You know something’s wrong here. Men don’t like gardening, do they? Jonathan certainly doesn’t. Finally one of the wives, a tall blonde with a tennis tan and good bones, stalks over and pulls her husband away by the sleeve. “Time to go home now,” she tells him, and curls her lip at you.
You know that look. You know a snarl when you see it, even if the wife’s too civilized to produce an actual growl.
You ask Diane about this the following week, while you’re in her garden, admiring her tomato plants. “Why do they hate me?” you ask Diane.
“Oh, Stella,” she says, and sighs. “You really don’t know, do you?” You shake your head, and she goes on. “They hate you because you’re young and beautiful, even though that’s not your fault. The ones who have to work hate you because you don’t, and the ones who don’t have to work, whose husbands support them, hate you because they’re afraid their husbands will leave them for younger, more beautiful women. Do you understand?”
You don’t, not really, even though you’re now twenty-eight going on thirty-five. “Their husbands can’t leave them for me,” you tell Diane. “I’m married to Jonathan. I don’t want any of their husbands.” But even as you say it, you know that’s not the point.
A few weeks later, you learn that the tall blonde’s husband has indeed left her, for an aerobics instructor twenty years his junior. “He showed me a picture,” Jonathan says, laughing. “She’s a big-hair bimbo. She’s not half as beautiful as you are.”
“What does that have to do with it?” you ask him. You’re angry, and you aren’t sure why. You barely know the blonde, and it’s not as if she’s been nice to you. “His poor wife! That was a terrible thing for him to do!”
“Of course it was,” Jonathan says soothingly.
“Would you leave me if I wasn’t beautiful anymore?” you ask him.
“Nonsense, Stella. You’ll always be beautiful.”
But that’s when Jonathan’s going on thirty-eight and you’re going on thirty-five. The following year, the balance begins to shift. He’s going on thirty-nine; you’re going on forty-two. You take exquisite care of yourself, and really, you’re as beautiful as ever, but there are a few wrinkles now, and it takes hours of crunches to keep your stomach as flat as it used to be.
Doing crunches, weeding in the garden, you have plenty of time to think. In a year, two at the most, you’ll be old enough to be Jonathan’s mother, and you’re starting to think he might not like that. And you’ve already gotten wind of catty faculty-wife gossip about how quickly you’re showing your age. The faculty wives see every wrinkle, even through artfully applied cosmetics.
During that thirty-five to forty-two year, Diane and her husband move away, so now you have no one with whom to discuss your wrinkles or the catty faculty wives. You don’t want to talk to Jonathan about any of it. He still tells you how beautiful you are, and you still have satisfying sportfucks. You don’t want to give him any ideas about declining desirability.
You do a lot of gardening that year: flowers—especially roses—and herbs, and some tomatoes in honor of Diane, and because Jonathan likes them. Your best times are the two-foot times in the garden and the four-foot times in the forest, and you think it’s no coincidence that both of these involve digging around in the dirt. You write long letters to Diane, on e-mail or, sometimes, when you’re saying something you don’t want Jonathan to find on the computer, on old-fashioned paper. Diane doesn’t have much time to write back, but does send the occasional e-mail note, the even rarer postcard. You read a lot, too, everything you can find: newspapers and novels and political analysis, literary criticism, true crime, ethnographic studies. You startle some of Jonathan’s colleagues by casually dropping odd bits of information about their field, about other fields, about fields they’ve never heard of: forensic geography, agricultural ethics, poststructuralist mining. You think it’s no coincidence that the obscure disciplines you’re most interested in involve digging around in the dirt.
Some of Jonathan’s colleagues begin to comment not only on your beauty, but on your intelligence. Some of them back away a little bit. Some of the wives, although not many, become a little friendlier, and you start going out to lunch again, although not with anyone you like as much as Diane.
The following year, the trouble starts. Jonathan’s going on forty; you’re going on forty-nine. You both work out a lot; you both eat right. But Jonathan’s hardly wrinkled at all yet, and your wrinkles are getting harder to hide. Your stomach refuses to stay completely flat no matter how many crunches you do; you’ve developed the merest hint of cottage-cheese thighs. You forego your old look, the slinky, skin-tight look, for long flowing skirts and dresses, accented with plenty of silver. You’re going for exotic, elegant, and you’re getting there just fine; heads still turn to follow you in the supermarket. But the sportfucks are less frequent, and you don’t know how much of this is normal aging and how much is lack of interest on Jonathan’s part. He doesn’t seem quite as enthusiastic as he once did. He no longer brings you herbal tea and hot water bottles during your transitions; the walks in the woods are a little shorter than they used to be, the ball-throwing sessions in the meadows more perfunctory.
And then one of your new friends, over lunch, asks you tactfully if anything’s wrong, if you’re ill, because, well, you don’t look quite yourself. Even as you assure her that you’re fine, you know she means that you look a lot older than you did last year.
At home, you try to discuss this with Jonathan. “We knew it would be a problem eventually,” you tell him. “I’m afraid that other people are going to notice, that someone’s going to figure it out—”
“Stella, sweetheart, no one’s going to figure it out.” He’s annoyed, impatient. “Even if they think you’re aging unusually quickly, they won’t make the leap to Jessie. It’s not in their worldview. It wouldn’t occur to them even if you were aging a hundred years for every one of theirs. They’d just think you had some unfortunate metabolic condition, that’s all.”
Which, in a manner of speaking, you do. You wince. It’s been five weeks since the last sportfuck. “Does it bother you that I look older?” you ask Jonathan.
“Of course not, Stella!” But since he rolls his eyes when he says this, you’re not reassured. You can tell from his voice that he doesn’t want to be having this conversation, that he wants to be somewhere else, maybe watching TV. You recognize that tone. You’ve heard Jonathan’s colleagues use it on their wives, usually while staring at you.
You get through the year. You increase your workout schedule, mine Cosmo for bedroom tricks to pique Jonathan’s flagging interest, consider and reject liposuction for your thighs. You wish you could have a facelift, but the recovery period’s a bit too long, and you’re not sure how it would work with your transitions. You read and read and read, and command an increasingly subtle grasp of the implications of, the interconnections between, different areas of knowledge: ecotourism, Third World famine relief, art history, automobile design. Your lunchtime conversations become richer, your friendships with the faculty wives more genuine.
You know that your growing wisdom is the benefit of aging, the compensation for your wrinkles and for your fading—although fading slowly, as yet—beauty.
You also know that Jonathan didn’t marry you for wisdom.
And now it’s the following year, the year you’re old enough to be Jonathan’s mother, although an unwed teenage one: you’re going on fifty-six while he’s going on forty-one. Your silver hair’s losing its luster, becoming merely gray. Sportfucks coincide, more or less, with major national holidays. Your thighs begin to jiggle when you walk, so you go ahead and have the liposuction, but Jonathan doesn’t seem to notice anything but the outrageous cost of the procedure.