His eyes sought Foxy’s seeking his. She would know that, hurt, he would seek her eyes. Their glances met, locked, burned, unlocked. He answered Carol, “They’re not ugly. They’re just ordinary.”
“They’re hideous. I think what you’re doing to Indian Hill is a disgrace.”
She had, slim Carol, deliberately formed around her a ring of astonishment. For one of their unspoken rules was that professions were not criticized; one’s job was a pact with the meaningless world beyond the ring of couples.
Terry Gallagher said, “He builds what he and Matt think people want to buy.”
Freddy said, “I like Piet’s houses. They have a Dutch something, a fittingness. They remind me of teeth. Don’t laugh, everybody, I mean it. Piet and I are spiritual brothers. I put silver in my cavities, he puts people in his. Jesus, you try to be serious in this crowd, everybody laughs.”
Angela said, “Carol, you’re absurd.”
Piet said, “No, she’s right. I hate my houses. God, I hate them.”
Janet Appleby said, “Somebody else died last month. A poet, Marcia was very upset. She said he was America’s greatest, and not that old.”
“Frost died last January,” Terry said.
“Not Frost. A German name. Oh. Marcia and Harold would know it. None of us know anything.”
“I thought you’d start to miss them,” Freddy said to her.
Janet, sitting on the floor, sleepily rested her head on a hassock. She had switched from twice-a-week therapy to analysis, and drove into Brookline at seven-thirty every weekday morning. It was rumored that Frank had commenced therapy. “We need a new game,” she said.
“Freddy, let’s play Impressions,” Terry said.
“Let’s think up more names for my play,” he said. “They don’t have to be dirty.” He squinted blindly into space, and came up with, “Donovan U. Era.”
“You had that prepared,” Janet said. “But Harold the other night did think of a good one. What was it, Frank?” With a rattle of wooden beads, the couple had returned from the political parlor. Frank looked sheepish, Irene’s eyebrows and lips seemed heavily inked.
“León MacDouffe,” Frank pronounced, glancing toward Janet, wanting to go home.
Carol said, in the tone of a greatly removed observer, “Irene, your husband looks less and less well. I think he should go upstairs but nobody else has bothered to agree. It makes no difference to me but we can’t afford to have our rug ruined.”
Irene’s expression as she studied Ben was strange. Maternal concern had become impatient and offended. Delilah gazed upon the Samson she had shorn. In the room’s center Eddie Constantine, a small effective man without religion or second thoughts, wiry and tanned and neatly muscled, vied in his health for her attention; a beer can glinted in his hand and his gray eyes could find the path through boiling Himalayas of cloud. As he gazed at her it dawned on the room that she was worth destroying for. Though pale and heavy, she had a dove’s breasted grace. Irene asked, “Why can’t he go upstairs in his own house a few doors away?”
“I’ll take him,” Eddie said and, going and thrusting his head under Ben’s arm, expertly hoisted him up from the chair.
The sudden motion, like a loud noise to the sleeping, led Ben’s conversational faculty to roll over. “I’m very interested in this,” he said distinctly. “What should the aesthetics of modern housing be? Should there be any beyond utility and cost?”
Gleefully Freddy Thorne chimed in, “Did the peasants who put up thatched huts worry about aesthetics? Yet now we all love the Christ out of thatched huts.”
“Exactly,” Ben said. He sounded like himself, and was reasoning well, but the sounds floated from his ghostly mouth at half-speed. “But perhaps a more oral and sacramental culture has an instinctive sense of beauty that capitalism with its assembly-line method of operation destroys. Commentary this month has a fascinating—”
“Greed,” Carol said vehemently, “modern houses stink of greed, greed and shame and plumbing. Why should the bathroom be a dirty secret? We all do it. I’d as soon take a crap in front of all of you as not.”
“Carol!” Angela said. “That’s even more wonderful than my wanting to take off my clothes.”
“Let’s play Wonderful,” Freddy Thorne announced, adding, “I’m dying in this fucking suit. Can’t I take it off?”
“Wear it,” Piet told him. “It’s you.”
Foxy asked, “How do you play Wonderful?”
“You,” Freddy told her, “you don’t even have to try.”
Terry asked, “Is it at all like Impressions?”
