Couples (57 page)

“Not really. We were terribly inhibited, I suppose, though Mother was always talking about how glorious Nature was, with that funny emphasis, and the house was full of art books. Michelangelo’s, the ones on Adam, are terribly darling and limp, with long foreskins, so when I saw you, I thought—”

“What did you think?”

“I’ll try to work it out with
him
what I thought.”

The Nun’s Bay Road was, since it had been widened, unlike the beach road, straight and rather bare, more like a Midwestern road, sparsely populated by a shuttered-up vegetable stand and, high on a knoll, a peeling gingerbread mansion with a single upstairs light burning, where a widower lived. Joop had had more Mama’s eyes and mouth. Washed-out, unquestioning, shattered. He felt Angela beginning to doze and said, “I wonder if I ever saw my mother naked. Neither of them ever seemed to take a bath, at least while I was awake. I didn’t think they knew a thing about sex and was shocked once when my mother in passing complained about the spots on my sheets. She wasn’t really scolding, it was almost kidding. That must have been what shocked me.”

“The one good thing Daddy did,” Angela answered, “was to tell us to stand up straight when we began to get breasts. It made him furious to see us hunch over.”

“You were ashamed of them?”

“Not ashamed so much, it just feels at first as if you can’t
manage
them. They stick out and wobble.”

Piet pictured Angela’s breasts and told her, “I’m very hurt, that you talk about your father when I thought
I
was your problem. To be sure, he
is
the one paying for it.”

“Why does that make you so angry? He has money and we don’t.”

The wheels of their car, her cream-colored Peugeot, crunched on gravel. They were home. Squares of windowlight transfixed shrubbery in misted crosshatch. The lawn felt muddy underfoot, a loose skin of thaw on winter’s body. A maple sapling that had taken root near the porch, in the bulb bed, extended last summer’s growth in glistening straight shoots red as thermometer mercury. Beside the black chimney the blurred moon looked warm. Gratefully Piet inhaled the moist night. His year of trouble felt vaporized, dismissed.

Their babysitter was Merissa Mills, the teen-age daughter of the ringleader of the old boatyard crowd, who years ago had divorced his wife and moved to Florida, where he managed a marina and had remarried. Merissa, as often with children of broken homes, was determinedly tranquil and polite and conventional. She said, “There was one call, from a Mr. Whitman. I wrote down the number.” On a yellow pad of Gallagher & Hanema receipt forms her round bland hand had penciled Foxy’s number.

Piet asked, “
Mr
. Whitman?”

Merissa, gathering her books, gazed at him without curiosity.
Her life had witnessed a turmoil of guilt she was determined not to relive. “He said you should call him no matter how late you got back.”

“He can’t have meant
this
late,” Angela told Piet. “You take Merissa home and I’ll call Foxy in the morning.”

“No!” In sudden focus Piet saw the two women before him as identical—both schooled prematurely in virtue, both secluded behind a willed composure. He knew they were screening him from something out there in the dark that was his, his fate, the fruit of his deeds. His tongue streaked tranced down the narrow path still open. “We may still need Merissa. Let me call Ken before we let her go.”

Angela protested, “Merissa has school tomorrow and I’m exhausted.” But her voice lacked fiber; he walked through it to the phone, his palms tingling. His movements, as he picked up the receiver and dialed, were as careful as those of a leper whose flesh falls off in silver shards.

Ken answered on the second ring. “Piet,” he said. It was not said as a greeting; Ken was giving something a name.

“Ken.”

“Foxy and I have had a long talk.”

“What about?”

“The two of you.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Do you deny that you and she have been lovers since last summer?”

Ken’s silence lengthened. An impatient doctor faced with a procrastinating hope. Piet saw that there was no glimmer, that the truth had escaped and was all about them, like oxygen, like darkness. As a dying man after months of ingenious forestallment turns with relief to the hope of an afterlife, Piet sighed, “No, I don’t deny it.”

“Good. That’s a step forward.”

Angela’s face, forsaken, pressed wordless against the side of Piet’s vision as he listened.

“She also told me that she became pregnant by you this winter and you arranged to have the pregnancy aborted while I was in Chicago.”

“Did she though? While you were in the Windy City?” Piet felt before him an adamant flatness upon which his urge was to dance.

“Is that true or false?” Ken persisted.

