by Sue Miller
Tony looked up quickly. “I’ll fix you one,” she said. “I make a mean one myself.”
“No insult intended, but I’ll just find Freddy.”
David went back to the dining room, the front hall, looked once more in the living room, to see if Freddy had returned from the bathroom, or wherever. He returned to the kitchen. “No sign of him,” he said to Tony. “You’ll have to do.”
She was already pouring gin into the glass pitcher Freddy used for what he called his “potion.” “I told you, I’m good,” she said.
“Ah! It’s not that I don’t believe you. It’s just that it’s one of the things I look forward to when we’re here.” He turned to Erica, who was starting back out to the front of the house. “Think he’s upstairs?” he asked her.
Erica shook her head quickly, almost frantically, it seemed to David, and was gone.
“David,” Tony said in a low voice, and stopped.
He turned to her. “What?”
She looked at him. Her face was sober and girlish under the aureole of gold that was her hair. She went back to her task. “Freddy’s just not here,” she said flatly. She measured a capful of vermouth into the pitcher. “Let it go, will you?”
But about half an hour later, Freddy was there again, a tall, skinny man with a horsey face. There was no sense of question among the group about his absence, no sense of mystery. They simply folded back up around him. It seemed to David suddenly that this had happened before—with Freddy, with others—and that he had been careful not to notice it. When David said good night, Freddy was laughing in the kitchen with Maurey Lee. He raised his martini glass in farewell.
That Friday night there was a slightly larger gathering, a party Lainey had planned ahead of time, at their house. She was gay and argumentative, as she frequently was among the group. David was sober, watchful. Sometime a few hours after the party had started, Jane Gordon, whom David had always thought of as fat and not very interesting, left alone. A few minutes later, Freddy left too.
David asked Tony to dance. He liked dancing with her. She’d been a professional dancer, actually, with a modern-dance company in New York before she married Harold. She was small and held herself so that you were always aware of her spine. The slightest touch on her back made her shift direction. They were the only dancers for the moment, alone in the dining room except for Freya Rosenberg, who was sorting through records in the corner by the piano.
“I’ve got a question for you,” David said, softly enough so that Freya couldn’t hear him over the music.
“Shoot.”
“How many other affairs besides Freddy and Jane …” He leaned away from her, and she had to tip her head back to see him. “Am I guessing right? How many are there? Going on now, I mean.”
“You honestly didn’t know before the other night?”
“I didn’t.”
She shook her head and laughed. “Lainey, of course, is the original sweet, hysterical naive, but I thought you, surely you, old sexy David …” She trailed off as he spun her rapidly backward under the arch of their arms, then in close again.
“So how many?”
“Well, I’ve been known to indulge.” She laughed again, a little breathlessly this time, and looked up at him.
“Ah!” He was truly surprised. She and Harold were a good couple, fond, funny together, sarcastic to each other in a way David, who was almost always careful of Lainey’s feelings, was jealous of.
He held her out, away from him, and looked at her. She was very fair, with white skin. Her nostrils and eyelids were always a little pinkish, as though she had a cold. He found it sexy. “And Harold knows?” he asked. “They all know? We”—he bowed slightly—“all know?”
“Harold does know, yes. And I think some of the rest of us. Though I’ve been a careful girl.” She made her lips prim for a moment, batted her eyes. Then her voice changed, and she said softly, “Erica Masur does not know. Does not know anything. Does not wish to know. She’s like Lainey.”
“There’s nothing for Lainey to know,” he said.
“Of course not,” she said, and grinned at him. She moved closer and they danced. David felt the soft fleece of her hair against his chin. He turned his head slightly so that it brushed his lips. Hank Gordon had drifted back from the living room and stood by Freya, talking to her. “So it’s okay by Harold?” David asked, after a minute.
She looked up at him, amused. “You’re a nosy bastard, aren’t you?”
“Well, it’s like any party game. You like to know the rules.”
“The rules!” She laughed. “Well, here’s rule one: what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”
“Ah!” he said.
