• • •
THE MALAMUDS ARRIVED QUIETLY, knocking on the door and waiting until I went to answer it, standing patiently outside in the still-wintry night air while I struggled with that sticky, obstinate knob. While Shirley paced the dining room on the lookout for badly folded napkins and spotty wineglasses, matters that usually failed to interest her, Stanley read to her from a book review he was writing. He’d stumbled over his own text repeatedly but without comment, as if his inebriation were not worthy of notice. Fred sat on the couch in the parlor, correcting papers.
I introduced myself. Malamud was small and wiry, perhaps my height but no more, while Ann seemed taller and older, a matronly woman with dark owl eyes that tracked through the front hallway deliberately, assessing the quality of the umbrellas in the stand, the gilt on the mirror, the threadbare loveseat where coats would be thrown. I saw the way she examined the sweep of the stairs and the paintings on the wall—Shirley’s and the kids’ intermingled with gifts from friends, a jumble of collected works and school photographs, all willy-nilly, that I found the essence of what familial life should be. “Shall I place my coat here?” Ann asked, shrugging off her navy cashmere. I took it, not thinking about whether she thought it was my job, but simply wanting to run my hands over cloth as lush and enveloping as this.
I brought her into the living room and introduced her to Fred, who was already handing Bern a glass of white wine. Ann was concerned that Bern not have too much salt, she said; with a heart like his, he had to be careful.
Enter Shirley, with a bowl of peanuts.
Ann refused them, as did Bern, and we arrayed ourselves on the various couches and chairs. Shirley raised the topic of the recent visiting writer whose car tires had been slashed while parked overnight in the village. Did Bern worry that someone was targeting writers?
No, he did not. In fact, he wished there were readers who cared enough to come and slash an author’s tires; he feared that in a world transfixed by Da Nang, the Beatles, and Frank Herbert’s Dune, it was unlikely that anybody would ever be sufficiently interested in him to stoop to violence. Intelligence glittered through the thick lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses.
“Malamud! Here to save the Jews!” Stanley half tripped on the edge of the Persian rug. Vodka splattered from the full martini glasses to the tray, but he managed to keep a hold on his burden. Shirley glanced at me expressionlessly.
“Have some peanuts, Bern.”
He made as if to take a few, politely. Ann touched his arm. They did not glance at each other; nonetheless, he changed his mind. “Watching my salt,” he said.
Ann began to talk about their lovely afternoon with Saul Bellow and his wife. “Bellow calls himself, Philip Roth, and my Bern the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx of literature,” she said, and chuckled, shaking her head from side to side the way an elephant does, as if the work of carrying the trunk is a kind of dignity. Shirley took a handful of peanuts and stuffed them sloppily into her mouth, chewing vigorously.
“Meeting of the National Book Award Winners Mutual Appreciation Society. If only Roethke were still extant, you could have included him.” Stanley offered Malamud a martini, was rejected, and drank the entire glass with antic dash. Malamud sipped his white wine, smiling thinly at the wall across the room, where part of Shirley’s collection of African masks was arranged.
A silence fell. Bern drew a small reporter’s notebook out of the inside pocket of his blazer and held it loosely in his right hand while he drew a pen from his shirt pocket with the other. Shirley watched him with fascination, her mouth twisted in a sad little grimace.
Fred motioned for me to come and sit next to him on the couch, sliding toward the arm so that I’d be sandwiched between his lean frame and Ann’s matronly girth. I shook my head. “The ham is calling,” I said, and escaped into the kitchen, where the cornbread I’d made at the last minute was browned and ready to emerge from the oven. I felt tremendously excited by all the tension.
• • •
WHEN I CALLED THEM TO DINNER, Stanley did not appear. “He fell asleep, I think,” Fred whispered.
“I’ll get him.” But Shirley said no, to serve the ham and she would wrangle him. Fred and I sat down with Bern and Ann Malamud, and I handed the large platter around. Bern asked Fred about his teaching load, and Fred described the way he was co-teaching with Stanley. Bern asked about Fred’s dissertation. Fred glanced at me anxiously, as if he had suddenly forgotten the entire sum of the past two years, had lost track of his own professional interests.
