by Marge Piercy
‘Too long. It’s quite dead and done with.’
‘Susan, that would be exceedingly foolish. Don’t let pride talk so loud you can’t hear your heart – or your common sense.’
‘You’ve had to cut your losses. Why be surprised I want to cut mine?’
‘My dear, I’m only thinking of what’s best for you. Life is not always kind or just, but we have to soldier on …’
‘I’m not giving up – far from it. I’m making quite rational plans, believe me. I have a real estate woman coming tomorrow to appraise the property. I intend to put it on the market and split the money with him. I think it would be good for my career and for me to be in New York.’
‘The city is dreadfully expensive, Susan. Half of what you could get for your house and land … um …’ He pulled out a small calculator. ‘Say two hundred, two fifty, your share. With that, you can’t afford anything livable in Manhattan. Would you find Staten Island attractive? Or New Jersey? Perhaps you opt not to buy anything, but to take the money and invest it for income. Invested with a return of ten per cent, you’d have, let’s say after taxes take their bite from the sale price, perhaps twenty K a year. That won’t pay your rent.’
‘I was hoping that you might know of some small condo in one of your buildings.’
‘I don’t own anything myself. I’ve simply bought shares in various holding and management companies. I’d never care to be a landlord, Susan, it must be rather trying.’
It was the tone of voice that she found less than pleasant. He was talking to her distantly, politely. There was none of the caressing intimacy in his voice she was used to. What had happened? She held her face still and tried to keep the whine of disappointment from her voice. ‘My demands alone, Tyrone, are rather modest. A studio. A place I can eat, sleep, create my designs, come home and curl up with a book and have a friend to dinner. I need nothing elaborate. I’m not as naive about my prospects as you imagine. I simply want artistic and intellectual stimulation, friends, a chance to pursue my career. And peace of mind.’
‘I don’t know how much peace of mind you can expect to find by moving to the city, Susan. You’re used to living in a beautiful and easygoing place. You’re a gracious part of that place for many of the summer people who come, and you enjoy each other’s company. But I don’t know if you’d see … quite so much of them if you lived in the city. People do tend to be rather caught up in their little circles.’
He was giving her a warning, that was why he sounded cool, that was why he was not sitting beside her on the rattan couch but standing against the railing, keeping his distance. He did not want her to move to New York; but, why? Surely she had made clear she understood that lending his apartment was a discrete instance and that she in no way expected to stay there, even while looking for a place to live. Tentatively she said, ‘My work centres on New York. I have rather a lot of acquaintances there. I wasn’t expecting to be dependent on anyone in particular.’
‘But you have expectations based on being a guest there, a married woman coming up to the city for a day or two, who entertains so beautifully here and whom everyone wants to visit with on their holidays in the country. You see, that gives you a particular position, one you relish and might not finally enjoy relinquishing.’
She had lost status in his eyes, as if Willie’s affair had tarnished her. ‘You think I’m foolish because I didn’t see what was going on under my nose.’
‘No, my dear, you haven’t a suspicious nature, that’s one of your charms. I simply feel you’re being foolish now, yes, a little silly in how you’re overreacting to what, after all, is nothing new. You can’t allow a man every freedom for ten years and then be surprised if he still feels he can exercise a little of that freedom, now can you, Susan?’ He beamed at her as if his little précis of her life would turn her mind around.
Sally brought the phone out to him and he embarked on a lengthy call with Los Angeles. She realized she had been effectively dismissed. Celeste did not appear to refill her drink and she was left to listen to an incomprehensible call he was taking with his back to her, as if to create artificial privacy for himself. She took the hint and picked herself up. She paused in front of him and tentatively waved good-bye. He favoured her with a big smile, waved but kept on talking.
