by Marge Piercy
Why did he want to hang around with those losers from high school? Whatever was the point of sending him to Dartmouth if here he was back drinking beer with the good old boys he had palled around with years ago, when she had worried he would get into trouble as so many of them did and amount to nothing? Fishermen, shellfish farmers, carpenters, plumbers, plasterers, the managers of motels and clam shacks. He was even dragging Laurie along to the movies and out to fast food with those yokels. Laurie would feel contempt for him; Tyrone would hear. It was potentially highly embarrassing. She tried to raise the subject with Jimmy twice, but it was as if she spoke in a pitch too high for him to hear. He simply did not respond. It was like yelling at Bogey, except that Bogey would hang his head and whine.
At least Willie was acting more responsibly. Not only had they almost completed the boathouse for Laurie, but he had even taken an interest in the work the MacIvors were having done. Several times he took the key to check on what the tiler had done and the progress of the painters. Finally that work was completed and the MacIvors would be out for Memorial Day weekend. Tyrone had invited them to his party, and she was thinking of asking them along to the traditional picnic she made for Tyrone the Saturday of the holiday weekend.
‘Isn’t it wonderful what the MacIvors had done with that old house?’
‘Art by the yard. Ruler minimalism. Something about the place makes me think of a furniture showroom.’ He shrugged.
Willie thought everyone should furnish a livingroom with antiques or at least old pieces; it was a prejudice of his, on a par with believing that Europeans did not know how to cure ham. Her husband was a creature of his emotions and his prejudices. Her taste was trained in areas where he still relied upon attitudes inculcated in his ancestral home. Mostly she did not mind. Her husband: it was years since she had thought of him that way. All relationships between any two of the three of them had been supposed to be equal. Dinah had a strong sense of what was due her. She was forever cutting a pie into fanatically equal slices, counting chocolates in a box to make sure each got his or her entitled share. A child of poverty, Susan told herself with pity. Dinah would never cease to be a child of want. Now Susan was free of that constant judgemental and measuring gaze.
When she saw Dinah in the yard, she often found an excuse to venture out and say hello quickly. She took a serene satisfaction in being the first to speak in an unfailingly cheery greeting. ‘Isn’t it lovely,’ she’d say. Or, ‘Looks like rain, doesn’t it?’ Nothing Dinah could use to start a conversation but pinning her in place, the neighbour to whom one was civil.
She had recovered completely, so when she caught a glimpse of Dinah in Souza’s Market or in the post office picking up her mail, she would go out of her way to greet her. Dinah’s face was supremely readable; she was still a child that way, as in so many others. A loud egotistical child. Now a child whose feelings had been hurt. Her eyes enlarged and her mouth turned down. Susan could have laughed out loud. It was such a charade, but it did her good to prove to herself how far she had come since the days when Dinah’s frown could make her cry and Dinah’s anger could make her shudder and rush to placate, to please.
Today as soon as Susan walked into Souza’s, she saw Dinah buying yogurt and local brown eggs. Now she was headed for the meat counter. Susan loitered until Dinah was waiting for Mr Rimini, the butcher, to grind chuck for her. Then Susan came briskly up to the counter and called to him. ‘Mr Rimini, I’m here to pick up my boned chicken breasts!’ To Dinah she said in that cheery lacquered tone, ‘I do hope the weather is fair tomorrow. It’s time for our annual picnic on Bracken Pond.’
Dinah looked at her uncertainly, obviously waiting to see if she were included, as the picnic had always been a family affair. Susan turned her gaze on the chops laid out under glass. She was acting the friendly neighbour who had no idea what the other person was expecting. Ah, there was an actress inside that had been biding her time all these years. She hoped that Dinah would break down and try to invite herself. Instead as Dinah took her package from Mr Rimini she muttered. ‘Too bad, I heard the sky was falling tomorrow. Maybe only the market.’
