Age (2 page)

‘Everything here is down in black and white,’ I said. ‘The people. The money. And the opinions.’

The people here, Gemma said, looked to her like lozenges. As I was to discover, she always saw people in shapes. Those here, she said, were oblongs all of the same size, with very sharp corners.

‘Maybe it’s their opinions sticking out,’ I said. ‘Like Kleenex, from the pockets of well-tended children.’

‘But someone else blows their noses for them,’ she said.

We stared again—remember?

‘We’re only on the local guest-list of sympathizers, you and I,’ I said then. ‘Or else we have a lover here. Have you?’

‘I did,’ she said, looking across the room. ‘Have you?’

‘As a matter of fact—’ I said, ‘—not yet.’

So should we leave—I said—before the speeches? ‘We’re not that talented.’

‘They’ll have caviar afterward,’ you said. ‘They always do.’ But you were smiling, and the smile was heart-shaped too.

‘So shall we,’ I said. We were always both of us so good at repartee.

So we joined hands, and left the neosophisticate life. I sold the farm, for a flat in the city. You sold your half of the firm in White Plains for a drawing board. Plus the opportunity to landscape a forty-foot city garden, southern exposed. And so we entered that bourgeoisie to which every loving couple of long duration willy-nilly belongs.

Repartee is still the spice of it, and the daily jaunt. But at the farther end is this record. Where nobody will answer.

We’ve not done badly, Gemma and I. Even under the aspect of the stars a decent poet and architect must be of some worth to the millenniums. Or of no worth at all, except as the ash a universe must have.

Still—the cosmos must cede us our dying. At a stroke, or inch by inch. And the extra inch Gemma and I ask to add—inch of grace, if not of credit, minute stretch of will, if not of joy—is this record.

I think to myself—is this the acreage? The space we wanted—and now earn?

I
SAID TO RUPERT:
‘What shall we be calling it, this account? Oh—just between ourselves?’

‘Let’s not name it,’ he said, and we both fell silent, remembering how in the first pride of accession he tried to name his farm, as people do—to wear as a signet on notepaper and cherish in speech. And how he could never find the one name to satisfy all the needs, and so ended by calling it ‘the house.’

‘Just between ourselves?’ he said. ‘For whom else is it?’

To refer to, I meant—as we go along with it. I’ll need that. I’m not like he is, always scratching on alone.

He senses that. ‘We can have different names,’ he said, like to a child. ‘From time to time.’ And I think how brave of him, and how foolish, to refer to time—ours—as of indefinite length.

‘When did you first begin to think of your lifetime as limited?’ I said. ‘Oh—not the cliché way—but in the real grain.’

‘When did I know I was mortal for sure?’

When he’s cornered he searches his pockets. The children used to watch him put out penny after penny after penny, in a straight line. ‘Not sure I ever have. What I retain is how it feels—every young day—that one is destined to live forever. Like those dreams that are all one intense blue.’

He grins then—what I call his triolet grin—the smirk he wears coming out of his studio, after he has written one of those. In a triolet the first line has to rhyme with the fourth and seventh. There are only eight. And that last line—which has to rhyme with the second—has to come true, and yet casual. ‘Like the only bong possible.’ Or sometimes he does those acrostic poems in which the first letters of each line, when read vertically, spell a sentiment.

At times I hate his wordplay. It doesn’t help that so does he. They’re poems for xylophones, he says, not for violins. And the sap the real stuff. I can always tell from his conversation—with others or with me—when he’s been doing them.

‘Oh you know me’—he says now—‘I can never remember what I forget.’

There isn’t a couple alive that doesn’t develop some kind of verbal venom—his phrase, of course. It comes of the interlocking—even when one wants never to be sundered—of small habits that should be learned and accepted—the other person’s—but never fully are. He’s kinder about this than me. Or less callous. When I want my blueprints spread on the dining table, I
want—
to accompanying shrieks if he clears for lunch. But when he doesn’t empty his all-day tea leaves—I sulk. Housewives develop certain venoms of gesture, I tell him. ‘But it’s no help—that we are ashamed of them.’

He answers that he and I must write down the daily impatiences too: These are part of what we are. The one who reads would know otherwise that the picture is false.

