Summer People

by Marge Piercy

  If she felt less like the victim of a cosmic bad joke these days, a relic with a Kick Me sign on her butt, it was in large part because Susan and Willie, and even Dinah, but preeminently Jimmy had given her a safe nest in which to recover a sense of herself. Tyrone had been enormously solicitous right after the disaster, but she saw now that he had carried her here because she embarrassed him in New York. Too much bad luck is never welcome at a dinner party. He had removed her to a safe distance, and left her to Susan and Willie. He could hardly blame her if she found other comforts.

  Now with Tyrone deserting her again, what to do? She had never had to seduce. The problem had always been getting men to be patient until she could decide if it was serious enough to be willing. With Jimmy she knew she was willing. She imagined waking with him in her room. She imagined breakfast together in the diningroom, the French doors thrown open to the pond. It was warming up. Today, Wednesday, the sun burned off the fog by nine in the morning and the sky was highly polished, an uninterrupted blue slick as a waxed tile.

  She looked at herself in the mirror and thought she looked brighter than she had in several years. She had a light tan already from all the walking with Jimmy and Dinah. What had changed most was her expression, but she could not define the differences. Maybe I’ve lost weight, she thought, but she knew better because she had weighed herself on rising. She had gained two pounds.

  Jimmy was already banging on the boathouse. Willie and he were at work most days by seven-thirty. She would have a livingroom facing the pond, opening onto a large deck. Behind would be a kitchenette, a lovely bath and then up a circular metal staircase, her bed in the former sail loft. Compared to the big house, the rooms would not be spacious, but certainly her bedroom would be larger than she had had in Chelsea. Lately she could remember that room without visibly flinching, but the lovemaking there was retroactively tainted by the corpse who had lain in her bed.

  Sometimes she regretted Tyrone’s decision that she should have her own little house. Her room in the big house had seemed for years her truest home, her continuity with childhood. She didn’t really see why, with only the two of them, his houseguests and his assistant, his secretary and of course Celeste, she couldn’t simply live on in the big house. Perhaps Tyrone was anticipating what she was beginning to imagine, that she might fall in love again and want privacy.

  Obviously Jimmy cared about her. He had put her interests before his own time and again that spring. There was a kind of delicacy in him that was exceptional in a man. But how to break through that reserve? No doubt he was afraid to damage the friendship between them. She had to make the first move, but she had no idea how to begin. Suppose he were simply not attracted to her? Suppose he still saw her as the spoiled sixteen-year-old? She had seldom wished to be beautiful, because it seemed to her beauty had launched her mother into the world unarmed, unfit. When it was gone, a woman had nothing. What was so sad as a former beauty? Now she wished she had the confidence beauty gave. Suppose she made a move and Jimmy drew back, appalled.

  Maybe he had a disease and that was why he wouldn’t get involved with any of those young women who called on him. But he seemed robust. She could see him on the roof, hammering rapidly and with impunity. In the sun of the morning he had peeled off his jacket, then his shirt, wearing only his undershirt. The sun made his hair flame. She imagined that it would feel more like plumes than like male hair.

  If only Willie would be called away or be smitten with a sudden impulse to make things up with Dinah. She strolled over after breakfast to chat with them, but Willie was less friendly than usual. At first she wondered if he was annoyed with her because she had gone to Dinah’s party. Jimmy had gone too. Besides, Willie sometimes asked her about Dinah, as if he really wanted to know. Susan never did, although if Jimmy or Laurie mentioned Dinah’s name, Susan would stop whatever she was doing to listen. If she had not witnessed three of Tyrone’s divorces, she would not have believed middle-aged people could be so absurd about relationships. Willie would get a tense woebegone expression on his face that convinced Laurie he missed Dinah.

  She felt like saying to him, go on, see her. Let me have a little time with Jimmy this morning. Willie obviously did not like leaving them alone together. If they needed to pick up something at the hardware store, if he did not send Jimmy outright, he would take Jimmy with him even when certainly one of them would have sufficed.

  It wasn’t until Thursday, when Willie had to meet with the sanitary engineers about the gallery while Jimmy stayed on to finish shingling the roof, that she had a chance to catch him alone. She climbed the ladder, balancing against the pitch of the roof.

  ‘You’re not afraid of heights,’ he said. ‘I remember. You were the best girl at climbing trees.’

  ‘I was.’ She was flattered he remembered. She had been inordinately proud of her ability. She sat next to him, unable to figure out what to do. ‘How did you get involved with your wife?’

  If he thought that a non sequitur, he did not let on. ‘The usual way. I was working for a catering service and so was she.’

  ‘But how did it start between you?’

  ‘One night late I gave her a ride home. She asked me in. Like that. How most things get started.’

  ‘Do you think a woman should be the aggressor?’

  ‘Half an hour later, what difference does it make? But you were raised with more rigid sex role expectations than me.’

  ‘Because of Dinah?’

  He nodded, staring off in the direction of the old house. ‘Be careful of your step. A roof can be a dangerous place.’

