Shirley (6 page)

Shirley's typing slowed, and he glanced toward the door, more alert to that sound than any other. “Thank you, Rose,” he said. And that was it. When the door slammed behind him, Shirley's typing took up its earlier pace. I think she typed straight through until about three o'clock, stopping only when she needed to insert a fresh sheet of paper. Later, as I was about to start dinner, I went to the study door and she was deep in thought, a pencil in hand, poring
over a small stack of yellow pages. She looked exhausted but not worn. Happiness in the set of her shoulders, the tilt of her glasses, the bend of her neck. I decided not to ask her my question, just to use the potatoes and leave rice for the next evening.

•   •   •

A
LREADY
MY
RELATIONSHIP
with Fred was free of that adolescent engrossment that had marked our first months. Our connection felt matter-of-fact and permanent; he was safety. But he and Stanley didn't interest me that much. And that's what we'd become: me and Shirley; he and Stanley. They talked and talked and talked. To be honest, I felt bewildered at the way they thought about literature. I thought of myself as someone who loved to read. But when I listened to Fred and Stanley, I was confused by what they found in books. They rootled around so deep inside what they called “text” that all the story seemed to disappear. Everything I enjoyed was gone. And, though I never said this aloud, it seemed to me that whatever they were doing to stories was unkind and put a distance between what I believed any writer intended—entertainment—and the reader lucky enough to find that particular book.

Fred and Stanley often stayed up so late, talking, that I didn't even hear my husband come to bed. In our room, I found his scrawled-on yellow legal pads, half the pages written on and turned over, page after page of Stanley's thoughts and Fred's thoughts about them, the outpouring of feverishly connected minds. I never tried to decipher the scrawls. Not only was I not interested, I also felt that what they were doing had some unpleasant effect on the
child inside me, as if their diligent dissection might distract the nascent being, turn it from a path of pleasure and fantasy to one of surgical analysis.

I heard them talking Shakespeare. Also Freud and Darwin, sometimes Nathanael West and Flannery O'Connor, but always coming back to Iago. Iago, Iago, Iago, until the thought of Shakespeare's villain brought Stanley's affable face to mind.

They sat at the dining room table—long after the rest of us had moved on, to the dishes, to the porch, or off to homework (Barry) or murder mysteries (Shirley)—discussing Darwin and Freud and Shakespeare. Stanley remained troubled by Iago, about how best to interpret his motivation. They returned to this subject again and again, so that even I began to understand what it was that they pondered so deeply. They were enamored of the notion of pluralist criticism, had concluded it was unethical, if not impossible, to consider a text simply from one critical point of view. The core of
Othello
is the question of Iago's motivation: Why does he lie about Desdemona's faithfulness? What is his purpose? The whole play hinges on this question. So how to read him?

Stanley: “Is Iago a stage villain? The devil? An artist? A Machiavellian? A latent homosexual in love with his best friend and leader?”

Fred: “He's all of them, isn't that what you said?”

Shirley, calling from the living room, standing as she did so, this argument interesting enough to call her from
Cat Among the Pigeons
: “He's the devil.”

Stanley: “You dub him the Elizabethan era's James Harris?”

Shirley: “Most certainly.”

Me, dishcloth in hand, from the kitchen doorway: “Why?”

She: “Because that's the way Shakespeare wrote him.
So will I turn her virtue into pitch.
”

It seemed Shirley and Stanley had every line of every work of literature locked accurately in memory. Usually both of them recalled identically, but when there was disagreement, Stanley turned out to be the one with the more precise recollection. He was also, and this is not meant as a criticism of Fred, the one most inventive with the question of how to dissect text. Iago, in Stanley's view, could be understood only if one used a plurality of critical techniques. Fred soaked in Stanley's words, nodding over and over as Iago's motivation was re-dissected through the psychoanalytic view, through symbolism and theology, and through the history of the play itself and of the folklore roots of the fundamental story. Fred, who was already growing a scrubby beard just like Stanley's, would sit at the table, scribbling down sentences as fast as Stanley spewed them. They drank copious amounts of Scotch, and occasionally—without warning—began to spout dirty limericks until they laughed so hard that Stanley started pounding the table.

