On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  “You didn’t scram, Kevin. You were come for.”

  “Arrangeable. I know what works.”

  He took the bottle back. “No more for you. You can have a fresh towel … And no more for me, after this one. Or I’ll spend the night here.”

  “You are spending it.”

  “Right. I meant the day.”

  “No, Kevin. That won’t work.”

  “See. You know that too. Ah Lexie, someday there’ll come a man for you. I’d like to be there when you meet.”

  Someday. The jukebox prescription that all the Judys sing. She got up, clutching the towel. “To hell with that. I want to meet myself.”

  “You’re going to. Anybody can see that a mile off.”

  “I can’t.”

  “How do you? See yourself?”

  Can she tell him? The brandy can. “Like a member of a tribe that’s—everywhere. And that nobody much but us sees.”

  So she’s said it. Aloud. And the minute she has, hears herself graduate from that stance. Oh no, Lex—there’s more.

  “Like at Popocatepetl?” Kevin’s nuzzling her breast. “Or Zocha—what’s that other Mexican volcano sounds like ‘milkshake’? Can’t say it… But your secret’s safe with me.”

  “It is with everybody. That’s the trouble.” She looks down at him. And now we’re going to mumble onto each other’s flesh what the soul can’t keep to itself. She stiffens. “Who’s that over there?”

  A couple, stealing into the bamboo, toward her house.

  He sees them too. He won’t answer.

  “James—wasn’t it?” The family knows the family anywhere. “And that girl—the sister.”

  “Not her. Home hours ago. Totting up the Kellihy estate. No—that was Tork.”

  “Taking her to my house?” That’s the end. But what difference to the children? If I’m out here.

  “No. Listen. They’re going up the hill.”

  From the crashing up above, they are.

  “What’s at the top up there?”

  “An old railroad track.”

  “That’s for Tork.”

  “I thought all along you knew her.”

  “Never met her, actually. My brother’s mistress once. Specializes in poets. Used to get into their poems quite regularly. Know his ‘In glades, in fiery glades—’? Doesn’t once rhyme with ‘shades’—though you’re always expecting it.”

  When she speaks of her own brother, does her nose fine to a white ridge like that? But Kevin also whitens when he drinks. He reddens only when he dances, like the night they met. “I drink for my brother,” he said later. “I’m his antibuse.”

  All’s quiet, up there on the old track. My brother—the horse.

  “Anyway-y” Kevin’s saying—“far as one knows, Tork has yet to copulate inside a house.”

  And I never have, outside one. “Kev—I never heard of your brother, until I met you. I have these gaps.”

  “Bless them,” Kevin said. “D’ya know—we’re quite alone.”

  The pool is still quivering. But yes, they are. Behind them downhill, the house is still brightly lit. The vanilla’s gone from the air.

  “Your village seems to’ve gone, Lexie. To tuck the children in?”

  The rented high-slide glitters crazily; it has a wired red-and-chrome crown jutting above it, so does the high-dive. Maybe Bob’s crown was rented too. Like all human apparatus deserted, the diving-boards look obsessive, forlorn. She walks toward them.

  “We could be Adam and Eve,” he says, following her. “Except for my belly. And all those apple cores.”

  Strewn at the pool’s edges are bathing-trunks, bras, pairs of huaraches, bottles, glasses—a few with lemon-peel in them. Real apples would have a strange innocence here. Imbedded in the fresh cream paint of the poolside are the small flies that were falling in clouds the day the contractor finished up—a small plague commemorated. And bemoaned by Bets—who daily picks her way through her raddled emotions in a floral state of physical cleanliness. Even delivering her babies, Bob says, “Like an envelope.” With hands clasped on her most recent crucifix.

  Not like me.

  The necklace that Violet and the boy were playing toss with is lying on the ground.

  “Bets’ corals. That’s not like Violet.” She picks them up.

  “Tidying. Tidying. Throw ’em in the pool, why don’t you? Bet it’s already full of diamond weddingbands.”

  “I can’t.” The beads hold a story; it clings to her hand. “They belong in Violet’s trunk. For Bets to steal back.”

