Couples: A Novel Read online

  Saltz seized the chance to latch on to Ken. “Tell me, if you can spare a minute, have you felt the effects of laser beams in biochemistry yet? I was reading in the Globe the other week where they’ve had some success with cancer in mice.”

  “Anybody can do miracles with mice,” Ken stated, ruefully staring down at Janet’s backside. He was not comfortable, Foxy had noticed years ago, talking to Jews; he had competed unsuccessfully against too many.

  “Do me a favor,” Saltz went on, “and tell me about DNA. How the blazes, is the way my thinking runs, how the blazes could such a complex structure spontaneously arise out of chaos?”

  “Matter isn’t chaos,” Ken said. “It has laws, legislated by what can’t happen.”

  “I can see,” Saltz said, “how out in our western states, say, the Grand Canyon is the best example, how a rock could be carved by erosion into the shape of a cathedral. But if I look inside and see a lot of pews arranged in apple-pie order, in rows, I begin to smell a rat, so to speak.”

  “Maybe,” Ken said, “you put those pews there yourself.”

  Ben Saltz grinned. “I like that,” he said. “I like that answer.” His grin was a dazzling throwback, a facial sunburst that turned his eyes into twinkling slits, that seized his whole face like the snarl on the face of a lion in an Assyrian bas-relief. “I like that answer a lot. You mean the Cosmic Unconscious. You know, Yahweh was a volcano god originally. I think it’s ridiculous for religious people to be afraid of the majesty and power of the universe.”

  Angela called from the porch, “Is anybody except me chilly? Please come into the house, anybody.”

  This signaled some to go and some to stay. Eddie Constantine crushed his beer can double and handed it to Janet Appleby. She placed it above her breast, as if it were a tin corsage. He crossed to his Vespa and, passing close to Foxy, tapped her stomach. “Suck in your gut.” Those were his words. The neighbors’ boy got on the Vespa behind him, clinging possumlike. Constantine kicked off, and a spray of stones leaped from his rear wheel as he went down the drive and banked into the road beyond the lilac hedge, which was losing transparence to the swelling of buds. The cat raced from the hedge in terror and ran silently across the lawn, elongating. Children were emerging from the darkening woods. Half of them were crying. Really, it was only Frankie Appleby crying. Jonathan Smith and Whitney Thorne had tied him to a tree with his own shoelaces and then couldn’t undo the knots so they had to cut them and now he had no shoelaces and it wasn’t his fault. His feet stumbled and flopped to illustrate and Harold little-Smith ran to him while Janet his mother stood cold, plump and pluming, on the porch gazing to where the sun, a netted orange, hung in the thin woods. Across the lawn came the rosy Hanema girls and a beautiful male child like a Gainsborough in the romantic waning light, curly black hair and a lithe self-solicitous comportment. With a firm dismissing nod Gallagher took this luxurious child by the hand and led him to their car, the gray Mercedes from whose tall clean windows Foxy had first viewed Tarbox. Saltz and the Thornes moved to go in. In the narrow farmhouse doorway the two men, one bearded and one bald, bumped together and Thorne unexpectedly put his arm, the arm with the crippled green-tipped hand, around the Jew and solidly hugged him sideways. Saltz flashed upward his leonine grin and said something to which Thorne replied, “I’m an indestructible kind of a prick. Let me tell you about dental hypnosis.” The pleasant house accepted them. Foxy and Ken moved to go.

  “Don’t all leave,” Angela begged. “Wouldn’t you like to have a real drink?”

  Foxy said, “We must get back,” truly sad. She was to experience this sadness many times, this chronic sadness of late Sunday afternoon, when the couples had exhausted their game, basketball or beachgoing or tennis or touch football, and saw an evening weighing upon them, an evening without a game, an evening spent among flickering lamps and cranky children and leftover food and the nagging half-read newspaper with its weary portents and atrocities, an evening when marriages closed in upon themselves like flowers from which the sun is withdrawn, an evening giving like a smeared window on Monday and the long week when they must perform again their impersonations of working men, of stockbrokers and dentists and engineers, of mothers and housekeepers, of adults who are not the world’s guests but its hosts.

  Janet and Harold were arguing in whispers. Janet whirled and proclaimed, “Sweet, we can’t. We must rescue Marcia and Frank, they’re probably deep in conversation.” She and little-Smith collected their scrambled children and left in her maroon car. As they backed from the driveway, the sinking sun for an instant pierced the windshield and bleached their two faces in sunken detail, like saints under glass.

