“I’m sorry.” I’ve read three volumes of Proust, she added silently, with guilt.
“Things are awful at work. Lanier quit without any notice and left a six-month backlog of stuff not done. It took us three days just to go through it.”
“Oh, Lord!”
“There’s so much laundry. And Isabel has started staying up so late at night.”
“How late?”
“Nine. Nine-thirty.”
“Well, why don’t you make her go to bed?”
“I don’t know, it’s kind of nice having her around. It’s so quiet in the evenings.”
“Well—”
“I’m not complaining.”
“You’re certainly giving a good imitation.”
“How are you? How is it going out there?”
“Fine. Really fine.” She had no desire to tell him much over the phone. She would tell him when she got back. Ivan seemed very remote now, while John was close to hand, palpable. It made her happy to have John around, even though she did not love him. He didn’t break in on her solitude the way Ivan did, nor did she need to think about him when he was not with her. Sometimes even when he was, she thought about events in her past, or her work, or the volume of Proust she was up to, things that had nothing to do with him and that she had no wish to share. Her walks in the snow were not spoiled by his company. He was a hand to hold, someone to show her discoveries—the waterfalls, the tower—yet they remained no less hers. Ivan would have infiltrated the north woods. At home he infiltrated everywhere. The air around him carried a magnetic charge that distorted her sense of boundaries. There was no solitude.
She and John, meanwhile, discovered that beyond sex, they had enough to talk about: New England, where they had both grown up; music, which Ivan knew nothing about; politics—John didn’t think anarchism was so impracticable; painting. What she knew about painting she knew from Ivan, she remembered guiltily whenever she said something intelligent. They also liked to play chess, which Ivan hated because he lost to her, eat pizza, throw snowballs at each other, and do all the things that lovers do. But we are not really lovers, Caroline thought. She hoped John did not love her. He had never said so. She did not want to leave wrenching pain behind her when she left; her own memories would be pain enough. And she was only on loan, after all.
In another telephone conversation Ivan said, “Isabel’s been invited to a birthday party, a new boy in her class, Dick, but she doesn’t want to go.”
“Why not?”
“She says she doesn’t like him.”
“Why doesn’t she like him?”
“Well, listen to this, this is terrific. She has three reasons for not liking him. He’s too fat, he spits when he talks, and his shirt hangs out over his pants.”
Caroline laughed.
“I tried to tell her those are no reasons to condemn a person, but she really is set against going.”
“I don’t blame her. I think those are pretty good reasons for not liking a person.”
“Oh, Caroline, really. My shirts sometimes hang out.”
“But you don’t spit,” she said.
“Oh no? I’m going to spit right now. Watch out.” He made a succulent sound into the phone.
Suddenly he was not remote at all. He had infiltrated the north woods. She slumped back in her chair. “I miss you,” she whispered.
“I miss you too. I put your pillows away. There were too many on the bed. Four. They made me lonely so I put your two in the closet.”
“Oh, Ivan, how could you?”
“The sheets are cold,” he said.
“Please.”
The next evening, with John, she felt something she recognized in panic was very like love. She clung to him and asked him to stay the night. She had never wanted that before. She felt a pang of delayed jealousy over the woman he had been married to for three years, a decade ago. What kind of woman would John choose as a wife? While he slept she spent a long time staring at him, and traced the lines of his face, neck and shoulder with her finger, very lightly so he wouldn’t wake. She wondered if she was headed for trouble.
But that passed, and then for the first time she knew a shallow duplicity, for all along she had felt her integrity rested in keeping John and Ivan distinct.
When it was time to leave she packed her bags with eagerness. John drove her to the train in the pale early morning light. Weeks ago she had imagined herself thanking him kindly for the many hours of good company, but when the moment came she could not summon such detachment. He had become too real.
