Couples (24 page)

From seven to eight they drank. Between eight and nine they put the children to bed. Franklin Jr., secretly afraid he would wet the sheets, refused to sleep in the same bed with scornful Jonathan. They gave him instead the cot in Henrietta’s room. This left Catharine Appleby, her cheeks as red as permeated wineskins, to go into the great high square sacred
marital bed, on top of a rubber sheet. Janet lay down and crooned to the baby while Marcia put the cooled-off pizzas in the oven. Harold read Frankie Junior a Little Golden Book entitled
Minerals
, while Frank watched Jonathan contemptuously settle himself under the covers with a Junior Detective Novel entitled
The Unwanted Visitor
. From nine to ten the grown-ups ate, from ten to eleven they talked, from eleven to midnight they danced. Harold put an old Ella record on their hi-fi and to the tunes of “These Foolish Things” and “You’re the Top” and “I’ve Been Around the World” the pair of couples rotated, Harold and Janet sliding smoothly around the edges, Frank and Marcia holding to the center of the de-rugged floor. The sliding glass doors giving on the view of the marsh doubled their images, so that a symmetrical party seemed in progress, the two linked couples approaching and withdrawing from two others like blots on a folded paper, or like visitors to a violet aquarium who, seeing no fish, move closer to the glass and discover the watery shadows of women and men.

Marcia, almost motionless, watched Harold’s hand confidently cup Janet’s derrière as he waltzed her from corner to corner; Janet, whirling, glimpsed Marcia bending closer into Frank’s static embrace as he rumbled at her ear. His face was glossy, suffused with drink. The hand of his not on her back was tucked in between her chin and his chest and Janet knew, while Harold’s thighs slithered on her thighs, that a single finger of Frank’s was hypnotically stroking the base of Marcia’s throat, down to the tops of her breasts. It was a trick he had, one of the few. She whirled, and the hand of Frank’s not at her throat was unzipping the back of Marcia’s dowdy black dress. Then from another angle Janet saw held between Marcia’s lips like a cigarette the slitted drag of cruelty that came to
her face, Janet had noticed, whenever she was very tired or very much at ease. To Marcia, Janet’s eyes staring from across the room seemed immense, so dilated they contained the room in their circle of vision as a metal lawn ball contains, distorted and compressed, an entire neighborhood. Frank’s delicate hand uncoupled her bra snaps; his single finger slipped further down her breasts. Her body slightly dissolved. She felt herself grow. “I’ve flown around the world in a plane,” Ella, purple spirit, sang, “I’ve settled rev-o-lutions in Spain.” Janet, dizzy from being whirled, felt tipped back by an insistent pressure, knoblike and zippered, amid a lizardly slithering, and thought it sad that Harold should appear a fool before these cruel two other people when she, alone with him, in an ideal seclusion, could have forgiven so well his conceited probing and insinuations of skin. As her image of herself expanded, milk and pollen and poppies, up to the parallel redwood boards of the ceiling inset with small round flush lights rheostated dim, it seemed to Janet that mothering had always been her specialty.

So it was she, when the music stopped, who said, “I’m sleepy and dizzy. Who’s going to take me to bed?” Frank in the center of the room made no move, and Harold stayed at her side.

To make space for themselves the two couples had to rearrange the children. Catharine Appleby, her heavy flushed head lolling, was moved into bed with dainty six-year-old Julia Smith; and the door to Jonathan’s room (he had fallen asleep with the light on and
The Unwanted Visitor
face down on the blanket) was closed, so no noise from the master bedroom would wake him. The two white sofas were pushed together to make a second bed. It seemed very strange to Janet, as strange as a visit to Sikkim or high Peru, to journey forth,
between three and four that morning, toward their own home; to bundle their two oblivious children in borrowed blankets and carry them across the little-Smith’s stone-hard lawn to their two dark cars; to hiss farewells and exchange last caresses through clothes that upon resumption felt like fake and stiff and makeshift costumes; to drive behind Frank’s steady taillights through a threadbare landscape patched with pieces of dry half-melted snow; to enter a deserted house carrying children like thieves with sacks of booty; to fall asleep beside an unfamiliar gross man who was also her husband; to feel the semen of another man still moist between her thighs; to awaken and find it morning and the strangeness banished with no traces save a congested evasive something in Frank’s grateful eyes and a painful jarring, perhaps inaccurate overlay printing, in the colors of the Sunday comics section.

