A Charmed Life (9 page)

The complacent, calm stare of Citizeness Coe, arranging her shawl on her shoulders, sent a chill through Miles. He recognized that Jane, fantastic as it seemed, was quite serious in what she said. If Martha were unbalanced enough to charge him, Jane and Warren would step responsibly in the box to witness for her; and not because they disliked him; they would do the same to Martha or to each other. Between them, he thought, staggered, they made a dangerous couple: Jane was a tale-bearer, and Warren had total recall. For the first time, Miles perceived that Martha’s return was going to be a limiting fact in his existence. As long as she was here, he would have to watch his Ps and Qs, even in little things he let drop to Helen about her, lest Helen repeat them to Jane or one of the other local busybodies. And yet her return was a sort of provocation, needling him to tell the truth, if only to defend himself against the things she and Sinnott might be saying. He was between two stools and every eye would be on him to see how he was “taking” it; that, he suddenly realized, was why he and Helen had been asked down here today. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he whispered, remembering his remarks on the beach. The fat was in the fire already, if Warren could not be persuaded to keep Jane’s eager tongue still.

“Don’t worry,” said Warren, kindly, as if divining his thoughts. “We all say a lot of things we don’t mean. We’re not going to tell Martha, I promise you.” “OK, old chap,” said Miles, feeling moved. He drew out a paisley handkerchief and wiped his brow; the room had become quite warm. “Another drink?” said Warren. Miles declined. “You’re not going to stay and
talk?”
asked Warren sadly. Miles shook his head. “Another time.” “Come back next week,” proposed Jane, “and we’ll take a long walk, out to the point.”

Miles shook his head again. Once in a season was all he could take of the Coes, as a general rule, unless brutal loneliness overtook him; there was nobody to talk to in Digby, except Helen and an old Marine boxer, the real-estate agent and a stripling with a crew haircut who got out the weekly newspaper. “Or come and read
Bérénice
next Friday with the vicomte,” urged Jane, with a funny look in her eye. “We’ll have some drinks and music afterwards.” “Martha going to be here?” queried Miles, sharply. “I don’t
think
so …” said Jane. “Don’t say that, darling,” expostulated Warren. “You don’t
know
that. They said they might come, after all.” And they began to bicker, excitedly, as to what John Sinnott had said, on Tuesday, and whether it contradicted what Martha had told Warren in the post office. Miles watched with a saturnine grin. “No,” he said flatly.

“You don’t want to meet her?” Jane’s round blue eyes grew big and naively wondering; she jerked her head back on her neck. “No,” said Miles. This decision had just matured in him, and he caught Helen’s troubled, surprised gaze. “That’s awfully unusual,” pronounced Jane, waggling her jaw and looking up sidewise at the portrait. “I mean, why would you want to have her
imago
in your study if you won’t see her socially?” “Yes,” chimed in Warren, “where’s the logic in that, Miles?” He had a look of profound disappointment on his bright features, like a child who sees a treat wafted away from him. “Gee,” he said, “it would have been fun to get you and Martha together again. I thought, down deep you really wanted that when you took a shine to the picture.” He turned a sweet, pleading face to Miles. “Please,” he begged. “Come do
Bérénice.
Come to dinner first. A week from tomorrow.” “No,” said Miles, curtly. “It wouldn’t be fair to Helen.” Rebuked, both the Coes directed their widened eyes to Miles’s better half, who smiled serenely and murmured, “Whatever you say, dearest.” Warren sank his cheek into his palm. He was torn, Miles could see, between his sociability and his sense of delicacy toward a woman’s feelings. But Jane was staring boldly at Helen. “You don’t
want
to see Miles’s ex?” she exclaimed. “I don’t mind,” said Helen, in a faint voice, looking to Miles for guidance. “I mind for her,” said Miles, grandly, letting the cat out of the bag; he took it for granted, as a mere matter of propriety, that Helen would feel jealous of Martha, and he saw no harm in letting the Coes know this. In his opinion, it reflected credit on her.