  “Violet was smashed. So’m I.” But he stands tall in his borrowed trunks, and shaped by games of toss toward targets not hung onto, able to let women go and perhaps even children; even his bookishness hangs at ease for him, in the libraries; all those books he owns are only the necessary few. He’s not linked forever to the dreaming world of objects, as she is. There are men who are, but none of them has come to it along the path she has. Under the silent, hope-chest instruction that twines early in girlhood. In order to stop the traveling.

  As always she feels humiliated by the process, but can’t stop it. “I ought to put these beads somewhere. Maybe in the house.”

  “The house?” With careful tiptoe he’s at her side. “I wouldn’t, I were you. The servant’s ball won’t be to your taste. And you won’t find the Kellihys.”

  “Where are they then? Skipped?” Stealing out with a suitcase full of nightgowns, walkie-talkie headphones wired to one of the best brokerage-houses, and a clutch of credit-cards the bills haven’t caught up with yet? To catch the cruise-ship they had their wedding-night on? That they’ve forgotten doesn’t run any more.

  “The Kellihys?” He squints at them. “Bets’ll be gone down to steerage, for a spot of near-rape. Keeping it to eye-level, until Master Bob arrives to carry her off. Just in time for both of them. Leaving behind large tips. And then—the Kellihys will be having an affair. Not in the matrimonial bed of course. Maybe in the one spare room that doesn’t have television. Or has never been fixed up. There must be one.”

  Sure there are, in most of the houses on this road. Or it can be done on the linen-closet floor, in the smaller ones. Or in the family-room at three o’clock in the morning, in the developments. The tension between marriage and tidiness, sex and children, life and television, goes on all the time.

  If that’s what he means. How long will it take me to learn how lone and single my interpretations are?

  “So that the world can hear their cries,” he said. “Aaa—deliver me from married people’s parties. Couples who have bashes all the time, so that the ree-lay-shun-ship may have an audience.”

  “I’ve done that. It’s often the wife.” Ray had his outside audience; I was never part of it. And he was never mine. “When Sunday gloms in, a line of cars pointed at your house can be quite a cheery thing.” And the kids were cheered because I was. “I sometimes think the mothermoods spiraling out of all the exhaust-fans will choke the nation.” Fuming up from the damp spot on the bathroom tiles, glassily regarded. Or from when you hear your heart beat in the cellar laundryroom, alone with the gray board-and-batten walls and the spiders’ polka-dots. Dirt isn’t what angers a woman; it’s our solace.

  He wasn’t hearing this undervoice of course; how can they. And half goes unsaid anyway, in the deadhead head.

  “Not a chimney toppled,” she said.

  Is he asleep? No, for he’s grasped her again. Oh, they can recognize us, coming upon us in the confessive dark. And nurture us. But not hear us. “But you never set fire to the house, Lexie. You’d never do that.”

  “Oh wouldn’t I?” she says dreamily. “Maybe not quite. Anyway it was little Rod, over there. He carries matches in his jeans as if they were money.” Later he’ll switch like everybody. To sex. “Kev. It was Roddy?”

  He shrugs, not taking his arms from her.

  She goes over the whole entourage. Arthur? Violet? Bob? Bets? Careless yes—except for Arthur. Indecent
ly. “No shit—you have to tell me. We saw a newly charred place over there; In the bamboo. Tonight.”

  “When I went to take a leak, Sean and Sister were just leaving. Sean said, ‘That’s some girl, Kev—the one from next door.’” He squeezes her. Bracing her, like a coach. “And Sister said ‘Next door? Well I just hope they’ve doubled their insurance coverage.’”

  “We have … Kevin. It couldn’t be—Bob?” I won’t say it could be Bets. Will he?

  He isn’t answering.

  “But this place is their life,” she says. “They—”

  “Have babies for it.” He strains her against him. She leans back, wishing she could see her own house. Her breasts are in his hands.

  “My son goes ice-fishing,” he says. “Every winter holiday. Mad for it. Just because once, when drunk and loving I took him with me. Never done it again myself.” He’s smiling, the eyes discs, the voice chill. Objectivity grows on him like lust. “The kids play our music that’s all. When they do it louder than us—should we be surprised? Sure, Roddy did it. But he gets the idea from both sides.”

