Bluebeard's Egg (18 page)

Marylynn laughs. “I once had a dentist who I swear drilled tiny holes in my teeth, so he could fix them later,” she says.

Sally sees Ed’s hand outstretched towards her, holding the empty glass. She takes it, smiling, and turns away. There’s a roaring sound at the back of her head; blackness appears around the edges of the picture she is seeing, like a television screen going dead. She walks into the kitchen and puts her cheek against the refrigerator and her arms around it, as far as they will go. She remains that way, hugging it; it hums steadily, with a sound like comfort. After a while she lets go of it and touches her hair, and walks back into the living room with the filled glass.

Marylynn is over by the french doors, talking with Walter Morly. Ed is standing by himself, in front of the fireplace, one arm on the mantelpiece, his left hand out of sight in his pocket.

Sally goes to Marylynn, hands her the glass. “Is that enough?” she says.

Marylynn is unchanged. “Thanks, Sally,” she says, and goes on listening to Walter, who has dragged out his usual piece of mischief: some day, when they’ve perfected it, he says, all hearts will be plastic, and this will be a vast improvement on the current model. It’s an obscure form of flirtation. Marylynn winks at Sally, to show that she knows he’s tedious. Sally, after a pause, winks back.

She looks over at Ed, who is staring off into space, like a robot which has been parked and switched off. Now she isn’t sure whether she really saw what she thought she saw. Even if she did, what does it mean? Maybe it’s just that Ed, in a wayward intoxicated moment, put his hand on the nearest buttock, and Marylynn refrained from a shriek or a flinch out of good breeding or the desire not to offend him. Things like this have happened to Sally.

Or it could mean something more sinister: a familiarity between them, an understanding. If this is it, Sally has been wrong about Ed, for years, forever. Her version of Ed is not something she’s perceived but something that’s been perpetrated on her, by Ed himself, for reasons of his own. Possibly Ed is not stupid. Possibly he’s enormously clever. She thinks of moment after moment when this cleverness, this cunning, would have shown itself if it were there, but didn’t. She has watched him so carefully. She remembers playing Pick Up Sticks, with the kids, Ed’s kids, years ago: how if you moved one stick in the tangle, even slightly, everything else moved also.

She won’t say anything to him. She can’t say anything: she can’t afford to be wrong, or to be right either. She goes back into the kitchen and begins to scrape the plates. This is unlike her – usually she sticks right with the party until it’s over – and after a while Ed wanders out. He stands silently, watching her. Sally concentrates on the scraping: dollops
of sauce suprême
slide into the plastic bag, shreds of lettuce, rice, congealed and lumpy. What is left of her afternoon.

“What are you doing out here?” Ed asks at last.

“Scraping the plates,” Sally says, cheerful, neutral. “I just thought I’d get a head start on tidying up.”

“Leave it,” says Ed. “The woman can do that in the morning.” That’s how he refers to Mrs. Rudge, although she’s been with them for three years now:
the woman
. And Mrs. Bird before her, as though they are interchangeable. This has never bothered Sally before. “Go on out there and have a good time.”

Sally puts down the spatula, wipes her hands on the hand towel, puts her arms around him, holds on tighter than she should. Ed pats her shoulder. “What’s up?” he says; then, “Sally, Sally.” If she looks up, she will see him shaking his head a little, as if he doesn’t know what to do about her. She doesn’t look up.

Ed has gone to bed. Sally roams the house, fidgeting with the debris left by the party. She collects empty glasses, picks up peanuts from the rug. After a while she realizes that she’s down on her knees, looking under a chair, and she’s forgotten what for. She goes upstairs, creams off her make-up, does her teeth, undresses in the darkened bedroom and slides into bed beside Ed, who is breathing deeply as if asleep.
As if
.