“I hope you’re not going to be very unhappy,” she said. “You knew it was just for a little while.” She heard her words as callous, and saw herself as a character in the kind of 1940s movie she and Ivan liked to watch late at night on television, a male character, Charles Boyer or Humphrey Bogart with important secret missions, not the type to be relied on for permanent arrangements. It was not a pleasant image.
“I knew,” John said. His blue eyes shone behind the aviator glasses with an odd light she hoped was not tears. “You will write, though, won’t you?”
“Of course,” said Caroline, and she left the north woods.
All day, on the train and in the first hours at home, admiring Isabel’s stack of abstract paintings from nursery school, resettling things on her desk and in her closet, checking to see what Oriental oddments were in the refrigerator, John was a shadow over her shoulder. But at night when Ivan touched her the shadow vanished. He made everything vanish.
“Let me see if you still feel the same,” he said.
“I’m so glad to be home,” Caroline said as she embraced him. In a while, amidst pleasure, she had a fleeting image of John at the train station gallantly holding her bags, with possible tears in his eyes.
“Well, tell me, do I feel any different?”
“Yes,” he said.
She moved from him, surprised. “How?”
He touched her like a blind man. “You feel as if you’ve been somewhere else.”
“I have been somewhere else. What do you mean?”
Ivan was silent.
“What are you not saying? Say it.”
“No. So long as you came back.”
“Well, of course.”
In the morning she awoke to the sound of soft voices behind her. She could feel Isabel’s hand resting on the curve of her hip.
“His name is Koh Ma. I don’t like him. He goes around hitting everyone in the class.”
“Have you told him to stop?” Ivan asked.
“I tell him, but he doesn’t understand. He can’t talk. He only talks Chinese.”
“Korean, I think it is.”
“There was this doll, and he grabbed it and said ‘dog.’”
“He’s learning English. Why don’t you try teaching him some words?”
“I don’t like people who hit. I don’t hit. More of the boys hit. When you were younger did you use to hit girls?”
Ivan gave a deep sigh. “Talk softly. Mommy’s here now, remember? She’s still sleeping.”
“Well, did you?” Isabel whispered. “Hit girls?”
“Everybody does things, when they’re very angry, that they’re sorry for later. But sometimes they can’t help it.”
“But did you?”
“Well, to be honest, I suppose I did.” He paused for a moment. “Once or twice.”
“You don’t hit me.”
“That’s different. This boy, Koh Ma—he hits because he’s frustrated. I mean, he can’t show what he wants any other way. Probably once he learns to speak English he’ll stop hitting.”
“Whenever we sing a song he yells.”
“How do you think you would feel if you were in his country and all the kids were singing something you couldn’t understand?”
“I wouldn’t yell.”
Ivan laughed. “Don’t be too sure, sweetheart.”
Caroline turned around. Isabel, wearing the dark glasses she had saved from l
ast year’s operation, was sitting up in the center of the bed facing Ivan. As she talked his hand stroked her sleek dark head from the wide forehead back down the sweep of smooth hair, in long slow strokes. His hand covered almost her whole head. He didn’t notice that Caroline was awake: he was staring at the child, absorbed in the touch, burying his fingers in her fine hair while she chattered on. They were quite content without her, she thought. All the time she was gone they had lived like this, happily ever after, a fairy tale’s sequel. Her feeling for John was nothing like this. An unease woke in her blood and spread through her every cell.
When she remarked, much later, that he loved the child more than he loved her he denied it, naturally. He said he loved Isabel not more but differently. “Can’t you see that? It’s so obvious. It’s a different kind of relationship.” It was jarring to hear Ivan use words like “relationship”; it made her doubt certain coveted visions she still had of him: that he was the noble savage who had approached her warily, with subtle grace, through the crowd. Or else the reverse, self-made eighteenth-century man released from the Augustan setting—balanced and serene, witty and sentimental, yet more attuned to brute impulse than he cared to acknowledge. But would a primitive or Augustan speak of “relationships”?
In any case, his love for the child didn’t appear different in kind to Caroline. What was so obvious was its sameness. All love was the same, a desire to gather in and embrace.
