by Marge Piercy
Their sex began to improve as they got used to each other. He liked her body and he liked eating pussy. She began to understand that if she let him eat her to climax, he was more relaxed when they came to fucking. He did not worry as much then whether he would come before she did, and if she came again that was nice, but not critical. He told her once that his wife had lost interest in oral sex when she became passionately engaged in trying to become pregnant. She could feel an enormous wound to his pride and his sexual confidence barely healed over from his marriage, but she did not think it had left him crippled. Only sore.
The next night they went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to hear the new Glass, sitting with Tom and his wife and going out for a drink with them afterward. Waking beside him the next morning after good music followed by good sex, she thought, I could just stay here and write music and he’d play it better than anyone in the world, and what more could I ask? She felt immediately as if she had wished for life as a harem slave or a bonbon eater. It was silly and sinful to wish for, and besides, nobody was offering it.
They had coffee at their old teacher’s apartment. When they arrived, Madam was just finishing with a student, who grew visibly white when he saw Itzak at the door. He dropped music all over the foyer. Itzak saw nothing, greeting Madam warmly and being passionately embraced.
‘So, you still look like a street urchin when your piece is premièred at Carnegie? Never will you learn, Dinah.’
‘Actually, it wasn’t the première.’ She was startled how Madam had aged. Her hands had a little wobble. Was that the ravages of a stroke in her face? Dinah felt frightened. The idea of not being able to go back to Madam if she had to was definitely scary.
They stopped at the Greenwich School to hear the Downtown Ensemble play some new German music that night and stayed up much too late afterward talking, making love, talking. Neither wanted to let go into silence.
When Sal, who kept yawning, picked her up, she took over the driving as soon as they hit Connecticut. She realized she had said nothing to Itzak about the renewal of her sexual relationship with Willie. It was a secret. Willie had come back to her, but he could not let Susan know that. Susan would punish him. Furthermore, if Susan realized they were fucking, she would never come back to Dinah. Dinah protected herself as well as Willie as well as Susan by her silence. Her loyalty to both Willie and Susan was old and strong. She did not like to lie to anyone; she did not like to lie to Itzak by omission. On the other hand, who did he see when he was on the road? She did not have the right to ask. The only person who knew everything was Nita, who thought she should drop Willie for Itzak, promptly.
She came back hot on her work. Music felt even more important and central in the universe than it usually did. That hit of applause, no doubt it had pumped her up. The next morning she met Willie at the MacIvors’ and that connection was as strong as if it had never been interrupted.
It felt awkward, weird, raw to be scampering around meeting once in the boathouse while Laurie was in Boston, usually in the MacIvors’ house, a couple of times in the woods since the weather was warming up. They had been in a marriage of sorts for ten years. She would have minded fooling Susan more if Susan were not playing Lady-of-the-Manor-Greeting-the-Peasants. Susan dashed from the house or crossed the street in town especially to greet her with a false club lady sociability. It was an insult to their former intimacy, a mockery of the passion and sweetness they had known together.
After that first time when Willie came after her, Dinah felt ashamed when she saw Susan. She could not even meet her gaze. She felt as if her guilt were so visible Susan must sniff at her and smell Willie on her skin. Gradually the sense of wrongfully deceiving Susan eroded under that maliciously empty manner. As Dinah cooked or washed up, she worked on justifying herself. She had her own independent loving relationship with Willie. If Susan wanted to dump her, Susan had no right to interfere between them. Deceiving Susan was for her own good, because Susan needed her and just wouldn’t admit it.
Over the next week, she got further and further into the third section that had given her such a hard time, and when she was eating, when she was washing up, when she was weeding her garden or carrying salt hay to lay between the baby tomato plants for mulch, music played in her head and she was feeling her way through variations. Regular sex did wonders for her productivity. She got a lot of Itzak about once a month and Willie once or twice a week depending on when they could manage it. She was working splendidly. She woke with music playing in her head. She walked around with it performing. She had parts playing all the time and life just seemed to zip past the hours necessary to get through till she could sit back down to the piece. She was living inside it as if she were a fish in a perfect pond. For three days it rained and she holed up working.
