When they came back from the farm they rushed into town to pick up a few things for Thanksgiving dinner the next day and once home again, Steven helped Mimi prepare the stuffing, although they wouldn’t put it in until the next morning. At night they played dominoes together. Every time I looked up I saw Vincent watching them carefully. When he put Steven to bed for the night he came downstairs and with a sheepish expression asked Mimi if she would go up and say goodnight, and she went and didn’t come down for a long while. When she did, Vincent asked her what they’d been talking about.
“Oh,” she shrugged, “lots of things. School, vacations, animals. Lots of things.”
“You like him, huh?” To ask Mimi if she liked any child was roughly comparable to asking other people if they liked money or food.
“I’m crazy about him,” Mimi said. “I wish he didn’t have to go back. I wish he could stay here.”
After a moment Vincent asked if Steven had talked about his mother. Mimi couldn’t remember that he had.
“How about me?” Vincent asked.
“Did he talk about you, you mean? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think he talked about people, at all. Why?”
“I dunno,” Vincent said. “Just curious.” He stood up and began prowling the room. “I may marry her,” he said suddenly.
I was stunned but Mimi jumped up and said, “Vincent, how wonderful! Congratulations! That’s marvelous.”
“How do you know it’s marvelous?”
“Well, it’s just . . .” she groped for an answer, “. . . I think it’s great for you to be getting married. And I think it’s great that Stevie’ll have a father again.”
“Not again,” Vincent said.
“I don’t understand. His father—before he was kiilled—”
“He never had a father. His mother’s a whore—was a whore, I should say. If you believe that anyone who’s a whore stops being one just because she stops peddling her ass. Personally, I think any broad who says she had a husband who was killed in Vietnam when she didn’t is a whore.” He smiled aggressively at Mimi. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Mimi said in a low voice.
“Aw, come on,” he prodded, “you must have some idea. Or at least . . . do you still think it’d be marvelous for me to marry her?”
“I don’t know, Vincent.”
“Well you must have some idea. Maybe you think it would be horrible.”
“No, I don’t think that. Not necessarily. Not if you love her.”
“I don’t love her. I don’t love anyone. What difference does that make? I don’t love myself but I’ve been married to myself for years. What the hell are you asking me, anyway, when you mouth all this garbage about love? Love is the direct opposite of hate. By definition it’s something you can’t feel for more than a few minutes at a time, so what’s all this bullshit about loving somebody for the rest of your life? Marriage is about ninety per cent indifference, people just going along, doing what they’d be doing anyway, and who they’re living with while they’re doing it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. The other ten per cent is about nine per cent hatred and one per cent love. If you’re lucky. Because love is a very unproductive feeling. It can’t be channeled. It’s got its object, its focus, and if it’s deprived of the object, forget it, it can’t turn on to something else, it just suffers. Hate is much healthier because you can use it in so many different ways. I write out of hatred—I don’t even know why or what for. I don’t have to. You don’t need a particular focus for hatred, you can use anything that comes along.”
He finished as abruptly as he’d begun. Mimi said nothing. Vincent stood there in a sort of suspended posture, waiting for her to respond in some way.
“If I’m only talking for posterity,” he finally said, “I can go upstairs and tape it.”
“It’s not that I wasn’t listening, Vincent,” Mimi said. “It’s just that I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Forget what I want you to say, just say what you want to say, if there’s any such . . . no . . . wait a minute. I changed my mind. There is something I want you to say. I want you to congratulate me again and tell me it’ll be marvelous for me to get married.”
“Congratulations, Vincent,” Mimi said levelly. “I’m very happy for you, if you’re doing what you want to do. And I hope you’ll be happy, too . . .” She smiled at him. “At least some of the time.”
“You did it,” he said after awhile. “You really did it, didn’t you? I mean, you managed to mean it. Didn’t you?”
She nodded.
“Doesn’t any part of you say it hopes that nasty bastard Vincent gets what’s coming to him? At least just enough to teach him a lesson?”
“You’ve had too much misery already, Vincent,” she said.
Vincent’s eyes filled with tears. He seemed helpless to move, nor did Mimi move, but just stood there watching him as the tears began to run down his cheeks. The weight of the room was unbearable. And then Mimi began crying, too, and I ran upstairs. Not thinking at the moment I ran, only knowing I couldn’t bear to stay. Then, as I got ready for bed, telling myself I had run because Vincent would be embarrassed later on and it would be better for him if I weren’t there. Trying to read but not able to concentrate. Turning off the light. But sleep wouldn’t come. Useless to chase after it. I got out of bed, thinking that if Mimi were still downstairs we could talk for a while. But they were both there. Talking. Mimi’s eyes were red. There was an air of intimacy between them which made me feel unwelcome. A sensation no one could have made me believe I would ever feel in Vincnt’s presence. They didn’t even notice me at first, as a matter of fact, and when Mimi finally saw me she was startled.
