A Bigamist's Daughter (26 page)

She brings her eyes to the carrot, smiles at it as if it were a jonquil. “ ‘And then I—met your father! Malaria fever and jonquils and then—this—boy.…’ ”

The two of them lean together toward the Formica counter, laughing. “I can’t believe you still remember all that.”

“It was my stage debut!” Joanne laughs. “Remember when I started going out with the guy who played the gentleman caller, Frank O’Murphy, and my mother thought he must be half Italian with a name like Franco?”

Elizabeth nods. “I remember hearing about it. I was up at school.”

Joanne sips her drink and then grimaces, swallowing hard. “I hope I don’t start imitating Tupper. You know how I get when I drink.”

Elizabeth laughs, lowers her voice. “You should really recite your speech for him at dinner. He’ll think you’re very literary. Even poetic.”

Joanne lowers her voice too. “Can you imagine? I’ll just turn to him at dinner and say, ‘Tell me, Mr. Daniels, have you ever had malaria fever?’ ”

They laugh again, girlfriends, until Tommy comes out and moves the bottle of gin away from them. “I knew you two
would be giggling out here,” he says fondly. “We’re going to have another drink, but maybe I’d better cut you ladies off.”

Spoken like a buddy bartender.

Joanne puts her glass in front of him and wipes one corner of her eye. “We haven’t even started yet,” she says, shoving the jonquil-carrot into the machine. “We’re gonna take quinine and keep on going, going!”

When Tommy hands her the drink, he leans to kiss her forehead. She smiles up at him, eyes huge.

“He’s sweet,” Elizabeth says, after he has returned to the living room. (“So,” they hear him, “what was your major in college, Tupper?”) She is not sure why she says it, except that, as if she’d been shown a newborn baby, a compliment seemed appropriate.

Joanne smiles. “He’s my honey. Whenever I get sick of being married, I think of how sweet he is.”

Elizabeth recalls Ann’s “The people were so nice.” It hadn’t occurred to her that she’d meant Brian.

“And he really puts up with me.” She dumps the sliced carrots into a wooden bowl already filled with lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers. “I’ve been making him take me out on
dates
the last few weekends. You know, waiting for me in the living room and everything.” She makes a face to show how silly she is.

“That’s good,” Elizabeth says.

She shakes her head, tossing the salad with her hands. “How can you have a date with someone who was sitting on the toilet with the newspaper when you stepped out of the shower?”

They both laugh and Joanne says suddenly, “Do you remember the time I went to the Xavier prom and the guy—Larry—showed up in a top hat and tails? He had a cane and gloves and everything.”

“Senior year?”

They both nod.

“Well, you can’t have surprises like that when you’re married. You see too much of each other.” She turns to put the salad into the refrigerator. Unlike when they met in Penn Station, she doesn’t seem to be protesting this—merely passing the information on, an old married lady advising the virgin bride.

Elizabeth decides not to bring up the wedding pictures.

“But you’re happy?” she says and realizes she has, in a way, brought them up.

Joanne wipes the wet counter and unplugs the processor. “Oh, yeah. Really. Tommy’s so great.” She rinses the sponge and smiles at Elizabeth over her shoulder. “You like the apartment?”

“Beautiful.” She can’t possibly say,
Everything matches but Tommy.

Joanne leans against the counter, drink in hand. Tucks the other under her arm. She is braless and her plaid shirt is thin. There’s a deep shadow where the buttons open at her throat. Even without a bra, Elizabeth thinks, admiring the achievement, she has cleavage. Her denim skirt is straight and perhaps a little too large. “I’m not happy with this room,” she says. “I may repaper it. Use brighter colors. Although I’m kind of stuck with avocado green.”

Elizabeth looks around the crowded kitchen. The appliances are avocado, the food processor, the tea kettle, the electric can opener, the coffee maker, the blender behind the bottles of vodka and gin. Also the pinstripe in the ruffled curtains they’d picked out together in Macy’s, the clock, the juice squeezer, the popcorn maker, the canisters for sugar and flour and tea. Even the handles on her utensils and the labels on the spice jars.

She laughs. “Well, you asked for it.” At the engagement
party, the shower, the wedding, on the bridal registry in Bloomingdale’s where the long list of kitchen items that could be bought for the bride was headed: avocado green.

