Couples (21 page)

The autumn of 1962, the two couples were ecstatically, scandalously close. Frank and Marcia were delighted to be thrown together so often without seeking it. Janet and Harold in private joked about the now transparent stratagems of the other two lovers. These jokes began to leak out into their four-sided conversations. To the Sunday-night ritual of fetched-in food had been added weekday parties, drinks prolonged into scrambled dinners, arranged on the pretext of driving the children (Frankie Jr. and Jonathan detested each other; Catharine was too much of a baby to respond to Julia’s and Henrietta’s clumsy mothering) back and forth to each other’s houses. While the women cooked and fussed and preened around them, Frank and Harold with bottomless boozy searchingness would discuss Shakespeare, history, music, the bitchy market, monopolies, the tacit merger of business and government, the ubiquity of the federal government, Kennedy’s fumblings with Cuba and steel, the similarity of JFK’s background to their own, the differences, their
pasts, their fathers, their resentment and eventual appreciation and final love of their fathers, their dislike and dread of their mothers, sex, their view of the world as a place where foolish work must be done to support fleeting pleasures. “Ripeness is all,” Frank would sometimes say when silence would at last unfold its wings above the four spinning heads intoxicated by an intensity of friendship not known since childhood.

Or Janet would say, knowing they expected something outrageous from her, “I don’t see what’s so very wrong about incest. Why does everybody have a tabu about it? I often wanted to sleep with my brother and I’m sure he wouldn’t have minded with me. We used to take baths together and I’d watch him get a hard on. He did something on my belly I thought was urination. Now he runs my father’s antibiotic labs in Buffalo, and we can’t.”

“Sweetheart,” Harold said to her, leaning forward above the round leather coffee table in the Applebys’ lantern-hung living room, “that’s the reason. That’s why it’s so tabu. Because everybody wants to do it. Except me. I had three sisters, and two of them would have stood there criticizing.
Trois sœurs est trop beaucoup
.”

Marcia sat up sharply, sensing a cause, and said, “I was just reading that the Ptolemies, you know, those pharaoh types, married brothers and sisters right and left and there were no pinheads produced. So I think all this fear of inbreeding is Puritanism.” Her earrings scintillated.

“Cats do it,” Frank said. “Sibling cats are always fucking.”

“But are fucking cats,” Janet asked, “always sibling?”

“I once talked,” Harold said, determined to quarrel with Marcia, “to a banker who did a lot of financing for the Amish around Lancaster P-A, and he told me they’re tiny.
Très, très
petits
. They get smaller every generation. There’s inbreeding for you, Marcia. They’re no bigger than you are.”

“She’s a nice size,” Frank said.

Marcia said to Janet, “I agree with
you
. I have a dreamy younger brother, he played the oboe and was a pacifist, and it would be
so
nice to be married to him and not have to explain all the time why you are the way you are, somebody who knew all the family jokes and would be sensitive to your
phases
. Not like these two clods.”

“Vice versa,” Harold persisted, “do you know why Americans are getting bigger at such a phenomenal rate? Nutrition doesn’t explain it. Exogamy. People marry outside the village. They fly clear across the continent, to Denver, to St. Louis, to marry.”

Marcia asked, “Why on earth St. Louis? Denver I can see.”

Harold continued, flushing at his slip (neither of the women knew of the mulatto, but Frank did), “The genes are fresh. It’s cross-fertilization. So the advice ‘Love thy neighbor’ is terrible advice, biologically. Like so much of that Man’s advice.”

“He said love, He didn’t say lay your neighbor,” Janet said.

“I want my dreamy brother,” Marcia said, pouring herself some more bourbon and twitteringly pretending to cry.

“Ripeness is all,” Frank said, after a silence.

Or else they would sit around the rectangular tesselated coffee table in the little-Smiths’ living room with its concealed rheostated lighting and watch Harold, bare-handed, gesticulating, conduct sides of Wagner’s
Tristan
, or Mozart’s
Magic Flute
, or Britten’s
War Requiem
. Frank Appleby liked only baroque music and would sit stupefied, his eyeballs reddening and his aching belly protruding, while Harold, whirling like a Japanese traffic cop, plucked the
ting
of a triangle from the rear of the orchestra or with giant motions of embrace
signaled in heaving oceans of strings. Janet hypnotically watched Harold do this and Marcia watched Janet curiously. What could she be seeing in this manic performance? How could a woman who nightly shared Frank’s bed be even faintly amused by Harold’s pathetic wish-fulfillment? One night, when the Applebys had gone, she asked Harold, “Are you sleeping with Janet?”

“Why? Are you sleeping with Frank?”

