Darling?

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  I had the perfect dress, simple as a Greek column, printed with entymologically correct tomato hornworms and boll weevils, and Jade and Ruby looked like Victorian babies in their embroidered smocks and frilled panties: I supposed they might be discovered here, by a painter who’d want to base a show on them or a poet who’d find inspiration for his next cycle. Park Mullins himself might notice that the energetic curiosity that would propel them through the rest of their lives was already in place. Oh, it was perfect for The New Yorker—these radiant children, illuminating the melancholy passion of age.…

  “It was a poem,” Peregrine said angrily, coming up behind me. “It was not journalism. If you’d seen the last page, you wouldn’t be upset at all.”

  “Well it’s too bad you didn’t ask me to fix your columns when you were on the last page,” I said, wondering if it might possibly be true that he’d started to write from his imagination suddenly after all these years.…

  “I’m a poet,” he said. “I take poetic license.”

  “You are an anachronism. If you were a poet, you’d be dead.” At the very least he’d have joined Sexaholics Anonymous and written a memoir.

  “I’m too busy for this,” he said. “There’s not going to be enough to drink.”

  “There will be enough to drink, O narrator. There are two cases of champagne. There is every kind of liquor on the bar. There are ten gallons of wine. And there are fifty people coming, half of whom are recovering alcoholics and the other half so old and frail they can hardly take a little glass of Dubonnet!”

  “I’ve seen Moss drink all night and at three A.M. he can still give you the source and probably the year of any line you quote him, no matter how obscure.”

  “That was thirty years ago! He was only sixty then!”

  Kit came in from the deck to ask where the ice was.

  “Ice!” Peregrine said, and ran out the front door.

  “He isn’t a natural host,” I admitted.

  “No,” she said, with only the mildest note of reproof. “Want some blow?”

  “Excuse me?” The twins were standing! It was the first time they’d both pulled themselves up at once, and now they were edging along the coffee table toward a great branch of pink coral on an ebony stand.

  “Some blow,” Kit said again. “You know.” She was offering me cocaine, and dosing herself as she awaited my answer, with something homeopathic from a brown bottle. “Shingles,” she said with a shrug, and the coral crashed to the floor, and the twins started howling, and in the midst of it all Moss appeared at the doorway, bent into a slight bow as if in eternal, humble acceptance of adulation, silent, ancient, and mysterious as a stone Buddha in the corner of a temple garden. Everything ceased, poets broke from their conversations and began to drift in his direction like dandelion fluff. He embraced them in turn: “Marietta, Liliane,” he said, giving each syllable a benedictive weight so that I thought of Linnaeus naming the flowers, “and, Giselle…”

  “Jane,” of course, does not have the same effect. I felt his irritation even as his arms went around me—I’m so unethereal, unyielding … entirely unsatisfactory, a stone in his bowl of sweet cherries.

  “Ninety !” I said, “and you don’t look a day over seventy!” The others had called him immortal. He smiled and escaped. The room was filled and would have emptied again if not for the strange pilgrimage one had to make to get out to the deck—a winding pathway between a pile of cardboard boxes on one side and a forest of drums and cymbals on the other. Standing in the middle of that narrow aisle was Tim Grue, Patsy’s estranged husband, a big, very handsome man, so well aware of his body that he seemed almost like a woman in spite of his strength and size. He was so fixed on his divorce he hardly knew where he was—fitted like a bottle stopper between the party and the sea.

  “She—Patsy’s a very—dark—even disturbing, sensibility,” he was saying to Liliane, who nodded with grave concern. “I mean, the in-vitro was a very intimate time for us, but now…” Liliane had not blinked, and taking account of this suddenly he leaned in and stretched his arm over her shoulder to the door frame. “I like pleasing difficult women,” he said. “I’m fine, I’ve never been better. I just need someone to love in my life, that’s all.” Liliane gazed up at him in pure calculation—he would adore her; she probably wouldn’t even have to bother sleeping with him.

