Couples (51 page)

He drank. The final sweetness of truly falling. Bea. Scared to call, she might guess. She knew some things. Had seen him leap from the window, Foxy’s head golden in the bathroom light. In her bed he had left unconfessed only that last drab Monday visit when, trespassing unwittingly upon Ken’s paternity, conjuring into the world another responsible soul, he had made himself legally liable. Disgrace, jail, death, incineration, extinction, eternal namelessness. The laughter of their friends. The maledictions of newspapers. He saw Bea smiling, her breasts melted, her body a still pool, his prick suspended in her like a sleeping eel, and knew why he loved her: she was sterile. His semen could dive forever in that white chasm and never snag.

His solitude became desolate. The blizzard crooned mournfully, a thing without existence, a stirring. He emptied his glass and went into the kitchen. His daughters and wife were arranging valentines. He had failed to get Angela one. Ruth and Nancy at school had received fuzzy hearts, mooning cows, giraffes with intertwined necks. Ruth was arranging the best on top of the refrigerator. Reaching up, her figure was strikingly lithe. His coming into the kitchen for more gin intruded upon a triangular female rapport especially precious to
little Nancy. She turned her face, shaped like a rounded cartoon heart, upwards toward him, giggled at the approach of her own impudence, and said, “Daddy’s ugly.”

“No, Daddy not ugly,” Ruth said, putting her arm about his waist. “Daddy pwetty.”

“He has awful nostrils,” Nancy said, moving closer and looking up.

Ruth continued the baby talk in which her impulse of love sought disguise. “Daddy has the beeyeutifullest nostwils,” she said, “because he came from Howwand long ago.”

Piet had to laugh. “What about my feet?” he asked Nancy.

“Acky feet,” she said.

Ruth hugged him tighter and stroked his furry arm. “Loberly feet,” she said. “Mommy has silly feet, her little toes don’t touch the ground.”

“That’s considered,” Angela said, “a sign of great beauty.”

“You know something, Mommy?” Ruth said, abandoning Piet’s side and the baby voice. “Mrs. Whitman has
flat
feet, because at the beach this summer Frankie Appleby and Jonathan Smith were being detectives and following people and her footprints had no dent on the inside, you know, where the curvy place, whatever it’s called—”

“Arch,” Angela said.

“—where the arch is. It was like she was wearing sneakers only with toes.” The child glanced over at her father. True, even so unkind an evocation of Foxy gave him pleasure. Slouching flat-footed broad, big with his baby. His tall cockpit.

“How fascinating,” Angela said. Her hands busily sparkled amid the leaves of their supper salad. “What else have you noticed about feet?”

“Mr. Thorne has a green toenail,” Ruth said.

“Daddy’s toes,” Nancy said, gazing up impudently from beneath
Angela’s protection, “are like Halloween teeth,” and Piet saw that he represented death to this child: that what menaced and assaulted the fragility of life was being concentrated for her in his towering rank maleness; that this process would bring her in time to Ruth’s stage, of daring to admire and tame this strangeness; and at last to Angela’s, of seeking to salvage something of herself, her pure self, from the encounter with it. He loved them, his women, spaced around him like the stakes of a trap.

Ruth said, “Mommy, make Nancy stop insulting Daddy. Daddy’s handsome, isn’t he?”

Piet stooped and picked Nancy up; she shrieked and kicked in mixed pleasure and fear. A peppery whiff of red candy hearts was on her breath. Rotting her fine teeth. Angry, he squeezed her harder; she squealed and tried to fight down, all fear now.

“I don’t know if Daddy’s exactly
handsome
,” Angela was saying. “He’s what people call attractive.” She added, “And nice, and good.” He set Nancy down, pinching her unseen. She stared upward at him, now knowing something she would never forget, and could never express.

Perhaps as a sequitur of the tenderness of their being together with their children and their valentines, perhaps simply excited by their snugness within the blizzard, Angela led him to bed early and, like a warm cloud descending, made love to him sitting astride, in the classic position of Andromache consoling Hector.

Saturday morning their phone rang; Foxy spoke breathily, with her lips against the mouthpiece. “Is Angela right there?”

“No,” Piet said, “she’s out shoveling with the kids. What would you have said if she had answered?”

“I would have asked her if she was wearing a short or a long dress to the Heart Fund dance.”

“It’s really risky, you know. She’s just beginning to be less suspicious of you.”

