Away from Home (4 page)

“Dinner,” Mil Burns said, interrupting with a hand on Bert’s shoulder. “Come on, don’t you all be polite and let it get cold. Come on, everybody.”

Helen turned to take Bert’s arm, but Ernestine had already fastened on to him, smiling a great white smile. “I’ve been dying to talk to you,” she heard Ernestine say.

Nestor turned to her. “May I help you get a plate?” he asked. “It’s buffet.”

“Thank you.”

He was a nice little man, scarcely an inch taller than she was in her high heels, and he had a charming way of looking at her, as if he appreciated her but would not dream of making a pass unless she hinted at it first. It was that verge-of-a-pass look she had seen on other Brazilian men at American parties. They kissed your hand when they were introduced and when they said goodbye. They actually kissed your hand; they didn’t just lift it a bare two inches and make a token gesture. But they never held your hand too long at their lips, and if they squeezed it before they released it, it was such a slight squeeze that it was more flattering than forward.

They found seats next to Margie and Neil on the sofa. “Are you having a good time?” Margie murmured.

“Sort of,” she murmured back.

“Let’s not stay too late,” Margie said.

It was obvious that Mil had planned the menu with a great deal more nostalgia than practicality. There was ham and potato salad and Boston baked beans and brown bread and cold fried chicken and great buttermilk biscuits dripping with salt butter. The dessert sat on the sideboard: a large sticky-looking lemon pie, a chocolate pie covered with whipped cream, and a platter of brownies. The white-coated butler came around with a tray full of glasses of cold beer. It must have been a hundred degrees in the room, and the first bite of biscuit stuck in Helen’s throat. She put her piled-up plate on the coffee table in front of her and took a cigarette.

Nestor leaned forward to light it for her. “You don’t eat?”

“It’s very hot tonight.”

“This is a terrible summer,” he said. “It isn’t usually so hot in Rio.”

She smiled. “Is that true?”

“I swear it. I hate the heat too. In the summer here I nearly die of it.”

“My lord,” Margie said, “look at my husband eat, God bless him.”

Neil had devoured everything on his plate; he seemed oblivious to the heat. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

Margie laughed. “Nothing, darling.”

Neil stood up. “I’m going to get more. This is very good. Real kosher ham.” He grinned at his wife. “Does anyone want anything? More beer? Nestor?”

“No, no thank you,” Nestor said, looking slightly queasy. “I always eat a large lunch and then I eat very lightly at night. It’s much better in hot weather.”

Bert came over, with Ernestine following him. “Hi,” he said. “Is there room?”

Helen and Margie moved over on the sofa, and Ernestine sat down. Bert sat on the arm of the sofa next to Helen, even though there was still room where Neil had been. “Your husband certainly worries about you,” Ernestine exclaimed. “He insisted we come over to see if everything was all right.”

Nestor stood up. “I think I had better look for
my
wife,” he said. “I want to see if she’s all right.” He bowed slightly and left.

Ernestine got up from the couch and took Nestor’s empty chair, next to Bert. “You can just
tell
he’s a mining engineer,” she said, taking hold of Bert’s hand. “Just feel his hands! They’re wonderful. So hard! You can tell he’s been digging in those mines for jewels.” She rubbed her fingers against Bert’s palm. “Isn’t it exciting to be married to a mineralogist?”

“He’s a gemologist,” Helen said.

Bert extracted his hand from Ernestine’s grip. “That’s slightly different,” he said. “And my hand is this way from years of playing tennis. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

“Oh, you’d never disappoint me!” Ernestine cried. Her face was flushed from the heat and the highballs, and her nose and cheeks were shiny.

Helen felt Margie kick her lightly on the ankle. She turned to smile at her friend, and Margie winked at her almost imperceptibly. She could see that Margie was trying not to giggle, and looking at Margie’s elaborately restrained face almost made Helen laugh with her. They looked away from each other then. But the moment she was not in contact with the contagion of Margie’s amusement Helen began to wonder what was so funny after all. When Ernestine had said, “Your husband certainly worries about you. He insisted we come over,” Helen had felt a soft happiness—the reassurance of love. No matter how many years she lived with Bert she knew she would never stop needing to have him show her he loved her. But, of course, he had not come over to see if she were all right; he had come here to escape Ernestine. It was a completely different thing. For a moment Helen almost felt like getting up with some excuse and leaving him here to suffer Ernestine’s coy passes and tentaclelike fingers.

