That was our first meeting.
And when I got home, it was the strangest thing. Robert was there in the doorway, waiting for me. Isn’t that just too much? He looked worried to death, poor man. So I told him— where I’d been, I mean. I left out the part about the knife. Then I went up to bed.
But, good lord, listen to me!—nattering on and on. You’d think a person had nothing better to do all day than sit and listen to stories. You can stay a bit longer, can’t you? I’m so glad. I haven’t even shown you the upstairs. But first the dining room. This way, this way.
DINING ROOM
I promised you bookcases. Well, take a look. Uno. Due. And please observe the top shelf of the hutch. Book junkies, both of us. I started reading at five and forgot to give it up the way I gave up everything else—my tutu, my ballet slippers—so long, piano music, goodbye, ice skates, Ginnie doll, tennis racket . . . I can remember in sixth grade sitting holding Anne of Avonlea open on my lap, pretending to memorize the products of Central America. Chicle. Or was that South America? I had bangs back then—down to my eyebrows, like a helmet. I kept reading in high school, and college—where I majored in guess what—and then came the bookstore, and Robert, and good old marriage—still turning those pages. Do you think people can read too much? I’m grateful for it, myself, but you know what? I haven’t opened a book for nearly a year. One day I simply stopped. That’s right. Just when you’d think I needed it most, reading deserted me. Books just didn’t like me anymore. Betrayed by literature! But really, among so many betrayals, what’s one more?
This table is also from Robert’s grandmother. Solid mahogany—and will you look at the carving on those legs. Still, there’s a heaviness, don’t you think? We ate breakfast and lunch in the kitchen, dinner always here. Robert complained about the table at first—said it made him think he was eating roast pig with Queen Victoria—though really there’s nothing actually Victorian about the thing. But it was too fine a piece just to let go. It always got on his nerves a little. I kept it covered with a cheerful tablecloth, which helped.
There’s a secret about this table—two secrets. But first I have to tell you about tough girls and golden girls.
Just sit. Pull out a chair.
In high school I was never aware of any special unhappiness. You look surprised. But no, really. Oh, I had my bad days, my rotten days, but they were basically exceptions. The truth is, adolescent angst bored the hell out of me. At fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, I was never a morbid type, never broody or gloomy or crazy-restless. All that was like some dumb style of hat I wouldn’t be caught dead in. There were girls in my school—I could tell you stories. Girls who wore long black dresses with lots of rattly beads, stared at you with big sorrowful eyes, and looked like they started each day bright and early by slitting their wrists in the bathtub. Who needed it? Really, who needed it? I had a few good friends, I got on all right with my classmates. I fit in well enough, without fitting in completely—which was fine with me. But right from the start I was aware of two kinds of girls whose very existence made me uneasy. I would see girls walking down the halls in pairs, wearing tight skirts and sweaters, swinging their hips—girls who laughed loud, brassy laughs, wore too much lipstick, talked dirty at the lockers, and had sudden fits of anger. These were the tough girls, who’d give you a hard look if you met their eyes. What was it about them that seemed to make me doubt myself? And then there were the golden girls. . . . Ah, those golden high-school girls! Beautiful—really gifted with beauty—slightly languorous, clean-smelling, friendly but somehow untouchable. There they were, the golden girls, sashaying down the halls with their long hair swaying, giving off a kind of light, as if whenever you saw them they’d just spent the entire day at the beach . . . oh, they were as far as possible from the tough girls with their black leather jackets and cheap pocketbooks. But I saw that they shared a secret, the tough girls and the golden girls, a secret I wasn’t allowed to know. It was the way they walked. Yes, they were at ease in their bodies, they inhabited their bodies—while I, don’t you see, I stood a little outside my own body, I didn’t fit myself. I was like one of those color comics where the color doesn’t fit the outlines but leaves a space on one side and spills out the other. Don’t misunderstand me. I wasn’t ashamed of my body. It was a pretty good body, as bodies went. No, I wasn’t morbidly self-conscious— that came much later. That was your gift. But I was estranged from my body—in a not unpleasant way.
The grand thing about Robert is that he made the color fit the outline. In college I’d had two lovers—to call them that— strange name for the loveless—who taught me something about pleasure—and anger. But it was as if my body had its own life, and I myself another. But with Robert—well, he liked to tell me I was good in the sack, and all that jazz, but what thrilled me was how I no longer . . . I mean . . . it’s difficult to say. But the color fit the outline. I somehow got into my own skin. Do you see what I mean?
But I was telling you about the table. Here was this heavy, serious, deeply solemn piece of furniture, sitting right there where we had to eat our dinner. Robert said we ought to paint it yellow, or maybe put up a Ping-Pong net. Or else we ought to eat on the floor, he said, underneath the table. One night after dinner we both stood looking at it, the grandmother table—gleaming, solid, unmovable—all too depressingly there. We looked at each other. And we knew; we knew how to break the spell. And so we made love on the table. After clearing away the dishes, of course. Right over there, near that end. “That’ll give her something to think about,” Robert said later. I never knew whether he meant the table, or his grandmother, or Queen Victoria.
