Helen shook her head. She walked into the kitchen and found Mike and pulled him out into the hall and began looking for her pocketbook in the jumble of possessions on a hall table. “I’m going to walk on home,” she said. “I really have a bad headache. I can’t stand the cigarette smoke in here. You stay if you like. I need to go call DeDe.”
“Kundera,” the voice of one of the female students echoed in the hall. “What a bunch of crap. It’s just another example of a bad translation being passed off as genius. . . . ”
“You’re just pissed off because Mike Curtis sent back your story. If you weren’t in such a bad mood . . . ,” a male voice was answering.
“What’s wrong, Helen?” Mike had her arm, he was pulling her out the door into the exterior hallway. He had her close to him. “Come here to me. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong. Just let me go. I want to go home.”
“No. Come on. Well, wait then. I’ll take you.”
“No. I want to walk.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Yes it did. Tell me.”
“I don’t know what we do. To think, I’ve been sitting around being jealous of your female students. God, they’re so ugly, so unattractive. They aren’t even smart. You call that smart?”
“What happened?”
“This ugly girl with dirty hair asked me if we were married. I didn’t know what to say. I don’t know what we’re doing.”
“Okay.” They were outside the apartment now, on the stone steps leading to a tree-lined street. “Okay, then say it. Tell me what you want.”
“I don’t want anything. I just want to walk home in the clean air. If I can find any clean air in Boston. At least today it isn’t raining.”
“Helen.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to marry me. To be my wife. Live with me and be my love. No, I mean it, don’t turn away. Will you marry me?”
“If I can. I’m not divorced.” She started crying. Laughing and crying. “Oh, yes. Oh, God, yes. More than anything in the world. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” And the thing Mike liked remembering about that moment was that he knew she had never read Joyce.
“Would you like to go back inside and tell them?” he asked, when she had stopped crying and he had stopped kissing her. “I’ve never been engaged. I want to tell the students. I want to announce it to someone.”
“Okay. If you really want to.”
“You can snub the ugly girl.”
“I don’t want to snub her.”
“You might want to. Come on. Let’s go back to the party and see if you want to or not.”
“Okay. I will.” Helen wiped her face and combed her hair and they walked back into the building and up the stairs and went into the apartment and Mike got a glass and beat on it with a spoon and announced they were getting married at the end of the summer term. “Anyone who wants champagne can go with me to the store to procure it,” he said, and began to collect some of his male students.
The girls surrounded Helen, congratulating her, seeming benign and almost cheerful in their enthusiasm for anyone’s possible happiness. “Marriage is coming back in,” the ugly girl decreed. “I’ve been thinking of writing an article about it for the Crimson. They’ve been begging me to do an op-ed piece.”
“Mike is the best thing that’s happened around here in my four years.” A tall beaming girl was by Helen’s side. “And you’re the best thing that’s happened to him. Everyone talks about how different he is this year. Last year he was so remorseful. Before he met you. Everyone in English knows all about your meeting. It’s mythical now.” The beaming girl was at least six feet tall, very fine and goddesslike. She led Helen to a pair of chairs and sat down beside her. She took Helen for her own. “You know, he never used to go out anywhere. He was always alone.”
“He doesn’t like to be alone.” Helen moved into the comfort of the girl’s kindness. “He’s from a big family. So am I. We both come from very big families.”
“You ought to see my husband.” The girl laughed out loud. “He’s Sicilian. He has nine sisters. He’s never been alone in his life and he doesn’t want to be. Well, this wedding is a wonderful idea. It will inspire some other people around here to believe in love. You might as well believe in it, I always say. What else is there with that much energy?”
“What is your name?” Helen leaned in close. This happy day. This happy, happy day.
“P.J.,” the girl said. “I was named for a British actress. It’s a joke. My parents were living in Stockholm. My parents thought having a baby was a joke.”
The next afternoon Helen called Niall on the phone. “I want you there,” she said. “I need you there.”
“I can’t perform the ceremony.”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. Well, perhaps you could. But most of all, come here. Be here. Do you think I can be happy, Niall? Is this okay?”
“I’m happy. Why shouldn’t you be?”
“Because it seems impossible. I don’t know. I can’t believe it goes on. That it doesn’t stop. I keep thinking I should have a baby or something.”
“Expiation?”
“I guess so.”
“Well, don’t have a baby. You don’t need a baby, Helen. You can’t have one, can you? Oh, God, I hope not.”
“Well, theoretically I could, but I won’t. I won’t do that.”
“Are you doing something against it?”
“I think so.”
“You think so! Helen, you need to talk to a woman. Do you have any women friends up there?”
“Not really. I want to make them but Mike’s friends are all married to these dreary women. They never get dressed. I know it’s silly but I was raised to get dressed, to be pretty. I can’t help it. I met a graduate student the other day who was nice. This tall girl with a beaming smile. I think she’s some kind of journalist.”
“I love you, Helen. I’m so glad you’re happy. Call this girl if you liked her. Take her out to lunch. You know how to make friends. You always had the most friends of anyone.”
“And you’ll come, to the wedding?”
“Nothing could keep me away.”
