The Queen of Worldly Graces

by Joan Frank

You best remember Cal standing at your opened front door on a February Sunday in the pouring rain. An old borrowed car packed with Cal’s things idled in the driveway, wisps of white exhaust floating into the raining afternoon, motor glub-glubbing. Cal wore a new raincoat over jeans and a long-sleeved madras shirt, and he was panting from having leapt up the front stairs. (Cal leapt everywhere, always breathless.) He wore a hat that morning, which, with the raincoat, made him look like an extra from a Ray Milland movie. “Jenny. Jenny. How are you, dear.” Cal had a way of saying things several times, as if he were formalizing them for himself and for you; at the same time you knew he was buying time for this own thoughts to rocket ahead, ricocheting between a riotous splay of possibilities. Could he store his few things under your house? He was on his way to Paris the next day.

Your heart sank. All you’d wanted that Sunday was to brood over the Times in rainy peace. Tom was at a football game in the city (you’d forced the umbrella on him); Cal had not been expected until evening. But you smiled brightly and wrapped a warm lilt around your voice. These episodes have a resonance you know you’ll be revisiting—yet how often you’ve wished you could simply skip the present tedious theater of it. You wish for more time in your pink plaid flannel rode. “Of course,” you crooned. “Come ‛round the back.”

Cal believes himself a brilliant social scientist, convinced he will become beloved for his gifts, revered with age like a Bertrand Russell or a Gregory Bateson. He sends his tracts and treatises—presumably about human will and moral behavior, incomprehensible to you—to European universities, which he swears receive him far more intelligently than anywhere in America. In Bonn and Lille they’ve invited him to lecture, but in Sacramento he’s only invited onto cable TV talk shows that air at 4 in the morning. The rest of his time Cal argues with colleagues about fate and destiny: spirited beery debates in the sticky dark bars on the old side of town—bars near the community college where he teaches part-time, because Cal has no car and the bus system is spotty. He argues at such a pitch that it puts half his audience in a permanent fuddle. He seems to be onto something, they think as they watch him waving his arms and thumping one balled fist repeatedly into an open hand.

Calvin Grant is forty years old, son of a conservative Texas judge, younger of two brothers. (His older brother is gay, a pianist in a tony Dallas club at the top of a skyscraper.) The brothers are estranged from their parents, who live in a more or less permanent sense of betrayal by their sons. Both sons have shunned the family money, attached as it is to dourest conditions.

Cal has medium-length, slightly kinky hair parted in the middle like that of a court page in a medieval painting. He is not a handsome man, but his urgency lights and propels him like one of those kiddie cars you stroke against the floor and release to watch zip into a wall and flip over, sparks popping from its little wheels, still revving. Cal’s body is shaped in the pleasant inverted triangle of a manly form.  Yet his face, while no particular feature of it is outright bad, lacks that single odd or dear aspect that might bring it forward in women’s imaginations.

But it had not mattered about women’s imaginations when you first met Cal, because he had for many years been claimed and adored by a patient young woman named Gina. They had known one another since both were undergrads at the state college, and for nearly that long had lived in the top floor of a decrepit Victorian in old-town Sacramento. Though stifling in summer and freezing without insulation in winter, and though junkies and grifters stumbled past at all hours, leaving currents of bad smells amid the jasmine, it suited them. The old trees were lovely, canopied motheringly over the streets. And the rent was low. Cal could play his Mahler loudly, the neighbors below either away or stoned insensible. Here he would air-conduct his favorite passages sitting cross-legged at his old word processor, or pacing before one of the large bay windows with the glass that seemed to ripple. Cal and Gina had lived many years in three rooms on the third floor, opposite a condemned storefront, and never bothered with curtains: at night the streetlight and the moon combined to pour raw cool white over the floor, over the mattress, the books, changing it all to white marble or lava, a temporary Roman frieze.

