Couples (56 page)

Georgene had not been asked to return on Monday. But she was curious to know how Foxy had weathered the weekend, had put off Ken. She would ask if Foxy needed any shopping done. Seeing Piet’s truck in the driveway, she experienced
a compounded jealousy, a multiple destruction within her: the first loss was her tender comradeship with the other woman. Of Piet she expected nothing except that he continue to exist and unwittingly illumine her life. She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted; whatever he did he could not escape the province of her freedom, her free decision to love. Whereas between her and Foxy a polity existed: rules, a complex set of assumed concessions, a generous bargain posited upon the presumption of defeat. Georgene seldom visited the middle ground between female submission and sexless mastery, so her negotiated fondness for Foxy was rarer for her, more precious perhaps, than her love for Piet, which was predetermined and unchanging and somewhat stolid. Foxy’s betrayal found her vulnerable. She was revealed to herself as not merely helpless but foolish. Helplessness has its sensual consolations; foolishness has none. She pushed through the door without knocking.

Piet and Foxy were sitting well apart, on opposite sides of the coffee table. Piet had not removed the zippered apricot suède windbreaker he wore to jobs, and the stub of a yellow pencil was tucked behind his ear. The morning marsh light struck white fire from the hem of Foxy’s frilled nightie and froze into ice her pale hand holding a cigarette from which spiraled smoke sculptural as blue stone. Coffee equipment mixed arcs of china and metal and sun on the low teak table between them. Georgene felt she had entered upon a silence. Her indignation was balked by her failure to surprise them embracing. Nevertheless, Piet was embarrassed, and half rose.

“Don’t get up,” Georgene told him. “I don’t mean to interrupt your cozy tryst.”

“It wasn’t,” he told her.

“Just a meeting of souls. How beautiful.” She turned to Foxy. “I came to offer to do your shopping and to see how you were doing. I see you’re back to normal and won’t be needing me any more. Good.”

“Don’t take that tone, Georgene. I was just telling Piet, how wonderful you were.”

“He wasn’t telling you? I’m hurt.”

“Why are you angry? Don’t you think Piet and I have a right to talk?”

Piet moved forward on his chair, grunting, “I’ll go.”

Foxy said, “You certainly will not. You just got here. Georgene, have some coffee. Let’s stop playing charades.”

Georgene refused to sit. “Please don’t imagine,” she said, “that I have personal feelings about this. It’s none of my business what you two do, or rather it wouldn’t be if my husband hadn’t saved your necks at the risk of his own. But I
will
say, for your own good, unless you’re planning to elope, it is very sloppy to have Piet’s pick-up truck out where Marcia could drive by any minute.”

“Marcia’s at her psychiatrist in Brookline,” Foxy said. “She’s gone every day from ten to two, or longer, if she has lunch with Frank in town.”

Piet said, wanting to have a conversation, a party, “Is Marcia going too? Angela’s just started.”

Georgene asked him, “How on earth can
you
afford it?”

“I can’t,” he said. “But Daddy Hamilton can. It’s something the two of them cooked up.”

“And what were you two cooking up, when I barged in?”

“Nothing,” Piet told her. “In fact we were having some trouble finding things to say.”

Foxy asked, “Why shouldn’t I talk to the father of my child?”

Piet said, “It wasn’t a child, it was a little fish, less than a fish. It was nothing, Fox.”

“It was
something
, damn you. You weren’t carrying it.”

Georgene was jealous of their quarrel, their display of proud hearts. She and Freddy rarely quarreled. They went to sleep on one another, and kept going to parties together, and felt dreary all next day, like veteran invalids. Only Piet had brought her word of a world where vegetation was heraldic and every woman was some man’s queen. That world was like, she thought, the marsh seen through the windows, where grasses prospered in salty mud that would kill her kind of useful plant. “I honestly think,” she heard herself saying, “that one of you ought to move out of Tarbox.”

They were amazed, amused. Foxy asked, “Whatever for?”

“For your own good. For everybody’s good. You’re poisoning the air.”

“If any air’s been poisoned,” Piet told her, “it’s your husband that’s done it. He’s the local gamesmaster.”

