Away from Home (30 page)

She had never thought of Carnival as either an end or a beginning, although she knew that to many people it was one or the other. Before, Carnival had been only a public orgy to try to enjoy, to get through, to watch and try to participate in. Margie was not much for mass letting-loose. She tried. But she hated to feel so hot that she was bathed in sweat, to feel her clothing shrinking and clammy, to know that her hair was dangling like limp string and her mascara was making black circles under her eyes. The discomfort of Carnival and the constant jumping and hopping, the pressure of strange bodies, the unexpected bruises that appeared the next day on private places of her body, were all a strain for her. She smiled whenever Neil looked at her; she tried to pretend she was one of the group, but secretly she was so tired she wanted to cry. Her legs ached, her back hurt, muscles she had never known she possessed pained and stiffened during the week of Carnival. She really went to Carnival because Neil liked it. But next year, she kept hoping, we will go away to Porto Allegre, or Preto d’Ouro, and stay there all through this madness, quietly and alone.

How happy everyone looked! They looked as if they were drugged. Margie smiled, she put her arms around Neil’s neck and hopped up and down in the dance with him, trying not to lose her sandals, trying to keep her gold wreath from being knocked off by someone’s elbow, breathless, smiling, thirsty already in the hot, bright room, trying not to be wrenched out of Neil’s arms by exuberant, heedless strangers. It occurred to her suddenly that she did not simply dislike Carnival: it terrified her. For the first time she admitted that to herself. And having admitted it at last, Margie felt a wave of hopeless exhaustion. Why am I so different from all the others? she thought, looking at them. They seemed to have superhuman strength and endurance; they did not feel heat or thirst or physical pain. Someone’s shoe ground against her bare instep and she winced. She had a cramp in her side. Are they the crazy ones or am I?

She saw Mort standing in one of the
camerotes
on the theater floor. Trust him to know someone who had a box. He was talking to a girl with bleached blond hair and he was drinking a highball with a lot of ice in it. Margie tugged at Neil.

“Look! Maybe Mort will hand us out a drink.”

Helen and Bert had already vanished. Margie stood on tiptoe at the edge of the mob trying to find them. Then she saw them, rushing by, bobbing up and down, only their heads visible, like a couple who have been drowned in a great wave and are momentarily revealed on the surface of the force that has destroyed them. She tried to wave and cry out to them, but they did not see her, and then they were gone. She turned and leaned on the edge of the
camerote
. There were people standing on the railing already; she had to push past someone’s bare legs. No one seemed to mind.

“Mort!”

“Hi,” he said. He handed out a bottle of imported Scotch. “Here, quick. Take a drink.”

“Isn’t there any water?”

“
Water?
” He walked around in the box, looking for water among the half-filled glasses people had left on the small table near the wall. There was a silver platter of something that looked like chicken croquettes, getting cold and congealing in their white sauce. There was some limp lettuce and a bowl of melting ice cubes. A man dressed as a scarecrow and a girl dressed as a stripteaser the moment before she vanishes behind the curtain were kissing each other passionately. Mort walked around them as if they were a pillar and reached for a glass. He sniffed at it.

“Here,” he said. “Water. I think.”

“I’ll take the Scotch,” Neil said.

Margie drank the water and sat down on the edge of the railing on a man’s feet. He moved and apologized, and then when he looked down and saw who he was apologizing to he tried to kiss her. He was a middle-aged man, slightly drunk, very happy, and when she pushed him away and scowled at him he looked bewildered. He apologized again and turned away. A moment later he turned back, leaned over her, and asked hopefully, “Will you dance with me?”

“No, thank you.”

“Some whisky?”

“No, thank you.”

“Some champagne?”

“No, thank you.”

“Some food?”

“No, thank you.”

“You are American?”

“Yes.”

He looked at Neil. “Your husband?”

“Yes.”

“Very fortunate man,” he said gallantly, gave a little bow, and turned away, this time for good.

Mort came over to her. “What did you tell your admirer?” he asked, grinning.

Margie took Neil’s hand and smiled. “I said Neil was my lover and very jealous,” she said. She touched the back of Neil’s hand to her cheek.

