On Keeping Women (5 page)

They aren’t affairs, that’s it. Yet how is it then that both the men she’s in sequence chosen and been accepted by, both violently different in their attractions—have one resemblance to her. They too aren’t in it for sex alone. Though they too mightn’t yet know—for what else.

One day, two weeks after Ray’s house-call to the two Lesbians (and in effect on her), she drives back from town too late for her ritual bath. No time even to consult with the housekeeper as usual, for the sake of both their dignities. Just in time to sit down to dinner almost like a late guest. In time though to watch Ray come in a minute after.

A doctor-father’s always unexpected at meals, always a guest in his own house. Are the children getting used to her being that too, now? As she watches Ray with them, her belly, still electric with warmth, chimes for him in sympathy. Ray’s lot with his four children—which is to see them from the distance the time-demands of his life force on him—only exaggerates the lot of every father. Fathers spend their parental lives reestablishing the claims of that one ripple of their own fluid—a moment ever receding from the radials of their other life from the moment it occurs. There’s even a tribe, Plaut says, which doesn’t know of the nine-month link between conception and birth—hasn’t yet made the connection. Fathers, taken together, are merely a tribe who have. Artificially reestablishing that moment long ago. A tribe which has to look like its children too, if possible. Wise of them, the Bible says. Kind of them, rather. Very kind of Ray—who is that generally. Even if his kisses, one each to the two girls and a third on her own forehead, seem always, after his long day, to come from the dispensary. Yet here is she, who has been through that birth-fire which established the children as hers beyond challenge—to say nothing of the hothouse closeness since—trying her very damndest to disestablish herself.

“Ray—” she says, in the soft townvoice that at these times replaces her country one. “You kiss the girls when you come in. Why is it you don’t shake hands with the boys?” And for all her intent to help—was it that?—the boys glower at her. All four children stare at her like a jury.

“You were supposed to be at the hairdresser,” Chessie, the elder girl says, her eyes lowered over her plate. “Your hair looks terrible.”

Oh, there are frictions about her second day-in-town. Everything else about it pleased.

She sat up suddenly in the weeds. Opening her eyes to the blackness that shawled her, moistened now with little playing cusps of cool, windbuds that in a couple of hours will whiten and break into morning. Pleased? A mild statement, unworthy of the past year and a half, year, six months, which roll like an incline up to where she sits bare, on this crest. Alone again, but with adventure just departed. Leaving her with flesh heavy-ripe and a mind as sketchy as a girl’s, to await this newest and most fateful one. Outside her own house.

In the dark she laughs to herself like a child at the top of the highslide, who’s just that moment dared it and in the same instant learned its pattern—the zooming down, the climbing up. Before her days in town, her life had been a kind of bodywalk through the daily, in which any triviality of event or object—a chat with a friend in the Grand Union, a boil-over on the stove, even a contretemps with a child, like when Roy the youngest was caught hooking a bicycle lamp from the Speedy Supply—might scribble its shorthand on her faithfully receiving skin.

Now she goes weekly to that tattoo-artist, the city, and is incised.

The world’s tattoo. She sees it as a mixed heraldry, of battleflags she’s missed marching under, love-affair fashionlace she’s still young enough for, and tonic slews of that dirty snow and dark gutter-scum from which the suburbs are so famously free. All each being inked on her as near the bloodstream as possible, until that day when, whorled complete, she will be a truly reddened, purpled, black-and blue citizeness of the world. While all this time, her lovebody remains fair.

Meanwhile the crabgrass crosshatched under her buttocks is hurting; a soft paw of burdock or plantain tickles the small of her back like a domestic animal playing sinister. Lucky no thistles. And that it’s not yet fall. Or else the man who climbed out of the city’s Saturday heat—and has just driven off again—mightn’t have come at all. And the two sides of her life wouldn’t have snapped shut on her. Lucky or not.

Has travel brought me here? Our father’s idea of it? Not the man who’s now in Sarasota with his new wife in her marina—that frail, recalcitrant old daddy-o whom the sun has foundered. Of whom dry James says, dining with us after we’d all put Father on the return plane again, “We’re travel to him, now.” Not him, James, but that other mythic tower which every parent is to someone else’s youth. “You bought yourself his childhood brownstone,” I say to James. “Not even the real one. Not even ours.”

