One possible reason for her interest was envy. I imagined how we looked in her eyes. My husband was roughly my age; he and I would age in the same way, at the same rate. We were comparably attractive. In ten years, perhaps not even that, the evidence of her husband’s age would be ungovernable. Even now it must have cost him effort to maintain the engines of virility; it must have been difficult to be married to a younger wife sometimes. She must have thought often of death. But perhaps she was happy, perfectly happy, with her older husband, who surely gave her things a younger husband wouldn’t. And her husband would never see her old. He wouldn’t be there to see the decline of her beauty. He wouldn’t ask her for children, presumably. She would have to care for a dying man, but she would be in the prime of life; she would have the strength for that kind of work. It would be a death she was prepared for. When my husband died, I would be dying, too.
She stood. I couldn’t help feeling that she wanted to brandish her body for our attention. I sensed my husband turn his head slightly. Her act seemed to say: I could have had a man my age, but this was the man I wanted. She bent, slowly, and kissed her husband before going into their room. He said something to her. The kiss changed the feeling of the moment. He was so much older, his body so much further along the line of decay; her body was like a comment on his. What was sex like for them? Sex was important. What was it like to be a couple whose tenderness looked ridiculous? She was gone.
Some birds took off from a nearby tree, and for an instant they seemed to be falling, tumbling from the branch, before their wings inevitably gained traction on the air and they began to rise in staccato upward spurts. Their feathers were a bright, candyish shade of green I had never seen on a living thing. South America was filled with life that to a North American looked alien. The pool was briefly calm until the children returned. One by one they broke the surface. I waved over the barman to order another drink. My husband was asleep.
I heard a door open somewhere behind me. The wife. She sat next to me. I looked over at the husband, but he wasn’t watching. She was holding a book.
“My husband asked me to give you this. It is the book by his writer, the one who will read tonight. My husband thinks you will enjoy it. He says you are a lovely young couple. I can see that he thinks you in particular are lovely.”
She said all this in crisp English, as if it were a speech she had rehearsed.
The wife returned to her husband. They lay awhile in silence and then went back to their room. He waved good-bye; she didn’t. I wondered if I’d imagined this strange interlude, until I saw again the book she had given me, a novel in Portuguese whose title was a single word, which I didn’t know. The gift of the book was an invitation: to attend the reading that evening; and perhaps to meet for something else, later. He made his wife the messenger. I didn’t feel disgusted; I didn’t feel anything about it. I knew already I wouldn’t go. My husband was awake.
He didn’t say anything to me. He jumped in the pool and swam aggressively for a dozen laps. He paused and then swam awhile longer. The pool was short and every few strokes he was forced to make the turn again. His body was beautiful, pulsing through water. When he finally came out, he was breathing hard, dripping, and he flagged down the barman before reaching for his towel.
“Do you want something?” he said to me.
“I’m having Campari,” I said.
By the time the drinks came, his skin was dry again.
“I think Marcos and Iara are having problems,” he said.
“Oh,” I said.
“He talks a lot about the secretaries at work. All the men do, of course.”
“But he doesn’t confide in you.”
“When Brazilian men sleep around, there’s nothing to confess, it’s a fact of life. Maybe he confides in a priest.”
I said, “Iara and Marcos never mention church. I’m sure they baptized their daughters. I’m sure they assume we go to church, too.”
“That’s why they never mention it.”
IN DEFENSE OF THIS LIFE
Las Vegas: money, golf, desert, kitsch, personal injury attorneys, hard bodies, sagging bodies, precancerous tans, smoking indoors. It is a place for people who want something, not for people who have something.
His parents, Hal and Gussie. His brothers, Mark and David. And their wives. Everyone is here. There are children.
There is going to be a party, friends of his parents not invited to the wedding in New York—our wedding, in three weeks’ time, the decisions final. Hal and Gussie moved here recently, from Los Angeles, after Hal’s retirement. It is the valedictory stage of life.
They live in a gated community: a closed society under a dome of perfect weather. The airport is nearby, chalky contrails across blue sky, shark’s-teeth mountains in the distance. Houses sit on the rim of a golf course, Hal and Gussie’s edged against the fairway on the sixth. Spanish roofs of terra cotta, stucco walls. Retirees and Japanese women start golfing early in the day. A man in a pink shirt hollers about something that hasn’t gone his way.
I enjoy the company of his parents, his brothers. Hal and Gussie aren’t like my parents—they are talkative, instinctively warm, thoughtless with affection. Mark and David and their families live on the West Coast, Seattle and San Francisco. Their wives are from Idaho and Arizona. He is the only one in the family who moved east, and it makes him exotic. His brothers speak of New York the way they might speak of Paris: fondly, from a distance, a foreign city both charming and unusual in its ways. The West: mountains, rivers, the ocean.
