Compass Rose (18 page)

After a few moments Miss Perry opened her eyes. “Rose,” she said. “It
is
Rose. Does Rose know how to swim?”

Elsie said, “Yes.”

Miss Perry said, “I remember Charlie and Tom jumping in. Were you there that day?”

“No, but you described it very clearly.”

“Ah,” Miss Perry said. She smiled her lopsided smile. “I had a cousin who in his old age began to repeat himself. He would list all the mountains in New England that he’d climbed. I learned to say, ‘Yes, Chocorua—I remember how vividly you described it. I feel as if I’ve climbed it myself.’ Would you please help me upstairs? Actual conversations are more tiring than the conversations I have in my dreams.”

T
he parts of Elsie’s life that she saw as her own history and geography seemed to her so much the same for such a long time that she couldn’t tell the years apart. Rose growing. Miss Perry reviving, declining, reviving. Elsie quarreled with Jack about
different subjects, but it was the same quarrel. She was still undone when she would unexpectedly run into Dick. One time was so sharp that it kept jumping out of sequence—it came back to her as if it had just happened, leapfrogging what was in fact a longer and longer span of time. She was down by the docks;
Spartina
was in port. Dick was splicing two cables, weaving two starbursts of metal strands into a slowly lengthening joint, a bit thicker than either cable but neatly uniform and hard. Elsie watched the splice grow, watched Dick’s forearms and hands with the kind of absorption she usually felt only when watching something wild. It was when she turned away that she felt desire—not a sexual desire but a desire to sense again his inmost savor. It was such a sharp desire she felt hollowed out by it, as if by fear.

Another intensity that had an eccentric orbit in her memory—she couldn’t tell if it happened before or after she saw Dick working on the cable splice—was the red squirrel. She was sitting in the undergrowth on the edge of a clearing. She heard the chiming note of a red squirrel, so different from the chatter of a gray squirrel. She tried to imitate the sound, first by whistling, then by humming very high. She came closest when she half clucked, half whistled inward. The red squirrel appeared halfway down a maple tree. It was small even for a red squirrel, probably young. She called again. It looked around, came down to the ground, apparently didn’t see her. She called again and it hopped twice, two small arcs toward her. It turned its head, twitched its ears, hopped again. It was within six feet of her boots when she felt the air move. There was a blur and then a perfect stillness. A hawk folded its wings. The red squirrel was turned on its side, motionless in the talons. The hawk turned its head and looked into Elsie’s eyes. She was held absolutely still as the hawk’s stare moved through her. Then the hawk was gone.

By the time she got to her feet what had happened in front of her eyes was in fragments. She tried to reassemble it then, and many times later. She never got it whole. It didn’t matter.

Sometimes she felt guilt, sometimes not. She could place it in a season only because she’d gone over to the maple tree and seen where the red squirrel had gnawed a bare patch on which some
maple sap had crystallized. So probably March. She couldn’t remember if she’d been cold. She figured it was most likely a broad-winged hawk, but that was only a guess—larger hawks would have had trouble stooping into such a small clearing. She was a terrible witness—no details about wingspan or plumage—she couldn’t even say whether the talons had pierced the squirrel or clutched it. What she did have was an instant of intimacy that was both ferocious and serene.

As she had with Dick.

A milder exchange with Johnny Bienvenue, not one that plummeted so vividly through her, turned out in retrospect to be the start of a gradual rearrangement of her life. It was one of the rare occasions when they were in her bed. Rose was spending the night at May’s house, and Mary was at Sawtooth. Elsie was completely relaxed, happy to lie there, waiting until Johnny got up to make them tea. He rolled onto his side, kissed her shoulder, and sat up. He said, “Have you ever thought of having another child?”

She was in the middle of a yawn. On the exhale she said, comfortably, “God, no. It’s taking everything I have to raise this one.”

Johnny kept moving, stood up, and said, “You want something to eat?”

“Just tea.”

It was a few days before she replayed the question and answer in her head. She drew a sharp breath, partly at how obtuse she’d been, partly in sympathy for Johnny. But in the end the only thing she felt bad about was the truth coming out on a languorous postcoital yawn.

