Couples (47 page)

Irene Saltz floated toward him, her eyebrows arched above bright tears, scintillant in candlelight. “Are you happy, Irene?” he asked her.

“I still love him, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said.

“You want to be laughed at,” Piet told her, “like me. We’re scapegoat-types.”

Triumphantly upheld by Freddy flanked by Georgene and Angela, the ham, the warm and fat and glistening ham, scotched and festooned with cloves, was fetched in from the kitchen. Bea Guerin, her washed-out hair, paler than wind, done up loosely in a Psyche knot, followed holding a salad bowl heaped full of oily lettuce, cucumber slices, avocados, tomatoes, parsley, chives, chicory, escarole. Their blessings were beyond counting. With a cruciform clashing of silver Freddy began to sharpen the carving knife. Out of the gathering audience Frank Appleby boomed, “Upon what meat does this our Caesar feed, that he is grown so great?”

Georgene explained, “I had salmon for the Catholics but since none of them came I’ll give it to the children for lunch.”

Freddy’s eyeglasses flickered blindly as he carved; he was expert. Nobody but Freddy could cut slices so thin. “Take, eat,” he intoned, laying each slice on a fresh plate a woman held out to him. “This is his body, given for thee.”

“Freddy!” Marcia little-Smith cried. “That’s disgusting.”

“Don’t you think,” Bea Guerin asked, her voice pure and plaintive and proud of sounding lost, “we should be fasting or something?”

“Fasting or fucking,” Freddy Thorne said, with surgical delicacy laying on another slice.

Ken Whitman watched silent from near the wall, beneath an African mask. Ben Saltz, eagerly hunchbacked, fetched radishes and bread to the buffet table. Carol carried two bottles of burgundy black as tar in the candlelight. Piet, being passed a plate, chewed but without saliva; his mouth felt full of ashes that still burned. Suddenly old, he sought a chair. His knee did hurt.

Still limping, he visited Foxy the following Tuesday, when the nation resumed normal life. The three days of omnipresent mourning had passed for these couples of Tarbox as three tranced holidays each alike in pattern. The men each afternoon had played touch football on the field behind the Applebys’, by Joy Creek, while the women and children stayed indoors watching television in the library. During dull stretches of the Washington ceremonies or the Dallas postmortems (Piet and his children, just back from church, were watching when Oswald was shot; Ruth calmly turned and asked him, “Was that real?” while Nancy silently stuck her
thumb in her mouth) some of the women would come outdoors and arrange themselves in Frank’s hay and watch their men race red-faced up and down the hummocky field, shouting for the ball. These days on the verge of winter were autumnally fair, struck through with warmth until the swift lengthening of the shadows. At game’s end, that long weekend, the men and children would drink from paper cups the cider someone (the Whitmans, the little-Smiths) had brought from the orchard along the beach road, and then there would be a general drift indoors, to cocktails and a long sitting around the television set while the children grew cranky and raided Janet’s supply of crackers, peanut butter, raisins, and apples. Run and rerun as if on the revolving drum of insomnia, Haile Selassie and General De Gaulle bobbed together down Pennsylvania Avenue, Jack Ruby’s stripper drawlingly allowed that his temper could be mean, Lee Oswald, smirking, was led down a crowded corridor toward a lurching hat and wildly tipping cameras. The widow and one of the brothers, passing so near the camera they blurred, bent obliquely over an indeterminate tilted area of earth and flowers. The dome was distant in the southern sunshine. Amid drumrolls, the casket gleamed and was gone. The children came crying, bullied by others. Another drink? It was time to go home, but not yet, not quite yet. It was evening before they packed the children into the cars. The space in the cars as they drove home was stuffy with unasked questions, with the unsayable trouble of a king’s murder, a queasy earthquake for little children, a funny stomach-gnawing only sleep eased. School and Tuesday came as a relief.

Piet parked his truck in plain sight in the driveway. The Whitmans’ surviving lilacs were leafless and his eyes winced in the unqualified light. Every season has a tone of light we
forget each year: a kitchen with frosted windows, a leaf-crowded side porch, the chalky noons of spring, the chill increase, as leaves fall, of neutral clarity. October’s orange had ebbed in the marshes; they stretched dun gray to the far rim of sand. The tide was low; the sea lay sunken in the wider channels like iron being cast. Foxy answered his second ring.