“And what did you buy?” my sibling says cruelly, sitting on the porch alone with me after supper. “His idea of Hong Kong? That why you won’t go to Monte Carlo with Ray?”

“I’ve been to two doctors’ conventions beginning with M already. Imagine going to Montevideo, when you’ve never been anyplace else in the world. Not even to Paris, France. And then—to Miami. What secret significance do you suppose the letter M has for internists?”

James doesn’t answer—why should he? Whatever he does in that tight project office of his at the Medical Center, it’s taken him all over the so-called civilized world—from hospital to hospital. So that he knows everybody’s international health, and has never had a patient personally. Not even a horse.

“Montevideo would’ve been fine,” I say, “if I’d known enough to—wander enough. Or if they’d let me.” A new air in the throat and a new language. Waiting in
me,
I’d felt—all this time. I took it personally, all that first day. “As it was, I only came back home knowing how to hold my Chivas Regal whisky. And with one of those straw hats—made in Panama.”

In spite of all, I’d hired a driver to see the town with. Afterwards at first reporting only that I’d seen the haciendas of the rich. Not that, picking my way in the one foreign language I’d got from being a New York City medical secretary—Puerto Rican Spanish—I’d persuaded the driver to let me visit his home. Where I have coffee and a sweetish pancake, in a courtyard full of hens so scrawny they look like cocks, and four generations of women, all so mushroom-brown in their earth-black that they might be this year’s crop of one eternal vegetable—and a little boy in flashy white shorts of the most incredible flax-spun linen—I touch it—who has one bluish-blind eye. Was that trachoma?—I ask Ray afterward, describing it. He supposes so, he says wearily—why? “Is this a medical convention or isn’t it?” I say.

So we have a fight.

He’s spent the afternoon with some other medicos in a pachinko parlor some enterprising Japanese has set up. It hasn’t disturbed him at all that he’s done this in Uruguay. But I think travel ought to be separate.

So we have a fight.

Told of the courtyard, he says “Did you touch anything?” And I say “Yes of course. The eye.”

“They were all horrified,” I tell James. “And funny thing, the other wives were the worst. But it was Miami finished it.”

A big hotel shouldn’t be pink-and-blue. Or a lagoon either. Both were, with all the guests trying to match. Morning gold—in fake linen, but with 20:20 vision via contact lenses—then a rousing lunch.

“During which I perform the vodka as well as anyone,” I inform James. “In case you don’t know, the vodka is a local dance. Bloody Mary some call it, but I consider that sacrilege. Done in local costume—a bikini spotted with tomato juice. After which we all retire, to get to know our husbands better.”

We hadn’t, Ray and I. Perhaps there wasn’t that much of us left. So we went down to the lagoon. Swimming wasn’t as blue as last year’s, people told us, but I liked it anyway. In bather’s country, water itself is an emotion.

“And in the cocktail lounge afterwards, you could smell the sexual sweat. All permitted and expected—a general rut.” Not too blue, not too pink. But everybody openlegged and lax. “One of the men asks one of the women what perfume she has on. And she says
‘Afternoon.
At the Royal Esplanada. Bet every gal here smells of it. Or should.’”

“Some swapping around?” James said. “That’s how I lost Linda, praise be. You ever try? No, I suppose not.”

James looks butterscotch-pale these days, and his face has lengthened, if that’s possible. But he’s neither as tidy as he’d had to be with wife Linda, nor as neglected as he’d been by wife Ruth. In between is where James is, and this is unusual.

“Sure, doctors’ wives are the worst, Lexie. Don’t you know why?”

“No. Though I could write a pamphlet on them.” On us. The tough-titty ones who were nurses, and are now half an M.D. by marriage—and have mouths like old urinals. The society Janes who sail, golf, ride and surf, never speaking of the national health, simply being it. The one who’s been on the couch for years because of her dead life as an accessory to a brilliant man, and is at last earning a medical degree for her very own. As an anesthetist. The telephone Auntie—swelling with serous love-and-advice on the flattest Sunday. And the sweet-sprung newly married one, who looks forward to bandaging people, by his side. “No, I don’t know why. Or which one of the worst I am. Why?”

“Ray practices. What you can only preach.”

“Why-ee
sib—”
I say. “Who’s your new suffragette?”

