Any Minute I Can Split (17 page)

“I guess I'll have to feed her.” She took off her sweater.

“Ssssshhh,” Roger said, his back to her.

“She never goes back to sleep without being fed,” Margaret whispered irritably. Slowly, still rocking, Roger lowered the baby into the bunk bed. Silence.

“You were saying?” he asked triumphantly.

“Nothing.” She smiled, giving him his moment. He sat down on the edge of the bed, looked at her breasts, fondled them.

“You still nursing them?”

“Rue. She won't drink from a bottle. Rosie had a bottle last month for the first time and wouldn't bother with the breast any more. It's a little easier this way, they'd get terribly swollen before.”

“Lie down.”

“I was eating all this terrible stuff, and extra vitamins out of Adelle Davis so I'd have enough milk. Not everyone has enough for twins.” Did he know that she was bragging?

He peeled down her pants, stared at her stomach, tracing the now-pale ribbony ridges, leaning over and kissing them tenderly.

“I thought you'd be . . . I thought you'd hate the marks,” she whispered. She'd feared he would be repelled because she'd sensed more than once behind his cultivation of ugliness an attempt to exorcise some power it held over him.

“On the contrary,” he murmured, lovingly stretching her groin to see where the marks ended, kissing them, “they give you character. You could use some on your face.” The night they'd decided to get married he'd insisted on making her up as an old lady so he'd know what he was getting into, then informed her it would take her face about twice as long as most people's to get interesting. She'd asked him then in utmost seriousness whether he'd ever considered marrying someone twice his age instead of just a couple of years older and he'd replied with equal sobriety that he'd considered just that but had decided it would be more fun to find some bland-looking young girl and help her age prematurely.

Margaret giggled. She giggled because she had married Roger and that was a funny thing to have done.

Later, when they'd made love with fantastic pleasure and she had lain in bed sleepily wondering why it couldn't be that good all the time if you just lived together like two normal human beings—that must be the answer, it wasn't normal to have fantastic pleasure in regular doses—she drifted off into sleep and Rue
woke up in howling indignation at having been tricked back to sleep earlier. Thinking Roger was asleep, she put Rue between them on the bed and lay on her side to nurse. Then she looked up and met Roger's eyes. He caressed the baby's head, moved closer so that his body cradled the baby's back as Margaret cradled the front. Margaret and Roger looked at each other without smiling. A crystal moment she would always remember. A moment of awesome peace. Of
tangible
contentment. When she moved Rue and turned onto her left side, Roger cradled
her
back instead of the baby's. Briefly they all fell asleep but Margaret was awakened by the tightening of the sandwich whose filling she was, and then she put Rue back in the crib. When she returned to the bed Roger had rolled over to her side. She went around and got in on his side but it was an old peculiarity of hers, not to be able to sleep on the right-hand side of the bed, so finally, wide awake, she decided to go downstairs and make some tea. She put on Roger's long scratchy brown sweater that was on the floor and opened the door. David was curled up on the hallway floor, his eyes wide open. Oh, Jesus! David!

“David,” she whispered, “what are you doing, for crying out loud?”

“I thought you wouldn't want me to come in,” he said.

No shit.

“You were right, but why didn't you stay downstairs on the couch or find someplace in the barn?”

“It didn't seem fair,” he said. “The whole thing didn't seem fair, that all of a sudden I'm shut out of our room.” He was hugging himself, his hands caressing the soft blue wool of the sweater she'd finished for him just a few days before.

“Come on downstairs with me,” she said, at a loss. “I'm going to make some tea.”

“I don't know,” he said doubtfully. “I'm pretty tired.”

“Oh, come on,” she urged, tugging at the sweater. “It won't take long.”

He stood up and they went downstairs, where she put up water for tea.

“How come you're wearing that?” he asked.

She looked down at Roger's sweater, which came about a third of the way down her thighs. “It was just the closest thing to grab.” Ridiculous to be put in the position of feeling guilty that you slept with your husband. “The baby woke up. I didn't feel like going back to sleep.”

“Did you tell him about me?”

“No, David. I didn't.”

“Are you going to?”

“Not unless I have to, I guess.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that if I have a choice of telling the truth or lying and having Roger know I'm lying, then maybe I'll tell the truth.”

“But if you can lie and get away with it you will.” A certain moral loftiness in his tone.

“Sure.” The water began boiling and she put in some tea, wishing that tea bags weren't
verboten
at the farm because of the chemicals in the paper. “It seems like the least I can do.”

David said, “Sometimes I don't understand you.”

Margaret said, “That is because of your extreme youth and my advanced age.” Two poles with a distance of eleven years between them.

David said, “You're not so old.”

“You don't think I'm old?”

“I like women of all ages.”

“I'm so glad to hear that, David, because the fact is that tomorrow's my thirtieth birthday and I was fearing you would reject me.”

“But instead
you
rejected
me.”

“I didn't reject you,” she told him. “My husband just showed up.”

“Did you know he was coming?”

“Of course not. I would've told you.”

“Why did he come?”

She shrugged. “Maybe he missed me . . . or maybe he was just curious.” She smiled but David didn't. He wouldn't remember their conversation of months before. Why did she? It must have to do with the importance other people had for you. Yet David was acting as though she
was
important.

“David, you know that I'm fond of you and that's not going to change just because Roger's here.”

“What
will
change?”

“Oh, God,” she said, “I really have no idea. I find it hard to think in terms of the future.”
And so do you most of the time.

“The future,” he said bitterly. “Where I'm going to sleep tonight, is that the future?”

