Couples (11 page)

Gallagher said, “He doesn’t understand the game.” Gallagher would have been handsome but for something narrowed about the mouth, something predetermined and closed expressed by the bracketlike creases emphasizing the corners: prim tucks. Amid the whiskery Sunday chins his jaws were smooth-shaved; he had been to mass.

She said, “I think you’re all awfully rough with each other.”

“
C’est la guerre
,” little-Smith told her.

Ken, in the lull, was practicing shots, perfecting himself. Foxy felt herself submerged in shadows and cross-currents while he was on high, willfully ignorant, hollow and afloat. His dribbling and the quivering rattle of the rim irritated her like any monologue.

Hanema was beside her. Surprisingly, he said, “I hate being a shit and that’s how it keeps turning out. I beg him to come play and then I cripple him.”

It was part confession, part brag. Foxy was troubled that he would bring her this, as if laying his head in her lap. She shied, speechless, angered that, having felt from an unexpected angle his rumored force, his orphan’s needful openness, she had proved timid, like Angela.

The gravel driveway splashed again. An old maroon coupe pulled in, its windshield aswarm with reflected branches and patches of cloud. Janet Appleby got out on the driver’s side. She carried two sixpacks of beer. Georgene Thorne pushed from the other door holding in her arms a child of a cumbersome age, so wadded with clothes its legs were spread like the stalks of an H. By the scorched redness of its cheeks the child was an Appleby.

Little-Smith and Hanema quickly went to greet them. Gallagher joined Ken at shooting baskets. Not wishing to eavesdrop, yet believing her sex entitled her to join the women,
Foxy walked slowly down the drive to them as little-Smith caperingly described Freddy’s unfortunate finger—“le
doigt disloqué
.”

Georgene said, “Well, I’ve told him not to try sports when he’s potted.” Her upper lids were pink, as if she had been lying in the sun.

Piet Hanema told her, “But I asked him especially to come, so we could have four on a side.” Such a sad broad face, growing old without wisdom, alert and strained.

“Oh, he would have come anyway. You don’t think he’d sit around all Sunday afternoon with just
me
.”

“Why not?” Piet said, and Foxy imagined hostility in his eyes as he gazed at her. “Don’t you want to go inside and see how he is?”

“He’s all right,” she said. “Isn’t Angela with him? Let them alone. He’s happy.”

Janet and Harold were conferring urgently, in whispers. Their conversation seemed logistical, involving schedules and placement of cars and children. When the Appleby infant seized a cat on the lawn and tried to lift it by its hindquarters, as if spilling a bag of candy out, it was little-Smith who went and pried it loose, while Janet held her face in this idle moment up to the sun. The cat, calico, with a mildewed eye, ran off and hid in the lilac hedge. Foxy asked Hanema, “Is that yours?”

“The cat or the child?” he asked, as if also aware that the child’s parentage seemed in flux.

“The calico cat. We have a cat called Cotton.”

“
Do
bring Cotton to the next basketball game,” Georgene Thorne said. She added, throwing an athletic arm toward the woods, “I can’t see the children for the trees,” as if this explained the rudeness of her first remark, with its implied indignation at Foxy’s being here at all.

Hanema explained, “She belongs to the dairy down the road but the children sometimes feed it. They let the damn thing into the house full of fleas and now I have them.”

Freddy Thorne came out of the house. His little finger was bandaged to a green plastic picnic spoon. The pad of his fingertip rested prettily in the bowl and the curve of the handle made a very dainty fit. That Angela had improvised this strengthened Foxy’s sense of illicit affection between these two. Freddy was plainly proud.

“Oh Freddy,” Janet said, “it’s just gorgeous.” She was wearing white slacks so snug they had horizontally wrinkled along her pelvis. The nap of her turquoise velour jersey changed tint as it rounded the curve of her breasts; as she moved her front was an electric shimmer of shadow. The neck was cut to reveal a slash of mauve skin. Her lips had been painted to be a valentine but her chalky face needed sleep. Like her son she was thin-skinned and still being formed.

Freddy said, “The kid did it.”

Constantine’s young neighbor explained, “At camp last summer we had to take First Aid.” His voice emerged reedy and shallow from manhood’s form: a mouse on a plinth.

Eddie Constantine said, “He comes over to the house and massages Carol’s back.”

Freddy asked, “Oh. She has a bad back?”

“Only when I’ve been home too long.”

