Jenny and the Jaws of Life

by Jincy Willett

  “My name,” I began, deferentially addressing not the shadowy form beside me but the red glow of the radio, “Is Edwin Crapeau Foote. I am not a Newport Foote, but a Mattapoisett Foote. There is no ancestral excuse for my middle name; my mother just thought it sounded classy. I am a wildly successful investment lawyer, having in fifteen years made myself richer than half my clients and the social equal of the rest. I owe my present success to youthful ambition, and that ambition to precocious childhood revulsion toward the dullness and mediocrity of the smack dab middle of the middle class. I sought, you see, to move always among talented, challenging, unusual people: the witty, the sparkling, the unpredictable. Heady conversation. Candlelit surprise. I thought, you see, that there must be some connection between money and memorable experience; between rare wine and rare intelligence. In short, I was a romantic idiot.

  “Dear Lady, you have just provided me with the only moment in my entire life when I was not bored almost to the point of lunacy. With a single wordless act you have shown more daring, more devastating social awareness, more sheer imagination—”

  “I tripped,” she said.

  I was silent for a long digestive moment. “That’s impossible. Nobody could do that by accident.”

  “I do everything by accident,” she said. “That’s all you have to know about me. I’m a stupid secretary, that’s all, and my stupid boss brought me to this stupid party because his wife is even homelier than me. And I would just like,” she said, her voice rising in pitch and thinning out into a child’s cry, “to do one goddamn simple thing in my life, like walk across a room or down the stupid stairs, without goddamn making a fool of myself.” At the end of this remarkable speech (which, unlike my own, I am able to render verbatim) she fell silent, or almost silent: after a while I became aware of soft gasps, breathy shudders, regularly spaced, almost imperceptible, and realized she was sobbing. (Melinda’s sobs and Melinda’s laughter were quiet affairs, practically indistinguishable.) And with a soothing cry I embraced the huddled bundle of her, and kissed her plump damp cheeks, and I was lost. She had astonished me twice in fifteen minutes. Are there really any better reasons for making a lifetime commitment?

  “God, yes,” said John Rittenhouse, my partner, with uncharacteristic animation. “Jesus, Ed, she’s a typist over at Flink, Spitalny and Whatsit. She’s a chubby little oaf. Young, okay, cute, possibly, but marriage—Good-Lord-have-you-lost-your-mind?” Rittenhouse and I have been friends since Chicago, so I let him get it off his chest and didn’t take offense. “The trouble with you, Rittenhouse,” I said chuckling, “is that you have no sense of vision. See you in church.”

  “Oh, of course, the Acrobat,” said Kimberley Swanson, with her perfected silvery laugh. She was my current mistress and had, in fact, been one of the ladies on the stairs. “The Bouncing Ball. Dumpling Descending a Staircase.” She stopped laughing when I asked her to clear her little toilet articles out of my bedroom, and my last glimpse of Kimberley, as she slammed out of the house, was a flash of long legs and elegant hips, swaying gracefully even in fury. A lovely woman, splendidly fashionable, utterly boring.

  My mother, still alive at that time, was “tickled to death.” I brought Melinda up to Mattapoisett one evening, and Mother celebrated us with pink champagne and great gobbets of her Famous Lasagna, the recipe for which she carefully copied out for my future bride on a “From the Kitchen of Mona Foote” index card, which I later incinerated. Mother was a good woman with execrable taste.

  Melinda herself was more incredulous by far at my intentions than Rittenhouse or Kimberley. “All right, a joke’s a joke,” she said, after I arranged for our blood tests. This was at the end of a week-long courtship, during which she had received, with some apparent pleasure—Melinda was an eloquent blusher—my innumerable avowals of love. “But Darling, you accepted my proposal just the other night. We’re all set. You said, ‘Sure thing, Mr. Foote.’” “I thought you were kidding,” she said. Delightful Melinda! What I had taken for unbecoming flippancy (I had been rather hurt) was really her lovable attempt to humor a crazy man. It took me some time to convince her of the sincerity of my desire, but in the end she agreed, this time in earnest. “What the hell,” said Melinda.

