‘Gemma!’
I had to call her twice.
Then the arms come down, but inching like a wound-up doll’s, and I have to catch the package before it falls. Those merry-Andrew eyes of hers—blank. For a long minute she did not know me. That sharp mind, the other half of my soul’s repartee—where is it?
I look to our kitchen for help. A hundred years ago, when tenements could still be respectable, the kitchens were often good-sized like this one, with walls tiled white halfway up, above the deep washtubs and the porcelain-knobbed iron stoves. We came too late for the tubs but not for the stove, on which two generations of a Sicilian clan once cooked. The fire-escape sun, still ours even if barred and gated, is our hearth. The best of our pictures hang above the tile—the Marsh, a Soyer, and the Hopper, whose sad misogynist porch I have marked to sell first, should we fall heir to those death costs, which are now called ‘terminal expense.’ All of them, including the not-authenticated Prendergast, are as truly owned pictures should be, a little darkened by the vapors of use. The long white-enamel table, rimmed with a milky blue where the zinc shows through, has two leaves in it, which when pulled out make a sound like a grandmother’s cough. I sit Gemma down at it. The sun splashes all with afternoon paint.
In an effort to keep ourselves more forward-looking, we have recently stored away the family photos. That’s as near to retiring to Florida as we care to go. I joke that perhaps Christina’s baby will want them. The first-born of a forty-year-old mother may well have such tastes. I am relieved that gone too is the snapshot clipped from Francesca’s high school yearbook, underneath it the printed comment: Ambition: ‘To be a lovely baddie.’ Jeepers, Frankie, don’t we know! Ambition achieved, I thought as I took it down—the German newspapers take excellent black-and-whites, even of alley manslaughter. Gemma’s face was hard as I did it, but not with hate.
And not surprisingly, that moment, as we took ourselves down from that gallery and packed us away too, was when our death dropped into our palms—to be scrutinized.
I think of women as suffering heart-wounds that even men who, unlike me, have had children, would not have. She would deny this, not because she’s proud, but because of my lack. She knows I would want everything my span could give, even to the wounds. As it is, I have assumed that our deaths, whatever the body cause, will in the body’s core be different. Now, holding her close, warming her eyes back to me, I am not sure. I had never dreamed that either of us would begin dying in the mind.
Then she snapped back. The package of meat is still in my left hand.
‘In the fridge, why don’t you?’ she says, in that voice which will housewife me in eternity, but before I can manage to put the package there with the hand that tremors, she snatches it. ‘No, why don’t I cook it now?’ she says. ‘Hand me down the peppercorns.’
I do that, with my right hand. As I do, she clasps both my hands and kisses them, the shaky left one more.
‘Since that day in the gallery, eh?’ she says, smoothing it. ‘But maybe it’ll pass.’
‘What day?’
‘You don’t remember? It was why you had the CAT scan.’
‘Oh, I remember that all right. Four hundred smackers out the window. What a waste of cash. But I suppose it’s routine.’
She looks at me so lost.
There was such a day, then. Must have been.
That is the shock.
We watch each other. But unevenly. There are times when one or the other of us is already alone.
WE HAVE BEEN AWHIRL in the world. I had forgotten—we both had—how absorbing of ills it is to be there—and that the world can be entered by intent.
Rupert bought us tickets to four plays, two off-Broadway and two on—one the kind of musical we are snobs about, on which we never splurge. How awesome it is that all over the city these convocations spring up, each one only for a night—as if the very seats hold spores of audience.
‘No other audience is the same,’ Rupert said, at the first theater. ‘So dearly bought—for some. So much a birthright—for others. People who see language. Who must have mimicry.’ And I know he is thinking, as he arches his white head and the neck tendons tighten: People who may still read me.
Perhaps somebody saw us—that old couple too stiffly in their Sunday best. For, as if by some sympathetic twitch in the tough city scheme, our phone began to ring. I was asked to testify at our community board on the merits of two projected high-rises in our area, and did well, the meeting being covered on TV. Within the month, two articles mentioned Rupert’s work.
