I got pregnant with Sara the next year. My reaction to having a baby was unexpected, but, I found out later, not all that untypical. Having Sara made me afraid, made me want to have a job, someplace else to go. I went back to school and got my M.S., then, almost dropping with fatigue, had Rebecca. Rebecca made it easier, now there were more of us, the house felt not so empty. Bobby was an afterthought, he arrived six years later, and Steve and I, whenever he happened to bump against my pregnant belly, would look at one another and laugh. By then, that was how it was between us. We were glad to have a boy, though. For me, touching Bobby’s flesh is as close as I’ll ever come to touching Steve again, the old Steve, Steve of the Tivoli Gardens.
That’s not the whole thing, either. I haven’t said a word about our house, which is a big colonial, painted yellow with black shutters. It sits on a rise. There’s a stone wall bordering the side yard, originally built 200 years ago. All of us in the group have good houses, old oversized houses, houses with special features, and sometimes we talk about this, and laugh, as if these houses were really meant for other people, the large, steady families that came before us. We’re the burghers in our little town, we fill the houses that once belonged to sheep farmers and ministers. It seems odd and a little insufficient that we’re the civilization we have now, these steady, work-bowed men, these women who call each other up and complain, in careful tones of irony, that we’re vaguely, vaguely unfulfilled, that something we were led to expect seems to have eluded us. What this thing was I’m not even sure anymore. Sometimes I can stand at my kitchen windows and look out at the yard and watch my children out there—at least, the two younger ones; Sara’s eleven now and has gotten reclusive—watch Rebecca pushing Bobby on the tire swing, with our Irish setter, Dorothy, nearby—and I’ll think, I’ll honestly think: What else is there but this?
I would like to describe this sort of moment to Billy. Something prevents it; maybe the realization that in pushing it, I might very well be bleeding it dry of real, substantial meaning. I haven’t told you very much about Billy, either. Not nearly enough. Even the little scenes, the things he says, or manages not to say, don’t fully express his power.
When Billy’s here, he lives in the house of one of his former professors. The man is retired now. He lives with his wife, their children are long gone. Billy settles in their youngest son’s former room. He doesn’t say much about this arrangement, except that these six months are when he gets most of his work done. He also told me that he gets pleasure out of inhabiting a room that is like a shrine to someone else’s boyhood. “Cusphood” is actually what he called it. “Everything in that room is about being on the cusp,” he said. “There’s a Dartmouth banner on the wall. There’s an old poster of Cheryl Ladd inside the closet door.” Steve, making a joke, asked him why he didn’t replace Cheryl Ladd with someone more au courant, Madonna, say, or Sharon Stone. Billy gazed at Steve, as if he was just going to let the question fade. Then he turned to me. It was only a moment’s shift of focus, but he was checking on me, remarking—we were remarking together, in that way Billy has of making me complicit in his judgments—on Steve’s thickness, his failure to understand.
How it is that I did understand is, I guess, a mystery. Billy and I have never sat down and talked about these things. But I can see, without much effort, the yellow edges of that Cheryl Ladd pinup. I can see the faded look of what was held attractive more than a decade ago, the long blond hair, the too-simple face, the girlish flesh, a little soft and doughy around the middle. I can imagine, too, how Billy stands there, facing this poster, in a world not his world, entering the body of an eighteen-year-old boy. That boy has since gone off, married, had a child of his own. None of this would interest Billy. What holds his attention instead is the way a moment, a boy’s fantasy, can be endlessly relived. You do not really have to step beyond it, you can stay within it; this is a choice. Below him, in the house, the boy’s parents move shuffling from room to room, fighting together the onset of everything grim that is to come. All of that, the fighting part, the blind wish for life, on whatever terms, Billy could not begin to appreciate, or respect.
Do the men understand any of this? There are times when I want to ask Steve, really ask him. On Wednesday nights they all go to the Y to play basketball. Afterward there’s beer. None of the women is allowed. Billy steps out of the boy’s room and joins the world of men, and for all these guys know, it’s never any different for him. They excuse the fact that he’s a poet the way you might excuse someone from having to leave the dinner table to medicate a buildup of phlegm. These things happen, that’s all, is their attitude. Steve has attempted to read both of Billy’s books, but I knew by their placement on the bedside table, open to a certain page, exactly where he gave up on each of them.