Jane cogitated, looking from one to the other. “Everybody does up here, you know, Helen,” she chided. “I mean divorced couples meet their ex-mates. They all go to the same parties, and nobody thinks a thing of it. There wouldn’t be any social life if everybody felt like Miles.” “I am different,” said Miles. And in truth he felt a million light years distant from the New Leeds people. Old, soured, boiled as an owl a good deal of the time, bored to desperation except when he was working, he nevertheless had passions, he told himself, that let him know that he was a man still, among senile adolescents. Like an old lion, he nursed the wound Martha had given him because, as Jane ought to realize, he held sex sacred. “Why, Jane, isn’t that funny?” he heard Warren twitter. “What?” said Jane.
“You
remember, darling,” her husband prompted reproachfully. “Martha said the same thing, right here in this room. Only she said, ‘I’m different.’ Remember that?” Jane nodded. “When they first thought of buying the house,” she mused. “She didn’t want to meet
you,
Miles,” she continued, with a giggle of innocent malice. “That was the reason she gave for not buying it. We all told her she was a nut, that everybody met their ex-spouses here. But she claimed she was different….” Miles smiled disbelievingly. “Martha,” he observed, “is a woman of words.” “Oh, she meant it all right,” averred Warren. “She
fought
buying that house, let me tell you.”

Miles’s face reddened. He felt a ridiculous stab of pain. She refused to meet him while he, sentimental fool, had been on the verge of buying her portrait! The anger that had been accumulating in him during the past discussion suddenly boiled up and he wanted to hurt somebody. “Let’s go,” he said harshly. “Forget about the picture.” As he took a step toward the door, a knock sounded. There was a stark moment of silence; no one moved. The conviction that it must be the Sinnotts was graven, Miles saw, on every face. “It
can’t
be them,” whispered Jane. “It might be,” whispered back Warren. Another knock came. “They know we’re here because of the cars,” whispered Jane. “Answer it, man,” said Miles, in his normal voice. As Warren skipped to the door, Miles turned aside, steadying himself. Very likely, he said to himself, it was not Martha at all.

But it was Martha, in a gray cloak, accompanied by her husband and a strange tall girl with short blond hair, wearing slacks. As soon as the door opened, Miles felt a release of tension in his belly. Now that she was here, he could say it: He had known they were going to meet today, ever since he got up this morning, and all his talk of not wanting to see her had been a protective mechanism, against disappointment. Wise Helen must have guessed when she saw him before his mirror, clipping the hairs in his nose while he was shaving, for she had said nary a word when he put aside the old coat and tie she had laid out for him in favor of the new tweed and the paisley. Jane Coe must have known that it was in the cards too as she sat there like a witch in her black shawl, urging him to stay. He would not put it past her to have cooked the whole thing up with Martha; he had never trusted the two of them when they got together.

Martha herself, he noticed, was very formally dressed, for New Leeds. She had on a pair of smart black walking shoes, stockings, a black skirt, and some sort of white silk blouse, under the cloak, which he moved forward to take from her, doing the honors, while the rest of the party milled about in confusion. Sinnott was the only one who retained his self-possession, coming forward to shake hands briskly, ignoring the portrait—a very considerable feat, for, the sixty-six square feet of canvas had magnetized every eye but his. Nobody could miss the fact that Martha had been the chief topic of conversation. It was, as they said, a situation. Martha was shaking all over. Miles could feel it, as he lifted the cloak from her shoulders; he remembered that she had trembled, the first time he saw her, on the stage of a hapless summer theater production, so badly that the scenery shook.

Her nervousness put him at ease. “I’m glad to see you,” he announced, taking her frightened hand in his firm, friendly grip. And he meant it. Whatever he might have expected to feel, seeing her at last, pleasure and cordiality were his prime sensations, as if he had caught a glimpse of a familiar face in a crowd. “It’s good to see you,” he reiterated, looking her over. But she, in a characteristic movement of rejection, began to apologize. They had thought, outside, that it was the Hubers’ car, she said; the Hubers had a new Cadillac too. Otherwise, the inference was, they would not have come in. Miles suppressed a smile. Wild horses, in his opinion, would not have kept her out, once she had guessed that he was inside: she had had to see him, just as he had to see her. But she was alleging that they must go, that they had dropped in, just for a minute, to have the girl in slacks meet the Coes, who were going to be her neighbors. Dolly Lamb, she explained, with a jerky nod at the tall girl, was a painter who had taken the house on Tern Pond for the winter; she did not know anybody up here; that was why they had brought her.

