Unravished - Hester Kaplan

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      Copyright © 2014 by Hester Kaplan.

      All rights reserved.

      Grateful acknowledgement is made to the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rhode Island Council on the Arts.

      Some of the stories in this collection first appeared in the following publications:

      “Unravished” in Copper Nickel

      “The School of Politics” in Indiana Review

      “The Aerialist” in Salamander

      “Companion Animal” in Ploughshares

      “Natural Wonder” in Ploughshares

      “Lovesick” in Night Train

      “This is Your Last Swim” in Mt. Hope

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Kaplan, Hester, 1959-

      [Short stories. Selections]

      Unravished / Hester Kaplan.

      pages cm

      ISBN 978-1-935439-94-3 (Ebook)

      I. Title.

      PS3561.A5577A6 2014

      813'.54--dc23

      2014012327

       For Michael, Tobias, Alexander, and for love

      CONTENTS

       The Aerialist

       Companion Animal

       Natural Wonder

       Lovesick

       Cold-cocked

       This is Your Last Swim

      They pursued me down the jetty one day, through the white cedars and into the pond the next, those bitches, to talk to me about the women in Tillman’s famous paintings, women who gazed out windows, leaned on counters or sat on beds with their knees pulled up. Not beautiful—none of us are beautiful anymore, Alice, they said—but lonely and soulful, don’t you think? What they meant was that I must have been lonely and soulful like those women because I was married to August Weiner, the devil.

      “Please, leave me alone,” I told them.

      And now another of those pursuers had me cornered in the drugstore, my back against the toothbrushes. The thunderous July afternoon had driven people from the beaches, and the parking lot thrummed with the efficient disappointment of errands. She touched my arm and said she knew how hard it was to be married to a certain kind of man. Those boastful, proud bullies, she meant, know-it-alls, non-apologizers. Her laugh was light and unromantic. I couldn’t remember her name, though I’d known her for years. Aug’s prescriptions were rattling in my bag, and he was waiting in the car, diminished by his failing heart and a long morning with Boston’s doctors, his rosacea rioting in the humidity. Talk to him, the woman urged. Just talk to him about art and beauty and Tillman’s legacy. Get him to change his mind about building that ruinous house of his.

      Art and beauty and legacy? What amazing, pompous bullshit these people spouted. I didn’t know how could they stand themselves. “Please, leave me alone,” I told her.

      In the car, Aug had slid down in his seat, either from fatigue or persecution, though he’d deny both. He was, at sixty-six, a proud, boastful, know-it-all, sometimes a bully. We’d been married for ten years. He was the most entitled man I’d ever loved and been loved by. He’d saved me from a small life of compromise and disappointments.

      “Oh, sweetheart, there you are. I’ve been watching this rain the whole time,” he said, full of awe at its power to make people scatter. “When I was a kid, the water used to come pouring in under the windowsills. The walls would swell for days.” The neck of his white shirt was damp with sweat and uncharacteristic nostalgia. My blouse was soaked, too, and I started to shiver. Aug didn’t talk about his past often, but he’d described his childhood in Worcester as screechingly poor, beyond dirt and into dust. Mine had been not so different, but with some slugging and slapping, and the front door slamming so often it came off its hinges.

      Was I lonely married to Aug? Only sometimes, but you hear enough terrible things said about the one you love, as I’d been hearing that summer, and you’re not persuaded, but a kind of puzzlement creeps in. The mind reconsiders even what it first dismissed. It is a wife’s anguish to one day allow herself to see her husband the way others see him—and I was terrified of that day. The woman from the drugstore passed in front of our car and hesitated as she considered haranguing us even there in the downpour, but something made her tug at her slicker and go on. Aug was disappointed. A fight might revive him; it was his best mode then, and what kept his heat pumping juicily. He would never accept that it was his defenseless pallor, that yeasty hue of coronary decline, that made her keep going. He would rather be reviled than have people know he was sick and mortal.

      A year and a half earlier, Aug, rich for over a decade by then, had overnight scooped up the piece of land that now so inflamed people, thirteen untouched acres that rested between two hills swaying with beach grass, from a man who’d hit a fatally bad patch of business. At one end, the property slid into Block Island Sound, the other end narrowing into locust trees, rugosa, and an unpaved stretch leading out towards New Town Road. If you stood on the beach with the water at your back, as Aug and I had done from time to time admiring what we owned, you could see the famous Tillman house to the right of our property—small, modest, dusty white like a bone, set back for the widest vista. This was the landscape that had inspired Tillman to paint those bereft, gazing women, and sometimes the soulful water, and it was this landscape and view Aug was accused of destroying with the house he planned to build. What he was doing was immoral, his enemies said, like hitting a child. They called themselves the Shoreline Citizens, and they would fight him and contest his plans at every step. That Aug owned textile mills like some wicked master out of a darker time made perfect sense to those who opposed him. He was the rich industrialist, they were on the side of angels.

      August was determined to go to the selectmen’s meeting about the building permit for the house that evening even though he hadn’t been feeling well or energetic since the medical visit in Boston two weeks before. I told him I didn’t want him to go, but he was adamant, and eyed me warily, prepared for a challenge. He called me into the bathroom where he’d dumped my makeup into the sink.

      “What the hell am I looking for?”

      The new medication sometimes swamped his mind with irritation. His jaw line had become pronounced, the slack of health almost used up. He wanted to paint away the dark swags under his eyes because he couldn’t have people think this house trouble was getting to him, keeping him up at night or making him sick. I smeared on some foundation, but he wanted more color, though he was already too cakey, like an old drag queen. I asked him again not to go; I couldn’t stand the thought of those people seeing him like this. In the mirror, we were alarmingly mismatched; I was taller, twenty years younger, still vigorous. I looked away first.

      “The picture of health,” he announced, but who knew which one of us he’d meant.

      In the town hall, the windows were open in the second floor hearing room. The night

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