Now he turned to reductive thinking, so freshly discredited. If this phenomenon was not love, then it could only be lust or illusion. If illusion it would be gone by morning, or by the next time he and Marcy met. If lust it showed what a powerhouse Orrin was, for sexuality was strong enough to do this to him and yet he was strong enough to deny it. And here, finally, at four in the morning he had drawn a conclusion worth drinking to and he drank—just the one—and either the drink or the consoling knowledge it celebrated gave him ease enough to sleep at last.
Even there, however, he dreamed a dream as direct as a bullet, in which he ravished Marcy Green and she ravished him back, in the chair she had earlier occupied, in positions inconceivable, time and time again, to the violins of Mendelssohn, with her tracery of cotton gown shredded like kleenex and her head tossed back to show the regal pulsing neck.
23
Orrin was not exactly surprised, three nights later, to see Marcy come in smiling from a dense yellow rain. He had fantasized the sight of her so relentlessly that by now she was purely an adjunct of his own thought. Of course he never expected her to materialize, but that assumption evaporated to complete insignificance once she simply and magically had.
Nor was he surprised when with no salutation beyond the smile she commenced peeling away layers of clothing—the faded silk kerchief she had bonneted on her head, the sweatshirt and canvas sneakers—since they all were soaking wet. But it did leave her in quite apparently just two more garments (white cotton top and red flannel sweatpants) that were similarly drenched so as to be uniquely formfitting. And tugging now at the drawstring of her sweats, Marcy was taking the sequence to a consistent if not exactly proper conclusion.
“Whoa,” said Orrin. “Hadn’t I better go fetch a nice big towel or blanket at this juncture?”
“That would be nice,” she said, though when he returned with the towels she was standing there in her skin; skin that appeared astoundingly dry and smooth and luminous. The skin took his breath away, for all the clichés still applied.
“Marcy, are you trying to tell me you’ve had a change of heart?”
“Me?” she grinned, wrapping the tan towel around her waist steambath style and winding the green one on her head like a turban. Her gleaming white breasts, the nipples bunched dark and grainy as red briar, were impossible not to touch. And touching them, he could feel his pants lift in response.
“But you see,” he managed, “I know this whole scenario. Soon you’ll start to tremble and heave miserable sobs—”
“No, Orrin, don’t you worry. I’ve been thinking this through for days.”
“Oh so have I, make no mistake. I’d almost finished rationalizing it, in fact—decided the point was in my making the attempt, in wanting to, you know.”
“If you wanted to, Orrin, why don’t you want to now?”
“Not so fast. You didn’t want to then. So why do you want to now?”
“Yak yak yak,” she said, and Orrin blushed more at this accusation than he had at her dazzling anatomy. “Don’t you feel ridiculously out of place standing there with all your clothes on?”
He certainly did, by this time.
Orrin was not surprised he could love her like a man, nor did Marcy seem to expect anything else. To Orrin, an easy accustomed dreamer, it seemed entirely natural they should fit a bed so well, fit together so easily and so often. They conjoined throughout the night, as young lovers do in songs, only at greater and talkier intervals, and to varying degrees of conclusion. That they both were happy with it all there was no denying.
“At my age,” said Orrin, “one is glad just to have it happen.”
“I’m glad to have it happen, too. I don’t think we want age to be a topic here.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re not old, you’re you. Besides, I like older men. I liked you the first time we met.”
“That can’t be true.”
“Why can’t it? You seemed handsome and wise. And you had a sense of humor.”
“Did I? I sound almost perfect. It’s amazing you could resist me. Don’t these ever get soft?”
“You should talk. But I couldn’t resist you, as it turns out. I just had to schedule you. It’s very inconvenient meeting two men you like, after you’ve gone a year without meeting any at all.”
“So inefficient, you mean. But shouldn’t you have scheduled us in reverse—elders first? According to my doctor, I may have only thirty more years to live.’
“Now you’re talking.”
“Wait, though, Marcy. You are the one who called me a dirty old man.”
“It was just wishful thinking at the time. You’ll have to drop this complex about age, because what I really hate is neurosis.”
“Oh dear, in that case I’m afraid I may have to refer you.”
A week later, after one night at her place and one more at his, Orrin grew bold with her. “Would you have any interest in renting Eli’s old room?”
“I don’t think so. But thanks.”
“If I were to give up on Gail—just hypothetically—would you have any interest in renting my room? Say half of it?”
“No thank you, Orrin.”
“Really not? I could offer you a marriage of convenience.”
“Aren’t we better off with a non-marriage, of inconvenience? I don’t love you, Orrin, and you don’t love me either. You love Gail.”
Was this so? If it was so, this bilateral absence of love, wasn’t it okay anyway? Wasn’t it what made a marriage of convenience convenient? Orrin was framing this little joke when a stray thought intruded on him:
“You love Eli.”
“I told him so, for all the good it did me. But it wasn’t spoken lightly. I can’t retract it just because he ditched me.”
“So why are we here, then?”
“Because life goes on. And this is what life gave each of us next. Because it’s good for us and can’t devastate either one of us—”
“Since you love Eli and I supposedly love Gail.”
