by Marge Piercy
She had tried to talk to Tyrone about Jimmy, but he simply would not let her. He was surrounded by guests, his assistant Donald, Sally. She decided he would not take the relationship seriously until more time had passed. He was waiting for her and Jimmy to prove themselves. In the meantime he pretended no such relationship existed. Jimmy spent every night with her in the boathouse, but he went on living at Dinah’s – meaning he kept his clothes there, received most phone calls there, ate there half the time.
Tonight they were eating at Dinah’s, because she was away and they had more privacy across the pond from the big house. Dinah had left early that morning for Boston, all fussed because Itzak had suddenly moved there and she did not know whether to be glad or sorry. She was carrying him a basket of zucchini, cabbages, early tomatoes, lettuce and beans, as if he must be starving. Laurie found Dinah amusing. She lived by other rules than most people.
‘I can remember when Dinah scared me.’ She gazed at Jimmy across the table of leftovers, more picnic than formal meal. ‘I thought she was witchy and dangerous – a lesbian who might mesmerize me with a glance.’
‘Dinah? I can’t imagine being scared of her. I used to run to her when I was feeling misunderstood. She always seemed halfway between being a kid and being an adult.’
‘Because she didn’t have children like other adults?’
‘No children, she wasn’t married, she played instruments alone and with other musicians. She was always running around in the woods like a kid.’
‘But she was married when she first moved here. Her husband was tall and gaunt, with a beard.’ She remembered Susan telling Tyrone, ‘He’s a very famous poet,’ in a tone of awe. Tyrone did not collect literature as he did paintings and sculpture, judging it inherently more subversive and chancier. He had no interest in a dying poet; she however recalled being intensely curious. She had imagined Mark Edelmann falling in love with her and writing her sonnets. She had to write an Elizabethan and a Petrarchan sonnet for her English teacher that year, so she knew how hard they were. Love of her would make them easy for him. She would read them and cry after he was dead, and other men would want to meet the woman who had inspired the poems. Such had been her fantasy at fourteen about Mark Edelmann.
‘While she was married she wasn’t important in our lives, just the people next door with the sick husband you had to be quiet for. Kids dismiss invalids. We had no idea who Edelmann was. Johnny and I called him Spider Man because he was so skinny and weird looking.’
‘Dinah’s funny about Itzak. She can’t seem to figure out how interested she is. I’d think by the time you’re her age, you’d know what you want.’
‘It’s more complicated than that.’ Jimmy nodded toward the new house. ‘She’s involved with my father again.’
‘She told you?’
‘I see him ducking into her house early in the morning.’
‘Are you sure? My goodness. Does Susan know?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t think she officially knows, but you’d think she’d guess. Still I don’t think she’s let herself notice. She’s been in a blue funk all summer. I don’t know what’s eating her. She’s sure been moody.’
‘No wonder Dinah is confused what to do about Itzak. She doesn’t seem to know who or what she wants.’
‘She wants things to be like they were all those years. It might happen. I don’t know why Susan is so dead set against her. Susan gets stuck being furious with people. It used to happen all the time with her and Johnny.’
‘Is Johnny really coming home this summer?’
‘Only for a couple of days. She called me yesterday. She’s already working on me to stay with you so she can stay here. It makes her nervous to sleep in the same house with Susan.’
‘I haven’t stayed over at my mother’s in years. Of course she lives in a tiny apartment, she could only put me on the couch. But I was glad when she had to move into that apartment, because then she didn’t have a room for me any longer.’
‘Would you like to stay over here tonight? My room’s small, but we can make up the bed in Dinah’s room with clean sheets – she stripped it before she left. It’s a beautiful room with a nice big bed.’
