I Cannot Get You Close Enough (34 page)

“I think I should call your father anyway,” Miss Crystal said, but Miss Lydia was into it by then and talked her out of it. “Let it alone,” Miss Lydia advised. “It's over now. Olivia knows that Anna's dead. You know that, don't you, honey?”

“She's dead if you mean her body,” Olivia says. “But her spirit isn't dead. Her spirit is in every word she wrote. You ought to know that, Lydia. If you don't, nothing you paint will ever be worth a damn.” Can you believe a young girl would speak to a grown woman like that? Girls didn't talk like that where I came from. But that was long ago and far away and we are in the new world now.

The next day Mr. Manny arrived. He came driving up in this little beige car he rented at the airport. He was looking very tired, wearing his rumpled-up beige suit. Of course he put on this big smile and acted like all was well with the world and he didn't have a care. Crystal Anne came tearing up from the beach and threw herself into his arms. Then Miss Crystal came out and they started being so polite.

“I'm glad you're here, honey,” she said. “I guess you're tired. I bet you want to get out of that suit. Well, come on in and see the house. King, come here and speak to Manny. Manny's here.”

They followed him into the house and into the kitchen. “Traceleen, what are we doing way up here?” he asked me. “Is there a glass of water in this house?”

“Seeing the world,” I answered and got out the ice and put it into one of the best blue tumblers and filled it with water and handed it to him.

“Well, I'm sick of everybody being gone. The dogs are lonely and the house is full of dust.”

“Didn't Grace come? She's supposed to be there Wednesdays and Fridays.”

“She leaves the curtains closed. The place looks like a morgue. Tell her to open up the curtains, can't you?” He was smiling and putting on his old joking mood, his little daughter hanging on his arm. So here he is and he hasn't seen his wife in two and a half months but all he does is joke with me about the house in New Orleans. What goes on between people when they get this deep into a troubled marriage? Here he is, and he should be saying, What is going on here, Crystal? Are we married or not? But I could see the chances of him saying it were slim. She was watching him, like you'd watch an actor perform a play, only he wasn't an actor, he was deep into a world very far away from the one where he was raised. My auntee worked for his family for many years and it is like another country from the one where the Mannings and their connections do and say exactly what they please all day every day. In the Weiss family everything is very secret and no one dares to do a thing they aren't supposed to do. That is why they have collected all that money Miss Crystal spends any way she likes and throws away. She pays me more money than any housekeeper ever made in uptown New Orleans and any time she thinks about it she gives me another raise.

“Open them up yourself,” Miss Crystal says. “Manny, even you can figure out how to open up the drapes.” She turns away. She might have been hoping he would start something and now she has given up.

“I'm making lamb and soufflé for dinner,” I declare. “Why don't you go show your daddy his room, Crystal Anne. And all your forts you have everywhere.” Then they went off to the upstairs and I began to get out the things I needed to prepare for supper. In a little while Crystal Anne came down and said her mother and father wanted to be alone. I called Andria and told her to take Crystal Anne to the beach.

MANNY I said (as carefully as I could phrase it, not blaming anyone, just stating the facts), I said, Crystal, the child has gotten the idea in her head that she is going to get some genetically caused cancer. Have you explained to her that we are not going to get cancer? I want us to sit down with her and explain to her that she has four healthy grandparents, not to mention hybrid vigor.

Could I have phrased it any more carefully than that? She immediately took umbrage and began to berate me for thinking she is a bad mother.
I am a wonderful mother
. She must have said it a dozen times. Then, when I tried to put my arm around her, she ran off to the other side of the room and started screaming at me about not making love to her. How can I make love to her when she is never there? How can I make love to her when I know damn well she is unfaithful to me? How can a man forgive that? I have to leave her. I have to let her leave. But then Crystal Anne would be left at the mercy of these people. I don't need a psychiatrist to tell me what to do. I need the strength and wisdom to ride this out. This is my marriage. I have to live with it.