‘“Seminal,”’ I said, ‘what does that mean?’
‘“Not in the swim,”’ he said, before he thought, and then caught my hands, so that I lost the rhythm of the herbs I was putting into the potato salad. I always set them out on either side of the salad bowl, and if I leave it to habit and to my hands to alternate, I’m okay. I ruined the brisket. Don’t focus is now the order of the day.
‘It means I still have sperm,’ he said, jaunty.
‘That can ruin salads!’
What has come over me? I have always tended his physicality, his cockscomb sense of it, with a tact that came from my own delight in it.
A cowlick on a white-haired man is such a sunny sight. Now did it droop? Do I want it to?
He took the bowl from me: Actually he is a better salad-maker than me. ‘Maybe you don’t want a lover anymore, Gemma. It’s occurred to me.’
I don’t know. Maybe I don’t?
‘Or not in the kitchen.’ His smile is sad. It’s an old joke between us, that kitchens make him randy.
I cling to him, but only in love. ‘It’s rage. Where does it come from?’
His arms tighten. I suspect he knows. But won’t say.
What I want us to say to each other, want us never to say to each other, crawls behind my temples like an investigating worm.
You’re old.
You’re old.
THAT RAGE WHICH WELLS up in both of us. Why do I feel that if we name it we are done for?
Luckily the phone rang—Gemma’s lifeline—and she ran toward it, this time without stumbling. I am thinking of putting an extension in the kitchen, if I can suggest that without fuss. Though when she does fall, she lets go like the college gymnast she once was, so far never breaking a bone. And so vain of her lightness that I cannot bear to point out that she falls rather a lot.
When she comes back she is radiant, as much because the phone rang at all as for the message, though it must be a good one. The phone is your real lover, I used to say—but today, better not.
‘Sherm and Kit are in town. They’ll stop by.’
I refrain from saying how many times over the last few years our two best friends of early Village days must have been in town without ever a call. But I can’t wholly hold back. ‘Well, that’s encouraging.’
I used to say that I could tell infallibly whether my stock in the writing game—Sherm’s term for it—was up or down, by whether or not Sherm called me when in New York.
We grin at each other. How good to feel on even keel again. Gemma has to have other people for that—for the even keel. Yet depends on me to provide them. She won’t make a good widow.
It strikes me—why are we really keeping this record? To find out privately how to survive? Or to make plain which of us will do it best?
That’s a blow. For how will we ever jointly know?
‘They want something,’ Gemma said, after she’d said who it was. ‘You can depend upon it.’
And upon her. She’s the expert there.
I pinch her cheek. ‘The phone racketeer.’
And there they are at the door. They must have phoned from around the corner.
‘Four years!’
Four persons say it.
For the first few minutes, those two look terrible.
HOW I’VE MISSED THEM. Even if I really don’t trust Sherm. And Kit couldn’t wait to get me in the bedroom to rake over Francesca. ‘We were
with you through the whole case, Gem. Just couldn’t lay it on you—to call up and condole.’
Not—as I couldn’t help thinking—that they hadn’t wanted the political association, with the parents of a girl who died that way? Or maybe Sherm didn’t.
‘Frankie was never political,’ Kit says. I love her again at once, for saying Frankie.
And for migrating to the kitchen, she and Sherm both—like real friends. And for telling us the worst.
Kit begins at once.
‘That picture—’ she says. ‘Those eighteen-ninetyish kids on the beach. In those wide-banded hats, with shovel and pail. Like a border. I always loved it. But Gem, you shouldn’t keep it so near the stove. Darkens it.’
I know. But these days I want everything in its own place, as first put there. Have to. I never was one to let objects scatter the house—they all hold their places. Now they seem to migrate of themselves—rain boots dropped next to the toilet and left there, cups of old tea on Rupert’s bookcase, and once, on a kitchen shelf, an egg, maybe intended for a cake and poised there and left, while I reached for the rice.
‘Oh well—’ I say. ‘Probably it isn’t a Prendergast. We haven’t any provenance for it.’
