Couples (2 page)

“In sight? Do I?”

“Of course you do. You know you do. Big or little, old or young, you eat them up. Even the yellow ones, Bernadette
Ong. Even poor little soused Bea Guerin, who has enough troubles.”

“You seemed happy enough, conferring all night with Freddy Thorne.”

“Piet, we can’t keep going to parties back to back. I come home feeling dirty. I hate it, this way we live.”

“You’d rather we went belly to belly? Tell me”—he had stripped to his waist, and she shied from that shieldlike breadth of taut bare skin with its cruciform blazon of amber hair—“what do you and Freddy find to talk about for hours on end? You huddle in the corner like children playing jacks.” He took a step forward, his eyes narrowed and pink, party-chafed. She resisted the urge to step backwards, knowing that this threatening mood of his was supposed to end in sex, was a plea.

Instead she reached under her slip to unfasten her garters. The gesture, so vulnerable, disarmed him; Piet halted before the fireplace, his bare feet chilled by the hearth’s smooth bricks.

“He’s a jerk,” she said carelessly, of Freddy Thorne. Her voice was lowered by the pressure of her chin against her chest; the downward reaching of her arms gathered her breasts to a dark crease. “But he talks about things that interest women. Food. Psychology. Children’s teeth.”

“What does he say psychological?”

“He was talking tonight about what we all see in each other.”

“Who?”

“You know. Us. The couples.”

“What Freddy Thorne sees in me is a free drink. What he sees in you is a gorgeous fat ass.”

She deflected the compliment. “He thinks we’re a circle. A
magic circle of heads to keep the night out. He told me he gets frightened if he doesn’t see us over a weekend. He thinks we’ve made a church of each other.”

“That’s because he doesn’t go to a real church.”

“Well Piet, you’re the only one who does. Not counting the Catholics.” The Catholics they knew socially were the Gallaghers and Bernadette Ong. The Constantines had lapsed.

“It’s the source,” Piet said, “of my amazing virility. A stiffening sense of sin.” And in his chalkstripe suit pants he abruptly dove forward, planted his weight on his splayed raw-knuckled hands, and stood upside down. His tensed toes reached for the tip of his conical shadow on the ceiling; the veins in his throat and forearms bulged. Angela looked away. She had seen this too often before. He neatly flipped back to his feet; his wife’s silence embarrassed him. “Christ be praised,” he said, and clapped, applauding himself.

“Shh. You’ll wake the children.”

“Why the hell shouldn’t I, they’re always waking me, the little bloodsuckers.” He went down on his knees and toddled to the edge of the bed. “Dadda, Dadda, wake up-up, Dadda. The Sunnay paper’s here, guess what? Jackie Kenneny’s having a baby!”

“You’re so cruel,” Angela said, continuing her careful undressing, parting vague obstacles with her hands. She opened her closet door so that from her husband’s angle her body was hidden. Her voice floated free: “Another thing Freddy thinks, he thinks the children are suffering because of it.”

“Because of what?”

“Our social life.”

“Well I have to have a social life if you won’t give me a sex life.”

“If you think
that
approach is the way to a lady’s heart, you have a lot to learn.” He hated her tone; it reminded him of the years before him, when she had instructed children.

He asked her, “Why shouldn’t children suffer? They’re supposed to suffer. How else can they learn to be good?” For he felt that if only in the matter of suffering he knew more than she, and that without him she would raise their daughters as she had been raised, to live in a world that didn’t exist.

She was determined to answer him seriously, until her patience dulled his pricking mood. “That’s positive suffering,” she said. “What we give them is neglect so subtle they don’t even notice it. We aren’t abusive, we’re just evasive. For instance, Frankie Appleby is a bright child, but he’s just going to waste, he’s just Jonathan little-Smith’s punching bag because their parents are always together.”

“Hell. Half the reason we all live in this silly hick town is for the sake of the children.”

“But we’re the ones who have the fun. The children just get yanked along. They didn’t enjoy all those skiing trips last winter, standing in the T-bar line shivering and miserable. The girls wanted all winter to go some Sunday to a museum, a nice warm museum with stuffed birds in it, but we wouldn’t take them because we would have had to go as a family and our friends might do something exciting or ghastly without us. Irene Saltz finally took them, bless her, or they’d never have gone. I like Irene; she’s the only one of us who has somehow kept her freedom. Her freedom from crap.”

“How much did you drink tonight?”

