Tania laughed drily. ‘My god, Gerry, I knew the girl’s parents. Her father was a teacher and poet, her mother a musician, played the viola, gentlest people in the world. I’m sure Naomi’s never had a real spanking in her life. Not that she couldn’t use one …’ Eileen set her empty glass down on the rim of the basin, stared at us bleakly for a moment as though trying to place us, then dropped the seat of the toilet, lifted her limp skirt, pushed her pants down to her knees, and sat to pee. ‘Or maybe she’s at the wrong party …’
‘It’s blocked, Eileen,’ I said. I noticed that my electric razor was missing. Not (Tania was staring down at her dirndl in the tub of suds, lost in thought, it was as good a moment as any) in the linen cupboard either. ‘You should use the one downstairs.’
‘Somebody’s in there,’ she replied dully. ‘I think it’s Janice Trainer and some guy.’ I hung fresh towels on the racks, got out a washcloth and soaked it in cold water. Eileen looked down at her shoes and, peeing disconsolately, said to them: ‘I’m sorry …’
‘Here, Eileen, hold this against your face.’
‘It’s so sad,’ she said, ‘and there’s nothing we can do about it.’ She blew her nose in the washcloth. ‘And the worst thing is, I don’t feel a thing. That’s what’s horrible. They’re both killed and I don’t feel a thing.’
‘You feel sad.’
‘I felt sad when I came here.’ She’d left the door open: Alison didn’t seem to be around, but the sewing room light was on. I felt vaguely frightened and wanted her close to me again. Eileen twisted her finger in her cotton drawers, looked up at me. ‘Your wife was asking for you, Gerry.’
‘I know. I’m going.’
‘Gerry, do me a favor,’ Tania said, stopping me just as I stepped out the door.
‘It’s … it’s not over, you know,’ Eileen murmured softly behind her, posted there as above some deep abyss. Her urine had dwindled, but now it started up again, rattling against the clog of paper like a disturbing thought.
‘I’m worried about Mavis. Something about that look on her face. I can’t get it out of my mind. Check on her for me, will you?’
‘Sure, Tania. Should I—?’
But something she’d seen past my shoulder had made her frown suddenly and close the door. I turned to look: the two uniformed officers were coming up the stairs. Nobody in the sewing room now except Sally Ann and Dickie. My mother-in-law’s room was locked. The policemen had paused on the landing, hats tipped back, arguing about something around mouthfuls of food: it seemed to be about which sandwich was whose, but the party noises from below drowned them out. In the sewing room (little Gerald’s room actually – left more or less as it was ever since the stillbirth, the walls still a bright green, decals on all the furniture and closet doors, only a couch and a sewing machine added), Sally Ann was trying to thread a needle, and Dickie, cuddling behind her, had reached around and pushed his hand down inside her jeans. She glanced up, saw me watching, pulled his hand out as though to kiss it, and stabbed it with the needle. As the policemen started up the stairs again, alerted by Dickie’s yell, I decided it might be a good moment to get changed. Also I needed time to think. Too much was happening too fast and I was beginning to feel like my mother on that ski slope, sit down, sit down.
‘Can’t you tell them to be a little more quiet?’ my mother-in-law scolded, standing sentinel at the doorway of my son’s room.
I smiled at her, then edged past a stack of dirty plates and crumpled cocktail napkins into our bedroom and closed the door.
The room was quiet, hushed almost, lit only by the dense yellow glow cast by the bedside lamp, and I felt the jitteriness ebb away. I crossed the room to draw the curtains shut, catching a glimpse of myself in the wall mirror as I passed it. Hmm. Once I’d cleaned up, I should go say good night to Mark again so he wouldn’t carry that face into his sleep with him. Unless, of course (recalling Naomi’s valentine), he needed it.
Tania’s ‘Susanna and the Elders’ had hung where the mirror was until something she said one night made us move it to the dining room. Her husband, Howard, writing on a painter he disliked, had called his work ‘bedroom art,’ meaning too private and self-indulgent. I’d argued that all good art, being a revelation of the innermost self, and thus a kind of transcended dream, was ‘bedroom art,’ but Howard would have none of it. ‘This widespread confusion of art and dreams is a romantic fallacy,’ he’d said, ‘derived from their common exercise of the brain’s associative powers – but where dreams protect one’s sleep, art disturbs it.’ Tania had agreed: ‘I don’t paint in bedrooms, I don’t even think about painting in bedrooms, and I certainly wouldn’t hang one of my paintings in one, any more than I’d go to a party in haircurlers and pajamas.’ So we’d put the mirror there and moved ‘Susanna’ down to the dining room (admittedly, we’d hung it in the bedroom in the first place for no better reason than that the forest colors went well with the curtains and russet-canopied four-poster), and truth to tell, it did seem to take on more power down there.