  Under her own power Melinda was, in word and deed, as deliberate, stolid, and graceless as a basset hound. When she walked, she plodded; when she sat, she sank; she ran as though underwater and swam as if uphill, noisily, without propulsion, like a huge, water-logged bumblebee. Her expression was typically grave, ruminant. Her voice was pleasantly low but often so vigilantly modulated as to be almost toneless; and except for the occasional blurt her speech had a regular stately rhythm—like a sarabande—which imparted to her most casual remark the faintly ominous quality of pronouncement. She never gestured when talking, carefully trapping her hands, or busying them. Her smile was shy and pretty, transforming, but so long in coming that you could not watch its progress without conscious suspense.

  Her enthusiasms were rare, bizarre, and zealously guarded. She loved two paintings, the only two with which, as far as I know, she was familiar: Hopper’s “Sun in an Empty Room” and Edvard Munch’s “The Shriek.” Two old issues of Time magazine containing photographs of these were among the few personal effects she brought into our marriage. After much cajoling, she explained why she kept them, and when I presented her with decent prints, handsomely framed, she was startled into a wildfire smile. Her hands rose up and opened out like flowers. She hung them, sun and shriek, in our bedroom, side by side.

  Her literary appetites were limited to doctor-nurse romances and nonfiction accounts, with photographs, of natural and man-made disasters. Fearful, wholly without cause, of my contempt she cached her paperbacks around the house in the most unlikely places. Enchanted by my accidental discovery, in the clothes hamper, of Clinical Passions and Nine Horrible Fires, I searched out the rest, like a child on an Easter egg hunt, carefully replacing them in their niches. So secretive, so unfathomable was my Melinda that I half expected also to find collections of like-colored objects, ribbons and string and pieces of glass, nestled in the chandeliers; odd cufflinks and earrings under carpet corners.

  She liked these few things—the paintings, the books—and sex, which I will get to in a moment; and not much else, really. She hated only her body. “It’s out,” she once confided, “to get me.” Because of what she misconstrued as innate clumsiness (she was spectacularly wrong), she waged constant battle against spontaneity and impulse. What appeared to the untutored eye to be lumpishness of manner was really extreme caution. She was methodical about everything she did in the vain hope of avoiding accident. Of course, this had the same effect upon her body as the command “Don’t think about green elephants” has upon the mind. I could have told her this, but never did.

  For Melinda out of control, obedient to only the natural laws, was incomparably graceful. She fell the way we do in dreams, lazily and in profound silence. She never degraded her falls with unseemly attempts to save herself. She did not flail, or thrash, or clutch at things and knock them over. She did not shout or make funny noises. She never wore the lonely, humiliated expression of the commonplace stumblebum. She fell glissando, down every set of stairs in our three-story house, on the sidewalk, in the tub (backwards into bubbles, sending up aqueous sheets, puffs of foam), down a gentle grassy hill in Nova Scotia, off a stone wall in Salem, over the lap of a grateful old gentleman on the Super Chief. Every slip, tumble, and languorous, effortless roll was as neatly executed as a movement in classical ballet.

  Just how graceful, you may wonder, can a careening fat girl be? You fail to consider, for such is the tyranny of fashion, that the swan is not a slim animal; that the sea lion has no waist. You forget the patient, timeless arch of the surfacing whale.

  Early on I learned to trust in the ingenuity and competence of her brilliant body—something she was never inclined to do—and I could watch her lose her balance, or rather gain imbalance, without my heart leaping
to my throat. For I never knew her to acquire so much as the palest blue bruise, let alone do herself any serious damage. This is not to say that I stood idly by, a heartless voyeur, and offered her no protection from the anarchic forces which so distressed her. On the contrary. I installed extra handrails throughout the house, lowered the kitchen and pantry cabinets, laid down on tubs and tile those foot-shaped pads of ribbed rubber (so that our bathrooms looked like tiny dance studios), marred every extensive glass surface with gaily-colored safety decals (this following a sunny August morning when she joined me on the back patio without sliding open the glass door, exploding through it with casual magnificence, looking for all the world, I hardly need to say, like Danaë at the visitation of Zeus); and in general, as the sly Rittenhouse often observed, turned the house into a “paradise for shut-ins.”

