Summer People

by Marge Piercy

  How different it was being with Tyrone in the woods than with Willie. If she tried to talk to Willie about her feelings, she would think he was listening and then suddenly he would burst out, ‘Look at the flicker. Right on the second branch of that split pine, on the left side.’ Or, ‘Hey, a cardinal flower in bloom.’ He would stare at a grey squirrel chattering on a branch as if it were delivering some personal message to him. He went along pricking his ears after sounds and sniffing after scents and chasing after motions in the corner of his eye, just like Bogey. She swore that he didn’t even know what he felt half the time, because he paid no attention. Then he would suddenly wake up one morning depressed and not know why because he was so out of the habit of analysing or even observing himself. He would rather stare at beech bark than think about her.

  Dinah was no better. Dinah could be silent as a tree stump for weeks. Susan would be walking along with Dinah trying to talk and Dinah would hum to herself as if Susan hadn’t said a word. Or she would start beating some maddening rhythm on a stick she picked up or on trees they passed and sometimes she would be beating one rhythm with her right hand and one with her left until Susan wanted to beat a third one on her head to shut her up. Dinah would do the exact same thing sometimes when they were sitting at the table. Really, Susan would be there bursting to share her feelings, to talk about something real in her life, and there would be Willie staring at a spiderweb in the corner totally absorbed as a three-year-old in how the light hit the strands; and there would be Dinah like a two-year-old in a crib beating on the table with a spoon. It was like living in a cage with monkeys!

  Dinah had the nerve to feel vastly superior to Tyrone on the basis of some bohemian snobbery about the superiority of artists over their patrons, as if it wasn’t simply his own sensitivity and refinement that made Tyrone a collector when somebody else with the same amount of money would have spent it all on yachts or Lear jets. Yes, here was Tyrone, not wrapped up in himself as well he might have been, not mumbling about finances or money markets or the trade deficit but opening up to her and talking about their lives. How could she help but make comparisons and how could she help but be moved? Tyrone had referred for years to their special friendship, and the passing of time had only made it more important, more necessary to her. She thought they had grown closer since his third marriage had disintegrated.

  ‘I know you’ll take care of Laurie while she’s recovering. It’s only because I trust you that I dare leave her here and go back to the city without feeling I’m abandoning her.’

  They simply operated together on a different plane of existence than her everyday dreary interactions. It was fine and intelligent, not in the sense of random bombast about art or dry dissection of art theory or Willie’s recitation of what he had heard on the radio about South Africa or the Middle East. Rather she and Tyrone shared that high civilized discussion of feelings and intentions and relationships that made life interesting and which for her defined the true best province of human interaction. ‘I will, Tyrone, I will! You can trust me. I’ll do whatever I can for Laurie. I’m delighted that you’re creating a new gallery here. Perhaps we can see some of the artists who are getting known in New York. I’d love that.’

  He took her hand in both of his and squeezed firmly but not too hard. ‘Ah, Susan. I count on you. I always do.’

  Chapter Ten

  DINAH

  The first bad storm of the season struck right after New Year’s and the woods and the road to town were covered with six inches of snow. Dinah, Willie and Jimmy spent all day digging out. A fine dusting fell on top of the crust. The air grew steely and ice began to skim the pond. Friday the pond stood as a field under a coating of new snow, the treacherous time when the ice looked like solid land but wasn’t yet thick enough to bear weight. Monday Dinah flew to Rochester to give a lecture at the Eastman and take part in a performance of her Celebration for Hands and Feet, a piece of which she was more than a little weary, but she needed the money.

  A gig in academia always reminded her why she had chosen the hard road, although when she had become a minimalist, that in itself would have closed university doors to her. She could remember her own dark feelings as a student, that composing had not always been on a par with theoretical physics in the mathematics and arcane jargon required, that music could perhaps be once again more immediate, more sensual, more accessible and hot. Often by now she forgot that claustrophobic stringency, that pride in rigorous method and meagre results, from which she had revolted by going into a rock band instead of a chamber orchestra. It was well to be reminded why she lived from gig to gig and commission to commission, depending in between on odd jobs; it was well to remember that her independence had been hard won, painfully maintained but consistently fruitful. She had never run out of musical ideas – what they were called, although of course they were not in any sense ‘ideas’ but shapes moving in her mind, tones, a string of notes. Sounds and silences.

