Summer People

by Marge Piercy

  She nodded. She was waiting to say she had laryngitis.

  ‘I may, too. I don’t know.’ He grimaced. ‘I might as well be here as anyplace else right now.’

  She felt a stirring of dim hope. He wasn’t going to ask her about Tom. He was churning with emotional energy, full of some trouble of his own. She took a step closer and decided not to have laryngitis. A man who wanted to talk about his troubles would not have seemed much of a find at a party a couple of months ago, but right now he formed an oasis.

  When it was time to go into dinner, she noticed Dinah wince when she sat at the table, staring at the amaryllis. It was a strange-looking flower, but surely it couldn’t disturb Dinah. It was odd to see her in a dress, this one black wool and obviously made by Susan. There wasn’t much Dinah could do with her hair, which grew out like a prickly bush in kinks, but Susan must have cut it close to her head recently. Dinah wore earrings in all the holes in her lobes, two on one side and three on the other. Around her neck she wore a fetish necklace of carved birds. They looked heavy and primeval.

  Dinah was always a presence like a Buddha, squat, full-bodied, a broad, slightly flattened face with piercing, glittering eyes. Tyrone had once said she radiated pure sex, but Laurie thought he was simply reacting to the ancient scandal surrounding her. Dinah had a low cellolike voice, sometimes throaty, sometimes coarse, sometimes caressing. She also had the capacity for sitting without saying a word for endless amounts of time, not fidgeting, not moving, like a woman turned to warm stone. Laurie had come on her more than once in the woods or in the dunes, just sitting, immobile, once with a deer grazing nearby who had fled at her own approach. Dinah would look at Laurie, but sometimes it did not even occur to her to say hello. Laurie thought of her as simple, a true peasant, a dim earthy soul.

  Yet if Laurie wanted to impress a certain kind of person in New York, she would mention not her father, not the gallery owners she knew or the artists she had met, but Dinah, who was not widely famous – narrowly but intensely. Only au courant or arty types would have heard of her, but they would be truly astounded that she knew Dinah. An exclusive but potent legend. Laurie found that absolutely weird, because Susan and Willie and Dinah were like family, like aunts or uncles who could fix what went wrong there, who knew what to do when you had friends looking for a summer rental or a baby-sitter or an au pair girl, when you required the roof repaired or the pump fixed. That was mainly Susan and Willie; Dinah was not likely to put herself out. She and Tyrone were not exactly chummy. Was Dinah chummy with anyone? People brought her injured animals and she nursed them back to health. She looked like an Indian through the face, but she wasn’t.

  It was still kind of gross when she thought about it, looking at them all around the table like regular married people, that Dinah had sex with both of them. Laurie always reached a point in any social evening when she would start wondering how they did it, all together, by twos, who chose when and where. How did they arrange it? She really loved Susan, but the cool/warm matronly Susan who tucked her in bed and held her when she cried, how could she have sex with her husband and with this witch? It sometimes made Laurie feel as if the motherly Susan were a front or a trick. Ten years of three of them crawling all over each other. How could Jimmy stand it? How could he grow up with that going on?

  ‘That’s a beautiful necklace,’ Tyrone said, reaching for it. ‘May I?’

  Dinah visibly drew back but suffered herself to endure the examination that brought Tyrone’s hand close to her breast.

  ‘It looks like a fine piece. Do you know where it came from?’

  ‘It was a present from someone I was studying with. His grandmother made it.’

  ‘Zuni, isn’t it? What an extravagant present! Perhaps he thought of it as something old he had around the house. I met a dealer once in Crete who used to go around to the mountain villages and trade the villagers plastic mixing bowls and nylon blankets for their antiques.’

  ‘Since he teaches Native American culture at the university, he could no doubt assign a dollar value to it. He gave it to me as a bed present,’ Dinah said blandly, glancing down the table at Susan. ‘I had a need to study Hopi music.’ Again she glared at the amaryllis in front of her, its full strange dragonfly head nodding over the china.

