A Big Storm Knocked It Over (2 page)

Being newly married made Jane Louise feel weird. She felt peculiar when people came in to congratulate her, as if her clothing was too itchy and didn't fit. She suddenly became shy and at a loss for words. It seemed odd to her that people would congratulate you for being able to sleep with your boyfriend legally. But to her office colleagues marriage was about matched towels with monograms, wedding presents sent from all over, and eventually the creation of a nice little family. It was not, except to Sven, about the marriage bed. But then, who knew what marriage really meant to Sven? According to her secretary, Adele, a veritable encyclopedia on the subject, Sven liked being married because it gave him a reason to feel guilty about adultery.

Jane Louise did not believe that Sven felt guilty about anything, but Adele's theory was rather more complicated. She said that Sven did not feel guilt in the sense of feeling bad about something. Guilt to him was like a seasoning in cooking—hot peppers or chili powder—that put an edge on his philandering, without which he would have been bored.

It was odd to feel so uncomfortable at work. Her office had always been like a friend. She had spent the crucial hours of her girlhood in this place, and even though she was hardly a girl when she got married, she felt that she had crossed some border.

Her door was open, and through it stepped Adele, a compact young woman with bright yellow hair, long pink nails, and a fondness for outfits—clothes that actually matched. She was engaged to her boyfriend, Phil, who had given her a little diamond engagement ring. She came from an enormous family of telephone company workers, nurses, and taxicab drivers. On the subject of Sven she was brilliant. Her only other interest was her engagement and pending wedding, for which elaborate plans had been made.

She had been invited to Jane Louise and Teddy's wedding and had been puzzled by it, Jane Louise could see. It was so plain, so not like a wedding. But she loved Jane Louise, and she admired her. Adele felt that Jane Louise came from some loftier artistic territory in which people wore what looked like a sundress—and not even a white one—to their wedding, with no hat, no veil, and only the tiniest little bouquet of flowers, which the bride actually had to be reminded to throw. Adele, of course, had caught it, but then Jane Louise had thrown it right at her.

“So hi!” Adele said as she entered. She was more than ten years younger than Jane Louise and seemed a veritable baby. “I see Sven's been in to check you out.”

“For signs of wear,” Jane Louise said.

“I'm so glad I don't register with him,” said Adele. “It would creep me out to get the once-over from him. You're his type.”

Jane Louise considered this. Sven's wife, Edwina, was a strawberry blond. The mother of Allard and Desdemona had been a reddish blond, and the Swede, mother of Anik, had also been blond. Jane Louise mentioned this.

“He marries out of type,” said Adele.

Jane Louise made a mental note to remember to tell this to Teddy. She thought Adele was a genius, but Teddy said she was only a genius on the subject of Sven.

Jane Louise noticed that Adele, too, peered at her, as if for signs of wear. She focused on Jane Louise's wedding band, and her face relaxed. Here was an identifiable and correct piece of wedding protocol! Adele sat at her desk at lunchtime and read such magazines as
Modern Engagements
(which Jane Louise originally had thought was a literary magazine) and
Today's Bride.
Or she set out with Phil-the-Fiancé and went shopping for towels and matching shower curtains, place mats, and napkins. She and Phil were going to be married in two years, but they shopped assiduously for specials and sales (
YOUR MONOGRAM EMBROIDERED FREE WITH THE PURCHASE OF TWO BATH SHEETS
!), and the Stuff was hauled away and stored at Adele's grandmother's house.

All this made Jane Louise feel very tender toward Adele. She did not begrudge Adele any of it: She wanted
someone
to want it.

She and Teddy had simply merged their possessions and were now thinking about buying a sideboard. Jane Louise had never bought a piece of furniture with another person in her life. It seemed to her an act of almost exotic intimacy. After all, anyone can sleep with anyone, but few people not closely connected purchase furniture in common.

Dita Neville was Jane Louise's next visitor. Jane Louise was dreading her. She breezed into the office trailing cigarette smoke and wearing the sort of clothes girls might have worn in French convent schools in the forties. No one could identify where she got these clothes which, as Edie pointed out, were killingly lovely. Today she was wearing a heavy white shirt, a knife-pleated black serge skirt, heavy black stockings, and flat suede shoes like ballet
slippers. Her stripey, tawny hair was cut asymmetrically. She was older than Jane Louise, and they had been close friends, but recently Dita had faded out of her life.

