But sex, oddly enough, was better with Stewart than with handsome, sexy Ray. Ray was always too rough, too quick, and he always wanted from her what she had no idea how to give. Come on, come on, baby—she hated him saying that, right in the middle of everything, in an impatient voice that clashed, to say the least, with the mood. And the first time, when he took her to the hotel, it hurt so much she pushed him off her, and he pulled his pants on and walked around the room swearing and kicking the furniture. She was a senior in high school. It was a long time before she would let him try it again.
Stewart said, “Oh honey,” and she turned back to look at him. Tears in his eyes, hand raked back through his hair, trembling lower lip. “Listen to me for a minute. Try to understand. It was probably his, but it could have been mine,” he said. “It could have been my child. I think back, trying to remember dates and figure it out, and I can’t get anywhere, I can’t put it together. And I can’t stand it, Caro. I can’t stand not knowing.”
There was silence—no sound but the radio and a gurgle in her stomach from the Pepsi. What was she supposed to say? She understood that he was upset. All right, it was a shock, it made everything just a bit worse, she could see that. But profoundly, from the bottom of her heart, she didn’t care. So what if Peggy had a baby? What difference did it make if the father was Stewart or Ray or the man in the meat market—which was not outside the bounds of possibility. Peggy was gone, Ray was gone. The baby was gone—who knew where? Adopted by some rich California friend of Aunt Alice’s, no doubt. Water under the bridge. Water over the dam. What did it matter?
“I wonder if you would find out for me.” He had better control of himself, and he spoke humbly, shyly—the voice he used when he wanted something or criticized her, a voice that was meant to calm and placate but always infuriated her instead. “What happened out there in San Francisco. You could write to your aunt, maybe. Or find out from your mother.”
“I don’t want anything to do with it,” she said.
“Please, Caro. I just want to know. I don’t want to do anything. But—if it’s true, for one thing. If anyone knows—I mean, whose it was. And what happened to it. I only want information.”
“I don’t get it,” she said. She stood with the window behind her, looking at his naked, saggy face. The sun was hot on her back, and sweat ran down from her armpits. “Why is it so important? These things happen. I can tell you this much—it’s true, all right. I don’t know why I didn’t see it, I must have been blind. She had put on weight, I remember that now. She stretched out the elastic on my green skirt.” What she remembered was glee, that Peggy was getting fat; she remembered that distinctly. Poor Peggy. Not that she didn’t deserve everything she got. Well, not everything. But that—yes. The way she carried on.
He said, “I remember how she avoided me, those weeks before she left. Didn’t want me to touch her. And her—” He made a rounding motion in front of his chest. “You know—her breasts were—”
“Oh, never mind, Stewart. I don’t want to hear it.” She finished the Pepsi and clutched the empty bottle. What if she just brained him with it? That thick greenish glass. He’d go down like a big old sawdust doll, too surprised to protest, too miserable. She said, “Maybe she avoided you simply because you were boring, you bored her to death, you bore everyone to death. Did that ever occur to you?” She turned her back on him and banged the empty bottle into the wooden case on the floor. When she stood up he was staring at her, stricken, his face flushed pink.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She sighed and went to him, put her hands on his shoulders, apologized, cradled his head against her. Oh Lord, it was wrong, it must be wrong, to hurt someone like this—when it was so easy. She wolde wepe, if that she saw a mous caught in a trap. “I didn’t mean that, Stewart. I’m just upset.”
“I know.” His voice was muffled, his face burrowed into her waist. He smelled of cigarettes. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I was afraid it would hurt you. But I felt it was important that we share everything.” He pulled back to look up at her. “And you’ve been so distant lately, Caro—as if you’ve got something on your mind. I don’t know. Maybe I wanted to get your attention, shake you up a little.”
Well: that was mildly interesting, at least. She stroked his hair, at the spot where she would have brained him with the bottle. He did have wonderful, wavy, thick hair—not really very gray. “Stewart, I really think you should forget this. I don’t want anything to do with it—something some horrible man told you. It’s disgusting, and it’s—it’s like an invasion of privacy. I mean, it’s Peggy’s business.”
