Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  When she stared at him across the tennis court, it occured to her to say, Hal, why has not one single thing here worked out? Of course, she could not ask.

  After he told her Sallie had no imagination in bed, and since she couldn’t compete with Sallie’s bosoms, she decided to be more sexy. She had not forgotten the night she asked him if he liked her new shortie trousseau nightgown, and he looked away. Then staring at the blouse, she realized other women would have filled it out. She had not enjoyed trying to nurse Rick, and she became “dry as a buckshot field in August.” Her mother provided the description. Anyway, she had thought being confined to a nursing schedule was a bore, and she had not found the whole experience a galvanizing one at all. But she wanted to nurse Hal, and liked lying atop pillows or turning backward, trying every position that came to mind. She liked his wanting her twice in one night; everything was a new experience. She had learned to suck his balls because he liked that. One night she suggested the wheelbarrow position; though once she explained, he did not feel up to it. She was relieved. She did not have the energy, either, to walk about on her hands while he held her thighs and inserted himself. Yet she would have tried.

  Now that Laurel was here in this quiet country farmhouse without the active household she had left behind, she had more compassion for her mother’s difficult role as a widow. She wondered if she was right in having refused to move down here when she did. She would wait and see what happened, her mother said, on a foreboding note. Here, she had counted on a family situation. She and Hal had written for months about Christmas in their own house. She had thought about there being grandparents, Mama and Daddy and her mother, and Uncle Pete and Aunt Pris and their children as cousins for Rick. She cooked the first Christmas dinner for everyone herself. Hal shot a wild turkey. By then she wished Natty Bumppo had never existed. And that she had not longed to be the first woman to write intimately about the sacred initiations of the woods belonging formerly to male writers. Sometimes, actively skiing, she and William would quit because it seemed a mindless sport. But hunting! You had to be mindless to sit for hours in silence in a field, or on a log, or in a tree stand in the woods, waiting for a bird to fly or a deer to walk past. She hated the lethal zing that brought lives to an end. But she kept up pretext. After Easter, Rick said over the phone his stepmother had dyed eggs and the teenagers waged war with them; what an ache she had felt, thinking of that household. “We went turkey hunting,” she had said. “Wow,” Rick said. Why tell him the day’s reality, how after Bloody Marys at lunch Hal slept that afternoon in a field, flies on his face, snoring so loudly any turkey would have flown out of the county. She lay watching soft spring clouds, wondering if the day was as pretty in Connecticut, wondering what Rick was doing. Thinking how back there they had had jelly bean trails around the house on Easter morning.

  Hal’s family came late to Christmas dinner. He started the cocktail hour alone. Seeing his condition, she threw his last drink into the sink. She knew she would pay for that later. But she spared them all the horror of having him drunk at Christmas dinner. Conversation lagged despite ten people being present. She missed the way dinners had been with William and his mother; having removed herself from the middle-class boredom she grew up in, she had returned herself to it. Pete did remark he believed this thing of working for money was for the birds. People ought to do something they liked. She remembered thinking, If only she could have looked toward Hal with the sense of superiority about life they’d once counted on.

  Hal had nightcaps after everyone left, and her mother and Rick were asleep. She followed his stumbling path to bed thinking, This is our first Christmas in our own house.

  The Christmas they were apart, they had agreed to look at the stars at a certain hour and think about one another. She remembered his writing when he put his face to the bars a certain way, he could even see the stars whole, without stripes across them.

  By the next Christmas, she left her mother and Rick to have Christmas with Hal. He had a ten-day leave, but not being paroled was still not allowed into his county. They went to a motel in Delton called the Ditty-Wah-Ditty. It ain’t no town, it ain’t no city! the old song went. That motel had been the butt of jokes back in her and Hal’s teenage years. She and William were divorced. He knew she went South to see Hal and on her return said, “Your prison friend’s a lucky guy.”

  “I don’t think he’s so lucky,” she said. “Why?”

  “He got out of prison and is getting out permanently.”