  Tuesday the plane into Boston was only two hours late and she caught the last connection to the Cape. The small plane was enveloped in grey matter until it burst free in time for her to see the comma that was Cape’s end lying there, a fragile sandbar on the waters. It was the colour of a rabbit’s coat and furred with grasses from which a winter sun and wind had stripped the thatching of snow already. So small, so beautiful, it took her by the throat as it always did, making a little triumph of every arrival, every homecoming.

  By the next day, the remaining snow was thawing to puddles. Dinah burst out of her house. The cats chased each other around the yard. Willie was taking down a rum cherry that had developed ugly dripping knots. He started out in a pea coat and as the morning progressed, shed layer upon layer in the softening warmth until he was wearing only an undershirt. Across the pond, it was quiet. Tyrone had returned to the city. The outside work was done on the Captain’s house, the noise of the workmen contained within.

  The next week grew gradually warmer. Winter seemed to have come and gone. Dinah felt drunk with the sudden warmth, the soft wet January thaw that blew off the Gulf Stream and felt, not like the real Cape spring which was slow and inch by inch, but as if a ghostly visitation of the tropics touched their faces, a languorous humid fragrant breath. She relished moving around freely in the woods again. She and Susan took a long walk on the old road over the dunes, the badly eroded sand track the original Coast Guard had used to watch for wrecks and drowning sailors. Susan pointed out how much maroon and purple mellowed the winter landscape, the bearberry glinting in the sun, the arching canes of wild roses. The sand was shaded with garnet here and there. The beige grasses wrote with their tips a calligraphy of semicircles. Everywhere the dunes were softly rounded into the shapes of breasts and thighs and bellies, vast gentle planes of flesh. The poverty grass in its dense curliness made Dinah think of pubic hair, grizzled by the winter.

  Sometimes they strolled in a miniature desert and sometimes they emerged to stand high over the ocean furiously chewing at the base of the clay and sand cliffs, the winter ocean that came so much higher and tore off chunks of land in every storm. Susan loved the ocean. Dinah could tell she too felt high on the clean soft air, glad to be outside to run around without their winter coats. They fell down in a saucer of sand heated by the sun to a temperature that felt more like May than January. Even in the summer few people climbed up here, and now, sheltered from the beach below and the old sand track, their only spies were the gulls who hung over them shrieking scandal.

  They did not so much take off as loosen and selectively set aside some of their clothes. Peaches. Apricots. Peonies, full rich many petalled peonies fragrant and silky. Susan. ‘It’s one of the luxuries of the world to be here, now. Clean air, clean sand, us together.’ Dinah felt as if the sea were playing a long sonorous note on her bones, a secret vibration, the C far far below the keyboard, the kind of harmonic cloud La Monte Young created. The right harmonics through her body and her mind. Her friend, her love.

  Susa
n arched her long neck. She liked to be kissed on the neck. Sometimes Dinah felt like a vampire and other times she thought of Figaro mounting Tosca, grasping her nape in his teeth, of the kittens Tosca had transported the same way. Susan’s perfume filled Dinah’s nose and mouth. ‘What an ear you have, Pretty, my pretty baby, my lady, my angel, what a delicate ear like a peach blossom.’

  Lately Susan, who had been so passionate in their early years that they had sometimes made love for two hours until both were sore and neither could move, often merely offered herself to be caressed and pleased, returning perfunctory gestures of affection. Oh, she went through the motions and Dinah came with her, but the zing was sizzled out. Today Susan rolled on top of her to suck her breasts and kiss her in those long serpentine movements of the tongue that melted Dinah to warm honey. She was so delighted that she stopped wondering at the change and swam in her delight.