“Hi, Beth,” she said. “Is something wrong?”
“I just couldn’t sleep.”
“Come on and sit with us for a while.”
But I fancied—although it could have been my imagination, it was such a rapid thing—that I saw a flicker of resentment on Vincent’s face when she said this, so I refused and came back upstairs. Not wanting to be in the way. In the way between Vincent and Mimi!
I tried to sleep again but I was too tense to let myself fall into it. An explosion had to follow this unusual amity between the two of them. After all, the faults they’d always found -with each other were still there, even if they were choosing to ignore them for a while. Sooner or later they were bound to come up again and then there would be new and more horrible anger. The idea wasn’t pleasant, of course, it was much more pleasant—or should have been—to see the two of them being friendly for the first time in all these years. But on the other hand, such an explosion would have the virtue of restoring things to a more normal situation. This wasn’t a time in my life when I could stand any more change. What was this frantic desire for movement and change, anyway? So often I heard people paying blind obeisance to change—as though it had some virtue of its own. Change or we will die. Change or we will stagnate. Evergreens don’t stagnate. The perennials that year after year die down for winter then come up the following summer neither die nor stagnate, and if they change at all it is usually for the worse.
What were they talking about downstairs?
I finally fell asleep by gripping the brass sidepieces on either side of my bed, just below the mattress, and holding on to them as tightly as I could for a very long time until finally my grip relaxed, and the rest of my body as well.
• • •
When I came downstairs Thanksgiving day I found: the twenty-five pound turkey in the oven already; Mimi and Steven at the work table skinning pearl onions; Vincent on the high stool near the window, watching them. This, at eight o’clock in the morning. Barney, the only one besides me who usually got up early, wasn’t around at all. I mumbled something about wanting to dress before breakfast and ran upstairs. After breakfast I tried doing various things since Mimi didn’t need my help in the kitchen . . . Mimi didn’t need help in the kitchen, she had so much
help already . . . but I couldn’t concentrate on anything and finally at about eleven o’clock I decided to take a walk. It was a cold nasty day. I put on my raincoat. My quilted raincoat I hardly ever wore because it made me look like someone else. Mimi had bought it for me in the spring and I’d been so surprised, it was unlike anything I’d ever owned. I disliked it, especially as it came to seem part of some larger pattern, a symbol of other changes being foisted upon me. But now summer had come and gone and everything was happening anyway and this was a cold rainy day so I wore the coat, which because of the quilting was warm. And perhaps because I was wearing it, I sneaked out of the house, walked quickly up the drive, and when I got to Sugar Hill Road, walked north toward Max’s house instead of south toward town, my usual direction. Of course at the beginning I didn’t know I’d end up walking all the way there, a long, mostly upward climb which took me over an hour as I stopped several times to rest. The name was on the mailbox, his car in the garage. I didn’t want to knock so I walked past very slowly, which failed, but I kept walking and after going up the road some yards I turned and came back and this time he saw me and came out of the house.
“Hi,” he called. “What’re you doing up here?”
“Taking a walk,” I called back.
He hesitated. “Do you want to come in and see the house?” Coming down the path to me.
I said, “You must be busy.”
He said, “Not really. I’m going out later but now . . . I’m watching the Macy’s parade on TV.”
I said, “All right, then,” and followed him in.
A strong smell of paint. The walls had just been done white. Dark and massive furniture, looking shabby now, and incongruous. He said he was leaving the furniture because it was easier to sell a furnished house than an empty one. I felt upset when he said it but I couldn’t tell whether it was at the thought of his leaving or at the idea of a house changing hands. He turned off the T.V. set and we went into the kitchen. It was very large as he had made one big room out of a dining room and an ordinary kitchen. The appliances weren’t there yet but the glass wall was. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps it will be all right in the spring when the outside is green again. The high stone wall around the back terrace did give some feeling of protection. (How little encouragement a female needs to feel proprietary. We sink our roots as though some magnetic force below pulled for them.) An electric percolator stood on the floor, hobbling away. He offered me coffee and I accepted and we drank it together (it tasted terrible) on the terrace. I told him I thought he was doing a beautiful job, and I told myself that the only reason I seldom lied was that the need seldom arose. He said he hoped I was right.
“Am I keeping you?” I asked.
“Well . . .” he said, “I guess I should take a shower, I’m going off to someone’s Thanksgiving.”
“Please go ahead,” I said. “I don’t feel like going back, yet, do you mind if I just wait?”
