“Edwin told me you said analysis is just another form of exploitation.”
I was careful not to let her see the hurt. Edwin was not supposed to repeat our conversations. “I was only arguing that ideally treatment should be free.”
“Then the patient wouldn’t respect it. You know what you get for free is useless, without any value—a handout.”
“Paying doesn’t mean that much to me.”
“You can afford that attitude.”
Swiftly, I shifted: money was a dangerous subject. “Generally, I guess I don’t have much faith in doctors.”
“Since when have you been so disillusioned?” There was a smile like a point of ice in her eyes.
“Since Jeff was born,” I answered rapidly. “The obstetrician—you know I switched on purpose—insisted on forceps—”
Edwin emerged suddenly from the cellar, and I lost the last half of what I had meant to say.
“I’ve never claimed to do anything more than replace neurotic misery with ordinary unhappiness,” he said.
“That’s saying a lot, even if it’s misquoted,” I grumbled, annoyed because his mere reappearance had robbed me of what I had intended to say. The births of my children had been turning points for me, all lost in the good-humored glance he gave me.
David, making his way into the conversation, asked, “Who else do we have, after all, for help?” I could hear my own opinions caught like flies in his waxy voice: he was never quite up-to-date. “We can’t turn to priests anymore, or parents. Who do we have for trouble except doctors?”
“We might do better with nothing,” I said, refusing him the right to compliment my lover who was not, after all, my cure.
“There are a lot of other things to turn to,” Edwin said. “Liquor, drugs, sex.” He grinned. “Charles told me last July they were thinking of a separation,” Flora said, turning us off the track. “I told him I thought it might be a good idea. They ought to think things over.”
“We had them here afterward to talk,” Edwin observed. “They were hardly speaking to each other at that point, but I think we got them started again.”
“Perhaps they are saved, then,” I said.
Edwin went on. “I used to think those two held each other up. Now I think they’ve made it easy to fall apart.” Before I could answer, he went to the telephone and began to dial. Watching his finger feeling for each hole, I remembered how he felt for me like a blind man, his fingers hardly discriminating between nipples and buttonholes. I loved his blind fingers. It was only afterward, when the talk began, that he discredited what he did so well by instinct, because it was by instinct and not by love or will.
I strained again to hear his cautious conversation cupped into the telephone. Flora and David had begun to talk about schools—this was Flora’s area of expertise. She knew each week which of the city private schools had reached its apex and was beginning to slide down the other side. She spoke intensely about one such school, which had begun to deteriorate, and as she leaned toward David, convincing him, I imagined how the other mothers might listen, overawed as she introduced them to the system.
“I think five o’clock should suit,” Edwin said into the telephone, and I lost track of the rest of Flora’s monologue. His neat life was full of holes gnawed by my suspicion. He had been faithful to me for the first six months of our affair (a word which neither of us used, out of moral conviction or a fear of the end)—except, of course, for Flora, our companion in all our dreams. Later, at a party, he had begun to work on my cousin, flattering her, smiling at her, asking her directly what she liked in bed, until she melted into his hands. I don’t think he ever saw her again—that would have been intentional—but it did not much matter. He was demonstrating to me that he wanted his effects back. I knew that he had reached the limit of his commitment and would begin, out of guilt and despair, methodically to destroy it. I knew for a whole day and then forgot. It was too painful. I needed my little bite of pleasure. I needed perhaps even more the flimsy, ever-failing conviction that I was special to him, that my mouth, my words, or my tenderness, had turned him into a lover. Now I succeeded in distracting myself from Edwin’s telephone conversation by getting myself a slice of bread from Flora’s loaded refrigerator. The sight of all that food reminded me of the children, the meals, the planning, the solidity of their life, backed up protectively behind our partial life together. I buttered the bread and slowly consumed it.
Flora was telling David about her concern for Helena’s children if the marriage should fail. “Sheila is impossible as it is. So rude. Helena simply ignores it. She lets the child get away with anything. I told her the last time she came here she couldn’t eat with her hands at my table, not at her age. She’s practically nine years old. Helena of course wouldn’t say a word, though she thanked me afterward for pointing this out.”
“Maybe that’s why Charles is bored,” I said.
“What?” They both turned to look at me.
“Maybe, like a five-year-old, he keeps hoping she’ll set him some limits. When he was off with that girl—what was her name?—at Mary’s last party, he came in looking like a child who wanted to be whipped.”
“Helena just turned her head away,” Flora said. “I thought at the time it was a mistake.”
“Resignation is boring, though, at least when you’re looking for something else.”
“Reaction?” She eyed me. “I think you have told me something quite perceptive.”
“Use it, next time you get them talking.”
David intervened smoothly. “I don’t believe they speak with anyone outside anymore. Flora and I just wanted to get them started.”
Flora nodded. I looked at the two of them, fellow conspirators over the coffee cups. “Let’s hope they’re not two hours late this time,” Flora said, glancing at the clock. “I’d like to get lunch over with.”
Edwin changed positions and leaned against the wall, listening intently to whoever was talking to him on the telephone. Pricked, I asked Flora, “Do his patients often call him on the weekend?”
