When Maggie died in her old age, my mother said matter-offactly, “Nobody will remember the same things I do, now.” My father was alive then, but his memory was gone. I saw in my sister’s attentiveness, her careful stirring of his coffee, that she too had waited too long to make up for her unconcern, her single-minded pursuits. We were there with all the family, both of us with our children, around the kitchen table after Maggie’s funeral.
“Would you say you remember things the way Maggie did, the way she said they were?” Jack asked my mother, with the interest he always showed in our family’s history, despite its being so narrow and individual.
“Oh, well, yes, some things, dear. Some people.”
Jack said, “The way she talked they were all so . . . complete.” It was safety, they lived in safety, I could have told him. For he was probing for something to explain people so free of any wish to change themselves, people so unscarred by what was going on in the world at the same time they were watching for a fate of which they had no fear.
“Oh yes. But some of that was Maggie.” We all looked, as one, at the table where the ashtray for Maggie’s cigarette would have been.
“But that first husband? Uncle Randall? He was really such a prince?” said my husband Jack.
“He was indeed,” my mother said. “But you know Maggie was untrue to him. Did you know that? With Ted Brown.” She paused and sighed, turning her own wedding band. “Of course, Ted was the love of her life.”
Mance Lipscomb
MY HUSBAND DRAGS my arm under the pillow he has over his head. “Poor Joe, poor Joe.” He is mumbling into the mattress, keeping my hand against his cheek.
All I say is, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe there’s a young thing out there for Joe.” We have drunk so much bad wine at Joe and Kate’s house that we can’t get to sleep. We toss around and finally turn on the TV and watch a program on the naked mole rat. “They look cozy,” Cy says, as the teeming pile of babies clambers and suckles in their burrow. It appears each mother can smell her own. We can’t be sure, we have the sound off, but it appears the fathers grow long teeth and enlarge the burrow.
Earlier it had been a clear night with a moon, but it got chilly after dark. Kate kept going inside to get sweaters for us, a fringed red shawl for herself that I had never seen before, and finally an old sleeping bag. “Move in close,” she said as she draped it over our shoulders on the picnic bench. We were out in back on the deck. Cy stuck his arm through a hole in the moldy lining and Kate said, “Looks like Joe got the good sleeping bag.”
She displayed each wine bottle in a dishtowel before she screwed the top off. “I can bring the tape deck out. That’s all that’s left. With this wine we need something funky to listen to, but all I have is what we had before CDs. Joe—”
“Joe took all the good blues,” Cy growled at her.
Kate and Joe have both suffered financially in the divorce, each taking only half of everything. That doesn’t bother Kate. She always made fun, anyway, of people like their next-door neighbors the Rileys, a handsome younger couple who take courses in wine and Italian cooking and planning a remodel. The Rileys have been redoing their house ever since they moved in; every time they paint a room Kate gleefully reports the colors. “Papyrus and . . . urn!”
“Urn?”
“Urn is dun.”
“And how are the Rileys and the fair Riley-ette?” Cy will say. That is the little daughter as pretty as the mother. For some reason this couple, the Rileys, whom he knows only to wave to, stirs up a little flame in Cy. Kate knows it. She agrees it’s the wife. “Oh, the Rileys are exceptionally well!” she will sing out. “They’ve found the granite for the counters!”
Kate’s counters, where you can see them through the frying pans and stuck spoons and propped-open books, are the cracked linoleum put in in the ’20s; she and Joe never painted or rearranged or altered anything in their house. They were lazy; once their kids were in college they liked sleeping all weekend. Our best friends. Two big, unhurried people, alike in their habits. As lecturers they were fond of the slide projector, both of them popular, all their fifteen years in the History Department with Cy, as givers of easy tests.
Joe always smiled and shrugged if Kate got started on the Rileys, or sometimes he allowed himself to grunt, “Now, Katie.” Joe has a mild stutter, for which he is known on campus. Students can be heard “doing” Joe: “Some will blame the entirety of the World—War on the—on the kaiser’s—uh, uh—withered arm!” It’s a kind of tribute. Joe is always at the top of the student polls, with Kate, despite her sharp tongue, only a little farther down, while my husband Cy is more demanding, sought out by a smaller, fiercer group of students.