She laughed breathlessly. She didn’t know why it should sound exciting to sleep with him in a new bed. Actually she would love it if they could sleep at his parents’ house while Susan was away, in his old bedroom. She had a vague memory of having been in that room while they were both of high school age. She wanted to see it again, the room of his boyhood, to touch every old object and hear its story. ‘Let’s stay here. It’ll be fun.’ She liked escaping from the coterie around Tyrone. Since they drew their attitudes from Tyrone, all of them ignored her relationship with Jimmy. That got to her after a while, because she was proud that she had attracted him and that he loved her. She felt as if she ought to be congratulated, envied, not treated to a campaign of calculated silence.
She felt like a woman who had dropped twenty pounds, looked in the mirror and liked what she saw, but no one around her noticed a damn thing. She felt better than she ever had in her life. She felt competent, she felt loved, she even felt pretty. Willie had said to her just the other day, ‘Laurie, you’re positively blooming.’ She still retained enough of a memory of her old crush on him to have blushed, enormously pleased. It wasn’t like asking Tyrone how she looked and having him blandly assure her she looked just fine. Willie had paid a spontaneous compliment: blooming, he had said, like a flower, like a rose, something natural and lovely.
Jimmy appreciated her body. He said she had delicate but strong bones like the best porcelain. He said her hair was spring sunshine. He told her she had an inner strength she was only beginning to explore. Slowly she began to discover how long she had been unhappy, a quiet desperate but almost acceptable unhappiness she had thought of as part of her nature, as someone who never leaves New York will come to take the steady roar of traffic for a given and never know the lack of silence. She always felt second rate, disappointing as Tyrone’s daughter. Compared to the golden youthful women he married, she was awkward and shy. Even with the few men who had sought her out, who had pursued her, she had felt plain and apologetic. She had never been among the brightest, the prettiest, the most popular girls in any of the schools she had attended.
She did not apologize to Jimmy, for he had not settled for her. In one version she told herself, she was the princess wooed by the worthy commoner. Only on this pond was she a princess, but here as Tyrone’s daughter, she enjoyed a privileged status lacking in Manhattan where she must compete with the prettier and more confident daughters of men richer and more powerful than her father. In another version, he was the beloved she had chosen, who foolishly thought he had seduced her, the prize she had cleverly won. She felt a carefully suppressed anger that neither her father nor any of his attendants, not Sally or Donald or his guests, would give her credit and wish her joy of her choice. Only Celeste acknowledged his existence, calling him when they were both in the kitchen, your man. Do you want to take the rest of this lobster salad to your man?
‘Working at the gallery, I was always nervous. I felt as if I was there under sufferance, because Tyrone bought a lot of art from Manning Stanwyck.’
‘But you know plenty about it. You have good ideas for your gallery. Surely you were overqualified for the job that was mostly hanging stuff on the wall and making phone calls and arranging for caterers.’
‘I guess I was.’ Laurie had never thought about it that way. She beamed at him. ‘But that makes it even more striking, how apologetic I felt in that job, as if I was taking it from someone truly deserving.’
‘Most of your life, you’ve been walking around apologizing.… I wonder why Tyrone never had another child with any of his wives?’
‘I know Glenda wanted a child. They tried, I think.’
‘Do you want children?’ he asked her, as if casually, leaning back in his chair with a knowing grin. ‘I mean by and by.’
&n
bsp; ‘Of course! But not one, like me. I want two or three children. I used to envy you and Johnny, always having each other.’
‘We didn’t always have each other. Sometimes we stuck up for each other, and sometimes we’d sell each other out for a smile from some other kid we had a crush on or wanted to be pals with. They didn’t invent sibling rivalry out of some psychology book. Johnny and I were close, yes, but we were also out to get each other, we were always jockeying for favour and space.’
‘I think a truly wise and caring mother can prevent that.’
Jimmy shrugged. ‘You can’t keep the sun from coming up or going down, and you can’t keep a little kid from wanting all of his mother’s attention all of the time.’
‘Original sin?’ She felt so happy she got up and danced around the table and hugged him. ‘I love to talk to you. I have better times with you than I ever had with anybody.’