“Ah,” she echoed. Hank and Freya were dancing now, and David had moved Tony gradually away from them, toward the corner of the room. She looked at him. Her face was suddenly serious. He had to bend down slightly to hear her. “But I’m not sure, darling David, that I’m a person who could have stayed married if it hadn’t been okay by Harold.” Then she smiled. “If he hadn’t been my kind of gander.”
He didn’t answer, but he felt his penis stiffening, and to hide this from her, he twirled her out abruptly, away from him. The music was rising to its conclusion—David remembered how in San Francisco the band would stand at this point, the horns blaring, unmuted. He turned Tony around three, four times, and then they stood, startled slightly by the end of the brassy noise, several feet from each other.
“God, you’re a discreet man,” she said abruptly. “Why are you so discreet?”
He lifted his shoulders. “This is a kind of revelation, Tony.”
“Well, make use of it, darling,” she said carelessly. And she walked away from him, her spine straight.
David wandered around the edges of the party. Harold Baker was telling a joke, the punch line of which was “Chop Suez,” and Lainey’s laughter rang loudly above the others. He thought about the group, about their marriages. It all made a kind of sense to him. They were the children of struggling middle-class parents or stuffy upperclass ones. They’d all had those moments of freedom during the war, they’d all married young, and then they’d moved to this community, drawn by the university, by the promise of something different, a kind of intellectual freedom, maybe a slightly bohemian life. And they had remade their lives here, reinvented them—the things they thought about, talked about; the way they raised their children, the way they entertained. Why not their marriages? He was in the kitchen, and he could see Freddy and Erica Masur in the dining room, framed by the doorway. They were talking seriously to each other, both frowning; and then smiling suddenly in agreement, Freddy showing his long horsey teeth. He touched Erica’s shoulder. A marriage.
Why not his marriage?
He was holding a drink, and he had to set the glass down, his hands were suddenly shaking so hard. He turned away from the rising noise around him and looked out the dark window over the kitchen sink. Why not his marriage? Why not this relief? This way out?
And then almost instantly he felt the no, the no of Lainey, of her version of life, of her understanding of their marriage. The no of the children. The no of the strange powerful bond between them on account of Randall and all that was unresolved because of it.
He thought of her near-hysterical gaiety at parties, of the endless passionate arguing that was undoubtedly at base the same sexual energy that drove Jane or Tony to have affairs. Toujours la chose génitale. He bowed his head, smiling. He thought of her naïveté, the nearly blasphemous association she made between their sex life and her religious feeling. From the other room, he heard her whooping, slightly false social laugh. He was flooded, suddenly, with tender protectiveness for her. She seemed so fragile, so vulnerable. It was impossible to risk exposing her to the others, to their ridicule or amusement—to their eager smiles—in the way he would if he accepted what had clearly been Tony’s invitation.
He fixed himself another drink, and then another, but h
e seemed unable to pass into the oblivious state he would have liked. The party was winding down anyway. He emptied a few overflowing ashtrays; he noticed a circle of spilled liquid on the kitchen floor; he watched Tony leave on Harold’s arm. He’d avoided her after their dance, and she hadn’t said good night to him. He got involved in a long discussion with Freddy, who suggested they each buy the other’s house and rent them back to each other. “It’s an idea of great genius,” Freddy said. “Great genius. The tax benefits are extraordinary.” When David persisted in treating it as a joke, Freddy insisted he was serious, he’d worked out the figures, he’d show them to David cold sober.
Hank and Jane Gordon were the last to go. They sat in the dim living room—only one light was on—and Hank told a long and confusing story about how he was being passed over at work because the woman directly under him was somehow related to the man directly over him.
