Summer People

by Marge Piercy

  ‘There’s always that pull toward perfection.’ He was leaning on a parapet staring at the oily black waters sloshing in. ‘The Glenn Gould trip. Never perform again. Only record the perfect version under controlled circumstances. I can understand that, but I fight it. That’s another reason I keep trying to expand my repertoire and another reason I do play new music when I can. Sometimes in your pieces there’s space made intentionally for improvisation, so that you are asking the performer to share responsibility and judge the audience and think and feel the music and become totally involved.’

  ‘So that there is no ideal performance,’ she said. ‘Yes. I want it to be alive and changeable. I’m just enough of a musician to respect performance, to respect the rapport that can create real electricity between the player, the piece and the audience.’

  ‘Dinah, sometimes you stare at me and you look so worried. What is it? Do you think I’m pushing you too hard? Is it some professional doubt?’

  ‘No, no!… One thing is, sometimes you make me think of my husband.’

  ‘You didn’t get divorced. He died, right? So is that bad? Or just painful?’

  ‘I loved him. But it wasn’t till he died I really could work full steam ahead as a composer. We were involved in some more intimate passionate demanding absorbing way than I’ve been with anybody else. Maybe I’m scared that could happen between us. Maybe I’m scared that I’ll somehow lose myself or my work will suffer.’

  ‘How old were you when you met him?’

  ‘Twenty-two.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Forty-eight.’

  ‘Don’t you think if he overwhelmed you, age had something to do with it? I’m not exactly the overwhelming type. I don’t tend to think I know everything, if you haven’t noticed. I have more doubts than certainties. And we’d always be apart for long stretches while I’m on tour.’

  ‘I don’t know if it was the age difference or that I dealt with sounds and he dealt with words, and words are how people get to each other. But maybe a certain degree of intimacy gets in the way of creation.’

  ‘Do you really believe that? It sounds like romantic nonsense to me.’

  ‘I don’t know what I think, Itzak. I’m sorely confused. I have to feel my way.’

  ‘Dinah, I’m not pushing that hard.’

  ‘Maybe I feel pulled that hard.’

  When they were back at his house, sitting in the livingroom with the pleasant red and blue Tree of Life Oriental from his previous apartment – a rug that had belonged to his grandparents – both of them curled up on the leather coach, she said, ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘Why do I think that means you’re going to say there’s someone else. Is it that guy who moved in with you? It is, isn’t it?’

  ‘Jimmy? Never. I’ve known him since he was in grade school. He has a girlfriend he’ll probably marry, after his divorce comes through.’

  ‘But there is someone else.’

  ‘I’ve been seeing Willie again. You know, I was with Willie and Susan before I met you. I’d just broken up with them.’

  ‘And the woman? Susan?’

  ‘She speaks to me but distantly, like an acquaintance.’

  ‘What does she think about you fucking her husband?’

  He was angry, he was quite angry. His mouth thinned, his voice deepened and hardened. She felt a sense of premonitory loss. Was he about to break off with her? Could she talk him out of it? ‘Understand, we got involved eleven years ago. We’ve been family. Their kids have been my kids. When it all came apart, I felt lost.’

  ‘You’re saying you got involved with me as an act of desperation?’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said, aware that he spoke perfect truth. ‘Only that my life has been structured in a certain stable way for a long time and –’

  ‘I don’t know that having an affair with a man and a woman at the same time can be described as a stable family setup. And are you saying I interrupted this cosy arrangement?’

  ‘Susan ended it. She got furious with me. She’d been building up resentment toward me for at least a year. But I’m trying to tell you that when I met you, I thought that was all over. Then Willie came to me and we’ve been involved again. Not the way it was. We don’t eat together, we don’t have a family life.’ She decided not to mention that he was helping build her addition. ‘It is just an affair now. But I can’t give up on them just yet. Willie thinks Susan will come to her senses and we’ll be close again.’

  ‘And where does that leave me? On the sidelines cheering?’

