by John Updike
Overhead the elm branches were embedded in a sky of dirty wool: erosion deltas photographed high above the drained land: stained glass. Footsteps returning from lunch scuffed everywhere in the Common distinctly, as if under an enclosing dome. A small reddish bug crawled along an edge of brick. Happened before. When? His head tilted just so. Exactly. His mind sank scrabbling through the abyss of his past searching for when this noticing of an insect had happened before. He lifted his eyes and saw the Park Street church, stately. He looked around him at the grayly streaming passersthrough and all people seemed miraculous, that they could hold behind their glowing faces the knowledge that soon, under the whitewash-spattered sky, they would wither or be cut.
Church. Tolled. Three. He weakened, broke faith with himself, ran for coffee and one, no two, cinnamon doughnuts. When he emerged from the cafeteria the yellow sky between the buildings was full of Foxy. Coffee slopping through the paper cup and burning his fingers, he ran up Tremont, convinced of hopeless guilt. But Freddy’s car, his yellow Mercury convertible, the canvas top mildewed from being buttoned up all winter, was still parked, half on the sidewalk, down a narrow alley off the street, near a metal door painted one with the mustard wall yet whose hinges, rubbed down to the bare steel, betrayed that it could be opened. So she was not gone. He went back across Tremont to the pavilion’s vicinity and ate.
His feet grew numb. Boston danker than Tarbox: oily harbor lets in the cold sea kiss. More northern. To his dread for Foxy attached a worry that he would be missed at home. Gallagher, Angela, each would think the other had him. The sun slipped lower behind the dome of sky, to where the walls were thinner. Sunshine luminous as tallow tried to set up shadows, touched the tree plaques and dry fountains. In this light Piet saw the far door down the alley open and a dab that must be bald Freddy emerge. Dodging through thickening traffic, Piet’s body seemed to float, footless, toward the relief of knowing, as when he would enter the Whitmans’ house by the doorway crowded with lilacs and move through the hallway fragrant of freshly planed wood toward the immense sight of the marshes and Foxy’s billowing embrace. Freddy Thorne looked up from unlocking his car door, squinting, displeased to see him. Neither man could think to speak. In the gaping steel doorway a Negress in a green nurse’s uniform and silver-rim spectacles was standing supporting Foxy.
She was conscious but drugged; her pointed face, half-asleep, was blotched pink and white as if her cheeks had been struck, and struck again. Her eyes paused on Piet, then passed over him. Her hair flowed all on one side, like wheat being winnowed, and the collar of her Russian-general greatcoat, a coat he loved, was up, and buttoned tight beneath her chin like a brace.
Freddy moved rapidly to her side, said “Six steps,” and, his mouth grimly lipless, one arm around her waist, the other beneath her elbow, eased her toward the open car door as if at any jarring she might break. The Negress in silence closed the metal door upon herself. She had not stepped into the alley. Piet’s running had attracted the curiosity of some pedestrians, who watched from the sidewalk at the alley mouth yet did not step toward them. Freddy lowered Foxy into the passenger’s seat, whispering, “Good girl.” With the usual punky noise of car doors hers swung shut. She was behind glass. The set of her mouth, the tension above the near corner predicting laughter, appeared imperfectly transported from the past, a shade spoiled, giving her face the mysterious but final deadness of minutely imitated wax effigies. Then two fingertips came up from her lap and smoothed the spaces of skin below her eyes.
Piet vaulted around the front of the car. Freddy was already in the driver’s seat; grunting, he rolled his window some inches down. “Well, if it isn’t Piet Enema, the well-known purge.”
Piet asked, “Is she—?”
“Okey-doak,” Freddy said. “Smooth as silk. You’re safe again, lover.”
“What took so long?”
“She’s been lying down, out, what did you think, she’d get up and dance? Get your fucking hand off the door handle.”
Perhaps roused by Freddy’s fury of tone, Foxy looked over. Her hand touched her lips. “Hi,” she said. The voice was warmer, drowsier, than hers. “I know you,” she added, attempting, Piet felt, irony and confession at once, the irony acknowledging that she knew very well this intruder whom she could not quite name. Freddy rolled up the window, punched down both door locks, started the motor, gave Piet a blind stare of triumph. Delicately, taking care not to shake his passenger, he eased the car down off the curb into the alley and into the trashy stream of homeward traffic. A condom and candy wrapper lay paired in the exposed gutter.