Sally lies in bed with her eyes closed. What she sees is her own heart, in black and white, beating with that insubstantial moth-like flutter, a ghostly heart, torn out of her and floating in space, an animated valentine with no colour. It will go on and on forever; she has no control over it. But now she’s seeing the egg, which is not small and cold and white and inert but larger than a real egg and golden pink, resting in a nest of brambles, glowing softly as though there’s something red and hot inside it. It’s almost pulsing; Sally is afraid of it. As she looks it darkens: rose-red, crimson. This is something the story left out, Sally thinks: the egg is alive, and one day it will hatch. But what will come out of it?

Spring Song of the Frogs

W
omen’s lips are paler again. They wax and wane, from season to season. They haven’t been this pale for years; not for fifteen or twenty years at least. Will can’t remember when it was, when he last saw those shades of rich vanilla, of melting orange sherbet, of faded pink satin, on women’s mouths. Some time before he started really noticing. All this past winter the lips were dark instead, mulberry, maroon, so that the mouths looked like the mouths of old-fashioned dolls, sharply defined against the china white of the skin. Now the skins are creamier, except on the ones who have ignored whatever wordless decree has gone out and have begun to tan.

This woman, whose name is Robyn, has a mouth the colour of a fingernail, the wan half-moon at the base. Her own fingernails are painted to match: someone has decided that they should no longer look as if they’ve been dipped in blood. She has on a loose cool dress, cotton in a pink so faint it’s like something that’s run in the wash, with buttons down the front, the top three undone. By the way she’s glanced down once or twice, she’s wondering if she’s gone too far.

Will smiles at her, looking into her eyes, which are possibly blue; he can’t tell in this light. She smiles back. She won’t be able to keep staring him in the eye for long. After she blinks and shifts, she’ll have three choices. The menu, on grey paper with offset handwriting, French style, which she’s already studied; the view off to the side, towards the door, but it’s too early for that; or the wall behind him. Will knows what’s on it: a framed poster advertising a surrealist art show of several years back, with a drawing on it, fleshy pink with pinky-grey shadows, which suggests a part of the body, though it’s difficult to say which part. Something about to grow hair, become sexual in a disagreeable way. Either she’ll react to it or she won’t see it all. Instead she’ll glance at her own reflection in the glass, checking herself out as if she’s a stranger she might consider picking up: a deep look, brief but sincere.

The waitress arrives, a thin girl in a red brushcut, with a purple feather earring dangling from one ear. She stands as though her head is fixed on a hook and the rest of her body is drooping down from it, with no tendons. She’s wearing what could be tuxedo pants. The restaurant is in a district of second-hand clothing stores, where foreign-looking women with stumpy legs and black hair pulled back into buns come to shuffle through the racks, and also where girls like this one get their outlandish costumes. The belt is wide red plastic, and could be either twenty-five years old or brand new; the shirt is a man’s dress shirt, with pleats, the sleeves rolled to the elbow. The girl’s arms, bone-skinny and white, come out of the puffs of cloth like the stems of peonies that have been grown in darkness.

Her thighs will be much the same. Will can remember the thighs in the ancient men’s magazines, the ones that were passed around when he was at school, black-and-white photos on cheap paper, with no air-brushing, the plump women posed in motel rooms, the way the garters would sink into the flesh of thighs and rump. Now there’s no flesh, the thighs have shrivelled up, they’re all muscle and bone. Even the
Playboy
centrefolds look as if they’re made of solid gristle. It’s supposed to be sexy to show them in leg warmers.

Will asks Robyn if she’d like something to drink.

“A Perrier with a twist,” says Robyn, looking up, giving the waitress the same smile she’s just given Will.

Will orders a Bloody Mary and wonders if he’s made a mistake. Possibly this waitress is a man. He’s been here several times before, never without a slight but enjoyable sense of entering forbidden territory. Any place with checked tablecloths gives him this feeling, which is left over from when he was a student and thought he would end up being something other than what he has become. In those days he drew illustrations for the campus newspaper, and designed sets. For a while he kept up the drawing, as a hobby, or that’s what his ex-wife called it. Maybe later he’ll go back to it, when he has the time. Some days he wanders into the galleries down here, to see what the young kids are up to. The owners approach him with cynical deference, as if all he has to offer, to them or anyone else, is his money. He never buys anything.

