Couples (30 page)

Are you ready?

I want you in me
.

He felt her inner music stall. Her cunt was young, snug. A kind of exasperation swept him forward toward the edge, and as she whimpered he ejaculated, and sighing she receded. But in her forgiving him and his forgiving her, in her blaming herself and his disagreeing, in their accepting the blame together, their love had exercise and grew larger. Her brown eyes, gazing, each held in miniature the square skylight above him. She apologized,
I’m sorry. I can’t quite forget that it’s you
.

Who should I be?

Nobody. Just a man. I think of your personality and it throws me off the track
.

Does this happen with Ken?

No. Sometimes I come first. We’ve known each other so long we’re rather detached, and just use each other. Anyway, as I guess I’ve told you, we don’t make much love since I’ve gotten big
.

That seems strange. You’re lovely this way. Your skin is glossy, even your shape seems right. I can’t imagine making love to you with a flat tummy. It wouldn’t be you. You’d lack grandeur
.

Ken is strange. He wants sex to stay in a compartment. He married me, and that solved the problem, as far as he was concerned. He never wanted me to have a baby. We had enough money, it was just his selfishness. I was never his wife, I was his once-a-week whore for all those years
.

I’m jealous
.

Don’t be. Piet, don’t feel bad about my not coming. I feel love too much with you, is the problem
.

You’re kind, but I honestly fear I’m second-rate at this. Like my skiing and my golf. I began too late
.

Horrible man. I hate you when you fish for compliments. As all the ladies must tell you, you’re incredible. You’re incredibly affectionate
.

Any man you took to bed with all his clothes off would be affectionate
.

No. At least, I’ve only known three men, and the other two weren’t especially
.

Not the Jew?
She had told him about the Jew.

He laughed at me. Sometimes he hurt me. But then I had been a virgin and probably he couldn’t help hurting me. Probably he wouldn’t hurt me now
.

Do you want him now?

I have him now. Is that awful to say? I have him in you, and you besides. It’s better. He was perverse, Piet
.

But you’re perverse too
.

Her brown eyes childishly widened.
How? You mean
—her fingertips touched her lips, then his penis—
that? But why is that perverse? Don’t you like it?

I love it. It binds us so close, though, I’m frightened
.

Are you? I’m glad. I was afraid only I was. Piet. What will the world do to us?

Is it God or the world you care about?

You think of them as different? I think of them as the same
.

Maybe that’s what I mean when I say you’re perverse
. Her face so close to his seemed a paradigm, a pattern of all the female faces that had ever been close to him. Her blank brow, her breathing might have belonged to Angela; then Foxy turned her head on the pillow so her pink face took the light from above, the cold blue light of the sky, and was clearly not Angela, was the Whitman woman, the young adulteress.

She was frightened, brazen, timid, wanton, appalled by herself, unrepentant. Adultery lit her from within, like the ashen mantle of a lamp, or as if an entire house of gauzy hangings and partitions were ignited but refused to be consumed and, rather, billowed and glowed, its structure incandescent. That she had courted him; that she was simultaneously proud and careless of her pregnancy; that she would sleep with him; that her father had been an inflexible family-proud minor navy deskman; that her mother had married a laundromat entrepreneur; that by both birth and marriage she was above him in the social scale; that she would take his blood-stuffed prick into the floral surfaces of her mouth; that there had been a Jew she had refound in him; that her mind in the midst of love’s throes could be as dry and straight-seeking as a man’s;
that her fabric was delicate and fragile and burned with another life; that she was his slave; that he was her hired man; that she was frightened—compared to these shifting and luminous transparencies, Angela was a lump, a barrier, a boarded door. Her ignorance of the affair, though all the other couples guessed it, was the core of her maddening opacity. She did not share what had become the central issue of their lives. She was maimed, mute; and in the eggshell-painted rooms of their graceful colonial house she blundered and rasped against Piet’s taut nerves. He was so full of Foxy, so pregnant with her body and body scents and her cries and remorses and retreats and fragrant returnings, so full of their love, that his mind felt like thin ice. He begged Angela to guess, and her refusal seemed willful, and his gratitude to her for permitting herself to be deceived turned, as his secret churned in sealed darkness, to a rage that would burst forth irrationally. “Wake up!”