  “He got out on a legal pass because he’s been a trusty for two years.”

  “Still, he’s lucky. He killed someone.”

  “It was manslaughter. Teddy Kennedy killed someone and didn’t go to prison at all.”

  “I’m not making points,” William had said.

  During those ten days, they drove into the Delta, away from Matagorda. When she went home, she was prompted to send him a postcard from Kennedy Airport. The Delta was the loneliest looking place on a lowering Sunday afternoon—all that flat brown emptiness filled me with a sort of fear.

  Then he sent her a card:

  It is my conviction

  That loneliness is never

  Where one is, but

  Who one is with.

  The Delta, though cold

  And flat and brown

  And full of winter emptiness,

  Is not lonely.

  Even on a lowering

  Sunday afternoon.

  Or better to say it won’t be

  Anymore.

  She was more in love with him because of his placement of the words on paper. She had written, I feel absolutely wild with love. And desperate about the times I can’t crawl inside your skin and be totally one with you. It’s why I want to learn to swallow what I could not when I tried.

  For a long time I will feel you, angel, he answered. My hands, my mouth, all feel you this morning. I remember kissing in all the delicious places. I think men with no ties pull easier time than those of us whose hearts and minds live on the outside with people we love.

  Isn’t it amazing, she would say, that last year I was afraid to tell people I wanted a divorce and this year I’m afraid to tell anyone I’m married—and to a prisoner? Those ten days were the most fantastic of my life. They taught me what I’ve already learned, that to live one must be willing to run risks.

  All along a cautionary saying her father liked worried itself out of the back of her mind: If chance is present at the beginning, a dice throw will never abolish it.

  Only in extreme circumstances were prisoners allowed to marry. As editor of the paper, Hal had been to one such service. A con had remarked, “The groom was tight as hell, but the bride was anything but.”

  She had not been certain she would go through with that marriage, even though she arrived with her blood test. Out one day with Buddy, Hal had gotten his. Then again she found herself on a Mississippi highway heading toward marriage, and with uncertainty in her heart. He went into a phone booth on a highway and called the minister they both knew, Brother Walker, who brought the children to sing at the prison. She had wondered at the strangeness of things, that the man had come back into her life. “Preacher, will you marry us?” she could hear Hal saying over the roar of passing trucks. She went into the rest room of a filling station and changed into a soft dress and high heels, thinking, What a strange place to get ready to be a bride.

  On their wedding night, Hal said, “This is what I was made for, to lie around and make love. All I’ve ever wanted to be was a playboy. I just never had enough money.”

  Those words could rankle this much later. At the time she thought how she and William had struggled and about their aims and goals and the future they wanted for Rick.

  But they were in love; while all people thought their love was special, she and Hal knew theirs really was.

  They intended keeping the marriage secret till Hal was out—till he crossed those tracks for the last time. Unexpectedly, he told
his family after a while; she had had to tell her own, and that included William. Waiting a year for Hal, secretly married except for her family knowing, she began to panic.

  Hal, I’ve struggled long and hard to bring myself up out of what I came from. I can’t let my life come to tragedy, or go down the drain. Now I have nothing and no one but you. I wonder if you see the enormity of what you’ve taken on, that you really are responsible for my life. We got married on money Daddy gave you for your ten-day leave, but we are middle-aged and can’t be dependent on him. I wonder if you know how hard you must struggle to stay as you seem to be, and that life won’t be all making love. Reality will loom as I’m facing it now about leaving Rick. I’ve married someone most people think killed a boy on purpose. I can’t be left someday, Hal. I am helpless without you and totally dependent. I need to be taken care of emotionally and financially.

  If I were not giving up my child for you, it would be one thing. But to have done so and made some horrible mistake is another thing. I’ve wondered about our drinking together when you’ve been out, and how easily you seem to fall back into an old pattern. Having an abrupt quarrel on our honeymoon and patching it up making love is fun, but when the great rush of first love is over, are you going to stay changed, as you’ve said you have changed? I have controlled drinking and been as strong as I am because William was strong, and I need the same strength from you.

