Summer People

by Marge Piercy

  ‘You really think some music is good and some is bad because it has a backbeat or it doesn’t. If you meant it in terms of rhythms or harmonics maybe I could understand. Labelling stuff the classics deadens people. So they go take out a subscription to the Boston Symphony and they expect to hear maybe three of eighty-odd pieces and that’s the good safe stuff you pay your money for and it’s all certified and it’s all dead and stuffed.’

  ‘You sound like those idiots who think that all writing is equal, and John Donne and the guy who writes ad copy for toilet bowl cleaners are in the same business.’

  She got furious with him and would have left except that it was snowing hard and nothing was running, a March snowstorm that knocked out their power for a day. Then she began to enjoy arguing ideas. She wasn’t used to it, but she developed a taste and then an addiction. She found out what she thought by defending her at first amorphous but gradually forming ideas against his precision and sarcasm. Sometimes their arguments terminated in screaming and sometimes in throwing dishes. She worried about the breakage; he didn’t.

  They played too. If he often called her a child, sometimes scornfully and sometimes in what sounded like awe, he also could find his own ten-year-old self, his fifteen-year-old self. They had snowball fights in the yard. With an old sled from the basement, they took turns on the hill behind the house. They took bubble baths together till water shuddered in puddles on the floor. Whooping, he would launch himself at her and they would tussle and roll on the bed tossing the covers across the room. Kneeling naked on the mattress, he would bark and howl. He was ticklish to complete vulnerability and could be dissolved to helpless writhing by her merely poking a finger toward his midsection, threateningly. They made pancakes in the form of naked bodies, sexual organs, words, eating them with maple syrup. Cornell proved a useful source of dairy products and sausage. She met local musicians and began getting seriously into electronic music. She worked lab music briefly and then started playing with tapes, using feedback and delay, mixing the sounds of voice and instruments with natural and mechanical noises. It was the opposite extreme from the band, writing for specific musicians.

  She learned he had little understanding of music and a poor ear. He actually preferred the pop music he scorned, or the ersatz stuff from movie scores. Yet he was happier when she was playing music he could not enjoy, because he truly believed in the unbridgeable gap between Culture High and culture low in spite of the fact that he could not always tell the difference when she was practising flute. Flute was her basic instrument, had been since age seven. It was what she always took with her and what she could always fall back on. For cash, she played the organ Sundays in a church and guitar in a coffeehouse Friday through Sunday nights. He might get a headache from Stockhausen and hum the Beatles when he was truly happy, but he was convinced that only the former counted in eternity.

  They were a couple. That was a new and sometimes alarming experience for her. Mark came from a regular mommy/daddy/two baby family, his father a successful accountant in Philadelphia, his mother a housewife with a busy volunteer life. Dinah had been born in Chicago. Her mother Shirley taught music. Her father, Nathan, had been in Auschwitz. He died of a heart attack when she was thirteen; she could not remember him as ever entirely well. He had been a man of silences, happiest when he was singing or hearing music, especially Baroque music, but not a man who talked much or casually. Once he had been the first violin in a symphony orchestra in Krakow; now he ran a Laundromat. Tenderness came hard to him and sarcasm easy, but there was a gentleness in him she could count on when she was truly hurt, physically or mentally. Shirley was frightened of pain and withdrew behind fussing. Nathan understood pain intimately. But sometimes the entry into his gentleness led through a wall of fire, his temper.

  When Dinah talked to Mark about her father, she could almost see the figure building in his mind, sentimentalized, idealized. Years of brutality and pain, witnessing death on the hour, had not made Nathan a saint, but only a complex, once ambitious and thoughtful man of towering emotions who had had his calling, his family, his life, his health, his prime, stolen, stolen forever. After the burning of his family, he was enabled only by the wreck of his once great vitality to make a small leftover life with a wife who would never mean to him what his first wife had, a daughter to replace the murdered son, a strange daughter entirely American, a tough child of the streets of their loud neighbourhood who nonetheless could please him in one way utterly. He lamented that he had not the strength, the health, the time left, he had not the money to push her through where he wanted her to go. He had given her what he had to give: the sense that music was supremely important and except for human kindness, perhaps the only sure good, and that her desires were important inside music. He had given her a sense of worth based on her musical ability. He had also insisted she carry on the family.

