Couples (39 page)

Still later
.

I fell asleep. So strange to wake in floods of light, mouth bloated and hair full of sand. I must go home. Ken is tennising with Gallagher and Guerin and I don’t know who the fourth is. You? Answer to a riddle: the fourth of July
.

Piet, have I explained anything? I think I wanted somehow to untangle us from those others, to spare you that woeful wild look that comes into your eye when it’s time to be back on the job or you imagine the phone in your office ringing. In a way, because you suspect a Heaven somewhere else (like Harold’s French: a constant appeal to above), you live in Hell, and I have become one of the demons. I don’t want this, I want to be healing—to be white and anonymous and wisecracking for you, the nurse I suppose my father said I was too good to be. I worry that you’ll do something extravagant and wasteful to please your funny prickly conscience. Don’t. Have me without remorse. Remorse is boring to women. Your seducing me is fine. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Better you than Freddy Thorne
.

Which is a way of concealing that falling asleep on the sand has sexed me up. I crave your strength and length, and remain
,

Your mistress

Oh blessed, blessed Piet—

How tactless, how worse than tactless
wrong
I was to use you today as an audience for my feelings about Ken. How comic your anger was—you seemed amazed that I
had
feelings about him—and how sad, in the end, your effort to turn your anger into a joke. It is one of your charms that you make both too much and too little of yourself, with a swiftness of alternation that is quite hypnotic. But your departure left me depressed and with a need to try again
.

When I said that he and I had been married seven years whereas you and I had known each other a few months it was not a criticism—clearly your newness in many ways works to your advantage. But in the mysterious (as much to me as to anyone) matter of my sexual response, it is an advantage in Stage I, a dis- in Stage II. Maybe men like new women while women perform best with men they know. There is something of trust in this—there really is, whenever you spread your legs, the flitting fear you are going to be hurt—and something of the sad (why do I find it sad?) fact that with women personality counts for less in sex than with men. In actual sex as opposed to all the preamble. A dull familiar trustworthy tool is all we ask. Female genitalia are extremely
stupid
, which gets us into many a fix our heads would get us out of
.

Why must I apologize to you for continuing to enjoy my husband? You have woken me from my seven years’ sleep and Ken benefits. Isn’t it enough for your ego to promise you that you exist in dimensions where Ken is blank? And that his ignorance of our affair, of what consumes my inner life, makes him seem a child, a child behind
glass, a child
willfully
behind glass. He has never been very curious about life, above the molecular level. He is a masked man who climbs a balcony to be with me at night. I discover in myself a deep coldness toward him. In this coldness I manipulate our bodies and release the tension you have built in me
.

Yet do let me love him as I can. He is my man, after all. Whereas you are only a man. Maybe the man. But not mine
.

I suppose I am confused. Having decided, long before we slept together, to have you, I determined to keep you each in place, in watertight compartments. Instead, the two of you are using my body to hold a conversation in. I want to tell you each about the other. I live in fear of calling out the wrong name. I want to confide you to Ken, and Ken to you—he is unhappy about his career, and apprehensive about our unborn child, and turns to me more often now than since our first year of marriage. Of course, I am so safe. He pierces me saying, You can’t impregnate the pregnant. You can’t kill the dead. Compared to you it is mechanical but then Ken’s career is to demonstrate how mechanical life is
.

Yours is to build and blessed lover you have built wonderfully in me. I breathe your name and in writing this I miss your voice, your helpful face. Do you really think we bore God? You once told me God was bored with America. Sometimes I think you underestimate God—which is to say, you despise the faith your fear of death thrusts upon you. You have struck a bad bargain and keep whittling away at your half. You should be a woman. The woman in the newspaper holding a dead child in her arms knows God has struck her. I feel Him as above me and around me and in you and in spite of you and because of you. Life is a game of lost and found. I must start Ken’s supper. Unapologetic love. Love
.

Piet turned with relief from these narcissistic long letters to a small scrap asking:
Are you still sleeping with Georgene?

After she had told him about the Jew, he had told her about Georgene. In September her instinct, or gossip, informed her that he had resumed. In truth, there had been the unplanned lapse on the day the Kennedy infant died, and in the month and a half since, only three visits, and these largely spent in tentative exploration of the new way out. He found Georgene sulky, passive, flat-stomached, and sexually unadventurous. Whether in Freddy’s bed or outdoors under the sun, Piet was so nervous and watchful he had difficulty maintaining an erection. Foxy’s note seemed a warning, a loud snap in the dark. He saw Georgene once more, early in October: the shedding larch needles pattered steadily on the tarpaper, the sun was wan, her chin trembled, her eyes in tears refused to confront his. He left her with no doubt that he would not come soon again, blaming Angela’s suspiciously
gemütlich
intimacy with Freddy, Freddy’s threatening manner lately, Piet’s strained relations with Gallagher and increased work load, Georgene’s own well-being—surely the essence of an affair was mutual independence, and Georgene had sinned, endangering herself, by becoming dependent. Her firm chin nodded but still her green eyes, though he seized her naked shoulders in his hands, refused to gaze into his. To Foxy’s question he answered No, he had not slept with Georgene since soon after the Whitmans came to town and he had first glimpsed Foxy slamming her car door after church. He retrospectively dated his love from this glimpse. He admitted that Georgene remained his friend, and—with such a husband, who could blame her?—now and then called him at his office; Piet admitted this on the chance that Foxy already knew, via Matt and Terry. Thus, in being deceived, Foxy closer approached the condition of a wife.

