Heart Troubles

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  When she exploded, as she sometimes did, she screamed at him and said, “Justin, talk to me! At least talk to me! Tell me what you’re thinking. Don’t just sit there trying to look peaceful. Tell me what the trouble is! Is it me? Is there something wrong with me? Have you stopped loving me?”

  He only said, “It’s nothing, Irene. Please. Let me finish my paper.” And she had reached a point where each vicissitude of life, each encounter with him, seemed to appear as an insurmountable wall; the future seemed to stretch ahead of her like a series of tall cliffs, each unconquerable and stern. Then, unexpectedly, walking on a Saturday morning on Lexington Avenue, she had seen something shining in the window of a dusty shop, and said, “Look, Justin—” and had taken his arm. From that moment everything began to change.

  Across the backgammon table, sipping coffee one night, she said to him, “Do you remember how we used to quarrel, Justin? Just a few months ago? Do you remember how I used to scold you and accuse you of making mistakes?”

  “Oh, I remember,” he said.

  “I admit it,” she said eagerly. “I do admit it now! I was in the wrong, I know, because I suppose I am too fussy.”

  “You’re very meticulous,” he said.

  “Thank you, but—but perhaps I was wrong to be,” she said. “Anyway, have you noticed that it’s different now? That we don’t quarrel that way any more?”

  “You’re right. We don’t,” he said and smiled at her.

  She rolled her dice out, across the tabletop, hearing their deep ring. Then she reached across and covered his hand with hers. “I love you,” she said.

  “And I you.”

  “I was thinking,” she said. “About—oh, about things like the stair carpet. I’ve been wrong to insist that you walk up the edges of the stairs. I admit that now. I’m sorry for making you do it.”

  “I sometimes forget, I know,” he said.

  “But my point is, it’s all right if you forget, Justin. After all, it’s only a piece of carpet. It’s not as important as—us, for instance.”

  “I agree,” he said.

  “And—about making you put on your slippers the minute you come in the door. You don’t have to do that, either, if you don’t want to.”

  “It’s easier on the rugs with slippers.”

  “But I don’t care! And you can smoke in the dining room, darling, from now on!”

  He smiled still. “You have changed,” he said.

  “Yes,” she laughed, “I know!”

  It was the happiest conversation they had had in months.

  “It’s your turn,” she said.

  They returned to the game.

  A little later she said, “Justin, what was it that first made you think you loved me?”

  He held the dice cup in his hand, gently rattling the dice, and frowned, as he tried to think of the answer. “Do you mean what quality in you I admired most?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Well, I guess it would be your executive ability,” he said.

  She very briefly closed her eyes. “Is that all?”

  “Well, let’s see—let me think.”

  “In the beginning, I mean,” she said.

  “Well—”

  “Never mind. It was a silly question,” she said.

  “No. Wait,” he said eagerly. “Remember, before we were married? We were at the Colsons’ party in Englewood? I’d never danced with you before, and that night I did—I danced with you—and I thought, Irene is one of the best dancers in the world! I thought you were a wonderful dancer, considering you were such a little thing.”

  “Oh. Well, thank you, Justin.”

  “And what about you?” he asked.

  “Me?”

  “Yes—you, Irene.”

  She thought about it for a moment. “Oh, I know what it was—what I first loved about you,” she said softly.

  “What?”

  “Before the Colsons’ party. We were at my mother’s place. There was a cherry tree in the garden and you took me out there, under it, and it was—oh, April, I guess, or early May, and you said—you said …”

  “What did I say?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.”

  “Tell me, Irene.”

  “Well, we were there, under the tree, and it was just beginning to flower. It was all pink, and I remember we both looked up at the blue sky between the branches of pink flowers and you took my hand in yours and you said—”

  “What?”

  “That I was beautiful, that’s all.”

  “I remember now,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I said you were beautiful—but then you denied it.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes. You said that you weren’t beautiful. You said that beauty wasn’t as important as common sense, and you said that partnership and a mutual give-and-take were the important things in a marriage.”

  “What I said was true.”

  “So was what I said.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were beautiful.”

  “Oh!” It came out as a gasp. She hated to have him see her cry—even tears of joy. To keep the tears back she opened her eyes very wide and stared hard, straight down, at the backgammon board. And, staring at it wide-eyed, she felt herself lifted into it, into the pink-lighted countryside, felt herself borne coolly down among the smooth mountains and all about her felt sunshine filtering as if through cherry blossoms.

  “You’ve made your bar point,” he said to her.

  The backgammon table became the center of their lives. It was the continent that held them. It was a land that was both safe and calm. Even when they argued—as they still did upon occasion—the backgammon table was like a platform for their discussions, a lectern across which opinions flowed more easily and could be debated more sensibly.

