Couples (35 page)

“Thank you. Now please sit down and stop swishing, Carollino. Eddie and Irene are just putting Ben to bed. They’ll be back in a minute. And what if they aren’t? The world won’t stop grinding. Imagine Eddie’s off on a flight to Miami.
Che sarà, sarà
, I keep telling everybody.”

“Explain,” Terry said, “the point of Wonderful.”

“The point is, Terrycloth, at the end of the game we’ll all know each other better.”

Angela said, “I don’t
want
to know any of you better.”

Foxy said, “I don’t want any of you to know
me
better.”

Piet asked, “Where’s the competitive element? How can you win or lose?”

Freddy answered Piet with oracular care. He still wore the
giant monocle and was drunk, drunker than anyone except Angela, white-wine-drunk, a translucent warm drunkenness whose truth lifts the mind. “You can’t lose, Piet. I’d think you’d like that for a change. You know, Peterkins—may I speak my heart?—”

“Oh do, brother, do!” Piet holy-rolled on the floor. “Say it, brother, say it!”

Freddy spoke solemnly, trying to be precise. “You are a paradox. You’re a funny fellow. A long time ago, when I was a little boy studying my mommy and my daddy, I decided there are two kinds of people in the world: A, those who fuck, and, B, those who get fucked. Now the funny thing about you, Petrov, is you think you’re A but you’re really B.”

“And the funny thing about you,” Piet said, “is you’re really neither.”

Before he began sleeping with Foxy, when Freddy, however unknowingly, held Georgene as hostage, Piet would not have been so quick to answer, so defiant. Freddy blinked, baffled by feeling Piet free, and more openly an enemy.

“If you two prima donnas,” Terry said, “would stop being hateful to each other, we could play Wonderful.”

“I think more wine would be wonderful,” Carol said. “Who else?”

“Me,” Angela said, extending a shapely arm and an empty glass. “I must face Georgene in the finals tomorrow.”

“Where
is
Georgene?” Piet asked Freddy politely, afraid he had overstepped a moment before, saying “neither.”

“Resting up for the big match,” Freddy answered, apparently forgiving.

“We really must go soon,” Foxy said to Terry.

“Us too,” Piet told Angela. In her rare moods of liberation she held for him the danger that she would disclose great
riches within herself, showing him the depths of loss frozen over by their marriage.

Carol poured from the Almadén jug, making of it a dancer’s routine. Six glasses were refilled. “OK,” Freddy said. “Carol has begun by saying that more wine is wonderful.”

“I didn’t say it was the most wonderful thing I could think of. I still have my turn.”

“All reet-o, take it. You’re the hostess; begin.”

“Must I start?”

All agreed yes, she must, she must. As Carol stood barefoot in silence, Angela asked of the air, “Isn’t this exciting?”

Carol decided, “A baby’s fingernails.”

Gasps,
ah
, awed, then parodies of gasps,
aaah
, greeted this.

Freddy had provided himself with a pencil and wrote on a small piece of paper, the back of his folded play. “A baby’s fingernails. Very well. Please explain.”

“I must explain?”

“Well. I mean the whole process, all the chemistry. I don’t understand it, which may be why it seems wonderful. You know,” she went on, speaking to Foxy, who alone of the women did not absolutely know, “the way it produces out of nothing, no matter almost what we do, smoke or drink or fall downstairs, even when we don’t want it, this living
baby
, with perfect little fingernails. I mean,” she went on, having scanned all their faces and guessed she was not giving enough, “what a lot of
work
, somehow, ingenuity,
love
even, goes into making each one of us, no matter what a lousy job we make of it afterwards.”

Piet said, “Carol, how sweet you are. How can anyone so sweet hate me and my nice little houses?” He felt she had taken the opportunity to repair her image; she was aware of having appeared a hennaed bitch and, deserted by the Saltzes
and her husband, needed love from those left around her, and perhaps especially from him, who like her had been born lower in the middle class than these others.

She said, “I
don’t
hate you. On the contrary, I think you have too much to give people to waste it the way you do.”