Ben said, his weight full on Eddie now, his colorless face turned to the floor, “I’d like to discuss this seriously some time. Super-cities, for example, and the desalinization of seawater. I think the construction industry in this country is badly missing the boat.”
“Toot, toot,” Eddie said, pulling on an imaginary whistle cord and hauling Ben toward the doorway.
Irene asked, “Shall I come along?” Her expression was again indecisive. To be with her husband was to be with her lover. The romantic Semitic shadowiness of her lower lids contended with pragmatic points in her eyes and lips seeking their good opinion, these heirs of the Puritans.
Eddie looked at her acutely, estimated her ripeness, chose his path, and said decisively, “Yes. I’ll get him over there and you put him to bed.” So all three made exodus from the musty room, through the huge space-wasting hallway smelling in all weathers of old umbrellas, into the leaf-crowded night splashed by blue streetlamps.
Carol swung her arms, relieved and seething. The Applebys exchanged solicitous confidences—Frank’s stomach, Janet’s head—and also left, reluctantly; their manner of leaving suggested that this was an end, an end to this summer of many games, that they were conscious of entering now an autumn of responsibilities, of sobered mutuality and duty. Only Freddy Thorne begged them not to go. He had peeled himself out of his skin-diving suit and stood revealed in a soaked T-shirt and crumpled bathing trunks. The skin of his legs and arms had been softened and creased by long enclosure like a washerwoman’s palms. The Applebys’ leaving left Freddy and Piet alone with many women.
Foxy rose, stately in yards of ivory linen, seven months gone, and said, “I should go too.”
“Sweetheart, you can’t,” Freddy told her. “We’re going to play Wonderful.”
Foxy glanced at Piet’s face and he knew that whatever was written there she would read, Don’t go. He said, “Don’t go.”
Terry asked Freddy, “How do you play?” Piet pictured Gallagher, grim as a mother, waiting up for her, and wondered how she dare not go, dare sit there serene. Women have no conscience. Never their fault. The serpent beguiled me.
Freddy licked his lips, then answered weakly, “Each of us names the most wonderful thing he or she can think of. Carol, where’s the fucking furnace? I’m freezing.”
She fetched from another room an Afghan blanket; he wrapped it around himself like a shawl. “Freddy,” she said, “you’re getting old.”
“Thank you. Now please sit down and stop swishing, Carollino. Eddie and Irene are just putting Ben to bed. They’ll be back in a minute. And what if they aren’t? The world won’t stop grinding. Imagine Eddie’s off on a flight to Miami. Che sarà, sarà, I keep telling everybody.”
“Explain,” Terry said, “the point of Wonderful.”
“The point is, Terrycloth, at the end of the game we’ll all know each other better.”
Angela said, “I don’t want to know any of you better.”
Foxy said, “I don’t want any of you to know me better.”
Piet asked, “Where’s the competitive element? How can you win or lose?”
Freddy answered Piet with oracular care. He still wore the giant monocle and was drunk, drunker than anyone except Angela, white-wine-drunk, a translucent warm drunkenness whose truth lifts the mind. “You can’t lose, Piet. I’d think you’d like that for a change. You know, Pet
erkins—may I speak my heart?—”
“Oh do, brother, do!” Piet holy-rolled on the floor. “Say it, brother, say it!”
Freddy spoke solemnly, trying to be precise. “You are a paradox. You’re a funny fellow. A long time ago, when I was a little boy studying my mommy and my daddy, I decided there are two kinds of people in the world: A, those who fuck, and, B, those who get fucked. Now the funny thing about you, Petrov, is you think you’re A but you’re really B.”
“And the funny thing about you,” Piet said, “is you’re really neither.”
Before he began sleeping with Foxy, when Freddy, however unknowingly, held Georgene as hostage, Piet would not have been so quick to answer, so defiant. Freddy blinked, baffled by feeling Piet free, and more openly an enemy.
“If you two prima donnas,” Terry said, “would stop being hateful to each other, we could play Wonderful.”
“I think more wine would be wonderful,” Carol said. “Who else?”
“Me,” Angela said, extending a shapely arm and an empty glass. “I must face Georgene in the finals tomorrow.”
