Couples (61 page)

“Well, it’s not as if I had been totally—”

“Oh, I know, I know, but that’s never really the issue, is it? People use it when they need to, because of our moronic Puritan laws.”

“Who used who, do you think, in my case?”

“Why,
clairement
, Foxy used you. How else could she get rid of that zombie? Don’t be used, Piet. Go back to your kids and forget that bitch.”

“Don’t call her a bitch. You don’t know the story at all.”

“Listen, Piet, I wouldn’t be telling you this just on my own account, out of my own reliably untrustworthy neofascist opinion. But Marcia and I stayed up till past three last night with the Applebys talking this over and we all agreed: we don’t like seeing a couple we love hurt. If I weren’t so hung, I’d probably put it more tactfully.
Pas d’offense
, of course.”

“Janet agreed too, that Foxy was a bitch and I’d been had?”

“She was the devil’s advocate for a while, but we wore her out. Anyway, it doesn’t mean a fart in Paradise what we think. The thing is, what are you going to do? Come on, I’m your friend.
Ton frère
. What are you going to do?”

“I’m not doing anything. Angela hasn’t called and doesn’t seem to need me back.”

“You’re waiting for her to call? Don’t wait, go to her. Women have to be taken, you know that. I thought you were a great lover.”

“Who told you? Marcia?” Harold’s twin-tipped nose lifted as he scented a remote possibility. Piet laughed, and went on, “Or maybe Janet? A splendid woman. Why I remember when she was a prostitute in St. Louis, the line went clear down the hall into the billiard room. Have you ever noticed, at the moment of truth, how her whole insides kind of
pull
? One time I remember—”

Harold cut in. “Well I’m glad to see your spirits haven’t been crushed. Nothing sacred, eh Piet?”

“Nothing sacred.
Pas d’offense
.”

“Marcia and I wanted to have you over for a drink sometime, and be serious for a change. She’s all in a flap about it. She went over to your house, and Angela was perfectly polite, not a hair out of place, but she wouldn’t unbend.”

“Is that what Marcia likes, to bend people?”

“Listen, I feel I’ve expressed myself badly. We care, is the point. Piet, we
care
.”

“Je comprends. Merci. Bonjour.”

“OK, let’s leave it at that,” Harold said, miffed, sniffing. “I have to get a haircut.” His hair looked perfectly well-trimmed to Piet.

The invitation to a drink at the little-Smiths’ never came. Few of the friends he and Angela had shared sought him out. The Saltzes, probably at Angela’s urging, had him to dinner by himself, but their furniture was being readied for moving, and the evening depressed Piet. Now that they were leaving, the Saltzes could not stop talking about themselves as Jews, as if during their years in Tarbox they had suppressed their race, and now it could out. Irene’s battle with the school authorities over Christmas pageantry was lengthily recounted, her eyebrows palpitating. The fact of local anti-Semitism, even in their tiny enlightened circle of couples, was urgently confided to Piet. The worst offenders were the Constantines. Carol had been raised, you know, in a
very
Presbyterian small-town atmosphere, and Eddie was, of course, an ignorant man. Night after night they had sat over there arguing the most absurd things, like the preponderance of Jewish Communists, and psychoanalysts, and violinists, as if it all were part of a single conspiracy. Terrible to admit, after a couple of drinks they would sit around trading Jewish jokes; and of course the Saltzes knew many more than Eddie and Carol, which was interpreted as their being ashamed of their race, which she, Irene, certainly, certainly was
not
. Piet tried to tell them how he felt, especially in the society of Tarbox, as a sort of Jew at heart; but Irene, as if he had furtively petitioned for membership in the chosen race, shushed him with a torrent of analysis as to why Frank Appleby, that arch-Wasp,
always argued with her, yet couldn’t resist arguing with her, and sought her out at parties. In fairness, there were two people among their “friends” with whom she had never felt a trace of condescension or fear; and one was Angela. The other was Freddy Thorne. “That miserable bastard,” Piet groaned, out of habit, to please; people expected him to hate Freddy. The Saltzes understood his exclamation as a sign that, as all the couples suspected, Freddy and Angela had for ages been lovers.

