Heart Troubles

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Mr. Fiedler chuckled softly. “In addition to its charming flora and fauna, this village is noted for its malicious gossips,” he said. “They delight in spreading ugly stories about anyone who—how shall I say—who seems to be a bit different, or perhaps better, than they are.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they do!” Dolores said.

  “If what’s-his-name—your young Freddie—ever did say anything … or if anyone else did … you wouldn’t believe it, would you? Any more than you’d believe that patently obvious line he’s handing you?”

  “It isn’t a line. It’s—”

  “How can you tell? How old are you? Seventeen?” Mr. Fiedler’s voice was very hard. “Give yourself a few more years to find out, pet.”

  Dolores looked at her fingernails. “Please don’t be cross with me for telling you. I—”

  “That’s okay.” Mr. Fiedler stood up abruptly. “It just makes me sad—literally ill—to hear you talking the way you’ve been about this—this red-necked young riding instructor. You don’t know what love is.”

  Dolores made a steeple of her fingers and rested her chin on their tips, flattening her elbows against the stones, and as she did so her white blouse came untucked around her waist.

  “You see?” he said, standing above her. “You yawn, you stretch, you laugh, your blouse comes prettily out of your jodhpurtops. You’re young, you see, and—”

  “Huh?” Dolores laughed and reached around to tuck in her blouse.

  “Dolores,” said Mr. Fiedler. He knelt on the terrace beside her.

  “What?” Dolores laughed again, but this time the laugh was briefer. “You’re a funny person,” she said. “You say the strangest things …”

  “Can you keep a secret?”

  She sat up abruptly. “No.”

  “Why not, Dolores?”

  “Because I don’t want to. I’ll betray it if you tell me, so please don’t.”

  “But I want to.”

  “No, no …”

  Mr. Fiedler stood up once more. “Let me have that glass,” he said. As he reached for it, his hand trembled. “I mean just don’t say you’re in love with him. How’s the arm?”

  Dolores showed it to him. “I think it’s gone away. What time is it?”

  “Nearly seven.”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “Please stay,” he said tensely.

  “I really must—”

  “You’re just a little dear in those jodhpurs, Dolores.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes. A little beauty. Here, let—”

  Dolores jumped to her feet. “You should save those things for your wife,” she said. She picked up the green jacket.

  “You don’t know what it’s like, Dolores, living with a woman like that.”

  Dolores shivered. “Why do you—” she began.

  Mr. Fiedler seized the girl’s shoulders, and turned her around to face him. “Why do you? Why do you behave so foolishly? Don’t you know that I’m not poison? Do you want a cigarette?” He fumbled in his slacks pocket for a pack.

  “No, thanks. I must—”

  He still gripped her shoulders. “‘The poet—’” he said in a hollow voice “‘—the poet is like a prince of the clouds, who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer—exiled to the noisy earth, his giant’s wings—’” He dropped his hands suddenly, and his voice caught as if he were choking. And he turned his head sharply away from her. When he spoke again his voice was a whisper. “‘Whose giant’s wings keep him from walking,’” he finished. “Baudelaire. That was Baudelaire. Do you ever see what I’m talking about, Dolores?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Once more he reached for her arm, but this time she stepped away from him. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Please. Look. Oh, God, I’m sorry if I—but listen,” he said, “just listen a minute, can’t you? Do you want to know what it’s like? You asked me, didn’t you, how I endured this place? Do you want to know? Do you want to know what it’s like to be a man who never, not once in his life, has ever achieved a single thing he’s wanted? Do you? Even at Burneyside, when they said I—Wait!” he said, as she took another step away from him.

  Across the terrace someone called, “Dolores!”

  “It’s Freddie,” Dolores said. “He wants to walk me home. I have to go.”

  She pushed her arms into the sleeves of her jacket. “Thanks for the huaraches,” she said, kicking them off. “I’ll walk home barefoot. Coming, Freddie!” she called.

  “Wait a minute—I’ll get that book.”

  “I’ll—I’ll pick it up some other time.”

  “Wait. You’ll catch your death walking that way. Tell him to—”

  Dolores laughed nervously. “Please,” she said. “I’m sorry. Please tell Mrs. Fiedler good-by for me, and—”

  “That boy isn’t worth it.”

