The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (36 page)

“He was just tired today, honey,” Jill said. “I don’t think Katrina gave him his nap.”

“Nick,” Amanda said quietly, “you’re making a scene over nothing.”

Nick looked at her, then took a large swallow of his drink.

“In any case,” Owen said, taking Jill’s arm gently, “I’d quite like to see the little viper.”

“He’ll be thrilled, Owen,” Jill said. “He was asking for you all afternoon.” And at that moment, she felt so grateful to Owen that she might have been telling the truth.

Upstairs, Joshua welcomed Owen with a bonhomie and poise that caused Jill’s eyes to brim. He presented Owen with a select offering of toys and stood back as Owen, sprawled out on the floor, affected to be defeated by the workings of first one, then another. “Don’t be discouraged, Mr. Plesko,” Joshua said. “These things take time.”

Owen put down a little plastic hammer and sighed. He really did look sad, Jill thought.

“Does Mrs. Plesko like toys?” Joshua asked.

“Mrs. Plesko has a way with a toy,” Owen said. “She’s younger than I am, you know. By virtually hundreds of years.”

“Do you think she’d like to come play, too?” Joshua asked hopefully.

“No more come-play tonight, Mr. Joshua,” Katrina announced from the doorway.

“Katrina—” A bolt of candor cleared Owen’s face as he struggled to his feet, and his eyes loomed up behind his glasses like fish.

Katrina lifted her light, springy hair from the back of her neck for a moment and smiled at Owen. “Joshua,” she said. “It’s time for our bath.”

Owen’s expression had resumed its unclear underwater shiftings, but Jill had seen enough. “Well, Katrina,” Owen was saying, “it looks like you’ve been in the sun.” He looked down at his shoes.

“This sun—” Katrina closed her eyes and leaned her head back. At the opening of her shirt, Jill saw, was a little triangle of skin that glistened as white as her teeth. “I could spend my whole life under this sun…”

Owen started to speak but looked down at his shoes again instead.

“So, Joshua.” Katrina smiled. “Are we ready?”

But Joshua had gone oddly sullen. “I have to see my dad first,” he said. “Tell my dad to come upstairs.”

“He can’t,” Jill said sharply. But then she knelt and hugged Joshua so hard he squeaked. “I’m sorry, darling. Not right now.” As they went downstairs together, neither Jill nor Owen spoke.

Everyone else had gone out into the garden, and Jill and Owen, drawn out behind them through the French doors, were able to disengage from their distressed intimacy. Jill paused on the terrace and watched as the others fanned out across the sloping lawn. They drifted alone or in twos among the spires of delphinium, and the peonies, whose huge blossoms shed a waxy glow and a lovely, tormenting fragrance. The colors of the lawn and the flowers intensified with the dark; the night was saturated with the concentrated colors of summer. Beyond the hedge, lights showed in the top story of the Binghams’ house. Little clusters of sound sparkled in the air like fireflies—the chiming of glass, leaves clicking against one another, Amanda’s tiny, shimmering laugh. Jill closed her eyes, and the sounds intermingled, into a distant surf. For a moment, Nick was behind her. His hand moved up her neck, then down. He let her hair glide through his fingers. When she opened her eyes, he was gone.

By the time they all sat down to dinner, they had become an ensemble; the night and the garden had uncoiled the skein of associations and habits, memories and dependencies that ran between them, dropping it over them in a loose net. Jill lifted her glass, and the amber sea in it moved—these were her friends.

Bud was asking Owen’s advice about a lawsuit he was considering bringing against an account, Lyle was counseling Kitsy about London hotels, Nick was unusually animated—Susan
was
, in fact, enjoying the focus of his charm, Jill saw, as he embarked on a lengthy and involved anecdote; her large eyes misted with effort as she nodded, listening intently. “But how true!” she said earnestly when Nick completed his story and burst out laughing. Amanda twirled between her fingers a little flower she had broken off in the garden, smiling at it quizzically.

“Isn’t that the Bingham house?” Lyle asked. “Right next door?”

A silence fell. “Yes…” Jill said.

“So terrible,” Kitsy said.

“Just what exactly was it that happened?” Lyle asked.

“Well, it might not seem like much to you,” Kitsy said. “But it was devastating for them.”

“No,” Lyle said, “all I meant was—”

“Of course they’re insured,” Kitsy said. “But it’s their privacy, isn’t it? And to have one’s own home
invaded
like that! Those poor old people—they never did anyone any harm.”

