Couples (3 page)

Sweet Piet, you heard. I must be very drunk. Forgive me
.

You’re dancing divinely
.

Don’t poke fun. I know I can’t matter to you, you have Georgene, and I can’t compare. She’s marvelous. She plays such marvelous tennis
.

That’s very flattering. You really think I’m seeing Georgene?

It’s all right
, singingly, gazing into a blurred distance,
don’t bother to deny it, but Piet—Piet?

Yes? I’m here. You haven’t changed partners
.

You poke fun of me. That’s mean, that’s not worthy of you, Piet. Piet?

Hello again
.

I’d be kind to you. And someday you’re going to need somebody to be kind to you because—now don’t get cross—you’re surrounded by unkind people
.

For instance who? Poor Angela?

You’re cross. I feel it in your body you’re cross
.

No
, he said, and stood apart from her, so her dragging was no longer upon his body, and she sagged, then pulled herself erect, blinking, injured, as he went on,
it happens every time I try to be nice to a drunk. I wind up getting insulted
.

Oh!
—it was a breathless cry as if she had been struck.
And I meant to be so kind
.

Whitewash wore away after two or three rains, but after the war the chemical companies came up with a compound that lasted pretty well until winter. In winter there could not be too much light. The Michigan snows piled in strata around the glass walls and within the greenhouse there was a lullaby sound of dripping and a rasping purring in the pipes rusted to
the color of dirt as they snaked along the dirt floor flecked with tiny clover. A child cried out in her sleep. As if being strangled in a dream. From the voice he guessed it had been Nancy. She, who could tie her shoes at the age of three, had lately, now five, begun to suck her thumb and talk about dying.
I will never grow up and I will never ever in my whole life die
. Ruth, her sister, nine last November, hated to hear her.
Yes you will die everybody will die including trees
. Piet wondered if he should go to Nancy’s room but the cry was not repeated. Into the vacuum of his listening flowed a rhythmic squeaking insistent as breathing. A needle working in the night. For her birthday he had given Ruth a hamster; the little animal, sack-shaped and russet, slept all day and ran in its exercise wheel all night. Piet vowed to oil the wheel but meanwhile tried to time his breathing with its beat. Too fast; his heart raced, seemed to bulge like a knapsack as into it was abruptly stuffed two thoughts that in the perspective of the night loomed as dreadful: soon he must begin building ranch houses on Indian Hill, and Angela wanted no more children. He would never have a son.
Eek, ik, eeik, ik, eeek
. Relax. Tomorrow is Sunday.

A truck passed on the road and his ears followed it, focused on its vanishing point. As a child he had soothed himself with the sensation of things passing in the night, automobiles and trains, their furry growling sounds approaching and holding fast on a momentary plateau and then receding, leaving him ignored and untouched, passing on to Chicago or Detroit, Kalamazoo or Battle Creek or the other way to the snow, stitched with animal tracks, of the northern peninsula that only boats could reach. A bridge had since been built. He had pictured himself as Superman, with a chest of steel the flanged wheels of the engines could not dent, passing over him. The retreating whistles of those flatland trains had seemed drawn
with a pencil sharpened so fine that in reality it broke. No such thing in nature as a point, or a perfect circle, or infinitude, or a hereafter. The truck had vanished. But must be, must. Must. Is somewhere.

Traffic this late in this corner of New England, between Plymouth and Quincy, between Nun’s Bay and Lacetown, was sparse, and he waited a long stretch for the next truck to come lull him. Angela stirred, sluggishly avoiding some obstacle to the onflow of her sleep, a dream wanting to be born, and he remembered the last time they had made love, over a week ago, in another season, winter. Though he had skated patiently waiting for her skin to quicken from beneath she had finally despaired of having a climax and asked him simply to take her and be done. Released, she had turned away, and in looping his arm around her chest his fingers brushed an unexpected sad solidity.

Angel, your nipples are hard
.

So?

You’re excited and could have come too
.

I don’t think so. It just means I’m chilly
.

Let me make you come. With my mouth
.

No. I’m all wet down there
.

But it’s me, it’s my wetness
.

I want to go to sleep
.

But it’s so sad, that you liked my making love to you after all
.

I don’t see that it’s that sad. We’ll all be here another night
.