They kept seeing each other, usually every other week. She did two things consciously. She asked him more questions about his work, and she got him to be the one to start their lovemaking. He’d been pleasantly surprised in the beginning and even after several years, that she would be the one. His experience wasn’t nearly as varied as hers, and he’d been surprised to find that a woman could have been thinking about him that way. During what she was pretty sure was the slow uncoupling of their love life, she didn’t want him
to think he’d been—she picked a lawyer’s word he’d taught her—fungible. A fungible partner, fungible body, fungible pleasure.

She found herself wondering whether she’d prepared him for the marriage he was bound to have—in fact, needed for his career—or if the habit of secret trysts might have spoiled him for it.

In the long run, she was glad that the truth about her not wanting another child had come out, because it precluded her having to say anything further—for example, that the idea of being a politician’s wife set off an attack of claustrophobia in her.

All of this was a diffuse and intermittent part of her life. In fact, the drifting apart, which she’d thought would take a few months, went on for more than a year.

Mary Scanlon, Elsie’s only confidante about Johnny, said, “The pair of you are making more farewell appearances than Nellie Melba.”

Elsie said, “Nellie Melba?”

“An old opera singer. You can substitute Cher.”

What Elsie didn’t tell Mary was that it was precisely because these were farewell performances that they were (a) so sentimentally as well as erotically charged that it would be a shame not to have another, or (b) not quite the right note to end on, so it would still be a shame.

There was some artifice on Elsie’s part. She often said, “Let’s just have a nice lunch and take a walk.” Sometimes it was just that, but it was pretty much up to Elsie. She genuinely liked talking with him about his problem cases, whether they presented perplexities of law or politics, but she also knew she had the geisha-like ability to convert his pleasure at being listened to into physical desire. One time she squeezed his wide paw of a hand and said, “Wait. Sorry. My brain just reached overload.” She laughed. She looked at him two seconds longer than called for. She turned her head and lowered her eyes. She waited while the air between them grew thicker. She put her fingertips to her forehead and, mixing the words with a soft breath, said, “Do you have to get back to work right away?”

She told herself that it wasn’t so much artifice as method acting. She wasn’t just indicating a feeling, she was experiencing the feeling,
or at least using a remembered feeling to set off a present feeling. Because she saw Johnny infrequently, it took her a long time to see that she was splitting him into two people: One, a guy she really liked, who liked her, who in his turn listened to her, understood and sympathized with her, but, compared to her, was wholehearted and innocent. Two, a smart, powerful man whom she could seduce as if he were someone from her red-dress days, with that extra whiff of pleasure she got from turning an upstanding citizen into a bad boy.

One Sunday before Johnny showed up for a picnic, she saw in the style section of the
Providence Journal
that he was one of Rhode Island’s ten most eligible bachelors. She felt a succession of pangs—what? How dare they? He should be ashamed. She read it to be sure her name wasn’t there. When he showed up she said, “Seen the paper yet?”

“No.”

A bright Sunday morning, Mary doing brunch at Sawtooth, Rose helping May in her garden. She drove them to near where she’d seen him catch the trout. She walked in toward the stream. When he saw where she was taking him, he laughed. She set the picnic basket down and spread a blanket. She took out the Sunday
ProJo
and began to read it, lying on her stomach.

She said, “Slow news day,” and offered him the first section.

He said, “It’s our day off.” He sat down beside her. “I’m going to be away for a while; I have to go to a conference. Do you happen to know if New Orleans is on the other side of the Mississippi? I’ve never been across the Mississippi. In fact, I’ve never—”

She rattled the paper and said, “You’re on the same page as a basketball player and a TV weatherman. And someone designing a yacht for the America’s Cup. Did you go to church today? It says you went to Our Lady of Mercy in Woonsocket, where you were an altar boy. I didn’t know you were an altar boy.”

After he read the piece, he said, “Oh, shit.” After a moment he said, “Maybe it’ll die down while I’m away.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Ex–hockey player, ex–altar boy at Our Lady of Mercy. Cute picture. When you start looking for the perfect wife this’ll be a big help. You probably shouldn’t marry a French-Canadian,
you’ve got that covered, but there’s Italian and Irish and Portuguese. Maybe not Portuguese, I can’t think of any Portuguese political families. Of course, Captain Teixeira does have a lot of very pretty nieces and grand-nieces. But he’s not political. Italian or Irish makes more sense. Mr. Salviatti has two daughters; one of them’s attractive. Rhode Island has had some very patrician Wasp senators—Pell and Chafee—but then you’d lose the Catholic vote. Unless you could get a beautiful Wasp to convert. Now, that would be a feather in your cap.”

