Dale Loves Sophie to Death (4 page)

Vic met him at the airport, and he had not brought Ellen along just so he and Martin could discuss the
Review.
And they did discuss it all the way home. Aside from the two seminars he would teach at the college, most of Martin’s summer would be given over to discussions just of this sort, and he was weary in the car as they passed through the Berkshire Mountains to West Bradford. He was relieved to be quiet at last and back in his house when Vic dropped him off. But he was perplexed, too, when he was left there alone. He opened the shades, even the ones over the windows that looked down on the town’s single commercial street, and, most particularly, at a college bar and Laundromat adjacent to it. He had never found these buildings offensive; they weren’t so very near, just easily seen from the height of the house. The house was silent, but Dinah’s energy seemed to emanate from every corner and cubby of those rooms, and he was unnerved. When Martin was in this house he liked it; he always had, but now the rambling shell of the building shrouded him in a peculiar eroticism. He was more aware of his wife’s impact on these rooms now that she was
not
in them. His family’s artifacts were everywhere around him, and that was what buildings were to Martin: simply containers. He had no other vision of them, though he had tried at various times in his life to think of them apart, as art in themselves. But now, when he sat down in a chair, he never even considered the color of the woodwork or the very walls and the manner of their construction. He sat in a chair in his living room with the tall trees swaying in the yard outside and was aware only of the remnants his family had left behind them.

What puzzled him unaccountably was the unperturbed order settled into every cranny, up the stairs, into the bathrooms, bristling at him from the closets and the cupboards. In the usual course of events this was a household state seldom attained, and even then attained only after the expenditure of great energy and fury, and always attained temporarily.

“We’re terrible in this place together,” Dinah often said when they were in the midst of battling back the disorder that occasionally enveloped their lives so that they had to stop and put things right just to get on with their work. “You only understand neatness, and I only care about basic sanitation. You’d think it would work out so that we complemented each other, but instead we never really get the place either neat or clean!”

When the house was put in a state of domestic efficiency—with every towel folded, beds made, sinks clean—the arrangement was tenuous. And it seemed ominous to Martin, just for a moment, that throughout the summer, with only its lone inhabitant, the household would function with a calm and gloomy regulation.

As he walked around in his house, he found numerous plastic bins filled with carefully sorted toys. Each year, before they made the trip to Enfield, Dinah rearranged and straightened and cleaned all the rooms, because she didn’t want him to suffer from her habit of casual disarray. He discovered plastic building blocks in one bin, miniature cars in another, and so forth. In the kitchen there were two laundry baskets beside the clothes dryer. One was filled with clean clothes, through which he would sift this week, finding what he needed, and then he would deposit those same clothes, once he had worn them, into the companion basket—only to begin all over again after doing a wash. The drawer from which he took a paper napkin to set the table for his meals was full of wire closures for plastic bags, substitute tops for open soda bottles, checked-off grocery lists:

Milk ½ & ½

granola bars

chicken

tomatoes

Toby’s sd. drsg.

chick-peas (4)

He was overwhelmed with the sweet triviality of these things left behind, in the same way he would have been affected if his family had all gone off to war. In their bedroom he was even more overcome. Dinah’s books were shoved beneath the draped quilt which covered her round night table. A basket by her bed still enclosed a plethora of small articles she gathered throughout a day and deposited there at night when she emptied her pockets; she would sort them eventually. There was a book of matches, though she didn’t smoke, a child’s rubber eraser in the shape of a little car, spools of thread, a large cat’s-eye marble, etc. He sat on the edge of the bed transfixed, heady with the presence of his wife. He remembered when he had fallen in love with her, or at least he remembered the feeling of being in love with her, when there had been a sultry kind of tension between them, and now he would certainly say he loved her—he did love her—but that struck him as too simple a description. It was more as though she and he anticipated the other’s moods and longings so exactly that they forever wore the other’s persona like a cloak. Martin played the radio or the television most of the time the first few days of every summer to dispel the uncanny silence.