“Freddy just wants to be human. He knows you all think he’s ridiculous so he’s adopted that as his act. Anyway, I didn’t mean poison. Maybe the rest of us are poisoned and you two upset us with your innocence. Think of just yourselves. Piet, look at her. Why do you want to keep tormenting her with your presence? Make her take her husband back to Cambridge. Quit Gallagher and go somewhere else, go back to Michigan. You’ll destroy each other. I was with her at the end of last week. It’s not a little thing you put her through.”

Foxy cut in dryly. “It was my decision. I’m grateful for your help, Georgene, but I would have gotten through alone. And we would have found a way without Freddy, though that
did
work out. As to Piet and me, we have no intention of sleeping
together again. I think you’re saying you still want him. Take him.”

“That’s
not
what I’m saying! Not at all!” There had been some selfless point, some public-spirited truth she had been trying to frame for these two, and they were too corrupt to listen.

Piet said, joking, “I feel I’m being auctioned off. Should we let Angela bid too?”

He was amused. They were both amused. Georgene had entertained them, made them vivid to themselves. Watching her tremblingly try to manage her coffee cup, a clumsy intruder, they were lordly, in perfect control. Having coaxed the abortion from their inferiors, they were quite safe, and would always exist for each other. Their faces were pleasant in sunlight, complacent in the same way, like animals that have eaten.

Georgene took a scalding sip of coffee and replaced the cup in its socket on the saucer and sat primly upright. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say,” she apologized. “I’m delighted, Foxy, to see you so happy. Frankly, I think you’re a very gutsy girl.”

“I’m
not
happy,” Foxy said, protesting, sensing danger.

“Well, happier. I am too. I’m
so
glad spring is here, it’s been a long winter up on my hill. The crocuses, Piet, are up beside the garage. When can we all start playing tennis?” She stood; there was no coat to slow her departure. On all but the coldest days of winter, Georgene wore no more than a skirt and sweater and a collegiate knit scarf. It was warming, on a January afternoon when the sun had slipped through a crack in the sky, to see her downtown dressed as if for a dazzling fall afternoon, leading snowsuited Judy over hummocks of ice, hurrying along full of resolution and inner fire.

•   •   •

Town meeting that spring smelled of whiskey. Piet noticed the odor as soon as he entered the new high-school auditorium, where orange plastic chairs designed to interlock covered the basketball floor solidly between the bleachers and the stage, beneath the high fluorescent emptiness hung with cables and gymnastic riggings. A few feet above the swamp of faces hovered a glimmering miasma of alcohol, of amber whiskey, of martinis hurriedly swallowed between train and dinner, with the babysitter imminent. Piet had never noticed the scent before and wondered if it were the warm night—a thawing fog had rolled in from the sea and suddenly dandelions dotted the football field—or if the town had changed. Each year there were more commuters, more young families with VW buses and Cézanne prints moving into developments miles distant from the heart of historical Tarbox. Each year, in town meeting, more self-assured young men rose to speak, and silent were the voices dominant when Piet and Angela moved to town—droning Yankee druggists, paranoid clammers, potbellied selectmen ponderously fending off antagonisms their fathers had incurred, a nearsighted hound-faced moderator who recognized only his friends and ruled all but deafening dissents into unanimity. At the first meeting Piet had attended, the town employees, a shirtsleeved bloc of ex-athletes who perched in the bleachers apart from their wives, had hooted down the elderly town attorney, Gertrude Tarbox’s brother-in-law, until the old man’s threadbare voice had torn and the microphone had amplified the whisper of a sob. Now the employees, jacketed, scattered, sat mute and sullen with their wives as year after year another raise was unprotestingly voted them. Now the town attorney was an
urbane junior partner in a State Street firm who had taken the job as a hobby, and the moderator a rabbit-eared associate professor of sociology, a maestro of parliamentary procedure. Only an occasional issue evocative of the town’s rural past—the purchase of an old barn abutting the public parking lot, or the plea of a farmer, a fabulous creature with frost-burned face and slow tumbling voice, that he be allowed to reap his winter rye before an S-curve in the Mather road was straightened—provoked debate. New schools and new highways, sewer bonds and zoning by-laws all smoothly slid by, greased by federal grants. Each modernization and restriction presented itself as part of the national necessity, the overarching honor of an imperial nation. The last opponents, the phlegmatic pennypinchers and choleric naysayers who had absurdly blocked the building of this new school for a decade, had died or ceased to attend, leaving the business of the town to be carried forward in an edifice whose glass roof leaked and whose adjustable partitions had ceased to adjust. There was annual talk now of representative town meeting, and the quorum had been halved. Among Piet’s friends, Harold little-Smith was on the Finance Committee, Frank Appleby was chairman of the committee to negotiate with the Commonwealth for taxpayer-subsidized commuter service, Irene Saltz was chairlady of the Conservation Commission (and charmingly coupled her report with her resignation, since she and her husband were with sincere regret moving to Cleveland), and Matt Gallagher sat on the Board of Zoning Appeals. Indeed, there was no reason why Matt, if he believed the hint of the Polish priest, could not be elected selectman; and Georgene Thorne had narrowly missed—by the margin of a whiff of scandal—election to the school board.

