Without a word, he turned toward the living room, and I followed, mastering my panic, chattering to Flora. “I’m sorry you didn’t wear your new dress.”
I left her to make the round of the little circle of friends standing near the fire. Helena greeted me with an exclamation of pleasure, holding me off to admire my green-and-blue striped dress. “I’ve been calling you all week!” she said. “We really must talk,” and she looked at me with a surmise that frightened me. “Why did you call … ?” I began, but Charles came over and slipped his arm around my waist. “The prettiest girl at the party.” We were all in line again.
Winty Cassaday made my drink and brought it without a word. Hooded in his reserve, he took up his post beside the fire. He was the only person I did not dare to kiss. Frugal, hardworking, he was not a weekend visitor but a full-time country schoolteacher. He had served the local high school for thirty years, which everyone said was a waste and an example of his lack of self-confidence. He had a degree in philosophy from Harvard. Winty had no illusions about education; he simply liked to live in the country. At parties, Winty was never talkative or drunk or flirtatious, but simply totally removed. Mary was his only vice, apparently. The summer before, I had walked with him in Mrs. Lyton’s rose garden, crying because Edwin had not been to see me for a month. “You should leave him,” Winty had remarked at the end of our promenade, and I realized he had mistaken me for Flora.
Parker Harris drew me to his side. “You are looking simply marvelous, as always. What a smashing dress.” The compliment was not undone by his irony. Parker was a slight, dapper man with a blond moustache; his eyes were very bright. We began to talk and laugh together—Parker with his sense of style would never let me complain. He lent tone to my life, to all our lives, which he seemed to see objectively, in a glassy blue glare, as though lit from above by a fluorescent tube. Eddy Lang, Parker’s friend, who rumor claimed had supplied all the money for the big house they had bought at Long Wharf, came up and kissed my hand. I was delighted by the attention. His lips on the back of my hand seemed real compared to the feel of my own lips on everyone else’s cheeks. He began to tease me about my long hair, which I had been threatening to cut. “I see you are still hoping to draw up a prince.” Parker and Eddy both disliked Edwin, whom they accused of being irresponsible. Parker and Eddy were both very careful, even cautious in their dealings, sensitive to the slightest swing in mood or opinion in the people around them. The local gentry, the river folk, scorned them for basing their lives on sexual preference. In spite of their charm, they fell into the same category as the millionaire who had installed his mistress in one of the river places. Parker and Eddy did not ignore the slights, the turned backs at the supermarket, the invitations ostentatiously ignored, the fawning friendliness when a new piece of upholstery or an extra man was needed. They were not bitter. They often seemed quite gleeful at the sight of the discomfort they caused. They were an idea whose time had not yet come, and they had been unfailingly kind to me.
Looking at their trim small bodies, I wondered if they took pleasure in each other, in spite of Parker’s waspishness and Eddy’s bad back, or whether they had settled, like the rest of us, for the voyeurism of middle age.
Mary Cassaday was lighting candles in the dining room and calling us in a whispery yet penetrating voice. As we went in, I saw our reflections, as white as ghosts, in the dark windows behind the dinner table. Mary seated us according to a written plan. I was on Edwin’s left. Too lucky: I knew it at once. Edwin did not look at me or pull out my chair. We were made for difficulties, after all, not for the obscenely smooth working of a benign fate.
Edwin sat down and turned immediately to Ellen Cassaday, Mary’s eldest daughter, who was seated on his right. I was frightened. What had I done? Then I remembered the moment on the stairs. I turned hastily to Eddy on my right and launched into conversation. His brown eyes were dead, and I wondered what kind of hell Parker had made of his day. I asked him about his sister. Eddy was the pillar of a large, tottering family. He gave them money, which they accepted, and advice, which they invariably ignored. He sent them to colleges and other institutions, shaken by their failures but never in despair. “Lou-lou has gone out West to take the cure,” he told me. “This time she seems really to want to change.” He went on to say that he was running out of money. His small advertising firm had been hit hard by the recession, and he did not know anymore whether or not he would be able to send his youngest niece to college.
