Any Minute I Can Split (22 page)

“I don't know. There's something that seems right about it, in some awful sort of way.”

“It only seems right if you believe that people who do good things deserve to be kicked in the teeth.”

Was he defending her or himself? Damn Roger for leaving his drops of poison in her mind.

“I was nasty to him today,” she said. “I mean not exactly nasty but it was the first time I really talked to him the way he talked to me.”

“Good,” De Witt said, stroking her arm with his encircling arm, her hair with his other hand.

“He said I had no right to be that way. That he and I were—well, what he was saying essentially was that I was violating the nature of our relationship. That I'd always been giving and loving, however he'd been, and it wasn't fair for me to suddenly change.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Well, I understand what he meant.”

“Maybe he meant that he was jealous that you were capable of change and he wasn't.”

She looked at him wonderingly. “That's exactly what
I accused him of, being jealous. That's when he got so mad.”

He smiled. “Okay, then. What's our next problem?”

“De Witt,” she said, “don't ever leave me.”

“I won't,” he said tenderly. “I promise you that, Margaret. If I ever leave here, you can come with me.”

Tears welled in her eyes. “I really love you, De Witt.”

“I love you, too, Margaret.”

There were footsteps on the stairs; she froze. Then there was Roger's voice.

“Get the fuck away from my wife, you fucking motherfucker.”

De Witt released her gently, swung around on the bench to face Roger.

“It seems to me,” he said mildly, “that you want all the privileges of the extended family but you don't want Margaret to have them.”

“You don't think I'm going to argue with you and your fucking idiot lingo, do you?”

“Now you sound just like David,” De Witt said. “You can say whatever comes into your mind but nobody can talk back.”

“Listen, you pimp—”

“Roger,” Margaret interrupted, “he was comforting me because I was upset and you wouldn't!”

“Why the hell should I?” he shouted. “It was my wife geting fucked by that crazy little bastard, not his!”

“I wasn't fucking him!” she shouted back. “Not after you came! And what if I was? You've been fucking around yourself, you'd have had Hannah, if she could be had.”

“She can be had, all right,” De Witt muttered.

“And when I think back,” she went on, too furious to pay attention to De Witt, “to the number of girls you've had since I knew you—”

“I never gave all those girls put together,” Roger shouted at the top of his lungs, his face bright red with rage, “the love you gave that lousy kid in one day!!!!!”

She was dumbstruck. By what? By the truth? By
Roger's perception of it? By her own failure to perceive it before? De Witt was watching her. Roger, seeing her reaction, was calming down. Outside the kitchen window at least one of the twins was crying. How long had that been going on unnoticed? She couldn't relate to it.

De Witt said, “You're trying to penalize Margaret for being a more loving person than you are.”

Roger said, “If I tried to give you an intelligent answer you'd think I was interested in talking to you.”

De Witt said, “You should be, we live in the same house.”

Roger was silent.

“We've been sort of walking around each other,” De Witt said. “Not arguing but never being friends, either.”

“So what?”

De Witt shrugged, “There must be more to be gained for both of us.”

“What if I don't like you?”

De Witt's expression didn't change but it seemed to Margaret that he was hurt. “Then I think you should tell me why.”

“Okay,” Roger said. “Sure I'll tell you. You see, I disagree completely with Hannah's idea of you. Hannah thinks, you know, you're a fraud, some Kind of dark, menacing power freak who's only being nice in exchange for control of the situation.”

De Witt smiled, nodded.

“But I think you're just what you seem to be. Bland. Eager to please. Catering to other people's emotions. A fucking caterer to the emotions, never getting mad because people wouldn't like it.”

“I don't think that's fair,” De Witt said slowly. “Although it's true that I seldom get angry.”

“But Roger has trouble getting anything
but
angry,” Margaret said. Aching for De Witt.

De Witt smiled. “Then maybe it's an attraction of opposites.”

“On
your
part, maybe,” Roger said to him.

“All right,” De Witt said. “On my part.”

Silence. Outside the babies were still crying.

“What do the poor kids have to do?” Roger asked her. “Scream out their lungs before you go find out what's wrong?”

Reluctantly Margaret went out. Rue had apparently eaten some dirt and choked it up; she was practically purple with rage, and Rosie was crying along with her, in sympathy. Guilt stricken, Margaret picked up Rue, who continued sobbing uncontrollably, although Rosie, watching, stopped. Margaret paced around the yard with Rue until the crying had slowed down somewhat, then she sat down in the grass with Rue in her lap; Rosie nestled alongside. The yard was alive with activity. Paul and Jordan were repairing the chicken coop. Hannah was showing some people around the grounds; she seemed in good spirits. One of the alternatives bulletins had listed them as having a school and for several weeks they'd been having visitors at least all weekend. They turned away people who phoned first, requesting that they wait until planting time was over, but most of them found it difficult to be rude to any reasonably decent human being who showed up in person, however inconvenient his presence might be. Finally, by tacit consent of the group, Hannah, who was so ingratiating with strangers, had been given the job of greeting people and answering their questions. Most people asked questions about the nature of life at the farm and Hannah was the only one who could answer because she was the only one who was convinced that her answers wouldn't turn out to be irrelevant. How things worked had more to do with how you perceived them to work, how you made them work, than with anyone else's idea of the order of things. Only Hannah could assure people, straight-faced and utterly believable, that there were no emotional difficulties at the farm because they didn't have the time and energy to waste on fighting, and then point out that besides they didn't eat white bread and all that shit that poisoned people's minds. At the beginning, some types would do a double
take on that one, but by the time she tripped off on the use of niacin to cure schizophrenia, no one seemed to think that she was kidding—or should be. The women in particular seemed to take to Hannah and often she would get letters saying it had proved impossible for someone to move up for economic or other reasons but the writer did hope that Hannah would visit sometime with her children.