Isabel was at her most beautiful the summer she was seven. With an enviable bronze glow, she resembled an Indian of the Southwest. Half her length was legs. “A dancer’s legs,” one of their friends commented, and Isabel, her legs stretched out before her on the rug, smiled back shyly, uncomprehending, with missing teeth. Caroline was grateful for the missing teeth: they represented a visible lapse from perfection, even if temporary. She didn’t like the way the friend had looked at the child, but told herself she was being absurd. Isabel was a baby. She liked to wear her long hair severely tied behind with a ribbon. It swung over her straight back like a skein of velvet. She winced and groaned every morning under the hairbrush, while Caroline hardened her heart and brushed on. “You can have it cut if you want.” Isabel shook her head with gentle stubbornness. “I like it long. Daddy likes it long.” She was strong, infatuated with life and her own beauty, spreading an entrancing glow of goodwill. More than sheer infantile magic—she was truly good, Caroline believed, the outer beauty an accurate portrait of the inner. The fluctuations of emotion played openly on her face in hundreds of tiny gradations in lips and eyes and color: reading her expression, Caroline felt she saw through to the purity of nerve and bone. In her seductive contradictions of innocence and subtlety she was Ivan all over again, and she was bewitching.
They went, that summer, to an inn in the Berkshires for two weeks. After a hike in the woods they lay on the large double bed, Isabel resting between them, holding a hand on either side. Ivan was silent, possibly dozing, while Isabel asked her usual questions and received the usual answers, from a script of unending fascination to her.
“So what do people do when they want to make a baby? Do they say, let’s make a baby, just like that?”
“Well, not exactly. It happens in different ways. They usually both know if they want to.”
“And then do they just go to bed and do it?”
“Yes.”
“Do they have to take off all their clothes?”
“They don’t have to, but they usually do.”
“It must be so embarrassing. Do they have to be married?”
“No, they don’t have to, but most people who have babies are. It’s better for the baby that way.”
The child suddenly clutched Ivan’s arm. He started and blinked. “Let’s get married!” she cried.
“What?”
“Let’s get married.”
“Oh. But I’m already married,” he answered her, smiling. This, too, was from the script.
Instantly, with the fleetness of a butterfly, she was stretched out full length on top of him. “Well, let’s make a baby anyway.”
Ivan put his hands on her shoulders and laughed out loud. “I already made a baby.”
“Isabel,” said Caroline, “it’s hot in here. Go and open the window, please.”
Grunting with mild resentment, she climbed off Ivan and did as she was asked. “Anything to get me out of the way,” she said good-naturedly.
Caroline blushed. “Come here,” she said, smiling. She moved over to make room for Isabel on her right, away from Ivan, circling an arm around her and hugging her close. Her body was soft, immediately yielding. Despite herself, Caroline, too, yielded. “You know I don’t want you out of the way.” Isabel snuggled into her side. After a while Caroline added, “How did you get so clever?” But no one heard. They had both fallen asleep.
She watched them. They even slept alike, their brows slightly furrowed and their lips, the bowed, exquisitely articulated lips, barely parted. But Ivan, as usual, groped and clung; one leg was flung over her own, a heavy, comforting weight, his fist was pressed into the bend of her waist, and his chin had found her shoulder to lean on. Isabel’s sleep was essentially solitary; Caroline might have been a wall or a pillow. She noted with a tinge of nostalgia how Isabel’s primitive infant desires were restrained even in sleep: the renounced thumb came to rest gently on her lower lip, pulling it down to reveal the soft inner pink of her mouth.
The child had an unfair advantage, she thought. Isabel did things that she couldn’t do. Evenings when she heard the click of the door—and she always heard it first—she raced through the living room to meet Ivan and leap up in his arms. When his hair periodically grew long enough Isabel would tie it back in a rubber band and bring him a mirror to see. He submitted like a ludicrous enchanted lover. Bottom and Titania, Caroline thought, looking on. After her bubble bath Isabel would run out, the huge flowered towel fastened like a sarong, and offer him her small shoulder to smell. Ivan rolled his eyes, sighed, and pretended to swoon.
