My Dearest Friend (25 page)

That day Laura was wearing cherry-red velour slacks and top with black velvet boots; the slacks accentuated how very long and sleek her legs were. She had pulled her long thick brown hair up into an elaborate twist—in Germany, she said, women of a certain class did not wear their hair down in public. Daphne was wearing an old maternity sweater that Laura had given her, a blue silk thing that flared out from the bosom. Underneath was one of Daphne’s own blouses, white silk with lace at the cuffs and neck. She had expanded so much that she couldn’t button the blouse at the breast or waist, but
the sweater was high-necked and hid this. This was the first time Daphne had put on maternity clothes, the first time she had realized that she really would have to wear maternity clothes.

“Let me see your stomach!” Laura commanded when they entered the kitchen. This room was warm from the heat of the oven and aromatic with Christmas fragrances; it was like entering the cave of a witch.

Obediently Daphne raised her blue sweater. Her white cotton underpants covered her pubic hair but could not stretch any further; her belly swelled out in a full rosy bowl above the strip of cloth. Her silk blouse hung down unbuttoned, parted like curtains, revealing the drama of her body.

“No stretch marks yet,” Laura said. “Good. Here. I had Otto bring this for you from Germany. You must do it like this every morning first thing when you get up, every night last thing before bed. Then you never have stretch marks.” She opened a large jar of cream and began to massage it into Daphne’s skin. “Like this, little circles,” she said, demonstrating.

Daphne looked down at her stomach, which had become such an “object,” and watched as her friend swept the cream around in little swirls until it had dissolved into her skin. Laura’s light and efficient touch was both relaxing and stimulating; Daphne stood smiling, and wished it would go on forever. Joe did not touch her like that anymore, just to caress her, to make her feel good, without sexual motives lurking—had he ever? (Had she ever wanted him to?)

“There!” Laura said triumphantly, and capped the bottle. “You should be grateful I got this for you. It is very expensive and very hard to find. It’s only sold in Germany.”

“I must pay you for it,” Daphne began.

“Oh, don’t be silly!” Laura said. “Of course you will not pay me for it! What are friends for?” She leaned forward and hugged Daphne. Their breasts bumped together and their perfumes mingled brightly in the brief embrace.

“Now!” Laura said. “We must clean up the kitchen quickly so we can do something else before we start cooking dinner! You clear the table. I’ll rinse and stack the dishwasher.”

As Daphne moved from room to room carrying dishes, she seemed to be moving in and out of white flashing light. It had snowed for the past three days, and now the sun was out—an absolutely perfect Christmas Day, a white Christmas, sparkling. The sun on
the snow was so brilliant through the modern house’s great picture windows that it almost chimed, luring, and Hanno jumped up in the middle of the recorded story and ran to his mother, crying, “I want to go outside and play!”

“Just one moment,” Laura said. “Let me start the dishwasher. There. Now, where is your snowsuit?”

Daphne pulled on her boots and coat, then watched as her friend bundled up the little boy. It seemed to Daphne that when Laura bent over to tug on Hanno’s snowpants, her face took on a puffiness around the eyes, a white and vulnerable tint. Daphne looked away, looked back. Laura had straightened and was pulling on her own coat—the warm luscious fur Daphne envied. She smiled at Daphne, but still Daphne thought her friend’s face looked slightly bloated, as if the skin was tense with withholding. Had Laura been crying? Laura turned to look at Daphne, and her glance was moist.

“Ready? Here we go!” Laura said gaily. She pulled on black sunglasses against the winter glare. How beautiful she looked, how European! The sleek hair, black fur, long red legs, high black boots.

The two women pulled the little boy on his sled down the street toward the local park. Hanno sat, a little king, holding on with one hand, eating snow with the other. The runners of the sled made shussing noises in the snow. The air glittered.

“Otto is having an affair,” Laura said.

Daphne tripped on a crust of ice and snow. She grabbed on to her friend’s arm to right herself, and in doing so, stopped them both.

“Laura!” she said, looking her friend in the eye.

“Mama!” Hanno, the little despot, yelled, unhappy to be halted.

Laura began walking again. Her voice was low. Daphne, walking next to her, studied her friend as she talked: she saw the swollen eyes brim and spill their tears.

