by Marge Piercy
“I always had two images of myself,” Tom was saying. “One image I was big and strong. The other, I was big and fat. In grade school I was the fat boy. Then I shot up in middle school and suddenly I was towering over the class and everybody wanted me on their team. When I feel good about my life, I feel good about my body. When I hate my life, I hate my body.”
“I grew up with a fashionable body for my time. Now it isn’t the right kind any longer, but somehow I’m still happily back in the aesthetic I started with. I know I’m supposed to be skinny and flat now, but I don’t want to be skinny and flat. I like flesh.”
“So do I. Yours in particular.”
“What did your wife look like?”
She could feel him tighten. Then he answered her, his voice thick and low. “She was fairly tall, with honey blond hair. The last three years we lived together, she was always on a diet. After a while, whatever came up, was it going to the movies, was it fucking, was it making friends, her only interest was in how many calories it had. The first thing she’d say when she was describing somebody was whether they were overweight or not—according to her. I felt like an elephant.”
“I guess that’s a thing people do now when they’re dissatisfied—with their lives, with their lovers, with themselves.”
“If you come to represent the flesh and the flesh is bad, then you must be punished.” He groaned. “Aren’t I being talkative about myself? Sandra María gave me a lecture. She says if I don’t open up with you more, you’ll give up on me.”
“Tom! Somebody’s coming out! Through the breezeway.”
Huddled far down and resting a pair of binoculars on the dash, Tom stared through them at their quarry. “All right! He’s got a moustache. Could be our man.”
The silliest thing was that she had a funny feeling that she recognized the man. “Let me look too.” Where would she ever have seen Louis Henry?
“Sorry.” He handed her the binoculars, but she could not get a good view until the man had backed out his pickup truck, loaded with his gear. As the truck backed and then turned past them, she got an excellent view of his profile, bent forward to light a cigarette from his dashboard lighter.
Something troubled her. Grey blond hair on his bare head and a droopy moustache. Leather jacket that looked too big. She had seen him before and not only in her mind’s eye, she knew she had.
“That’s our boy,” Tom was exulting. “There’s our torch. We got him!” After the pickup truck had vanished, he started his own engine.
Snow on the ground then, yes, and her hands had been shaking. She had been following Ross in the rented car, yes, but he had not gone toward his office in the Little Pru office building. He had walked briskly toward Mass Avenue where he had paused outside a coffee shop. Yes. That was the man who came out to him. “Now I know where I’ve seen him.” Her head whipped around to stare back at the house as if she could watch him walk out again, to be sure.
“Where? In Allston?”
“No. When I was jealous of Ross, I followed him one morning. He went to Gail’s apartment. Of course at the time I didn’t know it was Gail he was seeing, I thought her name …” She stopped abruptly, the breath kicked out of her.
“Yeah, well, go on, where does our Louis come into it?”
She almost could not speak. Louis Henry Ledoux was Lou. The glamorous lady of her nightmares. She spoke slowly, as if by rote. “I waited outside. When Ross came out, he didn’t go straight to work. He walked down to Mass Avenue and there he met that guy. Lou was in a coffee shop. Ross stopped outside and Lou came out to meet him. They talked for a moment and then Ross went off to work.”
“You know what? You’ve just tied a little knot for us.”
“No!” She was horrified. “That doesn’t mean there’s any real connection between them. They both own buildings in the same neighborhood.”
“Did Walker hand him anything?”
She was frightened, because it was almost as if Tom could read the memory, could snatch it from her. Here was Tom assuming Ross’s guilt just because she had seen him stop and say hello to some man he knew. Ross might care more about money than he used to, but Tom simply did not know Ross as a person. Landlord was a category that made Ross a complete cartoon villain. She was sorry she had mentioned seeing Ross with Lou. “I’m not even sure of the identification. I was way across the street.”
“But did Walker hand over anything at all to him?”
“I don’t remember! I didn’t see!” She did not want to think about it. She would not expose Ross further. Why had Lou been writing to Ross anyway, the mysterious Lou she had believed was Ross’s love interest? Did she really want to know?
“Did they talk long?”
“I don’t remember! No. They just said hello or something and then Ross went on to work.” Daria glared at Tom. “Don’t push me so hard! It was something trivial, that happened months ago.”
“Daria, you aren’t betraying him. If Lou is working for Walker as well as for Petris, we may be dealing with deliberate arson. If Walker is involved, you can’t protect him.”
She shook her head mutely. “I hate the way I was then—shameful, prowling through his papers. Following him in the street. Steaming open his letters. Can you believe I did all that? It embarrasses me dreadfully to remember. How can you trust me, when I acted that way with my own husband?”
“Look, if one person lies, the other tries to find out the truth. If one person in a couple hides something, the other tries to uncover it. I don’t think you’d act that way with somebody who was levelling with you.”
She had a moment of guilt remembering how she had been questioning Fay and Sandra María. Was that investigation the same obsessed pursuit? Perhaps digging to know had become habit and she was turning into a monster of persistent curiosity.
