Textures of Life (13 page)

“Look at that shadow,” she said. “It’s like a palm tree. I’m glad I left that studio wall bare…Oh darling. If we couldn’t talk like this I would die.”

They were silent in tribute.

He chuckled suddenly. “‘Come into the Drawing Room!’ Remember?”

“Sh-hh,” she said. “It
is
a palm tree. I wonder if it comes every night. I wonder if it’s us…Drawing room?”

“You remember. You said we were talking as if we were in one. On our wedding night. In the old place. We were sitting just like this.”

“Shhh, don’t move,” she said. “We’re in Florida. We’re going to be in Florida here every night!…Oh,
were
we? No, I don’t.”

“Well, I know damn well I didn’t dream it. You don’t remember your own wedding night?”

“Oh—you moved!” she said. “Oh, it
was
us. The palm tree…Oh, that night, the public one. No, what I remember is—the first one. In my bedroom, at home. The real one. I remember everything in the world about that.”

So must he, of course. His forefinger traced again the patch of down. But the memory that came of itself, without prodding, was always of the one she called with such disdain the public one, his long night’s vigil. What she remembered best was the drama of her virginity and its loss, the same as any girl who had worn a bridal veil, the same as any girl.

He turned her face up to his. If he’d grown up with a mother, sisters, perhaps he would know for certain whether a woman’s face always looked so plumped and renourished after tears. He turned hers from side to side. Perhaps he would take much more for granted. “You’ve lost your house-face. D’you know that?”

“Have I?” Above her parted lips, her eyes looked back at him; they could be innocent; they could be frightened; they could be knowing. He hadn’t an idea on earth of what they saw. He kissed them. The mattress springs shifted queasily.

“I remember the subway,” she said.

“So do I,” he said, in the greatest relief. “So do I.”

On the same impulse, they lay back. Up on elbow, he regarded her. “Imagine,” he said. “Imagine
us
, having a bed.”

He put his face down on her stomach. Outside, in this end-of-the-island cove, the diorama of the world crept past them, its furnishings endlessly attitudinized. Inside even the quietest room, by the hint in the lamp chain, from the port-sparkle at a window, in the coil of a mattress, something shifted ground. Only they two stood firm. “We don’t move,” said the calm rise and fall of her navel, and his hands answered, smoothing, “We don’t change.” Only they two stood still, eye to Gargantuan eye. When the phone rang, he was already inside her; they were joined.

They hung rigid, under the affront of it, her neck arched. Once before, interrupted so, they had answered it, spending the rest of the day sheepish and reduced; they could not get back. Don’t answer. But that had been the middle of the afternoon.

“Don’t answer.” Against his chest, her hands closed to fists.

The phone rang and rang; it rang.

“I—can’t—” It was the long-distance ring. “—My father.” By no will of his own, he was already outside her. Shrunken and cold, he stumbled to the windowsill where the phone was.

“California calling. Hold on, New York.”

He already knew the worst, then. His father disliked the telephone, never used it merely for company or sentiment. Mrs. Jacobson called thriftily on Sundays from wherever she might be, or at the coastal dinner hour, as she had last week from San Francisco. It would be Jacques, on that death-call by whose prospect all his own dorm years had been haunted, during which he could always be depended on to run for any insistent floor-call the others ignored—“There goes Pagani again—who’s the girl?” With luck, his father had not been alone.

Across from him, hiked up naked in the bedclothes, she questioned him dumbly and he nodded back. It was the call that, since his marriage, had not so much haunted him. His father would not have had him feel guilty for that, and he did not—only older—in a sudden acknowledgment of the way we all have to live. With luck, a friend would have been with him. With luck, it would be Jacques.

It was Margot.

“Hello? Hello. Hello, David.” Then there was a silence, through he had already said hello and yes. Usually she burbled.

“Yes, Margot?” She had been at the house for the weekend, as she sometimes was. Jacques sometimes drove her down from San Francisco. As luck had it, they both had been with him.

“I—hope it’s not too late—” she said. “I thought—the party’d still be going on.”

“No, they’ve gone.” Even as he said the dull words, a heavy joy stroked him. “You’re in New York!” That’s all it was. She’d flown home.

