Incubus

by Ann Arensberg

  “What do you want us to do?” asked Sally. “I can’t think in this heat,” said Jane. “I haven’t slept for weeks,” Ruth said, with that hint of smugness common to insomniacs. I went down the agenda as briskly as possible, divided up the list of women who had baked last year and ought to be approached again, stuck Sally with the job of designing the booth and the printed labels, asked Jane if she was ready to launch her savarin. Their lack of interest was obvious. Sally and Ruth kept asking me to repeat myself. Jane was taking notes with her right hand, while her left hand was always touching some part of her body, stroking her neck, kneading her upper arm, removing one sandal and rubbing her foot.

  They left as soon as our business was concluded, another departure from custom. Usually we refilled our cups or glasses and did some catching up. Today they were unwilling to linger long enough to fix a date for our next meeting, so I would have to round them up by telephone. As I cleared away the glasses and plates (no one had eaten a single one of my shortbread hearts), I wavered between hurt feelings and irritation. I had a large—you might say an exaggerated—stake in the success of the bake sale, but it had never alienated my friends before. In fact, they used to tease me about it. Perhaps I was taking their coolness too personally. It was not as if they had presented a united front, all three radiating a concentrated hostility toward me. On the contrary, each of them had seemed to be in a private world of her own. Sally’s behavior was especially distracted. I don’t believe she heard a word we said. Her expression flickered on and off between a smile and a little frown, as if in response to some troubling inner dialogue. If we were teenagers and still in high school, I would have said my friends were keeping secrets from me.

  Two days later Sally stopped by to make excuses for her behavior at the meeting. I had difficulty accepting her explanation but was trying not to show it. She had brought me some pots of Roman chamomile, which was reseeding itself too liberally in one of her borders. If the plants were intended as a peace offering, I would have been better pleased by a few divisions of her expensive red daylily, the only variety that came close to a true fire engine. Sally took off her battered straw hat. Her short blond hair was plastered to her head and her right eye was bloodshot. The heat was having its toll on our looks as well as our spirits.

  Sally had come to bring news that was not very welcome to me. “I’m happy for your sake,” I said. “For all of your sakes.” “I wouldn’t be so generous in your place,” said Sally. I gestured at the flower beds. “Can I give you anything of mine?” “All right,” she said. “Do you have any lavender to spare? It loves this weather.” I picked up a trowel and a six-inch plastic pot. “No, not now,” said Sally. “Sit down and talk to me.” “Stay where you are. I’ll get us some ginger ale.” “I don’t want any,” she said. “You’re trying to dodge me. I’ve upset you.” I perched on the edge of a bench, ready to bolt if the conversation took an offensive turning. With envy and spite and all uncharitableness I told Sally she didn’t look like a woman who was having a second honeymoon. “You look as if you’re coming down with something,” I said.

  We had never formed a club for wives of sexless marriages. If we had, I would be its only surviving member. According to Sally, the rest had fallen by the wayside. I was obliged to hear that Jane believed she was pregnant, while Ruth reported that her Ralph was “making overtures.” It seemed Ford was approaching Sally every night, and completing his approaches. If she looked hag-ridden, it was because he feasted on her from the small hours until daybreak, robbing her of rest. As a sop to me, or so I thought, she permitted herself to complain about his new insatiability. Although Ford had always been “athletic,” she confessed, he was good for only one round a night, at least until now. Once she was asleep, he would never have dreamed of rousing her for sex. As concerned for her pleasure as for his own, he had always encouraged her to ask for what she wanted. His manners, social and sexual, were beyond reproach, as were his habits of personal grooming. Ford could work outdoors all day without getting dirty or sweat-stained or ruining the crease in his khaki trousers. He kept his work clothes as immaculate as his dress clothes, his nose hairs clipped and his chin free of stubble. He exuded a constant reminder of his most recent ablutions, of soap and spicy shaving lotion.