Tania and Howard had arrived with Anatole tonight just minutes before Roger and Ros – in fact, I was still taking their coats when I heard Ros laughing on the porch – so we were all there in the hallway together for a moment, a moment that now in retrospect seemed almost magical. Ros had given each of us a big hug (I remembered Anatole blushing and staring at the ceiling as she smashed her breasts against him, Howard adjusting his spectacles knocked askew) and announced she’d just got a new part in a play – I’d had the impression at the time that it was news to Roger as well, and dismaying news at that – and then off she’d gone, the last time I’d seen her alive, best I could remember, to pass her hugs around. Ros was a great hugger. She always made you feel, for about five seconds, like you were her last friend on earth and she’d found you in the nick of time, and now, as I searched through the clothes hanging in the closet for something to wear, I found myself remembering all her hugs like one composite one: not a girl hugging, but hugging, girl-shaped. I picked out some soft linen slacks and a rust-colored open-collared wrap-tie shirt, tossed them over the back of a chair. Have to change shoes too. And socks: I was wearing blue.
Ros sometimes asked us, if we were visiting her backstage, to help her change costumes. I say ‘us’: I was seldom lucky enough to have her all alone. And anyway, somehow you were never really quite alone with Ros even when there wasn’t anyone else around. But it didn’t matter. One of the best times I ever had with her, in fact, was the day I arrived to find a photographer there shooting stills. I was married by then and so was she, so we’d seen each other only rarely, but her greeting was the same as if we’d been actively lovers. That is to say, exactly as it always was. What the photographer was after were simple straightforward publicity stills of Ros in rapture, but whenever she tried to act ecstatic, she always looked like she had a fly up her nose. The photographer said he’d be glad to help her work up the real thing himself, but he wasn’t loose enough, as he put it, to shoot pix and jism at the same time, so he asked me if I’d do him the favor of pulling Ros’s trigger for her. For the sake of art, he added with a professional grin. I protested – weakly, as Ros had just thrown her soft arms around me and given me another breathless hug: oh yes! let’s! – that my wife had slightly less magnanimous notions about art and duty, and I couldn’t take the risk of an uncropped photo turning up somewhere. Ros, of course, didn’t understand this at all, but the photographer, a married man thrice over, thought about it for a moment, then suggested: why not wear a mask? So we got the keys to the costume trunks, locked ourselves in a rehearsal room where they had some colored lights, mirrored walls, and a few loose props, and enjoyed an enchanted hour of what I came to think of as an erotic exploration of my own childhood. I was severally a clown, a devil, a scarecrow, skeleton, the back half of a horse, Napoleon, a mummy, blackamoor, and a Martian. I played Comedy to Ros’s Tragedy, Inquisitor to her Witch, Sleeping Beauty to her Prince Charming, Jesus Christ to her Pope. Someti
mes the mirrored images actually scared or excited me, altered my behavior and my perception of what it was I was doing, but Ros was just the same, whether as a nymph, a dragon, an old man or the Virgin Mary: in short, endlessly delicious. The photographer occasionally joined in – just to keep his hand steady, as he put it – and once we balled her together without masks, dressed only in red light and jesters’ bells. I probably learned more about theater in that hour or so – theater as play, and the power of play to provoke unexpected insights, unearth buried memories, dissolve paradox, excite the heart – than in all the years before or since. After the third orgasm, it all became very dreamlike, and if I didn’t have a set of prints locked away down in my study to prove that it actually happened, I probably wouldn’t believe it myself. I enjoyed no particular costume so much as the strange sequence of them – a kind of odd stuttering tale that refused to unfold, but rather became ever more mysterious and self-enclosed, drawing us sweetly toward its inner profundities – but from the photographer’s viewpoint, the best was probably one of the simplest, a variation on Beauty and the Beast in which Ros wore only a little strip of diaphanous white cheesecloth and I dressed up in a gorilla suit. He said her astonished expression as she gazed up at the monstrous black hairy belly with a little white pecker poking out was exactly what he’d been looking for.
I smiled, feeling grateful. My bruises hurt less. I felt I could stay here forever, wrapped round by memory and the soft light and fabrics of my bedroom; but then I heard my mother-in-law scolding someone out in the corridor. I sighed, kicked my shoes off, peeled off the socks, removed my belt and laid it over the chairback with the clean clothes, lowered my trousers (all that blood in the crotch, hers: I shuddered, pained by this sad final gift), and had one leg out when Vic’s daughter came in. ‘Hey, I’m changing, Sally Ann!’
