Museums and Women: And Other Stories Read online

“What I’d like to know is, why are you so pleased?”

  “Pleased? I’m annihilated.”

  “You’re delighted. Look at your smile in the mirror.”

  “You’re so incredibly unapologetic, I guess I think you must be being ironical.”

  The telephone rang. Joan picked it up and said, “Hello,” and Richard heard the click across the room. Joan replaced the receiver and said to him, “So. She thought I’d be playing tennis by now.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “You tell me. Your lover. Your loveress.”

  “It was clearly yours, and something in your voice warned him off.”

  “Go to her!” Joan suddenly cried, with a burst of the same defiant energy that made her, on other hungover mornings, rush through a mountain of housework. “Go to her like a man and stop trying to maneuver me into something I don’t understand! I have no lover! I let Mack kiss me because he’s lonely and drunk! Stop trying to make me more interesting than I am! All I am is a beat-up housewife who wants to go play tennis with some other exhausted ladies!”

  Mutely Richard fetched from their sports closet her tennis racket, which had recently been restrung with gut. Carrying it in his mouth like a dog retrieving a stick, he got down on all fours and laid it at the toe of her sneaker. Richard Jr, their older son, a wiry nine-year-old presently obsessed by the accumulation of Batman cards, came into the living room, witnessed this pantomime, and laughed to hide his fright. “Dad, can I have my dime for emptying the wastebaskets?”

  “Mommy’s going to go out to play, Dickie,” Richard said, licking from his lips the salty taste of the racket handle. “Let’s all go to the five-and-ten and buy a Batmobile.”

  “Yippee,” the small boy said limply, glancing wide-eyed from one of his parents to the other, as if the space between them had gone treacherous.

  Richard took the children to the five-and-ten, to the playground, and to a hamburger stand for lunch. These blameless activities transmuted the residue of alcohol and phlegm into a woolly fatigue as pure as the sleep of infants. His sore throat was fading. Obligingly he nodded while his son described an endless plot: “… and then, see, Dad, the Penguin had an umbrella smoke came out of, it was neat, and there were these two other guys with funny masks in the bank vault, filling it with water, I don’t know why, to make it bust or something, and Robin was climbing up these slippery stacks of like half-dollars to get away from the water, and then, see, Dad …”

  Back home, the children dispersed into the neighborhood on the same mysterious tide that on other days packed their back yard with unfamiliar urchins. Joan returned from tennis glazed with sweat, her ankles coated with clay-court dust. Her body was swimming in the afterglow of exertion. He suggested they take a nap.

  “Just a nap,” she warned.

  “Of course,” he said. “I met my mistress at the playground and we satisfied each other on the jungle gym.”

  “Maureen and I beat Alice and Judy. It can’t be any of those three, they were waiting for me half an hour.”

  In bed, the shades strangely drawn against the bright afternoon, and a glass of stale water standing bubbled with secret light, he asked her, “You think I want to make you more interesting than you are?”

  “Of course. You’re bored. You left me and Mack alone deliberately. It was very uncharacteristic of you, to go out with a cold.”

  “It’s sad, to think of you without a lover.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re pretty interesting anyway. Here, and here, and here.”

  “I said really a nap.”

  In the upstairs hall, on the other side of the closed bedroom door, the telephone rang. After four peals—icy spears hurled from afar—the ringing stopped, unanswered. There was a puzzled pause. Then a tentative, questioning pring, as if someone in passing had bumped the table, followed by a determined series, strides of sound, imperative and plaintive, that did not stop until twelve had been counted; then the lover hung up.