“Are you interested in Jewish folklore, in our cultural myths?” Bern asked.
Fred nodded. “Lately, I’ve been thinking about the Old Testament as science fiction. Adam and Eve the first colonists after nuclear disaster—”
Bern laughed out loud. “You’re a novelist!”
“Oh no, I only meant—” Fred blushed, picked up his fork.
Ann said, “Ham.” The one word, flatly.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I never thought. You don’t eat pork?”
“Of course we eat pork. But when she asked us, I told her Bern was trying to avoid salt. His doctor says he should. And here you give us ham.”
He reached across the table and put a hand on her arm, a mirror of what she’d earlier done with him. “We’ll make do,” he said. “It’s fine.”
I liked the way her fury sputtered at his touch. They seemed married in a way I aspired to, their fortunes managed mutually. Fred offered Bern a helping of sweet potatoes. I passed the mashed cauliflower and explained what it was, that we made it for Stanley. “You’re a good girl,” Bern said. He patted my hand.
I heard the typewriter start its arrhythmic beat. Had she gone back to work? I swallowed a bite of partly chewed ham and coughed, then told Bern how much I’d liked The Assistant, how much I admired his work. “You’ve caught the world we come from so completely, how there isn’t time to protest the war or hear the Beatles, how a neighborhood feels like the universe broken out block by block. I know your characters, all of them.”
He offered to read a little bit after dinner. “You’d do that?” I couldn’t believe my luck.
Ann spoke loudly, as if she wanted to be heard over the sound of Shirley’s typing down the hall. “He’d do that.”
I felt a pool of sweat begin to form on the chair seat, under my legs. They were bored and we were not enough to entertain them; she did not like me. “I wonder where Barry’s gotten to?” I said, but of course he was at the Malamud house, she explained, eating spaghetti with their daughter and some other friends. I passed the wine bottle and she took another glass, although he refrained.
“Those myths,” Fred said. “You use them in your stories, don’t you? I’m thinking of The Magic Barrel.”
“My mother’s stories,” Malamud said, his face brightening as he began to talk to us about his family, about his parents’ journey to this country, about the way he combined superstition and folklore with the culture he’d been raised in—the marriage broker, the princess, the poor schmuck with the good heart who needs guidance to become a wise man in the end. Ann chewed her food daintily, politely. I wondered how tired she was of hearing him repeat his epics at dinner table after dinner table; did that happen to all couples? I was confused; I admired the Malamuds and was ashamed for our hosts, and yet I could see that though she loved him, Malamud was imperfect in his wife’s assessment. To my not-yet-twenty-year-old eyes, their stretch of life together was daunting in all ways: prosaic, faintly embarrassing, and astonishing.
I was overfull by the time Bern had finished picking at his plate. I cleared, and Ann helped me, and as I set the coffeepot to heating I suggested we return to the front parlor. She had Shirley’s witchy ability to find her way around the kitchen, pulling out the silverware drawer on the first try and piling all the coffee cups and the sugar bowl on the precise tin tray Shirley preferred.
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“Stanley, Stanela, wake up there, why don’t you?” Bern said. “Company’s here.” But Stanley snored blearily, stretched out full-length on the less comfortable of the two sofas, as if he’d graciously ceded the better one to those who remained awake. Shirley typed away in the library, her rhythm so steady she might easily have been practicing secretarial exercises: quick brown foxes jumping over lazy dogs. I sat in the chair next to where Bern was perched, on the end of the good couch. Fred took the chair opposite me. Ann, a cup of coffee in either hand, came over and perched on Bern’s knee, smiling at me as if our moment of shared labor in the kitchen had made us friends.
“Get off,” he said. “You’re too heavy.” And he pushed her crudely, so that hot coffee splashed like an O’Keeffe flower across the bottom half of her pale green dress.
“For God’s sake, Bern!”
Stanley sat up with interest, rubbing his eyes, as I ran into the kitchen to grab a wet dishcloth. By the time I returned, everyone was standing. No typewriter sounds from the other room, either.
Malamud’s jaw was set in a mulish manner. “I’ll apologize for the coffee, but honestly, Ann. You sat on me without asking.”