  If I were inclined to believe Sally’s story, Ford had begun to forget his manners along with his deodorant. Once, he had given all her sensitive areas equal attention, so that her earlobes were never less privileged than her nipples. Now his target was exclusively genital. She woke up to find him pinning her down. “He doesn’t care if I’ve finished,” she said. “He keeps pushing at me.” They had always reached climax with their mouths fastened together in a kiss. She was grateful he no longer tried to kiss her. She inhaled his sour breath on her neck and remembered when his mouth had tasted of mint. He used to whisper to her while he aroused her, borrowing love words from classical pornography. Now he was silent except for occasional “snurfling” noises.

  It was the paramount duty of friendship to be an ungrudging listener, to remove one’s ego as far as possible from the equation. I wanted to blame Sally for abusing my generosity, when all she had done was reach its limits. Either to spare my feelings or stave off my resentment, she was downgrading her own good fortune—a common but ineffective female tactic. I cut her lamentations short and said she should be talking to her husband, not to me. She hung her head. “I can’t do that. You can’t do that to a man.”

  All at once I wondered if my friendship with Sally was a friendship of convenience. We lived a few miles apart. We were the same age. We loved cooking and gardening. Now I found there was a gap between us. I felt honesty had a place in sex; she believed it was on a footing with emasculation. She was excited by old-fashioned dirty words. If Henry ever tried referring to my “tickler,” “quim,” or “pouters,” I would have died laughing, unless he started laughing first. Were the differences between me and Sally drastic or manageable? Was I inventing a rift where there was none because I was envious of her? On the whole, I would rather have neighbors than friends. The lines between neighbors were clear-cut. You fed their cat when they were away for the weekend. They watered your houseplants ditto. You were not required to follow them into the bedroom, or listen to tales that should be told only to a sex therapist.

  In order to regain the initiative and salvage my friendly feelings, I decided to ask questions. While Sally was making her confession, I had been pacing up and down, unable to meet her eye. Now I sat down opposite her, knee to knee, and patted her hands, which were clenched in her lap. A yellow jacket was browsing in her sweat-soaked hair. I brushed it away. She went on explaining how she couldn’t talk to Ford but had tried to send a message indirectly. “I let him fall asleep, then I left the bed and went to the guest room. Sometimes I did that when I had a cold. I had a night to myself, but the next night he followed me. He stayed a long time, then I felt him leaving. When I got up he was still asleep in our room.” She anticipated my next question. “I couldn’t,” she said. “Besides, we never had keys to the bedrooms.”

  I had shown none of Sally’s wifeliness. I’m sure I broadcast my frustration every night by some unconscious gesture—a brisk “goodnight” unaccompanied by a kiss, an abrupt withdrawal if one of Henry’s extremities brushed one of mine. I was only getting what I deserved. Every other husband was back on the job, except for Henry. I wanted to know what Sally had done to make Ford feel desire again. What actions had she taken? What wiles had she practiced? What perfume had she been wearing? I asked her to think back to the day itself and review the circumstances that led up to the renewal of his ardor.

  Sally said that day had been busier than usual, full of extra chores. In the morning she had interviewed housekeepers for her father-in-law, and picked up the thank-offering envelopes from the printer in East Windham. At lunchtime the orchids had arrived, delivered in boxes with labels all over them warning OPEN IMMEDIATELY. She unpacked them and put them in her window greenhouse
, recently installed.

  I knew how it went with orchid lovers. Eventually she would build a separate glass building to house her new hobby, then several additions to that building. Orchids were the one horticultural topic on which Sally and I disagreed. Orchids hypnotized people. They were creatures of air, not earth, overpowerful and sinister. Their breeders neglected the earth for their sake. You could tell the gardens of orchid fanciers by their lack of bloom. They didn’t bother to prune the shrubs or cull dead flowers. These gardeners had transferred their allegiance to the greenhouse, a temple where they worshipped little gods that grew on sticks and blocks of wood. Sally was bound to follow their example, and I would be left without a companion to share the driving on day trips to flower shows and nurseries.

