American Appetites (10 page)

“What of Ian?” someone asks.

“Ian will have to fend for himself,” Glynnis says.

So, like children, they pass the containers around: protesting, some of them, that they cannot eat another mouthful of anything, yet spooning up the ice cream nonetheless; like children. A cigarette burns in Glynnis's fingers, though she cannot recall having lit it; and she has finished her second tiny glass of crème de menthe; and her eyes water, after a spasm of laughter; and she licks banana-ripple ice cream from a spoon held by Vaughn Cassity and wonders where Ian is, and where Bianca is. And why, now, when the party has crested, and all that might have gone wrong with the meal has not gone wrong, and their friends are so clearly enjoying themselves, warmed, mellowed, agreeably intoxicated with food and drink, why, she wonders, should she feel, in secret, so melancholy, as after love, after the expenditure of love in passion; so leaden, behind her party vivacity; so susceptible to tears? she thinks, too, even as she laughs in a fit of helplessness at a funny remark of his, that Denis and she have had relatively little to say to each other tonight; he has been more keenly attuned, in fact, to Meika, and Meika to him: Meika Cassity, with her stylish streaked ash-blond hair, her so very French so very feminine laughter, looking, aged forty-three or -four, a decade younger, and ravenous for men. . . .

“
IAN? IS SOMETHING
wrong?”

Glynnis has opened the door to Ian's study, without knocking, and there he sits, in the dark, at his desk, the telephone before him, his head in his hands. When the light from the hall falls onto him he looks up, blinking and guilty. Seeing him without his glasses always arouses, in Glynnis, conflicting emotions of tenderness and impatience. She guesses, at such times, that he can barely make out the expression on her face.

“Who are you calling?” Glynnis asks, frightened. “
Is
something wrong?”

Ian gets quickly to his feet, puts on his glasses, says, apologetically, “Nothing is wrong, Glynnis, I'm sorry to have . . .” and there is a long pause, as, it seems, he cannot think of what he means to say. Glynnis is puzzled; she is hurt and angry, asking why on earth he has to make a telephone call now, doesn't he know their friends are about to leave, isn't he aware of having been away from the table for a very long time, of having been rude, when everyone has been so wonderful to him, when the evening has gone so well?

“I'm sorry,” Ian says. “I hadn't realized I was away very long. I seem to have lost track of . . .”

“Ian, how could you!”

His hair is disheveled, his necktie loosened; there is an unpleasant dampish odor about him, commingled with a sweet wine smell. A guilty man, Glynnis thinks. An adulterer.

She says, calmly, “Something is wrong, isn't it? Who did you call?”

“I
tried
to call Stanley Brisbane . . . but no one answered. I've been trying to get through to him most of the day.”

“Who is Stanley Brisbane?”

“My co-chairman for the Budapest conference in October . . . he and I are organizing the world population symposium . . . we have to get speakers, panels. There is a minor crisis, a budget problem; I've been trying to reach him in Chicago for two days, actually, with no—”

Glynnis cries, “Ian, please do not speak of that
now
.”

When they return to the dining room, it is to discover, to Glynnis's chagrin, that several of their guests are on their feet, ready to leave; and Ian apologizes, not without a certain measure of charm, explaining about the telephone call, his futile attempts to reach Stanley Brisbane, the political scientist, of Chicago, the problems he has been having with Brisbane overall, in organizing their part of the conference, and so on and so forth, glossing over the awkward moment and making everything all right, or nearly. Denis, in whom drink arouses belligerence and a curious stubborn loyalty to friends, says, “You should know better than to get involved with Stanley: the man is spoiled rotten.” Denis proceeds then to tell one of his convoluted and, in this instance, not entirely coherent tales, and the Hawleys and the Kuhns, though prepared to leave, linger; and everyone laughs at the posturings and pretensions of Stanley Brisbane, of Chicago, of whom, until now, Glynnis has never heard. But she laughs, with the others. And pours herself another tiny glass of crème de menthe. So lethal, and so delicious.

BY THE TIME
the taxi comes for Marvis it is 1:20
A.M
. Glynnis, switching off the lights in the kitchen, dining room, living room, sips a glass of leftover Bernkasteler Doktor Auslese 1982, swaying, in her stockinged feet, with exhaustion and exhilaration: for Ian McCullough's fiftieth birthday has been a great success . . . a memorable evening, as everyone said . . . the food superb . . . no one quite like Glynnis. Ian, helping clear the dining room table, swaying too on his feet, was apologetic, contrite, speaking slowly, enunciating each syllable, his way when he has had too much to drink and doesn't know it. Saying for the third or fourth time, “I am sorry, I hadn't realized, I didn't mean to be rude, I seem to have lost track of. . . .”

