Summer People

by Marge Piercy

  ‘Is that why Tyrone left her?’

  ‘No. She never started drinking seriously until he married again. Until then, she just kept trying to get him back. I must have been fourteen before I ever saw her drunk. At first I didn’t even understand what was wrong.’

  ‘That isn’t something you ever have to worry about where I’m concerned. I’m a pretty controlled person. I don’t need help to feel good or to relax.’

  ‘I admire that. I don’t understand how I could go from my mother to Tom, from one kind of addict to another, and not even see what I was doing.’

  ‘I think until a certain age, we all fuck up in ways we don’t understand. Then we begin to take control of our lives. It just takes longer to grow up than it’s supposed to.’

  ‘I think you’re absolutely right! That’s what’s finally happening to me. I think one enormous thing we have in common is that we both feel as if we made terrible choices that we’re responsible for, yes, but that we learned a great deal and are ever so much clearer than most people our age.’

  ‘I only hope being clear, as you call it, makes it easier to get what we want and not just easier to see what we didn’t get.’ He stirred, a stretching that rippled over his body. She was proud that she understood that meant he was ready to move now toward supper.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind that I was working on the curtains till five. Where do you want to go for supper?’

  He suggested a seafood place with a bar where they would run into his friends. That was fine with her. She was accepted as a couple with him. People whose faces she had seen for years in the street now said hello to her. After twenty-four years she had acquired a local identity. It was startling but pleasant. It made going into the post office or Souza’s a much more personal experience. On Sunday, the lady in Souza’s would hand her The Times without her having to ask. In the fish market, the man with the beard would confide what was fresh that day. She was proud that she was acquiring a fund of small talk for such occasions. All her life she had been too shy to function smoothly with people she did not know well; she felt as if this new ability was one more sign of her maturity.

  After supper they drove to the ocean and, holding hands, strolled along the beach barefoot on the firm sand the tide had relinquished. A wind had risen and combers were building, cracking their long whips over the hidden sandbars. He insisted she put on his jacket. They huddled at the base of a dune, sheltered from the wind and staring at the line where sea melted into sky, lights of a fishing vessel bobbing perhaps a mile out, the amethyst waves breaking.

  ‘Are you really going to wait till Tyrone gets here to tell him?’

  ‘He’s in Japan right now.’

  ‘Any excuse. Are you afraid of him? You know, I’m not.’

  She sighed. ‘Not afraid. I just don’t know how he’ll react –’

  ‘On the contrary, we both have a pretty good idea he won’t be overjoyed. He will think of me as déclassé. No surprises there.’

  ‘He’s friendly with your mother and your father, after all –’

  ‘Not as equals.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Jimmy, you’re practically family. I just think it’s silly to give him advance warning so he has time to think up a campaign. Better to have him find out when he’s face-to-face with us.’

  ‘Laurie, don’t act ashamed of the relationship, and he can’t make you ashamed. Understand I am not about to hide in the woods or skulk around. We are together or we aren’t. It’s that simple.’

  She was silent, clutching herself under the jacket that smelled of him, big on her but comforting. She was learning how it was with him. He was not fierce in his daily will the way Tom had been. He did not fight for every detail, the movie they saw, the kind of beer. He had preferences but he attached little passion to most of them. He would just as soon have strawberry ripple as fudge. On the other hand, he was stubborn about what he felt was important. She perceived that he was not going to give her a lot of room to manoeuvre with Tyrone. He intended to control the content of her presentation. On one hand she felt flattered, because what woman wouldn’t prefer that what mattered to her man was the relationship with her rather than the brand of toothpaste she stocked in the bathroom cabinet and which cheese she brought home; on the other, it was frightening, because she could not dissuade herself that being straightforward with Tyrone would cause a fracas. Further, it made the relationship more important than she had fully decided it to be.

  ‘You’re shivering,’ he said and drew her up at once. ‘The wind’s chilly. Come, let’s go back.’ He steered her along the twilight shore where the sand glimmered dull grey, toward the parking lot. ‘We’ll stop for ice cream and map out a strategy. When exactly is he coming?’

  Walking barefoot on sand and then on the cracked gritty asphalt that still held a little of the day’s heat made her recall every summer of her life, this place where she had been more at home, more important, more confident than she ever could be in New York, in her real life. She never went barefoot in New York. Here she had bossed Jimmy around and sometimes even the children of Tyrone’s guests. ‘He’ll be late this year, because of Japan. He said he’d arrive the second week of July. Usually he comes for the Fourth.’

  ‘An appropriate time for fireworks.’ Jimmy stopped to kiss her.

  For the first time in her life, she dreaded Tyrone’s arrival. She had always cherished any time he could pry loose to be with her. She felt guilty for how little she was looking forward to his arrival this time, for how delighted she would be if he broke his annual pattern and went off instead to England or Sweden. But Tyrone was certainly coming.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  DINAH

  An interrupted relationship has its own intensities. Maybe it was the ardent musicality of Tanglewood, the emotional concentration of the place, with all those students wanting a break professionally, all the stars blowing through, isolated from cities, from ordinary life. Maybe it was the season or the mood one or both of them brought with them. Dinah sensed at once things had heated up. When Dinah went from the Cape to Lenox, she was always struck by how different the scale was. The buildings were larger, the streets wider, mansions as common as saltboxes at home, the trees twice as tall, the hills, small mountains. Vistas stretched into the distance. It was spacious, and they expanded together to fill it with strong feelings and reactions.