The waitress returns with the drinks, and Will, in view of the two slight bumps visible on her ribcage, decides that she really is a woman after all.

“I thought for a minute she was a man,” he says to Robyn.

“Really?” Robyn says. She glances at the waitress, now at the next table. “Oh no,” she says, as if it’s a mistake she herself would never have made. “No. Definitely a woman.”

“Some bread?” Will says. The bread here is placed in tiny baskets, suspended over the tables by a sort of rope-and-pulley arrangement. To get to the bread you have to either stand up or lower the basket by unhitching the rope from where it’s fastened on the wall; which is awkward, but Will enjoys doing it. Maybe the theory is that your food will appeal to you more if you’re allowed to participate in it, or maybe the baskets are just some designer’s fiasco. He always has bread here.

“Pardon?” says Robyn, as if
bread
is a word she’s never heard before. “Oh. No thanks.” She gives a little shudder, as if the thought of it is slightly repulsive. Will is annoyed, but determined to have bread anyway. It’s good bread, thick, brown, and warm. He turns to the wall, undoes the rope, and the basket creaks downwards.

“Oh, that’s very cute,” says Robyn. He catches it then, the look she’s giving herself in the glass behind him. Now they are going to have to make their way through the rest of the lunch somehow. Why does he keep on, what’s he looking for that’s so hard to find? She has generous breasts, that’s what impelled him: the hope of generosity.

The waitress comes back and Robyn, pursing her pastel-coloured lips, orders a spinach salad without the dressing. Will is beginning to sweat; he’s feeling claustrophobic and is anxious to be gone. He tries to think about running his hand up her leg and around her thigh, which might be full and soft, but it’s no good. She wouldn’t enjoy it.

Cynthia is white on white. Her hair is nearly blonde, helped out, Will suspects: her eyebrows and eyelashes are darker. Her skin is so pale it looks powdered. She’s not wearing the hospital gown but a white nightgown with ruffles, childish, Victorian, reminiscent of lacey drawers and Kate Greenaway greeting cards. Under the cloth, Will thinks, she must be translucent; you would be able to see her veins and intestines, like a guppy’s. She draws the sheet up to her chest, backing away from him, against the headboard of the bed, a position that reminds him of a sickly Rosetti madonna, cringing against the wall while the angel of the Annunciation threatens her with fullness.

Will smiles with what he hopes is affability. “How are you doing, Cynthia?” he says. There’s a basket on the night table, with oranges and an apple; also some flowers.

“Okay,” she says. She smiles, a limp smile that denies the message. Her eyes are anxious and cunning. She wants him to believe her and go away.

“Your mum and dad asked me to drop by,” Will says. Cynthia is his niece.

“I figured,” says Cynthia. Maybe she means that he wouldn’t have come otherwise, or maybe she means that they have sent him as a substitute for themselves. She is probably right on both counts. It’s a family myth that Will is Cynthia’s favourite uncle. Like many myths, it had some basis in truth, once, when – just after his own marriage broke up – he was reaching for a sense of family, and would read Cynthia stories and tickle her under the arms. But that was years ago.

Last night, over the phone, his sister used this past as leverage. “You’re the only one who can talk to her. She’s cut us off.” Her voice was angry rather than despairing.

“Well, I don’t know,” Will said dubiously. He has no great faith in his powers as a mediator, a confidant, even a strong shoulder. He used to have Cynthia up to the farm, when his own sons were younger and Cynthia was twelve or so. She was tanned then, a tomboy; she liked to wander over the property by herself, picking wild apples. At night she would wolf down the dinners Will would cook for the four of them, five if he had a woman up – plates of noodles Alfredo, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, fried chicken, steaks, sometimes a goose which he’d bought from the people across the way.