“Let’s go home. I want to go home.”
Shirley appeared in the doorway. “But you can’t. You’ve barely gotten here; it’s far too early. We’ll call some people, have a party. I’ll invite Alan and his wife, and the Burkes. And Jules might be free. You can’t go now.”
“I want to go,” Ann said tightly.
There was a long pause. We all watched Malamud as he considered the question of staying or leaving. Stanley’s eyes were half open, his posture wobbly and his cheek indented by the seam of the throw pillow on which he’d been sleeping. Shirley leaned against the doorjamb, head tilted: no notebook needed to retain the details of this evening. Fred stood with his palms open; who was he beseeching?
I opened my mouth. “You were going to read to us,” I said.
“Oh yes, you must read to us. A veritable Pickwick Society meeting here tonight.” It was impossible to miss the harshness of Shirley’s tone. Stanley sat back down on the couch with a thwap, lifted his legs, and stretched them out along the cushions.
“I want to read,” Bern said to Ann, but it was not as if he had decided, more as if he wished her to accede. Her face was suddenly lovely, so vulnerable and tender. She would agree to anything, if he would look at her that way. Shirley shifted, next to me, and a glance showed her sympathy writ large. Both of them strong, strong women still subservient to their men; I looked for Fred, and he’d gone over to the couch. One hand already reaching for the student papers he needed to correct. Could I ever be so focused on the job at hand that I would stop watching for others’ reactions or listening for a baby’s cry?
Ann buttoned her cardigan over her green jersey dress, a smile inlaid on top and bottom lips. I was upset for Ann, and for Shirley and for myself. All around us, out in the world, there were Negroes insisting on their civil rights and children insisting they would not go to war and women giving voice to their right to be counted as equals, at work and at home. Women who said, I want this or I will be that. “I want you to read,” I said evenly, to Bernard Malamud. “I think you should read to us now.”
“You should read, too,” he said to Shirley, politely. His balding pate glistened under the orange light thrown off by the wall sconces.
“Not now,” she said. “I’m in the middle of a story. I’ll finish it tonight.”
The look that passed between them should have been funny.
“I like that story you wrote,” Bern said, “the one about the girl who went missing from the college.”
Stanley took his glasses off and rubbed his forehead. Shirley said, “Paula Welden? That was before our time.”
I jumped up. I said, “I’ll get The Assistant. You can read from that.”
“No,” he said. “You have The Magic Barrel, don’t you?”
“Of course we do,” Shirley said. She stayed by the doorjamb, and he remained right there, four feet from her. Ann hugged herself over her newly buttoned sweater. Fred held his students’ papers as if there were nothing he’d rather do than correct homework, and Stanley lolled clownishly on the couch.
I found the book filed correctly under M, right next to Malamud’s other books. The dust jacket was chilly to the touch. I returned to the front parlor, handed the book to Bern, and sat on the sofa, my skirt brushing against the soles of Stanley’s shoes. Stanley did not sit up, merely tapped my skirt cheerfully with a clad toe.
Bern opened the book; all of us heard the cree-ack of the spine being broken for the first time. “I see you have a fresh copy.” Exuding calm, he took the pen from his pocket and turned to the title page, as if about to autograph it.
“It’s fresh,” Shirley agreed, and then she burst out laughing. The giddiness of it frightening to the ear. It did not stop, the sound caught on itself and amplified, turbulent to hear and awful to watch. She leaned against the wall, the light reflected off the plaster spilling its glow over the paleness of her skin, and she laughed as if the mirth were painful, gale after gale of whooping howls that brought tears to her eyes and bent her over in the middle. “Oh, oh, oh!” she cried, and kept on laughing, shriek upon shriek, so that Stanley stood and went to her, his drunken pleasure utterly dissipated, and Malamud stood, and Ann with him, and only Fred and I remained sitting.
“We should go,” Ann said, her fingers automatically unbuttoning and rebuttoning that sweater, while Shirley went on laughing, laughing, laughing, and Stanley had his arms around her, saying, “Shh, shhh, shhh, Cynara, shh, my Shoiley, shhh, shhh.”