  I wanted her to be happy. Had I been the selfish decadent my old crowd thought me to be (for they eventually hit upon the consensus that I was keeping Melinda as some outlandish sort of pet, like a capybara or potto), I would, rather than trying to help her, have gone out of my way to precipitate her lovely disasters, bumping her as though by accident at the top of the stairs, absently stretching my legs out in front of her as she passed by. I would, for example, have bought her ice skates.

  Her body was sleek, compact, and rounded everywhere, each section as soft and solid as a peach. On our wedding night she came to bed in an outsized red flannel nightshirt, her brooding chubby face scrubbed and gleaming. She said, “I’ll do whatever you want if you’ll turn off the light.” “And I’ll do whatever you want,” I replied, “with it on.” We compromised, throughout our marriage, with indirect lighting from the hallway (and similar arrangements when we spent our nights away from home), and her skin curved in and out of shadow like dunes on a moonlit beach. “If it’s all right with you, let’s not do anything athletic,” she said. She began, the first time and always, with terrible awkwardness, bucking, grasping, panting, without sincerity or sense, a savage if unconscious parody of the sexual technician. But in time she gave it up, and her breathing became slow and deep, and her arms circled my back, steadying me, and she took us out to sea: a night sea, some time after the passing of a storm. She moved with great power, beyond petty violence, beyond wildness, with the awesome elemental rhythm of nature in order. And though her cadence never varied, and the force of her surges never increased, at last she fell, and at the perfect moment, as if from a wonderful height. There was nothing of the flopping and hooting of her slender, acrobatic sisters. She fell with a low drawn-out sigh, smiling, her eyes wide and unseeing; her flesh and muscle rippled beneath me, and her hands fluttered against me, like wings. It was always this way. “I like that,” she would say, almost as if she were realizing it for the first time. And I often wondered if she did forget, from one occasion to the next; if, in all her falls, she was in some kind of trance, or lapse.

  Or perhaps, as Rittenhouse tactlessly suggested on the eve of our wedding, she was merely stupid. This is quite possible, and quite irrelevant. Melinda was the only woman I ever loved. I loved her dumpy and earthbound. I loved her floating free. It had often struck me that while we view the pairing of lovers with benign speculation, even envy, there is nothing so baffling, so grotesque, as another man’s choice of wife, or a woman’s of a husband. It occurs to me now that no explanation is possible.

  During the first year I let my half of the practice go to hell and took an extended honeymoon. We spent the last six months touring Europe at a luxurious pace. My intent was not to “widen her horizons,” for I was no Pygmalion, but to give her pleasure. On balance, then, the trip was not a great success, for only occasionally did her good-natured stoicism give way to genuine interest. At first I sought out, on the basis of the paltry clues she had provided, likely objects of delight: surprising her, for instance, with a detour to the Munch Museum in Oslo. She trudged through the place without complaint, but it soon became apparent that the awful, hag-ridden lithographs and woodcuts did not move her. For all I could see they did not even ring a bell. I had better luck leaving our itinerary more or less to chance. She liked provincial French cuisine, so much that with the aid of explicit instructions she learned to duplicate it quite well when we got home. She liked the way the sheep clogged the cobblestone streets of Skye. In Paris, she coveted the voluminous dark robes and yashmaks of the Algerian women. I bought her a half dozen hideous yashmaks. (She never wore them in front of me, and I was startled to find, some months after our return, that she habitually wore them when she shopped for groceries. Whether she was enacting a fantasy or simply hiding out, I cannot say.)

  Things ground to a halt in Salisbury, where, upon entering the nave of the great cathedral, she looked up at the immense vaulted expanse and, without even swaying, crashed heavily to her hands and knees. It was the only ugly fall she ever took. It was not her body’s doing. “Makes me dizzy,” she said, in a cranky mumble, and when I got her outside, “Can we go home now?” Overcome with remorse I begged pardon for my insensitivity, promising we would leave on the next available plane. And in bed that night she patted my shoulder in one of those rare bursts of affection for which I was so grateful and said, “This isn’t Europe. This is me, in Europe.”

