I'm Dying Laughing (26 page)

Stephen said nothing but stared at Emily. Emily continued, ‘This countess went to another man who had loved her as a girl and said, “Don’t you remember me?” He said, “Yes.”’

‘A better memory than Alfred I see.’

‘And though it was years since they had been in love, he got Alfred out of prison for her. Alfred called upon her at one of her at-homes, took tea, thanked her for the roses and the other service, bowed and never saw her again.’

‘Let that be a lesson to you,’ said Stephen.

Emily went on chattering. Stephen took to walking up and down the room. Finally, he said, ‘Emily, I’m trying to think of my Roosevelt book. I’ve done ten pages today but there are two or three I ought to revise.’

‘Oh, very well, I’m sorry,’ cried she and left the room in a huff.

After this she said no more about Coriolis. If Stephen said, ‘Did you see Coriolis?’ she would answer impertinently, ‘Yes, I did.’

Stephen was ashamed and encouraged her to talk about him. He said, ‘I do understand, Emily. You ought to have got this out of your system when you were fifteen. But you were working too hard.’

Another week he said, ‘Is Coriolis a friend of Dr Park?’

He was an old friend, from Europe.

‘Why don’t you invite Coriolis and Park down to our next barbecue? Maybe the mosquitoes will eat them both.’

Emily hemmed and hawed, brightened and said she would ask them. They accepted the invitation. Emily began running about the house like a luminous beetle, shining, flashing back light, busier than ever before. Whom would they ask? Who ought to meet these brilliant Europeans? Axel and Ruth Oates, Max Wilvermine, Edward Nonesuch the chess champion (Coriolis played chess), dear Anna, Maurice—all their best, hand-picked guests, with one or two other friends who had lived in Europe and would make Park and Coriolis feel at home. Stephen helped with the preparations, allowed the extra expense without grumbling.

‘How good you are, Stephen, to me!’

‘I’m not really good at all. I’m a bastard.’

‘But you’re so good to me, I know you don’t really like these two.’

‘I don’t know them.’

‘I’m a dope, I suppose,’ sighed Emily.

‘You work hard and I’d be a criminal to say no to you. And then I’ve been a husband much longer than you’ve been a wife. I ought to try to make you happy.’

Emily sat down and looked at Stephen. Stephen looked at Emily. A serious silence fell. After a moment, Emily, with a sober expression, got up and went into the kitchen. He soon heard her bustling, commanding, laughing; and the servants’ laughter and loud chatter. He sat still for a moment, thinking. Presently he got up and, going into his study, started looking gravely at the last pages of his manuscript.

The party was a success. It was a warm Saturday, slightly cloudy and damp; this the only hitch, for the damp brought out the insects. While Stephen prepared the barbecue, Emily went to the station twice, once for the foreign doctors, and Hortense and Carlo, once for Anna and Maurice.

On the way up the station ramp to the car, Emily took Hortense’s arm and said, ‘I’m so glad you came. I want to see you. I want to tell you something.’

Ahead of them were the two dark, middle-aged men. Emily’s eyes moistly lighted, ran to them and back. Hortense, a fair pensive woman, with a brusque manner, said, ‘You told Coriolis you loved him.’

‘Yes. How did you know? I wrote to him this week.’

‘I knew it.’

‘How did you know?’

‘It’s obvious.’

‘It’s obvious?’ Emily chortled.

She was very excited all through the day.

Carlo was one of Stephen’s oldest friends, a short, plump New Yorker with round head and face, who loved Europe and would have been living there then, but for the war. Emily walked the two doctors round the field, then went off with her arm through that of Coriolis.

Stephen stood by Carlo and said, ‘A man like that will get nowhere with Emily. She’s sturdy; this is just childishness, a sort of dare; a prank she’s playing on me. At most it’s a passing fancy. I’d like to spank her, but that wouldn’t help. I have to laugh at her instead.’

‘Emily’s serious and completely loyal,’ said Carlo.

‘I know she is.’

Meanwhile, Emily was walking around the grounds with Dr Coriolis, showing him the hen-yard, the orchard, the vines swarming with Japanese beetles. Then she took him through the wild patch down to the stream and beyond, to the old mill; and all the time she was waiting for Coriolis to say something about her letter to him; pleased with herself, glad of what she had done. She did not believe for a moment that he would reject her. He said nothing. She chattered.

