Couples (15 page)

As if underwater he moved through the final hour of this heavy gray day. An irreversible, constricted future was brewing in the apparatus of his lab—the fantastic glass alphabet of flasks and retorts, the clamps and slides and tubes, the electromagnetic scales sensitive to the hundredth of a milligram, the dead experiments probably duplicated at Berkeley or across the river. Ken worked on the fourth floor of a monumental neo-Greek benefaction, sooty without and obsolete within, dated 1911. The hall window, whose sill held a dreggy Lily cup, overlooked Boston. Expressways capillariously fed the humped dense center of brick red where the State House dome presided, a gold nucleolus. Dusty excavations ravaged the nearer ground. In the quad directly below, female students in bright spring dresses—dyed trace elements—slid along the paths between polygons of chlorophyll. Ken looked with a weariness unconscious of weariness. There had been rain earlier. The same rain now was falling on Tarbox. The day was so dull the window was partly a mirror in which his handsomeness, that strange outrigger to his career, glanced back at him with a cocked eyebrow, a blurred mouth, and a glint of eye white. Ken shied from this ghost; for most of his
life he had consciously avoided narcissism. As a child he had vowed to become a saint of science and his smooth face had developed as his enemy. He turned and walked to the other end of the hall; here, for lack of space, the liquid-scintillation counter, though it had cost the department fifteen thousand, a Packard Tri-Carb, was situated. At the moment it was working, ticking through a chain of isotopically labeled solutions, probably Neusner’s minced mice livers. A thick-necked sandy man over forty, Jewish only in the sleepy lids of his eyes, Neusner comported himself with the confidence of the energetically second-rate. His lectures were full of jokes and his papers were full of wishful reasoning. Yet he was liked, and had established forever the spatial configuration of one enzyme. Ken envied him and was not sorry to see, at four-thirty, his lab empty. Neusner was a concertgoer and winetaster and womanizer and mainstay of the faculty supper club; he traveled with the Cambridge political crowd and yesterday had confided to Ken in his hurried emphatic accents the latest Kennedy joke.
One night about three a.m. Jackie hears Jack coming into the White House and she meets him on the stairs. His collar is all rumpled and there’s lipstick on his chin and she asks him, Where the hell have you been? and he tells her, I’ve been having a conference with Madame Nhu, and she says, Oh, and doesn’t think any more about it until the next week the same thing happens and this time he says he was sitting up late arguing ideology with Nina Khrushchev …
A sallow graduate student was tidying up the deserted labs. A heap of gutted white mice lay like burst grapes on a tray. Pink-eyed cagefuls alertly awaited annihilation. Neusner loved computers and statistical theory and his papers were famous for the sheets of numbers that masked the fantasy of his conclusions. Next door old Prichard, the department’s prestigious ornament, was pottering with his
newest plaything, the detection and analysis of a memory-substance secreted by the brain. Ken envied the old man his childlike lightness, his freedom to dart through forests of evidence after such a bluebird. Neusner, Prichard—they were both free in a way Ken wasn’t. Why? Everyone sensed it, the something wrong with Ken, so intelligent and handsome and careful and secure—the very series expressed it, an unstable compound, unnatural. Prichard, a saint, tried to correct the condition, to give Ken of himself, sawing the air with his papery mottled hands, nodding his unsteady gaunt head, whose flat cheeks seemed rouged, spilling his delicate stammer:
The thing of it, the thing of it is, Wh-Whitman, it’s just t-tinkering, you mustn’t s-s-suppose life, ah, owes us anything, we just g-get what we can out of the b-bitch, eh?
Next to his lab, his narrow office was a hodgepodge encrusted with clippings, cartoons, snapshots of other people’s children and grandchildren, with honorary degrees, gilded citations, mounted butterflies and framed tombstone tracings and other such detritus of the old man’s countless hobbies. Ken halted at the door of this living scrapbook wistfully, wanting a moment of encouragement, wondering why such a sanctified cell would never be his. The old man was unmarried. In his youth there had been a scandal, a wife who had left him; Ken doubted the story, for how could any woman leave so good a man?

