Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  Pay the Piper

  A Novel

  Joan Williams

  FOR LESLIE WELLS AND E. F.

  I always liked this bathroom wallpaper, though I never expected to lie here staring up at it. The background color is beige, soft, warm, caramelcolored; before, the color meant serenity to me. There is a somewhat indistinguishable design of pale tangerine and blue that reminds me of morning glories; perhaps this comes to mind because those flowers make me remember summertime and the South when I was young. My childhood, however, never seemed innocent.

  The hour is late. There is enough light from the bedroom beyond and from a streetlight on the suburban road to allow me to see Hal’s face clearly, as he could see mine if he looked at it. He keeps staring past me at nothing, I suppose, because there is only the darker corner of the room beyond the toilet, where he holds me.

  The wallpaper and the rug of a slightly darker beige I chose with care; I’ve been proud of the result. Being of a literary nature, I have not spent much time thinking about decorating houses. My mother used to say with disdain that all I did was keep my nose in a book. As far as she is concerned, this never paid off, though I have written three novels.

  I wonder if he is thinking anything. I don’t believe he is deciding whether or not to kill me.

  The pressure of his hands around my throat, his thumbs to my windpipe, has neither increased nor lessened in the time he has held me on the floor with the back of my neck in the niche of the toilet where the seat divides; the porcelain grows so hard.

  “Laurel,” he said, coming into the bedroom. My heart stood still: only the one word, my name Laurel.

  I had locked the back door, not knowing he had a key. Six years we have lived in this house, yet I did not know there was a back door key. Always, I have been passive and not demanding enough. My not having a key was no oversight. It was Hal’s animal-like nature to love secretiveness. He skulks about, like a fox or hound in a chicken yard. Married three times, Hal has not yet learned to be head of a household or that the act of cohabitation is supposed to mean sharing.

  I bolted other doors. Our habit was to lock the garage, which opened on an electric buzzer. From the garage we entered the house, so I had never thought about a key till the moment I heard him fit the lock and then heard his steps across the kitchen floor, and his presence coming up the carpeted stairs. Where was I to go?

  “Laurel,” he said, coming into the room.

  “Hal,” I said. “Don’t.”

  Why did I not jump onto the big bed and scramble across? I suppose because I thought he could beat me to the door. I should have tried that escape route, though. Perhaps foolishly, as I had thought for years, I thought Hal would come to his senses. I had begun to shiver.

  I knew in the beginning something was attractive to me about his making me terrified, something uncivilized out of my past for which I longed again: something bound up with fright in childhood and with a sensuality I had not understood. Having wanted to escape mine, maybe in the end we all do want to marry our fathers. But with Hal by now I’ve had all the blows to my head and face I can stand.

  After saying “Laurel,” he walked me backward into the bathroom and shoved me down. Now I lie with my back aching and the thought that at any minute he may flip me forward and put my face into the water as he threatened. “Laurel, I’m going to drown you in the toilet. It’s what you deserve.”

  I am powerless. There will be a brief last minute when I will not want to die while I picture the degrading manner of my death. How hard to believe this is me, here, and that Hal is my husband. When I once had everything, how have I let this come to be my life? What mysterious thing haunted me from the past, the South, that forced me to go back? Imagine that a shot fired nearly two thousand miles from where I lived, about which I knew nothing at the time, has come to wreck my life.

  I’m afraid to plead. One word might topple him over the edge of sanity to a place where he has been before. If I say, “Darling, this isn’t you. Let’s go to bed,” the words may enrage him more because he’ll know the man here is him; or if I threaten, “You’ll go to prison for the rest of your life this time,” he may be only angrier.

  Time passes so slowly. I have been lying here a long while. I feel I’m in a frame from a movie. Always I will be here. Sometimes I say, “Hal.”

  Then he says again, “Laurel,” mocking and menacing. “Laurel.”

  Beyond him I can see family pictures on the wall. Black and white, they are partially lit from the streetlight and from the moon and the bedroom. I see my son, Rick, with an old black man on Hal’s plantation, skinning a rabbit. I picture my son with agony and longing. The photograph was taken when he was fourteen; hard to believe ten years have passed. Hal, if you are going to kill me, let me apologize to my son first for bringing you into his life.

  I wonder if my son will mourn me. In the half-light, I see how much Rick looks like his dad. If only I could talk to William again, this time we might say what we think. I see my mother, trying to smile head-on at the camera, and realize what a fearful lady she really is. Who’ll see about her growing old, since Rick deserves to be free? How much grief I’ve caused the only people I had really to love.

  I see pictures of Hal’s children by his other wives. “Hal, your children can’t stand—”

  His pressure tightens on my Adam’s apple, and I’m not so dumb as to keep running my mouth, as he would call it.

  Don’t I feel attraction still? I wonder why Hal does not honor honor. It’s strange that I have to suffer for his inability to pay back a society to which he doesn’t even consider he owes anything.

  All night I was depressed, finding myself at a roadhouse where no one I used to know would go. I have been drowning already a long time before tonight.

