Every day now, the structural problems of writing fiction overwhemed her so that invariably she began typing in a mindless sort of way, letting things occur on paper the way they did in her life, haphazard, accidental and redundant—except that printed in pica they seemed, worst of all, unlikely. Ever since she had first recognized this problem Coco had dedicated half of her REVIEW HOUR to thinking seriously about FORM and only last week had written out a list of guidelines.
RETHINK ENTIRE DIRECTION OF BOOK
TRY TO FIND AN OBJECTIVE (get an IMPORTANT pt. to make)
FIX CHARS. SO THEY CARRY MORE SYMBOLISM
REVISE OLD SCENES OR THINK OF NEW ONES TO DEVELOP MINOR CHARS.
DO OTHER CHARS. SEEM SCRAWNY NEXT TO GWENSANDRA?
WHAT STYLE IS THIS BOOK BEING WRITTEN IN?
WHAT ARE THE PHILOSOPHIC IMPLICATIONS OF VARIOUS PATTERNS OF PROSE?
Coco reread the list in her notebook and felt like a messy drawer full of lingerie that badly needed straightening. Hating herself for lacking a fixed identity, she decided that her role-playing nature excluded the possibility of structure in anything she created. It was logically impossible for anyone who had a multiple-choice personality to have a single coherent point of view even on paper. And the saddest part of all was that she wasn’t even overly ambitious. She didn’t even aspire to the heavyweight intellectual division of social histories or psychological treatises on women.
All Coco wanted was to make the minor literary leagues, to recycle some of her own leftover life (like converting slightly green Saran-wrapped roast beef into hash) and show how a sensitive American woman, reared in and ruined by the inverted values of the 1950’s, could never find happiness. Theoretically, Take Heaven by Storm was to be a riotously funny mock-epic of an American girl on a hunt for happiness, working her way through battalions of men—every age, color, size, and kind—while accumulating college credits, cute clothes, groovy memories, job experience, airline ticket receipts, souvenirs, and Wisdom. But for some reason the scenes of Gwensandra Rappaport husband-hunting, which were to have an undate-upbeat Tom Jones quality, sounded terribly Candy-ish, and Coco hated Terry Southern.
Torn between fears of formlessness vs. infinite possibilities, Coco started typing again. But at four o’clock, instead of rereading or revising the ten pages during her REVIEW hour, she went downstairs, an hour earlier than usual after changing clothes, to begin picking up the toys and clutter that reaccumulated during Mrs. Marshall’s brief bed-making tour on the third floor. Hustling around in a six-o’clock style—although it was only five—Coco tried to trick the children into a premature dinner, which was her only chance to appear put-together when Suede arrived. Coco always tried to outfox her own existence when ex-lovers or in-laws visited the house. Even now, in her post-lib days, she, used pre-lib ploys to camouflage her oppression in front of judgmental visitors and spies. For Coco believed that exposing the horrors and errors of her domestic days and ways was just as rude as the crazy exhibitionist up in the park whipping his penis out of his pants for no practical purpose at all.
But right after Mrs. Marshall left, Coco nonchalantly asked Jessica to watch Joshua while she cooked dinner, and the request produced a hysterically shrill refusal. It was at the peak of Jessica’s shrieks that Coco heard the front door open.
Coco wasn’t ready. The house didn’t look right, the children weren’t behaving, and her heart, unexpectedly, began to pitch wildly about in her chest. She stooped to scoop up a heavy, wet Pamper lying crumpled on the floor, tossed it toward the trash basket, missed, and then, inhaling urine, moved into the hallway.
Gavin came forward to side-swipe her face with a kiss, and then everything blurred, because Suede was standing close beside her, and for one moment—with Ultra Man roaring on the television set in the background—Coco felt an instinctive, almost forgotten quickening in her core as Suede’s shoulder grazed past her breasts.
Ahhhh, her body whispered, and Coco felt surprise that after so many years Suede could still stir that eternal moan in the center of her being.
He hugged her and printed a friendly kiss on her face.
“How are you?” she asked, smiling and moving back a few inches.
