So I stretched the truth a little. I stretched the truth, I changed my clothes and adopted the student uniform as shamelessly as Tyler had; I wore my hair long and flowing again; I stopped wearing jewelry and makeup. After years of trying to look older I tried to look twenty-two again, and it didn’t work. Nothing did.
The day I chose was unseasonably hot. Hank and I were both wearing shorts, and while my legs were not nearly so wonderful as Hank’s, I thought I didn’t look too bad. We climbed up a limestone outcropping at the swamp’s far end, searching for evidence of hawks, and when we reached the top I sat down and spread our lunch on a cloth. Below us I could see the transects the botany students had laid from the edge of the water through the reeds, stakes hammered at one-meter intervals. I gave Hank the cans of beer I’d smuggled in and he drank them gratefully. When he was done he took off his shirt and stretched himself out on the rocks.
‘God,’ he said. ‘This weather’s the best.’
‘It’s nice,’ I said. I lay down next to him and pretended to enjoy the sun, which was making me sweat.
‘This is great,’ I said. ‘Do you mind …?’
He lay on his back with his eyes closed. ‘Mind what?’
I took off my shirt. He opened his eyes, blinked, looked at me again. Smiled. ‘Hell,’ he said. ‘Why not? It’s not fair, the way women always have to wear tops.’ He closed his eyes again.
I lay next to him, no more exposed in my taupe satin bra than I’d be in a bathing suit. I moved my arm so that it brushed his.
Still nothing. He moved his arm away and smiled at the sun. I moved my arm again. He moved his. I moved my leg until our thighs touched. This time he shifted a little uneasily. Of course I should have left things there, moved away, pretended disinterest. Given up. I rolled over heavily and kissed him, my unclothed chest mashed against his.
He threw me off as if I were a rabid dog. He pushed me off, sat up, rose to his knees. ‘Jesus, Grace,’ he said. ‘What the hell? You’re married. To Walter.’
I kneeled next to him, a sharp stone pressed into my shin. ‘Forget that,’ I said. ‘Forget Walter.’ As if either of us could. I reached out and rested my arm on his shoulder. ‘Don’t you want me?’ I said.
His mouth opened and closed and he flushed dark red. He shrugged off my hand and stood up. ‘Let’s just forget this whole thing happened,’ he said. ‘Okay?’ His voice quivered with his effort to stay calm. ‘Let’s just get back to work. We don’t want to wreck this project.’
But of course I did. I wanted to wreck this project, wreck him and Walter, tear apart this life I found myself floundering in. I was so humiliated and disappointed that I started crying. Hank looked at me for a minute and then grabbed his shirt and ran down the rocky path. He left me alone, hot and sweaty and half-naked, brokenhearted, and that’s how Walter found me an hour later when he passed by with his gill net and happened to hear me crying.
‘Hello?’ Walter called from below me. ‘Who’s up there? Are you all right?’
I couldn’t answer; I couldn’t stop crying. Walter left his gill net by the transects and sprinted up the slope.
‘Grace?’ he said. He kneeled down beside me and wrapped me in his arms. ‘Grace?’ he repeated, completely bewildered. ‘What is it? Are you all right?’ He checked me quickly for cuts and bruises, his hands pausing over the sweat and dirt and gravel stuck to my back. His face darkened. ‘Did someone …?’ he asked. ‘Has anyone …?’
‘Hank!’ I wailed. Perhaps I meant Walter to understand that the only way he could. Perhaps that cry simply tore itself from my heart.
‘Hank?’ he whispered. ‘Hank did this?’
I never contradicted him. I let him dress me, lead me back to the car, think what he wanted. I let his own heart break, half with rage at my supposed violation, half with a pain he could never admit, and I didn’t care. I knew I could never face Hank again, never survive unless Hank was out of my life. I could never stand to watch Hank and Walter together. I brought our world crashing down around us, the end of another life.