  She was left to puzzle over that remark, for he picked up his hammer. But the way he smiled at her. It was a knowing and an inviting smile, she thought, but how could she be sure? Why didn’t he make a pass at her? She had not been in this situation since school, when she had wanted boys to ask her out who paid no attention. Jimmy paid attention. He had to be interested. He was cautious, viewing her as more fragile than she was.

  If only he wasn’t living at home! That too was awkward. He was saving money. At noon he accepted her invitation to come in for lunch. As if they were continuing the conversation on the roof, he said, ‘It’s expensive to fly to Seattle. I have to be there while she has the baby, even though she doesn’t want me to. I figure it’s a last chance. And I want to see the baby.’

  Now she understood. She was sick with disappointment, but his hesitation was clear and she could not argue with it. ‘When is the baby due?’

  ‘It’s supposed to be next week. I know with a first baby it could be late, but I have to go out and wait. Willie understands, but Susan doesn’t. She’s convinced if we’re not done by Memorial Day, Tyrone will be furious and somebody else will renovate the gallery.’

  ‘Really! Don’t worry about it. Tyrone’s doing it for me, anyhow.’ She thought she managed to sound quite blithe and sympathetic.

  ‘While he’s here, maybe you can feel him out about the timing.’

  ‘Sure.’ She felt vulnerable again. If Jimmy stayed in Seattle, what would happen to her? She had become dependent on him. It was more than that. She wanted to be with him. She could hardly beg him not to go to his estranged wife while she had his baby! That would be too gross.

  As if he were reading her mind, he said. ‘Will you be all right here? I don’t like to leave you alone. But Willie and Susan and Dinah are all available to you. No matter what happens, I won’t stay in Seattle. If Lisa and I get together, I’ll bring her and the baby back here.’

  ‘Will she want to come?’

  ‘I don’t even know that she’ll do more than glare at me.’ He sighed and took her hand. She felt it was an extremely meaningful gesture, in the context of what they’d been discussing. ‘I have to get my life settled. One way or the other. You understand.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said fervently and hollowly. ‘Of course!’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  WILLIE

  When Willie was first out of art
school, he found sculpture a lonelier activity than he had anticipated in the scarce and shared studios of college. He had begun working to the radio and had discovered the talk programmes, the call-ins. All day long people spoke to him while he worked, and mentally and sometimes aloud he answered them. If only Susan could learn to share that, she would not be so needy in the evenings for the sort of intense chatter she craved. Those voices discussed the news of the day, the issues, reviewed movies, kept him up with sports and the casual scandals of Washington and Hollywood. There was no subject out of current news that any guest mentioned on which Willie hadn’t formed an opinion. Sometimes he found Susan touchingly childlike in how little she knew of what was happening in the world.

  One reason he missed Dinah was that he used to discuss with her issues that roiled him up, when simply talking back to the radio didn’t suffice. Everybody had sore spots. Willie knew that better than most people, because of listening to the call-in shows. Some people got furious if somebody said God damn or mentioned evolution. He got a little crazy about South Africa. It was the nightmare of his childhood played out.

  He had grown up in a liberal family, with a father who always said, Remember they’re human too and they have rights. Separate but equal, maintain the dignity of the races. A gentleman always thinks of the feelings of others. A gentleman acts to protect the weak and succour the needy. Their family treated the coloured help well. He loved his Mona, whom he wasn’t allowed to call Mammy because that was lacking in dignity. Then in his sophomore year at college, he became involved in civil rights. It had seemed so obviously an extension of what he had been taught, that he could never have imagined his father’s response of deep and abiding fury.

  It had been a major rebellion. The murderous rage of the white crowds terrified him, but a man could not back down from what was right. He had forced himself again and again to march into that hideous turmoil, clutching a sign with some simple truth carefully lettered on it. He had learned a great deal. He had met other Dewitts, Black Dewitts, and that had intrigued him. One was Jason Dewitt, who was just his age, at least as bright and who wanted to be a lawyer. He learned they were distant cousins, for the Black Dewitts were another lineage from his paternal great-grandfather. Starting with nothing, they were scrambling into the middle class. Jason’s father worked on the railway, as had his grandfather and two of his uncles. A brother and a sister were in the civil service. Another uncle had been in the Black Eagles, flying in World War II. Two other sisters taught school.

  The Black Dewitts seemed to him at least as worthy, as cohesive, as gentle as the white Dewitts. He had attempted to convey this knowledge to his immediate family. It was not right to ignore them as kin. It was hypocritical to trace the family tree without that huge branch. He had had the zeal of a young missionary, and the righteousness of one who has been recently beaten in the service of a just cause. His father never forgave him.

  Now news about South Africa woke that old mixture of guilt and passion, a sense of a wrong that must be righted and a sense too of a society grown up crooked and people caught in a dense suffocating weave of beliefs and pride and custom. That was what he had been recreating in his big piece in which the vines all hung with baubles grew into a prison of wires that pierced flesh, an immense nation-tree of barbed wire. Finally he had brought it to triumphant conclusion, but there it stood radiating menace and no one saw it. He had organized a little programme about South Africa at the Unitarian Church the winter before. Dinah had helped. She got more excited about nuclear waste and ground water and acid rain, but she had that capacity to listen and be moved by any good cause.

