by John Updike
“It won’t.”
“A friend of Ken’s who’s built his own house on the Cape thinks we were crazy not to excavate a full cellar under the living room.”
“It would have meant at least another two thousand.”
“It would have been worth it. Look at all the gas I burn buzzing around Tarbox visiting people to keep warm. Janet one day, Carol the next. I know all the dirt.”
“What is the dirt?”
“There isn’t much. I think we’re all tired. Janet was very curious about Ken’s boyhood and Carol thinks you’re seeing Bea Guerin.”
“How sweet of Carol.”
“Come into the kitchen for the coffee. It’s not so bad there.”
“I wonder if wooden-framed storm windows on the marsh side wouldn’t help. They have more substance than the aluminum combinations. Or what about shuttering them straight across with the boards that were there?”
“What would happen to Angela’s view?”
This humorousness remembered the times she had lain in his arms remarking on her double theft, of Angela’s man and Angela’s house. In the less chilly kitchen, where the Whitmans had reinstated the electric heater, she said, “You’d laugh to see me at night, Ken on one side and Toby on the other. It’s the only way I can keep warm.”
Though he knew that her description was intended to pique his jealousy, he did feel jealous, picturing her asleep between her husband and son, her fanning spread of moonlit hair tangent to them both. Knowing that his interest in her child irked her, he asked, “How is the young master?”
“Strapping. He’s two months old now and looks like Ken’s father. That same judicial grimace.”
“Two months,” Piet said. He was wearing workboots and a lumberjack shirt underneath his apricot windbreaker. She gave him coffee in a mug, without a saucer, as if to a handyman. He felt tongue-tied and coarse, and found her large brown eyes uncomfortably alert. Listening for the phone, another lover? Of course not, she had a child. The mother in her den.
She looked at him intently. The unbiased winter light showed a small sty distorting the shape of her left eyelid. She said, “Two months is more than six weeks.”
He groped for the significance of six weeks. “Oh. Terrific. But—do you want to? With me, I mean.”
“Do you want to with me, is more the question.”
“Of course. Of course I do, I love you. Obviously. But should we? Start everything up again. It frightens me, frankly. Haven’t we paid our debt to society? Getting over you once was hard enough.”
He feared she might mock him, but she nodded solemnly instead. Foxy’s hair was not blond clear through like Bea’s but blond in part, of many shades—oak, honey, ash, even amber—and darker with beach weather by. She lifted her head. There was a pink cold sore beneath one nostril. “I frighten you?”
“Not you. It. It would be wrong now.”
“All right, then go. Go, Piet. Thanks for everything. It’s been swell.”
“Don’t. Don’t be hard.” In waiting for her to begin to cry, he felt his own eyes warm. The scene must be played.
She seized the high, the haughty, rôle. “I don’t know how a dismissed mistress should act. They didn’t teach us at Radcliffe. Maybe I took the wrong courses. I’m sure I’ll be better at it next time.”
“Don’t,” he begged. Rays were being hurled from her dry eyes, and he hunched to dodge these spears.
“Don’t what?” she asked. “Don’t make a scene? Don’t be a bitch? When all the poor little workingman has done is come into your house and charmed the pants off of you and let you fall in love with him, don’t embarrass the poor baby, don’t make yourself a nuisance. I won’t, Piet love, I won’t. Just go. Git. Go to Bea. Go back to Georgene. Go way back to Angela. I couldn’t care less.”
Her eyes, they wouldn’t cry, and he must do something, anything, to smother their icy dry rays, that were annihilating him. He asked, “Can’t we lie down together?”
“Oh,” she said, and flounced herself, but her sweater and heavy nightie refused, amid the ghosts of summer’s billowing, to fling, and the kitchen presences, stove, oven, sink, and windows, retained their precise shape, like unimpressed judges. “You’ll make one more stab at it, as a favor. Forget it, I’m not that hard up.”
But the integrity of her eyes had cracked, she had been brought to tears. He heard his voice grow wise and warm, reaching into the reserves of darkness he and Foxy had shared. “I want to rub your back, and hear about your baby.”
