Couples (14 page)

“Nothing very much. It said, ‘Let’s break it off, no more phone calls,’ et cetera, which might mean anything. It could mean she’s putting on pressure for him to divorce me.”

“Why would she want to marry Freddy?” He realized this was tactless and tried to disguise it with another question. “You’re sure it’s her?”

“Quite. She signed it J and anyway her handwriting is unmistakable, big and fat and spilly. You’ve seen it on her Christmas cards.”

“Well. But sweet, it’s been in the air for some time, Freddy and Janet. Does it really shock you?”

“I suppose,” Georgene said, “there’s something called female pride. But more than that. I’m shocked by the idea of divorce. If it comes to that I don’t want him to have anything to throw back at me, for the children to read about in the paper. It wouldn’t bother Freddy but it would me.”

“So what does this do to us?”

“I suppose nothing, except that we must be very careful.”

“How careful is careful?”

“Piet. I’m not going to tell you how much you mean to me. I’ve said that in ways a woman can’t fake. I just don’t think I could enjoy you today and I don’t want to waste you. Also it’s too near noon.”

“Have you confronted Freddy with your discovery?” The man in the mirror had begun to squint, as his pang of fear relaxed into cunning.

Georgene, growing franker, said, “I’m too chicken. He’ll tell Janet, then she’ll know
I
know, and until I have some plan of action I’d rather just
know
.”

“I’m touched by how much Freddy means to you.”

“Vell, honeybunch, he
is
my husband.”

“Sure enough. You picked him, he’s all yours. Except I don’t see why I must be sacrificed because Freddy is naughty.”

“Maybe he is because I am. Because we are. Anyway you sound as though you rather
want
to be sacrificed.”

“Tell me when I can see you.”

“Oh love, anytime, just not today. I’m not myself.”

“Sweet Georgene, forgive me. I’m being very stupid and full of threatened egotism.”

“I
love
your egotism. Oh hell. Come on over now if you want, she isn’t brought back from nursery school until twelve-thirty.”

“No, of course not. I don’t want it unless you feel right about it. You feel guilty. You feel you’ve driven poor old God-fearing monogamous Freddy into the arms of this harlot.”

“I
like
Janet. I think she’s quite funny and gutsy. I think Frank is impossible and she does quite well considering.”

Piet liked Frank; he resisted the urge to quarrel. Every new assertion of Georgene’s, as she relaxed into the certainty that he would not come, advanced his anger. “Anyway,” he said, “I just heard the noon whistle blow. I don’t want Judy coming back from school saying, ‘Mommy, what’s that lump under the covers? It smells like Nancy’s daddy.’ ” Smells: the woods, the earth, the Negro’s skin, the planed pine of the garage, the whiskey on Bea Guerin’s breath.

“Piet. Am I putting you off? I do want you.”

“I know. Please don’t apologize. You’ve been a lovely mistress.”

She ignored his tense. “When I found the note, the first thing I wanted to do was call you and—what? Cry on your shoulder. Crawl into bed beside you. It was Monday night, Freddy was at Lions’. Suddenly I was terrified. I was alone in a big ugly house with a piece of paper in my hand that wouldn’t go away.”

“Don’t be terrified. You’re a lovely doubles partner and a fine wife for Freddy. Who else could stand him? If he lost you it would be the worst thing that’s happened to him since he flunked medical school.” Did she notice his unintended equation of her with dentistry—both practical, clean, simple, both a recourse? By this equation was Angela something difficult that he, Piet, had flunked? “Anyway,” he went on, “I don’t think either Freddy or Janet have it in them these days to give themselves much to anybody.”

She said, “It’s so sad. You call to be reassured and end up by reassuring me. Oh my Lord. Bernadette’s VW is coming up the drive. Nursery school let out early. Is today a holiday?”

“April twenty-third? The paper said Shakespeare’s birthday. He’s three hundred and ninety-nine years old.”

“Piet. I must run. There’s a lot we haven’t said. Let’s see each other soon.”