She remembered Peggy at the train—the lucky one, off to California, gloating, carefree, hugging everyone, laughing behind the new blue veil she’d bought for the trip. All that time, she was suffering. Caroline felt a brief, pure pang of sorrow for her sister—maybe her first one. She looked at Stewart’s bent head and took a breath. “Besides,” she said. “Stewart. Look at me.” He looked up. A mouse in a trap. She said, “I really believe that anything you found out would only make everything worse. I don’t mean just with you—I mean between us.”
There was another pause. She hated scenes like this, full of pregnant silences, melodramatic declarations, tears. She had thought they were done with all that. But she forced herself to look into his eyes, blue like her own—what were called gray in the Middle Ages: the books she read, all the poems, were full of gray-eyed beauties.
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it, Stewart.”
She stepped back from him and sat down, fanning herself with the morning paper. The heat in the kitchen was oppressive. She could not possibly cook dinner, even if they dragged the electric fan out of the bedroom and set it up in here. They could go out, drive over to Mother’s. Stay home and eat crackers and drink beer, she didn’t care. Or would they be too upset to eat at all? Would this conversation go on and on, into the night?
She waited, with a detached curiosity, to see what he would say, while the Laughlins’ radio was drowned out by a car revving up somewhere down the street. A horn blew. Stewart’s cigarette burned itself out in the ashtray. The headline on the paper was about the Germans in Paris: she pictured cruel helmeted men goose-stepping down the wide avenues. Stewart wouldn’t be called up if America got into the war, but what about John? What about Chip Maloney and Hank Douglas and all the other men they knew? She put the thought from her. She would go to the library tomorrow after her appointment at the hairdresser. A book on medieval art, she thought. Religious paintings. The Bayeux tapestry.
“You’re not happy,” Stewart said, startling her. She had almost forgotten him. He spoke sharply, so that she could tell the notion of her unhappiness had just occurred to him, he hadn’t had time to digest it and find a nice way to talk about it. He took one of her hands, clasping it between both of his; his hands were warm and sweaty. She wanted to pull away. Draw a cold bath, fling off her clothes, immerse herself up to her eyebrows, and then sleep, sleep. He said, “Caroline, don’t do this to me.”
“I’m not going to do anything, Stewart. What on earth do you think I’m going to do?”
“Don’t leave me.”
She knew she wouldn’t leave him. It sometimes made things easier for her to imagine leaving him, but she knew there was no question of it. She had married him—why? Because they were linked, because Peggy and Ray had died and thrown them together—yes, that. But what else? She thought back, trying to sort it out. A million years ago. That bleak winter and then the cold wet spring, when everything was so awful at home. John drinking, out until all hours. Jamie not talking to anyone, not even getting out of bed. Nell looking desperate. The store sinking. She was sick of college, sick of her mother’s short temper, sick of trying to get used to being poor—that, too, all of it. But when she really thought about it, it seemed to her that she had married Stewart because she had made him forget Peggy: in taking comfort from her, he had fallen in love with h
er. She remembered his face the first time he saw her naked. It was a face she decided she could love. And out of that mixture of triumph and gratitude and general disorientation, she had found the strength to marry him.
“If you left me, I don’t know what I’d do,” Stewart said. “I couldn’t take it.”
She said, “Of course I’m not going to leave you. It’s not true that I’m unhappy, not one bit. In fact—”
“In fact what?” He was smiling up at her, gently, benignly. Already she had cheered him up. She assessed his good points. Not bad looking, that gorgeous hair, lovely steady deep voice, hardworking and responsible, devoted, stayed home at night, didn’t drink much. She went through this list several times a week—always remembering something Nora Lyle had said to her in the ladies’ room at Lorenzo’s once when they doubledated. Nora was talking about her date. “I can’t think of anything negative about him,” she had said, blotting her lipstick in the mirror. “But there’s nothing positive, either. And you know what that adds up to—no positives and no negatives. A big zero, that’s what.”