I listened to Eddy with difficulty through a numbing clang. Edwin had turned sideways in his chair to enchant Ellen. His back, broad as a wall, was set in my face. I reminded myself that he did not go after young women; their expectations were too high. As I heard pretty Ellen Cassaday laughing, I remembered Edwin’s fascination with mothers and daughters. Certainly at some point in the last five years, he had fucked Mary, behind a sofa, at a party, behind a tree. To get into her daughter would cap the memory and prove, as well, that he was appreciated—his medicine effective on both generations. I was beginning to feel sick. I could not eat. Where was the gentleness, which I mistook for love, when he first touched me in the wet field a year ago? I thought then we were alone together. Now we seemed only to exist in terms of our effect on others. I had become Edwin’s tool, his weapon in the long-drawn silent battle with his wife. “You don’t know what he’s like,” Flora had called after me a year ago, a lifetime ago, when I started out with Edwin to pick wild grapes for jelly. Our first public escapade—and we made plans then for more.
Eddy was talking steadily, softly, trying to find my attention. Knowing that something was wrong, he was offering me a picnic, a night at the races, a chance to taste a new white wine. I accepted all his invitations, ducking my head, afraid to trust my voice. “Nobody believes in goodness anymore,” Flora declared across the table. She was trying to work up an argument with Winty, who was known to go to church on Sundays. I heard everything she said at my outer edges, preoccupied with my contract with Edwin, that sun-signed, sun-sealed promise we made in the grape arbor: no marriages and no divorces. I had laughed then, seeming to agree, tossing my head, unable to predict that the delightful flirtation would harden into genuine slavery.
Suddenly Edwin turned to me. He did not look at me as he began to talk. “Mary shouldn’t have put us together. It was a mistake. You see, it isn’t fun anymore.”
I was silenced, pain undoing rage.
He went on, “There are three types of schizophrenics. One shatters like a glass. One dents like celluloid and fills out again. The third doesn’t break or dent. It gives off a tin clang. Do you know which kind you are?”
I did not answer.
“You are the third kind.”
I turned my head on its hinge and asked Eddy about his niece, Lulu. He told me she had slashed her wrists on Labor Day weekend when her parents were away and she was in the house alone. He was horrified by their negligence. The girl had nearly died. Tears were filling my eyes. They crawled slowly down my cheeks, which were so hot the tears dried at once. Eddy glanced at me and took a sip of wine. “Excuse yourself,” he said.
I left the table with a clatter, knocking off my knife. Edwin had turned his back and was laughing with Ellen. I saw David across the table staring at me. With my napkin balled in my fist, I went upstairs.
Mary’s bathroom was cold: a window was open. I sat on the toilet lid in the dark, slit by a triangle of light from the open door. Their voices came up the stairwell. I stuffed part of the napkin in my mouth. We fell into bed together the last time—a sunny Wednesday. I licked Edwin down his chest and up again. It was too much. It was always too much, after the first time. I had never seen the smile I had seen on his face after he had fucked somebody’s wife during the second half of a country concert. He came out of the men’s room in time to drive Flora home, and he was beaming.
I knew all that about him. I was not deceived. For a year Flora had been providing me with the details. She was proud of him
and exasperated by him about equally. His absence, his torture, felt like love to me, the real thing, pain and pleasure unequally mixed. The absence of decency meant honesty, the absence of warmth meant truth, the perpetual threat of rejection meant that we were working on each other like yeast, rising to new heights of perception and pain. I wanted to suck his little nipples and claim him for my own because he was unclaimable, a scourge of God, a gift of love.
Finally I turned on the bathroom light and brushed my hair with Mary’s silver-backed brush and washed the tear-scales off my cheeks. Then I started down the stairs in my beautiful dress, which was too well fitted, too flattering. Eddy was waiting for me at the bottom.
“All right?”
“Yes.”
We went into the living room.