  They were not on her turf, as they had been at Pesach; they were not on his, as they had been in May in Manhattan. They were sharing a cottage. Itzak had rented a car. Of course one of his first queries upon seeing her was, ‘Should I buy a car? But where would I keep it in New York? I could get out of the city much faster with a car. I could get up to see you.’

  She was getting used to his constant queries, understanding the habit not as a lack of direction but as an openness to all possibilities at this era of his life, when his success as a performer turned all that was theoretically possible into something he might do. Having judged himself a total failure in his marriage, he was all of the time asking himself if he should try any particular option he could envision. He seemed conscious that any one choice shut down countless others and that his alternatives branched away from him in intricate patterns he could not evaluate. Hence the restless questioning.

  They went off to their first meeting with the chamber ensemble that was going to play with Itzak. She spoke briefly about the piece she would be conducting and gave out the parts. She cleared out quickly, as today’s time belonged to another performance. Tomorrow at ten would be the first run-through. Most of them, she thought, looked bored, testy, reluctant.

  Itzak drove them back to the cottage, a modern pine and glass box built against a huge stone fireplace that went up two storeys. It was essentially one vast room with a kitchen in one corner and a smaller bedroom. It had a broad deck with two white pines growing up through it. From the deck to the water’s edge was no farther than from her door at home to her own pond, but this was even bigger.


  He looked terrific. He was a man whose eyes sparkled more against a tan, whose crisp curly hair was set off better against summer clothes. He liked being in the Berkshires; he liked a more out-of-door life than he generally got. This little game of keeping house together briefly was fun for both of them. They tossed their stuff into the bedroom and went swimming at once. They were both inelegant but sturdy swimmers, puffing and splashing but making their determined way across the pond. Then they went back to the cottage and got into bed.

  She was kissing him and enjoying his mouth and his hands and thinking casually how he was just the right size for her so that they fitted together without overlap or awkwardness. He was eating her and she was beginning to melt. Then the sex bloomed out from her. She was hot. They were humping each other and it was hot and wordless and molten and she stopped thinking anything. There were sounds in her head, a drone under them sustaining them, a rhythm welling up through them, but no words, no thoughts except that he was inside her in more than one sense. They were almost one animal, one being. She approached orgasm and hung there caught on the verge, caught, and then finally was carried over and exploded in stopped time. It was and it was and it was for her, urgent and then graceful, floating, dispersing. She had to collect herself so that they could go on for him, and she was still so open and grateful that tenderness exuded through all her pores. She could not quite understand what had happened, but it was a sexual event, sui generis; she tried to label it safely, but still her body stirred under his casual glance like a grove of aspens in the wind.

  When they had disentangled themselves he lay on his side staring at her in surprise as great as her own. Then he fell asleep. Then she did. When they awoke they were both galvanized by hunger. They had no time to eat anything but a banana and some potato chips to be just in time for a piece of Antoniou that was premiering. They skipped the party afterwards and went to bed, both tired from long driving and long lovemaking.

  The next morning, they headed over to the grounds early. At home, she missed the company of other musicians sometimes not at all and sometimes as intensely as any other vital thirst. She felt as if she were not only listening to music all day but immersed in a great simmering bowl of it, that her skin was listening, her bones were vibrating to it, her blood was carrying it along in the red blood cells. She argued music at coffee break, she heard music all morning, music was lunch and supper and drinks and the stuff of her dreams at night. When Kyle listened to a mosquito for a moment and identified D over second C before crushing it on his arm, Dinah felt a sense of community with other musicians she never had at home. Walking across the grounds, she heard a soprano practising lieder overlapping a Brahms sonato for cello and piano overlapping some horns working on a Gunther Schuller piece.

  The first rehearsal was difficult. They were meeting in a big rough rehearsal building of perpendicular wood loosely built so that the wind wafted through and cooled them. It was hard to assert herself as a conductor. She had never had conducting fantasies, never stood leading an imaginary orchestra of chairs and cats. She felt she did a workmanlike job when she had to, but as a woman, it was always a matter of having to storm around and demonstrate her grasp of what she should not need to prove at all, her own score. Itzak, of course, already was in control of his part, but he had to help her drag the ensemble along. Nita was an immense support. She had studied her part the week before and played it through. She had played Dinah’s music for twenty years.

  While Itzak was talking to Ozawa, Nita and she stole away into the formal garden among the clipped hemlock hedges. ‘Maybe I am crazy about him. I feel so confused. Where’s Tanya?’

  ‘Giselle came up with Eileen to hear your piece, so we’re crowded, but we cover for each other. Don’t worry,’ Nita whispered, her bangs falling forward. ‘If something goes haywire, you can still camp out with us.’

