Gavin kicked his foot against the door and whirled around. “Listen, you nut. Where do you get off persecuting me because I balled some broad two or three times?”
“I’ll bet … two or three times.”
“Well, you haven’t been an angel these twelve years either.”
“Oh, I can assure you that I’ve never committed adultery,” Coco lied emphatically. “That I can assure you.”
“Bullshit. I didn’t fall off a tree yesterday,” Gavin said, moving threateningly in her direction. “I always knew when you had something going on the side.”
“You never knew anything about me,” Coco said defensively.
“Screw you, Coco.” Gavin turned away, looking as if he was seriously prepared to quit fighting.
“Why the hell don’t you stop lying to me, Gavin? Why don’t you tell me who she is?”
“How do you know it’s just one woman?” Gavin asked maliciously. “Why not more than one? Maybe I’ve got a harem.”
“Oh, come on, Gavin face it. There’s not enough of you to spread around that thin.”
“That’s what you think, baby.”
“I guess I should know, Gavin.”
“You don’t know anything except how to whine and bitch and complain all the time. Don’t you hear the baby crying? What kind of mother are you, anyhow?”
“I know I’m a better mother than you’re a father.”
“Tell that to the kids.”
“Well, where did you plan to take them today? Or do you have a very, very, very important brief to write to help the oppressed fight injustice?”
Gavin walked toward Coco’s dressing table and looked at himself in the mirror. “Well, maybe we should go to the zoo,” he said in a suddenly conciliatory voice.
“We went to the zoo last Sunday.”
“Yah. But we didn’t go down to see the bears or the seals.”
“Really, Gavin. Can’t you come up with something better than the zoo every Sunday?”
“For Christ’s sake, Coco. Joshua is getting hysterical. Why don’t you go change his diaper? He’s probably going to get that rash again.”
“And how would you know if he got a rash?”
Gavin marched over to the bed. “Get up, Coco. Get up and shut up, or I’m going to walk out of this crazy house and never come back.”
“You haven’t got the balls to do that, Gavin.”
“You want to bet?” he jeered. Then his expression softened. “What’s made you so hard, Coco?” he asked, looking down at her rather tenderly. “What made you so bitter and hard?”
“Frustration,” Coco answered promptly. “Sexual and creative frustration.”
“Well, I’m not to blame for both of them. And maybe if you stopped weeping and, wailing, you could write something, and then you would feel better.”
“Well, why don’t you take the kids to the zoo by yourself today, then? If you gave me some free time to do some work, maybe I would feel better.”
“Okay. Fine. I’ll take them myself, but get up now and dress them at least.”
“Sure, sport.” Coco climbed out of bed in a fashion that whirled her nightgown high up over her body. Then she turned her back on her husband to dig for underpants in her cluttered dresser drawer and heard him sneaking out of the room behind her.
But actually none of them went to the zoo. The children wanted to play in the backyard, and by the time Coco got downstairs Gavin had slumped off into his Sunday passivity and was reading the Washington papers at the kitchen table. Silently Coco joined him, and after a short while the coffee, the cigarettes, and The New York Times took the edge off her anger. Around ten, Coco mixed up a huge batch of eggs and bacon, enough so that no one would need lunch, and fed everyone breakfast. Afterward the children disappeared again, so Coco finished the newspapers.
“Jesus, the kids ate being great today,” Gavin said once, glancing at the clock.
“Yes, they really are,” Coco agreed, and then relaxed a little more.
The morning and early afternoon drifted past in low profile, and even interruptions to take care of the baby or break up a sibling wrestling match were low-key. Around three, Coco went up to the corner grocery to buy frozen pizzas for dinner. She walked slowly although the heat hung only halfheartedly over the city, brushing rather than banging against her. Coco felt rather peaceful by the time she returned home.
“Guess what?” Gavin asked in a testing voice, camouflaged in nonchalance, when she entered the kitchen.
“What?” Coco put her bag of groceries on the high-chair tray and sat down at the kitchen table again.
“Suede Bellock just called from New York. He’s doing a story about radical law firms around the country, and he’s coming down here for a week or so. He’s been out to Portland, California, Chicago and down to New Orleans, but he wants to wrap up the story here in Washington.”