He lay on his back like a town suspended from a steeple. He felt delicate on his face a draft from somewhere in his snug house, a loose storm window, a tear in the attic foil, a murderer easing open a door. He rolled over on his stomach and the greenhouse washed over him. The tables like great wooden trays, the flowers budding and blooming and dropping
their petals and not being bought. As a child he had mourned the unbought flowers, beseeching the even gray greenhouse light with their hopeful corollas and tepid perfume. He surveyed the party for a woman to bring home and picked Bea Guerin.
Dear Bea, of course I want to fuck you, how could I not, with your steamy little body so tired and small and kind. Just about all lilies, aren’t you? Now spread your legs. Easy does it. Ah
. The moisture and light within the greenhouse had been so constant and strong that even weeds grew; even when bright snow was heaped against the glass walls like a sliced cross section in a school book, clover from nowhere flourished around the legs of the tables and by the rusty pipes, and the dirt floor bore a mossy patina and was steeped in an odor incomparably quiet and settled and profound. He saw them, his father and mother,
vader en moeder
, moving gently in this receding polyhedral heart of light carved from dank nature, their bodies transparent, and his mind came to a cliff—a slip, then a skidding downward plunge. Left fist clenched upon himself, he groped in his mind for the party, but it was no longer there.

God help me, help me, get me out of this.
Eek ik, eeik ik
. Dear God put me to sleep. Amen.

A golden rooster turned high above Tarbox. The Congregational Church, a Greek temple with a cupola and spire, shared a ledgy rise, once common pasturage, with a baseball backstop and a cast-iron band pavilion used only on Memorial Day, when it sheltered shouted prayers, and in the Christmas season, when it became a crèche. Three edifices had succeeded the first meetinghouse, a thatched fort, and the last, renovated in 1896 and 1939, lifted well over one hundred
feet into the air a gilded weathercock that had been salvaged from the previous church and thus dated from colonial times. Its eye was a copper English penny. Deposed once each generation by hurricanes, lightning, or repairs, it was always, much bent and welded, restored. It turned in the wind and flashed in the sun and served as a landmark to fishermen in Massachusetts Bay. Children in the town grew up with the sense that the bird was God. That is, if God were physically present in Tarbox, it was in the form of this unreachable weathercock visible from everywhere. And if its penny could see, it saw everything, spread below it like a living map. The central square mile of Tarbox contained a hosiery mill converted to the manufacture of plastic toys, three dozen stores, several acres of parking lot, and hundreds of small-yarded homes. The homes were mixed: the surviving seventeenth-century saltboxes the original Kimballs and Sewells and Tarboxes and Cogswells had set along the wobbly pasture lanes, quaintly named for the virtues, that radiated from the green; the peeling Federalist cubes with widow’s-walks; the gingerbread mansions attesting to the decades of textile prosperity; the tight brick alleys plotted to house the millworkers imported from Poland; the middle-class pre-Depression domiciles with stubby porches and narrow chimneys and composition sidings the colors of mustard and parsley and graphite and wine; the new developments like even pastel teeth eating the woods of faraway Indian Hill. Beyond, there was a veiny weave of roads, an arrowing disused railroad track, a river whose water was fresh above the yellow waterfall at the factory and saline below it, a golf course studded with bean-shapes of sand, some stubborn farms and checkerboard orchards, a glinting dairy barn on the Nun’s Bay Road, a field containing slowly moving specks that were galloping horses,
level breadths of salt marsh broken by islands and inlets, and, its curved horizon marred, on days as clear as today, by the violet smudge that was the tip of Cape Cod, the eastward sea. Casting the penny of its gaze straight down, the cock could have observed, in dizzying perspective, the dotlike heads of church-goers congregating and, hurrying up the gray path, the red head of Piet Hanema, a latecomer.