  Hal is wearing his kilt and the cropped black jacket that goes with it for formal wear. His knees seem so pale. He lost his bonny cap when I whacked him across the face in the garage, and my bracelet caught his face. He was cut above one eye and across the bridge of his nose. All this while blood has been pouring and is even on the walls. I cannot understand how there can be so much blood. Sticking from one of his long socks is a skean dhu—a dagger—as true Scots wore them. Lying still so long, I’ve been thinking about grabbing this little knife and stabbing him, knowing no jury would convict me. But I’m afraid, in grabbing, I’ll miss and that, kneeling over me already, he will take it and stab me instead. Finally my rational sense convinces me the risk is too great. I go on waiting for the moment when the balance may tip and Hal lose his reasoning.

  I go on staring at his small face, thinking how the predicament I’m in is not funny. Because Hal has killed one person, and there is every reason to believe that in his drunkenness my husband may kill me too.

  1

  She felt strange having hidden something in the house. She did not even know why she hid the letter, a perfectly innocuous one from someone she did not know. But that was the whole point, Laurel thought; she had the sensation the man was going to become important to her. Yesterday when she read the letter for the first time, a voice announced to her quite calmly, You’re going to marry Hal MacDonald.

  That thought made the idea of leaving William—one she had toyed with so long—so much easier, because having something happen that seemed fated, having the letter arrive just now and the possibility arise of meeting someone else, seemed to be what the gods intended—that she leave William and marry Hal. Already she felt that was what she was meant to do, to live back in the region where she was born and to belong to a man close to the soil, and she gazed out at the cold New England spring from her suburban window, thinking how this landscape had never become part of her. Laurel laughed to think she had been around what seemed a whole w
orld, only to return, perhaps, where she had started.

  “What’s up?” said Rick, coming in, the product of her and William’s disparate backgrounds. She turned guiltily. He seemed a young seal, his hair slick and shining from his shower, still wet, and she found herself giving advice that would bore him: “Don’t go out in this weather with your head wet.” Hearing her mother’s caution, which once irritated her, Laurel thought how unintentionally you relived your past. “You’ll catch cold,” she said.

  “Yeah. Yeah.” He dabbed at his head with a paper napkin to satisfy her.

  His question had meant, what was she doing with all the fancy dishes out, and she told him, “My book group’s coming.”

  “Your bourbon and lettuce leaf club.”

  He grinned impishly, and so perfect was his mimicry that Laurel was astonished by his perspicuity at thirteen and that he was her own. “Gran’s certainly the pot calling the kettle—”

  “Mom. I don’t want to hear about all that past time. Gran drinking is not the grandmother I’ve ever known.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  She dished up oatmeal and avoided his face, which the moment he spoke had been clouded. How could she stand here on this April morning, in her large kitchen, in a house in a good neighborhood, and think of breaking up this household and causing this boy so much unhappiness? She had felt queasy waking up and held her breath against the oatmeal’s smell while carrying the bowl to Rick. It was sad she could know so positively she was not pregnant. When had she last slept with anybody? That, of course, was her main reason for wanting to leave William—his refusal to have sex; he had gotten it elsewhere until recently, when after a night of confessing transgressions they promised to have no more affairs and to start over with a clean slate. She had tried much harder since then, but when she made a move toward him in bed, he remained far over on his side and with his back toward her. Maybe it was going to take a while to learn a new pattern. She had given up Edward without any effort, except that she really liked him and he helped her enormously with her writing, but nothing was ever going to become of the affair beyond a few afternoons at the New Weston when he came into the city from Princeton.

  “Thanks,” Rick had said.

  “What else am I here for but to wait on men?” Looking at the floor, she added, “And dogs,” speaking to the two sitting there and watching for food so hopefully.

  “I hope we’re not becoming a typical slovenly housewife though, Laurel,” Rick said, deepening his voice and drawing down his chin into a face of disapproval.

  She laughed and touched the neck of her old robe, drawing it more closely together, though there was not much cleavage to show, sadly. “Listen, brat. A lot of women not only don’t get dressed first thing in the morning, they don’t get up and fix breakfast, much less real, long-cooking oatmeal.”

  “I know it. A lot of my friends and their dads eat Cheerios. How come they let their wives get away with that stuff?”

  She said in her subdued way, “I suppose other women know how to rule the roost better than I. I’m a patsy. A sucker. And I like being dominated to death.” She put one hand atop his head, smiling. “Oh, mutt. Pretty soon we’ll be in Mississippi again.”

  “Yay. I can’t wait.”

  “I feel I owe Dad getting up. He works his tail off to make us a living,” she said.

  “Did Gran always get up?”

  “Yes,” Laurel said, which was not a lie: there was only one different quality to her doing it, which Rick need not know. She thought particularly of those times her father set out, a traveling salesman, into dawn, with his breakfast churning in his stomach. She could remember her sense of guilt about being in bed herself, and could see him again in his wool shirt, cord breeches, and high-laced boots and hear his harsh crying across the hallway separating the bedrooms where her parents slept—Kate, are you going to get up and fix my breakfast?—and even so young, she had understood her mother’s deliberate delaying to antagonize him, until fear drove her up to slam-bang in the kitchen. His car would roar off with a sound equal to his fury and diminish down city blocks, while she lay buried in her pillow believing she heard it on and on. She was always trying to decide which of them was wrong, with a loneliness she remembered too well.

