Cocktails, Caviar and Diapers

by Duke, Renee

  My God, I feel as though a disaster is coming.

  There’s Sean with Gina. He looks so handsome. Does Evans see how really wonderful he is? When he took him and put him in one boarding school after another, Sean looked and was a druggie.

  Does Anne remember when he told the truth about her to Evans and she slapped him and sent him back to me? How alive and alert he looks, his black hair so straight and shining. We have laughed for days about his trips to Vidal Sassoon, so that he could impress his father with the change in his character.

  Hair shows change in character? That’s another cartoon view of living, that long hair means you’re a hippy, yet we know it matters to Evans. That and clean shoes and clean fingernails. Even when we had no nanny, I had to watch that with him. I would shine six pairs of little shoes before going to bed, every night, even after a ball.

  This hair thing is getting me angry. I’m fed up with the charade. Why should my beautiful sons and their beautiful wives be subjected to such tyranny, even for a moment of thought? I can feel my cheeks burning, as I see that he does not know them for what they are.

  “Look Daddy, Gina bought me the same lighter as I bought you. I didn’t know until Christmas.” Sean bends over the coffee table gracefully, giving love and interest.

  Anne’s cheeks are flushed, she sees Gina, who looks tiny and impressive. No doubt she will try and tear her down after a few kind words. Yes, yes, she will. I giggle to myself and have a feeling that I’m flapping my wings.

  “Anne, tell us about your horses. Gina has ridden in steeplechases, you know. She’ll be so interested.” Not much she will. We were at the races last week, and her life as a jockey was amazing. Nothing that Anne can say will match her, but Anne will be on a safe topic and Sean and I can assess the danger in Evans going to the school.

  “Sean, I want to see the school, perhaps you could drive your mother’s car with Gina and your mother could drive us in the rented car? We’ll meet you there and then we can go to lunch.” It is strange, I cannot imagine us at lunch. We trade the names of some restaurants but nothing is set.

  With Sean and Gina to help me, he is sure to be favorable towards the school. We suddenly seem to be blowing like chaff out of the house, into the car.

  “No, Anne, you sit in the front with Andrée. I won’t hear of you in the back.”

  I remember once sitting in the back of their Rover and showing them Denmark as if they were my oldest friends. They still betrayed the family later.

  “Yes, Anne do sit here. Gracious! I haven’t driven a car as big as this in years.” What a struggle with this damn key, this car has a life of its own. I’d better drive slowly or I’ll never manage it. Evans is wincing. He drives like a bat out of hell, he’d do 150 kilometers an hour with the children in the Morgan and they’d nearly fly out of the car.

  The school looks so homely. We sway around the curve up the hill, tall poplar trees on one side, children running with their kites, some playing baseball in the long grass, some little children hanging upside down on the swings with their hair swinging in the wind like dandelion fluff.

  Now that we’re parked, he looks approving. There’s happiness here and every part of the school is bursting with life at recess time. Some children run up to say hello and I tousle the hair of a little girl I know. It feels springy and she smiles.

  For a moment we seem a bit lost here.

  “Charming,” says Anne, “what a lovely school.”

  “Yes, where is Duncan’s classroom, Andrée. I want to see his classroom.”

  Where is Duncan? The school looks shabby to me. Am I seeing it through his eyes or mine? I hope we can see this through quickly.

  Ah, there’s Matthew. How eager he looks to see his father. They know what he is like but forget each time, and he sees them each time and forgets they love him.

  “Matthew old man, how big you are!” Oh, he is, and bulging out of his britches too. I hope Evans doesn’t see that, he can’t stand sexual competition from the children. I’ll never forget when Jock had Evans’ mistress as his mistress too, but then that’s something else.

  I feel Evan’s brain boring through my mind as though he’s trying to find something here that he can use against me. Why?

  Gina is standing like a sentinel by the classroom. Ah, yes, she’s standing in front of the picture of the school founder. She knows Evans can’t stand him and has done as much as he can to discredit him among the circle of our friends. Clever.

  The cool classroom is bathed in a light diffused by the bushes all around it, the bright California sun creates the light and shade, and the children are gathered in an octagonal hut in a protective group. Shabby perhaps, the alphabet in cursive writing strung along the rafters.

  “Andrée, what is this?” he asks me, as if interrogating some criminal

  “What is what, Evans?”

  My heart is fluttering. What am I being cross examined for, the years of travail in this terrible relationship telescoping into one moment. Years of patriarchal questioning, of heavy handed justice on subjects I never knew married people had to give justice for–like burnt coffee and un–ironed shirts. And me, paying for his mistresses.

  What! I shout to myself and my entrails knot. I see his face turn to me, skin yellow and the eyes black and expressionless and the lines of his mouth pulled down at the corners and shoulders hunched. There are gods with me and no one–but no one–goes unpunished in the long run for doing this.

