On Keeping Women (36 page)

“Anything.”

“You mean that?”

“You do?” he said.

“I do.”

He nodded. “I mean that.”

They’re in a rhythm. Call it the dawn-rhythm. When two people begin to know they are two.

“Only what we’ll—have to say.” She glanced behind them, in the direction of the house. “Like what we’ll do now. And how.”

“And—where.”

They were quiet for the same minute.

“But no whys and wherefores.” She hesitated. “Unless we—want to.”

He considered. Nodded.

“And no excuses.”

He hesitated. “None.”

They were silent. Would it be the triumph of their life together, if they could hold to that?

“Agreed—” he said. “Then—I’ve just this minute gotten off the bus.”

“Agreed. And I’ve been—lying here. Waiting for it.”

His eyes widen, but hold. This man, long ago rejected in the flesh, is by circumstance her one sharer. From long association able to stalk the underbrush of her mind in all its yallery-greenery of serio-comic reference. Where, as they both know, one minute she’s in vestal command of all the mysteries, but the next is wandering uncommissioned in the semigloom of her kind—as a family professional whose personality, by reason of a work-history only loosely corroborated by others, has to operate at some loss.

His glance slid down her, reinforcing her nudity. In the warm, viscid air, she’d forgotten about it, as real nudists must.

“I see,” he said. “Of course.”

He must think she’s waiting for someone. Stripped, to him she’s erotic only. Fair enough. When that’s how she came to be here. “No,” she should say, “there was someone. But he’s gone.” I heard the car go by.

She resists. In their minds, did all naked women wait merely for them? Not for—other connection.

What did a naked man wait for in the eyes of women? Not for them alone, that’s certain.

She’d equip him. That’s it; she herself always equipped them. Lying in bed beneath or above anyone of them, with his throat and sex bare to her hand, she herself complicitly armed them, even before they did it themselves. Respectfully she hung the powerbag between their legs like a codpiece, and cocked on her pillow their judge’s-hat.

For in her mind they already lie twice as open as she to life’s accounts. Lying in her bed, they waited to rejoin the world. Or in the piercing contemplation of arrows already received. They wait in such busy dignity. In her own mind.

It’s why she can never wholly love or murder them.

“I didn’t mean to ask,” he’s saying.

Granted. But I mean to tell you.

“We were taught only to connect with each other,” she said gruffly.

And we couldn’t. No need to say.

She’s touching his arm. “There’s something more, I’m not sure what. But we chose the village instead. I want to live by my own—.” Her mouth went wry, muting the rest of it. “And I want them to know.”

How many patients had touched him on the arm like that—woman or man. Nobody must know, Doc. Doc, I can’t wait to let it out. The village always chose the village, one way or other—is she just discovering it?

I want to live by my own images. That’s what she said. They all said. And I want the whole village to know.

On a bush behind hers an opulently striped beach-towel unlike any of their own faded ones. In hospital he’d already warned himself of how the house and all in it would have acquired new objects, new facts and new people, a tide which would have swelled over the lump of him. There’s an underground of waterfront sex here. Does she now belong to it?

“You’ll go on as you must.” He said that to all of them. Except himself. He made himself look at her—personally. She deserved it. “You have the right.”

But if she’s going to do what he has a hunch she is, then he’ll have to stand by.

He’s looking at her body, her face too. She’s forced him to. If he could have done that on his own—seen her true and whole in the altogether—how her body too would have smiled for him. Her face trembled, ready to be radiant. The long hysteria’s ending. Even he’s admitting it. She stood up, breasts forward. It was how she stood on her ledge. Would stand, if the children came down here.

But they haven’t come. After adult parties, children sleep late.

“This is the way—.” But it stuck in her throat. The children stick in her throat.

“It’s growing light.” How different the light was here, complicated, offering him back his native life.

What’s this? She’s reaching down for his jacket, drawing it toward her, bent over from the waist straight-knee’d, like a woman digging with a hoe too short for her. She’s slung the jacket over her shoulders, shrugging it close. The most humble gesture he’s ever had from her. Now we can talk, she’ll say though. Now—can’t we talk.

She’s touching his shoe.

Those gift shoes of his. So heavily perforated at the narrow wingtip. At the heel’s a flange reminding where spurs were, once. Not a father’s shoe.