Who’ll look just a trifle like our mother, probably. With the same censorious smirk. And none of her lifesaving dottiness. I hadn’t blamed Linda for switching from my brother to their top-floor tenant, a black playwright who beats her up regularly for being a blond. Copulating with my brother, one would watch that long jaw mobilize itself against its own sadness, above whatever international project was going on down below. Afterwards seeing that long skull relax into its own rigor, the palomino cheeks tanned with travel it never sees, the ponyteeth protruding in happy love-death.

“Poor James—you’re like me,” she’d said. “Perhaps you
should
have an astronomer.”

The moon comes up over the river to hear his answer. Showing her Ray, who these days has formed the habit of “going down to the dock,” as he says, though their strip of river-edge scarcely has one, “to watch.” To watch the river, the moon, the season. A habit of coastal people. More and more, after dinner, she saw Ray from the back. The children seem not to notice. Perhaps that’s the way they see her.

“Like
you
?” James says. So hard a sound that she sees their two backs as if from behind also, two cats arched facing each other over their pebble of hate.

Yes, I’ve receded, she thinks. Too far. If I see us all from the rear.

“Yes,” she says. “We both have no private practice.”

Out there Ray turns slowly, and comes back across the road and up the steps. But not to the two of us. At the last minute, he veers and goes in the side door the patients take. From the beginning, the house has been a convenient one.

“When Ray goes,” James says, “I’m giving a party. In town. For both of us. Don’t look at me like that. As if I’m a corpse.”

It’s the way you’re looking at me, she thinks.

But training held. “It’s the moonlight,” she said.

She goes to that party as if it’s her first. “What kind of dress, you say—” the salesclerk says, “—a Saturday one?” And the party takes to her as if she’s its belle. In white cashmere, with blazing knobs of glitter all down the figure she’s fasted to an hourglass curve. James’s house has gone comfortable bachelor, in everything except dirt. All the other women guests tend to be nondescript, with hopes of hair well-washed but too young for the face. No match for her—who has been to Arden’s. For the first time she feels the belle’s contempt for other women. Covering her own longing—for they all work in one or the other niches of the city—governmental, artistic, intellectual—after which they have their own flats to return to, and this dazzling freedom after five. To be with men like the male guests, every one of them attractive in one of the variations of bachelor, a good number separated or divorced, or just not now living with anyone. Many are fathers, with complicated weekend arrangements. The women are similarly divided, but they’re not interested in her, when she tries to talk to them. Sexual adventure stalks the fat elbow and knowing giggle of old Markie, the black woman who keeps James’s house clean, passes his canapes and pops bedhints on the side. Most people here are on the loose for bed, but the wind that blows through James’s discreetly thick blinds is a tame one, and not mercenary.

A man named Kevin Sheridan dances with her as only Irishmen can, and lowering his handsomely dented face at her as unself-consciously as the cherubs all such types look to her, leads her around the corner to his apartment. His clothes are seedy with what she assumes is life-in-the-raw but turns out to be literature. The place is a box-of-books, with niches for the natural functions. As halfbrother, by different fathers, of a well-known poet, Kevin edits textbooks, researches for dictionaries, translates erotica, all tasks cast his way by his brother. “Crumbs from the lyric table,” he calls them—and does the actual writing in his favorite bar.

Where he sat with an air of being in Paris, nursing the first vermouth of the day and paying for his office with wit alone, she thought, until she saw him substitute for Jody the barman, and learned that he had a passion for being a bar’s family friend. Extending his patronage only where this was allowed. And where she could find him, anytime.

He’s brilliant in bed (always his own, grubby as it is, for she won’t use James as pander, being too afraid that James is willing) and gives her many shrewd comments on her life. During the country half of her week, mulling while she performs all the duties of her station, she alas falls in love with him. If subordinating every inch of her days and all her dreams to that one obsessive drive a week and the hours she gets from it—means love.

“You’re an intelligent girl,” he says, sipping his one luxury, the champagne he likes to have on hand during sex. Before or afterwards he’ll drink anything. “Don’t let romance get you in the head. What every woman wants is a hard cock. I have one, that’s all. Along with some Gaelic charm. It’s made a poet of my brother. But not me.” The word “cock” sounds tonically—ah, the Village, she thinks—and he seems to be addressing the organ itself, once again pointed at her.