“It’s always been terrible; your skin wasn’t meant to last forever. You can sit inside and read. You can use a number-fifteen sun block.”
“Well, that seems to defeat the whole purpose of going. Why not just stay home and save the airfare?”
“You know something, my dear? You’re becoming a real drag.” Ed had urged her to accept the commission appointment because he wanted her out of the house. He wanted her, if the truth be known, out of his life.
But she had done him no harm—had done, indeed, everything he had asked. Borne him healthy children, created a home that could be displayed to colleagues and friends, served as an extension of his ego. Yet, lying beside her night after night, rising to urinate once, twice, depending on his insomnia, which expanded in spirals like a rage, he had become convinced that there must be a better life than this. A better life for the both of them. Carol had her qualities still—a flexible grace, though she had put on weight with the years, and a good-humored intuitiveness that was like the pure blue pilot light burning in an old-fashioned oven—but Ed had never dared expect that some other man might covet her. Jason Reynolds’s message, in its festive red outline, had struck a tone handsomely blended of friendliness and passion, a tone of manly adoration. Carol, somehow, was loved. Realizing this made Ed, too, feel loved, and like a child in arms he fell swiftly asleep.
For days and weeks Ed did nothing with his knowledge, merely observed. How could he not have seen before? At parties, the lovers would do a long circling dance of avoidance, elaborately courteous and jolly with almost everyone else there, and only after dinner, when the shoes come off and the records go on, and the tired host brings fresh logs up from the cellar, did Carol and Jason allow themselves to drift together, and to talk quietly in that solemn way of people to whom the most trivial daily details of one another’s lives have acquired the gravity of the sexual, and then to dance together with a practiced tenderness that they trusted those around them to be too drunk or sleepy to observe.
Jason was a thin and dignified man, a trust officer at a mid-town bank, who observed a rigorous health regimen of exercise and diet; he had a rowing machine, played squash at lunchtime in the city, and after dinner jogged along the country roads in a reflective orange vest. It sometimes happens with such people that their bodies make their faces pay the price of aging, and so it was with him: his middle-aged face needed flesh. His fatless, taut, weather-yellowed features, his deep eye sockets and long creased cheeks and dry gray hair were those of a man ending rather than beginning his forties. Jason was forty-two, like Carol. In his arms she looked young, and her broad hips suggested a relaxed and rounded fertility rather than middle-aged spread. Though Jason’s eyelids were lowered in their deep sockets, and seemed to shudder in the firelight, Carol’s blue eyes were alertly round and her face as pristine and blank as a china statuette’s each time the slow music turned her around so Ed could see her. It was not their faces that gave it away, it was their hands, their joined hands melting bonelessly together and Jason’s other hand pressing an inch or two too low on the small of Carol’s back.
Ed was not watching alone, he noticed; the flickering, dim room, cushions and chairs and fuzzy heads and stockinged legs, was lined with shadows watching Jason and Carol, or studiously not watching. People knew—had known, with the casual accuracy of detached observation, long before he had, before the night of the valentine. Until then he had existed in a kind of bubble, a courteous gap in the communal wisdom. He had been blundering with a blind smile through society while the truth, giggling, just evaded his fingertips. This, in retrospect, was hard to forgive. Did his opposite number, Patricia Reynolds, also exist in such a bubble? What did she know, or guess, or feel?
She was a short woman, with exemplary posture, who seemed wooden to Ed. Even her prettiest feature, her thick chestnut hair, seemed a shade of wood, brushed shiny and cut short in a helmet shape, with bangs. She jogged and exercised alongside Jason, but the regimen that had ravaged his face gave hers instead a bland athletic smoothness. Her chin was square, her brown eyes opaque. From a wealthy but not famous family, she had attended correct second-best schools and was thoroughly the product of her background; with a mannish upper-class accent, throatier than one expected, Pat had a good-soldier air about her, as if she had stiffened in her mission of carrying her family line into the next generation. There were two Reynolds children—a son and a daughter. Pat was slightly younger than Jason, as Carol was younger than Ed. Ed had never heard Pat say anything unpleasant or unconventional; but, then, he had rarely listened to her. At parties they tended to avoid each other. He had the feeling that he, with his rumpled, sleepless air, his incorrigible cigarettes and bossy, clownish, perhaps coarse manner, rather dismayed her; when he approached, she grew extra polite. Now, though, his eyes sought out her chiselled profile in the room, to see if she, like him, was watching.