  “Good-bye,” Piet Hanema said politely from the porch. Foxy had forgotten him. He seemed so chastened by the finger incident that she called to him, “Cheer up.”

  Safe in their MG, Ken said, “Zowie, I’m going to be stiff tomorrow.”

  “But wasn’t it fun?”

  “It was exercise. Were you terribly bored?”

  “No. I loved Angela.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. She’s gracious and careless and above it all at the same time. She doesn’t make the demands on you the others do.”

  “She must have been a knockout once.”

  “But not now? I must say, your painted friend Janet with her hug-my-bottom sailor pants does not impress me aesthetically.”

  “How does she impress you, Fox?”

  “She impresses me as less happy than she should be. She was meant to be a jolly fat woman and somehow missed.”

  “Do you think she’s having an affair with Smith?”

  Foxy laughed. “Men are so observant. It’s so obvious it must be passé. I think she had an affair with Smith some time ago, is having one with Thorne right now, and is sizing you up for the future.”

  His flattered languid answering laugh annoyed her. “I have a confession,” she said.

  “You’re having an affair with Saltz. God, Jews are ponderous. They care so much. The Cosmic Unconscious, Jesus.”

  “No. But almost as bad. I told Angela we wanted to have her husband look at our house.”

  His voice withdrew, acquired a judging dispassion. “Did you set a date?”

  “No, but I think we should now. You should call. She didn’t think he’d be interested anyway.”

  Ken drove swiftly down the road they already knew by heart, so both leaned a little before the curve was there. “Well,” he said after silence, “I hope his basketball isn’t a clue as to how he builds houses. He plays a pretty crusty game.”

  Ruth, standing beside the bed with almost a woman’s bulk, was crying and by speaking woke him from a dream in which a tall averted woman in white was waiting for him at the end of a curved corridor. “Daddy, Nancy says the dairy cat got an animal downstairs and the hamster’s not in his cage and I’m afraid to look.”

  Piet remembered the eek eeik by which he had learned to lull himself to sleep and slid from the bed with fear lumping in his stomach. Angela sighed moistly but did not stir. The floor and stairs were cold. Nancy, huddled in her pink nightie on the brown living-room sofa in the shadowless early-morning light, removed her thumb from her mouth and told him, “I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to, it was a ’stake!”

  His mouth felt crusty. “Mean to what? Where’s the animal?”

  The child looked at him with eyes so pure and huge a space far bigger than this low-ceilinged room seemed windowed. The furniture itself, surfacing from the unity of darkness, seemed to be sentient, though paralyzed.

  He insisted, “Where is the animal you told Ruthie about, Nancy?”

  She said, “I didn’t mean to,” and succumbed to tears; her smooth face disintegrated like a prodigy of embalming suddenly exposed to air, and Piet was numbed by the force that flowed through the hole her face made in the even gray light.

  Ruth said, “Crybaby, crybaby, sit-and-wonder-whybaby,” and Nancy plugged her face again with her thu
mb.

  The little animal, sack-shaped, lay belly up in the center of the kitchen linoleum. The dairy cat watched at a distance, both cowardly and righteous, behind the rungs of a kitchen chair. Its quick instinctive work had been nicely done. Though scarcely marked, the hamster was dead. Its body yielded with a sodden resilience to the prodding of Piet’s finger; its upper lip was lifted to expose teeth like the teeth of a comb and its eyes, with an incongruous human dignity, were closed. A trace of lashes. The four curled feet. The lumpy bald nose.

  Ruth asked, though she was standing in the kitchen doorway and could see for herself, “Is it him?”

  “Yes. Sweetie, he’s dead.”

  “I know.”

  The adventure was easy to imagine. Ruth, feeling that her pet needed more room for running, suspecting cruelty in the endless strenuousness of the wheel, not believing with her growing mind that any creature might have wits too dim to resent such captivity, had improvised around his tiny cage a larger cage of window screens she had found stacked in the attic waiting for summer. She had tied the frames together with string and Piet had never kept his promise to make her a stronger cage. Several times the hamster had nosed his way out and gone exploring in her room. Last night he had made it downstairs, discovering in the moonsoaked darkness undreamed-of continents, forests of furniture legs, vast rugs heaving with oceanic odors; toward morning an innocent giant in a nightgown had admitted a lion with a mildewed eye. The hamster had never been given cause for fear and must have felt none until claws sprang from a sudden heaven fragrant with the just-discovered odors of cat and cow and dew.

