by Marge Piercy
The only time she had ever really known sexual feelings was with Ted Topper, the user. One night she watched an old movie on TV, gladiators and Romans in armor. It was a bad night for Nana, and Becky was sitting up with her. Nana lay on the couch moaning. Becky imagined that she was a Roman aristocrat watching Ted Topper fight a lion. She was supposed to think the women watching the men fight were evil, but she could imagine getting a lot of pleasure out of seeing Ted Topper hacked up. She had shown him a little trouble, but as long as he lived she would feel he had a piece of her she couldn’t get back.
She stood in the vestry of Sancti Antonii with the other members of the wedding imagining the slow death of Ted Topper, but then it was time to march. She held her head high and tried to sweep gracefully down the aisle in her tons of peach taffeta. She felt like a one-woman float, but every bridesmaid was similarly overladen, broad as barges. Sylvie was a huge white satin sailboat wide in the beam with yards of tulle sail unfurled. Becky could smell mock orange. The air was dense and sticky. Mario was pale as Dracula and seven feet tall. There was a stirring in the room of women fanning themselves.
The food was glorious and they were allowed to change out of their dresses so they could dance. She wore a little blue dress. She had had it for three years, bought at the mall marked way down, but it still looked good. It was on the bare side. She ate and she danced with every guy who asked her, even people’s daddies. One chance, she thought, give me one decent chance, as she tried to keep Mario’s older brother from dancing too close. There were men from Sylvie’s family, from Mario’s, and there was the third in command of what her own Papa always called The Guys. Some of the boats made a lot of money. Scalloping was good money, but drugs made more, and the fishing industry offered a great way to launder cash. If someone was in with The Guys, they did all right. Her Papa was too honest and patriotic besides. He stayed clear, but twice he had been beaten, just so he wouldn’t think he was too good. Things happened on the docks. A car was fire-bombed. A rival packing business had a mysterious fire. Somebody who didn’t play along had his refrigeration sabotaged so he lost thousands of dollars.
She knew The Guys, everybody did, but while they were rich, she wanted no part of them. She didn’t need some man who, if she pulled what she had pulled on Ted Topper, would put out a contract on her or beat her toothless. She wasn’t the long-suffering type like those wives who sat out the dances gossiping. She wanted a man who would be faithful to her, not some wise guy who ran around getting diseases and dumping his money on other girls. Besides, they played around outside, but they married their own. Her eyes passed over the men in the room, one by one scanning them for a reasonable hope. Some were cute and a few were handsome, but none of them would take her up and out.
THIRTEEN
Leila
“He sits on the monitor while I work at the computer. When I take a bath, he lies on the rim of the tub and dips his tail in the water.”
Jane shook her red bob in exasperation. “You sound just like me when I fall in love, do you know that? But I fall in love with women, not some tomcat.”
“He’s a perfect companion. And when I talk, at least he listens.”
“You’ve been in a bad marriage so long, a cat seems like a lover to you.”
“Oh, Jane, I’m just enjoying having a pet. I haven’t had one in years. I never imagined I’d be crazy about a cat, but you mustn’t talk on as if I’m an aging spinster with twenty-two cats—”
“I have nothing against spinsters, my dear. Some of the greatest women who ever lived were spinsters. For the last two thousand years, spinsters were far more apt to get something done, including spinning, than married women.” Jane put her feet in their gorgeously tooled leather boots up on her desk, grinning slyly. Jane was almost always in some costume; today she was Western. Her students adored her. She was slim, out, quick-witted and sexy.
“You have a prejudice against marriage. Marriage is like the weather, always changing in its own cycles. If I had married six times instead of only once, each marriage would be a strange house, one Victorian, one a studio apartment, one neoclassical—”
“From the outside, most look depressingly similar. But I admit yours is unique. He doesn’t cheat on you. He just has carte blanche and you smile and bear it and hope he doesn’t give you AIDS into the bargain.”