Into the second week, though, he fell into the rituals of isolated domesticity he had developed over the many summers of Dinah’s absence. The world
beyond
the house became suddenly erotic to him as well, so that even at the grocery store as he was sorting through the onions he might look across the aisle at a stringy girl choosing among the bell peppers and be stunned by desire. Ordinary people all at once seemed extraordinary in their mundane surroundings; their images leaped out at him from a hazy background like those photographs from SX–70 cameras in which the colors are more than real.

He grew even trimmer, because there was no comfort in having his meals alone at the kitchen table without his family. He took up his summer life as usual, relying more and more on Vic and Ellen. He spent a great deal of time with them, often bringing food to their house to be cooked and shared with them for dinner. Ellen’s sister, Claire, was there for the summer—or perhaps forever; Martin had long ago stopped asking Vic and Ellen for information about themselves when he had at last discovered that they would only look back at him with a smile—ironic and mysterious. It baffled him, but it stifled his curiosity.

When he and Dinah had first come to know the Hofstatters, the four of them had been inseparable. They had all, for a while, felt that they had found soulmates—two happy couples, intelligent, young—and then subtly Dinah’s disaffection began to settle into a solid enough persuasion so that Martin became aware of it. At first he had suspected jealousy, because Ellen was many things that Dinah was not. She was petite and exact and careful in her housekeeping, just as Vic was so precise in all his habits. Ellen had a mind and temperament like glistening, cool metal. She could be sharp; she was slightly inflexible. Martin knew that Dinah did not think
he
particularly admired those traits or even thought much about the difference between the two women. He thought Dinah might be jealous solely on her own behalf, because Ellen possessed qualities of order and emotional discipline that Dinah had longed for all her life. But one day Dinah had walked quietly into Ellen’s kitchen while Ellen shelled peas at the sink and found Martin, taken unawares, contemplating Ellen’s brown legs, muscular and supple in her brief red shorts. Dinah had looked at those legs, too, with a cool eye—his conspirator—until Ellen turned from the sink and the moment was over. When he thought about Dinah’s detached and aloof assessment, Martin decided her new and private disenchantment could not be due entirely to jealousy, after all.

During those long evening conversations, over glasses of beer, about what America really meant, or the particular sort of world view that must be brought to the writing of great literature, Dinah began to grow more silent. When Ellen leaned her elbows onto the table, with her hair swinging forward in its long, curly triangles against her forearms, and spoke in her soft, intense, persuasive voice, he had begun to notice more and more that Dinah retreated into the haven of her bentwood chair. And one day his suspicions of Dinah’s inexplicable disdain had been absolutely confirmed. They had all been working in the Hofstatters’ garden, and Martin looked in the direction of the two women to see if it was almost time to stop. Ellen had bounced on her haunches as she stooped to gather beans from their intricate vines, and she began to sing some song in a gentle voice, but Martin saw a look cross Dinah’s face which pronounced it all artifice—the entire enterprise. There were the four of them working in this rural garden while the sun went down, and Dinah’s expression proclaimed it all artifice. And so, gradually, their association with Vic and Ellen had waned.

But Martin didn’t see artifice in the lives of his two friends; alone, he took pleasure in their company in the summers. And he knew Ellen had a special interest in him, just as Vic did. An unusual intimacy had come about over the years; he felt more than ordinarily included in their lives. He would arrive, for instance, just as Ellen had lost her bra in the pond while she and Vic swam, and she would sit in the rowboat glimmering and topless, her breasts drooping a bit and touchingly vulnerable to scrutiny, while Vic dove and searched through the muddy weeds. She and Martin would chat quite naturally, but always for some reason—the flash of her white, white teeth in a small smile, a raised eyebrow—he understood that he was meant to know this was not just common friendship. Vic would emerge nude, guileless, and dripping, with the sodden brassiere held aloft in triumph, and Ellen would turn her back while he fastened it for her. Martin enjoyed this special informality, and it fascinated him, because he knew that Dinah would view it with scorn, but he couldn’t think why.

