by Marge Piercy
They were hungry and thirsty and lying in their own filth, jammed together so that everybody was leaning on everybody else. It was so loud and so crowded, she felt as if they all had one headache. A little boy whose mother had died two nights before had attached himself to her and Maman. He did not cry much now. He felt fiery to her fingertips. His eyelashes had matted his eyes shut and he lay across her feet with his head in Maman’s lap. His name was Jules. He did not know his last name. He did not know how old he was, but Maman had said, when she was still able to speak, that she thought he was between three and four. She was Naomi-Rivka, both of them at once, her throat too burned with thirst to speak, to cry, even to ask Maman when it would stop. The air itself was dirt, and she felt her body crumbling like bad cheese.…
She woke in her hot dark room hearing Ruthie sighing in sleep in the bunk below her. Boston Blackie lay across her feet, snoring softly. She felt raked with fear. She felt as if she were bleeding fear onto the sheets. It was only a bad dream. But she did not believe that. She did not believe that at all.
LOUISE 3
Afternoon Sun
The sand scorched the soles of Louise’s feet as Claude and she crossed the low dune among dwarf blueberries and poverty grass to the beach beyond, where bathers had already established a path through the barbed wire. The waves were rearing up to roll in smartly although the wind was only a mild breeze here. A storm had passed out to sea, distant beyond the horizon like the war, washing up seaweed, odd pieces of twisted metal, shell casings and the night before a body, Louise had heard in the village when they bicycled in to do their shopping. Louise had not been on a bicycle in years, but after a bad night of aching calves she kept to herself, her resilient muscles had adjusted and remembered.
Claude’s wiry body in striped trunks was a novelty to her, still a little startling. He was thinner than Oscar, more lightly built, a nervous agility and speed to his movements. She caught herself comparing him once again to Oscar and grimaced in exasperation. Would she never stop? Since she had come away with him for this week of vacation, she kept being struck by the strangeness of being intimate with a man who was not her ex-husband. A hundred little habits and usages surprised her, that he wore pajamas, that he sang in French when he was doing some little task such as cleaning a bluefish. A local fisherman had given it to them when they had fallen into conversation watching the boats in the town harbor.
After swimming, lying side by side with salt water drying on their skin, they were both silent. She lay on her belly, the straw hat pulled over her head to protect her scalp from the sun’s rays. She was grateful to be out of New York for a week. Kay was off working as a counselor in a progressive children’s camp. Normally Kay would have been a year too young for the job, but the camp was short on counselors, having lost the boys to the draft. Louise found it more a relief than a pain to be separated from Kay for two months. They had been quarreling a great deal. Kay continued to pick up servicemen, claiming that all her girlfriends did the same. Louise had withheld her allowance, made scenes, reasoned, brought in a family friend, insisted on accompanying Kay to and from school, kept her in for a week at a time, but Kay was as stubborn as she was. Louise had arranged for the job in an effort to keep Kay out of trouble.
She inhaled the salty almost smoky musk of her arm. She smelled like something delicious to eat. It made her think of Kay’s hair when she had been playing in the sun, when they finally had enough money to take a vacation occasionally. She remembered going to Montauk Point, where there had been cheap fishermen’s cabins. The salt smell of the ocean was something Oscar had first given her. They used to dawdle along on the beach, the three of them, beachcombing, picking over the shells and the rocks, popping the little bladders on the rockweed. She had been delighted to escape Brooklyn. Lying in a lumpy double bed and hearing the waves slide in had been erotic and soothing at once.
Claude stirred himself, sighing. He was lying on his back with one hand shading his pale aquamarine eyes. He flipped over suddenly. “I don’t know why, but I was just thinking about St-Malo. It’s in Bretagne. Have you ever been there?”
“I’ve never been in Brittany at all, I’m sorry to say.”
“I used to spend August at a little stone house on the beach. There is sand and marsh, as here, but there is also granite. The bones of the land.”