3
September, just a year ago: a fusty Saturday full of wood smoke and the threatening claustrophobia of early fall. During the morning, the sun burned through layer after layer of mist. By the time David and I had been to town to buy the groceries, the New York Times, and pots of chrysanthemums, the day had turned hot, and the children were complaining because the swimming pool had already been covered.
We unloaded the station wagon, each child agreeing to carry something, which turned out to be a jacket. There were, as always, six brown bags of groceries to take into the house. David and I hauled them in and began putting everything away, opening cabinet doors into each other’s faces. We were both perfectionists and would have preferred to do the job our own way. I stacked a can of chicken soup on top of one of David’s pyramids, and the whole thing collapsed, cans rolling off the shelf, one of them bouncing on David’s toe. “Ow, ow, ow!” he shouted, hopping on one foot, but he smiled his enigmatic smile and picked up the cans and began to rebuild his pyramid on a wider base.
Molly and Jeff careened through the kitchen, firing the cap guns David had bought them in lieu of allowance.
I shouted, “Get out of here!” David tried to soothe me.
“Why do you buy them cap guns?” I asked. “You know I can’t stand the noise.”
“They wanted them.”
“What if they had wanted dynamite?” I began to lecture and tone down my irritation. “Shooting cap guns is one thing they don’t need to be taught. Everything else—books, models, all the worthwhile things—mean one or the other of us has got to help. We never help them anymore, have you noticed? Neither of us seems to have the patience.” I was growing calm, having shouldered half the blame.
“I help Keith with his homework.”
“I mean, working with their hands. They don’t know how to put anything together or even take it apart; Keith asked me the other day to screw a lightbulb into his desk lamp. They don’t seem to understand how anything fits together, and now they’ve given up even asking for help, so we won’t be irritated. They just do what they can do alone. They seem to accept the fact that we’re both permanently distracted.”
“They do well in school.”
“Maybe because it’s all abstract, or because they can ask for help there.” Suddenly I tasted my fatigue, the sourness of the last late night in the back of the throat. “All we do here is go to parties.”
“Helena was expecting us last night. She would have been upset—”
“I know. There are always reasons, good reasons. But we came here in the beginning to be quiet, to be with the children, and now we’re never with them. Mrs. T. has to come on Friday and spend practically the whole rest of the weekend here.” I was bargaining on the fact that David would not mention that it was me who accepted all the invitations.
“If you don’t want to go to Saul’s birthday party—”
“That’s different,” I interrupted hastily.
David did not ask me why.
I went on in the humming voice of perpetual strain. “Sometimes I wonder if they are going to grow up just heathen—the children—or simply unskilled, manual illiterates.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with our going to parties.”
The children streamed through again.
“Get out of here with those guns!”
Giggling, they fled outside, slamming the door.
David suggested, “Let’s get those chrysanthemums out.”
We went back to the car; I waited while David brought the old red wheelbarrow. Together we loaded the six pots of chrysanthemums. David took up the handles and began to trundle the wheelbarrow down the hill to the flower garden. We’d arranged it badly, the weight all to the front, and the wheelbarrow began to lumber rapidly, jerking David along. “Watch out!” I shouted. The wheelbarrow toppled over on the hill, one clumsy leg sticking up into the air. The chrysanthemums bowled out. David began to pick them up, breaking off the bent branches and laying them in a little pile. He apologized for loading the wheelbarrow badly—anything to avoid a fit of rage, which would have left me sweating and trembling in the void of David’s calm.
We carried the plants to the edge of the flower bed. David took up the shovel. With its edge, he began to feel for a giving place in the gravel. We had ordered the garden to be made in the foundations of the fallen-down barn, and the gardener, taking advantage of our ignorance, had added a bare two inches of topsoil to make the beds. There were rocks everywhere under the briefly flourishing plants; they dried up and died in just one hot summer. Each spring we replanted, at great expense, since the frost heaved up most of the perennials. The garden was our most important creation, radiant with tulips and daffodils in May, a scorched desert of drooping petunias in July. Now it had entered its empty period, which the chrysanthemums would disguise. Behind the singed petunias, in front of the iris, David found a spot that gave and began to dig a small hole.