It was our little joke—our secret—our little protest against gravity. We ate in the dining room without trouble, after that.
We were lighthearted, Robert and I. Can you understand that?
I don’t know exactly what I hoped for, after the night of my visit to you. If it was peace I was looking for, an end to night madness, I found none of it. Instead of imagining all women, I confined myself to just you—but you grew to be a giantess, you were all women, you were more than all women. You were my obsession, my . . . demon. I imagined Robert making love to you, over and over again, until my head felt battered. I wondered what you did in bed exactly, what you did to draw him to you. I’d seen your plain nightgown, but I imagined you had fancy things, just for him: black lace underpants, for example. Robert had once pointed to a pair of black lace underpants on a mannequin and said, “Do you think she’s trying to tell me something?” And speaking of a colleague’s wife he said, “She’s a white cotton underwear sort of woman”—curled lip, little dismissive wave of the fingers. “Like me,” I said. “Oh, you’re different,” Robert said with a laugh. And it’s true that I like yellow, and blue, as well as white. But I thought of that mannequin, when I imagined Robert in your room. Black lace underpants. Was that your secret? I imagined him tearing them off with his teeth. It wasn’t—you realize—simply a matter of black lace underwear. It was that I thought I might have misunderstood something about Robert, that my whole life might have been wrong.
So: black lace underpants. But that was only the beginning. I imagined you owned more specialized things, things you ordered from expensive catalogs—maybe a sheer pink bra embroidered with flowers, or one of those male-fantasy things that hook up the back and come with garters to go with your lace-top thigh-highs and your spike heels. Or say a nice black nylon spandex slip with lace hem over your pale-peach bikini panties. Oh, I imagined you could teach Victoria a secret or two! Unless the trick was simpler than that. Under a tight skirt that showed off your legs—look, Robert!—no underpants.
There was no stopping you now. You’d do anything— anything. I saw you in a little-girl Sunday frock—ironed and pink—sitting with your knees pressed together—your long-lashed eyes blinking innocently—a nice pink bow in your hair—your legs in black fishnet stockings. And of course there was your classic chambermaid routine: short black dress, wh
ite apron, little white cap, lowered eyes—oh yes, sir, oh no, sir, very well, sir—reaching higher, higher, higher with that cute feather duster as your skirt hiked up.
I imagined Robert standing behind you, burying his teeth in your shoulder.
Or you as calendar pinup in six-inch heels and black top hat—your back to Robert and me—black-gloved hand on hip—white dress shirt not quite covering your perfect behind— as you glance over your shoulder at us—well, hello there—with bee-stung lips—in a darling little sulky pout.
But maybe that wasn’t it at all, maybe there was some other trick you used, to get him into that room of yours. One summer Robert and I traveled to Paris. Our hotel room was small, but we faced a courtyard, which seemed to me exotic. On the first night I was startled by a loud cry, a terrible anguished groan that made me think someone was being murdered. I ran to the window, but Robert pulled me away, laughing. I realized that what I was hearing was the sound of a woman screaming in orgasm. I was uneasy, thinking of my own much quieter sounds. “I imagine he’s completely deaf by now,” Robert said, in that way of his. But now I wondered: Is that what men liked? Were you a screamer? I imagined you letting everything go, filling the room with murderous cries, with shouts of ecstasy bordering on pain.
I watched the two of you making love—is that what you called it?—in your moonlit love nest on the other side of town—while I lay alone in my big big bed and Robert creaked in his study. Sometimes I felt myself turning into you, a high-class whore in fancy lingerie, seducing my husband away from his boring wife. And he would make love to us fanatically— insanely—in the cheap motel room of my mind—till we hurt between the legs.
Is this what’s called jealousy? I guess. Who knows? For me it was also a kind of—I don’t know, a kind of exploration. As though I wanted to push past whatever I thought I was, into regions of unknown pain, frontiers of humiliation. Look at me!—the cowgirl of sorrow.
Sometimes I thought of beaches: Robert and me at the beach, sun shining on sandbars—another life. Robert leaning back on his elbows, his skinny-muscly legs crossed at the ankles, images of sky and water in his dark glasses. Dream-women walking in the sand, walking right there in his sunglasses—he always did like a pair of long legs on a woman. Like yours. At the beach he would look at them admiringly. I never minded—well, maybe a little. More than a little. And both of us liked to look people over, it was a thing we did well together. “Your type,” I’d say, nodding toward some leggy bimbo in a string bikini. Robert would laugh. Sometimes I worried about my legs, that they weren’t long enough. “Long enough for what?” he said once. Typical Robert.
