Edges (ssc), page 16
Marietta woke and asked with low gurgles to be nursed. Iris peeled away half her bodice and offered her breast to the smiling infant. Iris’s bushy red hair, back-lighted by the picture window, formed an aureole expressive of maternal fulfillment.
’Tell me,” said Bonnie, already caught in the toils of Hera’s devising, “about your babies. They’re both such…
“…inexpressible darlings—aren’t they? What can I say? I guess the most incredible thing about them, the thing I least expected, has been the energy I get from them. Like now, with Marietta nursing, I can feel a kind of…like a lightning bolt I’ve trapped inside my spine.”
Bonnie tried to preserve a rational skepticism. “I’ve always thought they’d be a drain. Especially the first few months.” C,
Marietta unclenched a tiny fist, pressed her fingers against her mother’s resilient breast, and cooed bubbles of milk.
“Oh, there’s that side of it, too,” Iris admitted. “But they replenish much more than they ever drain. The other thing, or maybe it’s the same thing from another angle, is the way they connect me to Reality. I mean, before Jason I was avoiding Reality.”
“I wish you’d tell me how to do that,” said Bonnie with a nervous laugh.
“I mean, staying around the house and never going out or seeing anyone. Just watching tv and combing my hair. Like that”
Bonnie winced.
“And I felt so empty all the time. But now, with the children, the whole world seems different. More solid. Coming over here today is an example. Before Jason I might have thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to drive over to White Plains and see Bonnie?’ But I never got round to doing it No oomph.” ’
“Don’t apologize. I’m just the same.”
“But that’s my point, Bonnie—I’m not the same, any more.”
Bonnie looked at her transformed friend, then at Marietta, then at Jason, and saw herself mirrored in them. A premonitory tingle tingled in the small of her back. Not a lightning bolt yet, just the merest hint of what she now knew to be her preordained and necessary fulfillment. How could she ever have been so blindly selfish as to have agreed with Jack, that afternoon in Bermuda as they downed rum swizzles, that theirs should be a childless marriage? She remembered how passionately as a girl she had mothered her little family of dolls—Selma and Baby Susan, Whiffles and Wanda, Lily and Rose; how she’d never allowed them to grow up and become self-mirroring Barbie dolls but kept them always in the livery of infancy, pink and baby blue; how, until Jack had announced his allergy to cat fur, she’d cuddled and coddled and cared for those two beautiful Persians from the animal shelter. All these signposts pointed to a single destination, which she could see now as clearly as a spire rising from the plain: Motherhood.
Iris, having accomplished Hera’s purpose, announced that it was time to return home and start the pot roast. On the way out the door she admired the macrame pot hanger cascading stringily down from the ceiling of the breakfast nook. Bonnie insisted on giving it to her as a present, languishing ivy, ceramic pot and all.
“No, really,” Iris protested. “It’s much too nice.”
“Not at all. It will give me a chance to make another.”
“You made it yourself?” the goddess marveled.
“It’s easy once you get the knack. Like tying shoelaces all day.”
“I’m sure this is nicer than most of the ones I see in shops. You could make it a business.”
Bonnie laughed in self-deprecation. “That’s what Jack said yesterday. I think he’s afraid my mind will rot, sitting around all day with nothing to do. And I think he may be right.”
Iris scooped up Jason from the couch and popped him into the carrier, then slid the straps over her shoulders. “I can tell you my solution to that problem.”
She did not need to say more. Bonnie’s eyes were brimming. Her hands strayed, unconscious, to cup the shallow convexity of her still unquickened womb. Her soul hungered.
That night as her fingers exercised their almost lost facility on lengths of coarse twine, Bonnie began the slow work of bending her husband’s will toward her new-formed purpose. It wasn’t hard to manipulate Jack. Having no guiding principles beyond serendipity and his own caprice, he had little staying power against a will sturdier than his own. This pliancy accounted for a large part of Jack’s charm. His photographs had the same quality of careless accommodation to prevailing winds.
