Superior Women (50 page)

By now, naturally, strong relationships have developed between this house and the nearest doctors’ offices, the small local hospital, and the local police—all these connections of an exemplarily cordial nature, thanks to strenuous efforts from all.

But what they are doing seems still a plausible venture, as they all say to each other from time to time, Peg to Vera to Meg to Florence, to Henry, recently to Jackson; they accomplish at least a small amount of good. A few weeks, in some cases months, of good food and rest generally prove helpful to the people who come to them. “We don’t hurt anybody, ever, and it’s a whole lot better than leaving them out on the streets,” as Florence has put it.

Also, the variety of personalities offered by the house works out; there is someone for everyone, as it were, some possible temporary friend. A woman who was somehow turned off by Megan might take up with Vera, or with Florence. Peg, or Henry. Jackson, for the past two months.

Perhaps the most useful task of all, and the hardest, is the effort made to find jobs, or at least some plausible, affordable housing to send the people on to. Or dredged-up families, or friends. This is how Megan spends most of her time; she has a room full of files, which she keeps meticulously complete and up to date. She spends hours and days on the phone and writing letters, following possible leads. She lavishes considerably more care on placing these people than she formerly did on placing books, as Henry has pointed out to her. “Obviously, you think that any person is valuable.” “Well yes, I guess I do. And I’d really had it with all those nonbooks.”

Megan, like Florence with her drive-in customers, makes a lot of friends. People send her postcards.

She (Megan) worked out an interest in the agency, which Leslie now controls and very capably runs (despite the fact that she and Benny now are married, and that they have somehow produced a daughter). Megan spends most of each October and May in New York, at the Gramercy Park—ostensibly to see to her business there, actually because she loves New York, still, especially during those months, and she needs time away from Georgia, from that work, even from her friends, and her mother.

It is fortuitous that Florence’s birthday occurs during a rare interval when there are no needy guests. Or only Rex and Biff, both of whom could be considered family.

And other celebrations, too, are involved in this day: their project, and loose arrangement for living and working together, has been going on for almost exactly three years, since the summer of 1980 (just before the election of Mr. Reagan). It was during that summer that Megan and Florence, who had visited Peg several times, and talked about the possibility of developing a shelter, moved down in a permanent way. And Henry came down to visit, and to help, and he continued both to visit and to help. In his view he is a sort of weekend husband to Megan, which is not precisely how she sees it herself.

In any case, three years, and there they still are. Peg and Vera. Megan, Florence. Henry.

And: this present June marks forty years,
forty years,
that Peg and Megan have known each other, a fact that until the actual lunch they have somehow not really talked about.

•     •     •

At the last minute Megan chooses a conventional seating arrangement, men alternating with women; thus, she is seated between Henry and Biff, on the sunny, wisteria-sheltered side of the porch. And Peg, between Rex and Jackson, is across the table.

Midway through lunch, or nearly, then, Megan leans across the table to tell Peg what has obviously been much on her mind all morning. “I can see it all so clearly!” she says. “Forty years, I don’t believe it. I can see the three of you coming into the smoking room at Cabot, Cathy in those dumb green pajamas, with calomine all over her face. I was talking to Janet Cohen, and right away I knew Lavinia didn’t like her, before I even
knew
Lavinia.”

Peg frowns just slightly, at the effort of recall. “I don’t remember that so much as seeing you in Hood’s, and all those bran muffins we used to eat.” Now gray and lean, and lined, and considerably happier than she was in those old days, Peg smiles in a tolerant way at her glimpse of that former bulky, awkward self.

“Oh yes, Hood’s. I used to look at you three and think being friends with you would be the greatest thing in the world. You all looked so
Eastern.
”

Although he has heard much of this before, Biff is still the most ardent listener in the group. “Oh, how I remember those freshman feelings,” he now puts in. “My first year at Harvard I fell in love with everyone I saw.”

“I hated everyone at Tulane,” says Rex, with a handsome scowl. “What a bunch of assholes.”

Peg regards him with some concern, wondering as she often does what to say to him, and concluding, again, that it doesn’t matter.

