A Big Storm Knocked It Over (6 page)

In the office Sven turned the force of his intense regard on Jane Louise. She felt picked over, ransacked, probed. He seemed to sniff her, like a mother cat. Now that she was married, she felt he saw right through her. She felt that the nights of her married life were as open to him as a book.

“What's the scene with
him?
” she asked Adele, who was herself the X-ray technician of Sven. “He's all over me.”

“I think one of his girls quit on him,” Adele said.

Jane Louise went blank.

“His lunchtime sweetie,” Adele said.

Jane Louise was dimly aware that Sven's lunches, when not with printers and graphic artists, were spent in the company of compliant women of any age. She had once expressed the belief that he went several days a week for psychoanalysis. Adele had set her straight.

“He meets girls,” Adele said. “You know what I mean.”

“Do I know what you mean?” Jane Louise had said.

“He likes it with two girls,” whispered Adele, and Jane Louise found this information compelling but scarcely believable.

Adele now deduced that one of the girls had taken a powder.

“You mean this twosome is a routine thing?” Jane Louise said.

“It's been going on a while,” Adele said. “It started when he told this girl to bring a friend.”

“Maybe he meant for a friend of his,” Jane Louise said.

“He doesn't have any friends,” Adele said. “Haven't you noticed?”

“What about his poker game with Al and Dave?” Jane Louise said.

“Colleagues,” Adele said. “Sven only has wives, colleagues, and people he goes to bed with.”

“He had to have a mother,” Jane Louise said. “Isn't she alive?”

“Barely, and she calls him ‘Svenny,'” Adele said. “Isn't that adorable?”

“Svenny,” said Jane Louise.

“The reason he's all over you is because you got married,” said Adele. “Any woman's husband is his rival—you get it? It's some primitive force.”

Jane Louise looked at Adele with pure admiration.

It was hard to figure out what marriage meant to Sven. On the one hand, he had been married three times. On the other hand, three times was a lot of times. Adele always said that Sven liked to get married because it made him feel more guilty. It was Jane Louise's opinion that guilt was not in Sven's emotional repertoire. If he ever felt the merest twinge of remorse, it was like a dab of cologne.

“I think adultery means a lot to him,” Adele said.

On this elevating note Jane Louise went back to her office. Her interior life was trisected: She was now a married woman, and with her husband, Theodore Cornelius Parker, she was creating
an entity known as “Their Marriage.” It was like a museum stuffed with breakfast conversations, fights about where the extra key had been put, dinners eaten, movies viewed, showers taken together, plans made. In sickness and in health, and in confusion. Decisions were made: to try to conceive a baby in the early summer—a communal decision. Eventually a baby would emerge, and Jane Louise would have another mental section, a quarter section to deal with known as “Their Child.” They would then have an entity to inhabit called “Their Family.”

Also there was the office, as thick with associations and memories as any home. Her office itself was not as richly furnished as, say, Erna's, which had family photos, children's artworks, large fossils from Dorset, a wing chair, a scarlet sofa, and a dozen needlepointed pillows.

Jane Louise had a photo of Teddy on her desk. She had taken it herself, of him standing by the lake wearing a striped shirt, the wind ruffling his hair. She had a poster of one of Edie's cakes on the wall. The cake, which cost hundreds of dollars, was called “The Meadow” and had made Edie famous. It was a three-layer cake with shiny, pale green icing. Heaped and scattered everywhere, as if a child had flung a bouquet of wildflowers, were hundreds of spun-sugar-and-buttercream pansies, violets, bladder-wort, primroses, buttercups, and rose rugosa. It was a work of art.

On her desk was a clay bowl that she had made in art school. It contained paper clips. Her paperweight was a painted bronze elephant on a green base, a gift from Teddy.

Whatever was left over between office and home was some tiny slice called “Private Life.” Here she absentmindedly filed Sven and his lunchtime trysts. She tried not to think about it, but he had some weird hold on her.

