Couples (65 page)

Piet said, “Oh, if the exterior shell can be salvaged, between two and three hundred thousand. From the ground up, maybe half a million. At least. Construction costs increase about eight per cent a year.” These figures bent the gaunt clergyman
like a weight on his back; Piet added in sympathy, “It
is
tragic. The carpentry in there can never be duplicated.”

Pedrick straightened; his eye flashed. He reprimanded Piet: “Christianity isn’t dollars and cents. This church isn’t that old stump of a building. The church is people, my friend, people. Human beings.” And he waggled a horny finger, and Piet saw that Pedrick too knew of his ouster from his home, his need to be brought into line.

Piet told him in return, “But even if they do save the shell, the walls are going to be so weakened you’ll have to tear it down anyway.” And as if to bear him out, fresh flames erupted along the wall on the other side and leaped so high, as the hoses were shifted, that a maple sapling, having ventured too close to the church, itself caught fire, and dropping burning twigs on the shoulders of spectators.

The crowd churned to watch this final resurgence of the powers of destruction, and Piet was fetched up against Carol Constantine. She carried an umbrella and invited him under it with her, and two of her children, Laura and Patrice. Her show of sorrow touched him. “Oh Piet,” she said, “it’s too terrible, isn’t it? I loved that church.”

“I never saw you in it.”

“Of course not, I’m a Presbyterian. But I’d look at it twenty times a day, whenever I was in our yard. I’d really be very religious, if Eddie weren’t so anti-everything.”

“Where is Eddie? On the road?”

“In the sky. He comes back and tells me how beautifully these Puerto Rican girls lay. It’s a joy to see him leave. Why am I telling you all this?”

“Because you’re sad to see the church burn.”

The gutted walls stood saved. The pillars supported the pediment, and the roof beam held the cupola, but the place of
worship was a rubble of timbers and collapsed plaster and charred pews, and the out-of-town firemen were coiling their hose, and Buzz Kappiotis was mentally framing his report, and the crowd gradually dispersing. Carol invited Piet in for a cup of tea. Tea became supper, spaghetti shared with her children. He changed from his wet clothes to a sweater and pants, too tight, of Eddie’s. When the children were in bed it developed he would spend the night. He had never before slept with a woman so bony and supple. It was good, after his strenuous experience of Foxy, to have a woman who came quickly, with grateful cries and nimble accommodations, who put a pillow beneath her hips, who let her head hang over the side of the bed, hair trailing, throat arched, and who wrapped her legs around him as if his trunk were a stout trapeze by which she was swinging far out over the abyss of the world. The bedroom, like many rooms in Tarbox that night, smelled of wet char and acidulous smoke. Between swings she talked, told him of her life with Eddie, his perversity and her misery, of her hopes for God and immortality, of the good times she and Eddie had had long ago, before they moved to Tarbox. Piet asked her about their affair with the Saltzes and whether she missed them. Carol seemed to need reminding and finally said, “That was mostly talk by other people. Frankly, she was kind of fun, but he was a bore.”

Larry & Linda’s Guest House
Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, V.I
.
May 15

Dearest Piet—

Just to write your name makes me feel soft and collapsing inside. What am I doing here, so far from my husband, or my lover, or my
father? I have only Toby, and he, poor small soul, has been sunburned by his idiot mother who, accustomed to the day-by-day onset of the Tarbox summer, has baked both him and herself in the tropical sun, a little white spot directly overhead no bigger than a pea. He cried all night, whenever he tried to roll over. Also, this place, advertised as “an inn in the sleepy tradition of the islands of rum and sun” (I have their leaflet on the desk, the very same one given to me by a Washington travel agent), is in fact two doors up from a steel band nightclub and the slanty little street where blue sewer water runs is alive most of the night with the roar of mufflerless VW’s and the catcalls of black adolescents. So I have fits all night and droop all day
.

Just then a maid with slithery paper sandals and a downcast lilt I can hardly decipher as English came in. From the way she stared at Toby it might have been a full-grown naked man lying there. I don’t suppose too many tourist types bring babies. Maybe they think babies come to us in laundry baskets, all powdered and blue-eyed and ready to give orders
.

Peace again. The girl cuddled him at my urging and made the beds and pushed some dust here and there and left and he went back to sleep. Trouble is, his mother is sleepy too. Outside the street is incandescent but in here sun lies slatted like yellow crayon sticks on the gritty green floor—Piet, I think I’m going to love it here, once I stop hurting. On the ride from the airport in I wanted to share it with you—just the way they build their houses, corrugated iron and flattened olive oil cans and driftwood all held together by flowering bougainvillaea, and the softness of the air, stepping from the plane in San Juan, like a kiss after fucking—oh lover, forgive me, I am sleepy
.

