On Keeping Women (12 page)

Each morning, standing at the door of his own cubicle, or uprooting her from hers, he shames her, with his special knowledge of her small riverstrip, into giving back what she knows of it. She rises for these addresses the way Jean had told her students were said to honor their professors at the Sorbonne. She saw her village, all villages, shrinking calcified in the high wind of a voice which held its decibel while picking its way through the rubbed gore of any human defilement—while the stunned typewriters stopped behind him, the Applecheeks, the current reporter, halted his chewing-gum. Hoppe’s voice is what is nutcracker, at the business of splitting open a life. She learns nothing more of its own, even whether or not it has children—or whether it considers it has a life. Probably—since it so conserves its own facts—no. Or nothing worthy of its own pincer, which goes deeper than gossip, and is more precise than legend. Sex looms no larger in his probings than ritual; he’s as interested in the rich hermit who erodes time in winding car batteries of matchless strength made to give away but not sell, as in the local rapesters—and the latter only if they’re remarkable. What Hoppe broods over is the human fabric, and the monsters to be made of it. Monsters of fidelity even, or virtue—to him it’s all the same.

While journalism makes what comic connection it can. “Chained his lactating wife in the barn, he did. For general use. When the Well-Baby clinic preaches mother’s milk in Torporsville, what else can you expect?”

He’s half a foot shorter than she and the wens repel her, as does his chalky, missionary breath. He’s a vegetarian perhaps, or maybe eats only nocturnally. Never is seen to, and his name on the masthead—J. J. Hoppe—is never used, replaced either by “Sir,” or “Him.” Yet if he put a hand on her, she’d let him have her, even as she’s sure it would have to happen for him—in full sight of the cubicles. Which wouldn’t make a sound. In the light of what they’ve learned from him. Nor would she.

For she’s recognized him. Moving behind his day, which goes from telephone to print and back again, he walks to some other referential tune. He has meditation, which moves
him.
He too must believe there is a shape to what is lived. A shape to be made. Or sought.

Oh yes, she knows him. He’s like one of those faceless narrators she’s met in print only. A figure maybe standing in a ditch in Byelorussia and recording for no reason except that such things must be—whose pangs one afterward remembers as one’s own. Or standing in the orange boudoir-garden in Algiers, or in the clerk’s office in antique Palermo. Wherever suffering that alien life which we know to be ours. Hoppe’s what she is. He’s the
other
anthropologist.

When he called Grand River “the village of unnatural acts” she’d known he meant all villages really.

“Natural and unnatural,” she’d answered him that first time. “And hysterical.”

For three weeks, they have an affair of the mind.

In field-knowledge, of course, they’re in no way equilateral. He unlocks her village for her, in all its underground moaning. What can she give such an authority in return?

The Kellihys.

“Two days after the fire,” she tells him, “Betsy comes doodling down the martini-path. Politely deploring its lack of use. She means—by Ray.” Yes, she’s told Hoppe that. Or half of it, and he can guess the rest.

“She’s wearing black satin, at ten in the morning, and carrying a beer. She waves the can at me, very excited. ‘Lexie, how do you get the best swimming pool foundation ever?—When the garage apartment burns down on you! Best he ever saw, the architect says. And Mummy is giving us the ten thousand to pay for it.’”

Hoppe never laughs at anything. His mind is searching its middens, ever analogizing. “‘Lamb’s Essay on Roast Pig.’”

She doesn’t know it.

“Haven’t read it myself in years. A hut burns down, as I recall, with a pig inside. Poking the ruins and charred bones, the savages burn their fingers, put them in their mouths—and taste chitlings. Next time they want a taste of the same—natch, burn down the hut again. And that’s how you get a swimming pool.”

She does the laughing. Though it stops short. “‘Mummy’ is Bob’s you know. The Kellihys have the money. Betsy only has the pretensions. Longings, really. They do doodle, you know. All they know how to. Bob looks older, but they’re the same. At twenty-eight, the two of them. Two poor crocks.”

“What did you answer,” Hoppe asks, “—about the path?”

How did he know? That she’d have said something? “I said ‘Betsy. Didn’t you think
I’d
give you a beer?’ … Stinking of me, wasn’t it. Because you know, I really envied her. Dragging her silk, drinking from a can. The style of it. Maybe
I
want to be a crock.”