Partly to fill in what has become a silence, Megan rushes on. “What I can’t remember, though, and sometimes I try to, is a conversation that Cathy and I had, much later on, after we all got to be friends, sort of. It was about those old boarding school books, where there were always four friends. You know, Grace Harlow, all those?”

It is Vera who laughs, who says, “Oh yes, the most wonderful trash. I used to gobble them up. It drove my poor upward ascendant folks nuts, they wanted me to be an intellectual.”

“Seems to me like they got pretty much what they wanted, girl,” Jackson tells her in his most phonily “Negro” voice.

Megan persists with her memory, though; she has clearly given some thought to the theme of four friends. “It seemed so perfectly
us,
” she says. “Those girls in the books. We were classics. Always four of them, and one was kind and jolly. That’s you, Peg.”

“Yes, and too big and noisy, ‘jolly.’ I know.” Peg grins.

“And one was rich and beautiful and rich and wicked. Lavinia, naturally. And one was poor and innocent and slightly simple, from the provinces. That’s got to be me, although Cath and I used to argue, she thought it could be her. But I always thought she would have to be the mysterious fourth.”

They are quiet, Megan and Peg remembering Cathy, until Henry says, “I do wish I’d met Cathy. I think she
was
mysterious.”

“That’s true, she was, and I wish you had too. You would have liked her,” Megan tells him. But Cathy would have been intimidated by Henry, at least at first, she further reflects—as she was herself, years ago, meeting him at Adam Marr’s improbable White Plains house.

“Well now, I wish I’d met the beautiful rich wicked one, that Lavinia.” It is Jackson who has said this, and he is mildly surprised when no one responds, at all. Only, after a pause Megan tells him, “It wouldn’t have worked out for you, Jackson, gorgeous as you are.”

They smile at each other—good friends, occasional and very secret lovers.

Jackson’s first visit to the group there in Georgia lasted for a month; his second, eight months later, lasted for three.

Megan and Peg believe that the real reason he visits is that he has laid out a fine seven-mile run: down their hill and across the furrowed meadow to the creek, several miles on a path along the bank, and back across the fields and up to the house. He does
this every day. He also helps considerably, as they all do, in the running of the house. He likes to cook, and he is, like Megan, “good with people.”

Megan thinks, though, that now this stay with them is almost over, despite his run. He spends more and more time listening to music in his room, at the end of the attic. He combs every music store in Atlanta for new tapes, of new groups. Megan believes that he is getting ready to play again.

Megan has a recurring fantasy concerning Jackson that no one knows about—surely not Henry, Megan’s weekend lover, her almost-husband, and in many ways her closest friend—and surely not Jackson himself.

In the fantasy, Megan and Jackson drive down to Atlanta and register at a hotel.

Like sexual addicts, which perhaps they are, or very young lovers, which clearly they are not (but perhaps with a kind, late-middle-aged persistence of vision they see each other as young: Jackson as hard-muscled, as taut, and Megan as smoothly voluptuous as when they first met, some thirty-nine years back), all afternoon they make love, in that room. They exhaust each other’s bodies and imaginations, they lie soaked in sweat, in secretions, in their sea-smelling bed. They laugh a lot, they bathe and dress and drive back home, to their separate quarters.

Henry of course knows that Jackson once lived in Hawaii, and he has undoubtedly worked it out that it was Jackson with whom Megan “went to bed,” as she told him, after she had confronted him with Lavinia. And he has very likely concluded that since he no longer “sees” Lavinia, Megan and Jackson no longer make love either. Megan would not do what he himself would not, is how Henry would think. Probably.

Megan has had more than an occasional flash of guilt, at even fantasizing a betrayal of such trust. Henry and Jackson are even friends, in their way. Would it be worse to betray your lover with his friend, or with an enemy (Lavinia)? Megan is not sure.

In the meantime Megan has her strong fantasies.

•     •     •

This day, which belongs to Florence, is wonderfully warm, clear, and blue; it seems the first day of summer, after all the cold, the cruel rains of that preceding spring (some of the women whom Megan will pick up tomorrow are flood victims, still out of their homes and without possessions. Uninsured, of course, since they were poor to begin with).