“Jane, he doesn’t pick up prostitutes in Times Square. Sheryl went to B.U. He’s the careful type. We have an agreement. Never at home. What he does when he has a play in Minneapolis or Los Angeles, I don’t want to know about Didn’t Shaw say that a woman would rather have a part of a good man than all of a boring one?”
“I noticed he didn’t say a man would rather have a good woman one day a week and share her with six other men, than have a stupid wife every day and night. I am sure he insisted on fidelity from Mrs. Shaw. You’re boringly faithful, except for this affair with your cat.”
“I don’t much like men. Not as a group. I’m hardly ever tempted. And, no, I’m not drawn to women. I’m the wife-type. When he’s with me, which is, after all, seventy percent of the time, he’s really with me.”
“You’re the Patient Griselda type.” Jane put her feet down and planted her elbows on the desk, clearing a place among student exams. That was her signal that the social hour was over, and it was time to get to faculty business before the meeting at four. “Okay, what are we going to do about the dean’s new regulations on copying?”
Becky’s lawyer forbade her to talk to Leila. Leila decided to start on the boyfriend, family first. Always best to have advocates. His mother was widowed and Sam had lived with her. Mrs. Solomon would be glad to see Mrs. Landsman on Sunday afternoon. Saturday, Nick’s play was opening.
In Boston, at least she was part of the activities. When he had an opening away from her, she could only wait. It would have felt disloyal to go out to a movie or over to a friend’s. She listened to Bach, read the Globe, a professional journal, played with Vronsky. Then she straightened her drawer of pantyhose, placing blacks with blacks and reds with reds. It momentarily soothed her. She sewed a button on her black silk blazer. She mended the pocket of her raincoat. She put her earrings together by pairs. She tried to read student papers. When she finished one, she realized she could not remember what it was about. Not fair. She put it back in the unread pile.
She paced. She examined the phone to make sure it was actually working. She took the answering machine off-line. She picked up the receiver again to make sure she had a dial tone. Then she hung up quickly, so that when Nicolas called, he would not get a false busy signal.
She poured herself a small glass of cognac. Then it was empty. She had no desire to get drunk. She wanted to talk to someone. Actually she wanted to talk to Melanie. Melanie had spent these evenings with her, so that Leila would not implode with tension. After all these years in the theater, Nick remained vulnerable to reviews. No amount of success seemed to harden him to the terror of someone suddenly calling his bluff. He always thought he was somehow putting something over on everybody, underneath all the confidence and the honors and the experience. He still expected to be laughed at. He feared mockery more than death. The good reviews he would nod at, accept as if they were his due, but the bad reviews pierced him. He seemed to memorize them as he read them through rapidly and tossed them away. Phrases would return to him in the middle of the night, at supper the next day. Two years later he would suddenly remember an insult from a review. She was sure he had perfect recall of the first hostile comment he had ever received.
Sometimes her books got good reviews, sometimes bad. Except for a few people in her field, she did not greatly care. She was always working on the next project when a book came out, and that helped shield her from the opinions of others. A book made its way or it didn’t, and the notices of those who read hastily and badly, who had a cause to fight or push, could never worm their way into her psyche as reviews did into Nicolas.
It was past time for the play
to have ended. She expected him to call and tell her how the audience had reacted. Her stomach hurt and for a moment she wondered if something had been wrong with the soup she had eaten; but it was only anxiety. She wished she could care less. She wished she could simply dismiss him from her mind as he seemed to do when he was away from her. Sometimes when he was off in another city, she could talk to him and mention some problem of David’s or Melanie’s illness, and there would be a moment when she would know that Nicolas had drawn a mental blank. Then he would shift gears and dredge from his memory what was concerning her, and they could talk again.
She looked into Vronsky’s calm and skeptical yellow eyes, feeling as if he measured her tension and judged it foolish. Finally at midnight, the phone rang. Nick sounded as if he was calling from a party, the most likely case. “It seems to have gone well enough. Not a huge success, but not a failure. I expect we’ll have a decent run.”
“You always think it will be a matter of extremes.”
“I do, don’t I? I can never imagine a mixed reaction.” He chuckled. “You see right through me. I expect doom or bliss.”