Last Wednesday, after the game, I lay waiting in bed for Steve. I’d been reading a book, a popular history of Vienna I’d picked up when I was pregnant with Bobby but never gotten around to until now. I was just dipping into it, not reading it all that seriously, but interested. I liked the title: A Nervous Splendor. I knew Steve and I would make love later, because basketball keeps Steve awake, and because it had been a while, and I wanted to.
Lust at this stage of the game is a funny thing. I don’t think of it as desiring Steve, especially. When he came home and started undressing, I watched him. There are parts of his body I can’t look at for very long anymore. They frighten me. I know this is silly. He’s just a man. But he’s a man aging. Things are happening to him. I closed my eyes. Inside my closed-eyed state I thought of the sex we were going to have and it was strange, because the pleasure had already started in me, yet I knew if I opened my eyes and looked at Steve and caught sight of the wrong part of him, some of the pleasure would start to evaporate. Is this love? I wondered, and it was like, seeing that question before me, I had to push Billy out of the bed. Or else, say: It’s this double thing, Billy, this trick we all perform, a dangling, light-reflecting prism of an existence you could never understand. But why did I need to apologize to Billy? As soon as Steve got into bed and I started kissing him, I knew it was the aging, fallen parts of him I wanted as much as anything. Probably if you start examining the way the mind works during sex, especially during sex in a long marriage, you’re dead. Sometimes there are moments of our past I fix on. A beach, or sitting on a bench once, a hot day in the Florida Keys, waiting for Steve.
But then, as I lie there afterward, physically satisfied, another part of me begins to speak, always, and I knew that night we wouldn’t have the conversation I’d been plannning, the one about Billy. Instead, I lay there in the quiet, listening to the rhythm of Steve’s breathing change, waiting for him to drop off.
The fact is, I cannot sleep after we make love. Something keeps me up, more alert even than I was at midday, as if a sound coming from somewhere in the house below has made me anxious. I lie and I listen, while Steve sleeps the sleep of the just. I used to resent him for this, but no more. I’ve come to understand that this post-sex anxiety is, in fact, a solitude I’ve come to depend on, even to desire.
What I did within it that night was to get up and stare out the window. The snow had been on the ground for a month, so it looked solid as a moonscape, and I imagined seeing Billy down there in our yard, waiting for me. “Okay,” I’d say, to his gesture of invitation, and it would be, saying that, like a kind of giving in. I imagined going out and putting on my skis and loaning Billy Steve’s skis and the two of us skiing down the bike path near our house. “Did you make love?” Billy would ask. “Uh huh,” I’d say, and wrap my hat closer around my cheeks, like I was keeping a secret. “Was it good?” Billy would ask, and I’d just smile. We’d get to the end of the bike path and Billy would say, “Want to go farther?” Ahead of us would be a big open field, vast and perfectly white. There would be no tracks on it. We’d stand there, just looking. I would understand, for a single, thrilling instant, that I didn’t have to go back to Steve, Steve was an adventure, someon
e I’d slept with, a figure in a long, densely peopled life. Thinking this would make me want Steve again, to feel him inside me. But I would choose to go forward, into the unmarked field, and behind me, I would hear the cold shush of Billy’s skis on the hard snow.
