Museums and Women: And Other Stories Read online

  Joan said, “Darley, you know you’re coming to that terrible curve?”

  “You should see my father-in-law carve. Snick, snap, snap, snick. Your blood runs cold.”

  “On my birthday, my birthday,” Eleanor said, accidentally kicking the heater, “the bastard was with his little dolly in a restaurant, and he told me, he solemnly told me—men are incredible—he told me he ordered cake for dessert. That was his tribute to me. The night he confessed all this, it was the end of the world, but I had to laugh. I asked him if he’d had the restaurant put a candle on the cake. He told me he’d thought of it but hadn’t had the guts.”

  Richard’s responsive laugh was held in suspense as the car skidded on the curve. A dark upright shape had appeared in the center of the windshield, and he tried to remove it, but the automobile proved impervious to the steering wheel and instead drew closer, as if magnetized, to a telephone pole that rigidly insisted on its position in the center of the windshield. The pole enlarged. The little splinters pricked by the linemen’s cleats leaped forward in the headlights, and there was a flat whack surprisingly unambiguous, considering how casually it had happened. Richard felt the sudden refusal of motion, the No, and knew, though his mind was deeply cushioned in a cottony indifference, that an event had occurred which in another incarnation he would regret.

  • • •

  “You jerk,” Joan said. Her voice was against his ear. “Your pretty new car.” She asked, “Eleanor, are you all right?” With a rising inflection she repeated, “Are you all right?” It sounded like scolding.

  Eleanor giggled softly, embarrassed. “I’m fine,” she said, “except that I can’t seem to move my legs.” The windshield near her head had become a web of light, an exploded star.

  Either the radio had been on or had turned itself on, for mellow, meditating music flowed from a realm behind time. Richard identified it as one of Handel’s oboe sonatas. He noticed that his knees distantly hurt. Eleanor had slid forward and seemed unable to uncross her legs. Shockingly, she whimpered. Joan asked, “Sweetheart, didn’t you know you were going too fast?”

  “I am very stupid,” he said. Music and snow poured down upon them, and he imagined that, if only the oboe sonata were played backwards, they would leap backwards from the telephone pole and be on their way home again. The little distances to their houses, once measured in minutes, had frozen and become immense, like those in galaxies.

  Using her hands, Eleanor uncrossed her legs and brought herself upright in her seat. She lit a cigarette. Richard, his knees creaking, got out of the car and tried to push it free. He told Joan to come out of the back seat and get behind the wheel. Their motions were clumsy, wriggling in and out of darkness. The headlights still burned, but the beams were bent inward, toward each other. The Corvair had a hollow head, its engine being in the rear. Its face, an unimpassioned insect’s face, was inextricably curved around the pole; the bumper had become locked mandibles. When Richard pushed and Joan fed gas, the wheels whined in a vacuum. The smooth encircling night extended around them, above and beyond the snow. No window light had acknowledged their accident.

  Joan, who had a social conscience, asked, “Why doesn’t anybody come out and help us?”

  Eleanor, the voice of bitter experience, answered, “This pole is hit so often it’s just a nuisance to the neighborhood.”

  Richard announced, “I’m too drunk to face the police.” The remark hung with a neon clarity in the night.

  A car came by, slowed, stopped. A window rolled down and revealed a frightened male voice. “Everything O.K.?”

  “Not entirely,” Richard said. He was pleased by his powers, under stress, of exact expression.

  “I can take somebody to a telephone. I’m on my way back from a poker game.”

  A lie, Richard reasoned—otherwise, why advance it? The boy’s face had the blurred pallor of the sexually drained. Taking care to give each word weight, Richard told him, “One of us can’t move and I better stay with her. If you could take my wife to a phone, we’d all be most grateful.”

  “Who do I call?” Joan asked.

  Richard hesitated between the party they had left, their baby-sitter at home, and Eleanor’s husband, who was living in a motel on Route 128.

  The boy answered for him: “The police.”

  Joan got into the stranger’s car, a rusty red Mercury. The car faded through the snow, which was slackening. The storm had been just a flurry, an illusion conjured to administer this one rebuke. It wouldn’t even make tomorrow’s newspapers.

