Couples (34 page)

Irene said, “Status and opportunity are inseparable.”

“Can’t we shut them up?” Eddie Constantine asked.

“It’s sex for Irene,” Carol told him, standing and buttoning her shirt. “Irene loves arguing with right-wing men. She thinks they have bigger pricks.”

Janet’s lips opened but, eyes flicking from Carol to Freddy to Ben, she said nothing. Self-knowledge was turning her into a watcher, a hesitater.

Terry Gallagher came down the Constantines’ grand staircase holding a single often-folded sheet of paper. “It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s not even begun. It’s a cast of characters. Freddy, you’re a fake.”

Freddy protested, “But they’re beautiful characters.”

Amid laughter and beer and white wine, through the odors of brine and tennis sweat, the play was passed around. It bore no title. The writing, beginning at the top as a careful ornamental print, degenerated into Freddy’s formless hand, with no decided slant and a tendency for the terminal strokes to swing down depressively.

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

Eric Shun,
hero

Ora Fiss,
heroine

Cunny Lingus,
a tricksome Irish lass
Testy Cull, a cranky old discard

THIN ICE

Auntie Climax,
a rich and meaningful relation

ACT I

Eric
(entering):
!

Ora
(entered):
O!

“That’s not fair,” Janet said. “Nobody is really called Ora or Ona.”

“Maybe the problem,” Piet said, “is that Eric enters too soon.”

“I was saving Auntie Climax for the third act,” Freddy said.

Terry said, “I’m so glad Matt isn’t here.”

Foxy said, “Ken loves word games.”

“Good job, Freddy,” Eddie Constantine said. “I’ll buy it.” He clapped Ben Saltz on the back and held the paper in front of Ben’s eyes. Ben’s face had become white, whiter than his wife’s sun-sensitive skin. Foxy went and, awkwardly pregnant, knelt beside him, tent-shaped, whispering.

Piet was busy improvising. The crude energy the others loved in him had been summoned. “We need more plot,” he said. “Maybe Ora Fiss should have a half-brother, P. Niss. Peter Niss. They did filthy things in the cradle together, and now he’s returned from overseas.”

“From Titty City,” Eddie said. He was of all the men the least educated, the least removed in mentality from elementary school. Yet he had lifted and hurled thousands of lives safely across the continent. They accepted him.

Janet said, “You’re all fantastically disgusting. What infuriates
me, I’m going to have to waste a whole twenty-dollar session on this grotesque evening.”

“Leave,” Carol told her.

Piet was continuing, gesturing expansively, red hair spinning from his broad arms. “Ora is frightened by his return. Will the old magic still be there? Dear God, pray not! She takes one look. Alas! It is. ‘Ora!’ he ejaculates. ‘Mrs. Nism now,’ she responds coldly, yet trembling within.”

“You’re mixing up my beautiful characters,” Freddy complained.

“Let’s play some new game,” Carol said; she squatted down to gather the residue of the spilled ashes. Her slim breasts swung loose in Piet’s eyes. Welcome to Titty, somber city of unmockable suckableness: his heart surged forward and swamped Carol as she squatted. Love for her licked the serial bumps of her diapered crotch. Her bare feet, long-toed, stank like razor clams. Her painted hair downhung sticking drifting to her mouth. She stood, ashes and aster petals in her lily palm, and glared toward the corner where, beneath a Miró print, Foxy was ministering with words to the immobilized Ben Saltz.

“Let’s not,” Freddy Thorne said to her. “It’s good. It’s good for people to act out their fantasies.”

Angela leaped up, warm with wine, calling Freddy’s bluff, and announced, “I want to take off all my clothes!”

“Good, good,” Freddy said, nodding calmly. He stubbed out his cigarette on his own forehead, on the Cyclopean glass mask. It sizzled. His wise old woman’s face with its inbent lips streamed with sweat.

Piet asked him, “Shouldn’t you take that outfit off? Don’t you eventually die if the skin can’t breathe?”

“It’s me. Piet baby, this suit
is
my skin. I’m a monster from the deep.”

Angela’s hand had halted halfway down the zipper at the back of her pleated white tennis dress. “No one is watching,” she said. Piet touched her hand and redid the zipper, which made a quick kissing sound.

