SEX IN THE FIFTIES by Ruth Moose
“You think they had sex?” Marcy asks. She’s driving, eyes on the road, slightly bent toward the steering wheel as though that will make the car go faster.
I’m holding the map and the paper on which I’d written directions that turned out to be wrong. The poet’s widow, who I’ll call Anna, had given me the directions to her retirement community three times, and, all three times, when she’d said right, it had been left. Marcy and I made several wrong turns before we figured it out, found Anna’s red sports car with the license plate reading “Poets,” then her apartment with its white picket fence and climbing roses. Otherwise, at 90, she turned out to be extremely coherent, bright and witty. Plus remarkably attractive. For lunch she had her freshly tinted blonde hair in an upsweep with perky curls at each ear lobe, makeup with false eyelashes, heavy blue eye shadow, rouge and blazing lipstick. She wore a denim jumper with a bright yellow blouse and matching belt. The belt was wide in front going up into a peak, then becoming narrow behind. A Wonder Woman belt, I thought, and such a tiny waist. Several times as we had sherry, and during lunch, I noticed her fingering the belt, the point in front.
At lunch, Anna told wonderful stories and jokes, talked a lot, picked at her baked chicken and green peas, meanwhile buttering and unbuttering her roll.
A few weeks earlier, Marcy had come back from a writers’ conference in Colorado, called and asked me what I knew about John X, the poet. “Tell me everything you know,” she said.
“I know Anna, his widow,” I said.
“I want to meet her,” Marcy said. I could hear Marcy almost leaping in the air, waving her cell phone. “Can you? Can you arrange it?”
So I wrote Anna, who promptly called and we scheduled a lunch date. I offered to take Anna out but she said, “I do better here and we have really good food. You can order what you want.”
Everything was arranged. We drove to Y and despite Anna’s directions, found her apartment where she served us a bit of sherry before lunch.
“This is so civilized,” Marcy said, her eyes bright, voice dancing.
Anna enjoyed our appreciation of her paintings, huge mural-like oils that seemed to own the apartment. One wall, floor to ceiling, was a series of impressionist nudes, and parts of nudes, swimming hard in bright pinks and blues. The other wall had three portraits: the first, a dark study of her poet husband done in deep purples, blacks, dark blues with only his face, complete with beard, barely visible at the very top of the canvas. The next painting was a landscape, and the third was Anna’s portrait in yellows, reds and orange. It almost stepped off the wall.
Marcy wanted to hear about Anna’s husband, the poet John X. At lunch she asked question after question, hardly letting Anna finish an answer. “How did you meet your husband?” Marcy asked.
“The first one?” Anna answered. “Oh, he was tall. Over six feet and I liked that. I was tall too. All my life. Until now.” She looked embarrassed. “He was good looking. My family loved him. Especially my father. They were both naval. My father was an admiral.”
She must have been in her twenties, I thought. She’d gone back seventy years.
Marcy tried again, “No, John X, the poet. That husband.”
“We were married fifteen years and I still loved him the first seven,” she laughed. “We lived in Italy for a year. Bicycled everywhere.”
Marcy leaned closer, impatient. I knew she didn’t care a whit about the first husband. It was the poet husband she was after. She’d heard a paper delivered at the conference and fallen in love with a poem in it. She wanted to know more about the poet. “Tell me about John X,” she had said to me when she returned, “his poetry. Do you know his poem ‘Swimming Nude With Others’? How do you know his widow?”
I said his widow liked a poem I published in the undergraduate magazine as a student and asked the editor to get in touch with me, invite me for tea. He did, and I went for tea, stayed all afternoon. That had been ten years ago. We’d kept in touch ever since. Notes, telephone. Mostly correspondence. She didn’t do e-mail, didn’t own a computer, said she didn’t want one of the things in her house. I reviewed the poet’s biography Anna had written, then the volume of his letters she edited and she always called after my reviews were published to thank me.
I knew Anna would be delighted to learn a paper on her husband had been given recently. Her biggest fear was that he would be forgotten, his work lost. She’d spent thirty years of widowhood making a stay against that. She endowed contests in her late husband’s name, appeared on panels to talk of his poems, worked with students on research papers, did everything she could to keep his name, his work alive. She was his living legacy, knew the history and background of every poem he’d written, every reading he’d given, every appointment he’d had. I knew she even corresponded with some of his former students.
So here Marcy and I were, at lunch, after the sherry and a toast to poets, poetry, good health, long life.
The question hanging over the life of John X had always been, “Was it suicide?” Anna insisted not, though he’d made one attempt only weeks before “the accident.” She said, “He slit his wrist. Oh, it was awful. I’d been out shopping and when I came in the door I knew something was wrong. Oh, so wrong. Things were too quiet. When John was home there was always music. Classical music. He had a stack of records this high.” She held her hand out almost shoulder level. “He’d put on continuous play and they’d go all day. All night if he was writing.” She paused for a drink of water. “The autopsy showed all the bruising on the right side. That’s where the broken bones were. His ear bloodied.” She touched her own ear. “Where he was thrown into the grass beside the road.”
I remembered how all the newspapers had reported the death of John X as a suicide. He was in the hospital at that time, but was out for a walk. The driver of the car that hit him said the poet just stepped out in front of him.
