A Big Storm Knocked It Over Read online

  She was small and wiry, like a wildcat. She stalked about like a cat, too. Her stride was nervous and taut. At the moment she was married to her third husband, the reportage photographer Nick Samuelovich, an overlifesized, blond man. Handsome. Her first husband had been a charmless, appropriate stockbroker. This had pleased and then displeased her mother, who was horrified by divorce. Next she married a poet from a very old family but left him for Nick, who had carried her off to Cambodia.

  Dita had taken Jane Louise up with a vengeance, and Jane Louise had been somewhat dazzled. Together they had gone to the movies at lunchtime armed with huge sandwiches from the local delicatessen. When Nick was out of town, Dita and Jane Louise camped out at the cozy Samuelovich flat in Greenwich Village, where they talked and gossiped endlessly. Dita had given Jane Louise access to her private life: In front of Jane Louise she felt free to cry, rant, let down her public face, and display what seemed to Jane Louise a boiling vat of emotion. In public Dita was perfect: a clubwoman who used dirty language, a freewheeling, freethinking maverick from an impeccable background, the person you could count on to get all the jokes and nuances. Their friendship prospered over the years, but around the time that Jane Louise first met Teddy, Dita began to withdraw. She no longer came into Jane Louise’s office to yak. Their midday movie dates were over. Dita was never home in the evening anymore, and Jane Louise had known in her heart of hearts that Dita would never make it to her wedding.

  And she hadn’t. It turned out that the birthday party for Nick’s old father was the same day, even though it was not his official birthday. And although a smaller party would be given for the old man on his actual birthday, Dita said it was imperative that she attend both. If it had not been Nick’s father’s birthday, Jane Louise had suspected, it would have been something else.

  “Hello, sweetie,” Dita said. “I’m so sorry about your wedding. Those ghastly White Russians.”

  Jane Louise knew this voice. Its tone did not encourage conversation. It made breezy, unchallengeable statements.

  Dita thrust onto Jane Louise’s desk a large box covered in shiny black paper and done up with an enormous silk bow—pink.

  “Open it, please,” said Dita.

  Jane Louise obeyed. Inside a nest of bright pink tissue was a large sprigware pitcher—a Georgian water jug from an antique shop Jane Louise had never so much as dared to browse in.

  “Oh,” said Jane Louise. “I love it!” She felt she would have to clench her teeth to prevent herself from bursting into tears.

  “Sprigware,” Dita said. “To go with your nice white ironstone. I felt a little decoration would be a good thing.”

  “Oh, it’s wonderful,” Jane Louise said.

  “And do you suppose your old man will like it?” Dita said.

  For a moment Jane Louise thought she was referring to her father, long deceased, but Dita meant Teddy.

  “It’s just the sort of thing he’d like,” Jane Louise said.

  “Now, sweetie,” said Dita, clearing away the tissue paper and tapping an unfiltered cigarette on her case to pack it down, “let’s get serious.”

  For an instant Jane Louise wondered if she and Dita were going to talk about why they seemed no longer to be friends. Sven had once warned Jane Louise that Dita would be a dangerous person to know. Jane Louise had had dangerous boyfriends, but in her experience, women had never been the enemy.

  “Can we change the lettering on Dream of the Biker’s Girl?” Dita said. She blew a smoke ring. “The author hates it. I can’t think why, but she feels it isn’t raunchy enough.”

  “What isn’t raunchy enough?” asked a voice from the hallway, and in strolled Sven. He stared at Dita. “An infiltrator from editorial.”

  “Oh, hello, Sven,” Dita said. Her voice was perfectly formal.

  “You never come down here anymore,” Sven said. He leaned over and filched a cigarette from the open walnut case, brushing Dita’s arm. He took the lighter out of Dita’s hand and lit his cigarette with it. Jane Louise held her breath. “You don’t mind, I’m sure,” he said.

  “It’s heaven to be able to smoke in peace,” Dita said to Jane Louise as if Sven were mere dust on the window ledge. “Upstairs you can hardly light up without two editorial assistants coming in to give you a health lecture.”

