“You have to be careful out here,” Jeremy told Caro officiously. “These horses can be dangerous.” She could see this made him proud. “That’s why Edward wears the eye patch: he got into the middle of a fight between two horses.”
“It wasn’t their fault,” Edward declared at once, protective. “He was trying to kick another horse, not me. Two stallions had been put in the same pasture by mistake. It never should have happened. It wasn’t their fault.” Frowning, he walked unevenly across the dry turf, pulling his built-up shoe along with a tiny hitch in each step.
There seemed little risk of danger now. The horses barely moved, raising their heads calmly, still chewing, to look as the people approached, dropping them again peacefully to the grass.
“There’s my favorite, Edward,” Teresa said. She was on tiptoe again, teetering across the bumpy grass on her glittering sneakers. Holding her hand out, she stepped up to a small bay mare with deep brown eyes and a short dished face.
“Don’t put your hand out to her head,” Edward snapped. “That’s what the vet does. Don’t go to her. Let her come to you.”
Teresa stopped at once, putting her neon feet together, her hands clasped behind her back. She leaned forward, daring the mare with her chin. The mare blew out a gentle, wary breath from her silky nostrils, flaring them widely. She stretched her curving neck toward Teresa. The two profiles faced each other, the woman with her flat white hair and raised chin, her steeply sloping bosom; the mare’s short pricked ears, her dark, liquid eyes, the fluid arching line of her neck, her small, inquiring muzzle.
“That’s the prettiest mare on the place,” Edward said.
He spoke so low that Caro had to lean toward him to hear. She thought she’d misunderstood him.
As Edward watched the two bending intently toward each other, another mare came up, moving her body confidently against him from the side. He turned and put his arms around her neck. He spoke casually, as though what he said were not astonishing.
“You’re my lovely one,” he said to the horse, “aren’t you. You’re my lovely one.”
The mare stood still and calm within the circle of his arms, blinking, peacefully swishing her muddy tail, listening to his murmuring. She was used to this, it was how she knew Edward.
Here, Caro saw, was the object of Edward’s passion, here was the other side of his rancorous self. Here was where Edward allowed himself tenderness. All the horses in this wide valley, the peaceful foals, blinking in the spring sunlight, the slowly grazing mares, the yearlings loose among the lilacs, the wary chow beneath the table: all of them were held in the wide unlikely glow of Edward’s love. It was animals he honored and cherished, people he despised.
The abrupt shift from rage to gentleness, the startling discrepancy, and the distance between the extremes reminded Caro of her research. Edward himself was like the early Church, with its two paradoxical, contradictory sides, one gentle and compassionate, one raging and malevolent.
For this moment, all was peaceful. Jeremy stood with his hands in his back pockets, gazing out at the horses, waiting for a cue. Teresa faced her muddy mare, each leaning closer, now nearly nose to nose. Edward stood with his arms looped around the quiet horse’s neck.
Without warning, Caro felt Eloise’s arm slide around her shoulders, drawing her close. The touch on her body was intimate and proprietary; Caro flinched. She felt as though she were being claimed, as though Eloise were making a public declaration.
Before she could move, Edward released his mare and turned. His good eye fell on the two women, their bodies linked.
“What are you doing?” he asked them, furious at once. Rage rose up in him like a geyser, it came foaming out in spates. The mare jerked her head in alarm, and moved protectively toward her foal. Edward ignored the horse, he was his other self now. “What are you, perverts?” He spat the word at Eloise and Caro. “What are you doing here? Who are you? I don’t even know who you are.”
Teresa stood upright, pulling back from her mare.
“Edward,” she said pacifically, “you know who they are. That’s Eloise.”
“Shut up,” Edward said, without looking at her. Flecks of saliva flew from his mouth, glittering in the sunlight. “Get out of here,” he said to Caro and Eloise. “Get out. Get off my ranch. You’re disgusting.”
Caro and Eloise stood motionless, as though turned to salt by his hatred. Eloise’s arm was still across Caro’s shoulders.
