‘Sure.’ It seemed far-fetched to refuse.
They descended four concrete steps, opened a shabby orange door, entered an overheated half-basement lobby, and began to climb flights of wooden stairs. Richard’s suspicion on the street that he was trespassing beyond the public gardens of courtesy turned to certain guilt. Few experiences so savor of the illicit as mounting stairs behind a woman’s fanny. Three years ago, Joan had lived in a fourth-floor walkup, in Cambridge. Richard never took her home, even when the whole business, down to the last intimacy, had become routine, without the fear that the landlord, justifiably furious, would leap from his door and devour him as they passed.
Opening her door, Rebecca said, ‘It’s hot as hell in here,’ swearing for the first time in his hearing. She turned on a weak light. The room was small; slanting planes, the underside of the building’s roof, intersected the ceiling and walls and cut large prismatic volumes from Rebecca’s living space. As he moved farther forward, toward Rebecca, who had not yet removed her coat, Richard perceived, on his right, an unexpected area created where the steeply slanting roof extended itself to the floor. Here a double bed was placed. Tightly bounded on three sides, the bed had the appearance not so much of a piece of furniture as of a permanently installed, blanketed platform. He quickly took his eyes from it and, unable to face Rebecca at once, stared at two kitchen chairs, a metal bridge lamp around the rim of whose shade plump fish and helm wheels alternated, and a four-shelf bookcase – all of which, being slender and proximate to a tilting wall, had an air of threatened verticality.
‘Yes, here’s the stove on top of the refrigerator I told you about,’ Rebecca said. ‘Or did I?’
The top unit overhung the lower by several inches on all sides. He touched his fingers to the stove’s white side. ‘This room is quite sort of nice,’ he said.
‘Here’s the view,’ she said. He moved to stand beside her at the windows, lifting aside the curtains and peering through tiny flawed panes into the apartment across the street.
‘That guy does have a huge window,’ Richard said.
She made a brief agreeing noise of n’s.
Though all the lamps were on, the apartment across the street was empty. ‘Looks like a furniture store,’ he said. Rebecca had still not taken off her coat. ‘The snow’s keeping up.’
‘Yes. It is.’
‘Well’ – his word was too loud; he finished the sentence too softly – ‘thanks for letting me see it. I – Have you read this?’ He had noticed a copy of Auntie Mame lying on a hassock.
‘I haven’t had the time,’ she said.
‘I haven’t read it either. Just reviews. That’s all I ever read.’
This got him to the door. There, ridiculously, he turned. It was only at the door, he decided in retrospect, that her conduct was quite inexcusable: not only did she stand unnecessarily close, but, by shifting the weight of her body to one leg and leaning her head sidewise, she lowered her height several inches, placing him in a dominating position exactly suited to the broad, passive shadows she must have known were on her face.
‘Well –’ he said.
‘Well.’ Her echo was immediate and possibly meaningless.
‘Don’t, don’t let the b-butchers get you.’ The stammer of course ruined the joke, and her laugh, which had begun as soon as she had seen by his face that he would attempt something funny, was completed ahead of his utterance.
As he went down the stairs she rested both hands on the banister and looked down toward the next landing. ‘Good night,’ she said.
‘Night.’ He looked up; she had gone into her room. Oh but they were close.
WIFE-WOOING
OH MY LOVE. Yes. Here we sit, on warm broad floorboards, before a fire, the children between us, in a crescent, eating. The girl and I share one half-pint of French-fried potatoes; you and the boy share another; and in the center, sharing nothing, making simple reflections within himself like a jewel, the baby, mounted in an Easybaby, sucks at his bottle with frowning mastery, his selfish, contemplative eyes stealing glitter from the center of the flames. And you. You. You allow your skirt, the same black skirt in which this morning you with woman’s soft bravery mounted a bicycle and sallied forth to play hymns in difficult keys on the Sunday school’s old piano – you allow this black skirt to slide off your raised knees down your thighs, slide up your thighs in your body’s absolute geography, so the parallel whiteness of their undersides is exposed to the fire’s warmth and to my sight. Oh. There is a line of Joyce. I try to recover it from the legendary, imperfectly explored grottoes of Ulysses: a garter snapped, to please Blazes Boylan, in a deep Dublin den. What? Smackwarm. That was the crucial word. Smacked smackwarm on her smackable warm woman’s thigh. Something like that. A splendid man, to feel that. Smackwarm woman’s. Splendid also to feel the curious and potent, inexplicable and irrefutably magical life language leads within itself. What soul took thought and knew that adding wo to man would make a woman? The difference exactly. The wide w, the receptive o. Womb. In our crescent the children for all their size seem to come out of you toward me, wet fingers and eyes, tinted bronze. Three children, five persons, seven years. Seven years since I wed wide warm woman, white-thighed. Wooed and wed. Wife. A knife of a word that for all its final bite did not end the wooing. To my wonderment.
