Superior Women (46 page)

With a cup of tea and then a small blue bowl of soup Lavinia wanders wherever Jethro is not, sometimes resting, or at least just sitting down for a while. Every now and then in a surprised way she observes that she is crying.

She is still in her long white robe (still stained, with some ugly blood at the back, she has noticed) and she knows she should change, before Henry comes. I will change into something beautiful and then take some pills, she thinks, but does neither.

Jethro leaves around six, as usual, and then the house is empty and perfectly quiet. So quiet, and it occurs to Lavinia that the phone has not rung all day. Picking it up she discovers that the line is dead, out here a not at all unusual occurrence. But sinister, just now.

Of course Henry will not come to her at all; he was simply “being nice,” when he said that he would. He was hoping to get her through a bad night, maybe thinking that she was drunk, and would be over it in the morning. Nice Henry.

However, with Henry not coming there seems no point in taking pills—nor does there, for that matter, seem to be much point in not taking pills. In “sticking around.”

In that suspended mood Lavinia decides, at least, to bathe (maybe take pills in her tub? not tonight, but maybe later on? She had not quite thought of that before. However, it is probably not a good idea, after all. The water might wake her up, or else make her all swollen, a bloated corpse. Very Grade B). She throws a lot of flower-scented foamy lotion into the tub, hoping to make her bath last an hour or so, thus to take up—to kill off an hour.

This old house, which was built a couple of hundred years ago, between the Revolution and the Civil War, like an elderly person seems to creak the more, with its increasing age. And its sounds are unreliable; generally they signify nothing. Lavinia, in her cooling bathwater, tells herself these things as she hears what could be
(but undoubtedly is not) the distant opening, the closing of the front door of her house.

She turns on more hot water. Lying back, just for a minute or two she runs her hands along her body, so beautifully smooth, so lightly, lightly oiled.

But unless she is crazy, delusional, which most surely is highly possible, there are footsteps on the stairs.

She is slightly groggy from so much immersion in warmth and steam, and what she thinks is, Well, good. Someone has broken in, to murder and rob me. I won’t have to take pills. I wonder, will he rape me first? Don’t they usually? (And if he does, will I come? Does anyone, being raped?)

Strangest of all, the intruder—and there really is someone, she can hear him—the intruder knows her name. She can hear herself being called, “Lavinia, Lavinia where in hell are you?”

She recognizes that Henry Stuyvesant has arrived, at last, and probably does not mean to murder her, or to rape. She sighs, before answering, “I’m in here.”

Watching the gold doorknob as it turns, a motion that seems infinitely slow, she has time to think: Could some murderer have learned to impersonate Henry’s voice?

But it is Henry, though, who comes in to her, the old tall giraffe, with his thick glasses and old tweed coat, his receding, graying curly hair. At the sight of him, uncontrollably and quite incomprehensibly Lavinia bursts into tears. Sitting up in the tub, in all those stupid bubbles, one arm covers her breasts (though small, they have fallen a little, in all those years); with the other hand she tries to shield her eyes—getting soap in, making everything worse.

Henry quickly sits down on the heavy white rug, beside the tub (or squats: his knees creak, like her house, as he does so). He reaches toward Lavinia, touching her back. She feels scratchiness, then smells wet tweed.

He is saying, “Jesus, I must have scared you, Lavy, I’m really sorry. My goddamn carburetor, damned old car—damn Detroit! I tried all day to call you.”

Through sobs, she manages to say, “It’s not that, I wasn’t afraid. Oh Henry, that’s what’s so frightful, I wanted someone to come in and kill me. So I won’t have to kill myself. Oh Christ, if you knew how I hate my life.”

“Come on, now.”

“Oh, it’s
true,
I hate everything. Potter, and Amy, and everyone I know, and
me.
Christ, how I hate being me.”

“Lavinia, come on. Get up out of that cold water. Right now. Later we can talk all night, if you want to.”

She has stopped crying; she is looking at Henry, his thick fogged glasses, big nose, wide mouth.

He says, “Come on, I mean it. Shall I help you out?”

“No, you go on into the sitting room.” But then she begins to cry again—crying, shivering, everything out of control, nothing as intended, as meant. She is an ugly white old woman, all gooseflesh, crying, crying, and every single minute getting older, uglier. It no longer matters at all if Henry sees her fallen breasts.