All little girls did these things, most likely. And she was glad Ivan could yield with whimsical abandon. She loved that in him. In men. Her own father would never have humored her in any such silliness. Caroline could not even recall trying out seductive games. Perhaps all little girls did not do those things, or at least not in quite that beguiling way.
She might attempt things equally beguiling. But the lure of ingenuousness had never been her style, and besides, at thirty-eight years old she could not stoop to copying the wiles of a child. Amazing Grace, another friend called Isabel, after the spiritual. Such a quality descended at random. Useless, mortifying to imitate. Nevertheless, she thought as she watched the child begin to stir and stretch lithely in her sleep, there were a few things she could do that Isabel could not. And recalling those things, she smiled with languor, and a touch of smug, vengeful satisfaction.
Isabel’s long lashes fluttered. She smiled up at her mother.
“Did you have a good sleep?” Caroline murmured. She nodded and rubbed her eyes. Caroline glanced over at Ivan. His breathing had changed, quickened. He had rolled off her and lay flat on his stomach. He began to scratch his wrist in his sleep. In five minutes he would be awake.
“Why don’t you go take a swim?” she said to Isabel, and sat up to peer through the window at the pool outside. The lifeguard was on his chair and several children around Isabel’s size were playing in the shallow water.
“Okay.” But she did not move.
“Go on, now.” Caroline gave her a gentle nudge. “We’ll come out too, in a while. Get your suit on quietly, Daddy’s asleep.”
As she watched her undress and pull on the one-piece bathing suit she chided herself for being a fool. It was a baby’s body. Look at the way she yanked the suit up, shifting from side to side in awkward exaggerated movements. But then, the way she gave herself a final appraising glance in the mirror, flicked her hair off her neck and flung the beach towel over her shoulder…no, that was uncanny
. Caroline sighed, discomfort flickering in her chest. “Don’t slam the door,” she said. “Have fun. And be careful.”
The closing of the door, though obediently soft, woke Ivan. He turned, opened his eyes and threw a weighty arm across her. “Mm,” he said lazily. “You still here?”
“Obviously.”
“Did you sleep?”
“No. I watched you.” She ruffled his hair and smoothed it off his forehead.
“Where’s Isabel?”
“She went swimming.”
“Ah,” said Ivan, and put his arms around her, settling his head on her breast as if to sleep again. Then he looked up. “Is the lifeguard there?”
“Yes, I checked.”
He settled back on her. “You’re soft.”
“I know. You’re hard.” She stroked his back and smiled. She liked the hardness and sometimes wished she were like that. Her mind wandered and blurred, she felt herself falling into sleep. If her body were hard Ivan would not love her in the same way. If she were different in any other aspect he would not, perhaps. She suddenly imagined herself on probation, with all her lovable qualities liable to vanish at any moment, leaving her with no resources. But she smiled—these notions rose from the irrational edge of sleep. The dazed warmth of him drew her in. Then an odd idea struck her, and she was wide awake. Ivan still lay on her breasts and ran a hand aimlessly over her thigh. Her age was against it, but it wouldn’t be the first. It was having the first at her age that was most dangerous. She could keep her job—she had gotten tenure two years ago. It would mean more juggling of schedules, more baby-sitters. Money. They could manage it. And they still had the old things in the cellar. Every time friends borrowed them they were returned promptly and in excellent condition. That was almost like an omen. Why not, except for the wear and tear on her own body, before and after? But it would be worth it. Her blood seemed to thicken and slow down, and she felt the heaviness of her years settle softly in her veins—a warning. She shivered; the alien feeling passed. Ivan rolled over on his back. As she regarded him, the idea took root in her body with a frightful tenacity. It seemed a tactic worthy of his invention.
Rough Strife Page 16