Although he said I, she knew he was also remembering his family in France, a wife and two sons. That was all she knew, except that his wife was not with him and she had heard him describe himself as single.
He sat up. He seemed determined to clutch the present, running a hand over her back caressingly. “You said you’d been in France, though, yes? Paris, I suppose?”
“Four times. My ex-husband’s sister lives there. I wonder if you ever met her?”
“Paris is a large city, not a village, Lulu.”
She wondered why men always gave her nicknames. She had never called Oscar poopsie or honeybunch or Ozzie. She addressed Claude as Claude. But every man she had ever been involved with invented a name for her, as if that gave him true possession. “Still, you might well have crossed paths.”
“What is she called?” he asked without interest, batting at a sand flea.
“She writes under the name Gloria Ivoire, but that’s just her pen name for fashion stories. She covers the Parisian designers for Harper’s Bazaar and McCall’s. She lives under her husband’s name, as the Baronne de Montseurrat, Gloria Barthoise.”
He laughed, a sharp sound of surprised delight. “In fact I have dined with her. Far more beautiful than the models she writes about, but married to a man of paralyzing dullness. He races—and resembles—a horse.” Claude was smiling, alert, fascinated in a different way than he usually was—although, like Oscar, he was a man whom almost everything could interest, briefly. “I’m astonished that you should know Gloria. I knew her for half a year before I learned she was American. She has only a faint accent. A woman of formidable style and perhaps more formidable style intelligence. But you said your ex-husband came from Pittsburgh?”
“So does Gloria,” Louise said, sitting up.
“Gloria Neige Noire, we called her. Oh, my.” He smiled again, settling into the sand and the gossip. It was as if his American years were sloughed off and she was permitting him to talk about the people who had mattered to him in his real life. “She had something of a scandalous reputation trailing after her until she married. The sort of lovers an adventuress might choose. Then nothing. Complete rectitude. Boring fidelity. A sudden cold.”
Louise was smiling attentively, but she was also thinking about that phrase, a boring fidelity. She had never found fidelity boring. She had given it absolutely to Oscar, and she had vainly expected it back. If Oscar had used that phrase, she would have begun an argument at once, but she was obviously going to let it pass by. She had much to learn about Claude.
“How did you ever meet her?”
“When I was seeking backers for La Tête du Bonhomme, we were brought together at a producer’s house. But I like going to the races at Longchamp. I like to watch the crowds even more than the horses. To make little bets and care passionately if a nag wins or loses, to drink champagne and watch the most beautiful and fashionable women of Paris. There’s nothing like it here. Nothing at all.” He looked tired.
She had a moment’s sense of them as curiously mismatched. She would not care for the races at Longchamp, and what did someone who adored the most beautiful and fashionable women of Paris want with her?
He looked up frowning. “But surely Gloria Ivoire isn’t Jewish?”
“Sure she is. Her husband isn’t, of course. She stays in close touch with her family. Or did till December of forty-one. We haven’t had word from her since then. I know Oscar’s extremely worried.”
“I’d imagine she’d be safe enough. The Nazis and the French Right are going after the Jews, but she’s well protected, married to that nothing of impeccable family. We never did get any money out
of him, by the way.”
“I suppose she’s safe, but it would be a relief to know. I have no idea how Gloria would respond to living in an occupied country. She has an iron will and detests being ordered to do anything.”
“I might be able to find out for you,” he said casually. “If you really want to know.”
“I do.” She did not take the offer seriously. He was showing off, assuming she would forget.
That evening he found a grill in the old barn beside the house, and decided he would broil the bluefish they had been given. This was his idea of roughing it, staying in the well-equipped house of a friend with hired help lurking and broiling a fish over an open fire. A good breeze whipped off the marshy inlet at the foot of the knoll on which the house stood, a grey weathered double Cape with many small rooms upstairs that opened into each other. All along the edge of the crabgrass lawn where Claude had built his fire, rosa rugosa, the wild beach roses that made enormous orange hips, were flowering in pink and cherry red.