  Eros Rampant

  THE MAPLES’ HOUSE is full of love. Bean, the six-year-old baby, loves Hecuba, the dog. John, who is eight, an angel-faced mystic serenely unable to ride a bicycle or read a clock, is in love with his Creepy Crawlers, his monster cards, his dinosaurs, and his carved rhinoceros from Kenya. He spends hours in his room after school drifting among these things, rearranging, gloating, humming. He experiences pain only when his older brother, Richard Jr., sardonically enters his room and pierces his placenta of contentment. Richard is in love with life, with all outdoors, with Carl Yastrzemski, Babe Parilli, the Boston Bruins, the Beatles, and with that shifty apparition who, comb in hand, peeps back shiny-eyed at him out of the mirror in the mornings, wearing a mustache of toothpaste. He receives strange challenging notes from girls—Dickie Maple you stop looking at me—which he brings home from school carelessly crumpled along with his spelling papers and hectographed notices about eye, tooth, and lung inspection. His feelings about young Mrs. Brice, who confronts his section of the fifth grade with the enamelled poise and studio diction of an airline hostess, are so guarded as to be suspicious. He almost certainly loves, has always deeply loved, his older sister, Judith. Verging on thirteen, she has become difficult to contain, even within an incestuous passion. Large and bumptious, she eclipses his view of the television screen, loudly Frugs while he would listen to the Beatles, teases, thrashes, is bombarded and jogged by powerful rays from outer space. She hangs for hours by the corner where Mr. Lunt, her history teacher, lives; she pastes effigies of the Monkees on her walls, French-kisses her mother good night, experiences the panic of sleeplessness, engages in long languorous tussles on the sofa with the dog. Hecuba, a spayed golden retriever, races from room to room, tormented as if by fleas by the itch for adoration, ears flattened, tail thumping, until at last she runs up against the cats, who do not love her, and she drops exhausted, in grateful defeat, on the kitchen linoleum, and sleeps.

  The cats, Esther and Esau, lick each other’s fur and share a bowl. They had been two of a litter. Esther, the mother of more than thirty kittens mostly resembling her brother, but with a persistent black minority vindicating the howled appeal of a neighboring tom, has been “fixed”; Esau, sentimentally allowed to continue unfixed, now must venture from the house in quest of the bliss that had once been purely domestic. He returns scratched and battered. Esther licks his wounds while he leans dazed beside the refrigerator; even his purr is ragged. Nagging for their supper, they sit like bookends, their backs discreetly touching, an expert old married couple on the dole. One feels, unexpectedly, that Esau still loves Esther, while she merely accepts him. She seems scornful of his Platonic attentions. Is she puzzled by her abrupt surgical lack of what once drastically attracted him? But it is his big square tomcat’s head that seems puzzled, rather than her triangular feminine feline one. The children feel a difference; both Bean and John cuddle Esau more, now that Esther is sterile. Perhaps, obscurely, they feel that she has deprived them of a miracle, of the semiannual miracle of her kittens, of drowned miniature piglets wriggling alive from a black orifice more mysterious than a cave. Richard Jr., as if to demonstrate his superior purchase on manhood and its righteous compassion, makes a point of petting the two cats equally, stroke for stroke. Judith claims she hates them both; it is her chore to feed them supper, and she hates the smell of horsemeat. She loves, at least in the abstract, horses.

  Mr. Maple loves Mrs. Maple. He goes through troublesome periods, often on Saturday afternoons, of being unable to take his eyes from her, of being captive to the absurd persuasion that the curve of her solid haunch conceals, enwraps, a precarious treasure confided to his care. He cannot touch her enough. The sight of her body contorted by one of her yoga exercises, in her elastic black leotard riddled with runs, twists his heart so that he cannot breathe. Her gesture as she tips the dregs of white wine into a potted geranium seems infinite, like one of Vermeer’s moments frozen in an eternal light from the left. At night he tries to press her in
to himself, to secure her drowsy body against his breast like a clasp, as if without it he will come undone. He cannot sleep in this position, yet maintains it long after her breathing has become steady and oblivious: can love be defined, simply, as the refusal to sleep? Also he loves Penelope Vogel, a quaint little secretary at his office who is recovering from a disastrous affair with an Antiguan; and he is in love with the memories of six or so other females, beginning with a seven-year-old playmate who used to steal his hunter’s cap; and is half in love with death. He as well seems to love, perhaps alone in the nation, President Johnson, who is unaware of his existence. Along the same lines, Richard adores the moon; he studies avidly all the photographs beamed back from its uncongenial surface.

  And Joan? Whom does she love? Her psychiatrist, certainly. Her father, inevitably. Her yoga instructor, probably.