Inspiration came to him: Prichard’s virtues might be a product of being left, a metabolic reduction necessary to growth, a fruitful fractionation. Inspiration died: he looked within himself and encountered a surface bafflingly smooth. On Prichard’s cluttered desk today’s newspaper declared,
ERHARD CERTAIN TO SUCCEED ADENAUER
.

Morris Stein was waiting for him with a problem, an enzyme that couldn’t be crystallized. Then it was after five. He
drove home expertly, a shade arrogantly, knifing along the Southeastern Expressway like a man who has solved this formula often, changing lanes as it suited him, Prichard and Neusner and Stein revolving in his head while automobiles of differing makes spun and shuffled, passed and were passed, outside his speeding windows. He wondered about the people in Tarbox, how Hanema could drive that filthy clanking pick-up truck everywhere and the Applebys stick with that old maroon Mercury when they had the money. He wondered why Prichard had never won the Nobel and deduced that his research was like his hobbies, darting this way and that, more enthusiasm than rigor. He thought of photosynthesis and it appeared to him there was a tedious deep flirtatiousness in nature that withheld her secrets while the church burned astronomers and children died of leukemia. That she yielded by whim, wantonly, to those who courted her offhand, with a careless ardor he, Ken, lacked.
The b-b-bitch
.

The smokestacks and gasholders of South Boston yielded to the hickory woods of Nun’s Bay Road. He arrived home before dark. Daylight Saving had begun. Alone in the living room Cotton was curved asleep in the sling chair from Design Research. Ken called Foxy’s name. She answered faintly from the porch. Someone had torn away the boards that had sealed the French doors. She sat on a wicker chair, a tall gin drink in her hand, looking through rusted porch screens toward the sea. The sky was clearing after the brief rain. Dark-blue clouds thin as playing cards seen edgewise duplicated the line of the horizon. The lighthouse was tipped with an orange drop of final sun. He asked her, “Aren’t you cold?”

“No, I’m warm. I’m fat.”

He wanted to touch her, for luck, for safety, as when a child in Farmington after a long hide in the weeds shouts
Free!
and
touches the home maple. Gazing in the dying light across the greening marsh, she had a tree’s packed stillness. Her blond hair and pink skin and brown eyes were all one shade in the darkness of the porch. With a motion almost swift, the light had died. Bending to kiss her, he found her skin strange; she was shivering. Her arms showed goosebumps. He begged her, “Come in the house.”

“It’s so pretty. Isn’t this what we’re paying for?”

He thought the expression strange. They had never given much thought to money. Advancement, distinction: these were the real things. As if having overheard his thoughts, she went on, “We all rather live under wraps, don’t we? We hardly ever really open ourselves to the loveliness around us. Yet there it is, every day, going on and on, whether we look at it or not. Such a splendid waste, isn’t it?”

“I’m going in to make a drink.” She followed him in and told him about her day. She had weeded and raked in the side yard. She had decided she wanted roses, white and red mixed, along the blind southern wall of the servants’ wing. The Plymouth agency had called and said her car—a secondhand station wagon they had bought for her, since without a vehicle she was virtually a prisoner at this end of the beach road—would be ready Thursday, with license plates and an inspection sticker. Ken had forgotten about this car, though obviously she needed it. In Cambridge they had done so long without any car at all. Just before lunchtime Irene Saltz, with tiny Jeremiah in a papooselike arrangement on her back, had dropped in on her way back from the beach. She was a conservationist and distressed that the winter storms had flattened a number of dunes. Any town but Tarbox would ages ago have put up fences and brush hedges to hold the sand. She asked Foxy to join the League of Women Voters and drank three cups of
coffee. With such a monologuist for a husband, you probably have to develop another erotic outlet, but the trouble with people who have poured themselves into good works is they expect you to do the same, pour away, even if they have husbands as handsome, charming, and attentive as, dear, yourself … Ken sipped his drink and wondered what she was driving at. In the living-room light she looked pale, her ears and nostrils nipped pink. She was high on something.

What else happened? Oh, yes, in the middle of her nap, and by the way she had gotten to volume two of Painter’s life of Proust, which looked to be much the duller, since Proust was no longer having his childhood, Carol Constantine had called, inviting them to a May Day party; it sounded rather orgiastic. And finally she had got up her nerve and called this man Hanema to come look at the house.