She felt tremendously disappointed. He didn’t understand, he didn’t understand at all. He liked the way things were set up just fine. He actually expected her to eat her shame and stay with Willie. Was he right that her summer friends would drop her in New York? A woman of a certain age alone, working for a modestly middle-class living. Would it even be middle class with only her earnings to counter higher expenses? Was that his point? Perhaps she had assumed that Tyrone would assist her in finding a place to live, that he would share his resources with her to some extent. She had supposed that he would welcome her presence in his life in Manhattan, that she would help him there much as she did here. She felt exhausted as she walked home even more slowly than she had come.
She could not relinquish the images of her new life in the city, but she obviously had to win back Tyrone to her side. Had Laurie given him some lurid version of events? Something had caused him to withdraw. But she could get him back. Earlier in the summer they had had that coolness over Willie’s bungling of the gallery permits but it had not lasted. Instead they had ended up closer than ever, instead he had lent his apartment to her. This coldness too would thaw. He would come to see how advantageous it would be for him to have her nearby.
Of course! He wanted her nearby in the summer. He had come to depend on her. He found the prospect of summers here without her presence on the pond worrisome, but his anxiety expressed itself in coldness, in being judgemental with her. He was used to her being his interface with local people and feared managing without her. She had to find some way of reassuring him, making him see she could still come. His house was large. She could take over Laurie’s boathouse. She could live in the apartment in town over the gallery. There were a hundred solutions. How foolish she had been not to understand that naturally he would think of her decision as it might impact on him. She had given him credit for being a little more mature and together than perhaps any man really had to be. She began to walk more briskly.
However, when she got back to her house, she could scarcely force herself to enter. Obviously Willie had been cooking. He had set the table for two, but his place was used. He had left grilled salmon, rice, a salad on the table for her. At first she thought she would simply ignore the food, but then she realized she had no desire to scrounge a meal for herself. A great deal of figuring and hard planning lay before her. She had resumed swimming after supper, scrupulously exercising to tighten her body in anticipation of the more critical eyes of acquaintances in the city. If Willie wanted to make supper for her at the same time that he cooked for himself, she might as well enjoy the perks of his guilt. It had been long enough building.
Chapter Forty-Two
DINAH
Dinah stood arms crossed before Willie, who slumped in the sagging centre of her old couch with his head in his hands. ‘Telling me how sorry you are isn’t useful,’ she said in a cheery tone of voice intended more to annoy than to soothe. ‘You have to talk to her, not to me.’ Dinah had to keep her emotional distance from him in order to keep her physical distance. She had been refusing to go to bed with Willie until he told Susan, and now everything was in smelly pieces.
‘She won’t talk to me. While you were in Boston Friday she had Mary Lou over to appraise the house. She wants a divorce.’
‘She’s royally pissed off.’ Dinah paced, a little crazy from being interrupted during her work time. ‘You should concentrate on getting through to her. Buy her a necklace. Bring home champagne. Seduce her, Willie. There’s got to be a way.’
‘She won’t even look at me. Every time I’m in the room with her, I feel guilty. I don’t know why. I don’t think I did anything wrong. I want to talk to her, but she won’t listen.�
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‘Complaining to me is getting you further into the hole.’ She knew that Willie felt that she was insufficiently sympathetic, but she was angry that he had temporized until Susan found out. Dinah was also annoyed with herself for not insisting more vehemently. Since she had got back from her week with Itzak, she and Willie had been fighting. She had not felt she could march over and confront Susan without doing more damage than good; she had been convinced that Willie had to be truthful. Now they were stuck with the consequences of his avoidance. ‘Willie, you have to sit down and really talk with each other. You have to figure out what the two of you want.’
‘I want her back. I want things the way they were before.’
‘It doesn’t look as if either of us can have that. Moreover, it seems to have suited you and me better than it suited Susan.’ She needed to be practising. She had a gig in Hartford that required her to perform. She was working on her ‘Five Vegetables for Chamber Orchestra’ which she hadn’t played publicly in four years. As she practised, she rewrote. She had a rule that pieces written in one of her old styles, she left alone, but that anything more or less in her current idiom, she was free to fool around with. The concert was the first Sunday in September, but here she was still reworking the music. The ‘Vegetables’ filled her with delight; the frustration was her own eroded technique. She kept imagining how Itzak would make it sound. She wasn’t being paid much, but it was something. She found Willie’s misery hard to focus on, with a chamber orchestra playing full tilt in her head. At the same time her indignation was suspect. She was part of the problem. Perhaps since Willie kept delaying, she should have blurted out the truth to Susan. Or abstained from Willie, as she finally had recently.