  Susan had her seasons and her cycles. Sometimes Dinah understood the causes of a particular trough of depression and sometimes it was mysterious to her, a fault opening in the earth where all had seemed firm in its integrity. Similarly, at times she could reach Susan and draw her out and other times nothing she did would avail. She thought of it as a pane of grey glass behind which her lover sulked. Then suddenly as today the glass was gone and Susan was with her, sensuous, warm, deeply comforting, healing Dinah into the richest silence she knew.

  Afterward they sat on the top of the outermost dune watching the waves slide in below, sinuous, cracking the whip of their white backs over the hidden sandbars. Susan brought two yellow apples out of her jacket and bit into one, handing the other to Dinah. She had polished it till it shone, as the afternoon shone. Dinah felt simple with joy. Everything I want is here, now, that’s all I want, she thought, just this, just to be alive now. Problems of being a woman composer, bad reviews, the question of offspring, all seemed as far away as Gibraltar across that glittering blue arc. Her life was filled to the top, quivering with light.

  Susan stared and stared at the sea, content too, Dinah thought. Susan buried her core neatly in the sand. ‘Laurie wants to get some mileage on her Rover so she can take it in for the first checkup. She’s driving down to New York this week to pick up some things before the buyers move into her condominium. Jimmy’s going with her. We could go too …’

  ‘To New York?’ Dinah yawned, the sun on her face painting her closed eyes vermilion as she lay on the warm sand. ‘I’m chugging along on my new commission. I have some interesting ideas I want to work out.’

  ‘What would a week matter? Or only four or five days. I want to shop the January sales and I want to see a play – any play. I want to dine in a splendid restaurant with sixteen waiters – Tyrone would take us out, you know he would. He always knows just where to go.’

  Nothing could sound less appealing. Dinah rose on her elbow looking at Susan. ‘I’m hot on my work now. Tuesday I have to be in Boston to sit in on a run-through of my Meditation. Why don’t you ask Willie? There’s always some gallery or museum show he’s curious to see.’

  ‘I did ask him. He’s just like you. He’s in the middle of constructing a plastic bone heap and he won’t be bothered to have any fun.’

  Fun, Dinah pondered. Willie was surely having fun if he was working well. She herself evaporated into composition when the flow was on, only to return to her forgotten life hours later with a sense of having been far and high and wide. Susan was a little bored with her designs. She needed some new stimulus. A craftsman in a matrix with two artists may want her work to do more for her and to the world than it can. Yet Susan was more successful as a fabric designer than Willie was as a sculptor.

  Susan was shivering, she noticed. It was, after all, January and the sun had slid halfway toward the pines. Shadows spread out to where they sat as the sand began to relinquish its warmth.

  ‘You could go with Jimmy. He’s good company and you haven’t had time alone with him in a couple of years.’

  ‘We wouldn’t have time alone. He’s helping Laurie. Sure, he wouldn’t mind my coming along in the car but once he’s in Manhattan, he won’t want to hang around with me. He has his own plans. If it isn’t Laurie he’s after, and I surely hope it isn’t, then he’s about to look up some old girlfriend. Really, who’d have expected our Jimmy to grow up irresistible?’

  ‘I suspect the keenest Don Juans were lonely nerds in high school. Not that Jimmy was ever that. But do you think he’s interested in Laurie?’

  ‘Of course not, Dinah, they practically grew up together. There’s no romantic stranger in each other to fall in love with.’

  ‘Was I a romantic stranger to you?’ She helped Susan into her jacket and they started along the dune road toward their own trail home. She wanted Susan to draw near her again.

  ‘Oh, with women, that doesn’t matter.’

  ‘You just don’t remember. You thought I was dashing and smashing when I got back from New Mexico.’

  ‘Then you hit the road on a whim. You weren’t such a homebody. You picked up that grungy pack you used to carry on your back and you were ready for wild adventure. You’d run off with me at a moment’s notice.’

