by Marge Piercy
He pulled them onto the bed then and put himself into her. She realized he wasn’t using a condom and she had not done anything at all. She had gone off the pill after Tom … She could not do anything about it.
When they were lying side by side she said sheepishly, ‘I haven’t made love with anyone since Tom died …’
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t hurt you. Did I?’
‘It’s just I went off the pill then and I don’t have a diaphragm.’
He raised himself on his elbow. ‘We’ll take you to a doctor tomorrow, a gynaecologist down the Cape. Don’t worry about it. Anything that happens is all right, you know, so don’t ever worry with me.’
They took a bath together and then went out to a fried clam shack that had picnic tables outside. She kept the necklace on under her shirt. It felt different, scary and safe at once, to be with him now. She had not been with anyone as a couple since Tom, and their relationship had been rocky. Jimmy was relaxed, expansive. He did not hang on her, but when he touched her, he was firm, possessive. She felt as if her entire body had changed, growing sensitive. She could not stop looking at him. He was incredibly handsome. She did not know how she had ever managed to keep her eyes off him when he was in her field of vision.
He told her all about the woman who had made her necklace, a Seattle artist he had known when he lived there, about how he went there to find exactly the gift for Laurie, how he had looked through the whole store and found nothing that was perfect. The artist had told him she was just finishing a special new piece and had taken him in the back to see. That was her necklace. It had not been completed for another day, but then he got it for her. The woman had been trying to decide between a turquoise and an opal. He had chosen the opal for her.
‘I’ve never had an opal. I think it’s exquisite.’ She glanced at it tucked in her shirt. It felt a little heavy and almost alive. He had given it to her as a love gift, as a means of taking possession of her. She felt special, planned for, connived for. All the while she had been worried he was not attracted to her, he had been spinning a seductive web. He thought he had caught her, but she knew better.
They went to a movie together, like a couple just beginning to date, like an old married couple. They went to see a bozo comedy and held hands. Then he came back to the house with her. ‘My parents won’t like this. Tyrone won’t like this. But I want to be with you.’
She lay with him in the bed that had been hers since she was five and given a whole big adult double bed. It had a bird’s-eye maple frame that creaked as he made love to her. ‘Mine,’ he said as he came into her. ‘Mine. Mine.’ Then he laughed against her just after he came. In a way, she thought, he was mocking the rhetoric of passion and possession, but in another way, he meant it. She was thrilled. She felt new. She did not think she had ever felt so sexually alive. She had never wanted a man for a long time before they had sex. Always before she had more or less reluctantly given in. He could have made her try to seduce him; she had almost been driven to that. Instead he had come after her, and beautifully.
She could not sleep, curled with him in her childhood bed, in her old room with the pond rippling outside. The rain had stopped but the night was dark. He slept in her arms, but she was too unused to his presence and too excited to doze off. She could not bear to let go of the day that had just ended, for fear the fragile design it had sketched might dissolve in unconsciousness.
She did sleep because she woke with him in the morning. Willie was making a lot of noise with a saw outside. She was almost afraid to look at Jimmy. Her experience with Tom was that he could go from being passionate to being sarcastic without any action or words of hers having intervened. Jimmy paced to the window, looked out, drew the curtain and came back to bed. ‘He’s starting on the deck early this morning.’
‘We’d better hurry with breakfast.’
‘In a bit. He does things at his convenience too. First things first.’ He put his hand on her belly and leaned for a moment, then let himself down on her, taking the nipple of her small breast into his mouth. She could not imagine so cavalierly making Tyrone wait for her, but Jimmy did not seem to think of his father again until he had finished making love and then eating breakfast. Only then did he go out where Willie was making so much noise with the electric saw.
She went slowly back up to her room to make the bed, much messier than it was when she slept in it alone. Then she sat at her vanity and stared at herself, at the necklace in the middle of the embroidered runner. It was beautiful. She felt ashamed to have doubted his taste. She had not imagined past fretting whether he was attracted to her or not to what it would be like to be involved. She had thought it would be as it was, with a layer of sex, of romantic interest. She perceived that she had been wrong.
