Augusta Played (22 page)

It was so complicated that Elaine took several weeks to mull it over. From her point of view, there was no urgency about the situation. Most of this time she was absorbed in other tasks as well, fixing fresh orange juice for the boys in the morning and tucking them in at night and in between trying to socialize them without de-socializing herself beyond reclamation. Another thing that none of her professors at Wellesley had warned her of was that being the mother of sons meant learning everything you ever wanted to know about sex and also everything you didn't want to know. She was doing her best to help them grow up with the minimal number of hang-ups, but it wasn't easy, not when their father's attention kept wandering. From the time he was an infant, almost, Jeremy had been taught by Richard that whenever he wanted to do what Elaine, in spite of Dr. Spock, could only think of as indulge himself, he should simply say so and excuse himself from the room. Now she had an eight-year-old son who indulged himself while watching Batman on the twelve-inch portable in the room he shared with his brother. She could deal with this, a son with a Penguin fetish, but what was driving her up the wall was that whenever he vanished into the room to indulge himself, he locked his younger brother out. In fact, Elaine sometimes suspected that Jeremy used Richard's modern notions of child-raising as a cover, and what he was really doing was watching Batman.

Jeremy's younger brother, Jeff, was a sturdy, pugnacious, round-faced five-year-old with a tucked-in chin, close-spaced eyes, and an Aldo Ray voice. God only knew what he was going to be when he grew up. In jail, probably. He had an incipient gruffness that Elaine loved—she could look into his crossing eyes and see a boxer, a jockey, or a boss of big crime. When she was an old lady and Richard was too weak to lift his baton anymore, at least there would be someone to take care of her. Elaine nurtured a special affection for her baby boy, the little tough one. When Jeremy locked the door against him, Jeff went at it with such vigor that Elaine was convinced it would one day cave in. Nevertheless, Jeremy refused to open it until he was ready to, which generally meant after the show was over. And then Jeff would hit Jeremy. It might seem that the simplest solution would have been to fix the door so it wouldn't lock, but Richard refused to allow this. He said that children needed their privacy quite as much as adults did. Elaine pointed out that Jeremy was enjoying his privacy at the expense of his younger brother. Richard said Jeffrey would simply have to learn that in this world you had to make concessions. It was plain to see where Richard's sympathies lay, but it was not clear to Elaine whether Richard sided with Jeremy because he favored self-indulgence, privacy, or Batman.

Introduction to Marriage and the Family 101 had never warned her that she would spend the best years of her life shouting. For years she had been shouting. It seemed to her that life since Wellesley had been one long scream—at the kids, at Richard. Not hysterical screaming, mind you; merely motherly screaming. Elaine toyed with the idea of someday starting to scream and never stopping, but she had not gone to Wellesley for nothing. She knew how to keep her hysteria well under control. No, this was beneficent screaming and shouting, dutifully undertaken for others' sake, not her own. Admonitions delivered in a normal tone of voice went unheeded. If you wanted them to put their rubbers on, to take their vitamins, to remember a meeting, to do their homework, to refrain from falling into bed with the latest dolly bird, it was necessary to scream. Frequently over the din of music. Elaine's most treasured moments were those she could spend in silence, with the boys asleep and the phonograph off. She drank her vodka gimlets and sank into a restful contemplation of the sound of one hand clapping.

What Richard dreaded, she loved.

She drank her vodka gimlets and the fluffy snowflakes turned thin and gray, and then the thin gray falling snow turned to a sharp, stinging needlelike rain stitching a veil in front of her eyes as she walked home from Gristede's in raincoat and rainhat.

