Summer People

by Marge Piercy

  ‘Don’t worry. They’ll taste the same.’ She was thinking maybe she could secretly reshape them in the kitchen.

  Burt arrived with the gefilte fish. ‘Darling, don’t say anything. Leroy baked some bread today, he was trying to be nice. I told him to leave it home, but he insisted on bringing it. Could we put it on the table anyhow?’

  ‘Let me freeze it, and I promise the next time I have you over, we’ll all enjoy it.’

  They sat down at the table finally. Introductions had gone well. Nobody paid special attention to Itzak. To the others he was the shmuck from New York who had filled the house with smoke. Laurie knew, but she was used to celebrities and semicelebrities and was her usual shy self. Jimmy was undampened in his customary insouciance, his hand greased with vitamin E and wrapped ostentatiously in a white handkerchief. Maybe things would work out.

  The battle of the Haggadahs was on.

  Gary: ‘Blessed art thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, who hast kept us from harm and sustaineth us and sanctifieth us among the nations, Blessed be He.’

  Zee: ‘Pharaoh is the same as any other king, dictator or boss who oppresses working people since the class war began. Let us now sing, “We Shall Overcome.”’

  Itzak: ‘Yatayatayatayatayatayatayatayatayata.’ He spoke the Hebrew in a dead rush as if compelled to cram it all into one champion flute player’s exhalation.

  Courtney: ‘When do we eat?’ (The first question.)

  Only Itzak and Burt remembered how to read Hebrew, and only Itzak, Jenny and Dinah knew any of the melodies. She could tell from Itzak’s face that like her he found the sound of the eight uncertain voices savaging ‘Mah nistanah halilah hazeh’ in eight different wavering keys as unpleasant as brakes squealing. Whenever it was Itzak’s turn, he read the Hebrew in a run-together marathon monotone, like an auctioneer selling off a prize bull. It was a high hypnotic supercharged mumble that brought instant glaze to the eyes of everyone else at the table. It stirred ancient unpleasant memories in Dinah, old men making sure, she had suspected at twelve, that you couldn’t understand a word they said no matter how well you had studied your Hebrew.

  ‘Did someone in your family read the Haggadah that way?’ she thought to ask, for his accent rattling it off was entirely different than the way he spoke Hebrew normally, like an Israeli: from his ex-wife, of course.

  Itzak looked surprised. ‘My grandfather. He never skipped anything, but he managed to get through it all in an hour and twenty minutes …’

  ‘How did you ever figure out what he was saying?’

  ‘I didn’t have the faintest idea for years. I knew it had something to do with Moses and food, that was it.’

  Gary: ‘Who is like unto the Lord our God, He that is enthroned on high, that gazeth down far far below upon the earth; Who lifteth up the poor out of the dust and preserveth the needy out of the dunghill …’

  Zee: ‘Why do we eat bitter herbs tonight? We eat bitter herbs dipped in the salt water of tears so that we will remember the taste of oppression and unite ourselves with the oppressed everywhere who are fighting for their freedom. Let us sing “Solidarity Forever.”’

  Itzak: ‘Gibblegibblegibblegibblegibblegibble.’

  Courtney: ‘Why do I have to eat horseradish? It burns my mouth.’ (The second question.)

  Dinah was filling her cup too full and drinking it all down each time. It felt appropriate. The wine was so sweet she forgot how alcoholic it was. Itzak was on her right and Laurie on her left. She had been liking Laurie better lately. She tried to do the right thing. She was the best behaved person at the table. They should have had Laurie ask the four questions.

  Courtney: ‘Can Molly and I go watch TV till this is over?’ (The third question.)

  At some point she realized Burt had taken over and was making it move forward. From somewhere in his present Fred Astaire persona rose a rabbinical scholar who settled points of precedence, danced through the maze of differing texts and herded the rowdy guests toward the final goal.

  Courtney: ‘How much do we get from the afikomen?’ (The fourth question.)

