Couples (19 page)

Without looking it, they were slightly older than most of their friends in Tarbox; Harold was thirty-eight, Marcia was thirty-six.

She did seem, lately, more inventive and solicitous. A ramshackle boardwalk, in need of repair every spring, had come with their land, with the old summer cottage they had torn down. It led out to a small tidal creek too narrow for most powerboats; here, at high tide, between banks tall with reeds, in water warmer than the sea off the beach, they and their friends and their friends’ children could swim. At night, now, this summer, when the tide was right, and the children were asleep, Marcia had taken to inviting him, Harold alone, for a swim before bed, without bathing suits. So they would walk down in moonlight through poison ivy and cut-back sumac,
treading warily, and out the often-patched boardwalk, its slats of varied wood like the keys of a gigantic piano, and on the splintery soft dock take off their clothes and stand, husband and wife, naked together, gooseflesh rising, for an instant of nerve-gathering before plunging from the expectant summer air into the flat black water alive with reeds. Beside him her flitting breasts, arching arms, upturned face gashed by black licks of her hair bubbled through the blanched foam and slopping clammy slick. The water’s million filaments sucked from his nerve ends the flecks of city filth. Our first love, our love of the elements, restored to him his youngest self. Sometimes, at high tide, like a laboring Cyclopean elephant a powerboat would come crowding up the channel with its searchlight and they would squat like aborigines under the dock in the root-riddled mud until the boat passed. And they would dry each other, Harold and Marcia, she toweling even his fumbly dripping genitals, thinking how innocently part of him they seemed, and not a harsh jutting second life parasitic upon him. As she ran ahead up the boardwalk, clutching her clothes to her breasts, her buttocks would be dancy in the steady moon. If in bed they made love, with salty bodies and damp hair, she praised his ardor—“so fierce”—and expertness—“oh, you know me so well”—as if a standard of comparison, someone gentle and clumsy, had appeared. And she would blurt “I love you” with a new emphasis, as if the “you” were darkened by the shadow of an unspoken “nevertheless.”

At their next lunch Janet had nothing to offer but complaints about Marcia’s constantly calling up and suggesting they do things together, as couples—sail, swim, play tennis, go to meetings. She was even trying to get her interested in the Tarbox Fair Housing Committee, which Irene Saltz and Bernadette Ong were organizing. “I said to her, ‘But there
isn’t a single Negro in town,’ and she said, ‘That’s the point. We’re culturally deprived, our children don’t know what a Negro looks like,’ and I said, ‘Don’t they watch television?’ and then I said, getting really mad, ‘It seems to me awfully hard on the Negro, to bring him out here just so your children can look at him. Why don’t they instead look at the Ongs on a dark day?’ I shouldn’t have said that, I think Bernadette’s great; but there’s something basically snotty about this committee. It’s all because other towns have one. Like a drum-and-bugle corps.”

Janet seemed old to Harold, though she was years younger than he, old and double-chinned and querulous, vexing herself with what he knew to be Marcia’s simple gregariousness, her innocent need to be doing. He changed the subject. “What were you and Piet talking about so earnestly at the Thornes’ party?”

Her valentine mouth, its lipstick flaking, frowned. “He was telling me his wife doesn’t give him shit. He tells every woman.”

“He’s never told Marcia.”

“She’s never told you. Piet’s been aching to break out for a long time and I don’t know what’s holding him back. Georgene’s right there waiting.”

It was fascinating, seeing his friends through a whole new set of windows. “And Freddy Thorne?” he asked delicately. He had long wondered if Janet had slept with Freddy.

Janet said, “Freddy’s my friend. He understands women.”

“And that’s all you choose to say.”

“That’s all I have to say. We’ve never gone to bed, I’m fond of Freddy, he’s harmless. Why are you men so mean to him?”

“Because you women are so nice to him.”

Amused to discover himself jealous, Harold studied his fingers,
which he set parallel to the table silver, and asked, “Do you think the Hanemas will get a divorce?” He liked Angela, one of the few women in town who could speak his language. He loved her upward-searching diffidence, her motherly presiding above their summer-evening gatherings. Everyone rather loved Angela.

“Never,” Janet said flatly. “Piet’s too tame. He’s too thick in the conscience. He’ll stick it out with those three, picking up whatever spare ass he can. The bad thing about a cockteaser like Angela is she turns her man loose on the world and lets a lot of other women in for trouble. Piet can be very winning.”

“You speak as one who knows.
Elle qui sait
.”

“There’ve been overtures, nothing drastic. Among his other problems, he’s shy.”

“Poor Piet,” Harold said, uncertain why, though Janet nodded in agreement.

That weekend, he asked Marcia, after a party, when both were drunk, “Do you love me?”

“I love you, Harold, but please not tonight. We’re both too drunk and sleepy. Let’s have a nap instead sometime tomorrow.” Tomorrow was Sunday.