“You about through? You’re not that funny.”

“I’m not being funny. This is serious. And why was I thinking inside the box? Rhode Island is pretty closed in, but a nice Kennedy cousin from Massachusetts …” Elsie felt herself slipping from teasing into a more reckless urge. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to provoke. Perhaps that he’d say he thought of her but that she was impossible—unwed mother, non-Catholic, and likely to say anything that came into her head.

She said, “I may have spoiled you. You may have developed a taste for bad girls. Suppose you end up with a politically alert Sunday-school teacher who’s willing to be your broodmare but honest to God thinks sex is just for procreation. Never crossed her mind to undo your belt with her teeth. Of course, speaking of Kennedys, you might have an arrangement on the side. But these days they end up blabbing. Used to be a mistress kept her lip buttoned. So here’s what we hope for … political family, Italian soccer mom, you have three kids, she stands by your side the whole campaign, gives great talks to women’s groups, Red Cross volunteers. But she has a secret dark side, an inner bad girl. That only you know. That only you know how to set off. Like if she hides in the bushes and watches you catch a trout.” Elsie’s mouth opened with surprise at what she’d just said. And just as unexpectedly as she’d said “catch a trout” she said, “You fuckhead eligible bachelor!” She tore the page in half. Her mouth opened again. “You fucking altar-boy attorney general! Go make some baby altar boys with your dumb altar-girl wife.” She got up and walked into the stream. She sat down. The current piled up on her back as if she were a rock. It spilled over her shoulders.

He waded out to her, stood her up, and walked her back to dry ground. As she was wringing out her clothes she felt how neutral her nakedness was. Good old naked Elsie. She went about the business of spreading her clothes on branches.

He said, “I could build a fire.”

“No. We’d have to arrest each other.”

He laughed. She wrapped herself in the blanket. He said, “You don’t really want me, not for a life.” She didn’t say anything. “And you’re right. You’re a wonderful woman, but most of my life would bore you or make you angry.” He picked her pants off the branch and wrung them out more thoroughly. Then her shirt. He sat down by the picnic basket. He lit his pipe. He took off his shoes and socks, wrung out the socks. He squeezed some water out of the cuffs of his pants, then rolled them up to his knees.

She said, “They won’t dry like that.”

“I am not seeking the remedy of dryness. I am merely reducing the sensation of wetness.”

She liked his making fun of his lawyerishness. She’d telephoned him at his office one afternoon, heard rustling and crackling. “What’re you doing?”

“I am eating steamed shrimp seriatim.”

She’d been charmed then. Now she dried her hair with a corner of the blanket and wondered if she was going to fuck him for one puff of charm.

Or because her own tantrum had stirred her up.

Or because it had been two—no, three—weeks.

Or because she was Nellie Melba.

Her nakedness was of more interest to both of them now that she was wrapped in the blanket.

O
ne day Elsie was cutting Miss Perry’s toenails. Miss Perry began to cry. Elsie had never seen Miss Perry cry. Elsie felt the hunch of Miss Perry’s shoulder as the motion ran down her body and made her foot jump. Elsie looked up and saw Miss Perry’s face squeeze tight. Then Miss Perry held still and a tear came out from under one lens of her eyeglasses.

Elsie didn’t know what to do. She lowered her eyes. She dropped the clippers and held Miss Perry’s bare foot in both hands. She laid her forehead on the top of Miss Perry’s foot.

Miss Perry cleared her throat and said, “What on earth are you doing? I am not an Oriental potentate.” Elsie picked up the clippers and finished cutting the last two toenails. She gathered up the clippings and put Miss Perry’s slipper back on.

Later in the day Miss Perry said, “I have known two or three men who became more courteous, even sweet, after they had their strokes. While I admired their transformations, at the same time I had the unkind thought that they had a lifetime of bad temper for which to atone.”