Not that Jack any longer considered himself a serious photographer. For the past three years he had photographed little but beds: beds with sheets, with blankets, with spreads, with comforters. These photographs appeared in magazine advertisements and in department store and mail order catalogues. That it was possible to make nearly forty thousand a year photographing beds always struck Jack as an astonishing testimony to the colossal size of the world he lived in. To think that there could be so many people who needed to proclaim the merits of their particular sheets and pillowcases that a man’s entire life could be directed to that single purpose!
This matter of purpose proved to be his Waterloo in the discussions with Bonnie. What was the purpose, she wanted to know, of their marriage? It could not be the furtherance of his career, since Jack was prepared to admit that his career amounted to little more than a joke. But then he asked no more. Bonnie would not accept this. There had to be more. There had to be a purpose. What was the point of living in her parents’ two-and-a-half-bedroom ranchhouse instead of in the city, where at least you could go out to a movie sometimes?
What but a baby?
Jack was certain he would not enjoy a steady diet of parenthood, but he had to admit that this theory had not been put to the test of experience. Bonnie was just as certain that fate had decreed her to be a mother, and her certainty had the force of a faith behind it. By the time the last half-hitch had been snugged into place on the new macrame pot hanger Bonnie was pregnant.
Four weeks after the birth of his daughter, Joy-Ann, Jack Fleetwood moved out of his suburban home on Exeter Road and into his photography studio in a still very raw loft on West 26th Street in the city. Since earliest youth Jack had been able to solve the successive crises of his life by the simple expedient of running the other way. When he was twelve he had refused point-blank to cope with the decimal system, and after only a little while his parents had transferred him to a progressive school. The invention of the pocket calculator confirmed Jack in this first grand refusal, and those that followed all seemed to endorse the same moral—that a problem resolutely ignored was a problem solved. While other young men anguished over the trials and errors of young love. Jack sipped the nectar from each flower that invited and fluttered on to the next. While others elbowed and shoved their way into the elevator of success, Jack took a job on the ground floor. Far from deteriorating, his character took on the agreeable, hard-rubbed patina of a vintage car that has spent all its existence in a museum. At the age of thirty-two Jack still retained the ideal fecklessness of his pampered childhood. Not for him, therefore, the colicky nights and pails of diapers of responsible parenthood; not for him the pretense that Joy-Ann’s birdlike noises and muscular spasms were objects of perpetual proud fascination. As a fetus she’d never represented more to him than a disfiguring growth in Bonnie’s no longer smoothly functioning body. As an infant squalling in a crib or being suckled at his wife’s engorged and droop* ing breast she was unendurable, and accordingly Jack did not endure her.
There were allied considerations. The house on Exeter Road, which had been dangled, prior to the wedding, as a carrot was still, two years later, the property of Bonnie’s father, a professional son-of-a-bitch, who continued to dangle it at the end of an ever-receding stick. Meanwhile it had become evident, living in the dump, that the reason he’d enticed them with this particular property was that its divers liabilities (electric heat, a cellar prone to flooding, and the threat of a highway that was to be their new view from the back windows) made it all but unsaleable. (It had been their intention to sell it as soon as it legally belonged to them.) Bonnie was livid over her father’s treachery, but Jack’s temperament was as little given to outrage as to long-suffering. However, since the promise of the dower-house had been a decisive factor in their decision to undergo matrimony, it seemed reasonable to Jack, though not to Bonnie, that Mr. Malvin’s failure to deliver the goods released them from their side of the bargain. Jack didn’t care to argue about it (arguing never accomplished anything) but when he did pack his bags and sort out his records from Bonnie’s it was without any pang of guilt for having been derelict in his duty. As for the Diaper Monster, that had been Bonnie’s initiative from the first: so bye baby bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting.