“I don’t know,” Bud said. “Spencer’s a hard man on the golf course.”

Kitsy cast a reproving glance at her fork. “You know what I mean, Bud,” she said.

“Doesn’t he make pesticides?” Susan said, and looked brightly around the table. “I mean, didn’t Mr. Bingham manufacture pesticides?” she said.

“Well—” Nick stopped smiling. “Actually, there are new studies indicating that if pesticides aren’t used, a plant will produce its own, much more toxic, sub—”

“That’s so strange,” Susan said. “Or really, there’s nothing really strange about it, is there? And that’s—I mean, Mr. Bingham manufactured pesticides and there’s nothing strange about that, and someone broke into his house, and there’s nothing strange about
that
, either. But don’t you sometimes have the terribly vivid sensation that under this thing we refer to as ‘life’ is something that—how do I say this?—that there is this thing going on, and we
make
it, or it makes itself, possibly, and then there is this other thing that it looks like, or seems like, which is only sort of a top view of the first thing. A reflection, if you see what I mean. And usually those two things are exactly alike, or at least, reasonably alike. Or—well, I suppose you might say, they coincide, the bottom and the top. So, in any case, it’s as though we decide what our lives are going to be like—we deal in futures, or we manufacture pesticides, or we take a trip to Europe, or whatever it
is
, and everything seems to be just the way we’ve planned it, because, in the vast majority of instances, it
is.
Exactly the way we’ve planned it. And so the thing that we think is going on is just like the thing that
is
going on, and everything is just the way we’ve decided it ought to be. But sometimes the…the thing on the top and the thing on the bottom are completely different—they’ve
diverged
, somehow, and we wouldn’t even know that they’d diverged, except sometimes the thing on the bottom just pops
out
, it pops out!
Into
the top thing. Because, suppose, for instance, that one of us—oh, goes to Venice, for example, and just falls into a canal. Well, I don’t suppose any of us would do that, but I mean people still
die
, for example. Not that that’s exactly—but, you see, things are going on in some continuous way, somehow, and, in a sense—Well, look. If you have a party, then people talk to other people. Things happen between people. Or even just happen, like somebody’s baby has Down’s syndrome, just to mention a—well, happen. When there isn’t anything to do about it, nothing, nothing, nothing at all to do about it, because things only happen in one direction—”

Susan stopped, and a laugh bounced slowly out of Owen, like a rubber ball falling down steps.

“It’s strange,” Susan said, turning to him. “I don’t know what I mean…”

Susan was never much of a drinker, Jill thought. But in fact she herself was expanding outward, and the few sips of wine she’d had with dinner were causing everything to pass over the convex surface of the evening in long, slow, luminous flashes. Nick, at the other end of the table, seemed to be at the other end of a tunnel; the gentle sounds of conversation rode at the margins of a darkness enclosing her.

There had been things—there was something about Owen…She had been angry, if she wasn’t mistaken, but the anger had consumed itself, leaving an ashy void. And something had happened—oh, Nick and Amanda had had…was it a quarrel? about Roo and her brother; and something had happened with Roo—yes, Roo had been wearing Jill’s
dress
, of all things. And before that was when Joshua had been so bad. And before that—oh, yes. Before that, she had visited the Binghams. Of course; she had visited the Binghams, and that must be why she felt so sad. And so ill, really—like an apple with a hidden soft spot spreading under the skin. It must be because of her visit to the Binghams that everything seemed so flat and bad—so stained.

Although Hattie and Spence Bingham lived right next door, they and their house seemed to belong to an earlier era, distant in space as well as in time. They were near eighty, Jill thought, though they’d never looked anything like it until today, when they had looked much, much older. Even their vitality, issuing, as it did, from an untroubled and unreflecting pleasure in success, seemed to sequester them in a more vigorous and brightly colored period.

Jill and Nick had attended several enormous parties or receptions held on the Binghams’ lawn, which was glorious in the spring and summer with flowers and blossoming fruit trees. The Binghams were marvelous hosts. And once or twice a year Jill would stop over to have tea with Hattie. The heavy drapes in the living room were always open, allowing the light to fall in rich panels across the polished floor and the deep silence of the old furniture, and Hattie would serve Jill tea and slices of a dense buttery cake, as well as cookies so fragile they almost disappeared by themselves.

But this afternoon it had been Spencer who opened the door. “Well, Jill,” he said. Without letting go of the doorknob, he glanced back into the dim hall.