There is always the moment at a not quite successful party when you feel as though you have been dropped from a height of gaiety and suddenly everyone is unpleasantly revealed; and you are totally alone watching them, wondering what you are doing there anyway. These are the same people who were so entertaining a few minutes ago, you think, but now they just look tired, their chatter is forced and endless, and your face is weary from smiling at them. It is the moment to leave, but of course you never can leave just then, so the rest of the evening turns into a black abyss in which you wait and wait and wait, despising yourself for being so conventional and polite instead of inventing a headache or an urgent late appointment. It was that moment now for Helen. She looked at the large blonde flirting with Bert, at Mil Burns, at Linda in her tight little curls, and at all the other expatriate wives who were huddled together for protection and warmth in a strange land, guarding their old customs and keeping away the intruders. Mil and Phil had invited a Brazilian, it was true, but he was a tame Brazilian. He spoke perfect English, he had spent years in the States, he had money, he acted chivalrous but not wolfish, he never expressed violent or controversial ideas. He was almost wearing a Brooks Brothers’ suit. It seemed, Helen thought, as if they had invited the tame Brazilian as a sort of inoculation. They figured if they could survive him they would be immune, and eventually when they
had to
go out into the city and meet
real
Brazilians, then they would be safe.

What do they think they’re going to catch, Helen wondered, mumps? And there are Embassy people here too, and Phil Burns the Brazilophile is so happy that he’s snared a tame Brazilian and all these other international types. But except for a few topazes and amethysts and aquamarines and one or two foreign clichés in their conversation, these people might as well still be at home. Maybe I’m exactly the same; who is to tell? How
can
I be different, when this is all I know?

Margie tapped her arm. “We’re leaving. It’s twelve o’clock. Do you want to go?”

“Oh, yes!”

There was a confusion of goodbyes at the door; Mil telling them not to go, Phil arranging a luncheon date with Neil, a woman Helen had never seen before who happened to be standing near the doorway and who smiled at her slightly and said, “Goodbye. It was very nice meeting you.” Ernestine trailed Helen and Bert to the door.

“This is the way the Brazilians say goodbye,” Ernestine said, and flung her arms around Bert’s neck, kissing him soundly on first one cheek and then the other. It was her own variation on the formal, airy little kisses Brazilian women always exchanged, and when she headed for Helen, Helen tried to avoid her, but it was too late.

Ernestine put her arm around Helen’s neck and kissed her cheek, and drew her slightly away from the others who were congregated at the doorway. “Watch out for your Bert,” Ernestine whispered intensely. She looked almost tearful. “Keep him on the straight and narrow!”

“Good night,” Helen said. “Good night. Thank you. Good night, Mil dear. Thank you again. Good night.” And they had escaped.

When she and Bert were safely inside their apartment, where the maids had left lamps lighted softly in the living room and the night breeze blew the curtains inward like children playing ghosts, Helen sighed happily. She dropped her shoes and purse on the floor and sank into an armchair. “Ah, how wonderful. Merry Christmas, darling.”

Bert smiled. “Merry Christmas. Let’s have a brandy.”

“All right.”

He brought two glasses of brandy and gave her one, and then sat in the other armchair. “Do you know what that woman was doing to me?” he said in a tone of delighted amusement. “I was watching to see if you noticed. She had me against the wall and she kept punctuating her conversation by bumping me with her pelvis. I swear it! ‘Tell me all about mining,’
bump, bump
. ‘It must be so interesting,’
bump, bump
.” He laughed.

“Oh, no!” Helen said. “And she kept telling me about these nice virtuous people and how no one was so
corny
as to have affairs any more!”

“She had hands like an octopus,” Bert said. “I had to remove each finger separately when she was talking to me.”

“I’m delighted you’re so irresistible, dear.”

“Oh, so am I.” They both laughed.

“After we put out the presents, let’s open ours
now
,” Helen said. “I want you to see what I found for you.”

They went to the closet and took out the gifts for the children, all wrapped, and piled them under the tree until they reached the lowest branches. Then they found the ones each had bought for the other. “You first,” Helen said.

