Souvenir of Cold Springs (33 page)

“If you left me, I don't know what I'd do,” Stewart said. “I couldn't take it.”

She said, “Of course I'm not going to leave you. It's not true that I'm unhappy, not one bit. In fact—”

“In fact what?” He was smiling up at her, gently, benignly. Already she had cheered him up. She assessed his good points. Not bad looking, that gorgeous hair, lovely steady deep voice, hardworking and responsible, devoted, stayed home at night, didn't drink much. She went through this list several times a week—always remembering something Nora Lyle had said to her in the ladies' room at Lorenzo's once when they doubledated. Nora was talking about her date. “I can't think of anything negative about him,” she had said, blotting her lipstick in the mirror. “But there's nothing positive, either. And you know what that adds up to—no positives and no negatives. A big zero, that's what.”

“In fact, what, sweetheart?”

“Maybe it's time we thought about having a baby.”

As soon as she said it she saw how witless it was. What a farce: Peggy dictating babies to her from beyond the grave. But she persisted. “It's what you want, isn't it? Admit it.” Smiling at him. “The patter of little feet around this place.”

He couldn't get the grin off his face—like Jamie when he finally got the easel he'd been angling for. Stewart jumped up and kissed her and brought in the electric fan, set up to blow on her chair—pampering her already. He opened another Pepsi and poured it in a glass, then got a cold beer for himself and sat down opposite her. “We've got to talk about this,” he said. He was out of breath with happiness. “It's what I want more than anything, but you've got to be sure that you do.”

She understood that it was already done. All that remained was the deed, the waiting, the pains, the life ahead. She sipped, drawing the cold Pepsi through her front teeth, trying to think what should come next. She had the strange sensation that she had just aged several years—like Stewart, when she came upon him in the kitchen, looking like an old man. She said, finally, “The only thing is, I thought I might go back to school.”

“You can do that,” he said, talking fast, gesturing with his big hands—spreading them out as if to indicate a wide path before her. “As soon as the children are in kindergarten. I'd be all for that, Caroline. With you all the way.”
Children
. She saw him wrench his mind away from a roomful of blond darlings so he could ask her, “What do you think you'd like to study?”

She hesitated. She had no desire to talk about it, but she had to answer, so she shrugged her shoulders and said, “I've gotten interested in medieval history. I had that course, Tyler's Medieval Lit. course, I told you about it, my last semester—what? Two years ago. I started looking over my notes—up in Mother's attic one day, going through my old books and things, and I realized that what really intrigued me most was the history, not the literature so much, although of course I—” Abruptly, she stopped talking. Discussing it with Stewart was like a betrayal, though she didn't know of what. And yet what she was saying was important: it was, she knew, her life. She took a breath and went on, talking fast. “Anyway, I've been spending time at the library up on campus, reading. Afternoons, I go up there. I was there today.”

Things she said to him often fell flat—wifely things like new curtains, or what the grocer said. The details of her life. When he feigned interest he wore the fake, posed, lively look of people in photographs. But he was watching her closely, the way he observed clients. “Really,” he said.

“I know it may sound strange.”

“No—not at all,” he said, which she knew was a lie. He did think it was strange, maybe even suspected an ulterior motive—meeting a man at the library, some old classmate or a stuffed-shirt prof like Tyler. Men always distrusted her, which was absurd.

“It's important to me. Sometimes I even imagine I'm living then. That I'm an actual medieval person.”

He grinned at her. “You wouldn't like it at all, I guarantee. No electric fans. No radios. No canned food.” He tipped his head back for a swig of beer, and she looked away from the pimply stubble on his neck. “But seriously,” he said. “Go back to school and get your degree. Why not? Maybe you could teach, get a job at the high school. You'd have the same hours as the kids.”

“Well.” How could she tell him that all she wanted was the knowledge, the understanding? And what could she ever do with that? Distantly, she could see herself, like a tiny background figure in a medieval painting, writing a book herself.
Medieval Women
, she thought. She said, “I don't necessarily want to teach.”