  Throughout this interchange Sven gazed at Dita. If this made her nervous, she did not show it. It made Jane Louise sort of hysterical, however. She longed to get them out of her office.

  “Listen,” she said to Sven. “Why don’t you go out and smoke that thing in the hall?”

  Sven feigned hurt. “You don’t make her smoke in the hall,” he said.

  “She’s here on company business,” Jane Louise said.

  Sven crushed out his cigarette. “Well, Josita,” he said, using Dita’s real name. “We all missed you at Janey’s nice wedding. We were all sure you’d barge in at the last minute.”

  “Nick’s papa—” began Dita.

  “Oh, yes. Nick’s thousand-year-old papa,” Sven said. “Well, girls, I’ll vanish. I’ll just grab another smoke as a keepsake.” He took another cigarette and put it behind his ear. As he turned to leave his eyes met Dita’s. It was perfectly clear to Jane Louise that they either had slept together or were going to.

  CHAPTER 3

  Teddy liked a real dinner: It made him feel adult. Jane Louise, who was a very good cook, felt that on the first business day of married life you ought to feed your husband his favorite meal.

  He was not home when Jane Louise walked in, which gave her a few minutes to get acclimated. Although they had shared this apartment for a year, in some ways she was still not used to it. She had never lived with anyone before, and the fact that she shared this dwelling with a man amazed her.

  The kitchen was as they had left it, the coffee cups washed and set neatly on a tea towel. She and Teddy were both neat: Jane Louise had the tidy habits of a designer whose tools are always clean and put away in the right place. Teddy was a plant chemist. His firm invented nonpoisonous alternatives to such toxic products as pesticides and household products. His mind was orderly, and order banished bad, chaotic thoughts.

  The household they had created in their own image was more bare than cluttered. The couch, which they both loved, was elegant and uncomfortable. It had belonged to Teddy’s grandmother and was made of mahogany in the Empire style. When Teddy inherited it it had been covered with crumbling black horsehair, and Jane Louise had had it recovered in green-and-yellow stripes. She loved it because it was beautiful, and Teddy loved it because it rooted him in his history.

  There were times when Jane Louise was quite enraptured by that history, at least on Teddy’s mother’s side—generation after generation of stable New Englanders. She herself had been dragged around as a child and could never really say she was from anywhere, whereas Teddy had grown up in the country, in the house his mother had inherited from her mother. His best friend, Peter Peering, had been his friend since he was born. Otherwise Teddy’s life had been something of a mess. His parents had been bitterly divorced when he was three and had never had a kind word for each other since.

  The least happy part of planning the wedding had been the contemplation of Teddy’s parents in the same room. After all these years they still hated each other, and Eleanor loathed Cornelius’s second wife, Martine. But in the end they had stayed in separate corners, and Edie and Mokie had served as runners between them, making sure everyone was calm.

  Teddy’s father was a Brit, with a stiff white mustache and the bearing of a naval man. He had been in the British navy during the war and had spent the years after it doing something for a company his family had long had an interest in. Later he became a wine merchant, which he was quite good at, and had married Martine, a big, soft woman from Bermuda who had produced Teddy’s three half-sisters.

  Once upon a time Teddy’s parents had had a wedding and thought they might be happy. Teddy had a photo of this event: Eleanor, looking th
e same, except younger and interested in looking pretty, and Cornelius, in his dress uniform, looking as if his only interest were in having his photo taken. In spite of his fractured boyhood, Teddy had turned out to be level and even tempered, even if he was not an easy read.

  What was it about marriage, Jane Louise wondered, sitting down on the couch’s hard, striped, unavailable surface, that made it seem so strange to her? It was not a bit strange to Adele and Phil-the-Fiancé. They were schooling themselves in it, buying towels and hampers, shopping for china patterns, and saving their money in a joint account. Adele and Phil had known each other for ten years, since they were babies.