In his own house, however, he still longed for his family. He would dream of his wife and wake to find she wasn’t there. Her clothes hanging in the closet made him sad with yearning. He thought and thought about her, and her incredible energy seemed to have remained behind her, like thwarted intentions. He found her bedraggled winter night-gown on a hook on the back of the bathroom door, over the hot-water bottles suspended from their plastic tops, and it made him intolerably melancholy. It was as personal to him as her skin.

Martin wasn’t a man who noticed buildings or paintings or clothes, and he had not even been aware that, day after day, Dinah had washed her flannel gown and worn it again that night. He hadn’t known until he woke up one morning to find the bed empty of Dinah, and the house, too, he had thought after looking. He finally came upon her enclosed in her bathroom. When he called her name, she didn’t answer, and so he rattled the door and called her again.

“It’s all right, Martin,” she finally answered him, but her voice was full and tight in her throat, so he knew she was crying. He had only been able to stand at the door, sleepy and irritated and puzzled, not knowing how to proceed. But she opened the door and leaned against the doorjamb in that ragged flannel gown printed with little candlesticks, and held her hands over her face and wept as heartily as Martin had ever seen her.

“Oh, God, Martin,” she said. “How can you love me? How
can
you? I don’t think you do. I don’t think you could!” She cried on and on, and he didn’t touch her at all he was so surprised. He didn’t even know what she could mean. He felt the beginnings of a vast exasperation that sometimes becomes a chasm between men and women. He was tired; he was angry, and he was helpless in this one instance because of the disparity of their separate male and female histories.

“Look at me! Just look at me! I woke up in the middle of the night with the most awful feeling. Oh, Martin, I haven’t slept! I felt my whole face change; I felt my skin pulling and sliding. Why didn’t you
tell
me? I thought I was still so pretty! Damn!” and she slapped her hand against the wood-work in teary fury. “I wouldn’t have cared so much if I had known! Why didn’t you tell me? I have circles under my eyes—bags under my eyes—and creases where I smile. I can feel them from the
inside!
My hair doesn’t shine anymore. Oh, God, oh, God, I used to be all shiny the way young girls are. I used to
be
a young girl!”

David, then just eight, had come to the door of his room and was watching them solemnly, but when his father turned and saw him, he went back inside and closed the door, embarrassed. Dinah was at last simply leaning against the wall, her head back, and her hands hanging limply at her sides. Her face was blotched and puffy, and her pale-blue eyes looked rabbity, underlined as they were just then with flaring red rims.

Martin was so taken aback that he only stood there and thought how awful she did look at this moment. Maybe she was right; why hadn’t he told her? She wasn’t pretty now; she
was
getting older. But he was thoroughly struck through with sympathy all at once, and he reached out and held her against him, with one hand cupping the back of her head to his shoulder. “I love you, though, Dinah. I just do love you more than anything.”

She cried and cried. “God! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said.

That evening she had looked as beautiful to him as always when they went out to dinner. He looked for circles beneath her eyes and didn’t see any; he noticed her soft, blond hair curling gently at the nape of her neck where it was tied with a blue scarf. She was, as usual, charming, enchanting, and unconsciously intimidating to the young couple they were entertaining, Martin had always seen that other men watched his wife, and they did tonight. He had no idea that there was beginning in his wife that subtle reliance on style rather than substance that gives to some women in their thirties and forties a particular grace.

When they were home she came to bed in a cream-colored, silky gown, very lacy, and he knew that she wanted him to hold her and admire her, and he
did
admire her, so that was exactly what he wanted to do. But it wasn’t the way they always made love; she was rarely ever so vulnerable; she wasn’t often a victim of vanity. That night she was the subject of her own censure; she kept herself under careful control. She lay beside him for a while, and he knew that she was still tense, but he wanted to sleep. He also had the idea that she didn’t want him to realize her need; she wouldn’t want to be approached again. Finally, she slipped away into the bathroom and came back in the tatty, tacky flannel gown. When she caught his glance she smiled at herself. “I sleep better in it,” she said. “Well, it’s so comfortable.”