Couples (25 page)

“Thank you, Freddy. You’re a nice man.” Janet’s conscience pricked her; she added, “Yes.”

“Yes how?”

“Yes, in answer to your question, I am on the pills. Marcia isn’t yet. She’s afraid of cancer.”

Freddy smirked and made a ring with his thumb and forefinger. “You’re golden,” he told her. “You’re the last of the golden girls.” He put the ring to his mouth and fluttered his tongue through it.

Janet considered his offer seriously. As she picked her way through the tangle of her party it seemed not so implausible. Freddy would know his way around a woman. Marcia and Frank and Harold would be horrified. Harold’s vanity would be unforgivably piqued. Love ousts love. These things happen. Piet was making out with poor little Bea Guerin. Frank was grotesquely Twisting (his digestion!) opposite Carol Constantine. Eddie on the sofa was demonstrating with his circling hands to Bernadette Ong the holding pattern of air traffic over LaGuardia and Idlewild, and why the turboprops and private planes were brought down sooner than the pure jets, the beautiful new 707s and DC-8s, and why with every new type of commercial aircraft several hundred passengers will die through pilot error, and why the starlings and gulls at Logan are a special menace; and finally he brought his narrow curly-haired head down safely onto her silk shoulder and appeared to sleep. The guests of honor felt out of it. Foxy queasy, the Whitmans left early. When everyone had left except the little-Smiths, and they were sitting around the table
having the dregs of the liqueurs, Janet asked Marcia, “Did Freddy Thorne seem attractive to you tonight?”

Marcia laughed; the glitter of her earrings clashed on the surface of her face. “Heavens, no. He asked me if I was happy in Applesmithsville.”

“What did you say?”

“I was very frosty. He went away. Poor Georgene.”

“He asked me, too. In fact”—Janet was not sure if this was a tactic, but the Benedictine made it seem one—“he offered to have an affair with me.”

“He really is a fantastic oaf,” Frank said. Brandy was the worst thing for him, and he was on his third glass.

Harold swirled his Grand Marnier thoughtfully. “Why are you telling us this?”

“I don’t know. I was so surprised at myself, that it didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Since he’s lost all of his hair, he’s rather handsome, in a sinister way.”

“In a mealy-mouthed way,” Marcia said. She sipped anisette.

“Janet, you disgust me,” Harold said. “How can you unload this
merde
on three people who adore you?”

“I half-adore her,” Marcia said.

“Two point five people who adore you,” Harold said.
“Deux point cinq.”

“I don’t know,” Janet said. “I guess I want to be talked out of it. I don’t see why you men look so offended. It might bring Georgene in and don’t we need some new blood? It seems to me we’ve said everything we have to say about sixty times. We know all about Frank’s ulcer and Frank’s father who avoided getting an ulcer by learning all about China and how Shakespeare doesn’t work as well as China, maybe he’s more acid; I
do
advise Maalox. We know all about what saints her father
and grandfather the bishop were from Marcia, and how she hated Long Island and loves it up here away from all those dreary clubby types who kept playing badminton with martini olives. We know all about Harold’s prostitutes, and the little colored girl in St. Louis, and how neither of us are quite as good …”

“Any funny business with Freddy,” Frank said, bloating with menace, “and it’s get thee to a nunnery. I’ll divorce you.”

“But then,” Janet told him, “I’d have to drag all of us out into the open, and we’d look so funny in the newspapers. Things are so hard to explain that are perfectly obvious to friends.”

“It’s obvious to me,” Freddy Thorne said to her the following weekend, when they were alone in the kitchen late at a dinner party given by the Guerins, “you never were in love with Harold, you went after him to even the score with Marcia.” In the intervening week she had had a dental appointment, and in the gaps of prophylaxis he had wheedled from her her version of the full story.

“Freddy, how can you judge?” She helped herself to a piece of cream-cheese-laden celery left over from the hors d’oeuvres. “How can you hope to get inside people’s lives this way? Harold when he and I are alone is something you can’t imagine. He can be irresistible.”

“We all can,” was the answer. “Resistibility is a direct function of the female decision to resist or not to.” He seemed to be sweating behind the thick eyeglasses that kept misplacing his eyes. Freddy had trouble seeing. He had recently installed a new drill with a water-spray attachment, and during her appointment his glasses had often needed to be wiped.

“Freddy,” she told him, “I don’t like being pried and poked at. You must make a woman your friend first.”