  By the time they were ready to eat, Dinah found herself too drunk to manage. Her head was floating beside the light fixture. Laurie and Jimmy served. Jimmy had been in and out all day and knew what she had been cooking. By the time she had eaten her plate of chicken soup with the matzoh balls in it perfectly light and fluffy, she found herself too dizzy to stand. She drifted up the stairs as the gedempte flaisch mit abricotten was being served and decided it would not hurt if she lay down for just a moment on her bed.

  When she awoke, Itzak was sitting on the edge with a cup of coffee. ‘Your guests are still at the table. I think they’ve given up on finishing the service. They’re finishing each other instead.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It didn’t work.’ To her embarrassment a large tear rolled out of her eye. She grabbed for the coffee and drank it down scalding hot. She felt like a large incompetent child. She could hear the babble of voices and the canned roar of the television from below. ‘Thank you for the coffee! I have to go downstairs. This is embarrassing.’

  ‘Tomorrow night we’ll eat the leftovers and make a second night seder that works, I promise you. Don’t fret.’ He took the empty cup from her hands and helped her up. His mouth brushed hers as he pulled her against him for a long moment and then turned her toward the door. ‘Thank you for trying.’

  Her reflexes were slow. She was just realizing she had been kissed as she picked her way clinging to the railing down the steep flight. It had happened too quickly for her befogged condition. She was not even quite sure what had happened, whether it was affectionate, consolatory or sexual. She did not feel up to sorting it out. Living with Susan and Willie, it had been years since she had had to put together a social evening on her own, and her life with Mark had never followed conventional formulae. ‘I saved a plate of food for you,’ Itzak said. ‘Eat something.’

  However, when she got downstairs she found people in a jolly mood. The food had been a huge success and Molly and Courtney were watching television in the livingroom, collapsed into inebriated giggles. Jenny and Leroy had formed an alliance of underappreciated spouses and were discussing couples therapy in low voices. Jimmy was selling Gary a sleeping porch, to be added in the fall. Burt was organizing the dishwashing. He had Laurie drying, he was washing, and he drafted Itzak into fetching the dirties and Dinah into putting the clean ones away. Figaro had climbed on the counter and was begging leftovers, stuffing himself until his eyes glazed over while Tosca, glaring from the top of the refrigerator, deigned to eat a few tidbits.

  By eleven they were all gone. The coffee was still buzzing in Dinah’s brain. Laurie had taken the extra table off with her. The embers of Jimmy’s well-made fire smouldered in the fireplace. Itzak and she sat on the couch and stared at it. She still felt befuddled. She could not decide what was happening. Maybe he expected to sleep with her as a matter of courtesy since she had invited him to be her houseguest. She had no idea. She briefly wished she had allowed Jimmy to move in, not as her lover but as her roommate. It would be infinitely easier to handle the situation if they were not alone. Or did she want to ‘handle’ it? Was she curious about him? Yes, but wary. Figaro lay on his back with his white belly exposed, smack in the middle of the hearth rug snoring softly.

  ‘I haven’t figured out yet how to live in the States,’ he said. ‘I moved back to New York without thinking about it. I went to school there – like you. My grandparents had always been there. So I returned and bought a condominium on automatic pilot … I don’t like how long it takes me to go in and out of LaGuardia and Kennedy. I don’t like my apartment. I don’t like never seeing the countryside. I had a little house in Périgord, not fancy. A little stone house in a village that clings to a red cliff. We sold it in the divorce. Now I miss it. I had the use too of a friend’s house in the Cotswolds, all the years I lived in London. I can’t figure out exactly what I need to do with my life to make it
more comfortable.’

  ‘When did you get divorced?’

  ‘Two years ago.’

  ‘What happened? She was Israeli?’

  ‘You’ve been asking questions about me.’ He looked sideways at her with a knowing smile. ‘Caught you.’

  ‘I’m someone who likes gossip. It’s a weakness of character, but endearing, don’t you think?’

  ‘You were checking me out.’

  ‘Whereas you never asked anybody about me but just came down here for Pesach thinking I might have fourteen children and a drunken husband.’

  ‘I gather that your long ménage à trois has folded its tents.’

  ‘Quite. Jimmy is their son, and he still talks to me. But neither of them do.’