She smiled. “That’s one of the questions I never ask, Ann.”
David observed, apropos of nothing, “This fall, it seems as if everyone is breaking up.”
4
Tom is knocking at the kitchen door. I can see him through the window, his head turned away to preserve my privacy. I slide my feet into my shoes and go to let him in. He glances at me before asking, “What about setting the tent up in front of the house? People would see it from the road.”
“All right.”
He turns away, beckoning to his partner, Fred Shingle, a small surly-looking man who hangs around the drugstore in the village. “You know Fred,” Tom tells me.
“Yes. Good morning.”
Fred ducks his head.
“We’ll set it up in front of the house, then,” Tom says, turning away. He is a short man with a large belly swinging out over his belt. His monkey face is sad and mean. This house belonged to his family for three generations; I have a snapshot of Tom and his brother as children eating watermelon on the side porch. Tom was not particularly happy to let the place go and he is not particularly disappointed that we are leaving. We are a strange breed to him, living according to rules which have nothing to do, as far as he can see, with seasonal changes or economic survival.
“We’ll get the tent set up, and then we’ll start moving things out,” he says to me over his shoulder. “Good warm day, they’ll be coming in crowds.” An authentic country man, he gauges the sky. Yet I’ve heard he was a failure as a farmer, sitting drunk in the kitchen all day.
Jeff is standing behind me, so close I nearly fall over him as I turn around. “Are you going to sell my bed?” he asks for the tenth time. He looks sleepy and cross, having just arisen from the bed I’m selling out from under him. His pajama bottoms hang on his hips below the navel. He has my body, lean and tense, and I wonder if he will ever be strong or if he will have to settle, as I hav
e, for a certain degree of flexibility.
“We’ve been over this, Jeff,” I tell him patiently. “You know the rule. You can each keep one piece of furniture from your room, in addition to your toys. You didn’t choose your bed.”
“I’m too big for that damn rocking horse!”
“Do you want to change your mind?”
Without answering, he edges toward the kitchen table and begins to shuffle through the cereal boxes.
“You’ll have to decide in the next few minutes,” I tell him. “Tom and Fred are putting up the tent, and then they’re going to begin to empty the house.”
Jeff leaves the cereal and runs to the living room window. Over his shoulder, I see Tom squatting by an enormous bundle of canvas. “Is that the tent?” Jeff asks, and his voice and his face change, becoming animated, hopeful.
“Yes, that’s the tent.” I am as proud as if I stitched it up myself.
“It’s going to be a really big one,” he says. I kiss the back of his neck where his thin blond hair lies like tiny feelers on his pale skin. He still smells babyish there, powdery. He is going to allow himself to be drawn into the spirit of the occasion.
It is this optimism, I think, that David finds so hard to accept. If the auction were held in a spirit of defeat, of humble acceptance of life’s blows, he might be able to tolerate it. But the springing of hope out of destruction is what he finds obscene. Last night, when the children and I were running around the house slapping red tags on the objects we wanted to keep, it felt like a game (until we came to their rooms, at least). David, standing in the middle of the hall, watched our foolish careening as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. He told me I could do as I pleased, but had not planned on seeing me enjoy myself.
He has reserved a few items for himself—his clothes, of course, and a collection of books and prints. He was supposed to take more to furnish his own apartment, and I was sorry when he did not arrange for a moving truck to arrive because whenever David fails to make an arrangement, he is making a point instead. Perhaps David will interpret this auction, or my enjoyment of it, as evidence of my instability. To fight me, David would have to place himself in a posture of defiance; he would have to agree with himself to use the past as ammunition; he would have to think of himself as a man capable of rage.
Outside the window, Tom and Fred are crouching and darting, dealing with a maze of ropes. Jeff, fascinated by their expertise, watches with his nose against the glass. I go back to the kitchen and pour myself another cup of coffee.
When I turn away from the stove, Keith is standing by the table, eyeing the boxes of cereal. “Cereal again,” he complains, not looking at me. “At least I hope you remembered to get some bananas.”
“There’s one on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, but it’s brown.”
Keith sighs, abandoning breakfast, and drops into a kitchen chair: thirteen years old, already in despair. His pajamas gape at the waist, showing his fat white middle. “You always used to cook real breakfasts, eggs and all, before.”
“That’s because Daddy was cooking real breakfasts every other morning. I had to keep up. He would cook sausages, I would cook bacon, or vice versa. We argued once about which took the most time.”
“Where is Daddy?”
“In the guest room getting dressed.” I do not allow myself to remind Keith that this process always takes a while.
He looks toward the door to the porch, then shifts his eyes regularly around the room to avoid looking at me. “Daddy asked me to go down to the Caribbean with him at Christmas. He’s going sailing on Uncle Sheldon’s yacht.”
I will not show my surprise. Calmly I remark, “Sheldon always did prefer your father to me. I suppose it’s natural. You can’t very well have sibling rivalry with your brother-in-law, and Sheldon really did hate me when we were little.”
“It’s either that or sitting around in New York for three weeks.”
“If you’re going to eat, eat. I want to clear the table.”
