All My Relations (6 page)

“I bought Kahlua,” she said.

No, they said, the club already would be crowded.

At the doorway Linda kissed Julia thanks, twined her arm around Tim's waist. Solitary, Julia felt conspicuous, as if the others were ignoring a comical deformity, hands sewn on the wrong wrists maybe. “Tim, I almost forgot,” she said. “I've organized my papers in a filing cabinet, insurance, the will, investments, taxes. Alphabetized. It'll only take a minute. You must know, in case anything happens to me. Much as we want to avoid the fact, I am ill.”

“Mom, good God, not on Mother's Day.”

By 10:30 Julia had smoked her daily quota. The pact with herself was inviolable. Instead she watched a Cary Grant double
feature. Cary waltzed and feinted through the heroine's amorous lunges as if greased. At midnight Julia lit #1 for the following day.

She awoke with what she thought was a severe hangover, though she had drunk moderately. After phoning in sick to the zoo she returned to bed with the blinds drawn, a shirt over her eyes. She saw Philip turning from the window, approaching, nothing between them but the sheet drawn to her chin. Cigarettes tasted like smoldering chemicals and made her head throb. She wasn't aware when night fell. The next day was no better, so, she decided, there was no reason not to work.

“I have something for you,” Philip called to say. Julia said fine but didn't fix her hair or change clothes, drawstring pants and a jersey.

He arrived empty-handed. “It's a massage. No protests.” He covered her mouth. She was clairvoyant, he said; the outfit was perfect. He was unrolling a pad, popping a Bach harpsichord concerto on the stereo. She was face down on the floor.

“Petrified wood,” he laughed, fingertips playing over the base of her skull, her neck, back, legs. Indeed Julia felt all hard grain, indissoluble knots. As his fingers probed she yelped and started to rise.

“Patience. Bear with me,” Philip said.

Flowing blood did tingle in unexpected far parts of her body. Philip cautiously gave weight to his hands, then lifted her from beneath, let fall. Julia had the image of a board, clapped to her back, being pried loose. Now Philip could knead her flesh. The circling strokes of his palms were erasing her form. Even the pressure released her further.

“I don't feel anything,” she mumbled into the cotton. “I mean, I do”—she laughed—“but I'm disembodied.” The music advanced and receded, lacy waves breaking on the beach. She was
a bubble, zigzagging from spume into the pure air.

Julia became absorbed in the carpet before her eyes, its thickness, geometry, flagrant colors. She tumbled through the weave, the pile separating, closing over her. “It yields like water,” Philip panted, “and the colors stain your skin.” Their merging of thought Julia accepted as natural.

Philip rolled her over, kissing. Their stripping altered nothing. She might always have been naked. At Philip's touch nerves opened until she was entirely this fresh, ageless openness. Caresses were partaking and giving in the same movement.

“These are
your
hands,” she exulted.

Julia was swimming powerfully from shore, cutting a straight line through the water. When they finished she floated in a million miles of ocean, one with the currents.

“Now we truly are bonded,” Philip said.

Energy begets energy—Julia's credo. Editing the zoo newsletter, she also drafted press releases and mailings to fund the stalled sun bear enclosure. Days off she and Philip might decamp for an Anasazi ruin, Mexico, the Santa Fe Opera.

Swimming sixty laps a day had firmed her muscle—and toughened the cardiopulmonary system, the doctor commended, examining her. She had virtually quit smoking. In Philip's presence she wasn't tempted. Exercise suppressed the desire in four-hour blocks, one before, one during, two after. The surviving indulgences, over tea and at bedtime, didn't satisfy as before, the inhalation pinched, and often Julia skipped even these.

A slow, hot July morning, she daydreamed in the zoo's information kiosk. Until he was upon her she didn't recognize him—Philip, in floppy beach shirt patterned with exploding firecrackers, cantaloupe-sized knees protruding beneath green bermuda shorts.

She laughed uncontrollably. “Alaska. Gigantic vegetables that
grow in two weeks.” She clipped the price tag from his belt loop.

Together they cast fish food from a keeper's bucket, a privilege of the veteran docents.

“Nice motion,” Philip said of their arms' lazy sweeping. Cattails nodded in a breeze skimming cool off the water. Clouds puffed by.

“I'm happy,” Julia said.

