Men and Angels (33 page)

The woman who was in charge of Anne and Ianthe dipped into a white enamel pot with a wooden spoon. She scooped out a spoonful of taffy-colored hot wax and slathered their legs with it.

“Now, Gilda, this is my very best friend in the world, so try not to be quite so savage. It’s her first time.”

“What you do before me—shave?” the woman asked Anne.

“Well, yes,” Anne said, feeling pitifully the inadequacy of her reply.

The woman merely grunted. She waited for the wax to harden, then pulled it off in long strips, looking dreamily into the middle distance. When she finished Anne’s legs, she grunted in the direction of the sunlamp area.

“Close your eyes now, relax, don’t make more wrinkles,” said the young woman who had let them in. She covered Anne’s face with steaming cloths, then dug at it with a small sharp instrument. When she had finished with these, she massaged Anne’s face with lotion, humming a slow unmusical tune that sounded like an incantation. “Heavenly, Irena,” Ianthe kept saying to the woman who was doing identical things to her. But Anne was too frightened to respond. She kept thinking of a movie with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Karloff comes to Lugosi, a plastic surgeon, and tells him he’s ugly, to give him a new face. Lugosi makes him hideous, then blackmails him into committing crimes to earn a proper operation.

“Darling, you look radiant,” said Ianthe, when they were in the changing room. “Now, don’t you feel ready for whatever it is you have in mind?”

“I don’t have anything in mind, Ianthe.”

“Listen, my love, I’m longing to know the details. But I know you’ll never be a chum and tell. My only advice is, don’t go all girlish and confess. It would destroy Michael.”

“Thanks a lot, Ianthe. That’s very helpful.”

“Well, to tell you the truth, Anne, the thought of your being unfaithful makes me sick. I’m sure you don’t know what you’re doing. You mustn’t do it. I’m quite serious. You have the only decent marriage in America. It’s worth a little self-control.”

“Ianthe, for five years, you’ve been carrying on about the unquenchable demands of the female libido, how you’re driven as no man on earth has been.”

“Yes, but that’s me, darling, that’s not
you
.”

“Anyway, nothing’s going to happen.”

“Mm, perhaps, but remember, you can’t touch pitch and not be defiled. Meanwhile, I must fly. I’m going to meet Leonard Armitage for a weekend at the Ritz in Boston.”

“What about Adrian?” Anne asked.

“Well, what about him, darling?” said Ianthe, fastening her bra.

She was reading to the children when Ed came and sat down among them on Peter’s bed, taking his shoes off, putting his arm around Sarah. The room smelled like all children’s rooms, a mixture of clay dust and wax, a neutral and unfleshly smell that always made Anne sad. They were meant to be grown out of, these small rooms, and Anne felt their generosity, like that of a wife about to be abandoned who makes up a packet of sandwiches for her husband’s mistress. Ed laughed as the children laughed at Mr. Toad and his car crashes.

Anne let her arm brush against his on the bedstead. She wished she could prolong this scene forever. It was like being in her father’s greenhouse, where the air was rich and warm and moist, where the loamy smell and the dampness came together in an atmosphere so purely, innocently sensual that no act could have a moral tone. It was so natural for her to be there with Ed, with the children. She kept being aware that in a minute they would have to get up, to separate the children, to put them in their separate beds, turn off the lights and walk away somewhere, somewhere cold and dry and solitary where everything would take on a new shape.

They walked downstairs into the kitchen. It came to Anne suddenly, as if she had stepped into the path of a wave and felt herself overturned, over and over in a foreign medium, that she and Ed must be lovers now. She would do it. It was the right thing to do, she was sure; she would invite him to her bed, she would tell him she loved him. It was true, she did love him, not in the way she thought she would her first adulterous lover, not desperately. Her love for him was not a burden or a threat. It blended into her life easily, she was immensely comfortable with him. She told him things; he told her things. They talked about the children. That was why she hadn’t until now recognized it as love. But it was love, and it was, overwhelmingly now, desire. Her limbs felt incompetent on their own; they needed to be with his. She wanted his body with her body. She wanted all that went with that, all the sweetness they had had, and all that wasn’t kind or comfortable or patient or benign, all that was hungry, driving, driven, strained.

