Couples (20 page)

The little-Smiths returned to Tarbox Thursday night. Harold was conscious of having broken the string of appointments with Janet and doubted, without conscious regret, that there would be any more. Her theory had been wrong and may have never been more than a pretext. Growing up with three sisters had left him with little reverence for female minds. He had seen his sisters turn from comfortably shouting slugging animals into deceptive creatures condemned to
assure their survival without overt aggression; their sensibilities were necessarily morbid. Janet was at best a poor reasoner and at worst a paranoid. About to go fat and lose her looks, stuck with a bilious and boring husband, she had turned desperately to a man in no way desperate. Brokers reaped in fair and foul weather, and Marcia had demonstrated a new versatility and violence in her love of him.

He did expect Janet to call him at his office Friday and, when no call came, was annoyed at the extent to which he permitted himself to listen for it. All day, as he rooted through the earthbound stack of waiting mail and obsolete stock fluctuations, a signal from outer space kept tickling his inner ear. He remembered her strange way of wearing cloth, so that it came loose from her body and fluttered in the mind’s eye. Perhaps they would see them this weekend. He hoped she wouldn’t attempt a scene. Her indignation was so—fluffy. His secretary asked him why he was smiling.

Saturday morning, Marcia drove up to the center of Tarbox to talk to Irene Saltz about the Fair Housing group; Marcia had agreed to be on the education committee, whose chief accomplishment so far had been to give the high-school library a subscription to
Ebony
. “It might take hours, you know how she talks. Can you feed yourself and the children if I don’t make it back by noon? There’s some pastrami in the freezer you can heat up. The directions are on the package. The important thing is to boil it with the cellophane
on
.”

They had been up drinking with the Thornes and the Hanemas the night before, and Harold was content to putter about gingerly, tucking away the props of high summer, folding the collapsed and torn plastic wading pool, coiling hose and detaching the sprinkler. Jonathan rummaged the football from a closet and he and Harold tossed it back and forth until
a playmate, pudgy Frankie Appleby, arrived, with his mother. Janet was wearing snug blue denim slacks, an orange-striped boating jersey, and an unbuttoned peach-colored cashmere sweater, hung on her shoulders like a cape. “Where’s Marcia?” she asked, when the boys were out of earshot on the lawn.

“In town conferring with Irene. Where’s Frank?”

“He told me he was getting a haircut. But he didn’t want to take Franklin because he might go to the drugstore and have to talk politics.” She snorted, a sardonic equine noise, and stamped her foot. She was caught beneath a bell of radiance; the mistless sharp light of September was spread around them for miles, to the rim of the marshes, to the bungalow-crowded peninsula of East Mather and the ghostly radar dish, cocked toward the north. Janet was hollow-eyed and pale and ripe with nervous agitation, a soft-skinned ripeness careless of itself.

Harold said, “You think he’s lying.”

“Of course he’s lying. Must we stand out here? The sun hurts.”

“I thought you were a sun lover.
Une amoureuse du soleil
.”

“Not today. I’m sick at what I have to do.”

“To whom?”

“To youm.”

Harold opened for her the door that entered from the lawn the lower level of the house, where the children slept and the laundry was done. The laundry room smelled of cement and soap and, this morning, sourly, of unwashed clothes heaped around the dryer. The gardening and carpentry tools and shelves of paint and grass seed and lime were ranged along the other wall, which reeked of gasoline from the power mower. Amid these fragrances Janet took a stance and said, “While
you were away in Maine my car broke down, the transmission, so I had to go shopping in Frank’s Corvair. I like the Lacetown IGA and on the way back that officious old Lacetown cop, the one with the gold teeth, stopped me for gliding through the stop sign, you know, just this side of the lace-making museum. What made me so mad, I was almost in Tarbox, where they never arrest you. Anyway, in looking through the glove compartment for the registration, underneath all the maps, I found this.” She brought from her purse a piece of smudged white paper folded quarto. Harold recognized the indigo rim of Marcia’s stationery. The notepaper had been given her as a wedding present, embossed with a monogram of her new initials, by a Southampton aunt, boxes of it; Marcia had laughed, thinking it hideously pretentious, the essence of everything she had married Harold to escape, and used it so seldom, once the thank-you notes were written, that after twelve years it was not used up. Indeed, he wondered if Janet had not somehow stolen a piece, it was so unlike Marcia to write on it. He reached and Janet held the folded paper back from him. “Are you sure you want to read it?”

“Of course.”