In fact, she was seated on the floor not far away and, her face turned full away from the dancers, was discussing with another woman that most appropriate of topics for the commission chairman’s wife, zoning—the tragic break-up of the local estates, the scandalous predations of the developers. Ed moved from his easy chair to the floor near her and said, “But, baby—you don’t mind my calling you ‘baby,’ do you, Pat?—nobody wants to live in the old estates. The third generation is all in SoHo doing graffiti art. They can’t afford the upkeep and the taxes and nobody can afford servants and they want to get their money out and in hand.”
“Well, of course that’s what everybody says,” Pat said, “and I suppose there’s some truth to it.”
“Some truth! It’s all truth, Pat honey.” Six bourbons were talking through him, not quite in synchrony. “You blame these poor hard-working Italian contractors who do the bulldozing and put up their four-hundred-thousand-dollar tract houses, but it’s the rich, the rich who are greedy, who are dying to sell and let somebody else put the new slate roof on Daddy’s old stables. Condominiumization”—he was so proud at having got the word out intact that even Pat smiled, briefly showing her dental perfection—“is the only way to save these old places from the wrecker’s ball.”
The woman next to Pat, Georgene Fuller, tried to come to the rescue. She was lanky and lazy and whiny, with long bleached hair loose to her shoulders. Ed had slept with her, for six months, years ago. “Still, Ed, you have to admit—”
“I have to admit nothing,” he said quickly. “How about you, Pat? What do you have to admit?”
A flicker of puzzlement crossed this other woman’s even features. Georgene nudged Ed in the small of his back. But she needn’t have feared; it suited him to have Pat in the dark, in her bubble.
“The wrecker’s ball,” he resumed. “It should be the name of a song. We’re gonna dance off both our shoes,” he began to sing. The pressure on his back repeated, and it occurred to him he should ask Georgene to dance. Once you sleep with them, however many years go by, they fit smoothly into your arms.
But others also wished to break up the conversation between Pat and Ed; Jason and Carol suddenly loomed over them like parents above children playing on the floor. “We think you two should dance with us,” Carol announced primly, and obliging Ed pushed himself up from the floor, which seemed with the bourbon to have taken on an elastic life of its own, and to bounce under his feet. Carol, rather miraculously, always felt slightly strange in his arms, as though their many years of marriage had never been. They had never quite worked out the steps, and this awkwardness made her interesting, especially now that he knew that somewhere, with somebody else, she was working out the steps. Her plump body felt solid with her secret, and unusually flexible to him; reaching behind her gracefully, she adjusted the position of his hand on her back. Ed had experimentally placed it an inch or two lower than usual. “Jason looks like a smooth dancer,” he said.
“Not that I noticed,” she answered.
“He is with Pat. Look at them go. Twirls, and everything.”
“T
hey went to the same sort of cotillions.”
“But there’s more to life than cotillions, huh?”
“Ed, you really shouldn’t drink so much. It’s what gives you insomnia—all that sugar in the blood.”
“Next you’ll be telling me I should take up jogging.”
“Or something. It’s not just you. We’re both horribly out of shape.”
He moved his hand lower again on her back and patted her solid fanny. He had his husband’s prerogatives still. “To me you feel just right,” he said.
