Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  When he knelt her robe brushed softly across one of his boots. They were both acutely aware of each other. Quickly she moved to the staircase. But had he lifted his bent head, his face would have met her crotch. Her pubic hair tingled. He busied himself inspecting the leak and announced they needed fiberglassing. Were they on a maintenance plan? She had no idea and bit back saying she’d phone her husband, but he was out of town. Earl said he would phone the main office in Bridgeport and followed her back to the kitchen.

  He hung up, stuck a pencil into his pocket, and looked directly at her. Laurel moved toward the door, yanking and tugging at Jubal’s collar as if he were as dangerous as a tiger. He’d do the work in a few days, Earl said, and don’t worry in the meantime. “Thanks a lot,” she said, and watched him back from the driveway with his truck ringing its shrill warning to the unwary. If she had wanted a quickie, what move should she have made? Laurel had no idea.

  The tap water ran warm. Ought she to boil water for the towel? On the fingers of one hand, she could count things her mother had mentioned to fit her daughter for life: eggs stayed fresher in their own carton in the refrigerator; glasses that held milk washed out more easily if you ran cold water in them as soon as they were empty; oranges squeezed better if you rolled them under your hand; a finger down the throat for too much alcohol. By herself, she had assimilated her mother’s method of cooking leg of lamb. “That’s all, folks,” she told her canine audience, who said nothing. When the phone rang, the two dogs looked at her questioningly, and she said, “You know who.”

  “Did your mold come out all right?”

  “I didn’t know how hot’s too hot.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Another smoke ring must have appeared; her mother puffed against the speaker. She would have pulled her dainty lady’s chair close to the phone, her television turned to a soft pitch, her cigarettes and lighter handily nearby. Laurel said, “Mother, I’ve got to go. They’ll be here soon, and I’m not dressed.”

  “Go on. I’m not stopping you.” She hung up.

  How did she always leave herself open to this? Laurel thought. Her telephone pad caught her eye. The message scrawled across a page looked as if some half-literate had written it. Only now the memory came back of a man phoning William. She had stood here last night trying to keep her voice on an even keel and trying to understand his words, though he seemed at the end of a long yellow funnel. She had been sober enough to realize she was crocked, and wondered if he could tell. She wrote the message over, hoping his telephone number was right. What scared her, though, was to think the whole incident had erased itself from her memory.

  Sunday nights after Rick was asleep it was her habit to grow maudlin before TV, drinking Scotch and watching the Judy Garland show. She liked growing weepy and shedding tears. Judy, aging, was still her idol, the way she had been when Laurel was growing up star-struck in Tennessee and herself unable to carry a tune. Over the years, she and Rick always watched any rerun of The Wizard of Oz, and Laurel cried when Dorothy clicked her red heels and said twice, “There’s no place like home.” After a while Rick began to wait for that moment, already turning to watch her, laughing at her as she laughed at herself, but always a little puzzled as to what caused those tears to course down his mother’s cheeks. She knew she thought of the South as a home she had left. But wasn’t there something else too?

  This year Rick asked, “Am I too old to watch this show?” She knew he meant watch it with his mother, so she cried, “Of course not! It’s a classic.”

  “OK, munchkin, keep cool,” he had said.

  In the dining room she squinted against sunlight bounding off old snow and had entered thinking her table was set. She knew she had been in here last night dancing and singing around the table to her heart’s content, “I’m a one-man wo-man looking for the man that got a-way,” and stomping her feet also, in Judy’s manner. Not once would she have been on key.

  She saw now there was no water in the centerpiece, and the flowers drooped shamed heads. There were no napkins, teaspoons, or water glasses in sight. What happened to the remainder of last evening? she wondered in quick misery.

  The phone rang, but she could not believe the caller would be her mother.

  An efficient-sounding woman on the other end said she was somebody’s secretary, and this somebody was trying to reach William.