Yet I appreciate she said ‘border.’ That’s the way it looks to me. She and I have eyes of the same era.
Maybe that’s why I’m too upset now to write more.
PROBABLY ONLY GEMMA AND I, and a remnant few, know how conventional for their time Sherm and Kit actually were—they look so individual a couple now. Survivors of that big decade, they seem now to embody it.
When Sherm and Gertrude and I were young, he used to write about art as if it were politics. Early on, he discovered how much safer it was to write about nature as if it was art. People magazine had just called him the grand old countryman of American culture, Kit announced in the bedroom, though we all knew he grew up in a suburb of Chicago. He no longer wears those chestnutty tweeds thick enough for their New Hampshire winter. From which, when in to talk assignments with a magazine, he used to descend on his old New York friends for the night, spreading peaty pipe-smoke over their parties. The pipe went early, once he discovered that the frosted lens that hides an eye damaged in childhood is distinction enough. Newspapers are kind to him because of it; they speak of his ‘all-seeing’ style. Which is true.
In his small field as an intellectual who manages to be popular, I know of nobody who has been cannier on the anthropology of success there. All his dangerous opinions are in the past—but he would never hide having had them. Indeed, his own life is his artifact, and honesty his public profession. He never relaxes that, and is always on call.
Gemma says their house looks like a line drawing to illustrate the Brahmin life—as practiced in New England. Kit cooks like a dutiful girl who has heard about food somewhere, and Sherm likes his garden and woods almost as much as his image of himself there. Wine is often sent them, by those who like to dine with an arbiter of taste who can’t afford to buy. The result is that their raw kernels and thrifty salads have kept them in a fine health that intermittent dinners on the town cannot ruin.
Kit, as a onetime Village beauty and darling of the poets and painters of her period, is as authentic as all the rest. Her sole jewel, the pendant that appears at all functions, was made for her, one notable afternoon, by Picasso, who stuck a bit of metal over a brasier, gave it a twist and presented it—although the story that he offered Sherm two hours of interview instead of one if his wife would pose in a private part of the studio is false. ‘Who circulated that story anyway?’ Gemma asked when she first met those two—and a whole parlor floor of our cocktailing days answered her: ‘Not Kit.’
Although Kit has always been quite matter-of-fact about the pendant’s lewd shape.
What pleased her most about the gift, she always said, was that it was brass. ‘He knew that for us, gold would not be suitable. Ah—he knew.’
And Sherm, who at his own hearthside looked like a man who only an hour ago had deserted the desk for the woodman’s axe, always smiled back at this wife of his heart. Did he school her? Or was she always like that? Gemma whispered to me during our first visit up there, and I answered this wife of my heart with equal pride. Both.
I hope this is not envy. It never used to be. Conscientious honesty in public—what a chore. No artist could afford it. One has to take honesty as it comes, in fits and starts—spurted on the canvas, gasped on the page. But in the decline of life, could one yearn for a mite of Sherm’s public portion, and of Kit’s basking in that as his wife?—though Gemma, proud as she is of me, would never bask. Yet she is the one with the thesis that public approval lengthens one’s span. ‘Those orchestra conductors—’ she said once, watching Leopold Stokowski. ‘They don’t only live longer because they wave their arms and sweat. They get clapped.’
And the company of those who are accustomed to that can be oddly reassuring. Even if, as with Sherm, the good eye is droopy with pomp. The pomp of modesty, as befits a man who wherever he chances to be looks like one of those old boys who are the native best of some heath historically good. And who in fact has just yesterday been asked what Thoreau would have thought—of something or other. Sherm’s answer being: ‘Even as you and I.’
How could I have felt, in that first moment at the door, that they showed the wreckage of the years in a shocking way? Key West, where they used to visit out the winter, hadn’t turned them that pumpkin color of other coastal Florida retirees. Nor do they wear those sunbelt clothes that look like food coloring. In the dark of our foyer I couldn’t have seen the fish-scale skin and the vein bumps shining through like opals. They are in fact both distinguished-looking persons, still dignified by good hair and carriage for their years, and good woolens. Whenever we were a foursome at a restaurant, the maître d’ always led us to the right niche.