  It’s about to kill me absolutely to give up Rick. Sometimes I wonder if it will mar our marriage, if I can stand it. I wonder if you realize what is happening inside of me because of it. You are charming and handsome and romantic and I’m afraid I fell head over heels in love with you because of that, and you may want someone younger in time. You know, I think that could drive me to suicide. I’m scared.

  Then the third Christmas, they were in their own house, so long planned for. She told him afterward, “You almost ruined Christmas. It’s not my fault your own children weren’t here.”

  Her nose caught the blow. The moment before his hand flew out, she wondered if she had expected it, wanted it, enticed it, but believed it would never happen. Thank God, her mother had already left. She had turned to Pris: hadn’t her sister-in-law any feeling for her that she had married Hal, given him back a life, a place for his children to come, was good to her parents, and her brother was hardly out of prison and back to dangerous drinking? She only asked, “Pris, will you help with Hal’s drinking? He’s broken my nose.”

  “Put some ice on your nose,” Pris said.

  Family? Do they love him that they’ll never offer a word of criticism? Laurel wondered.

  When she drove Rick to the Delton airport after Christmas, her black eye was covered by sunglasses. “I tried to talk to him, Mom,” he said. “But Hal has me boxed in, and knows it. One wrong word and he’ll tell me not to come here again, and separate us.”

  “God in heaven, try not to think about it. There are the good times.”

  “I know,” he said quietly. “I have them with Hal too.”

  Life without children was so difficult when you were used to them. There was only her and Hal’s dependence on one another, a multitude of small conversations, no one to intervene, only the dogs to turn to occasionally. She left Rick at the airport, dreading her return to the silent house. He was taller than she. He looked more like William and his family. “Why does Rick lift his lip and show his gums when he laughs?” Hal had asked.

  “It’s upper-class New England to look like a horse,” she said.

  She worried at the airport why Rick had gained so much weight; wasn’t William watching him dependably as he always had? He needed a bra, she told him. He had eaten so much at dinner, he excused himself suddenly from the table. “Did you throw up?” she had asked. He said not to worry; he was keeping up his weight for boxing and the swimming team. Rick thought himself too old to hug and kiss, and walked away. Then he came bounding back; they embraced. “See you in February,” they said bravely. He said, “Mom, at home I start counting the days. I wake up in the morning and say, Only thirty more days, only twenty-nine more days.…” She could only nod. She watched him go along the corridor. She had had two husbands, and one husband was damaged by too much mother love and the other one suffered its lack. How hard the road, she had thought.

  She returned to inane evening conversations after Hal had a few drinks. Once when he reminded her she had come from nothing, she found herself crying back, “I could belong to the DAR. An aunt traced it.” Overvalue the past and you can’t take hold of the reins of the future. Where had she heard that? He told her Sallie was descended from Thomas Jefferson. “From his black relatives or his white ones?” she asked. “Thomas Jefferson never had a black mistress!” he cried out. “Who cares,” she said. “I’d like to sleep with a black man.” Hal had turned ashen. “In Boston, the Cabots and the Lowells speak to the Perrys,” she had said. The remark went over Hal’s head.

  Now she went to graduate school, which Hal thought was stupid. “What else am I to do?” she had said. “Nothing to dew, nothing to dew; don’t start that again,” he said. What was there for her to do? She asked Rick if he would not ask William, since he had always programmed her life. “Mom,” Rick had said, “are you crazy?”

  No one would know what it cost her going to that small college farther south in the Delta, the only one within feasible driving distance. Crossing the campus among small-town kids, hugging schoolbooks to her chest, she had wanted instead to be seeing about Rick’s going to school. “Well, I guess I’d be going through something like this with Sallie by now,” Hal conceded. Sallie? Didn’t the man see the difference between them? Not even two dollars’ worth, she thought. That was the old story about Pepper. He’d asked Daddy to get him a marriage license in town, but Daddy forgot for a while. When he brought the license, Pepper said he had decided to marry a different girl and needed a new license. “Well, it’ll cost you another two dollars for a license with another name,” Daddy said. Pepper said, Never mind then. He’d marry the first girl. There wasn’t two dollars’ worth of difference between them.

