Three Short Novels (8 page)

In the second spring after their move to the new house, it was included in a tour of several beautiful homes in the city, the tour a charitable endeavor by the young matrons' league to which she belonged. While the woman who came once a week to the house was cleaning it the day before the tour, Vivian locked up in cabinets and closets small valuables that could be pocketed, although there was to be a leaguer in almost every room to act as hostess. It was customary for the owners of the houses in the tour to be away all day, and she had planned to spend the day with her mother, shopping for summer clothes. But the night before, carefully wiping out with a tissue the ashtrays she and Russell had been using and rinsing their liquor glasses, she knew she would remain in the house—not to hear words of praise and not to prevent any thefts, but to stand anonymously by and watch the flow of strangers who had paid their tour-ticket price in order to enter into the privacy of her home.

With the other women who were acting as hostesses, she awaited the invasion. Wearing a pink spring suit and white gloves, a white purse under her arm, she was, she felt, sure to be mistaken by the crowd for one of them. The early ones, at ten o'clock, entered with a reverent step because it was their first house of the day; but the later ones entered with less reverence, commenting loudly on plants and garden lamps as they came up the front path, taking in the living room with gazes already somewhat jaded by their acquaintance with other homes of secluded beauty. She watched them as she sat on the arm of a chair, chatting with a hostess, or wandered with them
through the house. They were chic women, young and old, and they were impeccably dressed men with oblique faces as if seen in attendance upon her in a mirror of a beauty salon and never in direct confrontation; they were eccentrics, one a young woman in a garishly green outfit, with a pheasant feather a foot long attached to her beret and switching the space behind her as she stopped frequently, her feet in a dancer's pose, to glance around with large, transfixed eyes and a saintly smile; and there were two seedy brothers, shuffling and gray, who had the look of small-time realtors from the Mission district. For brief moments Vivian met eyes with the invaders, their roundly open eyes, their shifting eyes, their eyes ashamed of their curiosity, their envious eyes, and their eyes desiring ruin. She caught sight of a hole in the sock of one of the seedy brothers and of their run-down, polished shoes. She mingled with them up and down the hallways, on the flight of stairs between the two floors, and in and out of rooms, following a group into the serenity of the bedroom of herself and her husband and observing with them the wide, high-swelling bed, the ornately carved bedstead and the plum silk spread, the highboy with its shining brass hardware; the lamps, one on each side of the bed, a yard high with cylindrical shades of white silk; the black marble ashtrays; and the sand-color, thick carpeting that hushed everyone's step. They were fascinated by the small photos of Russell and David in pewter frames on her dressing table, and by a snapshot of the three of them in ski clothes. They bent to see the three faces closer, and after the others had done this, she, too, leaned closer to see for herself.

13

I
n the summer of the third year of their marriage they bought an old, large house near Clearlake on four acres planted with fruit trees. They invited two and three couples for weekends and spent the time in boats on the lake, over elaborate breakfasts and buffet suppers, drinking at the bars to survey the patrons and reclining at home in the sun or under the trees if the sun was too hot.

David was off on his own all day. He was twelve, that year, and although she knew that his distance from them all was due, in part, to a dislike of their friends, it was also, she felt, a sullen and almost violent resistance to any tracing of him, either the tracing of him in his roaming during the day or of his present self into the past, as the eyes of their friends traced him into childhood, and as hers did, and Russell's. They saw him cruising around on the lake with another boy in somebody else's motorboat, or laughing with another boy as the two bailed out a dinghy, or they did not see him for an entire day. Sometimes he did not come in for meals and ate leftovers up in his room, wanting more privacy than was given him in the kitchen where the guests went in and out and tried to talk with him.

One night, however, he came to watch them dance in their bare feet in the parlor. He sat on a kitchen chair near the door, his arms crossed over his chest and his legs stretched out toward the dancers. The women tugged at his shirt to persuade him to dance with them, and one drew up another chair by his and stroked his hair and called him shy. When at last he danced with the woman, he danced without the hesitation and clumsiness and deafness to the beat of the music that were signs of shyness. He danced with the woman almost instructively, a glide of insinuation in his hips and a contempt and an urging of her in his gaze that he kept on her belly and legs.

The night was warm, the house warmer than the night, containing in all its rooms the heat from the day. The women wore no more than they had worn during the day, cotton shorts and halters. The woman he was dancing with, the wife of the bank manager, had loosened her high pile of red hair so that it fell in strands along each side of her face. That she was short and stocky, that her long hair and bare feet made her almost comically squat, she was apparently not aware. They danced a foot apart, each flattering the other, seductively, with every move. The days of his avoiding them, of crossing to the other side of the road, of eating alone in his room at night—all were cast off in an eruption of melancholy desire. His eyes appeared almost black, they were open wider, and there was a firmness in his hands on the woman like that of a man experienced in arousing, and the vigor in his slender body ridiculed the men in the room who were slumped earthward, who were debilitated by the sun of the day rather than enlivened by it, as he appeared to be. Vivian recalled the comic dance he had performed as a child, the uncontrolled dancing, the stomping with no grace or rhythm, the prancing that was nothing more than self-tripping. The woman cupped her breast with one hand, a gesture that she did not appear conscious of. It must be, Vivian thought, a habitual caress, probably one that she gave herself when alone. The woman was smiling at David, and since he was watching
her belly and legs, it appeared that she was watching herself with his eyes. When the music was over, she collapsed onto the couch, falling into her husband's lap.