“It has been the most horrible time of my life,” Laura said. “He will not sleep with me. He has promised
her
he will be true to
her
! And I his wife!”

“Snowman! Mama, there’s a snowman!” Hanno yelled, pointing.

The women turned back to smile. “Yes, snowman!” Laura said.

“I don’t understand,” Daphne said. “What do you mean?”

“I mean while Otto was in Berlin, he met a woman. A young woman, of course. A young blonde. How these aging professors love their young blondes. He has been fucking her for the past four months! The entire time of his sabbatical. When he came back home
to visit this fall, he slept with me and did not tell me. He thought it was only infatuation, you know, a middle-age obsession. But now he tells me it is
serious.
”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, oh, God,” Daphne said. “Oh, Laura, I’m so sorry. What can you do?”

“What can I do? I think there’s nothing I can do. Believe me, I have thought of nothing else for days. Daphne, there is nothing I can do!” She spoke the words slowly, like instructions from a manual in a foreign language, as if only now grasping the meaning. “He tells me he loves her. Sonya. He tells me he has tried to stop loving her, he has tried to stay away from her, but he cannot live without her.”

“Oh, Laura,” Daphne said again. She was weighted down with sorrow for her friend.

They had arrived at the playground, and Laura arranged her son safely on the sled, then gave a push that launched him down the hill. No one else was there. The two women watched a moment as the little boy, as gleaming in his snowsuit as a cardinal, slid down the snowy hill that swept away from them in a long and gentle descent. His wild laughter rose back up at them, a reverse avalanche, as bright as the sparkling air. At the bottom of the hill he threw himself from the sled and tumbled and rolled as far as he could go, screaming with delight. Then he stopped and looked back up the hill at his mother.

“I want to go again!” he called.

“You must come back up, then!” she called back. “Grab your sled and pull it up the hill.”

Hanno looked at her suspiciously for a second, perhaps remembering winters before, when she or Otto had made the climb up the hill with him seated on the sled.

“Come on!” Laura called, clapping her hands together. Tears were streaking her cheeks, glistening in the bright sun—Hanno was too far away to see. The little boy grabbed the rope and began to pull his sled up the hill.

Laura waited until Hanno was launched downward again before going on. “He met her at the university. She is a doctor. And listen to this. He wants to get the university there to offer him a job. A full-time and lucrative and prestigious job. He could go back to Germany and live with this new woman. Have a new wife, a new life, somewhere with no one who remembers me to frown at him.”

“I just can’t believe this,” Daphne said. She was beginning to cry too.

“I know, I know,” Laura said. “I can’t believe it myself. But this is what I have
been hearing for days. Everything. Every detail. He is angry at me because he is hurting me, and so he punishes me for making him feel guilty. So he tells me what they do together. She likes it like a dog. Like a boy. Even in the ass—”

“Stop it,” Daphne said. Her breath had caught in a snarl at the base of her throat. She was gagging on her breath.

“He tells me she is everything to him, his man and his woman. I never was comfortable with such things. She loves it.”

“Stop it!” Daphne shouted. She grabbed Laura and turned her to face her. “You must leave him. This is too awful for anyone to bear. Laura, he should not tell you these things. You should not listen. You should not let him tell you such things.”

“Oh, do you think I like it? Do you think I like to hear and envision such things?” Laura was shouting at Daphne, and she put her hands on Daphne’s arms, while Daphne’s hands were still on Laura’s shoulders, so that the two women were almost in an adversarial embrace, and they nearly shook one another in their rage. They were both weeping. Then Laura let out a low harsh howl and collapsed into Daphne’s arms. She wept on Daphne’s shoulder, and Daphne wrapped her arms around her friend and held her and rocked her, or rather, the two women swayed together as they stood in the cold and burning snow.

“Mama?” Hanno asked. He had reached the top of the hill and stood, sled rope in his hand, puzzled at the sight of his mother and her friend.

Laura pulled away from Daphne. She bent, her face red and wet, picked up her son, and set him down firmly on the sled. She set the sled in the right direction. The obliviousness of childhood was an amazing sight to Daphne, and she told herself she must remember this when she had a child of her own. For Hanno was shrieking with anticipation of the next downhill run and did not notice his mother’s face. Daphne reminded herself that to a four-year-old everything adults did must seem bizarre and unexplainable—so why should he question this? What
he
needed was being done. Laura pulled him to the edge of the hill, gave the sled a push, and off he went, laughing.

