Raw Silk (9781480463318)

by Burroway, Janet

  We were going to fight. We hadn’t fought for so long that our bitching and battering first eleven years had seemed permanently past, as if we had come to mutual agreement that they didn’t work, and passed on to maturer forms of enmity. But this time we were going to fight, and I looked forward to it with fear and exhilaration. There’s no use pretending I didn’t welcome it. Because I held the belief, unfocused but profound, that if I once succeeded in proving to Oliver how unfair he was, if I once laid out incontestable evidence he was wrong, he would love me again. I don’t apologize for this; I think half the bitterness of the world feeds on such beliefs.

  But it wouldn’t have been that easy even if it had been that easy. I came home to the conspicuous mass absence of Jill, Mrs. Coombe, Mr. Wrain and Mr. Wrain’s truck. There was no precedent, no note, and nothing to go on except the picture of broken limbs and car crashes that mothers keep ready in their minds. For an hour I paced between this agitation and the other, half looking for evidence of an accident but finding none. I called the Cambridge hospital but they weren’t there. I wasn’t going to call Oliver. By the time I thought of dialing the hospital in Migglesly they were back, Jill limping importantly and Mrs. Coombe and Mr. Wrain competing to tell the story. Jill had stepped on a nail in a board in the tool shed such as went right through her foot. Only the fleshy bit outside the bone, said Mr. Wrain. But a rusty nail all the same, said Mrs. Coombe, as everybody knows is the best way to get lockjaw, and if anybody wanted to take the responsibility for that she was sure they were welcome, but it wouldn’t be her. So they went for a tetanus shot. I assured her she had done right. Well, yes, but she tried to call Oliver and he wasn’t in his office, and she didn’t know where I was as I hadn’t said where I was going, only “out,” and she hadn’t thought to go up to Cambridge because Migglesly was her own hospital, her council estate being as it was on that side of the county line, and she being, she supposed, upset and not thinking as clear as she might. Mr. Wrain asserted that they had tetanus shots and to spare at Migglesly Victoria. That was so, but they also had a Pakistani doctor in Casualty, which she didn’t know how Mrs. Marbalestier would feel about that, and they had to wait for Jill’s records to be called from Cambridge, although Jill had behaved herself patient as could be, like a little lady, and didn’t let out a peep only when they disinfected her foot and not again till they stuck the needle in. Jill, on my lap, displayed a lollipop and a sixpence.

  I thanked Mr. Wrain, who gave Jill a hug and took his leave, placidly refusing to be paid for his time or his petrol. Mrs. Coombe had missed two buses and I offered to drive her home, but she wouldn’t hear of that either, she’d wait for the six o’clock. I didn’t insist because I could see she did want to stay. The break in her humdrum routine among my paraphernalia had caused her enough real anxiety to make her breath come short, her swollen fingers jiggle on the kitchen table. Now she very properly wanted her due: my reiterated assurance she had done well, and a chance to perfect the telling of the crisis for when she arrived interestingly late at home. We sat over cups of tea exchanging recollections of infant danger while Jill limped around the kitchen for us wearing one of Oliver’s socks, remembering new details of the adventure like the rocking horse in the waiting room or the floor shift of Mr. Wrain’s truck. When Oliver got home we switched to sherry, and Mrs. Coombe went over it for him, at greater length and with a ballooning sense of averted catastrophe. Then she caught her bus, and Jill, exhausted by the excitement, allowed herself to be fed early and put to bed.

  I came back down to the kitchen and mixed two drinks. The other crisis had been eroded, my anger had lost its edge. Now there would be a cold confrontation, or possibly a reasonable discussion, even if the knockdown drag-out would have relieved me more. In that other mood, for instance, it would clearly not have been my impulse to carry a Scotch in and set it waitresslike on a paper napkin at Oliver’s end of the coffee table. I went to my chair and sat for a minute collecting my distracted feelings, trying to pick the best opening.