Ed was an engineer, specializing in stress analysis of tall steel-frame buildings. His plan for dismantling his marriage demanded that his wife’s affair remain in place, as a temporary support; otherwise, at the moment of pullout, his burden of guilt and strangeness would be too much. The children were heaviest, but the house, the town, and all the old connubial habits would weigh upon him in his moment of flight. He feared that Jason and Carol might break up out of their own dynamics, or in response to discovery from the other side; yet he wanted to allow some months to steel himself, as it were. Seeing, in the raw spring evenings, tall Jason moving with his jogger’s stagger along the shadowy roads, Ed felt a pang of alarm that the precious man would be hit by a car, and the whole structure collapse.
Warm weather arrived, with its quickening of the blood, and then summer, with its promiscuous looseness, its airy weave of coming and going, of lingering light and warm darkness, of screened porches and reactivated swimming pools and pickup drinks on the patio. Everyone got browner in the summer, more frolicsome and louder; the suburban women in their bathing suits and sundresses took on the sultry hardness of high-class whores—their eyes hidden behind sunglasses, their toenails lacquered. Jason and Carol became more blatant; more than once, Ed spotted them holding hands in a corner of a cocktail party, and when asked where she had been during some unaccountable absence, she would give a teen-ager’s lame, evasive answer—“Oh, out.” She might add, “It’s so hot I had to take a walk toward the river,” or else display a half-gallon carton of skimmed milk and a packet of wheat-germ cookies as if the purchase of these had naturally consumed two hours. And Jason was always coming around to the house on more or less plausible errands, having to do with zoning or tennis or an exchange of gardening equipment. Ed, to make his tennis-court fence ten years ago, had invested forty dollars in one of those two-handled post-hole diggers, and it was surprising how many posts Jason seemed to be planting in his modest back yard, or how often, for a man who owned only a half-acre, he had to borrow Ed’s chainsaw. Every errand, of course, won from Carol a hospitable offer of coffee or tea or a drink, depending on the time of day.
Pat sometimes came along on these hollow excursions, and made flawless, wooden small talk with Ed out on the screened porch while the other two were coincidentally absent within the house: Carol had had to rush into the kitchen, Jason to the bathroom or to make a phone call. The house, that summer, seemed much used. Carol kept setting up, around the excuses of the tennis court and the swimming pool, informal little parties that almost always included the Reynoldses. One day in early August, returning to the house from an emergency run to the liquor store downtown, Ed swung into the driveway as Carol and Jason were greeting another couple. They looked so natural, posed side by side in the golden late-afternoon light, so presiding, standing together one flagstone step up from the driveway, he with his gray hair and gaunt stoop and she with her matronly round arms and shoulders, that Ed felt abolished, already gone; he secretly shared their joy in each other, and yet primitive indignation contributed to his energy as he marched toward them with the rattling bags of liquor. Carol looked toward him; she seemed un-feignedly happy to see him. Or was it the liquor she was happy to see? She was wearing only a wraparound denim skirt over her black bathing suit, and in the chill of approaching evening was hugging herself; the homeyness of this ageless gesture, and the familiar small sight, as she stepped down and reached forward to take one of the bags from him, of the downy hairs standing erect with goosebumps on her bare forearms, wounded him unexpectedly—activated random stress within a situation he had considered thoroughly analyzed.
The season was ebbing. Ed had to make his move. The children were conveniently scattered to summer jobs and to friends’ houses, but for the youngest, who after dinner wrapped himself in the mumble of television in his room upstairs. Ed invited Carol to take a walk with him. Her eyes widened, into their china-doll look, and she hurried to get a jacket from the closet; the tone of his voice, without his willing it, had spoken to her guilt. They walked along the broad grassy path, favored by joggers and snowmobilers, kept open above the Croton Aqueduct, which poured water south in a line parallel to the river and the railroad tracks. The city’s gravity pulled everything toward it. The Marstons walked uphill, between clumps and groves of maples and beeches, and past school grounds seen through wire fencing; back yards abutted on the right-of-way, and Ed and Carol felt themselves moving like ghosts through family cookouts and badminton games and the domestic music of chugging dishwashers and the evening news.
