Women and Children First

by Francine Prose

  Outside the window, the moon is bright and almost full. The night is so clear Kate can see the moon’s craters. The moon hangs in the sky like a giant iced cookie someone has chewed on and put back. And that’s when she sees Rice. She says, “Jesus Christ,” and her voice is a kind of a moan. She grabs the Mexican blanket off the couch and runs out. If she is very quiet, the children won’t look out the window and see their uncle on fire, burning, stumbling out into the yard. But even if they don’t see this, they will see something. Whatever happens after this, nothing will be the same.

  The fire—a body on fire—looks as it does in newsreels and movies, only more orange, brighter, and much slower. Kate is running towards Rice as fast as she can, the yard isn’t very large, but still it seems slow, there is so much time, time to think, to think and remember the most unrelated things: a quiz-show jingle, Nicky’s phone number in L.A., exactly how her children sound when they’re cheating and denying it, their voices strained and cracked, insistent, shrill, screaming that everything’s fair.

  Tomatoes

  VINCENT’S FATHER IS DYING, but Laurel, the physical therapist, comes for an hour every afternoon and acts as if something can still be done.

  “Feel up to a walk?” she says. When Vincent’s father nods, she wrestles him off the bed and, hugging him from behind, half stumbles, half waltzes him around the room. “That’s great, Mr. DiStefano,” she says. “Push against the headboard. Count. One…two…three. That’s terrific.”

  Vincent can’t look. Unfocusing his eyes, he concentrates on wondering how Laurel—who, though plump and sturdy, is fairly small—can bear his father’s weight. Not looking reminds Vincent of watching scary movies as a kid—even when he hid his face, he always saw something. Today what he sees is the wet circle where Laurel’s white uniform sticks like a tight, shiny skin to her back.

  It’s August, but Vincent’s father is always chilly. Another thing Vincent can’t look at is the air conditioner his parents brought with them from New Rochelle when they retired and moved here to the country to be near him. Vincent had thought: They won’t need that upstate. But as it turned out, they did. Even on cool country nights, their bedroom was freezing, and they’d lie on the king-size bed, watching TV, slightly lizardlike and slow. Vincent’s father used to talk about his boyhood: hot nights on Elizabeth Street, his whole family on the fire escape, wrapped in wet sheets like mummies. He never got over his pleasure in being able to make his nights so cold. Now all that has changed. Vincent’s father and Laurel are also slow, but differently, not lizards but dancing bears as they stagger in the heat.

  Vincent can’t remember ever seeing his father dance. He does recall his walk—the dignified, slightly stiff walk of a man who feared he was clumsy and from time to time would trip; but when he thought no one was watching, he moved with astonishing grace. What astonishes Vincent now is that any of them can stand this. At least when Laurel’s here, his father seems—literally—in good hands. For that hour, Vincent feels somehow lighter, as does his mother, who uses Laurel’s visit to sneak off to the kitchen and cook.

  Vincent follows her, and sitting on a step stool, just watches. There is nothing to say. Until a few weeks ago, Vincent could distract her with stories about his kids. Now Rose has lost interest in the grandchildren. Vincent can’t blame her, but is troubled that Rose should act so much warmer toward Laurel, who’s been coming only six months. When Laurel bounces in, Rose grabs her shoulders and holds her. With Vincent, Rose kisses the air and says, “Go see Dad.” Yet this, too, has come to seem right. Laurel touches Vincent’s father in ways Vincent can’t. It would never occur to him to kneel behind his father and prop him against his thighs and tell him to reach for the bedrails. Though Vincent is in pretty good physical shape, he’d be scared to.

  Last week, in the bookstore of the college where Vincent teaches, he heard a woman ask for a book called The Healing Touch. Now Vincent wonders if that’s what Laurel has. For by the time Laurel has got him back in bed, Vincent’s father has perked up some; his face is flushed with blood.

  “All right, now, you be good,” Laurel says. “See you tomorrow, Mr. DiStefano.” Vincent’s father smiles and waves. While Rose walks Laurel to the door, he motions Vincent close to his bedside and whispers, “That Laurel is some hot tomato.”