He tapped her arm. “Want to go home?”
“Please. Peggy’s coming in today and I’m feeling unravelled.”
“Why would seeing that guy Louis unravel you?”
“It’s just remembering that bad time. I was half crazy.”
“Why did you call him Lou?”
“I don’t know! Maybe I heard Ross say the name to someone. Don’t you think it’s an obvious nickname for Louis?”
He glanced at her sideways and she felt sure he was suspicious of her suddenly poor memory. She felt guilty for covering up for Ross and suspecting him herself. Tom was silent for a while, frowning. “Lou is the weak point. We can get at him, I know it. Wait and see!”
21
When Cesaro invited her to dinner, she had a hard decision. She wanted to bring Tom, so that he would begin to know her family. However, she was not quite sure she could trust any of her brothers. Only Gussie knew about Tom. She decided she would be cautious and wait longer.
Cesaro tried to question her like a corporate father about her finances. Then he told her that Ross was genuinely worried about Gail. “He’s afraid it’s too much of a strain on her, waiting and waiting. He thinks you’re dragging your feet to be punitive.”
“Cesaro, you can tell him that as soon as he produces an honest financial statement, I’m sure we can work out an agreement. It’s only his lies that are holding us up.”
“Don’t you trust me at all? What’s happened to you?” Ross whined into her ear. “You always used to be so accepting and easygoing.”
“But that’s what we have lawyers for. So they can do our fighting for us and we can be easygoing.”
“Daria …” His voice was coaxing, warm taffy, the way he used to sound when he wanted her to cook something particularly complicated for eight boors. “We can work it out together, we can!”
Did he suddenly want to come back? She was interested to note that her first reaction was fear. She really did not want him back. “We can work out what?” she asked cautiously.
“The settlement! You didn’t think I meant …? Daria!”
“I didn’t know what you meant,” she said sweetly. “I though
t we were doing just that—working on a settlement with the aid of our lawyers.”
“Do you have any idea how much it’s costing?”
“Not as much as if we fight it out in court, right?”
“Daria, if you’d just sign’ the agreement we drafted, I could fly down to the Dominican Republic next week and it would all be over the next day.”
“But, Ross, I’m in no hurry. I have no wedding plans.” She waited, curious, to see if he would say anything indicating he knew about Tom.
But he only snarled, “That’s your problem. I do.”
“Then it’s your problem, isn’t it?” Oh, she was enjoying herself. Those months of being reduced to tears and then treated as an imbecile for crying; preceded by years of creeping around him pleasing, trying to please, failing to please, the standards of what would please him always raised higher like the bar at high jump until at last she missed and sprawled ignominiously on her back.
“Daria, when are you going to sign that agreement?”
“That one, never. My lawyer says it won’t do. You should have our response in today’s mail.”
“All the grasping, demanding side of you I’ve always hated is boiling out. You can’t get me back this way, no matter how you try to ruin my life all over again!”
“Ross, you’re going to have to split more property with me than you want to. You’re going to have to share more of what we own.”
“And what the hell would you do with it? Fritter it away. It’s throwing property down a rathole. You don’t know the first thing about what you’re asking, just because you hired some out-of-work title searcher your lawyer put you onto. It’s throwing away property to turn it over to you.”
“Good night, Ross.”
Dorothy looked pleased with herself, the first time she had projected anything but a wary combativeness in Daria’s presence. “We’ve got him where we want him. He’s hungry for it.”
“What did he say when you showed him a copy of his holdings?”
“He was furious. He also tried to say those buildings have nothing to do with you. In other words, the family has been living on your earnings, and his have gone into real estate. I told him that wouldn’t fly. But it’s fascinating. He really does seem to believe that all that is his and your money was used up in living expenses, as if you earned red money and he earned blue money and they were different.”
“He said something about flying to the Dominican Republic.”
“That’s a quickie divorce. But we must have the financial agreement completely worked out here. I hate to be optimistic before the fact, but he’s under pressure from his girlfriend. How much are you prepared to give away?”
“I want the house I live in. I want the building Fay lives in, but with that huge mortgage paid off. I want the cash in the savings certificates when they come due. We had some stocks we should split fifty-fifty. You can bargain with everything else. Oh, and Tracy’s tuition paid through college.”
“We’re talking about whole or part interest in another eleven buildings.”
“I’m not going into the real estate business. It’s all pyramided on those huge mortgages. Do as well for me as you can. But you know what I really need.”
Coffee was one of their new rituals. Sandra María had learned to drink cappuccino, although if she came down first, she would simply make café con leche, using the same dark roast. Morning coffee, blinking, sleepy, each of them mumbling about plans and schedules. Chatty coffee when both came home or stopped work. Coffee after supper when Mariela demanded their attention, soaking up love and praise like a bit of good bread taking up gravy. Coffee Sunday morning with Tom and Ángel in the dining room in view of the tulips making a brave display against the ledge, as she had imagined in the fall.