After they left, David and Lainey went back into the living room together and, in a practiced, familiar rhythm, began to gather up glasses. “He’s a terrible bore, isn’t he?” David said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lainey said. “Tonight he told me this absolutely wacky story, fascinating in a perfectly dreadful way.” She stopped, frowning, to recall it. Her pronunciation was exaggerated, drunk. “He had some ancient relative, a great-great-great-aunt or something, who had a conversion experience when she was four, at the hands of Jonathan Edwards. He seemed to see this as some kind of pedigree. Isn’t it nauseating?” She was holding four glasses on as many fingers, and abruptly one slid off, landed in a darkening pool on the couch. “Oh!” she cried out, and leaned against the wall, closing her eyes.
David set his own glasses down. He stepped in front of her. “I prescribe many aspirin,” he said, lifting the glasses from her hands. “Immediate bed rest and many aspirin. I’ll finish down here.”
“Truly?” she said. She watched him for a moment.
“I’m wide awake,” he said. “I’d just as soon.”
She sighed. “Well, I won’t argue.” She came slowly to him, brushed her cheek against his, and then turned quickly toward the stairs. Her rhythm up was heavy and lumbering. “Thank you,” she called down formally from the second landing, like a child reminded of her manners.
“Fine,” he said, and took one collection to the kitchen.
In the middle of gathering glasses, emptying ashtrays, David thought of Tony with her delicate nostrils and her wild hair. He thought of Marie Lomassi, dark and plump in her white uniform. He felt the pull of his cock, hardening. He thought of Lainey in another world, when they were trying to get her pregnant with Randall; for the first time in years, he thought of a lover he’d had early in his San Francisco years—Marjorie Evans.
Marjorie had been the wife of one of David’s patients, and David had believed for a while that he was in love with her. He had thought they needed to do something, something honorable and brave and painful, about their affair; but every time he broached this with her she would laugh and recross her legs, or have another drink. She drank a good deal, mostly bourbon, and she had very long legs, which were in constant motion, like nervous hands. Making love, David could feel them stirring the air around his head and back, and sometimes they held him in an animal clutch, like monkey’s legs. He remembered telling her once that they owed her husband at least the truth, and she had answered that he might be the single most naive person she’d ever met. There was nothing unfriendly in her tone. “Let me tell you something, honey,” she had said. Her makeup had rubbed off in their lovemaking, and her lips were puffy. She had balanced a glass on her chest, and now she was moving it in circles that left a gleaming slick over her breasts. “As soon as Wayne gets better, I’m taking him back to Portland. In Portland, I’m a member of PEO. I belong to the Methodist Church. I volunteer at the county hospital. Everyone likes me. They like Wayne. We have a marriage, honey. A good marriage. We’re going to live happily ever after, and what happens between you and me has nothing to do with that.”
David had sat down. Now he turned off the light and unzipped his pants. Alone in the smoky darkened living room, he pumped himself, violently, quickly. When he was done, he felt no real relief, just a kind of jaded relaxation. He sat on the couch listening to his heart rate return to normal.
After a while he turned the light back on. His limp penis was curved sideways across his pants front, leaving a glistening slug’s trail on the cloth. The house seemed airless. The nicked coffee tables and the mantel were still littered with glasses, spilled ash, crumbs. The room looked bare and unwelcoming. They’d had to remove the rug and the curtains, because Randall had stained one and torn the others. He felt a sense of desolation seize him. He rose and, with still-sticky hands, began again to collect the glasses.
The next morning was gray and overcast. The leaves on the silver maple sat motionless and green outside the window when David woke. Lainey moaned when he got out of bed, and turned away.
He shut their door quietly behind him. In the hall, the other doors yawned open and half open. He could hear at least some of the children downstairs. He unlocked Randall’s door. The boy looked up; he smiled sweetly at something just beyond David’s shoulder.
“Good morning, old chum,” David said, and bent to clear the sleep crusts from Randall’s eyes. Randall tossed his head like an impatient animal at his father’s touch. Efficiently, singing, David moved him through his toileting, got him dressed, got him down the stairs.
Liddie, her hair in curlers, was already on the telephone in the hall, lying across the bench in her nightie. Her feet stuck out past the newel post, white and dirty. “No, not the red one,” she said. “It’s a kind of orangey, with all those little tiny buttons, you know what I mean?”