Piet said, “Tell me the rules of this quiz. Can I win, or only lose?”

Ken paused. Angela’s face, as something of what was happening dawned on it, grew pale, and anxiously mouthed the silent syllable,
Who?

Less disciplinary, a shade concessive, Ken said, “Piet, I think the best thing would be for you and Angela to come over here tonight.”

“She’s awfully tired.”

“Could you put her on the phone, please?”

“No. We’ll come over.” Hanging up, he faced the rectangle of slightly darker wallpaper where until recently a mirror had hung. Angela had transferred it to Nancy’s room because the child expressed jealousy of her father’s birthday gift of a mirror to Ruth. He told Angela, “We must go,” and asked Merissa, “Can you stay?” Both acquiesced; he had gained, in those few seconds over the phone, the forbidding dignity of those who have no lower to go. His face was a mask while his blood underwent an airy tumult, a boiling alternation of shame and fear momentarily condensing into those small actions—a sticky latch lifted, a pocket-slapping search for car keys, a smile of farewell at Merissa and a promise not to be
long—needed to get them out of the house, into the mist, on their way.

By way of Blackberry Lane, a winding link road tenderly corrupted from Nigger Lane, where a solitary escaped slave had lived in the days of Daniel Webster, dying at last of loneliness and pneumonia, the distance from the Hanemas’ house to the Whitmans’ was not great. Often in summer Piet after his afternoon’s work would drive his daughters to the beach for a swim and be back by supper. So Piet and Angela had little time to talk; Angela spoke quickly, lightly, skimming the spaces between what she had overheard or guessed. “How long has it been going on?”

“Oh, since the summer. I think her hiring me for the job was a way of seeing if it would happen.”

“It occurred to me, but I thought you wouldn’t use your work like that, I thought it was beneath your ethics to. Deceive me, yes, but your men, and Gallagher …”

“I did a respectable job for her. We didn’t sleep together until toward the end. It was after the job was done, when I had no reason to have my truck parked there, that it began to seem not right.”

“Oh, it did seem not right?”

“Sure. It became very heavy. Religious, somehow, and sad. She was so pregnant.” It pleased Piet to be able to talk about it, as if under this other form he had been secretly loving Angela, and now could reveal to her the height and depth of his love.

She said, “Yes, that is the surprise. Her being pregnant. It must be very hard for Ken to accept.”

Piet shrugged. “It was part of her. I didn’t mind it if she
didn’t. Actually, it made it seem more innocent, as if that much of her was being faithful to Ken no matter what we did with the rest.”

“How many times did you sleep with her in all?”

“Oh. Thirty. Forty.”

“Forty!”

“You asked.” She was crying. He told her, “Don’t cry.”

“I’m crying because you seemed happier lately and I thought it was
me
and it’s been
her
.”

“No, it hasn’t been her.” He felt under him a soft place, a hidden pit, the fact of Bea.

“No? When was the last time?”

The abortion. She mustn’t know. But it was too big to hide, like a tree. In its shade the ground was suspiciously bare. He said, “Months ago. We agreed it would be the last time.”

“But after the baby had been born?”

“Yes. Six or so weeks after. I was surprised she still wanted me.”

“You’re so modest.” Her tone was empty of irony, dead. A mailbox knocked cockeyed, toppling backwards forever, wheeled through their headlights. Ghosts of mist thronged from the marshes where the road dipped. Angela asked, “Why did you stop?”

Having withheld truth elsewhere, Piet lavished frankness here. “It began to hurt more than it helped. I was becoming cruel to you, and I couldn’t
see
the girls; they seemed to be growing up without me. Then, with her baby, it’s being a boy, it seemed somehow clear that our time was past.” He further explained: “A time to love, and a time to die.”

Her crying had dried up but showed in her voice as a worn place, eroded. “You did love her?”

He tried to tread precisely here; their talk had moved from
a thick deceptive forest to a desert where every step left a print. He told her, “I’m not sure I understand the term. I enjoyed being with her, yes.”

“And you also enjoyed Georgene?”

“Yes. Less complexly. She was less demanding. Foxy was always trying to educate me.”

“And any others?”

“No.” The lie lasted as they dipped into the last hollow before the Whitmans’ little rise.

“And me? Have you ever enjoyed being with me?” The desert had changed; the even sand of her voice had become seared rock, once molten, sharp to the touch.