When Dita first came to the firm she had created a minor stir: She was extremely glamorous. No one else in the office carried a burled-walnut cigarette case with a twenty-two-carat-gold clasp. No one else had lunch with people whose title was Princess. She seemed to know everyone: old film directors, movie stars, wild Southern boys who wrote dirty novels, elephant trainers who wrote poetry. At the moment she was publishing a novel entitled
Dream of the Biker's Girl,
by a woman who had ridden with the Hell's Angels and came to the office in full biker regalia. Undeterred, Dita, wearing sober gray and real pearls, took her out to lunch at the fancy women's club of which her mother was a member.

She was small and wiry, like a wildcat. She stalked about like a cat, too. Her stride was nervous and taut. At the moment she was married to her third husband, the reportage photographer Nick Samuelovich, an overlifesized, blond man. Handsome. Her first husband had been a charmless, appropriate stockbroker. This had pleased and then displeased her mother, who was horrified by divorce. Next she married a poet from a very old family but left him for Nick, who had carried her off to Cambodia.

Dita had taken Jane Louise up with a vengeance, and Jane Louise had been somewhat dazzled. Together they had gone to the movies at lunchtime armed with huge sandwiches from the local delicatessen. When Nick was out of town, Dita and Jane Louise camped out at the cozy Samuelovich flat in Greenwich Village, where they talked and gossiped endlessly. Dita had given Jane Louise access to her private life: In front of Jane Louise she felt free to cry, rant, let down her public face, and display what
seemed to Jane Louise a boiling vat of emotion. In public Dita was perfect: a clubwoman who used dirty language, a freewheeling, freethinking maverick from an impeccable background, the person you could count on to get all the jokes and nuances. Their friendship prospered over the years, but around the time that Jane Louise first met Teddy, Dita began to withdraw. She no longer came into Jane Louise's office to yak. Their midday movie dates were over. Dita was never home in the evening anymore, and Jane Louise had known in her heart of hearts that Dita would never make it to her wedding.

And she hadn't. It turned out that the birthday party for Nick's old father was the same day, even though it was not his official birthday. And although a smaller party would be given for the old man on his actual birthday, Dita said it was imperative that she attend both. If it had not been Nick's father's birthday, Jane Louise had suspected, it would have been something else.

“Hello, sweetie,” Dita said. “I'm so sorry about your wedding. Those ghastly White Russians.”

Jane Louise knew this voice. Its tone did not encourage conversation. It made breezy, unchallengeable statements.

Dita thrust onto Jane Louise's desk a large box covered in shiny black paper and done up with an enormous silk bow—pink.

“Open it, please,” said Dita.

Jane Louise obeyed. Inside a nest of bright pink tissue was a large sprigware pitcher—a Georgian water jug from an antique shop Jane Louise had never so much as dared to browse in.

“Oh,” said Jane Louise. “I love it!” She felt she would have to clench her teeth to prevent herself from bursting into tears.

“Sprigware,” Dita said. “To go with your nice white ironstone. I felt a little decoration would be a good thing.”

“Oh, it's wonderful,” Jane Louise said.

“And do you suppose your old man will like it?” Dita said.

For a moment Jane Louise thought she was referring to her father, long deceased, but Dita meant Teddy.

“It's just the sort of thing he'd like,” Jane Louise said.

“Now, sweetie,” said Dita, clearing away the tissue paper and tapping an unfiltered cigarette on her case to pack it down, “let's get serious.”

For an instant Jane Louise wondered if she and Dita were going to talk about why they seemed no longer to be friends. Sven had once warned Jane Louise that Dita would be a dangerous person to know. Jane Louise had had dangerous boyfriends, but in her experience, women had never been the enemy.

“Can we change the lettering on
Dream of the Biker's Girl?
” Dita said. She blew a smoke ring. “The author hates it. I can't think why, but she feels it isn't
raunchy
enough.”