Not until days later, after Foxy had survived the forty-eight hours alone in the house with Toby and the test of Ken’s return from Chicago, did Piet learn, not from Freddy but from her as told to her by Freddy, that at the moment of anesthesia she had panicked; she had tried to strike the Negress pressing the sweet, sweet mask to her face and through the first waves of ether had continued to cry that she should go home, that she was supposed to have this baby, that the child’s father was coming to smash the door down with a hammer and would stop them.
After she confessed this to him over the phone on Monday, his silence stretched so long she laughed to break it. “Don’t take it upon yourself that you didn’t come break down the door. I didn’t want you to. It was my subconscious speaking, and only after I had consciously got myself to the point of no return, and I could relax. What we did was right. We couldn’t do anything else, could we?”
“I couldn’t think of anything else.”
“We were very lucky to have brought it off. We ought to thank our, what?—our lucky stars.” She laughed again, a perfunctory rustle in the apparatus.
Piet asked her, “Are you depressed?”
“Yes. Of course. Not because I’ve committed any sin so much, since it was what you asked me to do, what had to be done for everybody’s sake, really. But because now I’m faced with it again, really faced with it now.”
“With what?”
“My life. Ken, this cold house. The loss of your love. Oh, and my milk’s dried up, so I have that to feel sorry for myself about. Toby keeps throwing up his formula. And Cotton’s gone.”
“Cotton.”
“My cat. Don’t you remember him?”
“Of course. He always greeted me.”
“He was here Wednesday morning catching field mice on the edge of the marsh and when I came back that night he was gone. I didn’t even notice. Thursday I began to call, but I was too weak to go outdoors much.”
Piet said, “He’s out courting.”
“No,” Foxy said, “he was fixed,” and the receiver was rhythmically scraped by her sobs.
He asked her, “Why didn’t you talk to me more, before we did it?”
“I was angry, which I suppose is the same as being frightened. And what did we have to say? We’d said it. You were too chicken to let me have it as if it were Ken’s, and I’ve always known I could never get you away from Angela. No, don’t argue.”
He was obediently silent.
She said, “But what now, Piet? What shall we expect of each other?”
He answered, after thought, “Not much.”
“It’s easier for you,” she said. “You’ll always have somebody else to move on to. Don’t deny it. Me, I seem stuck. You want to know something horrible?”
“If you’d like to tell it.”
“I can’t stand Ken now. I can hardly bear to look at his face, or answer when he talks. I think of it as him who made me kill my baby. It’s just the kind of thing he’d do.”
“Sweet, it wasn’t him, it was me.”
Foxy explained to him, what he had heard often before, how Ken, in denying her a child for seven years, had killed in her something only another man could revive. She ended by asking, “Piet, will you ever come talk to me? Just talk?”
“Do you think we should?”
“Should, shouldn’t. Of course we shouldn’t. But I’m down, lover, I’m just
terribly, terribly down.” She pronounced these words with a stagy lassitude learned from the movies. The script called for her to hang up, and she did. Losing another dime, he dialed her number from the booth, the booth in front of Poirier’s Liquor Mart, where one of their friends might all too likely spot him, a droll corpse upright in a bright aluminum coffin. At Foxy’s house, no one answered. Of course he must go to her. Death, once invited in, leaves his muddy bootprints everywhere.