  So I was caught off balance by Oliver’s offensive. He carefully folded his paper and took a sip of his drink, then set it down with a gravel rap. “Why were you at the plant?”

  “Why what? Why was I what?”

  “Why were you at the mill and not at home?”

  I sat bewildered. My righteousness began to bubble inside again. “I don’t stay home all day every day; that’s what Mrs. Coombe is for. It would have happened just the same if I’d been here. Do you think I follow her into the tool shed looking for rusty nails?”

  “I asked why you went to the plant.”

  “I had things to deliver. I had things to pick up. What difference does it make?” I didn’t know exactly why guilt was mixing into my rage, or rather not mixing, but swirling like oil and water in my gut.

  “Then why didn’t you take Jill with you? That would have been a reasonable thing to do. And in that case, Virginia, if I may observe, it would not have happened.”

  His sarcasm struck me as prissy. I figured out what it was I’d been avoiding saying, so I said it. “Because I went in to have lunch with Frances Kean. I didn’t think that’d be a particularly edifying experience for Jill, or a very easy one for Frances. But I did get pretty well edified myself, Oliver. I found out I was the only person in the whole company that hadn’t heard about a Japanese merger!”

  To my astonishment he ignored this altogether. “That’s exactly my point, you went in to have lunch with Frances Kean, when Nicholson’s specifically said that he doesn’t want you getting mixed up with her.”

  Pulled off the point, on the wrong side of the wrong argument, I didn’t know where to begin. “I am not mixed up with anybody,” I said, raising pitch. “You are mixed up with a whole major company policy change that affects me every way I turn, and the reason you’re pulling this red herring is because I found out about it.”

  “It’s fairly mixed up, I’d say,” he continued like a cold volcano—I recognized the mood from a long ways back and knew it could erupt, “to drive thirty-six miles for a sandwich with a lunatic that doesn’t eat, when your ultimate superior has given you to understand that she’s an embarrassment to him.”

  “Oh, crap, Oliver. Embarrassment hell. She doesn’t even see him. She depends on me for a couple of hours a week, she’s an unhappy kid and it costs me nothing. I can’t believe this.”

  “She depends on you is exactly my point. You have an obsessive attraction to underdogs and misfits, cockneys and queers. And let me tell you, it’s more embarrassing to me than Frances is to George.”

  “I can’t believe this,” I said again, and I couldn’t. “I work in Design Print. I hang out there.”

  “You hang out there, as you so accurately put it, against my will. You are the wife of the second-ranking administrator in the company, and you have a certain prestige yourself as an artist and designer, and you slouch into the workers’ refectory to lunch on Cornish pasties and lager like some fourteen-pound-a-week council house hussy. And your loyalties are so misplaced that it does not seem in the least absurd to you to argue the ‘dependence’ of a hysterical file clerk when your own daughter is depending on the gardener to drive her to hospital.”

  “My loyalties!”

  “Your loyalties are so misplaced that it has not once in five months occurred to you to have lunch in Executive Hall.”

  “My loyalties!” In the middle of this radical bullshit, the abruptly disarming notion that Oliver was hurt because I didn’t lunch with him gave my equilibrium another knock. I held onto the arms of the wing chair and tried to find some footing. “Your loyalties,” I rasped, “are so misplaced. That it never occurred to you. To ask if I wanted to go to Japan.”

  “Do you want to go to Japan?” he rapped out instantly, in deadpan fury. The aspen trees and the tickling minnows purled up in my mind, a jewel of irony I had no time for.

  “I think,” I faltered, trying to hang onto some scrap of my indignation, “I do think it’s
something we might discuss.”

  The volcano went. “Yes, I think,” he shouted, shoving himself up and over the space between us, standing over me so that his spit sprayed on my face, “that I might dare to discuss it with you now that it’s the gossip of every postboy in the packing room. Because you’ll understand that I didn’t dare do so before, not knowing whether you keep more secrets from me than you keep from your androgynous lover down there.”