“What isn't
raunchy
enough?” asked a voice from the hallway, and in strolled Sven. He stared at Dita. “An infiltrator from editorial.”

“Oh, hello, Sven,” Dita said. Her voice was perfectly formal.

“You never come down here anymore,” Sven said. He leaned over and filched a cigarette from the open walnut case, brushing Dita's arm. He took the lighter out of Dita's hand and lit his cigarette with it. Jane Louise held her breath. “You don't mind, I'm sure,” he said.

“It's heaven to be able to smoke in peace,” Dita said to Jane Louise as if Sven were mere dust on the window ledge. “Upstairs you can hardly light up without two editorial assistants coming in to give you a health lecture.”

Throughout this interchange Sven gazed at Dita. If this made her nervous, she did not show it. It made Jane Louise sort of hysterical, however. She longed to get them out of her office.

“Listen,” she said to Sven. “Why don't you go out and smoke that thing in the hall?”

Sven feigned hurt. “You don't make
her
smoke in the hall,” he said.

“She's here on company business,” Jane Louise said.

Sven crushed out his cigarette. “Well, Josita,” he said, using Dita's real name. “We all missed you at Janey's nice wedding. We were all sure you'd barge in at the last minute.”

“Nick's papa—” began Dita.

“Oh, yes. Nick's thousand-year-old papa,” Sven said. “Well, girls, I'll vanish. I'll just grab another smoke as a keepsake.” He took another cigarette and put it behind his ear. As he turned to leave his eyes met Dita's. It was perfectly clear to Jane Louise that they either had slept together or were going to.

Teddy liked a real dinner: It made him feel adult. Jane Louise, who was a very good cook, felt that on the first business day of married life you ought to feed your husband his favorite meal.

He was not home when Jane Louise walked in, which gave her a few minutes to get acclimated. Although they had shared this apartment for a year, in some ways she was still not used to it. She had never lived with anyone before, and the fact that she shared this dwelling with a man amazed her.

The kitchen was as they had left it, the coffee cups washed and set neatly on a tea towel. She and Teddy were both neat: Jane Louise had the tidy habits of a designer whose tools are always clean and put away in the right place. Teddy was a plant chemist. His firm invented nonpoisonous alternatives to such toxic products as pesticides and household products. His mind was orderly, and order banished bad, chaotic thoughts.

The household they had created in their own image was more bare than cluttered. The couch, which they both loved, was elegant and uncomfortable. It had belonged to Teddy's grandmother
and was made of mahogany in the Empire style. When Teddy inherited it it had been covered with crumbling black horsehair, and Jane Louise had had it recovered in green-and-yellow stripes. She loved it because it was beautiful, and Teddy loved it because it rooted him in his history.

There were times when Jane Louise was quite enraptured by that history, at least on Teddy's mother's side—generation after generation of stable New Englanders. She herself had been dragged around as a child and could never really say she was from anywhere, whereas Teddy had grown up in the country, in the house his mother had inherited from her mother. His best friend, Peter Peering, had been his friend since he was born. Otherwise Teddy's life had been something of a mess. His parents had been bitterly divorced when he was three and had never had a kind word for each other since.

The least happy part of planning the wedding had been the contemplation of Teddy's parents in the same room. After all these years they still hated each other, and Eleanor loathed Cornelius's second wife, Martine. But in the end they had stayed in separate corners, and Edie and Mokie had served as runners between them, making sure everyone was calm.

Teddy's father was a Brit, with a stiff white mustache and the bearing of a naval man. He had been in the British navy during the war and had spent the years after it doing something for a company his family had long had an interest in. Later he became a wine merchant, which he was quite good at, and had married Martine, a big, soft woman from Bermuda who had produced Teddy's three half-sisters.

Once upon a time Teddy's parents had had a wedding and thought they might be happy. Teddy had a photo of this event: Eleanor, looking the same, except younger and interested in looking pretty, and Cornelius, in his dress uniform, looking as if his
only interest were in having his photo taken. In spite of his fractured boyhood, Teddy had turned out to be level and even tempered, even if he was not an easy read.