I returned to gnawing at my subject. “You know, David, sometimes I think we only come to the country to see the Fields.”
“It’s lucky for us they are here. Our kids get along so well.”
“They’re not really friends, though, have you noticed? Except for Jeff and Saul. The others just hang around together. It’s the grownups, really, who enjoy each other.”
“Yes. It works very well.” He took one of the chrysanthemums and edged it into the hole, which was too shallow. “You’ll have to dig more,” I said.
He lifted the plant out and began to pry at the hole with the shovel. “I’m afraid I’ve hit rock,” he said after a while.
Crouching down, I felt the dry earth at the edge of the rock. I clawed away at it, my nails clogging as the dirt piled up. As a child, I had clawed the dirt at home to get rid of the stripped feeling after my grandmother cut my nails. “Here, use the trowel,” David said, dismayed, but I continued to rake with my nails at the dirt. At last I uncovered the rock and lifted it out, straining. It was flat and wide, an old-time occupant nearly a foot across. I hoisted it up, longing to hurl it, but it was too heavy. I staggered to the edge of the flower bed and dropped it with a thump in the long grass.
“Good for you,” David said. He sunk the plant into the deepened hole and began to stamp the dirt around it.
“Do you think we’ve learned anything about plants in eight years?” I asked when I had my breath back.
David paused to consider the situation. “Yes, I believe we have. The catalogs are very helpful.”
“We haven’t learned much about anything else.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
I did not have the courage to go on. Digging in the earth had reminded me of sex. Sweating and straining generally did, as though physical effort was the most important component of fucking: simply the effort required to lift the arms and legs, tilt the pelvis and rotate the hips, combined with the more obscure but equally arduous effort required to raise a flagging penis. David and I had begun several years before to ration this effort. We now did not sweat together in bed, unless we had the electric blanket turned too high, yet it was exhaustion which provided us finally with the excuse to stop fucking altogether. For six months, we had rested
, hoarding our energy for a later date. All in all, it was a relief. Looking back, it seemed that the exercise wasn’t worth the effort, raising hopes for intimacy which were certain to be dashed. I had never come with David, and he had stopped coming with me; this underground blight had finally undermined our affection. David was parching me, leaching me dry as I was parching him. He did not give me money, and he did not give me his prick. The connection was as odious as it was vital. That he was a good father, in his absent way, and a decent man no longer mattered to me at all.
“I’m not going to be able to stand it much longer,” I said ruefully, stunned by regret.
He unpotted the next plant with a tap. “What?”
Choking back tears, I did not answer and he did not ask again. We had both learned to avoid questions which had no ready answer. Instead, I turned away. “It’s nearly noon. I’m going to get the children ready for the party.”
“All right. I’ll come up to the house in five minutes.”
Walking up the hill, I began to imagine Saul’s birthday party, and my anger evaporated. I knew I would see Edwin there, possibly touch him, possibly steal a word or two alone. We would be able to plan our next meeting.
I lifted my head and really looked around for the first time that day. The willow behind the house was yellow, its streamers separated by sharp lines of shadow. It grew over the cesspool, which it clutched with its roots. It sprang a few feet higher every year, clearing the peak of the house, planted by a second wife two generations ago.
Behind the willow, my land fell away into a shaggy, overgrown field full of straggling hay, which was bleached now and bowed to the ground. Tom Goldsmith had refused to cut it this year, saying it wasn’t worth his time. It worried me to see the land lying idle, covered over with milkweed and cockleburs, but I didn’t have the money to pay Goldsmith—he had taken the hay before as a fair exchange—and I knew the time had come for me to accept, as my neighbors had, that the land had lost its primary use. Next summer there would be sumac in the field, the year after, scrub pines. The pasture would cease to have any justification except as a backdrop for our lives.
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