Tom knew Cal and Gina from undergrad classes at State; he had liked them both. When Tom moved to the little town on the north coast where he’d accepted a job, he’d invited Cal to visit.

“They’re nice,” Tom had shrugged when you pressed him for particulars the night before you were to meet them. “I’ve know them forever.” You’d only know Tom then about a year, determined like all new lovers to learn his life and impress his friends. Amazing, how little men would reveal when you asked for background, for any debriefing. Perhaps men were embarrassed by how little they themselves knew; how little they sought to know.

“Well, what is it about Cal that keeps you interested?” you finally asked as you set the table. The evening sun was sending last pewter rays at a low slant through the kitchen windows.

Tom, tossing salad, arced his thick brows and widened his eyes: his “search me” expression.

“He’s a bit crazy; bright, ambitious.”

“But are you dazzled by his thinking? Do you expect great things of his work?”

A pause. “I’m never sure I completely understand it,” Tom said to the salad bowl.

Gina was a translator, finishing doctoral work in French literature. She was thin, dark haired, with the black liquid eyes such types seem bound to own. She spoke with gentle wit, giving the sense she was old enough to have seen some things and not too old to have given up on others. As you passed  the Caesar salad and the red wine, watching and listening to her, you found you liked her. She was going to be hostile or neurotic, or to preen or pout. The four of you spoke that night with animation that soon relaxed into amity, Cal presiding with that great boyish zeal of his. At any moment it seemed he might jump onto the table or stick his head out the kitchen window and howl with pleasure, with the urgency of his quest—and his quest was perpetual, voracious. At first this seemed charming, but over time Cal’s displays had come to make you feel lackluster and annoyed—his volubility took over a room. He seemed to be forcing some sort of contest, leaning forward with that hectic light in his eyes, the light of street-corner zealots. Whether or not Cal staged his antics consciously, you were aware of him pumping the stakes of a situation, aware of his careening mind, his rapid calculations and dismissals—he lent proceedings a sudden largeness that would burn into memory and echo later: those days at Tom and Jen’s when we were all struggling and eating cheap dinners. You noticed, during these sessions, that Gina watched Cal with a kind of practiced patience, her face a studied neutrality you could not place, neither exactly fond nor cold. You noticed too that Cal rarely turned to confer with her, to glance or murmur some private reminder as couples will; instead he concentrated on directing himself in performance.

Both Cal and Gina—when she could get a word in—did ask after your own life, your magazine job in the city, your bad commute, your brother in Tucson, your bicycle tours. Neither seemed too handsome or too crazy, you decided. Neither would present Tom with a more attractive option. (This reflex shamed you; though you disliked it all your life on the faces of other wives and girlfriends, there it was.) You noticed with relief that Gina dressed like any ordinary student: jeans and a soft, nondescript shirt. Her hair was short, her face clean of makeup. You could feel generous toward this eccentric couple. You could even fancy affection for them.

Any yet you had felt the tiniest fillip of anxiety about them in your breast as you washed the dishes that evening, couldn’t find the slippery seed of it except to know it had to do with Gina, with a hooding glitter in her eyes. Her contained listening.

“They’re lovely,” you’d said to Tom after that first dinner, as he gathered plates and residue in quick, expert scoops. You said it unhappily, accusingly. Tom heard it.

“Of course they are; I told you they were,” he said. He stopped to gaze at you. His voice carried roused attention: waiting for you to let out more line, which he would gently tug. Tom was alert to cues; he was good for your grimness, and you loved this unruffled patience of his. It was one of the reasons you’d left the city to move in with him. They didn’t grow gentle, faithful men on trees.

“It’s just—what,” you left off lamely, looking deep into the thousands of opalescent dish suds as if they might form a hologram to explain it for you. “Something is—pained about it. Off-balance.”

“Well, Cal is completely mad; that might affect matters,” he offered, depositing another pile of soiled saucers at your elbow.