‘I love you better than anybody else has, or anybody else would,’ he said, grinning again. ‘You just have to want to keep me, real bad.’
Chapter Thirty-Seven
DINAH
Dinah drove to Boston to the regular moans of Figaro. Tosca was curled up in the same carrying case, quiet and at ease. After the first hour of the trip, she suddenly sat up and for ten minutes protested in loud piercing interrogatory mews. Dinah worried about taking the cats into the city. Would Itzak really agree to keep the doors shut and watch that neither of them bolted and was lost? She had been over-anxious about the cats since Figaro had run away. They personified her lost peace. They wanted what she wanted, quiet, a regular schedule, things in their appropriate place and all the others gone away.
She had not told Willie where she was going, because she felt as if being open with him would give him an advantage so far lacking to Itzak, and because she was afraid he would punish her by stopping work on the addition in her absence. Her lie of omission would give her time to make a decision about what she had with Itzak. And maybe she would get some work done. She had to try to be honest with Itzak about Willie, and that hung over her head like a canopy of wet cement.
Itzak’s house was two-thirds of the way up a steep hill in Brookline. In order to get to the house from her parking space on the street, she had to climb a flight of cement steps set in a rocky slope. The house itself was on a little plateau. Behind it the land fell away, so that the roof of the house on the next street was below them; to the right the land rose sharply to the next lot. His turn-of-the-century brick house was small only by comparison to the Victorians on either side. The purple beech he had mentioned was an enormous full bosomed tree filling half the front yard. The sunny part was planted in browning grass edged with overgrown perennial beds, neglected irises and old-fashioned orange daylilies just finishing.
She could hear Itzak practising inside. She carried up the cats, her suitcase and the presents of produce and flowers she had brought him, but she did not go in until he finished the Mozart. She was being thoughtful and she was being nervous. Then she rapped on the screen door and called to him. Was this a place she would return many times, a house she would come to love? Or would she never return? She had to get some honesty back into her life, as neglected and weedy as those poor perennial beds. Both cats crowded at the grid of the carrying case, sniffing the air apprehensively and staring out, two yellow and two green eyes with pupils dilated.
He had lost some of his Tanglewood tan. He kissed her and then latched the screen door as she released the cats, who sidled out to move forward like soldiers on point into unfamiliar jungle. He gave her a tour. The furniture she remembered from his New York apartment, the piano his accompanist used huddled in the big livingroom, the kitchen, his bedroom and practice room. He had a desk for his new assistant marooned in a room downstairs with a chair and a telephone. The diningroom was empty and so was the extra bedroom. She had a sense of him as a project like the house she must tackle or refuse. He needed to be taken in hand. The moment she was in his presence she began to feel that sexual energy that had cooked between them at Tanglewood, along with a gust of strong feeling that made her wary. Was this passionate draw something to be seized or fled? Was it sexual programming? She wasn’t about to abandon herself to a Wagnerian Liebestod. Wagner had always got her dander up, no matter how she might appreciate his music intellectually.
The house needed draperies, rugs, furniture, lighting. The rooms had been freshly painted, but the fixtures were old. The kitchen and the bathrooms would require complete renovation. The cats disappeared to explore, creeping from room to room, while she unpacked her country gifts for him and hung the couple of things that should go in the closet. Then they sat right down and began going over the suite together, with him reading the flute part and she using the piano as the other instruments. She wanted to show him the changes she had made after the performance at Tanglewood, after their discussions and the feedback she had received. They read their way through, arguing, haggling. Twice she apologetically brought out her own flute to show him what she had been thinking of in the way of attack. By the time they left off, it was midafternoon, the cats were chasing each other up and down the curved stairs and through the empty halls, skidding with their claws on the bare floors, and Dinah was unreasonably happy.