There was nothing wrong with Cynthia then; she wore her hair loose, her skin was golden, and Will felt a disturbing sexual pull towards her which he certainly doesn’t feel now. The boys felt it too, and would tease and provoke her, but she stood up to them. She said there was nothing they could do she couldn’t do too, and she was almost right. Then they got into their motorcycle-and-car phase, and Cynthia changed. All of a sudden she didn’t like getting grease on her hands; she began painting her nails. Will sees this now as the beginning of the end.

“It’s an epidemic,” his sister said over the phone. “It’s some kind of a fad. You know what she actually said? She actually said a lot of the girls at school were doing it. She’s so goddamned competitive.”

“I’ll go in,” Will said. “Is there anything I should take? Some cheese maybe?” His sister is married to a man whose eyebrows are so faint they’re invisible. Will, who doesn’t like him, thinks of him as an albino.

“How about a good slap on the backside,” said his sister. “Not that she’s got one left.”

Then she began to cry, and Will said she shouldn’t worry, he was sure it would all turn out fine in the end.

At the moment he doesn’t believe it. He looks around the room, searching for a chair. There is one, but Cynthia’s sky-blue dressing-gown is across it. Just as well: if he sits down, he’ll have to stay longer.

“Just okay?” he says.

“I gained a pound,” she says. This is intended to placate him. He’ll have to check with the doctor, as his sister wants a full report, and Cynthia, she claims, is not accurate on the subject of her weight.

“That’s wonderful,” he says. Maybe it’s true, since she’s so unhappy about it.

“I hardly ate anything,” she says, plaintively but also boasting.

“You’re trying though,” says Will. “That’s good.” Now that he’s here, he wishes to be helpful. “Maybe tomorrow you’ll eat more.”

“But if I hardly ate anything and I gained a pound,” she says, “what’s going to happen? I’ll get fat.”

Will doesn’t know what to say. Reason, he knows, doesn’t work; it’s been tried. It would do no good to tell her she’s a wraith, that if she doesn’t eat she’ll digest herself, that her heart is a muscle like any other muscle and if it isn’t fed it will atrophy.

Suddenly Will is hungry. He’s conscious of the oranges and the apple, right beside him on the night table, round and brightly coloured and filled with sweet juice. He wants to take something, but would that be depriving her?

“Those look good,” he says.

Cynthia is scornful, as if this is some crude ploy of his to coax her to eat. “Have some,” she says. “Have it all. As long as I don’t have to watch. You can put it in your pocket.” She speaks of the fruit as if it were an undifferentiated mass, like cold porridge.

“That’s all right,” says Will. “I’ll leave it here for you.”

“Have the flowers then,” says Cynthia. This gesture too is contemptuous: he has needs, she doesn’t. She is beyond needs.

Will casts around for anything: some hook, some handhold. “You should get better,” he says, “so you can come up to the farm. You like it there.” To himself he sounds falsely genial, wheedling.

“I’d be in the way,” Cynthia says, looking away from him, out the window. Will looks too. There’s nothing out there but the windows of another hospital building. “Sometimes I can see them doing operations,” she says.

“I’d enjoy it,” Will says, not knowing whether he’s lying. “I get lonely up there on the weekends.” This is true enough, but as soon as he’s said it it sounds like whining.

Cynthia looks at him briefly. “You,” she says, as if she has a monopoly, and who is he to talk? “Anyway, you don’t have to go there if you don’t want to. Nobody’s making you.”

Will feels shabby, like an out-of-work man begging for handouts on the street. He has seen such men and turned away from them, thinking about how embarrassed he would be if he were in their place, shuffling like that. Now he sees that what counts for them is not his feeling of embarrassment but the money. He stands foolishly beside Cynthia’s bed, his offering rejected.