  I still have a photograph, taken earlier that day by a cooperative stranger, of the two of us framed between Stonehenge monoliths: a distinguished man of forty or so, an incongruous yet convincingly hearty smile on his urbane face; and beside him, crushed against him by his circling arm, a small, stout, frumpy young woman confronts the photographer with the wistful expression of a child mauled by a distant relative.

  We were married for five years. During the first four I was deliriously happy and Melinda—well, Melinda rolled through them, like the great globe itself, in her own inscrutable way. The trouble started one evening early in the fall, when we hosted a dinner party for the firm and a few important clients. It was partly Rittenhouse’s fault, and partly mine.

  Melinda had arranged a creditable feast—standing roast, mushrooms à la grecque, braised endives, and a risotto. She had also readied the fixings for crepes suzette, with the express condition that I would take care of the final preparations. She sat with the rest of us in the living room during cocktails, though she did not drink herself. In the interest of self-control, she never drank. Banal chitchat filled the air and she listened intently, or did not hear at all, and fended off the occasional polite question with monosyllables, and regarded everyone, or no one, with an unblinking stare at once vacant and portentous, like a shell-shocked sphinx. All was as usual. And Rittenhouse, as usual, regarded her with bemused fascination, for the passing of years and my continued happiness had only worsened his obsessive incredulity.

  I was mired in zinc futures with old man Winthrop and so did not notice exactly when and how Rittenhouse insinuated himself next to Melinda, and when I did see them he had what appeared to be her full attention and was obviously pouring on the not inconsiderable Rittenhouse charm. When I looked again they were gone—to the kitchen, as it turned out, where Rittenhouse, under the pretext of mixing himself a special drink, got her to try it. “I just wanted to see what she’d do,” he told me the next morning, in a tone of mingled apology and awe. “Goddamn it,” I said, too late, “She’s not a toy.”

  They were gone a long time, and when they returned her face was flushed and happy, her brown eyes sparkled, and she carried in front of her, with monumental self-assurance, a tray holding two dozen frosted old-fashioned glasses filled to the brim with a deep amber liquid. Draped across each brim was an odorous gardenia, evidently culled from the back garden, withering visibly in its alcoholic bath. “Everybody try one,” she commanded, graciously passing among us, and we all took at least one sip of her concoction, which was vile in a truly surprising way.

  “What is it?” I choked, not so much alarmed as amazed at the totality of her transformation.

  “A ‘gin rummy,’” she said. “Jack says they make wonderful ones
down at the HoHo Luau Pit.” She frowned prettily. “They really should be drunk out of coconut shells.” I shot Rittenhouse a look that collapsed his sheepish grin.

  All hell broke loose that night, though if it had not been for the denouement I, at least, would have judged the party a success. For Melinda, who got steadily drunker throughout dinner, was the cynosure of all eyes, her body reveling wickedly in its unwonted release. There were no accidents, except for the finale: rather, she became more and more adroit as the evening progressed. Yet her unearthly competence contributed to a generally shared premonition of disaster. Conversation died as, long knife flashing in the candlelight, she carved and portioned out the huge roast with the blinding skill of a Japanese steakhouse chef. But she made up for it with a running patter of her own, commenting at length and very entertainingly upon our trip to Europe, which I had not until then realized had even registered with her; interlarding her account with aphorisms and opinions that I was startled to recognize as my own. “Neapolitans are the idiots savants of life.” “When one meets the English, one understands the French.”

  As she glided around the table replenishing wine glasses, Winthrop leaned over and punched my shoulder with a horny forefinger. “Remarkable woman,” he said.

  At one point she excused herself, drove to the grocery store (she had no license), and returned in a twinkling with half a coconut, which she gutted and filled with yet another “gin rummy.” Which proved to be a mistake.