Couples (46 page)

Foxy said in a whisper reverberant in the bright tiled space, “You’re mad to be in here.” Then with incongruous deliberation she patted herself, let the paper drop into the oval of water below, and, half-turning on the seat, depressed the silver handle. Sluggishly the toilet flushed: Georgene used to complain about the low water pressure on the hill. Foxy rose from the vortex and smoothed her gown downward. Facing him, she seemed tall, faintly challenging and hostile, her closed lips strangely bleached by pale pink lipstick, newly chic. He made sure the door behind them was shut, and moved past her to urinate standing. With a pang, initially reluctant, his golden arc occurred. “God,” he said, “it’s a relief to see you alone. When the hell can we meet?”

She spoke hurriedly, above his splashing. “I wasn’t sure you wanted to. You’ve been very distant.”

“Ever since you’ve had the baby I’ve been frightened to death of you. I assumed it was the end of us.”

“That’s not true. Unless you want it to be true.”

“The fact is, all fall I’ve been frightened of everything. Death, my work, Gallagher, my children, the stars. It’s been hideous.” A concluding spurt, somewhat rhetorical, and a dismissive drying shake. He tucked himself in. “My whole life seems just a long falling.”

“But it’s
not
. You have a good life. Your lovely family, your nice square house, me if you want me. We can’t talk here. Call me Monday. I’m alone again.”

He flushed, but the water closet had not filled. “Wait. Please. Let me see your breasts.”

“They’re all milky.”

“I know. Just for a moment. Please. I do need it.”

They listened for steps on the stairs; there were none. Music below, and the television monologue. Her mouth
opened and her tongue, red as sturgeon, touched her upper lip as she reached behind her to undo snaps. Her gown and bra peeled down in a piece. Fruit.

“Oh. God.”

She blushed in answer. “I feel so gross.”

“So veiny and full. So hard at the tops, here.”

“Don’t get them started. I must go home in an hour.”

“And nurse.”

“Yes. What funny sad lines you’re getting here, and here. Don’t frown, Piet. And gray hairs. They’re new.”

“Nurse me.”

“Oh darling. No.”

“Nurse me.”

She covered one breast, alarmed, but he had knelt, and his broad mouth fastened on the other. The thick slow flow was at first suck sickeningly sweet. The bright bathroom light burned on his eyelids and seemed to dye his insides a deep flowing rose, down to the pained points of his knees on the icy tile. Foxy’s hand lightly cupped the curve of the back of his skull and now guided him closer into the flood of her, now warned by touching his ear that he was giving her pain. He opened his eyes; the nipple of her other breast jutted cherry-red between ivory fingers curled in protection; he closed his eyes. Pulses of stolen food scoured his tongue, his gums; she toyed with his hair, he caressed her clothed buttocks. She was near drowning him in rose.

Knocks struck rocklike at the unlocked door inches behind them. Harsh light flooded him. He saw Foxy’s free hand, ringed, grope and cup the sympathetic lactation of the breast jutting unmouthed. She called out, as musically as before, “One moment, please.”

Angela’s lucid polite voice answered, “Oops, sorry, Foxy. Take your time.”

“All ri-ight,” Foxy sang back, giving Piet a frantic look of interrogation. Her bare breasts giant circles. A Christian slave stripped to be tortured.

His body thundered with fear. His hands were jerking like puppets on strings but his brain took perspective from the well-lit room in which he was trapped. There was no other door. The shower curtain was translucent glass, two sliding panels; his shape would show. There was a little window. Its sill came up to his chest. Realizing the raising of the sash would make noise, he motioned Foxy to flush the toilet. As she bent to touch the silver handle the shape of her breasts changed, hanging forward, long-tipped udders dripping cloudy drops. He undid the brass catch and shoved up the sash as the water closet again, feebly, drained. Setting one black dancing slipper on the lip of the tub, he hoisted himself into the black square of air headfirst. Trees on this side of the house, elms, but none near enough to grasp. His hands could touch only vertical wood and freezing air pricked by stars. Too late he knew he should have gone feet first; he must drop. This the shady rural side of the house. Soft grass. The toilet had quieted and left no noise to cover the sounds of his scrambling as he changed position. Foxy thought to turn both faucets on full. By logic she must next open the door to Angela. Piet backed out of the window. Foxy was standing by the roaring faucets staring at him and mopping herself with a purple washcloth and resecuring the bodice of her silver gown. He imagined she smiled. No time to think about it. He stood on the slick tub lip and got a leg through the little window and doing a kind of handstand on the radiator cover maneuvered the other leg through also. Button. Caught. Ah. There. He slid out on his chest and dangled his weight by his hands along Thorne’s undulate shingles. Loose nails, might catch on a nostril, tear his face
like a fish being reamed. Air dangled under his shoes. Ten feet. Eleven, twelve. Old houses, high ceilings. Something feathery brushed his fingers gripping the sill inside the bathroom. Foxy begging him not to dare it? Angela saying it was all right, she knew? Too late. Fall. No apologies. Pushing off lightly from the wall with his slippers and trying to coil himself loosely against the shock, he let go. Falling was first a hum, then concussion: a harpstring in reverse. His heels hit the frost-baked turf; he took a somersault backwards and worried about grass stains on his tuxedo before he thought to praise God for breaking no bones. Above him, a pink face vanished and a golden window whispered shut. They were safe. He was sitting on the brittle grass, his feet in their papery slippers stinging.