“Yet they’ve known each other so long,” you murmured, more to yourself than Tom. You soaped and rinsed and stacked. Your hallowed thinking spot, the sink, the rainbowed bubbles, seldom seemed to make you smarter.

“And life is full of surprises,” said your longtime lover, cocking his head, smiling. “Who knows what’s really going on over there?”

“I want them to stay happy together,” you said, turning to face him as if he had it to grant. As if you were a toddler requesting the corner piece of cake, the one with the most icing.

“Of course you do,” he said, kindly. And he moved to take your face between his hands, as if to draw off its unease.

When next did you see Cal, before he wound up at your door in the rain? Let’s see. There were the visits he made to Tom, when they walked the beach and hashed the most grandiose ideas about truth and reason and artistic morality. (Tom curated the small museum whose dedication ceremonies, five years ago, had brought you from the city to cover the event for City Arts. Discreet mutual measures were taken, phone numbers exchanged, Italian dinners eaten, bed with candlelight.) But you weren’t around during Cal’s beach walks with Tom; you were at work—the men had flexible schedules, you had nine to five. And in those just-starting-out days you’d been pleased to think of Tom being entertained in ways that need not worry you. Then there was the weekend one of them, Cal or Gina, had a birthday—you cannot remember which, for in your mind then the two had already assumed that interchangeable status of a fixed item, when both names are uttered together in one breath. They’d invited their few friends and unlocked their street-level steel gate (just a hair ajar so that those who knew a party was upstairs could slip in) and given a barbecue in their third-floor flat. On the tiny back balcony they’d set up a hibachi, where they were grilling—it had touched you to see—a few sad hot dogs, a tofu burger. They couldn’t afford more.

Since then, news had trickled back to you. Cal had gone to Paris a year ago (without Gina, because of expense, of course) as part of the semester abroad program. There he had met a woman. But you could not get much of a description from Tom about it, perhaps because Tom felt in some ways self-conscious about the episode; after all, Cal had confided in him. Her name was Claire. Daughter of an old French family which kept the honored tradition, a Paris apartment and a house in the country. Claire was beautiful and imperious—but this you did not know until Cal produced her photograph after dinner.

It seems to you now that Claire was actually a distant friend of Gina’s family. She must have come to one of Cal’s lectures—she had decent English; Cal had almost no French. Claire was very sure of herself, brought Cal to meet her mother and sister. They had their photos taken dining together in a posh boîte—the snaps you saw. She had money, and so could ease their passage through a maze of coffees and meals and sightseeing. Cal began to decide he had profound feelings for Claire. You can imagine how his reasoning leapt along. He tormented himself about the decision, came back to Sacramento and broke the news to Gina.

They continued to live together for a time after his announcement, according to Tom.

My God, you had said.

Part of the mystery was that Cal struck you as oddly nonsexual. You’d never felt the subtle air about him that indicated a man’s sexual awareness, though in truth you had not felt the distinct lack of it either. Tom may or may not have known what kind of sex Cal had with Claire, but he’d never spoken of it. You knew Tom would be deeply curious to know, but men sometimes kept an unexpected coyness about such matters, and you could not shame yourself to ask.

How they must have suffered—you fretted to Tom—when Cal told Gina his news! They had been together so many years. Tom shrugged, but you could envision it: Cal straining for the words, whipping himself to finish a truthful description of the sequence. Say Claire had drinks with him after a lecture. Say she brought him to see her apartment. Say he stayed for more drinks or coffee. Say she expressed vehement admiration for his work; say she insisted she understood his intention. Say she told him—pacing, smoking, locking eyes with him—that she want to follow that intention.

You can see Cal handing it over to Gina like something shoplifted, his belief that he loved this exotic Other, the incredible fact that he would have to leave Gina. Then Gina’s face. Gina’s face! A mask over the internal siege; the world in which she’d dwelt crushed like a hastily stubbed-out cigarette. Her eyes so glossy and sad, a tender horse’s eyes. What had Gina said to Cal? You imagined her upright, scarcely breathing, someone informed of a death, her eyes two night skies never leaving his face. Listening. Questioning him softly; drawing closed (with each of his replies) a wrap around her heart like a shawl. Then this is what you must do, Gina answers him (in your mind). She cannot own him. She will honor his choices. She loves him but bids him choose. Wishes him to choose.