“When will he come?”

“Oh, he came.”

“And what did he say?”

“Oh he said fifteen thousand, more or less. It depends on how much you want to do. He’d like to see us with a full basement but a crawl space with I think he said plastic film over the earth might do for the kitchen half. He prefers hot-water heat but says hot air would be cheaper since we can put the ducts right in the walls we’re going to have to build anyway. You’ll have to talk to him yourself. Everything seemed to depend on something else.”

“What about the roof and the shingles?”

“New roof. He thinks we can patch the shingles for now.”

“Does this fifteen thousand include doing anything to those ugly upstairs dormers and that leaky skylight?”

“We didn’t go upstairs. Of course he knows the house already. He thought the big issue was the basement. He was
rather quaint and cute. He kept talking about babies crawling around on a nice warm floor and glancing at my tummy.”

Ken felt a weight descend but persisted. “And the kitchen?”

“He sees about four thousand there. He wants to knock out the pantry partition and have new everything except the sink. He agreed with me, the slate sink must be kept. But the plumbing should be done over top to bottom. And the wiring. Have some more bourbon, baby.”

She took his glass and smoothly, like a sail pushed by wind, moved toward the kitchen. “Very weak,” he said, and, when she returned with the drink, said, “Well. But did you like him?”

Foxy stood a moment, her pale mouth shaped as if to hum. “I can manage him. He seemed a little forlorn today. His daughter’s pet hamster was eaten by a neighbor’s cat.” Ken remembered Neusner’s tray of gutted mice and wondered how some men still could permit themselves so much sentiment.

“You’re the one,” Ken said, “who’ll have to deal with him.”

She again moved with that airy quickness, as if she had considered a possibility and dismissed it. “I don’t think he wants the job. He and your friend are building new houses for the population explosion.”

“Gallagher’s not my friend especially. Did Hanema recommend any other contractor?”

“I asked him to. He said there wasn’t anybody he’d trust us with offhand. He was very indecisive. He seemed to feel possessive about this house.”

“His wife had wanted it.”

“You keep
saying
that.” Her reactions had a quickness, her eyes a hard brightness, that was unusual; he felt an unseen factor operating, an unaccounted-for chemical. She had disliked
Hanema: this guess, flattering to himself, inevitable in the light of himself, disposed him to the man, and he told her, “I think, why not put him to work? Exert your charm.”

She was moving, swiftly, lightly, about the room, taking a kind of inventory perhaps, touching rough surfaces that soon would be smooth, saying goodbye to the ugly mementos, the fan-shaped shell collection, the dried sprigs of beach pea and woolly hudsonia, that had housed her for this while, this pregnant month. She changed the subject. “How was your day?”

He confessed, “I feel bogged down.”

She thought,
You need another woman
. She said, “It’s too much commuting.”

“It’s too much mediocre mental grinding. On my part. I should have gone into law. That we can do. The old man has two flat feet for a brain, and everybody in Hartford thinks he’s nifty.” She laughed, and he looked up startled; his vocabulary became boyish when he thought of Hartford, and he was unconscious of it. He went on sadly, “I was thinking about Prichard today and it made me realize I don’t really have it. The flair. It all just looks like a bunch of details to me, which is the way it looks to every boob.”

“Prichard’s an old man. You’re young. Old men have nothing serious to think about.” By “serious” she meant the shadow within herself, her child, the dark world of breeding.

“Except death,” Ken said, a touching strange thing for him to say. She had pictured him as thinking no more about death than a watch does about running down. She had assumed he from birth had solved it and had worked out her own solution apart from him.

Foxy said eagerly, “Oh no, when you’re young you think about that. So when you’re old you have nothing to do but be
happy for each new day.” She drifted to where a scantling shelf horizontal between two studs held a single forgotten amber marble, striped with a swirl of honey-white. She held it in her pink oval palm and tried to see into its center and imagined God as a man so old each day makes Him absolutely happy. She wondered why she could not share God with Ken, it was so innocent, like this marble, meek and small but there. She didn’t ask him to believe in more than this. But in his presence she became ashamed, felt guilty of duplicity.

Ken looked up as if awaking. “Who took the boards off the porch doors?”

“He did. Hanema.”