  I blanked. The idea of a lover was so far off that I lost a beat figuring out that he meant Malcolm. “Just let … just let me understand what you’re accusing me of, Oliver. Because I swear to God I can’t follow you.”

  “I’m accusing you of disloyalty!” he sprayed. “It’s a perpetual humiliation to me. You went to East Anglian and staked out your claim in a Quonset hut as if you didn’t already have a position to maintain.”

  “Because Jill left.”

  “Because you won’t have anything from me! Because you save all your energy and your intimacy to use away from home. And that worries me, Virginia, because you have a loose tongue. Because you’ll chatter your whole history to any pair of bifocals at a sherry party, so it gives me cause to wonder if there’s any part of my bedroom behavior, for instance, that isn’t common knowledge in Design Print.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “You’ll therefore understand, that if I have been asked to keep a major company confidence, the last person I dare share it with is you. And if it becomes common gossip, it’s reassuring to me to know you can’t have caused it.”

  “I’ll leave you.”

  I thought he’d hit me. When, instead of that, he spat at me, and missed, it made him a sap without making me cower less. He left, I suppose to work, and I stayed for a long time, hours, drinking myself fuzzy while I tried to make sense of things.

  The threat of leaving him was arbitrary; I hadn’t meant more than “go to hell.” Now for the second time in a year I turned and took a look at it. For a while, as in the relief of indolence after an exhausting job, I lay slack and shivering, taking a look at it. Mist glowed at the windows where I’d forgotten to close the curtains. I stared out into it and mistily posited another life. Myself in a shop somewhere, of my own, maybe, out of the flatlands and next to the sea, where I would be perfectly at liberty to come and go, to slouch around and choose my own beliefs. I would be a bleeding liberal, by God; a social hemophiliac. My friends would be fat and shabby and smell of California. There’s Jill back from school in jeans and a T-shirt, dragging home a scraggy cat. I’d live in litter and the litters of strays, I’d eat spaghetti and take up pot. I would never see another tea cozy or a goddam snifter of Grand Marnier, I would never be deferred to in a local shop or pay cash for a sheepskin coat, I would never cut roses, blanch peas, preserve gooseberries, dry bay leaves, pick an apple from my own tree, I would never watch six thousand yards of my design pour wet from the presses and rise aloft over the rollers of steam …

  Dillis said, “I’m not a rebel.” Did she really accept it as easily as all that? Or did her reconciliation to her easy lot, like mine, last just so far as the threshold of home, where her heart sank with longing for the different life she might have had, which, if she went to find it, would leave her grieving for the one she left?

  And even beyond that, besides the life I owe Oliver, I’d make a lousy rebel. A rebel needs an acute myopia for the other side; you don’t actually rip up paving stones unless in your heart you know you’re right. Whereas, although I can work up an impassioned impromptu on racial equality, legal abortion and related virtues, I can never get to the point of disbelieving that where there’s smoke, somebody is rubbing two sticks together. There was, for instance, no conceivable justification for Oliver’s jealousy of Malcolm. Malcolm’s gay. He also has an impeccable moral code, a respectable position, and no envy of anything of Oliver’s including me. He’s about as likely to seduce me as Winnie Binkle.

  All the same, it was adultery every way but sex. I came home downbeat, I picked up on the drive back to work. I saved souvenirs of our field trips, I saved up things to tell him. I couched my emotions in the terms that would make Malcolm laugh. I was open with him, and that openness was the dearest part of my day. How much, let me look at it clearly, how much of Oliver’s bedroom behavior might Malcolm, let me look at it clearly, be able to describe? If I’d had the details of the merger news, and Malcolm got wind of it, how likely is it I could have held back the details? If my loyalties tugged at each other, which tie would have broken first?

  It might look as if, this way, I tried to see Oliver’s side. It’s not so; I might just as well have saved myself the trouble. Because what I meant by loyalty was that openness, it had to do with feeling. What Oliver meant was “maintaining the dignity of my position.” So whatever profligate loose-mouthed sins I confessed to, I’d still think he was an ass. I wonder if Oliver, having presented me with incontestable evidence I was wrong, believed I would love him again. It’s possible.