This pattern, of quarrel and reunion, of revulsion and surrender, was repeated three or four times that winter, while airplanes collided in Turkey, and coups transpired in Iraq and Togo, and earthquakes in Libya, and a stampede in the Canary Islands, and in Ecuador a chapel collapsed, killing a hundred twenty girls and nuns. Janet had taken to reading the newspaper, as if this smudgy peek into other lives might show her the way out of her own. Why was she not content? The other three were, and there was little in her religious background—feebly Presbyterian; her father, though a generous pledger, had been rather too rich to go to church, like a man who would have embarrassed his servants by appearing at their party—to account for her inconvenient sense of evil. She suspected that Marcia and Harold and Frank, having completed college, knew secrets, and used her. She felt her flesh prized by them. She was their sullen treasure. Once, serving them scrambled eggs in her home after midnight, wearing a bathrobe over a
nightie (she had gone to bed with a headache and a temper and had come back downstairs again after an hour of listening to their three-cornered laughter), Janet had leaned over the kitchen table with the frying pan and Frank had stroked her from one side and Harold from the other and Marcia, watching, had smiled. She had become their pet, their topic. They could not understand her claustrophobia and indignation, and discussed her “problem” with her as if it might lie anywhere but with them, the three of them.

“Did you ever see,” Harold asked, as they sat around the round grease-stained leather table, “your parents making love?”

“Never. The nearest thing to it, some Sunday mornings the door to their bedroom would be locked.”

“Dear Janet,” Marcia said. “Poor dear Janet. Tiptoeing in her Sunday-school dress down that long silent hall and pushing, pushing at that locked door.”

“Shit,” Janet said. “I never pushed at anything. Speak for yourself.”

“Dear me,” Marcia said. “I suppose that should hurt.”

“Bad girl, Janet,” Harold said. “You pushed me into the laundry.”

“Because you looked so miserable.” Janet tried not to cry, which she knew would encourage them.

“Let Jan-Jan alone,” Frank said. “She’s a lovely broad and the mother of my heirs.”

“There’s Frank,” Marcia said to her husband, “giving himself heirs again.” Their intimacy had forced upon each a rôle, and Marcia had taken it upon herself to be dry and witty, when in fact, Janet knew, she was earnest and conscientious, with humorless keen emotions. Janet looked at her and saw a nervous child innocently malicious.

“You don’t have to defend Janet to me,” Harold told Frank. “I love her.”

“You desire her,” Marcia corrected. “You’ve cathected in her direction.”

Harold continued, shinily drunk, his twin-tipped nose glinting, “She is the loveliest goddam p—”

“Piece,” Marcia completed, and scrabbled in her bent pack of Newports for a cigarette.

“
Pièce de non-résistance
I’ve ever had,” Harold finished. He added, “Out of wedlock.”

“The horn, the horn, the lusty horn,” Frank said, “is not a thing to laugh to scorn,” and Janet saw that the conversation was depressing him also.

Harold went on with Janet, “Were your first experiences with boys under bushes interesting or disagreeable?
Intéressant ou désagréable?
”

“Buffalo boys didn’t take me under bushes,” Janet said. “I was too fat and rich.”

Marcia said, “
We
were never really
rich
. Just respectable. I thought of my father as a holy man.”

“Saint Couch,” Harold said, and then repronounced it, “
San’ Coosh!
”

“I thought of mine,” Janet said, growing interested, beginning to hope they could teach her something, “as a kind of pushover. I thought my mother pushed him around. She had been very beautiful and never bothered to watch her weight and even after she got quite large still thought of herself as beautiful. She called me her ugly duckling. She used to say to me, ‘I can’t understand you. Your father’s such a handsome man.’ ”

“You should tell it to a psychiatrist,” Marcia said, unintended sympathy lighting up her face.

“No need, with us here,” Harold said. “Pas
de besoin, avec nous ici
. Clearly she was never allowed to work through homosexual mother-love into normal heterosexuality. Our first love-object is the mother’s breast. Our first gifts to the beloved are turds, a baby’s turds. Her father manufactures laxatives. Oh Janet, it’s so obvious why you won’t sleep with us.”

“She sleeps with me,” Frank said.

“Don’t brag,” Marcia said, and her plain warm caring, beneath the dryness, improved Frank’s value in Janet’s eyes. She saw him, across the small round raft crowded with empty glasses and decanters, as a fellow survivor, scorched by the sun and crazed by drinking salt water.