Perhaps Gina told Cal that everything between them would now be changed forever, that it was not something she could help. Cal would have to accept this, because he was its instigator. No one has told you what Cal was thinking, but you have an idea.

Cal Grant was forty years old, broke, teaching part-time in a community college, and he had met a stunning Parisian woman who said, Come live with me; we will be a team; I will help you get lectures, I will translate for you, I will introduce you to people who can help your career. How she would do this, whom she knew, was unclear. But Claire was dazzling. Her figure was mannequin-perfect, her clothes the smartest, her almond eyes made up to stop anyone cold. She chain-smoked, always in the act of fishing for the pack and extracting one and lighting it and gesturing with it and repositioning the ashtray—it hypnotized Cal; even making him a little jealous of the intimate cracked red prints on the white paper. He told himself he’d come to care for Claire; their chatter had seemed to rush headlong on the momentum of their frosty breath that winter, in and out of brasseries and theaters, along the severe gravel paths in the Luxembourg. He knew she regarded him as a novelty, a kind of reverse-chic trophy, but it was a status nonetheless. If he closed his eyes he thought he could envision a life between them. He thought of Wagner, Picasso, Camus. All attended by adoring, beautiful women, as utterly willingly subjugated as Friday to Crusoe.

Then Cal had to think of losing his poppet (as he called her): his waif, Gina. The calm, sisterly goodness of her. The shorthand they spoke after so much time; the cookie-dough smell of her, slenderness of her wrists and ankles—her languorous tenderness in lovemaking, the way she looked into an invisible hearth as she formed her thoughts. His reflex of telling her everything and the relief that always poured into him once he did. The consolation of her troubled him ’round the clock: the idea of separating her from his awareness seemed as violent as amputation, yet the process already seemed loosed and rolling; he felt like one of those silent film characters with one leg planted on each of two fast-separating ice floes. Gina had never complained in their years together; only watched him quietly. And while her glittering eyes might question him, her goodness had always somehow accounted for them both, lent weight and constancy to them, a couple’s universe that she did the work of sustaining—without her, Cal sometimes thought, he would likely be an itinerant crank who lived out of cans, the sort whose smell followed him in public. He felt he was effectively carrying out her murder. Cal imagined himself—briefly, guiltily savoring the comparison—a modern Prometheus, his precociousness singled out for torture by the gods.

Several fervent phone calls to Tom later, it was decided. Cal would quit his job, cash out his tiny retirement fund, sell or store his few things, and fly to Claire in Paris. He would arrange work and visas with Claire’s help, after arrival. Tom hung up the phone to tell you when he got Cal’s news.

You felt struck as if by a hand. He really would go through with it. “But why? Who is this person?  What does he know about her? And he’s going to live in her apartment, her country, and he speaks no French?”

Tom lifted his opened hands, eyes wide, brows high—he was getting good at these gestures of large, elaborate distancing. Normally you loved his Abe Lincoln looks, his quick dark eyes. But not this face, which seemed to be working to present a steady blankness.

“But where is the fairness of it?” you demanded. “All Gina has done is be faithful to him and love him for seventeen years. And here is her reward? We’re all supposed to shrug like good Californians and say Whatever, man? This is the way the story goes?”

You were at the kitchen table, having pushed away the article you were editing, a diet advisory for women, whose author, a manic macrobiotic doctor, had insisted on no softening of his hard rules. Tom pulled up a chair across from you, sat down, set a beer on the table. He said, “Jenny. Cal is forty years old. He has no money; his work is not getting the attention he thinks it deserves. He probably sees this as a last long shot that might spring him. I’m not—” he added quickly as he saw your mouth inhaling to interrupt—“I’m not saying this is right. I don’t yet know what to think.”