‘That’s all right, don’t mind me – I just want to sew this patch on.’ She peeked back out into the hallway (I heard someone protesting, something like a scuffle on the stairs – what I read on Sally Ann’s hindend was ‘SEAT OF BLISS’), then eased the door shut. ‘Everywhere else, there’s always somebody bothering me.’
She padded barefoot across the room to my wife’s dressing table, pausing there to admire her navel in the mirror. I’d pulled my trousers back up, partly to hide the erection I had from thinking about Ros, and stood holding them. ‘Come on, I’ve got a houseful of guests! I’ve got to get dressed and—’
‘Well, go ahead, for goodness’ sake,’ she said with an ingenuous smile, studying my open fly, ‘don’t let me stop you!’ She turned her back to me, pushed her blue jeans down, her little bikini pants getting dragged along with them. She stepped out of her jeans, very slowly pulled her panties back up, then sat down on the dressing-table stool, her little bum stuck out like she was trying to get rid of it. ‘I mean, we do know what men and women look like, don’t we, Gerry?’ She laid her blue jeans across her lap, took up her needle and thread as though conducting me with a baton. I noticed now the two whiskey glasses on the dressing table, the half-eaten sandwich, open jar of petroleum jelly, smelled the alien perfumes, the sweat and smoke. Even here then … ‘Look, I won’t even watch if that’s what’s bothering you,’ she added, gazing at me mischievously in the dressing-table mirror.
‘Have it your own way,’ I said, turning my back on her. I saw now that the bed had been rumpled, the covers tossed back over loosely. I lifted them: there was a bloodstain on the sheet, a small brown hole burned by a cigarette, coins, crumbs, a wet spot, and someone’s false eyelashes. Well … and the lamp’s yellow glow: it came from one of my wife’s nighties, draped over it.
I removed my trousers and tossed them on the bed, feeling fundamentally deceived somehow, just as Sally Ann said ‘Ow!’ and came prancing over to show me her thumb, which she said she’d pricked with the needle. ‘Kiss it for me, Gerry,’ she groaned, squeezing up behind me, her voice schoolgirl-sultry.
‘Now, see here, damn it—!’ I snapped, whirling around, and the ice pick, wrapped in my ascot, fell out of my shirt on the floor at our feet.
‘Gerry—! My gosh!’ she squeaked, stepping back, still holding her pricked thumb up with its tiny bead of blood.
‘It’s not mine,’ I said lamely. ‘It just … turned up …’
She squatted to pick it up. ‘It’s so – so sexy!’ she gasped, stroking it gently. She wound it up carefully in the ascot once more and handed it back to me. ‘I’ll never tell, Gerry!’ she whispered gravely and, standing on her tiptoes, threw her arms around my neck and kissed me. ‘Cross my heart!’ I tried to twist away, but she held on to my nape with one small warm hand, pointing down at the hard bulge in my shorts with the other: ‘See, you do like me, Gerry! I felt it pushing on my tummy – you can’t hide it!’
‘Don’t be silly, it gets that way by its—’
‘Can I see it?’
‘What? No, of course not!’ I pried her hand away from my neck.
‘Please, Gerry!’ She blushed, her worldly pretensions evaporating. ‘I’ve never really, you know, seen one …’ She touched the tip of it gingerly through the cotton. ‘Not … not sticking up like that …’
‘Don’t kid me, Sweet Meat, I’ve read your ads.’
‘Don’t make fun of me, Gerry. I was … all that was just for you. You’re so experienced, I thought you’d …’ She ducked her head, sucking at her pricked thumb. ‘I was just showing off …’ Her knotted shirt gaped, showing the firm little bubbles inside with their pink points like new pimples. I could hide it inside one of my wife’s hatboxes, I thought. Or her boot maybe, a sewing basket … ‘I feel so dumb …’ She leaned against me, putting one arm around my waist, pulling my shorts down with the other.
‘Hey—!’
She started back in amazement, holding on to the shorts. ‘Wow! Is that supposed to go in … in me?’ she gasped, cradling it in both hands. ‘Doesn’t it, you know … hurt?’
‘Only when you swallow,’ I said drily, tugging at my shorts with my free hand, trying to back away.
‘Wait, Gerry!’ She held the shorts down firmly with one hand, clutching my rigid member with the other. ‘I’m not as dumb as you think, honest – but in all the pictures they showed us at school, it was always hanging down like a lump of taffy, I never saw one all stiff like this!’