  “I’m sorry,” Laurel said. “He’s in Washington. You can reach him at the Mayflower.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation before the woman gave a short, throaty laugh. “I’m in Washington,” she said. “Mr. Perry’s been working in our office. I called the Mayflower. He checked out yesterday.”

  “Then I have no idea where he is.”

  Always she would remember that laugh. It had been all-encompassing and all-knowing, as though the woman had seen and heard everything and knew it all. Laurel knew what she saw: the dumb little broad in the suburbs with the station wagon, and the bright busy executive husband out conquering the world.

  2

  If only you weren’t so scatterbrained! The judgmental voice in her head spoke, and she was ready for it. She was lost, but maybe she did not really want to find the address. She turned along silent winding roads with stone walls, thinking how odd that she knew so little about Soundport, Connecticut, when she had lived here nearly ten years. Being lost in the town, she reacted in a way she knew to be typical by blaming her current difficulties on the whole of the Northeast. You couldn’t wait to get away from home. Now you’ve got to run back there every summer. Whenever her mother spoke like that in person, her eyes seemed as viscous as the insides of smashed green grapes. Just then, on what seemed an alien street, where forsythia only budded, Laurel had an insight: I never meant to leave home forever.

  For years after college she moved back and forth between East and South like a piece on a Monopoly board. Then she’d met William and married. She had been grateful, for by the standards of Delton she was already an old maid. She got down on her knees in her one-room hole-in-the-wall apartment in Greenwich Village and thanked God for William’s proposal—not knowing he would soon say he’d changed his mind. She was not certain how they happened to keep dating, though she was not the kind of person to let go first. Now it seemed ridiculous that she had stopped by a dime store to buy a wedding band before seeing a gynecologist who had never heard of her. She had been ecstatic about getting married, though terrified about carrying off a seven-month baby under the collective eyes of Delton, eyes she felt followed her everywhere. One night in their apartment, William mentioned having paid for an abortion before he knew Laurel, when he was uncertain the baby had been his. Sitting up, she said flatly, “You married me because I was pregnant.” She expected him to deny the statement.

  “I couldn’t keep going around New York knocking up girls and getting abortions,” he said.

  She told herself William did not marry her only for that reason, even if he thought so. Remembering her loneliness back then, she knew if William had disappeared there was no one with whom she could have shared her pregnancy. Might she have killed herself? Nevertheless, what William had said hurt her feelings and the hurt lasted. She was hurt now. She had mentioned the call from Washington, and William said, “That woman’s crazy. Of course I was still there,” and she let pass the fact that she did not believe him.

  Rounding a corner, she stared in surprise at the panorama of Long Island Sound spread out before her; there were wrinkles of sunlight on the water, and a rocky jetty and willowy grass. People stood on the beach bundled up to paint this landscape which refused to belong to her; in her mind’s eye she focused on opaque muddy pools with inquisitive cows huddled nearby and imagined the smell of summer-dried pasture grass: TK, Laurel thought in William’s company’s editorial jargon; more to come, that meant, when set into incomplete copy. Her life was different from the lives of her girlfriends in Delton, who did not sit around their bridge tables discussing writin
g and editing. She could envy their talk about black maids who took care of their children, cleaned their houses, and were their best friends. She thought her life more interesting than if she’d been a Delton matron. Back in that city there was no family of the caliber of William’s, despite the upper-crust society to which Hal MacDonald belonged. The South’s old class and caste system bothered her still.

  Laurel thought that the reason she kept going back south was that she was trying to reshape the past. For instance, her parents could never have gotten into the Delton Country Club. She was long past that kind of thing now as William’s wife, and yet in Delton people did not matter unless they belonged there. Married to someone like Hal, she could have made it. But in those days someone like him seemed beyond the pale.…

  Stop biting your fingernails! Laurel put her hand back on the steering wheel. Having been lost so long, she was going to be late. Maybe she should not go at all. The seedy office she was looking for would not be in this rich neighborhood near the Sound, not that anything in Soundport was very seedy, God forbid. She missed tacky things in the South, old and dilapidated things, clay hills and bar-b-que stands with smoky smells and poor people, blacks and whites.