Shirley always liked those moments the most. She would put her Agatha Christie or P. D. James down on the chair arm and head back into the dining room, pouring herself another Scotch as if the glass with the melted cubes she'd left in the living room weren't hers. She was happiest, I thought, when she could let words patter down around her, landing and glancing off her upturned face. If he could make her laugh, keep her entertained, Stanley would push himself to greater effort, saliva glistening on his tongue and lips, red-faced. And when the guffaws died, he was always the
one to give that last wistful chuckle, as if he already missed how happy he'd been. “Scotch, Shirley!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
Shoil, if only we had more of it!” And he would pour into whichever glass he could reach, liquor splashing on the tablecloth. And then he'd sigh, longing for more afterglow before raising the refilled glass to his lips.

Both the Hymans could drink a hell of a lot more than anyone else I knew. She popped pills, too, Dexies to wake up and something else to fall asleep, and there were candy dishes with pills in them in the kitchen and by her bedside. Once or twice, I'd heard her offer a Dexedrine to one of the girls, to help with focus when studying for a test.

But she never, ever seemed out of it. Never drunk, never high. He ranged across so many enthused states of an evening that it was dizzying, but not her. Once in a great while, she got angry and left the room, but she did it quietly, in a kind of grand, noble gesture. For a big and untidy woman, she could be most regal.

This brings us to an evening in mid-October. It had to be a weeknight, because Jannie was on campus and Sally back at her boarding school in Boston. Twelve-year-old Barry was upstairs, supposedly doing homework, but I could hear the vibrato of guitar strings as I walked past his room on my way back downstairs after using the bathroom.

The phone had rung several times during dinner, as often happened. No one answered it. This was also a normal occurrence. But tonight, perhaps because it was chilly and the wind was high, there had seemed to be a greater level of tension about this than usual.

As I held the banister in my right hand, heading down the
stairs, I heard the ringing start again. Shirley was already in the parlor, the men were still at the table, still arguing the logic without end of their eternal debate. The phone rang and rang, perhaps ten rings, and then stopped. In a moment, it started again.

Stanley and Fred continued talking, raising their voices above the ringing phone without paying the slightest attention. I walked past the open door and into the parlor, where Shirley sat stiffly in her chair, head cocked to the side.

“He might as well take the call.”

“Excuse me?”

She cracked the back of her mystery and opened it up. “He might as well take her call.”

I said, “Who is it?”

She studied me as if I were either very stupid or extremely naïve.

“I'm sorry. I don't understand.”

“You don't,” she said. “And it's delightful, in its way.” She opened her book. It seemed she had begun to read, but then she closed it, sighed, and asked if I felt like taking a walk.

She was often out of breath from the simple act of climbing the stairs, so this surprised me. I nodded, yes, and offered to get both our coats. Shirley's was a well-worn but still luxurious mink; I liked to bury my face in it whenever I went to the closet. She treasured it, I know, perhaps as much I did my fine blue wool. We went out the front. Somehow she was always able to open that sticky door; I never could, and always used the kitchen entrance when I was alone.

I had not walked on the long paths through the campus at night before. The air pocketed in the dips on either side of the tarred
road, along the swathes of field that I could sense only in the darkness. One who has never walked on unlit, untraveled roads in the dense, nearly crushing cushion of night air can't possibly know how brilliantly, exhaustingly, each footstep echoes. There's a tautness to it, a tension, and I have never felt so brave as out of doors in such drenched dark, finding my way through the impenetrable air.

Shirley was furious. No fear in her, simply the stiff thudding of her robust frame, her thick-soled shoes. Her breath came quickly; as my eyes adjusted, I could see dense, foggy bursts of it. I tried to match my footsteps to her own; she was not a graceful woman, her rhythms unpredictable at best.

“I suppose,” she said suddenly, “that you presume fidelity to be an outmoded and unnecessary feature of marital union?”

