Raw Silk (9781480463318) (13 page)

Pulled off the point, on the wrong side of the wrong argument, I didn’t know where to begin. “I am not
mixed up with
anybody,” I said, raising pitch. “
You
are mixed up with a whole major company policy change that affects me every way I turn, and the reason you’re pulling this red herring is because I found out about it.”

“It’s fairly mixed up, I’d say,” he continued like a cold volcano—I recognized the mood from a long ways back and knew it could erupt, “to drive thirty-six miles for a sandwich with a lunatic that doesn’t eat, when your ultimate superior has given you to understand that she’s an embarrassment to him.”

“Oh, crap, Oliver. Embarrassment hell. She doesn’t even see him. She depends on me for a couple of hours a week, she’s an unhappy kid and it costs me nothing. I can’t believe this.”

“She depends on you is exactly my point. You have an obsessive attraction to underdogs and misfits, cockneys and queers. And let me tell you, it’s more embarrassing to me than Frances is to George.”

“I can’t believe this,” I said again, and I couldn’t. “I work in Design Print. I hang out there.”

“You hang out there, as you so accurately put it, against my will. You are the wife of the second-ranking administrator in the company, and you have a certain prestige yourself as an artist and designer, and you slouch into the workers’ refectory to lunch on Cornish pasties and lager like some fourteen-pound-a-week council house hussy. And your loyalties are so misplaced that it does not seem in the least absurd to you to argue the ‘dependence’ of a hysterical file clerk when your own daughter is depending on the gardener to drive her to hospital.”

“My loyalties!”

“Your loyalties are so misplaced that it has not once in five months occurred to you to have lunch in Executive Hall.”

“My loyalties!” In the middle of this radical bullshit, the abruptly disarming notion that Oliver was hurt because I didn’t lunch with him gave my equilibrium another knock. I held onto the arms of the wing chair and tried to find some footing. “Your loyalties,” I rasped, “are so misplaced. That it never occurred to you. To ask if I wanted to go to Japan.”

“Do you want to go to Japan?” he rapped out instantly, in deadpan fury. The aspen trees and the tickling minnows purled up in my mind, a jewel of irony I had no time for.

“I think,” I faltered, trying to hang onto some scrap of my indignation, “I do think it’s something we might discuss.”

The volcano went. “Yes, I think,” he shouted, shoving himself up and over the space between us, standing over me so that his spit sprayed on my face, “that I might dare to discuss it with you now that it’s the gossip of every postboy in the packing room. Because you’ll understand that I didn’t dare do so before, not knowing whether you keep more secrets from me than you keep from your androgynous lover down there.”

I blanked. The idea of a lover was so far off that I lost a beat figuring out that he meant Malcolm. “Just let … just let me understand what you’re accusing me of, Oliver. Because I swear to God I can’t follow you.”

“I’m accusing you of disloyalty!” he sprayed. “It’s a perpetual humiliation to me. You went to East Anglian and staked out your claim in a Quonset hut as if you didn’t already have a position to maintain.”

“Because Jill left.”

“Because you won’t have anything from me! Because you save all your energy and your intimacy to use away from home. And that worries me, Virginia, because you have a loose tongue. Because you’ll chatter your whole history to any pair of bifocals at a sherry party, so it gives me cause to wonder if there’s any part of my bedroom behavior, for instance, that isn’t common knowledge in Design Print.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You’ll therefore understand, that if I have been asked to keep a major company confidence, the last person I dare share it with is you. And if it becomes common gossip, it’s reassuring to me to know you can’t have caused it.”

“I’ll leave you.”

I thought he’d hit me. When, instead of that, he spat at me, and missed, it made him a sap without making me cower less. He left, I suppose to work, and I stayed for a long time, hours, drinking myself fuzzy while I tried to make sense of things.

