The silhouette of the trunk of the elm nearest him wavered; a female voice giggled. “Piet, you’re such a show-off,” Bea Guerin said.
Ben Saltz’s orotund voice pronounced, “That was quite a tumble. I’m impressed.”
Piet stood and brushed dirt from his clothes. “What are you two doing out here?”
“Oh,” Bea said, and her offhand accents seemed, out of doors, disembodied, “Ben brought me out here to watch a satellite he miniaturized something in go by overhead.”
“A tiny component,” Ben said. “My old outfit developed it, with maybe one or two of my bright ideas. I thought it might be passing right about now, but all we’ve seen is a shooting star.”
“So lovely,” Bea said, and to Piet, still dizzy, the tree was talking, though the scarlet of her dress was growing distinct, “the way it fell, flaring all greeny-blue, like a match being struck, then nothing. I hadn’t seen a comet since a child.”
“That wasn’t a comet,” Ben said. “That was a meteor, an inert chunk of matter, of space dust you might say, burning up with friction upon contact with our atmosphere. Comets are incandescent and have elliptical orbits.”
“Oh Ben, you’re wonderful, you know everything, doesn’t he, Piet? But now tell us, whatever were you and Foxy doing?”
“Why do you say Foxy?”
“We saw her close the window. Didn’t you?”
“Are you sure it was Foxy? I thought it was Angela.”
“Angela, poo. Of course it was Foxy, that lovely honey hair. Were you making love? In the bathroom?”
“Boy, that takes nerves of iron,” Ben said. “Not to mention pretty well-padded bodies. I’ve tried it in a boat and it just wasn’t my style, very frankly.”
“Don’t be silly,” Piet said. “Of course we weren’t. You two are grotesque.” Perhaps anger could dissolve this unexpected couple.
“Why is that silly?” Bea cried in a soft raising wail, as when she had mourned Kennedy. “Everyone knows about you and Foxy. Your truck is parked down there all the time. We think it’s nice.”
“My truck hasn’t been there for months.”
“Well my dear, she’s hardly been in a condition to.”
“You know,” Ben said, “I wonder about that. Forbidding intercourse during pregnancy. I suspect it will turn out to be one more pseudo-medical superstition, like not breastfeeding because it wasn’t sanitary, which they sincerely believed in the Thirties. I made Irene breast-feed, and she’s grateful.”
“You’re a wonderful husband, Ben,” Piet said. “Now you’re making her work and she’s grateful again.”
Bea put her hand, trembling, on his forearm. “Now don’t be sarcastic to Ben, just because you yourself are embarrassed. We won’t tell anybody we saw you jump. Except Roger and Irene.”
“Well, who shall I tell about you and Ben necking out here?”
“You may tell one person,” Bea said, “those are the rules, but you mayn’t tell Angela, because she’ll tell Freddy Thorne, and then everybody will know. I’m freezing.”
All three, they went back into the house together. Doris Day was singing “Stardust.” Angela was coming downstairs from the bathroom. She asked, “Where have you all been?”
Piet told her, “Ben says he made one of the stars out there, but we couldn’t find it.”
“Why were you looking under the trees? I wondered who was mumbling outside; I could hear you from the bathroom.” Suspended halfway up the stairs, she shimmered like a chandelier. Now that he had safely rejoined the party, Piet was piqued by Bea’s assumption that Angela told Freddy Thorne everything. Wanting to ask his wife if this were true, he asked her instead, “How much have you drunk?”
“Just enough,” she answered, descending. Parting an invisible curtain with her hands, she floated past him.
Piet hurried on; he had questions to ask of every woman. He kept tasting cloying milk. Foxy was in the kitchen, talking to Janet, who turned her back, so the lovers could talk. He asked Foxy hoarsely, “Make it OK?”
“Of course,” she whispered.
He went on, “Did I imagine it, or were you standing there smiling at me?”