“It’s just that Freddy didn’t let me talk enough.”

“He’s a jerk,” Piet said and, suffocated by an obscure sense of exclusion, seeking to obtain at least the negotiable asset of
a firm rejection, he hopped across the hearth-bricks worn like a passageway in Delft and sharply kicked shut Angela’s closet door, nearly striking her. She was naked.

He too was naked. Piet’s hands, feet, head, and genitals were those of a larger man, as if his maker, seeing that the cooling body had been left too small, had injected a final surge of plasma which at these extremities had ponderously clotted. Physically he held himself, his tool-toughened palms curved and his acrobat’s back a bit bent, as if conscious of a potent burden.

Angela had flinched and now froze, one arm protecting her breasts. A luminous polleny pallor, the shadow of last summer’s bathing suit, set off her surprisingly luxuriant pudendum. The slack forward cant of her belly remembered her pregnancies. Her thick-thighed legs were varicose. But her tipped arms seemed, simple and symmetrical, a maiden’s; her white feet were high-arched and neither little toe touched the floor. Her throat, wrists, and triangular bush appeared the pivots for some undeniable effort of flight, but like Eve on a portal she crouched in shame, stone. She held rigid. Her blue irises cupped light catlike, shallowly. Her skin breathed hate. He did not dare touch her, though her fairness gathered so close dried his tongue. Their bodies hung upon them as clothes too gaudy. Piet felt the fireplace draft on his ankles and became sensitive to the night beyond her hunched shoulders, an extensiveness pressed tight against the bubbled old panes and the frail mullions, a blackness charged with the ache of first growth and the suspended skeletons of Virgo and Leo and Gemini.

She said, “Bully.”

He said, “You’re lovely.”

“That’s too bad. I’m going to put on my nightie.”

Sighing, immersed in a clamor of light and paint, the Hanemas dressed and crept to bed, exhausted.

As always after a party Piet was slow to go to sleep. There had not been many parties for him as a child and now they left him overexcited, tumescent. He touched his own self to make himself sleepy. Quickly his wife was dead weight beside him. She claimed she never dreamed. Pityingly he put his hand beneath the cotton nightie transparent to his touch and massaged the massive blandness of her warm back, hoping to stir in the depths of her sleep an eddy, a fluid fable she could tell herself and in the morning remember. She would be a valley and he a sandstorm. He would be a gentle lion bathing in her river. He could not believe she never dreamed. How could one not dream? He always dreamed. He dreamed last night he was an old minister making calls. Walking in the country, he crossed a superhighway and waited a long time on the median strip. Waiting, he looked down into a rural valley where small houses smoked from their chimneys. He must make his calls there. He crossed the rest of the road and was relieved when a policeman pulled up on a motorcycle and, speaking German, arrested him.

The party had been given by the Applebys in honor of the new couple, the what, the Whitmans. Frank had known Ted, or Dan, at Exeter, or Harvard. Exeter, Harvard: it was to Piet like looking up at the greenhouse panes spattered with whitewash to dull the sun. He shut out the greenhouse. He did not wish to remember the greenhouse. It was a cliff.

Stiffly his fingers tired of trying to give his wife a dream: a baby on the river of herself, Moses in the Nile morning found snagged in the rustling papyrus, Egyptian handmaids, willowy
flanks, single lotus, easy access. Sex part of nature before Christ.
Bully
. Bitch. Taking up three-quarters of the bed as if duty done. Mouthbreathing with slack lips. Words in and out. Virgins pregnant through the ear. Talk to me psychologee. He touched in preference again himself. Waxen. Wilted camellia petals. In his youth an ivory rod at will. At the thought of a cleft or in class a shaft of sun laid on his thigh: stand to recite:
breathes there a man with soul so dead
. The whole class tittering at him bent over. The girl at the desk next wore lineny blouses so sheer her bra straps peeped and so short-sleeved that her armpits. Showed, shaved. Vojt. Annabelle Vojt. One man, one Vojt. Easy Dutch ways. Married a poultry farmer from outside Grand Rapids. Wonderful tip of her tongue, agile, squarish. Once after a dance French-kissed him parked by the quarry and he shot off behind his fly. Intenser then, the duct narrower, greater velocity. Not his girl but her underpants satiny, distant peaty odor, rustle of crinoline, formal dance. Quick as a wink, her dark tongue saucy under his. His body flashed the news nerve to nerve. Stiff in an instant. Touch. A waxworks petal laid out pillowed in sensitive frizz: wake up. Liquor. Evil dulling stuff. Lazes the blood, saps muscle tone. He turned over, bunched the pillow, lay flat and straight, trying to align himself with an invisible grain, the grain of the world, fate. Relax. Picture the party.