CRYSTAL I said, “Manny, the trouble with us is we're not in love. If we were in love we wouldn't fuck like this. We'd fuck differently. We'd fuck the minute we see each other, not after we have six hours of talk. We don't love each other. That's the problem.”

“I love you.”

“No, you don't. You love going down to the law firm and pleasing your goddamn daddy. I don't know why you married me. I don't know why you wanted me and I don't know why you quit fucking me. That's why I run around on you. Because you quit fucking me. What do you expect me to do? Sit around and never get laid? Have you forgotten who I am?”

He sat on the bed and took it in. He didn't say, Crystal, that's the best I know how to fuck. I don't have some great sexual stuff to give. He didn't even say, Crystal, I'll learn how to make you come. I'll eat your pussy. I'll touch you with my hands. All he did was sit on the bed with his head on his hands and think. That's what he's good for in the world, to make money and to think, and I love that. I LOVE THE FACT THAT HE CAN THINK. I loved him for that and I married him for it and it was a terrible mistake. I thought I could fix the fucking part. I thought he'd learn how. I'd never known a man who wasn't good in bed. I didn't know about it. I thought somehow it wasn't true.

“What do you want to do?” he asked. “I'll do anything you want.”

“Will you fuck me now? Will you take off your clothes and your goddamn armor and have a drink of brandy or whatever it takes and stick your dick in me and keep it hard until I come? Will you do that?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I don't know if I can.”

So he took off his clothes and fucked me for about thirty seconds and then he lay on his back and looked up at the ceiling. I wanted to commit suicide. How in the name of God did a woman like me end up with a man like him?

And you want to know the worst thing of all. The very worst and strangest thing of all. I love the man. I honest to God really love the man and there have been times when it was all okay. Every now and then out of the clear blue sky the man can fuck me. Because of that I lay there beside him with my body and mind totally anxious and mad and evil and unsatisfied and wasted and I said to myself, Well, I'll masturbate later. Then I got up and got dressed and we went downstairs into the kitchen and I made a tomato sandwich and we started having a terrible fight right in front of Traceleen, and Crystal Anne heard us.

What am I supposed to do, I'd like to know? I know life isn't easy for anyone and it certainly isn't perfect but at least you ought to get to eat and fuck. Even rich people should get to eat and fuck.

I want Crystal Anne to grow up and love a man and fuck him. I want King and Jessie to fuck all up and down the coast of Maine. They're doing it. I know they are. At least someone around here is getting laid.

TRACELEEN Several hours went by while Miss Crystal and Mr. Manny stayed upstairs. What was there to do but make a pie? We had been out to an orchard the day before and picked some Jonathan apples and I cut them up in pieces and made the crust from scratch and added plenty of brown sugar and cinnamon and stuck two pies in the oven. Mrs. Chatevin has pie pans up here that are large enough for meat pies and I used them. They had barely come out of the oven and were sitting on the cooling rack when Miss Crystal comes down to the kitchen and goes and stands by the breakfast-room table looking out around the side of the stained-glass picture. I knew she could smell the pies. If she wanted a piece of pie I guess she would ask for one. I went on with cleaning up. I didn't say a word or ask a question but I knew one thing. Nothing good was going on. If a woman and a man have made up and put their souls and bodies together there is a glow on them that spreads out all around. There was no glow on Miss Crystal. Only this look of what next and how many hours until I die.

In a little while Mr. Manny follows her into the kitchen. He compliments the pies, then gets a piece of bread and butter and goes and stands beside her near the window. I go out onto the back porch where the washer is and start folding up some clothes. “You didn't even come up here for me,” I hear her say, “It took Crystal Anne writing you to get you to fly up here. You call that love, Manny. What am I anyway? Some girl at Mount Holyoke you write to when you're afraid the boys won't think you have a dick? Is that who I am? The token girlfriend so the guys at Andover think you're normal?”

“Is this what that psychiatrist tells you? That guy I gave twelve thousand dollars to last year?”