“You ought to get him in the movies,” said the bank manager. His hands had gone up to protect himself from his wife's falling body; in the next moment he had removed his hands from her, jerking his leg away also. He was a tall thin man whose high, complaining voice Vivian would often hear when she stood in the marble rotunda of the bank, and once she had watched him stride from his carpeted enclosure, slam the gate that only swung noiselessly, and run up the stairs, too impatient and full too of complaints to wait for the slow elevator.

“You remember that kid? You remember that thirteen-year-old kid?” Duggan, an attorney, a small, blond man who wore sports clothes that seemed with their expensiveness to dwarf him. Even when his lips were not moving in speech, they moved with anticipation of speech. “You remember he ran away with that woman? I attended the hearing. She had six kids and was thirty-eight and I forgot to mention she had a husband too. They took her 1941 Plymouth to Tucson and shacked up there in a motel—Big Indian or Little Indian Motel—stayed for four days, I think it was, before they were apprehended. She said she loved him, she said she loved him more than her husband, she said he was the greatest lover of the century. One of her boys was two and a half years older than her lover. She was stacked, that woman, almost six feet tall. You can imagine.” He was talking rapidly and loudly over the music of the record that had dropped into place.

Vivian turned the volume knob to obliterate his moist voice and, dancing, approached her son. She danced with him in a spontaneous attempt to prove to all of them that his dancing was a boy's imitation of dancing he had seen in the movies and that he was ignorant of its implications. She was a shield between him and the lascivious attorney's story. But he lost his competence dancing with her; his legs
bungled the rhythm, he looked down at his feet, and when the music was over he sat apart again.

When David danced with Duggan's wife, who came up to him, he made up with wildness for his clumsiness dancing with his mother. The woman was a tall blonde, with utter vanity in the poking forward of her gaunt hips and long, bare thighs; an assumption, in her dancing postures, of a lunacy that matched her partner's. These woman had no lunacy, Vivian thought. They had no wantonness, no risk, and he was wasting on them his abandonment of himself to his sensuality, the first public display of the sensuality that would be his in years to come. With her back to the dancing couple, with her drink held up high in her right hand while with her left she riffled through the record albums on the table, she lifted her eyes to see their reflection in the French doors: the woman's turquoise shorts and white blouse with its one diagonal stripe of red, her long bare arms and legs in angular seduction, and David's small figure in tan pants and soiled white shirt, his dark hair, and his face that was pale in the reflection against the night and yet was brown from the summer sun—both figures moving across the panes to the blaring jangle of the music.

At the moment she turned to watch them, Russell slipped himself between David and the woman, holding his arms up high in exaggerated homage to her and dancing away with her in his small-footed way that was always just a beat off. David sat for a while watching them, then went upstairs while everyone was dancing. After he left, although the records continued to fall into place and the music blared on and the vocalists sang on or whispered on, there was no more dancing.

Russell mixed a drink for them all that he called a golden viper. “This'll stone you on the first swallow,” he warned them. The bank manager's wife sipped with a little girl's curiosity, her eyes big over the rim of her glass. Russell, Vivian saw, made the most of this small sway over them; from the secret of the viper he went on to reveal
another secret—where and for what a low price he had purchased the cut glass from which they drank, holding up his glass to the light and turning it in his fingers, conscious, she knew, that she was watching him critically. While he sat on the edge of the table, the center of the group, host and entertainer, she remembered the times she had driven him home after parties, listening while he incoherently probed his depths and deplored his friends' shallowness. The loan officials who peopled his days, he condemned when alone with her. They respected him for what they called his genius, and their appraisers overvalued the hotels and apartment houses so that the loans they made to him were larger than warranted; he ate lunch with them in the best restaurants and drank with them in the best bars, and was, she knew, always his charming, boyish, shrewd, and witty self; and at night he ridiculed them for a tie, for suede shoes, and for their very shrewdness that saw him as the one to put their money on.

While they were talking about the war in Korea, with the bank manager predicting that the Chinese were going to overrun the world, Vivian left them and went up the stairs. The heat of the day was pocketed in the upstairs hallway; all the bedroom doors, and David's door at the end of the hallway, were closed. He was lying under the sheet, the blankets thrown off onto the floor, reading under the metal lamp fixed to the bed. His head was tilted against the headboard, the pillow stuffed under his neck.

“You were the life of the party and now they're just talking,” she told him, collapsing into the canvas chair and resting her feet on the bed. The room had a meager look; it was more a sanctum than his room at home. “Silly rug looks like it's eaten all around the edge by mouse teeth,” she said, lowering one leg to kick up the edge of the rug. “Read a little to me,” she said, closing her eyes.

“It's just about birds,” he said.

“Go on, read to me if it's about birds,” she urged. “I'm interested in birds.”

“What part?” he asked, embarrassed, she saw, about reading aloud, knowing that her interest was feigned. He flipped through the pages to lose deliberately the page that he had been reading, leading her away from himself by leading her away from the part that had absorbed him. “The hummingbird can't glide,” he said. “You want that important bit of information?”

“Ah, poor things, can't glide,” she said. “Go on. But what do they need to glide for?”

“You act like a teacher,” he said. “They ask you questions and spoil everything.”

“Me a teacher?” she cried in mock distress. “I came in here to learn a few things and you accuse me of acting like a teacher. Baby, I'm ignorant,” she pleaded. “I don't know anything about birds except they've all got feathers and go peep-peep. Go on and tell me about them. Because birds are the greatest miracle. God really outdid Himself when He made a bird. Say you and I were God, could we think up something like a bird? Never in a million years. It took God to think them up, and even for Him it was something. You go on, tell me more about birds.”

“It says about migration,” he began again, “that millions of them never get there, where they're going. It says it's really a big risk to a bird, the biggest risk in his life. It says that hundreds of millions of them never get there.”

“Isn't that funny? I thought they all made it,” she said.