  Angela came downstairs in her blue bathrobe, and Piet could not convey to her why he found the mishap so desolating, the dim-witted little exploration that had ended with such a thunderclap of death. The kitchen linoleum, the color of grass, felt slick beneath him. The day dawning outside looked stale and fruitless and chill, one more of the many with which New England cheats spring. Angela’s concern, after a glance at him and Ruth and the body of the hamster, was for Nancy; she carried her from the living room into the relative brightness of the kitchen. Squeamishly Piet enfolded the russet corpse, disturbingly dense and, the reins of blood slackened, unstable, in a newspaper. Nancy asked to see it.

  Piet glanced at Angela for permission and unfolded the newspaper. KENNEDY PRAISES STEEL RESTRAINT. Nancy stared and slowly asked, “Won’t he wake up?”

  Ruth said, her voice forced through tears, “No stupid he will not wake up because he is dead and dead things do not wake up ever ever ever.”

  “When will he go to Heaven?”

  All three looked to Piet for the answer. He said, “I don’t know. Maybe he’s up there already, going round and round in a wheel.” He imitated the squeaking; Ruth laughed, and it had been her he had meant to amuse. Nancy’s anxious curiosity searched out something he had buried in himself and he disliked the child for seeking it. Angela, holding her, seemed part of this same attempt, to uncover and unman him, to expose the shameful secret, the childish belief, from which he drew his manhood.

  He asked Nancy roughly, “Did you see it happen?”

  Angela said, “Don’t, Piet. She doesn’t want to think about it.”

  But she did; Nancy said, staring at the empty floor where it had happened, “Kitty and Hamster played and Hamster wanted to quit and Kitty wouldn’t let him.”

  “Did you know the hamster was downstairs when you let Kitty in?”

  Nancy’s thumb went back into her mouth.

  “I’m sure she didn’t,” Angela said.

  “Let me see him once more,” Ruth said, and in disclosing to her the compact body like a stiffening heart Piet saw for himself how the pet had possessed the protruding squarish bottom of the male of its species, a hopeful sexual vanity whose final denial seemed to Piet a kind of relief. With Ruth he knew now the strange inner drying, a soft scorching, that follows the worst, when it has undeniably come true. She went off to school, walked down the crunching driveway in her yellow Easter coat to await the yellow school bus, with all her tears behind her, under a cloudy sky that promised no rain.

  Piet had promised her a new hamster and a better cage. He buried the old hamster in the edge of the woods, near a scattering of scilla, little lillies of a wideawake blue, where the earth was soft and peaty. One shovelful did for the grave; two made it deep. The trees were beginning to leaf and the undergrowth was sketchy, still mixed, its threads of green, with winter-bleached dead stalks delicate as straws, as bird bones. In a motion of the air, the passionless air which passively flows downhill, spring’s terror washed over him. He felt the slow thronging of growth as a tangled hurrying toward death. Timid green tips shaped like tiny weaponry thrust against nothing. His father’s green fond touch. The ungrateful earth, receptive. The hamster in an hour of cooling had lost weight and shape to the elements. All that had articulated him into a presence worth mourning, the humanoid feet and the groping trembling nose whose curiosity, when Ruth set him out on her blanket, made her whole bed lightly vibrate, had sunk downward toward a vast absence. The body slid nose down into the shoveled hole. Piet covered him with guilty quickness. In the nearly five years they had lived here a small cemetery had accumulated along this edge of woods: injured birds they had vainly nursed, dime-store turtles that had softened and whitened and died, a kitten slammed in a screen door, a chipmunk torn from throat to belly by some inconclusive predator who had left a spark of life to flicker all one long June afternoon. Last autumn, when the robins were migrating, Nancy had found one with a broken back by the barn, groveling on the asphalt basketball court in its desire to fly, to join the others. Lifted sheerly by the beating of its heart, it propelled itself to the middle of the lawn, where the four Hanemas gathered in expectation of seeing it take wing, healed. But the bird was unhinged, as Piet’s own father with his shattered chest and spine would have been unhinged had his lungs let him live; and the children, bored by the bird’s poor attempt to become a miracle, wandered away. So only Piet, standing helpless as if beside a party guest who refuses to leave, witnessed the final effort, an asymmetric splaying of the dusty wings and a heave that drove the robin’s beak straight down into the sweetish weedy shadowy grass. The bird emitted a minute high cry, a point of noise as small as a star, and relaxed. Only Piet had heard this utterance. Only Piet, as now, attended the burial.