  “Tell her I’m—”

  “She knows. She’s upstairs.”

  “Upstairs? But I thought—”

  “She’s upstairs whenever I’m downstairs. Do you see what I mean?”

  “Yes. Well—good-by. Thank you so much for—”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes. That is, I will if Freddie—” She broke off. “I hope so, really. Well, good-by, and—”

  Mr. Fiedler tried to take her hand. “Good night,” she said. She picked up her gloves and riding crop from the terrace and, taking a boot in each hand, ran barefoot across the stones and across the lawn toward the trees.

  When she met Freddie, Dolores said, “Let’s run!” And they started running along the ocean’s edge, flat-footed, across the rocks and stretches of pebbly beach, between the clumps of sand grass and juniper. Just before they reached the cottage, she stopped suddenly.

  “Wait!” she said. “Wait till I get my breath.” She knew there were tears in her eyes. “I don’t think I like him now, really. In fact,” she said, “I was kind of scared. It was funny, Freddie … he was so queer tonight.… I—I feel so odd, scared and excited, as though I’ve avoided something, or outgrown something. Do you see …?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I see.”

  “You’re so wonderful, Freddie!” Quite impulsively, she clutched his arm and pressed her fingers into his sunburned flesh to feel the heat and the muscle and the strength of it. “You do understand! Oh, Freddie, do I look older? Do I look like a woman at last? Do I?”

  After watching Dolores, Mr. Fiedler went into the house, down the steps into the pine-paneled living room, holding his cigarette, unlighted, looking for a match. Martha was across the hall, in the dining room, setting the table. “Martha?” he called. “Where are the matches?”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know,” Martha said.

  Mr. Fiedler raised his voice. “I said where are they! Please get them for me immediately! I want a match for my cigarette! Didn’t I tell you to put matches in all the bowls?”

  “That’s not my job,” said Martha. “I’ve got other things to keep me busy, thank you.”

  Mr. Fiedler rushed into the dining room. Martha was putting silver on the table, and the silver candlesticks on either side of the centerpiece were moist and perspiring in the warm air. “How dare you?” he screamed. “How dare you to speak to me like that? Get out! Get out of this house!”

  “I take my orders from Mrs. Fiedler, sir.”

  Mr. Fiedler ran back into the hall and halfway up the stairs. “Louise!” he screamed from the landing, his voice becoming higher and shriller and harsher with every syllable. “Get that woman out of here before I kill her! Louise!” And when she didn’t answer, he cried, “Don’t worry! It’s safe! Everybody’s gone, nothing’s happened, it’s safe! You can come down now!”

  The Partly Joined

  THE BACKGAMMON TABLE

  It was made of pink marble. Irene Silton called the color antique pigeon’s blood and was convinced, from some hieroglyphics scratched on the underside of the stone, that it was very old—at least a hundred and fifty year
s old, she thought—and had been quarried in Algeria. Standing where it did, on a slim wrought-iron pedestal in their living room, it seemed to drink in the winter sunlight from Seventieth Street, and to reflect this light back from some interior place. The stone’s veins and clouds seemed deeper than the polished surface, as though a whole landscape of ridges and arroyos lay crystallized and buried there beneath a flat and glassy layer. Often, when she was alone in the house, Irene would go to the table and stand gazing into this wild and sunlit country, her fingertips resting on the table’s cool, smooth edge, dreaming of what it must be like to live among such frozen mountains and caverns.

  Justin and Irene had been taking a walk when Irene had spotted the table, covered with dust and clutter, in the window of a shop on Lexington Avenue. It was an odd little shop, full of what nots and gimcrackery, full of lamps with beaded shades, pockmarked pewterware, crazed Staffordshire plates, and bronze statues of fat and leering cherubs—a confused and totally unmemorable little shop. In fact, it was quite surprising that she had even looked in the window; it was not the sort of shop that usually interested her. But she had looked in—her eye drawn to it by something—and there, with its pedestal base wrapped in yellowed newspaper and tied with cord, its top piled high with empty picture frames, it was.

  “Justin!” she had said, seizing his arm. “Look! A backgammon table—a marble backgammon table! And pink marble!” They had gone inside for a closer look.