“Good.” Suede grinned. “How’ve you been, Coco?”
His voice was perfect. He always spoke in professionally tender tones so that business and bedroom talk sounded the same. Everything about him was professional, but his voice especially was reassuring. It had a perfect anchorman tone—a compromise between intimacy and authority, so that when the three of them were together they could all remain innocent strangers to distant days of illicit passions. Only Suede could pull off a heist like that one. He was that good, Suede, that professional.
“What a great house,” he said, looking around. Dominating the center of the hallway with his legs spread sea-captain-wide and absently rubbing a caressing palm across the white-shirted mounds of his chest, he was speculating about his creature comforts in this new environment.
Coco lifted her hands to her face and swept both palms along her cheeks, flattening damp strands of hair away from her temples. “It’s really a very big house,” she said softly, smelling the warm odor that rose from beneath her lifted arms.
Suede looked even handsomer—tougher—than Belmondo, who had played the film version of the famous antihero Suede created to catapult himself onto the cover of Time magazine last year. He seemed heavier than when she last saw him, and the topography of his face showed that his favorite expressions had permanently cleaved themselves into deep crags and nicely etched smile lines around his feverishly dark eyes. His heavy black hair was long over his neck, and his gentle but terribly knowing, smile was more tentative and less frequent than Coco remembered, making the occasional flash of hard white teeth more rewarding when it appeared.
Coco realized she was staring when, Jessica and Nicky suddenly came tearing through the hallway, bumping into the little red wagon parked near the radiator before chasing each other toward the kitchen.
“God, this place is like a zoo,” Coco laughed nervously. “Jessica, why aren’t you watching Josh?” Since her rage at her daughter was so intense she could only approximate a please-don’t-eat-the-daisies-ish tone, she smiled brightly so that it would all seem rather madcap and TV-situation-comedy-like.
“Jesus!” Suede laughed, pulling his knapsack out of the way as Nicky reappeared driving his tricycle in a furiously fast U-turn toward the kitchen again.
“But wait until you see this one,” Gavin said suddenly, turning to walk down the hall.
Coco stood her ground, fascinated by the sense of pure luscious yearning that spilled through her body. Oh, it had been a long while. Suede seemed like a forgotten holiday treat, a Thanksgiving cut-glass bowl of bright-red cranberries after a year-long abstinence. Coco felt a soft sweet ache inside for him like the gentle pain caused by a school-made Mother’s Day card or a homemade paste-lumpy Valentine.
“You look fantastic, Coco,” Suede said quietly, paying the proper tribute by first inspecting the shape of her body and then her hair and her face and even her bare feet below the cuffs of her tight white sailor pants.
Coco stood perfectly still, feeling rewarded and fulfilled.
“Here’s the baby,” Gavin said, reappearing with Joshua in his arms. “This is Josh.”
“Hey, he’s cute,” Suede agreed awkwardly. “You know, you guys are getting to be a legend in New York. Nobody there is having any kids anymore.”
“Oh, God, he’s just filthy,” Coco groaned, stretching out her arms as Josh flung his weight forward toward her. “I’m going to give him a bath in the kitchen sink. You guys go upstairs until I get this riot under control down here. And, Gavin, please tell Jessica to come downstairs if she’s up there.”
Gavin picked up Suede’s duffel bag and came on pure host. “I’ll show you where your room is. Coco, ask Nicky to bring up some ice cubes, will you?”
The men started up the stairs, and Coco
waited for a moment to watch them, staring at Suede’s back. His shirt was pulled taut against the thick, wide set of his shoulders, and his narrow but cupped buttocks rounded out the seat of his chino pants.
“Oh, God, something’s burning.” She whirled around, arms full of Joshua, ran back into the kitchen, and began stirring some pots on the stove with a hand that shook pleasantly from pleasure rather than rage. Finally she called the children to the table and first cajoled, then demanded that they eat spaghetti that she had cooked with six-day-old hamburger. She insisted that the sauce did not smell, while Mike gave her a dirty look and talked about ptomaine poisoning, Ralph Nader, and fair labeling of hot dogs. Afterward she let the children run through the sprinkler in the backyard so she wouldn’t have to bathe them, and finally took everyone upstairs, purchasing an extra hour of time by letting them lie in her bed and watch television before going to sleep.