  Vincent would like to see this as a sign of his father being more “like himself,” except that he was never like that. For most of his life, he was a high-school principal with formal, old-country good manners, a Louis whom no one ever called Lou. When Laurel calls him “Mr. DiStefano,” she could be one of his New Rochelle High kids, come to him for a talking-to—and whom he would never have called a tomato. But in some more basic way, calling Laurel anything is more like him. At least it shows some notice of, some interest in, some hanging on to this world. Most of the time he just drifts.

  So Vincent times his own daily visits to coincide with Laurel’s. Right after she leaves is when his father is most likely to ask about the kids or Vincent’s wife, Marianne. Vincent used to bring grandchildren stories and conversation about the new oil burner or minor car trouble—news, such as it was. It depresses him that his father is no longer interested. Now, though it’s no longer true, Vincent says what he’s been saying all summer: “Marianne’s got a great garden this year.”

  “Kids keep her busy?” says Vincent’s father, and Vincent, as always, says, “Yup.”

  What news could he give him? Marianne and the kids have taken up fishing; at least twice a week they paddle a friend’s boat out onto the reservoir and sit there, casting. As far as Vincent knows, they haven’t caught anything. Vincent has never gone with them, though they always ask. He tells Marianne it’s hard for him to sit still, and she says she understands. But does she? She can sit still, and so can the children, who usually can’t be anywhere without fighting. They must not feel the pressure Vincent does: how little time is left. Marianne loves Vincent’s father; she cries when they talk about him. But the fact is, Marianne’s own father is a hale Lee Marvin type with a twenty-six-year-old wife. Though Marianne and the kids wear hats and long sleeves, they are all deeply tanned—much, much darker than Vincent.

  Vincent can’t tell his father this. His father would hate knowing that, however unintentionally, he’d come between man and wife. Two things he always took seriously: marriage and work. So seriously that even now when, surprisingly, he asks, “How long till school starts?” Vincent can’t groan or roll his eyes or make any of the signs he’d make to another teacher or, he thinks, to any normal high-school principal in the world.

  “Three weeks,” Vincent says.

  Vincent teaches French literature. His specialty is Flaubert, whom he teaches alternate years and will be teaching this fall. Right now he dreads it. Teaching Madame Bovary, he used to feel the thrill he imagined a world-class headwaiter might feel smoothly deboning a very complicated poached fish. Now he wonders how anyone could be thrilled by that. Lately he’s been acutely aware of the skeleton, and of his father’s bones softening. Sometimes the word “bone” crops up in his conversation, inappropriately. A while ago he told Marianne that her dusty, neglected garden would pep up if it just had a bone of rain. Bone of rain?

  What’s more, Flaubert makes Vincent feel doubly pathetic for having become, as he’s finally admitted to himself, infatuated with Laurel. He feels like dopey Emma, pining for dull Leon. He wishes—has been wishing all summer—that he had studied Russian instead so he could be teaching Tolstoy, with his grand passions and grand punishments, or better yet, Chekhov, whose vision was broad enough to see that the slickest little flirtation could at any moment and without warning turn into something mysterious and profound.

  Lately, doing the small, back-to-school chores—caulking windows, getting the car inspected—Vincent has been thinking about Laurel. He knows that she lives alone, in an apartment in Remsenville, and that her family is from Troy. But that’s all. They’ve hardly spoken, though he’s thanked her a hundr
ed times for what she’s doing for his father. Laurel always says, “Oh, God, don’t thank me. It’s nothing.” Then she smiles at him, and Vincent is aware of her tight little body, packed into her white suit. A tomato, he thinks. That’s exactly what Laurel is.

  One form Vincent’s obsession takes is curiosity: How does his mother feel when Laurel crawls all over her husband of forty years? From what Vincent can gather, she’s just grateful. What’s between the three of them now transcends sex and jealousy—it’s just tending to the body. Whenever Vincent eavesdrops on Laurel and Rose, they’re exchanging recipes. Laurel is a serious cook; she talks of making crème brûlée, and Vincent thinks: Who for? But mostly those conversations give him the same sad feeling he gets when he finds himself eye-to-eye with Rose’s spice shelf, with the pint jars of dried homegrown basil and oregano, unopened for months.