As for not telling Itzak, why should Itzak care about Willie? In the heart of that maelstrom of publicity and performance about Itzak, she could not loom large. Itzak had her to call when he got lonely in Portland or Los Angeles; perhaps the affair would end when she fulfilled the commission. She did not know him well enough yet to understand what she could mean to him, but he was outside the daily flow of her life. The glamour of those moments at Carnegie were alluring but ersatz. The relationship was decorative, external, tangential. Willie and Susan had been essential, daily, her home and family. Going to New York was all very nice and useful to her in managing to hear all kinds of interesting work, but how often could she run off that way? Itzak could suddenly relocate to Vienna or Paris or Copenhagen or Rome. She would not be a major factor in such a decision.
No, she should enjoy the affair with Itzak but not permit herself to take it too seriously. It issued from the good luck of the commission. Like a commission, it was to be savoured to the fullest while it lasted, but she would be in trouble if she imagined either would continue or likely recur.
Willie on the other hand had been at the centre of her life for ten years. Susan was acting like a major asshole, but that too would pass. Susan had fantasies about Tyrone that weren’t going to materialize; the summer would prove that. She would get Susan back. In the meantime, she had not utterly lost Willie after all.
Jimmy came back from Seattle with a sharper edge on him. ‘It’s over with Lisa. She has an attitude about me I can’t deal with, no matter what I do.’ He was washing dishes after supper; Dinah was drying and putting them away.
‘You’re really getting divorced?’
‘Her lawyer thinks she’s crazy, but she’s going ahead. I did get things settled with Jackie.’
‘The partner who was keeping the books and ripping you off.’
‘Oh, it’s a complicated mess. Anyhow, we’re dropping our suit, she’s dropping hers and we settled everything.’ Jimmy smiled that deprecating half smile of his.
‘You’re involved with her!’
‘Just for old times’ sake and to grease the wheels of peace.’
‘Are you going back?’
‘There’s nothing there for me. I got everything more or less nailed down on this trip. I wanted to make up with Lisa and bring her and the baby back here, but she won’t even discuss it. Another woman with a baby has moved in with her. She has all our friends on her side. She’s built a whole life with no room for me. Not a chink, not a crack.’
‘Did you really try to get through to her? To show her you care?’
‘I even bought her a beautiful necklace this woman I know made, with an opal set into the eye of a flying bird. She wouldn’t even look at it.’
‘Jimmy, Jimmy, now what?’
‘Everything here is going just fine.’ He saluted her. ‘That is, once you let me get started on our addition and once I move in. I can help you financially. I don’t like living at home.’
‘Does Susan give you a hard time about hanging out over here?’
‘Mother doesn’t know how to bug me. She pulls all her vapour numbers, sighing, giving me looks, acting out distress. I just walk through it. I learned to igno
re all those histrionics by the time I was twelve. Susan’s fine if you don’t let her get to you. She’s a good mother, she’s always stood by me no matter what trouble I got into. She insisted I go to a good college. She managed to find the money no matter what.’
‘That’s true. We had some lean years there.’
‘She comes through when it counts. For the rest, I just never let her bother me. You always rush in and start interpreting and trying to make it better. That’s your mistake.’
‘But in an intimate relationship – not like mother and son where there’s a certain healthy distance you both need – you can’t just pretend you don’t know what the other person wants. You can’t shut out signals and tune out distress.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ Jimmy said reasonably. ‘A benign neglect works in most relationships with most little problems. Usually things go away by themselves.’
Tyrone called to invite her to his Memorial Day bash. Dinah temporized on the phone, but Tyrone liked to call a person’s bluff. It gave him a feeling of power, Dinah thought. He said, ‘I know you and Willie and Susan are not a ménage à trois anymore, but obviously you’re on civil terms. I’ve seen them chatting with you. Don’t be falsely coy. I was disappointed not to see you at the picnic. It wasn’t nearly as amusing without you.’