“Let’s,” Piet said, and her kiss ticked as he had halfway returned his receiver to the cradle. The man in the mirror was hunched, a shadow ready to spring, sunless daylight filtering into the room behind him. He looked, he thought, young, his crow’s feet and the puckering under his eyes smoothed into shadow. A fragment came to him of the first conversation he and Georgene had had as lovers. She had been so gay, so sporting, taking him upstairs to her bed that fresh September day, he could hardly believe he was her first lover. Reflected autumnal brilliance had invaded her house and infused with
warmth her exotic furniture of bamboo and straw rosettes and batik and unbleached sailcloth. Gaudy Guatemalan pillows heaped against the kingsized headboard had surprised him.
Here? In Freddy’s very bed?

It’s my bed too. Would you rather use the floor?

No, no. It’s luxurious. Whose books are all these?

Freddy’s pornography, it’s disgusting. Please pay attention to me
.

I am, Jesus. But … shouldn’t we do something about not making a little baby?

Sveetie. You’re so naieef. You mean Angela doesn’t take Enovid yet?

You do? It works?

Of course it works, it’s wonderful. Welcome
, Georgene said,
to the post-pill paradise
.

Piet remembered, standing alone in his low-ceilinged living room, where the wallpaper mourned its slanting visitor the sun and the spare neat furniture reflected his and Angela’s curiously similar austerity of taste, how Georgene’s cheeks, freckled from a summer of sunbathing, had dryly creased as she made this joke. Her manner had been a feathery teasing minimizing his heart’s clangor, and always until now she had brought to their affair, like a dowry of virginal lace, this lightness, this guiltlessness. If she was now sullied and spoiled because of Freddy’s dabbling, where would he find supplied such absolution? That first time, had she bathed? No, it became her habit when he revealed he liked to kiss between her thighs. And had her easy calm gaiety been a manner she had contrived to suit some other crimp in his manner of bestowing love, perhaps an untoward seriousness that threatened her marriage? His praise had amused her; she had always responded that all women liked to make love, that all women were beautiful, like a toilet bowl, when you needed one. But
by daylight he had discovered on her rapt Roman face an expression, of peace deeper than an infant’s sleep, that the darkness of night had never disclosed on the face of his wife. Furtive husbandly visitant, he had never known Angela as he had often known his lovely easy matter-of-fact morning lay. The line of her narrow high-bridged nose a double arabesque. Her white hairs belying her body’s youth. Her bony bit of a tail.

Her receding hollowed the dull noon. Tipped shoots searched for wider light through sunless gray air. The salami he made lunch from was minced death. He went at last to his office. His telephone voice grew husky, defeated. Garage doors of the type needed were out of stock in Mather and were being ordered from Akron. The price of gravel had gone up two dollars a ton and a truckload could not be delivered before Friday. The urban renewal in Boston had sucked the area dry of carpenters and six phone calls turned up only two apprentices from a trade school twenty miles away. Spring building had begun and he had been slow. Gallagher’s silences, though his conversation was commiserating, breathed accusation.

Piet had met Matt in the army, in Okinawa, in 1951. There, then, in that riverless flatland of barracks and sand, of beer in blank cans and listless Luchuan prostitutes, where the danger of death in battle was as unreal as the homeland whose commercial music twanged in the canteens, Piet was attracted by Matt’s choir-boy prankishness, his grooming, his black hair and eyes, his freedom from the weary vocabulary of dirt and disdain, his confident ability to sell. He had sold Piet on himself as a short cut to architecture and, both discharged, had brought him to New England, into this life. Piet’s loyalty was lately strained. He found Matt grown brittle, prim, quick to
judge, Jesuitical in finance. He dreamed of corrupting whole hillsides, yet wished to keep himself immaculate. He secured his wife and only child behind a wall of Catholicism. In the little transparent world of couples whose intrigues had permeated and transformed Piet, Matt stood out as opaquely moral.

When the phone on his desk rang, Piet feared it would be Georgene, seeking a reconciliation. He hated paining Matt with his duplicity; he thought of Matt with the same pain as he thought of his father, that ghost patiently circling in the luminous greenhouse gloom, silently expecting Piet to do right, to carry on.

It was not Georgene but Angela. Nancy at nursery school had burst out crying because of the hamster. The child suddenly saw with visionary certainty that its death had been her fault.
Daddy said
, she said. Her hysterics had been uncontrollable. Angela had carried her from the room and, since she was teaching, the class ended early. They did not go home. There was nothing to eat at home but ham. In hopes of distracting Nancy with syrup and ice cream, Angela had taken her to eat at the Pancake House in North Mather. Now the child, sucking her thumb and running a slight fever, had fallen asleep on the sofa.