Joanne shrugs. “And the bathroom is all wrong. It was Tommy’s idea to use the kiddie wallpaper. It doesn’t work.”

“Oh, I like it. It’s cute.”

She shakes her head, takes a long drink. “It’s too cute,” she says. She slips her hand into a green mit and pulls open the oven door. Elizabeth can feel the warm gust of air, smell the oregano. “We’re just having lasagne,” Joanne says. “I hope it’s all right.”

“Fine.”

She closes the door. “I didn’t know what to make.” She leans back, throws the glove on the table. She seems distracted. “Are you hungry?”

“Just a little.”

“Good. I’m not hungry at all. Let’s get drunk. We never get drunk together anymore.”

They laugh and touch glasses, both remembering all those nights they spent in bars together, meeting boys, all those nights Joanne would stay at Elizabeth’s apartment in Flushing (her father calling three and four times a night and once showing up at the door at six A.M. just to make sure she was really there), the two of them lying side by side on the double bed, drinking wine and telling each other stories, love stories, war stories, fish stories, about boys.

“You remember Mark Leibowitz?” Joanne asks.

“The Mark you dated?”

She nods. “He called me. Or called my mother. He’s getting a divorce.”

“Why’d he want to talk to you?”

“To go out. He didn’t know I was married.” She picks up a
stray piece of carrot and pops it into her mouth. “And know what my mother said?”

Elizabeth shakes her head.

“She said, ‘She married a lawyer. He’s not Italian, but at least he’s a Catholic. I guess you never heard of a Catholic lawyer.’ ”

“You’re kidding!”

She rolls her brown eyes, flutters her hands. “My mother? That surprises you? I’m surprised she didn’t say worse.” She takes Elizabeth’s glass and makes them both another drink, the smell of lime suddenly overpowering the lasagne. “So, anyway,” plopping ice into each glass, “I’ve been trying to call him. To apologize. He hasn’t been home.”

She hands Elizabeth her drink. “Maybe I’ll have lunch with him or something. I’d like to see him again.”

Mark had been the love of Joanne’s life when Elizabeth was in Buffalo. She never met him, but somehow the possibility of Joanne seeing him again disturbs her. She had considered him long gone. Like Bill.

“What about Tommy?”

Joanne laughs. “He knows I’ve had other gentlemen callers—” She picks up the accent, “ ‘Why, sometimes there weren’t enough chairs to accommodate them all.’ ” Drops it. “And besides, if I have lunch with him in the city, Tommy will never have to know.”

Elizabeth frowns, but before she can say anything, Joanne takes a quick step forward, touches her arm. “Oh, I’m only kidding. I wouldn’t sneak out on Tommy.” She looks at her glass. “He’s my husband, not my father.”

Elizabeth smiles, wondering whose side she’s on anyway. “It would probably be fun to see Mark again,” she says. “Is he a doctor now?”

Joanne looks up, brightening. “I guess so. I’d love to know
what happened to his wife. They were only married about a year.” She shrugs. “I’m just curious about him. That’s all. Don’t you ever wonder about Bill?”

Their nights together in her Flushing apartment had ended when Elizabeth met Bill. Better to share your bed with.

“You mean, do I wonder who’s kissing him now?”

She laughs. “Something like that.”

Elizabeth nods and then closes her eyes, nonchalantly, like Mr. Owens. “I wonder. You can’t help but wonder, really. After you’ve lived with someone.”

All that’s happened to him since she left has carved a hollow space into everything that has happened to her.

Joanne purses her lips. “Or even just been in love with someone,” she says lightly. They both sip their drinks.

In the living room, there is a sudden dull thud and they hear Tommy shout, “No, I insist. Literature is secondary.” Tupper’s voice follows it, lower, calmer.

The two women glance at each other. Slowly, they smile.

“Honey,” Joanne says in her Amanda Wingfield voice. “A little education is a dangerous thing in a man.”

“I feel I haven’t seen you all evening,” Tupper says as they drive home.

She has her head back, her eyes closed against the lights.

“You and Joanne must have spent half the night in the kitchen. That surprised me. I didn’t think you were like that.”

Like some lugubrious tradition,
his book says. “Like what?”

“Segregationists.”

