Honeydew: Stories (19 page)

O
n a bright Monday morning in February, Lois and Daniel were reading in their monochromatic living room—gray walls, gray carpet, gray furniture. It was the kind of room that could soothe a panic attack, or cause one. From the stereo Scriabin flung a cat’s cradle of notes.

The doorbell interrupted the Russian madman. Daniel was still in bathrobe and slippers—this was his day without seminars to conduct or office hours to show up at. Lois answered the summons. She was already dressed: stovepipe pants, tee, jacket, all black. Iterations of this uniform in various dark colors hung in her closet like a line of patient men. She had not yet put on her shoes. But even barefoot she was six inches taller than the lanky teenage boy in the doorway, though the offering of gladioli he thrust into her hands rose above them both. “‘Mrs. Daniel Bevington,’” the kid read from a yellow slip. Lois nodded. “There’s a note,” the boy said, and raced to a curbside van that bore the name of a local florist.

Daniel, noiseless as always, had followed Lois to the door. “Have we a vase long enough for those?”

“No.” You can’t really bury your nose in a gladiolus, but she tried. Meanwhile, boots pulled on because of the snow, he headed for the garage. She followed him, still barefoot, the purple shafts in her arms. He scanned the garage’s tidy innards, chose a tall rubber basket the color of earth, picked it up and rinsed it under the outside tap. Then he filled the thing halfway with water. He put it down and returned to the living room, Lois still behind him, her feet turning blue. He spread the automotive section of the newspaper on the floor in front of a bookcase. He went back out for the rubber basket. Lois went into the kitchen.

She laid the flowers on the kitchen table and loosened their wrapping. She slipped the note from between the stalks.
Happy Valentine’s Day,
it said.
Love, Daniel.

She returned to the living room, the gladioli now horizontal in her arms. “Daniel! How sweet of you. So sweet.” She put the flowers in the rubber basket.

“I’m glad you like them,” he said, looking up, sounding briefly young, younger than their twin college-age sons, younger even than the delivery boy, who had probably thought he was fleeing a house of mourning.

“Like them? I love them,” Lois said.
Especially since I’m not really dead,
she added silently. She walked to Daniel’s chair and kissed him. This was the first time he’d sent her flowers since her lying-in.

He noticed that her eyes were unnaturally bright.

The doorbell rang again.

This time the truck was from a florist in a neighboring town. Another teenager said, “Lois Bevington?” He handed her twelve tall bloodred roses in their own vase.

She placed this gift on the low coffee table. Daniel was suddenly at her side. “Heavens,” he said.

“Heavens,” she echoed. She fingered the little pink envelope before opening it. He took the delay as an invitation to move still closer. Finally she slid out the card.
From one who loves,
it said. No signature. The words had been printed by a computer.

“Century Gothic,” he identified. “I too was offered the use of the keyboard. I could have selected that font or any other. But I used my own pen.”

“I prefer handwriting,” Lois said in an earnest tone.

They returned to their chairs, though not to their reading.

The third truck belonged to a notable Boston florist. Its delivery person was a middle-aged woman. “Bevington?” she said.

Into the kitchen again, both of them. These flowers erupted from a shallow bowl. The elaborate ribbon and cellophane bright as tears at first prevented their identification, but when she cut the ribbon and removed the cellophane a rush of glory met their two gazes. The flowers were mostly white lilacs, with occasional sprays of heather and spikes of something very blue. She carried the bowl into the living room and placed it on the piano. An envelope fell to the floor. Daniel picked it up, as if the gift were for him. But it was meant for
Lois,
the four letters rounded, perhaps to disguise the penmanship, perhaps to make it legible.

“Open it,” Daniel said in an unlikely bark. “Please,” he amended. She extracted the card.

Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

Neither could identify the quote. Side by side on the gray couch they consulted their
Bartlett’s.
The source was a letter written by Rilke.

“I don’t believe those lilacs were sent to you by Rilke,” said Daniel. “Not the tulips either.”

“Roses,” she murmured.

“Roses. They didn’t come from a dead poet.”

