When Alice Lay Down With Peter (34 page)

She threw out the antimacassars, the red glass lamps with crystal teardrops, the photographs of bishops from Toronto. The new furniture would come from the catalogues of ateliers in Germany and France, with Morris’s pretty cyclamen wallpaper from London. The dining-room walls were painted a Delphic blue with gold trim, a cosmic vista that Helen ornamented with her sketchings of ospreys and monkeys, fawns and dachshunds, the plumage of pheasant, a hare, and combinatory creatures with squirrels’ feet, the body of a tiny horse with the tail of a fox. Stylized, libidinous cartoons. Even the birds looked like women.

The oak and mahogany were replaced by low tables in the Chinese fashion. Pewter, beechwood, plate glass with metal hinges. Helen filled the bookshelves in her sitting room with books bound solely in yellow chamois. They entertained their wickedly funny friends, freed from Victorian restraint. Helen designed a kidney-shaped swimming pool with a glass roof. Their guests displayed a tendency to swim in their evening
clothes. When the guests got wet, they stripped down in glass-and-marble change rooms where a maid would provide them with silk bathrobes that they could take home with them, compliments of the house.

She felt herself married to the mummified boy; she would wrap the house in gold-plated weeds. Helen too seemed gold-plated, especially the liver, for she remained flawlessly beautiful, even after a night of cocktails and laughter.

And with all this, Richard was well pleased. The cat had swallowed the canary.

Helen abandoned the young flapper and became dangerous. The prolonged economy of the bride, her enforced uselessness, made her errant, distracted, impetuous. She began to attract suitors. Edward Pennyfeather for one. Harold Burnside for two. T. K. Giles (commonly, “the King”) for three. Her black hair cut blunt, a sharp chevron, the inevitable bandeaux, her eyes blackened with kohl, as Egyptian as any wife on Millionaire Row. Of course she was bored. It was her duty to be bored. The suitors bored her. Richard did not bore her because he wasn’t importunate; in fact, he slept in his own bedroom and rarely bothered her. She remained easily virtuous; she was
married
, and not the least interested in love.

Helen and Richard were friends, especially when they drank champagne. They didn’t even
need
to talk. Helen’s beauty compelled Richard much more than champagne. He didn’t like addictions. He liked control. So he didn’t like his addiction to his wife.

How did Richard love her?

Desperately.

At what temperature?

Forty below. So cold it feels hot.

Then the marriage was a success?

R
ICHARD’S ROOMS WERE
adjoined to Helen’s by a door that she wished she could lock. Not that she didn’t trust her husband, and she was not yet afraid of him, but she didn’t like surprises, at least not that kind of surprise. She needed to be assured that when she was alone, she was truly alone. Increasingly, she did not
feel
alone. She grew sensitive to the sound of the door opening from her husband’s bedroom, a sound more rare than a cat’s sneeze, interrupting the sound of the shuttle travelling the loom, for she continued to weave; she had become very skilled, very refined. She wore a gold velvet robe with a turquoise sash and she’d risen before daybreak, having been restless in her big bed upon its elevated dais beneath a short canopy of brocade. She had risen and lit the fire in the grate and turned on the fluted lamp beside her loom and worked with her thread till the sun rose and overcame the yellow lamplight and filled the room with thin windy shadows. She was a woman who would never grow old. That’s another form of
ancient
.

Richard didn’t come. Solitude is a state of readiness, a small island prepared for war. The sunlight inched across the bedroom wall.

T
HEY HAD DINNER TOGETHER EVERY NIGHT
, the governance of “a good marriage.” “How are things with Richard?” I might ask, as if I truly had a mother’s claim to Helen. “We had dinner together last night,” she’d say. “Veal. The vegetables are always overdone. I must speak to Cook.”

“Does Cook have a name?”

“I don’t know,” said Helen, distracted.