It was what they said that told me what the matter was. Or what I at first thought they said. ‘You two!’ they said—and I could see then that they were still those persons. It was dark enough to.
‘We too—’ Gemma said then. I know her inflections.
So I hear why I was shocked at the sight of them. They have only brought us news of ourselves.
‘NO PROVENANCE, GEMMA!’ SHERM said, horrified, peering at the Prendergast. Although he and Kit own quite a few works of art, in that Puritan household these look as if they have done so only by intentionally avoiding the ugly baroque, the crowded Renaissance; Opting only, if most chastely, Rupert says, for the hallowed modern. Each piece, like rut’s pendant, has a story, and is so displayed. A one-string Calder mobile, signed ‘Sandy,’ with an adjacent photo of the children’s party it was made for. The tablecloth on which Barnett Newman one night wrote scurrilously. An early Rothko nude, dating from before the artist went abstract, and this time admittedly of Kit—though quite austerely.
Plus what must be a unique collection of small drawings, plaster casts, pastels, even an oil or two—one of them by Eilshemius, as I recall—and all by well-known but unstable artists whom Sherm had a habit of visiting in their temporary asylums or hospitals. A vocation that came over Sherm, as his books will tell you, when he left off being a Communist.
So all their art has the ultimate provenance: Gift of the Artist. Even if, for more than half of those, the proper qualification would be: While temporarily insane.
‘We bought that picture, Sherm,’ I say. ‘That’s all we know how to do.’
Rupert says, ‘Gemma.’ But I doubt they noticed. I want them to.
‘You don’t have to like it, Sherm,’ I said. ‘Until you know for sure.’
‘Same old Gemma,’ he says. ‘I only meant—if it’s real, you better have it insured.’ He looks around the kitchen, and at us. ‘Or better still, sell. You could get a pretty penny.’
They think we need money. In the bedroom Kit had obviously thought so, seeing the bed. Years ago they offered to buy it for their spare room, until they found we had lengthened the side rails, m
aking it no longer ‘mint. ‘That lovely old tester,’ she says now. ‘It ought to have a handmade spread. Like ours, remember?’ They have a sleigh bed for themselves, handsome enough but not quite right for a Revolutionary house. ‘And that mattress. I don’t believe it. It isn’t the same one?’
Rupert calls it our swan-boat mattress, and indeed it almost is. That deep hollow.
‘Those humps are dear to us. I don’t expect to change it now. I send it out to be cleaned once in a while.’ Or did, until the only cleaner who would take it on—a little tailor on Sixth Avenue—died. No department store cover will fit its worn-in curve; But we two still do.
She’s squinting at me. ‘You’ve kept your neck.’ She hasn’t. She arches one ankle, though. Legs still good. ‘If there’s one thing I promised myself, though—never let my hose droop. You see them on the street. It’s a sure sign.’
I’ve seen them. Old women often otherwise well dressed. But with no one to tell them maybe that the slip is showing too.
‘I only do it in the house. These old lisles. I must have had them since the war.’ Which war? ‘I like the slidey feel of them.’ It tells me I’m still in the house—this house.
‘We elder women shouldn’t keep clothes that long, Gem. It’s not good for us. I remember that blouse.’
I can shrug that one off. If your shoulders will still take old peasant blouses, why not? ‘That’s a nice suit, Kit,’ I say. ‘Custom-made, I’m sure.’ She would have to, with that belly. Such an odd-shaped little dropsical one. For a minute I mourn for us. What a lovely giraffe she was, once. Where did that neck go? And what an old fool I am. Or as she would say—elder fool.
For I know they intend nothing but harm.
‘I do have one of those bedspreads,’ I say. ‘Dated eighteen forty-six. Somehow we never get to use it.’
‘Eighteen forty-six, eh?’ She looks thoughtful. ‘Maybe we could swap you. Something you could use.’
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