  Laurel and Vincent’s mother and father form a kind of triangle so pure that it makes him feel doubly guilty for having sexual fantasies about Laurel. He can imagine digging his fingers in her tight blond sheepdog perm, but not how they got to that point. He can’t picture going to her apartment or to some motel, can’t even see suggesting it.

  So he tells himself it’s not sex he wants. Lately, sex with Marianne has been complicated enough. One week passion is the only thing that matters. Some weeks he couldn’t care less. No wonder Marianne wants to be out on that boat, with a whole reservoir between them. Vincent has never cheated on his wife, and though he knows that crises—like pregnancy, or death—drive people to break their own rules, they seem to him like strange times to start. Nothing, these days, is casual.

  What he tells himself is, he’d be satisfied to just be alone with Laurel. Often he has conversations with her in his head. He asks why she became a physical therapist—that’s one thing he wants to know. He also wonders if she has a boyfriend, and though there’s no way he’d ever ask, he wants to know if the way Laurel moves with her boyfriend is anything—anything at all—like the way she touches his father. He would like to go somewhere, anywhere with Laurel—for a ride in the country or just a cup of coffee at some roadside greasy spoon.

  Vincent hears Rose call, “See you tomorrow!” Looking out his father’s window, he watches Laurel slide into her little blue Camaro. Before she leaves there is always a moment when he wants to go out and stop her. It’s a little like the panic he feels sometimes when Marianne and the kids are leaving to go to the grocery.

  Vincent so wants Laurel to stay that he feels slightly funny when Laurel buckles her seat belt, turns the key, and then frowns and turns it again. Nothing happens, and Vincent feels responsible, as if the magnetic pull of his longing could have actually shorted the wires in Laurel’s car. He runs out into the driveway as if that will break the spell.

  Vincent motions for Laurel to slide over. He gets in next to her, behind the wheel. He turns the key: there’s a click. The car sounds completely dead. Vincent is very conscious of how close Laurel is. The front seat is so hot and small and intimate, they could practically be in bed. He closes his eyes, listening for that merciful one-second engine-splutter that sometimes lets you in. Laurel says, “I knew something was up. I drove all the way here with the battery light on.”

  “It’s the alternator,” says Vincent. The reason he can say this so confidently is that the same thing happened to his car earlier in the summer. Now he’s almost glad that it did, and he feels that the two hundred dollars it cost was well spent. He asks if she has a mechanic.

  “Sort of,” Laurel says. “This one guy in Remsenville saved me when another guy in Troy was trying to rip me off for a whole new brake job when all I needed was the drums ground down and some shoes. You know the really awful part? The Troy guy had been my folks’ mechanic for twenty years.”

  “That’s terrible,” says Vincent, but he’s pleased by this image of Laurel—smart and plucky and sensible enough to go get a second opinion on her brakes. The fact that they’re sitting here like buddies talking cars, talking brake shoes and alternators, encourages him.

  “Remsenville isn’t far,” he says. “I’ll drive you there, and maybe the guy can drive you back out here with a new alternator and some tools—put it together. It’s really no big deal.” Vincent is thinking, dispiritedly, that there’s really no sense to this—it’s easier to call the mechanic—when Laurel says, “I couldn’t. I’ve got to be at a client’s at four. This lady’s only fifty, she’s got Lou Gehrig’s disease, and her second husband just left her. I’ve got to be there.”

  That Vincent’s never considered who else Laurel might work for makes him feel small and self-involved and is partly why he says, “In that case I’ll drive you there and wait till you’re done and then drive you to the mechanic’s.”

  Laurel twists toward him. Her left knee up on the seat, her arm on the seat back, the curve of her breast against the upholstery—it’s all one more thing that Vincent is trying not to see. “Oh, no,” she says. “I really couldn’t do that.”

  “Sure you could,” Vincent says. “It’s nothing for me—there’s no place I have to be. I’d feel better…doing something. I mean…what you’re doing for my father, I mean, I want to.”

  “Are you sure?” Laurel says. “You can still take it back.” Smiling, she opens her mouth, turns her head to one side; light winks off a silver filling.