  Richard’s knees felt as if icicles were being pressed against the soft spot beneath the caps, where the doctor’s hammer searches for a reflex. He got in behind the wheel again, and switched off the lights. He switched off the ignition. Eleanor’s cigarette glowed. Though his system was still adrift in liquor, he could not quite forget the taste of metal in his teeth. That utterly flat No: through several dreamlike thicknesses something very hard had touched him. Once, swimming in surf, he had been sucked under by a large wave. Tons of sudden surge had enclosed him and, with an implacable downward shrug, thrust him deep into dense green bitterness and stripped him of weight; his struggling became nothing, he was nothing within the wave. There had been no hatred. The wave simply hadn’t cared.

  He tried to apologize to the woman beside him in the darkness.

  She said, “Oh, please. I’m sure nothing’s broken. At the worst I’ll be on crutches for a few days.” She laughed and added, “This just isn’t my year.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “You’re probably in shock. You’ll be cold. I’ll get the heat back.” Richard was sobering, and an infinite drabness was dawning for him. Never again, never ever, would his car be new, would he chew on his own enamel, would she kick so high with her fine long legs. He turned the ignition back on and started up the motor, for warmth. The radio softly returned, still Handel.

  Moving from the hips up with surprising strength, Eleanor turned and embraced him. Her cheeks were wet; her lipstick tasted manufactured. Searching for her waist, for the smallness of her breasts, he fumbled through thicknesses of cloth. They were still in each other’s arms when the whirling blue light of the police car broke upon them.

  Your Lover Just Called

  THE TELEPHONE RANG, and Richard Maple, who had stayed home from work this Friday because of a cold, answered it: “Hello?” The person at the other end of the line hung up. Richard went into the bedroom, where Joan was making the bed, and said, “Your lover just called.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing. He hung up. He was amazed to find me home.”

  “Maybe it was your lover.”

  He knew, through the phlegm beclouding his head, that there was something wrong with this, and found it. “If it was my lover,” he said, “why would she hang up, since I answered?”

  Joan shook the sheet so it made a clapping noise. “Maybe she doesn’t love you any more.”

  “This is a ridiculous conversation.”

  “You started it.”

  “Well, what would you think, if you answered the phone on a weekday and the person hung up? He clearly expected you to be home alone.”

  “Well, if you’ll get under these covers I’ll call him back and explain the situation.”

  “You think I’ll think you’re kidding but I know that’s really what would happen.”

  “Oh, come on, Dick. Who would it be? Freddie Vetter?”

  “Or Harry Saxon. Or somebody I don’t know at all. Some old college friend who’s moved to New England. Or maybe the milkman. I can hear you and him talking while I’m shaving sometimes.”

  “We’re surrounded by hungry children. He’s fifty years old and has hair coming out of his ears.”

  “Like your father. You’re not averse to older men. There was that humanities section man when we first met. Anyway, you’ve been acting awfully happy lately. There’s a little smile comes into y
our face when you’re doing the housework. See, there it is!”

  “I’m smiling,” Joan said, “because you’re so absurd. I have no lover. I have nowhere to put him. My days are consumed by devotion to the needs of my husband and his many children.”

  “Oh, so I’m the one who made you have all the children? While you were hankering after a career in fashion or in the exciting world of business. Aeronautics, perhaps. You could have been the first woman to design a nose cone. Or to crack the wheat-futures cycle. Joan Maple, girl agronomist. Joan Maple, lady geopolitician. But for that fornicating brute she mistakenly married, this clear-eyed female citizen of our ever-needful republic—”

  “Dick, have you taken your temperature? I haven’t heard you rave like this for years.”

  “I haven’t been betrayed like this for years. I hated that click. That nasty little I-know-your-wife-better-than-you-do click.”

  “It was some child. If we’re going to have Mack for dinner tonight, you better convalesce now.”

  “It is Mack, isn’t it? That son of a bitch. The divorce isn’t even finalized and he’s calling my wife on the phone. And then proposes to gorge himself at my groaning board.”