“But you’re all right with it? You can come home for Thanksgiving?”
“Of course. I’ll see how it goes the next couple of days. I may have to dash back to make sure things are staying on target. It still needs speed in the second act. Be home Wednesday—the train again. More relaxing.”
That night she dreamed that Vronsky was having sex with her. He was large and amazingly gentle. When she awoke, she was deeply embarrassed. Who had ever been so shameless as to dream about making love with their altered cat? Or an unaltered cat, for that matter? Vronsky lay at his most extended, washing himself with grave satisfaction as if after exactly such an act. She felt as if she should avoid going out into the world, lest anyone could read what sick and silly dreams she was subjected to by her subconscious. It was Jane’s fault, for saying she was talking about Vronsky like a lover. That had triggered the dream. She was glad she need not see Jane today at school.
That noon she drove down to Sandwich, to the Solomons’. The house was off 6A, the most picturesque of the Cape roads, down a narrow blacktop and then along a sand road past two houses, shuttered for the season. The house, when she came to it, was chaste and handsome, probably older than the other houses and far more permanent-looking. It was a full cape painted pale yellow now chipping, with modern decking on the side that faced a tidal stream. A rickety dock stuck into the river. In the yard a dinghy sat under a plastic tarp for the winter.
The garden had grown over and the fence was sagging to the ground. A five- or six-year-old Buick, its finish pitted by salt, stood at the end of the road in the middle of the casual yard. The road did not so much end as give up. Someone at the window had been watching for her. She parked beside the old green Buick and walked briskly toward the door. The screen door was still on it, in November, but the glass storm door was sitting against the house as if putting it on had been at least contemplated recently.
Like many Cape houses, it faced its view, and the door she was let in was the kitchen door. A slender man with dense curly hair and an even denser beard opened it, frowning. His glasses enlarged his green eyes. Reading glasses. He took them off, polished them carelessly and stuffed them in his shirt pocket. It was denim but well tailored, a dressy shirt disguised as a work shirt.
She introduced herself politely, adding, “And you are?”
“I’m Zak Solomon.” He would not smile. He was not welcoming.
“You’re Sam’s older brother?”
“I’m his uncle.”
Of course. He was in his forties. Her age.
A woman came dashing in. “Zak, why didn’t you tell me she’d come? I was on the telephone and I didn’t even hear you knock. I’m so sorry.”
“If you’re on the phone, I can wait.”
“No, it was just a friend. I’ll call him back later. Please, let’s go in the living room. Zak, where’s your hospitality?”
She was a little older than Zak, with hair that was probably at her age kept blond, pulled back in a ponytail. She wore large parrot earrings, balsa wood painted brightly, an oversized sweater printed with marching poodles, and well-washed jeans. Her voice was breathy and she spoke quickly, smiling placatingly at Leila.
Leila smiled broadly back, trying to put the woman at ease. “You’re Cathy Solomon?”
“With a C. That’s me. Come, sit down. Would you like tea? Some tonic?” She plumped down in the middle of the Danish sofa. The room was well furnished, but like the car outside, a little the worse for wear. Studded about the room were truly ghastly pieces of pottery, most in the shapes of vegetables and flowers. “Or would you like coffee? It’s instant. I can’t drink the stuff myself, it gives me heartburn, but my husband used to drink it by the gallon.”
“There’s real coffee. I brought some. I found a Chemex in the top of the cupboard.” Zak was standing in the doorway, frowning again. “It’s on the stove.” He seemed to want Cathy to get it, although he was obviously at home in the kitchen and closer to it. Were they involved? He seemed controlling. He did not want Cathy talking too much.
As soon as Cathy went through the doorway, he sat down facing Leila, who wished he would let her look around at the room. Instead he fixed her with a stare. “My brother, Cathy’s husband, died four years ago. That was a shock for her and for my nephew.”
“How did he die?”
“The family heart. He dropped dead one morning as he was raking the lawn. By the time Cathy went outside to bring him in to lunch, the body was almost cold. It was a great shock, understand. He was only forty-two. He’d never had a heart attack. But it runs in the family. Sudden death.”