“Watch that pity. People like you and me.”

She doesn’t dare ask—where’s that pity rooted? In tears for myself—is that it, Hoppe?

He doesn’t answer what she doesn’t ask. Their communion is not that sort. But one evening, they’re sitting late at the office, doing the Saturday ads. Everything on that paper is still unmechanized, including the view. Below them, the whole dusky valley of the county is spreading its footlights. Downstairs and off the front steps prance the two gay men who run the bookshop, who have just left their ad. Their cotton teeshirts bob on the provincial dusk like striped flares from Paris. They always enter on a fast joke and leave on a slow—both belied by too vivid and double a gesture, their anxiously formalized chat lingering on the air like the frou-frou of soubrettes. Everyone in town knows their house—fluffy as a bride’s, when there are two of them. Has Hoppe seen it?

“Mmm.” Into that face-curve of his, so pulled at both ends, a pipe fits well. The leaf he smokes spreads an odor palatable. Behind that rough tan shirt he hasn’t much chest. But the arm extended her is good; the brown marrowbone knuckles holding the pipe have a polish like ivory. Why is she scrutinizing what has no physical charge for her? Because he’s doing the same to her. What charges him is not merely her body. This makes her bridle with pride.

“Homos, they’re like women in more ways than one. Both sexes of them.” He always made his points in an extra-heavy voice. “People might laugh at them. So they have to live with more style.”

“Found a couple more words you wouldn’t know,” she said, flushing with pleasure. He didn’t believe there was any special language among women, or for them. She was beginning not to believe it herself, but she loved the haggling. “This one I frankly never heard before, myself. ‘To biggen.’”

“What’s that mean?”

“Look it up.”

He loved to. His forefinger pored down the big dictionary. “Ha. To recover strength after confinement. 1674.’ What do you know. Ever since then.” His eyes crinkled. “Whatever did they do before?”

“Ah I know—” she sighed, making all one word of it. “—you think I need words to confirm my actions.” He’s said it. “But words are still so new to me—their powers, I mean. And you’ve dealt with them most of your life.”

And where’s it got me?—another man might say. Not Hoppe. He’s like a crab, both scuttling the sea-bottom and niched. Who if asked in some Aesop-tale to consider why it is itself, would reply “Because I am Crab.” To him, his backwater’s no boundary, but part of the sea. He’s convincing because he’s convinced.

To have a small station in life, she thought—and yet know it to be an outpost. That’s it. That would be enough.

“And what’s your other word?”

“Oh, that one’s just from the female glossary. Not even a word that every one of us would know. Just the kind we would. This one’s from something my mother and I happened to look at quite often, that’s all. And my daughters could. None of us really noticing.”

She stared at her hands as sewing-women do, down at those shuttles weaving of their own volition, separate. “Like a man would get used to seeing the manufacturer’s name on the barrel of his gun. Equipment words. But there’re others. Clothing words. Product ones.
You
know. A man and wife might live together their whole lives and never really know—the other’s glossary.”

“You know, Lexie, you’re like some—no, not a child—some pre-girl. Who hasn’t been told about the differences between the sexes yet. After four children. Maybe that’s your charm.”

“And that’s your language. Not ours.”

“So maybe we do have differing ones. Accept it. It’s interesting.”

“I do. I just want the world to accept mine.”

They’ve never before flashed and quivered at each other like this. She sits tight. Not wanting any other part of him but the words.

“What is it with you girls and the world?” He got up to scrabble at his desk—a camouflage, since everything there was neat as an artillery range—or as she imagined one to be. A thousand items ready on their pins. He handed her one. “Goes in next Monday, in the social column. Between St. Peter’s Sodality benefit and the Veterans of Foreign Wars picnic at Bear Mountain.”

She reads it. The Woman’s Center committee on rape is establishing a telephone number, to be manned by trained advisers, where rape victims may call between the hours of ten to twelve, mornings, and evenings six to ten. “Jesus. What if you get raped after hours? Or in the afternoon?”

It’s grown dark in the room. The two streets parallel to this one, each of which leads down to the river, shine ghostly, as streets of white houses do, before the houses are lit. These were closed for business and would not light, except for here.

“Afternoons?” His voice is small. “No, that’s for the city.”