“I had to talk to you, I’m sorry. I thought you’d be at the Gallaghers’ last night. Why didn’t you come?”

“We weren’t invited. Who was there?”

“Everybody. Except you and the Saltzes and the Ongs. There was a new couple who seemed stuffy and young.”

“Matt didn’t say anything to me. Anyway. What’s up with you?”

“The test. It was positive. There’s no doubt, Piet.”

“Oof.” He was fascinated, as he sank into this fact, by the delicacy of his furniture, the maple telephone table with tapering legs, the mirror in its acanthus frame of chipped gilt. These things had been fashioned by men without care, with no weight on their hands. He marveled at himself, that he had ever found the energy, the space, to set two sticks together.

Into his leaden silence she cried, “Oh Piet, I’ve become such a burden.”

“No,” he lied. “I still think of you as very light and kind.”

“At any rate—hang up if Angela comes in—I think I’ve hit on something.”

“What?”

“Freddy Thorne.”

Piet laughed. “Freddy can bore it out of you. That’s called an abortion.”

“All right. I’ll hang up. I won’t bother you again. Thanks for everything.”

“No. Wait,” he shouted, fearing the receiver would already be away from her ear. “Tell me. Don’t be so touchy.”

“I’m in hell, darling, and I don’t like being laughed at.”

“That’s what hell is like.”

“Wait until you know.”

He prompted her, “Freddy Thorne.”

“Freddy Thorne once told me that dentists commit abortions. They have all the tools, the chair, anesthetic—”

“A likely story. And?”

“And last night at the Gallaghers’, you know how he gets you into a corner to be cozy, I brought the subject around, and asked him if he knew any who did it.”

“You told him you were pregnant.”

“No. Heaven forbid. I told him I knew somebody who was, a perfectly nice girl from Cambridge who was desperate.”

“True enough.”

“And—are you sure Angela isn’t listening?—”

“I’ll go to the window and see where she is.” He returned and reported, “She’s down the driveway shoveling like a woman inspired. She’s been in a very up mood lately. She was excited by the storm.”

“I wasn’t. I was driving in and out of Cambridge to donate my urine. Then we had to struggle over to the Gallaghers’.”

“And Freddy Thorne looked at you with that fuzzy squint and knew fucking damn well it was
you
who were pregnant.”

“Yes. He did. But he didn’t say so.”

“What did he say? He consulted his abortion schedule and gave you an appointment.”

“Not exactly. He said a very spooky thing. All this by the way was in the kitchen; the others were in the living room playing a new word game, with a dictionary. He said he’d have to meet the girl and the man.”

“That
is
spooky. The girl
and
the man.”

“Yes, and since if I’m the girl, he must guess you’re the man, I could only conclude he wants to see
you
.”

“You’re concluding too much. Freddy just isn’t that organized. He’s playing games. Blind man’s bluff.”

“I didn’t feel that. He seemed quite serious and definite. More his dentist self than his party self.”

“You bring out the dentist in Freddy, don’t you? I don’t want to see him. I don’t like him, I don’t trust him. I have no intention of putting us at his mercy.”

“Whose mercy do you suggest instead?”

The front door was pushed open. Deftly Piet replaced the receiver and faced the hall as if he had been just looking in the mirror. Nancy stood there, swaddled with snowy clothes. Her cheeks were aflame. Wide-eyed she held out to him on one wet leather mitten what he took to be a snowball; but it was half-gray. It was a frozen bird, with a gingery red head and a black spot on its chest, a tree sparrow caught by the blizzard. Crystals adhered to its open eye, round as the head of a hatpin. In a businesslike manner that anticipated his protests, the child explained, “Mommy found it in the snow all stiff and I’m going to put it on the radiator to get warm and come alive again even though I know it won’t.”

The Heart Fund dance was held annually at the Tarbox Amvets’ Club, a gaunt cement-block building off Musquenomenee Street. The club contained a bar and two bowling alleys downstairs and a ballroom and subsidiary bar upstairs. A faceted rotating globe hurled colored dabs of light around and around the walls, speeding at the corners, slowing above the windows, criss-crossing in crazy traffic among the feet of those dancing. No matter how cold the weather, it was always hot in the Amvets’. Whenever the doors opened, steam, tinted pink and blue by neon light, rolled out to mix with the exhaust smoke pluming from parking cars.