  He had never been able to get Susan involved. She sympathized. Her heart was in the right place. It just didn’t seem real to her unless she knew the person. She could get passionate about the case of a woman about to lose her children because she had been found unfit by some ramrod judge, or a haemophiliac boy put out of school for having contracted AIDS. She did not read newspapers and tuned out TV news as clutter. When she did pick up the New York Times, it was to look for people she knew or had heard of, to torture herself with what was happening in New York without her being there. She was all concrete, he thought. Once he had considered that a difference between the sexes, because for years he had based his opinions of womankind on his mother and Susan; but Dinah was not that way.

  He had grown up connected tightly into his family, a sense surrounding him of a comforting web of aunts, uncles, second cousins, great-grand-uncles. His involvement in civil rights had cut most of those ties till he had felt utterly lost. He had been desperate and confused about who he was, where he belonged. The Blacks he met in the movement were often friendly to him, but that friendliness had sharp limits. It was a walled garden in a howling wilderness. The other whites in the movement were just too different, too shrill and rude and noisy for him.

  He met Susan by her running into him on her bicycle, and then being stammeringly, profusely apologetic. She had brought him back to her room in an old mansion near campus where she lived in an honours dorm. It was two on a warm April afternoon and nobody was around, including the housemother. She brought him up to her room to tend his wounds, the cuts on his forehead and arm. It had all been so unlikely and she was so radiantly lovely he had begun to make love to her. Perhaps he had a mild concussion. Certainly he had no memory of the accident at all, only of walking down the street and then coming to on the ground with her flower face bent over him.

  He would never normally have seized a woman and borne her down on her bed and began to make passionate love to her, a woman whose last name he had not even learned. He imagined that certainly Susan would not normally have allowed herself to be seized and taken. Perhaps she still felt guilty for running him down. Perhaps it were merely that the strong immediate attraction was mutual. Before she ludicrously smuggled him out of her dormitory at four, he had realized he had fallen into what he most needed, a nest. Susan had the capacity to create home wherever she was, in a motel overnight, in a dorm room. She had immediately centred him, giving him a firm placement. He had fallen in love with her at once, with a relaxing sense of arriving where he had meant all along to go.

  He had realized about himself at around that time, seeing what Susan did for him, that he was a man who must have a woman. There were men, he thought, who went a little crazy without a woman. There were others who would act the same whether they were married or single, whose real life was always with other men in bars or construction sites from which women were excluded. The Captain was like that. But he himself was a man who if he did not make love regularly with a woman and did not have a woman to live with, to make a home for him, was a tree cut off from its roots to wither. There was both strength and weakness in that, but finally he accepted who he was. Susan was as necessary to him as water or air. He grew out of their joining.

  In the early years of his marriage with Susan he had tried to talk about that sense of unity at the core, of being almost physically rooted in her, with his brother Ted and with a friend, a fellow artist who had also recently married. What he had learned was that he could not speak of it to other men. They seemed able to feel nothing but contempt for a man who acted and felt deeply monogamous and who was willing to say how much he depended on his wife.

  It was a permanent irony that he, who was so thoroughly monogamous in his orientation, should also have been one of the only people he knew who had lived for ten years in a stable and serious triangle. He had thought of himself as having two wives. They were both his and he was theirs.

  At times he felt attracted to other women, particularly if they touched him. He could still remember Janette Burdock kissing him once in the moonlight when she was drunk. He sensed that Jimmy’s sexuality was different. He wished they could talk, that they could make each other understand, but the deep inhibition of discussing sex with family members stood in the way. He knew that Jimmy’s sexuality was more mercurial than his own, could flow in any direction, easily rouse
d, easily satiated. For Willie, only women who touched him were real to him and only the women he mated with, frequently and in full security of possession, could thoroughly excite him.

  He was utterly committed to Susan. He would fall apart if anything happened to her and they were pried apart. But he had grown dependent on Dinah and now he missed her every day, several times a day. It was as if he kept trying to run down a flight of steps where always one step was missing, and he could not seem to learn it was gone.

  He understood Susan’s fussing over Dinah’s presence next door much more clearly than he thought Susan did. If Dinah were dead, if she were in Paris or San Diego, then she would be gone except for memory. They could possess her in absence and remake their memories accordingly. However, there she was under their noses, giving parties, digging up her garden, walking around the pond every morning although now she detoured out to the road instead of crossing their little beach. As the weather warmed up, her music flowed out through the open windows. He could smell woodsmoke from her fireplace. Today he could smell what she was cooking for supper. He could hear her rough laughter and the voices of her arriving guests. Susan could say how she was sure Dinah would simply not make it out there without them to provide her with a ready-made life, but Willie thought all those people seemed to be having a dandy time. Not only did Jimmy come downstairs wearing his best blazer and his good turtleneck but Burt and Leroy drove up. Susan stationed herself at the window and called out as each car arrived. Zee Gildner. The Hills! A subtle war over friends was being fought. Susan, who feared she was losing, had stopped volunteering at the library as if to avoid comparison. ‘I think I just saw Laurie over there,’ Susan reported.