She drank her vodka gimlets and the bitter wind off the river changed direction, bringing spring breezes light as mus-lin, the sort of spring peculiar to Manhattan, promising fame and fortune in the fullness of summer. If you were under thirty-five. She shopped for mándalas and ming trees, after-dinner liqueurs and roach clips. (She didn't do grass herself, preferring vodka gimlets, nor did Richard, preferring Scotch, but that year it was the in-thing among patrons of the symphony; Elaine used the clips to hold place cards for her table settings.) She shopped for tennis shoes for the boys for when they went to the Hamptons for the summer, a one-piece suit for herself to hide the gallstone scar, thong sandals for herself and for Richard, and tickets to
Hair
. She wore a navy blue shift and tied her hair back with a matching piece of yarn, in what, when she went to school, had been called a horse's tail: it didn't ride high on the back of the head like a pony tail. The heat from the sidewalk seemed to slide up her stockingless legs like a not-unwelcome hand. The do-nothing clouds lazed in the blue sky, elegant, diaphanous, and disinclined to stir, like guests at a Roman banquet. The sun glinted off shop windows and the braided epaulets of doormen, and she developed an itchy rash directly under the face of her watch and had to give up wearing it, so that she lost all track of time. Nevertheless, though she was only barely conscious of herself thinking and of time passing, one day she realized that over a period of time she had arrived at a conclusion: it had hung on the edge of her consciousness like a nest on a branch. If it was true that Augusta Gold was not sleeping with Richard, she could not have told Richard what Norman had heard from her, Elaine; therefore, this woman Birdie must have heard it from Norman.
Therefore
Norman was acquainted with the same woman who was seducing Richard from the more important things in his, Richard's, life. THEREFORE Norman was no friend of hers. That explained why he had been so noncommittal in the bar on Amsterdam.

That was how the book had wound up in Elaine's apartment: from Norman Gold to Birdie Whoever to Richard. Did they know yet that they were sharing the same woman? God. Talk about a bird in the hand being worth two. The more she considered this, the more convinced Elaine became that Norman Gold had thought it was pathetic of her to tell him about Richard; she could remember distinctly the look in his eyes when they were sitting in the booth. He had been burned up to hear that his wife was running around on him, all right, but he had never once questioned Richard's right to run around. Why was it when a man was jealous of a woman it was high tragedy, but when a woman was jealous of a man it was low comedy?

That night, Elaine fixed herself a drink
before
she put the boys to bed. Several drinks. When Jeremy and Jeff had restored their toys to the toy chest and climbed into bed—twin beds, with a lamp with an anchor painted on the base and ships' helms printed on the shade on the nightstand between them, and a stack of comic books on the open lower shelf of the nightstand—she crouched on the scatter rug between them and told them a bedtime story.

It was a story about a woman who was forced to scream at her two sons and her husband so many times that one day she lost her voice. She had to look all over the world for it. The Queen of Sheba couldn't find it for her. The King of Siam didn't know where it was. Oh, she searched everywhere. Finally, after many years during which she grew old and shriveled, she found it perched in a mulberry tree in a remote and mountainous part of China, singing like a nightingale.
Come home
, the woman—by now she was “Mommy”—wanted to say, to the beautiful voice,
please come home
—but she couldn't. She had no voice to say it with. So the woman spent the rest of her days as mute as a silkworm, trailing her hand in the limpid lightshot pure green pool beside the very tree in which her former voice sang its heart out, ever after.

The boys were too terrified to say anything. Elaine turned the light out and went back to the living room. Richard was at a rehearsal. He said. She sat on the couch, examining her profile in the mirror, mirror, on the wall, and after a while, screwing up her eyes and dialing very slowly because the numbers had a tendency to blur, becoming reminiscent of one of Jeremy's New Math problems, she telephoned Augusta Gold. If Norman answered, she would hang up.

43

G
US
ANSWERED
. Except for Tweetie, she was alone in the apartment. The telephone rang while she was in the middle of drying her hair with a towel. “Gus Gold speaking,” she said. By now she was used to thinking of herself as Gus Gold.

“This is Elaine Hacking.”

“Elaine?”

“We know each other, I believe, by sight.”

“I didn't realize you knew me.”

“I make a point of knowing who Richard's girl friends are.”

“I'm not one of Richard's girl friends.”

“You were.”