We eat meat, meat I wrested warm from the raw hands of the hamburger girl in the diner a mile away, a ferocious place, slick with grease, sleek with chrome; young predators snarling dirty jokes menaced me, old men reached for me with coffee-dark paws; I wielded my wallet, and won my way back. The fat brown bag of buns was warm beside me in the cold car; the smaller bag holding the two cartons of French fries emitted an even more urgent heat. Back through the black winter air to the fire, the intimate cave, where halloos and hurrahs greeted me, the deer, mouth agape and its cotton throat gushing, stretched dead across my shoulders. And now you, beside the white O of the plate upon which the children discarded with squeals of disgust the rings of translucent onion that came squeezed in the hamburgers – you push your toes an inch closer to the blaze, and the ashy white of your thigh’s inner side is lazily laid bare, and the eternally elastic garter snaps smackwarm against my hidden heart.
Who would have thought, wide wife, back there in the white tremble of the ceremony (in the corner of my eye I held, despite the distracting hail of ominous vows, the vibration of the cluster of stephanotis clutched against your waist), that seven years would bring us no distance, through all those warm beds, to the same trembling point, of beginning? The cells change every seven years, and down in the atom, apparently, there is a strange discontinuity; it is as if God wills the universe anew every instant. (Ah God, dear God, tall friend of my childhood, I will never forget you, though they say dreadful things. They say rose windows in cathedrals are vaginal symbols.) Your legs, exposed as fully as by a bathing suit, yearn deeper into the amber wash of heat. Well: begin. A green jet of flame spits out sideways from a pocket of resin in a log, crying, and the orange shadows on the ceiling sway with fresh life. Begin.
‘Remember, on our honeymoon, how the top of the kerosene heater made a great big rose window on the ceiling?’
‘Vnn.’ Your chin goes to your knees, your shins draw in, all is retracted. Not much to remember, perhaps, for you: blood badly spilled, clumsiness of all sorts. ‘It was cold for June.’
‘Mommy, what was cold? What did you say?’ the girl asks, enunciating angrily, determined not to let language slip on her tongue and tumble her so that we laugh.
‘A house where Daddy and I stayed one time.’
‘I don’t like dat,’ the boy says, and throws a half-bun painted with chartreuse mustard onto the floor.
You pick it up and with beautiful somber musing ask, ‘Isn’t that funny? Did any of the others have mustard on them?’
‘I hate dat,’ the boy insists; he is two. Language is to him thick vague handles swirling by; he grabs what he can.
‘Here. He
can have mine. Give me his.’ I pass my hamburger over, you take it, he takes it from you, there is nowhere a ripple of gratitude. There is no more praise of my heroism in fetching Sunday supper, saving you labor. Cunning, you sense, and sense that I sense your knowledge, that I had hoped to hoard your energy toward a more primal spending. We sense everything between us, every ripple, existent and nonexistent; it is tiring. Courting a wife takes tenfold the strength of winning an ignorant girl. The fire shifts, shattering fragments of newspaper that carry in lighter gray the ghost of the ink of their message. You huddle your legs and bring the skirt back over them. With a sizzling noise like the sighs of the exhausted logs, the baby sucks the last from his bottle, drops it to the floor with its distasteful hoax of vacant suds, and begins to cry. His egotist’s mouth opens; the delicate membrane of his satisfaction tears. You pick him up and stand. You love the baby more than me.