  “And the sister—wants to be guardian.”

  “Ah—Sister.” He sits on a bench, pulling her down with him, cradling her between his legs. “Doesn’t even like the kids. Thinks they’re brats. Worse. Decadent.”

  So they are, poor babies. Children of a not too bright bacchante, and a frog not quite allowed to be a prince.

  “But she wants them.” His legs tighten, squeezing her.

  “Will she take Bob and Bets to court?”

  “Court? She’ll only have to wait.” He cocks his head. “Listen.”

  It’s the regular sound of it that’s so riveting. A waste so methodical. The sunporch is being smashed in again.

  “It’s a true marriage,” Kevin says. “They both want the same thing. And you know?—they’re going to get it. Maybe the gods don’t love the young Kellihys quite enough yet. But they’ll acquire a taste for them.”

  “We all have.”

  A taste blent almost with love—for the legend they prepare for us. A silly, gauzy extravaganza, of a girl flinging babies into the air like mortgages to be burned. Of a young man with a butler in the house, stirring his own job of soup. They’re our rogues, she thinks, who we hang on the kitchen hook for all to see in the evening—are the Kellihys. Our spotted darlings, ever so slightly cracked. They’re a legend tailored just for couples. The whole village’s acquired a taste for them. We can see far worse things on the telly, but somehow it’s not the same. The Kellihys smash our glass for us.

  Then there’s quiet. It must have been about a quarter of three. Our the Kellihys’ kitchen door comes a pell-mell, a hullabaloo. A truck in the driveway coughs, put-put, swings into full whine and grinds down their lane, spitting gravel backward. The black-top was worn out long ago; costs the earth, nowadays. Or a pair of twins. The truck soughs south, south.

  “The caterers are leaving,” she says. “Like rats.”

  “I hope—” he says.

  At first she takes it for an answer. Or a portent.

  “Hope I’m not too drunk to move.” He turns the most lucid eyes on her. “I only do it this bad in the country, you know. In the city I’m reasonably safe. Didn’t know that about me, did you.”

  And the wife comes and gets him up there—anyway. Because she knows it won’t work. I can understand that fatality. I might do the same. Seeing to it that the children play their father’s music. Saying to him, weddingband hollow, and with a cast in the eye that sheers childward “Won’t you go ice fishing once again—anymore?”

  When he puts a hand on her, love drains her toward him. He sees me, that’s it. Or I see him.

  “There’s a dock,” she whispers. “The Kellihys have only frontage. But we have a sort of dock.”

  As she gets him to his feet, the weight he bears down on her with staggers her … It’s her need … A pot of roses flowers between her legs, thorns and all. Far above it, eight feet taller and in another climate, floats that simpleton coconut, her head. From behind her, the animal of herself jumps her, and clamps her waist, simian. A woman in rut evolves the history of primates, every time—with appropriate flora added. Yet the theory of evolution had to wait to be phrased by a long-celibate don. And the word “rut” comes from the stag. If there’s no word direct for a woman in this state must I invent one? A word takes its own time. Best to brood on it—on the state of me moving with my burden, into dock.

  Four legs she has, at least ten arms and an indeterminate number of leaf-fingers—and still growing. Yet she is thinking, all this time. A woman in sex—in brood—is in her highest state of intellection. Vanity’s gone from the head, into the trunk. The body ripples with humor arboreal.

  And the best destiny of a coconut is to fall.

  We’re across the road on the riverbank on this dais of lawn, and will never get to the dock. Why should we? Kevin is propped against a large stone. I am propped against him. From our toes, the river below flows south. And against all logic, the night is getting deeper.

  “Are you well and sacred?” he says with a laugh, looking down at himself. His tongue sounds sleepy. “Used to say that to us, at Collegiate.”

  “Am now.” I’m sleepy too. “Glad to get out of there. I don’t like that pool. Too many faces in the water.” Including her own. All staring with marble-eyed fright into underwater living. Saying to their lack of image “This is not my true life.”