“Supposedly? Let’s be serious for a minute, Orrin. Would you seriously want to be hooked up to a young thing on the rebound? It’s so trite. Think how your friends would all nod sagely and say Oh yes, another aging shrink taking up with a younger woman—”
“They wouldn’t understand.”
“Sure they would. And they’d be right, probably.”
“Well goodness, Marcy, I don’t care—really and truly I don’t—about trite. I’d be proud to show you off at my Club or anywhere else. Is that so terrible?”
“It depends. Let’s say that for now I find it flattering.”
“But you categorically reject my hand in marriage?”
“I think it will be for the best.”
Orrin was continually reminded of something he had known from the start: having turned thirty-three, Marcy was younger than he was, but she was not actually young—or foolish.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “In the long run, we’ll be saving the price of a postcard.”
“Pardon?”
“Nothing. A silly inside joke, between me, myself, and I. But I do have a dream to relate.”
“A new one? What are you waiting for—tell me.”
“The night before last. I dreamt you turned me down flat. I said, you know, come live with me and be my love, and you called me a fool and walked away. I closed up shop and left the city. Bought a vast estate—in Transylvania, from the look of it. A cobwebbed stone castle with raging fires in a dozen great hearths—called Madlands. There was a painted sign between two granite columns, swaying on chains, like some old medieval inn.”
“And you lived there in splendid isolation?”
“I don’t know. I dreamed the place very vividly, but I never did see myself there, nor anyone else.”
“Not even the house-servants laying the fires?”
“No, nothing but the architectural detail.”
“So what do you think? Defiance? Or a
craving for some solitude—you could be sick of me already.”
“Madness would be my guess. Trying to contain madness, you know.”
Orrin was never surprised to see genuine force in Marcy’s affection—physically she held nothing back—nor was he surprised to discover rigid lines where the affection left off. In fact, he believed that nothing would ever surprise him again. (He even believed that this was itself an illusion, so that he would not be surprised when something did.) He did understand that Marcy Green was an impermanent star in his firmament, and yet by the time she left him Gail might be ready to return. Indeed it would not surprise him if Gail were ready now, or whenever she learned about Marcy, though it would be no more surprising should she prove altogether and eternally indifferent.
He even expected Elspeth’s packet, though it was the first piece of mail he’d had from her since summer camp in 1974. Her cassette was entitled Sluggish Plumbing. The front showed El in her feathers and the band in black leather; on the back, there was a photograph of the Madison Hotel imploding. Orrin wasn’t surprised to find the music crisp, or the lyrics tough and rich. All songs were copyright Third World Music and the best cut by far (“Bottled Spirits” by Summers/Ferguson) played a lilting calypso verse off against a harrowing vision of political smash and batter in the chorus.
Still he was surprised (if only momentarily) on a Saturday night in July, while dressing for The Midsummer Night’s Bal Masque. The windows were wide open, the air benign with distant ringing bells and long-fallen blossoms. On a night just like this one, Orrin reflected, he had moved into these rooms last summer. The year was an immensely flexible measure: so short and at the same time so very endless.
For simplicity’s sake, Orrin had chosen to go as himself tonight (“No one will recognize me!”) and to defuse her first appearance at a Club function Marcy would be The Younger Woman, herself as well.
“You’re going to hate this, you know.”
“Oh I hope so,” Marcy replied as the doorbell was sounding, “but I never like to count on anything.”
A confusing moment, doorbells mingling with the churchbells, plus the idea that “they” had a visitor. It could only be Eli, or so Orrin feared in a searing vision of all his joys disbanded. “Take a guess,” he said bravely, then saw at once that Marcy was shaken by the same supposition.
“Gail,” she guessed.
“I say it’s one of my children. I’ll guess Clyde.”
It was not Eli Paperman. Instead there stood before them a messy, mismatched couple, like a practical joke, a facialgram meant to parody the two of them in some obscure fashion. It occurred to Marcy they must be chums of Orrin’s, arriving in costume for a drink before the dance.
Orrin meanwhile suffered a moment of total blankness, followed by a brief nervous impulse—flickering genuflection to forgotton notions—and then achieved a wonderful smile, his best in decades, a smile that welled up from an enormous reservoir of new calm and pleasure. And extending both arms to embrace P. Jones, he confessed he was surprised, though happily so.
“Come in, my friend. Come in, Mary. You two must be thirsty on a night like this.”
“Thank you, Orry. And how are you tonight, young lady?”
“Pigford, Mary, may I present my friend Marcy Green. Marcy, Pigford and Mary.”
“Sorry I never came by sooner, Orry. Things come up, you know how it is, and before you know it the time slides away.”
“Of course, but you mustn’t overlook the plight of the homeful. You’ve been well?”
“Plus ça change, Orry. I’m still me. It’s a dog-eat-dog world and I just have no taste for dog. Never had it, really.”
“Fair enough. Try this stuff, if you’d like.”
“I suppose there was a sort of a class thing, too, if you know what I mean. Happy to see you down at The Dog & Cat anyoldtime but to come up here without an invite—”
“I’m so glad you finally overcame your reluctance. Something must have inspired you. What?”