Ken and Gallagher stopped playing and joined the grown-ups.

The sixpacks were broken open and beer cans were passed around. “I
despise
these new tabs,” little-Smith said, yanking. “Everybody I know has cut thumbs. It’s the new stigmata.” Foxy felt him grope for the French for “stigmata.”

Janet said, “I can’t do it, I’m too weak and hung. Could
you
?” She handed her can to—Ken!

All eyes noticed. Harold little-Smith’s nose tipped up and his voice rose nervously. “Freddy Thorne,” he taunted. “Spoonfinger. The man with the plastic digit.
Le doigt plastique
.”

“Freddy, honestly, what a nuisance,” Georgene said, and Foxy felt hidden in this an attempt to commiserate.

“No kidding,” Constantine said, “how will you get in there? Those little crevices between their teeth?” He was frankly curious and his eyes, which Foxy for a moment saw full on, echoed, in the absence of intelligence, aluminum and the gray of wind and the pearly width low in the sky at high altitudes. He had been there, in the metallic vastness above the boiling clouds, and was curious how Freddy would get to where
he
had to go.

“With a laser beam,” Thorne said, and the green spoon became a death ray that he pointed, saying
zizz
between his teeth, at Constantine, at Hanema, at herself. “
Zizz
. Die.
Zizz
. You’re dead.”

The people nearest him laughed excessively. They were courtiers, and Freddy was a king, the king of chaos: though struck dead, Foxy refused to laugh. At her back, Georgene and Piet, ignoring Freddy, exchanged words puzzling in their grave simplicity:

“How are you?”

“So-so, dollink.”

“You’ve been on your sunporch.”

“Yes.”

“How was it? Lovely?”

“Lonely.”

Overhearing, Foxy was rapt, as when a child she listened to her parents bumbling and grunting behind a closed door, intimacy giving their common words an exalted magic.

Ben Saltz’s voice overenunciated; his moving lips had an air of isolation, as if they were powered by a battery concealed in his beard. He was saying, “All kidding aside, Freddy, they really can do great things now with nontactile dentistry.”

“Whoops,” Freddy Thorne said, “that lets tactile types like me out,” and he slapped the biform seat of Janet’s tense white pants. She whirled from cozying with Ken to give Freddy a look less of surprise than of warning, a warning, Foxy felt, that had to do less with the pat than with its being witnessed.

Saltz seized the chance to latch on to Ken. “Tell me, if you can spare a minute, have you felt the effects of laser beams in biochemistry yet? I was reading in the
Globe
the other week where they’ve had some success with cancer in mice.”

“Anybody can do miracles with mice,” Ken stated, ruefully staring down at Janet’s backside. He was not comfortable, Foxy had noticed years ago, talking to Jews; he had competed unsuccessfully against too many.

“Do me a favor,” Saltz went on, “and tell me about DNA. How the blazes, is the way my thinking runs, how the blazes could such a complex structure spontaneously arise out of chaos?”

“Matter isn’t chaos,” Ken said. “It has laws, legislated by what can’t happen.”

“I can see,” Saltz said, “how out in our western states, say, the Grand Canyon is the best example, how a rock could be carved by erosion into the shape of a cathedral. But if I look inside and see a lot of pews arranged in apple-pie order, in rows, I begin to smell a rat, so to speak.”

“Maybe,” Ken said, “you put those pews there yourself.”

Ben Saltz grinned. “I like that,” he said. “I like that answer.” His grin was a dazzling throwback, a facial sunburst that turned his eyes into twinkling slits, that seized his whole
face like the snarl on the face of a lion in an Assyrian bas-relief. “I like that answer a lot. You mean the Cosmic Unconscious. You know, Yahweh was a volcano god originally. I think it’s ridiculous for religious people to be afraid of the majesty and power of the universe.”

Angela called from the porch, “Is anybody except me chilly? Please come into the house, anybody.”