  “Mom, I’m not really hungry. When Dad’s not here, I wouldn’t mind having cold cereal.”

  “OK. Eat what you can. I wish you’d told me.”

  “He’s coming back tonight?”

  “Yup.”

  Rick glanced at a paper magnetized to the refrigerator. “I haven’t done the list of things he left for me.”

  Her gaze went there too. “I haven’t done all of mine either. But I swept the basement.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  “I was down there doing laundry, so why not. Just don’t tell.”

  “Sorry, Mom,” he said, setting his bowl on the floor and apologizing about her wasted time cooking—William would have taught him that, and what would she have become if she hadn’t known William?

  The older dog, Buff, licked daintily, while a recent acquisition, a bloodhound named Jubal, sat back with reddened eyes waiting his turn. Buff, the matriarch, had let him know this was her territory long before he ever showed up here. Good for you, Buff, Laurel told her silently. “Jubal, you smell terrible.”

  “The bus!” Rick cried. His chair’s legs scraped backward, and the alerted dogs rushed for the door. In the distance air brakes soughed and groaned, though otherwise in the upper-class neighborhood there was no noise for miles, only silence. The yellow school bus had readied itself to climb a hill down the road, and Rick knew how many minutes before it would pass apple trees and arrive almost at his front door. He rushed upstairs to brush his teeth.

  Laurel had his jacket, books, and homework, neatly laid out the night before, and handed them over after he clobbered downstairs.

  “Thanks.”

  “That’s what mothers are for,” she said.

  “There’s a pickup ball game this afternoon.”

  “You’ve got to go.” Leaning into a cotton picker’s basket she’d brought back from Mississippi one summer, she extracted his catcher’s mitt.

  “I won’t get everything on the list done.”

  Not wishing to be disloyal to William, but thinking there were limits to things, she said, “We’ll just have to do our best.”

  He reached out and lightly flicked her on the arm. “Touch last!” he cried, and bounded into the driveway, laughing back. She shooed him off with a wave that recognized his child’s game from the past, when she and William were going out, and Rick dashed about the car windows to see who could touch each other last. As if he never wanted to part, Laurel thought suddenly, near tears. From behind the door’s glass panes, she watched till Rick’s light jacket bobbed aboard the bus and then, obedient to their day’s ritual, Jubal and Buff returned home, having accompanied him.

  She looked at the refrigerator and clicked off mentally what she’d accomplished since William left on his business trip to Washington. She’d taken her new skirt to be shortened to the length he’d suggested, and she’d called the fuel company about a leak in the basement and bought an extension cord. But she had not followed his regimen for working out. He had posted how many sit-ups to do daily, keeping her toes attached to something, and a schedule with barbells, their weights increasingly difficult as time went by. She would tell him, for once, she was not going to do what he said; and that’s that, she added to herself in her mother’s definitive phrase. Jogging was enough for her.

  You, William once said, did all right for a little girl from Delton. Marrying into his prestigious family, he had meant, more or less kindly. She certainly agreed, after the background she came from. She carried about her own epithet: the little girl from Tennessee. Yet she had stacked up a few Brownie points before meeting him and was neither a country tack nor stupid. She’d published two short stories in reputable literary quarterlies; this fact kept Wil
liam’s patrician, stalwart, and productive Bostonian female relatives from relegating her to the dust pile where they cast most Southern women, among the flirty, flighty, and mundane.

  She considered her middle-class Southern background, where materialism was success. If only she’d had the nerve, at some point, to tell William’s relatives she could at least cook. They pridefully announced they could not boil water for tea. There was fine art on the walls of William’s relatives’ houses, and fine furniture in them, but still their houses had a sparer, plainer, and more austere look than comparable Southern houses she had known. When his relatives’ rugs and upholstering wore out, these things were often left that way, as if from respect; books sat on shelves, with tattered jackets, because someone was always pulling them out to read them. In Delton, one of her friends had her Book-of-the-Month Club books covered in forest-green felt to match the color of her slipcovers; another old friend as he grew successful bought the whole of the Modern Library, though as she gazed at his lined wall, he confessed the only novel he’d read since college was “The Man in the Long Gray Underwear.” “Gray Flannel Suit”? she timidly suggested. William’s mother and the aunt who helped raise him wore conservative clothes whose hemlines stayed mid-calf no matter what fashion predicted. When Aunt Grace once looked surprised, saying, “You don’t speak French?” Laurel replied, “La plume de ma tante,” and cringed. For years, she longed for some snappy or devastating reply, but none had yet come. William, when they married, pointed out the difference between baking powder and baking soda, because, coming from the South, she not only had never cooked but had never washed out a pair of underpants for herself until she went to college.

  Jubal and Buff could not understand this morning why there were no egg, toast, or bacon scraps. Laurel opened the dishwasher to put in Rick’s dish, seeing there dishes from William’s last meal, and thought how she had said, “I don’t mind cooking your breakfast every morning, but it seems silly since you throw it up.”