“Oh, they walked me here,” he said down to her. “They’ll—walk me back.”

Her gaze traveled up him. “To the nuns?”

She can feel his shock, vibrating all the way to his shoe. “How come—what makes you say that?”

That’s it, then. What came spuming between the lines of every letter. He’s not a father anymore. He’s receded from it.

She’s careful. “Oh—Bob Kellihy said it. ‘Don’t leave him too long with the nuns.’ Ah well, you know. Catholics. They always think that everyone.”

He was breathing fast enough to remind him how sick he’d been. “Ah, ah, such women—” Sister Isaac said, raising her head from that last letter “—they have time to brood.” On what can take a man four months and three thousand miles to arrive at. With a whole hospital to help.

Where, ward to ward, bed to bed, is as Catholic as he’d ever need to be. Faced with a piece of the public health so simple that even he can manage it. Yes—he’s going back.

The light’s still lifting. The grass is still grass. “Oh yes, the Kellihys” he said from halfway across the world “—how are they?”

“They’re having an affair.” Her voice floated up dryly. “With each other.”

She’d hauled the jacket over her head, so that she had to peer up at him sideways. The nursing nuns, excused from wimples, still tilted their heads on this same slant. Did all woman have nun in them—as Sister said? As all men have monk. Nothing to do with celibacy. Or the red tawn of the penis, or the hanging, clitoral heat. Or even with parenthood. Something not to do with any of it.

Even in that teaser, Bets?

Struggling with her on the Kellihys’ spare-room couch, he’d knocked down some of Arthur’s silver-work; this happened every time. Shhh—she said at once. Below him her broad Cupid’s-bow mouth pouted for its kiss, her long corals swung between breasts—oddly enticing in their flatness—which had dropped. Four kids, was it? Or five? “No, Bob and I have an agreement. I only pet.” A word from his own mother’s archive. It had been the night of the christening party. He’d picked up a silver cup just finished for it, and handed it to her. “Your chaperone.”

“That Bets,” he said now. “The whole teaser apparatus. But she can’t.”

“Really?” Down in the grass she’s plaiting is Betsy, besatined and beery, signing books of photographs she’s not in, tagging after the priests. Saying—as she did say once, and was brushed off for—Lexie—may I attend your class. “It’s all for Bob, you mean.”

“Oh they’re fond—enough. Alcoholics like him can be very adroit sexually. That’s known.”

Yes, it is.

“But behind that front she puts up—oh the senior K’s know by now what they’re buying.”

“What’s that?”

“A mother. Bets is to the mother born. All she really likes is slipping them out.”

“She tell you that? Evenings?”

“Evenings and drunk. When she has a baby, she said. Then she feels her worth.”

Ah poor Bets. Join the class.

“But when she’s had the baby
and
is drunk. Then it’s the best.”

“Ah—poor Bets.”

Their eyes meet.

He’s half-smiling. “Oh I went for it. The teaser part. I need to be encouraged. As you may recall.”

“I recall.” The shame—cast on her own aggressiveness—that a woman—a girl—doggedly accepts. For the sake of the man. And the sex. Mother-reluctant, that’s what you were, Ray. And yes, I went for you—as young men went for jobs.

He turned to look at the house. He’s a tall man; his legs are much the longest part of him. Seventeenth-century legs she called them during their courtship, awarding his bones the elegance she wanted from life. Looking up them, they’re a tower yet. Until you arrive at the eyes.

“I won’t go in the house. Better just to leave again.”

It’s true then. He wants to hide.

“Put it on the market,” he’s saying. “You never really liked it.”

What can I say? It was where I hid.

“Some people think it already is,” she said. “Some—are still rooting for us.”

“For the practice,” he said. “They get used to the same ear.”

“Oh?” she said. “Oh. Of course.”

“But I want out.”

So he’s said it. This man of few words. While she who has so many is mum. Mother-mum. We don’t leave. We take cars to the bridge. Or tear the shopping-lists apart, face by face.

She got to her feet. “Ray. I thought maybe—. Charlie’ll be on his own by fall. And Royal in hospital. I thought maybe that you and the girls—might like to stay on here for a while.”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“It’s not—safe.”