  She has a part-time job in a museum and returns home flushed and quick-tongued, as if from sex. She must love the children, for they flock to her like sparrows to suet. They fight bitterly for a piece of her lap and turn their backs upon their father, as if he, the seed-bearing provider of their lives, were a grotesque intruder, a chimney sweep in a snow palace. None of his impersonations with the children—scoutmaster, playmate, confidant, financial bastion, factual wizard, watchman of the night—win them over; Bean still cries for Mommy when hurt, John approaches her for the money to finance yet more monster cards, Dickie demands that hers be the last good night, and even Judith, who should be his, kisses him timidly, and saves her open-mouthed passion for her mother. Joan swims through their love like a fish through water, ignorant of any other element. Love slows her footsteps, pours upon her from the radio, hangs about her, in the kitchen, in the form of tacked-up children’s drawings of houses, families, cars, cats, dogs, and flowers. Her husband cannot reach her: she is solid but hidden, like the World Bank; presiding yet impartial, like the federal judiciary. Some cold uncoordinated thing pushes at his hand as it hangs impotent; it is Hecuba’s nose. Obese spayed golden-eyed bitch, like him she abhors exclusion and strains to add her warmth to the tumble, in love with them all, in love with the smell of food, in love with the smell of love.

  • • •

  Penelope Vogel takes care to speak without sentimentality; six years younger than Richard, she has endured a decade of amorous ordeals and, still single at twenty-nine, preserves herself by speaking dryly, in the flip phrases of a still-younger generation.

  “We had a good thing,” she says of her Antiguan, “that became a bad scene.”

  She handles, verbally, her old affairs like dried flowers; sitting across the restaurant table from her, Richard is made jittery by her delicacy, as if he and a grandmother are together examining an array of brittle, enigmatic mementos. “A very undesirable scene,” Penelope adds. “The big time was too much for him. He got in with the drugs crowd. I couldn’t see it.”

  “He wanted to marry you?” Richard asks timidly; this much is office gossip.

  She shrugs, admitting, “There was that pitch.”

  “You must miss him.”

  “There is that. He was the most beautiful man I ever saw. His shoulders. In Dickinson’s Bay, he’d have me put my hand on his shoulder in the water and that way he’d pull me along for miles, swimming. He was a snorkel instructor.”

  “His name?” Jittery, fearful of jarring these reminiscences, which are also negotiations, he spills the last of his Gibson, and jerkily signals to order another.

  “Hubert,” Penelope says. She is patiently mopping with her napkin. “Like a girlfriend told me, Never take on a male beauty, you’ll have to fight for the mirror.” Her face is small and very white, and her nose very long, her pink nostrils inflamed by a perpetual cold. Only a Negro, Richard thinks, could find her beautiful; the thought gives her, in the restless shadowy restaurant light, beauty. The waiter, black, comes and changes their tablecloth. Penelope continues so softly Richard must strain to hear, “When Hubert was eighteen he had a woman divorce her husband and leave her children for him. She was one of the old planter families. He wouldn’t marry her. He told me, If she’d do that to him, next thing she’d leave me. He was very moralistic, until he came up here. But imagine an eighteen-year-old boy having an effect like that on a mature married woman in her thirties.”

  “I better keep him away from my wife,” Richard jokes.

  “Yeah.” She does not smile. “They work at it, you know. Those boys are pros.”

  Penelope has often been to the West Indies. In St Croix, it delicately emerges, there was Andrew, with his goatee and his septic-tank business and his political ambitions; in Guadeloupe, there was Ramon, a customs inspector; in Trinidad, Castlereigh, who played the alto pans in a steel band and also did the limbo. He could go down to nine inches. But Hubert was the worst, or best. He was the only one who had followed her north. “I was supposed to come live with him in this hotel in Jamaica Plain but I was scared to go near the place, full of cop-out types and the smell of pot in the elevator; I got two offers from guys just standing there pushing the Up button. It was not a healthy scene.” The waiter brings them rolls; in his shadow her profile seems wan and he yearns to pluck her, pale flower, from the tangle she has conjured. “It got so bad,” she says, “I tried going back to an old boyfriend, an awfully nice guy with a mother and a nervous stomach. He’s a computer systems analyst, very dedicated, but I don’t know, he just never impressed me. All he can talk about is his gastritis and how she keeps telling him to move out and get a wife, but he doesn’t know if she means it. His mother.”

