by JoeAnn Hart
Madeline stared at the hand. Don’t do that, she thought, don’t touch me, don’t say one kind thing or I’ll fall apart. Isobel backed right off, and in that instant Madeline felt untethered from the world, floating in a cold, empty space. A tiny lump, the size of a pearl, lodged in her throat, and she tried to wash it away with the rest of her drink.
“I’ve got to talk to Arietta,” Madeline murmured, glancing up with a painful smile as she stepped away.
“Call me,” Isobel said. Madeline nodded as she walked away, as if she would.
What-ever was in that drink was positively toxic. As she ducked and angled herself between rigid bodies, she struggled to keep her balance. Her dress stuck to her body from the heat, the fabric refusing to adjust itself to her movement. It was strangling her. Old friends looked like they might brave a word, but she pointed to the terrace as she walked, to spare them.
An arm reached out from the crowd. Peter Weber grabbed her elbow and pulled her in for a jovial kiss. She was too weak to escape. Besides, he was so boring as to be actually soothing. So she said hello, which was enough to get him going on his game that day, a conversation that allowed her to ruminate peacefully on her own thoughts. Peter, whose face was crisscrossed with a network of broken blood vessels, began to complain at length that moving Trough was throwing the entire tournament off. “What was Humpy thinking? How could he do such a thing?” he asked loudly, looking around for approval from passersby.
“How could he?” Madeline said, with such depth of feeling that Peter shut up and stared at her. He opened his mouth, then closed it.
“I’ve got to go,” she said in the ensuing silence, and they both moved on.
Food. Food was what she needed. The kitchen always put munchies out for cocktails, so Madeline turned in the direction of the sideboard, then stopped. There was no getting near it, what with bodies three-deep grabbing for cheese straws and tuna tartare, swallowing and chewing, everyone talking in cocktail Esperanto, with their mouths full. She’d always depended on Charles to get her plates of things. But there was no Charles now.
She was starving, but the blue ice pop would have to satisfy her hunger for the moment. She stood there sucking on it, immobile, blocked on one side by a waiter taking an order from a large group, and the backup from the bar on the other. They were all absorbed in getting Enrico’s attention, so she went unnoticed, contentedly so. The thought of making an effort to be agreeable exhausted her. Today’s weather, tomorrow’s weather, yellow Labs. She had no interest in any of the acceptable subjects.
She spotted Arietta weaseling her way to food, right to the choice bits, the caviar. Two kinds. She scooped both on a mini-blini, one on top of the other, then smothered it in sour cream. Frank would be appalled. It was like mixing two fine wines together, then adding seltzer. Arietta folded the blini in half and ate it in two bites, smearing cream on both sides of her mouth. Madeline was about to wave her down, when her empty glass was suddenly wrenched from her hand and another Smurf Pee put in its place. Beryl pecked her on the cheek, winked, and was gone again to swoop down on some other pigeon before Madeline could force it back on her. But why should she want to? Why shouldn’t she have a good time too, like everyone else? She peeled the paper napkin off the foot of her cocktail glass like dead skin and placed it on a passing waiter’s tray. By the time she remembered about Arietta, she was gone. She must have slipped back out to the terrace.
Madeline took a sip to fortify herself to follow, poking her eye with the ice pop. Then she began to squeeze through a weak spot in the crowd, pausing to rest at the table whereupon stood the Fothergill Cup. She put the brimming glass to her lips and, to her horror, slurped. She looked around to see if anyone heard, but the airwaves were dominated by Neddy Fenwick, braying to an indifferent audience how he had finally mastered the dogleg at #9 and come in at par for the hole. He’d made a poor showing in the championship but found joy in that one hole. He tapped his forehead, which in spite of being out under the sun all day, remained as white and unblemished as an egg. “It’s all in here. It’s not a matter of how well you play, but how well you handle how you play.”
How true, Madeline thought as she delicately slurped again. How very true. She ran a finger along the Fothergill Cup, pausing on Charles’s name, engraved in brass, from fourteen years back. She remembered that day. He’d been so happy. They’d been so happy. Hadn’t they?