“He’s a sharp one, The Doctor. I told Mary you would read my mind right off the bat. I guess you know”—Pigford now addressed Marcy—“that Orry here is a famous headshrinker.”
“I want to see your sliding scale,” cackled Sad Mary.
“Her idea of humor,” said Pigford. “Talks of it now and then, like it would slide down the hill, see?”
“Let’s see it,” she giggled again.
“The truth is this, and best taken straight out front—we came by hoping for a smallish loan.”
“Small enough and I’ll make an outright gift of it.”
“Oh no. It’s got to be a loaner.”
“A scholarship, then. What’s our ballpark here, how large a sum are we discussing?”
“Well I did a little work for the city, two months aboard the S.S. Sanitation. We got some clothes out of that, and we have the loose change in savings.”
“Yes?”
“The idea is to go on vacation, All-American style. Ride the bus down to the Cape for a weekend of surf.”
“The crowds are awful,” said Marcy.
“Sure they are, and we might have more fun at home, like any vacationer. But I convinced us that we earned the right to find it out.”
“Except you haven’t. Literally earned it, that is.”
“See! Right with Eversharp, Orry. We’ve got a hundred twenty and are looking for the balance. Busfare, motel, plus the necessaries. What do you suppose it would take?”
“I wouldn’t cut it too close. Err on the high side. You get your tickets and pay for the room, and then be sure to have a hundred fifty for each day you are there.”
“One fifty per diem! Gawd, no. Ten will be good for that, surely?”
“Pigford, no. Don’t get caught short. If you spend less, you can always return the balance and shrink your principal on the loan. But the money will be there if you need it.”
“You never know what can come up,” said Marcy.
“She knows,” Sad Mary agreed—fellow females these.
“Anyway, consider it done. Happy to come to terms, Pigford. I am a great believer in loaning a good man money—once.”
“That says it all. The Once.”
“But listen, here’s another proposition. We were just stepping out to my Club, not far from here. There’s a shindig on tonight—moyles and moyles of food, and a bottomless well of pedigreed booze. Would you consider joining us?”
“We are hardly presentable, you kind man.”
“But you are. It’s a masquerade, you see, so you can come just as you are and be—what?”
“Street-life,” said Mary.
“The Man in the Street! And the Woman. I am going disguised as Myself and Marcy as The Younger Woman. Among our party, we are bound to take a door prize.”
“That is good, as yourself. So we would be as ourself too, wouldn’t we. And she is a younger woman—than you, Mary.”
“She’s a good gal, though,” said Mary.
“But let’s run,” said Orrin. “It’s getting late, and I think we are all ready?”
“I don’t know about this one, Orry.”
They were halfway into the corridor as Pigford expressed his hesitancy. Back inside the flat, Orrin’s phone was ringing, but he waved it off and snugged the door behind them.
“Oh come on, Pigford, what the hell. If we’re not enjoying ourselves, we can always just go somewhere for a drink.”
Foliage À Deux
(envoi)
The world is sometimes quite unsteady even when one is not drunk.
—MUSIL
Three months later, in October, the Boston Red Sox were playing for the world championship in New York. There was wide disagreement in Boston as to whether they overcame the burden of history by going so far, or whether history rose up and overcame them—for naturally, they had victory in their grasp and failed to grasp it.
Orrin Summers was not watching. He and Marcy were just back from a weekend in Fitzwilliam,
New Hampshire, and when he read that Oil Can Boyd was being yanked from the pitching rotation for the decisive seventh game, he boydcotted it. The manager, McNamara, had told the press throughout the Series that he did not intend to tamper with a lineup that had won all year simply because logic might appear to dictate such changes. Then he yanked the Can and explained that the change was dictated by logic. This was a logic Orrin felt he had seen before in Boston sports.
But he was two-faced, too. The irony was not lost on him, for he had invited Marcy to fill Gail’s spot in the lineup on the annual Foliage à Deux excursion and it seemed to him in doing so that nothing was sacred now. It seemed that way to Tony, the innkeeper, too, although he kept his tightened twisted mouth shut about it.
Orrin wanted to explain to Tony that it was not his choice, that it was not what it seemed. Less than a week earlier, he’d tried to convince Gail they really ought to tough it out together for the sake of the children and, laughing almost in the old way, she confessed she hadn’t thought of that angle. “I would have gone on,” he wanted to tell Tony, “if only for the sake of little Clyde and Elspeth.”
As badly as he felt about the roster change, Orrin could not (or at least he did not) resist it and much of the bad feeling proved sadly hypothetical. For the meals were as delicious as ever, the sugar maples had never flared a more sultry red or radiant yellow, and the Ashuelot, the Contoocook, and the old Souhegan rippled happily still through the inflamed forests. And though Tony had stuck it to them, he was sure, with the most prohibitive hay-rack of a bed (out of a touching loyalty to Gail) it was nonetheless impossible for Orrin to deny his sexuality in Fitzwilliam, or repress a single note of any song.
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Postcards from Pinsk Page 21