Now she would do it. She’d never done anything like it before. When she met Michael she was twenty; they finally went to bed after a month’s discussion, after nights and nights of kisses and caresses and the furtive incomplete knowledge of each other’s body learned from hesitation that embossed the wrong things, they would find out later, with the stamp of genuine
frisson.
But she wasn’t twenty now, there was no possibility of discussion, no time for gradual buildup. He had to know right from the first that sex was what she wanted. How would she tell him? She couldn’t use words; words were for the brash or for the very young. She would simply have to take him in her arms.

She closed the kitchen door and leaned against it for a moment as if it were a springboard. She looked at Ed, trying to make her desire clear. She walked toward him slowly. She put her arms around his neck.

“Anne, are you all right,” he said, holding her as if he were afraid she would fall.

“Yes,” she said quietly, putting her head on his shoulder.

“Come here, sit down,” he said.

“I don’t want to sit down.”

“Are you feeling dizzy? Here, sit down. Now put your head between your knees.”

She put her head between her knees. Then she realized that that was exactly the wrong thing to be doing. She lifted her head. “Ed,” she said, “I’m not sick. I just want you to hold me.”

“Hold you? Like hold you up?”

“No, I want you to embrace me.”

Almost rudely he let go of her and walked to the other side of the room. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I want us to be lovers,” she said, looking at the floor.

He began to pace heavily in a circle. He kept clasping his hands, unclasping them; he took off his watch and put it in his pocket. “I just don’t believe you mean that. I just don’t think you know what you’re saying. You’re not that kind of person.”

She ought to give up: she knew it. But it was too late, they would have to have it out. She felt slightly sick, but some stubbornness pushed her forward.

“What kind of person do you mean?”

“Like all those women I work for. Married women with nice families. Trying to talk me into going to bed. I thought you were different.” He looked up at her with a childish look of pure disappointment, as if he had seen his favorite teacher drunk.

Nothing he could have said would have made her feel more humiliated. All those women in all those houses. All those undifferentiated women. She had joined the ranks of hungry women throwing their bodies at a man, their loose breasts flapping, their behinds white, fat, in the stage light. The predatory woman was always a comic figure. Venus and Adonis. Fellini’s whores. Now she was in that company.

“I thought you were fond of me,” she said weakly.

“Of course I’m fond of you. I love you like a sister. I thought we would be friends for life.”

She began to cry. That was the worst. They would never be able to see each other again.

“Anne, I don’t understand. You’re a married woman.”

“My husband has a lover in France,” she said, and realized with shame that to have her way, she’d turned doubt into fact.

“Okay, that’s bad, but two wrongs don’t make a right.”

She looked up at him. She still wanted him. “Why would it be bad, what we were doing? Who would we be hurting? They’d never have to know.”

“Anne, we’re married people. We made promises.”

“But my husband broke his promise. And your wife, well, she’s not a real wife to you anymore. She can’t be.”

“That’s not her fault. She tried. A terrible thing happened to her. She’s lost everything. I would never do something like this to her on top of it. I thought you understood.”

He turned his back to her and leaned on the counter. “If you’re going to be out of the house for the next few days I can finish the wiring by Friday.”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll stay away.”

He nodded his head and walked out the door. As the door closed she could hear Laura sweeping the dining room floor.

“What are you doing out there, Laura?” she said sharply.

“Sweeping the floor.”

“I know that. But why at this hour?”

“Because I rented a floor waxer for a day. And I’ve spent the day waxing all the wood floors in the house. This is the last one. The machine has got to be back at nine in the morning.”

“Surely you’re not going to do it tonight. It’s nearly ten o’clock. You can rent the machine for another day.”

“I want to do it now.”