“Let her go, it’s good,” Freddy said. “She wants to share the glory. I’ve always wanted to see Angela undressed.”

“She’s beautiful,” Piet told him.

“Jesu, I don’t doubt it for a sec. Let her strip. She wants to, you don’t understand your own wife. She’s an exhibitionist. She’s not this shy violet you think you’re stuck with.”

“He’s sick,” Foxy told Carol, of Ben, in self-defense.

“Maybe,” Carol said, “he’d like to be left alone.”

“He says you all gave him lobster and rum for supper.”

Ben groaned. “Don’t mention.” Piet recognized a maneuvering for attention, an economical use of misery. But Ben would play the game, Piet saw, too hard in his desire to succeed, and the game would end by playing him. The Jew’s fierce face was waxen: dead Esau. Where his beard had been it was doubly pale.

“Shellfish,” Eddie explained to all of them. “Not kosher.”

Carol said sharply, “Foxy, let him sit it out. He can go upstairs to a bed if he has to.”

“Does he know where the beds are?” Freddy asked.

“Freddy, why don’t you put that mask over your mouth?” Carol’s skin was shivering as if each nerve were irritated. The holiday eve was turning chilly and the furnace had been shut off for the summer. Her lips were forced apart over clenched teeth like a child’s after swimming and, touched and needing to touch her, Piet asked, “Why are you being such a bitch tonight?”

“Because Braque just died.” Her walls were full of paintings, classic prints and her own humorless mediocre canvases, coarse in their coloring, modishly broad in their brushwork,
showing her children on chairs, the Tarbox wharf and boatyard, Eddie in a turtleneck shirt, the graceless back view of the Congregational Church, houses, and trees seen from her studio windows and made garish, unreal, petulant. Cézanne and John Marin, Utrillo and Ben Shahn—her styles muddled theirs, and Piet thought how provincial, how mediocre and lost we all are.

Carol sensed that he thought this and turned on him. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you for a long time, Piet, and now I’ve had just enough wine to do it. Why do you build such ugly houses? You’re clever enough, you wouldn’t have to.”

His eyes sought Foxy’s seeking his. She would know that, hurt, he would seek her eyes. Their glances met, locked, burned, unlocked. He answered Carol, “They’re not ugly. They’re just ordinary.”

“They’re hideous. I think what you’re doing to Indian Hill is a disgrace.”

She had, slim Carol, deliberately formed around her a ring of astonishment. For one of their unspoken rules was that professions were not criticized; one’s job was a pact with the meaningless world beyond the ring of couples.

Terry Gallagher said, “He builds what he and Matt think people want to buy.”

Freddy said, “I
like
Piet’s houses. They have a Dutch something, a fittingness. They remind me of teeth. Don’t laugh, everybody, I mean it. Piet and I are spiritual brothers. I put silver in my cavities, he puts people in his. Jesus, you try to be serious in this crowd, everybody laughs.”

Angela said, “Carol, you’re absurd.”

Piet said, “No, she’s right. I hate my houses. God, I hate them.”

Janet Appleby said, “Somebody else died last month. A poet, Marcia was very upset. She said he was America’s greatest, and not that old.”

“Frost died last January,” Terry said.

“Not Frost. A German name.
Oh
. Marcia and Harold would know it. None of us
know
anything.”

“I thought you’d start to miss them,” Freddy said to her.

Janet, sitting on the floor, sleepily rested her head on a hassock. She had switched from twice-a-week therapy to analysis, and drove into Brookline at seven-thirty every weekday morning. It was rumored that Frank had commenced therapy. “We need a new game,” she said.

“Freddy, let’s play Impressions,” Terry said.

“Let’s think up more names for my play,” he said. “They don’t have to be dirty.” He squinted blindly into space, and came up with, “Donovan U. Era.”

“You had that prepared,” Janet said. “But Harold the other night did think of a good one. What was it, Frank?” With a rattle of wooden beads, the couple had returned from the political parlor. Frank looked sheepish, Irene’s eyebrows and lips seemed heavily inked.

“León MacDouffe,” Frank pronounced, glancing toward Janet, wanting to go home.

Carol said, in the tone of a greatly removed observer, “Irene, your husband looks less and less well. I think he should go upstairs but nobody else has bothered to agree. It makes no difference to me but we can’t afford to have our rug ruined.”