RIDDLES

1.
What is five feet nine, Episcopalian, and about to burst?

2.
What is smaller than a boxcar but bigger than mortality?

3.
What is five feet?, clever with its hands, has red hair, big feet, and foreign origins?

4.
What is smaller than a breadbox but gives satisfaction anyway?

As they aged in their affair her notes became briefer and more playful; as fall progressed he was able to see her less. The renovations within her home were completed, and Gallagher had obtained a lucrative rush contract, the enlargement of a local restaurant in antique style. So Piet was compelled to spend long days rough-hewing factory-planed beams and fabricating seventeenth-century effects in green lumber. The owners of the Tarbox Inne, a pair of pushing Greek brothers, wanted the new wing ready for operation by November. The trips were tedious and frequent to Mather for old bricks, to Brockton for hand-wrought iron, to Plymouth for research into details of colonial carpentry:
the side bearers for the second story being to be loaden with corne, &tc., must not be pinned on, but rather eyther lett in to the studds, or borne up with false studds, & soe tenented in at the ends. In this story over the first, I would have a particion, whether in the middest or over the particion under, I leave it to the carpenters. I desire to have the sparrs reach downe pretty deep at the eves to preserve the walls the better from the wether. I would have the howse strong in timber, though plaine & well brased. I would have it covered with
very good oake-hart inch board …
Trying to turn these ethical old specifications into modern quaintness demoralized Piet. The fraudulent antiquation of the job seemed prophetic of the architectural embalming destined for his beloved unself-conscious town, whose beauty had been a by-product of neglect. Maddeningly, he could not get to Foxy, and absurdly he hoped for her unmistakable silhouette to bloom on the streets of strange towns, in the drab alleyways leading to construction-supply yards. Every blue station wagon stopped his heart; every blond blur in a window became a broken promise. Now and then they did meet in spots away from Tarbox—in a Mather bar where fluorescent beer advertisements described repetitive parabolas, in a forest preserve west of Lacetown where huge mosquitoes clustered thick as hair on her arms whenever they paused in walking to embrace, on a wild beach north of Duxbury where the unsoftened Atlantic surf pounded wrathfully and the high dunes were littered with rusting cans, shards of green glass, and abandoned underpants. The danger of being discovered seemed greater out of town than in it, within the maze of routines and visiting patterns they could predict; and as Foxy’s time drew near she became reluctant to drive far. Outside of Tarbox they seemed to themselves merely another furtive illicit couple, compelled toward shabby seclusion, her pregnancy grotesque. Within her breezy home they seemed glorious nudes, symphonic vessels of passion. Their dream was of a night together.

Piet—Ken has to go to a conference—in New York, Columbia—this Tuesday/Thursday. Could you possibly get free to see me, or shall I go to Cambridge and stay with friends—with Ned and Gretchen—for these days? Ken wants the latter—doesn’t want me left alone—but I can argue him down if there’s a reason—is there? I ache and
need to be praised by you. My bigness is either horrible or a new form of beauty—which?

He could not get free. The restaurant wing was in the finish stage and he and Adams and Comeau had to be there ten hours a day. And now that the foliage was down, the beach road seemed transparent. He was timid of driving his truck past the Thornes’ watching hill to the Whitmans’ house, visible in fall from the little-Smiths’. At night, also, he was barred from seeing her, by a new turn in their social life: Angela in her fascination with psychiatry had taken up with the Applebys and Freddy Thorne, which involved both the Thornes. Georgene’s brittle, slightly hyperthyroid eyes, when it emerged in conversation that Ken Whitman was going to be away, flicked toward Piet with the narrowing that appeared on her face when set point was deuced. Piet told Foxy to go to Cambridge, to place herself above gossip and to remove his temptation to do something desperate, revealing, and fatal.

Damn! My mother has decided to come hold my hand through “the adventure” so she will be in the house from Monday on. Could you go to church tomorrow?

After church, on the hill, beneath the penny eye of the weathercock, Piet walked down the gray path past the iron pavilion toward the reddish rocks by which Foxy had parked. Standing waiting with an alert appearance of politeness, she was vast, a full sail in pale wool, one of the high tight turbans fashionable that fall covering her hair and making her face appear stripped and sleek. He felt pulled into her orbit; he yearned to embrace, to possess forever, this luxurious ball,
this swollen woman whose apparition here recalled his first impression, of wealth and an arrogant return home.

“Hi.”

“Hi. Why the solemn face?”

“You look so good. You look grand.”

“So do you, Mr. Hanema. Is that a new suit?”

“New last fall. You didn’t know me then. Is that a new hat?”

“It’s called ‘a hat to meet your mother at the airport in, to show her you’re doing all right.’ ”

“It’s very successful.”

“Is it too severe? I’d take it off but it’s pinned.”

“It’s great. It brings out the pampered pink of your face.”

“God, you’re hostile.”

“I may be hostile, but I adore you. Let’s go to bed.”

“Wouldn’t that be a relief? Do you know how many days it’s been since we made love?”

“Many.”

“Nineteen. Two Tuesdays ago.”

“Can we elude your mother?” Piet’s palms and the area of his lips had gone cold; he felt here at the town’s center that he was leaning inwards like a man on the edge of a carrousel.

Foxy said, “I can if you can get away from Angela and Gallagher.”

“They’re a vigilant pair these days. Jesus, I hate not seeing you. I find myself—”

“Say it.” Perhaps she thought he was going to confess another woman.

“Terrified of death lately.”

“Oh, Piet. Why? Are you sick?”

“It’s not practical death I’m worried about, it’s death anytime, at all, ever.”

She asked, “Does it have to do with me?”