Stolen Pleasures (16 page)

But how could he make a cut-and-dried resolution, right in the midst of her wisdom? The thought that she had failed, after all, and he was leaving because she was obtuse was so humiliating that she overrode it by embracing his arm, begging him to please roast the duckling, to please make the eggnog.

They walked to the car with their arms about each other. “Now don't cry,” he said. “Everything comes to an end.” He laughed a bit when, standing by the car, she did not want to release him, and then was silent for a long minute, listening to her crying under his arm.

 

AFTER CAROL LEFT, a week before Christmas, Ruth spent the days in museums, saw a play, and mingled with the shopping crowds, for the apartment with only herself in it was an expectant place. She shifted her friend's little antique alabaster clock from the mantel to the dresser in Carol's room, for it was an intruding note. Only she, Ruth, lived there. Joe came by only once; it was in the middle of the week, and he brought the tree and left for a board of trustees meeting. They spent the day before Christmas together. She met him in the lobby of his office building early in the afternoon, and they bought everything for their dinner the next day, and in an import shop where all the clerks knew him, they chose exquisite tree decorations. They carried the things up in the elevator before they went on to dinner, and the two women who owned the dress shop, hearing them laughing and complaining in the hallway, helped them to carry in some of the packages and stayed on for an hour, drinking sherry and unwrapping the decorations they all were to hang later in the evening. When finally they sat down across from each other at the restaurant table, they were weary of chatting.

 

LATER, WHEN THEY stood alone in the tiny elevator, Joe took her hand, and when she unlocked the door of the apartment he still held her hand. She entered first, raising her arms to remove her red beret, and Joe, following, clasped her shoulders. When she tried to turn toward him she did not know whether it was to cling to him or to struggle to be free, but, as though complyingly, he lifted her, and there she was, carried like her mother in his arms, and he was saying, “Sweet, sweet,” his voice tangled. “Oh, God, how sweet you are!”

She closed her eyes, and was carried to his chair and down into his lap, and felt his legs trembling under her. The past year was bearing fruit, they were at last, she thought, easing Alice's concern for them both. But opening her eyes to see his face, wanting frantically to find his face familiar to her, familiar as it had been when it was more dear to Alice than to her—for only that earlier face could reassure her that everything was right—she saw only his dark head cradled on her breasts. The sight of herself lying like a babe-in-arms in the midst of his consuming figure shocked her into imagining that Carol was coming from the kitchen and saw her enfolded there, her thin legs dangling down. No, no, don't make me be my mother, she begged him, but it was only whimpering and, frightened by her inability to speak, she struck him with her fists.

For several minutes after her attack he wandered falteringly around the room, trying to find something to say but able only to cough from some arid place in his chest. He leaned forward on the table, knuckles on the edge, in the pose of a sagacious attorney preparing to speak, but whatever it was he intended to say he apparently decided that it was not to the point, picked up his overcoat, shrugged himself into it, and picked up his hat. And in that time, until he closed the door after him, she stood by the chair, watching.

When the hallway carpet absorbed him in silence, she went rocking about the room almost in his footsteps. “Mother, forgive me for hurting him! Mother, Mother, forgive me!” she cried and, appalled by the dryness of her eyes, she rained her fists upon her own face.

E
VERY HOUSE HAD a palm tree and a lawn, and some had a piano inside, a dark, sternly upright object in its own realm called the living room. Delia and her family had no piano and therefore no living room. Living, their kind, went on everywhere in their house, smaller than the other houses and closer to the alley. It was the piano that made a room into a living room, because the piano, she figured, promised the children of the family happy lives to come if only they'd learn to play it.

The piano, a huge, flat, forbidding face, until her best friend, Ellsworth, across the alley, sat down before it, lifted the long upper lip, baring the long rows of black and yellow teeth clamped together in an unsightly grin, and with nervous fingers picked out cajoling sounds that meant
Please, piano, piano, open up a happy future for me, for me, piano, please, for me, for me.

Inside, where you couldn't see what was going on, a lot of little hammers were beating on strings. A hidden cruelty in there, it seemed to Delia, slumped down on the floor in a corner, chewing on
the untied strings at the neck of her soiled dress. Without a piano, were her parents doubtful of her and her sister's future? Would they die while children? That very year, while Delia was seven, she was struck by a car, and her hair had to be cut short and away from the wound that became a scar the size of a silver dollar behind her ear, and that very year, her sister, Fleur, fourteen, came down with scarlet fever, and Delia spent gentle hours in bed with her, peeling away the shedding skin. Could they both have died that very year because they had no piano? While Ellsworth's small fingers begged the piano for a future happier than hers, she picked grass off her bare, dirty feet and tauntingly wished for his mother to come home and find her there, his undesirable best friend.

When she grew up, Delia still saw herself as outside the realm of music. And if you were a man interested enough to take her out on a date and talk to her about a famous pianist or sax player or a concert you'd been to, you'd wonder why she couldn't look you in the eyes at that point and why she got clumsy, knocking a fork to the floor or tipping over her wineglass.

For a time there was a violin in the house that had no piano. Fleur never really asked for the violin, she never asked for anything, and so the granting of the violin seemed only to comply with the high school principal's decree that every student learn a musical instrument. The only thing Fleur ever asked for was a pair of glasses so she could read the blackboard at school. She was lagging far behind the other students and was ridiculed by them and even by the teachers. She asked their father each semester, and he said neither yes nor no, and when she was already fifteen she told him she'd drown herself in the ocean, it was only a mile away, and
then she was granted glasses. Delia, too small then to know the depths of frustration in her sister's breast and in her father's head, learned only later from Fleur when she was old enough to know. But the night their father brought the violin home and Fleur opened the case and lifted it from the green velvet lining, for that moment Fleur, too, was assured a happy future.