“It’s August nineteenth. I don’t know where yet but the reception will be at Favrot’s. This little restaurant where we like to eat. Have you seen Lynley?”
“Quite a bit. He’s in love, did you know that? The best thing you ever did for him was leaving town. Now he has to find another girl.”
“Oh, Niall. I wish you wouldn’t say things like that. You’re worse than Anna was. Everyone doesn’t have to have an Electra Complex or whatever you call it.”
“Oedipus. Anyway, he’s perfectly fine. He likes his work and the girl is nice. She lived in Europe for several years and has all sorts of lovely mannerisms. She’s small and blond and very chic. You’d like her.”
“He didn’t write me about it. Maybe I should call him.”
“Don’t call him, Helen. He’ll call if he needs you. He knows your number. Let him grow up.”
“Oh, okay. Well, anyway, I have something I have to do so I better hang up. I have to read the new script for Anna’s movie. I hope this one is better.”
“You’re a wonderful sister, Helen.”
“I’m doing the best I can. It’s fun, talking to these movie people. You don’t have to do anything but let them call you on the phone. Mike makes me make all the decisions about it. He just tells me to be strong. He’s teaching me to be strong. You just say yes and no and don’t apologize. Well, I forget about not apologizing. I mean, I was taught to do that.”
“I have to go to Daniel’s for dinner. Can I call you later?”
“No. I just wanted to see if you’d come. August nineteenth. And bring a suit. I want it to be beautiful. I want Daniel too but I’ll call him later.”
“Are you going to ask the children?”
“I don’t want to. It’s my day, for M
ike and me. I don’t want them walking around frowning. Especially DeDe and Winifred. Stacy is nice to him but they’d just pout the whole time. Oh, well.”
“It’s okay, Helen. Spencer’s taking care of the children. Let him do it. It’s good for him. I think it’s softening him up.”
“Oh, well. Okay.”
“I love you. Stay well.”
“Love you too.”
Niall hung up the phone and walked out onto the patio and began to water his roses. The American Beauties were in bloom, twelve plants in a circle, their huge red flowers so fragrant, so soft, so unbelievably delicate and rich. Velvet, Niall decided. The old comparisons are still the best. He worked the roots, watered the plants, powdered the leaves with insecticide, pulled off the dead leaves. He was smiling inside himself, laughing deep inside his heart at the divinity, the absurdity of it all, Helen and her poet, Lynley falling in love with a girl who looked more like Helen than her own daughters, Helen’s annoyance with the most elemental psychological truths. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita . . . , he was thinking. He picked three of the flowers and took them inside and put them in a vase. “In the middle of my life I came to my senses in a dark forest. . . .”
“He’s coming,” Helen called to Mike, following him into the bathroom where he was shaving. “Niall’s coming to our wedding. Oh, Mike, we could get him to do the service. It doesn’t have to be Catholic. It can be anything we want. You could write it.” She put her hands around his naked waist, felt the lovely flesh of his stomach, ran her hands up and down the divine flesh of her lover’s body. He smiled and kept on shaving, pulling the razor down across his cheek and chin. They were reflected in the mirror, two absolutely charmed and charming human beings in the best year of their lives. Striving, striving, striving.
“You write it,” he said. “Why should I have to write everything?”
“What will I write?”
“Whatever you want it to say. Whatever you want to promise. What do you want me to promise you?”
“To love me forever.”
“Then let it say that.” He drew the razor down the last streak of shaving cream. Already the plot was forming in his mind, the characters beginning to fill his head. A family in the South, a dead sister, a sister who runs away, the men still caught in the net, the men left with the children, the women all gone away and the men and children still living the old forms, going to church on Sunday, having regular meals, living the dead past over and over again. The women plagued by guilt, marrying their lovers in churches they no longer believed in. The dead sister hovering over all of them, memento mori. The martini shakers, the black servants, the wainscoting and expensive wallpaper and Doric pillars, the lawns and tennis courts and private schools and swimming pools. Patterns, forms, shapes, webs. She struggles against the web, Mike was writing. She looses a hand, looses a foot, the pattern closes, clutches, glued to her back. Because she is still breathing, she thinks she is free.
“My darling Helen.” He goes to the bed and sits down beside her and begins to stroke her legs. “I wish to take you out for chowder tonight, madame. While you are still my mistress, I will treat you like one. You may not wish to exchange this for the married state.”
“Are we doing enough to keep from having a baby?”
“What are we doing?”
“Well, I’m using jelly. And I sort of count the days.”
“What day is today?” He put his face down on her thigh and began to kiss her legs.
“The day I’d ovulate if I still ovulate. I don’t think I do anymore. I think I’m starting menopause but I’m not sure. I forget to think about it. It all seems so irrelevant now.” She put her hands upon his head.
He parted her legs with his hands, began to kiss her stomach, put his tongue very gently into her navel. Where she is joined to the fields of time, he thought.
“Put it in me,” Helen said. “I want to fuck you now.” She imagined him bending over across the room, the great balls between his legs. She saw Spencer standing beside her as she pushed the babies out into the world, terrible searing pain, then release. “I love you,” she said. “Oh, my baby, baby, baby, my love.”