Maybe it was so; but her curiosity both angered and saddened me and I thought again of my walk that night through the laundry-laden streets of that seaside town of Italy: what a fool I was! ‘Sally Ann, please …’
‘But look – there’s the penis and there’s the scrotum, right? And the scrotum contains the epididymis, the seminiferous, uh, somethings, and the vas deferens, which I can just feel, I think, at the back …’ The illusion of novelty, that old shield against time: her fingers stepped tentatively between my thighs like a traveler in a strange city, excited by the possibility of the next turning, poor child … ‘At school, we girls called it the “vast difference” …’
‘Very funny.’ She pushed the shorts down further, thrusting her hand deeper, maneuvering my penis with the other like a lever – and in truth I felt like some kind of antiquated machine, a museum piece, once an amazing invention, the first of its kind, or thought to be, now seen as just another of time’s ceaseless copies, obsolete, worthless except as a child’s toy, disposable. I regretted my sarcasm.
‘And then the perannum—’
‘Perineum.’
‘The perineum, the anus, the – may I try to feel the prostate, Gerry?’ She held my organ gently now, the tip of it resting in her bared navel, as her finger probed speculatively up my rectum, and I thought: yes, the vast difference: a schoolgirl’s titter was what it was worth. Yet: maybe that was enough … ‘It’s all so soft and squishy and—’
‘SALLY ANN!’ roared Vic as he came crashing in, the door slamming back against the wall with a bang, his face pale with rage and anxiety.
Startled, she jerked her finger out – ffpop!: ‘Yow—!’
‘Oh, Dad!’ she groaned. ‘For crying out loud … !’
‘If that goddamn sonuvabitch—!’
‘Daddy, stop it! You’re making a scene!’
‘Holy smoke … !’ I wheezed, touching my anus gingerly: yes, it was still there.
Vic blinked, looked around blearily. ‘Oh, hullo, Gerry. Sorry. I thought – well, I didn’t see that bastard around anywhere, and …’
‘Really! You’d think it was the Middle Ages!’ She sighed petulantly, then, sniffing her finger, tipped my penis up for one last glimpse of it from the underside: ‘It’s all goosebumpy,’ she murmured, sliding the foreskin up and down, ‘just like the neck of an old turkey!’
‘Sally Ann, your father—’
‘I can take care of myself!’
‘Goddam it, you don’t know that guy, baby!’ Vic insisted, stumbling heavily about the room. He looked like a runner who’d just finished a mile and was trying to keep from falling over.
Sally Ann groaned, gave me a sympathetic grimace and a final squeeze, let go at last, as Vic fell heavily on the stool. I pulled my shorts up, caressing away the twinge in my anus. ‘Now, you’ve just sat down on my jeans!’
‘Sorry,’ he muttered, standing again, his eyes averted.
‘You’re drunk, Daddy, and you don’t know what you’re doing,’ Sally Ann scolded, tugging her jeans on. Vic had turned his back momentarily, drinking deeply, so I stuffed the ascot and ice pick under the mattress. There was something else under there already – a meat skewer? More picks? ‘I’m not a child, you know!’
‘You coulda fooled me,’ Vic grumbled, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. His blue workshirt, half-unbuttoned and bloodstained, was sweaty at the back.
‘Oh, Daddy, you’re such a pain,’ Sally Ann said, checking herself in the dressing-table mirror, pressing one hand against her flat tanned belly, untying and loosely reknotting her shirt when she saw me watching; but it was her mortality, not her childish flirtations, that I saw there. Something Tania had once said about mirrors as the symbol of consciousness or imagination. Maybe we’d been talking about her painting of ‘Saint Lucy’s Lover,’ the one with all the eyes. It had started, I remembered, with one of her little parables on wisdom, her painterly belief in immersion, flow, inner vision, as opposed to technique, structure, reason. Just as mirrors, she’d said, were parodies of the seas, themselves symbols of the unconscious, the unfathomable, the formless and mysterious, so were reason and invention mere parodies of intuition. What one might expect from Tania. What impressed me at the time, however, was her definition of parody: the intrusion of form, or death (she equated them), into life. Thus the mirror, as parodist, did not lie – on the contrary – but neither did it merely reflect: rather, like a camera, it created the truth we saw in it, thereby murdering potentiality. Sally Ann, watching me curiously through it, had clutched the collars of her shirt and tugged them closed as though chilled. ‘What … what’s the matter … ?’