This year the dance was indifferently attended by the couples Piet knew. Carol Constantine was a graceful Greek
dancer, and while the patriarchs and wives benignly watched from card tables laden with
keftedes
and
dolmathes
and black olives and
baklava
, she would lead lines hand in hand with their sons—grocers, electronic technicians, stockbrokers. Carol had the taut style, the archaic hauteur, to carry it off. But Irene Saltz was on the board of this year’s Heart Fund, and the Constantines had gone into Boston with the Thornes and Gallaghers to see the Celtics play. The Hanemas had come mostly out of loyalty to Irene, who had confided to them (don’t tell anyone, especially not Terry Gallagher) that these might be their last months in Tarbox, that Ben had been offered a job in Cleveland. The Whitmans were at a table with the Applesmiths, and the Guerins had brought the new couple. Their name was Reinhardt. They looked smooth-faced and socially anxious and Piet barely glanced at them. He only wanted, as the colored dots swirled and the third-generation Greek girls formed their profiled friezes to the Oriental keening of the bouzouki, for the American dancing to begin, so he could dance with Bea. Angela was sluggish from all her shoveling, and Foxy looked rigid with the effort of ignoring him. Only Bea’s presence, a circle like the mouth of a white bell of which her overheard voice was the chiming clapper, promised repose. He remembered her as a calm pool in which he could kneel to the depth of his navel. When the teen-aged musicians changed modes, and his arms offered to enclose her, and they had glided beyond earshot of their friends, she said, gazing away, “Piet, you’re in some kind of trouble. I can feel it in your body.”

“Maybe it’s in your body.” But she was not drunk, and held a little off from him, whereas he had had three martinis with dinner at the Tarbox Inne, and was sweating. He wanted to smear her breasts against his chest and salve his heart.

“No,” she said, singsong, refusing to yield to the questioning pressure of his arms, “it’s in you, you’ve lost your usual bounce. You don’t even stand the same. Didn’t I once tell you the unkind people would do you in?”

“Nobody’s been unkind. You’re all too kind. In that same conversation, which I’m surprised you remember, you asked me if I didn’t want to—”

“I do remember. Then you did, and didn’t come back. Didn’t you like it?”

“God, I loved it. I love you. The last time was so lovely. There was no longer any other place to go.”

“Is that why you haven’t called?”

“I couldn’t. You’re right, there
is
something in my life right now, a knot, an awful knot. If it ever untangles, will you have me back?”

“Of course. Always.” Yet she spoke from a distance; in sorrow he squeezed her against him, pressed her like a poultice against that crusty knot in his chest where betrayal had compounded betrayal. Frank Appleby, dancing with the Reinhardt girl, accidentally caught Piet’s eye, and biliously smiled. Lost souls. Hello in hell. Frank, having no mistress pregnant, seemed infinitely fortunate: advantages of an Exeter education. Whitewash.

Bea backed off, broke their embrace, gazing at something over his shoulder. Piet turned, frightened. Foxy had come up behind them. “Bea, it isn’t
fair
for you to monopolize this
adorable
man.” She spoke past Piet’s face and her touch felt dry and rigid on his arm. Maneuvering him to dance, she said, her voice sharp, her pale mouth bitter, “I’ve been commissioned by your wife to tell you she’s sleepy and wants to go home. But hold me a minute.” Yet her body felt angular and uneasy, and they danced as if linked by obligation. She was
wearing, uncharacteristically, a cloying perfume, overripe, reminiscent of rotting iris; by the contrast Piet realized Bea’s scent had been lemony. She had floated, a ghost, in his arms.

Freddy Thorne’s office smelled of eugenol and carpet cleaner and lollypops; holding Nancy by her plump tugging hand, Piet remembered his own childhood dread of that dental odor—the clenched stomach, the awareness of sunlight and freedom outside, the prayer to sleep through the coming half-hour. In Freddy’s walnut magazine rack old
Time
and
Newsweek
covers showed Charles De Gaulle and Marina Oswald. Both looked haggard. Freddy’s pug-nosed receptionist smiled reassuringly at the nervous child, and Piet’s heart, though tracked to run head-on into Freddy, was shunted by a flick of gratitude into love of this girl. A crisp piece, young. Like eating celery, salting each stalk as it parted. Had Freddy ever? He doubted it. He was full of doubt of Freddy; just to picture the man filled him with a hopeless wet heaviness, like wash in a short-circuited machine.