Savages

by Shirley Conran

  Normally, Ed didn’t care if his wife was a little late, he was easygoing and so was she. She wasn’t the Superwoman type and didn’t want to be. She was just a woman doing a job and trying to hang on to her identity, as well as raise a family—she didn’t want to be a female man like Isabel. But this morning, Ed had asked her to be on time, and made a point of telling her how important she was to his image at the moment. He seemed to have entirely lost his sense of humor since the question of replacing Arthur had arisen. Carey supposed that they’d have to wait for the appointment of a new president before Ed could get it up again. Ed attributed the problem to the fact that he felt threatened by what he called Carey’s quest for identity. (Sometimes Carey would like to pick Ed’s shrink up by the neck and rattle him.)

  But Ed’s real threat was Charley, Nexus’s corporate counsel. Ed wasn’t used to being frustrated. This executive cat-and-mouse game had been going on for months, and the more tense Ed became, the limper grew their love life. Carey was grateful to whoever had invented the missionary position, because Ed couldn’t seem to manage anything else at the moment, and only that once or twice a month. What was playing havoc with their sex life was Ed’s undischarged anxiety.

  She wished Ed would talk to her about his worries instead of pretending that everything was fine and normal, but Ed saw himself as the strong, silent type. Why couldn’t men admit their vulnerability? Carey would like, just for once, to be told what was going on inside Ed’s head, instead of guessing.

  She swerved to avoid a squirrel, glanced in her mirror to check that it hadn’t been harmed and then grinned at her reflection. She was a big tawny blonde, who was often told that she looked like Princess Diana, although in fact she took after her grandmother who lived in Stockholm.

  Because she was a big woman, few people realized that Carey found it difficult to stand up for herself. She couldn’t seem to hit the right balance. She could argue without hesitation over some architectural point that she felt was important, but she was a gutless wimp when it came to dealing with salespeople and hairdressers or complaining to the plumber that was his bill was twice what he’d said it would be. So Carey was hustled into shoes that were too small for her (“You have such big feet, madam”), dresses that didn’t suit her (“Horizontal stripes will make you look smaller, madam”) and clothes that cost more than she’d intended to spend (“Well—sniff—if you want something cheap …”).

  Carey’s fear of disapproval wasted hours of agonized thought, as well as a lot of money, and she would go to extraordinary lengths to avoid the curled lip, raised eyebrow, scornful gaze or pained hauteur of someone who was waiting to be tipped—some stranger who could, at a glance, make her feel contemptible. How did they manage it? Did they go to night school? Could you major in pained expression? Was it possible to get a degree in disdain? Carey knew that she should have gone to the hairdresser before tonight’s big party, but she’d ducked it rather than go through the tipping ordeal. Now, of course, she regretted it, because all the other women would have spent hours preparing to look their best.

  She sighed as she swung the car off the road and up the avenue of tall auburn trees, but she cheered up a few minutes later when her house came into view. She always loved this first view of the eighty-year-old white clapboard farmhouse, as well as everything else about it. She loved the high ceilings and was gradually collecting Shaker furniture for the entire house. Their water was piped in from a spring up the hill. They owned all the land which surrounded the house, so nobody overlooked them, and the house felt peacefully rural. But if Ed said, “Let’s see who’s playing at the Stanley this evening,” it took them only half an hour to get there, so they hardly ever missed a jazz performance.

  Ed was standing on the porch, looking like Carey’s mother used to, when she had gotten home after midnight.

  Carey said, “Look, I’m sorry. It won’t take me ten minutes to get ready.” She flung her left arm around Ed and kissed his unyielding cheek. It was like kissing a cigar-store Indian.

  She hurried through the square hall and started up the stairs. Ingrid and Greta were hanging over the top banister, looking like reproachful, bespectacled, russet-haired mice: they both looked like Ed’s sister. Together the little girls said, “You’re late. Daddy’s mad.”

