Couples (6 page)

“I think it’s
lovely
,” Bea said emphatically to Ken, touching his sleeve, “that it’s so complex. I don’t want to be understood.”

Ken said, “Luckily, the processes are pretty much the same throughout the kingdom of life. A piece of yeast and you, for example, break down glucose into pyruvic acid by exactly the same eight transformations.” This was an aspect of him that Foxy rarely saw any more, the young man who could say “the kingdom of life.” Who did he think was king?

Bea said, “Oh dear. Some days I
do
feel moldy.”

Freddy persisted, though Roger’s tiny mouth had tightened in response. “The trouble with Hammarskjöld,” he said, “he was too much like you and me, Roger. Nice guys.”

Marcia little-Smith called to her husband, “Darling, who isn’t letting you be a wonderful old bastard? Terrible me?”

“Actually, Hass,” Frank Appleby said, “I see you as our local Bertrand Russell.”

“I put him more as a Schweitzer type,” Freddy Thorne said.

“You bastards, I mean it.” The tip of his nose lifted under persecution like the flowery nose of a mole. “Look at Kennedy. There’s somebody inside that robot trying to get out, but it doesn’t dare because he’s too young. He’d be crucified.”

Janet Appleby said, “
Let’s
talk news. We always talk people. I’ve been reading the newspaper while Frank reads Shakespeare.
Why
is Egypt merging with those other Arabs? Don’t they know they have Israel in between? It’s as bad as us and Alaska.”

“I love you, Janet,” Bea called, across Ken. “You think like I do.”

“Those countries aren’t countries,” Harold said. “They’re just branches of Standard Oil.
L’huile étendarde
.”

“Tell us some more Shakespeare, Frank,” Freddy said.

“We have laughed,” Frank said, “to see the sails conceive, and grow big-bellied with the wanton wind.
Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Isn’t that a grand image? I’ve been holding it in my mind for days. Grow big-bellied with the wanton wind.” He stood and poured more wine around. Foxy put her hand over the mouth of her glass.

Freddy Thorne leaned close to her and said, “You don’t have much of an appetite. Tummy trouble?”

“Seriously,” Roger Guerin said on her other side, “I’d have no hesitation about calling Hanema and at least getting an estimate. He does very solid work. He’s one of the few contractors left, for instance, who puts up honest plaster walls. And his job for us, though it took forever, was really very loving. Restoration is probably his forte.”

Bea added, “He’s a dear little old-fashioned kind of man.”

“You’ll be so-orry,” Freddy Thorne said.

Frank Appleby called, “And you can get him to build a dike for you so Ken can farm the marsh. There’s a fortune to be made in salt hay. It’s used to mulch artichokes.”

Foxy turned to her tormentor. “Why don’t you like him?” She had abruptly remembered who Hanema was. At Frank’s party, a short red-haired man clownishly lying at the foot of the stairs had looked up her dress.

“I
do
like him,” Freddy Thorne told her. “I love him. I love him like a brother.”

“And he you,” little-Smith said quickly.

Thorne said, “To tell the truth, I feel homosexually attracted to him.”

“Freddy,” Thorne’s wife said in a level voice hardly intended to be heard.

“He has a lovely wife,” Roger said.

“She
is
lovely,” Bea Guerin called. “So serene. I envy the wonderful way she
moves
. Don’t you, Georgene?”

“Angela’s really a robot,” Frank Appleby said, “with Jack Kennedy inside her, trying to get out.”

“I don’t know,” Georgene Thorne said, “that she’s so perfect. I don’t think she gives Piet very much.”

“She gives him social aplomb,” Harold said.

Freddy said, “I bet she even gives him a bang now and then. She’s human. Hell, everybody’s human. That’s my theory.”

Foxy asked him, “What does he do neurotic?”

“You heard Roger describe the way he builds. He’s anally neat. Also, he goes to church.”

“But
I
go to church. I wouldn’t be without it.”

“Frank,” Freddy called, “I think I’ve found the fourth.” Foxy guessed he meant that she was the fourth most neurotic person in town, behind the fire chief, the Dutch contractor, and the lady doomed to be crushed by magazines.

Foxy came from Maryland and partook of the aggressiveness of southern women. “You
must
tell me what you mean by ‘neurotic.’ ”

Thorne smiled. His sickly mouth by candlelight invited her to come in. “You haven’t told me what you mean by ‘character.’ ”

“Perhaps,” Foxy said, scornfully bright, “we mean the same thing.” She disliked this man, she had never in her memory met a man she disliked more, and she tried to elicit, from the confusion within her body, a clear expression of this.

