Couples (33 page)

Oh Piet. Take these awful Paisley things off. I want to kiss you
.

As you like
.

Leonine he would lie back. Eyelids lowered, her dusty-rose cheek dented by the forcing apart of her jaws, her sleeping face would eclipse that gnarled choked part of him a Calvinist whisper by his cradle had taught him to consider vile. Touch of teeth like glints of light. Her fluttered tongue and lips’ encirclement. Her hair spun air between his lifted thighs, nipples and fingernails, muddled echoes of blood. He would seek the light with one thrust and she would gag; penitent he would beg
Come up
and her tranced drained face swim to his and her cold limp lips as he kissed them wear a moony melted stale smell whose vileness she had taken into herself. All innocent they would lock loins, her belly gleaming great upon his, and though short of breath and self-forsaken she would not quite come; this had happened and would happen again that summer of the solar eclipse.

Three weeks ago, it had been ninety per cent at their latitude. An invisible eater moved through the sun’s disc amid a struggle of witnessing clouds. The dapples of light beneath the elm became crescent-shaped; the birds sang as in the evening. Seen through smoked glass the sun was a shaving, a sideways eyebrow, a kindergarten boat riding a tumult of contorted cumulus. The false dusk reversed; the horns of the crescents beneath the trees pointed in the opposite direction; the birds sang to greet the day. Not a month before, he had first slept with Foxy.

Only one other time had been so ominous: the Wednesday in October of 1962 when Kennedy had faced Khrushchev over Cuba. Piet had had a golf date with Roger Guerin. They agreed not to cancel. “As good a way to go as any,” Roger had said over the phone. Stern occasions suited him. As Piet
drove north to the course, the Bay View, he heard on the radio that the first Russian ship was approaching the blockade. They teed off into an utterly clear afternoon and between shots glanced at the sky for the Russian bombers. Chicago and Detroit would go first and probably there would be shouts from the clubhouse when the bulletins began coming in. There was almost nobody else on the course. It felt like the great rolling green deck of a ship, sunshine glinting on the turning foliage. As Americans they had enjoyed their nation’s luxurious ride and now they shared the privilege of going down with her. Roger, with his tight angry swing, concentrating with knit brows on every shot, finished the day under ninety. Piet had played less well. He had been too happy. He played best, swung easiest, with a hangover or a cold. He had been distracted by the heavensent glisten of things—of fairway grass and fallen leaves and leaning flags—seen against the onyx immanence of death, against the vivid transparence of the sky in which planes might materialize. Swinging, he gave thanks that, a month earlier, he had ceased to be faithful to Angela and had slept with Georgene. It had been a going from indoors to outdoors; they met at beaches, on porches, beneath translucent trees. Happy remembering her, picturing her straight limbs, Piet sprayed shots, three-putted, played each hole on the edge of an imaginary cliff. Driving home, he heard on the car radio that the Russians had submitted to inspection and been allowed to pass. He had felt dismay, knowing that they must go on, all of them, Georgene and Angela and Freddy and himself, toward an untangling less involuntary and fateful. He had been fresh in love then.

Leon said: “That sun is brutal. I like winter myself. My wife and I thought we’d try skiing this year.”

Noon passed, and one. The connective skin between thumb and palm, where the hammer rubbed, smarted as if to blister. Piet left Leon and drove into town, through town, on down the beach road. Dusty flowers, chicory and goldenrod, a stand of late daisies, flickered at the roadside, but he was in too much of a hurry to stop.
I wanted to bring you a flower but it seemed too urgent so I just brought you myself
.

Of course. What a nice present
.

Her house was empty. No Plymouth station wagon, no workman’s truck, was in the driveway. The door was unlocked. The hall rug awry. Cotton slept in the blue sling chair. The work was nearly done, the plastering completed even to the sweeping up. A round thermostat and square light switch on the smooth wall side by side. Rough edges. Books of wallpaper samples lay face up on the sanded and sealed floor. A folder of paint shades was propped against a pine baseboard. In the kitchen all that was needed was white paint and for the dishwasher on order to arrive. Sawdust and earth smells still lived in the house. Salt air would wipe them away. She had promised to invite Piet and Angela down when the house was finished. The wallpaper books were open to samples that were not Angela’s taste. Big pastel splashes. Vulgar passion.