“I’ve been your friend since you moved to town.” He stroked her arm, left bare by the black-lace blouse. Candlelight shuddered in the other room, where the others were chattering. “On second thought,” Freddy murmured on, “I think you took Harold on not to hurt the other two but to oblige them, to win their affection. For a magnificent piece who’s also rich, you’re damn unsure of yourself.”

“For a near-sighted boob who’s also a dentist, you’re damn sure of yourself. Speaking of which, stop trying to make the Whitman girl. She’s pregnant.”

“Praise be. More men to man America’s submarines. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s a swinger. Women with that superheated skin are usually fantastic in the sack. Their hearts beat harder.”

“You’re such a bastard,” said Janet, whose skin, though strikingly pale, was rather grainy and opaque.

Freddy was right, she later reflected, in that obligingness had become a part of it; they had reached, the Applesmiths, the boundary of a condition wherein their needs were merged, and a general courtesy replaced individual desire. The women would sleep with the men out of pity, and each would permit the other her man out of an attenuated and hopeless graciousness. Already a ramifying tact and crossweave of concern were giving their homes an unhealthy hospital air. Frank and Harold had become paralyzed by the habit of lust; she and Marcia, between blow-ups, were as guarded and considerate with one another as two defaced patients in an accident ward.

In the following week she had a porcelain filling replaced, and Freddy called her on the phone every noon, always inviting her to sleep with him. But he never named a place where they could go, never suggested a definite time; and it dawned
upon her that he had no serious physical intention: the verbal intimacy of gossip satisfied him. Meanwhile Harold, begging her to resume with him, had gone to the trouble of acquiring the key to a Beacon Street bachelors’ apartment that was empty all day. Curious as to how bachelors live, she went there with him the Friday before the Sunday when Piet broke Freddy’s little finger. At a glance she gathered that the inhabitants were homosexuals. The furnishings too beautifully harmonized; bent wicker and orange velvet prevailed. One of the men painted, or, rather, did collages juxtaposing magazine advertisements and war headlines, deodorized nudes with nacreous armpits and bombed peasants flecked with blood, green stamps and Robert McNamara and enraptured models in striated girdles, comic-strip cannons pasted at the crotch. It was quite ugly and malicious, yet the room was impossible to shock and the magnolias on the south of Beacon were about to flower. Harold was polite, timid, fatherly, reminiscent, touching. She allowed him to slide her from her clothes and, rising quickly, came with him and then, after a cigarette and wine, let him come again, let him gather himself into his groin and hurl himself painlessly into the dilated middle amplitudes of herself. Trembling as if whipped, he licked her eyelids and sucked her toes, one by one. The sensation felt hysterically funny. The next day, Saturday, she wrote Freddy a letter:

Freddy dear—

I am grateful for your caring. Truly. But my future, I am more than ever convinced, lies with Frank. So your phone calls must stop. After today I will hang up on your voice. May we continue to be
pleasant, and friends? Please, I don’t want to change dentists, you have all my records
.

Fondly
,
J
.

She mailed it to his cottagelike office on Divinity Street. He received it Monday, read it smiling, was not disappointed, considered burning it on the gas flame in his lab but, the amorous keepsakes of his life having been few, instead crumpled the envelope into the wastebasket and tucked the letter into his coat pocket, where Georgene found it that evening, while he was at Lions. The next day she confessed her terror to Piet, and irrevocably offended him.

So Foxy was both right and wrong about Janet. She overestimated Janet’s freedom, and had mistaken the quality of Freddy Thorne’s sexuality. Though he seemed aggressive toward women, he really sought to make alliance with them. But then summer overwhelmed Foxy’s speculations about the love life of others, and swept her as if out to sea, to a vantage where the couples on the shore of Tarbox looked like a string of colored beads.

Piet Hanema was sent out of the room and they decided he was Ho Chi Minh. Frank Appleby wanted him to be Casanova but Irene said the person couldn’t be fictional. Frank told Irene that Casanova had been as real as you and I but everyone agreed they had no feeling for him. Irene suggested Vice-President Johnson. Everyone protested that he was much too dreary. Terry Gallagher came up with Ho Chi Minh and it seemed perfect. Good for Terry: ever since getting her lute, she was much more with it. More human. All spring she
had been taking lute lessons from an old woman in Norwell. She had let her long black hair down; her wide lips were tucked up at the corners as if she were holding a coin or candy in her mouth. Looking at Terry, Eddie Constantine suggested that Piet be Joan Baez, but the rest voted to stick with Ho Chi Minh, and Georgene went to the foot of the Saltzes’ stairs to call Piet down.

