Couples (60 page)

Piet asked, “She told him that?”

“Yes. She’s never liked Whitman much.”

“How nice of Terry.”

Terry had gone on, Ken might imagine he was free to make decisions, but Piet certainly wasn’t. He loved his children, he needed Angela, and it would be very wrong of Ken to try to force him, out of some absurd sense of honor that hasn’t applied to anybody for centuries, to give up everything and marry Foxy. Piet just wasn’t free.

“And how did Ken take all this?”

“Not badly. He nodded and thanked us and left. Later in the morning Terry went over to see Foxy, since Ken has somehow chosen us, and she was packing. She was perfectly calm, not a hair out of place. She was going to take the baby and go to her mother in Washington, and I assume that’s where she is.”

“Thank God. I mean, what a relief she’s all right. And that she’s out of town.”

“You honestly haven’t heard from her?”

“Not a whisper.”

“And you haven’t tried to reach her?”

“Should I have? No matter what I said, that would only have meant to her that I was still in the game and confused things. What’s your advice?”

Matt spoke carefully, picking his words in such a way that Piet saw he was no friend; one did not have to speak so carefully to friends. Matt had grown to dislike him, and why
not?—he had grown to dislike Matt, since he had first seen him, in a pressed private’s uniform, his black button eyes as shiny as his shoes: an eager beaver. “Terry and I of course have discussed this since, and there is one thing, Piet, we agree you should do. Call his bluff. Let them know, the Whitmans, either by phone to Ken or by letter to Foxy, you surely can find her mother’s address, that you will
not
marry her in any case. I think if they know that, they’ll get back together.”

“But is that necessarily good? Them coming back together to make you and Terry and the Pope comfortable? Georgene just told me I shouldn’t try to play God with the Whitmans.”

The other man’s skull, half-lit, lifted in the gloom, one tightly folded ear and the knot of muscle at the point of the jaw and the concavity of his temple all bluish-white, for beyond the office window the carbon-arc streetlight on Hope Street had come on. Piet knew what had happened and what would: Matt had misjudged the coercive power of his moral superiority and would retreat, threatened by Piet’s imperfect docility, into his own impregnable rightness. Matt slammed shut a steel desk drawer. “I don’t like involving myself with your affairs. I’ve given my advice. Take it if you want this mess to have a decent outcome. I don’t pretend to know what you’re really after.”

Piet tried to make peace; the man was his partner and had transmitted precious information. “Matt, frankly, I don’t think I’m calling any of the shots any more. All I can do is let things happen, and pray.”

“That’s all you ever do.” Matt spoke without hesitation, as a reflex; it was one of those glimpses, as bizarre as the sight in a three-way clothing-store mirror of your own profile, into how you appear to other people.
The Red-haired Avenger
.

At home Angela had received a phone call. She told him about it during their after-supper coffee while the girls were watching
Gunsmoke
. “I got a long-distance call today, from Washington,” she said, beginning.

“Foxy?”

“Yes, how did you know?” She answered herself, “She’s been calling you, though she told me she hadn’t.”

“She hasn’t. Gallagher told me today where they both were. Ken apparently went over there Tuesday and told his sad story.”

“I thought you knew that. Terry told me days ago.”

“Why didn’t you say so? I’ve been worried sick.”

“We haven’t been speaking.” This was true.

“What did the lovely Elizabeth have to say for herself?”

Angela’s cool face, slightly thinner these days, tensed, and he knew he had taken the wrong tone. She was becoming a disciplinarian. She said, “She was very self-possessed. She said that she was with her mother and had been thinking, and the more she thought”—Angela crossed her hands on the tabletop to control their trembling—“the more she felt that she and Ken should get a divorce now, while the child was still an infant. That she did not want to bring Toby up in the kind of suppressed unhappiness she had known as a child.”

“Heaven help us,” Piet said. Softly, amid motionless artifacts, he was sinking.

Angela lifted a finger from the oiled surface of the cherrywood dining table. “No. Wait. She said she called not to tell me that, but to tell me, and for
me
to tell
you
, that she absolutely didn’t expect you to leave me. That she”—the finger returned, weakening the next word—“loves you, but the divorce is all between her and Ken and isn’t because of you
really and puts you under no obligation. She said that at least twice.”

