The Early Stories (142 page)

“I love that building. And it loves me.”

“No. It's me who loves you.”

“Can't you share?”

“No.”

She felt possessive about the apartment; when he told her Joan had
been there, too, and, just for “fun,” had slept with him, her husband, Ruth wailed into the telephone. “In
our
bed?”

“In
my
bed,” he said, with uncharacteristic firmness.

“In your bed,” she conceded, her voice husky as a sleepy child's. When the conversation finally ended, his mistress sufficiently soothed, he had to go lean his vision against his inanimate, giant friend, dimming to mauve on one side, still cerulean on the other, faintly streaked with reflections of high cirrus. It spoke to him, as the gaze of a dumb beast speaks, of beauty and suffering, of a simplicity that must perish, of time. Evening would soften its shade to slate; night would envelop its sides. Richard's focus shortened, and he read, with irritation, for the hundredth time, that impudent, pious marring, that bit of litany, etched bright by the sun's fading fire.

With this ring
I thee wed

Ruth, months ago, had removed her wedding ring. Coming here to embark with him upon an overnight trip, she wore on that naked finger, as a reluctant concession to imposture, an inherited diamond ring. When she held her hand in the sunlight by the window, a planetary system of rainbows wheeled about the room and signalled, he imagined, to the skyscraper. In the hotel in New York, she confided again her indignation at losing her name in the false assumption of his.

“It's just a convenience,” he told her. “A gesture.”

“But I
like
who I am now,” she protested. That was, indeed, her central jewel, infrangible and bright: she liked who she was.

In Manhattan they had gone separate ways and, returning before him, she had asked at the hotel desk for the room key by number. The clerk asked her her name. It was a policy. He would not give the key to a number.

“And what did you tell him your name was?” Richard asked, in this pause of her story.

In her pause and opaque blue stare, he saw re-created her hesitation when challenged by the clerk. Also, she had been, before her marriage, a second-grade teacher, and Richard saw now the manner—prim, wide-eyed, and commanding—with which she must have stood before the blackboard and confronted those roomfuls of children. “I told him Maple.”

Richard had smiled. “That sounds right.”

•  •  •

Taking Joan out to dinner felt illicit. She suggested it, for “fun,” at the end of one of the children's Sundays. He had been two months in Boston, new habits had replaced old, and it was tempting to leave their children, who were bored and found it easier to be bored by television than by this bossy visitor. “Stop telling me you're bored,” he had scolded John, the most docile of his children, and the one he felt guiltiest about. “Fourteen is
supposed
to be a boring age. When I was fourteen, I lay around reading science fiction. You lie around looking at
Kung Fu
. At least I was learning to read.”

“It's good,” John protested, his adolescent voice cracking in fear of being distracted from an especially vivid piece of slow-motion
tai chi
. Richard, when living here, had watched the program with him often enough to know that it was, in a sense, good; the hero's Oriental passivity, relieved by spurts of mystical violence, was insinuating into the child a system of ethics, just as Richard had taken ideals of behavior from dime movies and comic books—coolness from Bogart, debonair recklessness from Errol Flynn, duality and deceit from Superman.

He dropped to one knee beside the sofa where the boy, his upper lip fuzzy and his eyebrows manly dark, stoically gazed into the transcendent flickering; Richard's own voice nearly cracked, asking, “Would it be less boring if Dad still lived here?”

“No-oh”: the answer was instantaneous and impatient, as if the question had been anticipated. Did the boy mean it? His eyes did not for an instant glance sideways, perhaps out of fear of betraying himself, perhaps out of genuine boredom with grownups and their gestures. On television, satisfyingly, gestures killed. Richard rose from his supplicant position, relieved to hear Joan coming down the stairs. She was dressed to go out, in the snug black dress with the scalloped neckline, and a collar of Mexican silver. He was wary. He must be wary. They had had it. They must have had it.

Yet the cocktails, and the seafood, and the wine displaced his wariness; he heard himself saying, to the so familiar and so strange face across the table, “She's lovely, and loves me, you know”—he felt embarrassed, like a son suddenly aware that his mother, though politely attentive, is indifferent to the urgency of an athletic contest being described—“but she does spell everything out, and wants everything spelled out to her. It's like being back in the second grade. And the worst thing is, for all this explaining, for all this glorious fucking, she's still not real to me, the way—you are.” His voice did break; he had gone too far.

Joan put her left hand, still bearing their wedding ring, flat on the
tablecloth in a sensible, level gesture. “She will be,” she promised. “It's a matter of time.”

The old pattern was still the one visible to the world. The waitress, who had taught their children in Sunday school, greeted them as if their marriage were unbroken; they ate in this restaurant three or four times a year, and were on schedule. They had known the ginger-haired contractor who had built it, this mock-antique wing, a dozen years ago, and then left town, bankrupt but oddly cheerful. His memory hovered between the beams. Another couple, older than the Maples—the husband had once worked with Richard on a town committee—came up to their booth beaming, jollying, in that obligatory American way. Did they know? It didn't much matter, in this nation of temporary arrangements. The Maples jollied back as one, and tumbled loose only when the older couple moved away. Joan gazed after their backs. “I wonder what they have,” she asked, “that we didn't.”

“Maybe they had less,” Richard said, “so they didn't expect more.”

“That's too easy.” She was a shade resistant to his veiled compliments; he was grateful. Please resist.