The house belonged to an actor who used it only in August, a man who usually played crusty country doctors or crazy old scientists or mellow old lawyers. The house was beautifully sited and well built, with wide eighteenth-century flooring, a beehive fireplace, but the rooms were small and had been built without halls. Bathrooms had been stuck in, one in an old birthing room. To get to any of them, she walked through other bedrooms, fine with only the two of them in the house, but unimaginable to her when it was fully stocked with children and adults.
With the house came a local carpenter who turned on the plumbing and electricity, whenever a telegram came to do so, stacked firewood, repaired what needed it, and a widow, who cooked. This was her night off. It was a new ambiance to Louise, but one to which she felt she could easily become accustomed. Claude, who had never been there before, was full of anecdotes about the house, the town and now the fish he was cooking.
“Bluefish are tigers,” he announced. “They go into a feeding frenzy like sharks, until they drive their prey up on the beach. They will even take a sizable bite out of a swimmer.”
I am learning about myself as well as about him, Louise thought. She observed similarities between Oscar and Claude, as well as the obvious differences. She seemed passionately drawn to men who felt the necessity of charming everyone they met, whereas she was a person who mostly went about keeping to herself. She did not start up conversations on the bus or in the post office. But Oscar did. And Claude did. Both were constantly picking up strangers and turning them inside out like pockets full of curious odds and ends of information. Both sat down in a restaurant wanting their waiter or waitress to like them. Louise wanted her waiter or waitress to be decently paid, to provide good service, to have a happy and fulfilling life outside the restaurant, but never would it have occurred to her to wonder whether or not the person liked her, or to try to seduce their liking.
In many ways, they were different, she reminded herself quickly, because a fear came on her occasionally that she was trying to repeat what could not be repeated. Oscar was an intellectual. He dreamed in ideas. He was an unusually physical and sensual man for an intellectual, but he loved to argue, to explore, to clunk ideas hard against facts and other theories to see how they rang when challenged.
Claude noticed light on the weathered wood, the slant of the mullions across the wide floorboards, the way the carpenter who took care of the house favored his right leg when he walked up- or downhill. He loved gossip and anecdote and speculation about why someone had done or not done something. If something was alien to him and he could not penetrate its behavior, like the swallows who darted at them if they went around the far side of the old barn and who streaked through the twilight air, he invented stories about it. The swallows were the ghosts of people who had been too busy to enjoy living, he said, who had never in the midst of ten thousand things to do, taken a week and run off with a beautiful lover, and so Venus was punishing them in the afterlife by making them fly aimlessly to and fro always in a terrible hurry. Oscar would have read a book about swallows and then closely observed their behavior.
“Actually I think they’re catching insects.” Louise sat on a bench watching his labors. They were drinking white wine he had brought with him. In the midst of the war, Claude always had wine.
“Exactly. What greater punishment than to spend your next lifetime eating mosquitoes, flies and gnats? Would you like that? No? Then you must always be prepared to interrupt your life when Venus bids you. Or she will have the last laugh.”
Louise very much doubted that Claude had become a successful director by always dropping his projects to run off with a lover, but then she doubted he had ever needed to go farther than a convenient and almost adjacent bedroom. The heat wave was slowing everything in New York, he had a little time, and he had spent last week in New York and must spend next week in Washington. She did not doubt he wanted to see her, but she also recognized that the timing was not dictated by passion but convenience. She must keep a level head. Not to want more than he would easily offer; to enjoy what was possible, then to turn away when he did, or if she were truly lucky, to let go the instant before Claude.
Each time she saw him, she found him more attractive, his eyes of aquamarine, like the earrings she had once been given because aquamarine was her birthstone, his agile wiry body that tennis and his own energy level kept trim in spite of the quantities of rich food and wine he took in. Another similarity, she warned herself: both good trenchermen, avid and adventuresome about food, querulous if not sufficiently and promptly fed. If he thought he was in danger of missing a meal, Oscar could throw a tantrum that other men might reserve for infidelity.