“It’s awfully conclusive.”

“Damn you, give it to me.”

She yielded it, saying, “You’ll hate it.”

The handwriting was Marcia’s.

Dear Frank, whom I want to call dearest but can’t—

Back from the beach, a quick note, for you to have while I’m in Maine. I drove home from our view of Nahant and took the children to the beach and as I lay there the sun baked a smell of you out
of my skin and I thought, That’s him. I smelled my palms and there you were again and I closed my eyes and pressed myself up against the sun while Irene and Bernadette chattered on and on and the children called from the ocean—there was extraordinary surf today. I feel today left you sad. I’m sorry the phone rang—like icy water being poured over us—and that I teased you to stay longer. I do tease. Forgive me, and believe that I cherish our times together however unsatisfactorily abbreviated, and that you must take me as you can, without worry or self-blame. Love satisfies not only technically. Think of me in Maine, wishing you beside me and happy even in this wish, my “wanton’s bird.”

In love and haste
,
M
.

The signature was hers, the angular “M” of three strokes emphatically overstruck; but the body of the letter was written with a flowing smoothness not quite familiar, as if she had been drunk or tranced—it had been years since he had examined her handwriting. He lifted his eyes from the paper, and Janet’s face held all the dismay he was still waiting to feel.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve often wondered what women think about while they’re sunbathing.”

“Oh Harold,” she cried, “if you could see your
face
,” and she was upon him, had rushed into his unprepared embrace so swiftly he had to pull Marcia’s letter free from being crumpled between them. The blue-bordered note fluttered to the cement floor. His senses were forced open, admitting the scouring odors of cement and
Tide;
along the far wall the sunburned lawn flooded the window with golden stitchwork, like a Wyeth. Janet’s chest and hips, pillows sodden with grief, pressed him against the enameled edge of the dryer; he was trapped at the confluence of cold tears and hot breath. He kissed her gaping
mouth, the rutted powder of her cheeks, the shying trembling bulges of her shut eyes. Her body his height, they dragged each other down, into a heap of unwashed clothes, fluffy ends of shirtsleeves and pajama pants, the hard floor underneath them like a dank bone. Sobbing, she pulled up her sweater and orange-striped jersey and, in a moment of angry straining, uncoupled her bra, so her blue-white breasts came tumbling of their own loose weight, too big to hold, tumbled like laundry from the uplifted basket of herself, nipples buttons, veins seaweed green. He went under. Her cold nails contemplated the tensed sides of his sucking mouth, and sometimes a finger curiously searched out his tongue. Harold opened his eyes to see that the great window giving on the lawn was solidly golden; no child’s watching shadow cleft it; voices glinted from a safe distance, the dock. His face was half-pillowed in dirty clothes smelling mildly of his family, of Jonathan and Julia and Henrietta and Marcia. He was lying on ghosts that had innocently sweated. Janet’s touch fumbled at his fly and he found the insect teeth of the zipper snug along her side.
Tszzzc:
he tugged and the small neat startled sound awoke them.

“No,” she said. “We can’t. Not here.”

“One more kiss,” he begged.

There was a wetness to her mouth, as her breasts overflowed his hands, whose horizon his tongue wished to swim to. She lifted away. “This is crazy.” She kneeled on the cement and harnessed her bosom in cups of black lace that reminded him of the doilies in his grandmother’s home in Tarrytown. It had been her side of the family that had known Teddy Roosevelt, who had taken Grandpa hunting. “The kids might barge in any second,” Janet said, pulling down her jersey. “Marcia might come back.”

“Not if she and Frank are copulating out by the dump.”

“You think they’d do it to
day
?”

“Why not?” Harold said. “Big reunion, she’s back from Maine with the horned monster.
Avec le coucou
. They’ve set us up for them to be gone for hours. Haircuts. Fair housing.”

She adjusted her peach sweater so it again hung like a cape. Standing, she brushed the smudges on the knees of her slacks, from having kneeled. He remained sprawled on the laundry, and she studied him as if he were an acquisition that looks different in the home from in the store. She asked, “You really never suspected her until just now?”

“No. I didn’t think she had the guts. When I married her she was a tight little mouse. My little girl is all growed up.”

“You’re not shocked?”

“I am desolated. But let’s talk about you.”

She adjusted her clothes with thoughtful firmness. “That was an instinctive thing. Don’t count on me for anything.”

“But I
do
. I adore you.
Ta poitrine, elle est magnifique
.”