Where was she? She never shopped at this hour, her nap hour. Had he only dreamed of possessing her? The tide was low and the channels seen from the kitchen windows were ribbons glittering deep between banks of velvet clay. Three red deer were bounding across the dry marsh to the uninhabited shrub island. The days to hunting season were finite. The crystalline sky showed streaks of cirrus wispy at one end, like the marks of skates braking. Miscarriage. Doctors, workmen returning. Without her here he felt the house
hostile, the walls of their own will rejecting him. Too soon, too soon. He became anxious to leave and, driving back toward town, turned on an impulse up the Thornes’ long driveway.

The Saltzes and the Constantines, maliciously called the Saltines by the other couples, had jointly bought a boat, the Applebys’ catboat, with a six-horsepower motor, and after a Saturday or Sunday of sailing would drink beer and California sauterne in their damp bathing suits and have other couples over. The Sunday night before Labor Day a crowd collected in the Constantines’ messy Victorian manse. The couples were excited and wearied by tennis; this was the weekend of the North Mather Court Club Open Tournament. Annually the North Mather men, rangy automobile salesmen and insurance claims agents who exerted themselves all winter long on two domed courts grassed with plastic fiber, easily eliminated even the best of the Tarbox men, such as Matt Gallagher; but, contrariwise, the North Mather wives wilted under the assault of their Tarbox counterparts. Invariably Georgene and Angela, Terry and Bernadette dominated the female finals, and for weeks before Labor Day their telephones jangled as the men of North Mather, centaurs in search of Amazons, beseeched the fabulous Tarbox women to be their partners in mixed doubles.

None of the Saltines played. A delicate social line had early hardened and not been crossed. Instead, today they had taken Freddy Thorne, who played terribly, out into the Bay for skin diving. It amused him to keep his wetsuit on. His appearance in the tight shiny skin of black rubber was disturbingly androgynous: he was revealed to have hips soft as a
woman’s and with the obscene delicacy of a hydra’s predatory petals his long hands flitted bare from his sleeves’ flexible carapace. This curvaceous rubber man had arisen from another element. Like a giant monocle his Cyclopean snorkeling mask jutted from his naked skull, and his spatulate foot flippers flopped grotesquely on the Constantines’ threadbare Oriental rugs. When he sat in a doilied armchair and, twiddling a cigarette, jauntily crossed his legs, the effect was so outrageous and droll, monstrous and regal that even Piet Hanema laughed, feeling in Freddy’s act life’s bad dreams subdued.

“Read us your play,” Carol Constantine begged him. She wore a man’s shirt over an orange bikini. Something had nerved her up tonight; a week ago, she had dyed her hair orange. “Let’s all take parts.”

All summer it had been rumored that Freddy was writing a pornographic play. Now he pretended not to understand. “What play?” he asked. Beneath the misted snorkel mask he missed his customary spectacles. His eyes were blind and furry; his lipless mouth bent in upon itself in a pleased yet baffled way.

“Freddy, I’ve
seen
it,” Janet Appleby said. “I’ve seen the cast of characters.”

With the dignity of a senile monarch Freddy slowly stared toward her. “Who are you? Oh, I know. You’re Jan-Jan Applesauce. I didn’t recognize you out of context. Where are your little friends?”

“They’re in Maine, thank God.”

“Don’t be your usual shitty self, Freddy,” Carol said, sitting on the arm of the chair and draping her gaunt arms around his rubber shoulders. The action tugged open her shirt. Piet, sitting cross-legged on the floor, saw her navel: a thick-lidded
eye. Carol caressed Freddy’s air hose, hung loose around his neck. “We want to do your play,” she insisted.

“We can make a movie of it,” Eddie Constantine said. He flew in spells; he had been home three days. His growth of beard suggested a commando, cruel and sleepless. He held a beer can in each hand. Seeing his wife draped across Freddy, he had forgotten who he was fetching them for, his vacant eyes the tone of the same aluminum. Abruptly, as if tossing a grenade, he handed a can to Ben Saltz, who sat in the corner.

“I want to be the one who answers the door,” Carol said. “Don’t all dirty movies begin with a woman answering the door?”