The silhouette of the trunk of the elm nearest him wavered; a female voice giggled. “Piet, you’re such a show-off,” Bea Guerin said.

Ben Saltz’s orotund voice pronounced, “That was quite a tumble. I’m impressed.”

Piet stood and brushed dirt from his clothes. “What are you two doing out here?”

“Oh,” Bea said, and her offhand accents seemed, out of doors, disembodied, “Ben brought me out here to watch a satellite he miniaturized something in go by overhead.”

“A tiny component,” Ben said. “My old outfit developed it, with maybe one or two of my bright ideas. I thought it might be passing right about now, but all we’ve seen is a shooting star.”

“So lovely,” Bea said, and to Piet, still dizzy, the tree was talking, though the scarlet of her dress was growing distinct, “the way it fell, flaring all greeny-blue, like a match being struck, then nothing. I hadn’t seen a comet since a child.”

“That wasn’t a comet,” Ben said. “That was a meteor, an inert chunk of matter, of space dust you might say, burning up with friction upon contact with our atmosphere. Comets are incandescent and have elliptical orbits.”

“Oh Ben, you’re wonderful, you know everything, doesn’t he, Piet? But now tell us, whatever were you and Foxy
doing
?”

“Why do you say Foxy?”

“We saw her close the window. Didn’t you?”

“Are you sure it was Foxy? I thought it was Angela.”

“Angela, poo. Of course it was Foxy, that lovely honey hair. Were you making love? In the bathroom?”

“Boy, that takes nerves of iron,” Ben said. “Not to mention pretty well-padded bodies. I’ve tried it in a boat and it just wasn’t my style, very frankly.”

“Don’t be silly,” Piet said. “Of course we weren’t. You two are grotesque.” Perhaps anger could dissolve this unexpected couple.

“Why is that
silly
?” Bea cried in a soft raising wail, as when she had mourned Kennedy. “Everyone knows about you and Foxy. Your truck is parked down there all the time. We think it’s
nice
.”

“My truck hasn’t been there for months.”

“Well my dear, she’s hardly been in a condition to.”

“You know,” Ben said, “I wonder about that. Forbidding intercourse during pregnancy. I suspect it will turn out to be one more pseudo-medical superstition, like not breastfeeding because it wasn’t sanitary, which they sincerely believed in the Thirties. I
made
Irene breast-feed, and she’s grateful.”

“You’re a wonderful husband, Ben,” Piet said. “Now you’re making her work and she’s grateful again.”

Bea put her hand, trembling, on his forearm. “Now don’t be sarcastic to Ben, just because you yourself are embarrassed. We won’t tell anybody we saw you jump. Except Roger and Irene.”

“Well, who shall I tell about you and Ben necking out here?”

“You may tell one person,” Bea said, “those are the rules, but you mayn’t tell Angela, because she’ll tell Freddy Thorne, and then everybody will know. I’m freezing.”

All three, they went back into the house together. Doris Day was singing “Stardust.” Angela was coming downstairs from the bathroom. She asked, “Where have you all been?”

Piet told her, “Ben says he made one of the stars out there, but we couldn’t find it.”

“Why were you looking under the trees? I
wondered
who was mumbling outside; I could hear you from the bathroom.” Suspended halfway up the stairs, she shimmered like a chandelier. Now that he had safely rejoined the party, Piet was piqued by Bea’s assumption that Angela told Freddy Thorne everything. Wanting to ask his wife if this were true, he asked her instead, “How much have you drunk?”