She smoothed the skin beneath her eyes. “I think you’re right about us,” she confessed. “I just don’t want to know exactly when it’s happening.”
This was, his release, of her many gifts to him the most gracious. In an hour, he knew, in good conscience he would be free. He asked, “Shall we go upstairs? We’ll need covers over us.”
She said, “We must leave the door open, to hear the baby. He’s asleep in the nursery.” Piet rejoiced that concern for her child was dovetailing with relinquishment of him.
The upstairs was even colder. In bed she kept her wool nightie on and he his underclothes; he rubbed the smooth planes of her back and backside until she seemed asleep. But when he stopped she rolled to face him, reached down to touch him, in Paisley underpants, and asked as if she could be refused, “Would you like to come inside me?”
“Terribly, actually.”
“Gently.”
Yes, she had been stretched by the child; the precious virginal tightness had fled. He offered to kiss her breasts, though a stale milky smell disturbed him; her fingers pushed his face away. She must save herself for the baby. Her long body beneath his felt companionable, unsupple, male. His mind moved through images of wood, patient pale widths waiting for the sander, intricate joints finished with steel wool and oil, rounded pieces fitted with dowels, solid yet soft with that placid suspended semblance of life wood retains.
A weight fell on the bed; Piet’s heart leaped. Foxy’s cheek against his stretched in a smile. It was the cat, Cotton. Purring, the animal nestled complacently into the hollow on top of the blankets between the lovers’ spread legs. “I have two lovers,” Foxy said softly, but fear had been touched off in Piet, and its flare illuminated the world—the Gallagher & Hanema office on Hope Street, the colonial farmhouse on Nun’s Bay Road, the unmistakable pick-up truck blatantly parked in the Whitmans’ drive. He must hurry. He asked her, “Can you make it?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve too many emotions.”
“Then let me?”
She nodded stiffly and with a few unheeding, gay and forceful strokes he finished it off, holding her pinned through the distracting trembling with which she greeted his coming and which at first he had mistaken for her own climax. He left his lust as if on a chopping block miles within her soft machine. She looked at him with eyes each holding the rectangle of the skylight. “So quick?”
“I know. I’m lousy at love. I must go.”
He dressed rapidly, to avoid the discussion and recapitulation he knew she desired. It was good, he thought, that the last time was bad for her. Her slowness to come, he saw now, had always been a kind of greed. As he carefully opened the door behind the lilacs, the baby began to cry in the nursery wing.
Outdoors was as still as a house in that interval after the last subcontractors have left and before the occupants have moved in and the heat is turned on. The woods toward the little-Smiths’ house, purple diluted with rime, moved no more under the wind than frost-ferns on glass. No cars passed on the beach road. A single gull knifed across his vision, and he heard behind him Foxy begin to cry. His palms tingling against the wheel, he backed the truck around and headed toward the center of Tarbox. Through the leafless trees peeked a gold weathercock. As the cab warmed, he whistled along with the radio music, exhilarated once again at having not been caught.
Perhaps that day he discovered a treasure of cruelty in himself, for alone with Bea later that week, late in the afternoon, he struck h
er. She had been above him on all fours, a nursing mammal, her breasts pendulous, with a tulip sheen, and as if to mark an exclamatory limit to happiness he had cuffed her buttocks, her flaccid sides, and, rolling her beneath him, had slapped her face hard enough to leave a blotch. Seeing her eyes incredulous, he had slapped her again, to banish all doubt and establish them firmly on this new frontier. Already he had exploited her passivity in all positions; the slap distracted his penis and he felt he had found a method to prolong the length of time, never long enough, that he could inhabit a woman.
Bea’s left eye slitted against a third blow and when it didn’t come widened with the surprise of recognition. “That’s what Roger does.”
“So people say.”
“I thought it was because he couldn’t make love normally, because I didn’t excite him otherwise. But that’s not so of you.”
“No, it’s in you. You invite it. You’re a lovely white hole to pour everything into. Jizz, fists, spit.” He spat between her breasts and lifted his arm as if to club her.