  “I’ll be groaning myself. You’re giving me a headache.”

  “Sure. First I foist off children on you in my mad desire for progeny, then I give you a menstrual headache.”

  “Get into bed and I’ll bring you orange juice and toast cut into strips the way your mother used to make it.”

  “You’re lovely.”

  As he was settling himself under the blankets, the phone rang again, and Joan answered it in the upstairs hall. “Yes … no … no … good,” she said, and hung up.

  “Who was it?” he called.

  “Somebody wanting to sell us the World Book Encyclopedia,” she called back.

  “A very likely story,” he said, with self-pleasing irony, leaning back onto the pillows confident that he was being unjust, that there was no lover.

  Mack Dennis was a homely, agreeable, sheepish man their age, whose wife, Eleanor, was in Wyoming suing for divorce. He spoke of her with a cloying tenderness, as if of a favorite daughter away for the first time at camp, or as a departed angel nevertheless keeping in close touch with the abandoned earth. “She says they’ve had some wonderful thunderstorms. The children go horseback riding every morning, and they play Pounce at night and are in bed by ten. Everybody’s health has never been better. Ellie’s asthma has cleared up and she thinks now she must have been allergic to me.”

  “You should have cut all your hair off and dressed in cellophane,” Richard told him.

  Joan asked him, “And how’s your health? Are you feeding yourself enough? Mack, you look thin.”

  “The nights I don’t stay in Boston,” Mack said, tapping himself all over for a pack of cigarettes, “I’ve taken to eating at the motel on Route 33. It’s the best food in town now, and you can watch the kids in the swimming pool.” He studied his empty upturned hands as if they had recently held a surprise. He missed his own kids, was perhaps the surprise.

  “I’m out of cigarettes too,” Joan said.

  “I’ll go get some,” Richard said.

  “And a thing of club soda if they have it.”

  “I’ll make a pitcher of martinis,” Mack said. “Doesn’t it feel great, to have martini weather again?”

  It was that season which is late summer in the days and early autumn at night. Evening descended on the downtown, lifting the neon tubing into brilliance, as Richard ran his errand. His sore throat felt folded within him like a secret; there was something reckless and gay in his being up and out at all after spending the afternoon in bed. Home, he parked by his back fence and walked down through a lawn rustling with fallen leaves, though the trees overhead were still massy. The lit windows of his house looked golden and idyllic; the children’s rooms were above (the face of Judith, his bigger daughter, drifted preoccupied across a slice of her wallpaper, and her pink square hand reached to adjust a doll on a shelf) and the kitchen below. In the kitchen windows, whose tone was fluorescent, a silent tableau was being enacted. Mack was holding a martini shaker and pouring it into a vessel, eclipsed by an element of window sash, that Joan was offering with a long white arm. Head tilted winningly, she was talking with the slightly pushed-forward mouth that Richard recognized as peculiar to her while looking into mirrors, conversing with her elders, or otherwise seeking to display herself to advantage. Whatever she was saying made Mack laugh, so that his pouring (the silver shaker head glinted, a drop of greenish liquid spilled) was unsteady. He set the shaker down and displayed his hands—the same hands from which a little while ago a surprise had seemed to escape—at his sides, shoulder-high.

  Joan moved toward him, still holding her glass, and the back of her head, done up taut and oval in a bun, with downy hairs trailing at the nape of her neck, eclipsed all of Mack’s face but his eyes, which closed. They were kissing. Joan’s head tilted one way and Mack’s another to make their mouths meet tighter. The graceful line of her shoulders was carried outward by the line of the arm holding her glass safe in the air. The other arm was around his neck. Behind them an open cabinet door revealed a paralyzed row of erect paper boxes whose lettering Richard could not read but whose coloring advertised their contents—Cheerios, Wheat Honeys, Onion Thins. Joan backed off and ran her index finger down the length of Mack’s necktie (a summer tartan), ending with a jab in the vicinity of his navel that might have expressed a rebuke or a regret. His face, pale and lumpy in the harsh vertical light, looked mildly humorous but intent, and moved forward, toward hers, an inch or two. The scene had the fascinating slow motion of action underwater, mixed with the insane silent suddenness of a television montage glimpsed from the street. Judith came to the window upstairs, not noticing her father standing in the shadow of the tree. Wearing a nightie of lemon gauze, she innocently scratched her armpit while studying a moth beating on her screen; and this too gave Richard a momentous sense, crowding his heart, of having been brought by the mute act of witnessing—like a child sitting alone at the movies—perilously close to the hidden machinations of things. In another kitchen window a neglected teakettle began to plume and to fog the panes with steam. Joan was talking again; her forward-thrust lips seemed to be throwing rapid little bridges across a narrowing gap. Mack paused, shrugged; his face puckered as if he were speaking French. Joan’s head snapped back with laughter and triumphantly she threw her free arm wide and was in his embrace again. His hand, spread starlike on the small of her back, went lower to what, out of sight behind the edge of Formica counter, would be her bottom.