“Just enough,” she answered, descending. Parting an invisible curtain with her hands, she floated past him.

Piet hurried on; he had questions to ask of every woman. He kept tasting cloying milk. Foxy was in the kitchen, talking to Janet, who turned her back, so the lovers could talk. He asked Foxy hoarsely, “Make it OK?”

“Of course,” she whispered.

He went on, “Did I imagine it, or were you standing there smiling at me?”

She glanced about to see they were not being overheard. “You were so manic, it was like a silent comedy. I wanted to
tell you not to be silly and kill yourself, but we couldn’t make any talking noises, and anyway you were clearly in love with the idea of jumping.”

“In love! I was terrified, and now my right knee is beginning to hurt.”

“You were terrified of Angela. Why? After all, so your husband is in the bathroom with another woman. It’s not the end of the world. Maybe you were helping me get something out of my eye.”

Piet drew on his impoverished reserves of moral indignation. “I’m shocked,” he said, “that you would laugh. With all our love in the balance.”

“I tried to catch your hand at the last minute; but you let go.” Her smile became artificial, feral. “We better stop talking. Freddy Thorne has a fishy eye on us and here comes Harold Little.”

Harold, petitely storming, his slicked-down hair mussed in pinfeathers in back, said, continuing a conversation begun elsewhere, “If I believed in the omnipotent Lord Jesus, I’d say this was punishment for his letting our one staunch ally in Southeast Asia get nailed to please the pansy left in this country.
La gauche efféminée
.”

“Oh Harold,” Foxy said, mothering, “in,” “don’t talk like that, you’re imitating somebody else. Cardinal Richelieu. You think we’ll think you’re cute if you go right-wing. We think you’re cute now. Don’t we, Piet?”

“Harold,” Piet asked, “have you thought of asking the young widow for her hand? You and Madame Nhu would make a lovely couple. You both have a fiery way of expressing yourselves.”

“You both speak French,” Foxy added.

“The trouble with this
merde
-heap of a country,” Harold
said, sullenly flattered by their teasing, “there’s no respectable way to not be a liberal.”

Piet said, “Why, look at me. I’m not a liberal. Look at all your fellow brokers. They swindle the poor and pimp for the rich. Nothing liberal about that.”

“They’re idiots.” In French:
“Idiots.”
Harold told Piet, “You never venture outside of this bucolic paradise, so you don’t know what imbeciles there are. They really
care
,” he said, “about the difference between driving a Buick and a Cadillac.”

“That’s too hideous to believe,” Piet said and, seeing Carol alone by the harpframe, went over to her. “What have you been telling that jerk Freddy Thorne?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I’ll tell you this, Piet Hanema. He was about the only person who kept coming around when the rest of you were ostracizing Eddie and me because of poor old Irene. Poor old Irene my ass. Did you see her take Eddie into the kitchen as soon as they got here?”

“You beauty. Let’s dance.” Doris Day was now singing “Under a Blanket of Blue.” Carol’s back beneath his hand was extensively naked, bony and supple and expressive of the immense ease with which in bed his hairy long arms could encircle and sooth her slender nerved-up dancer’s nakedness. His thumb grazed the edge of one shoulder blade; his palm lay moist across her spine’s raised ridge; his fingertips knew the fatty beginnings of her sides. Pliant sides that would downslip, gain muscle, and become the world’s wide pivot and counterthrusting throne, which in even a brittle woman is ample and strong. With a clothy liquidity Carol was yielding herself up, grazing easily the length of him. The bodies of women are puzzle pieces that can fit or not, as they decide. Imperceptibly Carol shaded the tilt of her pelvis so his penis
felt caressed. She rubbed herself lightly from side to side, bent her neck so he could see her breasts, blew into his ear. The music stopped. She backed off, her face frowningly dilated, and sighed. She told him, “You’re such a bastard,” and walked away, naked from nape to waist. Mermaid. Slip from his hands like a piece of squeezed soap.

Such a bastard. When he had been told, at college, coming in late from a date that had left his mouth dry and his fly wet and his fingertips alive with the low-tide smell of cunt, about his parents’ accident, his thought had been that had he been there, been there in Grand Rapids in any capacity, his presence would have altered the combination of events, deflected their confluence, enough to leave his mother and father alive. In the same way, he felt guilty about Kennedy’s death, when Jazinski told him of it, in the silence of the sander.