As if the compliment had adhered, she removed a piece of lint from her jersey. “They’re pretty saggy now. You should have known me when I was nineteen.”

“They’re grand.
Please
come upstairs with me.” He felt it was correct, in asking her, to stand; and thus their moment of love was reduced to a flattened heap of laundry. Having surrendered all evidence, he was at her mercy.

Janet said, “It’s impossible. The children.” Lamely her hands sketched multiple considerations.

“Can’t we ever get together?”

“What about Marcia and Frank?”

“What about them? Are they hurting us? Can we give them, honestly, what they give each other?”

“Harold, I’m not that cool. I have a very jealous moralistic nature. I want them to be punished.”

“We’ll all be punished no matter how it goes. That’s a rule of life, people are punished. They’re punished for being good, they’re punished for being bad. A man in our office, been taking vitamin pills all his life, dropped dead in the elevator two weeks ago. He was surrounded by healthy drunks. People are even punished for doing nothing. Nuns get cancer of the uterus because they don’t screw. What are you doing to me? I thought you were offering me something.”

“I was, I did, but—”

“I accept.”

“I felt sorry for you, I don’t know what it was. Harold, it’s too corrupt. What do we do? Tell them and make a schedule of swap nights?”

“You
do
de-romanticize. Why tell them anything? Let’s get something to tell first. Let’s see each other and see how it goes. Aren’t you curious? You’ve
made
me want you, you know; it was you who chased me through all those hot Boston streets in your sexy summer dresses. Janet, don’t you want me at all for myself? Am I only a way of getting back at Frank?” He glided the back of his hand down the slope of her left breast, then of the right. From the change in the set of her face he saw that this was the way. Touch her, keep touching her. Her breasts are saggy and want to be touched. Don’t give her time to doubt, she hates what she knows and doesn’t want the time. Don’t pause.

She spoke slowly, testing the roof of her mouth with the tip of her tongue and fingering each button on the way down his shirt. “Frank,” she told him, “is going to New York the first part of next week.”

“
Quelle coïncidence!
Also next week Marcia was talking about going to Symphony Tuesday night and doing Junior League good deeds Wednesday morning and maybe spending the
night in town. I think she should be encouraged to, don’t you? Poor saint, that long hour in and out.”

Janet gazed over his shoulder; her mouth, whose long out-turned upper lip was such a piquant mismatch with her brief plump lower, tightened sadly. “Has it really come to that? They spend whole nights together?”

“Don’t bridle,” he said, telling himself,
Don’t pause
. “It’s a luxury, to fall asleep beside the beloved.
Un luxe
. Don’t begrudge them.” He continued stroking.

“You know,” Janet said, “I
like
Marcia. She’s always cheerful, always has something to say; she’s often got me out of the dumps. What I think I must mind is not Frank so much—we haven’t been that great in bed for years, poor guy, let him run—as that
she
would do this to me.”

“Did you hear what I said about Tuesday night?”

“I heard.”

“Which of us should get the babysitter?”

So that fall Harold and Janet slept together without Frank and Marcia’s knowing. Harold at first found his mistress to be slow; his climax, unmanageably urged by the visual wealth of her, was always premature. Not until their sixth time together, an hour stolen in the Applebys’ guest room, beneath a shelf of Chinese-temple paraphernalia and scrolls inherited from Frank’s father, did Janet come, pulling in her momentous turning Harold virtually loose from his roots, so that he laughed at the end in relief at having survived, having felt himself to be, for a perilous instant, nothing but a single thunderous heartbeat lost in her. He loved looking at her, her nude unity of so many shades of cream and pink and lilac, the soles of her feet yellow and her veins seaweed-green and her belly alabaster. He found an unexpected modesty and elusiveness in her, which nourished his affection, for he enjoyed the
role of teacher, of connoisseur. It pleased him to sit beside her and study her body until, weary of cringing, she accepted his gaze serenely as an artist’s model. He was instructing her, he felt, in her beauty, which she had grown to disparage, though her bluntness and forwardness had clearly once assumed it, her beauty of fifteen years ago, when she had been the age of his St. Louis mulatto. Harold believed that beauty was what happened between people, was in a sense the trace of what had happened, so he in truth found her, though minutely creased and puckered and sagging, more beautiful than the unused girl whose ruins she thought of herself as inhabiting. Such generosity of perception returned upon himself; as he lay with Janet, lost in praise, Harold felt as if a glowing tumor of eternal life were consuming the cells of his mortality.