“I’m not going to eat. You’re in a foul mood, aren’t you?” When I do not answer, he goes on. “New York at Christmas really stinks. It rains, and you’re always in a bad mood, and there’s nothing to do.”
“I can’t afford to take you to the Caribbean. Grandpa’s money that we lived on all these years is nearly gone. Two houses, three children, and a husband used it up.”
It is not the first time he has heard this, and it is not the first time he has refused to believe me. “I guess I’ll go with Dad and Uncle Sheldon.”
“Have a good trip,” I say.
For the first time, he looks straight at me, and I see the wretched torn boy beneath his arrogance. “It’s all right, Keith. I expect you’ll enjoy yourself. I want you to enjoy yourself. I’m just angry because the money’s gone, and it wasn’t only me who spent it. You don’t want to hear that, and I won’t say any more for a while. Talk to your father. You’ll have plenty of chances, once you’re living with him.”
“He told me he’ll have his place fixed up in another couple of weeks. Can I take my stereo?”
“Of course. It’s yours.”
The collaboration between my husband and my eldest son sticks like a splinter of bone in my throat. I carry my rattling coffee cup and saucer into the parlor. It is important not to burden Keith with any more guilt. Yet when I think of him sitting in the evenings with his father sharing confidences, I am ready to die. This is the child I bore and nursed and raised when David was so busy he never even met the pediatrician, so fastidious he could not bring himself to change a pair of diapers, so clumsy that when he tried once to feed Keith his strained apricots, he upset the little jar into the lap of his pin-striped suit. And now they are united and solid against me: two males. It is the tie that binds.
Until the separation, they were united by distrust. Keith, after all, had edged David out of my attention. A baby is so much more satisfying than a dry man. Keith was hungry, angry, and kept me up night and day with his shrieks, his kicking, his active, changing pace. He was a racer from the start, and he kept me to the mark—with him I reached, for the first time, the limit of my endurance. David watched this from the sidelines, intrigued perhaps—it was another tiger of a sort to be held rather gingerly by the tail.
Now they are united against a common foe. I remember their voices late at night after I have gone to bed. They sit by the fire with their glasses of crème de menthe and their well-documented injuries. David told Keith about Edwin, and my son was devastated. “Frank and I used to be friends,” he told me with tears in his eyes. After that, he began to avoid me. His moon-look of devotion and patience, which I had depended on without even knowing it, has almost entirely disappeared.
“I don’t want to live with you without Daddy,” he told me dryly, finally, when I was discussing our separation. “I don’t want to live with you without a man.” He imagined, I suppose, an adolescence devoted to making drinks for my friends and taking me to movies. He is going to live with his father instead, where he hopes to be free of demands and disillusionment. For a moment, standing in the sunny parlor, I am frightened by my willingness to let him go. I am letting everything go. Where will I draw the line? Then I remind myself that it is because my other two, my babies, will still be with me: I can afford to lose one limb.
Molly comes running into the parlor, her face flushed and strained. “The Fields are here! I saw their car!”
David is behind her. “It can’t be,” he says, and goes to the porch to have a look. I stand rooted in the middle of the floor. My heart is pounding. I thought they might see the announcement of the auction in the local paper, but it never occurred to me that they would come.
David returns. “It’s true,” he says. He has turned pale, and for the first time I am sorry for him. He fears the embarrassment of confronting Edwin. What will he say?
For his sake, I call back my sangfroid like a genie escaped from a bottle. David is watching me closely. “They’re welcome,”
I say. “After all, it’s a public event.” I have not realized until I say those words how much I want to see Edwin.
“I wonder what they want.”
I do not answer, unwilling to be drawn in, although my curiosity hurts like heartache. We have spent a great deal of time analyzing Edwin’s and Flora’s motives—assuming that their motives are separate—and that effort took the place of analyzing our own. Those lines of comparison might have been worth drawing. Instead, we attempted to make of the Fields a common enemy, to unite briefly against them, but that was not possible for me. I genuinely cared for Edwin and that disrupted the common cause.
“What are we going to do?” David asks.
“We are going to behave as though everything is normal. Don’t frighten the children. There is nothing else we can do.” For the last time I am asking him to be a fellow conspirator, and he seems to agree. When Molly comes rushing back with the latest bulletin, we both greet her with an appearance of disinterest. I repeat to her that the auction is, after all, a public event.
Deflated, she sits down at the desk and begins to draw a series of large faces on a pad. “I wanted to help with the auction,” she complains, swiftly shifting ground. “You promised to wake me up early so I could help, and then you forgot.”
“There really isn’t much more for anyone to do, Molly. You helped me tag the things we want to keep. Tom and Fred are going to take the furniture out. Maybe you can help with that.”
She looks around the parlor. “In this whole room, we’re only keeping that ugly lamp.”
It is made from deer’s hoof, brittle with age. “That was in your grandfather’s lodge in the Adirondacks. I was always fond of it.”
“It’s ugly,” she says. “Why aren’t you going to keep this desk?”
David sits down and opens his newspaper; behind it, he will listen to our conversation.
“That desk is too small to be practical,” I repeat wearily. “I need a big desk for paying bills.”
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