  How can I peel him off my life, detach from his money and like a giant rocket soar into much loved space and life, free from the leftovers of life that he deigns to grant me and Anne and all the girlfriends lined up over time.

  All of us are losers and, poor man, he is the loser too. He will not hurt my children. I will keep them from my feeling, for this is no feeling they should ever know. This man has kept his hand on my life since I was eighteen.

  Get off my life, you!

  My blood pounds in my ears but I show nothing. Watch the rage, then he’ll know he has me and I will have slipped into his game. There still is nothing but the cartoon here, my life and no doubt, his, goes on beneath the surface.

  “Look, you see here the children celebrate HIS birthday as if he were George Washington or Lincoln.”

  “He’s the school founder, why not?”

  He’s pushing past me roughly. I touch the door. Anne’s face is pink and concerned, For the moment she sees a sister’s distress, echoes the danger. Later she’ll use it to entrench herself.

  Gina moves with an athlete’s tautness to see if others have heard, to help me shepherd him out of the school with as little vibration as possible.

  The color seems leached out of the school, box lunches and cups seem to be all over. Where are the children? Thank heaven, none around to see this scene.

  Sean comes up the path, jingling my car keys.

  We run in formation behind Evans as he strides out of the school. Just like the days when we’d go for a walk in the woods and he would leave me and the little ones far behind as he strode on.

  “But Evans, this man’s views on study skills have been adopted by the leading schools in L.A. Please, this is ridiculous. Let’s talk about it. Duncan will miss seeing you.”

  He brushes me off like a gnat.

  What should I plead for, whom am I begging?

  I won’t be part of this anymore. To hell with him.

  Slow down guys, let him reach the car alone.

  “Here’s the key, Evans.”

  “You understand, Andrée, I don’t feel much like lunch now.” Whether simulated or not, his rage has carried him to a true break. Does he know what he’s done?

  Chapter 2: Growing Up

  Puerto Rico–1956

  “This is the strangest place for a sailing party. Isn’t it charming!”

  I say this to no one in particular, because it’s untrue. Someone tell me what is the charm of this foul port? There must be some or Evans would not have brought me. My s
andals are already covered with black, stinking mud. It seems incredible but those seem to be pigs, rutting in the mud by the pier!

  “Pauline, what are the pigs doing there?”

  She’s thirty-five, seems self-assured. She must know.

  “Where else would you put them? They seem quite comfortable.”

  So English.

  How alone I feel. My husband, these two friends, they all seem unreal and far away. Why do I only feel and see when I’m with the children? This day, this place, I’ll remember them always. People fade out from minute to minute. I can’t even believe I am married. I am a Mrs. Evans Smokestone. I am not what I was born, Andrée Magnus. Where is Andrée Magnus?

  This is real: the broiling hot car door that I touch, grey planks on the wall of the bodega across the dirt sidewalk. Dirt and dust. Sun. Banana trees. Merengue music coming from the juke box.

  Puerto Rico is real. Real is the smell of fried green plantains and beans simmering on the back of the stove. Moros y Cristianos–“Moors and Christians.” The Puerto Ricans here couldn’t know much about Spanish history, but the white rice is still the Christians and the black beans, the Moors.

  Children run barefoot and ragged in the hot sun. I can love them, I can know them.

  My sun hat scratches my shoulders.

  Oh, a sailboat!

  “There’s the sailboat, Pauline! Let’s go see.”

  I feel childish, curious. Why do they hang back?

  “Evans, can you take the picnic basket? I’ll take the towels and things.”

  Eric ambles over from the bodega holding a bottle of lemon drink.

  “Wait until you taste the Jamaica rum punch, Andrée. We invented the recipe when we were living there. It will change your life.”

  Dear Eric. For an older man he’s very attractive. Nice too, but there’s something about him like a tightly-coiled spring. He may recoil on me. No, nothing to do with him. Evans is enough to understand and keep out of my most private thoughts.

  The grey boards on the pier squeak like the ones on the old Yacht Club at home. If I close my eyes, I could be there on a summer’s day, with the water sloshing against the barrels underneath the dock. Wonder how it would have been with pigs?

  “Aren’t the pigs big and fat, Eric? Look at the children playing in the mud with them. Do you think they’ll catch any dread diseases?” How dumb I sound. I would like to be amusing. I know I have a flashing smile but I don’t like my kind of pretty.

  Eric makes me feel amusing, he admires me for something, I know. I just bore Evans with my chatter ... oh, I wish ... I wish ... what do I wish? Nothing to wish.

  There’s my hand. I can peer up to the sky through the chinks in my hat. My feet flop in my muddy sandals on the boards but I am unconnected to this time and place.

  Was I always this way? At college I felt quick, open to new thoughts. Since I’ve been married, I feel caught up in a nightmare world, where the things I think are right are not right, at least to my husband. He has become my life and the sands are always shifting.

