Free A Big Storm Knocked It Over by Laurie Colwin Page B

between office and home was some tiny slice called “Private Life.” Here she absentmindedly filed Sven and his lunchtime trysts. She tried not to think about it, but he had some weird hold on her.
    Weren’t there, in this world, those who were immune to all this? Like Erna, who behaved like a grown-up, created a family,and never looked back, or sideways, and who did not live with the occasional fear that a swine like Sven might lean over again and kiss her neck, making her feel that an electric current had been run through her. Sven, she knew, was lying in wait. He would lie in wait for a long time, because she had not been conquered. She remembered her first months at the office—a youngish woman between attachments. Sven liked to take her out to lunch and make her drink a sip or two of his gin and tonic. He liked to say things like: “I wonder what it will be like when we wake up together.”
    His caressing voice seemed to curl up in her ear. A little voice inside her said, “How corny,” and another voice, a more physical voice, so to speak, realized how effective he was. The hair on the back of her neck prickled.
    Jane Louise had known exactly what to retort. She had said: “You mean, when we fall asleep in the van coming back from sales conference?”
    By that time in her life, lots of lyrical, ridiculous, and persuasive things had been said to her by men. She was neither in the bloom of youth nor the exhaustion of age. She did not feel she was the classic lust-inducing type, but rather a more specific attraction. But Sven would wear her down, like water over rock, until she finally gave in. If she ever slept with him, he would behave the next day as if nothing had happened and she had somehow made the whole thing up.
    Although Jane Louise had never thought of herself as boy crazy, she was certainly someone who had had her share of romance. She had experienced every possible kind: the kind in which you love them better than they love you; in which they love you better than you love them; in which you are madly in love and can’t stand to be in the same room with them; in which theyadore you but can’t seem to organize themselves to be with you. Then she met Teddy, the light at the end of the tunnel.
    Although he was frequently silent, prone to a kind of alienating depression, and it was sometimes very hard to have a conversation with him, in many ways Teddy was heaven. He was unencumbered by certain doubts. He and Jane Louise had fallen in love, and therefore it made sense to him that they should live together and plan to get married without any particular distress in the way. Although his parents’ marriage had been a disaster, Teddy did not want to see that sort of gloom in his future. He pointed himself in the direction of a union. Jane Louise, who had always been marriage-shy, slipped right in with him. In some ways Teddy was not like a modern person. He did not have spiritual difficulties. He tended to see a thing clearly, and life in some ways was very clear to him. He had the vision of a sensible grown-up. He certainly did not have impure thoughts about decadent types he worked with, but then plant chemists are not usually surrounded by louche types.
    A husband was someone you could hide behind. You could cover your head with a marriage the way Arab women covered themselves with a veil. You could stamp out unnecessary or wayward emotions. You could dispel untoward thoughts. You could pretend that all of your life was all of a piece and it was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. You didn’t have to admit to a thing. Like Dita.
    Dita was amazing to watch in this way. It was known to Jane Louise that Dita had had that brief, quite intense sex wrangle with that silky, seal-like Joe Ching. In fact, Jane Louise was the only person in the whole world who knew about this fling. Dita did not tell her oldest and best friend from boarding school, Peachy Hopkins, because