Twisting. Bald Freddy Thorne with a glinting moist smirk put on the record. Chubby.
Huooff: cummawn naioh evvribuddi less
Twist! Therapy, to make them look awful. They were growing old and awful in each other’s homes. Only Carol had it of the women, the points of her pelvis making tidy figure eights, hands aloof like gentle knives, weight switching foot to foot, a silent clicking, stocking feet, narrow, hungry, her scrawny kind of high-school beauty, more his social level, the
motion, coolly neat, feet forgotten, eyelids elegantly all but shuttered, making a presumed mist of Frank Appleby bouncing opposite, no logic in his hips, teeth outcurved braying, gums bared, brown breath, unpleasant spray. Everybody twisted. Little-Smith’s black snickering feet. Georgene’s chin set determinedly as if on second serve. Angela, too soft, rather swayed. Gallagher a jerking marionette. John Ong watched sober, silent, smiling, smoking. Turning to Piet he made high friendly noises that seemed in the din all vowels; Piet knew the Korean was worth more than them all together in a jiggling jouncing bunch but he could never understand what he said:
Who never to himself has said
. Bernadette came up, broad flat lady in two dimensions, half-Japanese, the other half Catholic, from Baltimore, and asked Piet,
Twist?
In the crowded shaking room, the Applebys’ children’s playroom, muraled in pink ducks, Bernadette kept bumping him, whacking him with her silken flatnesses, crucifix hopping in the shallow space between her breasts, thighs, wrists, bumping him, the yellow peril.
Whoofwheeieu. Wow
. Better a foxtrot. Making fools of themselves, working off steam, it’s getting too suburban in here. The windows had been painted shut. Walls of books.

Piet felt, brave small Dutch boy, a danger hanging tidal above his friends, in this town where he had been taken in because Angela had been a Hamilton. The men had stopped having careers and the women had stopped having babies. Liquor and love were left. Bea Guerin, as they danced to Connie Francis, her drunken limpness dragging on his side so his leg and neck ached, her steamy breasts smearing his shirt, seemed to have asked why he didn’t want to fuck her. He wasn’t sure she had said it, it sounded like something in Dutch,
fokker, in de fuik lopen
, drifting to him from his parents
as they talked between themselves in the back room of the greenhouse. Little Piet, Amerikander, couldn’t understand. But he loved being there with them, in the overheated warmth, watching his father’s broad stained thumbs packing moss, his mother’s pallid needling fingers wrapping pots in foil and stabbing in the green price spindles. Once more with the eyes of a child Piet saw the spools of paper ribbon, the boxes holding colored grits and pebbles for the tiny potted tableaux of cactuses and violets and china houses and animal figurines with spots of reflection on their noses, the drawerful of stacked gift cards saying in raised silver
HANEMA
, his name, himself, restraining constellated in its letters all his fate,
me, a man, amen ah
. Beside the backroom office where Mama did up pots and Papa paid his bills were the icy dewy doors where cut roses and carnations being dyed and lovely iris and gladioli leaned, refrigerated, dead. Piet tensed and changed position and erased the greenhouse with the party.

The new couple. They looked precious to themselves, self-cherished, like gladioli. Cambridge transplants, tall and choice. Newcomers annoyed Piet. Soil here not that rich, crowding. Ted? Ken. Quick grin yet a sullen languor, a less than ironical interest in being right. Something in science, not mathematics like Ong or miniaturization like Saltz. Biochemistry. Papa had distrusted inorganic fertilizer, trucked chicken dung from poultry farms:
this is my own, my native land
. She was called oddly Foxy, a maiden name? Fairfox, Virginia? A southern flavor to her. Tall, oak and honey hair, a constant blush like windburn or fever. She seemed internally distressed and had spent two long intervals in the bathroom upstairs. Descending the second time she had revealed her stocking-tops to Piet, reclining acrobatically below. Tawny ashy rims in an upward bell of shadow. She had seen him peek
and stared him down. Such amber eyes. Eyes the brown of brushed fur backed by gold.

Bea. What did you say? I must be deaf
.