Textures of Life, page 14
“What?”
“Got caught.”
“Got c—oh of course,” said Liz. “Of course.” She poured them each more tea. “Convulsions,” she said, in an off-hand tone. “Why would she ever think you’d have those!”
“You gain too much weight, there’s a kidney condition could give you them. With me, it wasn’t anything but the twins.” She stubbed out her cigarette, shaking her head at it. A deep ground noise was coming from the harbor now, not foundering but steady, sounding in the floorboards as if something might rise there. “E-clampsia,” she said into it, with a delicately special enunciation, her medical one. The word floated there like an offering. She looked up. “Oh honey, you’re all right, you didn’t put that much on!”
“I was just wishing it was over.”
“Oh—it isn’t so bad. You’ll forget it the next day.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that. I mean this.” Liz lifted her arms at her sides, describing their barrel-curves.
“Year from now, you’ll catch yourself wishing you could put it back where you always had it handy. When you really tied down with it.”
Far in the distance, she saw a figure still single, ghost who had nothing in common with the two girls sitting here. The nagging memory now returned in full—of the girl looking up the staircase with its hanging ropes, wondering who would be her friend here, dallying with an impulse to run, resolving to save the memory of it to laugh over with the still unknown—the day she had come here, since buried by the days that were.
“You’re the kind going to have lots of milk, you’ll feed yours. That’s what the nurse in maternity used to say to me, every time she put the breast pump on me. It’s the little ones have it, not the big lunks like you.”
Sonsie had been here, that was all; except for Ivan’s wife, avoided by all, she was the only other woman here. The two other tenants were homosexual pairs known only in passing—two who tripped lyrically down the stairs, ignoring the ropes, and two quiet, sad ones who cocooned their windows as if in hiding and lived behind a barrage of music from which one peeped out looking for the other, like elves behind a waterfall. Meanwhile Sonsie had knocked at her door the very first day, bearing a plate of her pastry and a gift packet of tea. This was the context that had been waiting for her, here. And so Sonsie, with whom she had nothing else in common at all. Even David, at first surprised at their getting thick so quickly, had later been glad of it, now that he was out so much. She stared past her now at that other lone figure—it could not be—who had so little in common with herself. “You don’t mean they actually—you don’t mean it!”
“Don’t I.” The other girl stretched now, flaunting herself against that image in the hospital, her face angry, then suddenly laughed. “Bailey. He come in once before he should of, when they had the pump on the two of us, the woman in the next bed, her and me. He turned green, I swear it, then he backed out. I could hear him making a hullabaloo out in the hall. ‘Whatsa matter with him?’ I said to the nurse when she come to take me off it. ‘He throwing up out there?’ ‘Not on your life!’ she says. ‘He’s laughing. He’s laughing his head off.’”
Sonsie got up and brought the cups to the sink, holding them one after the other under the spigot, musing. “Not that I needed him, to tell me. Not even on the delivery table, when they put your feet in those stirrups, I didn’t feel that way. Nothing else in the whole business made me feel—that lowdown. Only that pump.” She stood there for a moment, head back, shrugging off the thought, then moved past the long worktable where the wax figurine sat patiently in the welter of its own chips and dust of them, and shouldered the chair with her purse hanging on it. “I told the kids—be back at five.”
“Sonsie.”
“Ye-ep?”
“What’s it like? You know. On the table.”
It was the unasked question. They would tell one anything but that—in a complicity as deep, one was never supposed to ask it. “Oh, it’s not so bad,” they said, forestalling it, or “They gave me something, you know—I wasn’t really there.” Or leaning forward, stretching their lips in steel-edged matiness, “You’ll find you can take it, just like the rest of us.” She didn’t give a rap for the pain, nor, she was sure, had they. Still, she leaned forward, with the steady, lucid gaze people fix on the impossible, just as she had leaned in the doctor’s office, when he told her. There was always the chance that they might still tell her the truth—that she was not like the rest.