Jimmy went next door far more than Susan liked, and Dinah had begun to chat with Willie in the yard. He let himself be sucked into conversation, as she never permitted Dinah to draw her. He simply lacked the social manoeuvrability Susan possessed. She decided not to interfere, although sometimes when they seemed to be talking too long and too intimately, she stood at the window fuming. She knew that hidden within was a jagged wound Dinah had given her self-esteem, not in one blow but in hundreds of small contemptuous lessons in how to be a good person like Dinah, rather than a flighty butterfly like herself. She spread out the wings of the new kimono she had made from a bolt of the rayon she had designed for Young Ideas. The dress manufacturer who had bought up most of it was using it for a dress, a Belle France knockoff, but she had made a kimono with enormous sleeves. She made them flutter before the mirror. Suddenly a terrible melancholy blew through her like a wind carrying fog off the ocean.
She could have wept for how passionately she had loved Dinah. Dinah had made her feel precious. Oh, she had been sore with discontent then, bored to disgust with her marriage, tired of being the good mother of two children, no longer small and sweet and lovable and malleable and decorative, but now aggressive, secretive adolescents. Siobhan could have had a wonderful adolescence. Susan hadn’t been a ghastly resentful mother who tried to keep her daughter in rompers. She had been as excited as Siobhan when her daughter began to show an interest in boys, began to date. Susan had wanted to be truly helpful and to share her daughter’s adventures, an understanding mother as far as possible from the pious repressive attitude of her own mother. But Siobhan had been closed, hostile. Had lied about the most innocuous things. Had met boys secretly, when she could simply have told Susan where she was going. Jimmy had always been taciturn. Her adolescent children walled her out of their intimate lives. She had responded by joining everything in town, PTA, library, whatever. She had stared in the mirror and wanted, wanted, wanted to feel, to know, to experience, to be loved.
Dinah had come back from New Mexico like the hero in a Western riding into town. She had clanked and glittered. Her sexual confidence had been as tangible to Susan as the sun’s heat freckling her arm.
Everything about Susan that Willie took for granted was new and splendid to Dinah. Because Dinah was a woman, she appreciated all those fine little touches and gestures and prettinesses, but she was not a rival. Dinah would never have made herself a dress or even knitted a scarf. She had no idea how to shop. She bought gaudy or splendid items on impulse, like a gorgeous suede vest in purple and black, and then put them on with jeans and wore them till they were filthy and spoiled.
I am forty-six, Susan told her favourite mirror, the long one in which she could see herself entire, although I don’t look that old. Dr MacIvor was shocked when he met Jimmy. He said I couldn’t be old enough to have a son in his twenties, so probably he thought I was thirty-eight or forty at the most. My skin is still good. My hair hasn’t thinned. I keep my weight under control. But who will ever love me the way I want to be loved? I’ll die and it will never happen. Oh, Willie loves me the best he can, but he’s so self-involved and distracted, and he simply doesn’t have the temperament for a grand passion. He’s a man of appetites, not of passions.
In girlhood, she had imagined love that would be a wall of compelling emotion like the sound of opera, La Bohème or even the musicals she had been fond of when she was a girl, An American in Paris. Oh, she had experienced that with Willie in the early days of their affair. It had begun irresistibly. After she had knocked him down, he had swept her off her feet, just as if they were in a movie. It was one of her fantasies come to life. He had been handsome, courteous but unstoppable. If she hadn’t been interested, she would never have brought him back to her room, but she hadn’t expected anything to happen. She had only hoped something would.
T
he year before she had had a satisfying tempestuous affair with Earl, a young man she had met at a fraternity party, but her passionate nature had frightened him off. He wanted a blank meek girl, which he speedily found. The campus was rife with soft-spoken belles who concealed wills of steel behind a simper. No, Willie had not fallen in love the way Earl had, keeping one hand on dry land so he could haul himself out if the going got rough. Willie had given himself totally.