  Sometimes Carey could see why Ed’s first wife had left him, although she couldn’t say so, because Carey had also been married before. College madness. After six months he’d turned into a flower child and left her to go to India and study yoga. It was pretty humiliating, but nevertheless a great relief. One moment she’d been married to a football quarterback, the envy of all, and the next thing he was wearing saffron robes and chanting om at five in the morning. The entire dorm had complained.

  Carey grinned as she climbed the stairs. “Hi, kids. How’s the house going?”

  Last weekend she’d shown her daughters how to build their dream house, with a red Tinker Toy set of miniature scaffolding.

  “Booooooooring.”

  “It takes soooo looooong.”

  “We gave a doll’s tea party instead.”

  “You’ve been playing with Mummy’s makeup again.” Now she was close enough to see the luridly applied and not-quite-scrubbed-off signs.

  “No, no, it was our paintbox … well, almost all of it. We were playing Avon ladies.”

  She’d brought them every masculine and intellectual toy, from a tool set to Rubik’s cube, but they were a living reproach to the Women’s Movement. Sometimes Carey thought she’d done all that campaigning for nothing, at college, way back, when her heroine was Gloria Steinem.

  Carey would have liked to have had a boy as well, but she didn’t want to risk another duplicate of Ed’s sister and, to be serious, she didn’t think she’d be able to manage three kids and hang on to her job without going out of her mind. She’d had a surprise to find that two kids were twice as much work as one, and she’d had postnatal depression after both children, which had magically cleared up as soon as Greta had turned five and Carey had returned to work. (She’d decided to go back to work on the day she found herself cutting all the food on her own plate into itsy-bitsy, child-size pieces.) Carey loved working with real grown-up people who knew words of more than two syllables, but maybe her daughters wouldn’t be playing at Avon ladies if Carey were there to see that they didn’t grow up frightened of a screwdriver.

  Carey felt a flicker of guilt as she scrambled in and out of the shower. These days you felt guilty if you stayed at home, and guilty if you left it.

  Ed appeared in the bedroom doorway; he was still wearing his pained expression. “How much longer are you going to take?”

  “Almost ready, if you’d just do up the zipper.”

  He hadn’t noticed that she’d bought a new Bill Blass for the occasion. Severely simple, in black piqué with huge sleeves, it was cut low and flat at the front and even lower behind; Carey thought she looked like a Spanish infanta in it. She quickly fastened her pearl choker, while Ed tugged crossly at her back.

  The zipper broke.

  “Ed, why did you have to tug so goddamn hard?”

  “Don’t swear at me. If you’d gotten home earlier, you wouldn’t have been rushed.”

  “Look, why do I have to go to this party? You know I hate white wine and babble. None of the men listen if I talk sense, all the wives think I’m a homespun crank and you’re speaking to me as if you had a wooden upper lip. I don’t expect you to come to my office parties.”

  “I merely expect your support,” Ed said through stiff lips. “Is that too much to ask?” He turned away from her and shoved his hands in his pockets.

  “Did anyone ever tell you you look gorgeous when you’re mad?” she teased as she wriggled out of her dress, then sat on the bed and worked at the zipper with her eyebrow tweezers. Ed was really good-looking—nearly six feet and well built, with dark red hair like the kids, pale skin, gray eyes and a cleft chin. It wasn’t like him to pick a fight. He was on edge ab
out this damn promotion. He’d never minded about her job before—he was abroad so much as VP Overseas Expansion that he was glad she had independent interests.

  Carey suddenly hoped that Ed wasn’t getting as grouchy as this at the office. He was a quietly popular man, known to be a brilliant negotiator and easy to work for. He got a lot of respect because he was so good at his job and looking after his people. Ed’s background was geology, and he had the instinct of a truffle hound for nosing out what Nexus was looking for. It was uncanny; he’d brought off some of the company’s biggest coups. And, except for the last few months, he was also a loving husband, and crazy about his daughters. Carey had read somewhere that the average American father spent an average of only twelve minutes a day with his children, whereas Ed was really involved with his family—when he was home. What more could she ask for?

