Couples (55 page)

“Nothing will happen to you.”

“Let’s assume not. Georgene can drop around in a way neither you or Freddy can. Marcia goes up and down that road all day. It is especially important that
you
stay away. Forget I exist.” She would not tell him the address of the abortionist until she had talked to Freddy again. “Freddy’s afraid you’ll do something dramatic and crazy.”

“And are you?”

“No.” Her tone was not kind.

Freddy called him that afternoon, gave him the address on Tremont, absolutely forbade his coming in with them, and tried to discourage his keeping watch from the Common. “What can you do?” Freddy asked. He answered himself scornfully: “Pray. If she’s had it, son, she’s had it.” The ambiguity of “had it,” the suggestion of a finite treasurable “it” that Foxy could enclose and possess, as one says “had him” of sleeping with a man, the faint impression that Foxy was competing for a valuable prize, sent ghosts tumbling and swirling through Piet, the ghosts of all those creatures and celebrities who had already attained the prize. He longed to call it off, to release Freddy from his bargain and let Foxy swell, but that wouldn’t do; he told himself it had gone beyond him, that Freddy and Foxy would push it through regardless: they had become gods moving in the supernature where life is created and destroyed. He replaced the receiver physically sick, his hand swollen like a drowned man’s, the brittle Bakelite more alive than he.

Yet last night, playing Concentration with his two daughters, knowing he had set a death in motion, he cared enough to concentrate and win. Piling up cards under Nancy’s eyes filling with tears. She had thought the game hers. A little beginner’s luck had told her she owned a magic power of selecting pairs. Piet had disillusioned her. A father’s duty. But so jubilantly. Ruth had watched his vigorous victory wonderingly.

A snuffly bum approached him, hand out, whiskers like quills. Piet shied from being knifed. The other man confusedly flinched, palm empty. Piet settled to listening; he was being asked for something. Dime. Derelict wanted a dime. His voice retreated behind the whiskers toward the mumbled roots of language. Piet gave him a quarter. “Gah-blessyafella.” Angel in disguise. Never turn away. Men coming to the door during the Depression. His mother’s pies. Bread upon the waters. Takes your coat, give him your cloak. Asks a mile, go twain. Nobody believes. Philanthropy a hoax to avoid Communism. As a child he wondered who would eat wet bread. Tired old tales. Loaves and fishes, litter. Keep your Boston clean. He found himself hungry. A lightness in his limbs, strange sensation, how does it know food? Strange angels, desires. Come from beyond us, inhabit our machines. Piet refused his hunger. If he ran to the cafeteria burning at the corner, Foxy would die. He did without. His mother’s beautiful phrase.
Well sen, do wissout
. Her floury arms upreaching to the pantry shelf. Glory. An engine of love ran through him, flattened his gut. Never again.
Moeder is dood
.

Cruel hours passed. The pavilion, the frost-buckled bricks, the squirrels posing for snapshots, the hurtling gangs of hoodlum pigeons, the downhanging twigs glazed with mist to
the point of dripping became the one world Piet knew: all the others—the greenhouse, the army, the houses and parties of his friends in Tarbox—seemed phantom precedents, roads skimmed to get here. Hunger questioned his vaporous head, but he went without. Might miss Foxy’s moment. The knife. Ask for a dime, give a quarter. Fifteen-cent profit. He was protecting his investment. His being expanded upward in the shape of a cone tapering toward prayer. Undo it. Rid me of her and her of it and us of Freddy. Give me back my quiet place. At an oblique angle she had intersected the plane of his life where daily routines accumulated like dust. Lamplight, breakfast. She had intruded a drastic dimension. He had been innocent amid trees. She had demanded that he know. Straight string of his life, knotted. The knot surely was sin. Piet prayed for it to be undone.

Overhead the elm branches were embedded in a sky of dirty wool: erosion deltas photographed high above the drained land: stained glass. Footsteps returning from lunch scuffed everywhere in the Common distinctly, as if under an enclosing dome. A small reddish bug crawled along an edge of brick. Happened before. When? His head tilted just so. Exactly. His mind sank scrabbling through the abyss of his past searching for when this noticing of an insect had happened before. He lifted his eyes and saw the Park Street church, stately. He looked around him at the grayly streaming passersthrough and all people seemed miraculous, that they could hold behind their glowing faces the knowledge that soon, under the whitewash-spattered sky, they would wither or be cut.

Church. Tolled. Three. He weakened, broke faith with himself, ran for coffee and one, no two, cinnamon doughnuts. When he emerged from the cafeteria the yellow sky between
the buildings was full of Foxy. Coffee slopping through the paper cup and burning his fingers, he ran up Tremont, convinced of hopeless guilt. But Freddy’s car, his yellow Mercury convertible, the canvas top mildewed from being buttoned up all winter, was still parked, half on the sidewalk, down a narrow alley off the street, near a metal door painted one with the mustard wall yet whose hinges, rubbed down to the bare steel, betrayed that it could be opened. So she was not gone. He went back across Tremont to the pavilion’s vicinity and ate.