  Richard scuffled loudly down the cement steps and kicked the kitchen door open, giving them time to break apart before he entered. From the far end of the kitchen, smaller than children, they looked at him with blurred, blank expressions. Joan turned off the steaming kettle and Mack shambled forward to pay for the cigarettes. After the third round of martinis, the constraints loosened and Richard said, taking pleasure in the plaintive huskiness of his voice, “Imagine my discomfort. Sick as I am, I go out into this bitter night to get my wife and my guest some cigarettes, so they can pollute the air and aggravate my already grievous bronchial condition, and, coming down through the back yard, what do I see? The two of them doing the Kama Sutra in my own kitchen. It was like seeing a blue movie and knowing the people in it.”

  “Where do you see blue movies nowadays?” Joan asked.

  “Tush, Dick,” Mack said sheepishly, rubbing his thighs with a brisk ironing motion. “A mere fraternal kiss. A brotherly hug. A disinterested tribute to your wife’s charm.”

  “Really, Dick,” Joan said. “I think it’s shockingly sneaky of you to be standing around spying into your own windows.”

  “Standing around! I was transfixed with horror. It was a real trauma. My first primal scene.” A profound happiness was stretching him from within; the reach of his tongue and wit felt immense, and the other two seemed dolls, hom
unculi, in his playful grasp.

  “We were hardly doing anything,” Joan said, lifting her head as if to rise above it all, the lovely line of her jaw defined by tension, her lips stung by a pout.

  “Oh, I’m sure, by your standards, you had hardly begun. You’d hardly sampled the possible wealth of coital positions. Did you think I’d never return? Have you poisoned my drink and I’m too vigorous to die, like Rasputin?”

  “Dick,” Mack said; “Joan loves you. And if I love any man, it’s you. Joan and I had this out years ago, and decided to be merely friends.”

  “Don’t go Gaelic on me, Mack Dennis. ‘If I love any mon, ’tis thee.’ Don’t give me a thought, laddie. Just think of poor Eleanor out there, sweating out your divorce, bouncing up and down on those horses day after day, playing Pounce till she’s black and blue—”

  “Let’s eat,” Joan said. “You’ve made me so nervous I’ve probably overdone the roast beef. Really, Dick, I don’t think you can excuse yourself by trying to make it funny.”

  Next day, the Maples awoke soured and dazed by hangovers; Mack had stayed until two, to make sure there were no hard feelings. Joan usually played ladies’ tennis Saturday mornings, while Richard amused the children; now, dressed in white shorts and sneakers, she delayed at home in order to quarrel. “It’s desperate of you,” she told Richard, “to try to make something of Mack and me. What are you trying to cover up?”

  “My dear Mrs Maple, I saw,” he said, “I saw through my own windows you doing a very credible impersonation of a female spider having her abdomen tickled. Where did you learn to flirt your head like that? It was better than finger puppets.”

  “Mack always kisses me in the kitchen. It’s a habit, it means nothing. You know for yourself how in love with Eleanor he is.”

  “So much he’s divorcing her. His devotion verges on the quixotic.”

  “The divorce is her idea, obviously. He’s a lost soul. I feel sorry for him.”

  “Yes, I saw that you do. You were like the Red Cross at Verdun.”