“Oh,” Piet said, “Jesus, yes. Being with you is Heaven.” He hurried on, having decided. “One thing you should know, since Ken knows it. At the end, after I figured our affair was over, Foxy got pregnant by me, don’t ask me how, it was ridiculous, and we got Freddy Thorne to arrange our abortion for us. His price was that night with you. It sounds awful, but it was the only thing, it was great of you, and it absolutely ended Foxy and me. It’s done. It’s over. We’re just here tonight so I can get reprimanded.”

They were at the Whitmans’. With the motor extinguished, Angela’s not answering alarmed him. Her voice when it came sounded miniature, dwindled, terminal. “You better take me home.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “You
must
come in.” He justified his imperious tone: “I don’t have the guts to go in without you.”

Ken answered their ring. He wore a foulard and smoking jacket: the host. He shook Piet’s hand gravely, glancing at him
from those shallow gray eyes as if taking a snapshot. He welcomed Angela with a solicitude bordering on flirtation. His man’s voice and shoulders filled comfortably spaces where Foxy alone had seemed adrift and forlorn. He took their coats, Angela’s blue second-best and Piet’s little apricot jacket, and ushered the couple down the rag-rugged hall; Angela stared all about her, fascinated by how the house that should have been hers had been renovated. She murmured to Piet, “Did
you
choose the wallpaper?” Foxy was in the living room, feeding the baby in her lap. Unable to rise or speak in greeting, she grinned. Lit up by her smile, her teary face seemed to Piet a net full of gems; lamplight flowed down her loose hair to the faceless bundle in her lap. The array of bottles on the coffee table glittered. They had been drinking. In the society of Tarbox there was no invitation more flattering than to share, like this, another couple’s intimacy, to partake in their humorous déshabille, their open quarrels and implicit griefs. It was hard for these couples this night to break from that informal spell and to confront each other as enemies. Angela took the old leather armchair, and Piet a rush-seat ladderback that Foxy’s mother, appalled by how bleak their house seemed, had sent from Maryland. Ken remained standing and tried to run the meeting in an academic manner. Piet’s itch was to clown, to seek the clown’s traditional invisibility. Angela and Foxy, their crossed legs glossy, fed into the room that nurturing graciousness of female witnessing without which no act since Adam’s naming of the beasts has been complete. Women are gentle fruitful presences whose interpolation among us diffuses guilt.

Ken asked them what they would like to drink. The smoking jacket a prop he must live up to. Outrage has no costume. Angela said, “Nothing.”

Piet asked for something with gin in it. Since tonic season hadn’t begun, perhaps some dry vermouth, about half and half, a European martini. Anything, just so it wasn’t whiskey. He described the smell of whiskey at the town meeting, and was disappointed when no one laughed. Irked, he asked, “Ken, what’s the first item on your agenda?”

Ken ignored him, asking Angela, “How much did you know of all this?”

“Ah,” Piet said. “An oral exam.”

Angela said, “I knew as much as you did. Nothing.”

“You must have guessed something.”

“I make a lot of guesses about Piet, but he’s very slippery.”

Piet said, “Agile, I would have said.”

Ken did not take his eyes from Angela. “But you’re in Tarbox all day; I’m away from seven to seven.”

Angela shifted her weight forward, so the leather cushion sighed. “What are you suggesting, Ken? That I’m deficient as a wife?”

Foxy said, “One of the things that makes Angela a good wife to Piet, better than I could ever be, is that she lets herself be blind.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Angela said, preoccupied with, what her shifting in the chair had purposed, pouring herself some brandy. It was five-star Cognac but the only glass was a Flintstone jelly tumbler. Foxy’s housekeeping had these lapses and loopholes. Admitted to her house late in the afternoon, Piet would see, through the blond rainbow of her embrace, breakfast dishes on the coffee table unwashed, and a book she had marked her place in with a dry bit of bacon. She claimed, when he pointed it out, that she had done it to amuse him; but he had also observed that her underwear was not always clean.

Unable to let Angela’s mild demur pass unchallenged, she sat upright, jarring the sleeping bundle in her lap, and argued, “I mean it as a compliment. I think it’s a beautiful trait. I could never be that way, the wise overlooking wife. I’m jealous by nature. It used to kill me, at parties, to see you come up with that possessive sweet smile and take Piet home to bed.”