On Keeping Women (37 page)

She’s speechless. She dropped back on her green hummock. A pillar, collapsed inward from its middle. Speech is her pride. It flashes over her—why. She equates it with getting there first.

“For me to make the break—” he’s saying at her elbow. “At first I thought it was only the disease. You know me. But it was in me to do. All this time.” His face drooped at her in the ultimate shyness. Of self-understanding. “I was never sure you’d be ready to, tell the truth. Maybe I banked on it. James and I both.” His expression is sad, generous. “So I’ll be off soon, eh? I’ll go up the hill and borrow Charlie’s Volks. I know where he keeps the key.” He swallows. “Kept it.”

The grass she was plucking turned to hay as she tore it. But I banked on you. From the beginning so help me, I must have banked on you. To stay. “Well, go on then, why don’t you.” From the bottomless sulk it came, fretful, spiteful—and yet humorous? “Go on, yes.” She looked down at her breasts. “We don’t want you—on our bus.”

“Our?” When he was in his “surgery” his face still refocussed like this. Tightening his best feature, a marked triangularity of the upper lids. In a tender scrutiny not of her or any patient, but of his own inner fund of competence. Early on, this look had roused her like an aphrodisiac; she’d had spells of putting a hand on him at eleven o’clock in the morning in his own waiting-room, or luring him into the trumped-up partitions behind it, where in his first years he’d done his own biologicals. He’d thought her jealous of his trade. What she’d wanted was to sleep with that competence. Blending her envy of it in him, with him. By the time he came to bed, he’d always lost it. Or in the last years, even by merely crossing the little limbo passage which connected office with house. He’d never had the power to diagnose
her.

Ah but it was always muddling—the images she had. When that happens—accuse. “That’s what you thought, didn’t you. A man coming for me on it. Who I’m waiting for?”

He shook his head. “No. Or not exactly. What are you? Waiting for.”

So thin a vision. She gripped the ground. “What I said. To be seen.”

“Guess I’ve been alone too much.” He stared away from her. “With the religious. Who’re often very matter-of-fact.”

She heard her own flat laugh. “On the subject of adultery?”

No. On the subject of real thorns, in real flesh. And absolute desert-wanderings. “I thought you meant to board the bus. Or try.”

“
Board
it.” Her glance swept down over herself. Clearly it had never crossed her mind.

“We’d a case once.” On his balcony he’d sometimes thought of it. “Horrie let her on with the morning crowd without seeing her. Rest were too stunned to say. Bly saw her at the police station later. Said she was perfectly rational.” Just call me a streaker, she’d said. And let my children know.

The sky is pink behind her, silhouetting her dark. “I never heard. You never said.”

Nights you came home from town—from the hairdresser, with your hair electric from bed—how should you hear? Asking me to shake hands with my own sons. No, I never said.

“They hushed it up.”

“Who was she?”

“Those two women I made a call on once? The younger one. The soft blonde. With the puzzled face.” She thinks he never notices.

She didn’t move. “She left her children behind.”

Over at the Kellihys a deep whimpf-whimpf began vibrating through the trees. The largest dishwasher in the world, it sounded like. The Kellihys are cleaning up.

“Party?”

She doesn’t answer. The lawn between her and him, them and the Kellihys, the river and all of them, stretches astrally, giving up the last of the dark.

“Remember that young guy we found on the lawn once?” he said eagerly. “Remember?” Gave him coffee in my office, and offered him a paper examining-robe. No thanks doc, I’m fine, he said. “Been sleeping on a rainbow, for a fact. My belly still feels the arch,” he’d said. And strode off free as air.

He saw she was shivering. Elbow on knee, chin in hand, like Rodin’s The Thinker—though she’ll never in this life resemble it. “I wanted witnesses.” Her voice is hoarse. “When I should want—deeds.” She flung her arms up, to that audience of hers. And rolled over, face flat to the grass.

Should he go now? She always left it to him! To be irresolute.

Spain has made his ears sharp. Beyond the morning sounds thrusting the day up he hears a familiar ping-ping. The paper-boy here is earlier than most; the road’s accepted his zeal. Or the river has. What he himself will remember of this place forever is the barcarolle-ing splash of children in its water, the clickclack pingpong tracery of Charles and himself on the porch, even the muffled thump, impartially muted, of Royal’s foot.