  For the present, however, she was still devoted to dirt gardening and all it entailed. That afternoon she drove the station wagon to a beauty shop in Naples, where the owner had collected several bags full of hair clippings for her. Human hair was supposed to be a deer repellent, and Sally’s lily beds were under siege, especially on the wooded side of her property. She left two of the sacks in the shed and brought the other one into the kitchen. She spread sheets of newspaper on the floor around the table where she had assembled her equipment—a pile of old nylon tights, sharp scissors, and a ball of garden twine. She went to work stuffing wads of hair into sections of stocking, tying them at both ends to make neat balls. The hair balls could be hung from branches, attached to stakes, or distributed over the ground. As she worked, hair sprinkled to the floor or fell in clumps, covering the newspaper with a patchwork of colors—red, yellow, gray, black, brown, and white.

  Before long she regretted her decision to work indoors. Hair was everywhere, visible and invisible, clinging to her knees, layering her socks and sneakers, drifting off the paper toward other rooms, as silent as dust. She found she did not enjoy handling it. “It felt alive,” she said, “especially the gray hair.” Since her hairdresser cut heads dry, before the shampoo, it followed that the hair he had given her was dirty. Piling up on the paper beneath her, it gave off “a kind of warmth,” as she described it, not a smell but an atmosphere. Hair was prized by practitioners of magic because it retained a magnetic link with the person from whom it was taken. Sally wondered how many souls had to be shorn before you could fill two thirty-gallon garbage bags, and whether she had, in some way, invited all of them into her kitchen.

  Putting these notions aside, she began the job of cleaning up. She swept the floors and wiped off the counters—but hair reappeared where hair had been banished, as in a bewitchment. That evening she found hair in the bowl of the food processor when she began making béarnaise sauce for the filet steak, Ford’s favorite dish. When she turned down the bed later on, she saw a scattering of reddish-brown hairs on the bottom sheet. They had gained passage to the upper story by stowing away on her feet or her clothing. She ripped the sheets off the bed and made it up with fresh ones. That night, while Ford was poised above her, ready to enter her after a year’s abstention, she was suddenly aware of an itch between her shoulder blades, and another on the back of her knee traveling down to her ankle, an invasion of itches, caused by sharp, sticky hairs on the loose in the bedroom. Sally vacuumed every day for a week, but she still came across them now and then in intimate places—on the skin beneath her watchband, in the pages of her prayer book, on her powder puff.

  Looking back over Sally’s day (orchids, housekeepers, printers, hair balls), I saw nothing to suggest she had baited a trap for Eros. Her activities seemed irrelevant to sex, if not positively antierotic. At the end of such a day, Ford should have found her irritable and unkempt, in no way an object of lust for a man whose fires had been heaped with ashes. That night after supper I gave Henry an account of this cycle of sexual revival among our friends, having first ascertained that he was in a good humor and that the vestry had voted to buy a more efficient copying machine with Judge Harvey’s bequest. We sat outside at the very table where Sally had unburdened herself, surrounded by bug candles sunk in tin buckets, flavoring the air with citronella. I provided us with hot tea, sometimes more cooling in the heat than iced drinks. Throughout the narration my manner was as detached and comradely as possible, as if we were two professors enjoying a brandy in the faculty club lounge.

  Henry was wary at first, but my behavior soon reassured him. He did not suspect for a moment that I might be pointing a moral about our own infirm sex life. Instead, he imagined I had brought him more data for his paranormal research. During these summer doldrums he seemed inspired to find data wherever he looked, like an ancient soothsayer who used anything at hand—gizzards, bones, pebbles, straws—to make his predictions. I never knew what details he might seize on. I was surprised by his interest in the human hair. I thought he would be far more intrigued by the change in Ford’s style of lovemaking. His response to her method of repelling deer seemed to be based on Scripture. He wanted to know if the beauty shop in Naples had male clients as well as female. I assured him that the hair in those sacks had been taken entirely from women. Distracted by his thoughts, Henry poured himself a fresh cup of tea, letting the liquid brim over into his saucer. I knew my Bible well enough to recognize that he was quoting from Corinthians when he said, “Is it comely that a woman pray unto God uncovered?” St. Paul went on to say that women must put something on their heads in church “because of the angels.”

