Couples (26 page)

At the foot of the stairs he tapped Georgene’s flank with the side of his hand for old time’s sake while gazing straight ahead. He came into the living room; he wore a sweater and plaid bathing trunks; his bare feet looked knobbed and splayed on the floor and in Foxy’s eyes his naked legs wore a pale fur halo. “What kind of landscape am I?” he asked.

“Jungle,” Georgene said.

“Rice paddies,” said Marcia little-Smith.

Terry Gallagher said, “Torn.”

Piet asked, “A torn landscape?”

“Maybe I mean pacified.”

Angela closed her eyes. “I see a temple, with reddish pillars, and an idol with its head knocked off, overgrown with vines, and someone has been doing mathematical calculations with chalk on the broad part of one thigh.”

“Sexy,” Eddie Constantine said.

Georgene said, her chin hardening, “No fair couples using ESP.”

Piet asked, “Anybody else? Foxy? Ken?”

Ken said, “I get Indiana, I don’t know why.”

Everyone laughed, except Foxy, who nodded. “He’s right. Something quiet and gray and ordinary,” she said. “Oregon? South Dakota?”

Frank Appleby said, “You mean North Dakota.”

“No hints,” Carol Constantine protested. She was sitting on the floor in the position of one weaving, or praying, or playing Monopoly. Her legs were folded under a green lily pad of a ballerina’s skirt from which her torso rose like a stem. Her waist was remarkably thin and pliant and her nostrils, long slits, seemed always to be inhaling.

Piet asked, “What flower?”

“Poppy.”

“Poppy.”

“Nodding pogonia,” Irene Saltz said. “Or maybe a fringed orchis.”

“A fringed orchis in the shade of an enormous Chinese tulip tree,” Frank Appleby said.

Carol said to Marcia, “I don’t think Frank understands the game. He hints.”

Foxy Whitman said, “I see something gray. Mistletoe.”

“I keep getting gray out of you,” Piet said to her, with strange edge, and asked Angela, “Flower? Ken?”

“Daisy fleabane,” Ken said, perhaps antagonistically, staring at his feet. Did he mean it?

Angela said, “No flower or any flower. A single lily presented by a child to the major’s wife on a fête day.”

“A wilted gardenia in a busboy’s lapel,” Terry Gallagher said, and smiled broadly when they all burst into compliments. They felt her developing, coming to bloom.

Georgene said, “A thistle. From an official point of view.”

Piet complained, “I can’t even tell if you like this person or not.”

“What sex are you getting?” Carol asked him. Her face, though composed and smooth, held contentious points of shadow—at the nostril wings, at the corners of her mouth, beneath her pouting lower lip, where there seemed to be a smudge. Piet saw that she lengthened the line of her lids with eye shadow, and realized that her eyes were small and rather close together, so close together that in certain flitting lights her stilted dignity of stance appeared that of a cross-eyed person. He felt better about her, less fascinated. Her hair was a dull brown nothing color done up in a pony tail she was too old for.

“Male,” he answered. “But it doesn’t seem to matter. His maleness isn’t his claim to fame.”

“Unlike who?” Carol coolly asked.

Piet obligingly blushed. “What—what period of painting?”

“Art Nouveau,” Angela said promptly.

“Spanish cave,” Foxy said, also prompt.

Frank Appleby rolled his eyes inward and groaned. “All I get is what Carol doesn’t want me to get.”

“What’s that?” Carol asked.

“Soviet posters.”

“No,” Carol said, “I don’t mind that. It’s not very good, but I don’t mind it.”

Irene Saltz asked her, “Who appointed you referee?”

“Medical-textbook illustrations,” Ken Whitman said firmly, “with a rice-paper overlay leaf.”

“Good,” someone said politely, after a pause.

“Terry and the Pirates,” Eddie Constantine said.

Carol said, “I’m sorry, I think you’re all horrible. He’s definitely Yves Tanguy. And maybe Arshile Gorky.”

“He’s a playwright,” Frank told her.

“That’s Maxim,” she told him.

Ken, remembering the success of some of his other puns, asked innocently, “Who was Maxim Ize?”

Foxy winced.

“A Jewish expansionist,” Eddie said. “Whoops, no offense intended, Ben.”

Patiently Piet asked, “Any other painters or periods of painting?”

“I don’t think,” Marcia said, “they ever work out very well. They’re too literal. Stretch our minds, Piet.”

Into this Piet read Frank’s becoming bored, and asked him, “Frank, what play by Shakespeare am I?”