  ‘I don’t think it would ever be the way it was with them,’ she said, aware she was lying about her favourite fantasy. ‘I feel very connected to you. I’m telling you honestly, I’m confused. Things can’t go on as they are with Willie. I have to know what Susan feels. I can’t go behind her back.’

  ‘So what you want is either to go back with living with both of them or to have this woman give you a licence to have a continuing affair with her husband.’

  ‘Itzak, you’re furious. Yet I told you the situation I’d been in.’

  ‘I thought it was pretty bizarre before, but at least it was over. You can’t expect me to feel enthusiastic about the way it is now.’

  ‘I know I have to straighten it out. I feel as if I’m lying to Susan.’

  ‘Why? You haven’t been keeping anything from her you haven’t been keeping from me.’

  ‘This is the first real chance I’ve had to tell you. It wasn’t something I could mention on the phone.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me at Tanglewood?’

  ‘I was so happy with you I was afraid of spoiling it. I didn’t know, I still don’t know, what I can mean to you. I thought maybe when you had the suite, that might be it. After all, I don’t know who you see in New York. I don’t know who you go to bed with when you’re on tour. We’ve never discussed these matters.’ She was sitting there with her stomach turned to lead. She was sure she had lost him, but she could not accept the loss. She had the urge to fling herself at him, on him, so their bodies would argue for her. Inch by inch she moved nearer to him along the leather of the couch.

  ‘I guess we haven’t.’ His voice softened a little. He leaned back against the couch. ‘Maybe we’ve both been afraid to ask hard questions.’

  ‘Let alone volunteer hard information.’

  ‘I guess I assumed we both want one good solid central relationship.’

  ‘I didn’t set out to get involved with both Susan and Willie. It just happened and it worked that way better than it could with any two of us. No two of us could make it alone – that goes for me and Willie and for Susan and Willie too. We blundered into a triangle and now it has its own history and its own loyalties.’

  ‘But is it history or is it now? Because if it’s current, there’s no room for me. I can’t have what I want, so I’d be better off getting out. There’s nothing for me in that scenario but disappointment.’

  ‘The truth is, I don’t know yet. I don’t know yet what can be between you and me. We’re just getting to know each other. I have my fears about the intensity to deal with. If Willie and Susan moved to Saskatchewan tomorrow, we’d still have serious unanswered questions about the two of us.’

  ‘I have questions about you. Can you be honest with me? Can you make any kind of commitment and honour it? Can you be faithful or will you always be harbouring fantasies about having a woman too? Can you take living with someone who’s going to get more fame and more attention and more money for performing than you get for composing?’

  ‘Itzak.’ She took his head tentatively between her hands. ‘Can I stay on? Can we at least try to sort out what’s between us this week? Then I make you a promise that when I go back, I’ll bring the same rigour to bear on that front.’ She could feel her hands trembling against his cheeks, smooth, warm, the slight prickle of his returning beard.

  He laughed shortly, like a cough, but let her hands remain. His eyes looked into
hers with an intensity that made her blink. ‘You really want to stay?’

  ‘Yes.’ It came out explosively. She had been holding her breath.

  ‘But if things are good this week, it’ll be worse when you leave to know you’re going back to him.’

  ‘But if I leave now, we’ll never know if it would have been good or just not worth the trouble. Besides, this house needs an awful lot of work. I’m good at fixing things up.’

  ‘I noticed that,’ he said drily, but put his arm around her. ‘I don’t want you to leave. Maybe at least we can settle whether I’m the late great Mark Edelmann returned, or something new under the moon for you. But then you’re going to have to decide, Dinah. I’m not your bloody vacation.’

