Her vividness troubled the air as the blur of the returning hummingbird troubled the comer by the orange tree. I sat smiling, dabbling a stream of water on her sandals, and as she threw out her hands in a triumphant Q.E.D. sort of gesture I saw the slight, awkward stiffness of her left arm.
A cold finger was laid on my insides. I could not help appraising the false breast swelling above the real swelling of her pregnancy. I saw her brown throat, too vulnerable. Would I have so doted on this girl if she had not been maimed and threatened? Was it to herself or her danger that I responded with so much anxious solicitude? Talk about the need for contrast in a garden! She was herself, if one believed her thesis, the indispensable reminder of danger and pain to make this sanctuary blessed. She saw stars by daylight because she lived down a well, and she watched them with passion because any day the cover might go on and she might be bottled forever in the dark.
For that single intense instant the image of the king snake glared in my mind, the bloody coils bulging in the middle as Marian bulged. I saw him smashed and twitching, stuffed into a hole with the dirt falling on him. It was no more than an association of shapes, but the cold spot in my guts contracted in a spasm, and on my arms every little hair bristled from its crater of goose flesh.
I was dismayed at the violence of my feelings, and said angrily—but angry at what? At it, at her danger, at her brightness and bravery, I suppose—“Pain is fine when you can turn it off. It may even be good for the soul in small quantities, the way strychnine in small quantities is good for sick hearts. But they don’t arrange pain in this world so you can turn it off when you want. Feel the earth rough to all your length, sure, fine, but for God’s sake don’t cultivate pain. Pain is poison, you poor demented enthusiast with whom I am madly in love. Pain is poison! Don’t go hunting for it. Never praise it. Avoid it all you can and bear it if you must, but never never never mistake it for something desirable!”
It was an outburst, and it left them both staring. In my embarrassment at the way my feelings had snatched and shaken me, I squirted their feet with care and turned off the hose. Ruth’s half-dried shirt was stuck against her, showing the wiry outline of her torso and the white shape of her brassiere—a healthy and durable woman. But the flesh of her thighs sagged a little, her hair was pure white, and looked all the whiter because her eyebrows were still black. I felt a gush of tenderness, not so much because she had been my wife and my intimate for forty years, as because she was mortal and threatened like the girl beside her. They read me the same lesson in helpless vulnerability. Neither could have had the slightest notion how hard it was for me not to reach out and touch them, one after the other—groping for contact like a hippo or a walrus, one of a species that cannot live without rubbing against its fellows.
I met Marian’s eyes. She smiled tentatively, willing at a hint to forget this awkward moment and go back to the playful heckling that was our minds’ habitual disguise. I thought she might understand what my anger had been trying to say; after the long letter I had written her the day before I somehow felt that the masks were permanently off. But clearly she didn’t understand, and I had to remind myself that she had never seen the letter; I had poured myself out without an audience, I had fallen in the forest without an ear to hear my crash. Now, I saw, Marian would have tried to say something cheerful if she had been sure what I meant or what I needed.
But to cheer me just then she would have had to annul her mortality, Ruth’s, my own, the mortality of every blob that twitched with sensation anywhere on the indifferent earth, and fled the too violent sensations it knew as pain.
What a job of work was done when we crossed the fatal boundary between the polymer and the cell, and began stumbling toward the perfected consciousness that Marian was so sure we would ultimately reach!
The telephone rang, and I went with relief to answer it. It was Fran LoPresti, apparently without a thing to do but chat, though she had a hundred-odd guests coming at any time. She is dreadful to talk to on the telephone. Her voice absorbs you like quicksand. Unctuous and caressing, full of soft emphasis and boneless stress, she went on about the heat, and who was coming and who couldn’t come, and what ought to be done to keep Ansel Sutton sober. The telephone was wet in my hand, a fly kept lighting on my bald spot, the voice oozed on until mercifully some little plug of lead melted in my overheated skull and a connection shorted out and communication became only a soothing murmur.