“Well—something. It'll work out.” He leaned close to her across the table. Beer on his breath. The odd scent of his skin, not unpleasant, rather like something to eat though she could never figure out what. Chicken gravy? “I can't tell you what this means to me, Caro. I can't begin to tell you. I mean about the baby.”

Standing up then, pulling her close to him, his erection against her, his skin hot. She closed her eyes and thought of cool empty halls and silent gardens, the bishop coming to dinner, the bell ringing for vespers. But it didn't work. They kissed. He put his hand between her legs, and she gripped it tight with her thighs, and then he let her go and they went awkwardly down the hall, their arms around each other, into the darkness of the bedroom.

She kicked off her shoes and he pulled at her dress, unzipped it, so eager he was clumsy, panting. “I don't deserve you,” he said over and over, but she knew what had excited him: not her, but the idea of her as a vessel, something a baby could be pumped into. Why did that excite him? Perpetuating himself. Proving himself. And the thought of Peggy. She watched him throw his pants and shirt on the floor and pull off his shorts: oh yes, there it was, old reliable. She wondered, as she often did, why men weren't embarrassed by their penises, stuck out straight like something for a bird to perch on. She helped him with the clasp of her brassiere, and she lay back on the bed while he pulled her panties down. “I don't deserve you.”
True
, she thought—her mind, again, free of her body, floating above it like the pictures of souls in the catechism—little white winged things. He kissed the insides of her thighs, and with his fingers pushed aside her pubic hair to find a place for his tongue. She opened her legs and stopped thinking. Let it happen, who cares anyway. She heard her own breathing, and there was his smooth long back under her fingers, his heavy body raised above hers, his mouth that tasted of herself, and it was as if she were slowly lighting up, she was a fire, she burst into flames—like the flames of hell that burn but never consume.

PEGGY

1938

She used to push aside the green velvet drapes in the parlor, open the glass doors, and sit on the balcony watching for the mailman. Most days, that was how she spent the morning, starting around ten, when she had finished the breakfast dishes, made her bed, and washed out her underwear.

These chores weren't necessary, Aunt Alice had told her. Bernarda could take care of them. But Peggy continued to do them because they took up time, and when they were done she sat in the wooden folding chair on the wrought-iron balcony and looked two stories down to the palm trees on Laguna Street, smoking one of her aunt's Luckies, waiting the morning away.

The mornings in particular seemed immensely long. She tried to shorten them by sleeping late, but as her belly got bigger and the baby became more active, it was hard to find a comfortable position, and she would lie awake at dawn in her little room at the end of the long carpeted hall, listening to the foghorns out on the Bay, then the sounds of her aunt and uncle stirring, the arrival of Bernarda, the kettle whistling, her uncle humming on his way to breakfast. By October it seemed to her that she was hardly sleeping at all, so that she was always tired and sometimes dozed off in the parlor after supper—short foggy naps that left her sluggish and made it harder than ever to sleep at night.

When she had agreed to come to California, she hadn't understood that she would be alone all day—that, every morning but Sunday, Uncle Ralph would go to the Steele Ocean Transport and Shipping Company on Market Street, that Aunt Alice would leave shortly after he did—two mornings a week to teach sculpture at the California School of Fine Arts, the other days to work in her studio.

Peggy went to the studio once. Once was enough: a huge drafty room with an artist in each of its four corners. Besides Aunt Alice, there were Cora, Claire, and Frances—three painters plus her aunt, who worked in clay. They were cheerful women in young middle age, the wives of rich men. They all had short, filthy fingernails, and they wore green coveralls or paint-spotted smocks. They were old friends, affectionate or irreverent with each other. In their presence Peggy felt both disdainful and jealous.

The smells in the studio made her sick: paint, turpentine, clay, dust, and a stink of ashes from the fat black stove that stood in the middle of the room. The clay smelled like excrement, and the whole place made her uneasy. She didn't understand what drove these four women to come every day to a seedy old building—a top floor on Greenwich Street around the corner from the art school—to put paint on canvas or build strange shapeless things out of clay. She didn't understand Aunt Alice's sculptures, and she didn't like the paintings, even one her aunt told her she would love—a red-and-green painting of flowers that seemed to be trembling in a haze of heat, alive and out of control, almost sexual.