Anna could have told her what was happening. Or the tall beaming girl at the party who was writing a paper on sexual desire and release.
I must love violence, Helen had told herself a thousand times. Or else, why do I think such terrible things? Why would I mix up childbirth with making love? I must be a terrible person to think such nasty awful stuff. I think of Spencer watching the babies come and it makes me come. I still think this terrible stuff when I make love to Mike. Oh, God, if he knew what I was thinking he probably wouldn’t want to make love to me anymore. All the sweet white nightgowns and Chanel Nineteen and little silver bedroom slippers in the world won’t make up for thinking about blood all over the delivery room and me screaming and doctors cutting me. Oh, God, I am a terrible person and I will go to hell.
No you won’t, the smiling girl could have told her. That’s how we come. The sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems. You overload one and it flips over into the other one. The intersection is orgasm. Fear overloads the circuits. Fear trips the spring. We go as far as we can go with one, then it flips over, voilà, orgasm. The other clicks in and stasis is restored.
Chapter 38
CHARLOTTE, North Carolina. Seven in the evening. “Spencer’s plotting against her,” Daniel is saying. He and Niall are seated on his patio, overlooking the leaf-strewn tennis court. Niall is nursing a gin and tonic. Daniel is on his third Scotch and water. Inside the house Daniel’s old cook, Jade, is making shrimp gumbo.
“Oh, Dan, that doesn’t sound right,” Niall answers. “Why would Spencer plot against her? He’s not vindictive.”
“Yes he is. He’d like to take her for everything she’s got. I want to see this divorce finished. I’m nervous about it. I talked to James the other day and he’s nervous too. Spencer was supposed to sign the papers a month ago and nothing’s happened. If she wants to shack up with the poet in Boston, she deserves it. What has Helen ever done but be everybody’s doormat? She’s never had a life. I couldn’t believe she married Spencer when she did it. What a bore. He was a bore when he was sixteen.”
“Well, he can’t be vindictive enough to want Helen to be unhappy. He looks fine to me. I was over there the other night and he had out all his stamps and was talking about going to New York to buy some more. He’s got plenty of money. Why would he want to take Helen’s?”
“She cuckolded him, Niall. It looks bad. It makes him lose face with his insurance honchos. His friends know it.”
“They have him out every night. Half the women in town are lined up trying to marry him. What’s he got to complain about? And Helen isn’t shacked up, baby brother. She’s getting married in August. I guess I was supposed to let her tell you that. She called this afternoon. Well, act surprised when she calls you.”
“She can’t get married until she gets divorced.”
“She said James promised her he’d get it done.”
“That’s not what he told me. Unless she’s going to let Spencer have all the money. Surely James wouldn’t let her do that.”
“It belongs to the children one way or the other, doesn’t it?”
“You could look at it that way. It’s easy to talk about not needing it until it’s gone. Not that I ever said I didn’t need it.”
“She’ll always have the income from Anna’s trust.”
“That’s not enough. No one could live on that.”
“She’ll be all right. She’s happy, Daniel. She doesn’t give a damn for anything but that.”
“So Spencer gets the money? Grandmother’s too?”
“She said he would always give it back if she needed it. She said that to me today.”
“I’ll shoot Spencer if he takes her money. I’m calling him right now.”
“Don’t do that, Dan. Please don’t start something like that.”
“I ought to retire her,” Daniel said, getting up, gesturing to Niall to precede him into the house. “She’s getting worse every year.”
“So are we,” Niall said. “So are we all.”
They went through the downstairs door and up the wide stairs which were lined with framed photographs of the Hand family. There were photographs of Anna Senior holding each one of them as they were born. Weddings, vacations, occasions, Anna receiving awards, Jessie and Olivia on horses; all of them in Paris the summer James Senior took everyone to discover Europe.
Niall stopped by a photograph of Helen with three of her children and pregnant with the fourth. She looked sixteen, and not a day older, wearing a white smock and sandals, DeDe, Lynley and Winifred lined up in front of her. Lynley holding a wooden rifle, DeDe holding a doll, Winifred holding the hem of Helen’s smock and sucking her thumb. “Helen looks like a little girl,” Niall said. “She must have been at least eight months pregnant with Stacy. You know, I always thought she kept having those babies to plague Anna.”
“My God, Niall, you say the damnedest things. She had them because she wanted them. She liked being pregnant. Look at the expression on her face.”
“Triumph is ecstatic. I’ll admit that.”
“I can remember her being pregnant, as young as I was. She’d sit on the porch swing and everyone would wait on her and the children would be all over the house. I built a barricade out of two-by-fours to keep them out of my room. Momma would let them tear up all my stuff. We ought to feel sorry for Spencer. By the time he was twenty-seven he had five kids to support. No wonder he had to spend his life slaving for his father in the insurance business. I can’t remember ever seeing him without a tie, unless we were at the beach, and even then he looked like an insurance salesman.”
“We lived in strange times,” Niall said. “Well, come on, baby brother, let’s don’t keep Jade from her bingo game.”
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