  In Soundport there was one black man, a Ph.D. who taught Chaucer at Columbia. In the dashiki he lately had begun to wear, and talking about “helping my people,” he sat recently at her candlelit dining room table, and she had longed for people in Delton to know she had a black man to dinner. These days, he proudly got off the train at 125th Street to head toward Columbia. She took Rick south so he’d know black people, and they moved to liberal Soundport so he’d grow up with Jews and Catholics. Then, on his first day of school ever, he came home miserable because his desk was next to that of a Chinese.

  They had avoided moving to what William called the apartheid towns, New Canaan, Darien, Greenwich, not wanting Rick to grow up where prejudice was so obvious; thinking they’d be bored, too, by husbands in lime-green golfing slacks and wives in Papagallos, wraparound skirts, and round-collared blouses.

  Catholics, she learned, moved to Soundport for the same reason Jews did; she and William realized there was suspicion about them in those other towns—where they’d gone comparison shopping while house hunting. They passed the Anglo-Saxon test obviously but realtors always casually inquired, “Are you interested in the parochial school?” She often wondered if Catholics were shown houses in some ghetto she and William never saw.

  Once in the suburbs, what man wouldn’t fall into the habit of infidelity, able to spend the night fifty miles from home in a hotel room paid for by his company. On late evenings, she had to be agreeable about William’s excuses because always they were partly valid. William did not drink midday but had to attend three-martini lunches. Afterward, editors were lax about editing, writers were slow with copy, and everyone’s schedule was affected. She thought it amazing the company’s magazines got to the stands on time or at all. Some nights William had to wait for a story from a stringer in some far-flung place. Naturally, it would be ridiculous to take a midnight train home and get up to catch the 8:02 back to the city. She might be stupid to suppose William alone those nights. Commuting made affairs too damn easy, for men. In the suburbs, women were limited. Men around in the daytime were not so interesting, and you were home with the kids. She was often glad William was not coming home, and she could spend less time in the kitchen. She could drink as much Scotch as she liked. On regular evenings, she had Rick’s dinner ready at six, and she and William might eat an hour after he came home, by eight thirty, after the one predinner drink he allowed himself. She was never able to start the dishwasher before 10 P.M., when William was already in bed. She came upstairs carrying a nightcap of brandy and soda until the night William said, “I’m tired of listening to that ice go tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, upstairs every night.”

  On the night of their mutual confessions, William mentioned his longtime girlfriend was Jewish. He might have married her, he said, only his family would never have approved. All the years they lived together and William was having affairs she never suspected, till the night he told her about them, had he been thinking about divorce? Maybe he had exactly the idea he told her several of his friends at work had in mind. These men were silently waiting till their last child went to college and then planned on leaving the empty nest emptier.

  She saw them again that night, lying companionably across their bed, side by side on their stomachs, waving their legs in the air like teenagers confiding secrets. The first night he spent with this younger woman, he said her mother phoned the hotel room thirteen times about her daughter being there with a married man. William looked so proud, she was irked. She considered herself long past enjoying being in a situation so childish.

  That night William said something that made other things click into place. She sat up, saying, “Is she the girl who came to watch me have my picture taken for Events when they were going to review my book?”

  “Yeah. She wanted to get a gander at you. I didn’t know she was going to do that.”

  “Well, weren’t you furious?”

  “I was flattered she cared so much.”

  “Flattered! I think it showed incredible nerve,” she had said.

  She thought the incident gave even a tawdry touch to her book. She had suspected nothing when the photographer said a researcher on the magazine liked Rainbow’s End so much she wanted to meet Laurel. She smiled when the girl came in and said, “Hello.” The girl never replied and walked out in the middle of the sitting.