  ‘Laurie’s going to be living here,’ Tyrone said. ‘In the summer with so many people coming and going in the house, she’ll need her privacy. I want to remodel the boathouse as a little cottage for her. And I’m looking for a piece of property in town for a gallery.’

  ‘You’re opening a gallery?’ Willie sat up.

  ‘Laurie will be running it. Yes, I think it’s time for her to have her own. She’s been learning the business in New York.’

  Jimmy was looking at her with a knowing expression, his lip twisting in an empathetic grimace, but what he was thinking was how Tyrone tried to run her life. It’s all right, she would tell him later, he’s giving me exactly what I need. What an extraordinarily tactile stare he had. He had become handsome, more than handsome. When had it happened? She had years of memories of Jimmy, summer after summer. He came with the place, like the raft in the pond and the path to the beach. She never even had a crush on him, because he was almost five months younger, which had felt like an enormous stretch in her childhood. He was just Jimmy, skinny, red-headed and freckled, the kid she played with when more exciting kids weren’t visiting from the city or renting nearby. Then they both grew up and he was gone.

  Celeste was clearing dessert and bringing coffee and liqueurs. Tyrone continued, stroking his beard, ‘What would be perfect is for the two of you to do the renovation.’ He beamed first at Willie, then at Dinah. ‘You do quality work and that’s exactly what I want. First the boathouse. Take a look at the plans and tell me what you think of them.’ Fetching them from the sideboard, he spread them on the table. ‘Do you like the plans?’

  Did they like the plans? Really! Tyrone had had them drawn up by a fine architect, although she was sure nobody else at the table would know how famous and well respected he was. Did they like them! He knew how to make people feel important. That was part of his charm and she should discover how to do it too. She still had so much to learn from him about how to act with other people. Maybe charm was something she could practice, as she had mastered sailing and studied tennis and backgammon.

  ‘Then the gallery. I have two properties I’m considering. I’ll make up my mind this week, I promise you.’

  ‘This looks great,’ Willie said. ‘I see what you’re aiming at. It could be very nice, using the way it goes right to the water.’

  ‘No thanks,’ Dinah said. ‘I’m doing nothing inessential this year. I have a New Works grant.’

  Tyrone frowned. ‘Public works?’

  Dinah didn’t answer, doing her stone act. Willie hastened to cover for her. ‘I like the idea. It could be fun. Especially the gallery. I have a lot of ideas about how art should be displayed and I know every gallery in these towns. I can tell you what works and what doesn’t, the way they’re lit, the spaces for art, the walk-through. Jimmy can help. He’s a fine carpenter. And he’s done roofing. We wouldn’t have to subcontract the roof.’

  Jimmy shrugged. ‘Why not? It’s something to do.’

  ‘I think it’s exciting,’ Susan said. She had not looked at Dinah through the whole conversation and she was not looking at her now. She beamed at Willie and then turned back to Tyrone. ‘We’re delighted Laurie will be living here, I know Jimmy is, and a new gallery! I think that’s just what we all need.’

  ‘I’d like a dry cleaners,’ Dinah said, ‘or a bakery.’

  Dinah was obviously aware she was being rude. It was like trying to dine with a Neanderthal, Laurie thought, a genuine primitive. The fetish necklace seemed appropriate. Dinah had eaten a hearty dinner and was polishing off a large snifter of cognac. In all the years Laurie had known her, since she was a little girl and they had begun coming to the pond (her mother, Tyrone and her; then Tyrone’
s next two wives and herself), Dinah never changed. She always seemed to be the same weight and look the same, as if she like the necklace were carved out of something more immutable than flesh.

  Now Dinah caught her stare and held it until Laurie looked down, feeling herself blush for no good reason except that staring was rude, but then Dinah had stared too. It made her feel fifteen, and remember how she had had a crush on Willie then, of all people, and how she had hung around his studio. He had encouraged her to start painting and she had shown him and only him her first work, afraid to show Daddy for fear it was not good. Willie was the same age as Tyrone, she supposed, but never seemed so. Although his hair had been pure white since she could remember, his face was without lines. He was slender, supple, always dressed like a kid, too, in jeans and sneakers. She doubted he owned a suit. He was as ready to listen and respond with disbelief or astonishment or indignation or instant enthusiasm as she herself had been at fifteen. His emotions were close to the surface, not hidden by practice or artifice, not eroded by cynicism or too much experience of the world, she thought.