It was October. Dark at 7 p.m. The road where John X was hit curved sharply at that place.
“They thought it was suicide because of that girl who put her head in the oven,” Anna said.
“Sylvia Plath?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Anna. “And that Berryman fellow. He’d recently committed suicide too. So they lumped my John in with the bunch. Like it’s something poets do. Put him in that category even if it wasn’t true.” She made a disgusted sound, rolled her eyes.
Anna told me all this the time I had tea with her, the first time we met. I’d never heard about the first husband though, the father of her two daughters.
“He changed,” she said of her first husband and sliced across her chicken breast. “He was not the same person.”
I knew Marcy wanted to hear about John, not Anna’s first husband. “He was an architect,” Anna said. “Designed the house we built in California overlooking the ocean. Oh, it was a wonderful house. The girls walked to school. We had a such a view of the sea. It was a lovely house.”
Marcy interrupted. “How did you meet your husband?”
Anna put down her fork, frowned, her face dark in a small puzzle. “I just told you. It was arranged. An arranged marriage.” She laughed. “My aunt knew him from Annapolis. When she found out he was coming to the West Coast, she told him he absolutely had to look up the V’s. And he did.”
“No, no,” Marcy said, impatience in her voice. “The poet. Your poet husband.”
“Oh yes,” Anna said. “Him.” She took another bite of chicken. “I wanted to write a novel.”
Marcy settled back. She was drinking in every word.
“And I found this conference being held at a university.”
“Colorado,” Marcy said. “It was three weeks, wasn’t it?” She had done her research.
“Yes,” Anna said. “That was it. We were walking to dinner the first night. D came along the path. I was with Joe Jones. Just casually. My mother had come with me but she was back in our room. Joe asked what I was taking and so forth. When I said novel, he said, ‘Oh, you must sign up for poetry. John X is teaching.’ I wasn’t any more interested in poetry than Zen Buddhism.”
She took another bite of her food. “John wasn’t even there. He hadn’t come to the conference. Yet. He was off somewhere playing tennis. He loved tennis. Later he did come. Showed up and Joe introduced us. Right away, John said, ‘Let’s go get a Coca Cola.’ He loved Coca Cola.” She chewed slowly. “We did. He was wearing an orange corduroy shirt. We talked until midnight, then he walked me back to my room.”
“That was it?” Marcy sounded disappointed.
I was amused. What did she expect? Fireworks? Great instant passion? They immediately fall deep in love, hop directly into bed?
“He was married.” Anna went on. “I was married. I had children.”
Marcy leaned back, waited.
“The last day of the conference,” Anna continued, “when we said goodbye. We kissed a long time and I said, ‘When you get home if you want to forget all this ever happened, I’ll understand.’ ‘No, no,’ he said, and he got a divorce. I must say his wife was very decent about it all.”
“You’d been married how long?” I tried to put all this into some sort of frame.
“Fifteen years,” Anna said. “My daughters were ten and twelve.”
“How did they feel about John?” I asked.
“They adored him. They called him the adorable encyclopedia.” She laughed with an impish sort of grin. Even at ninety, she had charm, polish. “I broke up a marriage.” She looked at her lap. I noticed how thick her blue eye shadow had been applied. Not only on her eyelids, but wide above them, almost to her eyebrows. “I was the . . .“
“Other woman,” I finished for her.
She put down her fork. “Let me show you around the place.”
Marcy and I followed as Anna, taking my arm, showed us the rotunda, the Morris wallpaper in the library, the bar with the liquor lockers which she thought was so funny. “This place was a joint effort of Methodist, Baptist and Episcopalian. I’m Episcopalian. We wanted liquor and of course the Methodist and Baptist were horrified. There was a big concern for awhile that the whole complex was going to fall through. So the lockers were a compromise.”
We took her back to her apartment and said goodbye.
On the way home, Marcy asks, “Do you think they had sex?”
“No.”
“Why not? The conference was three weeks. Breadloaf is two and a lot of sex goes on there.”
“It was the Fifties,” I say.
“And that makes a difference?”
“Yes. Sex in the Fifties was different.”
“How?”
How can I explain? “Remember how Anna said they kissed a LONG time. You had long kisses then. That was the passion. The pre-lude. You petted. You only went so far. As far as you could go with your clothes on.”
Marcy thinks this over.
“And her mother was with her,” I add. “Remember?”
Marcy concentrates on the road. Thinking. I can almost see the gears in her head going around. “You really don’t think they had sex?”
“Not then. Sorry, I’ll bet they didn’t. But god, wasn’t he good looking? All that dark curly hair. Those magnificent eyes.”
“And those pictures of her then. She was beautiful.”
We ride along in silence for awhile. I’m casting Anna’s whole story in an old movie. Black and white. Ingrid Bergman as Anna, blonde, the slight German accent. But who to play John X, the poet? I can’t cast him at all.
And of course I change the end.
I let him live.
Ruth Moose is the author of two short story collections, The Wreath Ribbon Quilt and Other Stories (St. Andrew’s Press, 1989) and Dreaming in Color (August House, 1989). Her stories have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, New Delta Review, South Carolina Review, and St. Anthony Messenger.