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  SUSAN

  Susan was not tempted to eat out in New York. Instead she shopped at the local gourmet grocery store with its marvellous delicatessen counter half a block long, and found herself spending as much for a full bag as she would have in a restaurant. However, the pleasure of putting her cheeses, her duck pâté, her artichoke salad, her smoked salmon pasta in the giant refrigerator along with a bottle of Chardonnay she had found in a closet and was sure Tyrone would not begrudge her, was keener than she could have derived from any restaurant. It made her able to push away thinking about the afternoon’s meeting with Max. They did not like several of her designs. Said she was repeating herself. Fin de siècle wallpaper. That crude bastard. Resolutely she drew herself up. She would not think about it. She would not let his pettiness mar her evening, Mr di Vecchio, who had far more power and more taste than Max, would be there tomorrow when they talked about fabrics for next fall. It would be different with him.

  Being alone in Tyrone’s apartment was playing house, and funnily enough it reminded her of early adolescence when her parents would go out and by luck take her brothers along. She had loved having the house to herself for a precious evening to play at being adult – not what her parents were, but adults from movies. She would march through the rooms purposefully addressing servants, her husband, her children. She would find the chocolate-covered cherries her mother hid and eat two, pour an inch of her father’s rye whiskey into a glass and make up the difference in his decanter with water, go through everybody’s drawers. Alas, she had been the only one in the house who kept a diary, and after her brother Jack had got hold of it once, she had never written secrets in it again. She found her older brother’s condoms and his dirty comic books and a couple of marijuana cigarettes. Her family’s dreary house became almost glamorous when it was hers to control.

  Now here was Tyrone’s home open to her, vulnerable, welcoming. He had given it to her, apologizing because Celeste was not there to take care of her. She had told him she was used to looking after herself, but she did not tell him she was delighted by Celeste’s absence, because she was free to exercise her curiosity. She had no wish to rush out to get tickets to a play or to see a movie, to shop, to study the windows of boutiques, her usual New York pleasures. She was accustomed to having his Cape house to explore at her leisure, but it was, after all, only a summer house. He had another house on Aruba he had urged her to borrow, but Willie always said they didn’t have the money to fly down. Then he would promptly buy some electric fish sealer.

  The livingroom that had so fascinated her the last time held her only long enough to scan his collection of VCR tapes. He must own several hundred movies. She wondered why he bothered, but then perhaps it was an easy way to entertain businessmen he had little in common with, and sometimes their families. When she was trying to work, she had had to resort to baby-sitting Jimmy and Siobhan with the TV; how much less guilty to pick out a good children’s film and plunk them down with it. Children loved to watch a film over and over, she remembered that.

  His collection of records and compact discs was scantier than Dinah’s. He was visually attuned. Only art books, an occasional best-seller and the latest controversial thesis books about the stock market or the economy lay around the huge room with its view of the East River and the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. She had been silly to worry about borrowing a bottle of white wine. In the wet bar were stored dozens of bottles of liquor and liqueurs, along with cases of wine. The room had been designed with an eye to showing off art, walls two storeys tall with his big Motherwell, his stunning Jackson Pollock, the various paintings and pieces of sculpture that came and went, lights set up to pick them out and set them off.

  In one locked case were his pre-Columbian statuettes. He had told her he had begun by collecting them, but as he gained more confidence in his taste and in the market, he had moved into collecting contemporary art and then finally work of younger, just-breaking artists. The statuettes belonged to the first period, and the Franz Kline, the Motherwell, the Pollock, the Bultman to the middle period. The strange collages and bright blobs, the distorted figure paintings, fluorescent cartoons by the younger artists she had never heard of were what he collected now. She tried to memorize their names. They must be the pick of their generation. She smiled wryly when she thought how annoyed Willie was that Tyrone had never bought one of his pieces. Really, how out of place one of his shrieking political statements would be in this ambience.

  She wandered the room, now lying on the couch that looked away from the room at the river, now trying all the chairs in a conversational grouping. It was time for supper. She would take it, not in the formal diningroom but on the balcony, once she figured out how to get the French windows open. She was still working on it when the phone rang. It was the doorman. She had set off an alarm. She apologized profusely and decided she would eat in the diningroom after all. It slightly overawed her. The table sat twelve without added leaves. The chandelier was glass shards and bronze. It made her think of a crab poised over the table. The dining room could be a warmer more welcoming room. If she lived here, she would redecorate it. It was too stiff.