Miles patiently listened, looking down into Martha’s eyes, like brown topazes, he used to say. There were faint wrinkles around them now, and she had a distrait, slightly careworn air. “Cool off,” he felt like telling her. “You don’t have to account for yourself to me any more.” As she named Tern Pond, she colored and hurried on with her exposition, for she and Miles used to picnic there, at this time of year, and once or twice, after bathing, they had made love, over her protests, on the sand, by the deserted house that this girl must now be occupying. Martha had claimed that somebody would come and catch them; she had had a lot of sexual defenses, though she always liked it, in the end. Her look, now, kept dodging his and flying nervously to her husband. Miles turned his head to examine him—a thin, high-colored young man in old flannels and a whipcord jacket with leather-patched elbows; not the New Leeds type. He had never paid him much heed in the days when Martha used to talk to him, before she ran off; there were always young men, on the beach, actors or poets or anarchists, that the young wives liked to gab with. Sinnott, the women used to say, was exceptionally good-looking, which was why Miles had not bothered to notice him. But he now conceded that he had been wrong. There was something in the tall, scowling fellow that was out of the common run, something of the old-fashioned gentleman, a kind of knightly quality that Miles found appealing. To his surprise, he felt no jealousy. From his vantage point of seniority, he found, he could look on Sinnott and Martha almost paternally, as if he had sired this marriage. He found himself wishing them well and hoping, for Sinnott’s sake, that Martha was behaving herself. She seemed, as Jane Coe said, to be genuinely in love, and the Coes evidently liked him. Whenever Sinnott spoke, Jane Coe giggled responsively and Warren Coe beamed, as he had at the baby on the beach. Yet there was something unstable there, underneath the nice manners and the glowing cheeks of the
chevalier de la rose.
If Miles had had him as a patient, he would have diagnosed an hysterical fixity, very rare in men, nowadays.

Martha had changed a great deal. She was more unsure of herself and at the same time she had more dignity. There was less of the wayward modern girl and more of the bohemian lady in her. She had even changed her hair-do; that little knot at the nape was new. In the old days, she had had braids, wound around her head, unbecomingly, and she had worn peasant skirts, sometimes, and stripes and bright colors. Sinnott must have taught her how to dress. She had a frail look that Miles had never associated with her before, despite her small hands and thin waist. During their marriage, he had always been conscious of her tensile strength and durability—her Scandinavian side. Now it seemed as if the poetic side—the Italian mother—had got the upper hand. She appeared to be living constrainedly in some sort of romance: a projection of Sinnott’s, probably, a borrowed ego-ideal.

The fact that she had changed so was an eye-opener to Miles. It troubled him to think that he, in the past, might have handled her wrong, on the theory that what she wanted was a strong father-figure, whereas perhaps all along it had been a brother she was looking for. … And yet she was tenser than ever, he was disturbed to see. When he refilled his glass and brought her a strong drink from the table, to encourage her to talk, he was startled by the laughing sharpness with which she spoke of the local people. He would have said shrill, except that she spoke in such a low voice that he had to lean closer to catch the anecdotes she was relating. He was a critical man himself, but she made him feel old and tolerant, by contrast. Yet it puzzled him to remember, as he listened, that it was Martha’s arrogant intolerance that he had loved most about her. He shook himself a little as it occurred to him that it was he who had changed, grown soft and torpid from age and creature comforts. Listening to Martha now, he had the same unpleasant sensation that he got from leafing over his early plays when he was alone in his windmill with a gale blowing and a glass by his side. Is this I, he asked himself, or was that I, back there?

“Let’s sit down,” he said, interrupting her. He drew up two chairs and arranged them, a little apart from the group. On the couch, just to the right of them, Warren had cornered Miss Lamb, who sat upright and edgy, with a scared look, while he, leaning forward, his head to one side, was explaining the theory of his work to her. Miles motioned to Martha for silence. “Picasso,” they heard Warren’s modest voice say, “uses a succession of images, like the animated cartoonists to express linear time. I’ve gone a long way beyond that. Last year, I showed the continuum by painting both sides of the canvas. You get the idea? A mathematician up here suggested it to me. What you have is a continuous painting that curves back on itself. It’s the real break with easel painting.” “Why don’t you try sculpture?” the girl interposed, in a demure murmur, edging back from him on the couch. Mentally, Miles slapped his thigh, but Warren took the question literally. “I may,” he said, thoughtfully nodding. “I never thought of that. I guess it’s pretty obvious to an outsider.” The girl said something indistinct. Warren’s high laugh rang out. “Of course,” he cried, “I know it’s absurd that I should be ahead of Picasso—ever read Kierkegaard, by the way? Oh, you should, darn it; he taught me to accept the absurd. I’ve learned to accept a lot of things since I took up science and philosophy. The first thing I found out was that just about everything I thought was true wasn’t. Ever have that experience? I owe it mostly to Miles here.”