“No,” Lois said, but whether she meant accord or disagreement or let’s not speculate…that was anybody’s guess.

In order to understand the sudden beflowering of an unadorned room, one must go back a month in time and half a mile in space—back to the evening McCauley Bell selected the menu for the fiftieth birthday party he was throwing for his wife, Andrea. Lois had been hired to cater the event. She waited in her outsize kitchen, dreading the interview. McCauley Bell was a cardiologist, and so of course he’d forbid meat, soft cheeses, pâté. He’d turn thumbs-down on her signature tiramisu, any mouthful of which could kill you if you were genetically inclined. He’d probably demand fruit salad and hardtack.

But he turned out to be a paunchy man of sixty with a voice as rich as Lois’s seven-layer frivolity. She offered him a slice of frivolity, and then another. He indicated that he wanted to serve his guests exactly what his caterer liked best to make. He took all her lethal suggestions except Brie
en croûte;
he explained that he had a relationship with a cheesemonger who supplied him every so often with very special wheels of Camembert.

“And every so often you scrape out his arteries?” Lois asked.

He smiled at her. “That’s the surgeon’s work.” He felt a curious sympathy for this bony woman. She seemed to find smiling difficult—was it the slight malocclusion; had no one ever told her that buckteeth were sexy? He knew she was married, but he suspected that she was insufficiently attended to.

“Yes,” Andy said later, at home. She had taken an adult-education cooking course taught by Lois—Sweet Soups and Saucy Pies—and she had formed one of her shallow friendships with the tall teacher. They’d gone to
Pirates of Penzance
together. “The husband is out to sea and she doesn’t know how to haul him in—that’s my guess. He teaches algebra or something.” In fact Daniel Bevington was a world-class mathematician, but McCauley didn’t trouble Andy with that information. “Lois does know how to monkey with ingredients, combines things you’d never think of. Chilies and melon, say.”

The night before the party, the Bevingtons carried hors d’oeuvres and pastries into the Bells’ permanently disordered kitchen. Lois opened the refrigerator that McCauley and Andy had emptied that afternoon. The Bevingtons stacked trays inside the fridge, taking turns, never bumping into each other. Then Lois and Andy walked through the downstairs discussing the placement of the bar, the various routes from kitchen to the other rooms, the fact that the piano player could play just about anything if he was kept drunk enough.

McCauley watched the two women confer, Andy’s soft freckled beauty facing Lois’s profile. The sweet awning of the caterer’s upper lip did not quite cover the uncorrected teeth. Her husband was still in the kitchen, looking out the window. There were probably rabbits in the backyard; there might also be coyotes. Rabbits with their rapid hearts, 335 beats a minute in some breeds, can go into shock when a coyote comes close: convenient for the predator. But McCauley saw as he too neared the window that there were no rabbits just now. The mathematician was staring at something else, maybe the birches, white as the snow.…The man’s pulse was seventy to eighty if his heartbeats were normal. McCauley estimated them to be on the slow side.

He positioned himself in the dining room so he could see both husband in the kitchen and wife in the living room. He already knew that the caterer was competent and reliable, and she probably was master of the renunciation you often saw in people who cooked for a living: she knew she must taste only enough of her creation to test its merit and not enough to satisfy her appetite. But she had that streak of inventiveness Andy had reported…He shook his big head. Other people! Other people’s marriages! He himself could be considered imperfect as a husband: he never noticed clothes, he’d be damned if he’d make the bed. As for Andy: she buried herself in idle novels, talked forever on the telephone, played tricks on people.
All is lost. Fly
—once she had telegraphed this message to her cousin, an importer of wines; and the fellow did leave town for a while…She forgot to buy toilet paper and pick up his shirts and complain to the electric company about the bill. But he loved her tolerant nature and ready arms and generous bosom and the light laugh when he reached his peak—he was still capable of it, even if the postcoital heartbeats had become more irregular and the breathlessness more prolonged. Then she’d laugh again, again lightly, while his slow detumescence brought her to her own pleasure. All couples have their peculiarities. Suddenly he wanted to get rid of the skinny pair who had invaded their house to do their work so capably, like dancers who knew each other’s moves.