“I am,” Neil said. He tilted the bottle of Scotch and took a long drink.

“Do you know what I would like more than anything in the whole world?” Margie said.

“What?”

“A cold bath, and then to go to bed.” She realized, of course, as soon as the words were out, that both of them misunderstood. They thought she meant really Bed, not to sleep. She tossed her head and tried to pass the whole thing off, looking slightly wicked. Back home in New York, young wives had made comments like that all the time, and their husbands had said much worse, and no one had thought it particularly offensive to talk about one’s private life while playing bridge. Perhaps, Margie thought now, some of them had been lying too; crying wolf and talking big so that no one would know everything was not quite kosher at home.

“Let’s watch the people from the second floor,” Neil said, taking her hand.

They went out of the ballroom and up the stairs, inching their way past the people who were thronging the narrow corridor. Outside, on the floodlighted ramp, people were still arriving, the ones with such elaborate costumes that they could not dance and could barely walk; they would arrive only for the judging and to show their
fantaseas
and then they would go home. One woman wore a dress with side panels that opened into a huge silver fan when she held her arms out stiffly to the sides. The ends of the fan were attached to her wrists and she walked slowly and posed for photographers, smiling, her arms held rigidly out all this time as if she had been crucified.

“How can anyone have
fun
like that?” Margie asked, but her question was drowned out by the music.

They made their way to the second floor and tried several of the doors to the boxes until they found one that was unlocked. Margie had a moment of panic. She did not know these Brazilians or, indeed, any Brazilian, and she had no idea what surprised and hostile group they might find on the other side of that door. She glanced at Neil. “I’m afraid.”

“Come on!”

He was smiling, he was so happy, he was like a little boy. She could not think of anyone she would rather go to a party with than Neil. And yet, sometimes, she felt he went too far.… They opened the door and slipped in. All the occupants of the
camerote
were sitting or standing against the rail, leaning out to see, and none of them even turned around when Margie and Neil invaded their box. There was an old matriarch watching the dancers with tolerant amusement. Neil found a straight-backed chair and pulled it toward the front of the box for Margie to stand on.

“No,” she said, “Really, no.”

A man dressed as a harlequin left his place at the railing and went to the small table near the door to pour himself another drink. He smiled at Margie, thinking she and Neil were friends of someone else’s. She stood on the chair. Below there seemed to be several thousand people. She saw the bright colors of their costumes and their upturned faces. There was no separation among them or even a pattern; it was only an undulating, moving mass of humanity, bobbing, swirling, almost frightening. There was no longer such a thing as an individual down there. The music played loudly, as if its persuasive beat would continue to give strength to the dancers long after their muscles had given way. Even from this high above them she could see the sheen of perspiration on their faces and the fixed bright smiles that made some of them look like Esther Williams emerging dripping but smiling from under water in one of her movies. People were standing on tables at the side of the room, dancing alone or with others on the white tablecloths, and people were standing solidly side by side on the railings that edged the ring of boxes around the main floor. If someone were to faint and fall, Margie thought in horror, there would be nowhere to fall; he would simply be carried along on the wave, borne along unconscious on the merriment of the others. Some of the dancers looked up and waved happily. The people in the second-floor boxes, who were lucky enough to have chairs, waved back and squirted the dancers with their golden aerosol cans of perfumed ether.

“I want to get down now,” Margie murmured.

Neil put his arms around her hips to help her jump off the chair, and when she was standing beside him he did not open his arms but slid them up to her waist and held her against him.

“What’s going to happen to us?” he whispered. “Margie?”

She shook her head; she couldn’t speak. She was too hot, she was perspiring, she was tired, and she suddenly felt such a constriction in her throat that she could not have answered him even if she knew what to say.

“After all this is over,” he said. “Then what? We have to wake up some time, don’t we?”

She didn’t know what he was talking about, but there was genuine suffering on his face. For the first time in all the years they had been married, she suddenly realized, she had not the faintest idea what was in Neil’s mind. “Of course,” she whispered, not sure whether or not that was what he wanted to hear.