  She had been silly about Dinah then too, imagining Dinah seducing her in some indefinable way. She remembered with a further rush of blood to her face that she had cast herself in Dinah’s way several times, hoping for some cataclysm of unbridled lust. Dinah had done nothing, said nothing, only sent her on her way, yet she felt as if Dinah had read her mind with amusement.

  When she looked up again Dinah had slipped from the table. A few moments later she heard the piano from the livingroom. She could not tell if Dinah were improvising or playing; and indeed, when she had occasionally heard one of Dinah’s pieces, she had the same problem. It was not harshly atonal like a lot of modern music, but it was odd: repetitive, melodic but circling rather than ongoing. People could have danced to it, but round and round in place. Like Dinah, it was peculiar stuff.

  Jimmy slid over into Dinah’s seat across from her. ‘Do you really want us to make over the boathouse for you? You’d be comfortable with us working on it? It’s not necessary, you know.’ His voice was pitched low enough so that Tyrone and the others would not hear. ‘Only if it’s your desire too.’

  ‘It is. I’m glad you’re going to help me with a place to live.’ She chose the words carefully, not to push him into a workman’s role. She was being tactful, just the way Tyrone would be. In a way it was too bad he couldn’t hear her.

  ‘You’re not real easy in company now,’ he said just as softly. ‘The evening will be over soon. You can take us all better one on one.’

  ‘How did you happen to be here from the West Coast? It’s a lucky coincidence.’

  ‘It’s not a coincidence and if it’s luck, it’s bad luck, the bottom line from a string of disasters.’ He forced a grin. ‘You too?’

  She only had to nod. ‘Me too.’

  Chapter Eight

  DINAH

  Dinah fell in love with Mark Edelmann on the Fourth of July, sitting on a speakers’ platform with him as the temperature hit 101 Fahrenheit. She was there as a member of the Wholey Terrors, a self-styled women’s liberation rock band famous among their fans for making a hell of a racket and among cognoscenti of that weird area where postmodernism and rock secretly intermingled for being musically interesting. Dinah did not consider vocals her strong point, but she could carry a tune and they could hear her in the back row without amplification, and in the next county with it. She played rhythm guitar, flute, sometimes piano or any extra percussion needed. She was twenty-two, dressed wild and butch in black leather and silver studs, with her brown hair frizzed straight up and out, and was accustomed to groupies of all sexes.

  She was seated right behind the lectern where she got a fine view of all the speakers’ rear parts. Mark Edelmann had a nice tight butt in Levi’s, especially considering he was twice her age at least, but it was his rhetoric that made her inner parts stir. He was one fine poet and he wasn’t a bad rabble-rouser either. When he returned to his seat beside her, smiled and let his hand rest on her knee, at first she thought it was the heat getting to her. She had never been in love before. She had not had time to bother, with all there was to learn and do. When she felt fussed about someone, she took off on her bike and roared into the countryside. The next day she would be in a different town anyhow.

  She went back to his hotel with him without thinking twice, because she felt like it and at twenty-two, she always did what she felt like unless some force prevented her. He talked a lot, in and out of bed. That made him different right away. She was used to other musicians, who didn’t, or if they did talk, she could tune out and when she tuned back in, they would still be talking about how their agent screwed them or some new riff or the last or next gig. He expected her to listen. He was talking about Chile and the CIA and international banking. It wasn’t a lecture. He kept asking her questions about the band and the music they played. He was curious and he listened when he wasn’t talking.

  When he made love, he was different too: more specific, more personal. Often she had the feeling with people that whoever they were with was interchangeable with the last five and the next fourteen. They did it this way or that way and she did a certain thing to get them off. They wanted to get off, that was the current phrase, and off was where they went; she was a launching pad; they were the same for her. It was the release, not the partner, that was desired.

