by Marge Piercy
She was surprised to watch the four men and the woman on the board chatting with Willie and Jimmy and obviously having some ongoing relationship with the local one-horse lawyer Tyrone was using. She had never thought of the town as active in the winter, having a life of its own. Obviously they recognized her, but she had not even known they existed, local builders and businessmen. One ran a gallery and another an inn. The woman was a retired professor from Smith. Hers was the third case after a man who wanted to expand his boat-repair yard. This was apparently the second time the gallery proposal had come before them, after Tyrone, the architect from New York and Willie had redrawn the plans to meet previous objections.
Beside her, Jimmy murmured a steady commentary on the cases and the personalities involved. This one was the offspring of New York intellectuals who had come to the Cape to drink themselves to death, and had left the boy almost destitute and without the money for an education beyond two years at the community college. Now he was working in a gas station. That one was a millionaire on paper, although always short of cash, a hot developer who had parlayed an old moneyless Cape family’s land into a mortgage pyramid to finance his building. That one had been having an affair for the last ten years with the town nurse, who was married to the lawyer. Those two old men had not spoken in thirty years; each spent his time in litigation trying to prevent the other from expanding his business. Here was a Boston lawyer using conservation law to prevent a retired postal worker from building a modest house that would diminish the view of an accountant and his rich wife. It reminded her of going to some gathering with Tyrone and having him fill her in on past histories, affairs, animosities, so that she could conduct herself accordingly. Actually, she seldom conducted herself any particular way, being too shy to manoeuvre at a party. Tyrone told her those stories to entertain her, and also to show off how much he knew. Jimmy was doing the same.
Jimmy did not care for living at home. She understood, although Tyrone caused her no problems. If she had to live with her mother, she would go out of her mind. Jimmy was spending lots of time at Dinah’s little house, where he ate every other night. The old triangle had finally broken up, and Dinah was obviously at loose ends. Laurie wondered briefly if Dinah could be interested in Jimmy, even though he was fourteen years younger; but that didn’t seem to be the case. Jimmy said she was lonely and he insisted Laurie come with him to dinner at the old house one Wednesday night.
It was not quite as small inside as it looked from the outside, but it was half the size of the house next door where Laurie had been hundreds of times. It was furnished with charming antiques and simple old pieces, with a piano in the livingroom that ran all across the pond side. Probably walls had been taken down at some point. None of the old Cape houses had original rooms the size of this one.
The dinner that Dinah served them was surprisingly good: a pot roast of lamb shoulder in a vaguely Greek style with beans, tomatoes, garlic, lemons served with rice pilaf. It was a better meal than she had had the night before at Susan’s. Laurie had always assumed that Susan was the good cook, but now she wondered.
When they moved into the livingroom, a grey cat climbed into Dinah’s lap. It seemed to Laurie the cat was trying to stare her down. A huge orange cat with a big head stood on Jimmy’s knees and made a digging motion with its front paws. The others seemed to take the presence of animals for granted, so she said nothing, as if she were used to having them nosing around.
‘Just the idea of going out and trying to get it together with someone is appalling at my age,’ Dinah said. ‘Or maybe it’s not my age but the age that’s awry. In my twenties, I didn’t think much harder about fucking somebody than about going out for a beer with them. And all I ever got for my adventures was a urinary infection a couple of times and the crabs once.’
‘The crabs?’ Laurie repeated.
Laurie and Dinah looked at each other in mutual incomprehension. Then Jimmy stepped in. ‘Body lice,’ he said briskly. ‘They live in body hair.’
‘Yetch! I’m glad we didn’t talk about this while we were eating. I’d die if I caught something like that!’
‘They weren’t that bad,’ Dinah said gently. ‘Not like fleas. They just itched. Those dousings with A-I pyrinate were a ritual of the times. Anyhow the point I was trying to make is that there wasn’t any danger then except getting pregnant. I never even knew anybody who had the clap. We were amazingly lucky and we never worried about disease.’