  I was always late to church as a child, trying to find a covering for my head, a hat that wasn’t too embarrassing, a scarf to match my dress, a clean, ironed handkerchief. I didn’t understand if wearing hats was a sign of respect or a mark of shame. My grandfather Beaulac, who had no religion, explained that angels looking down from heaven were supposed to fall in love with women’s hair. I asked him why we covered just the tops of our heads. Couldn’t the angels see the rest of our hair beneath our hats, and our bangs sticking out of our head scarves? In more primitive communities, said my grandfather, women were required to wrap their heads. Perhaps my husband could explain, since my grandfather couldn’t, what sort of angels these were that human women were admonished not to tempt them, as teenaged girls of my generation had been warned not to lead boys on. I was taught in Sunday school that angels were God’s messengers, arrows shot from His side. They partook of His goodness and loving kindness. They had no bodies. They appeared to children who were lost in the forest and guided them home. According to St. Paul, however, angels were not only lustful but also somehow blameless, since women carried the blame.

  For a consecrated priest, Henry had some curious ideas about angels. In the Book of Genesis, at the time of Noah, angels hovered close to earth, consorting with human beings. “The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair,” recited Henry. “The sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them.” This union produced a race of giants, superhuman beings whom God destroyed out of jealousy, with the exception of Noah, who found grace in His eyes. Over the centuries, angels were relegated to higher and higher spiritual planes by the theologians. Theologians unsexed the angels and censored the chronicles of their deeds, lest they threaten the absolute power of the One True God.

  Christians and Jews banished the angels but could not exterminate them. They have kept coming back, yearning to recapture their former intimacy with human beings. Striving to assume human form, they were sometimes successful, as the Renaissance painters have testified, but often they got it wrong, producing a faint flickering outline or simply an inchoate mass, the rude suggestion of a human presence. In their partial or imperfect manifestations, there was nothing to distinguish them from demons, hungry in their own right for fleshly contact. Henry pushed his argument as far as it would go, ending on a question: was there one primal entity? or many entities? one supernatural force that had collected many names in different eras and different cultures? Thus the Greeks labeled gods and goddesses what the Celts called fairies and nature spirits and Western Europeans named angels a
nd devils. I took Henry’s cup and saucer, which were sitting on his knee and about to slide off. He was all wrapped up in the notion that the supernatural needs human beings to acknowledge it. “We have visitors here in Dry Falls,” he said. “I wonder what we’ll call them.” He said he thought a name would eventually be forced upon us.

  “We were talking about Ford and Sally,” I reminded him. “We seem to have wandered off the subject.” Henry gave me a frown. He was surprised I could have missed the connection, and so was I. If I had been slow to keep up with him it was because I disliked his ideas and resisted putting them into words. I did not want to think of Ford Bissell as the puppet of an unclean spirit who had been lured from another dimension into ours. I did not want to have to worry about the threat to Sally, or the threat to Ruth, if it came to that. Ruth used hair in her garden too, but she spread it loose around the plant, like a mulch, instead of tying it up in nylon. There was no link between Sally’s sexual beleaguerment, Hannah’s fear of our attic, the Burridge seniors’ drugged sleep, and Helen’s optical illusions. Henry needed to spin these webs in order to compensate for feelings of emptiness, to fill the hollow place where his priestly vocation used to be.

  I detested the scenarios Henry was imagining. In all of them, the supernatural invaded our domesticity, fastened onto the details of our everyday lives, and sucked the color out of them, like aphids on the leaves of African violets. There were so many things we did in all innocence: simmered beef for stew; grew the tallest sunflowers and the fattest tomatoes; soaked in the tub; crafted hair balls to keep deer away; burned candles, as Adele did, instead of turning the electric lights on. Would there soon be a time when we would have to censor the smallest act of sensual gratification, the most natural, automatic gesture: dabbing perfume on our pulse spots, picking peaches and letting the juice run down our chins? A time when sexual release would be taboo, and all the stages leading up to it? When sexual thoughts and feelings would also require suppression, because they were capable of attracting the Unembodied by the swarms, like the scent used in Japanese beetle traps? Under this regimen of fear the human race would die out for lack of breeding, as did the Shakers and the members of the Oneida community.