  One night she said, “Justin, do you know what I think?”

  “What?” he asked her.

  “This table didn’t revive our love.”

  “Didn’t it?”

  “No. Our love was there all along. The table simply made us face each other, made us remember that we loved each other.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” he said.

  “People,” she said, “should face each other.”

  He looked at her. “What’s the matter?” he asked her.

  “Nothing—nothing,” she said.

  Only as they got better at the game did anything that amounted to a quarrel occur over the backgammon table. He said to her one evening, “You know, the thing I like about this game is that there’s no skill involved. It’s all in the way the dice land.”

  “Why, I think there’s a lot of skill involved!” she said.

  “What skill is there? I don’t see any.”

  “There’s strategy, isn’t there? Don’t you call strategy skill, for goodness’ sake?”

  “Please, Irene. Don’t raise your voice at me.”

  “I’m not raising my voice!”

  “You are. You’re screaming again!”

  “I’m only saying there is skill to backgammon. Your last move, for instance.”

  “What was wrong with it?”

  “It was a very foolish move, Justin. Look, if you’d moved this stone to your three point and this one to your—”

  “You always know the right move, don’t you?” he said.

  “As a matter of fact, I do!”

  “Do you mean this move would have been better?” He rearranged his stones in the manner she had indicated.

  “Yes,” she said. “See? See what I mean? Look—now that stone is protected.”

  He studied the board. “Yes,” he said finally. “You’re right.”

  But despite such moments Irene felt that their marriage, which had been like a dying tree, was slowly beginning to flourish again over the backgammon table—that a new surge was coming to its branches, a new leafiness to its stems. And, along with her interior spring came another spring in the t
rees on Seventieth Street, outside her living-room windows.

  “This morning,” she said to him one sunny Saturday, “we have our choice. We can walk in the park or play backgammon.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  He was right, she thought comfortably, it didn’t matter; whichever thing they did they would be happy doing, together.

  “Well, let’s play backgammon then!” she said.

  “All right. You win.”

  “Why? Why do you say ‘You win’?”

  He smiled. “You usually win, don’t you? At backgammon, I mean?”

  She laughed. “Don’t be silly!” she said. “It’s because I think out my game. I use strategy!”

  That evening Irene said, “Darling, do you realize what’s happened? We’ve become so devoted to backgammon that we’ve neglected all our friends! I’ll admit it’s more fun to spend an evening alone with you but we really must have some people in—just for a change.”

  “All right,” he said. “Who’ll we have?”

  “Let’s have John and Eleanor Dixon.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  Irene went to the telephone. She had suggested the Dixons for a reason. Eleanor Dixon—who fancied herself an interior decorator, though she was totally without credentials—had never seen the backgammon table, and Irene was anxious to see what Eleanor thought. She invited the Dixons for the following Saturday night.

  Sure enough, Eleanor had no sooner spotted the table than she marched to it. “Darling, where in the world did you get it?” she demanded.

  “In a funny little shop on Lexington,” Irene said.

  “What shop?”

  “I’ve forgotten the name,” Irene said.

  “Oh, you can’t have forgotten! I must know.”

  “I don’t think there’s another like it in the world.”

  “Hey,” John Dixon said, “I get it—it’s like the back of a checkerboard.”

  “It’s a backgammon table,” Justin said. “Haven’t you ever played backgammon?”

  “We have such fun with it,” Irene said. “We’ve got so we play backgammon night after night. It’s our favorite pastime.”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake,” Eleanor Dixon said.

  “It’s a fascinating game, really,” Irene said. “And highly skilled. It’s one of the oldest games there is. No one knows how old, exactly, it is, but they played backgammon in the days of the Roman Empire.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I call the color antique pigeon’s blood,” Irene said. “Isn’t it an old, old looking pink? The table is over a hundred and fifty years old itself. The marble was probably quarried in Algeria and the stone has a date on the back of it that looks like 1802.”

  Eleanor knelt to examine the carved letters and numbers on the underside.

  “Here,” Justin said, “I’ll show you—”

  “Don’t lift it, Justin,” Irene said.

  “I can see the lettering,” Eleanor said.

  “I want to show you how translucent it is,” Justin said. “Here, let me hold it up to the light.”

  “Please don’t lift it, Justin!” Irene said. “You’ll drop it.”

  “I won’t drop it. I want to show Eleanor—”

  “No—”

  He started to lift it, and at the same time she reached out to restrain him. For a brief moment they struggled over it—one raising the table upward and the other pressing it down—and so, when it fell, suddenly, from their hands and crashed to the floor it seemed impossible that they had done it together and yet, at the same time, they knew that they had.

