Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  Hal was sunbathing in the backyard when she left. She wanted to speak to him but did not know how to break down her barricade of silence. However she did not plan to mollify him too much because the words she spoke were the truth.

  After her meeting, she did not want to return home to either Hal or the house’s quiet while he slept. She stayed downtown. She passed the drugstore where once she had phoned William, and had lunch in the luncheonette where she and Rick almost had a Coke; the shoe store was replaced by a fancy foods shop for pets, Lick Your Chops. She groaned. In Gristede’s she bought lamb chops and steak as treats with the twenty bucks she stole from Hal.

  Ahead was her summer’s stint at cooking when Tina came for her now laborious summer visit, bringing a friend; another interruption to her writing. Tina stayed longer each year. Soundport was more exciting than the inland small town in Florida where she lived. Laurel went on thinking Sallie got the short end of the stick, and scarcely any alimony. Laurel had reasoned out long ago that lives that came into contact with Hal were harmed, even Jubal and Buff. Something Fate had not called for happened. Tina dated Rick’s friends or met boys on her own. Hal snored away the night, but she heard the long silences in Tina’s room and cars going away at dawn. She faced wine bottles under the bed, layers of wet towels on the hardwood floors, and dirty dishes stacked around her room. For years she had tried to get Tina to help out, feeling the girl needed to be taught direction. Tina objected. When Laurel asked her to cook frozen peas for dinner, Tina said, “I can’t cook.” “You can read directions on the box,” she told her, but Hal ended up cooking while Tina watched TV, her summer’s activity. Then Tina phoned Sallie to say she didn’t feel welcome. Laurel wanted her to work. Sallie phoned Hal. A lot going on behind my back, Laurel observed. “Laurel, I’m ready to get rid of you,” Hal had muttered, one of his nasty mutterings. It bothered her. At least Tina had the decency to look embarrassed, the little bitch. Daddy’s girl. Hal plucked at a bow in her hair when he passed by to make sure Tina was looking at him. Finally the moment came when she said, “Tina, please help me with your father’s drinking.”

  “Oh, no, Laurel. I want money for college.”

  So much for the promise I’ve kept you all these years, she had thought.

  Laurel continued down the main street of town, thinking of the behavior of Hal’s people, their complete refusal to offer any criticism to help him. Shortly after he got out of prison she stopped expecting to hear from them, stopped even wanting to hear the telephone ring with best wishes, a kind word, an invitation. While he was in prison, they behaved properly; they sent him things. But none of them would have their social positions jeopardized afterward by inviting him to their houses. Her mother was right when she said, “You did them a great favor. If it weren’t for you, he wouldn’t be in Connecticut.” She had tried to be a good stepmother, she had tried to be a good wife. For God’s sake, she gave a party for his friends in the Scarabees’ band and their spouses. A dinner with card tables so everyone had a place to sit down and eat. She thought about that night and the pitiful creature, Doreen.

  “Dough-reen,” Hal called her in his Southern accent. What was wrong with the woman? She had long wondered that. Doreen was fat and hefty and wore a stationary, incurious smile on a big white face. The night of her party she figured out one thing wrong with the woman. She has a crush on my husband, Laurel observed to herself. It was such a pitiful situation, she wanted to tell Hal. But men were so susceptible to flattery, she thought it best not to bring it to his attention.

  But imagine, Laurel said to herself, how she walked into my house. When she opened the door, Doreen had barged in with her gaze averted. She didn’t know enough to speak to the hostess? she had wondered, even if she was a manicurist and obviously from the wrong side of the tracks. But Doreen knew little. She stayed in a corner of the dining room hulked up while others served themselves, uncertain about her behavior. She looked about all night with that smile, never speaking to anyone, though now she was one of four women who played in the band. Once passing between rooms, they met in a doorway. Doreen lifted up her chin and stared off. Laurel felt actually a little fear, Doreen was so much like a big-bosomed hen, and masculine in an aggressive, silent manner. She had thought again, The pitiful creature has a crush on my husband. But what odd behavior. She did not want to be uncomplimentary because she had looked down on his activities enough, so she did not remark on Doreen to Hal. He had started her on the bagpipes. Doreen came to the rented stone house one evening, six years ago now, with an old set of pipes she found in her attic. Hal tried them out, he made suggestions. That night Doreen never said a word either. She sat listening to Hal with her skirt hiked up, exposing huge white knees and thighs. Laurel showed her out in her silence. She watched Doreen with her big behind walk off into the dark, toward a rattletrap car, and could not imagine a life more terrible than to be ugly, alone, and have no money. That first night, she had turned back and said, “She’s certainly pitiful,” and Hal agreed. “Yes, she is.”

