Couples (31 page)

“Angela! That’s sinful.”

“The big difference between Janet and me is, I repress and she tries to express. No?”

“Don’t ask
me
.”

“I’m sure you’ve had an affair with her and know just what I mean. Tell me about us, Piet.”

“You are a scandalous wife. I have never slept with Janet.”

“In a way, I want you to. In a Lesbian way. I felt very drawn, lying beside her on the beach. I think I must be Sapphic. I’d love to have a girls’ school, where we’d all wear chitons and play field hockey and sit around listening to poetry after warm baths.”

“If you have it all analyzed, you don’t need an analyst.”

“I don’t. I’m just guessing. He’d probably say the reverse was true. I can’t stand being touched by other women, for instance. Carol Constantine is always patting, and so does Bea. He might say I’m
too
heterosexual, for America the way it is now. Why did nobody marry me, for example, until you came along? I must have frightened them away.”

“Or your father frightened them away.”

“Do you want to know something else sick? Can you take it?”

“I’ll try.”

“I masturbate.”

“Sweetie. When?”

“More in the summer than in the winter. I wake up some mornings between four and five, when the birds are just beginning, or a trailer truck goes by on the road, and the sheets feel terribly sensitive on my skin, and I do it to myself.”

“That sounds pretty normal. Do you imagine anybody, any particular man?”

“Not very clearly. It’s mostly sensation. You’re the only
man I’ve ever known, so if I picture anyone it’s you. Now why don’t I wake the real you up?”

“You’re too considerate and shy.”

“Oh balls, Piet. Just balls.”

“You must stop talking to Freddy Thorne at parties. Your language is deteriorating.”

“
I’m
deteriorating. I don’t know how to act in this sexpot.”

“Sexpot?”

“Tarbox.”

“A sexpot is a person, not a place.”

“This one’s a place. Get me out or get me to a doctor.”

“Don’t be silly. The town is like every other town in the country. What you’re saying is you’re too good for this world. You’re too fucking good for any of us.”

“Don’t raise your voice. I hate that high voice you put on.”

“Of course you hate it, you’re supposed to hate it. You hate me, why not hate my voice?”

“I don’t hate you.”

“You must, because I’m beginning to hate you.”

“Ah. Now you’re saying it.”

“Well, I don’t quite mean it. You’re gorgeous. But you’re
so
self-centered. You have no idea what I’m like inside—”

“You mean you’re having an affair and you want me to guess the woman?”

“No I don’t mean that.”

“Foxy Whitman.”

“Don’t be grotesque. She’s pregnant and adores her icy husband and gives me a professional pain in the neck besides.”

“Of course—but why do I imagine it? I know it’s neurotic but every time you go down there and come back so affectionate to me and the children I think you’ve been sleeping with her. I watch her face and feel she has a secret. She’s so
tender and gay talking to me. She knows me all too well, they’ve only been in town since March.”

“She likes you. Maybe she’s a Lesbian too.”

“And it’s not just Foxy, it can be Janet or Marcia or even Georgene—I’m madly jealous. And the more jealous I get the less I can bring myself to make love to you. It’s sad. It’s miserable. Your telephone was busy for half an hour yesterday and I made myself a martini at eleven in the morning, imagining it was some woman.”

Her oval face yearned to cry some more but a sophisticated mechanism produced a half-laugh instead. Painfully Piet looked toward the floor, at her bare feet; neither of her little toes touched the linoleum. His dear poor blind betrayed Angel: by what right had he torn her from her omnipotent father? Each afternoon, an hour before quitting, old man Hamilton would walk down his lawn between his tabletop hedges, trailing pipesmoke, bringing a quart bottle of Heineken’s and Dixie cups for the workmen. Piet told her, “I don’t have Appleby’s money. I can’t afford it.”

She asked, “Isn’t there some way I can earn it? I could go into Boston this fall and get enough education credits to teach at least at a private school. Nancy will be away all day in the first grade; I must do something with my time. I can begin therapy, just twice a week, with the education courses. Oh, Piet, I’ll be a wonderful wife; I’ll know everything.”

It grieved Piet to see her beg, to see her plan ahead. She was considering herself as useful, still useful to him, exploring herself bravely toward a new exploitation when to him she was exhausted, a stale labyrinth whose turnings must be negotiated to reach fresh air and Foxy. Foxy asleep, moonlight lying light along her bones and diagonally stroking the down of her brow: at this vision his stomach slipped, his skin moistened,
numbness stung his fingertips and tongue. There was a silver path beneath the stars. Obliviously Angela barred his way. “No,” broke from him, panicked as he felt time sliding, houses, trees, lifetimes dumped like rubble, chances lost, nebulae turning, “no; sweetie, don’t you see what you’re doing to me? Let me
go
!”