She glanced about to see they were not being overheard. “You were so manic, it was like a silent comedy. I wanted to tell you not to be silly and kill yourself, but we couldn’t make any talking noises, and anyway you were clearly in love with the idea of jumping.”
“In love! I was terrified, and now my right knee is beginning to hurt.”
“You were terrified of Angela. Why? After all, so your husband is in the bathroom with another woman. It’s not the end of the world. Maybe you were helping me get something out of my eye.”
Piet drew on his impoverished reserves of moral indignation. “I’m shocked,” he said, “that you would laugh. With all our love in the balance.”
“I tried to catch your hand at the last minute; but you let go.” Her smile became artificial, feral. “We better stop talking. Freddy Thorne has a fishy eye on us and here comes Harold Little.”
Harold, petitely storming, his slicked-down hair mussed in pinfeathers in back, said, continuing a conversation begun elsewhere, “If I believed in the omnipotent Lord Jesus, I’d say this was punishment for his letting our one staunch ally in Southeast Asia get nailed to please the pansy left in this country. La gauche efféminée.”
“Oh Harold,” Foxy said, mothering, “in,” “don’t talk like that, you’re imitating somebody else. Cardinal Richelieu. You think we’ll think you’re cute if you go right-wing. We think you’re cute now. Don’t we, Piet?”
“Harold,” Piet asked, “have you thought of asking the young widow for her hand? You and Madame Nhu would make a lovely couple. You both have a fiery way of expressing yourselves.”
“You both speak French,” Foxy added.
“The trouble with this merde-heap of a country,” Harold said, sullenly flattered by their teasing, “there’s no respectable way to not be a liberal.”
Piet said, “Why, look at me. I’m not a liberal. Look at all your fellow brokers. They swindle the poor and pimp for the rich. Nothing liberal about that.”
“They’re idiots.” In French: “Idiots.” Harold told Piet, “You never venture outside of this bucolic paradise, so you don’t know what imbeciles there are. They really care,” he said, “about the difference between driving a Buick and a Cadillac.”
“That’s too hideous to believe,” Piet said and, seeing Carol alone by the harpframe, went over to her. “What have you been telling that jerk Freddy Thorne?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but I’ll tell you this, Piet Hanema. He was about the only person who kept coming around when the rest of you were ostracizing Eddie and me because of poor old Irene. Poor old Irene my ass. Did you see her take Eddie into the kitchen as soon as they got here?”
“You beauty. Let’s dance.” Doris Day was now singing “Under a Blanket of Blue.” Carol’s back beneath his hand was extensively naked, bony and supple and expressive of the immense ease with which in bed his hairy long arms could encircle and sooth her slender nerved-up dancer’s nakedness. His thumb grazed the edge of one shoulder blade; his palm lay moist across her spine’s raised ridge; his fingertips knew the fatty beginnings of her sides. Pliant sides that would downslip, gain muscle, and become the world’s wide pivot and counterthrusting throne, which in even a brittle woman is ample and strong. With a clothy liquidity Carol was yielding herself up, grazing easily the length of him. The bodies of women are puzzle pieces that can fit or not, as they decide. Imperceptibly Carol shaded the tilt of her pelvis so his penis felt caressed. She rubbed herself lightly from side to side, bent her neck so he could see her breasts, blew into his ear. The music stopped. She backed off, her face frowningly dilated, and sighed. She told him, “You’re such a bastard,” and walked away, naked from nape to waist. Mermaid. Slip from his hands like a piece of squeezed soap.
Such a bastard. When he had been told, at college, coming
in late from a date that had left his mouth dry and his fly wet and his fingertips alive with the low-tide smell of cunt, about his parents’ accident, his thought had been that had he been there, been there in Grand Rapids in any capacity, his presence would have altered the combination of events, deflected their confluence, enough to leave his mother and father alive. In the same way, he felt guilty about Kennedy’s death, when Jazinski told him of it, in the silence of the sander.
Irene Saltz floated toward him, her eyebrows arched above bright tears, scintillant in candlelight. “Are you happy, Irene?” he asked her.