Maybe not. Maybe they were one of those couples who only operated well within the confines of a larger group, depending on it to fill in the silences between them. They were always safe here, within the social proprieties. Maybe what they’d been happy with all this time was not each other but the Club.
There seemed to be no going back for Charles, but she didn’t have to be alone. She stroked the stem of her empty glass, thinking, then put it down next to the trophy, almost missing the table. She would jump back in. Hilary Fisher was over by the door, talking to a new member—something Galton—with waxy blond hair and oversized jewelry. The Galtons were incredibly rich, so the rumor went. New people always were. Madeline made a move toward them but stopped when she realized Hilary had her on her hook.
“I hear you have the most beautiful home west of Boston,” said Hilary, standing too close and eyeing the Galton woman over her wineglass.
“Oh,” said the woman, blushing. She flapped a hand, glinting with stones, warding off the compliment. “We like it. You’ll have to come see it for yourself some day.”
“I’d love to,” Hilary said, barely moving her lips but rotating her hips in pleasure. There was a pause, and the Galton woman’s mouth opened slightly as she understood she was now expected to be more specific.
“Let’s see,” she said. “When the festivities are over this weekend?”
“Perfect,” said Hilary. “We’re free next Friday. In a week, I’m sure we’ll all be bored again.” Then she screeched like a howler monkey and leaned in even closer, until the Galton woman was forced to join in on the laugh. The volume of the whole room intensified, a group guffaw confirming that all was right with the world, creating a trumpet of sound that finally propelled Madeline to one of the French doors. Andrew Sortwell and Gregg Thayer, Charles’s old golfing buddies, stood on either side of the doorway, sucking in their stomachs to let her out.
Andrew laughed hello with a second-drink enthusiasm, a handkerchief tucked smartly in his breast pocket pointing up to his slightly simian features. As usual, his back was too stiff to bend for a kiss, but Gregg leaned to her as she passed, and breathed, “Hope to see more of you, Madeline.”
She turned, deeply offended. He raised his glass of yellow wine, hardly keeping his grin concealed. Was she considered fair game now? “Give my love to Ella,” she said, and kept moving.
The humid air outside was not as reviving as she’d hoped, but she took in a deep breath anyway, gulping it like food. Set up on the old croquet lawn, the tent for tomorrow’s banquet was vast and empty. She looked around for a canapé table and spotted Arietta sitting on the low stone wall with Gwen. Madeline took a step toward them, but her brain and legs seemed not to be in communication with one another, and she tripped on a mislaid flagstone. At that moment, Ellen Bruner rushed out of the lounge behind her, rosy and triumphant, and almost bumped into her. The two women, who now knew each other for enemies, were startled to see each other again so soon. Ellen ground out a greeting through her teeth.
“How did it go?” Madeline whispered. “With Humpy.”
Ellen looked around and lowered her voice. “Humpy?” She undid the top button of her silk shirt with extreme self-satisfaction. “It’s very warm, isn’t it? I might have to change.”
“I don’t think that’s possible,” Madeline said.
Ellen looked like she might just rise to the bait, but Alex Bruner interrupted them, his face wrinkled up like a Pekingese. Ellen excused herself with a curt nod and walked away with her husband, their heads bent together.
So that was that. Madel
ine hiccuped. It was time to leave.
Before she could escape, a blast came from beyond the terrace. She almost dropped to the ground before realizing it was just the Club’s cannon, announcing sunset and the lowering of the flag. She was never prepared for the explosion, even though they’d been doing it for more than a year now. She reached for her heart like everyone else and could still feel it racing. No one talked. No one took pleasure in the ceremony. The only time the silence had ever been broken was by Phoebe. Of course. It was the summer before, the last time her daughter had come to the Club as a member and not a tormentor. She’d left in disgust after the jolt of the cannon, announcing that pompous nationalism was the forerunner to fascism, and that it wouldn’t be long before they’d all be goose-stepping around the course.
Madeline loved her country; she considered herself patriotic and had never failed to vote, even in the primaries, but at the moment, standing so unnaturally straight with all the others, so uniformly solemn, she wondered if Phoebe was onto something. She had never felt the yoke of group pressure weigh so heavily upon her.