“No—I’m…still out here.” She paused. “Matter of fact…I’m down at Big Sur. We are.” And she stopped again.

“Oh,” he said. “Yes, Margot. Yes.” The road to the weekend cabin was high over the Pacific and hairpin. He or Jacques had always driven his father there. It was a male place. And she did not drive. But now, she would have thought it a duty, as family—“Margot, please let me talk to—”

“I will. I thought maybe I’d catch Liz, first. And then…
she
could—I really
ought
to talk to Liz first—”

“Put Jacques on, will you!” He shouted it.

“Jacques? Why—Jacques’s not here, David. We…I’m alone here. We came down alone. Just—just a minute…I guess I’m no good at this, after all…” She seemed to have left the phone.

He cupped his head in his hand, wondering how best to deal with hysteria three thousand miles away, death that far. There were neighbors down the road there, whose lights were visible, would be. Somehow that image brought home to him how far death was.

“No, she isn’t very good at it. Hello, Dave,” said his father. “How are you?”

“Fa—” He was able to make the right answers, noises, in time. A lifetime with that casual voice now served him well. He was even able to send a reassuring nod across the room to Liz, crouched there. “Fine, Dad.” He cleared his throat. “How are you?”

“Still a night owl. Hope we haven’t—Margot insisted a housewarming was just the time to call you.”

“Sure not. She want to talk to Liz?”

“Actually,
not
,” said his father. “She just thinks she ought to.” His words brought him almost into the room—his manner of saying, without dash, what often reverberated later as daring; the contrary look of youth given him by his silver hair. Over the very clear connection, his father now made a sound so slight that even the telltale wire could not quite calibrate it as chuckle or sigh, but David could see him as he might be standing, in the way that he himself was unaware of, that perhaps only his son saw—a sturdy enough body, almost too compacted and very slightly alop, carried as a body would be if it were a shield. “I’m no good over the phone,” said his father. “And you’ll get my letter tomorrow. So I’ll be brief.”

He was brief.

Just before he rang off, David roused himself. “Who drove you?”

“What’s that?”

“Who the hell drove you
up
there?”

“Margot.” This time it was clearly a chuckle. “She learned.”

When he had hung up, he went over and sat on the sofa that could not be sat on. It slid him forward, coolly as a pinball machine, and he let it deposit him on the floor, where he sat with his shanks stretched nakedly in front of him. If he’d had the will, he’d have got up on it again and let it dump him even harder; he needed somebody to douse his head or bang it, or turn him ass-upward, as his father had once done, when he swallowed the parcheesi button in the middle of a game. He sat there.

“Then he’s all right then? That was him?”

He’d forgotten her, over there wrapped in her tepee blanket. He nodded. In a minute, he meant to laugh.

“What’s the matter, then?” When he didn’t answer, she came over to him, dragging her blanket behind her. “Here, put something on then. You crazy?” He shook his head weakly. She dropped on all fours, trying to wrap the cover around both of them. He rose on hands and knees to help her, the twisted blanket between them, and for a moment they regarded one another over it, two quadrupeds, their limbs moony in the stone-age light, the brow of one of them knitted. She was getting ready to be hurt at not being let in on it, not asked to join with him against that enemy which waited always to separate. He started to tell her precisely how joined they were now, how related—and then he began to laugh. “Your father—” he said. “My mother…No…I mean
your
mother. And
my
father—”

He sometimes forgot how quick she was, under all that female miasma—or maybe because of it. “They—?”

He nodded.

“Holy God,” she said, words she never used. Slowly they collapsed together under the blanket, which untwisted suddenly, as if wanting to help them huddle under it, doubly un-orphaned as they were now. “
Ho-
oly God!”

When they got into bed, shivering from the cold of the floor, he put on his pajamas and sat back. Having gone to bed bare, as usual, she reached for his discarded shirt and slid it on. They sat pillow to pillow, not quite touching.

“Why do you suppose she didn’t want to talk to me?” she said.

“Oh, I don’t know.” It seemed strange that she should ask
him
. “Maybe she just didn’t know how to—maybe she was embarrassed.”

“Why?” said the girl. “I’m not
her
mother.”

They were quiet awhile.

“What did
he
say?” she said then. “I mean—how.”