I couldn’t imagine what she had called for. Anybody in his right mind would be sitting in a cool tub. Maybe that was where she was. I saw her, pink and white, sitting in the bathtub stirring the water with a pink toe, her mouth smootching the white telephone. From that, for some reason, I progressed to a vision of pink new-born mice being lifted by their tails and dipped into honey and lifted out dripping and smoothly swallowed.
It struck me that the murmuring had stopped. “Mmmmm?” I said.
“All around the patio,” she said. “We’ve been working like fiends. Every one of the mural things and all the driftwoods, and even the big one, the welded one. I finished it last night, out there with the perspiration simply pouring off my nose and bugs flying into the torch. You just don’t have any idea how I suffer for my art.”
“All art is suffering,” I said.
“Well,” she cried, “I hope not for you! I’m very anxious to hear what you think of them, especially the welded one.”
I said I couldn’t wait to see them. The receiver crooned and sighed and warbled at my ear.
“And, oh, Joe,” it said. “I knew there was something else I wanted to ask you. Have you seen Marian? Julie said she had to baby-sit, but I’ve rung and rung, and nobody’s home.”
“Marian’s here with us. She said Julie and Debby have gone over to the Casement pool.”
“Oh.” She sounded softly jolted, as if she had stepped down a step that wasn’t there. “She is with Debby, then.”
“That’s what Marian said.”
“Well, all right then,” Fran said vaguely, and then her voice rose a little and lost its syrup, and I found myself speculating that in a crisis she could probably even scream. “I would have bet she was down with that gang of beatniks again. Do you know, I found out she goes there all the time. And she lies to me, my God how that child lies! It’s the most awful age, I can’t do anything right, I can’t open my mouth without making her hate me. And that gang makes her ten times worse. Who owns that land across from you, Joe? Couldn’t we find out, and see if we couldn’t get them put out of there?”
“God help us, I own it,” I said.
“You own it? But why ever did you ... ?”
“I gave permission to one, and he became seven or eight by mitosis or something.”
“But you don’t want them down there.”
“Not particularly.”
“Oh, good,” she said. “Oh, wonderful! Maybe we can do something. I’m sure they shouldn’t be permitted in the neighborhood, they’re as vicious as can be, and dirty, and all those long-haired bearded boys. Ugh! Oh, you make me feel so much better! Let’s talk about it—not at the party, I want you to have a good time and I want you to look at my sculpture very carefully. Later, right away soon. Mmmm? Oopsie, there’s a car, they’re starting to arrive. Byeee. Come early. Bye-eee.”
I want back out to the patio. “Who was so endless?” Ruth asked.
“Fran. Mainly worrying about whether Julie is down with Peck’s crowd.”
Immediately I wished I hadn’t said it, for Marian was dismayed. “Oh dear! Is she upset?”
“Well, yes. She’d like me to run them all out.”
“Are you going to?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “The fact that Fran is upset seems to me the least good of several good reasons why I might.”
“Oh, I’m going to have to talk to her, and to Julie too. Maybe I shouldn’t hire Julie any more.”
“Then she’ll go anyway, as you told me yourself,” I said. “Well, the hell wit
h the surly young. I read some counselor the other day who was convinced the only thing worse than being a parent is being a child. He had it backward. Are we going to this party?”
“I suppose any time now,” Ruth said.
“Sun’s far enough over the yardarm, you think?” It was a provocative remark, but she only looked at me pleasantly and impenetrably. I suppose she did think it was now a legitimate time for a drink. She has these little rules, and when they are satisfied, she is. And I suspect that she had comprehended my outburst when Marian began trying to persuade us, or herself, that there is virtue in pain.
“Are we going across country?” Ruth said. “Let’s not, let’s drive around.”
Marian looked at us both and said, “Honestly, if you two can stand it, I’d rather walk.”
“Of course we can stand it, but you can’t,” Ruth said.
“Just because I got winded on your hill!” Marian said. She seemed genuinely upset. “I ought to walk, the doctor says so. Anyway, don’t I have to be consistent and choose the uncomfortable way?”