Slow tears rolled down her face as she flung herself on her bed, remembering how intensely they had longed to be together, how she crept out of her dorm at night to meet him, how they had made love in the grass. She wanted to feel that way again, with love taking her over utterly. Was her life done at forty-six? Was there nothing to look forward to but slowly dying? She could not endure the thought of simply enduring year after year, drinking tea in bed, coming down to the kitchen with Willie already working in his studio, planning dinner parties with nobodies, hearing Willie gossip about decisions of the selectmen and the Board of Appeals, making designs for fabrics to clothe other women as they lunched with lovers, chattered wittily at cocktail parties, attended openings and were photographed.
How many more thousand times would she stand there brushing her teeth in that bathroom she had created out of a mouldy dark room, pale green, the sloping ceiling beams stencilled with leaves, the corner airy with ferns? How often would she peer in that mirror measuring the pores in her nose? How many more nights would she lie awake while Willie snored and dream of slipping out into the night to meet someone, anyone? Is this it? All there would be for her forever and ever until death gnawed her to the bones? Is this all that was going to happen to her, who had so much to give to love?
Chapter Twenty-Four
DINAH
The third week in May, Dinah drove to New York with Sal from the Moonsnails. Itzak had invited her to his Sunday afternoon recital. ‘Four p.m. Horowitz time,’ he said on the phone. That was when Vladimir Horowitz always scheduled concerts. She would meet him afterward and spend three days with him before he left for the West Coast.
Sal was twenty-nine and would have won a music scholarship had he lived anyplace else, she thought. His father was a fisherman lost at sea. Both his brothers were fishermen too. Sal played just about anything, but he was their lead guitarist. From a family who never ‘crossed the bridge’ over the Canal to the mainland, he had learned everything he knew from records. He was very bright, set up their amps and synthesizers, but he had dropped out of high school from boredom at sixteen and could scarcely read. He was going to New York to visit an old girlfriend he was still crazy for. Dinah would not see him again until they met to drive back, but they sang all the way down.
It was abrupt to hop out of Sal’s pickup outside Carnegie Hall, give her name at the box office and be escorted to one of the chairs set up on the stage. The concert had been sold out for several weeks before it had occurred to Itzak to invite her, but sitting on the stage would give her a better view anyhow. She was vaguely aware she should be more dressed up; she hadn’t realized she’d be highly visible. She was handed over by the usher to a tall grizzled hard talking man who was Itzak’s manager. She knew his name, of course, but had never got in to see him in the days she had tried. He looked at her jeans, Mark’s old jacket, her high leather sneakers and purple silk shirt with a sneer. He looked martyred, he looked bored. A flustered assistant something took her rucksack away backstage.
She did not feel it would be wise to intrude on Itzak beforehand and doubted she would have been let near him in any case. She wondered if she should have come. He certainly pulled out a mixed crowd. She waved to her old flute teacher – his as well. A good dose of the Juilliard faculty had bestirred themselves to hear him. The audience simmered, waiting: a susurrus nothing like the wind in the pines or the surf battering the shore. Human excitement. The audience burst into frenzy when he strolled out flute hanging from his hand looking like someone who had wandered along, suddenly breaking into a great grin, saluting the audience with the flute. Dinah, who wasn’t bad with audiences herself, recognized a master showman. He was not in the line of the demoniacs, or the businesslike, or the monks: his pose was more, hey, look what we have here, isn’t this fun, isn’t this super stuff?
If she had had a seat in the audience, she would have disappeared with him into the intricacies of the Bach A Minor at once, but up here on the stage, she could not ignore the great waves of love and sex and charisma that washed through the music and churned from the audience. How could she possibly be meaningfully involved with a man who played audiences as well as his flute? What was real was the commission. The rest was circumstance. It was like standing outside the Lincoln monument and imagining you could camp in it.