  Whereas, Jane Louise reflected, she and Teddy were barely acquainted. They had met two years ago, courted for one year, lived together for another, and here they were, virtual strangers in each other’s lives, married forever.

  Suddenly Jane Louise was very tired. She grabbed a pillow off the chair, stuck it underneath her head, and closed her eyes, wondering about her own parents.

  Her mother, Lilly, had remarried after Jane Louise’s father, Francis, had died. She was happily married now in a way she had never been happily married to Jane Louise’s father, who was charming but never made enough money, and to whom the things of the world didn’t seem to mean much.

  Her new husband, Charlie Platt, was rich and settled. He had always been rich and settled. Together they had bought a sizable town house just for themselves and either gave or went to parties almost constantly. Lilly had a passion for social life. If she was not invited to a party, she gave one. She and Charlie were on the boards of hospitals, halfway houses, and foundations to study rare diseases, and they went to balls that raised money for the opera, the Artists League, or the Print Society. Her closet was the size of Jane Louise’s bathroom.

  Her father had been dead for ten years. He would never see his daughter’s husband and would never see her children, if she ever had any. At the thought of this, tears sprang out of her eyes. For a minute she could not stop crying. Then she turned on her side and fell into a dreamless sleep from which she was awakened by Teddy.

  “You must have been really wiped to fall asleep on that thing,” Teddy said.

  “I just suddenly felt as if someone had pulled the plug,” Jane Louise said. “All my energy went. I’m starving. Let’s make dinner.”

  Teddy made the salad, and Jane Louise grilled the chops, just like dolls in a dollhouse. The kitchen rang with the sound of the two of them.

  “My mother called,” Teddy said. “She’s going off to see her friend Nancy Aldrich in Boston and she wants to know if we want to use the house.”

  “Do we?” Jane Louise asked.

  “It’s up to you,” said Teddy. “The leaves have turned, and we could bundle up and go canoeing.”

  The idea of bundling up and going canoeing on Marshall Pond—actually a lake—where Teddy’s grandmother, mother, and Teddy himself had learned to swim seemed like heaven to Jane Louise, and being married to Teddy gave her access to it.

  “I love lamb chops,” Teddy said. Jane Louise looked at him. Was this a conversation between married people? It seemed to her that they had been much freer three weeks ago, before they were married.

  “I bought them because you love them, you twit,” she said. “Isn’t marriage weird?”

  “It’s probably less weird when you do it in your early twenties,” Teddy said. “Like Beth and Peter.”

  “Yes, but mostly, unlike Beth and Peter, when you get married in your early twenties, by the time you’re our age you’ve already been divorced and remarried.”

  “I think my dressing is delicious,” Teddy said.

  “Curry,” said Jane Louise, tasting it.

  After dinner Jane Louise attempted to curl up on Teddy’s lap. Her legs were too long, so they sat with their legs intertwined. “I don’t feel at all like myself,” she said. “Do you think something’s wrong with me?”

  “I think we just got married,” Teddy said. “We’re not kids, so it’s more serious.”

  Jane Louise gazed into the eyes of her husband, a serious person if there ever was one. His eyes were hazel. It was often not easy to know what he was thinking or feeling. On the other hand, he was easy to make comfortable, and his wants were not many. Furthermore, although he had had a series of long-term relationships with women, he had put in time living alone and could fend for himself. He did not eat out of cans.

  Thus, when Jane Louise was sick she could expect more than a piece of toast. Teddy did not much like cooking: He seemed happy and grateful when Jane Louise did it for him. He had been brought up by a rigorously unfussy woman who did feed herself out of cans. Eleanor hated to cook, hated most housework. She was, as Edie often said, a being without much interest in traditional gentler roles: the perfect mother for a boy, since she taught Teddy what she knew about—gardening, bicycle riding, and bird identification. She had set him up to be charmed by a person who smelled wonderful, who was not at all frilly, but who gave him a taste of the domestic life he had been deprived of.