  Out on the deck a gust had blown the tablecloth off the bar and the bartender was scrounging lemon pieces from the floor. Standing up, he caught sight of me and made an interrogative gesture—where was Peregrine? Where was anyone? Why was he out there all alone? I went out by the front door and around on the path, but as I did I heard an all-too-recognizable voice, a loud flat yaw like a siren, saying “lovable eccentrics—I’m glad to say I’ve never met anyone like that. I don’t why she bothered to write that insipid little book.”

  It was Patsy Grue, talking to Park Mullins, and all too likely the subject was me. I felt dizzy for a moment, struck broadside by an appalling thought: Suppose everyone at this party was as spiteful as I was?

  “Jane!” Patsy said as I came toward them. “Here you go,” she said, lifting two heavy pans into my arms. “This will feed the millions. Crabcakes, and that’s kugel, and here—” having piled these on me she bent down for a loaf pan, “—is the vegetable terrine.”

  “You went to so much trouble,” Park said. “It’s much too hot to cook.”

  “I just save the ends of the soups until I have enough, press it into the mold, maybe a little curry, and everyone loves it,” Patsy said.

  And one must make a compliment, and the compliment would elicit further helpings—it was the same with her books.… “Patsy, how good to see you,” I said. “I thought you were in Australia.” I’d rehearsed it, and took a deep breath to try and say it: “A real achievement, so dark, so…” But the words stuck in my throat.

  “Congratulations, by the way,” Park said.

  “On what?” I asked, thinking here was my chance to be nice.

  “On her new job!” Park told me, “She’s going to chair the Recovery Studies Program at Brown! Salary in the six figures, I hear.”

  I did not exactly gasp. Still, “The—the—excuse me?”

  A shudder of revulsion, barely concealed, passed over Patsy’s face. Of course, I wouldn’t understand it—what had I ever had to recover from? My life had been so simple and easy I’d never even written a memoir. “Recovery Studies,” she enunciated. “It’s new.”

  “Oh! I … my goodness … Well, that’s wonderful—”

  “I can see you’re thrilled,” she said, turning away just as Peregrine came up the walk—with two bags of ice sagging in his arms like a corpse. To my own profound vexation, I was glad to see him. We’ve been married too long: when I look at him now I remember seeing his face over me during my caesarian—he’d kept hopping up to peer into my guts, though the doctors tried to push him back behind the screen. What could the rest of it matter? Probably his poem was only a flight of fancy and instead of criticizing I ought to have praised its verisimilitude. “Where were you?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “I had to park on the highway. At least a mile away.”

  “Slit, slash, gash, slice, twat, that’s what it all comes down to, that’s the bottom line,” Patsy was saying, and Park agreed with a burst of very, very loud laughter. As author, as cook, as enfant terrible, Patsy works very hard. Peregrine helped me carry her dishes inside, and setting them on the table we saw that otherwise there were only some chips and a bowl of poached green beans. The cake, somber and healthy looking, was on a box behind Tim Grue, who was taking his turn as grave listener to Liliane. You’d have to be mad to walk between them. Someone had opened a window in the kitchen, and tiny old people on canes were helping each other through it onto the deck.

  “I’ll never have a popular success,” Liliane was saying, and somehow the way she pronounced popular raised the image of maggots teeming, though she was not disdainful at al
l—no, she felt only kindness toward Patsy and other, more accessible, authors. For her, though, reality was a broken thing, and if some pages were blank, or half their words sifted into a pile at the bottom, then, of course, certain less cognizant readers were bound to be left behind.

  “People don’t often mention how really funny your books are,” Tim said, leaning back.

  “No!” Kit cried, but too late. Tim’s elbow was deep in the cake.

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh, that’s all right … This is an old shirt…” and Liliane looked up into his eyes and said, “Funny?”

  “You’ll have to go out through the window,” I told Peregrine. “There’s no other way.”

  Park Mullins was at the bar trying to pour himself some seltzer, but the bottle was empty. I don’t suppose suicide has ever even crossed his mind—what poet has time to consider such things nowadays, with all the benefits to read at and competitions to judge, and the students lining up after class to find out whether you use a computer or a pen? The bartender filled a cup with ice and ducked in through the window.