  Vincent goes into the house. “Laurel’s car won’t start,” he announces. “I’m running her over to her next appointment and from there to the garage.” Vincent’s father just smiles. At first Rose looks pleased that Vincent’s doing something nice for Laurel, then satisfied, as if Laurel were some girl she’d been trying to fix Vincent up with, then worried, as if Laurel were a daughter Vincent was taking on a date. “What time will you be back?” she says. “What should I tell Marianne?”

  “Jesus Christ,” says Vincent, “just tell her what I’m doing.” Then he says, “Sorry, Mom.”

  “That’s all right,” says Rose, and turns away from him. Vincent rarely sees Rose cry, but now there are tears in her voice as she says, “I know, I know. We’ve all got to blow off steam.”

  Vincent steers Laurel to his car. With baby Owen’s car seat in the back, Beth’s crayons and coloring books, and fast food garbage matted on the back floor, his car, he decides, is a half-ton wedding ring. Vincent remembers hearing about a sex murderer being sought in L.A. The witnesses are all prostitutes whose friends vanished forever after talking to some John with a kid’s car seat in the back of his car. They disagree about what the guy looked like, but they all noticed that.

  “How many kids do you have?” Laurel asks.

  “Two,” Vincent says.

  “That’s great,” Laurel says. “I want to have kids. But I’m only twenty-five now. I figure I’ve still got time. Right?” She settles in, buckles up, then leans forward and runs one finger over the dashboard. “What kind of car is this?” she asks.

  “Rabbit diesel,” says Vincent.

  “I’ve seen that ad,” Laurel says. “Where Wilt Chamberlain gets out of the car?” Laurel sounds dubious, and Vincent can see why. Today the car feels small, mashing Vincent and Laurel together. The dark red interior fits them, close and hot as a blanket.

  “Where to?” Vincent says.

  Laurel laughs. “East Lexington,” she says.

  Vincent looks at her. East Lexington is twenty-five miles away. For a second he’s annoyed, then excited, then happy.

  “Are you sure that’s all right? I can call a cab from Catskill.” Laurel flutters her hands.

  “I’m sure,” Vincent says. “It’s nothing.”

  It’s a bright August afternoon, hot in the sun, but not humid. Driving through a shady patch, Vincent looks out at the cornfields; the edges of things are beginning to sharpen and turn crisp, like in the fall. The sky is a children’s-book blue. Today—miraculously—they go five miles on Route 34 without seeing another car, and no trucks come barreling up behind them while Vincent’s car strains toward the spee
d limit. “Hey,” Laurel says. “Private road.”

  Neither talks for a while. No need to rush anything. Vincent slips a tape into the tape deck and as if on cue, the Talking Heads sing “I’ve got plenty of time.”

  “Nice music,” says Laurel.

  Listening, they ride till they’re just past Gilford Lake. Then Laurel leans forward again and turns the tape all the way down. Vincent likes the way she just went ahead and did that. Laurel points out the window at the former Arrowhead Lodge, now L’Auberge Colette, a French country inn opened last spring by two guys from Brooklyn Heights. Vincent has heard it’s pretty good; some of the faculty go there.

  “Have you ever eaten there?” Laurel says, and when Vincent says no, she says, “That’s weird.”

  “Why?” says Vincent.

  “You teach French,” says Laurel.

  Vincent waves one hand vaguely. “The kids…”

  “You should get a baby-sitter,” says Laurel.

  “What about you?” Vincent says. “Ever baby-sit?”

  Laurel giggles. “I’m not kidding,” she says. “You should.”

  “You’re right,” says Vincent. They used to have a neighbor kid they thought was okay. One night they came home to find him showing the kids how to put lighter fluid all over his hand and set it on fire. But baby-sitter problems aren’t what Vincent wants to talk about. Suddenly he feels that pressure again: time’s running out. They’re a third of the way to East Lexington. Soon he’ll be dropping her at the garage and nothing will have happened but this.

  “You can start off with this great grilled seafood sausage,” Laurel says. “In a light tomato sauce with dill. And those crusty long baguettes to dip in the sauce—they bake them in this giant stone oven. Plus all kinds of terrines and pates with those little cornichons, I could eat a whole plate of them. The chef does great things with game. Venison with a kind of spicy Thai sauce. Stuff like that. Plus, you can get plain grilled fish, veal cutlets in this almond-lemon sauce. And for dessert—”