Her eyes, so washed-out they were scarcely blue, widened in alarm and she turned her head sideways on the shadowy pillow. “It makes me wonder if I’m insane,” she said. “That I do this to people. Eddie twists my wrist all the time. Please, Piet, I’d really rather you wouldn’t. Use me but don’t hurt me if you don’t absolutely have to. I don’t really like it. Maybe I should.”
“Oh I know, I know, you must hate it, forgive me,” Piet said, hiding his face in Bea’s throat and hair. “Do forgive me.” Yet he was pleased, for in abusing her he had strengthened the basis of his love, given his heart leverage to leap. He loved any woman he lay with, that was his strength, his appeal; but with each woman his heart was more intimidated by the counterthrust of time. Now, with Bea, he had made a ledge of guilt and hurled himself secure into the tranquil pool of her body and bed. High above the sound of children throwing snowballs as they returned from school in the dusk, Bea sucked his fingers, and her nether mouth widened until he was quite lost, and he experienced orgasm strangely, as a crisisless osmosis, an ebbing of light above the snow-shrouded roofs. Death no longer seemed dreadful.
The phone rang and surprised him by being Foxy. In the month since their unsatisfactory coitus in the cold house, she had not called, and had hardly spoken at parties. She had faded into the tapestry of friends. She asked, “Piet, is Gallagher there?”
“Yes he is,” he cheerfully sang.
“Could you go out to a pay phone and call me?”
“Now?”
“Piet. Please. We must talk.” Her voice had a distant chafed quality, and he pictured a handkerchief balled in her fingers.
“As you wish.” He added a firm, man-to-man “Right.” He felt Gallagher listening behind the corrugated glass partition, though his door was closed. Increasingly Gallagher’s door was closed. Each morning, coming to his office, Piet found that the walls had been slightly narrowed in the night. Beside his desk hung a calendar, from Spiros Bros. Builders & Lumber Supply, showing a dripping golden retriever mouthing a green-headed mallard; as Piet worked at his desk he could feel the dog’s breath pushing on his ear.
He went out into the valentine brightness of plow-heaped snow and entered an aluminum phone booth smelling of galoshes. A single dried-up child’s mitten lay on the change shelf, unclaimed. The Whitmans’ number rang three, four, five times unanswered. He pictured Foxy lying dead, a suicide, having called him in the clouded last moment of waking and then sinking in coma onto her bed, her long hair spilling, the child crying unheard. The phone was picked up; as if a window had been opened Piet saw, across the street, through the besmirched phone-booth glass, four men rocking a car, trying to push it free.
“Hello.” Foxy’s voice was cool, impersonal, unfocused.
“It’s me. What took you so long to answer the phone?”
Her voice, relieved, collapsed—but not, he felt, all the way. “Oh. Piet. You’re so quick to call back.”
“You told me to be.”
“I was with Toby.”
“What’s up?”
She hesitated. “I just wondered how you were. I had a spell of missing you, and realized that I’d been resisting calling you just to punish you and you weren’t being punished, so what the hell.”
He laughed, reassured yet suspicious, for he did not remember her as a waverer. “Well, I was being punished, but I figured unless we had something to tell each other it was right we didn’t talk. I admired your tact.” In her silence he hurried on. “I get your letters out and read them now and then.” This was a lie; he had not done this for months; they seemed, all those blue barbs and squiggles, dead thorns the sharper for being dead.
As if sensing this, she laughed. “But I do have something to tell you. Good news, you’ll be pleased. The house is warm now, and it wasn’t your fault. When they installed the furnace the man had put the thermostat too near some hot-water pipes in the wall, so the thermostat thought the house was warm when only it was, and kept shutting off. Ken and Frank Appleby figured it out one drunken night. The Applesmiths have been coming over lately.”
“Oh, sweet, but it is my fault. I was the general contractor, I should have noticed. But I was distracted by making love to you.”
“Did you like making love to me? I was never sure, I’m awfully virginal somehow.”
“Virginal and whorish together. I adored making love to you. It was somehow it. But don’t you feel better now in a way? You can look Angela in the face, and me Ken.”