She had been sitting reading a book in lamplight, and blinked. Her eyes, lifted from the bright page, could not see him. “I am awake.”

“You’re
not
. You’re drifting through life in a trance. Don’t you feel what’s happening to us?”

“I feel you getting meaner every day.”

Bruised moths bumped and clung to the lampshade above her shoulder. “I’m upset,” he said.

“What about?”

“About everything. About that pinchy-mouthed gouger Gallagher. About the crappy ranch houses on the hill. About Jazinski: he thinks I’m a drunk. About the Whitman job. I’m losing my shirt for the bastard and he isn’t even grateful.”

“I thought you enjoyed it, tripping down there every day to visit the little princess.”

He laughed gratefully. “Is that what you think of her?”

“I think she’s young. I also think she’s arrogant. I think she’ll be mellowed eventually, I think having a baby will do her good. I don’t think she needs your paternal attentions especially.”

“Why do you think my attentions are paternal?”

“Whatever they are. Can I go back to my book? I don’t find Foxy Whitman or this conversation that interesting.”

“God, you are smug. You are so fantastically above it all you stink.”

“Listen, I promise I’ll make love to you tonight, just let me get to the end of this chapter.”

“Finish the fucking book for all I care. Stuff it. Give yourself a real literary thrill.”

She heard the appeal in his violence and tried to lift her head, but the hooked print held her gaze. Absent-mindedly she asked, “Can’t you relax ten minutes? I have five more pages.”

He jumped to his feet, strode two steps to the mirror above the telephone, strode back. “I need to go out. I need a party. I wonder what the Applesmiths are doing. Or the Saltines.”

“It’s eleven o’clock. Please hush.”

“I’m dying. I’m a thirty-four-year-old fly-by-night contractor. I have no sons, my wife snubs me, my employees despise me, my friends are all my wife’s friends, I’m an orphan, a pariah.”

“You’re a caged animal.”

“Yes.” He took an aggressive stance, presenting himself before her with fists on hips, a bouncy close-set red-haired man whose rolled-up shirtsleeves revealed forearms dipped in freckles. “But Angel, who made the cage, huh? Who?
Who?
”

He meant her to fling him open and discover his secret, to be
awed and enchanted by it, to decipher and nurture with him its intricate life. But, enclosed in the alternative world—a world exotic yet strict, mixing a lover’s shamelessness and a father’s compassion—arising from her lap, she did not respond. The book was an old college text, little appreciated at the time, stained by girlish annotations and translucent blots of the oil she and her roommates had used under their sunlamp, the Modern Library edition of
The Interpretation of Dreams
.

Janet Appleby had confessed to Angela on the beach that she was seeing a psychiatrist. Angela explained it to Piet: “It’s just twice a week, for therapy, as opposed to real analysis. Frank’s all for it, though it was her idea. She described coming home about three a.m. from the little-Smiths after a terrible scene with Marcia and suddenly knowing that she needed help, help from somebody who isn’t a friend or a lover or has any reason to care about her at all. She’s only been a few times but already she’s convinced she doesn’t know why she does what she does. She never loved Harold, so why did she go to bed with him? She told herself it was because she felt sorry for him but he didn’t feel sorry for himself especially so who was she kidding? And why now, even though they’ve all stopped sleeping with each other, or at least she and Harold have, can’t they stay away from the other couple every weekend? She says now they’ve somehow acquired the Thornes, too, especially Freddy—”

“That jerk,” Piet said.

“—and it’s a real mess. Onion rings and gin. The Thornes never go home, apparently. Georgene just sits and drinks, which she never used to do, and Freddy writes an endless pornographic play on his knee.”

“So Janet has to go to a psychiatrist because Georgene drinks?”

“Of course not. Because she thinks she, Janet, is neurotic.”

“Define neurotic.”