‘Why can’t it be the way it was? I was happy. I was working well. Everything felt good.’
‘To us. Maybe I have to go talk to her. But you need to do some serious thinking.’ Even as she spoke, she could not imagine Willie making lists of pros and cons and weighing a decision. ‘You have to figure out, is it more important to you to be with Susan or to live here? She wants to move to New York. You may have to give up even being friends with me to keep her.’
‘I don’t want to move to New York and feel like a failure. What the hell would I do there? I like living where I know everybody. I know what counts locally, the right and wrong of every issue. I feel about water table issues and solid waste and acid rain, about why we have to worry about an accident at the nuclear power plant across the Bay. There’s not all that fake one-upmanship. Nobody judges you by the last review you had in The Times – if they bothered reviewing you.’
‘Susan lives for the summer people. Now she wants to live like them.’
‘Mary Lou discouraged Susan from selling with the addition only begun. Mary Lou said as it stands, it would bring down the value of the property, but if I finish it, it’ll raise the value. Maybe Susan will put off a move till I finish. I could take months.’
A resolution had formed in her under the suite playing in her head. ‘I’ll go talk to her. I’ll straighten things out if I can, and if I can’t, I’ll at least know I did everything in my power.’
Willie sat up as if he would protest, but then he sighed. ‘Maybe you should. Things couldn’t be much worse.’
As Dinah marched off toward the new house, he shambled bent over toward his studio, as if stooping his shoulders could make him less visible to Susan. Why hadn’t he told Susan before Susan found out? Why hadn’t she forced him to tell Susan? Why had she let things drift so long? At least she had been able to say to Itzak, with whom she had spent Thursday and Friday, that she had put the relationship with Willie on hold until her life was straightened out, and that Susan finally was read into the whole picture. She could promise him some resolution. He had become much more real to her since he had bought the house in Brookline. She felt his presence even on the days when they did not talk on the phone. The better the sex, the easier the communication, the more emotionally entangled she felt, the more she sometimes longed to flee an involvement that frightened her almost as often as it satisfied her.
The week before, she had been offered a position teaching for a semester at U. of California, Santa Cruz, replacing a colleague who had just been in a near-fatal accident. She had to tell them immediately, because school opened in September and they were up a tree. She had promised to call back Monday. Normally she would have declined politely, but she needed the money; after Tanglewood, she had expected a commission or two, but so far, nothing had materialized. She kept just missing grants. The addition had pauperized her.
She was a touch irritable. She had not been working well and she had not been sleeping well, two activities on which her strength and vitality were based. Without work, she felt lost. Without sleep, she was crabby and ill at ease in her body. She slept well in the city, which was topsy-turvy. Here she worried. She felt fussed over everything in her life. California had a certain appeal – it was far from Willie, Itzak, Susan.
As she stopped outside the screen door to the kitchen, where she had cooked hundreds of meals, she felt the bitter drag of nostalgia for their old communication. Yes, Susan was demanding. Yes, Susan wanted to gossip when Dinah wanted to work, yes, Susan had been emotionally draining. But for years, when Dinah was perplexed, she had Susan to unpack her. She wanted to go to Susan and talk about Itzak, talk about Willie; that was the last thing she could do. It was a huge loss that they should be alienated. She had been able to discuss Itzak a little with Johnny, Johnny understood why Dinah feared being consumed in a relationship with a man she really cared for who was also involved in music, but Johnny, like Jimmy, was Willie’s partisan and thought she should stick to him and let Itzak go.