His feet grew numb. Boston danker than Tarbox: oily harbor lets in the cold sea kiss. More northern. To his dread for Foxy attached a worry that he would be missed at home. Gallagher, Angela, each would think the other had him. The sun slipped lower behind the dome of sky, to where the walls were thinner. Sunshine luminous as tallow tried to set up shadows, touched the tree plaques and dry fountains. In this light Piet saw the far door down the alley open and a dab that must be bald Freddy emerge. Dodging through thickening traffic, Piet’s body seemed to float, footless, toward the relief of knowing, as when he would enter the Whitmans’ house by the doorway crowded with lilacs and move through the hallway fragrant of freshly planed wood toward the immense sight of the marshes and Foxy’s billowing embrace. Freddy Thorne looked up from unlocking his car door, squinting, displeased to see him. Neither man could think to speak. In the gaping steel doorway a Negress in a green nurse’s uniform and silver-rim spectacles was standing supporting Foxy.

She was conscious but drugged; her pointed face, half-asleep, was blotched pink and white as if her cheeks had been struck, and struck again. Her eyes paused on Piet, then passed
over him. Her hair flowed all on one side, like wheat being winnowed, and the collar of her Russian-general greatcoat, a coat he loved, was up, and buttoned tight beneath her chin like a brace.

Freddy moved rapidly to her side, said “Six steps,” and, his mouth grimly lipless, one arm around her waist, the other beneath her elbow, eased her toward the open car door as if at any jarring she might break. The Negress in silence closed the metal door upon herself. She had not stepped into the alley. Piet’s running had attracted the curiosity of some pedestrians, who watched from the sidewalk at the alley mouth yet did not step toward them. Freddy lowered Foxy into the passenger’s seat, whispering, “Good girl.” With the usual punky noise of car doors hers swung shut. She was behind glass. The set of her mouth, the tension above the near corner predicting laughter, appeared imperfectly transported from the past, a shade spoiled, giving her face the mysterious but final deadness of minutely imitated wax effigies. Then two fingertips came up from her lap and smoothed the spaces of skin below her eyes.

Piet vaulted around the front of the car. Freddy was already in the driver’s seat; grunting, he rolled his window some inches down. “Well, if it isn’t Piet Enema, the well-known purge.”

Piet asked, “Is she—?”

“Okey-doak,” Freddy said. “Smooth as silk. You’re safe again, lover.”

“What took so long?”

“She’s been lying down, out, what did you think, she’d get up and dance? Get your fucking hand off the door handle.”

Perhaps roused by Freddy’s fury of tone, Foxy looked over. Her hand touched her lips. “Hi,” she said. The voice was
warmer, drowsier, than hers. “I know you,” she added, attempting, Piet felt, irony and confession at once, the irony acknowledging that she knew very well this intruder whom she could not quite name. Freddy rolled up the window, punched down both door locks, started the motor, gave Piet a blind stare of triumph. Delicately, taking care not to shake his passenger, he eased the car down off the curb into the alley and into the trashy stream of homeward traffic. A condom and candy wrapper lay paired in the exposed gutter.

Not until days later, after Foxy had survived the forty-eight hours alone in the house with Toby and the test of Ken’s return from Chicago, did Piet learn, not from Freddy but from her as told to her by Freddy, that at the moment of anesthesia she had panicked; she had tried to strike the Negress pressing the sweet, sweet mask to her face and through the first waves of ether had continued to cry that she should go home, that she was supposed to have this baby, that the child’s father was coming to smash the door down with a hammer and would stop them.

After she confessed this to him over the phone on Monday, his silence stretched so long she laughed to break it. “Don’t take it upon yourself that you didn’t come break down the door. I didn’t want you to. It was my subconscious speaking, and only after I had consciously got myself to the point of no return, and I could relax. What we did was right. We couldn’t do anything else, could we?”

“I couldn’t think of anything else.”

“We were very lucky to have brought it off. We ought to thank our, what?—our lucky stars.” She laughed again, a perfunctory rustle in the apparatus.

Piet asked her, “Are you depressed?”

“Yes. Of course. Not because I’ve committed any sin so much, since it was what you asked me to do, what had to be done for everybody’s sake, really. But because now I’m faced with it again,
really
faced with it now.”

“With what?”

“My life. Ken, this cold house. The loss of your love. Oh, and my milk’s dried up, so I have that to feel sorry for myself about. Toby keeps throwing up his formula. And Cotton’s gone.”

“Cotton.”

“My cat. Don’t you remember him?”

“Of course. He always greeted me.”

“He was here Wednesday morning catching field mice on the edge of the marsh and when I came back that night he was gone. I didn’t even notice. Thursday I began to call, but I was too weak to go outdoors much.”

Piet said, “He’s out courting.”

“
No
,” Foxy said, “he was fixed,” and the receiver was rhythmically scraped by her sobs.