‘So happy to amuse you,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to leave it up in the air. I don’t know yet whether I’ll have company.’
‘Itzak Raab? I heard you were having an affair with him. Really?’
‘I know him. Who are you having an affair with, Tyrone?’
‘No one person, my dear. I spread myself around. All right, I understand, you’re discreet. Why not bring him? We’ll have a delicious spread.’
‘Itzak is in Boise right now. As I said, I’ll have to see, but I’ll seriously consider your spread.’
At noon, she noticed Susan sunbathing in a black and silver bathing suit. Staring at Susan’s body offered to the sun, eyes shut as if in ecstasy, Dinah found herself drawn from the house. An oriole flashed from the apple tree, his mate after him, orange and lemon. She stopped on the property line, willing Susan to speak to her. Susan sat up and stared back. Come on, Dinah prayed, forget all this shit and walk toward me. Take one step. Say something real!
Susan abruptly got up and scampered into the house and Dinah went back to work. Itzak called from the Seattle airport. His luggage was lost. His stomach was upset. His accompanist Tom needed a root canal.
That afternoon voices and laughter from across the pond disturbed her. For the hundredth time she wondered if she should buy herself an air conditioner, not to cool the house (which rarely grew hot) but to close out the summer people’s noise. Once she had noticed the drone of voices, she could not resume her concentration. Finally at four she abandoned any pretence at working and decided she would not allow Susan to keep her away. Not that she had any great desire to attend a party of Tyrone’s, but she resented being made to feel like an exile. She might as well join the noise and have some free and probably excellent supper.
Getting dressed was something of a problem. For years Susan had told her what to wear to parties. She had a pleasant tent of a dress Susan had made for her two years before. That was clean. She was still having laundry problems. She had to drive fifteen miles to the Laundromat, perhaps after the party. Her panties were soaked with sweat. She had handwashed her brassieres, but they hadn’t dried yet. The hell with underwear. The dress was so loose nobody would know what she was wearing or not wearing under it, and the afternoon was the first hot day of the year. She had been working so hard until the noise interrupted her, she had not noticed she was hot. Now she decided to take a quick dunk and then throw on the tent dress and row over. That would save her making supper. She’d say Hi to people, eat and drink the best of what was offered and then row home.
Chapter Twenty-Five
LAURIE
Laurie was lonely for the two weeks that Jimmy was gone. Dinah was away part of that time. Laurie didn’t feel at ease with the local people she had met through Jimmy, at least not enough to go off looking for any of them without him. She thought of going to New York with Dinah, but Tyrone was in London and she did not think she would feel less lonely in his apartment. She still felt uncomfortable when she imagined seeing city acquaintances.
Jimmy called her the day after his son was born. ‘Sure, I’m excited. How could I not be set up about it? But it’s real and unreal at once. Here I am a father, and I’ll have no relationship to my son at all. I’ll be the absentee dad.’
‘Are you thinking of staying?’
‘I’m still trying with Lisa. But I’m getting nowhere. Have you any advice for me? Please?’
She cried briefly afterward, partly because she felt sorry for him, mostly because she felt lonely and sorry for herself.
She would have liked to meet his plane, but Susan picked him up from the airport and never thought to ask Laurie if she wanted to go along, although she dropped several hints. She found that she could not talk about Jimmy with Susan. She would have imagined that it would be nice to be close to the mother of the man you had decided you were interested in, that they would have something important in common. However, Susan avoided discussing Jimmy with her, giving the conversation a sharp steer to the right whenever his name began to hover between them. It was embarrassing. Did Susan know that Jimmy was not interested in her, not in that way, only as a friend? Did Susan know that for a fact and thus was trying to protect her by refusing to encourage her folly?