She would have bet her best flute that Susan had watched her cross the yard, but the kitchen was empty. Her tentative rapping on the doorframe brought no response. Boldly she walked in and bellowed, ‘Susan!’ until she heard steps approaching.
‘I heard you, of course,’ Susan said with cold precision, stopping in the doorway. ‘But I couldn’t believe you’d have the gall.’
‘One of us had better before it all goes down the tubes.’
‘That’s where shit belongs, isn’t it?’
‘You’re shredding your life, Susan. Willie’s your husband. You’ve been together twenty-six years and raised two kids. He did break off with me when you ordered him to, but after all, he wasn’t mad at me. He missed me. Are you telling me you never do? I miss you every day.’
‘I guess that shows who was getting something out of whom.’ Susan crossed her arms. She wore a bronze and green dress that fell in loose folds from the shoulders. Susan was deeply tanned but looked as tired as Dinah felt. She was not sure if she could really smell the perfume Susan was wearing, or whether her memory was tickling her nostrils with its ghost.
Dinah had a moment’s urge to take Susan in her arms and soothe her. ‘Are you really lost and stuck in your anger? Can’t I help you find your way out?’
‘I’m not angry as a form of spiritual exercise. I’m tired of being saintly and giving. I’m sick unto death of picking up everyone’s lives after them. I’m angry because I’ve been hurt!’
‘Susan, listen. We can come back from this. We can still save our lives together. Nothing irrevocable has yet happened –’
‘You’re crazy! You’ve been fucking my husband all summer, and that’s nothing to get riled up about? You’re kidding me.’
‘I’ve been fucking both of you for ten years. Did you think I’d stop loving Willie or Willie would stop caring about me? We were divorced by fiat.’ As if casually, Dinah took a seat at the table. Sitting face-to-face might discourage dramatics. ‘I still care for you. That’s real.’
‘You never cared for anybody in your life. You just like to go around wrapped in a blanket of music, and you don’t want anyone to bug you.’
‘I do get terrifically involved in music. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care about you and Willie, that I do
n’t worry about you –’
‘You’re both stifling me. I can’t live the way I want to with the two of you hung around my neck.’
‘Susan, you’re making a gross mistake. We’re on your side. We’re the ones who are.’
‘You two have had things your way, you with your music no one can stand to listen to and him with his cages of starving children no one wants to look at –’
‘Oh, you don’t understand my music, and that’s my fault, is it?’ Dinah was furious. That was the kind of insult the most banal critics put out. ‘How much time have you spent this summer listening to Bach, to Mozart, to Schoenberg? Do you “understand” them? Or it is just that you object to music that asks more attention than easy listening?’
‘We’ve been living like peasants, onions and garlic hanging from the rafters, canning tomatoes, making preserves, digging potatoes while life passes by, while the real world goes on.’
‘No, you want to hang out at Tyrone’s, pretending to be rich. Hoping some diamonds will fall off the table, and you can slip one in your pocket. Over there, you’re just a servant without livery, Susan. They’ll use you when it’s convenient, but they won’t love you. They won’t consider you their peer.’
‘You never could stand for me to have friends you can’t overawe.’
‘Susan, Susan, you’ve given yourself leave to blame Willie and me for your life not being what you want. You’re bored with designing fabrics. You’re facile and it pays decently, but you need something more demanding. You wanted to be a designer. Why not try it, now?’
‘I’m sick of you, and you tell me I have a problem. Talk about self-serving!’
It was a certain glitter in Susan’s eye that made Dinah realize Susan was enjoying the confrontation, enjoying her anger. Dinah stood. ‘I can’t reach you, so let’s forget it. I give up. But I also inform you that I won’t be involved with Willie either. That was a stopgap measure to hold to what we had. So your husband is your husband only. You’re alone to work out with him whatever the two of you can, with no help and no hindrance from me. I thank you for not throwing anything.’ She stalked as far as the door, then turned. It felt dreary. She looked Susan in the eyes, her hand on the door handle. Even at this last moment, a hint of softness would stay her.