  “Let’s go to the country this weekend,” Jane Louise said. “It’ll be nice to sleep in that bed again, since that’s where it all happened.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Jane Louise had met Teddy in Marshallsville, where Edie’s parents had a house. Teddy’s mother lived down the road. She was not keen on the Steinhauses, since they were the sort of weekenders and summer people who walk around misidentifying wildflowers with great authority and complaining that the dump is not kept open for their convenience. Furthermore, they imported their social life instead of taking an interest in the town. Marguerite Steinhaus routinely hauled Teddy’s reluctant mother to a cocktail party or two, since Eleanor was the sort of country person the Steinhauses understood: an avid gardener from a very good family whose house was full of real period furniture. Marguerite could never keep black spot off her roses, whereas Eleanor’s roses were magnificent, and her house was on the local garden tour.

  In their later years the Steinhauses had begun to travel extensively, often on behalf of charitable organizations, and the house was Edie’s whenever she wanted, provided her brothers didn’t want it first. She and Jane Louise often spent weekends in the country when neither had anything to do. In all the years she had been coming up, Jane Louise had never met Teddy. And even though she had passed his mother’s house a million times, and had even been introduced to Eleanor, he had only been pointed out innumerable times on the road.

  When she was off at college, he was off at graduate school. When she was at art school, he was studying chemistry in England. By the time he came back and was working as a chemist, and Jane Louise was beginning her career as a book designer, she was old enough to find being around Edie’s parents so awful that she felt it was morally incorrect to take advantage of their hospitality, and she stopped going up to Marshallsville altogether, although Edie nagged her about it constantly.

  The summer she met Teddy was hot and wet. The Steinhauses went off on one of their fact-finding, do-good vacations. Edie’s brothers had rented adjoining houses at the seashore, and the Marshallsville house stood empty. One torrid week Edie prevailed. She gave Jane Louise the keys to the house and the key to the car and told her to get out of town.

  “There are no damp remains of my parents or brothers,” Edie said. “It is my house, too, even if I only get sloppy seconds. There’s no one there. I want you to go up and have a nice time.”

  Jane Louise had been working hard. The weather had worn her down. She was too tired to say no. Besides, deep in her heart she loved Marshallsville in the way you might love a married man: She loved everything about it and felt there was no way she would ever be connected to it. Her feeling for it often felt specious to her, since she didn’t live in it and hadn’t grown up in it. It was something like the landscape of her childhood, and she loved it in her bones.

  It was late summer. A few big storms had cleared the air, which was now hot and dry. The golden l
ight was heavy with pollen. Everyone who had hay was getting it in, and the air was pungent with the scent of fresh grass.

  Jane Louise and Teddy met by chance late one afternoon on the path to the lake. He had spent the day haying with Peter Peering. He was brown and sweaty and he had hay in his hair. He smiled at her. She smiled back, and then stopped.

  “I’m Edie Steinhaus’s friend,” she said. “Jane Louise Meyers.”

  “Oh, yes,” Teddy said. “I ran into Edie last week in the city, and she told me you were coming up. I’m going for a swim. Are you?”

  Jane Louise was in fact returning home from swimming, but she followed him down to the lake.

  They dropped their towels and their jeans on a bench. Jane Louise was suddenly covered with embarrassment. She had never spoken to this person before, and she was about to enter a body of water with him, half naked. She was wearing a two-piece bathing suit, and her thick, straight hair was tied back with a ribbon.

  Teddy walked the length of the dock. He was lean and rangy, with a long back and muscled shoulders. In an instant he dived into the water, surfaced, and yelled for Jane Louise to jump in.

  She dived modestly—actually she was afraid the top of her bathing suit would fall off—and swam to catch up with him. Then they raced back to the dock. Jane Louise, who had been swimming since she was a toddler, was very snobbish about other people’s swimming styles. Teddy, she noted, swam a long, elegant stroke. They rested on the dock. Teddy scanned the sky.

  “I think there’s one more day of good weather left,” he said. “It can’t last. Are you going back to the city on Sunday?”