“Get out,” Edward said again. He took an uneven step toward them, as though he would beat at them with his bare hands. His tottery figure vibrated with hatred.
Meekly, Eloise began to pull her arm off Caro’s shoulders, but now, unexpectedly, Caro felt something rise in her, answering Edward. She reached up and grabbed Eloise’s wrist, holding it hard in place, against her shoulder.
Facing Edward, she felt an odd exultation. Here it was: zealotry. Here was the black star bursting into dreadful radiance. Here was hatred, hysteria, choking rage: here was Torquemada himself. She felt his anger sweeping over her, it was like standing outside in a hurricane. Edward would have burned them at the stake.
Caro stood straight, holding Eloise’s bare arm across her shoulders like a mantle. Teresa and Jeremy were quiet. Edward stared back at Caro with his one good eye narrowed with hatred, his pupil black and bottomless.
Then Caro reached out and slid her other arm around Eloise’s waist. She pulled Eloise close, holding her hard, hip to hip. Shame: she’d had enough of it. She didn’t care what she was doing now—declaring herself lesbian, witch, anathema, the Antichrist. She didn’t care what happened next. She stood waiting, daring Edward to go on.
The Football Game
We slowed down as soon as we got off the highway in New Haven. Everyone, it seemed, was going to the game. Our car became part of a long crawling procession that was snaking its way toward the athletic fields where the parking was. Finally we turned in to a field and bumped across its wide green expanse. A man in jeans and a sweatshirt waved us briskly toward the end of an evolving lineup, and we pulled up next to another station wagon and stopped.
“Here we are,” Mr. McArdle said. Mr. McArdle was my roommate Karen’s father. He was in his late forties, cheerful, slightly stooped, and balding, with small merry blue eyes. This was the kind of thing he said: obvious and unimportant, but sociable and friendly. You didn’t have to listen to him, but it was nice that he was talking.
“I wonder if the Braithwaites are here yet,” said Mrs. McArdle, looking around at the other cars. Then she turned to look at us in the back seat, encouraging. “You girls all right? Are you looking great?”
I liked Mrs. McArdle. She was kind and energetic, and she said things my mother would never have said. But all the McArdles were different from the members of my family. For one thing, all the McArdles loved to sing. Before dinner they sang grace together, harmonizing, and taking parts. Karen sang second soprano; her older sister sang first. Mrs. McArdle closed her eyes, listening to the different voices, and once I heard her say afterward to Karen, “You know, kiddo, you had that second soprano line just exactly right. It was perfect.” She shook her head in a brisk wag of appreciation.
I was amazed by all of this: by the idea that a family would do something in harmony, taking parts to create a line of transient beauty together, just for the pleasure of it, and then by the idea that praise might be handed out so freely, without cost or guilt. I had never been told that something I had done was just exactly right—perfect—in my whole life.
I watched their family with awed respect, taking notes for my life. Karen’s older brother, Ned, was at Williams, and her older sister, Marian, was through college and already married, to a musician. Their family seemed to unwind, like a spool, into a perfectly woven fabric, the texture sound, the pattern beautiful. My own family was not comparable. For one thing it was too small: it consisted only of my parents, my much younger brother, and me. We had no pattern. I myself had no idea where I was u
nwinding, the world as I was discovering it seemed wild and erratic and unfathomable, and my younger brother was worse off than I was. We knew nothing, our family was stuck in a bizarre backwater that I longed to escape. When I stayed with the McArdles, I memorized the things they did, devouring their solutions, storing them up for my future.
Mr. McArdle worked for a bank in New York. He went off on the train every day from Bedford Hills, wearing a gray suit and carrying a briefcase. This seemed both proper and glamorous to me, as though he soared off daily into another galaxy, returning miraculously safe each night to the small protected planet he had created. When I was staying with them, visiting Karen, I saw him when he got home, his suit wrinkled, his face creased from the strain of his mysterious interactions with the larger world. I sat on the deck with them in the summer evenings, while the McArdles had martinis, and we listened to the katydids in the trees, and watched the night drawing closer over the sloping lawns, over the heavily laden trees and the misty meadows of Bedford Hills.
