Couples (42 page)

Angela came home brimful of Irene. “You know what that woman has done? She’s gotten a paying job at the Lacetown Academy for Girls, starting next Monday, today a week, which means I have to do the whole kindergarten by myself.”

“Tell her you can’t do it.”

“Who said I can’t? If I can’t go to a psychiatrist at least I can run a dozen children by myself, without Irene’s kibbutzy theories getting in my way.”

“You
want
to do it.”

“What’s so surprising about that? I don’t want to very much. I don’t think children this small are my meat really, but I do want to see how teaching after all these years strikes me. I mean, wouldn’t you like it if I could bring home a little money?”

“You’re afraid I can’t support you.”

Angela bent and rubbed her cheek against his temple softly, yet hastily, the brush of a wing about to fly. “Of course you can. But I’m a person too. My children are growing up.” She whispered: “Nancy goes all morning without sucking her thumb, unless something happens to remind her.” She whispered because she had brought the child home, and Nancy was on the stairs, wondering if she dared go bother Ruth.

“What else did Irene say? You’ve been gone forever. Has Ben found a job yet?”

“No, I’m not even sure he’s looking. But she was full of news. She keeps a beady black eye on the Constantines across the way and says they’ve taken up with the Guerins. Roger and Bea are over there every night, and what Irene thinks, you have to hear it from her to get the humor of it, is that the attraction is between the like halves of the couples.” She drew a box in air with her fingers to explain. “Carol and Bea are attracted to each other, and Roger and Eddie.”

“Well does she think they’re putting this attraction into practice? I’m having another drink. Would you like one?”

“Bourbon, not gin. Piet, summer’s over. She doesn’t quite dare say so. But she thinks Carol is capable of anything physically
and Bea
does
have this very passive streak. She’s always been a kind of a woman’s woman, in a way; she
flirts
with women, and gives them little pats.”

“But it must be a huge step,” Piet said, though knowing that heterosexually it was not so, “between that kind of current and taking off your clothes and doing the stuff.”

Angela took her musky gold drink from his hand; as she sipped her eyes went bluer, gazing toward scenes she had been told of. “But,” she said, “we’re none of us getting younger and if it’s something you’ve always wanted aren’t the inhibitions less and less? Things keep getting less sacred.”

Piet said, pouring lucid gin for himself, “Roger
is
homosexual, sure, but his charm has always been his refusal to admit it. Except in his manner to women, which is either rude or excessively polite.”

“I think there’s a difference,” Angela said, “between being homosexual and being angry at females. Has Roger ever, on the golf course say, made a pass at you?”

“No. But he
is
very comfortable, and can’t
stand
being stuck behind a female foursome. But I think Eddie’s the mystery. How can Irene accuse her lover of a few months ago of being a working fairy?”

“Well, for one thing, she didn’t exactly, and for another she is quite hurt and bitter. When I sort of asked her this, all she’d say was that Eddie could be very per
sua
sive. I don’t know what it meant, but she said it three or four times.”

Piet asked her, “Where does your friend Freddy Thorne fit in this new arrangement?”

“Oh, well Freddy’s the one who brought them together; the Guerins and Constantines had almost nothing to do with each other until Freddy. I guess he’s over there pretty much, stirring the brew.”

“Poor Georgene.”

Angela asked, alert, her upper lip lifted, her wet teeth aglint, “Why poor Georgene?”

“On general principles. Married to that evil jerk.”

“You can’t really think he’s evil. He just loves a mess. Anyway, Georgene’s been
very
frosty to me ever since school started. Once Irene goes, it wouldn’t surprise me if Georgene stopped doing her day.”

“What else did Irene have on her teeming mind?”

“Let me remember. John Ong is apparently sick. Something with his chest; the doctors have told him to quit smoking and he won’t. He can’t.”

“My Lord. Cancer?”

“Nobody knows. Of course, he’s older than any of us, it just hasn’t showed, because he’s Asiatic.”

“Is he in the hospital?”

“Not yet. And, oh yes, of course. This will please you. Foxy Whitman has had her baby.”

The air compressed; a sense of suffocation was followed by a carefree falling independent of space. Piet asked, “When?”

“Sometime this weekend. I think on Sunday. You saw her Friday night at the little-Smiths’. Maybe dancing with Matt Gallagher brought it on. He’s awfully bouncy.”