Coco felt instant fluster, so she stood up and began to unpack the groceries.
“He’s coming in on Thursday, and I invited him to stay with us,” Gavin concluded.
Coco returned to the highchair and extracted a box of elbow macaroni from the bag. Since she always forgot to cook macaroni or make Jell-O, she left those kinds of boxes out on the counter as menu memos. Then she fussed about in the canned-goods cupboard long enough to regain some composure so she could come on negative and sound natural. “Well, that will certainly make a little more commotion around here … and a little more cooking.”
Gavin shrugged and opened The New York Times Book Review section. “He says his new book is coming out in September, and he thinks it’s going to make a lot of bread. But he has to keep doing magazine articles until he starts getting the royalties.”
Slowly Coco began to fill the percolator with water, procuring another few minutes of face-averted safety as she stared out of the finger-smudged window above the sink. Mike was oiling his two-wheeler bike out on the brick patio. His slim hard body was tense with concentration.
“Where are the other kids?” Coco asked.
“Jessica went over to the Baumgartners’ and Nicky’s upstairs. Jesus, you know Josh is taking a hell of a long nap. Maybe we should wake him so he won’t stay up too late tonight.”
“I’ll go get him,” Coco said, pouring coffee directly into the percolator basket without benefit of a tablespoon. Commingling with her excitement about seeing Suede again was a slight sense of deprivation, since a house guest would certainly cramp her nightly campaign to bully Gavin into disclosing his secret lovelife. She could hardly carry on like a far-out Broadway production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Suede there. A week-long visitor would put the lid on both her fishing expedition and her well-coordinated nervous breakdown.
Still … Suede … what a lovely retaliation.…
After plugging in the coffeepot Coco went into the TV room instead of upstairs. Nicky was lying on the floor constructing one of his cowboy-and-Indian battlegrounds on the fake-brick linoleum tile, rearranging the positions of his troops with great precision. He would pick up one of the hundreds of small plastic figures—all of whose miniature faces he could distinguish—and patiently try to stand it up on its bumpy plastic bottom.
“How’s it going, Nick?”
“Dood.”
He had a terrible lisp, compounded by a confusion of consonants. Coco lay down on the couch and turned so she could watch the ambushes being laid behind plastic cactus plants.
“Who’s winning?”
“Nobody.”
Nicky’s straight black hair covered his eyebrows, and Coco was reminded of the massive clean-up effort that all the children needed.
“Want to take a bath, Nick?”
“No.”
“I’ll take one with you.”
“Don’t talk, Mudder.”
Coco closed her eyes, hearing the sweet scraping noises of Nicky’s cowboys and Indians preparing for war around the TV room, and thought about Suede and those confused years before she
had engaged Dr. Finkelstein or started her Ph.D. or conceived Mike one night in an unendurably hot little apartment on Capitol Hill where the FM played Tristan and Isolde and her future stretched like an empty desert ahead of her. She hadn’t seen Suede for … well, it was before Joshua was born … almost three years?
She and Gavin had gone to New York for a weekend, and Suede had invited them over for drinks. She remembered experiencing her old kind of raunchy feelings for Suede as they walked inside the remodeled brownstone and up a flight of stairs to his fashionable apartment with his telltale-titled books lined up like billboard and advertisements for himself. His college-days flat on Ellis Avenue on the South Side of Chicago had hardly been chic. It had been a very long cold windy walk from the campus, but it was there—in that ugly-furnished, out-of-the-way flat—that Coco and Suede were lovers until he introduced her to his friend Gavin. And when Coco married Gavin for a variety of reasons, among which was the fact that Gavin was the first man to propose, Suede was wildly jealous. (Really, Dr. Finkelstein, that was why, really. How long could a nice Jewish girl from Chicago sleep with three or four graduate students—even sequentially—right in her own hometown without legalizing one of them? And Gavin wasn’t on the rebound, Dr. Finkelstein. You don’t seem to understand that he left Ann for me.)
