On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  Oddly light, it felt, not to rebel against the great obvious.

  “Hey. You all right?”

  He’s so kind as to ask. As if the state of her mind is a worthy state. A fact. Not a worry.

  “Kevin?”

  “Yes?”

  She smiles at this man whose pose, tightening him to the moment like a drumskin, is that he’s in this for sex alone. “I can watch the double spectacle of myself. I can. I can. And not feel ashamed.”

  “Good girl. But let’s have a bottle with it.”

  Motioning her to wait, he walks off toward the long bar.

  From the spot he’s left her in, a blank, unshrubbed bit of service-yard where the earth is worn bald, she can see printed in black cut-out and lamp-glow, her own house. Creep through the hedge and gaze up. Three. Yes the children are home. They’re guarding it.

  In the corner room at the back, Royal’s nightlight is on. He got used to it in the hospital long ago. Sometimes he can be heard conversing with himself as doctors do to patients, in that quasi-medical dark.

  Next to his room, on the farther side of the house, Maureen’s room can’t be seen, dear girl, but she’ll be there.

  Charles’ room, between his and Chess’s, can’t be seen either, but there’s a light in the library downstairs. Reading there late sometimes as she goes up the stairs alongside to bed, he doesn’t lift his head but buries deeper in his lone carrel, the only adult left in the house.

  And Chess—now we come to Chess. We have to. Her room at the north front corner, facing here, is dark. Maybe she’s making cocoa for them all in the kitchen. Too bad the children’s party interrupted the lipsticked gaiety she’s been bringing from town. But even if I hadn’t come over her, Chess would have had to go to the party, or not go to it.

  The familiar dread and anger comes over her, a tocsin sounding between past and future, warning her that she can’t control events for this child; that this child will have a life whose events must be controlled. Maybe Chess is already asleep in that drugged way she sometimes has, right after dinner, going up the stairs, somnambulist—I did that once; didn’t I do that once?—adolescence is the time of heavy sleep. Though did I ever alternate like Chess? Those times when she stays up all through the night, immobile, even immune to cold, as if warmed by a burning fright. When only Charles, gently exasperated, clumsily kidding, tonically sane, can bring her down, out of it. While I wait, wracked, outside the door—oh I hope we’re not back to that.

  There. The kitchen light, barely to be seen from here. Creep nearer, almost halfway. There, dimly—thank God.

  The front door that faces the river is opened. Charles, calling to Maureen. Maureen, coming up the front steps—“I’ve got him.” She means poor Gabriel, the cat. So the Kellihys can hear us too from over here; somehow we’ve never thought of it. “Come in, will you? We’re having cocoa.” She hears the door close. There. Royal always takes his cup upstairs. All safe at home; she can trust Charles. She’s shaken with love for him. And I’ve got them all placed right… Funny, how she still uses her fingers to count them, as if in her heart she’s given birth to a horde.

  Then, in that upstairs room, the north corner one with the bay—a light’s snapped on. That room is the prow of the house. At first, nobody’s there. That wallpaper pattern’s clear, if you know it. Behind the scrawlings. A figure comes to the window then, and sits. Long-necked—a girl’s. With a blot-head. It will sit for hours yet. The people over there have long since given up asking it to come to bed. It is the figurehead of the house. Ask the waves of the river to ask what it is looking at. No one else dares.

  All are at home. If not safe.

  When Kevin comes back, laughing and burbling of his encounter with the barman, and toting two bottles, she’s crept back through the hedge. Humbled.

  “Here. A split of champagne for you—darling little bottle.” He presses it. The cork soars. He has her glass ready. “And Jack Daniels for me.” He drinks. “Let’s find a niche.”

  “Let’s swim first.” It looms like a cure.

  “These baroque delays. Ah women. I warn you.” He swigs.

  “My pearls are baroque. You taught me not to wear them, remember?”

  He doesn’t of course. While in her fidelity, as if in a gel, every move he made on her flesh is preserved. Even his talk has been an oratory, faithfully echoing, often visited. Staring at the real man, she rebuilds his robot; reinvests it with his sounds, but her sensations. Finding his familiar mystery still strong. That butch face, frail only at the eyes. The well-cut, word-kissing mouth. Thoughtfully she adds a bit of ruddy to those maritally pale lips. Men are what you make them. Or hers are.