Linda, who missed the large family left behind with a past marriage, adopted Julia. Accompanied by Linda, Tim dropped by as often as twice a week. Without complaint he replaced a leaky faucet washer and soldered a loose connection in the stereo. “Need anything from Target?” he said. “I'm right there.” A haunter of swap meets, Linda brought ceramic owl salt-and-pepper shakers, a touching, unusable gift.

“What do you do,” Julia asked Philip, “on those weekends when I don't see you?”

“My survivalist cadre holds its potlucks.”

“O.K.” Julia held up her hands. “No questions.”

“You know what would be lovely?” Julia said. A joint dinner for Philip, Tim, and Linda.

Philip was noncommittal.

After a few days Julia mentioned the idea again.

“My interest is in you,” Philip said.

“But they are me, Tim is.”

“That's an overpopulated armful for me.” Philip smiled.

“Don't put me in a position where I have to have all these little drawers, ‘Tim,' ‘Philip'… Please.”

“I like my drawer.”

Though she hadn't disbelieved him, the tangible evidence of
Philip's literary accomplishments stunned Julia. She turned over in her hands the hard-paper quarterlies with their austere cover designs, to read his name on the contributors' lists. The most recent was ten years old.

She borrowed them. Rhymed but metrically unpredictable, his poems, even the youngest, were predominantly elegaic. One conjured a circus from its abandoned grounds, overgrown with thorns. In another two friends discoursed ironically on love amid the fleshpile of a public beach.

Always a reader, Julia now studied literature systematically, analyzing texts in a notebook, to prepare for talks with Philip. For his birthday she composed a poem.

“Poetry isn't your forte,” he said, adding hurriedly, “but you are definitely in this poem. The sentiment is quite affecting.”

When a rancher friend presented her with veal steaks, Julia again proposed the family dinner.

“Our balance is delicate,” Philip said. “Let's not tip it.”

“I wasn't aware,” she said. “I thought we were quite robust. Tim and Linda keep asking to meet you.”

Philip was adamant. “You haven't made Tim sound like the greatest company.”

“How can you care for me and not want to know him?” Tightening vocal chords made Julia's voice strident. “You can't squirm away from them indefinitely. It's absurd.”

“Why not? I'll credit them with going cheerfully about their business, content without stalking me.”

Citing a need for “heart gossip,” Linda brought lunch. So eager was she that Julia confessed, yes, she and Philip were “intimate.”

“All right!” Linda pumped her fist.

Frankly, Julia said, the intervals between dinners were lengthening. Weekends, especially, were canceled. “A person doesn't
need sex. For nine years I did without. I didn't join a nunnery or the Communist Party. I wasn't bulemic. Flying penises didn't flock the skies.”

Linda rolled onto her back, feet kicking. “You didn't grow a beard. You didn't put ice cubes in your undies.”

“How come I feel like I'm going nuts?” She'd awaken fighting to breathe, as if steel bound her chest. The cough, when it came, was a relief.

“I never know when Tim's going to show up either, two days, a week, three in the morning.”

“How do you stand it?”

“Here's me,” Linda said, semicrouching. “I can go this way, that.” She pivoted left, right. “I never see Tim again, I'm sad, I'll live. Meanwhile I have a helluva lot of fun. Take it day by day. Tim zips me off to a ballgame, or picnicking in the mountains. One night we made masks and grass skirts from newspaper and called the house ‘Hawaiian Zone.' And then …” Linda whistled, drumming her fingers.

“Good for you. I don't see that side of Tim.”

“I should hope not.” Linda laughed.

“My idea of heaven,” Julia said, “is two people giving recklessly to each other, world without end. Amen.”

“Why do I always initiate our lovemaking now?” Julia asked Philip.

“You're the one who holds back sometimes. So I let you choose.”

“Don't you think maybe I'd like to be compelled by you, for that to make my choice?”

“I'm not much for coercion.”

“It's persuasion I'm asking for,” Julia said. “I don't want it to be all the same to you whether I say yes or no.”

Philip prepared an evening of tantra, “a true yoga, serenity in motionless sexual union.” He positioned himself on the mat, the
half lotus. Setting Julia on his lap, hooking her feet around his back, he entered her. Within minutes his breathing had subsided to a dilation of the nostrils, sigh. His eyes shut, the blue-veined lids unclenching. The forehead smoothed.