Bonnie, wholly given over to the passion of motherhood, expressed but one regret—that with Jack away from home she could not have more children without incurring the guilt of adultery. Jack, half-jokingly, suggested artificial insemination, and Bonnie half-seriously considered it but decided at last that adoption would be a more wholesome possibility. She actually started filling out reams of application blanks sent to her by the various agencies that supply orphans, but the only one that did not seem to take exception to her status as a still undivorced single parent was an agency in Seattle that arranged the adoption of children bom in a large Korean leper colony (guaranteed not to be lepers themselves). Even these orphans might not be made available for another year, so
Bonnie was obliged to lavish all her affection on her solitaire jewel, Joy-Ann.
Jack, among the model beds of his studio, experienced no difficulty readjusting to the zippier rhythms of inner-city life. In the day he shot sheets and pillowcases; by night he disported upon these same percale plains of Cherry Blossom, Royal Blue, Terra Cotta, Cream, and Carnival. The young women who shared his pleasures were always offered, as a keepsake, a complete change of bedding from among the ever-replenished stock. If his meals were not so regular as they had been on Exeter Road they were certainly more exquisite and less starchy. Soon his waist was a born-again thirty-one inches. He had never looked better or felt healthier, and his conscience seemed as trouble-free as the engine of his new Jaguar XJ6L.
Meanwhile on Mount Olympus Hera could not believe that he had so easily evaded the lesson she’d meant to teach him. Her fury waxed. She determined to use the utmost of her power against him. If in doing so she should also exact a long-delayed vengeance’ against Min-Tsing Bullard, so much the better!
It had been Jack’s earlier marriage to Min-Tsing, ten years ago, that had first alerted Hera to his impiety. Min-Tsing was the daughter of an aide to the Indonesian delegation to the United Nations and a fellow student with Jack at Pratt Institute. They knew each other through weekends of marathon bridge at the apartment of a mutual friend. When her father was recalled to Djakarta, Jack had been the first U.S. male citizen she’d approached with an offer of matrimony. Her object in marriage was to escape being deported when her student visa expired. At eighteen Min-Tsing was interested in sex only insofar as it related to photography. She’d approached Jack before anyone else because she sincerely admired his bridge game and his black-and-white studies of second-story windows along Sixth Avenue. Jack dropped out of Pratt as soon as the marriage contract was signed and Min-Tsing’s father had paid out the stipulated fee of $5,000. He continued to see his wife over the bridge table on such weekends as he was not otherwise engaged in squandering his windfall, but through all the time they were wed to each other he made no attempt against her chastity.
The benefits to be reaped from this arrangement didn’t cease with the first lump sum. When she was twenty-one
Min-Tsing fell in love with, and was ravished by, Jerome Bullard, a highly successful photographer’s rep. By the time Min-Tsing had divorced and remarried, Jack was settled into his new lifework. Bullard, though ordinarily an Othello of jealousy, had compelling proofs of Jack’s honorable conduct toward Min-Tsing, and he was made to share her enthusiasm for Jack’s talent as well. Bullard exercised his influence with a number of department stores and mail-order houses, and in little more than a year Jack had established himself as America’s foremost photographer of bed linens, confirming his often-expressed opinion that success depends not on what you know but who you know. Bullard, as rep, got a symbiotic third of all Jack’s fees and shared with him the distinction of being known, in the industry, as the Lord of the White Sale.
That Jack should prosper so undeservedly had been a source of aggravation to the goddess of marriage, but this was compensated to a degree by the unhappiness of Min-Tsing in her life as Mrs. Bullard. Bullard was a bully, sexually, socially, and in the conduct of his business. He alternated between long, morose sulks and spells of witless, cocaine-inspired garrulity. He grew fat, and then grew still fatter. He philandered, disappearing for days at a stretch with frowzy teenagers he obtained from agencies supplying office temporaries. The charming, intense, knowledgeable Bullard whom Min-Tsing had fallen in love with vanished before her eyes, and gradually she resumed her earlier attitude towards the realm of the erotic, which was simply to have nothing to do with it. From separate beds she and her husband evolved to a condition of separate bedrooms and then of separate apartments, albeit in the same building (which he owned). She continued, nevertheless, to work for him, since no one else could manage the complicated duplicities of their system of bookkeeping.