He knows about hers, he means. Her afternoons.

“We have rapes here, Lexie. Not in your town, maybe. Come to think of it, I’ve never heard of one there. You’re our aristocrats, too refined. Down there it goes by consent.”

She got up and turned on a dim lamp. “But you’ll print that notice. Nice of you.”

“I go with the times. And the subscription list.”

She leaned back in her chair, an oldfashioned one which revolves if you pedal it, and picked up yesterday’s paper. “Especially nice of you. In a paper which also prints this.” She reads from a syndicated column called Idolene’s Ideas:
“Dear Idolene: I recently found myself without a large piece of nylon-net and with a bowl of soup
—
broth to clear. I put it in the freezer to partially congeal, then thought of a freshly laundered sleep-cap, complete with flowers and a chinstrap. It was made of three layers of the net and fit over the bowl perfectly. Result: I lost a sleep-cap, but have the prettiest, most efficient strainer in town.”

“Okay, okay.
To partially congeal.
But we get a lot of mail on that column.”

“That all you see in it—a split infinitive?”

“Maybe not.” Against the waning windowlight, his silhouette waits. The head in penumbra, with the wens half-invisible, is rather fine.

“Listen, Hoppe. That letter’s from all of us.”

He pedals his chair.

“Oh yes it is. It’s from me. Look at me.”

He’s looking.

“Okay, I’ve never been raped.” She swallows. “There’re a lot of us who’ll never be murdered, only married. Or not. Never commit a crime of passion.” She grins at him. “And we don’t want to murder the men; we’re too late for it. On the other hand—I’ve never used a sleep-cap in my life. Don’t know anyone who does. But all of us any age—even the ones who can’t cook, the rich ones who won’t need to … There isn’t a woman in the country who wouldn’t understand about that woman’s soup.” She chokes. “And why she wrote you—about her accomplishment.”

She leans forward. Is it our talent or our curse, she wants to ask him—that we transliterate? But she’s afraid to ask. He may be the enemy. Why does she herself feel enmity, for the first time openly? To him of all people—who might have been her friend?

“So you’ve never seen a sleep-cap.” The wen on his chin twists to one side.

“You have?”

No answer.

On his mother? Or the wife? She leans back. These chairs could become a ballet in time, she thinks. If I stay. “What do your initials stand for, J. J.?”

He’s relighting his pipe. “My parents were radical dreamers. Before they came here. Swiss irredentists from Locarno, if you can imagine anything more unreal. I was named for Rousseau.”

She can’t imagine any of it. Except Locarno. “So? But what’s J.J. then?”

“Rousseau.”
Hoppe can’t believe she has never heard of him. Convinced, he even takes her hands, drops them quickly. The two chairs remain near. “But it’s unbelievable. You’re so smart.”

“I’m self-read. There are gaps.” She grinds back her chair. “College guides you, that’s all. I’m not all that sure I want that trip.” Lowering her eyes, she hears those excusing “alls” fall like rain. She can smell his breath. “Were your parents—vegetarians too?”

“No. My father had a passion for dried fruit, though. Which I inherit. Though he never shared any of his fruit with us. A real passion. My mother took to carrying a tray after him. For the pips.”

“My father did the same with his travel,” she said. “He only gave us the talk … So I know about Locarno.”

“Travel? You want that? … What do you want?”

Her eyes half-close. What does she want to extract out of this shuttered red-dark? “I want to voyage into the interior. Mine. Like an anthropologist. And someday, J. J.—maybe I can spell it out.”

“Lexie. Open your eyes.”

I’ll see the wens. She opened them. While she was intent upon her dark, he’d turned down the light. So he knows that about her, and his wens. He’s come no nearer.

“Come on, what’s your second word? That
we
wouldn’t know.”

“Belding’s Corticelli.” She says it slyly.

For he knows so much. About her village, for instance. She can imagine how the whole county’s underside looks to him by now, rough and ugly, pink with coarse, blocked feeling, like a sow’s sore tits. All ending up in his newsprint morgue. But he shan’t get this dainty detail of hers that easily. This foolish necessary. Of our ten-thousand-and-one.

“Sounds like an ointment … No? Pretty, though. Too pretty. Like those words people are always saying are the most musical in the language … Halcyon … Anemone—I could never go for them.”