Coming back they looked at the cultivated patches. On one grew sweet corn, rows of vegetables. The fence was draped with grapevines ruined and burned by the DDT spray. Between the green cornstalks, six to eight feet high, Emily and Dr Coriolis walked, picking cobs to be cooked right away for lunch.

She said, ‘And for supper, lobsters fresh too—just caught. That is the only way to eat them. And I am making cardinal sauce. Do you know it? It’s exquisite.
Exquis.
One pint béchamel, half pint fish
fumet,
truffle essence, finish with a lot of cream and some lobster butter. Wait till you taste it, Alfred! It’s my
shay doover.
I’m a very good cook, Alfred. I even put it in my mamma books, though I blush at that. Alfred, watch it. Beetles have got into the cobs, the tassels and leaves. Alfred, didn’t you get my letter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes; is that all?’

Leaning from one row through to the other, she thrust her rosy face into Alfred’s, and kissed him twice above the moustache and to the side where there was a descending ridge of soft flesh.

‘Alfred, I’ve had an obsession about that, just kissing you there.’

She laughed, blushed, turned her back and went along the row. She looked through the corn at Alfred, who caught up with her. He said thoughtfully, ‘You know I was afraid of you till just now.’

Emily laughed and walked on. ‘Oh, I was afraid of that. You see I am so nervous I broke this cob in two.’

‘Are you really nervous?’ he said wonderingly, looking her over.

‘Oh, yes, terribly.’

They came out of their rows at the other end. Here the fence divided Emily’s house from the neighbour’s. The fence was overgrown with heavy grapevine, quite sterile, swarming with beetles.

‘The neighbour is responsible; they do nothing about pests,’ said Emily.

Old trees grew along the fence and the vine had reached up to them. At one end was the rest of the vegetable garden with tomato plants protected on one side by plastic sheets; then there was a light fence with shrubs and trees, beyond which could be faintly seen the children’s lawn. Here Miss Groyne, the new governess, was playing with Olivia and Giles.

Emily stood looking, then said, ‘Put down your basket.’ She put her own down.

‘Don’t you want to kiss me?’

He was hesitant but put his arms around her and kissed her, a cold, loose kiss.

She put her arms round him and hugged him, stood back, said breathlessly, ‘Alfred, we are all going into town to an opening next week. Dear Anna has a box and you must come too.’

‘Dear Anna is your mother-in-law?’

‘Yes. She’s full of money. They all are, all but us, we’re the underprivileged Howards.’

‘Is your father-in-law here?’

‘The real one’s dead. Twenty years ago. But there’s a new one. Anna lives for the family. When there’s no war, she goes over to Paris and London every year to visit far-flung branches of the family tree. Ah, Alfred—’

He put his arms round her and she flung herself on his chest, kissing him on the jawbone and neck without thought of self, quite wild with affection. Then she withdrew and said, ‘Let’s go back to the others. I need three more cobs. Let’s get them.’

At the end, she had a few cobs over, but they piled them all into the one big palmleaf basket, which was lined and overflowing with cornleaves. She said, standing back, ‘Oh, that looks grand. Everything must please me today.’

She put the baskets on the ground and led him towards the fence near the hen-yard. The hens heard her and became excited. She pulled Coriolis by the hand, as he stood in the furrow of warm earth, with his back against the thick rusted vine and began to kiss him all around the mouth.

He closed his eyes. Emily laughed and rubbed the lipstick off his mouth. Coriolis frowned, and looked sharply at her. Emily ran, picked up the baskets and hurried before him through the opening into the big lawn which stretched from there towards the barbecue. People had strayed among the flowerbeds, and into the goat-field in which the weeds had grown high.

She yelled, ‘Look out, poison ivy. Stephen, did you tell them poison ivy?’

She said to the doctor, ‘Join them!’ and ran towards the kitchen with a triumphant smirk. She said to herself, laughing, ‘I cornered him, I made him pay up. Well, a good job done. I’m damned if I’m going to lie awake for Coriolis.’

She had muttered one thing to him while they were kissing under the ruined vines,

‘I began to stay awake because of your long lashes—they sweep your cheek.’

‘Yes—’ he said.

‘Yes—’ she repeated giggling; ‘So that’s what the other women said? Do you know they say arched eyebrows are a sign of deceit?’

‘No,’ he said crossly.

‘And eyebrows that meet are and narrow eyes are and feminine buttocks in a man are and you have them all.’ She shrieked with laughter.