The threat of leaving him was arbitrary; I hadn’t meant more than “go to hell.” Now for the second time in a year I turned and took a look at it. For a while, as in the relief of indolence after an exhausting job, I lay slack and shivering, taking a look at it. Mist glowed at the windows where I’d forgotten to close the curtains. I stared out into it and mistily posited another life. Myself in a shop somewhere, of my own, maybe, out of the flatlands and next to the sea, where I would be perfectly at liberty to come and go, to slouch around and choose my own beliefs. I would be a bleeding liberal, by God; a social hemophiliac. My friends would be fat and shabby and smell of California. There’s Jill back from school in jeans and a T-shirt, dragging home a scraggy cat. I’d live in litter and the litters of strays, I’d eat spaghetti and take up pot. I would never see another tea cozy or a goddam snifter of Grand Marnier, I would never be deferred to in a local shop or pay cash for a sheepskin coat, I would never cut roses, blanch peas, preserve gooseberries, dry bay leaves, pick an apple from my own tree, I would never watch six thousand yards of my design pour wet from the presses and rise aloft over the rollers of steam …

Dillis said, “I’m not a rebel.” Did she really accept it as easily as all that? Or did her reconciliation to her easy lot, like mine, last just so far as the threshold of home, where her heart sank with longing for the different life she might have had, which, if she went to find it, would leave her grieving for the one she left?

And even beyond that, besides the life I owe Oliver, I’d make a lousy rebel. A rebel needs an acute myopia for the other side; you don’t actually rip up paving stones unless in your heart you know you’re right. Whereas, although I can work up an impassioned impromptu on racial equality, legal abortion and related virtues, I can never get to the point of disbelieving that where there’s smoke, somebody is rubbing two sticks together. There was, for instance, no conceivable justification for Oliver’s jealousy of Malcolm. Malcolm’s gay. He also has an impeccable moral code, a respectable position, and no envy of anything of Oliver’s including me. He’s about as likely to seduce me as Winnie Binkle.

All the same, it was adultery every way but sex. I came home downbeat, I picked up on the drive back to work. I saved souvenirs of our field trips, I saved up things to tell him. I couched my emotions in the terms that would make Malcolm laugh. I was open with him, and that openness was the dearest part of my day. How much, let me look at it clearly, how much of Oliver’s bedroom behavior might Malcolm, let me look at it clearly, be able to describe? If I’d had the details of the merger news, and Malcolm got wind of it, how likely is it I could have held back the details? If my loyalties tugged at each other, which tie would have broken first?

It might look as if, this way, I tried to see Oliver’s side. It’s not so; I might just as well have saved myself the trouble. Because what I meant by loyalty was that openness, it had to do with feeling. What Oliver meant was “maintaining the dignity of my position.” So whatever profligate loose-mouthed sins I confessed to, I’d still think he was an ass. I wonder if Oliver, having presented me with incontestable evidence I was wrong, believed I would love him again. It’s possible.

Most cataclysm dwindles to nuisance. Marital shrillness is low on the pole. I slept in the chair and woke hung over, sickish and stiff in the joints. Jill was out of sorts too; her foot hurt; her arm hurt where she got the shot. When she realized she couldn’t get her boot on over the bandage and therefore couldn’t go out in the rain, she determined there was nothing indoors worth doing except figuring out fifty ways to say so. Mrs. Coombe was coming late by agreement, and I pottered listlessly in the kitchen, putting off going to my studio. I tried to impress myself that for the second time I faced the possibility of living in Japan, but I didn’t really believe in it, and really this coincidence looked more like something that ought to be significant than that was. I tried deliberately to think of Jay, to recapture, if not the atmosphere of the yellow gorge, well then, at least the atmosphere of my nostalgia for it. But I had changed, Oliver and I had changed, as if the drying up of our expectations of each other was drying up even nostalgia, even regret.

Oliver came down with the face of someone who’s smashed a plate. I used the womanish weapons, set a more sumptuous than usual breakfast more meekly than usual in front of him. He said he guessed he’d overstated things a bit last night. No decision had been made, and he could give me a little more than the plantwide gossip. Opinion was divided at Admin as well as in the ranks. If they took the Japanese proposal it was still a toss-up who would go. I admitted I talked too much, but assured him absolutely that he could absolutely trust a confidence with me.

“We’ll have plenty of time to talk it over. It would mean a move up for me. The fact is, you’re an asset, because they could relocate us on one fund.”

“But it’s a big move.”

“I know. I realize it is.”

“Do you want to go?”

“I haven’t got as far as thinking about that yet. I haven’t decided whether I should come out for the merger itself.”

“Do you think it’s good for the company?”