After a mild silence Angela said, “I can’t tell if that’s an insult or a come-on.”

“We have a baby’s fingernails,” Freddy Thorne said. “Who’s next?”

“Let’s have a man,” Terry Gallagher said.

Piet felt singled out, touched, by her saying this. Let’s. She reposed on the floor, a tall woman, legs bent under her broadened haunches and the knit of her hips. Her lips held a coin. Her dark hair’s harp-curve hung down. Once he loved her, too shy then to know they are waiting. Vessels shaped before they are filled. He drank more of the wine of a whiteness like that of the sun seen through fog, a perfect circle smaller than the moon. The eclipse. Love doomed? Foxy was watching him sip, her pink face framed by pale hair fluffed wide by sea-bathing. Sometimes her belly tasted of salt. Bright drum taut as the curve of the ocean above the massed watchsprings of blond hair. Her navel inverted. Their lovemaking lunar, revolving frictionless around the planet of her womb. The crescent bits of ass his tongue could touch below her cunt’s petals. Her far-off cries, eclipsed.

“Piet, you go,” Angela said.

His mind skimmed the world, cities and fields and steeples and seas, mud and money, cut timbers, sweet shavings, blue hymnals, and the fuzz on a rose. Ass. His mind plunged unresisted into this truth: nothing matters but ass. Nothing is so good. He said, “A sleeping woman.” Why sleeping? “Because when she is sleeping,” he added, “she becomes all women.”

“Piet, you’re drunk,” Carol said, and he guessed he had spoken too simply from himself, had offended her. The world hates the light.

Freddy’s mouth and eyes slitted. “Maybe sleeping,” he said, “because awake she threatens you.”

“Speak for yourself,” Piet said, abruptly bored with this game and wanting to be with his sleeping children; maybe they, Ruth and Nancy, were the women he meant, drenched and heavy with sleep like lumps of Turkish delight drenched in sugar. “A sleeping woman,” he insisted.

“Containing a baby’s fingernails,” Freddy Thorne added. “My, we’re certainly very domestic. Horizonwise, that is. Terry?”

She was ready, had been ever since her smile became complacent. “The works of J. S. Bach.”

Piet asked jealously, “Arranged for the lute?”

“Arranged for anything. Played anyhow. That’s what’s so wonderful about Bach. He didn’t know how great he was. He was just trying to support his seventeen children with an honest day’s work.”

“More domesticity,” Angela murmured.

“Don’t you believe it,” Piet told Terry. “He wanted to be great. He was mad to be immortal.” In saying this he was still involved with Carol, arguing about his houses, her paintings, apologizing, confessing to despair.

Terry said serenely, “He feels very unself-conscious and—ordinary to me. Full of plain daylight. It’s wonderful to have him in your fingers.”

“Keep it clean,” Freddy said, writing. “The works of J. S. Bach, not necessarily for stringed instruments. Angela.”

“I’m about to cry,” Angela said, “you’re all so sure of what’s good. I can’t think of anything wonderful enough to name.
The children, I suppose, but do I mean
my
children or the fact of having children, which is what Carol already said? Please come back to me, Freddy. Please. I’m not ready.”

Foxy said, “The Eucharist. I can’t explain.”

“Now it’s Freddy’s turn,” Piet said. It had been a double rescue: Foxy Angela, he Foxy. Exposure was, in the games Freddy invented, the danger. The danger and the fruit.

Freddy rested his pencil and with a groping mouth, as if the words were being read from a magic text materializing in air, said, “The most wonderful thing I know is the human capacity for self-deception. It keeps everything else going.”

“Only in the human world,” Carol interjected. “Which is just a conceited little crust on the real world. Animals don’t deceive themselves. Stones don’t.”

Angela sat up: “Oh! You mean the world is
everything
? Then I say the stars. Of course. The stars.”

Surprised, frightened—he seemed to sink in the spaces of her clear face—Piet asked her, “Why?”