Piet left early; he missed the silence of his shabby room, the undemandingness of the four walls. Ben put his hand on his shoulder and smiled his slow archaic smile. “You’re down now,” he told Piet, “and it’s a pity you’re not a Jew, because the fact is, every Jew expects to be down sometime in his life, and he has a philosophy for it. God is testing him.
Nisayon Elohim
.”

“But I clearly brought this on myself,” Piet said.

“Who’s to say? If you believe in omnipotence, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is to taste your own ashes. Chew ’em. Up or down doesn’t matter;
ain ben David ba elle bador shekulo zakkai oh kulo chayyav
. The son of David will not come except to a generation that’s wholly good or all bad.”

Piet tried to tell them how much he had liked them, how Angela had once said, and he had agreed, that the Saltzes of all the couples they knew were the most free from, well, crap.

Ben kept grinning and persisted with his advice. “Let go, Piet. You’ll be OK. It was a helluva lot of fun knowing you.”

Irene darted forward and kissed him good-bye, a quick singeing kiss from lips dark red in her pale face, rekindling his desire for women.

Later in the week, after cruising past her house several times a day, he called Bea. He had seen her once downtown,
and she had waved from across the street, and disappeared into the jeweler’s shop, still decorated with a nodding rabbit, though Easter was over. Her voice on the phone sounded startled, guilty.

“Oh, Piet, how are you? When are you going back to Angela?”

“Am I going back? She seems more herself without me.”

“Oh, but at night it must be terrible for her.”

“And how is it for you at night?”

“Oh, the same. Nobody goes out to parties any more. All people talk about is their children.”

“Would you—would you like to see me? Just for tea, some afternoon?”

“Oh, sweet, I think not. Honestly. I think you have enough women to worry about.”

“I don’t have any women.”

“It’s good for you, isn’t it?”

“It’s not as bad as I would have thought. But what about us? I was in love with you, you know, before the roof fell in.”

“You were lovely, so alive. But I think you idealized me. I’m much too lazy in bed for you. Anyway, sweet, all of a sudden, it’s rather touching, Roger needs me.”

“How do you mean?”

“You won’t tell anybody? Everybody’s sure you’re keeping a nest of girls down there.”

“Everybody’s wrong. I only liked married women. They reminded me of my mother.”

“Don’t be uppity. I’m trying to tell you about Roger. He lost a lot of money, one of his awful fairy investment friends in Boston, and he really came crying to me, I loved it.”

“So because he’s bankrupt I can’t go to bed with you.”

“Not bankrupt, you
do
idealize everything. But scared, so
scared—oh, I must tell somebody, I’m bursting with it!—he’s agreed to adopt a child. We’ve already been to the agency once, and answered a lot of insulting questions about our private life. The odd thing is, white babies are scarce, they have so many more Negroes.”

“This is what you’ve wanted? To adopt a child?”

“Oh, for years. Ever since I knew I couldn’t. It wasn’t Roger, you know, it was me that couldn’t. People poked fun of Roger but it was
me
. Oh, Piet, forgive me, I’m burdening you with this.”

“No, it’s no burden.” Floating, he remembered how she floated, above the sound of children snowballing, as evening fell early, through levels of lavender.

She was sobbing, barely audibly, her voice limp and moist, as her body had been. “It’s so rotten, though, that you need me and I must say no when before it was I who needed you, and you came finally.”

“Finally. Bea, it’s great about the adoption, and Roger’s going to the poorhouse.”

A laugh skidded through her tears. “I just can’t,” she said, “when I’ve been given what I’ve prayed for. The funny thing is, you helped. Roger was very frightened by you and Angela breaking up. He’s become very serious.”

“He was always serious.”

“Sweet Piet, tell me, I was never very real to you, was I? Isn’t it all right, not to? I’ve been dreading your call so, I thought it would come sooner.”

“It should have come sooner,” he said, then hastened to add to reassure her with, “No, you were never very real,” and added finally, “Kiss.”

“Kiss,” Bea faintly said. “Kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss.”

Sunday, bringing his daughters back from a trip to the Science
Museum in Boston, Piet was saddened by the empty basketball court. This was the time of year when the young married men of Tarbox used to scrimmage. Whitman was gone, Saltz had moved, Constantine was flying jets to Lima and Rio, Thorne and little-Smith had always considered the game plebeian. Weeds were threading through a crack in the asphalt and the hoop, netless and aslant, needed to be secured with longer screws. Angela greeted them outdoors; she had been picking up winter-fallen twigs from the lawn, and sprinkling grass seed in the bare spots. Seeing the direction of his eyes, she said, “You should take that hoop down. Or would you like to invite your gentlemen friends to come play? I could tolerate it.”