  Itzak, of course, was much busier than she was, for he had to rehearse the other three pieces on the programme and meet with students; after she left, he would be performing with the BSO. He was in residence for two weeks. But she had more than enough to occupy her time.

  It was great to argue with composers who still did twelve tone rows and believed passionately that her kind of music was reactionary and formless. She loved to be argued with; usually no one around her understood enough to challenge her premises, let alone judge her output. It wasn’t that she needed that kind of atmosphere to produce. As a daily life she thought she was far more productive living in a beautiful place where she could easily get lots of exercise and simply going into herself and her ideas and composing with an independence she would never have if she lived in this kind of simmering musical soup. Still this immersion was great for a vacation.

  The second rehearsal things began to come together. She worked the musicians over and over the third section, which was dragging, too soft. She could see when one of them suddenly got it. Robby, the damned viola, was driving her crazy. He was off tempo, coming in late, throwing everybody off. The younger players liked the music better than this guy, maybe fifty, did. She knew Robby was good because she had heard him enough times. He could do it, but he wouldn’t – either because he didn’t understand yet or because he disliked the music.

  But when she was conducting and it was moving right, she felt as if she and Itzak were one body, one mind, one sound. He was good. As a flautist, she wasn’t fit to pass him papers. He was not only technically extraordinary, he was extraordinarily expressive. Sometimes when he was playing, she thought she had never seen anyone as beautiful. Then she felt as if there was nothing she did in her life that was probably as truly important as simply pleasing him and enabling him to play. Those moments did not last long, because self-abnegation came rarely to her. She did find herself musing how hereditary such musical talent might prove to be. A child of theirs would certainly be attractive, at least in her sights. He or she would not be tall, would be stocky, muscular, strong; would have curly hair and brown eyes. Itzak was healthy, intelligent. Susan had really been upset by the idea of her having a baby with Willie, but if she had Itzak’s baby, maybe Susan would see that differently. Any child of hers would be a Jew, but her father would be pleased by Itzak. A pity Nathan could not have heard him. She kept these little fantasies to herself. She didn’t want to terrify Itzak.

  Days passed in intense hungers satisfied and sensations clear as the water they swam in. They talked all the time they were not in bed. They argued about the music they heard. They argued about Hindemith, who was undergoing a little revival of late, and whom Dinah liked better than Itzak did. They picked apart their least favourite conductors and described temper tantrums they had witnessed.

  Kyle acted liked a rejected suitor, although he was gay and never had shown the least personal interest in her. She could tell he was convinced that she had written a better piece for Itzak than for him; that was true, because she had only been subsidized to write a short piece for him for a rather casual reading, while Itzak was getting a suite for a major première.

  That night was the performance of her piece in the theatre, on a programme of Debussy, Mozart and Schumann. Her piece was right after intermission. She envied the crowds on the lawn in their beach chairs, with their little floating lights and their picnic hampers, their chaise-longues and their blankets sprawled with dozing children. The concert was sold out because it was Itzak performing, the seats crammed on the stage behind little barriers. Supper sat in her stomach hunched on itself like Figaro when he was sulking. She could not exactly remember how to breathe. She marched out onto the stage waiting for the hangman to fix the noose. Along came Itzak, to the crowd’s rising crescendo, strolling as into their bedroom. Yet she knew now how he built for performances, all nerves and elbows and static electricity. It was time to start. For a moment she couldn’t remember how it went. She had to glance at her own score. She felt disconcerted by all the random strangers on the stage, far outnumbering the little chamber group of musicians. Then she raised the b
aton and it all came pounding through her.

  She was driving them on through it, driving them while the wind ripped along and it was uphill and suddenly the momentum was carrying her, her arms were taken over, the ensemble was together and possessed and over it all the great silver bird that was Itzak was rising into the moon. There it was, just the way she had heard it in her head. Even the late entry of the viola in the same damned place Robby always straggled in did not throw the ensemble off and they churned along.

  Sweat was running down her sides under her long blue dress by the time she was facing the applause, which seemed warm, which seemed genuine. It was over. She wanted to do it again. It was too soon. She heard not a note of the last piece, for she was trembling and subsiding.

  When it was time for her to leave Monday, he begged her to stay on and she did, for two more days. She called Jimmy, did not get him, left messages on her answering machine to remind him to water the garden and be good to the cats. Then she had to leave. She was taking up too much of his time; they were breaking unwritten rules. Wednesday morning very early she drove out. She felt exhausted with overstimulation. It was a good fatigue, of being well used throughout her mind and body, of being fertilized into fruitfulness. All she could really want was to arrive, finally get home after the five hour drive, and sleep. She wanted to wake energized and start something new and utterly irresistible. She felt full of music, freshened, primed to launch into work while the impulse was fierce in her and while all other needs and hungers were laid to rest – silenced, abolished.

  She arrived on the edge of town just after two and stopped to buy groceries. She could feel herself about to commence a period of utter discipline and joyful hard work. A rhythm was beating in the back of her mind, a syncopated march, like an old blues march but with varying rhythms over that base rhythm and she could hear more brass than she usually worked with. She was more a percussion, a keyboard, a reed composer. Then she came to strings. The brass instruments were frequently afterthoughts. Not this time.