The paperboy’s as slow as he’s early; can’t see him yet through the trees. Or he’s stopping at Kellihys’, though it’s long past the first of the month. Short shrift he’ll get there if they’ve been giving parties. He himself has never sent them a bill. The Kellihys give our parties; they streak for us. But like all true partygivers, never on principle. So it doesn’t help.

She’s still lying there as if she’ll knit herself to the grass. In a cleansing energy.

He’ll remember her as a voice. Always a voice.

The boys? They need no tallying, never have. Unlike as they are, they’re his body natural. Which remembers them.

Add Maureen, dutifully—as the one he always forgets.

And the other one. Don’t name her.

He checks that window. Not there.

A witness is not what he needs. He rubs his face, his hands. Yes brother-in-law. I need to hide. But that’s for later. Before that—a deed.

Done. Such a small deed. He stands watching her.

Eyes closed, lips pressed into weeds, she’s boarding the bus. Mounting its steps in her own skin, that last disguise. What’s the reason for this charade?—ah, she’ll tell them. How it is that women who meant to assert the personal confused it with the female.

Passengers may include a few women who work the early shift at the next town’s paperbox factory, but by and large the aisles would be crammed with commuting men, cleanshaven and breakfasted. She’d stand just past the driver. Schedule-freak that he is, he won’t be stopping. But it wouldn’t help him to keep his head down.

What she wants to tell him and them is what goes on below all the talk-talk, below even the silent screaming—to give them a psychograph of her own dark interior, and what deeply murmurs there. Of how it is to be a Lexie-on-the-hill, waiting for a Ray to find her. In the ultimate sulk—as if she’s always expected the synopsis of her life to be played by some winsome but unimportant movie-star. Of how all her life she has felt the humiliation of having small aims.

Naked on a bus; can’t explain, can’t say a word. Of how in all the exercises of her life—meals to be made, children to be made—she’s dealt only in small patterns concluded. Of how, each morning, a woman had to project her own poem on the populace. A hopeless situation. Yet daily it was done—with a nylon soup-net. Compounding the absurdity, the ego and the humiliation all at once. And the soup. So that while the men before her can go ragged with inconclusiveness—in tragic asymmetry—she’s been allowed the minimal satisfaction of small ambitions quenched. While the men keep for themselves the tors unsealed, the grinding treks which come to nothing—the great, souring inconclusiveness of life.

She raises her head to see who she’s been telling this to. Maybe only one woman, dozing behind her babuska. But all the men are looking back at her, eyes bloodshot with the experience, of keeping women like her. They include: A redheaded man—who goes in early, in order to keep two of them. One Robert Kellihy, Jr., whose four cars are out of gas, whose pocket is out of money but has turned up a one-way ticket—and whose presence in the city is that morning required by his mother, at nine o’clock sharp. And there in the back seat—with his felonious masher’s hands showily on top of his raincoat—is the village molester, gazing outraged on her nakedness.

What did the streaker say, bravura—“I am your Representative”?

And what would she herself say? “This is the way it is, it is. And it has nothing to do with sex”?

Hadn’t she heard the bike? That boy would see her. And him. He stands stooping but tall, his deed done.

Up on the road overlooking their riverbank, the bike stopped. He could feel the boy standing there, in depth-charge quiet. Then the shouted syllables rolled over him, over her, motionless there.

The bike moved on. The boy’s second shout skimmed back through the trees.

She rolled over, luxuriously flat to the sky. Lazily an arm lifted in backward salute, flopped again. “What’d he say?”

“Sin. Sin and damnation.”

“He doesn’t count,” she muttered, stretching sensuously, and sat up.
“Ray!”

He felt foolish. Country-suburban devilish—and without a party’s excuse. His naked buttocks are dudes to this air. A good enough frame, and well-hung, but in younger locker-rooms these days his shoulders look rounded. He has left on the shoes.

“Ah he counts with me,” he said, eyes glinting.

A man’s body—husband, father or lover—shouldn’t it look more resolute? All the bodies that had been on hers have been admirable ones. Yet, all male bodies seem to her to be still hunting their armor. Even that chub gladiator the caterer’s boy, shedding his jeans in slit-eyed arrogance, or standing naked in his ten-gallon hat, would be belied somewhere—maybe by a rib slender as glass, or the target hip-plate above the angry sex, or the mutely hollowed clavicle. They’re caves of bone, in which deeds must,
must
generate.