“Darling,” he said to Andy and Lois. “I think you’ve obsessed enough about the pianist; just make sure the minions keep his glass filled.” And then, gliding into the kitchen, his belly shaking just a little, he said to the mathematician, still staring out the window, “You must be sure to come back in the spring and see the three hundred tulips I planted last October, like the October before, and the October before that. Many of the old ones keep coming up. Nature has its way with us.”

Daniel had not been looking at anything in the yard. Instead he’d been recalling an episode he’d witnessed earlier. It was brief, and soundless, and reversed—he’d seen it through the black mirror of the window, superimposed on the backyard geometry. He had been standing here then as he was now. All the stuff had been brought in. His dogsbody role had been played and he was at liberty. Lois was rearranging a tray of carved carrots and little pots of condiments. The Bells had been standing in the dining room behind Daniel. That is, in reality they stood behind him, but reality be damned; they were stationed right before his eyes in the very middle of the backyard. McCauley’s left arm slid across Andrea’s shoulders. Her right hand busied itself unseen, no doubt thrusting itself into his back pocket, curving her fingers around his pouf of a buttock. They didn’t look at each other, but she moved her head a couple of millimeters so her hair would tickle his nostrils, and he bent his head to ensure that result. That was all, decorous foreplay reflected in a window, yet he’d felt as if one of Lois’s wooden spoons was stirring his entrails. He roiled first with jealousy and then with painful relief: for why envy the fat cardiologist his unkempt wife when he had as his own companion a gentle-voiced person who had painted all the rooms of their house gray and had grayed the rest of his life too, just the way he’d wanted it, perfect for contemplation. She’d even developed an interest in Scriabin. But such consideration must be commutative, or should be—what had been placed on
her
side of the equation?

And so, three days before Valentine’s Day, he’d ordered the gladioli.

Oh, the roses? Lois had sent them to herself—perhaps they would light a flame, and fan it…

And the lilacs? They were paid for in cash at the Boston florist’s—both Daniel and Lois separately winkled that information out of the proprietor. But the lady would say no more—probably knew no more. So Lois had to be content with the discovery that the deception she had concocted had doubled itself. Apparently she did have an admirer. It would not be the first time.

Daniel’s interior was again contorted with anxiety. Two other bouquets! His wife was so desirable that unknown persons—persons unknown to him, anyway—sent flowers to her. Attention must be paid. And you can say this of him: he had a good memory, a strong resolve, and an ability, once something was brought to his notice, to keep noticing. Certain attributes could not be changed—he found numbers more interesting than anything else—but an affection that had once been planted in his heart now belatedly flourished. Nature does have its way with us.

After a time Lois found herself smiling more readily.

The day after the birthday party the Bells went to the Caribbean, and on Valentine’s Day they were still there. Early that morning, while Andy still slept, McCauley padded to the office of the little resort, and collected the camellias he’d ordered, and took his pill. He returned to the cabin and strewed the petals over her naked form. Brushed by this silken shower, she opened the hazel eyes that had brought many men to their knees, some literally, and smiled at the one she’d chosen, and slipped out of bed to go to the bathroom, disturbing only a few blossoms. She came back and lay on the petals and opened herself to her husband. As he was entering, she remembered the lilacs she had impulsively arranged to be sent anonymously to her caterer and wondered if they had done mischief or good or anything at all, and then—Oh, my love, my darling, McCauley panted—she stopped thinking about the flowers and devoted herself to the work at hand.

A
manda Jenkins was having a little trouble with her article, “Connubis.”

“
Not
cannabis,” she explained to Frieda, the girl from downstairs. “Do you really think anybody would read yet another dissertation on grass? Be your age.”

“I’d rather be yours,” said Frieda, who was fifteen to Amanda’s twenty. “What’s
connubis?
”

Amanda hesitated. Ben Stewart, eavesdropping from the bedroom, could hear for a few moments nothing but the sound of crockery being stacked. He and Amanda had agreed that dishes would be her task, laundry his. Now, at five thirty in the afternoon, she and her young friend were washing last night’s plates, which had lain odorously in the sink all day.