Morbid heat, a high wind—the desert alternates between stillness and violence. I wonder about the feats of engineering required to maintain a healthy golf course here. I look at my watch, thinking I last checked the time thirty or forty minutes ago, and see that only ten minutes have gone by. This happens again and again.
We have lunch at the clubhouse, and Gussie introduces everyone at the table to the waitress by name and relation. Son, wife, son, wife, son, fiancée.
The work Hal retired from was similar to his son’s. He misses it; it was a way of life. Now Hal does some day-trading on his computer. Father and son talk money, the fate of industry, the future. He is the youngest of his brothers. They are an oncologist and an environmental lawyer. They have other concerns. He isn’t the one his father thought would follow him into finance, and so is a kind of disappointment. This is a thing I know without being told.
But Hal is a warm man, Gussie a warm woman. They overflow with parental qualities, grandparental qualities. I am embraced often, pulled in. The children are doted on: new members of the tribe. Hal and Gussie plainly enjoy the surround of family. Mark and David are unrelenting conversationalists, and their wives talk even more freely. They are polished women: they each have twenty perfect nails. They could be sisters. Both couples, in fact, are the kind that look like siblings. I’ve always found that sort of thing eerie.
Twelve people, three generations. I think of my own family, the quiet there, New England. The hard, calm molecule of a one-child family, where emotions have only three paths to take.
Eventually everyone scatters—the children to play, the parents to watch T.V., the grandparents to fall asleep.
It is easy here to slip into a lull. I lie on a lounge chair by the backyard pool, not reading the book open in my lap. Ahead of me is the pastoral of the golf course. Every few minutes I hear the dull whumpf of a ball erupting from the tee. Occasionally the sound of cursing, the gulp of a ball landing in water. Trees ostensibly protect Hal and Gussie’s house, but it seems like only a matter of time before one of the solid white balls comes flying into the yard, crashing into the windows. A bad hook off the tee would do it. Birds animate the trees. I see robins, hummingbirds, ravens. They flirt, thrash. Golf carts migrate past at regular intervals, buzzing like lawnmowers. I watch through sunglasses. The blue of pools, blue of sky, the green of grass. The hostility of the desert is managed.
Dusk. We are gathered around the yard. T
he adults have drinks, babies loll in mothers’ arms. The three-year-old always wants something; the two-year-old has begun to investigate the world on her own and needs constant monitoring. It is easy in this gentle chaos of family to speak or not to.
A jangle of family talk in warm darkness. They all have an extroverted ease with one another. Mark and David have an instinct for calibrating potentially offensive humor so that it doesn’t offend. They’re charming, in other words. The things they say, if I were to say them, would sound reprehensible. And of course men are allowed to say things women aren’t.
Even these men, otherwise so confident, seek the affirmation of women. “I really didn’t deserve that,” David says, speaking of something at work, and then looks at his wife. The cliché of insecurity is a teenage girl; but it’s not teenage girls who are insecure: it is men. I pick up other cues as his brothers look for a word from their wives, a glance, reassurance they are still on solid ground. And the wives never fail to give it.
We all turn at the sudden startled-animal sound of a ball skittering up the embankment and rattling against the fence rails. The wives gasp. Gussie hoots. Close one, Hal says. Hal’s silver hair belongs on a yacht. Hal: hale.
He doesn’t know why they moved here, his parents, why they left California. His brothers also find it mysterious—to move away from the ocean rather than toward it. No one asks the question directly. They seem happy. The decision was made between Hal and Gussie, a private matter, not a family one, and the children were informed only when the house in L.A. was sold and packed up, the keys relinquished.
The three brothers together give the impression of family conspiracy; although perhaps this is in my head, only a general unfamiliarity with siblings. He seems both like them and not like them.
I see strange things on the golf course. For one, people in golf carts drive much faster than seems wise. Two drivers shout and accelerate past one another; it isn’t clear from a distance if this is bonhomie or anger. Given the nature of golf and the people who play it, mindless rage does not seem out of the question. The carts stop on the green, and the men step out, laughing among themselves, drinking beer and selecting putters. One of them performs a kind of dance, jackhammering his feet on the ground. More laughter. What have I witnessed? I feel like Lévi-Strauss, embedded among the natives of the Upper Amazon.
He steps outside to join me. I ask if he saw what I saw. I recapitulate the chase. Ridiculous, he says, but he doesn’t seem especially amused. I suppose golf course behavior isn’t as novel to him. He has golfed all his life. Hal first took him when he was five years old.
In defense of this life, he says, it’s supposed to be a reward. It’s supposed to come only after you’ve done something. After you’ve completed other pursuits.
My family likes you, he says. Really. And they know how I feel about you.
They’re just so different from my family, I say.