What was it about marriage, Jane Louise wondered, sitting down on the couch's hard, striped, unavailable surface, that made it seem so strange to her? It was not a bit strange to Adele and Phil-the-Fiancé. They were schooling themselves in it, buying towels and hampers, shopping for china patterns, and saving their money in a joint account. Adele and Phil had known each other for ten years, since they were babies.

Whereas, Jane Louise reflected, she and Teddy were barely acquainted. They had met two years ago, courted for one year, lived together for another, and here they were, virtual strangers in each other's lives, married forever.

Suddenly Jane Louise was very tired. She grabbed a pillow off the chair, stuck it underneath her head, and closed her eyes, wondering about her own parents.

Her mother, Lilly, had remarried after Jane Louise's father, Francis, had died. She was happily married now in a way she had never been happily married to Jane Louise's father, who was charming but never made enough money, and to whom the things of the world didn't seem to mean much.

Her new husband, Charlie Platt, was rich and settled. He had always been rich and settled. Together they had bought a sizable town house just for themselves and either gave or went to parties almost constantly. Lilly had a passion for social life. If she was not invited to a party, she gave one. She and Charlie were on the boards of hospitals, halfway houses, and foundations to study rare diseases, and they went to balls that raised money for the opera, the Artists League, or the Print Society. Her closet was the size of Jane Louise's bathroom.

Her father had been dead for ten years. He would never see his
daughter's husband and would never see her children, if she ever had any. At the thought of this, tears sprang out of her eyes. For a minute she could not stop crying. Then she turned on her side and fell into a dreamless sleep from which she was awakened by Teddy.

“You must have been really wiped to fall asleep on that thing,” Teddy said.

“I just suddenly felt as if someone had pulled the plug,” Jane Louise said. “All my energy went. I'm starving. Let's make dinner.”

Teddy made the salad, and Jane Louise grilled the chops, just like dolls in a dollhouse. The kitchen rang with the sound of the two of them.

“My mother called,” Teddy said. “She's going off to see her friend Nancy Aldrich in Boston and she wants to know if we want to use the house.”

“Do we?” Jane Louise asked.

“It's up to you,” said Teddy. “The leaves have turned, and we could bundle up and go canoeing.”

The idea of bundling up and going canoeing on Marshall Pond—actually a lake—where Teddy's grandmother, mother, and Teddy himself had learned to swim seemed like heaven to Jane Louise, and being married to Teddy gave her access to it.

“I love lamb chops,” Teddy said. Jane Louise looked at him. Was this a conversation between married people? It seemed to her that they had been much freer three weeks ago, before they were married.

“I bought them because you love them, you twit,” she said. “Isn't marriage weird?”

“It's probably less weird when you do it in your early twenties,” Teddy said. “Like Beth and Peter.”

“Yes, but mostly, unlike Beth and Peter, when you get married
in your early twenties, by the time you're our age you've already been divorced and remarried.”

“I think my dressing is delicious,” Teddy said.

“Curry,” said Jane Louise, tasting it.

After dinner Jane Louise attempted to curl up on Teddy's lap. Her legs were too long, so they sat with their legs intertwined. “I don't feel at all like myself,” she said. “Do you think something's wrong with me?”

“I think we just got married,” Teddy said. “We're not kids, so it's more serious.”

Jane Louise gazed into the eyes of her husband, a serious person if there ever was one. His eyes were hazel. It was often not easy to know what he was thinking or feeling. On the other hand, he was easy to make comfortable, and his wants were not many. Furthermore, although he had had a series of long-term relationships with women, he had put in time living alone and could fend for himself. He did not eat out of cans.

Thus, when Jane Louise was sick she could expect more than a piece of toast. Teddy did not much like cooking: He seemed happy and grateful when Jane Louise did it for him. He had been brought up by a rigorously unfussy woman who
did
feed herself out of cans. Eleanor hated to cook, hated most housework. She was, as Edie often said, a being without much interest in traditional gentler roles: the perfect mother for a boy, since she taught Teddy what she knew about—gardening, bicycle riding, and bird identification. She had set him up to be charmed by a person who smelled wonderful, who was not at all frilly, but who gave him a taste of the domestic life he had been deprived of.

“Let's go to the country this weekend,” Jane Louise said. “It'll be nice to sleep in that bed again, since that's where it all happened.”