Who would have thought, blood once spilled, that no barrier would be broken, that you would be each time healed into a virgin again? Tall, fair, obscure, remote, and courteous.
We put the children to bed, one by one, in reverse order of birth. I am limitlessly patient, paternal, good. Yet you know. We watch the paper bags and cartons ignite on the breathing pillow of embers; we read, watch television, eat crackers, it does not matter. Eleven comes. For a tingling moment you stand on the bedroom rug in your underpants, untangling your nightie; oh, fat white sweet fat fatness. In bed you read. About Richard Nixon. He fascinates you; you hate him. You know how he defeated Jerry Voorhis, martyred Mrs Douglas, how he played poker in the Navy despite being a Quaker, every fiendish trick, every low adaptation. Oh my Lord, let’s let the poor man go to bed. We’re none of us perfect. ‘Hey, let’s turn out the light.’
‘Wait. He’s just about to get Hiss convicted. It’s very strange. It says he acted honorably.’
‘I’m sure he did.’ I reach for the switch.
‘No. Wait. Just till I finish this chapter. I’m sure there’ll be something at the end.’
‘Honey, Hiss was guilty. We’re all guilty. Conceived in concupiscence, we die unrepentant.’ Once my ornate words wooed you.
I lie against your filmy convex back. You read sideways, a sleepy trick. I see the page through the fringe of your hair, sharp and white as a wedge of crystal. Suddenly it slips. The book has slipped from your hand. You are asleep. Oh, cunning trick, cunning. In the darkness I consider. Cunning. The headlights of cars accidentally slide fanning slits of light around our walls and ceiling. The great rose window was projected upward through the petal-shaped perforations in the top of the black kerosene stove, which we stood in the center of the floor. As the flame on the circular wick flickered, the wide soft star of interlocked penumbrae moved and waved as if it were printed on a silk cloth being gently tugged or slowly blown. Its color soft blurred blood. We pay dear in blood for our peaceful homes.
In the morning, to my relief, you are ugly. Monday’s wan breakfast light bleaches you blotchily, drains the goodness from your thickness, makes the bathrobe a limp stained tube flapping disconsolately, exposing sallow décolletage. The skin between your breasts a sad yellow. I feast with the coffee on your drabness, every wrinkle and sickly tint a relief and a revenge. The children yammer. The toaster sticks. Seven years have worn this woman.
The man, he arrows off to work, jousting for right-of-way, veering on the thin hard edge of the legal speed limit. Out of domestic muddle, softness, pallor, flaccidity: into the city. Stone is his province. The winning of coin. The maneuvering of abstractions. Making heartless things run. Ah, the inanimate, adamant joys of a job!
I return with my head enmeshed in a machine. A technicality it would take weeks to explain to you snags my brain; I fiddle with phrases and numbers all the blind evening. You serve me supper as a waitress – as less than a waitress, for I have known you. The children touch me timidly, as they would a steep girder bolted into a framework whose height they can’t comprehend. They drift into sleep securely. We survive their passing in calm parallelity. My thoughts rework in chronic right angles the same snagging circuits on the same professional grid. You rustle the book about Nixon; vanish upstairs into the plumbing; the bathtub pipes cry. In my head I seem to have found the stuck switch at last: I push at it; it jams; I push; it is jammed. I grow dizzy, churning with cigarettes. I circle the room aimlessly.
So I am taken by surprise at a turning when at the meaningful hour of ten you come with a kiss of toothpaste to me moist and girlish and quick; an expected gift is not worth giving.
GIVING BLOOD
THE MAPLES HAD been married now nine years, which is almost too long. ‘Goddamn it, goddamn it,’ Richard said to Joan, as they drove into Boston to give blood, ‘I drive this road five days a week and now I’m driving it again. It’s like a nightmare. I’m exhausted. I’m emotionally, mentally physically exhausted, and she isn’t even an aunt of mine. She isn’t even an aunt of yours.’
‘She’s a sort of cousin,’ Joan said.
‘Well, hell, every goddamn body in New England is some sort of cousin of yours; must I spend the rest of my life trying to save them all?’
‘Hush,’ Joan said. ‘She might die. I’m ashamed of you. Really ashamed.’