Julia's skin burst with excitement and frustration. When finally he stirred, she choked her limbs around him, mauled his chest with her teeth. Quick-quick-quick she moved, bouncing her rear on his ankles, beating against him.

“I have to beg off tonight,” Philip said over the phone. “My feet won't get me down the stairs.” He'd been complaining.

Julia covered the hot dishes in foil and drove them over. “This place may have had its day,” she said. “If you were closer at hand, I'd be more available.”

“Is that a suggestion that I move in?”

“I suppose it is. The shambles is charming”—she gestured around the apartment—“but why not live graciously for a change?”

“Can you imagine us rattling around each other twenty-four hours a day?”

“It's not so outlandish,” Julia said. She'd keep the top floor, he'd have the bottom, more territory than he was used to.

“Julia, your forays tire me.”

“Me, too, Philip, I couldn't agree with you more. Please do me the one favor. Meet Tim.”

A day later Philip said, “A concession on my part is called for. I'll come.”

Philip was due at six. Tim and Linda arrived an hour early to help set up. Linda, diminutively voluptuous in a tight sheath, hair coiled, arranged the snack tray. Acting out family stories, she revealed a flair for mimicry. Tim had prepped for the evening to the extent of dredging up college lit notes. He discoursed on symbolism in
The Mill on the Floss
. Dusting the London broil
with garlic, he quoted verbatim passages from
Anna Karenina
in the dog's point of view.

“Sweetheart,” Julia said. “I'm really moved by this support.” Tim kissed her.

A glass of sherry, intended to calm, made them giddier. Picking at the hors d'oeuvres, they had nearly emptied the tray when, at six sharp, the phone rang.

“I'm sorry, it's wrong. I feel coerced. We need to talk,” Philip said.

Julia turned to Linda and Tim. “You guessed it.”

“
Shit
,” Tim said. The explosive “t” made the word particularly ugly.

Julia and Philip stood at his kitchen counter half an hour, as if sitting hadn't occurred to them. They conversed with a distracted fluency, statements already thought through that they now borrowed from themselves. Neither referred to a purpose for the meeting.

Julia asked why Philip no longer wrote.

He did, but rarely, nothing to keep. “I won't write depressed,” he said. “That's ego, not poetry. I have no affinity with the vogue of inflicting one's every hidden recess upon 80 million readers.”

Why so depressed? “Your feet,” she joked.

“Yes.” He laughed. “And my wife.”

“Your ex-wife.”

“I've resumed with her.”

Julia rejected the attempt to believe she had mis-heard.

Vera was fifty, Philip said, still beautiful, copper hair and cream skin.

“Where do you go?” Julia asked numbly, as if interviewing.

“Here in town. Unfortunately, she's hopelessly unstable.” After leaving him, Vera had jumped off a bandshell roof during a rock concert. “I moved her back in the house, and I left. I knew she'd be more at peace there.”

Driving home Julia awaited the inevitable cough. Like the
braying of an onager, it came, accompanied by runny nose. She screamed in the closet, muffled by coats.

By phone she broke off with Philip. “I can't think of words to despise you enough,” she said.

To expand the newsletter Julia recruited correspondents. The sun bear drive cracked its goal, and construction began. Member of a YWCA with indoor pool since fall set in, she slogged through laps when the cough allowed. Sunglasses hid the dark circles around her eyes.

The following weeks Tim was so peevish and erratic—most often Julia entertained Linda alone—that Julia considered imposing a once-a-month quota on
him
. Despite the persistent cough she again bought cigarettes. Linda berated her.

“At a certain age, character becomes simplified,” she told Linda. “Julia plus Philip equals Tim minus smoking. Julia minus Philip equals smoking minus Tim.”

Bundled in a quilt against the damp chill, feet to the electric heater, Julia thought of Easter, herself in the ambulance, a gray stick, tassel of brownish hair, the oxygen mask a malignant flower covering her face. The cough boomed.

Napping, Julia dreamed of Philip in the form of a joke. The prototype she'd actually heard, a series of exchanges, increasingly damning accusations culminating in a punch line that was, as usual, all she could remember. In the dream the words were enormous stone monuments, unreadable from her perspective. Among the letters Philip scurried, a gnome with hairy rump and tail, mischievously peeking. Some of the joke's lines, rather than words, were film clips of him—striding naked, leaning back from the table wiping his beard, among trees, tinted green from their leaves.