Opening the door, she looked delicate, as if recovered from an illness, or as if she had just chastised herself with a severely hot bath. “Oh. You. Wonderful.”

“Is it? Are you alone? I’ve come to see the baby.”

“But not me?”

Yet, once inside, on the loop rug, he embraced and held her as if there were no baby, as if there were no one alive in this sunken barren world but themselves. Beneath her coarse house smock, between her lifted breasts and bony pelvis, a defenseless hollow felt placed against his memory of her swollen belly. A snuffling aggrieved sound, less crying than a scratching at some portal of need, arose in the living room. Foxy clung to him in a pose of weeping, and reflexively he bent his head into her hair to kiss the side of her neck, and now her tongue and fingers, as if released from the timidity of long absence, tremblingly attempted to seize him, but blind as bees in a room of smoke they darted to absurd places—his unshaven chin, his jingling pockets, an eye that barely closed in time, a ticklish armpit her ardor could not unlock. He told her, “The baby’s crying.”

Together they went to where in the living room the baby lay breathing in a bassinet. A pearly quiet blessed its vicinity and the windows giving on the frost-charred marsh seemed to frame images thrown from within, by a magic lantern centered on the infant’s untinted soul. Foxy asked, “Do you want to hold him?” and pulled the infant gently up and unceremoniously
passed him to Piet’s hands. Piet, cupping his broad palms under their sudden unsteady burden, let himself be astounded by, what he had forgotten, the narrowness of the buttocks, the feverish mauve skull. For a second the child appraised him with stern large eyes the color of basalt; then the irises crossed and the muscles in his forehead bulged like elastic levers to squeeze the eyebrows down. The baby began to cry. Fearing his noise would betray their secrecy, Piet returned him to Foxy. Brusquely, she jiggled the bundle against her bosom.

Piet asked, “What is his name?”

“You must know it.”

“Angela told me but I’ve forgotten. An old-fashioned name, I thought. For such a modern couple.”

“Tobias.”

“That’s not the cat?”

“Cotton is the cat. Tobias was Ken’s grandfather.”

“Why didn’t you name him after Ken’s father?”

“Ken apparently doesn’t like his father.”

“I thought his father was perfect, the perfect Hartford lawyer.”

“He is. But Ken was very definite, I was surprised.”

“Ken is full of surprises, now and then, isn’t he? A fascinating fellow.”

“Are you trying to sell him to me?”

Piet asked her, “Why are we fencing?”

Foxy said, “I don’t know. The baby upsets you.”

“I love the baby. I love you as a mother.”

“But not as a mistress any more?”

“Well”—embarrassment gnawed his stomach—“you’re not ready yet, are you?”

“I shouldn’t make love for two more weeks but I think I
could stand a little show of affection. Why are you so remote?”

“Am I?” How could he tell her, of the quietness he had found here, the sere marsh filling the windows, the serene room he had carved, its plaster walls spread wide like a wimple, of the pearly aura near the baby, of Foxy’s own subdued dry grace, dry as if drained of sleep and self-concern—of this chaste charmed air and his superstitious reluctance to contaminate it? He confessed, “I just wonder if I have any business being here now.”

“Why not now? What business did you ever have? I was never your wife. You came here for an extramarital screw, that was fine, I gave it to you, I loved it. Now what? I’ve made myself dirty by having a baby.” Piet felt she too much enjoyed such tough talk, that it was something revived, on the excuse of him, from deeper in her experience. She stood with legs apart, bent forward a bit from the waist, Tobias held tight but unacknowledged in her arms. Her raised voice had lulled him to sleep. Piet loved her maternal clumsiness, her already careless confidence that the child was hers to handle.

He asked her, “How can you want me? You have this marvelous little package. You have Ken who gave it to you.”

“He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like the baby.”

“Impossible.”

Foxy began to cry. Her hair, lusterless in the dull late light, hung forward over the child. “It frightens him,” she said. “I frighten him. I’ve always frightened him. I don’t blame him, I’m a mess, Piet.”

“Nonsense.” His inner gnawing was transmuted into a drastic sunk feeling; he had no choice but to go to her, put his arms around her and the child, and say, “You’re lovely.”

Her sobbing would not stop. Her situation, including his
concession and his sheltering arms, seemed to anger her increasingly. “Don’t you like talking to me?”

“Of course I do.”

“Don’t you like talking to me at all? Don’t you ever want to do anything with me except go to bed? Can’t you wait a few more weeks to have me?”