David stroked the bottom of one foot as he went by.
She jerked up. “Daddy!” she complained.
“I’ll need your help. Mom’s sleeping in,” he told her.
In the kitchen, Mack sat at the table. Sarah, in her high chair, was picking carefully at the Cheerios someone had sprinkled out onto the tray for her. Mack was slumped, reading Mad magazine. David greeted them and sat Randall down in his chair.
Sarah’s face opened in a huge smile, showing her few baby teeth. “Daddy,” she said blissfully. Mack looked up from her to David. “Daddy,” he imitated.
Moving quickly, David fixed Randall a bowl of cereal, poured him orange juice, helped him start.
“Who’s eaten what?” he asked Mack.
No answer. He knocked lightly on Mack’s skull and then, for pleasure, rubbed his hands over the soft bristles of his crew cut. “Who’s up, who’s down?” David asked. “Who’s eaten? Do eggs make sense?”
“Eggs—ugh!—do not make sense. Everyone’s done but the grownups.”
“Is this all Sarah’s had, though? Chickadee feed for our little chickadee?”
“It’s all she likes, Dad,” Mack said defensively.
Liddie swept into the room. “That made me mad, Dads.” Her eyebrows were pulled into fierce arches by the metallic curlers. She was yanking a sweater on over her nightie.
“What?” he asked, sprinkling more Cheerios for Sarah.
“I was talking on the phone and you interrupted me. You never allow us to do that.”
“Well, it wasn’t so much me as life, Liddie, that interrupted you, and that’s permissible.” He’d crossed to the sink and started to make a pot of coffee.
“I knew you’d say something like that.” She scooped up a Cheerio of Sarah’s and then, when Sarah did nothing, another. Sarah whimpered, then drew herself up and said, “No!”
“No,” Mack imitated. “Na, no, no, no, no.”
Sarah watched him, then said again, grinning, “No!” But he’d turned back to his magazine and was lost.
David set the coffeepot on the stove and turned to Liddie. “Find Mary and Nina for me,” he said. “I’d like them to be dressed.” He began to list instructions for her and Mack.
By th
e time Lainey came down, the little girls were all dressed and out in the yard. Lainey had a hangover, so David offered to drive Randall to his speech therapist. At the last minute, on impulse, he called to the girls and told them he’d take them to the Tot Lot while Randall had his lesson.
They walked ahead of him out to the car, Nina and Mary chattering, and Sarah struggling to keep up with them. Randall shuffled silently, obliviously, next to David. His hand in David’s was damp; David thought of it as trusting. He felt a sudden sense of calm, of contentment—a sense of how dear to him these children were, the three little girls he hadn’t wanted and the son he would wish away if he had the power. He reminded himself that these feelings were pure sentimentality, that on another day the girls might be whining, Randall might be screaming, struggling, and he’d feel another way. Randall saw the car and mooed joyously. He let go of David’s hand and began to run toward it.
David and the girls had the Tot Lot to themselves. Gradually the smooth gray above them crumpled into clouds. Blue appeared behind them, and then the occasional glinting light of the sun. David pushed all three girls on the swing for a while; he ran around the edge of the whirligig while they shrieked and laughed. Then abruptly he felt a dizzy fatigue, there was a metallic taste at the back of his throat. He crossed the dirty sand to one of the slatted benches set on concrete and sat down. He could feel his blood pulsing thinly with last night’s alcohol.
The Tot Lot had filled slowly. By now there were fifteen or twenty mothers and children milling around. David closed his eyes and pretended to sleep in the warmth of the sun. Someone sat down on the bench with him, but he didn’t open his eyes.
Suddenly he felt a stinging lash across his face. His lids jerked up. Mary stood in front of him, and he saw that he was holding the girls’ sweaters and jacket, that Mary had swung them carelessly into his lap. He raised his hand to his mouth, where a zipper or button must have caught him.