“I still love him, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said.
“You want to be laughed at,” Piet told her, “like me. We’re scapegoat-types.”
Triumphantly upheld by Freddy flanked by Georgene and Angela, the ham, the warm and fat and glistening ham, scotched and festooned with cloves, was fetched in from the kitchen. Bea Guerin, her washed-out hair, paler than wind, done up loosely in a Psyche knot, followed holding a salad bowl heaped full of oily lettuce, cucumber slices, avocados, tomatoes, parsley, chives, chicory, escarole. Their blessings were beyond counting. With a cruciform clashing of silver Freddy began to sharpen the carving knife. Out of the gathering audience Frank Appleby boomed, “Upon what meat does this our Caesar feed, that he is grown so great?”
Georgene explained, “I had salmon for the Catholics but since none of them came I’ll give it to the children for lunch.”
Freddy’s eyeglasses flickered blindly as he carved; he was expert. Nobody but Freddy could cut slices so thin. “Take, eat,” he intoned, laying each slice on a fresh plate a woman held out to him. “This is his body, given for thee.”
“Freddy!” Marcia little-Smith cried. “That’s disgusting.”
“Don’t you think,” Bea Guerin asked, her voice pure and plaintive and proud of sounding lost, “we should be fasting or something?”
“Fasting or fucking,” Freddy Thorne said, with surgical delicacy laying on another slice.
Ken Whitman watched silent from near the wall, beneath an African mask. Ben Saltz, eagerly hunchbacked, fetched radishes and bread to the buffet table. Carol carried two bottles of burgundy black as tar in the candlelight. Piet, being passed a plate, chewed but without saliva; his mouth felt full of ashes that still burned. Suddenly old, he sought a chair. His knee did hurt.
Still limping, he visited Foxy the following Tuesday, when the nation resumed normal life. The three days of omnipresent mourning had passed for these couples of Tarbox as three tranced holidays each alike in pattern. The men each afternoon had played touch football on the field behind the Applebys’, by Joy Creek, while the women and children stayed indoors watching television in the library. During dull stretches of the Washington ceremonies or the Dallas postmortems (Piet and his children, just back from church, were watching when Oswald was shot; Ruth calmly turned and asked him, “Was that real?” while Nancy silently stuck her thumb in her mouth) some of the women would come outdoors and arrange themselves in Frank’s hay and watch their men race red-faced up and down the hummocky field, shouting for the ball. These days on the verge of winter were autumnally fair, struck through with warmth until the swift lengthening of the shadows. At game’s end, that long weekend, the men and children would drink from paper cups the cider someone (the Whitmans, the little-Smiths) had brought from the orchard along the beach road, and then there would be a general drift indoors, to cocktails and a long sitting around the television set while the children grew cranky and raided Janet’s supply of crackers, peanut butter, raisins, and apples. Run and rerun as if on the revolving drum of insomnia, Haile Selassie and General De Gaulle bobbed together down Pennsylvania Avenue, Jack Ruby’s stripper drawlingly allowed that his temper could be mean, Lee Oswald, smirking, was led down a crowded corridor toward a lurching hat and wildly tipping cameras. The widow and one of the brothers, passing so near the camera they blurred, bent obliquely over an indeterminate tilted area of earth and flowers. The dome was distant in the southern sunshine. Amid drumrolls, the casket gleamed and was gone. The children came crying, bullied by others. Another drink? It was time to go home, but not yet, not quite yet. It was evening before they packed the children into the cars. The space in the cars as they drove home was stuffy with unasked questions, with the unsayable trouble of a king’s murder, a queasy earthquake for little children, a funny stomach-gnawing only sleep eased. School and Tuesday came as a relief.