“Oh—” Sonsie shook her head, sighing. “It—” she said. Her glance fell on the figurine. She put down the chair. Usually she had a bracing lack of interest in what was done of her, never came up to it afterwards as the amateurs did, never touched. Now, her face screwed up, she put out a hand, just above it. The figure sat patiently, as if waiting for final dismissal. “Why hon,” she said, “how did you ever—” Very gently, in spite of herself, she touched it. “How did you know. I had a hat once, just like that. How did you ever know.”
Both girls regarded the small statue in silence.
“I can tell you this—” Sonsie spoke in a whisper. “They he, when they say we don’t remember it.” She put out a hand, in another unwonted gesture. The hand was rescinded. “Why, honey—don’t look at me like that!” said Sonsie. “As if I were your mother.”
At the door, she shrugged, enemy or friend, hefting her chair again. “They say you won’t remember it—they lie.”
That night, undressing herself, Liz stood naked in front of the mirror, a game she sometimes now played. Behind her, David, already lying in bed, must be made to look. She had not yet caught him flinching from it.
She herself could scarcely believe what she saw there; it would be over before she believed it, the brown, secret navel now exposed forward like a rising third nipple, or as if there were about to poke from it the pink organ of a small boy. Under the belly, the skin was gauzy as an old wrist, the veins distended, unearthly blue. Above its curve, still high, her breasts rested, no longer triangular, not yet full. In the mirror, her face, for months a peach-bloom oval, now showed still another alien—the peculiarly socketed “mask of pregnancy,” fallen inward, toward birth, as the aged face falls toward death. She felt herself a confusion of sexes, ages, indeterminate in the many-limbed toils of something antecedent to any.
She turned sideways, examining the line where hip met buttock, testing the skin with her fingers. On each of Sonsie’s hips there were ridges whose glistening snail-tracks were deep enough to follow with the fingertips, traced on that calm Maillol curve like the marks the sea makes, withdrawing from sand. Common enough on women who had carried too heavily, the doctor had told Sonsie, tossing this into Sonsie’s ragbag of tips from seatmate and sister, where it remained as the marks had on her—nameless, commonplace and permanent.
“I’m not carrying—too heavily,” Liz said now. “I should go back to—pretty much the same.”
“Of course you will,” said David.
Oh, he was trying to keep in step with her, but could he have any idea of how far he would have to reach to be where she stood—as she saw herself in the glass—heels dug in, leaning back against the hard, amniotic weight of all that had been thrust upon her? From another orb she regarded him in the glass, lying there feckless behind her, in the simple one-track rhythm of his world, between them, true or false, all the dark, venous coil that now defined her away from him—as if she walked in a magnetic field on which secret facts flew to her, to which he was lead. If I’m late, they’ll “induce” me—castor oil. If the water breaks, it’s a dry birth, girl. Hubble-bubble. The Kaiser was a breech—he had a withered arm. Spring forever, O Republic, from the dust of my bosom. Of course, my hair may fall out afterwards. The look on my face, however, is medically documented. Quite common—but, luckily here—won’t last. I am still Persephone. It’s only a mask.
Oh, she must try to reach him, therefore her nightly game.
“You were absolutely right,” she said, “about Sonsie. We really have almost nothing in common. I just realized it this afternoon.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he said. “I didn’t. What I said was, living so close, maybe you shouldn’t get so—spend so much ti—”
“Well, it’s the “same thing,” she said. “It’s going to be a drag, to break off.”
“You girls have a fight, or something?”
“Of course not. I just realized.” She stared in the mirror, chin lifted. He seemed no nearer. “A girl like her. What do you suppose we could keep on finding to talk about? What do you suppose we do talk about. We girls.”
“Oh—house-stuff. Sex, maybe.”
“Se—!” As with most women, what they did with their men was never mentioned in those terms, between them. “Why, she never mentions it.” Sex was Sonsie’s modesty—theirs. “Nor do I.” It was the one adage in the manual that had not been discussed—“Intercourse should not be engaged in after the seventh month.” She gazed at him now with a remote, calculated pity.