  “Where’s the seltzer?” he asked, but it was long gone. The foghorn on the back shore started, and a minute later the one at Wood End joined it, though the day looked perfectly clear. Moss stood alone, looking over the water—his toes were gnarled and cracked like roots, his hands trembled, but his gaze was fierce and acquisitive, as if the beautiful world was a woman he was determined to possess before he died. Everyone steered around him—it would be embarrassing to repeat last decade’s tributes, and what else was there to say? It was too hot, we’d been close on each other all summer, all decade, most of the century … A lavender sail flicked by—Cleome’s boat, The Gift of the Magi—how I wished I were on it. Behind me Guinness Potzer was roaming with his camera, taking those pictures of his that show everyone’s fatuity—who invited him? And Park, having stood at the bar for a moment, ironically dripping the last of the seltzer into his cup, shook Moss’s hand and set out for the street—he’d seen enough. I guess his piece was for “Talk of the Town.”

  “Can the champagne have been stolen?” Kit asked me. “There were two whole cases.”

  “Peregrine brought it over last night, right?” I asked her.

  “I meant to,” Peregrine said.

  There came a little crash from inside, almost inaudible now the place was so full. Ruby and Jade had knocked over a nest of tables, breaking one leg off each. If you’re going to have such flimsy furniture, what’s the point of having furniture at all?

  “Come, my jewels,” I said, and called a cab, and waved good-bye to Peregrine, who looked to be in mortal pain, with Guinness dogging every step of his search. Snap, Peregrine peers into the dumbwaiter; Snap, he lifts the tablecloth gingerly as a woman’s skirt. Guinness was not, I thought, looking entirely dignified himself. Leaving, we passed Lundgren, the only person who had actually wanted an invitation—he had his new book on the ethical fallout of nuclear war under his arm, and he looked like Leonard Bernstein at Carnegie Hall—I worried he’d be crushed if there was no ovation.

  I turned back, overtaken by a lofty impulse: no matter how mad I was at Peregrine, the twins must kiss their father good night. Their father, whose illusions were some of the finest on earth, such a far sight above the banal illusions people live by today. And there he was, looking somewhere between perplexity and rage, like Ahab rudely awakened to find himself in Under the Table. I kissed his cheek—an act of historic preservation.

  “The champagne…” he moaned.

  * * *

  It was in our basement, keeping nice and cool. I called Kit, but no one answered, and Jade and Ruby were asleep, and I didn’t have the car … so I gave up, I just forgot it all. I put on Peregrine’s pajamas, the real linen ones that had been his father’s, and got an ice cream sandwich out of the freezer. The phone rang—it was Sinead.

  “Tell all!” she said. I began with Peregrine’s poem.…

  “Don’t get mad,” she said after half an hour, as I was trying and discarding phrases to describe the infinite pervasiveness of the reek of cat, “but I have to wonder if Peregrine wasn’t right.…”

  I got mad immediately. “What do you mean?”

  “You might not have been just the person to write it up for The New Yorker.”

  “Why?” I heard the foghorn and saw tufts blowing in off the water like cotton wool. There they all were, on Kit’s deck without champagne, being gently enveloped, as if to be stored away like glass ornaments for use this time next year. “I’ve got the true essence! That even the cake showed civic responsibility, that the only real gift was a book about Hiroshima…”

  “Mom’s bomb!” said Sinead, whose mother had been a mathematician on the Manhattan Project—honest employment, I mean, and a place in history, too.

  And the foghorns, each on its own interval so the calls come to meet each other, and diverge, in a slow, irregular rhythm. “Oh, my God, I have to go,” I said: Park Mullins was walking his Shitzu down the street, and if he saw me, he’d know the party had gone wrong. I hung up the phone and slid down onto the floor so he wouldn’t be able to see me. There was no paper at hand, so I smoothed out the ice cream wrapper: I thought I should take a note. I’ve almost never felt as happy, as surrounded by beauty and hope, as I did just then. Myself—spiteful, jealous, always in a rage—ceased to beat her fists against my skull, and for a minute or two I felt a great benevolent heart beating: I was an author and I loved everything human.

  The Funeral Party

  They, who now made all decisions, called Warren back from the city to his father in Spinnaker-by-the-Sea. His mother was there, too, but she was on the night shift, and they didn’t dare leave Warren alone at night. The whole bus ride he wondered how he’d recognize his father—he’d only seen Emerson once in the last fifteen years. And he hadn’t been to Spinnaker for so long he’d forgotten what winter was like there; no one would be left except the people who couldn’t get away.