“Please. Fox. Don’t be so silly.”

“I was afraid to take ether for fear I’d cry out your name. I go around the house saying ‘Piet, Piet’ to this innocent baby. I dragged poor Ken to that hideous party just to see you and you risked killing yourself rather than be found with me.”

“You exaggerate. There was very little risk. I did it as much to protect you as myself.”

“You’re still limping from it.”

“It was all that football.”

“Oh, Piet. I’m beginning to nag. Don’t leave me absolutely yet. You’re the only thing real I have. Ken is unreal. This marsh is unreal. I’m unreal to myself, I just exist to keep this baby alive, that’s all I was put here for, and it makes me
mad
.”

“Don’t be mad,” he begged; but he himself felt anger, to be so pressed and sunk he could not spare breath to explain that for them to keep seeing each other now would be evil, all the more in that it had been good. They had been let into God’s playroom, and been happy together on the floor all afternoon, but the time had come to return the toys to their boxes, and put the chairs back against the wall.

Ken came home from work looking more tired than she had seen him since graduate-student days. He carried a sheaf of mimeographed pre-prints and flopped them down on the hall table. “There’s been a breakthrough in photosynthesis,”
he told her. “They’ve figured out something involving ferredoxin—it seems to be the point of transition between the light and dark reactions.”

“What’s ferredoxin?”

“A protein. An electron carrier with a very low redox potential.”

“Who’s figured it out?” He almost never talked to her about his work, so she was anxious to respond fruitfully. For his return she had put on a lemony cocktail dress, celebrative. Their child was six weeks old today.

“Oh,” he sighed, “a couple of Japs. Actually, they’re good men. Better than me. I’ve had it.” He dropped himself into the armchair, the leather armchair they had steered up and down apartment-house stairs all over Cambridge. Feeling their life slip backwards, she panicked.

“Let
me
see,” Foxy said, and went, all wifely bustle and peremptoriness, to the hall table to prove him wrong. The pamphlet on top was titled
Neurophysiological Mechanisms Underlying Behavior: Emotions and the Amygdala
. The one underneath was
Experimental Phenylketonuria: Pharmacogenetics of Seizures in Mice
. She looked no further.

To our Tarbox doppelgängers the “little” Smiths—

Another Yuletide finds us personally well and prosperous yet naturally saddened by the tragic and shocking events of this November. Man is truly “but as grass.” A different sort of sadness entered our household when this September we saw young Tim, our precocious and precious baby of a few short years ago, off for his freshman year at St. Mark’s. He has been home for weekends, very much the “young man,” but it will be joyous to have him under the manse
roof these holidays—even if he has, to our decibel’s dismay, taken up the electric guitar. Meanwhile Pat, Audrey, and Gracelyn continue happily in the excellent Newton public schools. Pat, indeed, has been honored with (and that sound you hear is our buttons “popping” with pride
).

“God,” Marcia said, “the way she crawls right over poor Kennedy to tell us they can afford St. Mark’s.”

“To our decibel’s dismay,” Janet said, and both went helpless with laughter.

The evenings before Christmas are gloomy and exciting in downtown Tarbox: the tinfoil stars and wreaths hung from slack wires shivering audibly in the wind, the silent crèche figures kneeling in the iron pavilion, the schoolchildren shrieking home from school in darkness, the after-supper shoppers hurrying head-down as if out on illicit errands and fearful of being seen, the Woolworth’s and Western Auto and hardware stores wide-awake with strained hopeful windows and doors that can’t help yawning. This year the civic flags were at half-mast and some stores—the old jeweler’s, the Swedish bakery—had forsaken the usual displays. In the brilliantly lit and remorselessly caroling five and ten, Piet, shopping with his daughters for their present to Angela, met Bea Guerin at the candle counter. At the sight of her small tipped head, considering, her hair stretched to shining, his heart quickened and his hands, heavily hanging, tingled. She turned and noticed him; her instinctive smile tightened as she gauged his disproportionate gladness at seeing her.

Ruth and Nancy wandered on uncertainly down an aisle of kitchen gadgets. Their faces looked dirty in the crass light; his
daughters seemed waifs lost and sickened in this wilderness of trash. Their puzzled greed exasperated Piet. He let them go down the aisle and knew that they would settle on a package of cute Pop-pattern dish towels and a red-handled sharpener that would be lost by New Year’s.