  There’s no family, no close knit group of friends, no community of interests to back me up. I talk Spanish badly and the man who came to fix the air-conditioning stole all my family jewelry. My grandfather’s lace baptismal dress, from France, vanished from the trunk before the baby could be christened in it.

  The Puerto Rican ladies move slowly and wave fat hands with long fingernails in the air. I long to meet them. My only friend is a friend of a friend who is pure Spanish and lives in strange isolation in the hills.

  I feel lost. One moment I am all that Evans thinks is wonderful, brilliant and beautiful. The next moment I’m the lowest of the low. I’ m getting so nasty, so quick to defend myself from a danger I can’t define. How can it be that Evans, so handsome and erect, with black eyes piercing all pretense, could be unable to see me? Thoughts go fast and life seems too long. If I erase my sorrow, it all seems to erase. Better that nothing is real.

  What a silly fool I was when we first met. I remember then...

  Harvard University–late 1940’s

  “Ah, so you like Charles Trenet?”

  I look up from the old phonograph, surprised. I answer the first thing I think.

  “I’m trying to see if I understand the French words. I want to visit France, now that the war is over and see it for myself.”

  My, how handsome he is. Thick black hair and piercing eyes. I think I’ll forget about that blind date my friends want me to meet here. This one is much better. Besides, when they told me the blind’s dates name, Evans Smokestone, I thought, whoops! It would be just my luck to marry such a name.

  “I was in the war in Europe. I love Paris.”

  He speaks well and his hands are thin and nervous. He’s taller than me.

  “Really? Did you ever get to meet Charles Trenet?”

  I sound naive but I have dreamed that one day I would meet Charles Trenet and he would sing a song to me and I’d be wearing a red dress. I can’t say that.

  “Well, no, I haven’t met him but I’ve heard him and you’re right, he’s the voice of Paris.”

  He smiles down at me and sings a few words of Menilmontant.

  How glamorous he is. Different from Jack, singing T.S. Eliot’s verses to me on his guitar. What he must have seen and done in Europe. He doesn’t seem to have been wounded unless there’s a wooden leg. I can never tell with veterans. There’s always psychic trauma, of course.

  “Were you in the Battle of the Bulge?”

  Whoops, my small talk blundered into something, his face has become quite still and lifeless. His eyes are hard. I wonder what happened? I will never learn what to say to real veterans of the war. I’ll smile to show him I mean no harm.

  “Yes. I landed at Omaha Beach, in the Normandy invasion. Now let’s talk about French. Isn’t it a beautiful language?”

  I can answer that one. “I love it! Are the French women as pretty as I hear? “

  Whoops, once again, I’ve put my foot into it. Probably some great love. Strange how his face closes up.

  “Some are. They were very glad to see us. That makes women beautiful.”

  My, he must be sophisticated. Think I’ll get on to safer ground. I’m no conversationalist and the more he talks, the better for me. Will I ever be witty and interesting without working at it?

  “Have you known the guy who’s giving the party for long?”

  “Sure. We were both at Harvard before the war. We enlisted together when I turned seventeen.”

  “Seventeen? When did you come to college?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “So did I but I was nearly seventeen.”

  He must be bright. I don’t want him to think I’m too brainy. Susan says that men don’t like women with brains. I’d better change any opinion he has.

  “Actually I just got to Radcliffe on a fluke. The Dean’s Office wanted to see what would happen to a class of social girls. That’s me, a member of the butterfly class!”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Eighteen, I’ve got two more years here. Isn’t it fun to be in college? I love even the thought of being here. Sometimes I can’t believe it, that I’m here, at Harvard, where all the most brilliant men in America went.” Golly, I sound juvenile. I hear veterans don’t feel the same way, they’d rather be out earning their living. If I had a G.I. Bill, I’d never stop going to college. The teachers are so interesting, I want to study under all of them. Then, I love the old rose buildings, the ivy and the lilacs in the spring, the Charles River and the books and books. So exciting to learn. Not too brainy. “There are so many fun parties.” Smile.

  “I like it too,” he says. “It seems a long time ago that I first came to Harvard.”

  Ah, how romantic. I can see how deep he is by his long silences. He loves France. His profile is nice but he looks sort of thuggish from the front. His nose is crooked. There’s something about him that bruises me. No, it must be my imagination. Come on, I’v
e been looking for someone like him. A real man. I’m sick of all the callow youths. Well no–Barney’s not a callow youth but he’s always interested in my female friends at the wrong moment. It’s easy to talk to Barney. We laugh all the time, but life shouldn’t be a joke. That’s not right for a husband and it’s high time I should look for a husband. If I don’t, I’ll end up an old maid and sit in a library the rest of my life.

  “When did you first come to Harvard?”