Mariela now ran to her and crawled into her lap. Mariela now stormed at her, stomping her foot. When Sheba came into heat again and was locked into purdah, Mariela spent much of those days shut in with her, consoling her, she said. She also let Sheba out on the third day, “to see what would happen and what they would do.” This time Ali figured it out.
Sandra María and Daria must decide: kittens or no kittens. Sheba had to be altered at once or allowed to carry her litter. The children of incest. Cats seemed to find such matters irrelevant. Mariela wanted kittens. “We can’t have five or six cats,” Daria said. Then she raised her head sharply as if hearing a voice behind her. “But why not? If we want to.” There was no sensible father to say no. They could have fifteen cats, birds, goldfish, poodles and iguanas. Or simply the kittens.
“It would be good for Mariela to see kittens born,” one or the other would say, and then they would think, But not if brother-sister incest produced little monsters.
They had evenings of popcorn and fires, evenings of a return to adolescence and fiddling with each other’s hair and wardrobes. Daria had not laughed as much since the girls were little. Permission to be silly. Permission to get down on the floor with Mariela and the cats and play with a piece of string or a pile of lego blocks. Permission to talk about problems with her book, a conversation with her agent, the final negotiations with Channel 7, and never to feel that she was being tactless to admit that she was concerned about her work.
They were dyeing eggs for Mariela’s basket when Sandra María said, “I don’t want to hurt your feelings about this, Daria. But it’s kind of weird living with all those old photographs on every wall.”
Daria did feel slighted. After all, those were her daughters, her husband, herself. But of course they were merely Ross’s recordings.
“I’m sorry I said anything. It’s not a big thing.”
“You could put up your photographs too.’.’
“I guess so. Ángel has taken enough in the past year.…”
Daria could imagine what was going through Sandra María’s mind. Ángel favored bleak urban landscapes, the shape of an ironwork drawbridge at sunset, gulls on the ice of the Charles, the stiff body of a dead cat on a South End street. She would not find it easy to live with Ángel’s city images.
As she moved about the house that day she became aware of the eyes of those dead selves watching. Therefore Thursday night when Tom was working overtime finishing up a job that had been driving his crew crazy, while Sandra María was at school and Mariela had been bathed, read a story and tucked in, Daria found herself slowly taking down all the old photographs.
Hers she discarded cheerfully. Only in some early photos where she was holding up an infant did she look natural. None of the others resembled her inner image of herself, for they were too tentative, too conscious of pleasing or displeasing. The message of those faces to the camera was, Please don’t.
The infant wrapped in blankets she cuddled on the grass was Freddy. Tom could not understand Ross, because he saw him as all landlord. Tom could not imagine how Ross had suffered when Freddy was dying slowly, never having lived. How Ross had lain in her arms weeping for his damaged son. No, Tom could not understand that Ross had a heart.
He had left her because he wanted to be young again, he wanted to force his way back into the world of those pictures when they were newly married, when he was madly in love, when the children were young and she was almost entirely wife and mother—a little boring but desirable in her soft way. If she let herself think his desertion meant he was an evil person, she was crazy. Sometimes when Gretta talked about her ex-husband, Daria felt there was no limit to Gretta’s malice. She did not want to pass from love to hatred. Once those nasty but crucial details about money and property had been worked out lawyer to lawyer, surely they might sometime face each other as friends.
Gently she laid the photographs in albums she had bought earlier that day. A tenderness radiated between her hands and the paper. Oh, she could look back now and read the fretted ambition in Ross’s face. That snapshot had been taken when he was running for the school committee in Newton. After he had lost, he took a dislike to Newton and their home there, discarding it along w
ith his short-lived incursion into electoral politics.
She had loved Ross, and she had gone on loving him and enjoying their life together long after he had gradually ceased being the man she loved. If the past no longer felt to her just beyond reach, the potent and beautiful past so much sunnier and riper than the stark present—for her present was succulent in its own way now—nonetheless she did not remember with less gratitude or pleasure. Tom had cut away his past. He displayed it labelled in his heart’s museum. Ross wanted to revise his past so that it could be written off like a bad investment. She refused both gambits. The good in her past she would try to embody in some new form, and the bad she would try to understand. That was her strategy for survival.
What Tom refused to see also was that while she would fight through Dorothy for a decent settlement, she had no intention of forcing a gap between them so great they could not bridge it to come together occasionally for the girls, to provide what the girls needed, to do for them in trouble. In the long run, Ross would come to feel grateful to her for holding on to this home for Tracy as well as herself. Perhaps in time Robin would return, although when she thought of Robin she felt a stab of pain that never seemed to soften, her daughter who seemed to have divorced her far more swiftly and cleanly than her husband. But the girls were the hostages held against her, the reason she could not afford to remember any more about Lou than she had let slip to Tom.
“Lou was about to lose that building on Brainerd for taxes when he burned it,” Tom said. “So, interesting point: two weeks ago he sold it for more than he paid for it. Sold it burned. And already today Orlando tells me there’s a demolition crew taking it down and a sign about what’s going up there.
“He’s rehabbing a place around the corner up the hill a little. Near the boys’ club,” Fay said.