“Financially, certainly.”

“But not for the workers?”

“I want to see which way Nicholson swings.”

I could have pointed out that this was not an answer, but of course I didn’t, relieved enough that he would talk about it without having to admire his reasoning.

For his part, he said that my lunching with Frances was not a serious matter; it was the principle of the thing. I said it wasn’t important to me either, and for the rest of Jill’s vacation I didn’t go. But when, back at work, I found Frances sullen and closed, I forgot any life-easing resolutions I might have made, and worked at winning her back. So by September we were into the same routine as before, except that she was thinner, more silent, duller than before.

I don’t think it was my brief defection that sent Frances down. I accept her judgment that causes are not simple, and if they are, well then, it probably had as much to do with the weather as anything. Summer turned sour and sluggish before its time. The roads were rivers, the garden rotted, the windows ran melodramatically every day. The grayness got into everybody, and everybody seemed to be setting up a harder than usual winter. No decision was reached about Utagawa, and the rumors dragged on, dog-eared and agitating. Malcolm’s Gary was doing a semester of research at the Cité Universitaire, and Malcolm was lonely, torturing himself exactly like an academic wife with visions of peach-faced
école
boys. Mom was acting as buffer between the coppers and two adolescent petty thieves of her ménage—I was never sure which were her own and which were her various sisters’, and not certain she was certain either. Dillis was being regularly and insolently propositioned by, oddly enough, Jake Tremain, the carpenter who’d built our office under the auspices of the Petty Girl, who now was outfitting one of her husband’s projects, and who wore his virility on his sleeve. “I c’n smell the
sperm
on him,” Dillis wailed, weakening.

I was struggling to produce a set of spring designs that had some reference to the mood of spring. Even in personal tranquility it was hard to work nine months ahead, when I never believed in any season but the one at hand. Even if nature did it too, even if the peonies blasted forth in January and the summer laburnum was burgeoning at the matrix in the overweening fecundity that would make its petals fall; even so, if the garden prepared more than one season ahead, I couldn’t
see
it.

So I worked with the explosive beauties of plant disease. Under the microscope some of these were more lush than flowers. One day, inspired, I sent to the Division of Agriculture at Whitehall for slides of the
rubigo.
They referred me to a research team at Leeds who were so flattered by my request that they sent me, free, a padded envelope of spores, stomate and haustoria cross sections together with a two-hundred-page brochure full of such artistic information as that “their mycelium consist of hyphae located between cells of host tissues and usually have haustoria; they form no basidiocarp.” I had much more sympathy with
The Young Lady’s Book of Botany,
and this made me feel not only like a Victorian female, but a fraud. What was I doing with a microscope of my own, at company expense? Moreover, when I had painstakingly prepared my surprise design for Frances, a red rust fungus spore flowing through a leaf stomate into an air cavity, Frances dully observed that it was “not a very handsome disease.” Deflation made me angry. What was her opinion anyway? I put it back in the portfolio, determined to foist it on the presses and the industry.

Frances lost weight and words. She bused in from her digs at Migglesly, and the bus stop was on the other side of Admin, so that perpetual rain brought her perpetually bedraggled in to us, smelling of wet wool otherwise infrequently washed. Stupidly, she began to be beautiful. Sickness had brought her bones out, her eyes were deep-set as naked sockets. Her hair hung damp and heavy to her shoulders, and even the clumsy skirt slipped down to anchor on her hipbones, hiding her knees, an austere version of the fashionable midi. But she was bad. She cried less, she bent double less often; she sat or stood most of the time tensely inert, as if the loss of fat from her frame had made it brittle. The harder I tried, the less she said, and what little she said veered toward the conventionally insane. Suddenly, looking away, “It’s dark in here.”

“The lights are on.”

Palms to her face, “In here.”

The things that would have relieved me, to stroke her or to shake her, to tell her how differently I saw her than she saw herself, would have seemed to Frances a contemptuous intrusion. I dared not make her recoil. I felt sometimes as if I were immobile by a salt lick, waiting for the animals to trust me. In fact, I covered this feeling with an inexpedient tendency to talk while she held herself wary, elsewhere. When I urged her again to see a psychiatrist she wouldn’t argue; she had no new arguments and I had heard the ones she had.