Like some lugubrious tradition, she thinks. Not the waving good-by at thin air that he wrote about, but the hiding, the need to be away from them. The long, sad tradition of two women huddled in a kitchen, whispering about their life behind their life with a man.

“We wanted to talk,” she says.

“Well, it must have been about us and it must have been nasty if you had to be so secretive.”

She has not raised her head. He and Tommy are now us. Versus them. “We weren’t being secretive. We were just being polite. It was a lot of gossip you two wouldn’t have been interested in.”

Some lugubrious tradition. Shall we retire to the drawing room and let the men smoke their cigars? Shall we go up to bed while the men finish their whiskey? Shall we knit together as they plan their war? Shall we drink our coffee in my kitchen while they work, golf, hunt?

She smiles. He’s right to be suspicious. Only a very blind despot would fail to notice how his subjects gather when his back is turned. Only a very stupid one would fail to fear some whispered revolution.

She lifts her head and opens her eyes. Tupper’s face is pale blue. The lights seem to crack over his forehead, sink down his cheeks, break over his forehead again. He seems young and pale, and it occurs to her that he is a long way from home, on unfamiliar ground. That he is, except for her, alone.

She reaches over and pats his warm thigh. Was it Lenin who said a revolutionary must be without pity?

“I guess you didn’t have a very good time.”

He smiles at her. “No, it was fine. I just wish I’d seen more of you.”

She slides her hand up between his legs. He is soft, warm.

And just what whispered female revolution is she thinking of anyway? She herself decided tonight, in the warm glow of wine and candlelight and Joanne’s beautiful china, in the soft pink living room, in the moment when, leaving the apartment, she turned to wave good-by again and saw Joanne wrap her arms around Tommy’s neck, saw Tommy move his chin against her hair, that she still wanted it, still believed in it:
marriage, eternal love. The silverware I’ll pass on to my favorite granddaughter, the dear first apartment we’ll remember all our lives, the sweet solid sound of
husband:
This is my husband.

Given that, her own decision, what whispered female revolution is she thinking of?

She clicks her tongue, laughs to herself. A little feminism is a dangerous thing.

He shifts slightly in his seat and she removes her hand. She wonders if Tommy and Joanne are making love. She imagines Tommy would be very gentle, nearly polite.

“I guess I’ll never feel I see enough of you,” Tupper says.

“Well, you can see all you want of me when we get home. No holes barred.”

He laughs, eyes on the road. “That’s vulgar!”

She smiles. A little feminism, she thinks, merely makes you suspicious. Makes you kick at all those pretty pink rocks of romanticism, exposing their wormy undersides, but doesn’t make you lift them up and toss them out completely. Doesn’t keep you from pity and hope and seeing his side of it. From those old longings for husband, beloved husband buried forever at your side.

She looks out the cool window. Through the dark trees that line the highway she can see the yellow lights of dens and living rooms and bedrooms, each with a blue television light within it like the heart of a flame, or the iris of a jaundiced eye.

She tries to think of feminism again, whispering in kitchens, kicking at rocks, but it all flicks away, comes to her in parts, as if someone were spinning the dial, finding nothing to watch.

She read somewhere that children raised on television have problems with attention spans. And job satisfaction.

She leans back against the door, facing him. “I’m drunk.”

He glances at her. “Good. I want to ask you something.”

She places a hand on the dashboard, elbow straight. “Shoot.”

He moves his head to see her, faces front again. “Let’s go away together. Next weekend. Just the two of us. I’ll rent the car again and we can just take off.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know. Maybe out on Long Island, where your father was from. You said it’s pretty.”

She studies his profile, but the passing lights are like a strobe. He could be smiling, frowning, or alternately doing both.

“Why?”

He faces her briefly. “I want to have you to myself. I want to get out of the city. You said you liked it out there.”

She smiles. They will go to the land of her father and there she will discover her birthright. Her white roots.

“And you talked to me today,” he says. “I won’t deny it. I want you to talk to me more. I want you to tell me everything you know.”

“For your book?”

“For us, too. For you.”

They will go to the land of her father and there they will be bound forever by the discoveries she makes. Bound hand and foot. Bound to be disappointed.

“I doubt that we’ll dig up any artifacts,” she says.

He reaches out to touch her. “We’ll be alone. We’ll create our own artifacts.”