You pushed your chair back and rose, the heat rushing in your head.

“But what happens to the Ginas of this world? How many fucking times do we have to watch this play out?” Tom looked away and his nostrils flattened; you knew he hated hearing you say fuck. But he knew it was true: you could count at least three of his friends in the immediate neighborhood alone who’d dumped their loyal, longstanding loves for a shinier later model. It was certainly old, old news but it was news that was supposed to happen to faraway people, people in Sunday newspaper surveys and smug best-sellers and bad nighttime soaps. You have never been able to make any man admit to the cartoonlike blatancy of it, the humping-dog balefulness of his, this never-ending reflect to plug into the acolyte—someone who’ll sigh with thankfulness and tuck herself around him tighter when he declares, “And that’s the kind of guy I am.”

The numbing tediousness of it! Whenever a celebrity gets caught with his stewardess or stripper or his transvestite pickup and hung in public cross fire, the tabloids pawing over fuzzy zoom-lens photographs like last scraps of meat, you can only think, Yes. Hang the idiot. Keep him from spawning.

How am I supposed to endorse this?” you asked Tom in a lower, clenched voice. “What is the role of the woman who likes the woman the man is dumping” A Hallmark card? Godspeed and warm best wishes?”

Tom looked at you, the sweating beer between both hands.

“Jen, take it easy. He’s my friend. I can’t disown him. We don’t know the details.”

No, but you could imagine them all right, clearly as the veins and spines of the golding leaves drifting now in the yard, the scarlet and pink rose petals scattering that fall, the wild walnuts that crackled under the car in the driveway. You could imagine a gothic scene: tears, words, miserable dumb pauses during which two people stared at their feet, the walls, gummy coffee cups, objects they had seen without seeing for seventeen years as they each privately sounded out the word: ending.

And Tom had invited Cal to dinner, to store his stuff under your house, and for the how-many-eth time you would have to be gracious to another goddamned betrayer.

And yet that rainy Sunday morning you’d smiled and chatted as you ushered Cal in through the side gate, and in your bathrobe helped his haul his boxes and his ten-year-old stereo under the house, piling them neatly on some old wooden crates; waving as he drove off. He had come back to have dinner when Tom returned from the game, and the two men had stayed up late talking. That evening was when Cal had produced Claire’s picture. Her store-window mannequin looks had puzzled you, for they seemed a non sequitur to everything you’d understood about Cal’s bohemian ways. He never mentioned Gina except to tell Tom, late that night, it had been “a nightmare.”

Next morning he was gone.

A note came in the mail six months later.

The thing had crashed.

Crashed like one of those terrifying visions at an aerial show, the sputtering plane bleeding black smoke as it spirals nose-first, straight down. The message scribbled in harsh black pencil lead, in what appeared great haste, pressed down hard.

It did not work with Claire. I tried but it went all wrong. I am teaching again in Sac and working in a map store. If you want, leave a message at the social sciences department. It went very badly. I did not contact you sooner because it is hard for me to talk about.

Tom phoned the school several times and left messages, dropped a note into the mail, but no answer came. It threw him in ways you could not have anticipated. One morning after he’d sifted through the mail—usual ads and bills—he walked through the house adjusting the paintings where they hung, a compulsion you’d always found maddening and dear.  Nothing in the mail, and he had waited months for any word from Cal. You came from the kitchen in time to watch him walk to the sunny front window, hands fisted in his pockets. He looked at the quiet street, wide, clean, the leaves turning. You looked too. Through the window you saw a squirrel pause on a phone wire, sniffing, plume tail floating.

“No news from Cal yet, huh?” You felt badly for him in spite of yourself.