She watched his face as he unwrapped the small, heavy parcel. She wanted him to like it, to feel the way she had when she found it for him; and as always when she gave a present, she was a little afraid that it would not mean what she had meant it to, that it would be only another gift.

“It’s beautiful,” he said. He held it on his palm—a round crystal paperweight, glittering with colors from the lamplight, smooth and solid and heavy, with an inscription engraved on it.

“Read it,” Helen whispered.

“‘
Chance cannot change my love nor time impair
…’”

“I mean it.”

“I know. Thank you, darling.” He handed her a narrow, small box wrapped in white paper. “This is for you.”

She could tell by the feel of the box that it was a piece of jewelry, and when she lifted the lid she saw that it was a gold bracelet. “Oh, it’s marvelous! Thank you.” She held out her wrist for him to attach the clasp.

“It looks very nice on you,” he said. “I was afraid it might be too heavy.”

“No, I love it.”

He looked at the bracelet with his head cocked slightly, appraising the look of it. “Yes. I like it.”

The living-room clock chimed softly. “I don’t want to look,” Bert said. “What time is it? No, don’t tell me.”

“It’s only one-thirty.”

“And the kids will come thundering in at six.”

“It’s not so late,” Helen said softly.

He put his arms around her and kissed the top of her head. “Let’s go to bed,” he murmured.

He always went into the bathroom ahead of her because she took so much longer than he did, and Helen walked out onto the balcony that led off their bedroom overlooking the sea. The stars seemed very low and big in the cloudless black sky, and the beach was white with moonlight. Here and there on the sand she could see a tiny figure that sometimes briefly moved apart so she could see it was really two. None of the lovers below on the beach seemed ashamed that they were loving each other in public. Even if the night had been a disguise, fifty feet away on the sand there was always another couple as oblivious and occupied as the first. They were the poor from the crowded mountaintop
favellas
, and the not quite so poor from the Copacabana slums, taking the only real pleasure they had; and they were the young romantics who liked to make love on a moonlit beach, and some of them were wealthy drunks who had wandered from a party and were not quite sure how they had arrived on the beach at all. It was a night for love. But every night in Rio was a night for love.

Behind her, she heard Bert walking barefoot out of the bathroom and pausing to turn down the sheets of the bed. She went back into the room and smiled at him, full of love and secret excitement, and went quickly into the bathroom. She had taken a bath before they went to the party, but she wanted to take another one, quickly, quickly. She turned the cold water tap on full and poured in a handful of lemon-scented bath salts, because she knew it was a fragrance he liked. Waiting for the tub to fill, Helen brushed her hair, looking into the mirror at her eyes, which seemed to have become all pupil, great and dark. She would not take off any of her make-up. She loathed the idea of being one of those wives who come to their husband’s arms bristling with curlers and shiny and pale with cold cream. How could anyone bear that?

The bath water was slightly tan from the rusty pipes, but she had learned to ignore that, and when she had dried herself she dusted her body with powder, quickly, quickly, and once dropped the puff into the sink by accident because her hands seemed unable to hold on to anything in this moment. She kept a bottle of the lemon-scented cologne in the medicine cabinet and splashed it on her shoulders, her breasts, the insides of her thighs, and left it standing uncapped on the sink.

The bedroom was dark, but moonlight made objects stand out in gleaming silhouette. He was lying on his back, covered only by the sheet, lying very still. Helen walked quietly to the bed on bare feet and slid under the sheet beside him. He did not move. She raised herself on one elbow and looked down at his face, illuminated by the whiteness of the moonlight. His eyes were shut, shadowed, and the dark semicircles his joined eyelashes made did not even quiver under her cool breath. He was breathing deeply and softly, the otherworldly breathing of the dreamer in his first secret hours of sleep.

Oh, no, darling, Helen thought, no; wake up, wake for me. She tried to will him awake by looking into his face, remembering that somewhere she had heard it was possible to awaken children and lovers by watching them as they slept. He only sighed and slipped deeper into his dream. On the table next to his side of the bed Helen saw that he had turned his little clock so he could see the face when he awoke. She looked at the illuminated hands with loathing, changing them in her mind into time itself, all the hours of her days and nights, marked off and rigid and ritual.