  It was like a number of other pieces they had bought for the house: They had seen it, decided instantly that they couldn’t live without it, and so they had paid a ridiculously high price for it. Irene was sure that the minute the shopkeeper had seen them—the minute the sleighbells above his door had jingled to announce their entrance—he had seen the predatory gleam in their eyes, heard an excited, acquisitive note in the jingling bells, and doubled the price of the backgammon table. At least this was what she thought at first. Later, as she discovered more things about the table, she changed her mind and decided it had been a bargain. The table had so many surprises in it. The raised gallery, which ran around the edge, and the raised center bar were not—as she had first thought—separate pieces of marble that had been glued to the horizontal surface. The entire tabletop had been carved from a single piece of pink stone. The twenty-four points of the backgammon game were not painted on, as she had assumed, but were cut of alternately darker and lighter stone and carefully inlaid.

  On the day the table was delivered Justin picked up the marble top and carried it to the window. He held it up against the light. “Look, Irene,” he said. “It’s almost translucent. The light shines through.”

  It was then she had noticed the hieroglyphics on the rough bottom surface—letters or numerals—and, after studying them for a long time, they had decided that part of the inscription was a date—1802.

  “Just think of it,” Irene said. “It’s over a hundred and fifty years old.”

  He held it to the light again and she had begun to have the illusion of a hidden surface beneath the actual surface, of a canyoned land bathed in pink, clear sunshine that lay submerged in transparent stone.

  “The color is like—like an antique pigeon’s blood!” she had said, and laughed.

  He lifted the marble top to replace it on its pedestal. “Be careful, Justin!” she cried. “Don’t drop it!”

  They had put the table between two gold chairs so that, when it was not set up for a game, it could be used to hold a cigarette dish and an ashtray. “How have we been able to live without it this long?” Irene asked. “It looks as if it had grown there!”

  “It certainly ought to be a conversation piece,” Justin said.

  It was. Placed so prominently in the room, it called attention to itself immediately. When Irene’s friends came for lunch or tea, the table provided, almost invariably, a subject for a few minutes’ admiring talk. When her friends asked her, Irene said, “I’m sure there’s no other in the world like it.”

  Neither Irene nor Justin had ever played backgammon. But, once they had the table, Irene decided they should learn. She bought a copy of a book called Hoyle Up-To-Date, a handsome set of black and white backgammon pieces, two pairs of dice, and two leather dice cups. As they sipped their evening coffee over the backgammon table, they studied the rules and strategy of the game. They learned that the pieces were called “stones” and that certain rolls of the dice had odd and charming names. (An opening roll of six and five allowed the player to make a move called “Lover’s Leap,” and a roll of six and one permitted him to make what was called his “bar point.”) Irene delightedly learned that backgammon was one of the oldest games, with its origins lost in pre-Roman antiquity, and she decided that backgammon was good for them.

  It was pleasant, she thought, to sit this way, on a quiet winter evening—with a fire going in the fireplace, perhaps, on snowy nights—with Justin wearing the brown velvet smoking jacket she had given him for his birthday, his feet in slippers, his pipe lighted, as they sipped her hot espresso coffee. It was a peaceful scene as she saw it—the kind of scene their lives could have used more of. They sat together, husband and wife, calmly concentrating on a single area, equally matched, with only a pair of dice to determine who would win. She was sure that Justin was as happy as she was.

  When he rolled the dice for his turn, she heard the almost musical chink of the dice against the marble, and she looked deeply into the buried country. Backgammon, and the backgammon table, had, she decided, opened up a new and reassuring world to them both. For some time Irene Silton had been quietly wondering what was wrong with her marriage.

  When he had finished making his move she said to him, “I learned something else from Hoyle Up-To-Date today.”

  “Did you? What?”

  “There are quite a few variations on the standard game. Did you know that?”

  “No,” he said, “I didn’t.”

  “Well, there are. One is called Dutch Backgammon. Then there’s a game called Snake, and one called Acey-Deucey.”

  “Really?” he said. “That’s very interesting.”

  “Yes. I thought, if we ever get tired of this form of the game there are all the others to try.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  She rolled the dice for her turn. “Oh!” she said. “Lover’s Leap!”

  A little later she said, “Isn’t this fun?”