  “He is … white?”

  Penelope glances up; there is a glint off her halted butter knife. Her voice slows, goes drier. “No, as a matter of fact. He’s what they call an Afro-American. You mind?”

  “No, no, I was just wondering—his nervous stomach. He doesn’t sound like the others.”

  “He’s not. Like I say, he doesn’t impress me. Don’t you find, once you have something that works, it’s hard to back up?” More seems meant than is stated; her level gaze, as she munches her thickly buttered bun, feels like one tangent in a complicated geometrical problem: find the point at which she had switched from white to black lovers.

  The subject is changed for him; his heart jars, and he leans forward hastily to say, “See that woman who just came in? Leather suit, gypsy earrings, sitting down now? Her name is Eleanor Dennis. She lives down our street from us. She’s divorced.”

  “Who’s the man?”

  “I have no idea. Eleanor’s moved out of our circle. He looks like a real thug.” Along the far wall, Eleanor adjusts the great loop of her earring; her sideways glance, in the shuffle of shadows, flicks past his table. He doubts that she saw him.

  Penelope says, “From the look on your face, that was more than a circle she was in with you.”

  He pretends to be disarmed by her guess, but in truth considers it providential that one of his own old loves should appear, to countervail the dark torrent of hers. For the rest of the meal they talk about him, him and Eleanor and Marlene Brossman and Joan and the little girl who used to steal his hunter’s cap. In the lobby of Penelope’s apartment house, the elevator summoned, he offers to go up with her.

  She says carefully, “I don’t think you want to.”

  “But I do.” The building is Back Bay modern; the lobby is garishly lit and furnished with plastic plants that need never be watered, Naugahyde chairs that were never sat upon, and tessellated plaques no one ever looks at. The light is an absolute presence, as even and clean as the light inside a freezer, as ubiquitous as ether or as the libido that, Freud says, permeates us all from infancy on.

  “No,” Penelope repeats. “I’ve developed a good ear for sincerity in these things, I think you’re too wrapped up back home.”

  “The dog likes me,” he confesses, and kisses her good night there, encased in brightness. Dry voice to the contrary, her lips are shockingly soft, wide, warm, and sorrowing.

  “So,” Joan says
to him. “You slept with that little office mouse.” It is Saturday; the formless erotic suspense of the afternoon—the tennis games, the cartoon matinees—has passed. The Maples are in their room dressing for a party, by the ashen light of dusk, and the watery blue of a distant street lamp.

  “I never have,” he says, thereby admitting, however, that he knows who she means.

  “Well, you took her to dinner.”

  “Who says?”

  “Mack Dennis. Eleanor saw the two of you in a restaurant.”

  “When do the Dennises converse? I thought they were divorced.”

  “They talk all the time. He’s still in love with her. Everybody knows that.”

  “O.K. When do he and you converse?”

  Oddly, she has not prepared an answer. “Oh”—his heart falls through her silence—“maybe I saw him in the hardware store this afternoon.”

  “And maybe you didn’t. Why would he blurt this out anyway? You and he must be on cozy terms.”

  He says this to trigger her denial; but she mutely considers and, sauntering toward her closet, admits, “We understand each other.”

  How unlike her, to bluff this way. “When was I supposedly seen?”

  “You mean it happens often? Last Wednesday, around eight-thirty. You must have slept with her.”

  “I couldn’t have. I was home by ten, you may remember. You had just gotten back yourself from the museum.”

  “What went wrong, darley? Did you offend her with your horrible pro-Vietnam stand?”

  In the dim light he hardly knows this woman, her broken gestures, her hasty voice. Her silver slip glows and crackles as she wriggles into a black knit cocktail dress; with a kind of determined agitation she paces around the bed, to the bureau and back. As she moves, her body seems to be gathering bulk from the shadows, bulk and a dynamic elasticity. He tries to placate her with a token offering of truth. “No, it turns out Penelope only goes with Negroes. I’m too pale for her.”

  “You admit you tried?”