“When we return home, we must be normal,” Laura said. “Otto does not want me to talk to anyone about this. Not even you.”

“Well, my God, who
cares
what Otto wants at this point!” Daphne shouted. “What rights does he deserve to have?”

“Look, Daphne, I must try to save my marriage,” Laura said. She had pulled a
paisley silk scarf from her pocket and was drying her soaked sunglasses with it.

“Why?” Daphne yelled. “Why on earth would you want to?”

Laura looked at Daphne. “Wouldn’t you?”

“No! No, I would not! If Joe did to me what Otto is doing to you, I would make him move out of the house, I would see a lawyer, I would divorce him right away!”

“How very American of you,” Laura said dryly. “Disposable husbands. Like disposable diapers.”

“I would never share my husband,” Daphne said.

“No? Not if your pride cost you everything? You wait until that baby in your tummy is a real child and see how you think then. You will want his father in the house. You will want his father in his life. You will want to stay home and take care of the child. You will not want to be forced to go out to work. When you have a child, everything changes. I’m telling you, Daphne, you become a tigress, and life is all about protecting your child.”

“Never,” Daphne said. “Never just that.”

“You wait.” Laura glared at Daphne, and Daphne glared back.

Hanno was there again, then, needing his mittens readjusted and snow removed from the neck of his suit. Laura retied his bright muffler and pushed him off down the hill.

“In Europe, it is common for a man to have a mistress,” Laura said. She was catching her breath and calming down. She seemed almost ironic now. “My father-in-law did. My father did. No man who has worked hard all his life wants just a fat old wife to have sex with. In my heart I knew someday Otto would have an affair. I just did not expect it quite so soon. Or that it would be so serious to him—that he would call it love.”

“I would never stay with Joe if he had an affair,” Daphne said. “Especially not if he spoke to me about it the way Otto is speaking to you.”

“How pure the world is for you, Daphne,” Laura said. “I predict that it will not always remain so uncomplicated.”

“Still—” Daphne began.

“Who knows?” Laura interrupted. She seemed at once angry and somehow amused, as if she knew secrets Daphne did not. “Perhaps in your marriage it will be you who has an affair. Who lusts after someone else. Who sleeps with someone else.”

The two women stared at each other. Hanno came whining back up the hill, his
face frosty, his nose running. Other families were arriving at the hill, whooping and calling.

“One more time, then we go home for hot chocolate,” Laura said to her son.

“So you really
do
know what you’re going to do,” Daphne said. “You’re going to hang on. You’re going to wait this … Sonya out.”

“Yes,” Laura said. “That is what I am going to do. That is what I can do.”

When they got back to the house, Laura made them all hot chocolate with marshmallows, then put Hanno down for a rest time with his new books. She worked in the kitchen, stuffing the goose and roasting it, preparing the rest of the Christmas feast. Daphne, helpless in her pregnancy, fell asleep in front of the fire. When she awoke, the men were home, and Laura had done something to her face so that there was no sign of her tears, no sign at all of her grief, except for a slight puffiness around her eyes. The Christmas dinner was very gay, with much champagne and delicious food and laughter. Daphne could scarcely look at Otto, she despised him so; but she tried to act normally toward him so he would not guess that Laura had told her of their secret. Daphne did not want to betray her friend in any way.

Jack kept busy the first three days after Christmas. He worked furiously on his essay from morning till late afternoon. Then he forced himself out into the cold silver air and walked along ice-clotted country roads for an hour—it was too icy to jog. In the evenings he read novels while eating heated-up canned stew, and drank so much beer to ward off not only despair that he hadn’t written one of those novels but also envy of the men who had, that he felt bloated. He told himself he was getting a lot done.

But the fourth morning, when he awoke, the silence of his house made him lonely. The windows were white with empty winter air, and the wind howled. He felt sexy and wanted to make love. He wanted to cuddle his daughter, to hear his wife’s voice. At least he could call her on the phone. He needed the caress of her voice to take the ache from this long vacant day. Shoving all the pillows up behind his back, he sat up and dialed Carey Ann’s parents’ number in Kansas City.