What was going on inside? She'd been sitting outside for almost half an hour and no one had come in or out of the house. It was true that Roger got angry on the rare occasions when she let the twins cry, but it was also true that he'd seemed glad of the excuse to get rid of her. She decided the twins were probably thirsty, anyway, so she would bring them into the kitchen for some milk or juice. Rosie was drinking from a cup all the time now and Rue was doing it during the day. Rue could make it up the steps now, but Margaret carried Rosie. If there was an argument going on, she couldn't hear it from the outside, although she listened for a minute before cautiously opening the front door.

Sounds of quiet activity throughout the house reached her ears. From the crafts room came the hum of the sewing machine, from the kitchen the sound of the oven door being closed. It was late afternoon but the house was still full of daylight. The smell of freshly baked bread dominated but other good smells, soup or stew as well as something sweet, like baking fruit, were combining with it. She put down Rosie and went into the kitchen. Starr was muttering over the stewpot. And at the long table, sitting facing each other and chatting with an easy intimacy that suggested they'd been in telepathic communication for years, were Roger and De Witt.

So that was why he'd wanted her out of the way, he hadn't wanted her to see him capitulating to De Witt's friendliness! He waved her away when she tried to approach them. Resentfully she went into the other room. How like Roger, having decided he could tolerate
De Witt after all, to eliminate her from the friendship.

“Roger,” she asked later, “what did De Witt say that made you change your mind about him?”

“I didn't change my mind about him,” Roger said. “I think the same thing as I thought before, I changed my mind about the way I
feel
about that.”

“You mean you're compatible because you're so different.”

Roger nodded.

“Why didn't you want me there?”

“We were talking business.”

“So?”

“Women can't talk business without dragging a lot of other stuff into it.”

“What kind of business?”

“Making the farm self-sustaining. De Witt has a feeling Mitchell wants to get out. Whenever they talk on the phone lately Mitchell bitches about money. He's having trouble with conservation groups over one of his paper company's forests, and so on. Higher taxes.”

“You mean you want to buy the farm?”

“Yup.”

“Does De Witt have any money?”

“Nope.”

“How could you manage it? Your income might cover a mortgage but—”

“By selling the house in Hartsdale, to begin with.”

“Wait a minute.” It was an automatic reaction. Exactly the words she'd used when she got the phone call about her mother.
Stop and let's go back a few minutes to when it wasn't too late.

“You see what I mean?” Roger asked triumphantly. “You're in a panic already.”

“This isn't just business, you're talking, Roger,” she pointed out. “This is my life!”

“That
house?” Roger asked sarcastically.
“That
town? You're kidding me.”

She shook her head. She'd never liked the house or the town. But they were a bridge to the past and she
didn't like to burn bridges behind her. If you burned too many bridges you became just like those neighbors who frightened you so, the bright-eyed corporation wives ready on a minute's notice to collapse the contents of their lives and transport them on to Texas, New Jersey, Detroit, San Juan. To the next Newcomers' Club, Brownies Troop, Cancer Drive, Book 'n' Bake Sale. If their husband's timing was right they could bake the same cake each year in a different village of the damned and then move on to the next one, knowing that the body of some other corporation engineer's wife would appear to inhabit their home, their spot, their life.

She began to cry.

“Oh, shit,” Roger said. “How did I know this would happen?”

“I know it makes sense, Roger. I'm not saying it doesn't make sense to sell it.”

“You're
what doesn't make sense.”

“I know, I know.” Tearful. “Why couldn't we rent it furnished?”

“What would that solve? Where would we get a down payment? As it is we might have to take back the mortgage.”

“I think I'm scared of the idea of committing ourselves to this place.”

“Selling the house doesn't commit us to anything but getting out of Hartsdale.”

“Well, that's just it, maybe,” she said, feeling dishonest. “I need to feel committed
to
something, not just to getting out of something.”

“I thought you were crazy about this place.”

“I
am,
but . . .” But what? The tears stopped.
But what?
But she wasn't so sure, now that there was this change in their relations with De Witt? Now that she would no longer have De Witt's automatic support in her life battle with Roger? No, it was more than that. The truth was that while she'd had vague thoughts of De Witt in terms of the future, she'd never really
thought of the farm as anything more than a refuge from her marriage. Just as De Witt had said—it existed for her in contrast, and she was no more ready to abandon her real life than Marie Antoinette had been about to abandon the court at Versailles for the aprons and milk buckets she was fond of playing with. The steady routine, the lack of mental stimulation, the absence of stores, neon lights and traffic, of all those city nuisances that somehow served to keep your blood pressure from getting sluggish and your brain from turning into un- crunchy Granola, if she was frightened by De Witt's vision of movement as salvation, she was no less frightened at the thought of giving up more or less permanently those urban qualities, positive and negative, that made life seem much more interesting than it really was. In New York apocalypse seemed little more than an extension of everyday reality while up here you could picture yourself in another few years waiting for
anything
that would break up the monotony. “I love it here, Roger. But saying that isn't saying that I could stand to live here forever. Stay on a farm and milk goats and grow vegetables and all that with no change.”

“There's no law we'd have to do that,” Roger pointed out. “Why would we be any more limited to this place than we were limited to Hartsdale?”

“A farm is a lot more work than a house.”

“There's a lot more people to do it.”

“We'd be able to go places?” Quaveringly. “Together? Maybe take a vacation and go to Europe?”

Roger laughed. “You never wanted to go to Europe.” This was true. She was frightened of airplanes and convinced she would get seasick. “I used to talk about going back to Paris and you never wanted to get off your ass and do it.”