“The thing is.” Tom spoke without turning around, in a voice you did not quite recognize, as if it came from some other room in him. “Some stories, you want to see how they work out, because you always wanted to know if they could.” He was not looking at you. He seemed to be having an argument with himself. “I mean, if a man is forty and gives up everything to go try a dream life, to start again, it’s different than when he’s twenty or even thirty.”

“Go on,” you said, leaning in the doorjamb with your arms folded.

Tom sat again at the edge of the couch, hunched slightly, forearms resting against his knees, posture of a man in a waiting room. He opened his big hands. “The risk is wilder, but so is the need,” he said in the same unfamiliar voice. “Every man has Cal’s idea,” he said softly, glancing at you a scant moment. “Every man thinks about it.”

“I see.” Astonished he would let you glimpse this.

“But most men know better,” he added swiftly. You knew this to be spin control, but the gesture pierced you.

“So this was an experiment you were observing.”

“Sort of.” His eyes tracing some middle distance.

Last week a message from Cal appeared at last on the answering machine. His voice was sprightly and bounding again. He was on his way to Paris again. Could he stop through?

Tom went to pick him up at the bus station. You wished you had anywhere else to be, but it would look too obvious to run off, and you could not restrain a horrible curiosity. Cal burst into the house with the same old urgency, as if he’d just parachuted in. Same kinky curls, dull clothes, same lack of anything dear in his face. He looked agitated. You moved to buss his cheek; he seemed to shrink away. Did he sense your dim view, or had Tom told him? Was he embarrassed? Repulsed? Tom had set up chairs on the front porch so the two could sit and smoke. You remembered errands and, saluting them, slipped away.

They were more relaxed when you pulled the car back into the driveway. Cal actually asked to see your editing office, a converted shed behind the carport. You invited him in with alacrity, told him to sit, made a fire in the blackened potbelly some prior tenant had installed. As you did Tom entered to deposit a bottle of wine, then left to start dinner. You stirred the fire, put on a tape of baroque guitar. Cal was eager to talk and himself brought the conversation to Paris.

Going back to the city, he insisted, was a way of testing the worth of his work on its own merits, without help. He would make the rounds. There were daily humdrum realities—and then there was Paris. The two zones were never interchangeable; Paris was a proving ground like no other. The cold, the indifference, the expense, the grime—all of a piece. You listened patiently and finally asked.

“Why are you going back to Claire, Cal? What is going on?”

His eyes immediately hooded and seemed to cast themselves out the window. “Closure, maybe,” he said unsteadily, after a beat.

It was a latter-day term that tightened your jaw.

“But Claire was the one who sent you away before. She smashed your life to bits. What happened? What do you think will be different this time?” Earnest scientist in a lab coat trying to keep the prosecuting edge from your voice.

“She became frightened by the permanence of it last time,” he said quietly. “When she saw me with my bags, it overwhelmed her, she said. It was the bags,” he repeated, as if reminding himself of the pivotal error, the curse never to reinvoke, as if everything that had gone wrong since was the leering result of his fatal miscalculation: the decision to bring luggage. “But now she says she misses me. Says her life’s not the same without me. I want to see what is there for me this time.” His words made you wince, they sounded so stagy. “I’m staying in my own hotel room, at my own expense,” he added with a kind of wounded indignation. Cal, petulant! He had carefully fashioned his stance. He meant to maintain an offended front, a defiance: she would have to penetrate it to win him back.

It was difficult for you not to snort. His scholarship might be brilliant, you thought. But he understands even less of himself than you’d imagined. Or—perhaps more likely—he’s lying to spare your feelings. But since when had Cal considered anyone’s feeling but Cal’s?

“And what of Gina?” You had to ask it; no sense pretending. He stood up at once, and as you knelt by the fire you made yourself look straight up at him.

He face had voided. He looked neither angry nor sad, but as if he had been asked to speak of someone who had been dead for some time. His voice was similarly flat. “She won’t speak to me. She’ll have nothing to do wit me now.”

