and then allowed to cook in boiling oil.

“Don't eat it directly out of the pot,” he warns. “Slide it off the fork, and then when it's cooled a little use this other fork to eat it with. Otherwise you'll burn your mouth.”

Cynthia finds the entire process captivating and affected, much like Richard himself. There is about him an air of inconsequential refinement—his rooms are clean, cream-colored, and suffused with a vacant airy quality that is like the absence of gravity, as if they might cease to exist entirely if no one was sitting in them. In truth, the contrast between her own messy life and the careful, spare arrangements of Richard's days is a comfort to her. He is the kind of man who buys for his coffee table books intended exclusively for that purpose, and each evening while he pours the coffee Cynthia sits herself down in the living room and opens one of them. Tonight's book is called
Labyrinths
. Its pages are covered with pen and ink drawings of beautiful and complex mazes which Cynthia immediately attempts to solve. She finds in her purse a green felt tip marker and begins to make her way through the mazes, abandoning each one the minute she finds herself stuck. Richard is horrified to see that she is actually drawing on the pages of his expensive book.

“What…” he says. “You're not supposed to … Oh, well.”

Cynthia sighs. As if ignorant of Richard's presence and of the coffee cup he is holding out to her, she continues wrecking the book with her pen. This particular maze takes place in the innards of an elaborately rendered unicorn and seems to lead from the mouth to the anus, or from the anus to the mouth, depending on where you go in. Cynthia traces a route through the coil of the unicorn's intestines, only to find herself mired in the stomach cavity with no means of escape.

“This would be a perfectly nice book,” she says, “except for these stupid mazes. None of them go anywhere.”

Richard opens his mouth like a fish. For three weeks Cynthia has been aware of his gigantic desire to get into bed with her. He once confessed to her exactly how much time had elapsed since he had slept with a woman, and she responded with a sincere astonishment that agitated him. Thinking back, she remembers having felt for him a vague, automatic attraction, the same she might have felt for any man who was attentive to her and polite enough and not bad looking, but the feeling had no staying power. Since then, she has fallen into the habit of teasing him and has lost sight of her own intentions. Now, as he sips his coffee, she places the blunt end of her marker between her lips and begins toying with it, circling it with the tip of her tongue. She slips her shoes off and pulls her feet up underneath her. Richard leans forward in his chair and clasps and unclasps his hands.

“Cynthia,” he says finally. “May I touch you?”

“Sure,” she says.

Richard gets up, circles the coffee table, positions himself next to her, places his hands on her shoulders, and pulls her to him. He is trembling.

“Not
now,”
says Cynthia, focusing on him a look of sympathy and exasperation. “You have to learn to be spontaneous. You have to learn to do things without always talking about them first.”

Richard looks stunned and dejected.

“That's not what you said the last time,” he says. “You said not to jump right into things. You said you needed to be prepared.”

“That was last time,” says Cynthia. She continues sucking on the pen. Her mouth tastes of ink—sharp and metallic, the flavor of power. After a minute she stands, allowing the book of mazes to slide from her lap onto his. The pages fan apart like the petals of a flower and then fall together with a whisper.

On the following day, a Saturday, Cynthia sees a nun wearing striped socks under her habit. The stripes are all colors of the rainbow and the five toes of each foot are separate, allowing the straps of the nun's thongs to fit between them. The day is fine, damp and sunny. Since everybody seems to be coming out of the woodwork, it is perhaps not surprising that the nun should be outside too, where she can easily be seen, adjacent to a set of gates, hoeing a small portion of earth vigorously. In fact Cynthia is feeling so busy and distracted by the fury of activity on the streets, by the cyclists, the Frisbees, the wash on the lines, the dog walkers, that she might not have noticed the nun if not for those socks and the way their bright horizontal stripes stood out against the square of dark fresh-turned earth. She stops abruptly when she sees them, wide-eyed, remembering at once all the rainbows she has ever seen and the feeling of cynicism and disbelief she had when she saw them, as if rainbows were a joke being played on her. On the nun's face is a look of blissful concentration like the look of a person admiring a loved one. Her eyes are blurred, her brow smooth, her lips pursed as if for a kiss. Noticing Cynthia peering at her through the bars of the gate, she smiles. Cynthia jumps, startled, and resumes her walk with blank determination, street after street, lot after lot, along a highway overpass, down a steep embankment studded with dandelions, across the highway into one strange neighborhood after another, into the suburbs where people are washing their cars, and then out of the middle-class suburbs and into the rich ones. Two teenaged boys on a motorcycle whiz by then make a U-turn and offer her a ride.