She shrugged: “Oh. They’re so fixed. So above it all. As if somebody threw a handful of salt and that’s how it stays for billions of years. I know they move but not relative to us, we’re too small. We die too soon. Also, they
are
beautiful—Vega on a summer night, Sirius in winter. Am I the only person who ever looks at them any more? One of my uncles was an astronomer, on my mother’s side, Lansing Gibbs. I think there’s an effect named after him—the Gibbs effect. Maybe it’s a galaxy. Imagine a galaxy, all those worlds and suns, named after one man. He was very short, some childhood disease, with pointed teeth and bow legs. He liked me, even when I got taller than him. He taught me the first-magnitude stars—Vega, Deneb, Antares, Arcturus … I’ve forgotten some. As a girl I’d lie on the porch of our summer place in Vermont and
imagine myself wandering among them, from life to life, forever. They’re wonderful.”

“Angela,” Foxy said. “You’re lovely.”

“Angela can be lovely,” Piet admitted to them all, and sighed. It was past time to go.

“Freddy, tell us about self-deception,” Terry said. Freddy looked elderly and absurd, huddled in his shawl. In the slots of his flippers his toenails were hideous: ingrown, gangrenous, twisted toward each other by the daily constriction of shoes.

Freddy told them, “People come to me all the time with teeth past saving, with abscesses they’ve been telling themselves are neuralgia. The pain has clearly been terrific. They’ve been going around with it for months, unable to chew or even close their jaws, because subconsciously they don’t want to lose a tooth. Losing a tooth means death to people; it’s a classic castration symbol. They’d rather have a prick that hurts than no prick at all. They’re scared to death of me because I might tell the truth. When they get their dentures, I tell ’em it looks better than ever, and they fall all over me believing it. It’s horseshit. You never get your own smile back when you lose your teeth. Imagine the horseshit a doctor handling cancer has to hand out. Jesus, the year I was in med school, I saw skeletons talking about getting better. I saw women without faces putting their hair up in curlers. The funny fact is, you don’t get better, and nobody gives a cruddy crap in hell. You’re born to get laid and die, and the sooner the better. Carol, you’re right about that nifty machine we begin with; the trouble is, it runs only one way. Downhill.”

Foxy asked, “Isn’t there something we gain? Compassion? Wisdom?”

“If we didn’t rot,” Freddy said, “who’d need wisdom? Wisdom is what you use to wave the smell away.”

“Freddy,” Piet said, tenderly, wanting to save something of himself, for he felt Freddy as a vortex sucking them all down with him, “I think you’re professionally obsessed with decay. Things grow as well as rot. Life isn’t downhill; it has ups and downs. Maybe the last second is up. Imagine being inside the womb—you couldn’t imagine this world. Isn’t anything’s existing wonderfully strange? What impresses me isn’t so much human self-deception as human ingenuity in creating unhappiness. We believe in it. Unhappiness is us. From Eden on, we’ve voted for it. We manufacture misery, and feed ourselves on poison. That doesn’t mean the world isn’t wonderful.”

Freddy said, “Stop fighting it, Piet baby. We’re losers. To live is to lose.” He passed the sheet of paper over. “Here it is. Here is your wonderful world.” The list read:

Baby’s fingernails

woman (zzzz)

Bach

Euch.

capac. for self-decep.

Foxy said sharply, “I won’t believe it. Everything people have ever built up, Freddy, you’d let slide and fall apart.”

“I do my job,” he answered. “It’s not the job I would have chosen, but every day I put on that white coat and do it.”

White coat. The antiseptic truth. He has learned to live in it. I have not. Better man than I. Piet felt himself falling in a frozen ridged abyss, Freddy’s mind. Foxy silently held out her hand toward him; Terry turned to him and recited, “Hope
isn’t something you reason yourself into. It’s a virtue, like obedience. It’s given. We’re free only to accept or reject.”

Angela stood and said, “I think we’re all pretty much alike, no matter what we think we believe. Husband, I’m drunk. Take me home.”

In the hall, with its elephantine scent of umbrellas, Piet playfully poked Freddy in the stomach and said, “Tell Georgene we missed her.”