All this seemed infinitely preferable to my own parents’ life, so unconventional, so awkward, so stubbornly outside the American norm. My own father arrived home from work at four o’clock in the afternoon, stamping out of his cold studio, with his white wave of hair and his deep interior frown, his paint-stained blue jeans and loose jacket, his battered work boots. My father was an artist, and we lived in a converted barn in Vermont. The barn was composed of big drafty spaces, with not enough heat and no privacy. A second, smaller barn nearby was my father’s studio, and it was even colder.
My father was an abstract expressionist. He had studied with Adolph Gottlieb, and he made huge canvases full of slashing brushstrokes. His paintings now were all black and white, though the earlier ones, stacked in dusty rows in the horse stalls, were full of bold and anguished color. I could not bear to look at them, they were so freighted with my father’s burdens.
I could hardly ever remember seeing my father dressed in a normal suit. When we visited my grandparents in Oyster Bay, my father wore a tweed jacket and a polka-dot bow tie. For a big formal family party he wore his black dinner jacket and a black bow tie. But I had never seen him wear a gray pin-striped suit and a regular long flat normal tie, with dark subdued stripes, the kind that Mr. McArdle wore always.
When my parents came to see me at boarding school, they looked odd and out of place. My mother wore fragile dangling earrings, and her long hair was piled loosely on top of her head in a swirl. She wore long full skirts and black stockings, and little low black heels. My father’s hair was in a sort of pageboy, nearly chin length, but without bangs. His hair was long and coarse and turning white, and he often swept it back with his hand, combing it roughly with his outspread fingers.
Once I saw him do that at my school, during Parents’ Weekend. He was standing on the Oriental rug in the formal front hall, in the middle of the other parents. All the other fathers were in gray flannel suits and raincoats; my father was in his baggy gray flannels and his old tweed jacket. My father has an imperious profile, and he is tall and thin, and his head rose high above the other fathers. I saw his arm go up to his hair, and the sight of his wild raking despairing gesture among those neat decorous heads twisted at me. I could not bear to see him there, so different and so strange. I wanted to run from the room and pretend I had never seen him before. But I could not, because I knew my father, I knew those moments of concentration and delight and confusion that made him make that gesture, and the knowledge that I knew him like that made my heart contract, as though it was unbearable to know someone so well, to see his life so intimately.
The McArdles evoked none of this pain, because it seemed that they did normal things without effort. Though normal things were exotic to me. Mrs. McArdle was breathlessly interesting: for example, she belonged to the Garden Club. I knew about the Garden Club from hearing my parents mention it. My mother would say scornfully, “She’s the kind of person who would belong to the Garden Club,” or irritated, she would ask my father, “What do you want me to do, join the Garden Club?” Once I understood that the Garden Club was part of this other, stable world, and that it was the focus of my parents’ derision, I determined to join one as soon as I could, because I wanted to be as unlike my parents as possible. I believed that my parents had deprived me of the kind of life that their parents had had—a life of convention and stability, which were things I longed for.
My father’s obsession with aesthetics, his unanswerable pronouncements at the dinner table about form and space and color, his gloomy hostility toward the world, his gigantic and powerful opinions about everything, and the silent intermittent presence of his despair—all of these things sucked the air from our family conversation and blackened the big drafty spaces of our house. Our singing in harmony before meals was unthinkable.
All of this I blamed on my father’s decision to abandon his own father’s life, his choice not to enter the army of commuters who stepped onto the train each morning from leafy parking lots, heading into the noisy, bustling metropolis, where they all did something useful together, something powerful and important that wound the clock of the country, kept its internal gears in continual interlocking mesh. Those men returned in the evenings to pleasant houses with air-conditioning, to children who lived near their friends, children who were allowed to have television sets and eat junk food and listen to trashy music. Because of my father’s unfathomable decision, all that easy, graceful Elysium of American life was denied to my brother and me. Instead of doing what normal children did (whatever that was—we would never know), we made tree forts in the woods, we played Indian trackers in the meadows, we made up secret languages, we resented our parents’ rules. We were silent at school when the other children talked about television programs. “Television is trash,” my father declared with majestic disgust, when I once mustered the nerve to ask why we didn’t have one. “Television is for idiots.” My father’s idea of recreation was to walk with us through the woods, carrying his binoculars and watching for birds—something which I liked when I was small but which seemed antisocial and strange as I grew older.