A Refuse Heap
No one could have missed the changes that occurred in Walter after that. Over the years, five horizontal lines had carved themselves across his forehead, which folded into neat corrugations when he lifted his eyebrows. Now a pair of vertical lines sprang up above his nose, crossing the horizontals in a ragged checkerboard. The web of fine diagonals around his eyes darkened and deepened, and two furrows cut from the wings of his nose to his mouth. His face cracked into a complex map, as if I’d carved it with a razor; and at night, when he thought I was sleeping, he groaned. Not once or twice, on falling asleep or awakening, but all night long. Each time he rolled or moved he let out a low, broken sound, as unforced and unstoppable as breath. In the mornings he lay in the tub, quite defeated, and he couldn’t get out until I’d brought him coffee. Through all this he could never say what was hurting him so: as if, by his not saying, I wouldn’t know.
I knew. Walter had confronted Hank and Hank had refused to defend himself; all he’d ever said to Walter was, ‘I didn’t touch her.’ Walter turned all his frustration and hurt into anger and cut Hank off completely, and still it wasn’t enough for me. I was seized with a sense that I’d lived my whole life wrongly, falsely, badly; and all I could think of to do was to thrash at the world around me. Walter’s project collapsed and his group disbanded and Hank transferred to Page’s lab, and I congratulated myself on how well I’d punished everyone, even me: Walter was perfectly kind and sympathetic, but he could no longer make love to me. Perhaps he knew more of the truth than he knew he did.
As the fall wore on, Walter threw himself into the plans for an international conference he’d been invited to organize in Beijing, for the following September. He grew tired and anxious, drowning in a sea of visas and invitations, travel agents and hotel brochures, but I couldn’t make myself help him or even show any enthusiasm for the trip. This was my chance to follow in Uncle Owen’s footsteps and see what he had seen, but I had never meant to go like this: a forced march on the arm of an angry husband, who refused to allow me to stay at home alone. Our living room filled with papers and abstracts and I grew guiltier each day, until finally I roused myself enough to write Dalton and tell him some of what was happening. I described Hank and what had happened in the swamp, and what I had done to Walter; ‘… and now he wants me to go to China with him,’ I finished. ‘What am I supposed to do?’
‘Whatever you have to,’ Dalton wrote back. ‘But just go.’
His note lay on top of a big box of Uncle Owen’s things, all his diaries and dictionaries and maps, and despite myself the box roused my interest a bit. I compared Uncle Owen’s things with the guidebooks Walter brought home, and even that brief acquaintance was enough to tell me that the China Uncle Owen had visited was gone. The walls around Beijing had vanished; broad streets cut through the old alleys; concrete towers had replaced the low houses. Even the language was different: Beijing, not Peking. Cixi rather than Tzu Hsi.
I tried to take an interest in that. I buried the knowledge of what I had done, I buried everything, and I tried to forget Hank and to warm toward Walter, to show a little enthusiasm for this trip he was working on so hard. I tried to believe we might enjoy traveling together; we had in the past. But meanwhile I had nothing to do but eat.
When my mother visited early in December, she turned white with horror at the sight of me. She turned white and then laughed and then frowned and then smiled, and then she tore a sheet of paper from a pad and started outlining a diet. Slim as always, she wore a straight navy skirt and a white blouse with a boat neck, beneath which her bra straps showed. For my birthday, she’d brought me two bras that resembled armor, boned and thick-sided and fastened with long rows of hooks and eyes, as expensive as a good pair of shoes. Neither of them fit.
‘Grapefruit,’ she said firmly. ‘Grapefruit after every meal – burns up the calories. High protein, no fat, no carbohydrates, ten glasses of water a d
ay – how did you let this happen?’
I looked at the floor. Letting had nothing to do with it – I had done it on purpose, eating with all the stealth and steadiness of a prisoner of war. Since my escapade in the swamp, I’d gorged as I hadn’t done since Mumu’s death, gaining ten pounds, fifteen, twenty. At twenty, Walter had noticed. We ate our meals in silence then, he reading scientific journals while I flipped through Uncle Owen’s China diaries, searching for solutions to my life. Walter had frowned at me one night, after I’d taken a second helping of mashed potatoes and then a third.
‘Are you sure you want that?’ he’d said, sounding exactly like my mother. ‘A third helping – you look like you’re putting on a little weight.’
‘That’s my business,’ I’d snapped. But after that I’d taken to eating in secret, concealing my habits from Walter the way I’d concealed them from my mother as a child.