  Then she’s in his arms, has his tongue, each of them with their bottle dangling from a hand.

  As they start up the hill to the poll she stashes her glass in a thick bush, but he catches her at it. “All the more for me.”

  “I like leaving it there. For someone to see, maybe weeks after. And say ‘Must’ve been a party here.’”

  “As if they wouldn’t know. For years yet. A legend.”

  “No—for time itself, I mean. All the while spinning on—don’t you secretly applaud?”

  “God no.” He drains the glass and tosses it over his shoulder. “Had my way, it would leave me where I am. Or better still—where I was.” He reaches for her. And for her bottle.

  “Ah, Kevin.” In the dark she feels for the pock over his eye, smoothes it. “Time’s the one thrill the chemicals can’t destroy, can’t duplicate—I saw that on a Nova show. It’s why we’ll never evolve a mouse in a test-tube.”

  “Or a woman. So let’s make hay instead.” He doesn’t move. The bottles held in his one hand clink cool against her thigh.

  She moves her mouth back and forth across his throat, where the words are. Why must she sound like a freshman pedant when she’s most serious—is it that she has to express the basic, which is all she knows, while he has whole backgrounds of expressed argument? And why must she pick these times for it?

  She kisses deeper, grazing her teeth on his chest. It’s because I’ve never really been in the drawingroom of ideas. Of black-tie discussion. I’ve no status there. I still have to fight for the power to ideate. At any time. At just this time.

  “I’m gauche,” she says. At once, she feels its strength.

  His forefinger traces her lips in a circle, round and round. “You people. You—people.” He grasps her chin, turning it in his vise. “I don’t mind being with a woman for life. It’s when she starts connecting me to it. You people pick up a matchfolder on a curb in Kansas City, you have to find out who dropped it, from maybe Paris, France.”

  In the dark, her face is burning. Toward nightfall a woman’s thoughts ought tend only toward the dangling slipper, the midnight roweling. “Travel.”

  “Tidying up. Tidying up.”

  “Okay. So where did you come from? You never say.”

  “See?” He tilts her leftover bottle, draining it. “I just—flew in. And the whore at the Encyclopedia Motel said ‘You look a lot like your brother.’”

  “I meant, where you born?”

  “I know what you meant … I was brought up in Riverdale. But my folks came from the South Bronx. From when people still hung their heads out to dry—in church. Until Freud came along and hung up their underpants alongside. Tidying up.”

  How Irish he is, yes—every prickle shows. And we who have so many prickles of our own—we’re won by that in him. We people.

  “Freud wasn’t a woman.”

  “All Jews are women. Being in the true church.” He flashes his teeth at her, breathing close. The sexual underlies everything he says. Or he pretends it does. It’s his whisky, more than the whisky itself.

  “You should meet a friend of mine, named Plaut.” She grits her teeth. “Between you and him—I’m defined.”

  From the top of the hill, an exultant shouting. A white glare blanks them. The bushes jump. He pulls her up the crest, into t
he shaft of light.

  Black-on-black, under huge accessory lights which the caterer’s men and a few vainglorious guests are holding chest-high like halberds, the swimming pool, bobbing with pale-gold oval faces legioned among lilies, looks like a Japanese Satsuma plate. No one’s even splashing. A solitary, up on the high slide. Under the surface are they all hand-in-hand? The string trio’s stopped.

  “Yah—all these people want to disconnect,” Kevin said. “But look at them.”

  And the lights go out again. By design?

  “That friend of yours—.” He tongues her ear. “You sleep with him?”

  “His wife’s having a baby.”

  Kevin let out a sign. “All the more.”

  “You’re just pretending. That nothing counts.”

  Another sign. “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you’re afraid of getting rooked.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Why then?”

  “Maybe I haven’t the price for it. For whatever I used to think I should have.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Shut up, will you. Let’s swim.”

  And now she wants him. He excites her. Because he’s admitted that he wants more than her, more than this. They may even be paired off together because of it. She could drop her dress right here, but she’ll use the cabana for luxury’s sake: she’s never been in one.