He leaned against her and whispered, “Eat some of Bea’s lamb, just to be polite, even if it is raw.” Then he turned from her, as if snubbing a petitioner, and lit Marcia’s cigarette. As he did so, his thigh deliberately slid against Foxy’s. She was startled, amused, disgusted. This fool imagined he had made a conquest. She felt in him, and then dreaded, a desire to intrude upon, to figure in, her fate. His thigh increased its pressure and in the lulling dull light she experienced an escapist craving for sleep. She glanced about for rescue. Her host, his eyebrows knitted tyrannically above the bridge of his nose, was concentrating on carving more lamb. Across the table her husband, the father of her need for sleep, was laughing between Bea Guerin and Janet Appleby. The daggery shadow in the cleft between Janet’s lush breasts changed shape as her
hands darted in emphasis of unheard sentences. More wine was poured. Foxy nodded, in assent to a question she thought had been asked her, and snapped her head upright in fear of having dropped asleep. Her thigh was nudged again. No one would speak to her. Roger Guerin was murmuring, administering some sort of consolation, to Georgene Thorne. Ken’s high hard laugh rang out, and his face, usually so ascetic, looked pasty and unreal, as if struck by a searchlight. He was having a good time; she was hours from bed.

As they drove home, the night revived her. The fresh air was cool and the sky like a great wave collapsing was crested with stars. Their headlights picked up mailboxes, hedgerows, crusts of dry snow in a ditch. Ken’s MG swayed with each turn of the winding beach road. He asked her, “Are you dead?”

“I’m all right now. I wasn’t sure I could get through it when we were at the table.”

“It
was
pretty ghastly.”

“They seemed so excited by each other.”

“Funny people.” As if guilty, he added, “Poor Fox, sitting there yawning with her big belly.”

“Was I too stupid? I told Bea.”

“For God’s sake, why?”

“I wanted a pretend martini. Are you ashamed of my being pregnant?”

“No, but why broadcast it? It’ll show soon enough.”

“She won’t tell anybody.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

How little
, Foxy thought,
does matter to you
. The trees by the roadside fell away, and rushed back in clumps, having revealed
in the gaps cold stretches of moonlit marsh. The mailboxes grew fewer. Fewer houselights showed. Foxy tightened around her her coat, a fur-lined gabardine cut in imitation of a Russian general’s greatcoat. She foresaw their cold home with its flimsy walls and senile furnace. She said, “We
must
get a contractor. Should we ask this man Hanema to give us an estimate?”

“Thorne says he’s a fanny-pincher.”

“That’s called projection.”

“Janet told me he almost bought the house himself. His wife apparently wanted the view.”

Janet, is it?

Foxy said, “Did you notice the antagonism between Frank and the little-Smith man?”

“Aren’t they both in stocks somehow? Maybe they’re competing.”

“Ken, you’re so work-oriented. I felt it had to do with s-e-x.”

“With Janet?”

“Well, she was certainly trying to make some point with her bosom.”

He giggled.
Stop it
, she thought,
it isn’t you
. “Two points,” he said.

“I knew you’d say that,” she said.

There was a rise in the road, cratered by frost heaves, from which the sea was first visible. She saw that moonlight lived on the water, silver, steady, sliding with the motion of their car, yet holding furious myriad oscillations, like, she supposed, matter itself. Ken worked down there, where the protons swung from molecule to molecule and elements interlocked in long spiral ladders. A glimpse of dunes: bleached bones. The car sank into a dip. There were four such rises and
falls between the deserted, boarded-up ice-cream stand and their driveway. They lived near the end of the road, an outpost in winter. Foxy abruptly craved the lightness, the freedom, of summer.

Ken said, “Your friend Thorne had a very low opinion of Hanema.”

“He is
not
my friend. He is an odious man and I don’t understand why everybody likes him so much.”

“He’s a dentist. Everybody needs a dentist. Janet told me he wanted to be a psychiatrist but flunked medical school.”

“He’s awful, all clammy and cozy and I kept feeling he wanted to get his hands inside me. I cut him short and he thought I was making a pass. He played kneesies with me.”

“But he sat beside you.”

“Sideways kneesies.”

“I suppose it can be done.”

“I think his poor opinion should be counted as a plus.”

Ken said nothing.