Back downstairs, she set the dining-room table, called the men, and served them Chicken Kiev. Gavin and Suede ate happily and talked about the different political cases Gavin had handled over the past three years since he had set up his four-man radical legal-defense firm. Coco sat at the foot of the table, letting her food grow cold, while she began to feel tragically sorry for herself. Not only did Suede’s presence prevent her from quarreling with Gavin, but Suede was already getting a take on the shabby shape of her marriage. To be married, in Suede’s eyes, was bad enough, but a miserable marriage was nothing less than moral fraud. At the same time, things were too shaky between Coco and Gavin to allow her to capture any freebie feels off Suede. Gavin had co-opted and intimidated her by having a real, live affair, so that Coco was afraid even to flirt. Feeling isolated and aimless since she was unable to make either love or war at the dinner table, she continued administering glass after glass of Chablis Côte de Plume to her mouth.
Occasionally Suede would look at her as he passed a serving platter, and then his dark handsome face would lighten and brighten, reminding Coco of lost options. His affection only made Coco feel sadder, because the easy reprieve of a quick sexual encounter—to rebalance domestic power—seemed unlikely now. She was in no position to antagonize her husband or right his wrong in an old-style reversal-of-the-Double-Double-Standard play. All of a sudden her standing in the Amateur Betrayal Division had become irrelevant, because Gavin had secretly, sneakily, turned pro.
So when she reached a point of drunken euphoria, tarnished only by a touch of nausea, Coco served the Jello-O pudding disguised as mousse and left the dining room, without speaking, to go sit outside on the patio.
It was cool and rather windy. June’s soft blowy nights always apologized for the hot humid days. Coco took several deep breaths of fresh air and then circled the cookie and cracker-crumb-coated stroller, climbed over several generations of overturned tricycles, stepped around endless coils of unwound garden hose, discarded like the cast-off skin of a serpent after the children’s sprinkle-bath, kicked several toys over to the edge of the brick patio, and sat down in a low-slung canvas chair.
Along the back edge of the yard, chrysanthemums were wilting before their formal blooming season and tulips swayed, crushed and broken, like dead horsemen still strapped in their saddles. The azalea bushes were shriveled, starving for water, while holes that Nicky and Jessica had dug in the dirt were filled with biologically rich stagnant water. A few foolhardy dandelions crept around the hard trodden dirt beneath the swings, apparently undaunted by endless attacks of lethal feet. All of the trash cans near the back gate had lost their hats so that garbage flowered forth in profuse abundance, and daily spillage made the surrounding topsoil so rich that in this area only grass and wildflowers blossomed, undaunted by children or neglect. A sweet stench of decay wafted through the yard.
Coco lit a cigarette and wondered what could be done to improve the sanitation. Often, late at night, she saw rats, the size of cats, stroll across the patio. Gavin did not mind debris or filth. Mrs. Marshall did not consider the backyard part of her domain, and Coco felt defeated by the decadent condition of her private wilderness area. She blew several slow smoke rings and looked up at the neat, tidy, well-swept sky. The moon was like a 3-way bulb, dusted, shiny, and bright in the center of the celestial chandelier that dangled stars like pendants over the messy, unplanned, unsanitary and unsafe Burman patio.
Coco sighed and thought about what Dr. Finkelstein called her proclivity for disorder. She never totally understood what he meant when he talked about Order and Disorder, but now she genuinely felt that there was a psychological message coded and waiting to be deciphered right in her very own backyard.
After a while the telephone in the kitchen began to ring. Through the doorway Coco watched Gavin pick up the receiver and then settle down on a chair. A few minutes later, a patch of light fell on the ground as Suede pushed open the back door and came down the stairs. He leapfrogged over the juvenile hurdles, dragged a chair closer to Coco’s, and sat down. Then he let the silence grow and wrap itself around them while he studied her face.