“And what did you say?”

“What could I? ‘Yes, yes, no, thank you,’ and hung up. I asked her if there was anything we could do about the house, lock it or check it now and then, and she said no need, Ken would be coming out weekends.”

Piet put his palms on the tabletop to push himself up, sighing. “What a mercy,” he said. “This has been a nightmare.”

“Don’t you feel guilty about their divorce?”

“A little. Not much. They were dead on each other and didn’t know it. In a way I was a blessing for bringing it to a head.”

“Don’t wander off, Piet. I didn’t have anything to say to Foxy but I do have something to say to you. Could we have some brandy?”

“Aren’t you full? That was a lovely dinner, by the way. I don’t know why I adore lima beans so. I love bland food.”

“Let’s have some brandy. Please, quick.
Gunsmoke
is nearly over. I wanted to wait until the children were in bed but I’m all keyed up and I can’t. I must have brandy.”

He brought it and even as he was pouring her glass she had begun. “I think Foxy’s faced her situation and we should face ours. I think you should get out, Piet. Tonight. I don’t want to live with you any more.”

“Truly?”

“Truly.”

“This does need brandy, then. Now tell me why. You know it’s all over with Foxy.”

“I’m not so sure, but that doesn’t matter. I think you still love her, but even if you don’t, they mentioned Bea, and if it’s
not Bea it’s going to be somebody else; and I just don’t think it’s worth it.”

“And the girls? It’s not worth it for them either?”

“Stop hiding behind the girls. No, actually, I
don’t
think it’s worth it for them. They’re sensitive, they know when we fight, or, even worse I suppose, don’t fight. Poor Nancy is plainly disturbed, and I’m not so sure that Ruth, even though she inherited my placid face, is any better.”

“I hear your psychiatrist talking.”

“Not really. He doesn’t approve or disapprove. I try to say what I think, which isn’t easy for me, since my father always knew what I should think, and if it bounces back off this other man’s silence—I hardly know what he looks like, I’m so scared to look at him—and if it still sounds true, I try to live with it.”

“Goddammit, this is all because of that jackass Freddy Thorne.”

“Let me finish. And what I think is true is, you do not love me, Piet Hanema. You do not. You do
not
.”

“But I do. Obviously I do.”

“Stop it, you
don’t
. You didn’t even get me the house I wanted. You fixed it up for her instead.”

“I was paid to. I adore you.”

“Yes, that says it. You adore me as a way of getting out of loving me. Oh, you like my bosom and bottom well enough, and you think it’s neat the way I’m a professor’s niece, and taught you which fork to use, and take you back after every little slumming expedition, and you enjoy making me feel frigid so you’ll be free—”

“I adore you. I need you.”

“Well then you need the wrong thing. I want out. I’m tired of being bullied.”

The brandy hurt, as if his insides were tenderly budding. He asked, “Have I bullied you? I suppose in a way. But only lately. I wanted
in
to you, sweet, and you didn’t give it to me.”

“You didn’t know how to ask.”

“Maybe I know now.”

“Too late. You know what I think? I think she’s just your cup of tea.”

“That’s meaningless. That’s superstition.” But saying this was to ask himself what he contrariwise believed, and he believed that there was, behind the screen of couples and houses and days, a Calvinist God Who lifts us up and casts us down in utter freedom, without recourse to our prayers or consultation with our wills. Angela had become the messenger of this God. He fought against her as a raped woman might struggle, to intensify the deed. He said to her, “I’m your husband and always will be. I promise, my philandering is done, not that there was awfully much of it. You imagine there’s been gossip, and you’re acting out of wounded pride; pride, and the selfishness these fucking psychiatrists give everybody they handle. What does he care about the children, or about your loneliness once I’m gone? The more miserable you are, the deeper he’ll get his clutches in. It’s a racket, Angel, it’s witchcraft, and a hundred years from now people will be amazed that we took it seriously. It’ll be like leeches and bleeding.”

She said, “Don’t expose your ignorance to me any more. I’d like to remember you with some respect.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“Then I am. Tomorrow morning, Ruthie has dancing class and she was going to have lunch with Betsy Saltz. Nancy’s blue dress should be washed and ironed for Martha Thorne’s birthday party. Maybe you can get Georgene to come over and do it for you.”