“I never minded Angela. I had a mysterious feeling she approved.”
The subject displeased him; he did not like Angela to be dismissed. He felt his mistresses owed it to him to venerate her, since he had taken it upon himself to mock her through their bodies. “And how is Toby? Are you enjoying him?”
“Pretty much. He lifts up his head and seems to listen to what I say. Unlike his father.”
“Aren’t you enjoying Ken?”
“Not much.”
“And this is all you called me for? Got me out here in the snow for?”
“No.” The syllable seemed a metallic sound the receiver had made purely by itself. When Foxy’s voice resumed, it had collapsed all the way; he felt, listening, that he was skating on a crystal surface, the pure essence of her that God’s hands had held before thrusting it into a body, her soul. “Piet. My period is two weeks late. And it would have to be you.”
“Me what?” But of course he instantly knew. That cold house, that scared last piece. The chopping block. The hostage.
As she spoke, her voice made soft tearing noises, caused by the skating action of his listening. “It’s not just the lateness, it’s a whole chemical something, a burny feeling down low that I remember from carrying Toby.”
“Would you feel it so soon?”
“It’s been a month.”
“So soon after giving birth, aren’t your insides naturally mixed up?”
“But I had two periods.”
“And it can’t be Ken?”
“Not really, no.” He thought her phrasing strange. She added, “He uses those things.”
“Sometimes they break.”
“Not Ken’s. Anyway, it’s not been that often. I depress him since the baby. And he’s worried about his work. Not only Jews but now the Japanese are getting ahead of him.”
“But how often?”
“Twice when it could have been, except for the thing, and once just recently, when I hoped it would bring my period on.”
“And you do have the burny feeling?”
“Yes. And agitation. Insomnia. Piet, Piet, I’m so sorry, it’s so stupid.”
“Why did you let me that day, if—”
“I don’t know, you didn’t act like you were going to do it, and my old diaphragm doesn’t fit, and—”
“I assumed you used pills. Everybody else does.”
“Oh, does everybody else? You’ve taken a poll.”
“Don’t be petulant.�
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“Don’t you be. About the pills, not that it matters, Ken doesn’t trust them. He thinks it’s all too intricate, they may trigger off something.”
“Bang,” Piet said. “Bang, bang.”
Foxy was going on, “And if you must know, if you must know how naïve I am, I thought that I was nursing made me safe.” Her tears crackled and rasped in the receiver cold against his ear.
He laughed. “That old wives’ tale? I keep forgetting about you, you’re a Southern woman, raised on recipes learned at Aunt Jemima’s knee.”
“Oh,” her wet pale voice gasped, “it’s good to hear you laugh at me. I’ve been in hell. I called you this morning to keep from going crazy and then when you called back I was too frightened to answer, and then I lied. I just lie and lie, Piet.”
“It’s something we all get good at,” he said. The receiver was such a little weight in his hand, chill and stiff and hollow, he wondered why he could not hang it up and walk away free, why it was clamped to him as the body is clamped to the soul.
Foxy was asking, “What shall we do?”
In the illusion of giving advice he found some shelter, right angles and stress-beams of sense they could inhabit. “Wait a few more days,” he told her. “Take hot baths, as hot as you can stand them. If it still doesn’t come on, go to a doctor and take the rabbit test. Then at least we’ll know.”
“But I can’t go to Doc Allen. For one thing he’d be shocked that I was pregnant again so soon. He might tell some of his boatyard friends.”
“Doctors never tell anything. But didn’t you and Ken have a doctor in Cambridge? Go to him if you’d rather. But not quite yet. It might come on still. Angela is sometimes three weeks, sometimes five; she’s terribly casual. It’s a miracle I haven’t knocked her up.”
Though he had been serious, Foxy laughed. “Poor Piet and his women,” she teased, “picking his way through the phases of the moon. I guess I turned out to be the dud.”
“The opposite of dud, I’d say,” and he glimpsed in himself amid the terror pleasure that she had proved doubly fertile, that she had shown him capable of bringing more life to bud upon the earth.