Virginia, Ellsworth's sister and Fleur's best friend, came across the alley to take a look at the violin. Since her father, she said, played the organ in church and her mother sang in the choir, and she herself played the violin and the piano both, Fleur could never hope to catch up, though there was no harm in trying. Was it winter and early dark, that evening?

Once Delia followed Fleur to her violin lesson down the street and stood outside to see how Mrs. Chase opened the door and let her sister in. Without a smile, Mrs. Chase stepped back and in went Fleur, head bowed, careful not to bang the violin case against anything, especially not against a woman so plumply elegant, her dress of large flowers and gathers, her blond hair drawn smoothly back to reveal her whole pale, prettified face.

Fleur practiced at night after she'd done her homework, though their father turned the lights out at half-past nine. Not just a time called a Depression, called Dark Times, not just the War and the blackouts (if a light showed through a tear in your window shade you'd be guilty of the deaths of thousands), not just a father denies you the light to learn something by. Fleur began to deny it to herself.

Fleur carried notes from their mother to Mrs. Chase, promising to pay, notes she had to write herself because their mother couldn't write as well as Fleur, whose handwriting was perfect penmanship,
slanting always in the right direction like a constant catching up. Fleur didn't cry when the lessons came to an end. Delia saw Fleur cry only once and that one time was in the years to come. That one time was when Delia was fourteen and in high school and Fleur was already twenty-one, and they were living in an even barer house somewhere else, and their father was dead. Fleur's wish to go to the School for Nurses, far from home, where she was accepted and where she could live and where Virginia already was, that wish was drowned that day in the flood of tears and Fleur was carried away with it. She was to spend all the years of her young life tending their mother and doing the tasks a mother does. Fleur sat in a room by herself, crying for hours, and nobody went in to her though the door was open. Delia didn't go in, she was afraid to go in.

When Delia was very little, three, four years old, and Fleur went off to school on a day of high winds, then Delia would stand by the window and pray that her sister not be swept away. Even then, Delia sensed a waiting emptiness in Fleur that might never be filled with experiences other girls were to have. It set her apart from the girls she walked to school with. She'd be the one the winds would carry off.

When Delia was seven, with a voice of her own, she became her sister's protector, chastising grocery clerks and strange men, whoever happened to notice how one of Fleur's eyes slid upward whenever it felt like it. “Do you know your eye's crooked?” they said, and “Can't you look straight at me?” and the shock of their demands did bring it down. Holding Fleur's hand, she shouted, “You don't ask that question!” She told them to leave her sister alone, she told them to mind their own business.

When their mother went for strolls in the evening, Delia went with her, and, passing Ellsworth's house, they heard the piano and the violin at the same time, and even Mrs. Walshman singing. Fleur always stayed home, figuring out her homework and cutting pictures out of magazines and pasting them in a scrapbook, and when the stroll was over and they came into their little house, there was Fleur at their only table, pasting things without ripples, writing under the picture what it was: A Castle in Spain, A Movie Star, A Bouquet. Under the lamplight she was beautiful in Delia's eyes, a girl with auburn curls and large brown eyes, a girl who'd come quietly there when they were away.

Delia was afraid to wonder if Fleur was not loved by their parents as much as she was. That imbalance was like a burden on Delia. It wasn't enough that their parents had named Fleur after a heroine in a romantic novel that their father read to their mother, evenings, while she was carrying Fleur inside her. Something more was needed. She asked Fleur if she loved their parents, afraid that if she did not she'd be punished by God. Fleur, whose faint frowns always seemed over something else, said that she did.

Once Delia took the violin from the closet and carefully looked it over to see why it had failed to bring to Fleur the same kind of future as Virginia's. The very shape of it, and the glossy wood, and the curlicues, and the tiny wooden bridge that held up the strings—how untouchably perfect it must seem to Fleur who was so cast down by her shortcomings and mistakes. That night at the table cleared of supper things, Delia sat across from Fleur and drew the violin on a piece of her sister's lined tablet paper, and drew her sister playing it, bow in hand.

“Is that me?” said Fleur. “It looks like a little ant I saw playing Mrs. Chase's violin. She said it had no future and crushed it dead.”

Fleur's hesitant jokes surprised people, but they never took Delia by surprise because Delia knew what Fleur had inside herself to say when the chance came.

A hint of a bountiful future touched Fleur once more as the violin had seemed to do. When Fleur took Delia to a movie matinee, Fleur's ticket won a complete set of sherbet goblets. Delia would hold one up to the light and imagine that someday they'd live in a very nice house where the amber goblets would really belong. Only tapioca pudding was eaten from them. Years later, when their mother died and Fleur came to live with Delia in her apartment in San Francisco, she brought along the three that were left of the goblets, and for the very first time in their lives they ate sherbet.

“Sherbet is what the very rich eat between courses,” Delia said. “It cools their mouths, it sort of cleanses their taste for the next thing. I read that somewhere.” It wasn't something she'd read, it was told her by a lover who knew a lot about what the rich did, but there was no point in telling her sister that small truth. Fleur was like truth itself and other truths were negligible.