Sometimes, it felt as though I were their mother!
Oh, what a wonderful thing for a woman, any woman certainly but this woman in particular, to be listened to raptly by someone who in turn interested her.
I was in love with him, falling, free-falling through the sky without ever stopping to wonder about consequence.
He said no one would ever say we were bad people. He said two people so rarely fall truly in love, the sin would be in not pursuing our feelings to wherever they might take us. He said that one day—no, not soon, probably, but one day—he and I would be together publicly, as well we should be. He wanted us to have a baby together. Not then, most definitely not then, but someday.
He was shocked to learn I was a virgin. To him, who had been having sex longer than I had been alive, it was a shock to think that anyone over the age of consent could still be a virgin.
But he loved the idea.
You’ll laugh when I say I was a virgin, but I swear I was, a twenty-one-year-old virgin. And you can laugh again when I say that I had been saving myself for that one true love that would be worthy of the greatest gift I had left to give.
Perhaps in preparation for an event I hoped would come, I wrote a short story about a young woman’s first time and showed it to Helen and Grace on a night out. They, far more experienced than I, marveled at what they called the to-the-bone authenticity of the lovemaking scene.
“Pretend I’m Roger Ebert,” laughed Helen, assuming a masculine voice. “‘You can almost feel the body fluids.’”
“And I’m the other guy,” giggled Grace, also going baritone. “‘Better than a modern Harold Robbins—I think I just wet myself!’”
“That’s great,” I said. “But I don’t think those guys review books, too.”
“Oh, well…” Helen shrugged. “We don’t know any book reviewers.”
“But it really is good,” Grace said, handing the loose pages back to me. “You must be getting more action than I thought.”
Oh, if they had only known how little experience the author of that hotly erotic scene had ever had.
It really is amazing what you can learn in books. From Judy Blume, I’d learned how to deal with my first period. And from countless other books, I’d culled enough to know what exactly I would like from a sexual experience, enough so that I could fake a written simultaneous orgasm with the best of them, powerful enough to make Grace, imitating the reviewer who reviews with Roger Ebert, wet her pants.
I never minded that Buster was so much older than me. I know some will look at these events, set them beside what they know of my childhood and Freudianly conclude, “Ah, it is so obvious—she was looking for a father figure.”
But people who would think that seem to me to be the same kind of people who ironically conclude that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. A cigar is never just a cigar.
For the permanent record, I did mind calling a grown man Buster. Hell, I wouldn’t want to call a young boy Buster. But the one time I tried to call him Bertram it just didn’t feel right, either. So for better or worse, “Buster” it was.
Making love with Buster, when it finally happened, was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. Oh, there was pain to be sure, but it was so much more than pain. It was beauty and it was love and it was a closeness I’d only previously known through writing.
I never felt sorry for Alissa. I could see how cold she was, had no problem believing Buster that for her it had always been a marriage of convenience, the cachet of being married to the attaché.
And so the Saturdays piled up, whenever he wasn’t out of town on diplomatic business. The Saturdays piled up until there were nearly three years of them from when we had begun. And during those three hours a week, it was like we were the only two people in the world, a small yellow world with bad TV reception.
Sleep with someone in haste, repent at your own damn leisure, I always say. Well, I always say it now, at least.
Long into our third year together, I missed my period. If I’d been another woman, I never would have panicked so quickly, being just a couple of days late. But I’d always been regular, reliable like calling Western Union for the exact time. If I’d been a more practical and less in-love woman, I might have concluded that the delay in my period had to do with the anorexia I’d been flirting with, the lack of appetite brought about by my advanced state of in-loveness leading to a dramatic weight loss that had disturbed the tides of my regular cycle.
I told Buster, not too trepidatiously. After all, wasn’t this what we had been intending all along? Okay, so maybe this was a bit sooner than we would have liked, but did it really matter so very much if we’d jumped the gun by just a smidgen?
And that was when Buster offered me money to go away and have an abortion. I was crazy to think we could do this thing, he said. It would destroy his career, he said. His wife would take him to the cleaners, he said.
How quickly you can go from thinking someone is the greatest person who lived to thinking they don’t deserve you, never deserved you in the first place. Sometimes, the freefall out of love is quicker than the fall into it.
I didn’t want Buster’s money, of course, didn’t need it. But I also had no intention of aborting his child. I’m not trying to take a moral stand here on what’s right, pro-choice or pro-life, but if you push me I’ll tell you I’m pro-choice and only wish that more people, me included, were more careful about their choices ahead of time. But I couldn’t see destroying something that had been conceived in what I could still only think of as love. I had loved Buster, Buster had loved me, and any child of ours would have a great set of brains.
Okay, so maybe he or she would suck at math, but with my verbal skills—written, more than oral, “I guess” I’d have to say—and Buster’s sense of geography, any child of ours would still have a great set of brains.
Buster was livid, said if I was going to talk like a crazy woman, I should leave sooner rather than later.
And that was when I got the cramp, not a convenient miscarriage cramp as you might think, just a delayed-period cramp, so severe because of the delay, the buildup.
As soon as Buster realized what it was, he was contrite. Wouldn’t I stay? Wouldn’t I forgive him? Surely I understood: he had merely panicked at the suddenness of everything. If I hadn’t dropped the news on him so suddenly, so out of the blue, he would not have reacted so. If I were to tell him the same thing right now, he would most definitely react differently. Couldn’t we just make love to reseal our faith and love in one another? After all, we’d made love while I was on my period many times before…
I packed my things the same day.
It is a truth universally unacknowledged that just because you’re sleeping with your charges’ father, it doesn’t mean you can’t be a good mother to kids. But I wasn’t a good mother to Stevie and Kim, of course. I was a great mother. And when it came time for me to go, it killed me to leave them behind. I would have liked to stay on long enough to help them grow up all the way—they were eight and six at the time I left. But one of the most important lessons life teaches you is to tell when a thing is over and it’s time to move on.
I did not want to see Buster ever again, but I knew he would give me a good reference. After all, he wouldn’t want to risk my wrath, not knowing what my wrath might be.
Loving Buster had made me feel spectacular, special, and now I was back to being as ordinary as dirt.
Well, I certainly wasn’t going to tell Mrs. Fairly that. So instead, I lied.
When she’d asked about the conditions under which I’d left my previous position, I eschewed the pregnant-nanny story and told her instead that it was simply time to move on, that with