It was the last Sunday night in June. The tight wine-colored cones of the lilacs that Piet had noticed as he hesitated by Foxy Whitman’s gate had loosened and expanded with the first hot week of May into papal miters of bloom, first the lavender and then the taller, holier, more ascetic white, ensconced amid heartshaped leaves whose green was suddenly cheap. The lilacs faded and dried, and bridal wreath drooped, gathering dust, by every garage door and drive. Sagitta, most exquisite of constellations, flew unmoving between the Swan and Eagle, giant jeweled airplanes whose pilots are Deneb and Altair; the Milky Way wandered like a line of wash in the heat-bleached sky. Desultory parties, hardly organized, social weeds, sprang up to fill the pale nights bloated by Daylight Saving, parties mixed of tennis leftovers and sunburned half-couples and cold salami and fetched pizza and Bitter Lemon and sandy stray forgotten children lulled asleep by television’s blue flicker.
President Kennedy’s triumphal tour of Western Europe today subsided to quiet talks in Sussex, England …

The Saltzes, great birdwatchers and walkers, as if Nature were a course they were cramming, had gone down late to the beach, to see the sandpipers and to swim. Irene suffered from sun poisoning and ventured out at midday protected in floppy hats and long-sleeved jerseys, and went swimming only toward evening. Up by the far rocks she and Ben had found the Hanemas, all four of them, with the Whitmans,
the two of them. Ken liked to snorkel, and the Hanema children had been fascinated by his equipment. The beach here by the rocks dropped off steeply enough for diving. Piet was giving Ruth, in face mask and foot fins, a lesson while Nancy, anxious for her sister and envious, cried. Ken and Angela stood together, an almost godlike couple, untroubled, invulnerable, gazing at the horizon, where a sailboat race was suspended, gaudy spinnakers bellied. Foxy, in a skirted lemon-yellow maternity swimsuit, lay supine on a smooth rock, eyes shut, smiling. Irene was envious of everyone’s happiness and ease beneath the same sun that gave her a painful rash. They had all been here since noon. Impulsively, yet with some small hope of inducing the Whitman woman, so complacently uncommitted, to work on one of her causes (pre-primary education, fair housing, soil conservation), she invited them back for a drink. The Saltzes lived near the green, in a narrow asbestos-shingled house visible from the Constantines’. The Constantines saw the cars and came over. They brought Terry Gallagher with them. Carol, who had taken ballet and who sewed and wove and painted, also played the guitar, and that summer the two women sometimes met for duets. At Eddie’s prompting, Ben Saltz phoned the Applebys, who were having the little-Smiths and Thornes over for a pick-up meal, and half of this party showed up—Frank, Marcia, and Georgene. By now it was after eight. Before the light died, Eddie took Angela, of all people, on his Vespa to the Italian place on Route 123 and they brought back five pizzas. Reëntering the Saltzes’ narrow living room, Angela looked glorious, flushed from the wind and the fear and the effort of balancing the cardboard boxes. She wore a damp towel tucked around the waist of a wet black bathing suit, and when she bent forward to bite a point of pizza slice
Piet could see her nipples. His wife. Where he had sucked. Not thinking it would be so long a party, they had brought their children along. Ruth, her wide eyes watering, watched streams of television with the older Saltz boy Bernard, and Nancy fell asleep in little Jeremiah’s room. Irene loved word games. By eleven-thirty, when Ken Whitman was studying the laces of his sneakers and Frank Appleby’s eyes had rolled inward upon his digestion and Janet had phoned twice to make sure that he and Marcia had not gone off alone somewhere and to ask him how ever were they supposed to get Freddy Thorne out of the house, the crowd at the Saltzes’ had played four games of Ghosts, two of Truth, and three of Botticelli. This left Impressions. Eddie Constantine had gone out first and with only one wrong guess, Burl Ives, identified himself as the late Pope John. It took Georgene somewhat longer to discover that she was Althea Gibson. Then Piet volunteered because he wanted to go to the john and to check on Nancy (
I will never grow up and I will never ever in my whole life die
. Her hair was tangled and stiff; her aqua bathing suit, riding up in sleep, had exposed of her bottom half-moons sparkling with sand. Piet mourned the child’s body but the tug of bright life downstairs held him helpless here.
Sleep. Forgive us in your sleep
.) and they made him Ho Chi Minh.