And then Bianca comes home; and Glynnis feels compelled to speak with her, if only to show her, the hurtful little bitch, how little her absence meant: how little, in truth, her mother
had
been hurt by her selfish behavior. “And did you enjoy yourself, with—who was it, Kim?” Glynnis begins.

And Bianca says quickly, “Yes. Kim. And, yes, I did”—peeling off her sweater—“and how was Daddy's party here?”

“Daddy's party was fine,” Glynnis says, betraying no irony, no anger, not even reproach, as, all but ignoring her, Bianca stretches, and yawns, and shakes her head as a dog shakes its head, a handsome young woman whose vision of herself, so far as Glynnis can determine, is deliberately crude, flat-footed, clumsy, the obverse of her mother's style, it might be said, and in defiance of it. “Where did you eat finally?” Glynnis asks.

And Bianca says, shrugging, “Nowhere special.”

Glynnis says, “Yes, but where?”

And Bianca turns away, bored, sullen, belching beer. “One of the usual places.”

Why do you hate me? Glynnis thinks. Why, when I love you, when I would love you, except for your opposition?

Mother and daughter are standing just outside the door to Bianca's room. It is twenty to two; Ian has gone to bed; beyond them, the house, emptied of its guests, seems deafeningly silent, a mysterious becalmed ship at dock in a nighttime sea. Glynnis stares at Bianca, who will not look at her, wanting to take the girl's face in her hands, to squeeze, to frame, to define; thinking, And shall we quarrel, or shall we kiss each other good night? Or shall we, accustomed as we are of giving and taking hurt, simply say good night, and turn away, and let things as they are.

Bianca says, “Well—”

Glynnis says, “Well.” And then, turning away, softly, “Good night.”

IAN, ON HIS
back, lies with a forearm slung over his eyes, to shield them from the bedside lamp. His breath is audible, rasping; he appears to be asleep, unmoving, his long legs outstretched, perfectly still, like a stone figure atop a sarcophagus.

Glynnis slips on a nightgown; out of old habit draws her hands up, and over, her breasts, cupping them for an instant, feeling an instant's perplexity and regret. They say of course that it is the body that betrays; the self, the soul, remains inviolate; thus you are twenty years old so abruptly, so rudely, in a fifty-year-old body. And your journey has only now begun.

I cannot bear it, Glynnis thinks.

Something will happen and it will happen soon and it will happen without my volition or responsibility: but what?

She thinks of Ian, surprised in his study in the dark, having made, or having attempted to make, or having contemplated making, a telephone call. A professional call, and why not believe it, why not? For after all (Glynnis begins to think, heartened) it is not the first time Ian, or one or another of his colleagues, like Vincent, like Denis, above all Amos, has acted similarly. . . . Social life does not mean to men what it means to women, Elizabeth Kuhn once remarked. That is a fact we must always remember.

But an old memory, an old perplexity, intrudes: in January, Ian went to a professional conference in Boston at which he, or the
Journal
, received an award; but when Glynnis telephoned, on Saturday afternoon, she was informed that Ian had already checked out of the hotel. The conference was scheduled to disband on Sunday afternoon; Ian had told her he would be home Sunday evening; where was he? She thought, I will resist the impulse to call one of his friends. I will resist the impulse to hunt him down.

And when, Sunday evening, Ian returned home, tired, irritable, vague, telling Glynnis that the conference had not gone “perfectly”—there was a conservative faction gathering power among his colleagues, a sort of political-sociobiological element he found incipiently racist and in other ways distasteful—Glynnis said only, “What about your award; aren't you pleased with that?” And Ian said, “Oh, yes, yes, of course,” as if he'd only then remembered it; and to placate her, as a child might placate his mother, he showed her the gilt-stamped document from the National Association of Political Scientists and the check for $1,500. Glynnis had determined she would not ask him about the hotel but heard herself nonetheless ask, casually, “When did you leave Boston?” Ian said, with no apparent hesitation, “Today. This afternoon. The conference lasted until this afternoon.” Still casually, Glynnis said, “But I telephoned you yesterday and they told me you'd checked out, a day ahead of time,” adding, lest it seem she was accusing him—for she was hardly, after all, accusing him—“There must have been a mistake at the desk.” By this time Ian had turned away, was walking away, said only, over his shoulder, “Yes, that's right—I mean, that is probably right. A mistake at the desk.”