  Now Laurel thought about Hal’s sweet side, how he dropped by her mother’s some Monday evenings to break up her mother’s loneliness, and how he helped Doreen with bag-piping. She had come a long way in six years. Whenever she went to a Scarabees function with Hal, she found him in endless conversation with Doreen, a monologue. Doreen stood above him with her queer, remote smile, as if not quite taking everything in. Laurel had never seen Hal “run his mouth” so much, an action of which he’d have accused her. She saw Hal as happy he had someone to impress, at last.

  She decided to go home from downtown because she could not think of anything else to do. In the house, she could feel Hal upstairs sleeping. The telephone rang and she knew it was not for her; she had hardly anyone to call her; calls were always about bagpiping and Scarabees activities. A woman said, “Mrs. MacDonald? This is lawyer James Moody’s secretary. Would you please give me the date of your marriage to Mr. MacDonald.”

  “Just a minute.” Laurel put down the receiver and went upstairs in an obedient manner to rummage in a drawer till she found the Mississippi license in its blue folder. Then she went downstairs and told the woman the date, thinking as soon as she hung up, Why the hell didn’t I say I didn’t know, and let Hal find out?

  She went back upstairs to the room where he was asleep, with a sense of unreality and a pounding heart. She told herself, Not like this. No human being does this. How could he, after all I have done? She sat down in his bedroom on a settee from Matagorda, her hands folded in her lap, her ankles crossed, like a proper scared girl at dancing school hoping for a partner.

  “Hal, are we getting a divorce?”

  He opened his eyes without looking at her and shrugged his shoulders.

  “You can’t just—get a divorce.”

  “There’s no-fault divorce in Connecticut.”

  She saw there was nothing to be said. His mind was made up. She had no choice. Everything was to be stripped right away. Who had brought about no-fault divorce, the Women’s Movement? Signs had pointed toward his leaving, but she had refused to believe them. She had foolishly believed in idealism, in justice, and in loyalty.

  She could not imagine that Hal had scurried around behind her back and filed for a divorce without her even knowing it. He would have to have been thinking about one for a long time, secretly planning and secretly plotting. She had lived with such a person for ten years? Laurel, when she went into her bedroom, saw ahead inevitable years of middle-aged loneliness, of bravery in the face of despair. She turned around and marched right back to his doorway.

  “Thank you very much for waiting until I’m nearly fifty-three years old to do this,” she said.

  “Oh, are you that old?”

  The damn little bastard knew exactly how old she was, or ought to. She returned to her room and closed the door. She might as well now tell her mother this trouble. “Even I,” Mrs. Wynn said, “never thought Hal would do something like this.”

 
Before going out, he came into the kitchen wearing his navy blue Balmoral and carrying the case with his bagpipes. Hal outlined his plan. He would stay in the house until the divorce was over and then he would buy out Laurel’s half. She said, “In other words, you plan to exactly copy William. Don’t you remember saying when William stayed in the house during our divorce, it was the most unmasculine thing you’d ever heard of?”

  “The difference now is, Laurel, there’s no one who cares anything about you,” Hal said.

  15

  After the night he held her in the bathroom, Laurel decided she would live with Hal knowing he might kill her. She would only be more wary, she would only be more prepared. No man was ever going to rattle her brains again, striking her across the head. Not unless she stuck a knife through him afterward, or killed him somehow.

