Happy All the Time (23 page)

When Juliana was put on a blanket on the floor to wriggle her arms and legs, Ruth Binnenstock wriggled along with her. When she cooed, Ruth cooed too. When Juliana sang, Ruth sang along. The sound of Juliana singing drove Guido into a frenzy of love. She sang in a high, piping voice that Ruth Binnenstock could almost imitate.

After a month and a half, Ruth Binnenstock decided that Holly and Guido knew all they needed to know and she began to pack.

“You can't leave,” said Holly. “I'm too terrified.”

“Nonsense,” said Ruth. “If you get scared, just call me. But believe me, this baby of yours is a dream. She's perfectly fine. If there's any problem, it'll be yours, not hers.”

Juliana didn't seem to mind when Ruth left, but Guido and Holly were crushed.

“It isn't that Ruth understands babies,” said Holly. “She
is
babies.”

“Alone at last,” said Guido. “Don't look so stricken. Where's my kid?”

“She was taking a nap, but I think I just heard her.”

“I'll go get her,” said Guido.

“Be careful,” said Holly.

“Get a grip on yourself, woman,” said Guido. “Ruth said not to worry. Ruth says to coo when she coos, so I'll bring her in here and we'll coo together.”

Juliana slept in a football jersey given to her by Vincent and Misty, which made her look almost unbearably adorable.

“Look at this beauty,” said Guido. He held Juliana in his arms. He was terrified. “Now what do I do?”

“You put her on the couch next to me,” said Holly, “and then you sit down next to her. Then we coo and appreciate her.”

Holly and Guido were in great awe of their offspring. One or the other of them was constantly hanging over her crib, staring at her.

“We are treating this child like the Infant of Prague,” said Guido.

“Ruth says that awe is an appropriate response,” said Holly. “Besides, we have a sweet-tempered baby. Ruth says some babies cry all day and all night long. Our baby cries only when it's necessary. Some mothers are exhausted all the time. I'm exhausted only part of the time. Look at what gorgeous feet she has.”

“She has beautiful little Renaissance feet,” said Guido. Neither had taken an eye off Juliana, who lay almost perfectly still, taking adulation in stride.

As soon as Juliana had established a schedule for herself and Holly and Guido were a little less exhausted, Holly decided to have a dinner party in order to bring Juliana closer to the lives of Vincent and Misty. They had been permitted short visits, but now it was time to make an evening of it.

Before dinner, they all congregated in the living room. Juliana was placed on a quilt, where she wriggled happily. Holly and Guido demonstrated Ruth Binnenstock's precepts and when Vincent gave it a try, he found he was not half bad at wriggling. Misty was not much of a wriggler, so she waltzed Juliana around the room. Juliana found this very entertaining. Then they all sang to her. Guido sang her a song of his childhood. Holly sang Cole Porter. Vincent held her on his knee and sang “Lazybones.” Misty took over and sang “Dancing Chicken” and flapped Juliana's arms.

“All adult conversation has been suspended,” said Holly.

“This is the only baby I have ever seen who can be judged by adult standards of beauty,” said Guido.

“Fatherhood takes away all modesty and propriety,” said Holly. “Now you and Vincent can smoke your cigars. Juliana needs a few minutes of quiet after all this excitement and then I'm going to feed you.”

At dinner, the conversation centered largely around Juliana.

“Betty Helen sent a present,” said Guido to Vincent. “She knitted a little yellow coat and told me that babies were love incarnate.”

“How would she know?” said Vincent. “Having never been one herself.”

“Now, Vincent,” said Holly. “Betty Helen is extremely kind. She called me up and told me that if I wanted she would come over and read Juliana's aura. She said Guido's aura was golden the day he came back to work after Juliana was born.”

“I told you she was weird,” said Vincent.

“Stanley says that when the time comes, he'll be very happy to give Juliana Latin lessons,” said Misty.

“Having babies is wonderful,” said Holly dreamily. “It's really quite stupefying. I feel I should be given the Nobel Prize. I can't wait until you two have one.”