She smiled to herself as she delivered the corn to Paolo, the new butler, gave orders about the steaks, the hot dishes. The tables were already put outside, and the baskets of linen and silver and the trays taken out.

She kept away from Coriolis the rest of the day; but noticed him having long serious talks with Anna and Maurice. She could not help thinking him funny from a distance, a middle-aged, middle-sized podgy man, dark and eager, yet passive, like an invalid in a wheelchair. She detailed his defects to herself with malice.

This Coriolis affair went on till the Labor Day weekend, when the Howards always gave a big party.

Their Labor Day lunch was one of their most festive and, for the Howards, for long memorable. Anna had no car, as she always lived in a hotel when in New York and took taxis. She drove out for the Sunday and Monday with Dr Park. Dr Coriolis arrived by train on Monday morning; Paolo went to the station for him. Emily had been gardening, fixing the barbecue, and still wore washed-out denims with a tublike white middy jacket, white socks and brown saddle-shoes. Her sleeves were rolled up above the elbow showing her strong, fat arms. Her face was a freckled rose and her fair hair hung untidily but comically round her face. She was smiling, laughing all the time. At the corners of her wide-open blue eyes were two small wrinkles. Her hair, the colour of yellow loam, fell over half her summer-baked broad forehead. She was on an eating spree. Her face had become queerly caked with flesh, thickened, yellow and red. The middy jacket emphasised her portly figure, but suited her. Emily had not seen Dr Coriolis for some time. She knew he had had a heart attack; but she had not telephoned. She rolled forward to meet Alfred Coriolis and Ruth Oates, who had come up from the New York office on the same train. She kissed Ruth, Alfred was next; she kissed him on the cheek twice and rolled back on her heels making a sound of jovial relief. As they entered, guests with Anna came out into the hall.

‘Haven’t you something to wear, Emily?’ said Anna, in her usual cool, brief style.

‘Oh, this is just a picnic, but if you like Anna—’

When she got upstairs, she quickly put on the new dress she meant to wear, all black with a draped skirt to conceal her prepotent belly, a black, fringed bolero to conceal her bosom. It was well made, it improved her looks. It had a low square neck and short sleeves. She put on a necklace of small rubies with a ruby sunburst given to her recently by Stephen, to match Anna’s. She combed her hair back and up; it fell loosely down the back and curled slightly—nothing could be done about it. She fixed in half a dozen small combs carelessly, made herself up lightly, and stepped into her small black slippers. She looked much the same; but now she had a coquettish, cunning smile and her eyes shone piquantly. She put on some gold bracelets, some drops of fine perfume, took a new lace handkerchief from its envelope. She did not even now seem like a woman, but like a thick, loamy sprite, taking advantage of feminine forms and tricks. When she entered the newly-papered living-room with modern paintings in it, she smiled and waved her plump hands, she swooped across the room, behaved as she had often seen her cousin Laura behave. But her cousin was an ordinary siren with nothing original, and this same air and behaviour in Emily was quaint, even breathtaking. Everyone looked at her and laughed in sympathy. She began to chatter, to talk without stopping. Dr Coriolis had been talking intimately with Cousin Charlotte, one of Stephen’s cousins, a woman poor and a rebel from her family just as Stephen was a rebel, then an amateur playwright and actress, who was at present dressed in a splendid blue and black, corded silk suit, a French hat and shoes, the gift of her Aunt Anna; she looked liked the heiress she would in the end be.

‘But I am poor, really poor,’ Cousin Charlotte was saying to Coriolis, with a delightful artificial laugh, a stage laugh, with a roguish roll of her large, tired eyes. She was about forty. She was made up as ladies are made up, not actresses, she spoke with a drawing-room tinkle or drawl: she behaved modestly as if Anna were her protectress. She drew out a monogrammed black and gold vanity case with a cigarette compartment and offered a cigarette to Coriolis. Emily, seeing this, bounded over to the couple and began talking fast. She saw the eyes of Dr Coriolis fix themselves on her own ruby necklace and star brooch, her bracelets and rings. She was gleeful. She hurried Paolo to bring the drinks, to get Olivia and Lennie to present the hors d’oeuvre, she offered Alfred a cigarette, from a handsome wood box presented by Anna.

She said possessively, ‘Did you know we are going to Europe to live as soon as we can get a boat, Alfred?’