“It isn't your fault, Manny. It's not your fault they sent you off to school when you were twelve. But I can't suffer all my life from it. It wasn't me. I didn't sacrifice my life to get in Harvard. That's one thing Gravis told me. He said it was probably the boarding school that ruined you.”

“You had your tennis player. Wasn't he enough?”

“I didn't have Alan Dalton. Lydia's got a thing with Alan, not me.”

“Do you really think I'm that big a fool?”

“What are you accusing me of now?”

“I don't care what you do, Crystal. I've lost count of all your boyfriends. But I care about my daughter. I want my daughter home. I'm taking her this afternoon. I've had enough of this craziness your family gets into. This crazy girl of Daniel's and this cult stuff. Thinking she's got cancer. I can't believe you didn't watch them any closer than that.”

“You won't take her anywhere. She's mine, Manny. I almost died having her. She's my daughter and you'll never take her from me.”

I could see them through the open door between the back porch and the kitchen, standing so close to the window and the stained-glass picture. I thought, Glass will start to break. What am I doing in this Godless place? Why did I come up? Why don't they go on and get a divorce and stop all this terrible hate and using up their lives for no good reason? I must have begun to cry. I felt tears on my cheeks at the thought of how nothing turns out right. No matter how hard we try or how many miles we go it is fight, fight, fight to stay alive and so little love. I walked down the back steps so I wouldn't hear any more. I thought, I will go and find Andria and take her for a walk. These white people can solve their own problems. I must make sure my niece is still on the right track and hasn't been caught up in this disease of never loving a thing but ourselves. A butterfly was on the flat green leaf of the rhododendron plant beside the back steps. Not one, but many butterflies, a dozen or so very small white butterflies with yellow specks or a cast to their wings. How wonderful they were. How wonderful the sunlight and the plants and all the things that God has made to grow but all we do is talk and fight. I had no more lifted my eyes from the butterflies than I saw a spider's web stretched across the broom that leaned against the stone wall that bordered the old rose garden. A web of such lacy and delicate patterns. I turned and saw Andria coming up the front lawn with Crystal Anne beside her. They were talking and laughing about something. The young are all we have and we should worship them because they still have moments that are not sullied with the darkness of remorse and adultery and hate.

I stood in the backyard breathing very hard, feeling my heart pound in my chest and my blood pressure rise. Trying to beat it down. I get lonely too and scared. I sat down on the stone wall and tried to pray and thought of the sea with its beaches.

In a moment voices began to come out from the kitchen again. This time they were yelling. “You put that goddamn IUD up there. You stuck that wire up in your body to kill my babies. That's why. I'm not giving you any more babies of mine to kill with a wire.”

“You're out of your mind. I had Crystal Anne at the risk of my life. I had her and then I decided to stay alive if you don't mind. Kit told me not to ever have another one. He said I was lucky to be alive.”

“You killed my babies with a copper wire,” he yelled back.

“If you had fucked me I wouldn't have needed other men,” she said. “You did it, Manny. You did it to yourself. I did what I had to to survive. Don't come near me. Don't you dare hit me. If you hit me, I'll call the police.”

Then I heard something smash. She must have thrown something at him. I got up and moved toward the steps. I don't know what I thought I was going to do. Then the back door opened and here came Crystal Anne running out with Andria behind her. “Hold on, baby,” I yelled but she only looked at me and ran straight down the lawn toward the water. Andria stopped. “She heard them yelling at each other,” Andria said. “You want me to go after her?”

“I'll go,” I said. “She is my baby. I'll see to her.” I began to run down the way that she had gone. Behind me I heard Manny and Crystal coming out the back door and stopping to talk to Andria.

I ran to the bottom of the yard and climbed the wall and started toward the sea. Crystal Anne was not on the beach. She was not in the boathouse or by the rocks. I headed back toward the house and met Mr. Manny coming the other way. “Did you find her?” he asked.

“No. I thought she must have gone back to the house.”

“She heard us arguing. It's too hard, Traceleen. It's all too hard. Well, where do you think she's gone?”

“I couldn't say.”