Now that she was close up to him, he did not seem casual. Would he stay here with her often? Would he find someplace else to take her? If he moved in, Tyrone would probably be furious – she suspected that Jimmy was right about that. Once her boathouse was completed, maybe they could both live there, although it was tiny – still no tinier than the studios many couples in New York shared. She was being premature, but this did not feel like the first time she had slept with Rick or Tom, when each had left her apartment without her having any certainty whether she would see him again.
In midmorning he came up to the house to check that she had made an appointment with the doctor. She had not gotten to it yet. It was disquieting to trust her body to a doctor picked out of a phone book. He made the call for her and then went back to work. ‘So you don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Not that it would be a problem anyway. I’ll take you there.’
In some ways he reminded her of Tyrone, surprisingly. He took charge. She admired that. She washed her hair and reminded herself to ask him if he liked the way she was wearing it. Then she took a couple of magazines and went along the path through the woods to the beach, to pass the time until he could get rid of Willie and knock off work. She did not talk to them but instead left a note saying where she was and that she would be back at four, for she felt a slight discomfort at the thought of seeing Willie before she and Jimmy had worked themselves out more securely. Still it seemed to cast a long shadow for something so recent. As she crossed the dune, she smiled.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
WILLIE
‘All you’re going to do is force me to move in with her before either of us knows if that’s what we want.’ Arms crossed, Jimmy had his back to the refrigerator door with its magnetic clip of openings and invitations, the formal social occasions of the burgeoning summer.
Willie was hunched over the table with a cup of cold coffee. He wished he had stayed in his studio or at the work site instead of coming home with Jimmy for lunch and barging into a huge fight with Susan, who had been waiting for Jimmy, unable to control herself from the moment they walked in.
Susan was shaking with anger, her hands twisting before her. ‘I can’t understand how you can do this to us! And to her!’
‘What do you think I am, a plague? I’m making her happy. It’s about time someone did.’
‘Tyrone is going to be furious!’
‘Stuff Tyrone. He parked her out here till the scandal stopped embarrassing him. I didn’t seduce a fourteen-year-old. She’s a widow of twenty-four.’ Jimmy glared from Susan to Willie. Willie knew Jimmy was furious with him for hanging back. Working with his son most days, Willie had been feeling close, and Jimmy felt the same. They saw more of each other than either saw of Susan. ‘You talk about her as if she were feebleminded and I seduced her with lollipops. She’s been after me for weeks. I simply wouldn’t let anything happen until I knew what was coming off with Lisa.’
‘Laurie has been after you? You’re crazy. I know what state she arrived in. She was broken. You’re taking advantage of a young girl who doesn’t make friends easily. She’s shy. She needs sympathy and a quiet place. She needs to recover, to heal.’
‘Mother, you’re
ridiculous. I didn’t force myself on her. And I’m a hell of a lot better to and for her than what she’s used to. She knows that. Why don’t you?’
Willie felt trapped between them. They were both so much more vehement than he ever was, they hemmed him in. The serrated edge on Susan’s voice made him deeply apprehensive. He sniffed the air in the kitchen and smelled trouble. Why was she making such a fuss? Okay, he too didn’t think Jimmy’s getting involved with Laurie was a great idea, but given that they had hung out together since they were six, given they were both adults who had been married already, it wasn’t as if he or Susan could keep them apart. Tyrone might not be overjoyed but surely expected Laurie to find some guy while she was living on the Cape. Jimmy was a better choice than most. He had a good education, he was clean and handsome, and maybe Laurie felt more secure knowing his family well. Willie was inclined to shrug it off and see how it went.
He could remember when Laurie had had a crush on him, back when she was a teenager built like a bag of golf clubs. She had blushed whenever he spoke to her. Laurie might be shy, as Susan said, but she certainly could telegraph her interest. He had been kind to her, even enjoying her adoration, but she had seemed volatile enough. Willie was willing to believe Jimmy was telling the truth about Laurie showing her attraction plainly and strongly.