“Connubis,”
Amanda resumed, “a coined word, refers to being married. Or being as if married.”

“Like you and Ben,” Frieda said.

“More or less.”

Ben wondered why she was so wary. They were indeed living together as if married, a conventional enough arrangement these days. Only the difference between their ages was exceptional. But that difference was a mere ten years…

“Actually,” Amanda was saying, “I am not Benjamin’s lover but his daughter.”

“Stop it,” Frieda sighed.

“His niece,” Amanda smoothly corrected. “By marriage,” she further invented. “His relationship with my aunt soured considerably when he fell in love with me. We eloped. Now we live in fear of detection. If a large weeping gray-haired woman should one day appear—Ben’s wife, my aunt, is a great deal older than me—please tell her…” She paused. Frieda waited. Ben waited too.

“Tell her what?” Frieda said at last.

“To peddle her vapors elsewhere,” Amanda said triumphantly.

“Mandy!” shouted Ben.

She appeared in the bedroom doorway, curly-haired and ardent. Her T-shirt said
AUTEUR.

“Please stop feeding nonsense to poor Frieda,” said Ben. “What will she think?”

Amanda joined him on the bed and lay on her side, propped on an elbow. “She’ll discount the nonsense and think what she already thinks. That we’re libertines.”

“Ah. And are we that?”

“I don’t know. What are we, Benjy?”

Ben considered the question. He himself—dark, thickset, Brooklyn-born—was a respectful sort of person. He particularly respected Amanda, whose upright Maine family he also respected. Once, years ago, he had loved her older sister, presently married. Now he loved Amanda, but in a casual way. And impudent Amanda—what was she? At the least, an excellent student of literature. He wished that the college kids he taught were as clever.

“I am a conformist,” he said, illustrating his words by curving his hand around her breast. She giggled. He muzzled the Auteur, then put his chin into her curls and noticed that her double stood in the doorway. Frieda’s T-shirt read
GODOLPHIN HIGH, CLASS OF ’82
. “But, Frieda, you don’t even live in Godolphin,” Ben remarked across Amanda’s head.

“The shirt belongs to my cousin,” Frieda said with her usual blush.

Godolphin was the town—really a wedge of Boston—in which Ben, who worked in New York, and Amanda, who went to school in Pennsylvania, had elected to spend the summer. They had sublet a snug apartment at the top of a three-decker house. On the first floor lived an old couple, and on the second lived Frieda’s aunt, Rennie, a young divorcée with a son at camp. This aunt exhausted herself day and night in her antiques store. Frieda herself was a child of Manhattan. Her parents, both art historians, were spending their summer in Italy, and Frieda had chosen Godolphin over Florence’s I Tatti.

“Your cousin would not recognize his garment,” Ben said gravely to Frieda.

Amanda was on her feet again. “Come into the kitchen with us, Ben,” she said agreeably. “Have you been asleep all afternoon?”

Ben got out of bed. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

He used the bathroom, then paused in the dining room. He and Amanda were in the habit of eating at the round table in the kitchen and reserving the heavy oak table in the dining room for work. Their two typewriters, one at either end, looked like combatants. Each machine was surrounded by papers and books, Ben’s piles orderly, Amanda’s in disarray. Though he had no intention of working at this hour, Ben sat down in front of his typewriter in order to groan.

Frieda had an affinity for jambs. Now she stood aslant between the kitchen and dining room. “What are
you
writing about?”

“Hawthorne,” he said. “The first novel,” he expanded. “Name of
Fanshawe,
” he summed up.

She waited for a while. “Oh,” she said. “I haven’t read any Hawthorne.”

“Do so soon.”

“
Fanshawe.
A book of Gothic posturing,” Amanda called from the kitchen. “But the setting is excellent. And there are a couple of more or less comic characters. I find Hawthorne a not-bad writer.”

“Hawthorne is grateful,” Ben muttered.

“What are you going to say about
Fanshawe
?” asked Frieda.