He asked, “How do you think the kids are doing? John seemed withdrawn.”

“That's how he is. Stop picking at him.”

“I just don't want him to think he has to be your little husband. That house feels huge now.”

“You're telling me.”

“I'm sorry.” He was; he put his hands palms up on the table.

“Isn't it amazing,” Joan said, “how a full bottle of wine isn't enough for two people any more?”

“Should I order another bottle?” He was dismayed, secretly: the waste.

She saw this, and said, “No. Just give me half of what's in your glass.”

“You can have it all.” He poured.

She said, “So your fucking is really glorious?”

He was embarrassed by the remark now, and feared it set a distasteful trend. As with Ruth there was an etiquette of independent adultery, so with Joan some code of separation must be maintained. “It usually is,” he told her, “between people who aren't married.”

“Is dat right, white man?” A swallow of his wine inside her, Joan began to swell with impending hilarity. She leaned as close as the table would permit. “You must
promise
”—a gesture went with “promise,” a protesting little splaying of her hands—“never to tell this to anybody, not even Ruth.”

“Maybe you shouldn't tell me. In fact, don't.” He understood why she had been laconic up to now; she had been wanting to talk about her lover, holding him warm within her like a baby. She was going to betray him. “Please don't,” Richard said.

“Don't be such a prig. You're the only person I can talk to, it doesn't mean a thing.”

“That's what you said about our going to bed in my apartment.”

“Did she mind?”

“Incredibly.”

Joan laughed, and Richard was struck, for the thousandth time, by the perfection of her teeth, even and rounded and white, bared by her lips as if in proof of a perfect skull, an immaculate soul. Her glee whirled her to a kind of heaven as she confided stories about herself and Andy—how he and a motel manageress had quarrelled over the lack of towels in a room taken for the afternoon, how he fell asleep for exactly seven minutes each time after making love. Richard had known Andy for years, a slender swarthy specialist in corporation law, himself divorced, though professionally engaged in the finicking arrangement of giant mergers. A fussy dresser, a churchman, he brought to many occasions an undue dignity and perhaps had been more attracted to Joan's surface glaze, her New England cool, than the mischievous imps underneath. “My psychiatrist thinks Andy was symbiotic with you, and now that you're gone, I can see him as absurd.”

“He's not absurd. He's good, loyal, handsome, prosperous. He tithes. He has a twelve handicap. He loves you.”

“He protects you from me, you mean. His buttons!—we have to allow a half-hour afterwards for him to do up all his buttons. If they made four-piece suits, he'd wear them. And he washes—he washes everything, every time.”

“Stop,” Richard begged. “Stop telling me all this.”

But she was giddy amid the spinning mirrors of her betrayals, her face so flushed and aquiver the waitress sympathetically giggled, pouring the Maples their coffee. Joan's face was pink as a peony, her eyes a blue pale as ice, almost transparent. He saw through her words to what she was saying—that these lovers, however we love them, are not us, are not sacred as reality is sacred. We are reality. We have made children. We gave each other our young bodies. We promised to grow old together.

Joan described an incident in her house, once theirs, when the plumber unexpectedly arrived. Richard had to laugh with her; that house's plumbing problems were an old joke, an ongoing saga. “The back-door bell
rang, Mr. Kelly stomped right in, you know how the kitchen echoes in the bedroom, we had
had
it.” She looked, to see if her meaning was clear. He nodded. Her eyes sparkled. She emphasized, of the knock, “Just at the
very
moment,” and, with a gesture akin to the gentle clap in the car a world ago, drew with one fingertip a
v
in the air, as if beginning to write “very.” The motion was eager, shy, exquisite, diffident, trusting: he saw all its meanings and knew that she would never stop gesturing within him, never; though a decree come between them, even death, her gestures would endure, cut into glass.

Killing
 

Lynne's father's hand felt warm and even strong, though he lay unconscious, dying. In this expensive pastel room of the nursing home, he was starving, he was dying of thirst, as surely as if he had been abandoned in a desert. His breath stank. The smell from the parched hole that had been his mouth was like nothing else bodily she had ever smelled—foul but in no way fertile, an acid ultimate of carnality. Yet the presence was still his; in his unconscious struggle for breath, his gray face flitted, soundlessly muttering, into expressions she knew—the helpless raised eyebrows that preceded an attempt at the dinner table to be droll, or a sudden stiffening of the upper lip that warned of one of his rare, pained, carefully phrased reprimands. A lawyer, lost to his family in the machinations of cities and corporations, he had been a distant father, reluctant to chastise, the dinnertime joke his most comfortable approach to affection. He had spent his free time out of the house, puttering at tasks he lacked a son to share. In New Hampshire, over many summers, he had built a quarter-mile of stone wall with his own hands; in Boston, there had been the brick terrace to level and weed; in the suburb of his retirement, compost heaps to tend and broken fences to repair and redesign. In the year past, his hand had lost its workman's roughness. There was no task his failing brain could direct his hand to seize. Unthinkingly, Lynne had asked him, this past summer, to help one of the children to build a bird-house; manfully, chuckling with energy, he had assembled the tools, the wood, the nails. His pipe clenched in his teeth as jauntily as ever, he had gone through the familiar motions while his grandson gazed in gathering disbelief at the hammered-together jumble of wood. The old man stood back at last, gazed with the child, saw clearly for a moment, and abandoned such jobs forever. Dry and uncallused, his hand rested warm in his daughter's.