Dinah was less unsatisfactory but didn’t really see what Jimmy was like as an adult. Dinah on the subject of Jimmy was the same way many of Tyrone’s friends were about her: she was the perennially shy and oversensitive fourteen-year-old just out of braces. They would never take her seriously as an artist or as a person just because they remembered the awkward child they had pitied.
With work suspended, she was still living in the big house, but she was using the boathouse as a studio. The two skylights were in place and functional. What remained to do was finish work and the steps and deck. She had to climb on a cinder block to get in and out. She decided to try some diary paintings, focused on her childhood. She painted more that week than she had in years, if only because there was little else to do. Tyrone would be up soon and fill the house with people.
Jimmy got back just before Tyrone descended with his assistant Donald, Celeste, his secretary Sally and the houseguests. Tyrone brought along a broker and his wife – the Bromleys – who Laurie felt looked down on her, especially since her late disaster, and Betty Gore, the widow of an investment banker and well-connected herself, being a Barrington-Taylor. Tyrone had been having an affair with Betty, rather tepid by all she could judge, since his divorce. He fell back on Betty when he lacked a better option. She seemed to view him as one of a series of interchangeable escorts. Betty drank just a little too much, but she was a quiet and unobnoxious drunk who frequently dozed off. The first day Laurie found her asleep on a towel on their beach at the pond, later snoozing on a chaise-longue inside. She claimed the country air made her drowsy. Laurie thought of Betty as the dormouse in Alice, except that she was wrong for the part physically, being extremely tall and gaunt, with very large still beautiful dark eyes – when they were open. She played tennis decently, and between her first and second naps, she went off with the Bromleys and Tyrone to play on a friend’s court.
Laurie had tried for years to be positive and broad-minded about Tyrone’s affairs. After all, she found life easier while he was single. When he first remarried, he was almost inaccessible. Still, she found herself wincing when she heard him heartily introduce some new ‘friend’. It was the way he had of saying the word. Did he ever actually have any women friends? Yes, Susan. The sole exception, and she was married.
They had their annual picnic at Bracken Pond, an excursion they had been taking since Laurie could remember. Susan and Celeste divided the cooking this year, althoug
h of course Celeste had the day off. She had gone off early that morning with a Black man who drove a pickup truck. Laurie wondered where on earth she could have found him. Jimmy told her. Joe was a fisherman, a Black Portugee, so called, one of the descendants of Cape Verdians, just recently broken up with Leroy’s younger sister, who of course was white. Celeste had met him when they sent her to buy beer at the liquor store in town. Laurie girded herself for the overpopulated weekend: first the picnic and then the much bigger party Tyrone always threw.
Laurie felt a little out of things. Jimmy was back, but with so many people around, she had snatched no more than the briefest of conversations with him. He was being helpful, serving everyone. Dinah was absent for the first time in years, and Tyrone made a point of saying that he missed her, probably to tease Susan. Laurie was a little shocked that Daddy would go on about Dinah’s absence, but sometimes he thought being difficult was amusing, saying out loud what people were thinking.
It seemed to her she could see them sitting on this hill perhaps fifteen times, other years floating like balloons over her head. She remembered her own mother providing the large lunch, always carried in a series of sturdy wicker hampers. Bracken Pond was the next pond over. Like their own, it had only a few houses on it. Traditionally they picnicked at an old house site on a hill in a grove of locusts. Black locusts had been planted widely on the Cape in the reforestation, Willie had once explained to her. Willie was always sharing odd bits of history, because he loved to talk to people and find out whatever they knew. Willie said the forests had been cut down to feed the furnaces for Sandwich glass till the Cape had begun to blow away. Pitch pines had been planted then and people had put in locusts around houses. They not only held the soil but improved it, for they fixed nitrogen, whatever that meant, like giant peavines.
She could still hear Willie saying that. The locusts were not yet leafed out, just beginning to open their intricate airy foliage. The sun leaned hot on her head. She wished she had brought a hat. Soon the locusts would bloom in long sweet white panicles she had painted once, years ago. She still did not know what it meant to fix nitrogen. The image of some hidden underground repair shop came to her mind.