Susan however was frantic. Sometimes he thought once she got upset past a certain point, there was no calming down or retreating for her. He wished he could just turn the hose on both of them the way he did when Figaro got into a fight with some summer cat who was poaching on his turf; or the way he’d drag Bogey by the collar away from mischief. If he could just pick Susan up and dump her in the pond, she would cool off and the dangerous moment would go by. If he tried to force his way in between them, he would just draw her wrath. It would end with all of them shouting in a berserk rage. He hated that sense of everything out of control. He didn’t want to mix in between them, get riled up, end by saying things he didn’t mean.
‘There are people one just doesn’t get involved with – that one refrains from,’ Susan was beginning in a high trembly voice.
‘What did you ever refrain from that you wanted, Mother? Do tell me. It must have been something really ducky I should try sometime.’ Jimmy was angry too, bitterly, whitely angry. If Susan flushed with anger, Jimmy grew still and pale with it. ‘You think I’m not anticipating trouble with Tyrone? You underestimate me. You always have. But you should be on my side, Mother. And you too, Willie. You should be backing me. You both make me sick.’ He tore out of the room, up the stairs and slammed his door.
Susan was sobbing wildly and Willie got up reluctantly and went to comfort her. ‘It’s a fait accompli. Why not roll with the punches?’ He liked the sound of that. In his current struggle with his wife over Dinah, he considered he was letting her wear herself out brawling, while instead of counterpunching, he blocked her wild blows. He ducked and weaved and waited for her energy to flag. His strategy was a good one, but it was lucky he was a patient man. She was taking forever to tire.
‘How could he do this to us?’
Willie wasn’t sure what Jimmy was supposed to have done. He murmured soothingly. He would really like to get back to his studio or finish up the deck, one or the other. He hated being stuck in an emotional swamp in the middle of the afternoon. Now Susan was crying and Jimmy was upstairs. It sounded as if he was rearranging the furniture in his room. Willie thought of making love to her, but with Jimmy upstairs banging around, it wasn’t feasible. In his head stood the wall he was welding, barbed wire and grey pillars all hung with bits of newsprint and computer printout. He had just had a vision of skulls on the top, skull shapes in all colours. Cobalt blue skulls. Threaded through the barbed wire, acrylic tubes of red and blue, veins, arteries. He would use rods, maybe quarter inch. He reached for a pad to sketch his vision, then froze as Susan fixed him with her liquid gaze.
‘If you stop it now, it won’t do any damage. You must talk to him.’
Willie grimaced. ‘I’m supposed to tell him to stop fucking Laurie? Why should he lay off until he’s ready to? Really, Susan.’
‘Tyrone usually arrives by the Fourth of July. It must be over by then.’
‘Maybe it will be. Especially if we keep out of the picture. If it isn’t, then Tyrone will just have to adjust to it like anybody else.’
‘Oh, Willie, don’t be naive. You don’t understand Tyrone.’
‘I’d say that’s Laurie’s problem more than ours.’ He was tired of thinking about Jimmy and Laurie already. It was really none of his or Susan’s business. Kids had to work out their own love affairs. He wanted to clear his mind out and brood on the work he must get done for his coming show.
‘You just don’t see the whole picture!’
‘Susan, you’re hurting Jimmy’s feelings, can’t you see that? For all you know, he’s in love with her.’
‘That’s ridiculous!’
He had liked having the MacIvor house for a rendezvous. He had come to think of it as their own, his and Dinah’s. He could not help resenting the MacIvors for beginning to use it. Not that they were there all the time, but now he never knew when they would appear. They were not about to call up and inform him. Susan had given the key back – not before he had made a copy of it, just in case they went away to Europe or each broke a leg or something else useful. Fortunately Candida had forgotten about her bed being used. He needed another place to be alone with Dinah. Next door would not do and neither was his studio safe. They made love twice in the dunes above the beach, but Dinah found that risky in the summer, as well as hot. Tourists might step on them at any moment.