Lunch at the clubhouse with the brothers’ wives. This was someone’s idea, I’m not even sure whose, and so it is just the three of us, the “girls”—when adult women are grouped together they are girls. The girls insist on rosé. I don’t necessarily think this is a bad idea. Between them they have four children, ages one, one, two, and three. Among people with children, conversation has a way of shrinking rapidly to the common experience of parenting. Before I realize what is happening, we are deep into the indignities of pregnancy and motherhood, no holds barred: the often humiliating circumstances of one’s water breaking, the horror movie of labor and delivery, a detailed toxicology report of infant excreta, an anatomy of the hazards a woman’s body endures in the early months and years of a child’s life. We go into some detail about the strange feast of breast milk, the rigorous schedules of pumping, the cracked nipples, the ineradicable smell of milk in clothes. I’m told of the mountainous boredom, of the deleterious effects of “pregnancy brain”: apparently even a woman’s intelligence has to suffer. There is a lot of laughter. I have the sense of being subjected to a kind of rite. At some point I open my purse to confirm that I took my birth control pill this morning.
Afternoon. A golf ball climbs the embankment, shoots through the fence, enters the yard. It comes to a stop. We all look at it, first in silence, then with laughter. A bit of excitement. Two in two days, Hal says, that’s never happened.
The party is Saturday night, the day after tomorrow. We are calling it an engagement party. We were engaged months ago, but we can’t call it a wedding party, since we aren’t married yet. Saturday also happens to be the Fourth of July. Hal makes a joke about the irony of having an engagement party on Independence Day. All around the gated community I notice extra helpings of red, white, and blue.
We return to the clubhouse for dinner; bottles of wine are half-price. We talk about the wedding plans. There are details I find especially pleasing—an arts space in Brooklyn, music by a string band that plays rustic bluegrass—and feel like they belong to me even as I am aware of how many other people have similar tastes; but these things are somewhat arcane to his family. There was never a thought of using a church. I feel closer to him, perceiving how he is distinct from the rest of his family. Then I’m worried that we are talking about decisions already made in a way that reopens them for discussion.
Hal makes a remark about what good-looking children we’re going to have. Just don’t let them grow up to be golfers, he says.
Normally this is something I would let go without reply. He is only being kind. He is the father of the groom. It is the sort of thing he is supposed to say. But because of the wine, or perhaps some sediment of emotion building up during the visit, I say what I am thinking aloud.
Children aren’t a given for me, I say. I’ve never seen myself as a mother, I say. I’m not one of those women who marry and end up erased, I say.
This causes a silence, the first silence I can remember since the visit began. The brothers, wives, parents. The children recognize it: they are precision instruments for sensing adult emotions. I can’t say why I did it—perhaps I wanted to be a surprise again to this man who offered to marry me. Or perhaps I am only affirming something to myself by saying it aloud. I look away from everyone; I am not looking at him. His family is my family now: this is a thing they have said to me repeatedly.
Well, Gussie says. Let’s remember, all this is still a long way off.
Everyone stares out the tall windows of the clubhouse, at the dark course, the swells and traps.
I am not sleeping well here; but he appears to be sleeping normally.
Father and sons head out golfing. Conditions are ideal: clear sky, the wind docile. The brothers’ wives go shopping; I decline. I’m alone with Gussie. She suggests I relax by the pool. With that book you’ve been reading, she says.
We’re in the kitchen later, making lunch, when we hear a crash. We both know without turning. The window has a double pane; the inner glass was spared, but the outer is gashed through. Gussie and I go outside for a closer inspection, and a moment later a golf cart drives up, fast. It halts abruptly by the backyard fence. Two men. The one who steps out wears a hat with Callaway written across it. He stares for a moment at the broken window, assessing, expressionless. He doesn’t speak. He takes out a checkbook and pen from a side pocket of his golf bag. This man signs a check, leaves the rest blank, hands it to Gussie through the fence. Then he and his friend drive off, the matter settled, apparently.
Gussie opens a bottle of chardonnay. We scrub tomatoes and cucumbers for a salad. Gussie spelunks in the refrigerator for more provisions. You’re a bit different from my other sons’ wives, she says, handing me more tomatoes.
I don’t mean it in a negative way.
She says, I didn’t feel right telling the boys why we left California. I don’t want them to think badly of their father.
The chardonnay glows in a beam of sunlight just as it would in an advertisement.
I knew about it, she says. Something got into Hal, something about retirement, the
way men are. But then it spread around, it was just embarrassing. Hal ended it, I believe him that he ended it, but I just couldn’t stay in the same city. All three of us there like that. I couldn’t stand the idea. I didn’t make him beg, nothing dramatic. Just the one condition. Leaving. I had to leave. I had to make a fresh start. That was my condition.
Water spills from the tap through my hands. I turn it off and set the tomato down to dry. I don’t know if I’m supposed to talk.
I ask, Why Las Vegas?
Gussie laughs. She says, Why not Las Vegas?
I wouldn’t have imagined it of Hal. That is the point, of course; that is her point. No one would have imagined it. He is a man of almost overbearing affection, to Gussie most of all. The point is: Even a good man.
Feast Days Page 13