Couples (29 page)

In five July days, a roofer’s crew stripped the lumpy leaky accumulation of shingles and hammered down a flat snug roof.

The old sagging porch was torn away. Light flooded the living room, whose walls, as the hot-air ducts from the new furnace were installed, were covered with wire lath and plastered by an old Czech from Lacetown, with his crippled nephew: the last plasterers south of Mather. These major renovations, substantially completed by August, cost Ken Whitman eleven thousand dollars, of which only twenty-eight hundred came to Piet’s firm, and only a few hundred adhered as profit. The rest went for material, for rough labor, for the skilled labor of Adams and Comeau, to the heating contractor, the concrete supplier, the plumbing subcontractor. Kitchen improvement—new appliances, additional plumbing, cabinets, linoleum—came to another three thousand, and Piet, pitying Whitman (who never asked for pity, who comprehended the necessities and expenses with a series of remote nods, as the house at each transformation became less his and more Foxy’s), held his own charges close to cost. As everyone, especially Gallagher, had foreseen, the job was a loser.

But it gave Piet pleasure to see Foxy, pregnant, reading a letter beside a wall of virgin plaster, her shadow subtly golden. And he wanted her to be pleased by his work. Each change he wrought established more firmly an essential propriety. At night, and in the long daytime hours when he was not yet with her, he envisioned her as protected and claimed by sentinels he had posted: steel columns standing slim and strong in the basement, plaster surfaces of a staring blankness, alert doors cleverly planed to hang lightly in old frames slumped from plumb, a resecured skylight, now of double thickness and freshly flashed, above her sleeping head. He saw her as always sleeping when he was not there, her long body latent, ripening in unconsciousness. Sometimes, when he came in
midafternoon, she would be having a nap. The sea sparkled dark in the twisting channels. Lacetown lighthouse trembled in the distance and heat. High summer’s hay smell lay thick upon the slope, full of goldenrod and field mice, down to the marsh. Beside the doorway there were lilac stumps. No workmen’s cars were parked in the driveway, only her secondhand Plymouth station wagon, hymnal blue.

He lifted the aluminum gate latch. He examined the unfinished framing of the annex, noted two misnailed and split pieces of cross-bridging between joists, walked around the front of the house where the porch had been and an unconcluded rubble of mud and hardened concrete splotches and dusty hundredweight paper bags and scraps of polyethylene film and insulation wool now was, and, continuing, tapped on the side door, a door that seemed to press outward with the silence it contained. Within, something made the house slightly tremble. It was Cotton, the Whitmans’ heavy-footed caramel tom. Piet entered, and the cat, bowing and stretching and purring in anticipation of being picked up, greeted him amid the holy odor of shavings.

Foxy was above him. With a stealth meant to wake her slowly, Piet moved through the unfinished rooms, testing joints with his pocket knife, opening and shutting cabinet doors that closed with a delicate magnetic suck. Above him, a footstep heavier than a cat’s sounded. Furiously Piet focused on the details of the copper plumbing installed beneath the old slate sink, suspended in mid-connection, where the plumbers had left it, open like a cry. She was beside him, wearing a loosely tied bathrobe over a slip, her face blurred by sleep, her blond hair moist on the pillowed side of her head.
They said they’d be back
.

I was trying to figure out why they had quit
.

They explained it to me. Something about a male threader and a coupling
.

Plumbers are the banes of this business. Plumbers and masons
.

They’re a vanishing breed?

Even vanishing they do slowly. You and Ken must be tired to death of living in the middle of a mess
.

Oh, Ken’s never here in the day and it’s fun for me, to have men bringing me presents all day long. Adams and Comeau and I sit around the coffee table talking about the good old days in Tarbox
.

What good old days?

Apparently it’s always been a salty town. Look, would you like something to drink? I’ve woken up with a terrible thirst, I could make lemonade. That only needs cold water
.

I ought to get back to the office and give the plumbers a blast
.

They promised they’d be back so I’d have hot water. Do you mind if it’s pink?

Pink lemonade? I prefer it. My mother used to make it. With strawberries
.

In the good old days, Adams and Comeau tell me, the trolley car ran along Divinity Street and all the drunks would pile out because this was the only un-dry town between Boston and Plymouth. Even in the middle of a blizzard this would happen
.

Funny about the trolley cars. How they came and went
.

They used to make me sick. That awful smell, and the motorman’s cigars
.

Speaking of messes, what about where your porch was? Do you see that as lawn, or a patio, or what?

I’d love a grape arbor. Why is that funny?

You’d lose all the light you’ve gained. You’d lose your view from those windows
.

The view bores me. The view is Ken’s thing. He’s always looking outward. Let me tell you about grape arbors
.

Tell me
.

When I was growing up one summer, the summer before Pearl Harbor, my parents wanted to get out of Bethesda and for a month we rented a brick house in Virginia with an enormous grape arbor over bricks where the ants made little hills. I must have been, what? ’41, seven. Forgive me, I’m not usually so talkative
.

I know
.

I remember the little offshoots of the vines had letters in them, formed letters, you know
. She made an A with her fingers.
I tried to make a complete collection. From A to Z
.

How far did you get?

I think to D. I never could find a perfect E. You’d think in all those vines there would have been one
.

You should have skipped to F
.

I was superstitious and I thought I couldn’t. I inhibited myself all the time
.

Piet grimaced and considered. The lemonade needed sugar.
It seems to be going out. Inhibition. In a way, I miss it
.

What a sad thing to say. Why? I don’t miss it at all. Ever since I got pregnant I’ve become a real slob. Look at me, in a bathrobe. I love it
. Her lips, in her clear pink complexion, looked whitish, as if rubbed with a chapstick.
Shall I tell you a secret?