It was a question at once reasonable and impossible. She hesitated, his urgency about the present briefly contagious.

“Would you like me to get a blanket and sheet and make up the couch for you?”

He shrugged. How long had he been on the road and how often had he slept on grass, on gravel, on somebody's floor? But of course he'd made it clear from the beginning that he expected more of her. She made up the couch and grudgingly he stretched out on it without taking off his shoes. She pulled off his shoes and covered him. She turned off the light and sat on the floor near him, stroking his head, wondering what would happen if Roger woke up. Trying to figure out how David had managed to make her feel guilty about neglecting him instead of betraying Roger. Maybe she wasn't betraying Roger? Maybe it was what he wanted? No. More likely it didn't matter in her own deep down balance book what Roger wanted. If you were of that generation which having repudiated the old values still carried them around tattooed in your vital organs like some IBM cards of guilt, registering old ladies helped across the street, litter not picked up, husbands abandoned, young boys screwed, then it didn't matter what your explanation was or what your views of the future,
it only mattered that you were the devil's handmaiden. The guilt was there, it simply hadn't made itself felt, yet. David's eyes were open, wakeful. Challenging her to make him sleep. What could she tell him? The things she could say that might make him feel better would all be lies.

“If he leaves tomorrow will you go with him?”

“No,” she said. “I don't think so. But I don't think he'll want to, either.”

“What if he does?”

“I don't know, David. I hardly ever know what I'm going to do in advance.” No. That wasn't the right thing to say. “I can't imagine that I would just walk out of here and leave you and never see you again, if that's what you're thinking.”

He glowered at her.

“You're not being fair,” she said. “You know that I'm crazy about you.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

She hesitated. “It means I'm all involved with you. I like you and I care about you and I've been all wrapped up in you for a pretty long time.”

“You've been wrapped up in your
babies.”

“Yes, but in you, too.” Not in a hundred percent different ways. But maybe you know that. You know it and it doesn't mean shit to you.

He wanted to make love to her but she couldn't let him. She sat on the rug and leaned up against the couch.

“I'll have to go up soon.”

“You said you'd stay until I fell asleep.”

“Are you going to stay up all night, then?”

“How'm I supposed to know?”

Fair is fair.

“Maybe tomorrow we could set you up in the barn,” she said. “In the room next to the one Butterscotch is using.” And Jordan.

“You're trying to get rid of me.”

“If I was trying to get rid of you,” she pointed out, “I
wouldn't be trying to figure out how to make you comfortable.”

“I was comfortable where I was,” he said.

She sighed. “I know that, David, but it's not fair for you to . . . I mean it's not my fault Roger showed up.”

“It'll be your fault if he stays.”

“Not necessarily. He could stay to bug me.”

“You mean you don't want him to?”

“I didn't say that. I don't know how I'm going to feel. All I'm saying is that what he does doesn't depend on what I want.” Any relationship, if it exists, being inverse.

“What if you had your choice right now? Would you have him stay or go?”

“Right now . . . I guess I'd have to say stay, David. His daughters are here, you know, he's never even seen them before. How could I want him to go?”

“What if they weren't here?”

She stared at him, her mind a temporary blank. “What do you mean? Of course they're here, how can I . . .”
How can I want to know the answer to that?
This was her whole life they were playing around with as though it were some kind of game plan.

“All I'm saying is if it didn't happen that you became pregnant, and you did what you did, came here and so on, and we were all going along pretty much like we were except you had more time because no babies, and then he showed up—how would you feel?”

No, that wasn't it; she was wet wash being put through the mangle of an old-fashioned washing machine.

“I guess I'd have mixed feelings, like now.”

“What would you need him for if you didn't have this crap in your head about kids and parents?”

“It's not crap.”

“It
is
crap.” Fiercely. “My parents got divorced and it didn't make a fucking bit of difference in my life.”

“Mmmmmmm.”

“I mean you can tell yourself some shit about how I
was a boy scout when they were still married and this terrific change came over me but that's what it'll be, a load of shit.”

“How old were you when your parents got divorced?”

“Eleven.” Sulky.

“Did they get married again?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you five with your mother and her husband?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you like him?”

“Mitchell? He's all right. I mean he's a prick but he's a nice guy and he's got plenty of money and they travel all the time so they weren't on my back.”

Pause to digest. “David? Do you mean the same Mitchell who owns the farm?”

“Yeah.”

“Why didn't you tell me that?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I don't know but it does.”

“Bullshit.” Fierce again. “All this is bullshit because you don't wanna answer what I asked you before.”

“That's only partly true.”

Silence.

“You were getting balled anyhow, so you didn't need him for that.”

She smiled. “Maybe I like a kind of written guarantee that I'll always get balled.”

“Marriage doesn't give you that. Half the married people I know don't ball.”

“They told you.”

“They don't have to tell me. I can look at them and tell myself. Mitchell balled my mother more before they were married than after. You think I couldn't tell?”

Silence.

“There's a permanence to the idea of marriage,” she said feebly. He snickered. “I mean, I'm not saying it always works, but there's a certain security to the idea of it, of always being with the same person, for better or worse, and all that stuff.”

“You make me sick with your lies.”

That, David, is because you thinking I'm lying for your benefit while in truth I'm lying for my own.

Silence.

“All I was saying, David, is that a place like this you feel as if the whole thing could split up any minute, people coming and going, for me that's a very shaky feeling.” Shakier than going to parties with Roger and wondering how I'll get home? “All right, so a lot of it is baloney. I admit it. So I can't answer your question.”