  “She didn’t like you for sour apples,” William said, stretched out across their bed.

  “William,” she had said, “do you think your girlfriend’s going to tell you how great your wife is?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I know not.”

  He had referred to the girl as his mistress, a term Laurel hated. It had an old-fashioned formality that suited William. To her it implied being kept, which made her shudder. How did William reconcile that side of his life with his avid presentation of himself in the suburbs as a Little League coach, a Cub Scout den father, a member of the PTA and organizer of the kids’ ball teams marching in the Memorial Day parade?

  She could not keep from asking, “Did she like my book?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’d better have,” she muttered. She saw that girl still, so thin she moved loosely in a black sheath.

  William said he had stopped keeping the affair a secret; the photographer would have known why the girl wanted to meet her. She hated other people knowing something going on behind her back. Strangely, she had not been jealous. She had no visions of butts in the air or arms and legs entwined. She did not express to William sorrow over his dalliances and all the years she had been fooled, but let Edward wipe the slate clean.

  She supposed there was no way to go back to Edward. His masculine pride was hurt when she broke off, at William’s request. To drop Edward a cheery note suggesting lunch the next time he was in town from Princeton would be too obvious. Lunch was a euphemism for an affair, and understood as that in a case like hers.

  She wondered if she was too low key to feel jealousy. William and his mother often tired her with their Yankee spirits and Yankee energy. She thought the briskness of their lives matched weather they had always known: winter snows and sea spray on their faces in the summers. When Mrs. Perry visited, she suggested Frisbee, a game Laurel thought them too old to be playing. To William and his mother, games were fun only if you made up rules more difficult than the original ones. She saw herself rooted to one spot, as Mrs. Perry and William leaped midair, shouting out new rules as they went. Mrs. Perry had said, “Laurel, you only stand about. Have you no competitive sense?” She remembered feeling tongue-tied and ashamed.

  Now, at last, she saw something recognizable in Soundport, a school where they watched Rick play basketball one Saturday morning. He scored no points and missed the basket at the game’s most crucial moment and came
off the court tight-lipped.

  While William pushed Rick into sports, he knew when to back off. “Old man, basketball’s not your forte.” He clapped Rick on the back. “So what!” William laughed so hard, Rick could laugh at himself. She was always proud of William as a father and the way he instructed their son. When Rick was still very young, William had knelt down, saying, “Now when you are introduced, you put out your hand to shake and look the other man straight in the eye.” She tried to imagine having parents who used words like “forte” to her, or used them at all.

  Now that William had the same weekend off as Rick, the two of them shared a lot of strictly male activities. Yet she would not complain. Not after those ten years William worked in New York on Saturdays and Sundays and was home two days midweek, the dire editorial weekend. It was death on marriages and on women home those long two days with children. William always spent Sunday nights in town because of late closers. Ultimately, William felt shortchanged about not seeing Rick on his weekends and changed jobs within the company. It was then he began to throw up his eggs every morning.

  She went back to thinking how little advice she’d received in her life. One time her mother’s arrived after the fact. When she was back in Delton to be married, her mother said, “Here’s a little present” and handed her a white satin-covered douche bag. If only, Laurel thought, she’d had the presence to say, “What’s that, Mother?” Or if only she had had the courage to tell her, “It’s too late. I’ve got one in the oven.”

  In Delton to get married, William talked about how much people drank. She had had thoughts about men who didn’t drink in the crazy kind of manner they drank in the South; William would be better off, and their sex life might improve, if he could let his hair down. For her, alcohol was sexually stimulating. When they married she had to cut down her consumption. She was less free, though glad he kept her in check. Once, in college, William got drunk and came to himself digging a hole. He feared losing control again, coming to from a blackness to find himself doing something for which he had no explanation. Some clue to William lay in his behavior, as he suspected, though she’d kindly said, “Maybe you were digging a hole to China.” Actually she considered the action odd.