This lugubrious tale was delivered with a brisk sententious-ness while he watched her. She was taking an instant dislike to him. Theatrical, manipulative. What was he doing here? “Do you live here?” She asked gently.
“I live in Truro, about an hour from here. I try to help out.”
Cathy swept back with the coffee. “I really am so glad you want to hear Sam’s story. I mean, we thought she had just taken him under her wing. Her wing! Ha. Becky Burgess doesn’t have wings, does she, Zak? I heard you asking about Zak. He’s tried hard to be supportive. When my husband died, Zak was living in L.A.” She nodded at him, smiling as if forgivingly. “But since he came back here, he’s been good to us, really.” Cathy Solomon had large dark blue eyes that she kept widening as she talked. Once it had probably been flirtatious, but now it was a tic.
“What is it you’re trying to find out?” he asked, folding his arms.
“Basically I want to understand the case and explain it There’s a great deal of interest. Most of what’s getting into print is just daily journalism, the obvious response. I think everyone involved has a story to tell.”
“You have a contract?”
She hesitated. “Yes.”
“Who with? Who’s your agent? What other books have you published?”
She answered his questions, but she was growing increasingly restive. “You seem to know a fair amount about the book business,” she said dryly. She wished she could get him out of the room, for she was sure Cathy Solomon was dying to talk.
“I’ve done a book or two on animal behavior,” he said coldly. “I’d like to see something of yours, to judge what kind of treatment you give.”
“I’m sure at least one of them must be in your local library.”
“Zak’s a vet. Everybody swears by him.” Cathy trotted to a shelf and pulled down three books in a similar format: Living with Dogs, Living with Cats, Living with Parrots and Other Exotic Birds. On each cover, there was Zak looking a great deal more pleasant, beaming and stroking, in an armchair surrounded by the animal in question. Parrots to the right of him, parakeets on his shoulders, a crow on his left: that was her favorite.
“I just got a cat,” she offered.
He groaned. “Please don’t ask me about what to do. I c
an’t go to a party, I can’t go to the supermarket, without somebody backing me into a corner and describing their dog’s incontinence.”
“I’d be happy to send you a copy of Mothers Barred, Mrs. Solomon. I teach at Lesley, but while the study is serious, I don’t think you’ll find it too academic to read.” Rattle my credentials.
“Call me Cathy. I don’t get a chance to read much. I teach pottery in my studio and I do production work, and with all these legal fees.… Zak is helping us out, but still, it isn’t easy, believe me. So you’re a professor?”
“Just call me Leila.” If that skinny glaring man would clear out, she knew she could get Cathy talking. She was a chatty woman and her seams were loose. Cathy would be a fine informant if Leila could get one-on-one with her. “Could I see Sam’s room? That would make him more real to me.”
“Sure.” Cathy bounced off the couch to lead the way upstairs. It was an old-enough house to have one of those steep straight-up narrow stairways the eighteenth-century Cape houses had lying in wait for the careless, the dim-sighted and drunken, the unwary tourist Leila, who had once rented such a house for August, climbed cautiously. She no longer thought that Cathy and Zak might be lovers. Cathy acted too nervous around him.
His room reminded her a little of her own son’s. They both had computers obviously well used. Both had shelves of science fiction, but David’s shelves also contained hard science books, math, physics, while Sam’s ran to mysteries and how-to books. There were many pop psych books on gaining confidence, dealing successfully with women, making people respect and admire you. He had perhaps twenty-five such manuals on the shelf above his single bed. The other prominent objects in the room were a rowing machine in the middle of the floor and some sort of apparatus of pulleys and weights on the wall. On the bulletin board were photos of what must have been his father with his mother and himself at perhaps twelve, his uncle somewhat younger with a stunning redhead in a sort of abbreviated white romper, and several pictures of what appeared to be the cast of a play, including what she could recognize now as Sam and what she knew from newspaper photos and video was Becky Burgess. There was also a snapshot of Becky alone standing under a pine tree and smiling wistfully at the camera.