The big surprise came in the second half of the programme. After the Beethoven with his accompanist Tom, out came a cellist and planted her spike in the floor. Much adjusting of chairs and music stands, assistants flitting across the stage with that air of, If I move quickly and don’t look sideways, you can’t really see me, and then he announced he was going to play a very new piece of music by a friend of his, and proceeded into the Meditation – whose parts he had asked for on the Cape. She had assumed he was wanting to check out her musicianship. How it sang. Her face was burning with excitement and shock. He played so much better than Kyle it took the piece where she had imagined it, yes, that pattern rising, rising, circling, the hawk pattern with its sharp predatory mournful cry and the piano scuttling underneath, the cello circling it on wide extended heron wings. Oh, this was a bed present indeed, that was perfection. Although if he had asked her, she would have told him to push the tempo there, punch it harder. His accompanist Tom was better than the pianist in Boston, but the cellist lacked Nita’s clear singing tone. Nita understood her music thoroughly.
Now the applause made the air itself turn to noise, a medium thicker than water heavily churning. He was beckoning to her to rise, which she did, willingly. To think she had considered not coming. It had been a matter of chance, of Sal planning a trip at the same time. She had accepted Itzak’s invitation so casually, she could fall through the floorboards that had suddenly turned to gauze.
She scarcely heard the Mozart. She did not remember leaving the stage. She collected herself only when she realized they were climbing into a limo, bidding farewell to two dozen broad and important men. Itzak had declined a party, dinner. They were going off to his apartment, where he would have Chinese food delivered from his favourite spot. At the last moment a flunkey turned up with her rucksack grasped gingerly by a strap and handed it in.
Itzak had what she thought of as a typical city apartment: a roomy foyer, a large impressive livingroom with a view of the East River, a middling bedroom, a tiny kitchen and tiny bath. It was furnished with a combination of department store couches and storage units and old-fashioned mahogany pieces that had belonged to his grandparents. It reminded her of the apartment she had shared with Mark on the Lower East Side, not rationally, because this was far fancier, roomier, cleaner and cost more a month for condominium maintenance than the total rent on that building would have brought her landlord. What was familiar to her was the air of camping in New York, the unpacked boxes filling a closet and lining the foyer, the temporary strategems for managing, the shelves purchased but not put up, the suitcases never out of sight. Its air of being only passably satisfactory was soothing after the concert. It humanized him.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were going to play the Meditation? I mean, suppose I’d screamed or fainted on the stage?’
‘I only decided to do it two weeks ago, when the programmes were printed already. Why scream? It wasn’t satisfactory?’
‘You have to be joking. It was superb. Although you know when you get in the part that goes,’ she began to sing it, and discussion was launched and she forgot to be in awe.
‘Besides,’ he said as they sat down to eat, ‘a piece belongs to whoever plays it.
‘A poem is a cos
tume anyone may put on but like the cloak his abandoned wife sent to Herakles, it may burn through the skin, may char the bones oh quietly for truth is the subtlest posion …’
He was quoting Mark at her. She was startled, because no one had done so in years and because she had been rereading his poems lately. She had Intensive Care, his last book, beside her bed. Itzak must have noticed.
‘Do you enjoy his poetry?’ she asked cautiously.
‘I have been. I hadn’t ever read him. Oh, I read “Skull Dance” in college – I think everybody did. “Child of Fire” – that’s you, isn’t it?’
‘Nobody in a poem is anybody in the normal sense. Poems may start out of an argument or a landscape, but off they go in their own dimensions. It’s tangential only. Like when people tell you what Bach’s A Minor means.’
She found his intense beam of curiosity disquieting, because she was not sure what it implied – if anything. She had the sense of a sharp passionate mind meshing poorly with its surroundings. He was fiercely discontented.
Itzak was in a state of deep confusion about his life, which led him to cast about for various strategems that might reorganize it. Probably going to bed with her had been one of those attempts, along with reading the local real estate ads wherever he was (Should I buy a summer home, to have a place to go?) and calling friends in Boston about whether he should move there. She understood his unsettled state. He was on the road a great deal. His life had changed too much in a short time. Returning to the States had meant dispensing with the network of friends built up during a decade of marriage and living in London. He thought of moving out of the city as self-rescue.