Softly, I said to myself. Don’t argue with her. For some reason she’s got her backbone straight, she’s screwed up tight like the first day we met. So I said, as if it didn’t matter, “O.K. Have you got some sort of wrap, for coming home after it’s cooled off?”
“I’ll take an extra stole,” Ruth said.
A light trembling, not quite a smile, moved on Marian’s lips. “Joe, are you mad? Because I don’t really care. Just because I’m a pig and like punishment is no reason ...”
“I agree with John,” I said. “You have to do the things that are good for your spirit.”
“I’m afraid you are mad.”
“Not at you. At it, whatever it is. I’ve been mad at one thing or another all day. So just stick your feet in the water and stay cool and we’ll get dressed.”
A little later we were a tiny procession between brass earth and brass sky, little coolies in straw garden hats, me carrying a preposterous sweater and two stoles. It was so hot I shivered, and flares went off behind my eyes. My nostrils were coated with the dust-and-manure smell of the trail we followed, and I felt the tug of burrs at my cuffs, the prick of foxtails in my ankles. High over the hazed ridges the redtail was riding the thermals, looking not as if he were up there hunting, but as if he had gone up in search of a breeze.
Beyond the Shields pasture and the hot lane, a shortcut path hooked down into the willows around a pump house and tank. There was a head-clearing whiff of witch hazel, an illusory breath of coolness. Sidling through the turnstile, we passed the empty chicken house whose torn wire was a memorial to Weld’s brother’s dog, and climbed the gradual lane of oaks, almost defoliated by oak-moth caterpillars and clotted with dark mistletoe. Naturally, being a parasite, the mistletoe was unpalatable to any pest. The more ravaged the tree, the more healthy those kissing-clusters.
As we came up the lane we heard the sounds of the party as volubly unintelligible as an Italian traffic argument, and then we came to the top and it was spread out before us in the enormous patio.
A Renoir picnic on a construction site. Among random piles of lumber and sand and tile, between cement mixer and bench saw and sawhorses, women in bright dresses and men in bright shirts coasted and clustered. There were only three little fig trees for shade, but a red beach umbrella bloomed like a poppy in the blazing center. The shadow of the western wing of the house cut the patio about a third of the way, and against the shaded wall, by a white bar table, a man in a white coat dispensed respite and nepenthe. As he lifted a glass to pass it to a woman, the ice cubes caught the sun and threw me a brilliant blue wink.
Marian turned. Her smile for the moment was as bright as the wink of the ice cubes, but as we started in toward the crowd I saw her back, splashed with the mixed sun and shade under the desolated trees. Her shoulders drooped, her green dress was wrinkled in back where she had sat on it. However much I might want a cold drink with a touch of company, she looked as if someone should in kindness lead her off to a darkened room and put her to bed.
3
The other day, between rains, Ruth and I waded through the mud to the LoPresti place, carrying a little Christmas present with the notion of patching up our relations, sadly out of whack since the Fourth of July. We found no one at home but the sculptures, on whom I suppose I might have put some of the blame for Fran’s sense of grievance. And the whole vast patio in which they sat or stood or hung had been tiled, bordered, grouted, polished, planted, cleaned up, finished. Cement mixer, bench saw, generator and tank and torch, piles of sand and tile, were all gone. And not a muddy footprint besides our own, no sign that since the wind left them there the leaves in the comers had been stirred by anything bigger than an earwig, nothing busy about the place except a stream of ants that poured up and down the grout lines between the tiles. I got, somehow, the feeling of a bleak and tidy desolation; the aim had gone out of that once-busy yard, it was like an unhappy woman with a tight mouth. And for that I was partly responsible.
They say that more people are alive today than have lived in all previous human history. I find that hard to believe. It is so long a history, and so laborious, and it sits so heavy on the mind. Alive for what? I wanted to ask, up to my ankles in ants that I could have melted to goo with one blast of an insect bomb. Busy for what? But I knew well enough. We move because we move, we build because we build, we reproduce because our loins thirst for the profound touch, and then we divert upon our children, who have their own sort and do not want ours, the hopes that for ourselves are no longer mentionable without a grimace. Standing in Lucio’s courtyard before Fran’s ill-omened sculpture, I had a quick, comical impulse to get out of there and go home and do something useful—lay some stones, say, in the retaining wall I was building along the drive.