  Most cataclysm dwindles to nuisance. Marital shrillness is low on the pole. I slept in the chair and woke hung over, sickish and stiff in the joints. Jill was out of sorts too; her foot hurt; her arm hurt where she got the shot. When she realized she couldn’t get her boot on over the bandage and therefore couldn’t go out in the rain, she determined there was nothing indoors worth doing except figuring out fifty ways to say so. Mrs. Coombe was coming late by agreement, and I pottered listlessly in the kitchen, putting off going to my studio. I tried to impress myself that for the second time I faced the possibility of living in Japan, but I didn’t really believe in it, and really this coincidence looked more like something that ought to be significant than that was. I tried deliberately to think of Jay, to recapture, if not the atmosphere of the yellow gorge, well then, at least the atmosphere of my nostalgia for it. But I had changed, Oliver and I had changed, as if the drying up of our expectations of each other was drying up even nostalgia, even regret.

  Oliver came down with the face of someone who’s smashed a plate. I used the womanish weapons, set a more sumptuous than usual breakfast more meekly than usual in front of him. He said he guessed he’d overstated things a bit last night. No decision had been made, and he could give me a little more than the plantwide gossip. Opinion was divided at Admin as well as in the ranks. If they took the Japanese proposal it was still a toss-up who would go. I admitted I talked too much, but assured him absolutely that he could absolutely trust a confidence with me.

  “We’ll have plenty of time to talk it over. It would mean a move up for me. The fact is, you’re an asset, because they could relocate us on one fund.”

  “But it’s a big move.”

  “I know. I realize it is.”

  “Do you want to go?”

  “I haven’t got as far as thinking about that yet. I haven’t decided whether I should come out for the merger itself.”

  “Do you think it’s good for the company?”

  “Financially, certainly.”

  “But not for the workers?”

  “I want to see which way Nicholson swings.”

  I could have pointed out that this was not an answer, but of course I didn’t, relieved enough that he would talk about it without having to admire his reasoning.

  For his part, he said that my lunching with Frances was not a serious matter; it was the principle of the thing. I said it wasn’t important to me either, and for the rest of Jill’s vacation I didn’t go. But when, back at work, I found Frances sullen and closed, I forgot any life-easing resolutions I might have made, and worked at winning her back. So by September we were into the same routine as before, except that she was thinner, more silent, duller than before.

  I don’t think it was my brief defection that sent Frances down. I accept her judgment that causes are not simple, and if they are, well then, it probably had as much to do with the weather as anything. Summer turned sour and sluggish before its time. The roads were rivers, the garden rotted, the windows ran mel
odramatically every day. The grayness got into everybody, and everybody seemed to be setting up a harder than usual winter. No decision was reached about Utagawa, and the rumors dragged on, dog-eared and agitating. Malcolm’s Gary was doing a semester of research at the Cité Universitaire, and Malcolm was lonely, torturing himself exactly like an academic wife with visions of peach-faced école boys. Mom was acting as buffer between the coppers and two adolescent petty thieves of her ménage—I was never sure which were her own and which were her various sisters’, and not certain she was certain either. Dillis was being regularly and insolently propositioned by, oddly enough, Jake Tremain, the carpenter who’d built our office under the auspices of the Petty Girl, who now was outfitting one of her husband’s projects, and who wore his virility on his sleeve. “I c’n smell the sperm on him,” Dillis wailed, weakening.

  I was struggling to produce a set of spring designs that had some reference to the mood of spring. Even in personal tranquility it was hard to work nine months ahead, when I never believed in any season but the one at hand. Even if nature did it too, even if the peonies blasted forth in January and the summer laburnum was burgeoning at the matrix in the overweening fecundity that would make its petals fall; even so, if the garden prepared more than one season ahead, I couldn’t see it.