  He had given her a sense that being a Jew was something painful, powerful and radiant she must carry forward. When he talked about the past, it was always in terms of what she must tell her children. He was older than the fathers of her friends, who would sometimes think he was her grandfather. He was closer in age to her mother’s father than he was to her mother, but he was ageless. He told her often he felt like a ghost, a revenant. He never stopped insisting that she make music seriously and that she carry on his line. He had less prejudice against women than most of her friends’ fathers; he said in Auschwitz the women had been worked like men, and the few women survivors were just as tough as the few men. He never talked about his first wife, but he did talk about his sister Aviva, who had played the viola professionally in a string quartet, who had been gassed.

  Dinah’s mother Shirley had been a ringer for Dinah herself: same hair, same eyes, same body. But she was a far gentler longer suffering woman. Shirley taught music in a grade school in a neighbourhood two bus rides away. She had a few pupils on the weekend, studying the piano. When Shirley was giving lessons, Dinah slipped out of the house. She could not stand to listen. By the time Dinah was twelve, she could tune the piano and save her mother the fee for the tuner. Dinah was not exactly sure when she had gone from necking with her steady boyfriend Sammy to fucking, but she remembered exactly her fourteenth birthday on which she had been given her first silver flute. Her father had left instructions, it was to be purchased from his insurance money. She had begun sex early, she supposed; it had come easily to her. Or she to it. They had clung to the bottom of the lower middle class, working class with pretensions her mother had never had the spare cash to follow through. Without a scholarship, there would have been no Juilliard; but Dinah had been playing for money since junior high.

  Shirley’s second husband was a retired dentist with whom she moved to Fort Lauderdale. He had come with a hefty income, three grown children, two Cadillacs and a permanent leathery tan. Shirley bleached her hair and they no longer looked like clones. They had not a great deal to say to each other. Shirley worried about her, and her own motto was that the less her mother knew, the less she had to worry about. Dinah was not about to haul Mark home for inspection. Fort Lauderdale had never been her home anyhow, and she had never even worked out a satisfactory mode of address for Dr Morse.

  That first winter and spring of their joining: great fierce winds blew through them. She had had sex with many, mostly men but some women; however she had been most intimate with the musicians she played with and wrote for. She would still find herself working out passages and layers so that she would think, Jeri should come in right there on lead guitar and Sunni should hit the piano entrance percussively. She had little experience of intimacy as Mark, who had been married twice, expected it. She had no housekeeping skills, no preparation for what she thought of as the daddy/mommy roles. In the house of their relationship, it was as if Mark kept walking in and tossing his coat on a chair, only to discover there was no furniture and his coats lay on a bare floor. And she, she was always screaming at him, ‘I don’t see what liking to fuck you has to
do with being confused with a laundry service!’

  They were unsuited. They were mismatched. But they were not mismated and so they lumbered on, quarrelling and making up and breaking things, an uncouth Frankenstein monster with four legs all walking in different directions and two heads talking about different subjects and four arms punching each other, but joined where lovers join, indisputably, compulsively, beyond words and volition joined. It was not that they were even faithful, that first year. Whenever they were separated for longer than a couple of weeks, they both had other people and it did not matter and then it stopped. It was pointless. There was too much noise between them to hear anyone else calling on that wavelength.

  She worked her way through electronic serialism and into minimalism where she was writing for spoons and hands clapping and feet tapping while she was with him, but she was never as productive as she had been before she met him or nearly as productive as she would begin to be after his death. Looking back, she thought of the time with Mark as the years when she stopped being a free-form free-floating adolescent; when she was seized and held in place and grew up.