It cut. His voice for the moment took on an apologetic pallor. ‘Well, I’d be my usual goddamn saintly self if I’d had any sort of sleep last night. Five days a week I bump out of bed and stagger out the door past the milkman, and on the one day of the week when I don’t even have to truck the brats to Sunday school you make an appointment to have me drained dry thirty miles away’
‘Well, it wasn’t me,’ Joan said, ‘who had to stay till two o’clock doing the Twist with Marlene Brossman.’
‘We weren’t doing the Twist. We were gliding around very chastely to Hits of the Forties. And don’t think I was so oblivious I didn’t see you snoogling behind the piano with Harry Saxon.’
‘We weren’t behind the piano, we were on the bench. And he was just talking to me because he felt sorry for me. Everybody there felt sorry for me; you could have at least let somebody else dance once with Marlene, if only for show.’
‘Show, show,’ Richard said. ‘That’s your mentality exactly.’
‘Why, the poor Matthews or whatever they are looked absolutely horrified.’
‘Matthiessons,’ he said. ‘And that’s another thing. Why are idiots like that being invited these days? If there’s anything I hate, it’s women who keep putting one hand on their pearls and taking a deep breath. I thought she had something stuck in her throat.’
‘They’re a perfectly pleasant, decent young couple. The thing you resent about their being there is that their relative innocence shows us what we’ve become.’
‘If you’re so attracted,’ he said, ‘to little fat men like Harry Saxon, why didn’t you marry one?’
‘My,’ Joan said calmly, and gazed out the window away from him, at the scudding gasoline stations. ‘You honestly are hateful. It’s not just a pose.’
‘Pose, show, my Lord, who are you performing for? If it isn’t Harry Saxon, it’s Freddie Vetter – all these dwarfs. Every time I looked over at you last night it was like some pale Queen of the Dew surrounded by a ring of mushrooms.’
‘You’re too absurd,’ she said. Her hand, distinctly thirtyish, dry and green-veined and rasped by detergents, stubbed out her cigarette in the dashboard ashtray. ‘You’re not subtle. You think you can match me up with another man so you can swirl off with Marlene with a free conscience.’
Her reading his strategy so correctly made his face burn; he felt again the tingle of Mrs Brossman’s hair as he pressed his cheek against hers and in this damp privacy inhaled the perfume behind her ear. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘But I want to get you a man your own size; I’m very loyal that way’
‘Let’s not talk,’ she said.
His hope, of turning the truth into a joke, was rebuked. Any implication of permission was blocked. ‘It’s that smugness,’ he exp
lained, speaking levelly, as if about a phenomenon of which they were both disinterested students. ‘It’s your smugness that is really intolerable. Your knee-jerk liberalism I don’t mind. Your sexlessness I’ve learned to live with. But that wonderfully smug, New England – I suppose we needed it to get the country founded, but in the Age of Anxiety it really does gall.’
He had been looking over at her, and unexpectedly she turned and looked at him, with a startled but uncannily crystalline expression, as if her face had been in an instant rendered in tinted porcelain, even to the eyelashes.
‘I asked you not to talk,’ Joan said. ‘Now you’ve said things that I’ll never forget.’
Plunged fathoms deep into the wrong, feeling suffocated by his guilt, he concentrated on the highway and sullenly steered. Though they were moving at sixty in the sparse Saturday traffic, Richard had travelled this road so often its distances were all translated into time, so that the car seemed to him to be moving as slowly as a minute hand from one digit to the next. It would have been strategic and dignified of him to keep the silence; but he could not resist believing that just one more pinch of syllables would restore the marital balance that with each wordless mile slipped increasingly awry. He asked, ‘How did Bean seem to you?’ Bean was their baby. They had left her last night, to go to the party, with a fever of 102°.
Joan wrestled with her vow to say nothing, but maternal concern won out. She said, ‘Cooler. Her nose is a river.’
‘Sweetie,’ Richard blurted, ‘will they hurt me?’ The curious fact was that he had never given blood before. Asthmatic and underweight, he had been 4-F, and at college and now at the office he had, less through his own determination than through the diffidence of the solicitors, evaded pledging blood. It was one of those tests of courage so trivial that no one had ever thought to make him face up to it.