  The bus station was closed and Emerson was standing under the streetlight, looking tall and gaunt and impassive, the same figure as in Warren’s dreams.

  “’lo,” he said, picking up Warren’s bag and turning down the street, away from the harbor and the driving wind, walking so quickly Warren felt he was trying shake him.

  “I can carry that,” Warren said to his back. Should he address him as Dad? “I’m not sick, you know.” Only weak, and foolish, unable to bear the ordinary blows of life. “A disgrace,” as Emerson had said after Warren’s childish attempt to slash his wrists in high school—a disgrace that he’d tried to kill himself, or that he’d hardly broken the skin.

  “’S only two blocks,” Emerson said. All the storefronts were boarded over except for the Pilgrim Tap, where a lone man sat with his head down over his beer, maybe avoiding the sight of the Weather Channel on the television over the bar. They turned up Sea Street past the neat little houses, each sheltering an old woman who was hooking a rug and watching television until the time came for her to join her neighbors in the graveyard. Warren’s grandmother had already passed; in her place, resting her cigarette in the same ashtray, sat his stepmother, Noreen. “Warren!” she said, her voice constricted, her smile immense in a face entirely gray. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  He flinched and turned away. His thoughts were viscous, his tongue had grown thick and slow. He saw a hideous greedy emptiness in every face and imagined the same in his own—of course people recoiled from him. He’d been wrong, he thought, ever to go back to school, to leave his place in Maine, where isolation was natural and the bleak landscape—the ranks of spruce stretching infinitely north, the log trains slamming down from Canada—had fit his deep sense of things. In Maine, leaving Beth for the city had seemed an act of romantic courage, a casting away from safe harbor toward art and adventure, destiny. Now he realized how easily she’d let him go. She wanted marriage, a child, and, finding these were beyond him, she had pushed him out of her nest. Fooled him the way wom
en do, tempting him into love so as to see him vanquished in the end. Three months in New York and he’d forgotten it was he who left her and not the other way around.

  Brooklyn had been bleak in human terms: dirty, unseeing, unkind. His apartment windows looked into two airshafts, both gated as if thieves might get in somehow where no sunlight could. There’d been new women, of course—a design major who told him she was attracted to his desperation, and Sabra, a painter like himself, though unlike him she was able. When she spoke in class, the professors nodded grave agreement or argued as with an equal. The day Ned Fisk had “critiqued” Warren’s entire semester of canvases, calling them derivative and dated, singling out certain paintings with contempt, he’d asked Sabra’s opinion, and she’d tried to speak up for Warren, but without, he thought, real conviction. She was sure, she said, that he was “on his way somewhere”—though it was clear he had yet to arrive.

  It became awful to look at the world: every glimpse of beauty was a rebuke, to a man who couldn’t create it. Ned Fisk now seemed to Warren nearly visionary, the only one of his professors who had seen through to the empty heart of his ambition—he’d have turned himself inside out to please the man if he’d only understood what he wanted. But no—and he gave up, spent days playing solitaire on the computer and calling Beth far too often; watching his hand punch her number into the phone, he thought of an alcoholic reflexively pouring a drink. The ground went out from under him the minute she answered, and his voice would go soft and needful like a child’s; it filled him with shame.

  So, like a child, he had to come home. He told himself he wouldn’t call Beth anymore, but as soon as he heard his father get into the shower, he went to the phone. Her voice was quiet and soothing; he’d have preferred bitterness, anger, something that showed she missed him too. He heard himself telling her how much he wanted to give up, to die. Carefully, implacably, she kept him on the line, and hearing her familiar exhortations, the things she’d memorized for his sake—Van Gogh never sold a painting, the very nature of originality meant it was hard to recognize—he felt a calm come over him. As they talked he heard the church bell across her street ring three and four and five, then the 5:47 train from Presque Isle that had always acted as their alarm. He thought of her, moaning, pulling up the quilt to turn over, the warm luxury of her smell … “Beth,” he said, but he couldn’t bring himself to it, the admission that he loved her.