  Chapter Nine

  SUSAN

  Susan had just dropped off the Sunday Times Tyrone had ordered in town and truly meant to go home when he popped out of his office to greet her warmly, kissing her cheek. Caress of his beard, curiously animal in his handsome intelligent face. ‘Dear Susan, it’s going to be a mild day, isn’t it? I know one is supposed to yearn sentimentally for a white Christmas, but I must say I prefer it green and temperate. Would you have time for a walk, say in an hour and a half? I have a tad of business to clean up first.’

  She could see the amber monitor behind him flashing lines and boxes of numbers. ‘That would be wonderful, Ty. When should I come back?’

  She just had time to wash and blow-dry her hair. Both Willie and Dinah were in their tunnel routines, oblivious to her as usual. She might as well live with three dogs instead of a dog and two people, for all the company she got out of them when they put on their blinkers and started pulling along on some project. She prided herself that when she worked, she worked, and when she finished work, she let go of her preoccupations and functioned as a fully social being – as anyone could learn to do, witness Tyrone, who certainly was far more seriously plugged into the world than any of the rest of them, yet who could be engaged on an intense human level without her having to sulk or throw tantrums.

  Just as she was about to leave, Zee Gildner called – a vigorous widow in her late sixties. ‘Susan, darling, I am looking at the adult education schedule. I was thinking of taking a class in computers. Everybody should understand them, don’t you think? Would you like to go with me?’

  ‘I have no interest, Zee. Willie is always playing with his.’

  ‘How about stress management? Embroidering birds and flowers? Swedish conversation? Dancercize?’ Zee tried to tempt her, while she seethed, furious that Zee would think her someone who needed such mental pablum.

  ‘Why don’t you ask Dinah?’ she suggested wickedly.

  Tyrone let her choose the walk. She thought of the ocean, her passion, but it would be chilly there with an east wind blowing. Better to follow a trail among the ponds scattered through the woods. Tyrone walked far more slowly than Dinah or Willie, at a pace she could easily accommodate, so that they could go arm in arm and engage in a real conversation.

  ‘It has been hell, Susan my dear, absolute hell. When I think of my daughter married to that drug-happy loser for two years, I could kill him if he hadn’t managed to accomplish that himself. Laurie has no proper instincts of self-defence, have you noticed that?’

  ‘You mean she’s a little gullible with men?’

  ‘I overprotected her. Certainly that whining drunk who is her biological mother has done nothing for Laurie’s confidence or her savvy about men.’ He stopped to take Susan’s face between his hands, dry, warm hands that felt like the finest softest leather. ‘You know you’ve been her real mother for years. Without you I don’t know how she would have grown up to be as sweet as she is. You were her role model for what a woman should be.’

  She could feel herself flushing as if steam were rising in her skin. ‘You’re exaggerating, but I do like to know you appreciate what I’ve tried to do for Laurie …’

  ‘Do you think I’ve overvalued her sensitivity? That I’ve encouraged her to remain tenderer than perhaps is safe?’

  ‘Laurie’s a very special person, Ty. But what happened to her could happen to any young people now. Jimmy just had the shock of discovering one of his friends was stealing from their business. I do love Laurie, you know. I love her like a daughter, like my own daughter.’

  ‘I know! I know. That’s why I feel safe in leaving her here, with you to watch over her. This has been a harrowing episode. Of course it’s been that for Laurie, but I can confide in you and you alone, also for me. I’ve tried not to let Laurie know how shameful and sleazy I’ve found it.’ He let her go and they walked on, arm in arm through the monochrome landscape.

  She rushed to assure him that she understood. He was a deeply feeling man behind his façade, and it was more than façade, because Tyrone was genuine, a man of power and ability. He had inherited money, but he had made his own fortune several times over. He worked in the fray of finance, where risks were enormous and rewards just as generous. Even when he was on the pond with them, over the phone lines he was tied into commodities markets, the rise and fall of currencies all over the globe. He had only to make a call, and thousands of miles away, lackeys bought and sold for him, fought and won or lost on his behalf. Yet such a man could suffer because he truly loved his only child and she was in pain. He could not show that face of tenderness to many people, for he must be strong before his associates and strong before Laurie – but in their special tender friendship, he dared to reveal his pain.