  If she lived here. This was living. It was beautiful, yes, but there was the too careful hand of a decorator everywhere. She would loosen up the colour scheme and the placement of objects. She would get more interesting pattern and texture into the draperies. The rooms were too obviously arranged for the benefit of the works of art; she would change that emphasis to make all appear more serendipitous. Tyrone needed her light hand.

  Basically the colours in the diningroom were all too cool, too formal. It needed touches of warmth. Everything was beige and celadon and ivory. ‘Tyrone,’ she said, ‘Ty, you must give me a free hand with this room. You want people to relax a little while they eat, to let go. This room doesn’t give that message at all.’

  On the long imposing table she laid two places, as if someone, as if he were eating there with her. She put on a record softly, Handel’s Water Music she remembered from Dinah’s collection. There wasn’t much overlap. Tyrone had mostly show tunes, Frank Sinatra, mood music. She wanted background music for dinner with a little more class.

  As soon as she finished eating, she carried the dishes to the dishwasher. It would have seemed vulgar to leave dirty dishes in the gorgeous blue sink.

  She poured herself another glass of wine, settling the bottle back in the leather padded ice bucket. Glass in hand, she went exploring upstairs. Tyrone had told her to stay in Laurie’s room. Reluctantly she had obeyed him, because of the problem of sheets. Laurie’s room had only a double bed, while Tyrone’s had a king-sized bed and a balcony of its own, above the one off the livingroom. His bed was made up with cotton sheets in a pastel stripe. The coverlet was a light Irish wool, from which she deduced he did not like to lie on the spread. She was always throwing herself down on her bed naked or in her underwear.

  She kicked off her shoes and carefully opened the bed, folding the blanket, the comforter and spread neatly to one side. Then she lay down. She expected the pillow to smell of an after-shave Tyrone liked to wear, but it gave up no scent. The sheets were chilly under her. The room had been closed and felt stuffy as a basement although she was
high above the river. She wished she could open the doors to the balcony, but she did not want to set off another alarm.

  Apparently he did not read in bed except for a couple of catalogues, one from Tiffany’s, one from Gumps. He kept a bottle of single cask cognac in the bedside table along with two brandy snifters, a book of Japanese erotic art and a large electrical object that looked like a fan without blades. She examined it and finally decided it was a vibrator. When she plugged it in and turned it on, the padded end oscillated, producing a noise like a vacuum cleaner. Could it really be sexual? The only vibrator she had ever seen Siobhan had once pulled from a suitcase; it had resembled a plastic penis. Yet that had to be what this was. Maybe Tyrone needed some help because his last wife Glenda had been twenty years younger. She wondered what it felt like, but she felt too inhibited. Who could guess what woman it had touched last? She wondered if Willie would ever be willing to try one, but she dismissed the idea. He was too cock-proud to use any device. Tyrone must have an unusual degree of sexual openness, a willingness to experiment rare among men his age.

  After all, she was courageous about sex herself. Hadn’t she taken a woman lover? Nowadays everybody was in one box or the other. If a woman was with another woman, she would never admit to finding men at all attractive. If a woman was with a man, she pretended she never looked at other women with sexual curiosity.

  In his closet at the furthest end two women’s robes were hung, one in heavy white cotton terry cloth, one a blue silk kimono. She lifted them to her nostrils. The terry cloth smelled lightly of soap. The other had a faint flowery smell, someone’s perfume. She had an excellent memory for scents and in a moment she had placed it: Nina Ricci’s Fleur de Fleurs, yes. That was the perfume Tyrone had given her two years ago at Christmas. Was it the perfume Glenda had used? There was something significant in his giving her that very perfume. Perhaps Tyrone himself was not aware of the hidden message some of his choices carried.