  North of them, on the great ugly causeway the village fought against and yearned for, the cars one after the other go bombing into town. It’s a sound not unlike smashing. Leaving quiet air behind.

  Just beyond their heads is the cottage where the defective boy-man sits all day on the porch, making true sounds. We all live with his criticism. Never making reply. At night, when bidden to come in, he tosses his toy—a pair of shoes, a woman’s—over the side. The shoes remain on the landfall off the basement porch below until morning. Does the legend of the girls his mother hires really happen? Maybe it’s happening now. Everybody’s secret is safe with somebody.

  Kevin’s on his elbow. “Vital signs not good, Lexie. Guess I can’t. We left it too long.”

  Lying on her elbow alongside him, her own need half-leaked away, she turns up her other palm, to the dark. No, it’s not the liquor. It’s the past; we’ve had too much, yet not enough of it. If we’d just met, we’d’ve clapped together. Or if we’d lived together once—there’s profundity in that.

  Her mouth’s against his chest. “No it’s the past. It’s between us. Like a limp cock.”

  “Lucky me—I have two of them.” He pats the top of his swimming trunks. Under the elastic she feels a bottle, stashed there like a holster. He hauls it out.

  “No Kevin. Don’t.”

  But he’s already leaning into the bottle gripped between his knees, his bent thumb-knuckle pressing like the expert campaigner he is.

  Prying it. As he should be prying me.

  The cork pops.

  “There I go,” she said.

  Drinking first, he chokes. “You’re a comic.”

  He always drinks first. As if at the back of his mind there’s a wine-waiter, totting him up.

  With eyes opening to the dark, she can do that for him. A flint-white broad forehead, Sheridan’s—a fine nose. A mouth never vulgar, even when a bottle’s in it. But what’s there about this handsomeness that makes you feel nostalgic for it even while you’re face to face with it?

  When he offers the bottle this time, she accepts. So they drink, by turns into his mouth, into hers.

  So this is sex.

  She sees it—for him. For her. Those times, in his flat. The moment when with loins still locked, not breathless but absolved from breathing, when they should have been floating in the holy nimbus won for them by their own contractions—and he’d reached sideways for the bottle, pulling at it deep. Saw her shock; laughed. And she saw what he maybe wanted her to see: “I repudiate.” The shock w
ent beyond any insult to her, or to women generally. It was always for him she felt it.

  But now she feels—bottle passing over to him—that he doesn’t drink against what life does to him—bottle passing over to her—but against what life could do for him.

  He’s asleep? Not asleep. A man in profile’s what Sheridan is. His belly shines at her, full-face. She puts her face on it, nuzzling. Sliding down. When she takes him in her mouth like a bottle, he groans assent. The warm-raspberry aura of the drinker is in his flesh. No taste. As she moves, learns to move, her mouth’s not her mouth but another opening, linking slowly to her own core. Never done more than kissing before, never asked to. Never urged down, the face blotting faster, teeth shivering like a thoughtful animal’s. I was once serviced by mouth by Day, but at the end with him, always loins. Now my face is my loins. Obliterating slow. I become my lovers. I—am not. This I do, not even knowing the correct name for it. In the imaginary journal of her mind—barely admitted to but always kept—she is doing this in the imaginary journal of her mind.

  Now. Now she’s face-to-face with her own willed sub-dominance. This yearning posture that flows under all household service; she recognizes it. As if she’s doing a domestic service for him. Relieving him, tribally—as nursing mothers gave their extra milk to their men, or to dogs. How good to bend the forehead blindly, in the humble posture excused. All doctrine disappears in the doing. Blessed to bend the neck, the last vertebral resistance gone crack. I am understanding—obedience. Which is the other rhythmic of giving birth. This is the other side of birth, of giving it. I’m swallowing what comes of human intercourse. I’m in the humility of the task.

  And at the same time, an ancient childself, once hung for nine months on its own mother, is suckling. So it goes, from fleshgiver to fleshgiver, like the needle sewing, over and back. This man-mother—mother him. Her mouth is filled with nacre, as so often her lower body has been. Once. Now. Before.