  Mark was not an experience or a respite from noise but a person who insisted on a romantic overlay she was not accustomed to, a naming and telling and specifying she would have expected herself to find sentimental and old-fashioned, but which, from him, fascinated her. Held her fascinated. Mark Edelmann. He was a poet. So why should that matter? Who read poetry? People read his. People she knew. He was a hero on the campuses. She could reach twenty thousand people at a time and set them screaming, yet her work felt like gauze and his like silver, in their density.

  ‘You’re a child,’ he would tell her, warningly, dismissively, at times in a tone of worship. ‘But not a girlchild. Not a child of my generation. You have the heart of a boy in the body of a woman.’

  Oh, her body. He liked that. She was used to men liking her body, for it was in keeping with the taste of the times: chunky, zaftig, an earth mother like the women Crumb drew in his strips. ‘I’m not a boy. I’m what women are like now. You’re a late Victorian, Edelmann. Real tardy.’

  ‘The late Mark Edelmann.’ He liked that. He was always half obsessed with death, his own and others! Death by fire and death by water ran through his poems, through his language even in bed. ‘Burn me up, woman,’ he would mutter. ‘Stir my ashes.’

  He was thin and bony, as if he had more vertebrae and elbows than other people. His pale skin made his eyes appear black. His shoulder length honey brown hair was held back by a leather holder in the form of an intricate knot hung with a few beads he told her were lapis lazuli. His darker beard was carefully shaped; indeed she learned it took him as long to trim it to his satisfaction every couple of days as another man would spend shaving. The beard and hair and the studs he wore in his ears gave him a piratical air, but he was clean and careful with his body as a cat. He smoked constantly and had a hacking cough, his long shapely fingers always stained. He hated filters. He found them ugly. He could keep a cigarette between his lips while he drove, while he typed, while he dialled the telephone, while he walked and probably had he desired, in the shower.

  The attraction of opposites? He was airy, she was earthy. Yet they both were struck readily into fire, sexual fire, fire of concentration, fire of imagination, fire of creation, fire of anger. She knew herself to be anything but elegant, whereas he was in his person, his writing, his mental routines and habits of thought, of a clean and pared down elegance. His voice moved her right through her guts. His voice vibrated in her like a cat’s purr, deep, a marvellous instrument. Till he had to stop giving readings, when cancer had destroyed half his lungs, she never tired of hearing him.

  He’d held d
own a few academic jobs but he had been fired for getting too involved with students, for being too political. Now he was beyond being hirable and made his living off gigs, the same as she did. Both of them had tiny dingy studios in Manhattan where they stored gear they weren’t using and camped when they weren’t on the road or shacked up with anybody else. She came back to an eviction notice because of the jazz horn player who had been subletting in her absence. She moved in with Mark on Avenue C for a week or so until she could find another cheap flop. She never moved her stuff out until four years later, just after he was released from six months on Rikers Island, was diagnosed as having lung cancer and she took him to the Cape. Sick as he was, they had made him serve time for a demonstration against the neutron bomb.

  Still she was gone more than she was with him the first eight months. Then the Wholey Terrors broke up over separatism, forcing Dinah to decide. He was staying in the house of an academic couple who were on sabbatical in England, a farmhouse outside Ithaca, New York, far more comfortable than his little flop in the city. Mark was putting a book together. Superfluous Bodies. The house was big for them, comfortable and rambling but chilly. Deep snow hid the ground and ice closed in the Finger Lakes. They had never spent longer than a week together before. They rattled around in the farmhouse and the too ample time, striking sparks of disagreement over the small decisions of the day from when and what to eat for breakfast through the bumpy afternoon until the decision when to go to bed.

  He was shocked to find out she had been a scholarship student at Juilliard and while still there, had had a piece performed by a chamber ensemble. ‘How could you go from writing real music to playing junk?’

  ‘It’s not junk, asshole. It’s good hard rocking music. We weren’t the best musicians, but the stuff was good. We did all kinds of interesting things. We weren’t no three chord wonders.’

  ‘But you’d been writing real music. Serious music. Not pop. How could you give that up? Was it the money? It isn’t as if you sold out for millions and your face on the cover of Rolling Stone.’