And Glynnis wanted to scream after him, to rush at him, striking with her fists, hitting, hurting, demanding: Are you lying to me? Are you deceiving me? Don't you know there will be consequences?

NOW SHE SLIPS
into bed, not wanting to disturb him, switches off the bedside lamp, turns to him, as, usually, reflexively, he turns to her; and she kisses him, sleepily; and he wakes, and kisses her, yet very sleepily; and they ease apart. Glynnis customarily sleeps facing the edge of the bed, on her right, partly hugging herself: a childhood habit never outgrown. Except for infrequent restless nights and more frequent bouts of nighttime sweating, she is a quiet, even inert sleeper: heavy-seeming, in sleep, as a dark quivering pool rises to meet her and enclose her, her breath oddly quickening as a cascade of images, primarily faces, rush at her . . . some of them recognizable, the faces of her friends (though distorted, distended, as in a fun-house mirror) but most of them the faces of strangers (yet so striking in their vivid, hallucinatory detail, she cannot believe they are but mere fictions of her unstoppered imagination): rush at her like a speeding landscape in which she is passive, frozen, an uncomprehending witness. Yet it is not nightmare, nor does it ever lead to nightmare; simply a sleep of exhaustion steeped in alcohol . . . through which she makes her way, drifting, dropping, sinking, an element dense and porous as water that yields, always abruptly, another place . . . ah, but she is barefoot, and the floorboards are cold, and an odor as of stale food permeates the air, and drink . . . someone has spilled wine on the tablecloth, Ian said, a pity, do you think it will come out, our beautiful tablecloth, Ian said, but the brass chandelier shines and the candelabra with their tall graceful candles, the afterimages of the flames reflected in the mirror above the sideboard and in the glass walls and sliding door, and in the kitchen the bottoms of the copper pans shine like miniature moons and the hanging plants in the window quiver spiderlike with their own secret life and why, Glynnis thinks, why is Marvis so barely civil to her the latter part of the evening, unsmiling and unresponsive and Glynnis has always been so nice to her, generous at Christmas, careful not to be, not even to seem, condescending, what do they want, these black women, the women as mysterious finally as the men, what do they want from us we seem incapable of giving? . . . but Glynnis and Ian are at the door saying good night to their friends, Glynnis's warm cheek is being kissed, and she kisses in return, happily, greedily, Denis's liquorish breath in her face, and she laughs, and winces, and pushes him away, or is it another man, a stranger, she pushes away, as a woman she does not recognize stands on her tiptoes and kisses Ian good night, no, it is Roberta, or is it Meika, it
is
Roberta, but her hand is skeletal and cold so that in fright Glynnis drops it but shows no alarm, her facial skin tight as a mask showing no alarm, I love you both, I love love love you both, I drown in all of you.

AND THE DOOR
is closed, with care, in the glass wall.

It's an instinct now, with the McCulloughs.

Living in a glass house, after all.

On her bare drifting feet Glynnis traverses the many rooms of her house, these rooms that, though some of them appear unknown to her, are nonetheless hers, and her responsibility; in one of them, cavelike, cavernous, she discovers her daughter sleeping or the child they assured her was hers sleeping a baby's intense trembling sleep so deep she cannot be wakened; and how am
I
responsible, Glynnis protests, what am
I
to do? And in another room, in which the walls come together at a peculiar slant and the ceiling presses low and the air is humid, as in a greenhouse, there are Ian and Glynnis, the McCulloughs, in bed, beneath familiar covers, turned from each other in the privacy and loneliness of sleep and their bodies curled inward, coiled, like the bodies of soft creatures whose shells have been prized off them; and each is the other's twin, though turned resolutely away from the other, in the privacy and loneliness of sleep. And Glynnis is suddenly angry with them, and impatient, yawning a swift savage jaw-aching yawn like the one that overcame her in the kitchen, the bright lights on and Marvis at the sink noisily rinsing dishes, noisily setting them in the dishwasher except for those too delicate to entrust to the washer which will have to be done by hand: surely you know which ones, Marvis, after all our years together? At the far end of the beautifully set table sits a tall pale stranger eating her food drinking her wine baring his teeth in a wide white grin; but the candlelight is blinding, Glynnis cannot make out his face.