The street winds up a hill that puts the Rileys’ deck a level above Kate and Joe’s. Occasionally through the sparse laurel hedge we see handsome legs: Riley’s muscular in tennis shorts; Mrs. Riley’s very long, dreamily crossing and uncrossing, ending in big smooth sandaled feet with polished toenails. Seen full-length she is tall, thin, and swayingly top-heavy, with blond hair pulled back from her moody delicate face in a French braid—exactly the kind of woman who can bring my husband low.
Like Constance. She even looks a little like Constance, though Constance was even taller; Kate put her at six feet. Constance the music student. She was the most serious of all of Cy’s attachments, the one who most aroused his sympathies.
Cy doesn’t know Mrs. Riley’s name but I do. It’s Kristen. A name suited to a woman of that distant, graceful type. I am not that type at all. Once it seemed to me a secret advantage I had in our life together, that I was not Cy’s type. That was during my twenties, when I was braced in all things by his eyes following me around the room.
Kristen Riley’s husband’s name is Roy but he doesn’t look like a Roy Riley, he looks like a Marc or a Philip. He is a torts lawyer and he hits her. He has left bruises on her, sometimes just thumbprints on the upper arm, sometimes large blots of dead brown blood hidden under slacks and scarves. Once he knocked her out. After that he strove harder to get himself under control, and the strain told on him so that occasionally he wet the bed.
It was before their little girl was born, I was told, that Roy Riley did these things. I don’t know about since.
He wants everything just so, and so does she. They both grew up poor; that’s why they work so hard on the house and on making sure there are beautiful things around them at all times. He had a father who beat him and of course that put something into him, some seed, a meanness that hardly ever shows itself, that can’t be gotten out.
It may be that I am the only person in this city who knows these things, or knows them not from waking up in the damp, woeful proof of them in the sheets but from being told by Kristen Riley.
“I’M LONELY. COULDN’T you have invited Joe?” Cy complained to Kate as he poured. Joe is so mysteriously gone.
“That day may come,” Kate said evenly. “It was time, Cy,” she told him in a soothing voice. “It was just over. It had been for . . . oh, a long while. We have to get used to it.”
“Who has to?” Cy pondered, shaking his head. He is a white-haired man with a heavy mustache and a drooping eyelid that he has had since he was a little boy playing baseball. He was the catcher. He got it, and a deaf ear, when the bat knocked his mask off. Being teased about his eye as a child gave him a weaker case of what the stutter gave Joe, a sensitivity, a reluctance to wound, so that as soon as someone, a woman in particular, awakens emotion in him she has a key to the same storeroom of attentive pity that I do, as his wife.
“It makes me mad,” Cy said. “Joe is my best friend.”
Kate lowered her eyes. We know she is interested in someone. “Uh-huh. We’ll be hearing a lot more about that,” Cy predicted sourly in the car on the way over, and the authority was his, certainly he knew the churned-up and trampled earth around forsaking all others.
The phone rang. Kate jumped out of the deck chair on the first ring and was gone for a long
time. When she came back, flushed, she arranged herself and the red shawl rather lengthily, emptied her glass and said, “Cyrus, listen to me. I care about Joe. Of course I do. Do you honestly think I can just put the Hundred-Years-Marriage out of my mind?”
“She jokes. She jests. Over the bones. Let me just tell you.” Cy put his head down between his shoulders, tipping his glass at Kate. “I see Joe every day.” Wine spilled on the picnic table and he began a slow, aggrieved circling of his finger in it, letting himself appear drunk, even getting drunk, in order to say what he had to say.
Kate looked at me and mouthed, Mance Lipscomb. She waited for Cy to summon his hardy example. She knew and I knew that he was going to make use of the words of this old Texas blues-man to defend marriage.