“If we ever have a baby,” said Misty, “it will have my temperament and no one will want to come and see it. When it grows up, it will have Uncle Bernie's criminal tendencies and will cause great scandal.”

“I think it's a wonderful idea,” said Vincent. “Besides, you promised me that someday we would have a little Communist of our very own.”

By the time Gem turned up, Juliana had turned from a beautiful infant into a ravishing one. Gem was not interested in babies. She claimed to know nothing about them and to prove it she unwrapped her present, which was a little china pig—just the right size for a baby to swallow.

When Guido entered the living room, both Holly and Juliana were half asleep. Gem had been talking all afternoon and Holly was now afog with names and places. Was it in Chile that Gem had gone skiing and discovered the lost places in her own consciousness? Or was it in Gstaad that she had met the Utopian psychologist who had told her about the lost places in her own consciousness? Did she have the affair with the journalist in France? Or was he a French journalist she had met in South America?

Gem had her own time scheme. If she said she was staying for two weeks, it meant that people would telephone her at your number for two weeks but Gem would hardly be there. In New York, for example, the country houses of a great many people Gem referred to only by last names were open to her. She was careful to leave the telephone number of these country friends on a pad in case any of her city friends wished to contact her. They did, in large numbers.

After her arrival, she was gone for three days, back for one, off for the weekend, and back for the evening. On that evening, Holly invited Misty and Vincent for dinner.

Juliana had been put to bed, and the five sat around the dinner table. Misty wore on her face an expression that Vincent called “the only Jew at the dinner table look.” She was almost entirely silent. Vincent assumed that Misty did not approve of Gem, and that that was the occasion for the look. But it was not. For the first time in her life, Misty was mesmerized with jealousy. Gem was every dog breeder Vincent had ever fallen in love with.

“I've just got to locate myself,” Gem was saying. “All this traveling. All that luggage. When I was in Portugal, after I got back from Brittany, I realized that half my luggage was scattered over Europe and when I met Pablo Ruba—he's the psychoanalyst—I realized that life really is like a painting. I mean, if it's scattered here and there, it doesn't hold up as a coherent statement. So I've just got to locate myself and I think I ought to have a base. New York is it, I think. Did I tell you about this little house I saw? It's a carriage house and I think I'm going to rent it. It needs a lot of repairs but there's an option to buy. And it's a perfect place to work.”

“Work?” said Guido.

“I didn't tell you about my wonderful plan,” said Gem. “Well, when I was in London last month, I met this poet and he started me keeping a journal. I'd love to show it to you, Holly. I think you'd really understand it. Anyway, he sent me to a friend of his. You know him, Guido. Charles Redevere.”

Guido nodded. Only Juliana did not know who Charles Redevere was.

“Well, he runs this seminar at the New York Poetry Society,” said Gem. “And I'm going to be one of his students. I mean, I don't think that the poetic nature is everyone's inheritance, but I think the thing is that you've got to see if it's yours or not. When I was at Grandma's in Moss Hill, I used to ride over to that little chapel and just sit in there with my notebook. I thought maybe I would buy it and restore it. But then I thought, the country is for the luxury of calming down from something. The something is the city. So here I am. Now what do you do, Vincent?”

If he says “I'm in garbage,” it's all over, thought Misty.

“Misty and I work at the Board of City Planning,” Vincent said. “I'm a statistician, basically. I do studies of urban sanitation problems. Misty does language studies.”

“How intriguing,” said Gem. “Last year when I was in Greece I saw people dumping all sorts of stuff into the Mediterranean. And that doesn't have any tide, does it? Can you imagine all those island people dumping all that stuff into a body of water without tides? You ought to go see it, Vincent. Now, I've got to make a few telephone calls before it's too late, but I'm going to ask all of you if you'd like to go fishing this weekend. I have a friend with a boat and he's dying to go fishing for stripers. What about it?”

“We're having the invasion of the mothers-in-law,” said Guido. “They're coming to slobber over our daughter.”

“Why, that's perfect,” said Gem. “Juliana can stay here and you can get away for the weekend.”