  After that night, a different silence had existed between them. Not only had she known Hal might kill her, he knew it too. She was a living daily reminder of his past. When she said, “This time you’ll go to prison forever,” it was as if she had screamed, “This time.” Up here in the East, while a few people knew about his prison record, it was not like living where things had happened, it was not like living where people who were involved, one way or the other, were around: people who chose sides, people who condemned. While she attempted to bury his past inside herself, she could not bury the present, that he might kill her. Hal knew that, and it was partly why he left.

  Laurel believed this for the three years she had been alone. She who was always so attuned to silence was being driven stark raving mad by it sometimes. Never for a moment had she adjusted to living alone, to a house where no one else was coming, where no one else lived. Today she received a package from Frederick’s of Hollywood and watched UPS drive away, thinking of the absurdity of having sent for a bra, one which cost twenty-five dollars and which, as a divorcée, she could not afford.

  In the silence of this house, yet another rented house in Soundport, she walked about in the mornings talking to inanimate objects, in order to hear a voice. She would not succumb to morning television, even the news, not wanting to grow dependent on those cheery faces as companions. She was afraid of continuing to sit there and end up looking at shouting, mindless people on game shows. Going about these days, she wore indoors a paper cigar band on the appropriate finger, like a wedding ring. It was her talisman, she decided, the day she found it on a sidewalk. To wear it would mean she would find someone again. She took it off at home only to bathe.

  To the house’s silence she had said, “You are dark now, but you won’t be when the leaves are off the trees, will you?” To a woodpecker busy at the shingles, she said, “Shoo. What are you doing up there?” And she asked her jade plants, “Have I watered you too much?” In a diary she had begun keeping she wrote:

  Hal has stripped me of everything I had, was used to, was entitled to expect—my whole life-style: a large house, married couples as friends, animals, a sense of continuity, progressing on toward old age with a sense of peace, companionship. If anything, I know I am going to die this way of loneliness. The eternalness of getting up and going to bed alone. Solitude! So much. I don’t think I can bear it much longer. I’m not such a bleeding heart anymore. I gave everything of myself I had to give and got in return a roof over my head, three squares a day, and shit. The only consolation I can find is, Sallie got a lot worse.

  Feeling her life was in order, she looked over into it as from the edge of hell. She had done all she knew to do; she had tried. She made an error that indeed might be a fatal one: she sold the house she got in the divorce, and with a second mortgage. She was so innocent as not to know a house was something you took off on an income tax, and now she had nothing to declare. Then she moved to Delton. Delton!

  Was the past never to be repaired? She fled from there in a year. She would have fled sooner had she not had a year’s lease on a condominium. Coming back to Soundport, she liked the first little house she rented. Then unexpectedly the landlord wanted it back for himself. Even her sudden tears did not get him to change his mind. She cried more easily than she used to. She would never forget the torrent of tears that Hal unleashed. It shocked her still, because they seemed to be over something deeper even than his treachery. Deeper than over the future she knew she would have. She was still shaken to her roots by it.

  Laurel liked her house by the beach now, overlooking the Sound. But she could not afford to go on paying over a thousand dollars a month, with an increase yearly. Plus utilities, she reminded herself. She had dealt with so much alone since Hal left, she was more astute than she once was. She was less idealistic than before, too, about the human race. Too long she had believed in good in people. God knows, she had learned there was no one to depend on but oneself, certainly not real estate brokers, lawyers, bankers, people she turned to selling her house. I’m screwed. Her mother cried out about that house, “It was falling down around you.” It was mine, Laurel thought. Because of the second mortgage, she had no money to put down on a small house. Prices kept rising. No, from now on she could only be a renter, money thrown out the window. And soon she could not afford Soundport; what then?

  For so long, it seemed her breasts were like apples, like a young girl’s. Since they had fallen, they were rounder and softer and seemed larger. But who was she to capture with this bra, or who did she want to capture among the kind of men she met?