Weren't there, in this world, those who were immune to all this? Like Erna, who behaved like a grown-up, created a family,
and never looked back, or sideways, and who did not live with the occasional fear that a swine like Sven might lean over again and kiss her neck, making her feel that an electric current had been run through her. Sven, she knew, was lying in wait. He would lie in wait for a long time, because she had not been conquered. She remembered her first months at the office—a youngish woman between attachments. Sven liked to take her out to lunch and make her drink a sip or two of his gin and tonic. He liked to say things like: “I wonder what it will be like when we wake up together.”

His caressing voice seemed to curl up in her ear. A little voice inside her said, “How corny,” and another voice, a more physical voice, so to speak, realized how effective he was. The hair on the back of her neck prickled.

Jane Louise had known exactly what to retort. She had said: “You mean, when we fall asleep in the van coming back from sales conference?”

By that time in her life, lots of lyrical, ridiculous, and persuasive things had been said to her by men. She was neither in the bloom of youth nor the exhaustion of age. She did not feel she was the classic lust-inducing type, but rather a more specific attraction. But Sven would wear her down, like water over rock, until she finally gave in. If she ever slept with him, he would behave the next day as if nothing had happened and she had somehow made the whole thing up.

Although Jane Louise had never thought of herself as boy crazy, she was certainly someone who had had her share of romance. She had experienced every possible kind: the kind in which you love them better than they love you; in which they love you better than you love them; in which you are madly in love and can't stand to be in the same room with them; in which they
adore you but can't seem to organize themselves to be with you. Then she met Teddy, the light at the end of the tunnel.

Although he was frequently silent, prone to a kind of alienating depression, and it was sometimes very hard to have a conversation with him, in many ways Teddy was heaven. He was unencumbered by certain doubts. He and Jane Louise had fallen in love, and therefore it made sense to him that they should live together and plan to get married without any particular distress in the way. Although his parents' marriage had been a disaster, Teddy did not want to see that sort of gloom in his future. He pointed himself in the direction of a union. Jane Louise, who had always been marriage-shy, slipped right in with him. In some ways Teddy was not like a modern person. He did not have spiritual difficulties. He tended to see a thing clearly, and life in some ways was very clear to him. He had the vision of a sensible grown-up. He certainly did not have impure thoughts about decadent types he worked with, but then plant chemists are not usually surrounded by louche types.

A husband was someone you could hide behind. You could cover your head with a marriage the way Arab women covered themselves with a veil. You could stamp out unnecessary or wayward emotions. You could dispel untoward thoughts. You could pretend that all of your life was all of a piece and it was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. You didn't have to admit to a thing. Like Dita.

Dita was amazing to watch in this way. It was known to Jane Louise that Dita had had that brief, quite intense sex wrangle with that silky, seal-like Joe Ching. In fact, Jane Louise was the only person in the whole world who knew about this fling. Dita did not tell her oldest and best friend from boarding school, Peachy Hopkins, because Peachy did not approve of philandering and had two nice children whom she walked to school each day. Eventually,
when things got out of hand—when one of Dita's marriages broke up and a new one began—Peachy was told all.

This encounter with Joe Ching had eaten up a great deal of Dita's hot, intense energy. If Joe Ching called late, or was late for an assignation, or did not appear to be in desperate love, Dita went to pieces. Jane Louise had spent a couple of evenings trying to calm her down as she shouted and sobbed and insisted her life was worthless.

And then Dita turned up at a concert with her lawful wedded husband, the reportage photographer Nick Samuelovich, who had a noble head of white blond hair, clear-framed glasses for his stark blue eyes, and a long black scarf wrapped several times around his neck. He towered over Dita, who was small-boned. She brushed imaginary lint off his camel's hair coat, and smoothed his shoulders, and, after the concert, took Jane Louise and Teddy, who was still new in her life, off to a tiny Russian café where Dita called her husband Nikosh and Nikita and laughed at his jokes. You would never know a thing. Teddy thought she was pure hell.

The Arctic manuscript sat on Jane Louise's table, almost glowing with a lurid light, like a phosphorescent mushroom. I ought to take that home and read it, she said to herself, and think up some plain but handsome design.

Her mind was not on this project. Was it the result of marriage that your attention wandered and you felt that your own consciousness was like a new puppy on a leash?