  ‘I was wondering who the kid was. He’s possessive of you.’

  ‘He’s family, really.’

  ‘No one else in the picture?’

  ‘I’m quite clean if that’s what you’re trying to figure out. And yourself, Itzak? Who are you?’

  ‘I had a life but it came apart. My wife was a dancer who gave that up when she got pregnant, after we’d been married five years. I think we were happy together until then. But she miscarried in her sixth month and they couldn’t save the embryo. She was determined to replace it with a real baby. But she couldn’t get pregnant again.’

  ‘Did the doctors say why?’ She wondered if it could be like that for her. Dr Bridey said that she had already made up her mind not to, because she had waited too long. The women’s magazines were full of stories of women who waited too long and proved infertile.

  ‘Every doctor had a different explanation. Our whole life got organized around the effort. When and how we made love, what we ate, all kinds of crackpot diets. She was always taking her temperature and saying, not tonight, or suddenly, “Now! Right now!” I began to wonder if I really wanted a baby after all. It was like living in a combination sickroom and lab.’

  ‘Why did she want a baby so badly?’

  ‘Once she’d stopped dancing, it became the focus of all her energy and all her discontent. It was something she wanted more than she’d wanted to dance, more than she wanted me.’

  ‘And you resented that.’

  ‘I did. I felt incidental to the great fertility quest. It turned me off, finally. I began to dread going home. I had a long affair with a violinist who was unhappily married too. But we never wanted to live together and when my marriage fell apart, so did our affair.’

  ‘What finally broke up your marriage?’

  ‘My wife began having an affair too and she got pregnant by the other man. She decided her luck would be better with him.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Actually yes. She had a little boy while we were getting divorced.’

  ‘So you felt betrayed?’

  ‘No.’ He grinned. ‘If we’re being truthful, I felt relieved. It was off my back. She had what she wanted and I was free to go on my way. But I’m lying a little too, making myself more rational than I was. Sometimes I felt relieved and sometimes I felt like a classic cuckold, that they were both laughing at me. It was messy. Too messy to live with the remains. So I came back to the States.’

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Hot pussy. A nice Jewish girl. Safe sex. A harbour when I put to. What’s anybody looking for? All of the above. Someone who won’t confuse me with a sperm bank. What are you looking for?’

  ‘I haven’t been looking. I’ve been trying to learn to live my life now that I have it back.’ She felt slightly evasive, because she knew very well one of his attractions was a possible father: she was that age, it was that time. How could she help but think that here he was Jewish, attractive, musically talented. Wouldn’t Dr Bridey be surprised if she showed up pregnant? Well, she couldn’t do that by impulse, for she was still on the pill.

  ‘Ah, but you were the one invited me.’

  She thought, you follow your own star. What else can you do? You do what you know how to do. ‘Shall we go upstairs? It’s late. We’ve both been up forever.’

  He could take that either way. She climbed the steps without looking back and entered her own room. He was right behind her. ‘You have a nice big bed.’ He caught her around the waist, drawing her back against him. His mouth slid down the side of her neck and his hands moved up over her breasts. Both the men she had been with for any length of time, Mark and Willie, had been much taller than she was. Itzak was closer to her height and it was strangely exciting.

  She swung around to face him and their mouths joined, their hips came together. In a way it was more like making love with a woman, with Susan, someone close to her in size. Everything was in the right place. His erection was not sticking in her navel but rubbing against her mons. Her breath rasped in her throat. She felt at once loose and juicy, a strong desire to take him and roll him onto the bed and chew on him, curl around him, take him up into her; and a cautious nervous watchfulness. Here she was committed to something she had not really decided to do. You never knew when you took off your clothes with a man exactly what you were getting into, what demons you might be loosing. For years and years she had not been in bed with anyone she had not known intimately, absolutely. In her early life, she had gone to bed with men she had picked up at parties, but she had lost the habit of touching strangers. It felt too intimate to be handling each other in the cold bedroom, to be getting together into her bed. On the dresser Tosca crouched, making little noises of dismay.