“Where could you go?”

“Oh, many places. I could go home and play chess with Daddy. I could go to New York and see the Matisse exhibit. I could fly to Aspen and ski and sleep with an instructor. There’s a lot I can do, Piet, once I get away from you.” In her excitement she stood, her ripe body swinging.

The upsurge of music in the dark living room indicated the end of the program. Cactuses. Sunset. Right triumphant. He said, “If you’re serious, of course, I’m the one to go. But on an experimental basis. And if I’m asked politely.”

Politeness was the final atmosphere. Together they settled the girls in bed, and packed a suitcase for Piet, and shared a final brandy in the kitchen. As he very slowly, so as not to wake the sleeping girls, backed the pick-up truck down the crunching driveway, Angela made a noise from the porch that he thought was to call him back. He braked and she rushed to the side of his cab with a little silver sloshing bottle, a pint of gin. “In case you get insomnia,” she explained, and put the bottle dewy in his palm, and put a cool kiss on his cheek, with a faint silver edge that must be her tears. He offered to open the door, but she held the handle from the other side. “Darling Piet, be brave,” she said, and raced, with one step loud on the gravel, back into the house, and doused the golden hallway light.

He spent the first weekend in the Gallagher & Hanema office, sleeping under an old army blanket on the imitation-leather sofa, lulling his terror with gin-and-water, the water drawn from the dripping tap in their booth-sized lavatory. The drip, the tick of his wristwatch left lying on the resounding wood desk, the sullen plodding of his heart, the sash-rattling vibration of trucks changing gears as they passed at all hours through downtown Tarbox, and a relentless immanence within the telephone all kept him awake. Sunday he
huddled in his underwear as the footsteps of churchgoers shuffled on the sidewalk beside his ear. His skull lined like a thermos bottle with the fragile glass of a hangover, he felt himself sardonically eavesdropping from within his tomb. The commonplace greetings he overheard boomed with a sinister magnificence, intimate and proud as naked bodies. On Monday morning, though Piet had tidied up, Gallagher was shocked to find the office smelling of habitation. That week, as it became clear that Angela was not going to call him back, he moved to the third floor of the professional apartment building he himself had refashioned from the mansion of the last Tarbox. The third floor had been left much as it was, part attic, part servants’ quarters. The floorboards of his room, unsanded, bore leak stains shaped like wet leaves and patches of old linoleum and pale squares where linoleum had been; the oatmeal-colored walls, deformed by the slant of the mansard roof outside, were still hung with careful pastels of wildflowers Gertrude Tarbox had done, as a young single lady of “accomplishments,” before the First World War. When it rained, one wall, where the paper had long since curled away, became wet, and in the mornings the heat was slow to come on, via a single radiator ornate as lace and thick as armor. To reach his room Piet had to pass through the plum-carpeted foyer, between the frosted-glass doors of the insurance agency and the chiropractor, up the wide stairs with an aluminum strip edging each tread, around past the doors of an oculist and a lawyer new in town, and then up the secret stair, entered by an unmarked door a slide bolt could lock, to his cave. A man who worked nights, with a stutter so terrible he could hardly manage “Good morning” when he and Piet met on the stairs, lived across the stair landing from Piet; besides these two
rooms there was a large empty attic Gallagher still hoped to transform and rent as a ballroom to the dancing school that now rented the Episcopal parish hall, where Ruth took her Saturday morning lessons.

Though work on Indian Hill had begun again, with hopes for six twenty-thousand-dollar houses by Labor Day, Jazinski could manage most problems by himself now. “Everything’s under control,” Piet was repeatedly told, and more than once he called the lumberyard or the foundation contractors to find that Gallagher or Leon had already spoken with them. So Piet was often downtown with not much to do. On Good Friday, with the stock market closed, Harold little-Smith stopped him on Charity Street, in front of the barber shop.

“Piet, this is terrible.
C’est terrible
. What did the Whitmans pull on you?”

“The Whitmans? Nothing much. It was Angela’s idea I move out.”

“
La bel ange?
I can’t buy that. You’ve always been the perfect couple. The Whitmans now, the first time I met them I could see they were in trouble. Stiff as boards, both of them. But it makes me and Marcia damn mad they’ve screwed you up too. Why can’t
tout le monde
mind their own business?”