The Whiteness of Bones (24 page)

“She sounds smart to me,” Toni said calmly.

Jean asked, “Will you have coffee?”

“I’ve been thinking about it all day,” Claire went on. “
Is
there a way to do it so the ties won’t be ruined? A slip-knot? What
is
an Hermès tie, anyway? Perhaps this relationship could have been saved.”

“I’ll have coffee, please,” Mamie said to Jean.

“Maybe this would be a perfect use for Velcro,” Claire said thoughtfully, as if she were considering rushing down to the Patent Office in the morning.

She looked up and finally saw that Mamie was embarrassed. To be fair to Claire, it was almost never true that she set out to offend or shock. She was spontaneous and these things interested her. Even the night when she’d asked the Ambassador if his wife cupped his balls when he came, she had spoken in temper, not from a desire to titillate.

“People say the most extraordinary things to me,” she said, trying to make it up to Mamie. “If you’re a girl, they think you can’t be too smart, so they tell you anything. Even other girls. They think you won’t remember.”

Mamie looked at Toni. She was holding Pépé in her lap and she was smiling. Mamie was relieved.

“You know,” Toni said, “I told Jean that you are always in museums, Mamie, and that she should go with you sometime. She has only just recently started to visit them again.”

Jean put down her fork. “I had to stop going because I had this strange idea that the museum guards knew something about the paintings. They stood there day after day, year after year, looking at them, and I just knew that they would have, well, certain thoughts about them.” She stopped. She was blushing.

“She made the mistake of asking one or two of them about certain paintings,” Toni said. She looked at Jean fondly.

“They thought I was crazy, of course. They didn’t even know what paintings I was talking about.”

Mamie laughed.

After Claire finished the pie, the sisters offered to carry in the dishes, but their help was refused. Toni lit another Camel and said that she had to take out the dogs. She would walk Mamie and Claire to the corner. They thanked Jean and shook hands in the kitchen, Jean wiping her wet hand on an apron.

Toni took them down the narrow staircase and out into the warm, quiet night. The courtyard was very dark and the weedy ailanthus hid the gray sky and the reflected glare of the huge, lighted city.

They walked slowly up Grove Street, stopping at each mottled sycamore tree for the dogs. The tree bark reminded Mamie of the white patches on Mr. de Beaupré’s legs.

“I wanted to tell you something,” Toni said to Mamie as they waited for Pépé. “You needn’t do anything you don’t want to.”

Mamie looked at her. She couldn’t see her expression in the shadow of the trees.

“Don’t be afraid to be difficult. If something doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. Your instinct will always be better than theirs. The difficult ones are always the most interesting, anyway.”

Pépé was entangled in the leash and his old, spindly legs were bound together. Mamie bent down to free him. When she stood up, Toni reached out and held Mamie’s chin gently in her hand.

Mamie smiled at her. “Were you one of the difficult ones?”

“Not difficult enough,” Toni said quietly and took her hand away.

In the subway on the way home, Mamie was grateful that Claire was quiet. She said nothing about the two women and
their domestic arrangement. Perhaps she was too full from dinner, and still a little tired from her night with Brooke and Sean. She said only that Jean was a wonderful cook, and that she liked the little house. She said, too, that she thought Toni should have the old dog put to sleep immediately, he was so decrepit, but Mamie didn’t answer her and they sat in comfortable silence until Seventy-second Street.

The phone was ringing as they came into the apartment. It was Alder. He had been trying to reach Mamie for hours.

“How is the horse?” she asked.

“I’m afraid she died.”

Mamie knew that he wasn’t being funny. Danny Harrington at the ranch in Hanalei had a cutting horse that had foundered.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“She ate too much.”

“Just like Claire. She ate too much tonight.”

“Shut up, Mamie,” Claire said from the sofa.

He laughed. “She’s not dead, though.”

“Not yet,” Mamie said.

Alder and Mamie went to the movies. She sat in the dark next to him, so conscious of his body there beside her that she had to keep herself from brushing against him too many times as if by accident. She had a hollow, airy feeling in her stomach, a little like stage fright. She had not eaten very much since the night she stayed at his grandmother’s house. He saw that she was staring at him, so he turned from time to time and leaned forward to look at her in the dark to reassure her.

They walked after the movie. There was a light rainfall and it felt sharp and fresh on Mamie’s warm face. There was the smell of black tar from the steaming streets. Alder was not
hungry, either, and they decided to keep walking, east along the edge of the Park.

It never occurred to Mamie in the movie theater or at any time after, that Alder Stoddard might be experiencing any of the tortures of love that she herself was undergoing. Even when he yawned, and said apologetically that he had not been sleeping well, she did not suspect, even for an instant, that it might have anything to do with her. Mamie was simply following her heart.

Alder, who, as Alysse had said, had known many women, was caught by surprise by Mamie. He was fascinated by her individuality, and without pitying her, he saw clearly that she was troubled by her inability to set things right. He saw that she could not do it, and, worst of all, that she could not get used to it. Alder believed that you were given your life on the understanding that to the very end, you tried to set it all right, so he understood Mamie’s struggle, even if she did not understand it herself. He recognized in her the anxiety and guilt of someone who fears that something has been left undone. He was able to recognize her distress because he, too, had the sense that he had forgotten something very important. The difference between them, as well as age and sex, was that Alder took the distress as something good.

“I liked the movie,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Do you think we like the same things?”

He looked at her. “You mean a shared passion for Jacobean furniture and
The Duchess of Malfi
?”

“Is that how you pronounce it? I don’t personally admire Jacobean furniture, so perhaps I am all wrong.”