It was so sudden, the way electricity goes out in a storm. You’ve felt the pressure dropping and seen the clouds but now the swoop of the wind and the pelting rain arrives, and you are shocked by how abruptly the world becomes dangerous and incomprehensible.
He led her up the stairs; she was sobbing now, guttural belchings between the wails. The Malamuds had found their coats, and as I showed them to the door, I struggled once again with that godforsaken doorknob and had to square my body and shove the knob against my hip. I could not let them out. I wanted to tell them that it wasn’t anything they had done, that the events of the evening had nothing to do with them, or their marriage, or his writing—that the house itself was sometimes inclined to sour even the sweetest of connections. They were happy to use the kitchen door when I suggested it. Her footsteps crackled on the paving stones. They walked in unison under the library windows and I did not see a word pass between them. From the front hall, I listened to the water running for the tub upstairs, and even through Shirley’s thick bedroom door, I heard the sounds of grief, the grotesquery of despair trapped joylessly in mirth.
I stood awhile in the hallway, letting the nausea settle in my stomach, listening for the moment when her sobs would peter into calm and, I hoped, to sleep. I felt stronger than her, than other women. I thought of my missing mother, of Paula Welden, of those teachers lost in time at Versailles. And I am of the now, and I am staying in it, I told myself. Life will not defeat me.
I would have gone to do the dishes, but instead I went back to Fred and found him seated on the couch where I’d left him, the clutch of papers still in his lap. His ashen face, I won’t forget his face, and I asked if he was all right, and, shaking his head no, he said, “What happened? What was all that?”
I thought of the string I’d left coiled in the jar on Shirley’s desk, of the half-used matchbook in the pocket of my skirt. I put Fred’s hand between my own and closed my eyes, picturing the walls of the house pulsing like a heartbeat to keep us safe. Save her, I implored them. Save us. Save me.
I woke an hour later, nearly sliding off the couch in shock when Barry slammed the back door on his return and thudded up the stairs. Only Fred’s sleepy clutch kept me from the floor. The lights were still on. “Let’s
go up.”
“The dishes,” Fred said, ever the polite houseguest.
“They’ll wait,” I told him. “They’ll wait, and if they don’t, I’m sure there’ll be more tomorrow. Let’s go to bed.”
We left the lights blazing. I drew him up the stairs with both hands. Not for sex, not even for forgiveness. Just to prove to both of us that I could.
Twenty-four
THE NEXT NIGHT, Barry’s friend Mealtime dropped by with his usual acuity, just as Shirley called the household to dinner. That’s when we realized Barry wasn’t home. He’d left a note on Shirley’s desk saying he was joining his sisters on campus. “They did that last Sunday as well. What is it? I was in the kitchen; why didn’t he come in to tell me?” she asked. Mealtime’s face was a study in panic. Would he have to answer? The Hyman family was the cinema of his life, but he would die if he found himself a featured player. Not Hamlet, nor meant to be.
For a moment, I thought Stanley might add the proverbial fuel to the fire, invite Mealtime to the table to boost the numbers: the poor kid’s skinny chin trembled, anticipating Stanley’s imperial command, but it was Shirley who shooed the boy out of the house, telling him to return the next evening.
In all these months, we’d never been seated at that enormous table as a foursome before. We sat at Stanley’s end, Shirley on his right and Fred on the left, with me next to Fred. Shirley had made creamed corn and beef stew, served over the recurring mashed cauliflower. Fred, who still ate like a teenager, heaped his plate with food and began nervously to cut the cubes of beef into the smaller pieces his mother had always insisted were correct. I put some corn on my plate, and a heap of cauliflower. I had no taste for meat that night.
I watched Stanley’s mouth as he chewed, his lips glistening with the tomato-flecked stew broth, the way he brushed his beard with the side of his right forefinger each time he placed his fork, tines down, at the edge of his plate. Fascinating to watch that mouth, the lips dark with pumped blood, the teeth imperfect in form and yet white as a dairy farmer’s, the way his fat tongue emerged to swipe an errant drop of gravy: I could not look away, not even when I felt Shirley’s scowl. She had piled stew on her plate but left the corn and cauliflower; it didn’t matter, as she was drinking red wine and smoking a cigarette instead of eating at all.
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