  When the telephone rang, she was glad; the voice of a solicitor, even, was a welcome one from the outside world, even if she was writing. She kept on writing. When that stint was over, there was the silence of no one coming home, there was the night ahead. The only solution was to get a full-time job, but what could she do—be a saleswoman? Her friend Chris was calling. Her mother was always asking where she met the strange men she met. But she did not want to make her life among women. If that was an unpopular idea with feminists, she was sorry. But she was doing feminist things when she didn’t know what a feminist was, when she had never meant to be any kind of leader. She had struck out from home, she had traveled around alone, had an abortion when it was not acceptable or easy, been one of the first women to publish a story in Esquire, gone off and left her husband and child. She had rather go out to dinner with a man and was grateful for each invitation. At sixty, Chris was an unpublished writer and was happy about that. He would go on suffering and writing in a shabby room without water. He took showers about town, at tennis clubs, or at the Y, insinuating himself in. Last night he had taken a shower at her house before their usual Dutch treat date. He always wanted to see porno movies in Bridgeport, and they had a sandwich afterward.

  “How’d you like the movie last night?”

  “Boring,” she said. “I’m tired of looking between legs into vaginas and at engorged, purple cocks.”

  “I know, but this morning it turns me on. If I came over, would you blow me?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Have you got time to hear a fantasy?” This, too, was part of their palship, and she picked up a magazine and said, “Yes.” She propped onto her knees a copy of Hers. It was ridiculous she tried so late in time to hop into the world as a fast-paced journalist, hailing cabs and having a lot of appointments. Her agent got her an assignment at her request. “Living Alone at Thirty and Liking It.” She found young women she interviewed beginning to worry about their “biological clocks running out.” None of them had seriously interesting or important careers. She told them giving up being a wife and mother was not worth it. They had begun in their hearts to agree. However, they couldn’t find anybody to marry and blamed the Women’s Movement. It had messed things up quite a bit. They couldn’t subjugate themselves to men. Then they would have a hard time marrying, she had thought. Couldn’t they pretend awhile? Past their own generation of men, the young women believed things would be better. They had grown up with mothers being at home. Laurel’s generation, they meant. No sense telling them she had “done something.” She’d just always been
around to dispense lemonade also. Maybe Rick had not fallen in love seriously because he could not connect to a woman not content with house, kids, dog.

  Laurel turned a glossy page of Hers. She had failed at the article she tried because she could not write glib, racy copy. Rick had said, “If you were a girl, would you consider me a hot marriage prospect? Both my parents have been divorced twice. My mother married a convict.” She looked back to the couple she and William once were and doubted William understood anymore than she did how their images had changed. Rick had said he would make it because of the first twelve years of stability he’d had—that part of his childhood had been, to him, nearly perfect.

  “Hell, you’ve got to make it, boy,” she had told him.

  “Are you still there, pal?” Chris’s voice was hurried.

  She doubted Chris could get it up in person and was never going to find out. “And you take my cock in your mouth. It’s big and throbbing. You stick it up your pussy. I’m getting really turned on. My pants are open. In and out. My cock is shoved inside you. You’re hot and ready. Now, we’ve come. Did you come?”

  Laurel read the headline of a paragraph in the magazine. “Breasts Are Out in the 80s. Bouncy Beautiful Bottoms Are In.” So much for Frederick’s. “Yeah.”

  “You hang in there, pal,” Chris said, signing off.

  She tried on the bra; under a sweater it looked as if she were wearing two inverted ice cream cones. Laurel stashed it back in the box. “I’m not going to any more new singles groups,” she told the house’s silence.

  Hal had been married for three years, and here she was still seeking, floundering and searching. Her novel came out, which changed nothing in her life. She thought back to Hal’s moving and how his movers kicked about the manuscript, scattering pages. She had worked on a desk that belonged to him, and it was carted off. She had thought her pages safely set away, but they had not been. She did not know how she finished the book, being hit by a divorce in the middle of it, everything in her life scattered and fractured. Last Christmas Rick worried and said, “How much longer does your alimony last?”