He’s moving off.

“Where you going?”

“Where’d you think?”

“You going to walk down the road like that.”

He stood still. “No, I’m like you. I never thought of it.”

Some yards further on he was climbing down the bank. “Going in,” she heard him call. “Clean myself off.”

“Take off your watch,” she heard herself call back.

So now were they that suburban couple who merely got up a little sooner than the rest? And lay out in the non-wild, hoping for kicks?

Over the bank the watch came flying at her, landing with a thud.

So we’re not the stuff of legends. Or not yet.

He hates river swimming. But borrowing another person’s gestures—or hers—is useless. He’d tried before this to say silently “I side with you”; he never gets it right. This time, at least she hadn’t laughed. That startled “Ray!” even warms him.

From out here he had a seal’s view of the strip of town. The gently antediluvian houses straggled the waterside and hill in placements which often seemed to follow some conformation or purpose long gone. He could see clearer from here how life-in-general pushed its hollows through the earth, and through people. He could safely regard how he and she came to live in one of those houses. How he’d made them come. Because the city was his rival; he could never have hung onto her there. Bright as she is, she’d never suspected it. People always came to the suburbs because of something. It was travel parodied.

Down in the underwater the Hudson was briny dark. Eel on bottom, shad still to be netted in May, and crab returning, but on the surface utterly trafficless. A summer morning without inflection, holding the land in pause. In the river the great teeming pause which was life. Riverbottom thoughts, one got here. Does she know yet what he does? That men at their best don’t swim in couples but for the planet only?

Carefully he stroked back from the central channel, which was timbreless and very deep. Eyes open to the oily Pleiades ahead, nosing through the brown alluvial shorewater, he was swimming for the planet and with it, like everything else down here. And up above. His fingers grasped land; he vaulted onto its shelf. Not bad—he’d have years yet. Not to live in the future only, always denying it.

Halfway up the bank he turned back again. Hector’s shoes—he’d left them down below; better get them. Airports were prosy about bare feet. For his flight back he’d as soon be thermally protected only, in some friar-stuff of brown or white. It had always half surprised him, that for flights into what just might be forty thousand feet that much nearer God, the air-services didn’t provide even temporary migrants with some such stripped-down uniform. After he’d made clear his intention to work in the ward, maybe Hector, now reduced to his dead brother’s medical black serge, would dig up for him one of the old monk-tunics the Sisters surely had saved.

Up on the roadside again his own clothes are where he’d dropped them. “Conservatively” pinstriped and dotted, they seem to him now a clown’s. But on the undershirt is one of the ward-woman’s crazy red darns, with which half the hospital-gowns were spotted. He put the shirt back on, for affection. Plus his undershorts, against allergy. Poison-oak sprouted here every spring. Chess, who’d inherited his bones, his tender skin—and it might be, the hoarded soma of a lifetime of dreams unrecollected—once swelled to dropsy from it. Lexie, toughskinned as a gypsy, is immune.

Approaching, he saw she’d arranged herself on elbow—and on circumstance. This nonproducing ripple of land he’s provided her with has just enough rise. For much of the day its cranky, offshoot road remains hermetically empty. But shortly a few persons traveling of necessity south will have a champion view—for one camera moment longer than life—of a woman with a river behind her. And he can see how for her to set herself up as signal is appropriate. The bodies of women lurch beyond anatomy. Toward what may be obscure—but artists have spent paint on it.

She’s been disposing of her two extra men, which through all the movie-colored infatuation has been how she’d thought of them and had treated them. One, in spite of his pose of hunting only sex in her, had helped her respect her mind. The other, hungering for other people’s talents as the rich sometimes starved for protein, had given her a candidate’s hopes. Both had shown her that she’s had four kids by a man who, in the pure matters of the body—which run on carnally to the heart—is bitterly and maybe hopelessly shy.

When he sits down beside her the fertile river is shining from him. For a moment she’s almost sure he’s going to cover her with himself; then it passes, in her, and maybe in him. The air’s tingeing peach, pearly acrid as a baby’s sweat.