Was it your legs? Was it that simple? Two inches taller and a girl gets it all? Maybe there was something you did with your legs, some special way of walking across a room, or . . . or something. A technique you practiced: a secret craft. That was it. Or maybe it was your body itself that had a secret—some special feature—some unusual development—that no man could resist. I liked the idea of a secret—something hidden— because then you were lifted into the realm of magic, where you defeated me unfairly—where nothing was my fault.
Or maybe your nasty little secret was that you talked a different way in bed—talked dirty, as they say. Is that what golden girls do? I imagined the words coming from your mouth, words I never used because to me they were sharp stones flung at bodies. And Robert would never. . . . In the night I whispered them aloud: Cunt. Cock. Fuck. I was oddly soothed by them, as I said them over and over again: Cunt. Cock. Fuck. Fuck me, Robert, I imagined you saying. Come on, Robert. Fuck me. That’s what it comes down to, I said. Cunt. Cock. Fuck. I spoke them louder and louder. They thrilled me and hurt me. I had the confused sense that I was saying goodbye to something. My childhood? But I was a forty-seven-year-old woman! I felt tears on my face.
Late that same night I put on my robe and prowled around downstairs, exhausted and awake. I sat on the porch, but the sound of crickets was like a burn on my skin. In the kitchen I filled a glass with ice cubes and pressed it to my forehead. I walked into the dining room. That afternoon Robert had tightened a screw in a drawer pull. The screwdriver was lying on the hutch. I picked it up and went over to the table.
Here it is, under the cloth. An ugly mark, don’t you think? Like a scar. As I gouged the mahogany with that screwdriver, I thought of many things—the time, long ago, when Robert and I made love on the table, the time when we were happy and lighthearted—but most of all I thought of you. I imagined the table was your face.
You look shocked. You shouldn’t be. It’s only a table, after all. Besides, these little expressions of yours—shock, dismay—I’m sure they’re very appealing to men—who like to be shocking— but when you’re talking to me, you really ought to drop it. It just doesn’t do you a bit of good.
Robert was terribly upset, the first time he saw the mark. He wanted to know why.
Why, Robert? Why? He might as well have asked me to walk down the street with him holding hands.
Now I eat my meals in the kitchen. I don’t like this room anymore. Oh, let’s get on with it, shall we? I haven’t even shown you the upstairs.
STAIRS
I like this old stairpost, don’t you, with this whatchamajigger on top: a bowling ball, it looks like to me, though Robert said it reminded him of the top of a barber pole—or a bald old professor. Just follow me. The handrail’s a little nicked; nothing a bit of furniture polish won’t fix. Those three photographs were taken by my father—Mexico—photography was his passion, though he sold insurance. Here’s the step where I stumbled. Second from the landing. This one right here. Fell right down all those steps and landed on the floor at the foot of the stairs, down there by the hall closet. I could’ve broken my neck; Robert was impressed. Have you ever fallen down a flight of stairs, out of sheer—I suppose it was sorrow. A sorrowful fall. I remember everything: a feeling of just letting everything go, that sense of release, it was almost exhilarating, like floating up in the air, except that my head was banging against the banister and my body was a big awkward lump with arms and legs sticking out all over the place. At the bottom I lay there thinking: so that’s what it’s like, falling down stairs. One leg was bent in a funny way and my skirt was partway up. I wondered if anyone could see my underpants. Vanity!—take it from me, even half dead we’re stuck with it. So there I was, lying with my skirt up, aware of looking like some woman trying to seduce some man. Then I tried to remember the last time I’d made love to Robert. It seemed a long time ago. But was it really that long? And then out of nowhere I thought of Tom Conway. It’s astonishing what a person will think of, lying at the bottom of a stairway. Tom Conway. I’ll tell you about Tom Conway. But not now. Just three more steps after the landing. Robert said we ought to buy a statue and put it right there in the corner. A statue in magnificently bad taste—you know, white marble nymph emerging from bath, one hand modestly covering her pudendum. Instead: tah-dah! Emerson’s Essays. Murder on the Orient Express. Animal Architecture. Can you believe it?
UPSTAIRS BATH
This is the shower. We had a new head installed five–six years ago, walls and ceiling painted. I ought to spray the damn walls to stop that speckling, but I never do. Those tiles are original with the house; a little grout wouldn’t hurt over there.
At some point after Robert’s confession—it must have been late summer? early fall?—I began to take lots of showers. I’d stay under till the hot water ran out, sometimes three times a day. If I wasn’t going to die—and I realized, with astonishment— and disappointment—and a kind of outrage—that I was not going to die—then at least I was determined to be clean. It was as if by seeing you—as Robert so charmingly put it—he had made me dirty. Explain it any way you like: I needed to be clean, shining; a temple virgin; a little girl. Sometimes I took a long bath, and showered right after.
The King in the Tree Page 3