  “Yes, it is,” he agreed.

  “I like it because it brings us together,” she said. “It gives us something to do when we’re together.” She smiled at him and reached for his hand across the backgammon table.

  The Siltons had no children. Perhaps that was Irene’s fault; perhaps it wasn’t. At first, in the first years, she hadn’t wanted any. She had been frightened, really, of having children. She was a small woman—a size eight—and her mother had once told her that she was not built for childbearing. On the other hand, after a while she had decided that she and Justin ought to become parents. But then nothing had happened and then, for a long time, she had urgently, wildly, wanted children. Now, she felt, they had passed a point—a critical point in marriage—where children would help, in any way, to bring them together. Though they were still young, still in their thirties, she was certain that the addition of a child now would only shatter what remained of their relationship; that, if she had a baby, Justin would leave her. Their marriage consisted now of two perilously balanced ingredients—herself and Justin—and the entrance of any third being would disrupt the balance.

  What, precisely, was their marriage’s illness Irene did not know. She had long since stopped trying to diagnose it and, instead, bent every effort toward preventing it from failing further. She knew—or at least she was fairly sure—that Justin still loved their house in Seventieth Street, and the furniture, each piece lovingly chosen, that the house contained. She knew there was no other woman. She knew that Justin—a successful lawyer—was doing well, and was happy, in his business. Beyond that, the
reasons for their troubles were obscure and intangible. Sometimes she thought, If he would only shout at me! If he would only yell at me, abuse me, or do something that would define his position. But, instead of shouting, he withdrew into the silence of his smoking jacket and slippers and pipe. Instead of abuse he offered her painful considerateness and politeness. He had changed. It was hard to say how—after twelve years of marriage—but he had removed himself from her somehow. A bright, plum-colored runner ran up the stairs of their house and, for years, she had insisted that they walk up and down the stairs at the edges of the carpet, to avoid stepping on the centers of the treads where signs of wear were likeliest to show. This way they had preserved the carpet. With Justin, it seemed to her, it had come to be like that. He had developed the habit of walking up and down her edges, stepping delicately and cautiously away from the center area, as if he were trying to leave unbruised her heart’s nap.

  “Do you still love me?” she had asked him once, impulsively, and the instant she said the words she had known that his answer—even if it was “Yes”—would not comfort her.

  “Yes, I do,” he said, and Irene felt her spirit die within her, feeling his footsteps moving in their slippered way gingerly up and down her borders.

  She had held herself in, fighting the hysterical urge to cry out. “Well,” she said, trying to make her voice sound bright, “I love you!”

  “That’s good,” he said.

  A trifle more shrilly, she said, “I’ve never nagged at you, have I, the way some women do? I’m not a fuss, am I? Do I scold or criticize?”

  “No,” he said.

  This exchange—short though it was—had exhausted her. She sat back in the sofa, limp, and closed her eyes, her head full of whirring, hopeless thoughts.

  Irene believed in marriage; this was why she was determined to save her own. For years, even when she was in college, she had argued about the importance of marriage, of a man and woman in a partnership, of a mutual sharing and giving and accepting. It seemed ironic, and unfair, that her own marriage—which had begun with so much promise—should end sourly. It seemed cruel. Because, in addition to believing in marriage, she was also frightened of returning to singleness. The word “divorce” terrified her. To Irene, being unmarried meant days of waiting for invitations, hours of waiting for the telephone to ring. It meant a life of artful lies and careful pretense, of guile and insincerity, of double motives. To her, the life unmarried people lived was a dark and doubtful battleground and she, she knew, had none of the weapons, nor the courage, for the battle. She was not beautiful—she knew it. She had been called “pretty,” and “pretty” in her case meant a dark-haired, small-faced, beady sort of prettiness. Alert, bright, interesting—those were the words to describe her looks. To make up for a lack of beauty she had other qualities, of course. She was efficient, tidy, an excellent housekeeper and cook, an expert financial manager, a clever hostess—but these were virtues that were useful in a married woman, not in one who was looking for a husband. One reason she wanted to keep her marriage from collapse was that she was afraid she would never have another; inside her there lurked a small, tight knot of knowledge that, if Justin had not come along when he had, she might never have married at all.