‘I’m starving,’ he said. ‘I’m not a big luncher except when I’m travelling. Let’s go get something for supper. There’s a deli, an Indian restaurant, a Greek, a Chinese, an Israeli, a good ice-cream store. We can get take-out or buy groceries. But let’s take a walk. I’m curious about my neighbourhood. Have you noticed how hilly it is, all the big trees?’
He took her hand as they walked. She had not held hands with a man in twenty years. Mark considered it sentimental. She had gone arm in arm with Susan, but Willie walked at his own pace in a trance of observation. Holding hands was a little confining but it was also cosy, companionable. They stretched their calf muscles tromping up and down the hills. Then they went back to his house and upstairs to his bedroom, where he had obviously made up the bed that morning with fresh sheets in a zebra pattern.
She felt a little shy at first. Then she forgot. It was there again, the pressure, the rush, the depth of feeling that had been stirred up between them at Tanglewood. Her body swelled, elongated, grew more viscous and liquid, a thick golden molten substance beating in waves of urgency. She felt powerfully attracted as she looked at him, his black curls, the fine modelling of his chin, the darkness of his eyes that almost absorbed the iris into the pupil, the shaping of the bones of his shoulders, the fine muscling in his arms. He was not a big man, but he was well and strongly built, the same tough stock as herself. Then that observing part of her drowned, and the rhythm that rose in her was a river rushing around them, carrying her forward on its rapids.
He seemed a little shaken but also pleased. ‘I wondered if it would be the way it was then.’
Maybe it had been so many years since she had made love with anyone except Susan and Willie that she had forgotten the intensity of early hot sex; yet she did not think so. Generally sex got better as a relationship improved, relaxed, deepened – that was how it was for her. Chemistry was inexplicable and she could produce no reason her body preferred Itzak – nor was she sure she trusted her body’s frenzy. They were the right size for each other they had a similar high energy level, they were both strongly oral and they both liked to fuck. Yet put that all together and there were overtones, resonances, harmonics that could not be guessed beforehand.
They wandered out behind the house to a view of rooftops and the crowns of oaks and maples. A blue jay scolded from a white birch at the back of the lot beside an old but serviceable picnic table. She felt her emotions churning and splashing around. They had picked up lamb chops while they were out walking and a nice zinfandel. With the vegetables she had grown, she made supper they ate as a picnic at the table. A breeze tousled his hair. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, his arms bare. The dark hairs on his arms rose slightly. Tomorrow was Shabbat, she thought s
uddenly. She had been lighting the candles, but she had not lit them for or with anyone else since Mark had died. She would get a chicken to roast.
That evening they drove in her car down to the waterfront, where old granite or brick warehouses had been converted into condominiums, with stores and restaurants and offices at water level. Licking ice-cream cones from Atlantic Avenue, they walked out on the piers. ‘Why do you think you’re so much more open to new music than many of the soloists I’ve met?’
‘I like to be stretched. I like something that forces me to learn new ways to play. Besides, maybe I’m grateful somebody’s still writing well for flute. Composers who work only with synthesizers and computers are a lot scarier. Don’t you think that’s the composer’s ultimate fantasy? To get rid of the performer who can screw up, who can ham it up, who can give the piece the altogether wrong spin, the batty interpretation?’
‘It’s a way of controlling performance. I understand the appeal. Years ago, when Mark and I were living outside Ithaca, I got fascinated by electronic music. It was all I cared about.’ Things kept reminding her of Mark, forcing her to wonder if there was not a lot in Itzak that was like Mark.
‘What made you decide to go back to live ornery performers and old-fashioned instruments?’
‘One time a storm knocked the power out for two days. I couldn’t do anything. It bugged me. I got out my flute and I could play just fine. I also started thinking about all the equipment you have to haul around, from when I was in the band, the Wholey Terrors. You need a van just for your amps. Now you know, I’m not pretending I live in the Kalahari Desert and I have to beat two sticks together to make music. I’ve used tape recorders and delays and feedback, I still use computers and synths. But I also want to write music people can take off with them and play anyplace.’