I laughed. She didn’t. She looked out the window. A little girl was walking down the street. “There you are,” I said. Helen stared at the child, a pretty thing wearing boots trimmed with rabbit fur. She was her own Orpheus, looking back at herself. Turning herself to stone.

But that night he didn’t come. Helen worked at her loom all day long and dressed only when night had fallen and dinner was served. They always dined at eight when they weren’t entertaining. The house was in darkness. Through the upper windows on the landing, iron black branches, plainly unhaunted. Helen walked down the broad, dark staircase from the mezzanine, and she heard the croon of the water pipes. Mrs. John Anderson was adding hot.

Richard always came home for dinner if he wasn’t in New York or at the club, and he always called if he was going to be
late. As Helen assumed her place at the dining-room table and looked down its expanse with the candlelight reflecting like lights from a dock at the lake, as the butler shook the linen napkin and placed it across her lap, she looked down the telescope of her husband’s dining room at her husband’s empty chair, the place setting that always included his crystal ashtray and lighter, and she asked for white wine. She took a drink and set the glass down and ran her hand along its stem. She drank again. Nerves, she thought, and straightened her back. Nerves.

She had to acknowledge that she was not anxious for Richard’s safety. She thought hard about this. Her dinner was placed before her.

No, she felt no wifely concern on Richard’s behalf, none at all; nothing so friendly or intimate as that. She drank off several glasses of the French Sauternes without feeling any effect at all. When she tried to consider some danger to Richard—ill health, a car accident, an assassination—she came up cold. Surely this is intuition: she simply knows he’s fine. She’s just irritated that she’s been stood up; she’s in a snit to find herself on stage without her leading man, living this drawing-room farce alone.

But really, what a posturing ass Richard is. A cold, tedious man with trivial interests, self-indulgent, always looking out for number one. How greedy, really; decadent, profligate! (She heard her grandfather’s voice, as haunting as the water pipes.) A dissolute, bloodsucking parasite, a goddamn son of a bitch, a useless leech upon the honest souls of the working class. She rang the butler’s bell. Where
was
that man, what
was
his name, when
would
he come!

Helen was fixated on the revolution taking place within her and did not hear the butler’s polite inquiry, Madame has not enjoyed the veal? She slouched, draped one leg over the arm of her chair and took a cigarette from her sequined bag. The man rushed to fetch Richard’s lighter; Madame never smoked in the dining room. Helen held up her face with its cigarette and waited for a light. The butler was thin; he did not have a butler’s hands, but the fingers of a musician or something. He snapped closed the lighter. He didn’t even look like a butler.

A terrible longing had opened in Helen. She had swallowed a leopard, so fierce was the thing caged inside her. She groaned and then waved the man away before he could utter his paid-for solicitations. “I’m fine,” she said, and waved her cigarette, go away. All around her, the impossible animals peaked out from art-deco foliage, wagging their smooth tails. The charm of the room curdled in her stomach.

Then Richard arrived. He pulled back his chair, took his place and looked at her.

“Hello, Hansel,” said Helen, and she realized that her voice was drunk, whereas she was perfectly, icily, sober.

Richard seemed strangely innocent, in his elegant clothes, at the head of his big table. He looked surprised, as if he’d been injured out of the blue. He was all shiny and clear, like a tuning fork. He lit a cigarette and told the butler-person to bring him a Scotch and soda. Only then, inhaling, did he say hello.

He watched her stand and swing down to his end of the table. She wore a light shawl loosely around her bare shoulders. It accentuated her height. “You look very beautiful tonight,” he said. A cool statement, somehow resenting.

She stood beside his chair. “I’ve reached a conclusion,” she said.

Richard leaned back to look at her. “I believe that is a first.”

She thought about it. “It happens,” she said, “especially when you’re not here.” She touched his shoulder. And remembered that he inhabited a large space within her. So if he was a bloodsucking parasite, then she was a bloodsucking parasite’s wife. “I need to work,” she said.

“Was your mother here today?” he asked.