“I wish I could tell you,” Ben said. In truth he wished he knew. “But reticence is essential to the scholar. Ideas have to be nurtured in the dark silence of the mind before they can live in the bright light of discourse. When they can bear your intelligent scrutiny I will reveal them.” He went on in this vein for some time, unable to stop. Finally Amanda called him to dinner.

“Will you stay, Frieda?” she said with her beautiful smile. “Your aunt’s at the store tonight.”

Frieda did not have to be asked twice.

In the kitchen hung some plant that had been in beautiful condition a few weeks ago. The framed squares of needlepoint on the walls were the work of Mrs. Cunningham, from whom, through the proxy of Frieda’s aunt, Ben and Amanda had subrented the apartment. Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham, both schoolteachers, had gone to Iowa for the summer.

“What are the Cunninghams like?” Amanda asked as she served the tuna fish salad.

“I arrived only a week before they left,” Frieda said cautiously.

“Tell us your impressions.”

Frieda cleared her throat. “Clean and tidy and traditional.”

“All of those china cats in the living room,” Ben agreed. He helped himself to a carrot. “Couldn’t you have scraped this, Amanda? When it’s my turn to do dinner I always scrape the carrots.”

“I forgot.”

“I never forget.”

“But you often forget to flush the toilet,” she reminded him sweetly.

Ben addressed Frieda. “The Cunninghams, I am persuaded, never argue—”

“I don’t know.”

“—for she has her needlepoint, and he has his
Time.
Such mutuality. Theirs is a marriage of two minds. Did you remember to pick up some strawberries, Amanda?”

“Have a pickle,” Amanda said. “Mutuality is exactly the point I was trying to clarify last night. Mutuality isn’t the least bit important in marriage, Ben. It counts only in romance. Marriage has no truck with the smarmy mutual gratification that you just attempted to extol by sarcastic, by sarcastic…”

“Implication?”

“Implication. The idea in my article, ‘Connubis,’ is that—”

“Will the idea bear scrutiny?” Frieda asked. “Will it live in the light of day?”

“Of course I’m beginning to realize that conventional wisdom about the reasons for marriage is out-of-date. Like most conventional wisdom. People do not marry for security anymore. Security is provided by the welfare state.”

“But we live under capitalism,” Frieda said.

“Maybe you do at the Brearley School. The rest of the country is on welfare. In some form. Where was I? Oh yes, security. Security is out. And people don’t marry for status either, because marriage no longer confers it. Nor do they marry for sexual satisfaction, because anybody can attain that at any time—”

“I hadn’t noticed,” said Ben, looking hard at her.

“—as easily single as wed,” she blandly went on.

“So why should a person get married?” Frieda asked.

Amanda considered the question. Ben meanwhile thought of Hawthorne’s wedded contentment.

Finally Amanda answered, “There are two creditable reasons to get married. Financial and dynastic.”

“Financial?” Frieda said. “You told me we were already secure.”

“Secure isn’t prosperous.”

“Dynastic?” Ben wondered.

Amanda turned on him one of her shining gazes. “Think of it! To raise a family a couple need not be passionate. They need not even be compatible.”

“Need they be of different sexes?” Ben asked.

She waved an impatient hand. “They
must
be, as a pair, complete. Whatever they want for themselves and their progeny has to be provided by one or the other. If my family has influence, yours had better have cash. If I am worldly-wise, you had better be empathetic—”

“Empathic,” Ben said.

“—and so on. We choose each other on the basis of the needs of the future family rather than on our personal desires. Those we satisfy elsewhere…the
mariage de convenance!
That’s it, in a word.”

“In a phrase,” Ben corrected. “The old
mariage de convenance
had nothing to do with love.”

“Neither will the new,” Amanda said.

Ben gave his pretty paramour a long look. Did she believe this stuff? Or were she and her sidekick playing some deep, female game? He knew he would not marry her. He was proud of her, and he enjoyed her company, but she was not what he had in mind as a lifetime
partner.