Politics bored Piet. The Dutch in his home region had been excluded from, and had disdained, local power. His family had been Republican under the impression that it was the party of anarchy; they had felt government to be an illusion the governed should not encourage. The world of politics had no more substance for Piet than the film world, and the meeting of which he was a member made him as uncomfortable as the talent auditions at a country fair, where faces strained by stolen mannerisms lift in hope toward wholly imagined stars. Piet went to town meetings to see his friends, but tonight, though the Hanemas had arrived early, it happened that no one sat with them. The Applesmiths and Saltzes sat up front with the politically active. On the stage, as observers, not yet citizens, sat the young Reinhardts, whom Piet detested. The Guerins and Thornes had entered and found seats by the far doors and Piet never managed to catch either woman’s eye. Bernadette Ong and Carol Constantine came late, together, without husbands. Most strangely, the Whitmans did not attend at all, though they had now lived in Tarbox long enough to be voting citizens. At Piet’s side Angela, who had to rush into Cambridge after nursery school every day and then fight the commuter traffic home, was exhausted, and kept nodding and twitching, yet as a loyal liberal insisted on staying to add her drowsy “Ayes” to the others. The train service proposal, at the annual estimated budget cost of twelve thousand dollars, on the argument that the type of people attracted to Tarbox by creditable commuter service would enrich the community inestimably, unanimously passed. The self-righteous efficiency of the meeting, hazed by booze, so irritated Piet, so threatened his instinct for freedom, that he several times left the unanimous crowd to get a drink of water at the bubbler in the hall, where he imagined that the town
building inspector evaded his gaze and refused to return his hello. When the meeting, after eleven, was adjourned, he saw the other couples huddling by an exit, planning a drink at one of their homes. Harold’s eager profile jabbered; Bea slowly, dreamily nodded. Angela mocked Piet’s premonition of exclusion and said she wanted to go home and sleep. Before psychiatry, she would have equivocated. Piet could only yield. In the car he asked her, “Are you dead?”

“A little. All those right-of-ways and one-foot strips of land gave me a headache. Why can’t they just do it in Town Hall and not torment us?”

“How did psychiatry go?”

“Not very excitingly. I felt tired and stupid and didn’t know why I was there.”

“Don’t ask
me
why you’re there.”

“I wasn’t.”

“What do the two of you talk about?”

“Just
I’m
supposed to talk. He listens.”

“And never says anything?”

“Ideally.”

“Do you talk about me? How I made you sleep with Freddy Thorne?”

“We did at first. But now we’re on my parents. Daddy mostly. Last Thursday it came out, just popped out of my mouth, that he always undressed in the closet. I hadn’t thought about it for years. If I was in their bedroom about something, he’d come out of the closet with his pajamas on. The only way I could see him
really
was by spying on him in the bathroom.”

“You spied. Angel.”

“I know, it made me blush to remember it. But it made me
mad
, too. Whenever he’d be in there he’d turn on both faucets so we couldn’t hear him do anything.”

We:
Louise, her seldom-seen sister, a smudged carbon copy, two years younger, lived in Vermont, husband teaching at a prep school. Louise married early, not the rare beauty Angela was, smudged mouth and unclear skin, probably better in bed, dirtier. He thought of Joop. His pale blond brother, flaxen hair, watery eyes, younger, purer, had carried on the greenhouse, should have married Angela, the two of them living together in receding light. Leaving him dirty Louise. Piet asked, “Did Louise ever see his penis? Did you and she ever talk about it?”