“Where is Georgene?” Piet asked Freddy politely, afraid he had overstepped a moment before, saying “neither.”
“Resting up for the big match,” Freddy answered, apparently forgiving.
“We really must go soon,” Foxy said to Terry.
“Us too,” Piet told Angela. In her rare moods of liberation she held for him the danger that she would disclose great riches within herself, showing him the depths of loss frozen over by their marriage.
Carol poured from the Almadén jug, making of it a dancer’s routine. Six glasses were refilled. “OK,” Freddy said. “Carol has begun by saying that more wine is wonderful.”
“I didn’t say it was the most wonderful thing I could think of. I still have my turn.”
“All reet-o, take it. You’re the hostess; begin.”
“Must I start?”
All agreed yes, she must, she must. As Carol stood barefoot in silence, Angela asked of the air, “Isn’t this exciting?”
Carol decided, “A baby’s fingernails.”
Gasps, ah, awed, then parodies of gasps, aaah, greeted this.
Freddy had provided himself with a pencil and wrote on a small piece of paper, the back of his folded play. “A baby’s fingernails. Very well. Please explain.”
“I must explain?”
“Well. I mean the whole process, all the chemistry. I don’t understand it, which may be why it seems wonderful. You know,” she went on, speaking to Foxy, who alone of the women did not absolutely know, “the way it produces out of nothing, no matter almost what we do, smoke or drink or fall downstairs, even when we don’t want it, this living baby, with perfect little fingernails. I mean,” she went on, having scanned all their faces and guessed she was not giving enough, “what a lot of work, somehow, ingenuity, love even, goes into making each one of us, no matter what a lousy job we make of it afterwards.”
Piet said, “Carol, how sweet you are. How can anyone so sweet hate me and my nice little houses?” He felt she had taken the opportunity to repair her image; she was aware of having appeared a hennaed bitch and, deserted by the Saltzes and her husband, needed love from those left around her, and perhaps especially from him, who like her had been born lower in the middle class than these others.
She said, “I don’t hate you. On the contrary, I think you have too much to give people to waste it the way you do.”
After a mild silence Angela said, “I can’t tell if that’s an insult or a come-on.”
“We have a baby’s fingernails,” Freddy Thorne said. “Who’s next?”
“Let’s have a man,” Terry Gallagher said.
Piet felt singled out, touched, by her saying this. Let’s. She reposed on the floor, a tall woman, legs bent under her broadened haunches and the knit of her hips. Her lips held a coin. Her dark hair’s harp-curve hung down. Once he loved her, too shy then to know they are waiting. Vessels shaped before they are filled. He drank more of the wine of a whiteness like that of the sun seen through fog, a perfect circle smaller than the moon. The eclipse. Love doomed? Foxy was watching him sip, her pink face framed by pale hair fluffed wide by sea-bathing. Sometimes her belly tasted of salt. Bright drum taut as the curve of the ocean above the massed watchsprings of blond hair. Her navel inverted. Their lovemaking lunar, revolving frictionless around the planet of her womb. The crescent bits of ass his tongue could touch below her cunt’s petals. Her far-off cries, eclipsed.
“Piet, you go,” Angela said.
His mind skimmed the world, cities and fields and steeples and seas, mud and money, cut timbers, sweet shavings, blue hymnals, and the fuzz on a rose. Ass. His mind plunged unresisted into this truth: nothing matters but ass. Nothing is so good. He said, “A sleeping woman.” Why sleeping? “Because when she is sleeping,” he added, “she becomes all women.”
“Piet, you’re drunk,” Carol said, and he guessed he had spoken too simply from himself, had offended her. The world hates the light.
Freddy’s mouth and eyes slitted. “Maybe sleeping,” he said, “because awake she threatens you.”
“Speak for yourself,” Piet said, abruptly bored with this game and wanting to be with his sleeping children; maybe they, Ruth and Nancy, were the women he meant, drenched and heavy with sleep like lumps of Turkish delight drenched in sugar. “A sleeping woman,” he insisted.
“Containing a baby’s fingernails,” Freddy Thorne added. “My, we’re certainly very domestic. Horizonwise, that is. Terry?”