  Irene looked blankly at the broken marble and then cried out as if the jagged mountains and canyons she had seen beneath its surf ace had collapsed upon her and stabbed her. “Oh, you idiot!” she screamed. “You stupid, clumsy fool! You did it!”

  He stood facing her, his hands trembling. “You,” he said. “You did it! You did it, just as you’ve done everything else. You destroyed it, just as you’ve destroyed everything, always! Always arranging, planning, dominating everything—it’s you! It’s you who’ve broken everything, always!”

  “Oh, no!” She sank to her knees, sobbing, picked up the scattered pieces of broken marble and crushed them to her bosom. “Oh, God!” she cried. “I can’t bear to live without it!”

  “Oh, dear, dear—” Eleanor Dixon whispered.

  “Maybe you can find another like it, Irene,” John Dixon said lamely.

  But they did not find another like it.

  It turned out to be insured under one of the policies the Siltons maintained on their home and property, and after a week or two Justin told Irene that he put in a claim for the cost of the table. “I guess that makes me feel a little better about it,” he said. “It’s good to get money back from the insurance company for a change.”

  Irene said nothing.

  At Abercrombie & Fitch she bought a folding wooden backgammon board. It did not have the cool feel of the marble table, of course, and it produced no clear and true ring when the dice were cast upon it, as the other had. In other ways, too, it was not at all the same. It was more awkward than the table had been because, when they held it on their laps, or between them on the yielding sofa cushions, the stones had a tendency to slide about and become disarranged and the board itself had a tendency to double up on them, suddenly, in the middle of a game. They were forever, it seemed, starting over from the beginning. And, because the board was made of birch and not marble, it contained no buried mountain scenery.

  Irene did not mention the marble table again, until one night, several weeks later, when the board folded up, the stones scattering, and she rose from the sofa and walked quickly to the place in the room where the table had stood. She put both hands out for it, as though it might still be there, invisibly and indestructibly shining.

  He did not look up at her. “What’s the matter?” he asked her.

  “I loved it so!” she said. And then, “Where did we go wrong, Justin? Was it me?”

  For a moment or two he said nothing. Then he said, “If it makes you feel any better, the marble wasn’t from Algeria. It was from Massachusetts. The insurance company sent an appraiser—for the claim. We were overcharged for the table. It wasn’t an antique, either. It was only three or four years old.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I see.”

  “Or perhaps that doesn’t make you feel any better.”

  “Well—”

  “Well—” he said. He had begun to set up the board again. “Let’s play the game,” he said. He rolled the dice. “I’ve just made my bar point,” he said.

  She returned to the sofa and sat down before the board.

  They played in silence now.

  It was not just that the table had deceived her, she thought; it went deeper than that. The thing the table had stood for had deceived her. The love that she had thought was so alive and springing was, in fact, long dead. How long dead she did not know but it certainly had died before the day they had stood outside the shop on Lexington Avenue and had seen the table laden with empty picture frames. It had died, perhaps, even before the Colsons’ party in Englewood, and yet it had been alive that afternoon under the cherry tree at her mother’s place. Somewhere in the time between then and now it had died. Who knew when it had died? Or did the date really matter? The death had been quiet, discreet, unheralded. And the backgammon table had been nothing more than a marble monument to that dead love.

  RACE DAY

  Close to eleven o’clock Mr. and Mrs. Foley got to the club, parking the car down near the bathhouses. As Mr. Foley flicked off the ignition switch the starting gun for the race went off. Mrs. Foley plugged her ears with her fingers and remarked, “Goodness, you’d think it was a bombing or something, to hear the noise. It was deafening, just absolutely deafening.” Mr. Foley got out of the car and said, “C’mon, for gosh sake, do you want to miss the whole thing? My gosh, we’re late already!” He slammed the car door shu
t and started across the gravel drive toward the clubhouse.

  They both were in their early forties. Mrs. Foley was small, with crisply curled reddish hair and freckled arms. She wore a white tennis dress and white canvas shoes. Mr. Foley, a heavy man, wore a white visored cap, a blue pullover sweater, and yachting pants that were dirty and patched around the knees. “Wait for me, dear,” Mrs. Foley said, hurrying to catch up with him. Mr. Foley took his wife’s arm and steered her purposefully up the front steps of the clubhouse, through the lounge, and out the French doors toward the line of white benches in front of the pier. It was one of those warm, clear mornings on Long Island Sound when the windows of the club were always thrown wide open, and the combination of the fine day and the race had brought out quite a crowd of members. Deck chairs had been scattered across the stone terrace, even on the pier. All heads were turned toward the water. The judges, with heavy binoculars slung over their shoulders, were gathered at the far end of the pier, their white trousers and white shirts gleaming in the Sunlight. Mr. and Mrs. Foley finally found an empty bench.