All the Little Live Things (24 page)

“Yes, and squirt each other with water like a pair of six-year-olds.”

(How does one describe a smile like hers? Good teeth, white and even. Large eyes, very blue, uptilted at the outer corners. Face thin and fine boned. Skin brown and stretched, with a sheen on it. The physical details say nothing, and they do not recall the essential magic of her smile to me now. It was her spirit that smiled, it bubbled out of her like the bright water bubbling from the fountain. Remembering, I could knock my forehead on the ground.)

Her fine small head, shaped by the back-drawn hair, tilted to listen. Her eyes went around the patio in a flickering circuit. “And look what sort of shade you arrange to bicker in!”

Forced by her attention, we attended. She had the faculty of making you look and listen and smell and taste. The motor hummed, almost imperceptible, from its box. The stem of water rising five or six inches above the nozzle wavered and toppled with clunking, gurgling sounds. I saw that the jet was trying, against the interference of its own toppling weight, to rotate clockwise, like all volatile Northern Hemisphere things pulled by the spinning earth. Now and again the basin hummed out a deep reverberating note, like a gong. From its lip a smooth thin stream curved to shatter in the pool, and from the splash circles spread, overtaking each other, rocking the single yellow water lily afloat on its green raft, and from the spreading circles the sun knocked reflections that fluttered on the fence and crept among tongue-shaped clematis leaves. A hummingbird buzzed the orange tree by the pool’s corner and shot away.

“You wouldn’t have made this so beautiful if it didn’t please you,” Marian said, “and it wouldn’t please you so much if it wasn’t so hot and dry all around. Remember the argument we had this spring, the very first day we ever came up here? How I got after you for not leaving everything natural? Well, that’s the way I’d still do it myself, but yours is so good it almost persuades me. What’s an oasis without a desert around it? What’s a garden if you don’t come into it from a dirty street or a closed-in house? You
need
it hot in this patio. You wouldn’t turn on that fountain in the rain.”

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 with 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.