‘What difference will that make?’ I say. ‘It won’t be my picture you lack.’

He grips my wrists as roughly as he once used to. I feel their gauntness all the more because of his knotted hands, each of whose bumps and blotches I plot like a changing landscape.

‘You must not believe only in
your
death,’ he says. ‘You must learn to believe in
mine.
’

And so we face each other, openmouthed. For each of us the dilemma is the same.

W
HAT IS DEATH TO
her and me now—an aphrodisiac?

That, now that I had said it out plain, the two of us, a woman approaching seventy-seven and a man seventy-three, should close jaws, eyes, bend our knees, bank ourselves against a wall, and make love standing up?

We did that a lot when we first met. We hadn’t done so in years. Often in bed we make love without climax now, or barely, and do not ask ‘Did you?’ afterward.

This time, as I feel the rise and certainty in both of us, I see, past her shoulder, the small carpet-covered set of three steps we use as a kitchen ladder to the storage closets above. Then we shuddered toward the great cry.

We should be stood up in St Pat’s as a miracle—neither of us said. The flesh dripped, and I marveled. She put her wet cheek in my neck—and I nodded.

Afterward I said: ‘What are they, really. That set of steps?’ She brings things home. They melt into usage. ‘Is it a prayer stool?’

‘Could be. Or else steps to get into one of those high tester-beds.’

Then we laugh, and have ourselves coffee black as the midwinter ice on a lake on an animal farm used to be, and cheese smacking of the best cholesterol, and grapes.

‘You look so pretty,’ I say, mouth full. ‘Maybe I’ll let you leave your hair white.’

She kisses the backs of my hands. She’s always looking at them. She waves at the little ladder. ‘Next time, we’ll kneel.’

H
E SAYS I KEEP
him from seeing himself, and us, as too heroic. ‘I always did think the old were the real heroes,’ he says.

And now—they’re us. I think that for both of us.

‘To be under imminent sentence,’ he says. ‘And threading a needle.’

Sewing the button, I smirk. My eyes are good. None of our family has ever had cataracts. ‘That’s our function. Women.’

‘To thread? Or to be antiheroic?’

‘To be antiheroic—heroines.’

Repartee!

But now and then we sly out each other’s hurts—at least the old chronic ones. I am a great complainer on the subject of the neck. He knows each of my muscle crackings and is a connoisseur of the heat lamp and the traction apparatus, as well as an amateur masseur. But that other inner Babel of body sounds and heart tricks—all new arrivals crashing the tap-dance rehearsal without their union cards—these I keep to myself. And so, I suppose, does he. Or I assume he has five years less of them.

Until one day, when we are standing between two reflecting mirror-walls in a gallery show of environmental art—dribbled earth, bow-tied walls, and quicksand views of us spectators—I find out that he too has a neck.

He has stopped dead in his tracks, though we are supposed to tread across that earth—and spoil our shoes in it if we are wearing uptown suede. We aren’t. In the silly-mirror I see him touch his forehead. His head is alop.

‘Rupert! What?’

That’s all we appear to have to say these days: What?

He only told me because he was caught off his guard—by the environment. ‘Like a black-and-white parasol. Opened right between my eyes. And shook out its frills like Op-art. Moving in ripples.’

‘Oh—that—’ I manage to say. ‘Dead between the eyes? Like a paramecium in drag? I’ve had it. Stand still. It’ll go.’

The line of people behind us moved on without us, not sparing us some dirty looks. We are from another constituency of the environment—I thought of telling them. One foot out, one foot in.

‘It’s gone,’ he said. ‘I’ve had it before.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

He knew I knew why, so didn’t answer.

But now
I
am the amateur.

I took us home in a cab—ten blocks. Those minor habit changes—sudden cabs, untoward purse-fumblings, a sense that one has talked too much, or else been silent without knowing it—these are the scariest.

Nothing—Rupert’s CAT scan said, and the doctor also. What they call an ‘incident.’ Not the same, I gather, as—an event.

Rupert does not remember any of it.

I have always been greedy for events. Recently, it has seemed to me, and even to Rupert who has always been less dependent on them, that what with our one remaining daughter so far off and friends going for good—we haven’t had enough of them.