Janet had a variety of bikinis and semi-bikinis and Piet pictured her making her confession while lying belly down on the sand, her top untied to give her back an unbroken tan, her cheek pillowed on a folded towel, her breasts showing white when she lifted up on her elbows to explain better or to survey her children.

Angela said, “You know what neurotic is. You do things you know not why. You sleep with women when you’re really trying to murder your mother.”

“Suppose your mother’s already been murdered?”

“Then maybe you’re trying to bring her back to life. The ego tries to mediate between external reality and the id, which is our appetites. The ego carries all this bad news back and forth, but the id refuses to listen, and keeps trying to do whatever it wanted to do, even though the ego has turned its back. I don’t explain it very well, because I don’t understand it, but dreams are a way of letting out these suppressions, which mostly have to do with sex, which mostly has to do with your parents, who have become a superego and keep tormenting the ego from the
other
side. You know all this, everybody does.”

“Well, do you see anything unnatural about Janet sleeping with Harold now and then? Frank can be a real boor; would you like to go to bed with him for the rest of your life, night after night?”

“It’s not a question of natural or unnatural or right or wrong. It’s understanding why you do things so you can stop doing them. Or enjoy doing them. Certainly Janet does not
make herself happy. I don’t think she enjoys her children very much, or sex, or even her money. She could be great, you know. She has everything.”

“But it’s just those people who are unhappy. The people with everything are the ones who panic. The rest of us are too busy scrambling.”

“Piet, that’s a very primitive attitude. You’re saying the rich can’t get through the needle’s eye. The first shall be last.”

“Don’t poke fun of the Bible. What’s your stake in all this hocus-pocus with egos and ids? Why are you so defensive? I suppose you want to go to a psychiatrist too.”

“Yes.”

“The hell you will. Not as long as you’re my wife.”

“Oh? You’re thinking of getting another wife.”

“Of course not. But it’s very insulting. It implies I don’t give you enough sex.”

“There is no such implication.”

“I give you more than you want.”

“Exactly. Maybe a psychiatrist could tell me why I don’t want more. I do and I don’t. I hate myself the way I am. It’s doing awful things to both of us.”

Piet was taken aback; he had inwardly assumed that Angela knew best, that the amount of sex she permitted was the proper amount, and the surplus was his own problem, his own fault. He asked her, “You don’t think our sex life is right?”

“It’s awful. Dreadful. You know that.”

He tried to pin this estimate down. “How would you rate it on a scale of one to ten?”

“Two.”

“Oh come
on
, it’s not
that
bad. You can be gorgeous.”

“But so rarely. And I don’t use my hands or mouth or anything.
I’m sick. I need help, Piet. I’m turning you into a bully and a cheat and myself into one of those old maids everybody says you wouldn’t believe how beautiful she once was.” Blue-eyed, she began to cry. When she cried, it made her face look fat, like Nancy’s. Piet was touched. They were in the kitchen, she with vermouth and he with gin-and-Bitter-Lemon, after putting the girls to bed. Against the tiny red florets of the kitchen wallpaper Angela’s head, nicely oval, with summer braids and bun, did have a noble neatness that was maidenly. He then realized that in a sociable way she was preparing him for another night without lovemaking. Confessing her frigidity sanctioned it.

He protested, “But everybody loves you. Any man in town would love to go to bed with you. Even Eddie Constantine flirts with you. Even John Ong adores you, if you could understand him.”

“I know. But I don’t
enjoy
knowing it. I don’t want to go to bed with anybody. I don’t feel I’m a woman really. I’m a kind of cheerful neuter with this sex appeal tacked on as a kind of joke.”

“My poor Angel. Like having Kick Me on your back.”

“Exactly. I really thought, listening to Janet, how much we’re alike. A lot of coziness and being nice to creeps and this disgusted emptiness at heart. We both come from good families and have big bottoms and try to be witty and get pushed around. Do you know she keeps sleeping pills by her bed and some nights doesn’t bother to count how many she takes?”

“Well you don’t do that.”

“But I could. It sounded very familiar, the way she described it. I love sleep, just delicious nothing sleep. I’d love not to wake up.”