Piet said, “The kid sure knows how to get herself sympathy.”

“But not from her own father, evidently. I didn’t call just to touch you with this, though as a matter of fact I do think you handled it stupidly. Stupidly or cruelly. I called to ask you to meet Ruth after school and drive to the pet shop in Lacetown for a new hamster. I think we should do it
in
stantly.”

Magic. The new hamster by sleight of hand would become the old one, the one moldering nose-down underneath the
scilla. A religion of genteel pretense. The idea of a hamster persists, eternal. Plato. Piet was an Aristotelian. He said he couldn’t possibly do it this afternoon, he had a thousand things to do, the first quarter’s accounts to check, he was trying to move the houses on the hill, a million details, the construction trade was going to hell. He was heavily conscious of Gallagher listening. Softer-voiced, he added, “I wasted half the morning making a new cage. Did you notice it in the kitchen?”

Angela said, “Oh is that what it is? We didn’t know what it was for. Why is it such a funny shape? Nancy thought it was a little prison you were going to put
her
in.”

“Tell the kid I love her lots and to shape up. Good-bye.”

The books showed less than the twenty per cent Gallagher liked to clear. Spiros Bros. had attached to their monthly statement a printed threat to stop the account; the balance owed was $1189.24. Gallagher liked to let bills run long, on the theory that money constantly diminished in value. The figures made a gray hazy net around Piet and to compound his claustrophobia the Whitman woman, who had come to basketball uninvited, phoned and asked him to come look at her house. He didn’t want the job, he didn’t like working for social acquaintances. But in his hopeless mood, to escape the phone and the accounts and Gallagher’s binding nearness, he got into the truck whose tailgate said
WASH ME
and drove down.

The marshes opened up on his right, grand in the dying day. A strip of enameled blue along the horizon of the sea. Colored tiles along a bathtub. The first drops of a half-hearted rain, cold and dry, struck the backs of his hands as he climbed from the truck. The lilacs by the door of the Robinson place were further along than those of Piet’s own roadside hedge.
More sun by the sea. More life. Tiny wine-colored cones that in weeks would be lavender panicles of bloom. Drenched. Dew. Salt. Breeze. Buttery daffodils trembled by his cuffs, by the bare board fence where they enjoyed reflected warmth. Piet lifted the aluminum latch, salt-corroded, and went in. Even under close clouds, the view was prodigal, a heart-hollowing carpeted span limited by the purity of dunes and ocean. He had been wrong, overcautious. It should be Angela’s.

Ken Whitman’s field of special competence, after his early interest in echinoid metabolism, was photosynthesis; his doctoral thesis had concerned the 7-carbon sugar sedoheptulose, which occupies a momentary place within the immense chain of reactions whereby the five-sixths of the triosephosphate pool that does not form starch is returned to ribulose-5-phosphate. The process was elegant, and few men under forty were more at home than Ken upon the gigantic ladder, forged by light, that carbon dioxide descends to become carbohydrate. At present he was supervising two graduate students in research concerning the transport of glucose molecules through cell walls. By this point in his career Ken had grown impatient with the molecular politics of sugar and longed to approach the mysterious heart of CO
₂
fixation—chlorophyll’s transformation of visible light into chemical energy. But here, at this ultimate chamber, the lone reaction that counterbalances the vast expenditures of respiration, that reverses decomposition and death, Ken felt himself barred. Biophysics and electronics were in charge. The grana of stacked quantasomes were structured like the crystal lattices in transistors. Photons excited an electron flow in the cloud of particles
present in chlorophyll. Though he had ideas—why chlorophyll? why not any number of equally complex compounds? was the atom of magnesium the clue?—he would have to put himself to school again and, at thirty-two, felt too old. He was wedded to the unglamorous carbon cycle while younger men were achieving fame and opulent grants in such fair fields as neurobiology, virology, and the wonderful new wilderness of nucleic acids. He had a wife, a coming child, a house in need of extensive repair. He had overreached. Life, whose graceful secrets he would have unlocked, pressed upon him clumsily.