A Place Called Canterbury by Dudley Clendinen

Author:Dudley Clendinen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2008-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sex and Satisfaction

OCTOBER 2000

Sexy, irreverent, liberal spirit that she was, Martha Sweet was fascinated by the new couplings of Louise and Bob, Lucile and Louis. And glad. In a building stuffed with so many traditional WASPs and southern Christian Republicans, the arrival of Bob Nelson was a plus for her side.

“I like him,” she said, curled up in a contented ball in a corner of her oversize couch, smiling through the smoke from her cigarette. “He’s one of the few Democrats in the joint. There are not many of us, you know. We mostly have to huddle together for warmth.”

“How many of us do you think there are?” Bob had asked her, she said, when the two first realized they shared the same politics.

“Oh, out of a hundred fifty people in the building, I think maybe fifteen or twenty,” Martha told him.

“Well,” he said with a twinkle, “that makes us intellectually equal.”

“I knew I was going to like you!” Martha roared.

She also felt a personal stake in the choices the two couples had made. “I’ve been married three times and engaged about five,” she reminded me. But it had taken finding Judge Charles Sweet, the former marine and Harvard Law alumnus, to make her believe in the possibility of happiness. After meeting and falling in love with him, waiting years for him to be divorced and free, and then marrying him and feeling absolutely right about it for thirty-three years, Martha had become convinced that new love was possible for almost anyone.

Anyone but her. She had had hers. For Martha, the day she met Charles was the difference between B.C. and A.C. “Everything I did before I met him was wrong,” she said. “I didn’t know men like him existed.”

She had fallen into such a slough of despair after his death that one day, the thin, intense Dr. Mauricio Rubio appeared at Martha’s door: It was his nature to comfort and counsel. When he had first retired— before the collective idleness of life at Canterbury drove him back into practice—Mauricio had offered to treat residents who were troubled without charge, an offer so generous that Mrs. Vinas had given him a vacant studio apartment on the second floor to use as an office.

“Mauricio, I’m OK,” Martha said with a wan smile, trying to reassure him as they sat in her apartment. “I just had a little bad patch because I made a stupid mistake. I read his love letters. And that was a stupid thing to do.” Her face crumpled. She looked as if she were about to fall apart, just thinking of them.

Mauricio smiled and shook his head, as if that were not the least bit stupid. Then he gave her a serious look. “Get them out and read them again,” he ordered. “Just keep reading them. And talk about it—talk to people about it and you’ll get over it a lot faster than if you keep it in.”

Martha took his advice, and kept on talking. But something different happened.

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