Piet parked his truck in plain sight in the driveway. The Whitmans’ surviving lilacs were leafless and his eyes winced in the unqualified light. Every season has a tone of light we forget each year: a kitchen with frosted windows, a leaf-crowded side porch, the chalky noons of spring, the chill increase, as leaves fall, of neutral clarity. October’s orange had ebbed in the marshes; they stretched dun gray to the far rim of sand. The tide was low; the sea lay sunken in the wider channels like iron being cast. Foxy answered his second ring.
Opening the door, she looked delicate, as if recovered from an illness, or as if she had just chastised herself with a severely hot bath. “Oh. You. Wonderful.”
“Is it? Are you alone? I’ve come to see the baby.”
“But not me?”
Yet, once inside, on the loop rug, he embraced and held her as if there were no baby, as if there were no one alive in this sunken barren world but themselves. Beneath her coarse house smock, between her lifted breasts and bony pelvis, a defenseless hollow felt placed against his memory of her swollen belly. A snuffling aggrieved sound, less crying than a scratching at some portal of need, arose in the living room. Foxy clung to him in a pose of weeping, and reflexively he bent his head into her hair to kiss the side of her neck, and now her tongue and fingers, as if released from the timidity of long absence, tremblingly attempted to seize him, but blind as bees in a room of smoke they darted to absurd places—his unshaven chin, his jingling pockets, an eye that barely closed in time, a ticklish armpit her ardor could not unlock. He told her, “The baby’s crying.”
Together they went to where in the living room the baby lay breathing in a bassinet. A pearly quiet blessed its vicinity and the windows giving on the frost-charred marsh seemed to frame images thrown from within, by a magic lantern centered on the infant’s untinted soul. Foxy asked, “Do you want to hold him?” and pulled the infant gently up and unceremoniously passed him to Piet’s hands. Piet, cupping his broad palms under their sudden unsteady burden, let himself be astounded by, what he had forgotten, the narrowness of the buttocks, the feverish mauve skull. For a second the child appraised him with stern large eyes the color of basalt; then the irises crossed and the muscles in his forehead bulged like elastic levers to squeeze the eyebrows down. The baby began to cry. Fearing his noise would betray their secrecy, Piet returned him to Foxy. Brusquely, she jiggled the bundle against her bosom.
Piet asked, “What is his name?”
“You must know it.”
“Angela told me but I’ve forgotten. An old-fashioned name, I thought. For such a modern couple.”
“Tobias.”
“That’s not the cat?”
“Cotton is the cat. Tobias was Ken’s grandfather.”
“Why didn’t you name him after Ken’s father?”
“Ken apparently doesn’t like his father.”
“I thought his father was perfect, the perfect Hartford lawyer.”
“He is. But Ken was very definite, I was surprised.”
“Ken is full of surprises, now and then, isn’t he? A fascinating fellow.”
“Are you trying to sell him to me?”
Piet asked her, “Why are we fencing?”
Foxy said, “I don’t know. The baby upsets you.”
“I love the baby. I love you as a mother.”
“But not as a mistress any more?”
“Well”—embarrassment gnawed his stomach—“you’re not ready yet, are you?”
“I shouldn’t make love for two more weeks but I thi
nk I could stand a little show of affection. Why are you so remote?”
“Am I?” How could he tell her, of the quietness he had found here, the sere marsh filling the windows, the serene room he had carved, its plaster walls spread wide like a wimple, of the pearly aura near the baby, of Foxy’s own subdued dry grace, dry as if drained of sleep and self-concern—of this chaste charmed air and his superstitious reluctance to contaminate it? He confessed, “I just wonder if I have any business being here now.”
“Why not now? What business did you ever have? I was never your wife. You came here for an extramarital screw, that was fine, I gave it to you, I loved it. Now what? I’ve made myself dirty by having a baby.” Piet felt she too much enjoyed such tough talk, that it was something revived, on the excuse of him, from deeper in her experience. She stood with legs apart, bent forward a bit from the waist, Tobias held tight but unacknowledged in her arms. Her raised voice had lulled him to sleep. Piet loved her maternal clumsiness, her already careless confidence that the child was hers to handle.