But during the first five bitter years of her marriage, after they moved to Washington Coco had frequently taken the bus to New York. There, in a diligent but desultory way, she resumed old friendships with women who had done the brave thing and stayed single to make it big in the Big City, and resumed old affairs with several college lovers who still made fierce passionate love with her if she appeared at their apartment doors on a rainy Saturday afternoon because she couldn’t find Bloomingdale’s and decided to screw instead of shop.
And though her erratic erotic affairs during the years when Kennedy clamor and glamour ignited occasional high spirits were distributed among five or six gentlemen, it was Suede who most clearly dominated the memories of that fading time when they were all in their early twenties. Then Suede had been drafted into the army (no draft resistance then) and stationed at Fort Bragg, so that every week for over a year he visited the Burmans in Washington, sleeping on the ratty old sofa in their bedbugged, furnished apartment and went wandering around Capitol Hill with a little stenographic notebook that he used as a journal. But after his discharge, he moved back to New York to begin writing good strong journalism about the civil-rights movement and finally scored with a novel Making Out, while Coco retreated into successively bigger apartments, poorly spaced pregnancies, and dull coursework at the drab, dour Catholic University.
After Mike was born, Coco only visited New York a few times a year—and always with Gavin. They always stayed at the Chelsea, and she seldom found time to visit Suede or David or Bernardo alone, because she was worried Gavin might sneak off to visit Ann who, instead of using her sociology degree in some quiet teaching position, had begun writing articles for the Village Voice, and who would have been a P.L. for Gavin.
But perhaps Coco was already pregnant with Jessica by then, since in the sixties it was socially unacceptable to have only one child. Coco always remained strictly monogamous when she was pregnant, because she had once read a magazine article about a Welsh lady who bore fraternal twins fathered by two different men. It had put the fear of an affair into her—spoiling her safest period. Within two years after Jessica’s birth, Coco was pregnant again (she didn’t get an abortion, because she’d had three in college and hated each of them, and also because she felt it would be an insult to Mike and Jessica). So she continued teaching freshman composition at American University, and Nicky was born and had colic, and Coco didn’t sleep for a year and was too tired for love, let alone sex. Once she took a vacation alone in Puerto Rico and had a very good, intensely glamorous five-day affair, but she still went dutifully home again—to teach outlining to Long Island freshmen, to do a little more research on her dissertation, and to make dinner parties twice a month.
And then, drugged by demands and diapers, spaced out and dug in, she decided she might just as well have one more baby. So one sweet spring she simply dispensed with her diaphragm while dreaming about an eventual book-jacket boasting that the finest female writer to emerge in a decade was raising not one, not two, not three, but four little children, plus a poodle. Because, in those pre-lib days, three children were the expected number for young professionals, and four was such an easy one-upper.
So then there was Josh—the cutest, the fattest, the giggliest baby of all. But even before he was born, Coco began to hear about women’s lib and listen to the constant confirmations of the confusions that harassed her, and she began to think that her condition was, indeed, congenital.
But in the rush and flurry of those days that turned into years, she had little time to think of men much anymore, until now, when Gavin had revived the old battle of the sexes so that her blood stirred once again to the clarion call of competitive sex and struggle.
“Mudder, Joshua is cwying.”
Coco jumped up guiltily and ran upstairs.
seven
Coco slept badly the next Wednesday night, vaguely aware, even while still asleep, that she was moaning and thrashing about the bed. She woke up headachy Thursday morning to discover: that Gavin had retreated during the night to relocate on the living-room couch; that she was getting a monstrous pimple on her lower-left cheek (thirty-year-old acne?); that the baby looked splotchy and seemed inordinately cranky; that Nicky had lost or thrown away one of his flip-flops, so he had no shoes to wear to the park; that Mrs. Marshall wanted to take off Monday (July 3) as well as Tuesday, the fourth, so she could go visit her sister in North Carolina; that there wasn’t any Captain Crunch or pancake syrup in the reserve cupboard; and that Gavin had a suspicious expression on his face when he slammed out of the house to go to work. Coco drank a cup of instant coffee that kept curdling a lukewarm skin frosting on top, and felt harassed, hyped up, and half-hysterical.