  They were awkward getting out of their clothes. They each had eight elbows and said excuse me every fifteen seconds. Their bodies at first bumped and knocked knees. It felt very unrehearsed and fumbling. When she saw him sliding a condom onto his prick, she said, ‘Oh, I’m on the pill.’

  He gave her a surprised look and went on wriggling the condom over himself. It was as if a cold finger were placed on her nipple. Oh. Safe sex. He was not sure of her. Indeed, how could she be sure of him? Welcome to the wonderful world of the AIDS epidemic. She had not made love with a barrier between organs since high school. It was hard to forget that piece of rubber chafing at her thigh.

  When he came into her, he lay still with a great sigh and for a moment she thought he had ejaculated. No, he was still hard in her, she could feel him. He was just resting as if he had climbed a great hill. No, she thought, he was only beginning to climb. Now they were climbing together, very slowly at first, a hill that promised to be high enough, quite high enough.

  Because she tended to moan and croon many nonverbal noises while she was making love, she could tell he was not sure whether or not she had come. She had not, she could not the first time. She was awkward and too curious with him to relax that much, and too tired to concentrate on her own sensations. Before he could ask her – if he meant to – she fell into sleep and its warm waters closed over her head. She was vaguely aware of Tosca arriving in the bed with a flying leap and standing on her hip, hissing once at Itzak to warn him she was not to be had so easily as Dinah, then turning round and round and crawling under the covers to sleep between them, an ineffectual furry chaperon.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  LAURIE

  Laurie could not understand why Jimmy thought the evening before had been funny or why he was peeved that Itzak Raab was staying with Dinah. Laurie thought it was a nice touch of class. He was cute, although awfully short. She had seen him on television and thought he would be as tall as Daddy. Dinah had knocked herself out doing all that cooking so that by the time the guests arrived, she could only sit nodding out and smiling wistfully. But Itzak had been watching Dinah. He might be interested, Laurie thought, and rather hoped it would be so. Many people in music were attracted to each other in different ways than normal people and Dinah wouldn’t mind that Itzak was short and he wouldn’t care that she was dumpy and fleshy.

  In the meantime she had her own life to see to. She had been spending a great deal of time with Jimmy. He had been completely gentle and sweet and companionab
le with her. Except for an occasional peck on the cheek or squeeze of the hand, he had barely acknowledged their sexes. It had been soothing. He had made her feel at ease and safe.

  He had been all of that, and she was sick of it. She had come to think of him as radiantly handsome beyond Tom, beyond any man she had been involved with. Normally she didn’t care much what a man looked like. What use was it, anyhow? Women fell in love with the men they could have. But why couldn’t she have Jimmy? He was there, available. His wife apparently had no interest in him. He had made a mistake but he seemed to have learned from it. She saw young women visit him once or twice, but he paid them less attention than he did his old buddies, especially those who had gone into the construction trades. He was friendlier with Toby Lloyd, who had used to live where the MacIvors were, than any young woman. Willie said that after they finished the boathouse and gallery, he wouldn’t take on another job for a year, but Jimmy had decided to go into building and was actively seeking connections.

  The false sense of familiarity from their adolescence had made her fail to appreciate how much he had changed – and Tyrone too seemed not to have noticed – but she could see the way women looked at him, gazed after him on the street. She was grateful too how he had run interference for her in town, gone with her to New York, taken her into Boston twice. She sensed that both Susan and Willie worried about the amount of time Jimmy was spending with her, and she resented that apprehension. Did they think her a child who could not say no? During Easter dinner, she was particularly aware how they attempted to interpose themselves between Jimmy and her. Susan had placed them at table as far from each other as they could be, with neither occupying the head or foot. She was stuck between Donald and Willie, with Sally across from her. Were they afraid Tyrone would be annoyed? He never consulted her about his marriages or his affairs. He had planned to spend Easter in Italy with a Contessa Sforzi whose brother was to have been his partner in condominium building on the coast of Spain. Something had queered that deal and cooled his romance, but Laurie was still resentful Tyrone had not intended to spend the holiday with her. Only by dumb luck had his plans changed, and he was only with her for twenty-four hours.