Foxy went on, “Roger Guerin said he was a good contractor. He did their house. With their money they could have afforded anybody.”

“Let’s think about it. I’d rather get somebody nobody knows. I don’t want us to get too involved in this little nest out here.”

“I thought one of the reasons we moved was so our friendships wouldn’t be so much at the mercy of your professional acquaintance.”

“Say that again?”

“You know what I said. I didn’t have any friends of my own, just chemical wives.”

“Fox, that’s what we all are. Chemicals.” He knew she didn’t believe that, why did he say it? When would he let her out of school?

A mailbox rammed by a snowplow leaned vacantly on the moonlight. The box belonged to summer people and would not be righted for months. Foxy wrapped her greatcoat tighter around her and in the same motion wrapped her body, her own self, around the small sour trouble brewing in her womb, this alien life furtively exploiting her own. She felt ugly and used. She said, “You really
liked
those women, didn’t you, with their push-me-up bras and their get-me-out-of-this giggles?” The women they had known in Cambridge had tended to be plain Quaker girls placidly wed to rising grinds, or else women armored in a repellent brilliance of their own, untouchable gypsy beauties with fiery views on Cuban sovereignty and German guilt. Foxy sighed as if in resignation. “Well, they say a man gets his first mistress when his wife becomes pregnant.”

He looked over at her too surprised to speak, and she realized that he was incapable of betraying her, and marveled at her own disappointment. She puzzled herself; she had never been in their marriage more dependent upon him, or with more cause for gratitude. Yet a chemistry of unrest had arisen within her body, and she resented his separation from it. For she had always felt and felt now in him a fastidious, unlapsing accountability that shirked the guilt she obscurely felt belonged to life; and thus he left her with a double share.

He said at last, “What are you suggesting? We were invited. We went. We might as well enjoy it. I have nothing against mediocre people, provided I don’t have to teach them anything.”

Ken was thirty-two. They had met when he was a graduate student instructing in Biology 10 and she was a Radcliffe senior in need of a science credit. Since her sophomore year Foxy had been in love with a fine-arts major, a bearish Jewish boy from Detroit. He had since become a sculptor whose
large welded assemblages of junk metal were occasionally pictured in magazines. There had been a clangor about him even then, a snuffly explosive air of self-parody, with his wiglike mop of hair, combed straight forward, and a nose so hooked its tip appeared to point at his lower lip. The curves of his face had been compressed around a certain contemptuousness. His tongue could quickly uncoil.
Eat me up, little shiksa, I’m a dirty old man. I sneeze black snot. I pop my piles with a prophylactic toothbrush
. He scorned any sign of fear from her. He taught her to blow. His prick enormous in her mouth, she felt her love of him as a billowing and gentle tearing of veils inside her. Before he took her up she had felt pale, tall, stiff, cold, unusable. His back was hairy and humpily muscular across the shoulder blades and thickly sown, as if by a curse, with moles.

With a tact more crushing than brute forbidding her parents gradually made her love grotesque and untenable. She did not know how they did it: it was as if her parents and Peter communicated through her, without her knowing what was being said, until the
No
came from both sides, and met beneath her ribs. That schoolgirl ache, and all those cigarettes. Her senior year at Radcliffe, it had snowed and snowed; she remembered the twittering of the bicycles pushed on the paths, the song of unbuckled galoshes, the damp scarf around her neck, the fluttering of crystals, meek as thoughts, at the tall serene windows of the Fogg. She remembered the bleached light that had filled her room each morning before she awoke to the soreness in her chest.

Ken appeared, was taller than she, wanted her, was acceptable and was accepted on all sides; similarly, nagging mathematical problems abruptly crack open. Foxy could find no fault with him, and this challenged her, touched off her stubborn
defiant streak. She felt between his handsomeness and intelligence a contradiction that might develop into the convoluted humor of her Jew. Ken looked like a rich boy and worked like a poor one. From Farmington, he was the only son of a Hartford lawyer who never lost a case. Foxy came to imagine his birth as cool and painless, without a tear or outcry. Nothing puzzled him. There were unknowns but no mysteries. After her own degrading miscalculation—for this was what her first romance must have been, it ended in such a flurry of misery—Foxy sought shelter in Ken’s weatherproof rightness. She accepted gratefully his simple superiority to other people. He was better-looking, better-thinking, a better machine. He was fallible only if he took her, on the basis of the cool poise her tallness had demanded, for another of the same breed.