“Us, then.”
“You? Oh—men. Yes—we talk about you, some.” Her smile was almost for Sonsie. The men, never appearing intimately in those conversations either, instead were slid along in their grooves like puppets, moving jerkily in scenes devoted to the habits, care and feeding of, et cetera—never really to them. “What do you talk about, with Barney?”
“Work.”
“See!” she said.
“She’s a good egg,” he said severely. “She may not be in it for brain. But you knew that.”
“Oh, I know,” she said. “I know. And she’s not such a dumb bunny. The way she had to grow up, kicked up. By that mother of hers. Why, in a peculiar way I really love her, you know? Not just like.”
“She’s something to look at,” he said. “I wonder if I could catch it on film. Not sexy. She’s like some big, clean—not Venus exactly. But not Diana either.”
“You should see her in the nude,” she said. “She has one of those, almost abstract bodies. Like a good statue. As if it had already been through—you feel a kind of peculiar sympathy—” One hand smoothed her own hip. Suddenly, she wheeled clumsily to face him. “Dave! You don’t think…” Her mouth was open, eyes screwed tight, ready for horror, comically trusting as a young bird’s. The child had not dropped yet, according to Sonsie, yet its weight on her thighs was such that it toppled her forward, unless she kept her hands under it. She held them so, holding her belly like a great football. “Do you think—you think I could be a Lesbian, or something?”
He had just been taking off his glasses. Without any intent of cruelty—in the surprise with which one repeats a habitual gesture—he put them on again. But then he began to laugh. Probably there was a touch of hysterical release from this last month in it, but anyway he couldn’t help it. He rolled over and over with it, pounding the pillow, from which he rose, pointing a weak finger—only to fall back in another paroxysm.
At the core of the eye, lies the retina. Once it is “detached” as they say, even partially, the vision can never be the same. With the inner eye, it is that way also. She saw him there. Oh, she had her humor about her too, somewhere. With her outer eye, she could see well enough how she looked to him, even smile. When she spoke, though, it was from that dark, venous underground, always fresh with milk or blood, that he could never penetrate to, from which she herself had been running intermittently ever since she was thirteen—and to which now, in the full light of day, she was returned.
“Go on, laugh,” she said. “Go on, Pagani. Laugh.”
(They lied of course, when they said she wouldn’t remember it. What she remembered best was her great distance from others who could still suffer shades of feeling, their distance from her, who was all one shade. Later on, when they asked her about it, she lied, and said she didn’t remember it. How speak in the particular, of what should be all—one statement? Still later, when she asked herself, she responded also that she had forgotten. It had been the great obligatory scene of her life—hers—but nothing could make it a unique one. So she lied there, also, and said she did not remember it. It was an old wives’ tale.)
And now that the praeludium was over, with that expected chord which everybody had heard, the days offered themselves to the young Paganis—for what seemed a long time—in a mixed bag containing only many a minor good. Sometimes it was David, man of action, who appeared to be in the forefront of the family, holding aloft its banner, and Elizabeth who was the contemplative; sometimes it was she who set the tone of that psyche all families have—and now and again, walking with that lovely gait the world recognizes, they were one. In olden days, they would have had some actual ikon, household god to which or whom each would have had his and her duties, but here too their heritage, itself a mixture, left them free to—set their own course. Everything now conspired to help them believe they were doing so.
To Elizabeth with the child, crowned by it, life was ravished by circumstance. May, sweet nugget of the same, absorbed the unscheduled daylight hours, or corrected them to one; at night, sometimes carried to parties on her mother’s hip, she often allowed herself to be slipped into a quiet corner with others of her kind. Slowly her possessions entrenched themselves, trusted by her to bear it in upon her hosts that she was not leaving; gradually they learned to let all this creeping art nouveau abide. Meanwhile May, in return, offered them each day her small fistful of events. David from time to time patched together a film of these and sent it off to California, where each installment was extensively reviewed by letter, under the title with which Mr. Pagani had at once dubbed the whole continuity: “May’s Meanwhile.”