It was that Saturday night, after the Wednesday basketball game, that we had plans to go to dinner with the Kaufmans. Billy had agreed to baby-sit. We were stuck in a particularly dry stretch of winter, and we needed to get out, though I can’t say, when Saturday night arrived, that I very much wanted to. I was lying in bed with Bobby, reading to him, when the Kaufmans arrived. Billy wasn’t here yet. I heard, below, Paul Kaufman’s voice, which is hearty and likes to imitate other voices, likes to make others around him laugh. Hearing it, I felt a little dread, don’t ask me why. “Read,” Bobby insisted, because I’d stopped. I looked at him and said, “I want to stay home with you tonight. I want to stay with you in this bed. Can I do that?” “Okay,” Bobby said, taking his bottle from his mouth just long enough to speak. He’s three, and it’s late for him to still be on the bottle, but he’s my last, so I allow it. “You can’t stay, you’ve got to go out,” Rebecca called from the hallway, where she’d been listening. Rebecca is my social director; she worries about me. I am always finding my name on lists of parent volunteers for projects at her school, though I haven’t signed up for them. “It’s good for you,” she’ll say. Listening to her gently chide me tonight, lying beside Bobby’s pink warm body, I fell back for an instant, enclosed within the machine of family life, seeing it, for a moment, as a thing that operates independent of a single will, and being glad of that.
Finally Steve called for me. I tucked Bobby in and said good night, then lingered in the hallway. In the next room, Sara was at her desk, the halogen lamp on, her nail equipment laid out neatly. “Night,” I said again. “Billy must be downstairs.” “Okay,” she said. She’s really old enough to leave in charge of the others, but Billy doesn’t let us pay him anything, so it’s a convenience, that much more safety. Sara glanced up and took in the way I was dressed. She’s critical of me at this point. “Where are you going?” she asked. “Dinner,” I said. She seemed to be mentally calculating whether this was a situation in which the way I was dressed could conceivably embarrass her, then decided it was not. “Cool,” she said. I knocked on the door of the bathroom into which Rebecca had disappeared, gave my last instructions, then went downstairs.
Billy was drinking a beer in the kitchen. He had on a denim shirt and jeans. He was making himself comfortable. The video he’d brought was on the counter.
Paul and Mickey Kaufman were standing in their coats, waiting for me, and, beyond them, Steve was getting his on. I saw us, two suburban couples getting ready for a dinner out. I saw us as Sara might see us, as I had once seen my parents—even after a dozen years of this, it still felt strange to be in it now, this life where you do little things to make yourself feel not so cold. I picked up Billy’s video. The Asphalt Jungle. I must have made a face.
“Seen it?” he asked.
“No.”
“Fantastic,” he said. Then: “I looked for something for the kids, but nothing appealed.”
This was just as well. Billy’s idea of “something for the kids” rarely works. He’s made them sit through Koyaanisqatsi, Barry Lyndon, Life of Brian. Now they ask him please not to bring anything, to let them watch TV instead.
We left. In our coats, making our way across the icy driveway, I kept thinking of Sara looking out the window at us, and also, of an alpaca coat my mother used to wear in the fifties, when she and my father went out on their rare dates. We were being careful on the ice.
As we drove to the restaurant, as we waited the hour it takes around here to get a table at any place decent, as we ordered our veal forestière and our red snapper, I was a step beyond the conversation. I don’t remember what we talked about—whatever it was, our tone would have been light, chatty, and if we sounded the depths at all, we would have done so in a manner appropriate to the cream-colored walls and tasteful lighting of the restaurant; appropriate, too, to the solidity of our lives. If we sounded the depths at all, it would hardly have mattered, because the agreement we’d made, the agreement all the couples in the restaurant had made, would always hold us in its grip, keep us afloat. So we ate and laughed a little, and once Steve said, “Ellen, are you with us?” and I put on a little show of energy and verve to convince them that I was. But in fact I was thinking of Billy, back at the house watching The Asphalt Jungle, and the feeling I couldn’t quite shake was that something in that activity was more desirable than this.