“Fishing,” said Vincent. “I haven't been fishing for years. Let's go. Misty says she's only fished for smelts.”

“A weekend away would be nice,” said Guido.

At this, Misty began to yawn. Gem went off to make her telephone calls. It was arranged that they would go fishing. With that, they cleared the table, and Vincent took Misty home.

“I don't want to go fishing,” said Misty the next evening. “I have nothing to wear. You go.”

“I'm glad you said you have nothing to wear,” said Vincent. “I have bought you a pair of gum boots. Look, they're yellow. I saw them today and I thought they had your name on them.”

“You thought my name was on a pair of yellow gum boots?”

“I did. Now put them on,” said Vincent.

“I don't want to put them on. I don't want to wear gum boots. I don't want to go fishing. I want to be left alone.”

“Just put them on for a second,” said Vincent. “Get used to them. Fishing is a wonderful thing to do. You'll love it.”

“I hate it,” said Misty. “I hated it when my father took me fishing for smelts. All those creepy businessmen with their fishing rods and their business suits standing on the rocks across from Buckingham Fountain with their disgusting fishing gear catching those revolting little fish.”

“Did you catch any?”

“Daddy caught one. He put it in a jar and brought it home and let it swim in the sink. Then he fried it.”

“How was it?”

“It was disgusting, like these boots. I won't go.”

“You don't have to go fishing,” said Vincent. “But you have to come for the weekend. You've never been to Salt Harbor and that's where we're going. We're staying at Scott's Fisherman's Inn. The reservations are made. You can walk on the beach and mutter to yourself.”

The week seemed very long to Misty. She was glad that Vincent's schedule was crowded so that he could not see what a horrible state she was in. At night she had terrible dreams in which she seemed to have shrunk to the size of a catsup bottle and was huddled in corners watching Gem, who was as large as an equestrian statue. She had dreams in which Vincent passed her on the street without noticing her. She had dreams in which Vincent was married to Gem.

It was one thing to theorize, Misty knew, but quite another to live. Misty's theories looked down on the second-rate emotions such as jealousy. Since she had never felt it before, she had dismissed it as unworthy of feeling. Now she was in the grip of it. She stared it straight in the face and saw that the condition that jealousy covered was simply envy mixed with fear.

Gem stood for something—something effortless. Something that did not have to invent a personality in order to get by. Gem lived with an air of casual assurance. The world, Gem knew, would work for her. A million silkworms would lay down their lives so that Gem might have a shirt. Grooms went home to small, mortgaged homes so that Gem might stable her horse, and horses would be broken so that Gem might ride. Innumerable workers slaved anonymously so that Gem might be properly equipped. All Gem had to do was be, and doors opened to her.

Misty felt that life was a battle. You had to fight and think. You had to hack your way through life with your intelligence as a machete cutting down what obstacles you could. You were born knowing nothing: you had to fight for what you knew.

Even Vincent, whose effortless optimism was partly the product of hard work, fought. He fought at the Board. He fought government agencies and town councils. He sweated over his articles. Even Holly worked: she worked to make life sweet. Any reservations Misty might have lined up against Holly had been dispelled at her wedding breakfast. The sight of all that work and care made her realize what Holly's fight was: she fought to keep the ugly, chaotic world at bay and to keep a sweet, pretty corner to live in.

But Gem neither toiled nor spun. Gem made Misty feel that achievement was cheap in the face of that effortlessness. And Gem threw her. She had appeared at the wrong time. Misty was beginning to learn how much Vincent meant to her. She no longer thought of herself alone. She thought of herself and Vincent. She shopped as naturally for two as she had shopped for one. Every once in a while, she woke out of a deep sleep to realize how awful life would be without him. Gem stood for a part of Vincent that was not second nature to Misty—the part that was sporty and larky and on cheerful terms with the world, the part that had grown up sailing and fishing. Suppose Vincent got tired of someone who was not second nature to him?

Misty slunk around the office, breaking pencils, throwing her coat on the floor, and swearing over her calculator. She hated not working well. She hated having her mind cluttered. She was constantly afraid that she might burst into tears.