He said of course he didn’t and went off to shower, coming back after a while looking radiantly beautiful in a white shirt and dark pants. He poured me a little more coffee and I held the cup and was startled to see my hand and arm next to his as he poured. His skin was very fair and the hairs that crept out under his cuff were even lighter than the hair on his head. While my skin, in contrast, was terribly dark and sallow, and the dark down on my arms was much more noticeable than I’d ever thought it. I could almost have sworn, as a matter of fact, that it was darker and downier than it had once been.
“Your skin is so fair,” I said.
He laughed. “That’ll be taken care of when I get back to L.A.”
“When will that be?” I asked, once again saddened.
He shrugged. “After I sell the house, I guess.”
“It seems a shame to sell it after all this work you’ve done,” I said.
“But I only did the work so I could sell it,” he said.
“Is it so much better in L.A. than here?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “not really. I mean, there’s no winter but I never minded winter that much.”
“Then why are you going back?”
“No special reason,” he said. “Do I need a reason?”
“It’s not that you need one,” I said. “It’s just that I’d think you would have one before you did something big like leaving home.”
“Couldn’t the leaving be the reason?”
“I suppose so. If you were very unhappy.”
“No, I mean even if you weren’t unhappy. I wasn’t that unhappy. My mother breathed on me a little hard but she didn’t bother me that much. I had an apartment in the city for a while but she could drop in if she felt like it. Not that it’s so horrible having your mother drop in on you but while she can do it you’re still home, in a way, right? Maybe I wanted to get away just for the idea of it. Time is even different when you’re away from home. Did you ever notice that?”
I nodded. “It stops.”
“That’s it,” he said, pleased that I understood. “In L.A. time never weighs heavy on my hands. They say out there it’s the weather and all, there’s always something to do, but it’s not just that. You can get plenty bored out there. Everyone goes crazy when it rains, there’s nothing to do indoors. But it’s not the same thing, being bored and being weighed on by time. I have this feeling when I’m out there that I can’t die while I’m there because I’m outside of time. I can’t die unless I go home. Does that sound crazy?”
“No.”
“It would to most people.”
“When I was little,” I told him, “I had the idea for a long time that the clock on the mantelpiece was what made everything in the house work, even the people. Once a man came from the village to clean it and when I came into the room and saw pieces of it spread out on the table I was so frightened I got sick.”
We sat in silence for a while and then Max said he guessed he’d have to be going. We walked around to the front of the house and he said he would drive me home.
“I don’t think so,” I said. I wasn’t ready.
“It’s past one,” he said. “Don’t you have to be back?”
“Have to be? No, I don’t think so.”
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“No,” I lied. “Not really.”
“It’s so funny for you to be here like this,” he said. “I didn’t even think it was you, when I first saw you go by. I thought it must be some girl that looked like you.”
“It’s this rain coat,” I said. “I look like someone else.”
“No,” he said, softly persistent. “It did look like you. It was just that it was you . . . and on Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving’s such a family day.”
“Please,” I said. “I don’t want to keep you. You go ahead.”
“I can’t just leave you here,” he said.
“Yes, you can,” I said. “I’ll be all right, honestly. I just can’t go back there yet.”
“I have an idea,” he said after a bit. “You can come with me.”
“That’s a funny idea,” I said. Thinking, Wouldn’t they be stunned if I had Thanksgiving someplace else? Finding the idea had a distinct appeal. “I don’t even know where you’re going.” No. It’s a crazy idea, really.
“They’re some old friends of mine. You don’t have to worry about them, they’d get a big kick out of it. They worry about me. They like to see me with girls, they think it means I’m about to settle down.”
“I don’t think I’d better.” Frightened by the thought. “You can drop me off at the beginning of our road and I’ll walk in from there.”
“But you don’t want to go home,” he said as we got into the car.
“I know, but I don’t want to go there, either.”
He pulled out of the driveway and we began rolling down Sugar Hill.
“You don’t even know where I’m talking about.”
I was almost annoyed by his persistence. When all was said and done I did things very much my own way
at Yiytzo. A spoiled child in a permissive home. Mimi was impressive but it was I who dominated her, really, for the true center of any household is the person the others try to please.
“Look,” he said, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I’ll take you with me but you don’t have to stay. I’ll tell them you just came by for a few minutes and then if you don’t feel like staying, or say if they don’t invite you to stay, I’ll drive you home. Okay? The minute you say so I’ll take you home.”
“Maybe they’ll come and get me,” I said. “Mimi, I mean. Or Barney or Vincent.”
“I don’t mind driving you,” he said. “It’s only a few minutes from your house to theirs.”
“Still . . . I guess I’d better call them. They may be wondering where I am.”
He laughed. “Did you just tell them you were taking a walk?”
Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid Page 10