‘Why can’t you just tell Susan? We can’t go on keeping it from her forever. She has a right to know.’ Dinah was lying on a blanket at the old house site on Bracken Pond where they had their annual Memorial Saturday picnic – to which Dinah had not been invited.
‘I’m waiting for the right time.’
‘Wait too long and she’ll guess, if she hasn’t already. I don’t like fooling her. She’ll never forgive either of us – and that’s not the idea, is it?’
‘Dinah, telling her is on my agenda. It’s a matter of the right timing. You know how she can get worked up and fly off the handle and blow something up out of proportion.’ He was thinking of the recent fight with Jimmy.
Dinah knew what he was thinking, because she had Jimmy as a houseguest. ‘I think everything’s going to hell in our earthly paradise. We better start mending our lives.’
‘Well, haven’t you and I done that? The question is where we can meet.’ The mosquitoes were beginning. Soon making love outside would be an ordeal.
‘Is Susan mad because Jimmy moved into my spare room?’
‘No madder than she was before.’
‘Better he should be involved with Laurie than some things he might be doing.’
‘I suppose you can say that about anything short of murder.’ Willie shook his head mournfully. ‘I can’t really figure out why this affair exercises her so strongly. Jimmy’s slippery and he’s a bit of a manipulator but he’s hardworking and he doesn’t drink heavily or smoke or gamble or take out a lousy temper on women.’
‘Um,’ Dinah said noncommittally. ‘I’m sure Laurie could do worse.’
‘Why does it make Susan so mad?’
‘She doesn’t want to be Tyrone’s daughter’s mother-in-law. How unromantic. How prosaic.’
‘No, Dinah, you’ve got that wrong. Susan loves Laurie. She thinks of Laurie as her daughter, she’s always telling me that. Are you kidding? She’d love to be part of Tyrone’s family. I just think she figures he won’t buy it. As far as I can guess, she doesn’t want to risk Tyrone getting angry or suspicious that we encouraged the affair.’
‘I can’t live a life dictated by Tyrone’s moods. Do you really want to?’
‘Dinah, let’s not fight. I’ve had a belly full of quarrels this week.’
‘And I have a houseguest I didn�
��t want.’
‘He says he’s building you an addition for rent.’
‘That’s what he says.’ She swatted a mosquito on her arm. ‘That’s the third one I killed. My back is itching like crazy. Did something bite me?’ She turned her fine muscular back to him. Two large red bumps were spaced between her shoulder blades and a couple more on her buttocks.
‘You got bitten a few times.’
‘That’s it. No more outdoor sex until frost kills the mosquitoes.’
‘But where will we go?’
‘I guess you’ll just have to come clean with Susan so that you can walk across the yard to my house, or I can visit your studio the way I used to.’
‘I’m working on it,’ he said sullenly. He wanted everything simple again. ‘I sympathize with Jimmy. If he wants her and she wants him, what business is it of anybody else’s? Jimmy had a rough deal out in Seattle. Susan is too hard on him.’ And on me, he thought, swatting a mosquito that had just stabbed him in the ankle. If he didn’t make love to Dinah, he could lose her to that musician. He just needed to blur things so that they could all come and go again without it being anything special. With Jimmy next door, that might be easier. But then Jimmy would know he was making love to her. Not if Jimmy was off at Laurie’s.
It was all absurdly complicated, but he was sure he could make it work. A tunnel. He imagined a tunnel from his studio to her bedroom. Or suppose he put a shed in the way so that from the bedroom window Susan couldn’t look out and see his studio door. A garage. They had been talking for years of building a garage with a room above it. Yes. He would do that and then it would stand between his studio and the house and he could duck into Dinah’s with no trouble at all, or she could slip over to him.
He felt so proud of himself for thinking up that solution to his problem that he rolled over on her, starting that round and round motion on her breasts that drove her crazy. ‘Again?’ she asked, coming up for air. ‘What vitamins have you been taking?’