“No, I won’t tell Saul.” Patsy considered this for a moment, what she would say next. After all, she was speaking to the Marschallin. The Marschallin had finally gotten her young man. “Is it a French novel or is it an American novel?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Well, if it was an American novel, you’d have an affair with him, and you’d both feel soiled and degraded, and then he’d tell his parents, and his mother would file a suit against you, and somebody would be shot dead after a few months, you know, out of pure rage, and then there would be church-lady morals and a big mess to clean up with the litigation. If it was a French novel, though, you two would both have a perfectly good time, and he would be grateful to you and, you know, tireless, and you would teach him a thing or two about sex and the ways of love, and he’d remember you happily for a few years, have other girlfriends more his age who would all love him for his boldness and attentiveness and expertise, and then he’d get married and settle down.”
“It’s actually more like the French version,” Delia said, a bit dryly. “So far.”
“Well, good for you,” Patsy said.
“But you know, in these matters, nothing is as simple as all that. I go through the house,” Delia resumed, “muttering his name, and I think of his parents and whether they’ll ever find out, and then I think, well, in a few weeks he’ll start school again, and it’ll be all over.” She waited. “It will be over, and no harm will have come to anybody, as long as he doesn’t tell anyone. He says he hasn’t. And that’s how it’s supposed to work. But sometimes it’s more complicated.”
Delia stopped talking.
“Don’t tell me you’re pregnant,” Patsy said. Mary Esther’s cries upstairs were getting a bit louder now. Where was Saul?
“Oh, no, I’m not pregnant. I had my tubes tied a long time ago, and besides, I’m. . no, it’s not that, believe me.”
“Well, what is it?” Patsy thought she knew what Delia would say, but she didn’t want to anticipate it.
“See, the little complication is, I love him,” Delia said, her voice still absolutely neutral, even a bit cold. “Just a little bit. Of course it’s completely ridiculous. I mean, he’s only a boy. This is like something middle-aged men do, with their proclivity for college girls. But I do love him. Patsy, he brings in little bouquets of flowers that he’s picked. A boy does this! He brings them in for me, and we put them in water together. And you should see his smile. I don’t think I’ve ever had a smile like that from a grown man. Men don’t smile like that spontaneously. They forget how. He smiles at me and my insides just knot up, because he’s so happy to see me.” Delia’s voice continued in its uninflected way.
“Count your blessings,” Patsy instructed her mother-in-law, using the phrase she had just been thinking of. Delia was right, of course: Saul had forgotten how to smile, except to produce a result. “Does he love you?”
“Of course not. He’s just a kid. And I’m just a middle-aged woman he. . sometimes sleeps with. I’m a diversion. He doesn’t know from love. But he’s so devoted, and so sweet, and so kind — Patsy, he compliments me on my body, can you believe that? — and of course there’s his skin, and his body, which is gorgeous, and his smile, that it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t love me, because he might as well love me, considering the way he treats me. Somehow I missed all this before, when I was an actual girl. Know what I mean? I thought when you were my age, you stopped doing foolishness like this. I thought women stopped falling in love, at least comme ça.”
“Well, I guess not.”
There was a long pause, and Patsy could tell from the noises at the other end that Delia was blowing her nose, though tentatively. “Of course he has a little girlfriend, too.”
“Of course.”
“But he says that it isn’t as good with her as with me.” She waited. “Maybe he’s being nice. It’s his way, being nice. He’d say it even if he didn’t mean it.”
Patsy looked through the window and saw Gordy Himmelman sitting out on the front lawn. Like the proverbial bad penny, he kept turning up. What did he want this time? He had reappeared again, the poor zombie. He had been doing this for about a year now. It was his first anniversary. He was just sitting there, looking skyward. He wanted someone to pay attention to him. In this way, he was like everybody else.
“Delia, I don’t think you have any rights in this matter. You can’t be jealous. You just have a fling with him this summer and then let him go back to school in the fall.”
“No, you’re right, of course.”
There was a pause of several seconds.
“What?” Patsy asked.
“Well, sometimes I go to bed and I think, This seventeen-year-old is the love of my life. Which is quite silly, but that’s what I think. Don’t tell Saul I said that. Saul’s father was a good-enough man, all things considered. He was a hard worker. He worked himself to death. But a lover he wasn’t. I was married to him, and still he never noticed me except sometimes over breakfast when I brought him his coffee. As a provider, of course, I can’t complain about him.”
“Delia, you shouldn’t be romanticizing. Summer’s going to be over, and you’ll have to get your life back.”
“I know,” Delia sighed. Her voice was calm and unearthly. “I’ve had my French novel. So, how’s the baby? How’s little Emmy?”
Patsy crossed her legs at the ankles. She had been thinking of getting a tattoo, a tiny one, of a flower, on her left calf, but now that she was a mom, those thoughts were starting to seem senseless. Besides, tattoos were forms of expression for the inarticulate. She could always say what she meant. “Right now? She’s just woken up. She’s crying a little. Or maybe singing. She’s really not a baby anymore. Not at fifteen months. I think Saul’ll check on her in a minute.” Patsy smiled into the phone. “Her first teeth are in, and she’s still getting cranky. Of course, Saul is still a little jealous of her. He’ll get over it.”
“She’s so adorable. And here I am, a grandmother. It’s a strange thing to have happened to me, Patsy, it’s a strange thing to have happened to a nice Jewish girl, being a grandmother. Well, I don’t know about that ‘nice.’ I was a little wild in high school, you know. Privately. In public I was a nice girl. And then. . I stopped being wild. And then I was respectable when I was married to Norman, right out of high school, and dutiful with him, before he died so young, and then I was a grandmother, and now I stand at the windows watching the shadows in the afternoon and waiting for the sound of Jimmy’s pickup truck.”
“So you’ve started again.”
“Yes. I started again. But it’s not so pleasing when a woman falls in love with a young man that much younger. It’s not becoming in a grandmother. People don’t like it. And I can see why.” She stopped and waited — Patsy thought — for the words to be carried to her, and back out again, in exactly the form she wanted. “You’re right, you know. Once the summer’s over, I’ll give him up. And I will, I really will do that. A gift like that, it’s best not to try to draw it out. You’re right, it’s a fling. And, after all, I’ve been addicted to things before.” She said the last sentence with a weary inflection. “But not like this.”