Mance Lipscomb was the kind of man Cy would have liked to be. Years ago we walked over to the campus blues festival with Kate and Joe to see a film about him. In fact everyone at the festival wished, that evening in the auditorium, to be as this man was. Mance Lipscomb said some pure, doting things on camera about his marriage to his wife. An angelic keenness got into his sunken, thin-skinned face as he picked his guitar, if angels can be sly as well as pure. You expected to see a sort of fairy godmother of a wife to match him, a little thing ready with a tickle or a pinch. Instead his wife was big and close-mouthed; she ate dinner with the plate on her lap and looked away from the camera. For a grudge, she hadn’t sat at the same table to eat with Mance Lipscomb in fifty years.
“Love makes you take things.” That’s what he said to the cameraman. He smiled, and the four of us turned in our folding chairs in the dark and smiled at each other as warmly, sardonically, and wisely as friends our age could smile, a deep, four-note chord of smiles.
Thus what Cyrus was going to say now, he had said before. “Does anybody remember Mance Lipscomb?”
Also in the film was a man living down the road from the Lipscombs whose wife had shot his leg off. He beat her up one time too many. He recovered after she made for him in the field and shot him down, but he lost the leg. Mance Lipscomb said it improved his character. That man’s wife had the little, impish, fairy godmother face.
“The truth,” Cy began, finding his place, “the truth is—”
Kate raised her chin so that the doubling smoothed out, and cried, “Oh, Cy! Have mercy! Truth is not necessarily what we’re after.”
She was not to be jarred out of her firmness, that purpose that can be seen in her now, along with the eye shadow glinting in the creases of her lids and the half dozen silver bracelets slipping out from under her sleeve. She is noticeably thinner, though she has not given in entirely to whatever it is that awaits her when the telephone rings; she hasn’t dyed her hair or left off wearing clogs.
We were drinking our wine under the tree that comes up through a hole in the cedar deck. The deck was built around it, a pretty little tree with three or four slim trunks that fan into an umbrella of leaves. The hole was spacious but one of the trunks leaned as it grew, and a board dug its way into the bark and made a gall there. The tree goes on growing, putting out its pleasantly bitter-scented white blossoms late in spring and dropping them into the salad bowl in the summer.
“It isn’t the—house, it’s the—tree,” Joe said one night when we were there, after the news was out. “Who gets custody of the—the tree?”
This divorce is passing through its stations without any scourging or denying; it is a split marked by little considerations and favors, reciprocal offers, rueful jokes. Joe is just keeping up his end, but in Kate there really is a maddening lazy blandness, as if she is taking some drug that keeps her just below a normal reactive state.
I have failed, with Kate, as she did not fail with me. The whole thing seemed to happen in a matter of weeks. Their daughter called me from school. “What is this? I’ve tried to talk to Dad but he can’t speak. What is going on?”
Say you don’t know, I told myself. “I don’t know,” I said.
CY HAS FINALLY gone to sleep. He lets go of my arm and draws his legs up as high as they will go, claiming the eternal sweetness of the sleeping male. I don’t think a woman sleeping has this sweetness. Sometimes the position he lies in causes me a bristling sensation such as I imagine a guard dog patrolling a factory would have, and I know that if a landslide were rushing down on our bed I would have to throw myself onto him to keep him alive. In the past I used to imagine others who might feel this same way about him. All of us, awake at night, breathing the same air as it traveled the city. I used to wobble at the edge of the board that leads to the silent, rigid dripping of night tears, but I didn’t dive off because if I cried hard enough to get any relief I would get the hiccups and wake him.
At other times I thought of mashing the white hairs into his scalp with a baseball bat. “That’s just marriage,” Kate used to say, whenever I mentioned either feeling. Another thing she said no more than a year ago, when we were all gossiping about other people’s divorces, was, “Oh, it’s the same thing as going out and deliberately losing your dog. Let’s just not. All right, everybody?”