  At the cabana door, Arthur’s gone. He’ll be watching the baby, tender homosexual father, grandfather now. He’s always very courteous to her too, in a particular way. Not to her herself, or to Mrs. Doctor. Certainly not to Mrs. White Next-door. And least of all to what the men are after. For which Arthur will perhaps find a boy. No, there are certain gays—there was an orderly in the maternity ward once, with whom she had long nocturnal talks—who make her feel deeply and peculiarly a woman. They bow—curtsying almost—to her woman-parts. Nothing personal. Tribe to tribe.

  Inside the darkish tent she delays, stretching the dress slowly over her head, hunting a towel. One wall is all shelves of suits and towels, in a corner there’s a chemical commode. She makes use of it, luxuriously. The striped-duck walls smell rented, flirty patio-stuff, a party accommodation migrating from poolside to poolside to shelter tanned daytime-torsos, or palely fumbling evening bodies, whose hopes stripe up as they enter here. It doesn’t smell of the sea, like those wooden, salty bath-houses of her public-beach childhood did—privies where one couldn’t pee, but elemental still with kindly whiffs of fundament washed clean or about to be, toenails out of hiding, socks crumpled, and the sea riffing outside, lackadaisical.

  Absently she’s taken off her bikini and trunks.

  Someone’s here. Someone’s followed her in, squelch squelch. Belatedly her ears record it. Across the cabana, breathing hard. Hoppe. Walks toward her. Stands gleaming. Her eyes are adjusting to the dark. Hoppe is naked too. Erected. Head hanging as he breathes in the rented dark.

  Not humbly. His organ speaks for him.

  A silent pleader he is, shorter than she. Hand on his penis, knuckled in ivory. Her nipple fills his mouth. Between the wens.

  She rushes from the tent. Feeling at her pulled breast. Kevin’s waiting, just outside. She presses the scraped nipple against his bare chest. Some nakednesses you’re naked with. Others make you naked against. Behind them, a word is said at them. At her. The sandals recede. Squelch.

  “Who’s your friend?” Kevin’s eyes, bent to hers, are clear. They clear with drink. There’s not a dirty word in them.

  “He’s a—specialist in Anglo-Saxon.”

  “’t’s what I thought.”

  Over Kevin’s shoulder a searchlight picked up the receding Hoppe, ribboning him.

  “Not all four-letter words are obscene.” She was shivering. A spastic boy, jerking along, had first said it at her, when she must have been well into her teens. She hadn’t learned what it meant for years; there’d been a kind of undercurrent she shouldn’t. These days, they asked. Maureen being taken by the hand. “Let’s go ask that baby brother of yours what he said.” Royal telling them, with a not so medical glint. “It means a female opening.” Maureen and she turning their backs on him.

  She rubbed at her scraped breast. There was no mark on it yet. A breast bruise sometimes appeared later. After four strong sucklers, hers wasn’t even uddered, the way some women get—the way maybe a mother’s breast should be. Though Maureen came to her anyway.

  “Kevin—” Pressed against his chest, her mouth, open in soundless cry, hunts the nipple there. Finds it. Almost at once, she straightened up, hard-voiced. “Cripples should be slapped when they deserve it.”

  “Was he. I didn’t see.”

  No, it’s my own boy, she should say. Who’s one of those. But the more Kevin knows of her circumstance the less likely he is to sleep with her. Or she with him. They depend on each other’s anonymity, that blinder tenderness. And had she meant only Roy?

  She stared into the darkness that was Hoppe. “Neither did I.”

  He wraps his bathtowel around her like a husband, tying it under her armpit.

  She’s still shaking. “Don’t know why I took off that suit.”

  “You don’t really need it.”

  “No I don’t, do I. I’m practically home.”

  “Home—?” he says.

  “Uh-uh, Kevin. No.”

  “Then—they must have a dock here. If we must swim.”

  “I want to swim in the pool.” In that black glue up there. With the village. She makes a run for it.

  The pool, maybe sixty feet or so long but narrow for its length, is an odd one. Most pools are at their best when relieved of people—a rejecting glass, happiest with sky. But at noon this one looked like nothing—a misplaced inlet, leaked from better times.