Georgene, faithful to Freddy’s orders, came calling on Foxy that Monday, around noon, and was shocked to see Piet’s pick-up truck parked in the driveway. She felt a bargain had not been kept. Her understanding had been that the abortion would end Foxy’s hold over Piet; she believed that once Foxy was eliminated her own usefulness to Piet would reassert itself. She prided herself, Georgene, on being useful, on keeping her bargains and carrying out the assignments given her, whether it was obtaining a guest speaker for the League of Women Voters, or holding her service in a tennis match, or staying married to Freddy Thorne. She had visited Foxy late Wednesday night, twice on Thursday, and once on Friday. She had carried tea and toast up to the convalescent, changed Toby’s spicy orange diapers, and seen two baskets of clothes and sheets through the washer and dryer. On Friday she had spent over an hour vacuuming the downstairs and tidying toward Ken’s return. Her feelings toward Foxy altered in these days of domestic conspiracy. Georgene, from her first glimpse, a year ago at the Applebys’ party, of this prissy queenly newcomer, had disliked her; when Foxy stole Piet from her this dislike became hatred, with its implication of respect. But with the younger woman at her mercy Georgene allowed herself tenderness. She saw in Foxy a woman destined to dare and to suffer, a younger sister spared any compulsion to settle cheap, whose very mistakes were obscurely enviable. She was impressed with Foxy’s dignity. Foxy did not deny that in this painful interregnum she needed help and company, nor did she attempt to twist Georgene’s providing it into an occasion for protestation, or scorn, or confession, or self-contempt. Georgene knew from living with Freddy how surely self-contempt becomes contempt for others and was pleased to have her presence in Foxy’s house accepted for what it was, an accident. Wednesday night, Foxy dismissed her with the grave tact of a child assuring a parent she is not afraid of the dark. She was weepy and half-drugged and clutched her living baby to her like a doll, yet from a deep reserve of manners thanked Georgene for coming, permitted her bloody bed-sheets to be changed, accepted the injunction not to go up and down stairs, nodded gravely when told to call the Thornes’ number at any hour, for any reason, even senseless fright. Thursday morning, Georgene found her downstairs, pale from lack of sleep; she had been unable to breast-feed the baby and had had to come downstairs to heat up a bottle. Obedient, she had not attempted the return trip upstairs, and with one blanket had made a bed for them both on the sofa. Imagining those long moon-flooded hours, the telephone offering a tempting release from solitude, Georgene secretly admired the other’s courage and pride. She helped her upstairs and felt leaning upon her, naked under its robe and slip, the taller, less supple, rather cool and dry and ungainly body her lover had loved. Imagined love flowed from her. The current was timidly returned. They were silent in unison. They moved together, in these few days, whose weather outside was a humid raw foretaste of spring less comfortable than outright winter, through room upon room of tactful silence. They did not speak of Piet or of Freddy or of the circumstances that had brought them together except as they were implied by Georgene’s inquiries into Foxy’s physical condition. They discussed health and housework and the weather outside and the needs of the infant. Friday afternoon, the last day Georgene was needed, she brought along little Judy, and in the festive atmosphere of recovery Foxy, now fully clothed, served cookies and vermouth and persuaded Georgene, after her exertions of cleaning, to smoke an unaccustomed cigarette. Awkwardly they lifted their glasses as if to toast one another: two women who had tidied up after a mess.
Georgene had not been asked to return on Monday. But she was curious to know how Foxy had weathered the weekend, had put off Ken. She would ask if Foxy needed any shopping done. Seeing Piet’s truck in the driveway, she experienced a compounded jealousy, a multiple destruction within her: the first loss was her tender comradeship with the other woman. Of Piet she expected nothing except that he continue to exist and unwittingly illumine her life. She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted; whatever he did he could not escape the province of her freedom, her free decision to love. Whereas between her and Foxy a polity existed: rules, a complex set of assumed concessions, a generous bargain posited upon the presumption of defeat. Georgene seldom visited the middle ground between female submission and sexless mastery, so her negotiated fondness for Foxy was rarer for her, more precious perhaps, than her love for Piet, which was predetermined and unchanging and somewhat stolid. Foxy’s betrayal found her vulnerable. She was revealed to herself as not merely helpless but foolish. Helplessness has its sensual consolations; foolishness has none. She pushed through the door without knocking.
Piet and Foxy were sitting well apart, on opposite sides of the coffee table. Piet had not removed the zippered apricot suède windbreaker he wore to jobs, and the stub of a yellow pencil was tucked behind his ear. The morning marsh light struck white fire from the hem of Foxy’s frilled nightie and froze into ice her pale hand holding a cigarette from which spiraled smoke sculptural as blue stone. Coffee equipment mixed arcs of china and metal and sun on the low teak table between them. Georgene felt she had entered upon a silence. Her indignation was balked by her failure to surprise them embracing. Nevertheless, Piet was embarrassed, and half rose.