“In fact, what, sweetheart?”
“Maybe it’s time we thought about having a baby.”
As soon as she said it she saw how witless it was. What a farce: Peggy dictating babies to her from beyond the grave. But she persisted. “It’s what you want, isn’t it? Admit it.” Smiling at him. “The patter of little feet around this place.”
He couldn’t get the grin off his face—like Jamie when he finally got the easel he’d been angling for. Stewart jumped up and kissed her and brought in the electric fan, set up to blow on her chair—pampering her already. He opened another Pepsi and poured it in a glass, then got a cold beer for himself and sat down opposite her. “We’ve got to talk about this,” he said. He was out of breath with happiness. “It’s what I want more than anything, but you’ve got to be sure that you do.”
She understood that it was already done. All that remained was the deed, the waiting, the pains, the life ahead. She sipped, drawing the cold Pepsi through her front teeth, trying to think what should come next. She had the strange sensation that she had just aged several years—like Stewart, when she came upon him in the kitchen, looking like an old man. She said, finally, “The only thing is, I thought I might go back to school.”
“You can do that,” he said, talking fast, gesturing with his big hands—spreading them out as if to indicate a wide path before her. “As soon as the children are in kindergarten. I’d be all for that, Caroline. With you all the way.” Children. She saw him wrench his mind away from a roomful of blond darlings so he could ask her, “What do you think you’d like to study?”
She hesitated. She had no desire to talk about it, but she had to answer, so she shrugged her shoulders and said, “I’ve gotten interested in medieval history. I had that course, Tyler’s Medieval Lit. course, I told you about it, my last semester—what? Two years ago. I started looking over my notes—up in Mother’s attic one day, going through my old books and things, and I realized that what really intrigued me most was the history, not the literature so much, although of course I—” Abruptly, she stopped talking. Discussing it with Stewart was like a betrayal, though she didn’t know of what. And yet what she was saying was important: it was, she knew, her life. She took a breath and went on, talking fast. “Anyway, I’ve been spending time at the library up on campus, reading. Afternoons, I go up there. I was there today.”
Things she said to him often fell flat—wifely things like new curtains, or what the grocer said. The details of her life. When he feigned interest he wore the fake, posed, lively look of people in photographs. But he was watching her closely, the way he observed clients. “Really,” he said.
“I know it may sound strange.”
“No—not at all,” he said, which she knew was a lie. He did think it was strange, maybe even suspected an ulterior motive—meeting a man at the library, some old classmate or a stuffed-shirt prof like Tyler. Men always distrusted her, which was absurd.
“It’s important to me. Sometimes I even imagine I’m living then. That I’m an actual medieval person.”
He grinned at her. “You wouldn’t like it at all, I guarantee. No electric fans. No radios. No canned food.” He tipped his head back for a swig of beer, and she looked away from the pimply stubble on his neck. “But seriously,” he said. “Go back to school and get your degree. Why not? Maybe you could teach, get a job at the high school. You’d have the same hours as the kids.”
“Well.” How could she tell him that all she wanted was the knowledge, the understanding? And what could she ever do with that? Distantly, she could see herself, like a tiny background figure in a medieval painting, writing a book herself. Medieval Women, she thought. She said, “I don’t necessarily want to teach.”
“Well—something. It’ll work out.” He leaned close to her across the table. Beer on his breath. The odd scent of his skin, not unpleasant, rather like something to eat though she could never figure out what. Chicken gravy? “I can’t tell you what this means to me, Caro. I can’t begin to tell you. I mean about the baby.”
Standing up then, pulling her close to him, his erection against her, his skin hot. She closed her eyes and thought of cool empty halls and silent gardens, the bishop coming to dinner, the bell ringing for vespers. But it didn’t work. They kissed. He put his hand between her legs, and she gripped it tight with her thighs, and then he let her go and they went awkwardly down the hall, their arms around each other, into the darkness of the bedroom.