She heard a voice and looked up. Sven was standing in the doorway, appraising her. How long had he been there?

“Get to work,” he said, ambling in.

“I can't get to work with you in my office,” Jane Louise said. “And what's your story? You don't seem to be very work oriented these days.”

“It's the unsettling effect of your marriage,” Sven said. “Puts ideas in a person's head.”

“It's supposed to take ideas
out
of a person's head,” Jane Louise said.

“Oh, yes?” Sven said. “Is that why you got married?”

“Peace and harmony,” Jane Louise said. “A stitch in the ever-expanding tapestry of human affairs.”

Sven looked at her. “Men and women are adversaries,” he said. “Like cats and birds.”

“Really?” Jane Louise said. “Don't you and Edwina get along?”

“I get along with all my wives,” Sven said. “It isn't about ‘getting along.' It's about what's really underneath.”

“Underneath what?”

“Rapine,” Sven said. “Hunting and gathering. We are primitive people.”

“How interesting,” Jane Louise said. “You mean when a boy and girl go out, it's really about how he kills an animal, she finds some berries, and then he jumps her?”

“You know what I mean,” Sven said.

“I don't,” said Jane Louise.

“Passion,” Sven said, “is the sweater of pillage pulled inside out.” He looked enormously pleased with himself.

Jane Louise looked at him, saying nothing.

“You probably think it's all about oneness and unity.”

There was nothing Jane Louise could say to this. She did think it was all about oneness and unity.

“It's because women are receptacles that they feel that way,” Sven said.

“Seen in that light, you guys are simply garbage men,” Jane Louise said. “Get out of here, okay?”

This conversation rattled and upset Jane Louise. She felt her flesh creep in ways not entirely unpleasant. She also felt
slightly sweaty, as if her clothes had suddenly grown too tight.

She pushed some papers around on her desk. She fiddled with some type and answered a memo. She put the enormous manuscript in her canvas bag to take home. She called her husband, but he was in a meeting.

Teddy's office, unlike Jane Louise's, was large and uncluttered. The laboratories were painted a greenish white. The light was intense and focused. The halls of his workplace were quiet, unlike the offices of a publishing company, in which people could be heard yelling at one another, or barking over the telephone, or laughing in front of the coffee maker. Here radiators and windowsills were stacked with manuscript boxes, dozens of yellowing memos, and jacket sketches, and C-prints were pinned to bulletin boards. Teddy's office seemed like a monastery in which there were no extraneous words or things, although Teddy told Jane Louise that there was enough camaraderie to keep a friendly person happy. There were football pools and, during racing season, Derby pools.

Jane Louise imagined meetings at which sober, clean-looking scientists produced and analyzed data. This was, in fact, pretty much what Teddy described. Meetings of the editorial and design department were not like that at all.

Every now and again when some book presented design problems, Jane Louise was hauled upstairs to the editorial meeting. There Erna presided over a squadron of eccentrics: Delphine Kolodny, a nasty piece of work known to Dita as “the Flatworm.” Dita had the sweetest lunches with Delphine and then reported that Delphine took notes on everything she said. She felt that, given the chance, Delphine would sneak into her office and copy names off her Rolodex. Delphine had confided to Dita at one of their sweet little lunches that she wanted to be a “really top editor.” Dita recounted this story with considerable relish.

Dita's left side was always commandeered by Jeff Pottker, whom Dita had once French-kissed in a darkened office during the annual Christmas party. She revealed to Jane Louise that his wife was preoccupied with such paraphernalia of infancy as baby shit and breast-feeding, which seemed to have put a crimp in his libido. There was Omar Majors, editor emeritus, a fine-looking old man with the head of a Roman general, whose brother had once courted Dita's mother. And Willa Gathers, who did the cookbooks, and venerable Thomas Moss, who for years and years and years—he had never had another job—had edited poetry, art books, and history. Jim Phillipi came in three days a week and worked on an unending series of war memoirs. It was rumored that he had been on the Long March with Mao, as a journalist. Jane Louise surveyed this mostly underdressed (except for Dita) crowd, many of whom felt that designers were like cleaning personnel, while they, the editorial staff, were towering intellects.