For her part, Amanda claimed loftily that she was employing him to guide her through earthly delights. They would emerge from the summer as warm friends, nothing more. After college she intended to embark on an adventurous career. She would live amid palaces, and also dung.

“‘Life is made up of marble and mud,’” he had quoted softly.

“Hawthorne?”

“Hawthorne.”

“Hawthorne was right.”

She was in some ways as green as Frieda. Now he looked across the table at the two sweet faces, Frieda’s still vague under a cloud of hair, Mandy’s excited. Her dancing eyes showed that she considered her new theory to be revealed truth. He knew she would not rest until she had revealed it to others. It had been base of him to suspect her of clever falseness. Oh, her Yankee honesty! And, oh, his Brooklyn suspiciousness. Such a misalliance. And what on earth were the two of them doing here, messing up the Cunninghams’ place and overstimulating the worshipful Frieda? His stomach rumbled, as if in protest.

“What have we for dessert?” he formally inquired.

“For dessert,” Amanda told him, “we have nothing.”

The summer wore on. Amanda went every day to her typist’s job at the offices of Godolphin’s weekly, the
Gazette.
Then she came home to work on her article, which was going better. Ben taught his two courses at the university, and then came home to work on
his
article. Frieda continued to hang around their doorways.

“Connubis” got retitled “Mariage de Convenance.” Amanda had conceived of it as an intelligent young woman’s guide to marriage customs past and present. But it was now a manifesto, a call to common sense. “If marriage does not confer an advantage,” she declared one night, “it would not be undertaken. The new woman must not wed for sentimental reasons.”

“I think the dinner is burning,” Frieda said.

Mandy took the pot off the stove and served the baked beans. When they were all eating she continued. “The Roman custom of
concubinitas
might have demeaned the institution of marriage, but it didn’t demean the participants. However,
dignitas,
despite its name, was exploitative. The woman was expected to bear children, and she and the children were under the
potestas
of the male. As for the trustee marriage in the Dark Ages, it is being revived today in the much-touted ‘extended family.’ But the eager beavers who want to restore and strengthen the extended family don’t realize that the trustee system involved blood vengeance, bride purchase, and sometimes bride theft.”

Silence from her companions. Finally Ben said, “Take out
eager beavers
.”

“What? I was just making conversation.”

“You were quoting nonstop.”

A hand fluttered to her curls. “Oh, was I?”

“These beans are awful,” Frieda said.

United for once, her hosts glared at her.

“I was just making conversation,” Frieda protested. “Listen, tomorrow night I’ll do the cooking.”

Soon she was making their breakfasts as well as their dinners, running up early in the morning to start coffee. Amanda and Ben enjoyed sleeping late. Frieda cleaned up too. Ben liked coming home to a well-kept apartment. Each afternoon he sat down at his dusted typewriter with a vigorous feeling. Worthy pages began to pile up on the table beside the machine. He felt more and more benevolent toward Hawthorne’s first novel. The great author himself had repudiated
Fanshawe
—had even cast all available copies into the flames—but he, Dr. B. Stewart, would rescue the work, would reveal it as the precursor, however flawed, of the later masterpieces. It was a help on these afternoons to know that there was a bowl of strawberries in the refrigerator, and a pound cake on the counter. Frieda herself was never in the way.

“All daughters should be like you,” Ben said one night.

Frieda flushed. Amanda frowned at him.

“All younger sisters, I mean,” he said, getting the same response. “Silent partners? What do you consider yourself, toots?”

“A helpmeet,” Frieda said.

“Like Phoebe in
Seven Gables
?”

“Yes.” She had been doing her homework.

Every Friday the three of them went out for pizza and a movie. Every Tuesday Frieda went off with her aunt to visit another aunt, and Amanda and Ben were left to amuse themselves. They took the girl’s absences with the same good nature as they took her presence. Sometimes they talked about her devotion to them.

“She adores you,” Amanda said.

“She adores you,” Ben returned politely.

“She adores us both. My exuberance. Your scholarly wit. It’s wonderful, being adored. But whatever will Frieda do back on West End Avenue with those two aesthetes her parents?”