Making what seems the most enormous effort of her life, Lavinia stands up in the tub; she reaches past Henry for a towel—but of course he can already see everything, even (probably) the two white hairs that hurt too much to pull—except that his glasses are still so fogged, he might not see.

Henry wraps the towel around her, and rubs.

It is like an embrace but it is not one, not really, except that Lavinia suddenly longs to be
kissed
—to be healed, to be blessed. She looks up at Henry, who now has taken off his glasses, in so much steam; she sees his eyes, so dark, so thickly lashed, so beautiful. In what she believes to be her old familiar voice (in control), Lavinia says, “Henry, I can’t tell you how sorry I am, I’ve been acting so crazy.”

Henry says, “The truth is, you’ve never been more beautiful.”

Even as Henry is making love to her, in the broad soft bed that for so long was theirs (the Porthault sheets are new, however, or relatively new; they were presents from Harvey)—even then, as Henry kisses her lightly, perfectly, a far part of Lavinia’s mind
continues to think: How strange, what I meant all along to happen is happening, but somehow not as I meant it to.

And she thinks, He must do this to Megan too, but I don’t care; she is awful, and I am very beautiful, lovely, everywhere.

“I guess I’ve just been, well, extremely depressed,” Lavinia tells Henry, the next morning, over a rather scanty breakfast (hardly anything but cold cereal and instant coffee in the house, no eggs or milk). Lavinia laughs, at the same time giving him her old serious concentrated look. “I’m not aging well,” she says. “But today, I must say, everything seems gone. All the horrible things, I mean.”

“I should have been a doctor.” Henry smiles, then frowns. “But there are some things you could do, you know. About being depressed, I mean.”

“Oh, I know. A shrink, or some encounter group. A face lift, a vigorous exercise class. If you knew how I hate exercise.”

“Honestly, I wasn’t thinking of any of those.”

“Not even a shrink? Oh, I’ll bet you were. But I know, you’d want me to get ‘involved,’ to join in some left-wing groupie thing.” Lavinia can see that she is successfully annoying him (but
why
?).

Henry only says, “No, I don’t want you to join anything,” but he sounds cross.

“It’s odd how much Amy is like you,” Lavinia comments, as though she had never said this before. “Not in looks, of course, but her ideas—pure
you.
”

“Lavinia, for God’s sake, we’ve been through all this. She simply is not—she is not my child. Just because you’ve decided not to like her.”

Lavinia laughs, her old light self-admiring laugh. “Not like my own daughter? Don’t be silly, of course I love Amy. I just didn’t like her living in that Berkeley commune, or whatever it is. With those Hari Krishnas, or whoever. Or being so fat,” she adds, with feeling.

“Well, you must admit that Potter’s quite a lot fatter than I am.”

“Oh Henry, why do we always quarrel? Do you know? Do you and Megan fight?”

Henry frowns, severely. “No.”

That is all the mention of Megan between Lavinia and Henry, that day. When Henry leaves, as he quite soon does, Lavinia does not say (although it crosses her mind that she might do so), Give my love to Megan.

But Megan stays in Lavinia’s mind all that day—curiously, almost more than Henry does. She wants very much to talk to Megan, but even with her excellent mind working hard at this problem (perhaps too hard?), it takes her quite a while to work out what she will say.

“Megan darling, I know it’s late, but I’ve had such a day.”

It is about four thirty, but Megan so far has sounded surprisingly relaxed, not so cross and rushed as she often does, these days. She merely asks, “Where are you, Lavinia? You sound so far away.”

“Oh, just down in Fredericksburg. You know, resting up. Doing things around the house.”

“Oh.” Megan does not sound especially interested in Lavinia’s house, but then she never has.

“Well, it’s about Amy. I’ve been meaning to call you. I know how busy you are, but Amy has this friend, her boyfriend, I guess—they’re all so strange about sex, these days. Anyway, Amy insists that he writes absolutely terrific poetry. And she knows that I know you. And so I said I’d ask.”

Startlingly (and rather irritatingly) Megan laughs. “This seems to be children-of-friends day,” she explains, and laughs again. “I just had a really nice long lunch with Aron Marr. You know, Janet and Adam’s boy.”

“Oh, really? I’d heard he was, uh, queer.”

“Well, I guess he is homosexual, yes.” Megan’s voice has stiffened. “But I think he’s written a very good novel. So ironic in a way that he should.” (Lavinia has sensed that Megan is not thinking about
her
—is more or less talking to herself.) “I wonder how Adam would have reacted to his son’s being a good writer.”