This had been their status quo for many years when Hera determined to use Min-Tsing as the instrument of her fuller revenge. Summoning young Eros from his mother’s side, she instructed him to inspire Jack with a passion for Mrs. Bullard, and her with a passion for him. No need here to chronicle the delights and afflictions of the lovers: any program of popular music will relate Love’s universal truths (albeit only a select few). Jack wanted her love, he needed her love, and, this feeling being mutual, he got her love. For six months they lived as though in a heaven of fleecy, flesh-supporting clouds, and then the teeth of Hera’s trap snapped shut about their unsuspecting limbs. Min-Tsing was pregnant. (The pill, needless to say, is no precaution against the power of Hera.) Since Min-Tsing’s moral principles did not allow her to think of abortion, she was soon unable to conceal her condition from her husband-and-employer. Nor did she require much persuasion” to name the father of her unborn child. Can Love ever hesitate to pronounce the beloved’s name, if it is truly Love? In any case, she could not have palmed the baby off on Bullard as his own: there had been no sexual congress between them for nearly a year.
Min-Tsing had misjudged the effect her candor would have, expecting Bullard, after his first annoyance, to take her infidelity in the same civil, uncensorious spirit in which she took his. Instead, he reverted to his Othello manner. He denounced the lovers. He threatened physical violence to Jack—if ever they should meet. He revelled in horror, outrage, and self-pity. And he vowed to bring Jack Fleetwood’s career down about his ears. Jack’s dealing with the merchants he worked for had mainly been conducted through Bullard, who had set the fees and arranged the kickbacks—and so was able now to call the tune. Jack’s work was suddenly not in demand. He was billed for immense inventories of bedding that had been consigned to him in the clear understanding that they were to be his, and when he indignantly refused to pay, he was threatened with legal action. Most painfully, because most unjustly, Bullard simply withheld money owed to Jack for work he’d already done. Within a month Jack was confronting the clear prospect of bankruptcy.
All the while Jack foundered, Min-Tsing would telephone with the news of her latest moods, which succeeded each other with such whirligig impetuosity that Cleopatra herself would have acknowledged her as an equal. Giggles alternated with despair. She pitied Bullard from on high, then wanted to kill him, or at least confront him and have a proper shouting match. More than once she set off to her old office (she of course had been fired) to have it out, but Jack was always able to stop her. Then she urged Jack to take her home to Djakarta. There Jack would marry her and open a photography studio. She described life in Indonesia in lyrical superlatives, and became angry when Jack refused to be tempted. She discovered drunkenness and the heady pleasures of public hysteria. The barb of Eros was still lodged securely in her flesh.
Jack was not so fortunate. At the first axestroke of ill fortune, Love disintegrated into a welter of practical anxieties. It happened suddenly, like a slide being changed, snick-snack, by a slide-changer. Yet he could not, even so, have recourse to his usual solution, flight, if only because he still hoped Bullard could be made eventually to come round to a more accommodating attitude. This hope, however, could be realized only on condition that Min-Tsing were made to comprehend Love’s last universal truth, that it dies. Much, therefore, as he’d have liked to simplify his existence by taking off on his own for Las Vegas or Miami, he remained at Min-Tsing’s beck and call, hoping that by gradually weaning her from his already cooler embraces he might yet escape complete destitution. Besides, it is always delightful to be loved so thoroughly; more delightful perhaps, in an epicurean way, when the transaction is not reciprocal, for then the beloved will have the presence of mind to marvel at the sweetness of so much unmerited fond attention, instead of vibrating in blissfully unconscious resonance.
Time passed. Min-Tsing, far from tapering off, became clingingly dependent and still more wildly erratic. The studio had to be sold, and most of its equipment. Jack was reduced to looking for jobs at the very studios whose business he’d stolen during the years of his ascent, but Bullard had been before him, offering the old plums back and blackening Jack’s name, and so his abjection was of no practical value. Another photographers’ rep, whom he went to with his portfolio, told him he was unemployable without a good reference from either Bullard or a previous employer. The whole city seemed to be in a conspiracy against him.