  She wanted to reassure him, to ease his worry. At the same time she felt delighted, as if as they strolled, they were moving to grand swelling music. How well turned out he was. Willie went about in jeans baggy with washing, with stains on the knees, ragged at the bottom. He wore tee shirts or an old fisherman’s sweater. His idea of dressing for an evening out was to put on newish jeans and a clean sweater. She had bought him beautiful shirts and ties, exquisite Italian silk sports jackets picked up wholesale in New York, and they hung in his closet unworn. He trusted nothing that wasn’t just like the last one: the next pair of Levi’s, the next L. L. Bean chamois cloth shirt.

  Tyrone had on a beautiful Harris Tweed with flecks of green and rose in the grey of the jacket, tailored in London of a heavier wool than Americans liked, not the twelve-ounce stuff. Under it he wore a green cashmere sweater just showing the collar of a shirt of fine cotton, with a pale striping. His pants were of an extremely soft pale grey flannel. His boots were Italian and seemed to maintain their high polish regardless of the leaf mould underfoot. Tyrone was always perfect. He had dressed to walk with her, paying her the homage of knowing that she observed clothes. He had complimented her very full skirt. She could wear the high-heeled laced boots needed to set off the tulip hem, because Tyrone walked at a civilized pace. Really anybody would have expected an artist to dawdle and enjoy and a financier to rush along like a one-man battalion on a forced march, but it was the other way round.

  ‘Those are some of the reasons,’ he was saying, ‘why I think it wise to keep her out of New York until this scandal has blown over. As it will. Nothing is as dull as last year’s sensation.’

  ‘That’s true in cities, I’m sure, because people have so much to think about and so much to do. Up here, we’re always gossiping about what somebody did twenty years ago, for instance that Ozzie is really the Captain’s father’s son, because Ozzie’s mother was having an affair with him …’ Susan felt herself blushing again as she remembered that just the night before when the three of them had dined at the house of Burt and Leroy, they had had a wonderful gossip about half the town. Burt was the town
librarian, and Leroy ran the Sandspit restaurant and painted. She fell into gossiping often enough, although Tyrone did not know that, bless him. Dinah loved gossip; it did not seem to go with her character, but it was a genuine addiction.

  ‘I’m providing Laurie with a Range Rover to carry her back and forth to New York reliably – she needs four-wheel drive here. I haven’t given her a car since college. In New York, they’re a nuisance, like keeping a pet rhino, but I can’t do without one myself. She’s a good driver, better than I am because I grow bored and distracted. Don’t you think it’s wise to keep judging critically what one does well and what one doesn’t, so as not to waste time on what one does badly? Often men imagine because they’re good at what they do professionally, they’re able in all respects … But, old friend, you’d never think that of me. You’ve seen what a stream of errors I make with women in my personal life … How I admire you.’

  ‘Admire me? How could you?’

  ‘Because you’ve made an unconventional choice and stuck to it no matter what others may think. That’s gutsy. Whereas I’ve made what seems to be the same mistake three times running. You must think that I’m an idiot with women.’

  ‘I don’t think that, Tyrone, never.’ She felt guilty even as she spoke, for she had liked none of his wives, and aside from their blonde and slender beauty, had wondered why he had bothered to marry them. ‘I do think sometimes you’re too kind, in a way, I mean that perhaps you’ve gotten married when, well …’ She trailed off, embarrassed.

  ‘You think I should have had more affairs and less marriages?’ He chuckled. ‘But a man needs a wife. I need a wife … But I don’t doubt you’re right that the ones I chose were bad risks.’

  He was open, guileless with her; no one else was permitted to see him so … unadorned. Theirs was a special friendship, as he had often remarked, although she observed it was especially special when he was not married. She always disliked the first two years of his marriages, when he vanished into his infatuation with the new wife and had not yet grown dissatisfied enough to require Susan’s sympathy and understanding.