“Why hasn’t anybody told us before?”

“Piet, you’re taking it so
per
sonally. You’re not exactly the next of kin. I
am
surprised that Matt didn’t mention it at work. Terry must have heard, if she’s Foxy’s best friend.”

“Matt and I don’t communicate much at work these days. He’s sulking because we lost the nunnery. But that’s very nice. She had gotten enormous. Boy or girl?”

“Boy. Seven pounds something. Should we send flowers? I like Foxy, but we don’t seem quite at the flower-sending stage.”

“Oh, send her some. Loosen up. You can’t take them with you, Angel. Flowers don’t grow in Heaven, they only spring from dung.”

Angela grimaced, puzzled by his hostile patter, and left the kitchen, calling, “Ru-uth! Come down and be sociable. Nancy wants to play Fish.”

Alone, Piet tried to grasp the happiness distinct yet unsteady within him. She was safe. The child had been a boy. Foxy’s luck had held. He wanted to be very close to her, to creep into the antiseptic white room where she lay, deflated and pink, invisibly bleeding, breathing in unconsciousness, her pale mouth askew, her hair adrift. He saw hothouse flowers—lush gladiolas, display dahlias, beribboned hyacinths fragrant of greenhouse earth packed tight by mossy thumbs, red cut roses leaning heavy-headed and coolly rank. He glimpsed the glass of water standing stale-beaded beyond her blurred face, and the cartoon cards of congratulation, and a candy bar concealed half-eaten in an enameled drawer. And in a chamber beyond this possessive daydreaming waited the realization that, in giving birth without notifying him, she had been guilty of an affront and in that guilt promised him freedom. Once, uncoming, she had masturbated against his thigh squeezed between hers.
Is this too awful for you?

No, of course not, no. Youth must be served
.

Don’t tease. I’m shy enough with you as is
.

With me, your lover? Shy?

Just am
.

It’s so touching, how hard women must work
.

Touch my nipples
.

Gladly
.

More gently. I’m almost there
.

Come
. His thigh was beginning to ache and tingle, the circulation hampered.
Oh come. Good. Terrific. Wow
.

On top of the refrigerator was a wooden salad bowl brimming with Halloween candy that Ruth and Nancy had begged. To celebrate, to lend substance to, his happiness Piet took down the bowl and gobbled a handful of imitation corn; he rarely ate candy, out of fear for his teeth.

Though Foxy had made the appointment three weeks ago, while still in the hospital, for this Friday at one, Freddy Thorne seemed startled by her appearance in his office. Until now she had kept her Cambridge dentist, but toward the end of her pregnancy her teeth had begun to twinge, and with the baby nursing her mobility was lessened. No one, not even Piet, denied that Freddy was a competent dentist. Yet she could not escape the feeling, entering his inner office, that by coming to him, in his absurd cottage tucked beside the post office on Divinity Street, when there were other competent dentists in town, she was, emboldened by motherhood, playing the game that Tarbox had taught her, the game of tempting her fate.

He wore a white jacket and, an inch or more in front of his regular glasses, a pair of rectangular magnifying lenses. The sanctum was fanatically clean, from the circular napkin on the swinging tool tray to the scrubbed blush of Freddy’s palms, uplifted in surprise or blessing, in front of his backwards white jacket. A square black clock said twelve after one. His first appointment after lunch. She had nibbled around ten; the baby had scattered her habits of sleep and eating. It reassured her that like all normal dentists Freddy ran behind schedule. “Well look who’s here!” he said when she entered. “Lovely day,” he murmured while he adjusted her into the chair. Now he asked, as her mouth obediently opened,
“Which is the area of discomfort?” Three persons had spoken: the first a frivolous prying man she knew, the second a polite bored acquaintance, the third a wholly alien technician.

“Here,” she said. She pointed with her finger from outside her cheek and with her tongue from within. Freddy held the pick and mirror crossed at his chest as she explained. “The upper, molar I suppose it is. I get a twinge when I eat candy. And over here, on the other side, I can feel a hole where a filling used to be. Also all the books say, and my mother in
sis
ted, my teeth would fall out because the calcium went into the baby.”

“Did you take calcium pills?”