“Oh—he just sort of—said it. You know how—concise he is.” How concise men are. It was because she couldn’t be expected to know his father’s code of it—which his son understood without exactly ever having been told—that there was no point in telling her. Those words were between his father and him; he even thought now that this was why his father had said them, to deny that anything had changed between them, their closeness. Yet his father’s voice had had its own wonder—his father’s son was not to be fooled. “The surprises keep on coming, Dave.” He had repeated it, slowly. “They keep on
coming
.” To me, his father had meant. To me.

She was waiting.

“Oh you know,” he said. “He just said that—they were.”

“He’s very reserved, isn’t he,” she said thoughtfully. “I think he’s the most reserved human being I ever—”

“Restrained. He’s had to be.”

“But you’re not,” she said eagerly. “I mean reserved. I think it’s kind of wonderful that he managed to bring you up that way in spite of—” She gazed at him, big-eyed. “Are you?”

“No.” He smiled at her. “No, I’m not the least bit reserved.” He sank back on his pillow, easing down in a straight line. She did the same on hers.

“They haven’t got a thing,” she said after a while, “in common. Not a thing.”

“I suppose.”

“He’s so—sort of above things,” she said. “And she’s always running around after them.”

“Maybe—she’ll change.” She had already. Seen, not through Liz’s eyes, seen as someone’s wife, if not quite yet his father’s, Margot showed up as a woman whom all along they had ignored, clearly still a candidate as a woman. It was quite possible now to see her sexually, or see that a man could. He did not pursue this.

“I hope she—won’t run him ragged,” she said.

“Shut up,” he said at once. “Shut
up
!” He found himself shaking. It was the first time he had ever felt a tinge of dislike for her.

“Oh Dave, I didn’t—I’m sor—”

“I’m sorry.”

They said it at the same time. They both were. Lips caught in teeth, they reached for hands, across pillows. After a long enough pause, he released her hand. He brooded. He grinned suddenly. “There’s something we forgot about, they do have in common.”

She wasn’t as quick this time. “What?”

“Us.”

She shrugged. “Oh let’s—I hate people who say let’s face it, don’t you—but let’s. They weren’t thinking about us.”

“They were alone,” he said slowly. “I guess that’s it. Both of them.”

She weighed this. “They were alone before. And I’ll swear my mother never gave a thought to—Well, maybe we introduced them. Maybe they got together over—I hope it’s not
all
they have in—” She shifted quickly. “Anyway, it’s just as well they’re across a continent. From us.”

“They want us to pay them a visit,” he said. He turned to punch up the pillow. “You want to?”

“No!” she said at once. “I mean—after all, we just got this place—I—But if you think—You go, if you—I mean really…Dave?”

“I think I ought,” he said. “I’ll call them tomorrow.”

“You’re so much nicer than I am.” She whispered it. “You want the truth, I think I really feel—” When there was no response, she inched forward, from her pillow. “I want to know how you feel. Not because of them.” She disposed of them. “I want to—I have to know how you…feel. It might be about anything. It just happens that it’s them.”

He pleated the sheet. “Well, I’m used to worrying about him. I feel—you should excuse the expression—” He looked up. “I hate people who say that, don’t you? I guess you could say my feelings are still—paternal.”

“Oh, you’re so smart,” she said, but not as if it gave her joy. “We both are.” She leaned back. When she next addressed him, it was over her shoulder. “You ever notice…when people really feel, they have to use cliché?”

“Or say nothing at all,” he said.

“Christ!” she said. “Well,
we
certainly have
them
.”

There was a silence.

“Maybe we both feel sleepy,” he said.

“I don’t, do you?”

“No. I’ll turn out the light, anyway.”

When she next spoke, she sounded as if her eyes were closed hard. “Still, it would be awful, wouldn’t it, to live side by side, hardly knowing anything about each other, scarcely able to remember anything together. Never being able to—walk around in each other’s minds…Dave?” Her voice had a break in it. “We…aren’t beginning, are we…not to remember the same things?”

He closed his own eyes. “No.”

“Then can’t we talk about it. This.
Oughtn’t
we?”

His slight movement, an ankle kicking out, brought his cold thigh against her warm one. He shifted it, away. “You mean, anything we think we oughtn’t to talk about, then we should. Well go ahead.”