It seemed it was not. “Yes,” he said dully, and he let go of her at last, his arms falling heavily to his sides. “Let’s go find the bar.”

They pushed their way into a room which had a bar in it and fought through the crowd until they were standing againt the bar. Neil bought whisky for both of them. She drank hers as quickly as she could, as she had in the old days, and she noticed he had done the same.

“Let’s get drunk,” she said. “Let’s get plastered together.”

“I’ll match you.”

She felt happier after the second drink and she wondered why she had needed it. Neil looked rather grim. She had thought it would be fun to match drinks with him, sort of in the party spirit which she seemed to be so lacking tonight, but from the desperate way he looked he did not seem to need her to keep him company at all. She smiled at him. “Good luck.”

“Same to you.” They drank.

“Health.”

“Happiness.” They drank another.

“This,” Margie said, rather fuzzy now, “must be what they call Togetherness.”

“To togetherness.”

“Never apart.” They drank.

“Perfect couple,” Neil said.

“Perfect young couple. Isn’t that what they say?”

“That’s right.”

She tried to keep the words precise, although her tongue seemed to refuse to say what her mind told it to. “Such … a … lovely young couple, Margie and Neil.”

There was a stirring now among the crowd and cries that the costume parade was about to begin. Neil tipped the bartender and helped Margie to follow the other people back into the main ballroom. She saw the backs of the people in front of her as if through a mist, but with the colors very bright. Her eyes felt hot and she realized with some gentle surprise that she was crying. She was not exactly sure why she was crying because she did not feel very sad, only very drunk. From far away she heard herself speaking, and she was not exactly sure whether she was speaking out loud or only to herself.

“I hate them all,” she was saying. “I hate them.”

“Who?” Neil said. “These nice, lovely people?”

“No,” she said. “No, those other ones. The ones who call us a perfect young couple. Those are the ones I hate. I hate them.”

“Don’t hate them,” Neil said. He patted her shoulder. “Don’t hate them.”

“Can’t I?”

“No. No percentage.”

“They’re far away,” she said. “Why can’t I hate them?”

“Ignore them.”

There was a small space between two girls who were standing on the railing of a
camerote
and Margie was able to squeeze her way up there too. They put their arms around her in a friendly way to help support her and smiled at her happily. Neil stood in front of her and she leaned against his back a little and looked up to where the movable catwalk had been lowered so that it made a bridge across the room, up high, for the contestants to parade across. She wondered why they were neither afraid nor airsick.

A man was announcing the title of each entry in rolling, resonant tones, through a loud-speaker, with over-enunciation. First there were the groups. “Ar-le-cam,” he enunciated. “Ar-le-cam.”

A group of harlequins, shiny with satin stripes of many colors and tinkling with little silver bells, rushed across the catwalk, bobbing their heads and whirling gaily to wave at the people on both sides far below them. There was applause.

Then there were scarecrows, shaggy and fantastic and identical, and then there was a group of men dressed as Far Eastern temple dancers. After each group there was applause. Then there were the single entries.

“Dragon of Gold,” the announcer intoned. “Dragon of Gold.” As if we didn’t have eyes, Margie thought. But the dragon was impressive. It was a young woman, her dragon’s body covered entirely in stiff, gleaming golden scales. Her head was a dragon’s head, rather like a golden prehistoric monster from the Museum of Natural History, with an open mouth showing a red tongue. The eyes were green and lighted up. The tail trailed behind for at least six feet, and on the ends of the fingers were golden claws. There was applause from the crowd. A devil came out then, dressed in red, with a wicked grin. He bowed and swirled his cape, and tossed handfuls of gunpowder on to the catwalk, surrounding himself with small explosions and puffs of gray smoke. He ran by so fast Margie wished he would come back and explode some more gunpowder.

A blue and white clown paraded across the catwalk, bowing to the people. “He had that costume made in Paris by Jacques Heim!” one of the girls exclaimed to Margie, nearly pushing her off the railing in her excitement. “He came to Rio just to wear that costume to Carnival!” Everyone was much impressed by the cost of the Parisian costume and there was wild applause.