Better not. Tell me, what shade of white do you want your living-room woodwork? Flat white, glossy, ivory, or eggshell?

My secret is really so innocent. For years I wanted to be pregnant, but also I was afraid of it. Not just losing my figure, which was too skinny to care about anyway, but my body being somehow an embarrassment to other people. For months I didn’t tell anybody except Bea Guerin
.

Who told everybody else
.

Yes, and I’m glad. Because it turns out not to matter. People just don’t care. I was so conceited to think that people would care. In fact they like you a little better if you look beat-up. If you look used
.

You don’t look very used to me
.

Or you to me
.

Do men get used? They just use
.

Oh, you’re so wrong. We use you all the time. It’s all we know how to do. But your saying that fits with your missing inhibition. You’re very Puritan. You’re quite hard on yourself. At first I thought you fell down stairs and did acrobatics to show off. But really you do it to hurt yourself. In the hope that you will. Now why are you laughing?

Because you’re so clever
.

I’m not. Tell me about your childhood. Mine was dreary. My parents finally got a divorce. I was amazed
.

We had a greenhouse. My parents had Dutch accents I’ve worked quite hard not to inherit. They were both killed years ago in an automobile accident
.

Yes, of course. Freddy Thorne calls you our orphan
.

How much do you see of Freddy Thorne?

No more than I must. He comes up to me at parties
.

He comes up to everybody at parties
.

I know that. You don’t have to tell me
.

Sorry. I don’t mean to tell you anything. I’m sure you know quite enough. I just want to get this job done for you so you and your baby can be comfortable this winter
.

Her lips, stunned a moment, froze, bloodless, measuring a space of air like calipers. She said,
It’s not even July
.

Time flies
, he said. It was not even July, and he had never touched her, except in the conventions of greeting and while dancing. In dancing, though at least his height, she had proved submissive to his lead, her arm weightless on his back, her hard belly softly bumping. He felt her now expectant, sitting composed in a careless bathrobe on a kitchen chair, aggressive even, unattractive, so full of the gassy waitingness and pallor of pregnancy.

He said casually,
Good lemonade
, in the same moment as she sharply asked,
Why do you go to church?

Well, why do you?

I asked first
.

The usual reasons. I’m a coward. I’m a conservative. Republican, religious. My parents’ ghosts are there, and my older girl sings in the choir. She’s so brave
.

I’m sorry you’re a Republican. My parents worshipped Roosevelt
.

Mine were offended because he was Dutch, they didn’t think the Dutch had any business trying to run the country. I think they thought power was sin. I don’t have any serious opinions. No, I do have one. I think America now is like an unloved child smothered in candy. Like a middle-aged wife whose husband brings home a present after every trip because he’s been unfaithful to her. When they were newly married he never had to give presents
.

Who is this husband?

God. Obviously. God doesn’t love us any more. He loves Russia. He loves Uganda. We’re fat and full of pimples and always whining for more candy. We’ve fallen from grace
.

You think a lot about love, don’t you?

More than other people?

I think so
.

Actually, I never think about love. I’ve left that to your friend Freddy Thorne
.

Would you like to kiss me?

Very much, yes
.

Why don’t you?

It doesn’t seem right. I don’t have the nerve. You’re carrying another man’s child
.

Foxy impatiently stood, exclaiming,
Ken’s frightened of my baby. I frighten him. I frighten you
. Piet had risen from his chair and she stood beside him, asking in a voice as small as the
distance between them,
Aren’t we in our house? Aren’t you building this house for me?

Before kissing her, yet after all alternatives had been closed to him, Piet saw her face to be perfectly steady and clean of feeling, like a candleflame motionless in a dying of wind, or a road straight without strategies, like the roads of his native state, or the canals of Holland, and his hands on her body beneath the loose robe found this same quality, a texture almost wooden yet alive and already his; so quickly familiar did her body feel that there was no question, no necessity, of his taking her that afternoon—as a husband and wife, embracing in the kitchen, will back off because they will soon have an entire night, when the children are asleep, and no mailman can knock.

Outdoors again, amid the tracked clay, the splinters, the stacked bundles of raw shingles, the lilac stumps, Piet remembered how her hair, made more golden by the Tarbox sun, had been matted, a few damp strands, to her temple. She had averted her blushing face from his kiss as if to breathe, exhaling a sigh and gazing past his shoulder at a far corner of the unfinished room. Her lips, visually thin, had felt wide and warm and slippery; the memory, outdoors, as if chemically transformed by contact with oxygen, drugged Piet with a penetrating dullness.

His life with Angela suffered under a languor, a numbness that Georgene had never imposed. His blood brooded on Foxy; he dwelled endlessly upon the bits of her revealed to him—her delicate pubic fleece, her high-pitched coital cries, the prolonged and tender and unhoped-for meditations of her mouth upon his phallus. He became an obsessed inward housekeeper, a secret gardener.

I didn’t know you’d be blond here too
.

What would I be? You’re red
.

But you’re so delicate. Transparent. Like the fuzz on a rose
.

She laughed.
Well I’ve learned to live with it, and so must you
.

He lived dimly, groping, between those brilliant glimpses when they quickly slipped each other from their clothes and she lay down beside him, her stretched belly shining, and like a lens he opened, and like a blinded skier lost himself on the slopes of her presence. July was her fifth month; her condition forced upon their intercourse homely accommodations. Since bending was awkward, she would slide down in the bed to kiss him.
Do you really like that?

Love it
.

Is there a taste?

A good taste. Salty and strong. A bit of something bitter, like lemon
.

I’m afraid of abusing you
.

Don’t be. Do
.

She never came. However gladly she greeted him, and with however much skill he turned her body on the lathe of the light, shaping her with his hands and tongue, finally they skidded separate ways.
Come in me
.