But once upstairs out on her porch again, Coco reappraised all her possessions, still safe in their predictable places, smiled gratefully, unzipped her dress, and let it slide down the length of her body to crumple on the floor. Without exposing herself, she surveyed the backyard to see what the children were doing, glanced across the alley toward the fifth-floor-center apartment balcony to check if the handsome-from-a-distance man who frequently watched her was there (he wasn’t), adjusted the top of her bikini, rubbed some QT lotion on the front of her body, wiped her hands with a spit-dampened Kleenex so there wouldn’t be any telltale yellow-stained palms to reveal the secret of her speedy tan, and then lit a cigarette.
A sun-tinged breeze whispered through the screens and rippled Coco’s supply of papers beneath the chaise. At that moment the manifold carbons seemed to offer a much faster, happier catharsis than Dr. Finkelstein. Feeling the stir of potential success and sexual allure, she got down on the hot wooden floor and commenced her daily quota of fifty sit-ups. Back on the chaise she took her hand mirror out of the makeup kit only to be assaulted by a view of her pimple, which she had forgotten, growing bigger. She fingered it tenderly, seeking the secret source of its pollution, and then decided to compensate for her skin problem by starting to take care of business earlier than usual.
The sun was hot. She would have liked a G & T but had forgotten to bring any ice cubes upstairs, so she poured a shot of gin into one of the tumblers and drank it straight. Then she took out her calendar notebook.
CALL REVEREND PARKS AT QUINCY STREET CHURCH—ASK ABOUT USING HALL OVER JULY 4TH WEEKEND
CALL UNIVERSITIES—SEE IF THEY RENT DORMITORY SPACE
TYPE AND MAIL LIST OF HOSPITALITY HOUSES TO OFFICE
Petulantly Coco crossed out Thursday, wrote in “Monday, June 26” at the top of the page, added GO TO DRUGSTORE—BUY FLIP-FLOPS FOR NICKY, and returned the notebook to her purse.
It was almost: 11:30 when the gin struck Coco’s system and she beg
an to feel high, tan, thin, artistic and committed. Power and promise surged through her. Instantly she felt convinced that she really could produce a brilliant-novel, that before long she really would deliver a book that would provide total self-fulfillment—at least for as long as a newborn baby did. And it was quite clear that one published novel would eternally immunize her from the hurts which other people tried to inflict upon her. Now all of her vital life energy would be channeled into beautiful prose and sensitive perceptions rather than the emotionally violent, self-destructive behavior that Dr. Finkelstein warned against. Instead of tearing her life apart, Coco would engage in rapier-sharp analysis and poetic flights of prose.
Suffused with Determination To Write The Conclusive Thing, Coco inserted a paper into the typewriter, flipped ON, and waited for something like The Sound and the Fury to appear on her roller like teletype bulletins materializing off an AP wire-service machine. Slowly two paragraphs emerged. Coco stopped typing, read the words, tore out the paper, and crumpled it up into a tight angry ball. The phrases that filtered through the typewriter were an enormous aesthetic distance from what she had anticipated. Disappointed by what had arrived—a garbled message tele-typed from her interior—she sank back on the chaise.
It was obvious that Coco was blocking because all across the nation Didions, Goulds, Kaufmans, Buchanans and Roiphes were selling their novels to the movies. That pressure—plus the fact that in just a few hours Mrs. Marshall’s voice would rise up the stairwell announcing her departure—was too much for Coco. And the realization that Take Heaven By Storm was now nothing more than a carbon copy of collected contemporary clichés freaked her out. Coco’s book was turning out to be a series of poorly constructed sentences in a string of underdeveloped paragraphs that took off like a posse in hopeless pursuit of a still unformulated theme.
It was not like she was ignorant of literary structure. Indeed she had a B.A. and M.A. and half a Ph.D. with eighteen months still remaining of the original eighty-four in which to finish her dissertation. And she had taught English composition for seven very long years discussing outlines, paragraph structure, organization, topic sentences and the vivid use of detail. But she simply couldn’t organize her own life into a well-wrought novel.
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