“I have no gentlemen friends, it turns out. They were all your friends. Anyway, it would be artificial and not comfortable, don’t you think?”

“I suppose.”

“Mightn’t Ruth ever want to use the hoop?”

“She’s interested right now in being feminine. Maybe later, when they have teams at school; but in the meantime it looks hideous.”

“You’re too exquisite,” he said.

“How was your expedition? Artificial and not comfortable?”

“No, it was fun. Nancy cried in the planetarium, when the machine made the stars whirl around, but for some reason she loved the Transparent Woman.”

“It reminded her of me.” Angela said.

Piet wondered if this bit of self-disclaiming wit was the prelude to readmitting him into their home. Sneakingly he hoped not. He felt the worst nights of solitude were behind him. In loneliness he was regaining something, an elemental
sense of surprise at everything, that he had lost with childhood. Even his visits to Angela in their awkwardness had a freshness that was pleasant. She seemed, with her soft fumbling gestures and unaccountable intervals of distant repose, a timid solid creature formed from his loins and now learning to thrive alone. He asked her, “How have you been?”

“Busy enough. I’ve had to reacquaint myself with my parents. My mother says that for ten years I snubbed them. I hadn’t thought so, but maybe she’s right.”

“And the girls? They miss me less?”

“A little less. It’s worst when something breaks and I can’t fix it. Ruth was very cross with me the other day and told me I was stupid to lose their Daddy for them by being so pushy in bed. I guess Jonathan or Frankie at school had told her I was bad in bed, and she thought it must mean I didn’t give you enough room. Oh, we had a jolly discussion after that. Woman to woman.”

“The poor saint. Two poor saints.”

“You look better.”

“I’m adjusting. Everybody lets me alone, which in a way is a mercy, since I don’t have to play politics. The only people I talk to all day some days are Adams and Comeau; we’re doing some cabinets for a new couple toward Lacetown.”

“I thought you were on Indian Hill.”

“Jazinski and Gallagher seem to be managing that. They’re working straight from canned plans that don’t fit the slope at all.”

“Oh. They had me over, with some North Mather people I hated. Money sort of people. Horsey.”

“Matt’s on the move.”

“Terry seemed very bored.”

“She’ll be bored from here on in. And you? Bored? Happy? Fighting off propositions from our gentlemen friends?”

“A few feelers.” Angela admitted. “But nothing serious. It’s a different kettle of fish, a separated woman. It’s scarier for them.”

“You do think of us as separated?”

Rather than answer him, she looked over his shoulder, toward the corner of woods where scilla was blooming and where he had buried Ruth’s hamster and where the girls, in a burst of relief at being released from the confinement of their father’s embarrassingly rattly and unwashed pick-up truck, had, still in their Sunday expedition clothes, sought their climbing tree, a low-branching apple stunted among maples. Angela’s face was recalled to animation by remembered good news. “Oh Piet, I must tell you. The strangest nicest thing. I’ve begun to have dreams. Dreams I can remember. It hasn’t happened to me for years.”

“What kind of dreams?”

“Oh, nothing very exciting yet. I’m in an elevator, and press the button, and nothing happens. So I think, not at all worried, ‘I must be on the right floor already.’ Or, maybe it’s part of the same dream, I’m in a department store, trying to buy Nancy a fur hood, so she can go skiing in it. I know exactly the size, and the kind of lining, and go from counter to counter, and they offer me mittens, earmuffs, galoshes, everything I don’t want, but I remain very serene and polite, because I know they have them somewhere, because I bought one for Ruth there.”

“What sweet dreams.”

“Yes, they’re very shy and ordinary.
He
doesn’t agree, or disagree, but my idea is my subconscious tried to die, and now it’s daring to come back and express things I want. Not for myself yet, but for others.”

“He. You’re having dreams for
him
. Like a child going wee-wee for her daddy.”

She retreated, as he desired, into the enchanted stillness that, in this square yard, this tidy manless house, he liked to visit. “You’re such a bully,” she told him. “Such a jealous bully. You always dreamed so easily, lying beside you inhibited me, I’m sure.”