  They’d been really happy, in a jogging-along, peaceful way, until Arthur announced his retirement, whereupon Ed had started to twang. Ed said that stress was a part of success, but Carey knew that too much of it could kill you; she wondered what the statistics were on executives who dropped dead from heart attacks and strokes. She found herself hoping that Ed didn’t get the damned job, because just the prospect of it seemed to be upsetting the whole family.

  Furthermore, Carey knew without being told, that her own job was at risk. There was a constant stream of Nexus vice presidents from all over the world who expected to be entertained by the president and his wife when they visited Pittsburgh. That was why Ed had been behaving in such a furtive manner—although he hadn’t suggested that she might have to quit her job. Outwardly, of course, he’d approved of her going back to work after the girls were in school, she had a right to her own life, blah, blah … But nobody in the family took her job seriously, and sometimes she felt that Ed resented her lack of total attention to himself. He could be quite a subtle, closet tyrant. His other uncanny instinct was for knowing someone’s weak point and pressing on it in seeming innocence. Why else would she defend her job, when Ed hadn’t suggested she give it up?

  As she hurried down the stairs toward Ed waiting in the hall, Carey’s stomach rumbled loudly. She said, “Hang on. I didn’t have time for lunch today, I’ll get a few cookies and eat them in the car.”

  “They’ll spoil your appetite and you won’t eat your dinner. Silvana has probably gone to a lot of trouble. Just don’t drink before we eat. You know how you get.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  As the black Lincoln headed silently toward Sewickley, Ed said, “Guess I need a holiday.” It was the nearest he’d get to saying “Sorry.”

  Carey patted his knee. “I hope it is going to be a holiday, not just a week-long executive conference around a pool on this tropical island.”

  “There’ll be a certain amount of discussion, of course.”

  Suddenly Carey saw that Ed was going to return to Pittsburgh even more tense than when he left. She sighed and said, “Ed, do you really want me along on this trip? I mean, isn’t it foolish to use up half my year’s vacation time to go to some coral island where I’ll be stuck with a bunch of Nexus wives, and you’ll be stuck with the men, all wearing Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses but behaving as if they’re still in Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle.” She turned toward Ed and stroked his arm. She said softly, “What’s the point, Ed, when the Silverman lake house needs daily site visits? I have to coordinate the landscaping, we’re in the middle of planting and it must be done before the end of October. It’s fine for all the other wives, they don’t have jobs, but this is the most exciting project I’ve ever worked on.”

  “Most wives would think this holiday was fun.” Ed shrugged her hand off his arm.

  “Fun? Watching Arthur indulge his macho fantasies? Watching him fight sharks like a Hemingway hero on some half-developed tropical Disney World for jaded businessmen that looks adventurous but is really no more dangerous than sailing a duck in a bathtub?” Carey snorted and settled back in her seat.

  “Paradise Bay isn’t half-developed, it’s newly developed,” Ed said. But she’d scored on the rest. Paui’s first luxury resort had been planned as a new experience for the superrich seeking thrills; it offered adventure in a safe location. You could fish either from a dugout canoe or the most up-to-date powerboat.

  Carey lit a cigarette and returned to the attack. “If Arthur wants to fish, why can’t we go to someplace like Fiji or Kenya or Mauritius again?”

  “Stop being difficult, Carey. You know we hold the annual conference in a different trading area each year. This year it’s Australia, and Paui is just off the northwest coast. And Nexus people like to visit new places.”

  “You mean Arthur likes to visit new places. Thank heaven there’s no deep-sea fishing at the North Pole, or we’d all be dragged there for our summer holidays.” She inhaled deeply, then added, “I’ve never heard of this place, Paui, as a resort. I’ve only heard about the copper mine and that revolution they had last year.”

  “It was only a riot, and only in Queenstown. Riots are no longer rare. They even have riots in England.” Ed carefully kept his voice low and reasonable. Carey was chain-smoking again, and he didn’t want her in her assertive mood tonight; let her get it out of her system now, before the party.

