B0042JSO2G EBOK (13 page)

After a while her crying softened. She began to catch her breath. A tingling rose in her temples, she felt her cheeks hot. She stopped, shaken and worn out. The reason they never walked on this street
was that it ended in someone’s driveway. She looked around. In the houses were people with many lives she would never know. It was a summer evening in late July. People were getting home from work or already were home. Maybe they were having drinks, feeding babies. Maybe someone read a book, lit a pipe, walked down stairs. None of them was her mother. She heard a window shudder. Through the tangle of trees the sun was setting and the small orange diamond of it flashed, hitting Margie in the eye.

She retraced her steps back down the street they never took. The two men with the dog were gone. She followed the curving brick sidewalk, crossed the wider street with traffic going both ways, and took Radcliffe Way past the half-stone house with the television going inside, over the sidewalk stained wet from a sprinkler. She put her sunglasses on before reaching Brattle Street, feeling blank and drugged and numb. Back at the house was pain that did not stop, that would keep going, having no purpose, adding up to nothing, continuing until it ended. She stepped up to the market on the comer.

She took out of her basket and put on the counter a yellow bottle of Joy, three green apples, a bulb of garlic, a blue box of spaghetti, mushrooms under plastic in a purple container, an orange packet of batteries. The Asian woman at the cash register sometimes seemed to know her and sometimes didn’t. This time she seemed to and smiled. Margie asked for paper not plastic and put the items in the bag herself. She waited at the door while an old man who was coming in took the steps very slowly tapping his foot forward. Her mother would never be that old.

The evening light flooded Brattle Street which for a moment had no cars on it and the surface shone gold.

At home the flowers had been taken off the hall floor. In her mother’s room sat Mrs. Kelley and Pat Vincent. Margie tilted in the door as Mrs. Kelley was saying she’d just gotten a postcard from her son who was driving his family across the country, they’d stopped in New Mexico to see Buddy Cutler who as they knew had married the part-Indian girl who according to her son couldn’t be nicer though maybe not the brightest girl and they had four kids
and Buddy seemed to be doing very well with his business selling cactus plants. They were all having a super time.

Her mother’s eyelids were heavy from the drugs. She pointed to the cosmos. Where did those come from? she said in her new slow voice.

Margie said she’d picked them from the garden.

Tell her I love her, said Ann Lord, and she closed her eyes.

I don’t know how you can last in there, said Ralph Eastman when Ann Grant and Harris Arden climbed up the schooner ladder. Aren’t you freezing?

Harris handed her a towel. It was the only towel around and it occurred to Ann how Malcolm Flynn would have passed her the towel after quickly drying himself off first and even Vernon Tobin would have wiped his face before passing it on. Harris Arden gave her the towel while he dripped.

They sat in the sun to warm up. The engine kicked on and a sigh of protest rose up from the ship.

We’ll never get back in time otherwise, Ralph said.

Let’s never
go
back, Buddy said. He had a wet towel wrapped turban-style around his head. Gail Slater sat beside him with her long arms and long legs folded up like origami and Ann noticed a familiar worshipful look when her face tilted in Buddy’s direction. Ann had seen the look again and again on girls near Buddy. He liked quiet girls. Sometimes one never heard a word out of Buddy’s girls. They slumped in a posture of admiration, hypnotized. He seemed to cast a spell over them with no effort whatsoever. One summer he’d even turned his idle attention to Ann. There was one afternoon they’d ridden bikes to an abandoned farmhouse, stolen plums, and lay eating them under a tree. He’d taken a splinter out of her hand, and Ann had started to see him in a different way. Then he’d gotten distracted by the buxom Preston sisters. Ann had minded at the time but soon grew proud of having escaped being one of those girls swooning over Buddy Wittenborn.

The water was satin. Harris’ hand came toward her and she thought crazily he was going to grab her and pull her over. Instead he removed a thin green ribbon of seaweed stuck to her shoulder. Up at the bow Gigi lay unmoving in the same position as if nailed to the deck.

Don’t turn on the engine, she said.

We won’t.

It’s coming in from the south, said Ann Lord.

Teddy and Margie exchanged glances. Their mother looked through them.

A person is like a porpoise, she said solemnly.

Teddy and Margie started to laugh and left the room, pushing each other, not wanting to embarrass her.

But they did, they did turn on the engine and they kept it on. The hum took over the silence and the boat which had been drifting unsteerable into the glassy bay now pointed unwavering with a slicing bow back toward the bristled silhouette of Three O’Clock Island. The water passed in striped ripples beneath their feet dangling over the side. Gulls flew by weaving around each other and Ann Grant felt there was a purpose behind everything which she understood but could not put into words. Maybe music could explain it, words were too flat.

The man beside her was a tree.

At the stern Lila and Carl sat with their backs to the boat. Lila’s head rested on Carl’s shoulder as he talked to her and she nodded, keeping her head against him.

Gigi Wittenborn materialized on the other side of Harris. Even waking from a nap she seemed to be coming from some adventure. A whole crowd of people seemed to stare out from her lit face.

You were asleep a long time, Harris said. I hope it’s not that bump on the head.

I wasn’t sleeping, Gigi said. I was dreaming.