At his high voice her face paled; its eager flush and the offer of its eyes withdrew. “Very well,” she said, “go. What are you going to, may I ask?”

Piet opened his mouth to tell her, but the ice shelling his secret held.

Angela diffidently turned her back. “Your routines,” she told him, “are getting less and less funny.”

“Daddy, wake up! Jackie Kenneny’s baby died because it was born too tiny!”

Nancy’s face was a moon risen on the horizon of his sleep. Her eyes were greatly clear, skyey in astonishment. Red tear ducts the tone of a chicken’s wattle. Slaughter. The premature Kennedy had been near death for two days. Nancy must have heard the news over television. “I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was thick, stuffed and cracked. August was Piet’s hay-fever season. Strange, he thought, how pain seeks that couple out. Not wealth nor beauty nor homage shelters them. Suffering tugging at a king’s robe. Our fragile gods.

“Daddy?”

“Mm.”

“Was the baby scared?” Fear, a scent penetrating as cat musk, radiated through the flannel perfume of her infant skin. He had been dreaming. His brother. His brother frozen under glass, a Pope’s remains, Piet apologetic about not having
stayed and helped him, been his partner, in the greenhouse.
Is het koud, Joop?
Frozen by overwork, gathering edelweiss. He turned and explained, to the others,
Mijn broeder is dood
. Yet also Foxy was in the dream, though not visibly; her presence, like the onflow of grace, like a buried stream singing from well to well, ran beneath the skin of dreaming as beneath reality, a living fragility continually threatened.

“The baby was too little to be scared. The baby never knew anything, Nancy. It had no mind yet.”

“He wants his mommy!” Nancy said, stamping her foot. “He cries and he cries and nobody listens. Everybody is
happy
he hurt hisself.”

“Nobody is happy,” Piet told her, returning his cheek to the pillow, knowing the child was right, nobody listens. The window against whose panes his upheld hand was silhouetted at night as a monstrous many-horned shape now, at dawn, gave on the plain sweet green of leaves, heart-shaped lilac and feathery, distant elm. Space, it seemed, redeems. Piet reached outwards and pulled Nancy toward him, into the mediating warmth that remained of his sleep. She fought his embrace, feeling its attempt to dissolve and smother the problem. Her wide face studied him angrily, cheated. Freckles small as fly-specks had come to her nose this summer, though they had thought she had inherited her mother’s oily brunette skin. Angela’s serene form pricked by his own uneasy nature. Flecks of lead in the condensed blue smoke of her irises. Sea creatures. Vague light becomes form becomes thought becomes soul and dies. The retina retains nothing. Piet asked, “Where’s Mommy?”

“Up. Get up, Daddy.”

“Go talk to Mommy about the Kennedy baby while Daddy gets dressed.” Last night he had attempted to make love and
though Angela had refused him he had slept nude. He did not wish his body to frighten the child. “Go downstairs,” he said. “Daddy feels funny.”

“Are you drunk?” She had learned the word and felt threatened by it; once Frank Appleby had crawled into her playpen and shattered a plastic floating duck, and the next day they had explained to her that he had been drunk.

“No. I
was
drunk, and now I wish I hadn’t been. My head hurts. I feel sad about the Kennedy baby.”

“Mommy said I would never die until I was an old old lady wearing earrings.”

“That’s absolutely right.”

But—
It was unspoken. Impatiently needing to urinate, he threw back the covers; his body filled her eyes and they overflowed into tears. He said, “But the little baby was even smaller than you?”

She nodded helplessly.

Piet kneeled and hugged her and recognized in his arms the mute tepid timbre he had often struck from Angela’s larger form. He said urgently, “But the baby came out too soon, it was a mistake, God never meant it to live, like a big strong chubby girl like you.” His nakedness in air, the stir of her skin in his arms, was gently leading his penis to lift. A cleft or shaft of sun.

Nancy pulled from his arms and shouted from the head of the stairs, “God should have teached the baby not to come out!”

Angela called, “Piet, are you up?”