Ben sat staring, his dark eyes moist with disquiet. He had recently shaved, and looked enfeebled, slack-chinned, mockingly costumed in sailing clothes—a boat-neck jersey, a windbreaker, a white officer’s cap, and suntans cut down to make shorts, fringed with loose threads. Ben’s calves were heavily, mournfully hairy. Piet glimpsed himself in that old-fashioned male shagginess but his own body hair was reddish, lighter, gayer, springy. Ben’s lank hairs ran together to make black seams, like sores downrunning into the tops of his comically new topsiders, cup-soled, spandy-bright. Except for his sunburned nose, Ben’s skin was pasty and nauseated. He had pockmarks. His wounded love of Carol weighed on the air of the room and gave the couples an agitated importance, like children in safe from a thunderstorm.

“What’s a dirty movie?” Freddy asked, blinking, pretending to be confused.

“Tom
Jones
,” Terry Gallagher said.

Angela rose up unexpectedly and said, “Come on Carol, let’s undress him. I know he has the play in his pocket.”

“You think he takes it underwater with him?” Piet asked
mildly, exchanging with Foxy a quizzical look over Angela’s uncharacteristic display of flirtatious energy. They had become, these two, the parents of their spouses, whose faults they forgave and whose helplessness they cherished from the omniscient height of their adultery.

Foxy had come to the party without Ken, but with Terry Gallagher. Ken and Matt, having been easily beaten in North Mather, had played consolation singles together all afternoon on the Ongs’ court. The two men, uncomfortable among the couples, were comfortable with each other. Foxy and Terry shared tallness and an elusive quality of reluctance, of faintly forbidding enchantment, reflected, perhaps, from their similar husbands. But Foxy was Snow White and Terry Rose Red—something Celtic strummed her full lips, her musical hands, the big muscles knitting her hips to her thighs. She stood tall and joined in the rape, asking Janet, “Where are his pants? You told me he always carries it in his pants.”

“Upstairs,” Carol said brokenly, wrestling with Freddy’s flailing arms, struggling to undo his jacket’s rusty snaps. “In Kevin’s room. Don’t wake him up.”

Janet, who had been in therapy two months now, watched the struggle and pronounced, “This is childish.”

Angela tried to pin Freddy’s ankles as he slid from the chair. One of his flippers kicked over a tabouret holding a crammed ashtray and a small vase of asters. Angela brushed up the ashes and butts with two copies of
Art News
, Eddie carefully poured beer over Freddy’s head, and Ben Saltz sat dazed by the sight of Carol, her hair a color no hair in nature ever was, writhing nearly nude in the man’s black embrace. The rubber of his suit squeaked as her bare skin slid across his lap. Her shirt had ridden up to her armpits; her orange top twisted, and a slim breast flipped free. Crouching on the carpet, Carol quickly
readjusted herself, but kneeled a while panting, daring to look nowhere. All these people had seen her nipple. It had been orangish.

In the front parlor, reached through a doorway hung with a beaded curtain, Irene Saltz’s voice was saying, “I can’t believe you know what you’re saying. Frank, I
know
you, and I
know
that you’re a human being.” She was drunk.

His voice responded, heated and pained. “It’s
you
who want to keep them down, to give them on a platter everything everybody else in this country has had to work for.”

“Work! What honest work have you ever done?”

Janet Appleby shouted toward them, “He’s worked himself into an ulcer, Irene. Come on in here and take your husband home, he looks sick.”

The Constantines’ house was large, but much of its space was consumed by magniloquent oak stairways and wide halls and cavernous closets, so that no single room was big enough to hold a party, which then overflowed into several, creating problems of traffic and acoustics. Janet was not heard, but Frank’s voice came to them from the parlor clearly. “The federal government was never meant to be a big mama every crybaby could run to. Minimal government was the founders’ ideal. States’ rights. Individual rights.”

Irene’s voice in argument was slurred and even affectionate. “Frank, suppose you were Mrs. Medgar Evers. Would you want to cry or not?”

“Ask any intelligent Negro what the welfare check has done to his race. They hate it. It castrates. I agree with Malcolm X.”

“You’re not answering me, Frank. What about Medgar Evers? What about the six Birmingham Sunday-school children?”

“They should have the protection of the law like everybody else, like everybody else,” Frank said, “no more and no less. I don’t approve of discriminatory legislation and that’s what the Massachusetts Fair Housing Bill is. It deprives the homeowner of his right to chose. The constitution, my dear Irene, tries to guarantee equality of
opportunity
, not equality of status.”