Laurie was more appalled than she imagined Dinah would ever guess. For Laurie, sex had always been rather fraught. Mostly she had gone to bed with men when it was unavoidable, but she could not imagine seeking sex or having that as the primary component of how she related to somebody. It wasn’t that she was cold. In fact once she was into a relationship and trusted the man and felt cared for, she often wanted sex with him more than he with her, as had happened with Tom. But she could not imagine walking into a room and looking at some guy and thinking, What a good-looking man, let’s fuck. It seemed to her as bizarre as looking at a painting by one of the young painters whose work she admired or seeing a spectacular cloud formation over a salt marsh and saying to it, Do you wanna fuck? What a reaction to an aesthetic frisson! It felt like a short circuit in the brain, two different responses fusing because wires were crossed.
Jimmy was saying, ‘You just tend now to choose partners from people you know already, because you have some idea how much risk they represent.’
‘But we meet new people all the time. How do you put someone on hold while you investigate them?’ Dinah shook her head. ‘It all seems weird and awkward to me. I don’t think I’m fit for life in these times.’
‘I never felt I was,’ Laurie burst out. ‘All my life I’ve wished things could be simpler. Plainer. Quieter.’
‘You might like living here, then,’ Dinah said seriously. ‘You can simplify your life far more than you can in the city – if you really want to. It doesn’t follow it’ll be simple here. You can get as baroque in your relationships as you desire.’
‘I wouldn’t think so, really,’ Laurie said, wondering who on earth Dinah thought she could become involved with, the plumber? ‘I want to paint seriously. I want to set up the gallery and make a success of it.’
Jimmy built a fire in the fireplace. Now he sat beside it, the warmest spot, with his feet up on a hassock watching both of them with a proprietary air. He seemed quite pleased with himself and with them. The night was crisp and clear outside, but markedly less cold than it had been. The pond was no longer safe to cross so they had walked around it. The sand road was clear of snow. Dinah insisted that spring was already beginning. ‘I’ve had crocuses in bloom on the south side of the house for two weeks already. Early species crocuses. You can see the buds changing on the trees. Willie taught me to notice that. They get furrier, elongated. The twigs brighten on the swamp maples.’ Dinah’s face flattened with sadness.
‘Who do you miss more, Susan or Willie?’ Jimmy asked her.
Laurie was shocked. ‘That’s a ghastly question to ask! That’s like those ghoulish problems kids set each other, would you rather lose your arm or your leg?’
Dinah said blandly, ‘Tomorrow I have to drive into Boston, to be there by seven in the evening. I’m staying at my friend Nita’s. Either of you want to come along? I’ll be returning by late afternoon the next day, unless we have supper there before we drive back.’
‘I’ll go with you,’ Jimmy said. ‘What time are you leaving?’
Laurie was annoyed at him running off, now that they had started construction. As usual he could read her reactions in her face, turning to say, ‘I have to get butcher block for your kitchenette countertop. I can get it wholesale in Boston.’ He swung back to Dinah. ‘I have an old friend to stay with. What will you be doing?’
‘I have comps to the BSO – Itzak Raab is playing. I can’t take you, because I promised Nita’s room-mate Giselle. The next morning, I have to meet with him.’
�
��Itzak Raab? You’re meeting Itzak Raab?’ Laurie couldn’t remember exactly what he played, but she knew what he looked like from his picture in People magazine and articles about him in the Sunday Times. He was certainly a celebrity. Yet Dinah had not mentioned that she was meeting him until just now, and probably wouldn’t have brought it up at all if Jimmy hadn’t asked what she was going to do in the city.
‘I have to talk to him about the piece I’m commissioned to write.’ Dinah was looking downcast. ‘I wish I’d never agreed!’
‘Why, Dee? It could do your career some good,’ Jimmy said. ‘You want him on your side if he has to perform it. Wouldn’t you like him to play it again?’
‘I’m just afraid he’ll ask me to tone down my ideas. Try to get me to produce something easier. Maybe he’ll hate what I’m doing and refuse to play it. It could all fall through.’
Jimmy grinned. ‘Go on, I bet musicians are like actors looking for a good part. He wants to show off. Just prove you’re giving him a good shot.’