Claude’s brows ran straight across with no arch to them, not thick on the brow ridges but thin brown lines as if drawn with a fast pencil. His mouth was full, the upper lip dominating the lower. He shaved daily, but his body sported little hair, a few coppery wires under his arms and curling around the base of his short thick penis. His skin was tanning a golden olive. His dark brown hair glinted with brass highlights under the sun. She had begun to experience that melting between her hipbones when she looked at him. Her body wanted to trot after him wagging its tail and pushing a wet nose into his palm. Her body was enormously pleased and lacking in dignity.
He liked to make love in the mornings and again when they came back from the beach. He talked as he made love, up to the point where he entered her, which took some getting used to. He would praise her breasts and thighs, call her sweet names, tell her what he was going to do to her, tell her what she was going to do to him. He spoke in French and in English and occasionally in a language she finally asked about, Rumanian. He was not talking to her but to himself, she decided, exciting himself, proving to himself what he was doing, making it more vivid, with his running commentary.
“Voici, le petit bouton rose, comme il se gonfle. Now you’re going to beg me for my man, and he’s going to push hard between your little lips.”
She liked making love with him, mostly just tuning out what he said, as if it were a sound track or background music. She could not suddenly become someone who talked about making love while she did it. Her few attempts to imitate him simply made her feel awkward. She saw no reason she should not remain silent and allow him to bathe them in a puddle of sexual and semisexual words. He did not like her to mount him, preferring missionary position or entering from behind. He muttered, he moaned, he bit her shoulders. He had several different rhythms. Her body opened up wide for him and took him deep in, turning molten, improvident and vibrantly ripe.
In bed Oscar did not talk much, so perhaps he had created her reticence, or perhaps it was native to her. Never had Oscar called her by any other woman’s name in bed. However, one of the early warnings that he was involved with somebody was when he began to do some new little thing. Suddenly he was flicking his tongue against the corner of her mouth, he was rubbing her round and round on the belly. These new tricks were delightful in their wa
y, but they also chilled her, because she learned to ask herself, Now where did he pick that up? It was generous of him to want to carry home to her every pleasure he encountered, but she would just as soon he had read a sex manual or a dirty book instead.
When would she stop remembering, comparing, gesture by gesture? Yet she could tell that Claude also disappeared regularly into his mind and his past. After all, she thought, we are not virgins, we are not twenty-year-olds. We are each formed by a full and busy and loving life, so why be surprised that neither of us has totally discarded that past?
By silent collusion, both avoided discussing the war. Compulsively after supper they listened to the day’s news. Then Claude went for a walk alone and Louise straightened the house, while the widow did the dishes. The British were holding at El Alamein against Rommel, but for how long? German forces were pouring across Russia, toward the oil fields of the south. The Japanese had invaded British New Guinea. All sorts of ugly rumors floated around about what the Germans were doing in occupied Poland, where they were reportedly imprisoning millions of Jews, along with Gypsies, the Catholic Left, Communists, Socialists, homosexuals and resistants, millions of people uprooted and shipped off with only what they could carry, probably to the primitive conditions of work camps where disease and poor nutrition would be prevalent. Still, the worst rumors sounded like the sort of virulent propaganda that had been spread about German soldiers bayoneting babies during World War I. Everyone was leery of horror stories, not wanting to be fooled as the public had been in that war to end all wars.
Only on the train back did they talk about the war. “If the Soviet Union doesn’t stop them, nobody will,” Claude said. “The Americans are totally unprepared and the British seem to have lost the knack of winning on the ground. Once Hitler seizes the Caucasian oil fields, he’ll be twice as strong.” As they were gliding across Connecticut, he asked, “What does your ex-husband do now? Is he in the service or still teaching?”