Now—I don’t know.

F
OOD HAS ALWAYS BEEN
our joint responsibility. She has taught me to cook a little at her side, and now that she can’t carry I often shop alone, though on occasion she likes to come along to help select.

‘You two are the most
selecting
parents I know,’ Christina said, walking through our odd series of rooms again after so long, the year she came back from Italy to live with us and attend the Lincoln School a last year before college—for neither of which her father would pay. The elder child is not always the brightest, but she is—although to her father the infant son he and Gemma lost prematurely will always be in question.

‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘we are very select.’ Naturally she didn’t get the pun, being so rusty in English, but it wouldn’t take that girl long. I could see how our bare floors, small rugs, some of them only rag, and windows full of sky at the top half and showing the genre scenes of our side street at the bottom, must seem to her, after her father’s place, or rather her grandparents’, which I imagine as all leftover gilt, mock-antique damask, and the rippled ‘waterfall’-effect furniture of the 1940s Italian middle class. Although that was Rome as I knew it, not Tuscany. Our paintings are good, two or three thin-framed oils or watercolors to a room, each bought on installment until it was ours to hang. And often the work of a friend. Funny—how of all our group it was invariably the painters who became most famous, though of course not beyond their just deserts. Even at fifteen, Christina approved of their works in an awed way that made me suspect she already knew how much too good for us—for our means, that is—our little collection now was.

Of course she might already have known the names of some. Her father had an American crony over there who supplied all the art historians with slides of US art, and living here and the Lincoln School would do the rest. We allowed her to choose a picture for her own room, and she chose the Reginald Marsh—one of his lovely tarts striding the avenue, full of loose joy. Quiet girl, Christina; I doubt that she would have told her father about it. But the younger girl, Francesca, after her brief Christmas here, must have done so, and he promptly increased the amount of that ransom which has continued almost until this day. Even so, Gemma had always let him hang on to them for longer than he strictly should. ‘I will not have them bothered!’ And he gave them much, she said—a second language and sky, good butter and fruit as well as good manners, schools virtually without drug or sex problems, if otherwise too stringent, and the open heart of Italy itself.

‘And the tight purse?’

I only said it that one time; I do not grudge him anything except his fatherhood. The children were a great gift to me, who had none. And the rare fight Gemma and I had at that point did clear the air. Arturo himself, then on the edge of coming here to stay for God knows how long in one of our small spare rooms—for he is shameless—has never since dared. Christina, who heard all, must have shamed
him,
or even refused to let him use her and her sister as leverage—for after that Francesca too more or less came back to us.

They did have lovely manners. I think of Christina out there now in Saudi Arabia, almost in purdah with the other wives of the oil company’s executives, and how those manners must stand her in good stead, not only with them and such Saudi people as she might meet, but with herself. Having the baby will help. But is that—and charm—enough for a smart woman? Perhaps—when just remarried at almost forty. Though I have noticed that women museum curators tend to stay younger than their age. Lovely reticent girls like her to begin with, they stay enshrined in those cool halls, maybe tended by the very artifacts under their care, in some sympathy that streams from the long quiet of art.

As for our collection, much of it later went to pay the girls’ school fees, when my teaching and Gemma’s commissions lessened, and Francesca, as expensively vain as her father, became a problem we paid to stay away. What few artworks I have saved are for Gemma if I die. When I die. But the Marsh is in my will for Christina. Perhaps I should write and say it is hers, when the baby comes. I would have done so long since. But Gemma was so easily wheedled by Francesca. And the good child never asked.

The bad one, all sugar on top, often excused her demands by saying that one may ask anything of those who are lucky in love. I suppose many think that this is really all there is to Gemma and me. No doubt Arturo had so taught the girls—or had tried. Though when Christina did remarry she asked me to give her away—the only reason she was married in church, she said, adding to me in the vestry beforehand, and to Ethan at her side: ‘He raised me.’

Francesca wasn’t pressed to come for that second wedding. Her jobs were always shaky at best, even for Rome—if they existed at all, which her mother believed in more than I. But of course she phoned: ‘Doesn’t my sister want a bridesmaid? And I’m dying to meet Ethan.’