This signaled some to go and some to stay. Eddie Constantine crushed his beer can double and handed it to Janet Appleby. She placed it above her breast, as if it were a tin corsage. He crossed to his Vespa and, passing close to Foxy, tapped her stomach. “Suck in your gut.” Those were his words. The neighbors’ boy got on the Vespa behind him, clinging possumlike. Constantine kicked off, and a spray of stones leaped from his rear wheel as he went down the drive and banked into the road beyond the lilac hedge, which was losing transparence to the swelling of buds. The cat raced from the hedge in terror and ran silently across the lawn, elongating. Children were emerging from the darkening woods. Half of them were crying. Really, it was only Frankie Appleby crying. Jonathan Smith and Whitney Thorne had tied him to a tree with his own shoelaces and then couldn’t undo the knots so they had to cut them and now he had no shoelaces and it wasn’t his
fault
. His feet stumbled and flopped to illustrate and Harold little-Smith ran to him while Janet his mother stood cold, plump and pluming, on the porch gazing to where the sun, a netted orange, hung in the thin woods. Across the lawn came the rosy Hanema girls and a beautiful male child like a Gainsborough in the romantic waning light, curly black hair and a lithe self-solicitous comportment. With a firm dismissing nod Gallagher took this luxurious child by the hand and led him to their car, the gray Mercedes from whose tall clean
windows Foxy had first viewed Tarbox. Saltz and the Thornes moved to go in. In the narrow farmhouse doorway the two men, one bearded and one bald, bumped together and Thorne unexpectedly put his arm, the arm with the crippled green-tipped hand, around the Jew and solidly hugged him sideways. Saltz flashed upward his leonine grin and said something to which Thorne replied, “I’m an indestructible kind of a prick. Let me tell you about dental hypnosis.” The pleasant house accepted them. Foxy and Ken moved to go.

“Don’t all leave,” Angela begged. “Wouldn’t you like to have a
real
drink?”

Foxy said, “We must get back,” truly sad. She was to experience this sadness many times, this chronic sadness of late Sunday afternoon, when the couples had exhausted their game, basketball or beachgoing or tennis or touch football, and saw an evening weighing upon them, an evening without a game, an evening spent among flickering lamps and cranky children and leftover food and the nagging half-read newspaper with its weary portents and atrocities, an evening when marriages closed in upon themselves like flowers from which the sun is withdrawn, an evening giving like a smeared window on Monday and the long week when they must perform again their impersonations of working men, of stockbrokers and dentists and engineers, of mothers and housekeepers, of adults who are not the world’s guests but its hosts.

Janet and Harold were arguing in whispers. Janet whirled and proclaimed, “Sweet, we
can’t
. We
must
rescue Marcia and Frank, they’re probably
deep
in conver
sa
tion.” She and little-Smith collected their scrambled children and left in her maroon car. As they backed from the driveway, the sinking sun for an instant pierced the windshield and bleached their two faces in sunken detail, like saints under glass.

“Good-bye,” Piet Hanema said politely from the porch. Foxy had forgotten him. He seemed so chastened by the finger incident that she called to him, “Cheer up.”

Safe in their MG, Ken said, “Zowie, I’m going to be stiff tomorrow.”

“But wasn’t it fun?”

“It was exercise. Were you terribly bored?”

“No. I
loved
Angela.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. She’s gracious and careless and above it all at the same time. She doesn’t make the
demands
on you the others do.”

“She must have been a knockout once.”

“But not now? I must say, your painted friend Janet with her hug-my-bottom sailor pants does
not
impress me aesthetically.”

“How does she impress you, Fox?”

“She impresses me as less happy than she should be. She was meant to be a jolly fat woman and somehow missed.”

“Do you think she’s having an affair with Smith?”

Foxy laughed. “Men are so observant. It’s so obvious it must be passé. I think she had an affair with Smith some time ago, is having one with Thorne right now, and is sizing you up for the future.”

His flattered languid answering laugh annoyed her. “I have a confession,” she said.

“You’re having an affair with Saltz. God, Jews are ponderous. They
care
so much. The Cosmic Unconscious, Jesus.”

“No. But almost as bad. I told Angela we wanted to have her husband look at our house.”

His voice withdrew, acquired a judging dispassion. “Did you set a date?”

“No, but I think we should now. You should call. She didn’t think he’d be interested anyway.”

Ken drove swiftly down the road they already knew by heart, so both leaned a little before the curve was there. “Well,” he said after silence, “I hope his basketball isn’t a clue as to how he builds houses. He plays a pretty crusty game.”

Ruth, standing beside the bed with almost a woman’s bulk, was crying and by speaking woke him from a dream in which a tall averted woman in white was waiting for him at the end of a curved corridor. “Daddy, Nancy says the dairy cat got an animal downstairs and the hamster’s not in his cage and I’m afraid to look.”