She stared. Did they become mothers that quick, from a distance? “You can always lock the doors.”

His hands were making that tic-like routine again. The heel of one, swiped hard on the palm of the other. The other hand reversed it. No, that’s not so great for a doctor. But would James still do as he’d warned her he might? A custody ruling against her? For her own good?

“James will arrange them all right,” she said in fury. “I’ll insist on it.” In exchange for Royal. I know my own force. “But there’s no reason to
trust
him.” And you haven’t even seen what I’m telling you. That I’m the one leaving. “Ray. I said you could have them. The girls.”

In the dissecting-room nausea used to heave him like this. So that he used to rock, James said, like an old woman in church.

“She knee’d me.” His head flung toward the house. “The way I taught her to.” His teeth scored a thumb. “And because I’m back.”

On the upper road came the yearning siren of an ambulance. She glanced up, counting on her fingers as always. No, all are safe. Were safe. “You were in there?”

Heaving, he nodded. Clasping himself, he dropped to his haunches. The dying siren is still faintly traceable. Like the scream she can never make.

What’s he told her? In the somber precincts which she imagines his mind to inhabit, his automaton patrolled, trained not to observe itself. Or to take clues from others. When these pressed, when she did—it fled. But where?

She dropped to the ground beside him. Arms around him she rocked with him, exchanging the same spongy, adolescent gulps. She’s no better at it than he is. Behind them the tin-voiced psychiatrist, forefinger on lips, stole away with high, exaggerated sickroom steps.

Ray’s jacket, rooted in, turned up a handkerchief, big and European, a red darn in one corner. Tearing from the darn, he took the smaller strip, handing her the other. “I smell. I’m sorry.”

His bedside manner. As cool and distant to himself as to any patient. If he revolts himself, if it’s sometimes human to, he will never realize it. This will always terrify her.

“So do I.” But I can handle it.

Standing up again, she blew her nose with strong tweak, crumpled the strip into a ball and threw it, far.

He watched it disappear. For a moment it floated; it was linen. He crumpled the darned half in his pocket. “Look—I’m going to ship out now. I’ll write.” First to Charles. To all of them in time—I’m no fiend. Charles was the only one he’d miss, but this a father must never say. Let her keep her own illusions about loving all of them.

He’s never looked so canny to her. “And the kids, Ray?”

“Handle it.”

Aie. Relief—like a stomach-blow. Then power, bathing her. They were always mine.

He’s getting up to go. He was never a father.

Then she’s scrambling after him. But I was going to be the one. To leave.

The trilling of the birds began again. Observing them had been his passion once; she never seemed to notice them. He watched her with interest, just as when a boy, eye to the grass, he used to watch the underleaf life. Conscientiously, as if in domestic habit, she seized his jacket from the ground; will she put it on again? No, she’s walking with it, absently whipping it in the wind. Still unseeing, she drapes it on a bush. The night before giving birth, women and dormice houseclean. Always foreshadowing, women are. Dooming themselves. Yet the fluid lines and swells of her have an easeful devotion to the ground and to their own rhythm which stings him with the same envy animals incite; if she were to pad off on all fours he wouldn’t be surprised.

Facing the river, head bent—can she be smiling? Taken by vagary, she reminds him of the way indoor birds, perched in an aviary or hung in a cage at the vets, shift irrationally to the climate, or the visitors or their own innards—with exactly the same innerfixed eye.

Now she’s standing in front of him, her feet planted apart. From going barefoot, her feet have broadened but acquired personae. The right one can pick up sticks; the left one’s still lady-delicate. “So—we’re both leaving. So this is the logical life.” Her breasts jut at him aggressively. “We-ll, will you look at them?” she said, eyeing down at them. “My two jokes.”

The sun is up. Or its forward artillery, gilding her, the hillside, the house, in readiness. She stands tall, triumphant, a column of sunshine, blinding him.

From beyond the hill, again the mad toularou-rou-rou of the ambulance. He tensed. “Where’s it coming from?”

“Tappan. Coming back.”

And over the hill to the hospital. He tracked it. Fading north, to where if he stayed on here he might be meeting it. A gray soothe of abdication closed over it.

“So—both of us,” he said. “Yes, what a surprise. I thought it would only be you.”