The interior of the church was white. Alabaster effects had been skillfully mimicked in wood. Graceful round vaults culminated in a hung plaster ceiling. A balcony with Doric fluting vertically scoring the parapet jutted as if weightless along the sides of the sanctuary and from under the painted Victorian organ in the rear. The joinery of the old box pews was still admirable. Piet seldom entered the church without reflecting that the carpenters who had built it were dead and that none of their quality had been born to replace them. He took his accustomed place in a left back pew, and latched the paneled door, and was alone with a frayed grape-colored pew cushion—a fund drive to replace these worn-out cushions had only half succeeded—and a pair of powder-blue Pilgrim hymnals and a hideous walnut communion-glass rack screwed to the old pine in obedience to a bequest. Piet always sat alone. His friends did not go to church. He adjusted the cushion and selected the less tattered of the two hymnals. The organist, a mauve-haired spinster from Lacetown, rummaged through a Bach prelude. The first hymn was number 195: “All Hail the Power.” Piet stood and sang. His voice, timid and off-key, now and then touched his own ears. “… on this terrestrial ball … let angels prostrate fall … and crown him, Lorhord of all …” On command, Piet sat and prayed. Prayer was an unsteady state of mind for him. When it worked, he seemed, for intermittent moments, to be in the farthest corner
of a deep burrow, a small endearing hairy animal curled up as if to hibernate. In this condition he felt close to a massive warm secret, like the heart of lava at the earth’s core. His existence for a second seemed to evade decay. But church was too exciting, too full of light and music, for prayer to take place, and his mind slid from the words being intoned, and skimmed across several pieces of property that concerned him, and grazed the faces and limbs of women he knew, and darted from the image of his daughters to the memory of his parents, so unjustly and continuingly dead.

They had died together, his mother within minutes and his father at the hospital three hours later, in a highway accident the week before the Christmas of 1949, at dusk. They had been driving home to Grand Rapids from a Grange meeting. There was an almost straight stretch of Route 21 that was often icy. The river flowed near it. It had begun to snow. A Lincoln skidded head-on into them; the driver, a boy from Ionia, survived with lacerations. From the position of the automobiles it was not clear who had skidded, but Piet, who knew how his father drove, as ploddingly as he potted geraniums, one mile after the other, did not doubt that it had been the boy’s fault. And yet—the dusk was confusing, his father was aging; perhaps, in an instant without perspective on that deceptive flat land, at the apparition of onrushing headlights, the wheels for a moment slithering, the old man had panicked. Could there have been, in that placid good gardener, with his even false teeth and heavy step and pallid stubby lashes, a fatal reserve of unreason that had burst forth and destroyed two blameless lives? All those accumulated budgets, and hoarded hopes, and seeds patiently brought to fruition? Piet pictured shattered glass strewn across the road and saw snow continue to descend, sparkling in the policemen’s
whirling lights. He had been a sophomore at Michigan State, studying toward an architect’s certificate, and felt unable to continue, on borrowed money and the world’s sufferance. There was a shuddering in his head he could not eliminate. He let his brother Johan—Joop—cheaply buy his share of the greenhouses and let himself be drafted. Since this accident, the world wore a slippery surface for Piet; he stood on the skin of things in the posture of a man testing newly formed ice, his head cocked for the warning crack, his spine curved to make himself light.

“… and we lift our hearts in petition for those who have died, who in the ripening of time have pierced the beyond …” Piet bent his thought toward the hope of his parents’ immortality, saw them dim and small among clouds, in their workaday greenhouse clothes, and realized that if they were preserved it was as strangers to him, blind to him, more than an ocean removed from the earthly concerns of which he had—infant, child, boy, and beginning man—been but one.
Kijk, daar is je vader. Pas op, Piet, die hond bijt. Naa kum, it makes colder out. Be polite, and don’t go with girls you’d be ashamed to marry
. From the odd fact of their deaths his praying mind flicked to the odd certainty of his own, which the white well-joined wood and the lucent tall window beside him airily seemed to deny.

Piet had been raised in a sterner church, the Dutch Reformed, amid varnished oak and dour stained glass where shepherds were paralyzed in webs of lead. He had joined this sister church, a milder daughter of Calvin, as a compromise with Angela, who believed nothing. Piet wondered what barred him from the ranks of those many blessed who believed nothing. Courage, he supposed. His nerve had cracked when his parents died. To break with a faith requires a moment
of courage, and courage is a kind of margin within us, and after his parents’ swift death Piet had no margin. He lived tight against his skin, and his flattish face wore a look of tension. Also, his European sense of order insisted that he place his children in Christendom. Now his daughter Ruth, with his own flat alert face and her mother’s stately unconscious body, sang in the children’s choir. At the sight of her submissively moving her lips his blood shouted
Lord
and his death leaned above him like a perfectly clear plate of glass.