Who in hell
cares,
Lavinia does not say. But it is annoying for Megan to go on, as she now does, about this silly little Jewish fag, when she, Lavinia, called to talk about her daughter and her daughter’s talented friend. Also, every time Megan has ever mentioned that awful Adam Marr, since his very sordid death, she has sounded almost mournful.

In a heedless (or perhaps deeply thought-out) way, Lavinia next says, “I meant to ask Henry about all this with Amy, but then just as he was leaving I forgot.”

“Leaving?”

“Yes, this morning.”

A pause—has Megan hung up? But there was no click. And then Megan says, very clearly, “I assume that this call was really to tell me that Henry has just been to see you in Fredericksburg?” Unused to direct accusations, Lavinia improvises. “Oh now, Megan baby, don’t be so ‘uptight,’ as the kids say. I assumed you two had some really civilized arrangement, after all this time.” She suddenly recognizes that she has not felt so well in years; in fact, it could be all of thirty years ago, when she used to have such a good time teasing Megan, so easy to bring her close to tears.

Not crying now, her voice a little sharp, Megan only asks, “Lavinia, do you have any idea at all how totally out of style you are?”

Lavinia is working up to a light, careless laugh, which she will follow by saying, Well, somehow I never thought you’d be quite the person to give out instructions on style.

But it is too late; there is the click, and Megan is gone (for good, as things turn out; that conversation is to be their last).

And Lavinia is left to laugh all alone at the utter hilariousness of a reprimand to
her,
from Megan Greene, on the subject of style.

•     •     •

Lavinia does not come down to Fredericksburg again until the following March, and then, once more, her visit is for a recovery, of sorts. This time she has even brought a nurse, an Englishwoman, Miss Riggs, whom Lavinia calls Riggsy—striving for a somewhat warmer, cozier tone, or perhaps to make her sound even more English.

She has been through a lot though, Lavinia has; her poor face is still all swollen and black and blue and yellow, the most horrible bruises, but all that will disappear, her doctor has promised, along with the tiny scars behind her ears. She looks perfectly ghastly, so fortunate that no one but Riggsy is there to see her. However, even Riggsy has a disapproving look, Lavinia has noticed. Odd, in a nurse, who must have seen almost everything; and she wonders, is Riggsy just possibly “gay?”

Her face does not hurt, however, as awful as it looks; it just feels uncomfortably tight. But her breasts do hurt, the most frightful pains there, constantly. For which Riggsy will not give her quite enough drugs; it is really sadistic, Lavinia decides; nurses clearly become immune to pain, they do not care.

Riggsy is large and plain and absolutely shapeless, “my English pudding,” as Lavinia has described her on the phone to a New York friend (she hopes, out of the hearing of Riggsy). Lying back, in such pain! among all her lace and linen, in her bright room full of roses, spring flowers, Lavinia in an idle way wonders just who it is that Riggsy reminds her so much of, and then, of course: it comes to her that Riggsy is Peg all over, a big square unattractive woman whose laugh is too loud, who is (probably) a lesbian.

And who (probably) does not approve of beautiful rich women. Nor of plastic surgery.

The following June, Lavinia and Potter decide to have their thirtieth wedding anniversary party down in Fredericksburg—quixotic, in the view of many of their friends; they have almost never been known to spend any time down there together. However, Lavinia just laughs, and she exaggerates the trace of a Southern accent that is always somewhere in her voice, as she tells
her friends, “It’ll do you Yankees good to get a touch of Virginia air in June. You just wait till you smell some real home-grown gardenias, and lilacs.”

And (so typical of Lavinia, everyone feels) it all works out to perfection, a great deal of the perfection having to do with Lavinia’s incredible efforts, her engineering skills. Guests are happily distributed between the Hay-Adams, in Washington, and the Princess Anne, in Fredericksburg. Lavinia has let it be known that she is just not having any house guests; thus no one’s feelings are hurt, no friends are perceived as being more intimate than other friends.

And all of Lavinia’s efforts are rewarded with a perfect June day. Soft, clear, and blue, and everything is in bloom, the lavender wisteria drooping heavily, sensually, everywhere; the roses, azaleas, honeysuckle. And Lavinia’s terrace is literally a bower of potted flowers, all at their most hothouse perfect pitch of loveliness.