She kicked off her shoes and he pulled at her dress, unzipped it, so eager he was clumsy, panting. “I don’t deserve you,” he said over and over, but she knew what had excited him: not her, but the idea of her as a vessel, something a baby could be pumped into. Why did that excite him? Perpetuating himself. Proving himself. And the thought of Peggy. She watched him throw his pants and shirt on the floor and pull off his shorts: oh yes, there it was, old reliable. She wondered, as she often did, why men weren’t embarrassed by their penises, stuck out straight like something for a bird to perch on. She helped him with the clasp of her brassiere, and she lay back on the bed while he pulled her panties down. “I don’t deserve you.” True, she thought—her mind, again, free of her body, floating above it like the pictures of souls in the catechism—little white winged things. He kissed the insides of her thighs, and with his fingers pushed aside her pubic hair to find a place for his tongue. She opened her legs and stopped thinking. Let it happen, who cares anyway. She heard her own breathing, and there was his smooth long back under her fingers, his heavy body raised above hers, his mouth that tasted of herself, and it was as if she were slowly lighting up, she was a fire, she burst into flames—like the flames of hell that burn but never consume.
PEGGY
1938
She used to push aside the green velvet drapes in the parlor, open the glass doors, and sit on the balcony watching for the mailman. Most days, that was how she spent the morning, starting around ten, when she had finished the breakfast dishes, made her bed, and washed out her underwear.
These chores weren’t necessary, Aunt Alice had told her. Bernarda could take care of them. But Peggy continued to do them because they took up time, and when they were done she sat in the wooden folding chair on the wrought-iron balcony and looked two stories down to the palm trees on Laguna Street, smoking one of her aunt’s Luckies, waiting the morning away.
The mornings in particular seemed immensely long. She tried to shorten them by sleeping late, but as her belly got bigger and the baby became more active, it was hard to find a comfortable position, and she would lie awake at dawn in her little room at the end of the long carpeted hall, listening to the foghorns out on the Bay, then the sounds of her aunt and uncle stirring, the arrival of Bernarda, the kettle whistling, her uncle humming on his way to breakfast. By October it seemed to her that she was hardly sleeping at all, so that she was always tired and sometimes dozed off in the parlor after s
upper—short foggy naps that left her sluggish and made it harder than ever to sleep at night.
When she had agreed to come to California, she hadn’t understood that she would be alone all day—that, every morning but Sunday, Uncle Ralph would go to the Steele Ocean Transport and Shipping Company on Market Street, that Aunt Alice would leave shortly after he did—two mornings a week to teach sculpture at the California School of Fine Arts, the other days to work in her studio.
Peggy went to the studio once. Once was enough: a huge drafty room with an artist in each of its four corners. Besides Aunt Alice, there were Cora, Claire, and Frances—three painters plus her aunt, who worked in clay. They were cheerful women in young middle age, the wives of rich men. They all had short, filthy fingernails, and they wore green coveralls or paint-spotted smocks. They were old friends, affectionate or irreverent with each other. In their presence Peggy felt both disdainful and jealous.
The smells in the studio made her sick: paint, turpentine, clay, dust, and a stink of ashes from the fat black stove that stood in the middle of the room. The clay smelled like excrement, and the whole place made her uneasy. She didn’t understand what drove these four women to come every day to a seedy old building—a top floor on Greenwich Street around the corner from the art school—to put paint on canvas or build strange shapeless things out of clay. She didn’t understand Aunt Alice’s sculptures, and she didn’t like the paintings, even one her aunt told her she would love—a red-and-green painting of flowers that seemed to be trembling in a haze of heat, alive and out of control, almost sexual.
“It’s very nice,” she said. “But it makes me feel faint to look at it.”
Aunt Alice said, “But you must admit that at least it looks like what it is—a nice bunch of anemones,” and the women laughed—Cora, who had painted it, loudest of all.
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