“It's very nice,” she said. “But it makes me feel faint to look at it.”

Aunt Alice said, “But you must admit that at least it looks like what it is—a nice bunch of anemones,” and the women laughed—Cora, who had painted it, loudest of all.

Aunt Alice came home just before teatime every afternoon. If Peggy was sitting on the balcony, she would watch her aunt come up the street and turn into the cobbled sidewalk of the Clarion Apartments—a tall, strong-featured, slightly overweight woman in a split skirt and matching jacket, a flowered turban covering her wild gray hair. If she saw Peggy, she would call, “Hi there, kiddo,” but mostly she walked as if she were lost in thought, seeing nothing but the pavement under her feet or, probably, the blobs of rough clay she had left behind.

Teatime was at four o'clock and Aunt Alice took it very seriously. As the weeks went by, Peggy too began to look forward to it with an eagerness that astonished her. The prospect of drinking endless cups of tea, eating pastry, and listening to her mother's sister talk about Frank Lloyd Wright, or Roosevelt, or the projects her students were struggling with was not something that would normally fill her with anything but mild dread. Now it was the highlight of her day.

When she was in the wrong mood, she considered this a tragedy, and she would write to Ray that her dependence on the small and insignificant had become pathetic. She thought about that often, how things she had barely noticed in her previous life, or taken for granted, were now the whole world to her. The arrival of the mail. A tray bearing a teapot and a platter of cakes. A chat with someone at the drugstore. Claire and Frances coming to tea. A new magazine. Once, when she was watching for the mailman, the sun came out from behind a cloud in a burst of white light and illuminated Laguna Street—the tile roof of the building across the way, the pots of yellow and rose lantana that lined the walk, the gleaming maroon chassis of a Buick sedan parked out in front. Even after the sun disappeared again, the scene stayed in her mind, its colors and clarity and brilliance, like one of Cora's paintings but infinitely more beautiful.

When she was aware of the baby kicking, even if it was the middle of the night, she got up and walked around to distract herself, and did her best not to imagine a little fist, or a foot with tiny toes jabbing at her. She tried not to think of the baby at all. It came into her head sometimes not as a living creature but as her old doll, Madeleine, whose smocked pink dress and real leather shoes with mother-of-pearl snaps had been the joy of her childhood.

They had arranged for her to see a doctor—a cold, painless act that she could endure with half of herself turned off. After her visit, she couldn't remember his name or what he looked like or the sensation of his gloved, Vaselined fingers in her vagina. He talked distantly about her general health and what she should be careful of—no mention of an actual baby. And, mercifully, Aunt Alice stopped talking about it after the first couple of weeks. Uncle Ralph never mentioned it at all, and kept his gaze off her middle: when he talked to her he looked fixedly into her eyes, his round face stiff with the effort of it. This would have amused her if she hadn't been so grateful to him.

At first, she wrote home critically about her aunt and uncle, making jokes, with exclamation points, about their dinner table conversation, which almost exclusively concerned shipping and art. She described Sunday mornings, when they all walked to Mass at Saint Mary's Church—a red-brick monstrosity, Peggy wrote, like a church in a horror story—and her aunt and uncle singing hymns at the top of their lungs, Aunt Alice in a shrill, off-key soprano, Uncle Ralph a rumbling monotone.

“They made ‘Holy God, We Praise Thy Name' sound like a duet for mouse and freight train,” she wrote to her friend Ruth, who appreciated such things.

Her letters were full of funny stories about Claire and Cora and Frances, and about Bernarda, the Mexican cleaning lady whose only English words seemed to be
clean
and
dirty
and whose lunch was a beer and a greasy tortilla wrapped in newspaper. She presented her life in California as if it were a play with a comic cast of characters—something like
You Can't Take It With You
, which she and Stewart had seen at the university with Ray and Caroline.