Hate carried Anne up the steps. Suddenly she blamed Laura for everything. This thing she had allowed herself to feel for Ed was a result of the intolerable pressure of living with Laura. She had turned to Ed for solace and friendship, then misunderstood it as sexual desire. She had never done anything like that in her life before Laura was in it. And now Laura knew everything; she must have heard everything standing outside the door. She stopped herself. She couldn’t blame Laura. She despised that tendency in people, that abdication of responsibility in favor of some totemic theory of the power of proximity: “He was next to me, he pressed against me, I had to act.” It was her own responsibility; the shame was hers.

She hadn’t felt this kind of shame in her life before. Embarrassment, of course, guilt, mortification, but nothing like this realization that she had done a serious wrong that was damaging, and foolish to boot. There was the built-in debasement of a woman desiring a man who didn’t desire her. But what was worse, she had violated a friendship. It had been important to her to believe that men and women could be friends, could inhabit a pleasant well-lit room where sex was kept out, and she had betrayed that belief. She had also gone against all she believed of marriage. She had exposed her husband to a stranger’s censure, perhaps without grounds. She had denied what had been important to her: the idea of marriage. She’d said that if the circumstances are extenuating, then the vows don’t hold. And she had lost a good friend.

She didn’t have many good friends. There was no one she could call up at this moment, no one she could go to, because there was no one whose friendship she found substantial enough, rich enough to warrant the exposure of her husband’s possible offense, and of her own. She couldn’t go to Jane. Jane didn’t know Michael well enough. She couldn’t tell Barbara because Barbara had desired Ed Corcoran too. Ianthe had demonstrated that she was out of the question. And she couldn’t tell Ben or Adrian because they were men. The experience of having been turned down in a sexual offer aroused an ancient female
pudeur,
she didn’t want to reveal herself a sexual failure to men who she hoped still found her attractive.

She couldn’t tell anyone. She abode in marriage; it was the house she lived in, and outside it there was no one who ought to have access to its flaws. If it was cold and hard and comfortless, as it was now, that was simply the way things were, the condition of life on the estate.

She couldn’t read; she couldn’t lie in bed. She tried to take a bath, but the hot water made her restless. She kept walking around her room, picking up a hairbrush, a bottle of perfume. She longed for some ritual place where she could be cleansed. But she was who she was: a woman of the twentieth century, rational, responsible for herself, for her own acts and for her marriage, which she had just come from damaging. It didn’t matter that she was, technically, physically, chaste. She’d given up her chastity; she would never have it again.

Weeks before, Jane had agreed to come to Selby for a few days to help Anne with the parts of Caroline’s diaries she found illegible. But she didn’t want to see Jane now; she felt she wasn’t good enough to see her. Her encounter with Ed made her feel defiled; to be in contact with someone like Jane, whom she so admired, who might falsely admire her, seemed to her an offense against any ideal of fineness.

“You’re tired, you look tired to death,” Jane said, stepping out of the bus. She never waited to begin talking till she had stepped from one place to another: she talked over her shoulder on stairs, as elevator doors were opening; she would have felt quite comfortable, Anne thought, delivering speeches from moving trains.

“I’ve been working hard,” Anne said.

“Hard work doesn’t give you that look. Hard work is exhilarating. It’s some kind of strain. You don’t mind my saying so, I hope, but you look as if you’ve aged since I last saw you. At your time of life, of course, it’s nothing to be horrified by.”

“I haven’t been sleeping well. I guess that’s it.”

She didn’t want to talk to Jane about the incident with Ed. She couldn’t mention her problems with Laura because Jane already disliked her. Like a climber slowly making his way up an icy slope, what she wanted most, was determined to get, was equilibrium. She wanted to finish her work and to avoid having it out with Laura. It was March twenty-third. The catalogue notes were due on May thirtieth. And eight days before that, Michael would be home. If she was careful, quiet, if she didn’t make fast moves, everything would work. But she mustn’t speak to anyone about it: if the climber voiced his fear, the danger of the fall loomed large.

“If I were home I’d make you a
tisane, tine infusion.
Infusion. It always sounds so effective. So hydraulic. As if the best minds of the Industrial Revolution were behind it, so you’re bound to be all right. And yet it’s so wonderfully simple, not mechanical at all.”

“My sister makes her own herb teas.”