“Of course not.”

“In that case, I’m not sleeping with Janet.”

She tried a new tack. “Aren’t you awfully tired of the Applebys? What ever happened to our other friends?”

“The big-Smiths moved to Newton.”

“They were never our friends. I mean the Thornes and the Guerins and the Saltzes and the Gallaghers and the Hanemas. You know what Georgene told me the other day? She said Matt has had a nibble on the Robinson place, that Angela had wanted. A couple from Cambridge.”

“How does Georgene come by all her information? She’s become a real expert on the Hanemas.
Un spécialiste vrai
.”

“Don’t you think Freddy and Angela are fond of each other?”

“
Tu es comique
,” Harold said. “Angela will be the last lady in town to fall. Next to yourself, of course.”

“You think Georgene has Piet?”

“Well. She has a very indulgent smile on her face when she looks at him.”

“You mean like Janet has when she looks at you?”

“
Tu es trop comique
. She’s twice my size.”

“Oh, you have big—”

“Parts?”

“Ideas of yourself, I was going to say.”

The other couples began to call them the Applesmiths. Angela Hanema, who never dreamed, dreamed she went to the Applebys’ house carrying a cake. On the front porch, with its six-sided stained-glass welcoming light, she realized she couldn’t get in the front door because the house was full of wedding invitations. Marcia little-Smith came around the side of the house, in shorts and swinging a red croquet mallet, and said, “It’s all right, my dear, we’re going to be very happy.” Then they were all, a crowd of them, walking along a country path, in some ways the path down to the dock, Angela still carrying the cake on upraised palms before her, and she said to Frank Appleby, “But can you get the insurance policies straightened out?” which was strange, because in waking life Angela never gave a thought to insurance. With a gargantuan wink he assured her, “I’m floating a bond issue,” and that was all she could remember, except that both sides of the path were heavily banked with violets, hyacinth, and little blue lilies. She had coffee with Georgene the next morning after nursery school, and, feeling uneasy with Georgene lately, in nervousness told her the dream. Georgene told Bea and Irene, while Piet, who had heard the dream at breakfast, was telling Matt Gallagher at the office. So Bernadette Ong heard the dream from two directions, from Irene at a Fair Housing executive meeting and from Terry Gallagher after a rehearsal of the Tarbox-North Mather-Lacetown Choral Society; the thirsty singers commonly went back to the Ongs’ afterwards for a beer.

But it was Bea, Bea whose malice was inseparable from her flirtatiousness, in turn inseparable from her sterility and her tipsiness, Bea who told Marcia. Marcia was puzzled and not amused. She did not for a moment believe that Janet and Harold were sleeping together. She did not think Harold was
up to it; a certain awe of Janet, as of all big women, had been heightened by falling in love with this woman’s husband. She had not suspected that from outside the couples might appear equal in complicity. She was shocked, frightened. She told Harold; he laughed. They told the Applebys together, and it was Janet who laughed, Frank who showed annoyance. “Why can’t people mind their own dirty business?”

“Instead of our dirty business?” Harold said gaily, the double tip of his nose lifted, Marcia thought, like a bee’s behind.

“Our language!” she said, nettled.

“Come on,
mon petit chou
,” he said to her, “Angela can’t help what she dreams. She’s the most sublimated woman we know. Bea can’t help it that she had to tease you with it. Her husband beats her, she can’t have children, she has to make her mark somehow.”

Janet was in a lazy mood. “She must ask to be beaten,” she said. “She picked Roger so he must have been what she wanted.”

“But that’s true of all of us,” Harold said. “
Tout le monde
. We get what we unconsciously want.”

Marcia protested, “But they must think we do
every
thing, which seems to me so sick of
them
, that they can’t imagine simple friendship.”

“It
is
hard to imagine,” Harold said, wondering if to smile would be too much. They were all on the verge. He looked at Janet, sleepily leaning with a cigarette in the Applebys’ yellow wing chair, her silk blouse veined by its shimmer and her skirt negligently exposing her stocking-tops and fasteners and bland known flesh, and thought how easy, how right, it would be to take her upstairs now, while these other two cleared away the glasses and went to their own bed.

Frank said, “They’re starved. Their marriages have gone
stale and anything that tickles their nose they think is champagne. We enjoy relaxing with each other and mustn’t let them make us self-conscious about it.” He cleared his throat to quote. “The mutable, rank-scented many.”