Tom cracked open the door: dinner summoned. He had laid on a homey one, a roast with vegetables. You mashed the potatoes with annoyed energy, knowing you were enacting, for Cal to witness, Tom’s answer to Cal’s implicit question: Yes, this life with her is good, and it is enough. But you also knew this meal was Tom’s gesture of solidarity with Cal, offering fortification, ballast. Something irritatingly biblical about it. Take this for sustenance on your path, brother; hold fast to your journey: Cal ate heartily, accepting seconds. The three of you watched a Hitchcock movie. Finally you begged off to bed because of work next morning, while the men stayed up for a last smoke. You slept hard, not noticing when Tom slipped under the covers. Next morning you showered and tiptoed in the dark out to the bus stop; that night when you walked back in, of course, Cal was gone.

“Well? What did he have to say?” Working to keep your voice breezy as you tossed your coat and bag. Technically you had no right to the information, but you would force the matter if necessary, and Tom knew it. At once his voice muted, his facial features blurred—he’d suddenly ceased to be the inhabitant of his own body.

“Something about beauty,” Tom murmured.

“What? I beg your pardon?”

“Beauty. Beauty,” said Tom again, too loudly the second time. “Cal has this idea about beauty.” It seemed Gina, in Cal’s eyes, had become an embarrassment. A holdover from flower-child days in free-box clothes. She was actually (Cal told Tom) more a boyish sister at this point, the one who’d looked after him. Gina had short-cropped hair and wore no makeup. Never bothered with her nails; wouldn’t think twice about wearing jeans with a hole at the knee. (Neither do I; neither would I, you thought, cheeks hot. And what about Cal’s own hodgepodge style? Above such concerns, presumably. Eyes on the stars.) Whereas Claire was a woman of the world. Coiffed, fragranced, perfectly finished and lacquered; clothes and manners de rigueur. Heads turned where she passed. Cal had decided that a man of his capabilities, of the regard he anticipated—and he fully anticipated that regard—now deserved that level of beauty on his arm. Claire was classic, pristine, a Grace Kelly or a Deneuve. Gina was an urchin, a street mime. Cal had felt a premonition. He was ready now, he sensed, to partner a stunning beauty, a level of grooming—grooming was the word Tom used—in the woman he takes, as part of his claim to his rightful destiny.

Tom murmured this in short sentences, prodded by your insistent, repeated questions. He could let his eyes meet yours only an instant before he’d flick them away.

You walked to the sink and leaned hard against it, arms around yourself tightly, looking out the kitchen window into the early dark. “Ah,” you said. “Aha.” The words batted about senselessly. “Right. Fair exchange,” you said, nearly choked by the astonishment that had ballooned up in you, filling every cavity of you like some angioplasty gone haywire. “Of course. They deserve each other,” you said with a lightness so forced it edged on hysterical.

“Jen, for Christ’s sake.” Tom was sullen. He hated the sound of his own voice conveying this howlingly bad script, the dripping egg of its punch line sliding down his cheeks. No way to shelter himself: he’d had to deliver it, and now you both had to say logical things to each other, continue to live together in the world, act as if you were sure of anything. Both of you caught like prisoners against the compound wall, pinned under the white-hot spotlight of the new reality.

You turned on him, your voice taut and cracking. “You feel this way in some part of you, and now you are watching to see how this chapter turns out.”

“What do you mean?” Dully.

“Grooming. Grooming was always your obsession too,” you said, your voice now thick inside an aching throat. Your eye sockets hurt. “When we were in Europe. You were ashamed of me. I did not match the local level of—of gloss.” The month you’d spent three years ago, a trip he’d taken for his institute: pricked with unhappy revelations that had almost finished off the two of you. Unmarried, you’d lacked official status trailing after him at functions. Perhaps what they say is true, that women remember all the worst moments: his telling you he needed space; telling you to go shopping with one of his comely colleagues, who had “instinctive style.” The early evening you’d faced the Eiffel Tower together for the first time, leaning on a railing with your backs to the Trocadero, and you’d turned toward him, breathless, for a gesture. He’d only stared ahead at the Eiffel, mulling. You are certain now he was simply unconscious; he could have been adding up his bank balance. But it was your first trip together. Later he apologized and explained there was too much performance pressure on him: constant scrutiny by clients and colleagues. That you should simply forget that time, let it go. You’d felt he was struggling with a half-submerged wish to be free. Balancing it against an uneasy mix of guesswork and observation—about what, or who, was truly out there.