  ‘I also wasn’t performed then. All I ever did was play other people’s music, and I never had the raw talent or the drive to be a virtuoso.’ Dinah liked to play and she played the flute excellently but not superbly, piccolo about the same, and another eight instruments with diminishing mastery. She was still on the road more than she liked, to direct or perform her own music, to coach, to lecture or run workshops. ‘Pretty, I travel for money and stay home for fun. Here is where I want to be.’

  Susan was no longer listening. Instead of going arm in arm, she was walking ahead, tossing her head contemptuously. The pane of glass was back in place. Dinah kicked at the sand, disgusted. Maybe she could get Susan to come into Boston with her when her Meditation was performed. Nita had room for them to sleep over in the house she shared with another woman in Newton. Dinah hoped that a public performance in Susan’s presence would glorify her in the eyes of her beloved. She sure needed some kind of help.

  Chapter Eleven

  WILLIE

  Just a little after seven as Willie was finishing his coffee, the phone rang. He always shut off the ring upstairs so that if he had an early call – everybody knew he got up at six and had to be caught before he went to his studio – it would not wake Susan.

  ‘Willie?’ the voice startled him on first hearing because on the phone Johnny sounded exactly like Susan.

  ‘Johnny, kitten, how are you? It’s a pleasure to hear your voice.’

  ‘I’m fine, Dad. I’ve just got a new gallery. It’s run by two gay men who are really into new art. They show some exciting stuff from New York and Paris and Berlin.’

  ‘Are they going to give you a show?’

  ‘They promised me one in the fall, along with a sculptor. I’ve really got to produce in the next few months. I have a show in Rochester this August too. I sold two pieces in the group show over Christmas, so I got a new coat. It’s leather all the way down to the ground, black leather outside and possum inside. I love it!’

  ‘Every time you get a little ahead, you spend it. I bet you could live and paint for two months on what you put out for that coat.’

  ‘It makes me feel good. Besides, what’s wrong with working? You always work construction when you need money.’

  ‘But maybe I’d get a lot more done if I didn’t have to bother with construction. I’ve taken on two jobs for Tyrone Burdock, and there are times I surely wish I hadn’t.’

  ‘I meet other artists when I mat and frame for them … I had a postcard from Jimmy. So he and Lisa split?’

  ‘Jimmy’s staying here.’

  ‘He’s gone back home? I don’t believe it. What regression!’ She sounded delighted. ‘Is he there? I should say hi.’

  ‘I bet he’s up. Don’t get on his back about Lisa. She tossed him out.’

  ‘I just think it’s a riot he cr
awled back home to you and Mother. Really! How’s herself?’

  ‘Just dandy. How’s your boyfriend, Aldo?’

  ‘He just had an impacted wisdom tooth out, so don’t ask me how he is or I may tell you.’

  ‘I’ll fetch Jimmy for you, kitten.’

  ‘Willie, don’t mention to Mother the paintings I sold. She always wants everything to be a big story. Who bought them, where do they live, she drives me crazy wanting to make a romance out of a business transaction.’

  While his children were teasing each other, Willie washed his breakfast dishes. He had not answered Johnny truthfully about Susan. Lately he could feel Susan knotting herself up. Actually that was too tactile. No, it was the feeling on a summer’s day of the pressure dropping on you, the leaves lolling, the sky getting sulfurous, the congestion of an electric storm about to break open. Summers here were nothing like summers in North Carolina, where he had grown up. The spring and the fall were prolonged here, but summer was pretty much from sometime in June to sometime in September, just as the calendar said. Susan’s moodiness was more like the immense thunderstorms of home. A storm took its time building. Then once it started, it took a long while to wear itself out and pass out to sea.

  Christmas, the holiday season, had not satisfied her this year, although he did not know what could have been lacking. Johnny hadn’t come home for the holidays in four years. She called him every few weeks, always early in the mornings when she knew Susan would not yet be up. Since Johnny had entered high school, she and Susan had been at war. In theory, Susan would have liked Johnny to come home; in actuality, the two of them would be fighting pitched battles every few hours.