This job was too aridly closed up, and there was no sign of a new beginning. Yet Lucio had walked a treadmill of incessant new beginnings. The cement mixer, his heraldic emblem, was always rampant somewhere above a cone of spilled sand. Lumber piles and litter got incorporated into the living routines as people use the stumps and outcrops of a picnic site. I have seen Fran in her abstracted way flatten down the top of a two-ton pile of sand and throw a cloth over it and use it as a coffee table, and it was standard practice for Lucio, on party days, to fill the cement mixer with ice for the cooling of beer. Even worn-out tools never disappeared. With her torch, a real antique, one of those that generates its own acetylene gas out of calcium carbide and water, Fran welded them into art.
We were looking her major creation right in the eye, or would have been if it had had an eye, and I found myself actively disliking the thing. Troublemaker, pretender, parody of something sad and unattractive—in its maker? in its viewer? both, probably—it brooded back at us, its exposed torso shiny with welds like scars. Most of Fran’s art was either ragged messes of junk (she talked a good deal about learning to think in the medium) or mosaics of old teaspoons, safety pins, coins, and kinks of copper wire embedded in fused glass like the leavings of litterbugs in a Yellowstone hot spring. But this thing was frankly, even darkly, female. Back on the Fourth I had indulged my alcoholic humor at her expense, but now I thought she leered at me with a knowledge that was sinister, sad, and accusing.
A woman, of a sort, nearly life-size. She wore for skirt a cut-off galvanized boiler with rivets running like a row of buttons from belt to hem. Rising out of the rounding top of this skirt like a jutting pelvis was an old shovel whose handle made a spinal column linking pelvis and thorax, as in a wired skeleton. Midway in the spine, moved by some whimsy that I never did understand, but that I would investigate if I were her psychiatrist, Fran had drilled a hole in which she had set a lens from a pair of eyeglasses. For some reason, it was inescapably obscene to look right through that thing’s bifocal navel. Filthy X-rays.
Bracketed to the spine in place of a rib cage was a portable typewriter rescued from the dump. Its movable parts were fused with rust,
its keyboard made a panel of gangrenous guts, its necklace of rusty type hung down between ribbon spools like round rudimentary breasts. To enhance the resemblance, Fran, thinking in anything but the medium, had touched each spool with a bright nipple of solder.
The neck was a hammer handle wrapped with leather like the neck of one of those African women stretched with circle after circle of copper wire. The face was composed only of the hammer’s down-hooking claws. Curving up over this tooth-face as halo or sunbonnet was a bamboo lawn rake with some broken rays. Both hammer and rake were tilted slightly on the stiffly upright body, so that the faceless teeth under the sunbonnet wore an indescribable look of coquetry. You expected her to sidle up and say in a voice like Mortimer Snerd’s, “How’d you like to look through my navel, a-huh, a-huh, a-huh?”
“What in hell do you suppose Fran had in mind?” I said, when we had stood looking for three or four minutes. “She couldn’t have arrived at that thing by accident. And she takes it seriously or I wouldn’t have hurt her feelings so on the Fourth.”
“She’s a pretty vague woman. I imagine it’s just an iron doodle that turned out gruesome.”
“You know what I think? I think it’s a portrait of Julie.”
“Julie, or Fran’s feelings about Julie?”
“Well, isn’t every portrait a self-portrait?”
“Fran wouldn’t like the idea,” Ruth said. Then she said a strange, bitter thing. “If you did a portrait of Curtis, would it resemble you?”
We stared at one another almost with hatred. Her eyes ducked away, her lips moved in a deprecatory slight smile, as if she begged me to take her remark as a joke, and she went back to studying the caricature standing above us on its pedestal. “Isn’t it just that hammer that makes you think it’s hostile?” she said. “After all, she didn’t make that, she just found it lying around.”
All the Little Live Things Page 19