“I put all that away years ago,” he said. He looked steadily at you, the way you might stare down a rattler at close range, not moving from his chair at the table.

“Nice try,” you said. “Try again.”

“I don’t want to be him, Jen! I feel sorry for him!”

“Phase two of the Living Experiment: subject knighted by great beauty,” you said bitterly.

“Jen, I want a house and vacations. I want to be warm and eat well. I want to have my best pal with me to laugh at my jokes.  I don’t want to see the road through a hole in the car floor,” he said. It was an old code-phrase between you, from a visit to an aging hippie friend who’d kept your own younger, shabbier ways—code for the scrappy, blurted life that was good for people at twenty and thirty but not so compelling (you’d both agreed) after forty. Tom came to you and took your shoulders, your cheeks. “Don’t you see?” His voice cracked softly.

You nodded, exhausted. Why did it matter this much, anyway? Say you lost him to one type or another: wouldn’t it be better to know that sooner than later? Why live in dread, anticipating a siege? It was just (you would answer) that summoning great gentility, smiling and nodding, accommodating foolish men like the queen of worldly graces was not what first came to mind when their women—lovely, complicated, credulous women—were recurringly toppled and swept from the board like faded toy soldiers. Where did they take themselves, these women? What happened next to them? And after that?

Get a life, people say. A life doesn’t cringe. Too much cringing going on everywhere, to your thinking. You know one woman much older than yourself who insisted on walking the entire Bois de Boulogne in heels and hose, because she had long ago vowed never to be seen in anything less by her husband. You are sure she was temporarily crippled by the end of that day. You know another whose husband watches his wife get dressed every morning with an expectant air, waiting to be shown she can look good again. Make the grade again. Every morning.

A life stands in its own shoes. Says “This is what is, sweetheart. No character transplants or plastic surgery coming your way.” And it seems to you that as soon as you have said such words, whenever you tried them on like a shimmering green silk toga, a cool spaciousness filled you, a blessed lightness. Whenever you donned that thinking—when you thought I’m too old to cringe, in a kind of revelatory astonishment—then Tom seemed to feel the shift instantly, to seek you out. You think of the girlfriend who told you over drinks, shortly after she consented to marry—told you with sad, thoughtful finality, “Betrayal is not the worst thing, Jenny.” Mystified, you had asked her what on earth the worst thing was. “Quitting the game,” she sighed. “Disinvestment. Walking. Like Rhett Butler.”

Tom was not quitting. Nor were you. But he would watch for the outcome of Cal’s latest venture. Tom would always be watching for outcomes. Both of you would; no avoiding it—people’s stories, including your own, would scroll out before you in the tides of all your coming days. And what would those outcomes teach you that was not already known—for which the evidence did not already lie piled about tall as mountains? You laid your cheek against him, put your nose into his warm neck with its cola-sweet man-smell, and clasped him hard. He tightened his embrace; both of you holding on like siblings against a high wind in a suddenly cold place. Though the sun that morning glowed through the windows clean and warm, you held on tightly against an icy wind that swirled and sang silently about you, trying to pry between.

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Joan Frank’s literary essays and fiction have appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle (AWP), Iowa Review, American Literary Review, Salmagundi, and Antioch Review. Author of Desperate Women Need to Talk to You (Conari Press) and the forthcoming Boys Keep Being Born (University of Missouri Press), Ms. Frank lives in Santa Rosa, California.