  Angela came across the lawn to him where he stood with the shovel. She was dressed in an English-appearing suit of salt-and-pepper tweed; today, Tuesday, was her day to be a teaching parent at Nancy’s nursery school. “How unfortunate,” she said, “that of all of us it had to be Nancy who saw it happen. Now she wants me to take her to Heaven so she can see for herself that there’s room for her, and a little wheel. I really do wonder, Piet, if religion doesn’t complicate things worse than they’d have to be. She can see that I don’t believe it myself.”

  He stooped beside the shovel and assumed the manner of an old yeoman. “Ah,” he said, “thet’s all verra well for a fine leddy like yerself, ma’am, but us peasants like need a touch o’ holy water to keep off the rheumatism, and th’ evil eye.”

  “I detest imitations, whether you do them, or Georgene Thorne. And I detest being put in the position of trying to sell Heaven to my children.”

  “But Angel, the rest of us think of you as never having left Heaven.”

  “Stop trying to get at me and sympathize with the child. She thinks of death all the time. She doesn’t understand why she has only two grandparents instead of four like the other children.”

  “You speak as if you had married a man with only one leg.”

  “I’m just stating, not complaining. Unlike you, I don’t blame you for that accident.”

  “Ah, thank ye kindly, ma’am, and I’ll be makin’ a better hamster cage today, and get the poor kid a new hamster.”

  “It’s not Ruth,” Angela said, “I’m worried about.” These were the lines drawn. Angela’s heart sought to enshrine the younger chi
ld’s innocence; Piet loved more the brave corruption of the older, who sang in the choir and who had brusquely pushed across the sill of fear where Nancy stood wide-eyed.

  Angela and Nancy went off to nursery school together. Piet drove the pick-up truck into downtown Tarbox and at Spiros Bros. Builders & Lumber Supply bought five yards of galvanized cage mesh, a three-by-four-piece of ¾” plywood, twenty feet of 2” pine quality knotless stock, a half pound of 1½” finishing nails, and the same quantity of the finer gauge of poultry staples. Jerry Spiros, the younger of the two brothers, told Piet about his chest, which since Christmas had harbored a congestion that ten days in Jamaica did not clear up. “Those fucking blacks’d steal,” Jerry said, “the watch right off your wrist,” and coughed prolongedly.

  “Sounds like you’ve been sniffing glue,” Piet told him, and charged the hamster-cage materials to the Gallagher & Hanema account, and threw them into the back of his truck, and slammed shut the tailgate that said WASH ME, and drove to Indian Hill, taking the long way around. He swung by his office to see if Gallagher’s gray Mercedes was there. Their office was a shacklike wing, one-story, upon an asphalt-shingled tenement, mostly unoccupied, on Hope Street, a little spur off Charity, a short cut to the railroad depot. Charity, the main business street, met Divinity at right angles, and Divinity carried up the hill, past Cogswell’s Drug Store. The church bulked white on the green.

  Huge airy thing. Twenty-four panes in each half window, forty-eight in all, often while Pedrick wrestled he counted them, no symbolism since when it was built there weren’t that many states in the Union, Arizona, Oklahoma, Indian Territory. The lumber those people had. To burn. Waste? Gives the town a sense of itself. Dismal enough otherwise. On this heavy loveless day everything looked to need a coat of paint. The salt air corrupts. In Michigan barns stayed red for ages.

  The green was hourglass-shaped, cut in two by a footpath, the church’s section pinched off from the part holding the backstop and basepaths. Swinging left along the green’s waist, Piet looked toward the Constantines’ side yard hoping to see Carol hanging out wash with upstretched arms and flattened breasts. At Greek dances, leading the line, hair in spit curls, slippered toe pointed out, the neighbors’ boy linked to her by a handkerchief, lithe. Lower classes have that litheness. Generations of hunger. Give me your poor. Marcia brittle, Janet fat. Angela drifty and that Whitman gawky, a subtle stiffness, resisting something, air. Eddie’s Vespa but no Ford, Carol’s car. He home and she shopping. Buying back liniment. I ache afterwards. Funeral home driveway held a Cadillac hearse and a preschool child playing with pebbles. Growing up in odor of embalming oil instead of flowers, corpses in the refrigerator, a greenhouse better, learn to love beauty, yet might make some fears seem silly. Death. Hamster. Shattered glass. He eased up on the accelerator.