Families and Survivors (17 page)

Andrew (the professor) examines cautiously what it is that he does feel for Jill, and finds affection, gratitude, occasional irritation. She reads only crazy books, she is messy, she would much rather discuss sex than politics. (Politics?) He likes her, and he doesn’t like her, and he loves her in bed. As simple, as complicated as that.

But one thing that (then) very much pleases Andrew about Jill is what he feels to be the originality of his choice of her—in fact the originality of Jill. So much about his life, especially the episodes surrounding his divorce, has struck him as trite, as more banal than tragic, or even sad: Sally’s announcement at breakfast, and so on, up to and very much including the wooden phone call from Alex Magowan. It is also trite that he is now with a much younger woman. But not Jill. She is as far as possible from the stereotype, the Bunny. He is grateful for her dirty feet and her fat, her eccentric ferns and her crazy conversation.

…

But again and again in his dreams he is married to Sally. It is neither terrible nor marvelous: they are simply married. For good.

One night at dinner, a Monday night, Jill is talking about her brother George, who is back in town. She mentions his shower fixation. “He’s sort of a fanatic,” Jill says. “But good.”

“He must be terribly clean.”

But as she goes on a single fact slowly and surely intrudes on Andrew’s love- and wine-happy mind: she is not discussing the past; she is talking about what she and George did on the weekend immediately past, and almost certainly in this very room. Andrew looks at the rumpled bed from which they have just arisen.

Tightly he asks her, “You spent a lot of time with George last weekend?”

Of course his tone makes her defensive, and she tightly answers, “Yes.”

They both know exactly what has just been said, and they sit together in a silence that is like smog, heavy and oppressive and hard to breathe.

It is Jill who breaks into it. “Look, do I ever ask you anything? How do I know what you do on weekends with your wife?”

“I don’t see her on weekends, just the boys. Besides, she’s not my wife.”

But she has touched a nerve. He has had fantasies of making love to Sally again, and, cruelly, in the fantasies she is always the slender haunted girl he has just married, Sally warm with delight; she is not his dry exhausted wife, speaking of headaches in a voice he can hardly hear.

He has, of course, had fantasies of Alex with Sally.

“She’s not my wife—we’re divorced,” he repeats, out of varieties of anger and frustration.

Jill has warmed to another issue. “Besides, I really don’t see this fidelity bit. I never have. Why do people have to own each other? Sex is the way I communicate with people. Why should I only talk to one person?”

He has no answers.

“Who do I hurt by being with a lot of guys? What’s
bad?
”

What she says is absolutely true; she is not hurting anyone. Except possibly Andrew, and he can fasten onto no right that he has over her, not even the right to be hurt.

Very gently she says to him, “You’re not quite ready for that, are you? Don’t feel bad, a lot of guys aren’t.”

Very confused, but dimly aware that he is being dismissed, Andrew stands up to go.

“Call me,” Jill says—very friendly. “I’d really like to see you sometime.”

Andrew does not call Jill. He thinks about her instead, and finally he realizes that not seeing her is, curiously, a relief to him.

He begins to think again about Miss Isabel James, who is not registered for classes this quarter. It occurs to him that she might be in the phone book, and she is—she even lives nearby, on Russian Hill.

Of course she remembers him. Dr. Chapin; in fact they fall in love with each other and within a short time they marry. Isabel James Chapin.

Andrew rarely thinks of Jill, the post-beatnik, early flower and fern girl. However, a few years later, during a time when much is written and said about “hippies,” with a certain disappointment Andrew recognizes Jill in every
paragraph; he sees her vaunted freedom as programmatic—and thus he is able to dismiss her from his mind, for good.

But, married to Isabel, living in a new house in Sausalito, he dreams still that he is married to Sally. And he lives in his parents’ old house on the distant Atlantic.

And, inexorably, he and Isabel have three children, three more boys. At some point it occurs to Andrew’s quirky mind that he is producing sons instead of literature—as, often, women are said to do.

But this bothers him less and less.