I was hoping, as we drove home, that I could watch at least the end of the movie, that it wouldn’t be too late for that. In the car, I stared at couples on the sidewalk, men and women slipping on the ice and holding on to one another. It made me think of fin de siècle Vienna, as it was described in the book I was reading, and how couples had once walked on the sidewalks of Vienna, and the men had been thinking about their mistresses and how soon they could get to them, while the women kept their hands warm in extravagant muffs and knew, or didn’t know, about their husbands. And there had been hussars, regiments of hussars in beautiful uniforms on the streets, and the women had looked at them. But now all of them, husbands, wives, hussars, they all were dead. A whole society had died. An entire society in which men, and less frequently, women, had pulled hard at the stranglehold of the beautiful, highly stylized world they’d made, and that chafing, that pulling away had formed the society as much as the balls and the going to work and the formal greetings of men and women on the street had. It seemed to me then one of the sadnesses of the society in which I was living that there wasn’t enough pulling away, that people, myself included, made a great show of having all the answers, and all that the answers amounted to was a kind of formal domesticity. As if all the great surges and engulfments of the centuries came down to dinners like this, in cautious restaurants whose menus alluded, always, to other worlds.
I was lucky. When we got home, the movie was still playing, and Billy stopped it. But the Kaufmans wanted to stay. They took off their coats.
“The children were okay?” I asked.
“Hardly a peep,” Billy said, but I could tell he was elsewhere, he’d had to be reminded there were children in the house with him, though he’d been the single filter between them and potential annihilation.
The Kaufmans said yes, they would like me to put on a pot of decaf, so we sat around the table and talked some more, and as I glanced at Billy’s face, I could tell he was no more in the conversation than I was. I kept trying to catch his eye to let him know I was with him, but it didn’t work. My fear, I guess, was that he would leave, and when I thought this, a physical sensation inside me, one I couldn’t quite place—no, not desire, nothing that obvious—insisted that he stay.
Finally the Kaufmans left. I was never so grateful to see Steve yawn. I told him I’d wash up, but he insisted on helping. Billy had gone into the living room to lie down. “Mind if I watch the end of the movie?” he asked. There was no VCR in the professor’s house. “Wait for me, okay?” I said, and I could tell Steve heard that, his face made a little reactive grimace, and when we were finished washing the coffee cups, he put his arms around me and said, “Sure you don’t want to come up?”
“I thought you were sleepy,” I said, trying to smile and make him think it was all really appealing, except … well, except what? I’d rather watch an old movie with Billy? Steve has no jealousy in him. He trusts me, or he values himself, or maybe there’s no difference between the two. I had to be careful here, though, or he’d begin adding things up. My detachment in the restaurant, then the resistance to sex. He chose to let it go. In a little while I was sitting on the couch, next to a prone Billy, listening to Steve upstairs getting ready for bed.
Billy had his eyes closed.
“It’s nearly the end,” he said. Then he sat up and leaned forward to push the VCR’s ON button. “Sterli
ng Hayden’s about to die, and then all that’s left is for them to get Sam Jaffe. But that’s a great scene, an amazing scene.”
I watched, but I didn’t see. That is, the beauty of a film like this, which Billy seemed to revel in—his eyes, as he stared at the screen, seemed recessed, as if the movie were not being shown in this room but in a private theater of Billy’s imagining—well, this beauty was lost on me. I am not an aesthete, things have to be pointed out to me. I watched, and I wondered, what was it about this that had seemed so enticing back in the car?
Then it was over and Billy pressed the REWIND button. He sat back on the couch and waited for it to finish. Once, he glanced at me and seemed to look me over, searching for something. The only sound in the room was the whirring of the video going backward.
“What is it, Ellen?” he asked.
I had no answer for him, just the odd hope that something might follow this, that he wouldn’t simply take the video and go.
As soon as it stopped, it looked like that was what he was going to do. Then he stood there, watching me, and I could see a part of his face move, and for a moment he seemed genuinely interested.
“Is there something you’re trying to say to me, Ellen?”
His voice—perhaps he couldn’t help it—had a trace of irony in it, as if whatever I had to say would be, on some Billy-level, fan to hear, amusing for him.
“No.” I heard my own voice, a little faint, coming there out of the dark, where I sat. I took in Billy’s form and I thought, Hell, maybe I am fooling myself, maybe it’s his body I want after all. It seemed odd, anyway, that if I were to go upstairs now, and undress, there was a man who would want me without question, whereas here, if I were to do the same thing, I could only imagine Billy turning away, embarrassed for me. That sex couldn’t happen was part of what made things between us so complicated.
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