“Iron, I know. I took whatever Doc Allen gave me.”

Freddy said, “With a modern diet calcium displacement isn’t usually a problem. Primitive women
do
tend to lose their smiles. Shall we have us a look?” His touch with the exploratory picks was delicate. A steel point touched a nerve once, and tactfully feathered off. Mint on his breath masked the odor of whatever he had eaten for lunch, perhaps veal. His perfumed fingers were in her mouth, and, like many things she had abstractly dreaded, like childbirth, like adultery, the reality was more mixed than she had imagined, and not so bad.

“You have strong teeth,” he said. He made precise pencil marks on one of those dental charts that to Foxy as a child had seemed a wide-open scream. Curious, his choice of “strong” over “nice” or “good.”

She counted the marks and said, “
Four
cavities!” Always in dental chairs she wanted to talk too much, to fend the drill away from her mouth.

“You’re in respectable shape,” he told her. “Let’s begin with the upper right, the one you’ve been feeling.”

He removed an injecting needle from a tray of blue sterilizer. She told him, “I don’t usually bother with Novocain.”

“I want you to today.” His manner was mild and irresistible; where was that sloppy troll she knew from parties? With the secondary lenses in place, his eyes were totally elusive. Freddy became a voice and a touch. He said, “This is a new gadget,” and his fingers exposed a spot on her upper gum where, with a tiny hiss, something icy was sprayed. Thus numbed, she did not feel the stab of the needle.

They waited for the Novocain to take effect. Freddy busied himself behind her back. She yawned; Toby had been fed at two and awakened again at five. Her feet on the raised metal tread looked big and flat and pale in ballet slippers. Above her feet a large window curtained in dun sacking framed an abstract view: the slate roof of the Tarbox post office descended in courses of smaller to greater from a ridge of copper flashing set smack, it seemed, against the sky. The day was balmy for this late in November. Small tugging clouds darkened Tarbox with incongruous intensity when they crossed the sun. She wondered why Piet had sent no flowers. Freddy shuffled tinkling metal and his receptionist, a pug-nosed girl with skunk-striped bangs, passed back and forth between the anteroom and a nether room in which Foxy could glimpse a table, a Bunsen burner, a tattered chart dramatizing dental hygiene for children, and the end of a cot. Nearer, on a chest of enameled drawers, a small blond radio played colorless music interrupted now and then by a characterless male voice, a voice without a trace of an accent or an emotion. Foxy wondered where such music originated, whether in men or machines, and who supplied it so inexhaustibly to dentists’ offices, hotel lobbies, and landing airplanes. Ken called it toothpaste music.

Freddy cleared his throat and asked, “Is your mother still here? Will she be coming tonight?” The Thornes were giving a black-tie party tonight. To Foxy it meant that after weeks of seclusion she would at last again see Piet.

“No, we put her on a plane Tuesday. At last.”

“Did Ken not enjoy having his mother-in-law in the house?”

“He minded it less than I did. I’m used to being a hermit.”

“She seemed jolly.”

“She is. But I haven’t really had much to do with her since college. I’m too old to have a mother.”

“She enjoyed the baby.” It was not quite a question.

“She made the noises. But people that age, I discover, aren’t very flexible, and it took a lot of my energy to keep the baby off of her nerves. She kept changing clothes and trying to reminisce while I wobbled up and down stairs.” As the moment for Freddy to use the drill neared, Foxy’s mouth watered, fairly bubbled with the wish to tell him everything—the musical first pains, the narrowing intermittences, the dreamlike unconcern of the doctors and nurses, the anesthesia like a rustling roaring wing enfolding her, the newborn infant’s astonishingly searching gaze, her wild drugged thought that he more resembled Piet than Ken, and the miraculous present fact that she, slim Foxy, was a good nurser, a tall tree of food.

Freddy said, “She seemed in no hurry to go back to her husband.”

“Yes, I wondered about that. She spoke very loyally of ‘Roth,’ when she thought of him. I think she sees her life as a kind of Cinderella story, rescued at the end, and now that she’s living happily ever after, she’s bored.”

“She found Ken congenial.” Again, it was not quite interrogative.

“Very.”

Freddy had not expected so curt a response; delicately balked, he licked his lips and volunteered, “She also seemed attracted to me.”