They walked to the crooning of the traffic. The car tires in the wet street made a stream of hissing sound and Mamie could
smell the horse dung lying at the curb where the horse-drawn carriages waited for customers.

“Alysse has been trying to reach me,” he said.

“She doesn’t like that I see you. I had to drop off a ball gown from Mr. Felix and she wouldn’t allow me in the library. Once a week, she and Mrs. Washburn have a French lesson and tea with an assistant professor from Columbia and they aren’t allowed to speak English the entire two hours. I knocked on the library door and she yelled,
‘Attention! Attention!’
 ”

Alder laughed. “Are you coming home with me?” he asked.

They went again to the guest room on the third floor and she saw that someone, perhaps Alder, had made the beds with fresh linen and put piqué blanket covers on them, and pillows, and had taken the dust-sheet from the Louis XV chaise longue in the corner. The window to the garden was open and there was the smell of old, wet leaves. It was a feminine, formal room, with little grisaille panels between the
boiserie
. How funny, Mamie thought when she saw it, I liked it better the other way.

“Mr. de Beaupré was worried that you were cold the other morning.”

“Did he do this?”

Alder nodded. He turned out a silver lamp on a desk, but left a small lamp glowing on a table in the corner, like a child’s night light.

She sat on one of the beds and looked at the light.

“Do you want me to turn it out?”

She shook her head.

Just his simple, strong gesture of loosening his tie and unbuttoning his cuffs was enough to excite her. She turned away from him, surprised by the pleasure she already felt. She was fascinated by his masculinity. It aroused her, but it also moved her and made her feel protective toward him. She watched him. She was hypnotized by his maleness, not only in a phallic sense but in the more superficial ways that he differed from her; the very tie and shirt even, the brown hair on his arms, his brusqueness of movement and speech, his fastidious coordination. He did not bother to fold his tie, nor did he drop it to the floor in seduction, but tossed it deftly across the room to the chaise. He is different from me, she thought. He is without affect, without self-awareness.

He sat on the bed beside her. He watched quietly as she undressed, standing between the two beds, his knees touching her as she reached down to lift the hem of her silk slip to pull it over her head. She stood between him and the light, so he saw her body only in its dark, slender outline. He put his hands around her waist and drew her close to him, between his legs. He kissed her hips slowly.

“I am sore from the other night,” she said quietly. “It’s been a long time since I’ve made love.” She wanted him to know this in case she had disappointed him.

“Has it?”

“Yes.”

“A few months?” He held her hands behind her back and traced a stream down her neck, between her breasts, across her ribs.

“Day. A few days.”

“There goes the erection,” he said and fell back on the bed, pulling her down on top of him.

She said, laughing, “It’s a lie, it’s a lie.”

He suddenly turned her so that she was kneeling on the bed before him, her hands grasping the pillow, and he was on his knees behind her, holding on to her hair. He encircled her waist with one arm and pulled her hips back to him in a movement so quick that it seemed as if she took him in, rather than his entering her. He did not let go of her hair, or her waist, and it seemed to him that, even had he wanted to, he could not have separated himself from her, so neatly and tightly were they bound together.

It was painful for her at first, the arch of her back, his bending over her and pushing into her again and again. She could hear him, but she could not see him. She was dizzy. If she looked between her own legs, she could see his legs pressing against her legs, entrapping them and holding them and she could see his testicles, and the base of his penis as it moved in and out of her. With each thrust into her, he pulled her hips back onto him, and her damp skin made his hands wet.

She shoved the pillow off the bed and reached behind with her hand to touch him.

He took her hand and pushed it under her so that she was able to hold him.

“Like the Ambassador,” she said.

She heard him laugh, out of breath. His arm, the one she had stared at with such desire, with its wristwatch and brown hair and pink shirtsleeve, bare now, and the brown hair flattened with perspiration, reached around her. He put his fingers inside of her.

“Protect me,” he said.

Exhausted and blinded by pleasure, she gave herself to him and did everything that he wanted her to do, not thinking, without shame or even consciousness, and she protected him.

Alder returned with two cold bottles of beer.

Mamie leaned against the bedframe like a pin-up girl, arms folded boldly and luxuriously behind her head, and said, “I liked it better before.”

“Oh, great.” He handed her a beer and took off his trousers and lay down on the other bed.

“The room. I mean the room.”

“You’re lucky Mr. de Beaupré didn’t climb in with you. He was confused and thought you were my grandmother thirty years ago.”

“Perhaps they used to come to this room.”

They lay there on top of their separate beds, not looking at each other, but exhilarated and intimate. At that moment, it would have been impossible for either of them to imagine ever leaving the room.

He stood to open the window and as he stepped over the clothes that had been left on the floor between the beds, he put his hand on her vagina and said, “You’re very prettily made, Mamie.”

“Do you think so?” she asked in quiet surprise. “My friend, Lily, and I used to have what she called Cooze Seminars. Her theory was that, in the end, the world wins. You start out thinking that your vagina is all right, harmless even, and then something happens when you’re about thirteen, actually happens, and it all changes. It’s as if it’s turned inside out and suddenly it seems ugly and shameful and not at all harmless.”

He started to speak, but she interrupted him. “I’ve read all the theories about concavity and
vagina dentata
and the darkness. I have even considered it from the point of view of aesthetics. Lily and I used to study sex magazines. Obviously,
someone
thinks they’re attractive, but isn’t it interesting that women themselves don’t like their own vaginas? That is what Lily means: the world wins. Something happens along the way and we become ashamed.”