In the basement below us, our washer and dryer stood against adjoining walls, leaving a small corner of empty space between them. I’d always kept our clothes hamper there, but after Walter’s comment I began keeping our dirty clothes in plastic bags and I used the hamper for hiding food. I kept flat tins of anchovies there, jars of jam and peanut butter, bars of dark chocolate, nuts and sour-balls, cookies in tins, fruitcakes and canned pâté and maraschino cherries. At night, when Walter groaned beside me, I crept downstairs in my robe and slippers and headed for the hamper.
I ate like an animal, ripping and tearing the food from the packages, greedy, furtive, fast; half-asleep while the night passed by like a dream. The emptiness in me was so deep I could never fill it, and each time I found myself in the basement, my mouth smeared and my stomach so taut it hurt to touch it, I hardly recognized what I was doing. The food hit my brain like a club, sedating my confusion and pain until I could lumber back to bed. Night after night I’d done this, making something of myself. But when my mother asked how I’d let this happen, I looked at the table and said, ‘I don’t know. My metabolism must be changing.’
‘How’s the latest house?’ she asked me then.
‘I’m selling it,’ I said. Nothing about my business seemed interesting anymore. By then I’d had fantasies of living in one of my houses, away from Walter, away from our lives, but I went ahead and sold the last one and then, instead of buying another, put the money in the bank. I was tired. I couldn’t understand what I was doing. Walter was so glad to see me out of the rehabbing business that he threw a New Year’s party.
Because I couldn’t manage much of anything then, Walter’s colleague, Tyler Robertson, made most of the arrangements and brought over most of the food. I cleaned up a little and then wrapped myself in a new dress: white, soft, cut low and tight around my breasts but floating gently elsewhere, obscuring (I thought) the weight I’d gained since September. Page showed up; since Hank had returned to her lab she’d forgiven Walter for trying to steal him, and I think she even felt sorry for him. Stuck with this idle, crazy wife; she and Walter were colleagues now, and had more in common than she’d ever had with me. She’d shed her girlish shell somewhere, when I hadn’t been paying attention, and she’d turned into a formidable woman. Where once she’d made me feel old and sedate, now she made me feel like a child.
She took one look at me and said, ‘What’s happened to you? Are you pregnant?’
‘I wish,’ I said.
She raised her eyebrows and looked me over more carefully. ‘So?’ she said. ‘What in the world is wrong with you? Can’t you pull yourself together?’
‘No,’ I said. I couldn’t tell her what had happened. ‘Not right now.’
Her disapproval was so strong that I could smell it. She moved toward the bar Walter had set up in the kitchen, and I forced myself to circulate among the other guests. Tyler was so drunk he was prancing around in a rhinestone tiara. His shirt was hiked above his pleated pants, displaying six inches of freckled paunch. His third wife, Elena, a Hungarian graduate student four years younger than me, kept rubbing her fingers on his stomach. The two of them circled our living room together, filling glasses from a big jar of something they referred to as glog.
‘Scotch, brandy, spices, lemons, sugar, gin,’ Tyler recited gaily, pushing his tiara into his thinning hair. Elena had crowned him King of the Night and he was taking his role seriously.
He and Elena smooched and fondled each other, stuffing food into their open mouths; they’d been married for less than a year and Elena had cooked goulash and pierogies and potato pancakes, onion dumplings and a huge ham, shaming me completely. Tyler had invited all his students to the party, as well as his ex-students and post-docs and protégés, and all Elena’s foreign friends, Russians and Indians and Pakistanis, Chinese and Koreans. Almost everyone there was dependent on Tyler in some way, and so he was a happy man and this was a happy party for almost everyone but Walter.
While the party bubbled and tumbled and roared, Walter sat in a corner and sulked. He was wearing a hat shaped like a giraffe’s head, with ears and painted eyes and a long, quivering nose that seemed designed to express his slights. My own hat bore pink stuffed hands that clapped when I pulled a string; Tyler had crowned us all earlier and now the headgear he’d brought as party favors bobbed as our guests sweated and jiggled to the old Motown tapes he’d also brought. It was Tyler’s party, almost completely; only the house was ours.
I got trapped against the wall with a clump of comparative-literature types, Elena’s friends, and I stood there miserably. I wanted to dance with the students. I wanted to wear, as one girl did, a spaghetti-strapped green cotton undershirt and black Lycra pants. Instead, I stood in my white tent and listened to a discussion about folktales and the wish-fulfillment of barren couples.