Dinah grunted, staring into the fire. ‘I wish I was only seeing Nita. Suppose we get stuck? There’ll probably be a storm.’
‘I heard a weather report. It’s supposed to be almost balmy.’
‘I’m bound to offend him. He’ll find me an uppity woman and there goes my chance. It’d be better if we just talked on the phone and then he couldn’t know what I’m like.’
Jimmy didn’t understand, Laurie could tell. He thought Dinah should jump on the opportunity to sell herself and her work to Raab. Laurie empathized. Before she went to see some gallery owner, she’d have diarrhoea for a whole day. She’d walk around the block three or even four times before she could make herself enter the building. If the gallery was upstairs, she’d ride up and down in the elevator for ten minutes. Jimmy couldn’t understand because he had an easy confidence in his charm and his person, and because he had no vulnerable art he was trying to usher out into the world. ‘You’ll play some of it for him, right?’ Laurie asked.
‘It seems like chutzpah to play for a virtuoso who’s six times better than me. I’ll bring the rough score for the first section.’
‘So he’ll be playing it maybe. Whatever, just keep the emphasis on the music and don’t talk too much,’ Laurie said. ‘Then you won’t keep worrying about whether you’re saying the right thing.’
Dinah grinned. ‘That sounds like great advice.’
‘Wear that black dress Mother made you – you know the one I mean,’ Jimmy said. ‘That’s sophisticated and sexy and makes you look foxy.’
‘At breakfast? No thanks.’
‘Come on,’ he said to Laurie and stood up, yanking Dinah out of the rocking chair. ‘Let’s go look through her closet and pick out something for her to wear tomorrow. Otherwise she’ll go in her jeans.’
Laurie did help. Jimmy and she finally found a jumper and silk blouse combination Dinah was willing to wear. Dinah had no sense how to dress for the city; obviously she had obeyed Susan when she had to get dressed up. Laurie was liking Dinah better than before. Dinah wasn’t the formidable tough bar dyke Laurie had always imagined her to be. She seemed vulnerable and not as knowledgeable in some ways as Laurie herself. Jimmy was proved right again, dragging her over there. She felt almost comfortable with Dinah.
Chapter Seventeen
DINAH
Nita and Dinah had been friends since Juilliard, where for two years they had shared an apartment the size of a shower stall. Dinah’s phone bills arrived every month with a half-hour phone call each Monday night, from the Cape or wherever she was. Nita always called her Wednesdays. Neither had liked the other’s husband, but both had managed to avoid a rift. Nita had married two years after Mark died; her marriage had come apart very soon following Tanya’s birth, for her husband was too much of a baby, Dinah thought, to put up with a rival. It was all worth it for Tanya. Tanya, who was just five, was what Dinah imagined when she saw her own child in her desiring mind: bright, musical, mischievous, affectionate, with willpower like a drilling rig that could penetrate to the earth’s molten core.
Nita was tall, with glossy black hair she kept in a neat cap, enormous doe eyes and a body that had stayed pear-shaped after Tanya’s birth, like the cello she played. Nita was the youngest in a large Italian family from Staten Island, with parents old enough to be her grandparents. Her father had retired on his fireman’s pension. He had chronic bronchitis but could not tear himself from the extended family to relocate in a warmer climate. In her own gardening, Dinah was imitating the garden around their home, with its rambling tomatoes and blowsy old-fashioned roses, its grapevines, eggplants, red and green peppers. When she went into Boston, Dinah stayed with Nita in the turn of the century house she and Tanya shared with Giselle and Giselle’s daughter Eileen, in Newton five blocks from the highway.
Tonight she met Nita at the BSO. Just before the concert, she picked up at the box office the handwritten tickets Itzak Raab had left in her name. Giselle was using the other ticket, as she seldom got to hear Nita. If they weren’t both performing (Giselle played in a local chamber orchestra and taught at the New England Conservatory), the other would be home baby-sitting both girls. But Giselle wanted to hear Itzak too.