She tried to remember. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”

“Won’t you sit down while I have my dinner?” he asked. He rose to pull out her chair so that she might sit. Then he kissed her once upon her throat before resuming his seat. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

“It’s not just that.”

“Some things have come up.”

“Wall Street?”

“Wall Street. Yes.”

“It’s worse than before?”

“It will get much worse. But we’ll be all right. We’ve still got the local property.”

She shrugged. “I don’t care.”

“You’ll always be looked after,” he said.

Oliver-Jenkins-Higgins brought him the veal. “Oh,” said Richard. “Veal.”

“I will have wine,” said Helen. “A fresh glass.” Then, to Richard: “What does your broker say, your man in New York?”

Richard stopped, his glass at his lips. He said, “Walkins died today.” Then he sipped.

“Well, that’s a bit sudden.”

“He jumped.”

“Oh. He jumped. From Wall Street. Because of the big crash.”

“It’s more of a leak than a crash. Like a boat hitting… something.”

“In New York. He killed himself in New York.”

“And here. It’s the same.”

“Only smaller.”

“Not the way we’ve been playing it.”

“I’m sorry about Walker.”

“Walkins. His name was Walkins.”

“Yes. A nice man. His poor wife.” Then she remembered that she’d never met Walkins. The name was so familiar, one of Richard’s dramatis personae. “Or,” she said, “everyone.”

“I’ve no doubt he was a very nice man. They are down there. Yes, he was. We met at meetings. Of course, then he was all business. A fast-thinking man. As they tend to be, you know, more than here. Quite different.”

He began to cut his meat precisely. He said, “Prices are going to fall very fast. You may want to warn your mother. I’ll telephone her tomorrow if you like.”

Helen gripped the wine glass in her fingers. Her hands were strong from weaving. The three broken fingers had healed, crooked. “I can’t bear this,” she said. She squeezed the glass until it broke in her hand. The blood was a glaze upon the cherrywood table, a crimson edge on Richard’s linen placemat.

Richard’s fork hesitated midway to his mouth. He put it down with the same measured composure. He kneeled beside
her and wiped her fingers with his napkin. It was a small cut, but when he pulled aside the skin to see how deep it went, he saw the pink bone. Beneath the small flap of flesh was a sliver of glass, which he removed, for his hands were small, womanly. The cook brought out a bowl of ice water, and without moving her from the dining room, Richard bandaged Helen’s hand and taped it closed. When he resumed his seat, she was as pale as ivory and his dinner was still warm. He made a polite show of eating, and then put down his cutlery and sat back with his arms extended to the table.

So it was, between them. If there were no guests, it was always just the two of them, Hansel and Gretel. Childless. Helen had not yet used that word. Perhaps because a child cannot be childless, and there seemed to be a moratorium on her maturity, though indeed Hansel was thirty-five years old and Gretel was twenty-seven. They sat in the dining room for a long time, among the palm trees and ferns, monkey, possibly antelope, lemur, greens and yellows, that peacock in the lilac tree. Helen leaned forward and with her good hand she stroked Richard’s hair.

He told her which stocks had failed, who had become insolvent, who hung on, who let go. Pulp and paper, gold, railway stocks, Winnipeg Electric, International Nickel. The man who jumped, jumped again and again. Walkins, she tried to remember; Walkins was his name. It surely matters. They were served coffee, and she asked him the questions she knew he could answer. She showed no judgment, and received his information as if it were written on her. When they left the dining room, everything would be different. But she would never fall out of love with Richard.

They took each other’s hands (Richard holding her injury; Helen thinking of her father, how Eli played open chords on the guitar, the music of the lost thumb). They held hands, how gently Helen was held by Richard, and how elegant she was, wounded, pleasantly subdued. Together they climbed the stairs, and Richard entered Helen’s rooms and waited while she went to wash. Alone, she peeled away the bandage to see the white tear in her skin, the damp ridges of fingerprint; tomorrow it would be drier and then it would fall away, and under the lid of skin the blood vessels were throbbing.