“Don’t get up,” Georgene told him. “I don’t mean to interrupt your cozy tryst.”
“It wasn’t,” he told her.
“Just a meeting of souls. How beautiful.” She turned to Foxy. “I came to offer to do your shopping and to see how you were doing. I see you’re back to normal and won’t be needing me any more. Good.”
“Don’t take that tone, Georgene. I was just telling Piet, how wonderful you were.”
“He wasn’t telling you? I’m hurt.”
“Why are you angry? Don’t you think Piet and I have a right to talk?”
Piet moved forward on his chair, grunting, “I’ll go.”
Foxy said, “You certainly will not. You just got here. Georgene, have some coffee. Let’s stop playing charades.”
Georgene refused to sit. “Please don’t imagine,” she said, “that I have personal feelings about this. It’s none of my business what you two do, or rather it wouldn’t be if my husband hadn’t saved your necks at the risk of his own. But I will say, for your own good, unless you’re planning to elope, it is very sloppy to have Piet’s pick-up truck out where Marcia could drive by any minute.”
“Marcia’s at her psychiatrist in Brookline,” Foxy said. “She’s gone every day from ten to two, or longer, if she has lunch with Frank in town.”
Piet said, wanting to have a conversation, a party, “Is Marcia going too? Angela’s just started.”
Georgene asked him, “How on earth can you afford it?”
“I can’t,” he said. “But Daddy Hamilton can. It’s something the two of them cooked up.”
“And what were you two cooking up, when I barged in?”
“Nothing,” Piet told her. “In fact we were having some trouble finding things to say.”
Foxy asked, “Why shouldn’t I talk to the father of my child?”
Piet said, “It wasn’t a child, it was a little fish, less than a fish. It was nothing, Fox.”
“It was something, damn you. You weren’t carrying it.”
Georgene was jealous of their quarrel, their display of proud hearts. She and Freddy rarely quarreled. They went to sleep on one another, and kept going to parties together, and felt dreary all next day,
like veteran invalids. Only Piet had brought her word of a world where vegetation was heraldic and every woman was some man’s queen. That world was like, she thought, the marsh seen through the windows, where grasses prospered in salty mud that would kill her kind of useful plant. “I honestly think,” she heard herself saying, “that one of you ought to move out of Tarbox.”
They were amazed, amused. Foxy asked, “Whatever for?”
“For your own good. For everybody’s good. You’re poisoning the air.”
“If any air’s been poisoned,” Piet told her, “it’s your husband that’s done it. He’s the local gamesmaster.”
“Freddy just wants to be human. He knows you all think he’s ridiculous so he’s adopted that as his act. Anyway, I didn’t mean poison. Maybe the rest of us are poisoned and you two upset us with your innocence. Think of just yourselves. Piet, look at her. Why do you want to keep tormenting her with your presence? Make her take her husband back to Cambridge. Quit Gallagher and go somewhere else, go back to Michigan. You’ll destroy each other. I was with her at the end of last week. It’s not a little thing you put her through.”
Foxy cut in dryly. “It was my decision. I’m grateful for your help, Georgene, but I would have gotten through alone. And we would have found a way without Freddy, though that did work out. As to Piet and me, we have no intention of sleeping together again. I think you’re saying you still want him. Take him.”
“That’s not what I’m saying! Not at all!” There had been some selfless point, some public-spirited truth she had been trying to frame for these two, and they were too corrupt to listen.
Piet said, joking, “I feel I’m being auctioned off. Should we let Angela bid too?”
He was amused. They were both amused. Georgene had entertained them, made them vivid to themselves. Watching her tremblingly try to manage her coffee cup, a clumsy intruder, they were lordly, in perfect control. Having coaxed the abortion from their inferiors, they were quite safe, and would always exist for each other. Their faces were pleasant in sunlight, complacent in the same way, like animals that have eaten.