“Me?”

“Obviously.” Sarcastic.

“You mean cheating? Do I think it's okay to cheat?”

“That is the question on the table, Counselor.”

“Well, no,” I said. “I hadn't thought. We've never talked about it, but why would one marry and not be faithful? Why make those promises and not mean them? I don't understand.”

“We're not supposed to own one another. Or to treat love as if it gives one the right to possession.”

I listened to my own footsteps, the hesitance of my treads just a half- or quarter-beat behind each of hers.

I said, “I don't think I would want . . . I mean, marriage is possession, isn't it? Isn't that what you're doing, giving yourself to the other person?”

“I don't know,” she said, and all the familiar Shirley—witty, ironic—seemed to have drained from her voice.

“Is Stanley—” I couldn't finish.

“Is Stanley ever not?” she said bitterly.

I had read about open marriages. Somehow I assumed the people involved would be more attractive than Shirley and Stanley. They were old, and flabby, and sloppy, and although they had eyes lit by extraordinary intelligence, I didn't want to touch or be touched by them. Stanley exuded something animal, something charged, but it didn't work in a sexual way on me. Yes, he was attractive, but no, I was not attracted. I didn't feel I should have to make that clear. I was married. That settled the matter. I was out of bounds.

How innocent I was! Some of the least attractive people I know have done some monumental extramarital fornicating, bragged about it, left long marriages because of it. But I honestly couldn't picture either of the Hymans
in flagrante
. They weren't physical beings; even the effort to clear the table or carry a load of books from one room to another seemed demanding. And the notion of sexual pleasure, well, somehow it had always been connected to beauty for me. It was the beauty of Fred's chest and stomach, the muscularity of his organ and the lean of his thighs—that was what made me yearn for him. Not what made me love him, but what made me want to make love to him. And the idea of Stanley, the idea of his penis as an object to emerge, erect, from the nest of that belly, from behind the zipper of those crumpled trousers—well, I did not relish the thought.

And she was certainly no Lady Chatterley. I hated to let my mind draw the pictures it was drawing.

“In the beginning,” she said softly, “in the beginning, it was fine. It was part of what made him Stanley, part of what made us special. Unique. More original than anyone else.”

Ahead of us, car headlights appeared around a curve and began to bear down the road. We stopped in the grass, waving cheerfully as the white sedan passed us and headed toward the back gates, brake lights winking over the bump before the stone columns.

“But you would think that after twenty-five years, you would begin to think that he would either settle into our life or leave it, not hang like this. Me or them. There is a never-ending supply of them.”

“The students.”

She nodded.

“That's terrible,” I said.

“They are so impressed by Stanley's mind.” Again, the sour, sarcastic tone.

I hadn't pictured such a danger until this moment. I had been so tightly focused on our new friends, on the baby alive inside me, on the newness of all of it—I had assumed, I had simply assumed, that the language of marriage we all spoke was a common one.

“Not Fred,” I said. “Fred wouldn't.”

She snorted. It was not a pleasant sound.

I had never before noticed a creakiness in my hip and thigh, but suddenly I felt pain sear my leg, up into the muscle at my groin. I doubled over. Shirley patted my back.

“I'm not upset,” I told her. “I'm fine, it's my leg, the baby moved in a funny way. Fred would never.”

“The devil is a most extraordinary teacher.” I never could equate plump Stanley with the tall blue-suited devil of Shirley's fiction. I suppose she made her devil thin and blond simply to confuse—

“Why would you say that?” Yes, I could hear the whiny aggrievedness in my voice, could hear but not control it. “Why would you stay? Why ever would you stay with him?”

She turned back in the direction of the house, walking with stiff purpose. I kept up with her. The movement helped the pain. And I had never been the sort of woman who storms off confidently in a fit of fear, or fury.

“I keep trying to understand why I would leave,” she said. “Or who I would be, without him. Or what I would want or think or do. Don't get me wrong, silly Rose, I do know I am most to blame if I stay. I fully understand. But I have no idea who I would be.”