I don’t like these Laodicean divorces. I like divorces with flagrant adultery, arson of treasures, vampire lawyers, pills, psychiatrists, cars driven into ditches, screams in the night. I like them to stop just short of the actual proceedings, with imploring speeches, and family members rushing onstage with impossible demands or blind pardons at the last minute.
We had the kind of children who participate, all of them. Our daughters flew home from school on their own earnings and lectured Cy. Both are feminists, but they did not put all the blame on him. They agreed that I was neurotically possessive, unfair, unrealistic, hopelessly undisciplined in my own way.
As far as they knew, Constance, while a rude surprise because she had been their friend in high school, was the only one.
In high school Constance was a wunderkind. Five or six years before Cy saw her again on the campus when she played with the symphony. She had won a contest. When she came tipping out in the clunky shoes they wore, and bowed beside the piano before playing her concerto, which was long and dramatic and caused the platinum hair to leap off her shoulders once or twice like running water out of a spoon, Cy murmured, “That kid’s even taller than she was last year.” So he had already noticed her, when she was our daughters’ friend, little more than a six-foot child.
When they found out, both daughters flew home to take Constance out to a lunch that went on for five hours. “Constance is coming unglued,” they said when they came back to the house. “She gets out her plastic gizmo with the compartments for the days of the week. She shakes it. It’s got so many pills you could keep the beat with it. Dad doesn’t have any idea. She’s nuts. Look, someone like that can’t take it, she’s not like you.”
They had deprogrammed Constance, they said, and indeed the affair came to an end. “Concertina.” That was Kate’s name for her: a sisterly attempt to undercut the gloomy radiance, the magnitude of Constance.
Our son was fourteen at the time and he said, “Go ahead and get a divorce, I was going to kill myself anyway.” It might have been then that Cy’s plans, if he had them, crumbled. He had installed our son, the last-born, in a vacancy he had inside. It was an echoing garage, left empty when Cy’s own father drove away in the Depression and never came back. Without forethought on his own part, or any misstep along the way, our son Ben took the huge, gaping place of Cy’s father—and maybe that of the mother too, giddy with her solitary cocktails. Cy, unable to rest from promising comfort to women all his life, found his own solace in Ben.
Look here, I’d be glad to tell Mance Lipscomb if he were alive, love doesn’t just make you take things. It makes you deal them out. If I could threaten to take Ben away from Cy, and if Cy didn’t know I would never do that, then it’s no surprise that neither of us ever knew for certain what would happen to us, until it happened. I might sound as if I saw it all coming but I never did, and what would have been the good of prediction, if I
had? What’s the good of figuring everything out? What’s the good, really, of consciousness? If we are wrapped in blankets of ignorance with only the tiniest peepholes, it is probably a beneficial adaptation. Who knows the damage reason would do.
It was not so long after that that we sailed unexpectedly out of the Bermuda Triangle where we had been circling all those years. Just like that. I said so anyway. I told Kate we seemed almost to be in the clear.
Stop it! Stop talking! I kept wanting to shout at Kate in her new incarnation. Stop laughing! Don’t you remember what happened to us? Was it worse than that?
In the future there will be no such thing as wedlock. People will be milling around, trotting off to mate, busy with their projects.
But oh, someone will invent it. On the tranquil surface some dark bubble will appear, with an oily rainbow on it, and enlarge, and gently burst, and spread. Some silly pair will attract followers, imitators. They’ll go off, form a colony. Children will be named, kept close, infected with the habits of the parents. Rules for what they have devised will be drawn up. I think Ben read a story in high school in which that happened with war.
I COULD HAVE told Kate another story I know. It’s the story of an old friend of mine, my best friend, in fact, for many years. Kate is an old friend too, but as happens in cities—just as Kate has never talked, except across the painters’ ladders, to her next-door neighbor Kristen—my two friends didn’t know each other. Kate would have remembered her if I had mentioned her, but I didn’t do it. Kate is a historian but she likes to look ahead; she and I have the reckoning and plotting, the complaining and hoping relationship, rather than the regretting, reminiscing one.
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