Flowering privet still surrounds the pool, where so long ago Louisa and Kate arranged themselves in those poses (sex appeal!) and where, on a May afternoon, they both now sit. An afternoon a few days after Jack Calloway’s funeral. (Curiously, since they could not have been described as
close
, Jack and Caroline died within three years of each other. And, further irony: Jack died of lung cancer, having for years fought “rumors” linking tobacco and harm to the lungs.) Louisa has come for the funeral, and to settle possessions.

And Kate has come in time to visit her old friend—just not in time for Jack’s funeral; she never liked Jack at all. This is her vacation from her Berkeley family; after leaving Louisa she will go on to see her own parents, Jane and Charles Flickinger, who are still alive, in New Jersey.

Although Louisa came for her father’s funeral, what has happened has been something astounding: she has remet and fallen in love with John Jeffreys—John from her (and Kate’s) early past. It is as though John were the true purpose of her trip—in fact that is how she comes to see it.

…

Standing near her father’s grave, looking out into a crowd of familiar and half-familiar faces, she is caught by a pair of dark, pained, and intelligent eyes that have sought her eyes. John Jeffreys. (But with white, white hair. He is very striking.) Before looking down (she feels that she must not stare, not here) she is struck with a curious thought: she thinks, He knows everything about me.

That night, having contrived to be alone (with difficulty; everyone means so well), Louisa responds to a knock at the door.

John says, “You don’t mind?” Serious, tentative.

“No, of course not. Come in. You can be my excuse for having a drink.”

(These are two very Southern people.)

They have drinks, they talk without saying very much. Then Louisa says, “God, what a hot night! Why don’t we have a swim?”

“Great.”

As simply as that they leave the house; they walk across the lawn, past looming abandoned stables and the huge formally trimmed boxwood.

At the edge of the pool, not quite looking at each other, they take off their clothes; they slip slowly into the cool receiving water. They swim around, they exclaim, “It feels marvelous!”

They get out.

Naked, in the warm black night, in the sweet smells of privet and of spring itself, they turn toward each other. They kiss, they begin to touch each other’s smooth and supple skin.

They have fallen in love.

…

But for a while it seems to Louisa that what has happened between them is symbolic, rather than actual—that “Louisa” and “John,” of a certain time and place, are “in love.” It is at first too easy, even too appropriate. What is needed is a melting down, a diffusing of all the elements involved, and eventually that, too, takes place.

(Just as, some years later, when Louisa and John, very high on grass, make love, she has the sense of watching two puppets, two white stick figures, who are making love—all of whose violent sensations she herself experiences. And later she tries, and fails, to draw those figures.)

Now Louisa’s conversation leaps about, as she tries to explain to her old friend all the recent and violent events of her life, there on the familiar edge of the pool.

The two women’s bodies have changed with age (of course) and in opposite directions: Kate’s is fuller, softer, whereas Louisa’s has hardened; she is bony, perhaps too thin.

“Well?” Louisa asks, as though continuing a logical sequence, which she is not. “How
should
I feel—could I feel? He did behave so badly, really dishonestly.” She is speaking, Kate understands, of Jack, her father, and his attempt to contest her mother’s will, in which Caroline left all her money to Louisa.

“What’s strange, in a way,” she continues, with her own illogic (which makes sense to Kate), “is that I feel as though I’d come to my mother’s funeral. To bury Caroline. In fact during the service that’s what I was thinking, that it was Caroline in the coffin. In the earth.” A pause. Then, “You know, when she actually died I was still in mourning for Bayard. Not to mention laid up with colitis. I somehow missed her death.”

Louisa goes on in this vein, saying things that Kate half knows. Kate listens loyally, but her mind is not there. She is thinking about her husband, David, the great heart surgeon. Thinking:
Is
David fucking that nurse, that blond Miss Murray? Angrily, painfully, she thinks: Stupid prick, how trite of him. David at forty-five. The male menopause. Can I help being fat? Well, yes, I could help it, but screw him, why should I?

“I am literally stricken with her loss,” Louisa says, still speaking of her mother. “And then John,” she says, now unstricken, and she smiles deeply, an inward, pervasive smile.

John has just moved back to Virginia, after an unfortunate life in New York: a dead wife, a patchy career. (This reinforces the local view that it is dangerous to marry Yankees, and to try to work up there. Just look at that Calloway girl, that poor Louisa.) Aware of this view, John and Louisa think, and they say to each other: “They don’t know the half of it.”