Gus was trying to wrap the towel around her head with one hand while holding the receiver with the other. She managed to do this, but then she couldn't hold the receiver to her muffled ear. She tried to work one ear free from the towel, and the whole towel came down again. “Mrs. Hacking, why did you call me?” In a temper with the towel, she added, “It's a little late to play the aggrieved wife, isn't it?”

“For me, maybe. Not for you.”

Gus froze. It was warm in the apartment, the one room beginning to take in what Norman called its summer boarder, Stifling Heat, but Gus felt as if someone had stabbed her through the heart with an icicle. “What do you mean?” she asked, knowing she was asking only for the details, not the sense.

“Your husband is—” But suddenly Elaine felt ashamed of all the ways of saying it, and reaching for something gentler said, “Your husband is having it off with another woman.”

“Having it off?” Gus had never heard the expression before.

“With another woman,” Elaine said.

“You?”

“Me?” Elaine shrieked, with pleasure. It had never occurred to her that Augusta Gold might think her husband would cheat on her with
her
. “That's rich. What makes you think I would even be
willing
to sleep with your husband? He's too short. Besides, this may come as a surprise to you”—Elaine actually said “comes sprise you”—“but some women leave other women's husbands alone. They let them get on with the more important things in life.”

“More important things?”

“There are more important things in life than sex. Nightingales, for instance.”

“I don't understand what nightingales have to do with anything.”

“You do want to know how I happen to know that your husband is being unfaithful, don't you?”

“Yes,” Gus said, faintly.

“A little Birdie told me.”

44

G
US
SAT
for a long time on the big bed, staring at the door—long enough for her hair to dry, waving softly—and she had made up her mind to confront Norman as soon as he walked in. There was no way she could have known that when he walked in he would be covered with blood.

It was all over his face and hands, as if he had taken a bath in it. Gus found herself saying, “Oh God, Norman, are you all right? Are you all right?” over and over, and later, after she had washed off the blood and discovered that the cut was not so bad as it had seemed, she didn't know how to work her way back to the words she had originally intended to say. It would be too huge a leap from loving concern to anger—she couldn't bridge that gap with a single sentence.

Norman had a jagged gash across his forehead, and though the bleeding had stopped, it looked nasty enough. She dabbed it with rubbing alcohol and Norman jumped. “It stings,” he said.

“It's supposed to.” However, she dabbed him a little longer than was strictly necessary. It wouldn't hurt him to feel a little pain. “You probably should see a doctor,” she said, “to be safe.”

Norman was in an exultant mood. “You should have heard me, Gus, it was something. God, it was really something!”

“What was?”

“Those idiots want a revolution, let's give them a revolution. Listen, Gus—”

“I'm listening.”

“—you could turn all those radicals upside down and you wouldn't be able to shake loose a single idea. There isn't one real idea in the whole bunch. Hell, I really wish you had been there, Gus!” And he suddenly realized again how very, very fond of her he was, how pleased he felt when he knew he had acquitted himself well in the world's eyes for her sake.

“What happened?”

“They took over Low Library. They're calling it a Liberated Area.
Be free to join us
, they said. They put up a sign saying that. So I decided, Right, I'm free, and besides I need to use the library. I had to cross a picket line.”

“Oh no!”

“Oh yes.” Norman tucked her hair behind her ears and ran his finger along her chin before he went on. “This pea-brained revolutionary with an infantile desire for instant gratification raises a clenched fist over my head and calls me a scab. Can you believe it? I assured him he was no flower child himself.”

“You might have been killed, Norman!”

“I know,” Norman said, with immense satisfaction. “I went into the library but it was impossible to work in there. Too noisy. Mark Rudd and his baby thugs were trashing Kirk's office. I left, but somebody caught me with a piece of glass as I was coming down the steps.”

“I love you, Norman,” Gus said, wearily. “Don't do that again, please.”

“You smell good,” he said. “Are you wearing perfume?”

“It's the shampoo. I washed my hair.”

“Come here.”

She moved closer to him on the big bed.

“Marx was not too bright to begin with,” Norman said,

“but sometimes I feel sorry for him. He's been unluckier in his ideological descendants than just about anybody.”