In deference to past pleasures and indecencies, Suede gladly accepted the fact they had been lovers. What had been, still was, and he would never betray the past by either ignoring or enlarging it. Simply and silently he acknowledged that what they had shared altered the present, and Coco always appreciated his casual allusions to distant days and nights—his unstrained and gentle remembrances.
“What’s up, babes?”
Coco shrugged and looked helplessly toward him. The moonlight softened his battered nose and blurred the deep, jagged clefts in his face. It was just like Edgar Allan Poe said. Irregularity and imperfection were the height of beauty. Suede was still one of the most handsome men Coco had ever known. His large body was comfortably relaxed, yet still sexually challenging, and now that he was sitting close beside her again, Coco heard the same internal sigh and felt the old yearning motion for love within her once more. It was Suede’s professionalized brand of passion—without immaturities or romanticisms to promote any portion out of proportion—that allowed him to incorporate so much, so smoothly into his life.
“Why didn’t you stay and have coffee with us?” he asked.
Cco felt self-pity quiver through her bottom lip. She shrugged her shoulders, brimming with undifferentiated emotions.
“Jesus. You still look so fantastic, Coco. You really are smashing. You never seem to change, because you come on so strong people get the same feeling back every time they see you—year after year.” He took her hand. “Are you going to have anymore kids?”
Coco smiled gratefully, shook her head, and tasted the salty preview of tears in the mouth.
“Gavin told me you quit your job at the university. How come?”
She let two small tears drop. “Well, I wanted to start writing my novel, Suede. I’m really working hard for a change. Really hard. I know I’m going to make it good this time. I know it.”
“Shit, Coco, are you still shrieking around with that writing crap? Forget it,” he said with genuine disgust. “Writing sucks. You can bust your ass trying to do a good book, and even if you finally score, it never really pays off. Jesus … a woman with four kids …”
“Oh please don’t start in on that, Suede. I don’t want to hear it from you.”
His antagonism was instantaneous. “Well. It just can’t happen, babes. Ain’t any little Jewish mamas who have done it.”
“Are you kidding?” Coco squeaked. “Haven’t you read—?”
“I’ve read ’em all,” he sneered. But his interest in dissuading Coco was purely academic since he never seriously viewed her as a writer. For a decade he had been totally oblivious of the fact that his literary successes and his professional paternalism toward Coco’s writing were devastating to her.
“I don’t want Gavin to know about my book, though, Suede. I feel uptight when he knows what I’m working on.”
“That’s funny.”
Suede’s fingers encircled Coco’s wrist, so she transfe
rred her cigarette to the other hand and locked her fingers through his.
“Look, I’m not going to say anything about it to him,” Suede promised, “but I just feel badly because you seem sad. Maybe you can lay your trip on me.” He was pumping gently for information. “I’ve got a good rep for keeping my mouth shut, you know.”
Coco smiled appreciatively.
“Well, as a matter of fact, Gavin and I are having a war,” she said, looking toward the kitchen, where Gavin was still speaking on the telephone. She had originally decided it would be wrong to confide in Suede, but now that Gavin was using him as a buffer defense to run interference, she felt justified in trying to enlist him as an ally. Although they had always kept their friendship loyalties straight, even when there were sexual betrayals, Coco felt a little high-schoolish and guilty about ratting on her husband.
“A big war?”
“Pretty big. Gavin’s got himself a girlfriend.”
“Oh, come on, Coco!” Suede laughed. “You’re kidding.”
“No, really.”
“Hell. I seriously would doubt that. Whoever told you must have been bullshitting for some reason.”
“I don’t think so. Gavin told me.”
Suede slumped back in his chair and dropped Coco’s hand, injured by the sudden damage done to his own neat verities—the Burman marriage secure among the rocky marital shoals.
“Why?” he mumbled. “Why would he?”
But now the back door ripped open again, spilling light like water down on the patio, and Gavin thundered down the wooden stairs.
“You know, it’s really great to be here again,” Suede said, rising suddenly to stride along the length of the brick wall that enclosed the patio.
Gavin looked at Coco suspiciously because their friend had moved too quickly and spoken too formally, breaking the normal rhythm of their trio.
Loose Ends Page 9