  Softly he said, “I need you there, Carey, because I know that you’re president’s wife material, even if you refuse to see it. You’re a good organizer and you get on well with everyone. I want Arthur to see that, and this trip will give him the opportunity. You’ve got so much more to contribute than Patty, that neurotic greyhound who’s married to Charley.” He glanced toward her and said softly but firmly, “This trip is going to be important to our future, and this year that’s more important than your vacation time.”

  Carey sat in stony silence.

  “This is my chance to outshine Charley,” Ed continued. “I know more about the people and the mining possibilities on Paui than anyone else in Nexus. This is one round that Charley’s going to lose.”

  “You don’t need a situational advantage to show that you’re better than Charley.”

  Reluctantly Ed said, “Okay, I’ll tell you the real reason, but I don’t have to tell you to keep it to yourself. Our mining concession in Paui runs out in June ’85 and the new government hasn’t been easy to negotiate with. They want to meet the Nexus top chief, and they won’t be fobbed off with Harry Scott, because they know he’s only top chief of Nexus, Australia. The President of Paui wants to meet Arthur. In person. But if Arthur flew to Paui to meet the President, then Nexus would lose face.”

  “So this is really a kind of unofficial state visit?”

  Ed nodded. “The first round of the new concession talks.”

  To his surprise, Carey started to laugh. “I can’t help thinking of those photographs you brought back from your first trip—all those naked natives with painted faces and feathered headdresses. Does Arthur have to dress up to negotiate?”

  “No, they mostly wear Western clothes in Queenstown.” But Ed started to laugh as well and patted Carey’s knee.

  So she decided not to tell him about what he’d said in his sleep.

  * * *

  A howl of joy rose from the stadium, echoed by approving grunts from the darkened living room. Annie’s four sons, draped over sofas or sprawled on the floor, never took their eyes off the television as Annie handed around the supper trays of hot dogs and hamburgers, to a background staccato rattle…. With three down and four to go inside the Raiders ten, the Steelers are running out of chances here …

  Annie’s hair was tied up in a scarf, she was wearing her wrapper over her outfit, and because of the gloom, the boys hadn’t noticed her makeup. She’d spent two hours this afternoon lying flat on her back on a sort of operating table. Stan, Suzy’s visagiste (as he called himself), had stared at her face in silence for about five minutes, then, leaning down close enough to make Annie feel uneasy, dabbed at the little pots of color that he kept in a toolkit tray, mixed shad
es on the back of his hand and painted Annie’s face with delicate strokes from sixteen different brushes. Afterward he’d said she could get up now, as if she were at the dentist. He’d looked faintly smug as he handed Annie the mirror, and when she looked into it, Annie understood why. Because she looked seventeen again.

  Suddenly Annie had also felt seventeen again; she felt all the anxieties, the uncertainties, the sudden absolute conviction that she’d done the wrong thing, the mortification and the blushes—it all rushed back to her, and she longed to scrub her face. Instead she had said, “Why, thank you, that’s amazing,” and had written the check.

  “Wow, you look like an old Rita Hayworth movie,” Suzy had said as she handed Annie a pair of earrings, to each of which a fresh pink camelia had been wired.

  Annie said uncertainly, “It doesn’t feel like my face. I feel like somebody else.”

  “Ain’t that the whole point? Anyway, you look terrific! Let’s hook you into the outfit, I want to check the flowers against it.”

  Back in Annie’s room, Suzy had lifted poppy-splashed pink silk from the dress box and white tissue had fluttered to the floor. Dubiously Annie had said, “Are you sure that it’s okay to wear pants, Suzy?”

  “Evening pajamas, not pants,” Suzy said as she helped Annie into the outfit. “It’s a Saint Laurent, honey. You know you can’t go wrong if you buy a designer outfit.” Suzy then stepped back and screwed her eyes up, as she examined Annie. “It needs something more … if you’re going to really knock ’em dead.” She snapped her fingers. “No! I must be losing my touch; it needs something less. Take off those pants, I mean pajamas.”