He asked her, “Why didn’t you talk to me more, before we did it?”

“I was angry, which I suppose is the same as being frightened. And what did we have to say? We’d said it. You were too chicken to let me have it as if it were Ken’s, and I’ve always known I could never get you away from Angela. No, don’t argue.”

He was obediently silent.

She said, “But what now, Piet? What shall we expect of each other?”

He answered, after thought, “Not much.”

“It’s easier for you,” she said. “You’ll always have somebody
else to move on to. Don’t deny it. Me, I seem stuck. You want to know something horrible?”

“If you’d like to tell it.”

“I can’t stand Ken now. I can hardly bear to look at his face, or answer when he talks. I think of it as
him
who made me kill my baby. It’s
just
the kind of thing he’d do.”

“Sweet, it wasn’t him, it was me.”

Foxy explained to him, what he had heard often before, how Ken, in denying her a child for seven years, had killed in her something only another man could revive. She ended by asking, “Piet, will you ever come talk to me? Just talk?”

“Do you think we should?”

“Should, shouldn’t. Of course we shouldn’t. But I’m down, lover, I’m just terribly, terribly down.” She pronounced these words with a stagy lassitude learned from the movies. The script called for her to hang up, and she did. Losing another dime, he dialed her number from the booth, the booth in front of Poirier’s Liquor Mart, where one of their friends might all too likely spot him, a droll corpse upright in a bright aluminum coffin. At Foxy’s house, no one answered. Of course he must go to her. Death, once invited in, leaves his muddy bootprints everywhere.

Georgene, faithful to Freddy’s orders, came calling on Foxy that Monday, around noon, and was shocked to see Piet’s pick-up truck parked in the driveway. She felt a bargain had not been kept. Her understanding had been that the abortion would end Foxy’s hold over Piet; she believed that once Foxy was eliminated her own usefulness to Piet would reassert itself. She prided herself, Georgene, on being useful, on keeping her bargains and carrying out the assignments
given her, whether it was obtaining a guest speaker for the League of Women Voters, or holding her service in a tennis match, or staying married to Freddy Thorne. She had visited Foxy late Wednesday night, twice on Thursday, and once on Friday. She had carried tea and toast up to the convalescent, changed Toby’s spicy orange diapers, and seen two baskets of clothes and sheets through the washer and dryer. On Friday she had spent over an hour vacuuming the downstairs and tidying toward Ken’s return. Her feelings toward Foxy altered in these days of domestic conspiracy. Georgene, from her first glimpse, a year ago at the Applebys’ party, of this prissy queenly newcomer, had disliked her; when Foxy stole Piet from her this dislike became hatred, with its implication of respect. But with the younger woman at her mercy Georgene allowed herself tenderness. She saw in Foxy a woman destined to dare and to suffer, a younger sister spared any compulsion to settle cheap, whose very mistakes were obscurely enviable. She was impressed with Foxy’s dignity. Foxy did not deny that in this painful interregnum she needed help and company, nor did she attempt to twist Georgene’s providing it into an occasion for protestation, or scorn, or confession, or self-contempt. Georgene knew from living with Freddy how surely self-contempt becomes contempt for others and was pleased to have her presence in Foxy’s house accepted for what it was, an accident. Wednesday night, Foxy dismissed her with the grave tact of a child assuring a parent she is not afraid of the dark. She was weepy and half-drugged and clutched her living baby to her like a doll, yet from a deep reserve of manners thanked Georgene for coming, permitted her bloody bed-sheets to be changed, accepted the injunction not to go up and down stairs, nodded gravely when told to call the
Thornes’ number at any hour, for any reason, even senseless fright. Thursday morning, Georgene found her downstairs, pale from lack of sleep; she had been unable to breast-feed the baby and had had to come downstairs to heat up a bottle. Obedient, she had not attempted the return trip upstairs, and with one blanket had made a bed for them both on the sofa. Imagining those long moon-flooded hours, the telephone offering a tempting release from solitude, Georgene secretly admired the other’s courage and pride. She helped her upstairs and felt leaning upon her, naked under its robe and slip, the taller, less supple, rather cool and dry and ungainly body her lover had loved. Imagined love flowed from her. The current was timidly returned. They were silent in unison. They moved together, in these few days, whose weather outside was a humid raw foretaste of spring less comfortable than outright winter, through room upon room of tactful silence. They did not speak of Piet or of Freddy or of the circumstances that had brought them together except as they were implied by Georgene’s inquiries into Foxy’s physical condition. They discussed health and housework and the weather outside and the needs of the infant. Friday afternoon, the last day Georgene was needed, she brought along little Judy, and in the festive atmosphere of recovery Foxy, now fully clothed, served cookies and vermouth and persuaded Georgene, after her exertions of cleaning, to smoke an unaccustomed cigarette. Awkwardly they lifted their glasses as if to toast one another: two women who had tidied up after a mess.