This speech conjured a malicious night all about them. Marcia’s eyes, watching Frank, were dark, dark like stars too dense to let light escape, and she felt her being as a pit formed to receive this blood-slow soft-handed man whose own speech, more and more as she was his mistress, was acquiring Shakespearian color and dignity.
Tickles their nose is champagne
. He had called them back from the verge. The little-Smiths left at one-thirty and drove through the town whose burning lights, bared in November, seemed to be gossiping about them. From their bedroom window the marsh, rutted and tufted along the ebbed canals, appeared a surface of the moon and the onlooking moon an earth entire in space. Restless, apologetic, they made love, while miles away across the leafless town the other couple, also naked, mirrored them.

Full confession waited until winter. Snow fell early in New Hampshire, and during Christmas vacation the Hanemas, the Applebys, the Thornes, the Gallaghers, and the little-Smiths went north to ski with their older children. The lodge bulletin board was tacked thick with pictures of itself in summer, of canoes and couples pitching quoits and porch rails draped with wet bathing suits. Now packed snow squeaked on the porch steps, a sign forbade ski boots in the dining hall, the dinner was pea soup and baked ham and deep-dish apple pie, the children afterwards thumped and raced in the long hall upstairs, between the girls’ bunk room and the boys’, and downstairs their parents basked by the fireplace in the afterglow of exercise. Whiskey hurried to replace the calories fresh air had burned from their bodies. Georgene methodically
turned the pages of
Ski
. Freddy murmured on the sofa to Janet, who looked discontented. Frank played Concentration with his son and Jonathan little-Smith, and was losing, because he was concentrating upon a rotating inner discomfort, perhaps the ham, which had had a thick raisin sauce. Gaily rattling ice cubes, Harold was mixing a drink for Angela, whose fine complexion had acquired on the bitter slopes an unearthly glow, had reached an altitude beyond decay; she looked more twenty-two than thirty-four. Marcia was listening to Matt Gallagher explain the Vatican’s likely verdict, now that the ecumenical council was adjourned, on artificial birth control: “Nix. They won’t give us sex, but they may give us meat on Fridays.” Marcia nodded understandingly—having a lover deepened her understanding of everything, even of Matt Gallagher’s adherence to the letter of an unloving church—and glanced toward Terry. Terry, sitting cross-legged on the floor in black stretch pants, carefully picked through a chord sequence on her lute; it was a gourd-shaped, sumptuous instrument, whose eight strings produced a threadbare distant tone. Matt had bought it for her for Christmas, in line with the policy of conspicuous consumption that had led to the Mercedes, and perhaps with a more symbolic intent, for its blond lustre and inlaid elegance seemed sacramental, like their marriage. Piet lay beside her on the rug gazing at the taut cloth of her crotch. The seam had lost one stitch. Conscious of Georgene sulking at his back, he rolled over and did a bicycling exercise in air, wondering if with Catholics it was different, remembering his long-ago love for Terry, unconsummated, when he and Matt were newly partners. Whitney and Martha Thorne, Ruth Hanema, Tommy Gallagher with his Gainsborough fragility, and Julia Smith in raven pigtails watched a World War II movie starring Brian Donlevy. The
channel, from Manchester, was weakly received. The game of Concentration broke up. Frank needed more bourbon to soothe his stomach. In twos and threes the children were led upstairs or out to the gas-heated cottages beneath the bone-white birches. A bridge game among strangers beside the fireplace broke up. Georgene Thorne, a tidy woman with feather-cut graying hair and a boyish Donatello profile, nodded while leafing through
House & Garden
and followed her children out to their cabin to sleep. Freddy blew her a smirking kiss. Walking down the squeaking path alone, she thought angrily of Piet—his flirting, his acrobatics—yet knew it was in the bargain, she had got what she wanted. Her breath was white in the black air. The unseen lake gave a groan and crack, freezing harder. The black birch twigs rattled. Harold and Marcia tried to organize word games—Botticelli, Ghosts—but everyone was too suffused with physical sensations to play. The television set, unwatched, excited itself with eleven-o’clock news about UN military action in the Katanga province of the Congo; and was switched off. Piet begged Terry Gallagher to give them a concert, and so she, watching as if from beyond her own will her white bewitched fingers assume each position on the frets, played the one melody she had mastered, “Greensleeves.” They tried to sing with her but had forgotten the words. Her head was tilted; her long black hair fell straight from one side. She finished; Matt, with a military swiftness, stood; and the Gallaghers went outdoors to their cabin. In the momentary opening of the door, all heard a snowplow scraping along the upper road. High in a dusty corner a cuckoo clock, late, sounded eleven. Angela, stately, her fair cheeks flaming, now stood, and Piet, muscled like a loose-skinned dog that loves to be scratched, followed her upstairs to their room. This left the Applesmiths and Freddy Thorne.