“I didn’t mean to make love, I meant, honestly,
après douze années très heureuses
, aren’t you pretty bored with me? Don’t you ever think of what it would be like with other men?”

“Oh, maybe a little. Not very consciously.” She was wearing a chiffon nightie the color of persimmon, and as she crawled into bed her dark limbs looked monkeyish. Getting into bed demanded nimbleness of her because the bed was high; also it was high and hard, because they found such a mattress best for lovemaking. The little-Smiths’ bedroom, as they had designed it, was a shrine, a severe sacred space; its furniture consisted of little more than two teak bureaus, a
reading lamp built into the headboard, a mirror on a closet door, a philodendron, and for a rug the hide of a zebra that Harold’s grandfather had shot on safari with Teddy Roosevelt. When she was settled in, he turned off the light. The darkness was purple, and high in the window the marsh moon amid moving clouds seemed to swing back and forth like the bob of a pendulum.

“Tell me,” he said. “You won’t hurt my feelings.”

“OK. Ask me the men.”

“Have you ever wanted to go to bed with Piet Hanema?”

“Not really. He reminds me too much of a fatherly elf. He’s too paternal and sympathetic. Once at the Guerins we were left alone in the room with the bigger fireplace and he began to stroke my back and it felt as if he wanted to burp me. I think Piet likes bigger women. Georgene and Bea and I are too small for him.”

“Freddy Thorne.”

“Never, never. He’s so slippery and womanish, I think sex is all talk with him anyway. Janet responds to him better than I do; ask her.”

“You know I can’t talk to Janet. Her vocabulary puts me off.”

“It’s getting worse lately, isn’t it?”

“And Frank?”

Patterns of light—long lozenges of moonlight laid across the zebra rug and a corner of the bed; a rod of electric light coming from the hallway through the crack their door was left ajar, to comfort the children; a dim bluish smear on the ceiling from a carbon streetlight on the beach road, entering by the foyer transom—welled from the purple darkness as Harold held his breath, waiting for Marcia’s answer.

It came very casually, in a voice half asleep. “Oh, Frank’s
been a friend too long to think about that way. Besides, he has whiskey breath and an ulcer. No, thanks.” When, still studying their placid guests of light, he made no reply, she stirred and asked, “Why? Do you want Janet?”

He laughed quite loudly and said, “Mon
Dieu
, no! That girl’s pure trouble.”

“She’s very hostile to me lately.”

“I think,” Harold said, snaking his arm around her and snuggling his genitals into the curved warmth of her backside, “we should make an effort to see less of the Applebys. Let’s have the Guerins over sometime. Maybe with some new people like the Constantines. The wife seems pretty hip.”

Marcia made no response, and he nudged her, and she said, “The Guerins are so depressing.”

Janet was gayer at their next lunch, and looked five years younger. The day was one of those very hot days toward the end of August when to a woman summer seems a lover leaving, to be embraced with full abandon: appearances are past mattering; love disdains nothing. Sweat mars her makeup and mats her hairdo. Her arms swim freely in air. The steaming city streets crammed with secretaries have the voluptuousness of a seraglio. Janet wore an armless cotton dress printed with upside-down herons on a turquoise ground and swung herself along as if nothing in the natural world, no thrust of sun or thunderclap, could do her harm. Her feet, naked in sandals, were dusty, and Harold wondered, walking along Federal Street beside her in the heat, what it would be like to suck each dirty one of her ten toes clean. He took off his coat and swung it over his shoulder like a tough; they ate in a cafeteria whose glass doors were open at either end like sluice gates. Noise poured through him, backfiring trucks and the clatter of cutlery and the shouting of orders and the words of the girl
across from him, with her sweating round face and eroded lipstick. She said, “How was
your
weekend?”

“Fine. You should know. We saw you every minute of it, except when somebody had to go to the bathroom.”

“I know, isn’t it boring? Frank and Marcia mooning at each other and exchanging ever so teeny-tiny little tender glances.”

“You
do
exaggerate that.”

“Balls, Harold. Frank absolutely gets choleric when he can’t have Marcia as his tennis partner. And when they’re across the net from each other, all those cute little pat shots, I could puke. He’s always ‘swinging by.’ ‘I’ll swing by the Smith’s to pick up Frankie.’ ‘I just swung by Smitty’s to drop off the variorum Shakespeare, and they had me in for a drink.’ It turns out ‘they’ was Marcia and you were off at a town Republican meeting. Harold,
why
are you a conservative?—it’s such a pose.”

He endured this tirade pleasurably, as if it were a massage or a shower. “But you still have nothing definite.”

“How definite must definite be? Harold, he knows too much. He knew you were going to Symphony with the Gallaghers Saturday night. He knew Julia sprained her shoulder diving off the dock Thursday. When I talk to Marcia and tell him what she said he doesn’t bother to listen because he’s heard it all already. He knows you and she go skinny-dipping down by your dock and then fuck.”