“Be down in three minutes,” he answered. He half dressed and shaved and finished dressing. Today was to be a deskwork day. From the bedroom windows his square lawn looked parched. A droughty summer. Prevailing winds shifting. Ice-caps
melting. The great forests thinning. On Indian Hill clouds of dust coated the constructions, seeped into the unfinished frames cluttered by leaning plywood and loose electric cable. Here and there in the woods a starved maple turning early. The crickets louder at night. But from Foxy Whitman’s windows the marshes, needing no rain, sucking water from the mother sea, spread lush and young, green as spring and carved like plush by the salt creeks’ windings. Some afternoons, the tide high, the marshes were all but submerged, and Piet felt the earth reaching for the moon. Atlantis. Ararat.

The narrow farmhouse stairs descended through two landings and stopped a step from the front door, in a hall so cramped the opening door banged the newel post. On Piet’s right, in a living room which the crowding lilacs left rather dark and where like sentinels in castellar gloom the empty glasses used last night by the little-Smiths and Saltzes and Guerins were still posted on arms and edges of furniture, Nancy and Ruth were watching television. A British postal official, relayed by satellite, supercilious and blurred, was discussing yesterday’s seven-million-dollar robbery of a London mail train, the biggest haul in history—“not counting, of course, raids and confiscations which should properly be termed political acts, if you follow me. As far as we can determine, there was nothing political about these chaps.” Television brought them the outer world. The little screen’s icy brilliance implied a universe of profound cold beyond the warm encirclement of Tarbox, friends, and family. Mirrors established in New York and Los Angeles observed the uninhabitable surface between them and beamed reports that bathed the children’s faces in a poisonous, flickering blue. This poison was their national life. Not since Korea had Piet cared about news. News happened to other people.

On his left, in the already sun-flooded kitchen, Angela laid out breakfast plates on four rectangular mats. Dish, glass, spoon, knife. Her nipples darkly tapped her nightie from within. Her hair was down, swung in sun as she moved, blithe. She seemed to Piet to be growing ever more beautiful, to be receding from him into abstract realms of beauty.

He said to her, “Poor Nancy. She’s all shook up.”

Angela said, “She asked me if the Kennedy baby was up in Heaven with the hamster going round and round in the wheel. Honestly I wonder, Piet, if religion’s worth it, if it wouldn’t be healthier to tell them the truth, we go into the ground and don’t know anything and come back as grass.”

“And are eaten by cows. I don’t know why all you stoics think death is so damn healthy. Next thing you’ll get into a warm bath with your wrists slit to prove it.”

“Oh, you do like that idea.”

Nancy came into the kitchen sobbing. “Ruthie says—Ruthie says—”

Ruth followed, flouncing. “I said God is retarded.” She sneered at Nancy, “
Baaby
.”

“Ruth!” Angela said.

“Retarded?” Piet asked. It was an adjective her generation applied to everything uncooperative.
The retarded teacher kept us all after class. This retarded pen won’t write. Frankie is a retard
.

“Well He is,” Ruth said. “He lets little babies die and He makes cats eat birds and all that stuff. I don’t want to sing in the choir next fall.”

“I’m sure that’ll make God shape up,” Piet said.

“I don’t see why the child should be forced to sing in the choir every Sunday,” Angela told him, standing bent as Nancy cried into her lap. Her hair overhung the child. Mothering.
Seeking the smothering she had fled from in Piet. Loves her more than me. Each to each. Symbiosis.

“For the same fucking reason,” Piet told Angela, “that I must spend my life surrounded by complaining females.” He ate breakfast surrounded by wounded silence. He felt nevertheless he had done a good deed, had rescued Nancy from the grip of death. Better anger than fear. Better kill than be killed.

He drove to the office, rattling down Charity, parking on Hope. A space today, lately often not. Talk of the need for a stoplight at the corner where Divinity turned. Confusing to out-of-towners. Too many cars. Too many people. Homosexuality the answer? The pill. Gallagher was talking on his phone, Irish accent emergent. “We’ve got thirty-three rooms, Sister, and removing a lone partition would give us a grand refectory.” Piet heated water on their electric coil and made instant coffee. Maxwell. Faraday. He settled at his desk to concentrate on deskwork. Lumber $769.82, total, overdue, if has escaped your previous notice please remit, since a sound credit rating, etc. His nasal passages itched and his eyes watered. Another scratchy August day. Foxy far. Hours away. Her laughter, her fur.
To visit the little princess. Too pretty-pretty for you
. His own phone rang.