“I'm supposed to sit on the handlebars, right?” says Cynthia.

The two boys nod and gawk at her as if she were naked.

“No thanks,” says Cynthia. “I'll pass. Where am I, anyway?”

“Ladue,” says one of the boys. “Fortunoff's right down the street. Over that way.” He points with his dirty hand and then nudges the other boy, who after a second climbs down from the cycle to offer her his seat. She accepts, shrugging, and wraps her arms around the driver.

“You going to Fortunoff's?” he asks, then guns the motor and starts off before she answers him. The sad boy stands in the center of the road, on an island of grass, and watches them go. They turn down an avenue overhung with plane trees and follow it to a parking lot. In the center of the lot is the department store lit with yellow bulbs, and only at this moment does Cynthia realize that dusk has fallen and that the air is chilly. As the boy slows the cycle for a turn, she hops from the seat and feels in her pockets for change. In Fortunoff's she telephones Richard, who sounds far away.

“I hitched a ride to Fortunoff's,” she tells him. “Now I'm stuck.”

“In Ladue!” says Richard. “What are you doing there?”

“Just looking. Shopping around. Only I'm broke.”

“I'll buy you whatever you want,” Richard says when he arrives. He is wearing his white shirt and white slacks and white socks and white shoes, the same outfit he was wearing when Cynthia first met him, in the supermarket around the corner from her building. Its spotlessness astounded her then and astounds her now, so that she finds herself looking for stains, around the collar and the waistband, wherever a stain might escape notice, only there aren't any.

“I don't want anything,” she says.

Finally Richard selects a one-cup porcelain drip coffee maker and several imported dish towels, elegant but practical. He seems proud of his purchase but subdued, as if something is troubling him. In the car he says, “I didn't know you hitched. You shouldn't. It's dangerous and stupid.”

“It wasn't dangerous,” says Cynthia. “I got a ride with a nun. I felt like driving around. Now I'm starving.”

“Okay. Dinner. Where to?”

They end up in a crepe place with candles on the tables. The waitresses wear blue and white checked aprons over miniskirts.

“I don't think I've ever seen you in a skirt,” says Richard. “I thought girls were supposed to be wearing skirts again.”

“I have chicken legs,” Cynthia tells him.

“Nonsense. I bet they're beautiful.” Richard reaches across the table and takes hold of one of Cynthia's wrists and turns it over in his palm and strokes with his free hand the tracery of blue veins on the soft underside of her arm. Cynthia has never mentioned to him that her arms are a remarkably sensitive part of her body and that the merest touch is pleasurable. She leans back and half closes her eyes. After a minute she extends the other arm and asks Richard to please stroke that one too. His expression changes when she says this, becoming dead serious, and he fixes on her that steady, wicked manly gaze that is popular in movies. When the waitress brings the crepes, he spears a morsel with his fork and offers it wordlessly. Cynthia takes the food into her mouth. It seems that everyone in the restaurant is watching. In the heady, winy silence, Cynthia makes up a story about the nun who drove her to Fortunoff's. The nun was driving a tiny red convertible, she explains to Richard. In the passenger seat was a sheep dog that Cynthia had to take on her lap. The nun's headdress flew out behind them as they sped between the rows of plane trees, and droplets of the sheep dog's spittle made a fine warm rain on Cynthia's face.

After dinner, in the car, Richard presses his face against her neck and chest and begins whispering things. Cynthia is chilly and her nipples are erect; Richard bites them through the grainy cloth of her T-shirt. The parking lot is dark all around but sometimes cars pull in and out.