Frank revolved the question uncomfortably inside him, and after a swallow of brandy pronounced, “
Anthony and Cleopatra
, from the viewpoint of Octavius.”

Marcia in a helpful wifely way prompted, “What about
Titus Andronicus?
”

“Too messy,” Frank said. “This man is efficient.”

Foxy Whitman—she had stopped off at her house to change from her tentlike maternity bathing suit into a more flattering shift, a canary-yellow muu-muu that tapped and
hugged her hidden shape—was fighting for attention. “What about an
Othello
in which Iago is right?”

Frank said, “He’s always right,” and brayed.

Ben Saltz, looking tired, got to his feet and asked, “Who wants some more beer? Brandy? We have lots of gin but we’re out of Bitter Lemon.”

Georgene said, “Piet, you’re taking much too long. We’ve given you beautiful answers and you spurn us.”

“You’ve confused me, you’re all so beautiful. I keep thinking about Ken’s medical textbook.”

“Ignore it,” Foxy said.

“All right: what beverage?”

“Tea.”

“Tea.”

“Souchong more than orange pekoe.”

“Tea with nutmeg,” Angela said.

“Angela, you really like this person, don’t you?” It was Terry asking.

“I have to, he’s my husband.”

“I hate tea,” Piet said. “I hate tea with nutmeg.”

“You’ve never had it,” Angela told him.

“Don’t be too sure.” The others hushed, to give them space to quarrel. Piet hastily moved on: “What kind of food?”

“Rice.”

“Rice, but you want more,” Ben said, returning with beer in two brown nonreturnable bottles.

Piet asked, “Boiled or fried?”

Angela said, “Boiled. It’s purer.”

Marcia said, “Delicately fried.”

Terry closed her eyes and said, “A BLT on burnt toast.”

Frank Appleby said, “To hell with you all. I’ll say what comes to me. A monk barbecue.”

Carol cried, all her lithe lines electric, her feet thrusting from under her skirt, “Frank, you’re a pig! You’ve given it to him!”

Piet said in great relief, “I’m No-go Diem.”

The voices of the others flocked: “Ngo, you’re not.” “Close, but no sitar.” “Close? He couldn’t be wronger.” “Right church, wrong side of the aisle.” This last was Georgene, reaching out to him; her help was accepted while she was spurned.

Piet arrived: “Ho Chi Minh.” In a glad clatter the game collapsed. The beer went around. Terry Gallagher and Ken Whitman stood with one motion and looked at each other, surprised by unison.

“It’s treasonous,” Piet was saying, “how affectionate your impressions were. This enemy of our democracy, all those flowers and delicate grays.” His complaint was directed, Georgene felt, toward Angela and Foxy.

“
You
asked flowers.”

“You never asked animals. A whiskery weasel.”

“A very thin panda.”

“Why hate him? He’s what they want.” This was Irene, who had been uncharacteristically silent.

“
Chacun à son goût
, as Harold would say if he were here,” Marcia said with quaint loyalty.

“I thought that was good of me to remember him being a busboy in Paris,” Terry said. “Thanks, people, but I must go. We went to early mass this morning and poor Matt’s been showing houses all afternoon.”

“I second that,” Ken said. “Fox, come.”

But the momentary impression, of Terry and Ken standing together as a handsome couple, tall and dark-haired and grave, led the others to tease Foxy.

“Oh please,” Carol begged. “Stay for one more.”

“We’ll let Foxy be it.”

“Foxy’s it. It, Foxy.”

“All pregnant women leave the room.”

Foxy looked toward Ken; he read on her face a touching indecision. This boozy catty crowd tempted her; their own house was full of mosquitoes and uncompleted carpentry. Yet she was tired, and his wife, and faithful. She said, “No, I’d just be stupid. I don’t really understand the game.”

“Oh, but you do, you do.”

“The game is to be yourself.”

“Your impressions are lovely.”

“We’ll pick somebody simple. Margaret Truman.
Not
Jackie. It’ll take ten minutes.”

She wavered, and Ken spoke to her across the calling heads with perfect kindness, yet his voice frightened her; his appearance had no roundness. An immaculate cutout seemed wired for sound. “I’m dead, Fox, but you stay and play. Marcia can drop you off.”

“Oh,” she said, “but that’s not right. Marcia has Harold to worry about. I’ll go with you.”

They all said, “You can’t. You’re it. Stay.”

“Stay,” Ken told her, and turned to leave, and she felt herself cut off, her roundness rejected; her shape offended him. She had asked him to rescue her from indecision and he had petulantly set her adrift. Angered, she agreed to stay, and went upstairs, where Piet had been. He had left no clues.