The flag creaked and flapped noisily down, attended to by Pole, with what Madeline felt was practiced irony. As her mind wandered, her fingers absently went searching for the raised biopsy scar near her underarm. A small, meaningless fibroid, but big enough, apparently, to alienate Charles from her body. Now he was gone. Everyone was gone. She tried to feel her heart, but it was too well defended behind its cage of bone. She knew it was there by its pounding, but even that became distant and muffled.
A few tears began to slide down her face, and she didn’t wipe them away. She let them fall, landing on her dress, creating small dark spots among the daisies. She stood like that long after the flag had been folded into a pastry and put away, long after the others had wandered off in their relentless pursuit of happiness.
Chapter Thirty-five
Sinking the Putt
BREATHING IN THE WARM, moist air, Charles raised his bare arms over his head in a stretch and felt a deep animal satisfaction. Tomorrow was the day. All he had left was some polishing and he’d be done. The two goats pressed their noses against the wire to watch him, their leader, and a young rooster stood on a rock and flapped his wings, interpreting Charles’s stretch as an open invitation to battle. Charles could set the bird crowing by making a few challenging snorts, but the neighbors were getting very testy about those sorts of things. He bent to touch his work boots, loosening up all over, and while he was down there, he plucked some grass for the goats. Leaning against the fence, he opened his hand and let Randolph—Randy for short—the tweedy billy with the full, handsome beard, snatch the grass away with yellow teeth. Charles wished there did not have to be a wire barrier between him and the animals—but what was the alternative? There was no natural habitat for domestic livestock—they’d evolved, for better or worse, with humans, and there was no going back to the savanna for any of them. Randy continued to probe his palm with a leathery nose even as his cheeks bulged with what he already had. From the back pocket of his Lees, Charles pulled out a piece of rumpled paper—Randy’s favorite treat—and the goat tilted his head to better maneuver it down his throat. Madeline had left it pinned to the garage door that afternoon, saying she was going to the Club, “as if anyone cares.”
“She doesn’t mean that,” he told the goat, who cocked his head as he munched. “I don’t think.” How could she not know how much he cared? She was all he cared about—the reason he labored to get his sculpture done, so they could begin again. Renewed and reloved. Was that a word? He would make it one. He would make it theirs, even though, at the moment, they didn’t even have a bed in common. Lately he’d been camping out in the garage, only letting in Vincent and Nod to confirm he was still on track. They talked about the most amazing things—pain, passion, despair, divinity. It made him wonder whether he’d always confused socializing with friendship. He hoped he’d not also been confusing marriage with something else. When he’d proposed, he’d told Madeline that they’d make a great partnership, when what they needed was another kind of merger altogether.
But tomorrow night he would tow the sculpture to the Club, a memorial to commemorate the end of one life—the goose’s—and the beginning of another—his own. The more he worked, the more he desired Madeline, and yet he couldn’t seem to tear himself away from his sculpture.
How to get Madeline there? A love letter? He could leave it on her pillow tomorrow morning, while she slept. “Meet me at Plateau, at ten to-night.” Pretty romantic, he had to admit.
He pressed his forehead against Randy’s skull, not in aggression but in affection, like rubbing noses. But Randy took it as a challenge and pushed back hard until Charles gave up. He was not so thickheaded. He brushed fur from his scratchy cheek with the back of his hand. When had he shaved last?
Who cared? His whole life he’d kept himself clipped and pressed, trying to control one thing or another, even his facial hair. He should just let it go altogether—why hold growth back? But first, as Steeve said, he had to make room for abundance in his life, and to do that, he would have to toss a few things on the pyre. His job, for instance. Bond trader. He would turn bond traitor.
He smiled at his play on words. Trader, traitor. That sort of thing never happened before—how truly dull he must have been. No wonder Madeline had grown distant. But now, words and images flooded through his brain, latching on to one another to forge new life-forms, like exuberant molecular strands. He had always been a careful gatekeeper of his thoughts and emotions, only letting in so much at a time. But excess of the mind was good. Excess created. During the bull market, he’d thought of the world as a place that would keep on expanding, like the universe—but the only true expansion was in the human brain. He did not want to be one of those men, living without sense and dying without desire, sitting on the edge of the grave, still calculating yield. His father was dead at sixty from a stroke. What time was left to him?