To Kate, John is still a vivid memory of early pain, turning her down. (“Shall we take our clothes off, John—and do everything?” “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”) And then dumping her for that girl, that dumb little bitch, that—? (No, not Miss Murray.) She asks Louisa, “What was that girl’s name, do you remember? The one John liked for a while, after me?” She gives that last phrase a wry twist.

“Mary Beth Williamson.” Louisa has an odd memory. She laughs. “John couldn’t remember her name, either. God, what a dumb little bitch she was.”

“He doesn’t?” Then maybe in twenty years David won’t remember the nurse’s name, but by then it will be too late. Or—maybe he isn’t screwing her after all. “It’s so hot,” Kate says, and she flops flatly into the pool, a large lazy splash.

Feeling her friend’s unhappiness (What is wrong with Kate? She doesn’t say), Louisa is dimly reminded of another time, of herself excited and “in love,” at a time of sadness for Kate. And she remembers that she was in love with Richard Trowbridge (Richard
Trow
bridge?) and Kate was mourning over John. Snow, and sledding on the golf course. She remembers everything.

And now she loves John, and she is also mourning. In her strange, exaggerated state of mind, she could easily cry or laugh. In fact she does a lot of both. Now she slips into the pool after Kate. In tandem, more or less, they swim around its out-of-style kidney shape. They get out together.

A new thought bursts from Louisa, this time a funny one. “Kate, did I tell you what happened to Richard Trowbridge? John just told me last night.” (She loves to say John’s name.)

“Richard—?”

“You remember Richard. He was mad about you, and then me.” Louisa begins to laugh.

Kate has remembered. “Oh, Richard.”

“Well, he’s living in Washington, and he’s in the C.I.A.! He’s important there!” Louisa chokes on this.

“The C.I.A.—that’s marvelous.” Kate laughs, too; for various (and divergent) reasons they are both almost hysterical.

“The C.I.A.—”

“Richard—”

“How perfect—”

“Our country really needs—”

But (and again for separate reasons) neither of them can laugh long, and they sober up together. Kate says, “I don’t know, I really wonder about marriage.”

“Oh?”

Kate gestures, unspecifically. “Fifteen years—it’s so long. It’s so easy to get out of touch.”

“Touch” makes Louisa think of John. His touch. But she tries to listen. “Out of touch?”

“You sort of stop talking. I mean, of course we still talk, but a lot of it is about the kids. Lists for a Christmas party. Income tax. You know.”

“I can’t imagine fifteen years,” Louisa says, not very helpfully. But the very idea has made her vulnerable spirits sink. Where will they be, she and John, in fifteen years?
Should
they marry?

And you almost stop screwing. Kate goes on to herself, except for an occasional quick morning bout. David waking up with a hard-on, happening to be next to me. Not like years past, when we waited for the kids to go to sleep so we could do it on the sofa, listening to Ella, or Frank—hoping the music drowned us out.

Not only the contents of her mind but the impossibility of speaking them is oppressive to Kate; she feels lonely, and isolated from Louisa, who seemingly is saying everything in
her
mind. And Kate wonders: Do I not tell Louisa about what is nearly ruining me with worry out of pride, what is called false pride? Or don’t I say it because saying it might make it worse, like not screaming during physical pain. (“I’m afraid David is fucking his nurse” would be a scream.) Kate doesn’t know. she never cried out during the difficult births of her children. Stephen, Jane, Louisa, and Christopher, who is only three, who was not exactly intended. (But should she have cried out?)

“Christ,” Kate says, instead of saying anything else, “I’ve got to take off some weight.”

“Oh, why? There’re so many skinny women around. I love the way you look,” Louisa ardently tells her.

Kate laughs. “You’re crazy.” But of course she is pleased.

“So—what else is new?”

Louisa says, “I suppose you don’t remember that time you came to see me and Michael? When I was pregnant?”

“Of course I do. You lived in a funny sort of rented house, and after dinner those other people came over. The boy who took me to lunch that time.”

“Andrew Chapin. That’s funny—he reminds me of John. Do you think they’re a type?”