He described to her the night he had discovered the valentine, and what he had observed since. She listened and did not interrupt; in the corner of his vision, against the moving background of leaves and fence slats, her pale face seemed a motionless image projected from a slide upon a skidding, flickering screen. He proposed this to her: he would leave, take an apartment in the city, and take her secret with him. In return for his silence, she would present the separation to their children and friends as a mutual decision. He would provide financial support, and in a year they would see how things stood.
She spoke at last. “I’ll give him up.”
“Oh, don’t do that.”
“Why not?” Her eyes had grown watery, seeking his.
“You love him.”
“Maybe I love you, too.”
“You think that now, but in the long run …” The sentence trailed off. He summoned up a little indignation. “Anyway, I don’t want to be loved too. Come on, Carol,” he said. “We’ve given it a good try, had some nice kids and nice times; you wouldn’t have taken up with Jason if things were what they should be. You and he, you really seem to have it.”
She could have denied it. But she simply said, “He has Pat.”
Ed sighed. “Yes, well. I can’t take care of everybody.”
This was a Saturday. The next day, with the sickening new condition of their marriage drying everywhere like an invisible paste, and the children and the pets and the furniture all still unknowing, Carol surprised Ed by still wanting to be taken to a Sunday-afternoon concert at a local church. The Reynoldses were also there, in a pew on the far side of the nave; they all mingled over punch afterwards, in the ladies’ parlor. It was thrilling, for a connoisseur of stress, to see Carol lightly bantering with Jason and making valiant small talk with Pat. As Ed drove her home, she began to cry, and he asked her why she had wanted to come. “It was my only chance to see Jason,” she confessed, as bluntly as if to a counsellor, and not bothering to hide the reverent way her voice fell in pronouncing her lover’s name. So quickly, Ed had become her accomplice. He felt his heart shiver and harden. “He knows I know?”
“Not the details, just the fact.”
“How did you manage that?”
“I slipped a note to him. Didn’t you see?”
Ed felt trapped and betrayed. With the other man knowing, there was less chance of backing out. “No.”
“I thought you’d become such a great observer.”
He asked her, sarcastic in turn, “Aren’t you two afraid of Pat catching you out in some of these shenanigans?”
“She doesn’t want to catch us out,” Carol told him. He glanced over, and her eyes, though red-rimmed, had a twinkle. She seemed to be adjusting to his departure faster than he was.
That fall, Ed entered into the strange new status of half-husband. He found a small apartment in the West Eighties and went home weekends to
rake and put up storm windows and entertain the kids. Some nights, he slept over in the guest room, where the children didn’t like to find him. They wanted him back in Mommy’s bed. That creepy Mr. Reynolds was always coming around, red-faced and panting, in his jogging shoes. They called him Big Foot. “Big Foot’s just clumped up!” one of the children would shout from downstairs, and Ed, involved in a game of Trivial Pursuit in his oldest daughter’s room, would see Carol sail past the door, her quick step silent, her whole body lightened by expectation.
In this cozy atmosphere, with their conspiracy now widened to include the children, Ed asked Carol, in curiosity as much as envy, what Jason did for her that he had not. “It’s very peculiar,” she admitted, spacing her words. “He just thinks I’m amazingly wonderful.” And she had the grace, this valuation being so clearly excessive, to look down into her drink and blush.
“Well, who doesn’t?” he asked, himself blushing. Since leaving her, Ed was all flattery.
She looked up sharply. Did he imagine it, or had her blue eyes become darker, snappier in her months of living alone, of being her own woman? Certainly her hair, its oak color loaded with gray, had become wigglier. “You didn’t,” she told him. “You never did. I was just there for you, like an I-beam or something. Any other beam would have done just as well. I’m sure you’ve laid some in place already.”