“Florence, you really lucked out on the weather,” Peg has told her. “God must really like you. But of course we all know you would have served us salads anyway.”

“Of course I would have,” Florence tells Peg—she tells them all. “We could right now be eating cold salad in the rain, right out here on this porch.”

(Florence will live forever, they all think, and hope.)

“Florence darling, I’ll bet you’ve never looked better in your life.” It is Biff who says this, but it would have been any one of them.

“You just won’t believe I was ever young and cute,” Florence challenges.

“Oh, I do,” Biff assures her. “But in a way, don’t you feel a lot better now?”

“Of course I don’t, dummy. I creak and I forget most things. But in most ways I do feel pretty good.”

Megan’s attention has wandered over to Rex, across the table, and she wonders, as she has before, just how Peg feels about this handsome,
awful
boy.

Which leads her to wonder, too, about children she herself might have had. By Henry, or by Jackson—or both? She has read somewhere about multiple insemination, and observed its results in litters of kittens, but she does not know whether this is possible with humans. How very embarrassing, if it should happen. Although both these men, in their separate ways, are quite superior.

Years ago, very young, Megan used to think of having a child by Jackson, a tall beautiful tawny girl, she thought, with Jackson’s wide-set liquid eyes. However, more often, more realistically, she was in a state of panic at the thought that she could be pregnant.
Now she does not regret not having had children—too many people do, quite obviously.

Peg is thinking of Rex, as she watches him barely eating, and frowning, disapproving of everyone there. His extreme handsomeness is harder to explain than his difficult character is, Peg believes. His black hair and dark blue eyes and his graceful body seem an aberration, a mockery of herself, and of Cameron. She sighs, and thinks then that at least her other kids are all right. Even Candy has come out of her trouble; she is at Davis, studying to be an assistant to a vet. She is living with a man whom she only describes as “really nice.” Peg hopes he is.

And she hopes that Vera will never leave her, never find a younger, prettier woman to love. Or a man.

And she wonders why (oh, why!) she can never take anyone or anything for granted. All winter, when it snowed so much and hail came down like bullets, and the creek kept flooding over, Peg desperately feared for herself; she began to feel that she did not deserve to own such a beautiful house, and that it would be taken. She wonders: is the “virtuous” use to which they have put it a propitiation, of sorts?

Henry Stuyvesant, curiously, is still thinking of Cathy, the only one of the group of four friends whom he never met. He wonders if she sounded as much like the others as those three do to each other, in terms of inflection. He would never tell Megan how much she reminds him of Lavinia, when she speaks. In fact if it were not for Megan he would almost never think of Lavinia, whose beauty he now remembers with a tiny sigh. He sighs too for her extreme intelligence, and her remarkably shoddy values.

Henry hopes that Jackson Clay will soon move on, that Megan is right about his plans. An old jazz buff, Henry tells himself that he misses Jackson’s music, and, as a friend, he is sure that Jackson would be much happier, playing. But he also wonders if Jackson and Megan still make love sometimes—or if they ever will again.

And he hopes very much that his own new book will do well, at least some good reviews: a history of the American political left, 1925-1975, being published by the Press at Chapel Hill, in 1984. Good God, Henry thinks: 1984.

Henry would of course help her carry in the dessert soufflé, not let her drop it, Megan is thinking, as she looks over at Henry, next to her. There in the sun, in the heat of that day, she can actually smell his warm clean familiar skin. He is wearing a striped cotton shirt, blue and white, that she likes very much; it is so old, has so often been laundered, that its texture is silky. She now very lightly touches his sleeve, his arm, and they exchange a small smile, of the most intense affection.

The drinks at that lunch provide a curious study in contrasts. Biff, whose tastes have always been rather grand, and who is now rich enough to indulge them, has generously provided a case of champagne. (“Such a practical drink,” he has said. “You can drink it with anything.”)

However, both Jackson and Rex Sinclair, for quite different reasons, stick to milk. (“Booze is for assholes like my old man,” Rex has said.) Vera never drinks. Nor does Florence. “I’m too old, it makes me dizzy.” Which leaves a lot of champagne for Peg and Megan, Henry, Biff.