They faced out. Not far from the boat the sleek back of a porpoise slid up with its flat fin and rolled forward like the top of a wheel then slipped under again. Ann glanced at Harris Arden. He wasn’t wearing sunglasses and his eyes were suffused with light. Everything is in the eyes, she thought. The porpoises—there were two—swam alongside the boat without looking over, quick to attach themselves, unquestioning and proprietary. Ann Grant looked at his mouth with the crease in the bottom lip. Everything is in the mouth, she thought. For a moment the difficulties of their situation pricked her but she quickly assumed they would be resolved.

Look over there, someone said. Coming from the south.

Around the western tip of Perry’s Point plowing forward like a huge white snowbank was white mist tumbling with curls of steam dissolving upward in wisps.

It looks like an avalanche, someone said.

Ann looked at the encroaching fog. She felt it was coming for her.

Ask me again.

What?

To look at you.

What do you mean?

The way you did.

He was silent for a while. I’m not sure I can go back that far. Can we? It wouldn’t be the same.

That’s alright, she said. I have it here. She closed her eyes and knocked her fist on her breast.

The sheet on her knee rolled into a glassy swell. His hand came toward her again and touched the small of her back where her bathing suit dipped and his palm was cool.

Are you sunburned? he said. His hand on her back seemed to say, This is you. This is who you are under my hand. The boat moving made a breeze but the water’s surface remained still. You have a nice back, he said. This was how he would tend a patient, she thought, looking down, thinking what to do next.

You must have seen some awful things in Korea, she said.

He looked at her oddly and took his hand away. I don’t think about it, he said. It doesn’t help to think about.

She ought not to have brought it up. You must think normal life awfully usual, she said, meaning to apologize.

Not at all. He said nothing for a while then with an effort said, Not at all. It’s something which took place on another planet, it has so little to do with what’s here. Every once in a while I think … he trailed off. There were people there who … He shook his head. Anyway, he said, I don’t.

I can’t imagine it, she said.

One thing I liked about playing music, he said. You don’t have to talk about it. You just do it. I like that.

Before sunrise she watched the sky in little pieces between the leaves change from dark blue to pink to white. She’d once had a life but was no longer in it. Nights without sleep and hours spent staring did not make up a life. For moments the pain lifted like a sail filling with wind and the white bed sailed along then something slid under digging in its points and the wheels began to churn and the steel machine to hum. One endured suffering but it never took any shape, it was made simply to be borne. It produced nothing and after it was over was forgotten.

Where to turn? She looked about the room, into the corners, out the windows. She lay and lay and lay and lay. It seemed as if she’d been crossing this ceiling all her life. She wanted a song to sing, she wanted to be singing. Where had her life gone? She’d not even had it. An old longing billowed out like a curtain in a gazebo, flapping out as if to say, there was something you wanted … Someone was snapping his fingers in time with the music. Someone was playing
Duke Ellington through the trees. He played beautifully. Will you have dinner with me? he said. He had nervous dark eyebrows, was thin as a wire. He nodded a lot, encouraging himself, and snapped his fingers as if biting off something hard. There was a song on the radio, it was one of his singers, he took her to a low-ceilinged room where a band played hunched over their instruments, they were let in without tickets, smoke filled the wedges of light. He got up to play. He played piano with the boys onstage. The music was lively and filled up the room. He looked stricken smiling after applause, then sang “Imagination” and her knees buckled hearing his voice and she leaned against a column. Other people listened sitting at tables or dancing, some more rapt than others but all were under the spell. The music fell over her like a net and she thought of Phil Katz in a new way. He was a sort of poet. She never thought of him as a husband or a father and actually neither did he and yet that’s what he became, for a while.

He brought her soup when she had the flu reading Nancy Mitford and talked nonstop and when he kissed her she said he might get sick and he said, I’m not too concerned.

He held out his hand, he pulled her off the bench, his arm was wiry and firm, he was smiling, she was lost and did not know it. She took his arm. They walked by towering buildings, she looked up, he looked down, it had been raining. She could not remember what she said, she remembered holding onto his arm. They were wed at City Hall. She felt she was herself sometimes then at other times felt she was just another girl. He said my wife, she sat beside him driving into the sun, he called her from the next room, she ironed his shirt, he waited while she got dressed. Then she couldn’t fit into any of her clothes.

They had a little girl, Constance. Phil had wanted a girl. Then another, Margie right away. She was scrambling eggs, Phil was slamming the door, she made deviled eggs, Phil wore a hat. They took a picnic in the park wearing sunglasses, they ate half an egg salad sandwich, walked the baby carriage on Monday. Sunday Phil slept all day. He took her out, he came home late, he came home
at dawn. He took Constance on his bony knee, Margie was wrapped in an eyelet blanket. Fiona Speed stopped by in a new Chanel suit. Phil hitched his arm into his overcoat hurrying out. Margie lay in the crib, strawberries on her jumper, Constance wore a pom-pom on her hat, Phil’s knee beating in time with the music.
Don’t get around much anymore …

Her face changed after the babies. At night the music was louder, she left early, Phil put her in a cab and went back to the people he had to see. At home she paid the babysitter, fed Margie. Her sweater smelled of smoke, tears were streaming down her cheeks. Phil had an office in midtown. In at noon, home for dinner, out again. His clients were three singers and one band, a few musicians who came and went. She wrote checks from the family account. Phil had the business account which also went to backing other enterprises, shaky despite inside tips, visits to the racetrack. He stood very still sweating as the horses ran and if he won burst into a sort of spasm, his arms awkward, not like you’d expect from a musician. When he lost he stayed away from the apartment and the flowered chairs and Ann not looking at him. His daughters looked at him with his own brown eyes.