“Why must you ruin everything?” he suddenly called to her. “Can’t you understand, we all love you?”

“I don’t like messy games,” Janet said.

“As a child,” Harold asked, “did they let you play in the buffalo mud or did you have an anal nanny?”

“Anal nanny,” Marcia said. “It sounds like a musical comedy.”

“What’s the harm?” Frank asked Janet, and his boozy dishevelment, his blood-red eyes and ponderous head rather frightened her, though she had lulled him to sleep, her Minotaur, for ten years’ worth of nights. He shouted to all of them, “Let’s do it! Let’s do it all in the same room! Tup my white ewe, I want to see her whinny!”

Harold sighed daintily through his nose. “See,” he told Janet. “You’ve driven your husband mad with your frigidity. I’m getting a headache.”

“Let’s humanize each other,” Frank pleaded.

Marcia turned on him, possessive of his mind. “Frank, don’t quote Freddy Thorne. I’d think you’d have more intellectual self-respect.”

Yet it was Freddy Thorne who sensed the trouble, and who tried to turn it to his own advantage. “I hear there’s a snake in Applesmithsville,” he said to Janet.

“Where’s that?” They were in her house, at the April party given to welcome the Whitmans to town. Janet was distracted by her duties as hostess; she imagined that people and couples needed her everywhere. Piet Hanema was lying all over the stairs and down came Foxy Whitman from the bathroom, with him looking up her skirt. She must take Foxy aside and explain about Piet.

“Oh,” Freddy answered, demanding her attention, “here and there, everywhere. All the world is Applesmithsville.” In the corner, by the wall of uniform sets, John Ong, his ageless face strained and courteous, was listening to Ben Saltz painstakingly jabber; Janet thought that a woman should go over and interpose herself, but with this alternative she turned herself a little closer into Freddy Thorne’s murmur. Why does his mouth, she wondered, if he’s himself such a dentist, look so toothless? “They’re feasting off you, Jan-Jan,” he told her. “You’re serving two studs and Marcia’s in the saddle.”

“Spare me your vulgar fantasies, Freddy,” Janet said, imitating Marcia. “Contrary to what seems to be the popular impression, Harold and I have never slept together. The possibility has been mentioned; but we decided it would be too messy.”

“You’re beautiful,” Freddy told her. “The way you look me right in the eye handing out this crap is beautiful. Something you don’t realize about yourself, you really have it. Not like these other cunts. Marcia doesn’t have it, she’s trying to jiggle herself into having it. Bea’s trying to drink herself into it. Angela’s trying to rise above it. You’re right there. Do me a favor though and don’t fib to jolly old Freddy.”

Janet laughed; his words were like the candyish mouthwash by his porcelain dental chair—unswallowable but delicious. She asked, “And Georgene? Does she have it?”

“She’s OK in a tennis dress, don’t knock the kid. She fucks and she can cook, so what the hell. I’m not proposing marriage.”

“Freddy, don’t make me hurt your feelings.”

“You want out, right?”

“In a way, in a way not. I’m, what’s the word, not ambidextrous?”

“Ambivalent. Androgynous. Androdextrorogerogynous.”

“We have
fun
with the Smiths, just sitting and talking, neither Frank or I have ever had really close friends before. You can’t imagine just friendship, can you?”

He patted his bright bald head and in sudden exultation vigorously rubbed it. “Between you and me, yes. It’s what a fish feels for the fish he’s eating. You want out, I can get you out. Have a little affair with me and that circus you’re supporting will pack up and leave town. You can be your own girl again.”

“How little is little?”

“Oh”—his hands did one squeeze of an invisible accordion—“as much as suits. No tickee, no washee. If it doesn’t take, it doesn’t take. No deposit on the bottle, Myrtle.”

“Why do you propose this? You aren’t very fond of me. It’s Angela you want.”

“A, I don’t, and B, I am, and C, I like to help people. I think you’re about to panic and I hate to see it. You’re too
schnapps
for that. You wear clothes too well. Terrific dress you have on, by the way. Are you pregnant?”

“Don’t be silly. It’s an Empire line.”

“Now wouldn’t it be awful to get knocked up and not know which was the father? Hey. Are you on the pills?”

“Freddy, I’m beginning to hate this conversation.”

“Okey-doke-doke. Let it simmer. As Khrushchev said when he put the missiles on Cuba, nothing ventured, nothing gainski. I’m there if you think you can use me.”