She was ready, had been ever since her smile became complacent. “The works of J. S. Bach.”
Piet asked jealously, “Arranged for the lute?”
“Arranged for anything. Played anyhow. That’s what’s so wonderful about Bach. He didn’t know how great he was. He was just trying to support his seventeen children with an honest day’s work.”
“More domesticity,” Angela murmured.
“Don’t you believe it,” Piet told Terry. “He wanted to be great. He was mad to be immortal.” In saying this he was still involved with Carol, arguing about his houses, her paintings, apologizing, confessing to despair.
Terry said serenely, “He feels very unself-conscious and—ordinary to me. Full of plain daylight. It’s wonderful to have him in your fingers.”
“Keep it clean,” Freddy said, writing. “The works of J. S. Bach, not necessarily for stringed instruments. Angela.”
“I’m about to cry,” Angela said, “you’re all so sure of what’s good. I can’t think of anything wonderful enough to name. The children, I suppose, but do I mean my children or the fact of having children, which is what Carol already said? Please come back to me, Freddy. Please. I’m not ready.”
Foxy said, “The Eucharist. I can’t explain.”
“Now it’s Freddy’s turn,” Piet said. It had been a double rescue: Foxy Angela, he Foxy. Exposure was, in the games Freddy invented, the danger. The danger and the fruit.
Freddy rested his pencil and with a groping mouth, as if the words were being read from a magic text materializing in air, said, “The most wonderful thing I know is the human capacity for self-deception. It keeps everything else going.”
“Only in the human world,” Carol interjected. “Which is just a conceited little crust on the real world. Animals don’t deceive themselves. Stones don’t.”
Angela sat up: “Oh! You mean the world is everything? Then I say the stars. Of course. The stars.”
Surprised, frightened—he seemed to sink in the spaces of her clear face—Piet asked her, “Why?”
She shrugged: “Oh. They’re so fixed. So above it all. As if somebody threw a handful of salt and that’s how it stays for billions of years. I know they move but not relative to us, we’re too small. We die too soon. Also, they are beautiful—Vega on a summer night, Sirius in winter. Am I the only person who ever looks at them any more? One of my uncles was an astronomer, on my mother’s side, Lansi
ng Gibbs. I think there’s an effect named after him—the Gibbs effect. Maybe it’s a galaxy. Imagine a galaxy, all those worlds and suns, named after one man. He was very short, some childhood disease, with pointed teeth and bow legs. He liked me, even when I got taller than him. He taught me the first-magnitude stars—Vega, Deneb, Antares, Arcturus … I’ve forgotten some. As a girl I’d lie on the porch of our summer place in Vermont and imagine myself wandering among them, from life to life, forever. They’re wonderful.”
“Angela,” Foxy said. “You’re lovely.”
“Angela can be lovely,” Piet admitted to them all, and sighed. It was past time to go.
“Freddy, tell us about self-deception,” Terry said. Freddy looked elderly and absurd, huddled in his shawl. In the slots of his flippers his toenails were hideous: ingrown, gangrenous, twisted toward each other by the daily constriction of shoes.
Freddy told them, “People come to me all the time with teeth past saving, with abscesses they’ve been telling themselves are neuralgia. The pain has clearly been terrific. They’ve been going around with it for months, unable to chew or even close their jaws, because subconsciously they don’t want to lose a tooth. Losing a tooth means death to people; it’s a classic castration symbol. They’d rather have a prick that hurts than no prick at all. They’re scared to death of me because I might tell the truth. When they get their dentures, I tell ’em it looks better than ever, and they fall all over me believing it. It’s horseshit. You never get your own smile back when you lose your teeth. Imagine the horseshit a doctor handling cancer has to hand out. Jesus, the year I was in med school, I saw skeletons talking about getting better. I saw women without faces putting their hair up in curlers. The funny fact is, you don’t get better, and nobody gives a cruddy crap in hell. You’re born to get laid and die, and the sooner the better. Carol, you’re right about that nifty machine we begin with; the trouble is, it runs only one way. Downhill.”
Foxy asked, “Isn’t there something we gain? Compassion? Wisdom?”
“If we didn’t rot,” Freddy said, “who’d need wisdom? Wisdom is what you use to wave the smell away.”