Irene’s expression as she studied Ben was strange. Maternal concern had become impatient and offended. Delilah gazed upon the Samson she had shorn. In the room’s center Eddie Constantine, a small effective man without religion or second
thoughts, wiry and tanned and neatly muscled, vied in his health for her attention; a beer can glinted in his hand and his gray eyes could find the path through boiling Himalayas of cloud. As he gazed at her it dawned on the room that she was worth destroying for. Though pale and heavy, she had a dove’s breasted grace. Irene asked, “Why can’t he go upstairs in his own house a few doors away?”

“I’ll take him,” Eddie said and, going and thrusting his head under Ben’s arm, expertly hoisted him up from the chair.

The sudden motion, like a loud noise to the sleeping, led Ben’s conversational faculty to roll over. “I’m very interested in this,” he said distinctly. “What should the aesthetics of modern housing be? Should there be any beyond utility and cost?”

Gleefully Freddy Thorne chimed in, “Did the peasants who put up thatched huts worry about aesthetics? Yet now we all love the Christ out of thatched huts.”

“Exactly,” Ben said. He sounded like himself, and was reasoning well, but the sounds floated from his ghostly mouth at half-speed. “But perhaps a more oral and sacramental culture has an instinctive sense of beauty that capitalism with its assembly-line method of operation destroys.
Commentary
this month has a fascinating—”

“Greed,” Carol said vehemently, “modern houses stink of greed, greed and shame and plumbing. Why should the bathroom be a dirty secret? We all do it. I’d as soon take a crap in front of all of you as not.”

“Carol!” Angela said. “That’s even more wonderful than my wanting to take off my clothes.”

“Let’s play Wonderful,” Freddy Thorne announced, adding, “I’m dying in this fucking suit. Can’t I take it off?”

“Wear it,” Piet told him. “It’s you.”

Foxy asked, “How do you play Wonderful?”

“You,” Freddy told her, “you don’t even have to try.”

Terry asked, “Is it at all like Impressions?”

Ben said, his weight full on Eddie now, his colorless face turned to the floor, “I’d like to discuss this seriously some time. Super-cities, for example, and the desalinization of seawater. I think the construction industry in this country is badly missing the boat.”

“Toot, toot,” Eddie said, pulling on an imaginary whistle cord and hauling Ben toward the doorway.

Irene asked, “Shall I come along?” Her expression was again indecisive. To be with her husband was to be with her lover. The romantic Semitic shadowiness of her lower lids contended with pragmatic points in her eyes and lips seeking their good opinion, these heirs of the Puritans.

Eddie looked at her acutely, estimated her ripeness, chose his path, and said decisively, “Yes. I’ll get him over there and you put him to bed.” So all three made exodus from the musty room, through the huge space-wasting hallway smelling in all weathers of old umbrellas, into the leaf-crowded night splashed by blue streetlamps.

Carol swung her arms, relieved and seething. The Applebys exchanged solicitous confidences—Frank’s stomach, Janet’s head—and also left, reluctantly; their manner of leaving suggested that this was an end, an end to this summer of many games, that they were conscious of entering now an autumn of responsibilities, of sobered mutuality and duty. Only Freddy Thorne begged them not to go. He had peeled himself out of his skin-diving suit and stood revealed in a soaked T-shirt and crumpled bathing trunks. The skin of his legs and arms had been softened and creased by long enclosure like a washerwoman’s
palms. The Applebys’ leaving left Freddy and Piet alone with many women.

Foxy rose, stately in yards of ivory linen, seven months gone, and said, “I should go too.”

“Sweetheart, you can’t,” Freddy told her. “We’re going to play Wonderful.”

Foxy glanced at Piet’s face and he knew that whatever was written there she would read,
Don’t go
. He said, “Don’t go.”

Terry asked Freddy, “How do you play?” Piet pictured Gallagher, grim as a mother, waiting up for her, and wondered how she dare not go, dare sit there serene. Women have no conscience. Never their fault. The serpent beguiled me.

Freddy licked his lips, then answered weakly, “Each of us names the most wonderful thing he or she can think of. Carol, where’s the fucking furnace? I’m freezing.”

She fetched from another room an Afghan blanket; he wrapped it around himself like a shawl. “Freddy,” she said, “you’re getting old.”