  One time Hal had laughed, saying every time he got rid of one woman, another one was waiting. Was that what she was to him—a convenience? Once they settled in here, he heard from the little nurse, Rosalie. As he spoke about her letter, a light of reminiscence came into his eyes, the certain light men get thinking back on a woman they have slept with. “Did you sleep with Rosalie in the hospital?” she said.

  “Why not? It was available.”

  She only thought he should have been suffering as fully as everyone else in the case.

  The refrigerator door slammed. Ice cubes fell again into a glass. He never would ask if she would like a drink. She got up to fix dinner.

  She thought again about the day at the tennis court and another blow to her nose, this one unintentional. She believed Hal was watching a woman walk away from the courts, whose bosoms were jiggling. She turned to watch. He sent a ball her direction, and as she looked back, it caught her face sharply. Hal was horrified. He ran around the net crying “Baby!” She tasted blood. As her eyes closed, she had another flash of memory. They were all in the backyard shortly after Hal had come home. She was so pleased he was teaching Rick to shoot clay pigeons. “Pull,” she heard Rick cry. And then he shot.

  When she looked around, Tina was hovering in the carport. She went inside. She found her curled up in a chair in this bedroom and took the girl on her lap. “Tina,” she said, “you mustn’t be frightened by the sound of guns. What happened with your father was an accident.”

  Tina sat bolt upright in her lap. “It certainly was not an accident. My father said, ‘I’m going to kill your brother.’ He got the gun and loaded it. I wrestled him for it. I was eight years old. Then he shot him.”

  She opened her eyes at the tennis court, saying, “It doesn’t hurt.” People were playing golf on a bright green course beyond them. Black waiters in cropped jackets carried trays loaded with drinks above
their heads. Words carved in stone in a building directly ahead of her swam into focus: SWAN COUNTRY CLUB.

  I’m a member, she had thought.

  13

  They gave a funeral but no one came. While she could speak humorously, Daddy’s dying, of course, was not funny. He lay comatose for weeks for a reason no doctor could figure out, since when Daddy was cut open and sewn up, his cancer past hope, he was given the least anesthesia. Lying in the Delton hospital, he said one word occasionally, “Mitzi,” until a doctor arched an eyebrow and asked her, “Another woman? Everyone has skeletons.” She told him, “No. That was a little dog of his wife’s that died soon after she did.” Why the substitution of names, anyone could guess about. But she and Hal agreed Daddy had had a nervous breakdown in his coma, the only place he dared to, at last.

  Another woman? Laurel had stood at his hospital window those months back thinking about the words. What happened between her and Daddy in his bathroom became not even a memory once she came to Matagorda to live as Hal’s wife, two years ago. If there had been another woman, though, late in Daddy’s life, that woman was herself. Always, the look he gave her out of pale, kind eyes said he knew what she had come to Matagorda to offer—love, trust, obedience, intelligence, and respect: things her husband never seemed to realize. Here I am in Soundport again, Laurel thought, staring out a window and contemplating a world that was one sheet of ice. She tried to imagine the warm weather Hal was having in Africa.

  The rented cottage where she stood was like a cocoon; its windows covered by plastic sheeting against the cold closed her in. From an upstairs window, Laurel looked out toward Long Island Sound, a gem of flashing water in the distance. When a school bus shifted gears nearby, she assumed a mother’s satisfied smile. Old habits die hard. Yesterday, driving too fast, stopping abruptly, she threw out an arm to protect Rick from the dashboard. They laughed. He was twice as big as she was now. She wondered why she and William had never thought to walk at the beach in winter; it was lovely, and Buff’s hair feathered out along her spine.