When I was sent, at the age of fourteen, to the girls’ boarding school outside Philadelphia where my mother had gone, I felt I had escaped from prison. I was being allowed at last to enter the larger, normal world, where people like Karen and the McArdles lived, in regular houses, not barns. Moreover, I was tacitly being allowed to enter the world of sex, the existence of which was not admitted in our household. When I was in sixth grade, I had dressed up for Halloween as a sort of Superwoman Witch. While I was getting myself up, my mother saw me standing in front of the mirror.
I was interested by what I saw: I had dark cherry red lipstick on, and I had outlined my eyes in black. I was wearing black tights and leotard, and a black cape, and I had set my hand on my hip, and thrust my hip out to one side. I could see that the image in the mirror was no longer the one I was used to. What I was used to seeing was a child ready to play, in a T-shirt and blue jeans folded carefully up at the bottom, and sneakers. Or a child dressed up for some occasion, in a pale smocked Liberty print dress sent by my grandparents. But either way the image was sexless: I was a child, and my torso was smooth and straight. My proportions were mysteriously right, the way children’s are, as though there is some classical equation that applies to all children’s bodies the way there is for Greek temples: the length of the legs equal to one and one-fifth the length of the torso, something like that. It’s not until adolescence that things begin to go awkward. Then the legs become too long or too short, the head suddenly out of scale, the rib cage inexplicably outsize, the hips too high on the frame. But all children are the right size.
Now in the mirror I could see something else: the cocky tilt of the hip, the sultry black rimming of the eyes were mimicking some other form of life. I was pretending to be something I was not, but I was using the same, regular body that I’d always had. I could do it, I could see that. It was a strange, dange
rous feeling, and as I stood there, eyeing myself with curiosity and excitement, I saw my mother standing behind me.
“Don’t stand like that,” she said.
I pulled my hip in. “Like what?” I asked.
“It makes you look ‘sexy,’” she said, and the word in her mouth was shaming, unthinkable.
“It does not,” I said stoutly, denying everything, as I always did. But I knew guiltily that, in fact, I might have looked sexy, that my body could now do that, that it could move, unbidden, into an illicit realm, the large trashy popular world that my parents shunned, where anything might happen, where everyone else lived.
By the time I was fourteen I was interested in looking sexy, though at school this was not encouraged. We wore uniforms, decorous green pleated tunics, tied with sashes. These could not be too revealing; they were loose, and the hem had to be no more than four inches from the floor when you were kneeling. They were strange garments, but we didn’t care. We didn’t care how we looked in our tunics, since when we wore them we only saw each other. We only saw boys under special circumstances: at tea dances, glee club concerts, the junior prom. These events happened seldom, were brief, and took place under strict supervision. I wondered what boys were like.
What were they like? My brother was too young, really, to qualify, and none of my friends at elementary school had been boys. Those boys had their own weird lives, shooting each other with rubber bands, snorting gleefully over unintentionally obscene references made by anyone. The boys were, all of them, strange, clumsy, big-footed, restless, violent, unknowable. Who knew what boys were like? At boarding school, for the tea dances, we spent all day preparing. We washed and cream-rinsed our hair, and put it up in giant rollers. We shaved our legs perfectly, perfectly smooth—as though, while we were dancing primly under the eyes of the chaperone in the discreetly lit room at Lawrenceville, there would be an opportunity for a boy to discover the delectable truth about the skin on your panty-hosed calf. There would not. Still, the ritual of preparation was central.
A Perfect Stranger Page 17