After her restorative nap, the fair-haired young soon-to-be divorcee swiftly arose, and dressed, taking care not to abrade her sunburned forearms and thighs and (especially touchy) abdomen, and
changed her youngling’s soiled unmentionables, and hurled herself into the blinding clatter of the tropical ville in a heroic (heroinic?) effort to find food. No counterpart of the Tarbox A & P or Lacetown IGA seems to exist—though I could buy bushels of duty-free Swiss watches and cameras. The restaurants not up on the hills attached to the forbidding swish hotels are either native hamburgeries with chili spilled all over the stools or else “gay” nightclubs that don’t open until six. At this time of year most of the non-Negroes seem to be fairies. Their voices are unmistakable and everywhere. I finally found a Hayes-Bickford type of cafeteria, with outrageous island prices, up the street near the open market, which meets my apparently demanding (sweet, I’m such an old maid!) sanitary standards, and gives me milk for Toby’s bottle in a reassuring waxpaper carton. Larry and Linda aren’t much help. They are refugees from New York, would-be actors, and I have the suspicion she rescued him from being gay. He keeps giving me his profile while she must think her front view is the best, because she keeps coming at me head on, her big brown bubs as scary as approaching headlights on a slick night. I was shocked to learn she’s five years younger than me and I could see her tongue make a little determined leap to put me on a first-name basis. They seem waifs, rather. They talk about New York all the time, how horrible it was etc., love-hate as Freddy Thorne would say, and are in a constant flap about their sleepy elusive unintelligible help. Though the evening meals Linda puts on are quite nice and light and French. American plan—they give you breakfast and supper, forage as best you can in between. $18 per diem
.

But it’s you, you I think about, and worry about, and wonder about. How grand we were, me as a call girl and you as a gangster in hiding. Did I depress you? You seemed so dazed the last morning, and pleased I was going, I cried all the way into B.U., and let Ken take me to lunch at the faculty club and cried some more, so the tables
around us became quite solemn. I think he thought I was crying for
him
, which in a way I was, and I could see him fighting down a gentlemanly impulse to offer to call it all off and take me back. He has become so distinguished and courtly without me—his female students must adore him. He had bought a new spring suit, sharkskin, and seemed alarmed that I noticed, as if I were wooing him again or had caught him wooing someone else, when all the time you were flowery between my legs and I was neurotically anxious because we had left Toby in Ken’s lab with his technicians and I would go back up the elevator and find him dissected. Horrible! Untrue!! Ken was very cute with the baby, and weighed him in milligrams
.

Days have passed. My letter to you seemed to be going all wrong, chattery and too “fun” and breezy. Rereading I had to laugh at what I did to poor Linda’s lovely bosom—she and Larry are really a perfectly sweet phony fragile couple, trying to be parental and sisterly and brotherly all at once to me, rather careful and anxious with each other, almost studiously sensual, and so lazy basically. I wonder if ours was the last generation that will ever have “ambition.” These two seem so sure the world will never let them starve, and that life exists to be “enjoyed”—barbarous idea. But it is refreshing, after our awful Tarbox friends who talk only about themselves, to talk to people who care about art and the theater (they invariably call it, with innocent pomp, “the stage”) and international affairs, if that’s what they are. I’ve forgotten what else “affair” means. They think LBJ a boor but feel better under him than Kennedy because K. was too much like the rest of us semi-educated lovables of the post-Cold War and might have blown the whole game through some mistaken sense of flair. Like Lincoln, he lived to become a martyr, a memory. A martyr to what? To Marina Oswald’s sexual rejection of her husband. Forgive me, I am using my letter to you to argue with Larry in. But it made me sad, that he
thought that somebody like us (if K. was) wasn’t fit to rule us, which is to say, we aren’t fit to rule ourselves, so bring on emperors, demigods, giant robots, what have you. Larry, incidentally, has let me know, during a merengo at the Plangent Cat, which is the place down the street, that his sexual ambivalence (AC or DC, he calls it) is definitely on the mend, but I declined, though he does dance wonderfully, to participate in the cure. He took the refusal as if his heart hadn’t been in it
.

Which brings us to you. Who are you? Are you weak? This theme, of your “weakness,” cropped up often in the mouths of our mutual friends, when we all lived together in a magic circle. But I think they meant to say rather that your strengths weren’t sufficiently
used
. Your virtues are obsolete. I can imagine you as somebody’s squire, maybe poor prim fanatic Matt’s, a splendid redheaded squire, resourceful, loyal, living off the land, repairing armor with old hairpins, kidding your way into castles and inns, making impossible ideals work but needing their impossibility to attach yourself to. Before I knew you long ago Bea Guerin described you to me as an old-fashioned man. In a sense if I were to go from Ken to you it would be a backwards step. Compared to Ken you are primitive. The future belongs to him or to chaos. But my life belongs to me now, and I must take a short view. I am not, for all my vague intellectual poking (about as vague as Freddy’s, and he knew it), good for much—but I know I could be your woman. As an ambition it is humble but explicit. Even if we never meet again I am glad to have felt useful, and used. Thank you
.

The question is, should I (or the next woman, or the next) subdue you to marriage? How much more generous it would be to let you wander, and suffer—there are so few wanderers left. We are almost all women now, homebodies and hoarders. You married Angela because your instinct told you she would not possess you. I would. To be mastered by your body I would tame you with my mind. Yet the
subconscious spark in me that loves the race wants instead to give you freedom, freedom to rape and flee and to waste yourself, now that the art of building belongs entirely to accountants. Ever since you began to bounce up to my empty house in your dusty pick-up truck and after an hour rattle hastily away, I have felt in you, have loved in you, a genius for loneliness, for seeing yourself as something apart from the world. When you desire to be the world’s husband, what right do I have to make you my own?

Toby is crying, and Linda is here. We are taking a picnic to Magens Bay
.