Irving, the other goat—spotted and dainty-bearded—bleated meekly for a bit of grass, and Charles had to hold Randy back by his curved horns to keep him from Irving’s share. When the chewing died down, Charles scratched both their bony heads, and they arched their necks in heathen pleasure. He remembered taking Phoebe to a petting zoo when she was a little girl and telling her not to touch the goats—or anything, for that matter. “Dirty creatures,” he had called them. How silly. Nothing was wrong with them—there had been something wrong with him. They made him uneasy with his own animality, and in the process, he had probably warped Phoebe’s notion of farms, livestock, and life. The goats thrust their heads under his hands to redirect the scratching between their horns. Their desires were so wonderfully unmediated by conscious thought—if they felt physical delight, they showed it. When they were hungry, they ate. And if they were horny, they mounted each other—the fact that they were castrated males notwithstanding. It was not possible for humans to be as spontaneous as all that without being locked up; in fact, it was horrific to think of people going around letting instinct lead them—what with fear, aggression, and sexual impulse taking up so much real estate in the gray matter. Instinct was best left to art—the stylized expression of the full range of arousal, good and bad. When he and Madeline first met, she used to lead him into discussions like that, and he would encourage her, just happy to hear the sound of her voice even though he understood nothing. But then the first time he heard her talk like that at a cocktail party, he’d stepped in and deflected the conversation to golf, and she got the point. From then on, she never said another word that she hadn’t already heard from someone else at the Club, and he praised her for fitting in so well. What a jerk he was. But why hadn’t she pushed back?
Music drifted down from Phoebe’s open window on the third floor, along with a sound he hadn’t heard in the house all summer: laughter. She had a visitor, a man by the sound of it. A romantic interest? Maybe, but more likely just one of her ALF compatriots, gleefully helping to plot a
meatless humanity. He hadn’t seen her in days, and he hoped she’d been staying out of trouble. He should go up and say hello, reconnect. They had drifted apart after he told her he couldn’t join her in the demonstration—she refused to understand it would have killed her mother.
Phoebe would have to wait—she had company now anyway, and he had things to do. He had to find his chain. He thought he’d left it coiled up by the door, but it wasn’t there, and he’d need it tomorrow night to pull his work over to the site with his John Deere lawn tractor. The goats put their cloven hooves up on the fence, absorbed in his every move as he burrowed through piles of material lying around the yard, bits of interesting iron and brass he’d rescued from Dumpsters and charity shops. It was too bad the neighbors didn’t find this collection as fascinating as he did. A designated representative had called Madeline, accusing the Lamberts of running a junkyard. Why that sort of thing should bring her to tears he did not know—it was more of a reflection of the neighbors’ insecurities than anything else.
Charles scratched his hair with both hands and was entranced by the heady bouquet of goat musk on his skin. It made him want to roll in the grass and scratch in the dirt. The sky was turning in streaks from blue to apricot as the low sun settled behind the maples. How fast the summer goes. Crickets in the lawn warmed up for the evening recital, and families of crows gathered in the treetops. A clamor rose at the golf course, the harsh honking of geese as they clustered to the safety of water hazards. Close by, he heard a satisfied warble.
Olson. He was one of Phoebe’s two Bronze Beauty turkeys that she had, as she put it, liberated from its animal prison this summer. In spite of Olson’s size—more than forty pounds, and barely able to carry his breast about—he was a real escape artist, quite nimble when it came to slipping through weaknesses in the fence. Charles followed the warbling to the back porch, where Olson liked to roost, waiting for the milk delivery in the morning. But he’d grown too big for the railing and could only perch on the top step, a sitting duck for any predator. Until they kept livestock, he had no idea how hard wildlife was pressing against the suburbs—he’d seen a coyote sniff around the animal pen one night, and soon afterward he found an eviscerated goose on the course. Nature had her own ways of controlling an explosive population, and she was none too subtle. It would be a shame to have Phoebe rescue the turkey from the knife only to have him done in by the claw.