It did not take them long to decide, June having been so fertile of news: Pope John had died, Quang Duc had immolated himself, Valentina Tereshkova had become the first woman in space, John Profumo had resigned, the Lord’s Prayer had been banned in the American public schools. Soon
Georgene was at the foot of the stairs, calling, “E-liz-a-beth! Elizabeth Fox Whitman, come right down here!” It was the voice of her Wilmington aunt.

Like a rebuked child Foxy entered the living room; its human brightness seemed savage. The darkened rooms upstairs, rooms of pinned-up maps and scattered toy tracks, of silently sleeping children and docile plumbing fixtures, had been a better world. She thought of her bedroom and the moon that shared her insomnia. The blank pillow beside Ken’s head was her. Here, Ken and Terry Gallagher were gone. Frank Appleby was asleep, his feet in sandals cocked up on the Saltzes’ fake-colonial coffee table, his mouth ajar and raggedly snoring. Foxy also heard whispering in the kitchen and counted Eddie Constantine and Irene missing. The six survivors, four of them women, looked weary and forbearing and she realized she should have gone home with Ken. The game was exhausted, they were merely being polite, to make her feel loved and part of them. She must quickly guess and go.

“What—what kind of ocean am I?” Foxy wasn’t sure if the rules forbad using associations others had used, and she wanted to be creative, sensitive, unique. On the nubbly sofa next to his wife, Piet Hanema gazed down into his glass.

“What kind of ocean?” Carol echoed. “How odd. Choppy, I guess.”

“Sometimes choppy,” Marcia said. “Sometimes very still and tranced. Sometimes even a big wave.”

“Untracked,” Piet said.

“Untracked?”

“Ships go back and forth across you and leave no trace. You accept them all. They don’t impress you.”

“A piece of ocean,” Ben said, grinning, “with a mermaid in it.”

Carol said, “No direct hints.”

Suddenly immersed in timidity, Foxy asked, “Angela? Any ocean?”

“Not an ocean,” Angela said. “A sad little pond.”

“Sad?”

“Kind of scummy,” Georgene said: a startling flat insult, but everyone, especially the men, laughed, agreeing.

“Well. What time of day?”

“Two in the morning.”

“Eleven a.m., with rumpled sheets.”

“Any time. All day.”

Again, this unkind laughter. A slow blush caked Foxy’s face. She wanted to like this person she was, in spite of them.

Angela tried to rescue her. “I see this person around nine at night, going out, into the city lights, kind of happy and brainless.”

“Or maybe even,” Marcia added, “at four-thirty in the afternoon, walking in a park, without a hat, smiling at the old men and the squirrels and the babies.”

“And the bobbies,” Piet said.

Carol sang, “We’re getting too spe-ci-fic,” and glanced toward the whispering kitchen with that abrupt head turn ballerinas use in pirouettes.

English, Piet’s implication was. Queen Elizabeth, scummy? Virginia Woolf?
The Waves
. But those rumpled sheets. Perhaps an effeminate seedy man. Cecil Beaton. Alec Guinness, Piet’s saying back and forth across an ocean, an actor’s parts. But a scummy pond? How stupid she was being. Afraid to guess wrong, self-conscious, stuck. The furnishings of the Saltzes’ living room pressed in upon her emptiness: velvety dark easy chairs wearing doilies on their forearms, maple magazine racks of
Scientific American
and
Newsweek
and
Look
,
inquisitive bridge lamps leaning over the chairs’ left shoulders, Van Gogh sunning on the walls, wedding pictures frozen on the top of an upright piano with yellow teeth, an evil-footed coat rack and speckled oblong mirror in the dark foyer, narrow stairs plunging upward perilously, children climbing each night in a fight with fear. Her mother’s Delaware second cousins had lived in such houses, built narrow to the street and lined with hydrangea bushes where a child could urinate or hide from her third cousins. The Jews have inherited the middle class—nobody else wants it. “What social class?” Foxy asked.

“Too direct,” Carol said.

“Lower,” Georgene said.

“Middle lower,” Piet said. “Some airs and graces.”

“Transcending all classes,” Angela told her. “Lower than low, higher than high.”

“You sound,” Ben Saltz said to Angela with a pedantic mannered twinkle, “like a Gnostic devotee.”

“What a nosty suggestion,” Marcia said.

“Oh, I
don’t
understand how we
know
about this person, she seems so
common
!” Foxy cried.

“She has hidden talents,” Piet said.