“Doesn’t everybody know that? The dock part of it. The other doesn’t invariably follow.”

“How would everybody know? You think your friends have nothing better to do than splosh around the marshes with binoculars?”

“Marcia might tell Bea, or Georgene, or even Irene, in passing.”

“Well she doesn’t tell me and I’m her best friend supposedly. Frank tells me. Frank.”

“I asked her the other night if she was having an affair with Frank.”

Janet bit into her pastrami-on-a-roll and stared above the bun. “And she said?”

“I forget exactly what she said. We were both sleepy. She said he was too old a friend and had an ulcer.”

“Two good reasons for it. Every woman has a nurse complex. And why not sleep with a friend? It’s better than sleeping with an enemy. I’ve never understood why people are so shocked when somebody sleeps with his best friend’s wife. Obviously, his best friend’s wife is the one he sees most
of
.”

“Well, she convinced me.” He tried to state his heart’s case. “We’re not that unhappy, for her to do me dirt.”

“Very well. She’s as pure as Snow White and the stains in Frank’s underpants are accidents of nature. Let’s forget them. Let’s talk about us. Why don’t you like me, Harold? I like you. I like the way your nose comes to two points, like a very pale strawberry. Why don’t you take the afternoon off and walk me through the Common over to Newbury Street and look at pictures? You understand pictures. What’s this new gimmick of making things look like comic strips?”

She put her hand palm up on the tabletop; it was moist, a creased pink saucer of moisture on the silver-flecked formica. When he put his hand in hers, the gesture, amid the clatter and breeze of the cafeteria, felt hugely inflated: two immense white hands, like the mock-up of a beefburger, advertising love. With the other hand she was mopping up bits of pastrami with the final bite of the roll. “That’s a delectable idea,” he said, “but I can’t. We’re taking off Friday for Maine over Labor Day, so I have only one day left at the office. I need this afternoon. It’s called Pop Art. It’s also called hard-edge.”

“So you’ll be gone all weekend?” She withdrew her hand to wipe her fingertips, one by one, on a paper napkin. Her face seemed forlorn; her eye shadow had run, making her look theatrically tired.

Harold said, “Yes, and we’re staying a few days past the holiday, so I’ll miss next week’s lunch with you.
Je regrette
.”

“Do you?” In parting she told him, this blowzy stacked woman in upside-down herons, with a wave of her shapely swimmer’s arm, “Have a
good
time with Marcia,” the emphasis insolent. Then they went out of opposite ends of the cafeteria, she toward her maroon car in the Underground Garage, he toward his office on Post Office Square, glad to be released.

The family place in Maine overlooked a mottled blue harbor choked with glinting sails, swinging buoys, and surprising rocks that all jutted from the water at the same angle, testifying to a geological upheaval aeons ago. The largest rocks supported grass and shrubs and were therefore islands. The water was icy-cold and the beaches, far from the endless dunes of Tarbox, were niggardly arcs of shingle and brownish grit strewn with rack. Yet Harold, who visited Tarbox Beach only once or twice a summer, here swam before every breakfast. He was always happy in Maine. He ate the lobster and potato salad his mother set before him and read brittle paperback mysteries and old explorer’s accounts in splotched bindings and sailed through the slapping spray and needled his sisters and brothers-in-law and slept soundly, having made love to Marcia like a sailor in from months at sea. She seemed his whore. She crouched and whimpered above him, her nipples teasing his lips. She went down on him purring; she was a minx. This was new, this quality of prostitution, of her frankly servicing him, and taking her own pleasure as a subdivision of his. Her slick firm body was shameless yet did not reveal, as
her more virginal intercourse once had done, the inner petals drenched in helpless nectar. She remained slightly tight and dry. He did not wonder from whence this change in her chemistry had been derived, since he found it an improvement: less tact was demanded of him, and less self-control. Perhaps he abused her, for in the second half of their vacation, abruptly beginning on Labor Day night, she refused him. Afterwards she told Frank that suddenly she couldn’t stand the confident touch of Harold’s all-too-knowing hands. “He seemed a lewd little stranger who acted as if he had bought me.” To have him inside her was distasteful: “like food in my mouth I couldn’t swallow.” Perhaps, in Maine, Marcia had experimented with corruption too successfully. Carrying within her like a contraceptive loop her knowledge of her lover, she had inflicted a stark sensuality upon her husband and then been dismayed by his eager submission to it. She realized she could serve several men in one bed, many men in one night—that this possibility was part of her nature; and she fled into an exclusive love for Frank. Making love to Harold suddenly lost seriousness. What they did with each other’s bodies became as trivial as defecation, and it was not until months later, when his form was charged with the tense threat of his leaving her, that the curse of squeamishness was removed from their physical relations.