  Approaching it now from the narrow end she can see that habitation still dictates here; it’s built on the foundations of a house. Craves people. Bodies are thrashing there; now an arm lifts gilded, now a head. The arc lights are working again, sentinel. On the high-dive, a man is poised, pretty with biceps, foreshortened in the neckless way of men in comic books. A wet mushroom-cap of blond hides his features, but she knows him; it’s the youngest caterer, the tough. He’s crossed the party line. But that’s okay, the village prides itself on being egalitarian. When he dives—“Perfect!”—at least fifty bodies applaud.

  On the steps at the shallow end she receives their wave, flinging aside her towel. All the benches around the pool-rim are loaded with discards. Treading water, she sees everyone she knows, no one she need greet specifically—and sees what the pool is. This is a flooded room. Some in it appear to be naked, others not. By an odd courtesy, no one’s touching. Each body, pedaling its territory, has the same incline. Though here and there a couple, bridging arms, floats serene. Water, the secret tickler, is the only licentious one here. Pedaling softly herself, she passes by smilers she could name if it mattered. A large man, said to be a gambler, said to be Mafia, and recent purchaser of a house here, glides past her in lazy rapture. No more music; the trio’s in the water too. She doesn’t see Hoppe. Along with all the others, she too is now an anecdote. And at least it’s safe here. With so many careful, ritual feet trundling the water heel to heel, how could there be a drowned face down below? Her face tilts oval like the rest. The gilding lights pass over it. She is in the Satsuma plate.

  Kevin, seeing her head go under with eyes closed, jumps in and pulls her out.

  “Laid out straight on the bottom,” he says, wrapping her. “You’re no drinker.”

  Streaming water clutters her mouth. “Were no children there. Had to investigate.”

  Kevin, peeling the soaked towel from her, rewraps her in a fresh one, clasping her to him from behind. Swaying her into warmth, like a nurse.

  On the long concrete lip of the pool, Violet, lumpy dowager Cleopatra dancing alone, strips off her necklace, tossing it arc-high. To the tough, just emerged. They play catch with it.

  “Cater
er team’s staying the night,” Kevin says into her nape. “Bob’s fixed up the basement for them.”

  “Good.” Water’s still draining from her. “Maybe that one’ll give Dodo her bath.”

  “Or Violet’ll give him one.”

  The boy’s stopped the game of toss. Strutting over, lifeguard style, he fastens the corals around Violet’s neck. The strong-man muscles in his upper arms move of themselves.

  Behind in the water, no one applauds.

  At the shallow end of the pool, couples start slipping up the steps and out into the dark. One anecdote doesn’t like the sight of another.

  She and Kevin sit on a bench, watching them. Kevin has a bottle again. Cognac. “Here, this is good for you. Not champagne.”

  She laughs. “Where do you keep those bottles? You have no pockets in that suit.”

  When they made love, he used to reach behind him for one. Sometimes even in the midst of things. Always just afterward. A silhouette with a bottle, that’s how she best remembers love with him. “You used to pull them out of your hair, I thought. Or your ear.”

  “Always a bottle under my bed. You know that.”

  The water’s washed away her reserve. “Mmm. But why’d that give me confidence.”

  “Come on. I kept showing you the mirror, that’s all.”

  “You were always nice about my looks.”

  He takes the towel from her. She’s dry. And feels foolish. Nudity scanned, not for nudity alone.

  “Jesus. Don’t you women ever separate from your looks? You’re a worldbeater, is what I was trying to tell you. Worldbeater. Living in the back woods.” He tipped up the bottle. “I scrammed because of it. I’m too good a hotwalker for horses like you. Done it once too often. I was afraid I’d ask you to live with me.”

  She took the bottle from him, remembering those dreamy apartment-hunting afternoons. But that the fantasy can be double—I never dared that. “What’s a hot-walker?”

  “Never been to the track? They walk the horses after the race. And sometimes before. Long before.”

  And sometimes, do they marry them? She remembers the wife, that last evening at the bar. Coming in from her job, desperate. Keeping her desperations for the evening. A competent business-woman, humbled only by fatality. But scarcely outsize. Scarcely a worldbeater. His symbols are too cheap and easy, aren’t they? She can imagine saying that to the wife.