‘This occurs so often,’ one black-haired woman said. Her hair was swept in a complex knot below a pale blue, Carmen Miranda-like hat sprouting blossoms and fruits – one of Tyler’s favorites. The woman spoke as if she’d forgotten she was wearing it. ‘A woman begs an old witch for a tiny girl and then finds a baby in a tulip: Thumbelina. A woman beneath a juniper tree pleads for a child and then eats some berries and is granted her wish, but then she dies. A queen pricks her finger sewing and then begs for a daughter as red as blood and as white as the snow. The wish is always granted, but there is always a twist.’
She smiled at me; she had lipstick on her front teeth. I turned and stared out the window, at the snow lying over the grass, and I thought how I could prick my finger with the marcasite brooch Uncle Owen had given me. The drops might fall, harden like sugar-on-snow, leap up as triplets. Life might leap up in my womb. I had had too much to drink but I thought I knew how the women in those fairy tales had felt: yearning, burning, brooding, dreaming, wishing, wanting. Despairing, sometimes. Lost in an inner world. I still dreamed that I might get pregnant somehow; that I might, like a marsupial, have a baby no bigger than my thumb.
A man wearing a silver alien’s helmet said, ‘Remember the man who said, “I want a son so bad it could even be a hedgehog”? And then he gets one who’s half hedgehog, half boy?’
The people around him smiled knowingly and their voices rose and fell, confident, self-satisfied, dry. Here at a party where all was permitted, even encouraged, they could find nothing better to do than to talk about their work and insinuate that if I was finally granted a child I’d either die or bear some sort of monster. Two girls were dancing near us, eyes closed and hair flying, ignoring us completely. I tapped my feet and longed to join them but knew I couldn’t; I was too old, too heavy, too respectable. I had just turned thirty, and I thought no one would ever dance with me again.
As I moved away from the folklorists I bumped into a plump Pakistani who lowered his lids and confided that his astral body could fly. ‘I fly over mountains and deserts,’ he said, waiting for me to be impressed.
‘Desserts?’ I pricked up my ears.
‘Deserts,’ he said. ‘Dunes, oases, date palms …’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘Watch out fo
r DC.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Missiles,’ I told him. He looked so disappointed that I told him not to worry. ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Probably you fly too fast.’
‘Oh, very fast,’ he beamed. ‘Several millions of miles per hour. And also I fly when everyone else is asleep.’
I wished him well and excused myself and moved on. A Russian woman, a prominent biophysicist, tried to tell me about her theories of the arctic soul. ‘Cold climates,’ she said. ‘The long nights, the temperatures, cause a darkening and deepening of the soul. Korlovsky clearly demonstrates …’
I excused myself again.
‘The parthenogenetic whiptail lizards of the South-west,’ a pale man said.
‘Wulfric of Haselbury,’ a tan girl said. ‘You’ve never heard of him?’
Two biochemists were slandering their brokers, a political economist was proclaiming the perils of not studying Latin, a sculptor was trying to buy an old Dodge from a girl with remarkable legs. I drifted through all of them to the corner where Walter, still crowned with giraffe ears, sat surrounded by his students. The students cast yearning looks at the dancers, at the group watching the physicist who was demonstrating the laws of surface tension by blowing bubbles through a straw into other bubbles, at the thumb-wrestling finals and the limbo contest and the crowd throwing Velcro darts toward a target fastened to a woman’s bottom. But they knew better than to abandon Walter, who was trying to reconstruct a colony from the rubble that I’d left him. He’d told everyone he’d had to abandon the swamp project because of his other commitments. Now everyone wanted to know what those other commitments were.
‘China,’ he kept muttering. ‘I’m arranging this big meeting in China …’
Tyler Robertson danced by just then, his tiara glimmering. ‘Outside, everyone!’ he called. ‘Two minutes to midnight!’
We tumbled out of the house and into the clear, cold night. Tyler pranced along the snowdrift at the edge of our driveway, setting out sparklers. ‘Ten seconds!’ Elena called. Tyler struck a match. ‘Nine, eight, seven, six …’ Tyler lit the sparklers. ‘Five, four, three, two, one!’
The Middle Kingdom Page 18