Ozawa started with a brisk Haydn. Then Itzak sauntered out with his flute tucked under his arm to play a shimmering Mozart K313. Nita had asked her if she was going to come back at intermission, but she preferred to wait to meet him until the next day. Giselle urged her to change her mind, but she was adamant.
She didn’t get to see Tanya until breakfast time. ‘I didn’t even know you were here,’ Tanya said, climbing into her lap and lacing her hands in Dinah’s curls.
‘I snuck in and saw you asleep last night.’
‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’
‘Your mother would kill me. So would you.’
Sweet face cheek to cheek with hers, snuggly body smelling of soap and banana, from her breakfast cereal. Although Nita was tall and dark and Giselle short and blonde, their daughters, Tanya and Eileen, both had smooth light brown hair caught back in slides, and often passed for sisters. But only Tanya called her aunt. Only Tanya climbed into her lap and hugged her neck and asked her with intense severity, like someone paying a formal call, about Tosca and Figaro. Tanya had been promised a kitten for her sixth birthday, and every week she changed her mind about what colour it was to be. ‘And so dumb bozo Billy didn’t repeat when we got to the capo and just kept going while we went back like you’re supposed to! Ugh. Was it all a mess. Are you going to take me to the aquarium today?’
‘Not today.’ She always took Tanya to the aquarium every spring. ‘Next month. It’s a date.’
‘I’m going to have a spotted cat. I saw one on TV.’
‘It cost a thousand dollars,’ Eileen said.
‘No spotted cats,’ Nita said. ‘How could we tell if it was clean? Dinah honey, if you’re not going to be late, you better get organized.’
‘Music was our common language,’ Dinah said. ‘Beside sitting and listening the odd times he did want to talk, playing music was the one thing I could do for my father. We weren’t even native speakers of the same language. But through music we communicated. That was the way I could touch him, the way I could please him.’
‘That’s at least some connection. Music was part rebellion and part compulsion for me. When I was inside the music, I didn’t care about anything else. Who were these two people who called themselves my parents? I was closer to my flute teacher.’
‘Oh, when I was actually playing, I didn’t think about my father. It’s just that growing up on the streets, you need somebody to give you reinforcement for something so exotic as playing the flute.’
‘You think growing up in the suburbs it’s more relevant? For my parents, it was like I was running back to the ghetto. That was the old folks’ shtick – Little Itzak will be a genius at seven and make some money for the family and we can pay the landlord this month. No, I was supposed to be a psychi
atrist, a stockbroker. Not a musician, that was too ethnic. Almost embarrassing.’
‘Short Hills, New Jersey …’ she mused. It made her think of short hairs. His hair was not so much long as dense, bushy. He had a sharp face built around large wide-set brown-black eyes and a long arching, flaring nose, a chin with a marked cleft as if a finger had touched it and left a print. He was only three inches taller than she was but his hair made him seem taller. Performing he always looked tall. Close up he was not lean but solid and strongly built. She thought he probably worked out to keep his strength on the road.
‘My name isn’t what I was given at birth. My father had changed Raab to Roberts. I was Ian Roberts. I took Raab back and renamed myself. I did it partly to annoy. And partly because I felt lost. I wanted to be who I really was. I was more at home with my grandparents than with my parents. I was always running off to New York to see them – Avenue A on the Lower East Side. When they turned eighty and my bubba got mugged for the third time, my father finally got them into a retirement community where they died within a year. I still miss them. My problem was feeling rootless. Of course it was easier for them to like me than for my parents. Here I was, a genuine prodigy and a disappointment to my father, who wanted a well-adjusted suburban quarterback. Flute playing wasn’t American enough, WASP enough.’
‘Is it still that way?’
‘Is there more coffee?’ He turned the pot upside down. ‘Never mind, I have a coffee machine. It makes better coffee than room service. I’m addicted to caffeine, so I carry it with me – that and five pounds of converters to make it work in Finland and Italy, plugs and transformers. Then you stick the transformer into three plugs in the right combination so you can finally ram it in the wall, and the whole apparatus is so heavy it falls out.’