As was natural, some portion of her parents’ own almost always adhered to it. The field of dandelions where she was shown, a wandering topknot almost as bright-penny, lay just outside the wood where they went to hunt wood for Elizabeth, where they had found that large bole she would soon be working on. Here was May again, in the secondhand car her father had bought with his own earnings. For though the big opus was not yet done, indeed enlarged itself monthly, two smaller sections of it—one on certain architectural leftovers in the city, and one on its municipal sculpture—had been purchased by a university, share in the payment refused by the already well-heeled Barney, on the true grounds that these ideas had been David’s. More of the same, if he could turn up some, was on order.
Elizabeth, writing the letters that accompanied these installments, found herself a more eager correspondent now. Two addressees were more neutral than one—and she had found her subject, on which all of them could dwell. Under a still of May in the car—for an album which her own mother had started—she inscribed date and anecdote:
“The old bus makes a racket going up hills, probably needs a carbon job. First time out, I made a crack about it. We didn’t take it out again until last Sunday, more than a week later. What was our surprise to hear her say, clear as a bell, what I’d said. “Will this thing exploge?” At two-and-a-half! Can you believe it!”
The senior Paganis could well believe it. Though they had their accounts too, of the sniffles and nap-fevers a child could breed in a wink and a gust of wind, even hearing, safely afterwards, of the midnight croup, when Liz and Sonsie took turns walking the floor with the child upright on a shoulder, or of the time May got into the studio and cut her wrist, on a tool called a riffler that Elizabeth herself had never used—a half-inch more and it would have been the artery—the child of the pictures was the one they most truly believed. To Margot’s anxious query, not of course a suggestion, as to whether the studio could not be locked, she received an airmail answer: It was. She opened it. We’ve taken other precautions now. You really can’t realize I’m a mother now too, can you.
Both knew this equally. On May’s first birthday, when Margot had flown East, ostensibly to re-rent the apartment she still kept on there, the good intentions of each had made for a prepared formality—under which repression one lance from an old attitude had instantly pierced. “I’ve tried,” each said to herself—“she will not accept.” “She will not forbear.” For walk about as they might and did, under an obscurely tender knowledge they increasingly felt themselves to be sharing, in speech they were helpless—birds striking in midair. “May hasn’t yet made her suffer,” the elder thought, and the repetition made her sad. But from these encounters, Elizabeth rose refreshed, a phoenix-girl. If Margot’s presence would not let her be a mother, then she would be a girl again, rediscovering her need, in all this happy humdrum, to rebel and not forbear, even to shut off from May that new fount of knee-high wisdom which May herself had opened in her, and fling up the single hand again—to push against the weave. All this was fine for work—but lasted briefly. So it was not quite possible to say who had conquered whom.
As for David, he had gone to the Coast once since, on the excuse of showing his father sections of the new film, and of course there was never any trouble between those two, though each found the other more reserved. “It must be because he has her now,” David told himself. “Is it because he is beginning to see?” Mr. Pagani asked himself—and trembled against what David might turn and tell him. Meanwhile, the time was approaching when all five must really meet, foolish to delay that pleasure. May was old enough now to see California. California must see May. Jacques (Margot wrote), whose grumbles over his liver all but convinced them that he had one and might make good his eternal threat to take it home to France forever, must see her—they must see him. Mr. Pagani was never the one to press for this—he was the same as always.
This was the real news from the older ones, and the best—that everything was the same. Each side knew the marvel of this, but differently. David no longer worried, or had to remind himself to do so. To the younger lovers, the older couple had been returned to that plateau where all keep their parents; distance made the latter even more safely constant, and they sent no pictures; like all letter-writers who remain faithful but unseen, they did not change.