“I’ve interrupted, haven’t I?” Jill said. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“No, no,” Spencer said, and displayed his cordial smile. “Come in, Jill. Hattie,” he called, “we have a visitor.” He dropped his voice. “She’ll be glad.”

“Well, invite Jill in, Spence,” Hattie said, and then Jill saw that Hattie was having difficulty with the stairs, so there was nothing to do except wait through the painful descent. “A visitor is supposed to come in and visit. Come in, Jill, and sit down.”

But when Jill did sit, in a generous upholstered chair near the fireplace, there was a silence.

“I can’t stay long,” Jill said. “I just dropped in to say how sorry I was to hear about—about the other night.”

“Oh, yes,” Spencer said, as if he were picking up a story in the middle. “Wednesday night. Well, we’d been over at the DeForests’ for cocktails. They had a little do for that young man—the new head of cardiology over at Lakeview. And then we went into town for dinner. We usually do on Wednesdays, party or no party, so you see what a bad thing a habit is. Because this Wednesday, when we got back and opened our door—well, it was just like being somewhere else—it was like something that hadn’t happened. I mean, if you were to go back outside and come in again, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“What Spence means,” Hattie said, “is that we opened the door of our own house, and we didn’t even know where we were—everything torn apart—drawers dumped out, furniture every which way, papers all over the place—private papers!”

“And the dolls, of course,” Spencer said.

“
We
want some tea, don’t we,” Hattie said.

“Hattie,” Spencer said. “Sit down, Hattie—don’t bother with that—”

“Not for you, you tyrant, for our guest—”

“No, no,” Jill said. “I really can’t stay.”

“Well, Spence has to have his tea,” Hattie said. “Unless he’s going out. Are you going out, Spence?” She turned to Jill. “He’s just been sitting around like an old man. Why don’t you call Bob Niederland, dear, and play some golf? Get outside and do something.”

“Why should I do anything?” Spencer chuckled unhappily. “I’m an old man, and I like it right here.”

“Well, we have to have
something
,” Hattie said. “Otherwise, it isn’t a party.”

Spencer and Jill sat quietly as Hattie made her way toward the kitchen. “Her leg is bothering her, I think,” Spencer said, frowning hopefully over at Jill. “Have you noticed?”

“Not at all,” Jill said, embarrassed.

The Binghams had never seemed absorbed in their own problems before. In fact, they’d never seemed to have problems, or to think of themselves at all, beyond whatever satisfaction they took from being themselves. Certainly they had never referred to their bodies, to infirmities. “And as you can imagine,” Spencer said after a time, “she’s heartbroken about the dolls.”

“I couldn’t even find the tea,” Hattie said, returning with juice and a plate of cookies that seemed to have come from a package. “Ruby and I worked all day to restore a modicum of order around this place, but I still can’t find a thing. That darned thief—”

“Don’t suppose he took the tea,” Spencer said. He smiled at Jill. “Didn’t have the style of a tea drinker.”

“He got our Lacy, did you hear?” Hattie said. “He broke most of the others, or spoiled them, but he took the four or five really valuable ones, including Lacy.”

“She was the first one we owned,” Spencer explained to Jill. “We found her in Smoky Mountain country. The first time we went down there, the year we were married.”

“Oh, the Smoky Mountains in those days…” Hattie said. “Well, we went back after the war once, and of course everything had changed. But in those days—well, you can’t imagine—it was so remote, just those cloudy green hills and silent roads, dirt roads, with leafy little hidden enclaves here and there of those peculiar mountain people. You could hear the train whistle sometimes, from way up over the mountains, but that was as close as the world came. And they still spoke their own kind of English then, practically some sort of Elizabethan English—they were almost like an odd little race of animals. Anyhow, Spence and I were driving around up there, and we stopped in Asheville, to poke around some big barn of a place full of antiques. Junk, really—and I spotted Lacy. Can you imagine? She had a handmade lace dress and a lovely white wax face—so elegant and perfect it was almost eerie. Some poor mountain woman’s dream of a lady, I suppose. And that’s what started us. Afterward, we liked to look wherever we went, and eventually we found ourselves with a whole world, all sorts of nationalities, all sorts of periods. But we never looked for value. Who would have dreamed that dolls would become an item of value? Of course, everything does sooner or later, now. Isn’t it funny? Old toasters and everything—all that ugly kitchen trash we hated so. But we never even thought of that. It was the feeling. You couldn’t believe what people put into some of those little things—all the beauty and personality that anyone could imagine, that anyone could want in a human being…” Hattie sighed and looked past Jill out the window.