Another Marvelous Thing Read online

  After Francis left, Billy washed the teacups, locked the door, and checked the windows. Then she went upstairs and got into bed.

  The bedroom Billy shared with Grey was the nicest room in the house. Billy and Grey were mostly indifferent to objects, and their idea of home decor had to do with placing inherited possessions here and there. In the bedroom, this inheritance was not only harmonious, it was actually pretty, a fact Billy had seen register on Francis’s face.

  Billy sat up. In the corner was the oak valet that for years had stood by her grandfather’s closet. Now it was Grey’s and when he was home his jacket hung on its shoulders, his trousers over its rack, and his watch and cuff links sat in its little tray. When he was not home it was as bare as a skeleton.

  Billy had known Grey all her life. Both their fathers had worked in London, and at the same day school favored by American parents, Billy and Grey had met. Billy could easily remember him: a sturdy, wavy-haired boy wearing gray shorts, gray knee socks, and a football jersey, his fogged-up glasses concealing a fierce air of concentration. Both of them had been sent to college in America, and they had re-met in London when Billy was in graduate school and Grey was finishing at the London School of Economics.

  In matters of the heart, Grey was rather a cave boy. He had hit Billy over the head, so to speak, and carried her off to his den. It had been their almost immediate intention to marry: they were both the sort who cannot imagine marrying someone they have not known forever.

  Thus Billy had been a love object and a marriage object but she had never, so far as she knew, ever been the inspiration for anyone’s romantic fantasy. The love affairs she had had in college with serious boys who liked to read were more like study dates than romantic encounters.

  On Grey’s side of the bed were his pile of astronomy books, his natural history magazines, his Russian grammar. Things had their place—the water jug on Billy’s side because she got thirsty at night, the hooks on the back of the door for her night shirt and Grey’s pajamas. In the known world her life had order, precedent. Anything could be dragged out into the light of day to be examined.

  In the unknown world was Francis, to whom she would never be legitimately connected. She could never walk out in the sunshine with him—not in any place where they might be spotted. The experience of him was educational in a way Billy had not anticipated. She did not want to have these feelings: she had been so much happier when she had been unaware she had them. They reduced the world to a kind of love comic, or something in One Hundred Standard Plots. These feelings led nowhere. Unfortunately, they were hard to give up, although they caused pain more often than not. She rolled over to Grey’s side of the bed, put her arms around his pillow, and fell asleep.

  The next morning Francis turned up before noon. He knew Grey’s schedule by heart—those parts of it Billy revealed to him. He knew when Grey was away, and if Vera was away too, as happened infrequently, he took advantage of this felicitous circumstance by seeing Billy as much as possible.

  “I came for elevenses,” he said.

  “Oh, dear,” said Billy. “There isn’t anything for elevenses.” A nicer mistress, she had been told, would have kept a little something or other around to feed a person.

  “I’ll just have you for elevenses,” Francis said. Billy’s heart seemed to slip. It never ceased to amaze her that the only thing she had to offer—herself—was what Francis seemed to want.

  “I’m sure you’d rather have a lovely sandwich,” Billy said.

  “You’ll do quite well,” Francis said. “After all, I can always have a lovely sandwich. We can have lunch out later.”

  They went for lunch to one of their haunts—a seedy delicatessen in an out-of-the-way neighborhood.

  Billy wolfed down her pastrami sandwich and was watching Francis, a slow eater, slowly finish his matzoh ball soup. She leaned over and took a nip with her spoon.

  “Get your own soup,” said Francis.

  “I’m much happier with yours,” Billy said. “Or don’t you like to have people eat off your plate?”

  “You’re the only person who does,” said Francis. “I rather do like it.”

  Billy stared at him. Married all these years and Vera never snagged so much as a chicken wing?

  “Really?” she said. “Then you won’t mind if I take a sip of your iced coffee.”

  “Vera feels very strongly about sharing drinks,” Francis said offhandedly.

  “Gosh,” said Billy, who knew a cue when she heard one. “Think how strongly she’d feel about sharing you.”

  Francis stared into his soup.

  “On the other hand,” said Billy, crunching a piece of ice, “maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she’d be relieved, or maybe she would think of it as another opportunity for good works. Maybe she’d say: Oh, that poorly dressed Billy Delielle. Surely she deserved a crack at Francis to dress her up a little.”

  Francis did not respond. It was Billy’s theory that she had been given the function in Francis’s life of hating Vera.

  Billy was sick of Vera. She was sick of hearing about the library for handicapped citizens which Vera was designing free of charge. A million do-good projects did not compensate for the fact that Vera had strong feelings about sharing drinks.

  She felt she knew Vera like the back of her hand. She knew the names of Vera’s three closest friends as well as the names of their husbands, children, and pets. She knew the history of Vera’s career as an interior designer. She had heard three or four or five times the story of how Vera had packed an entire set of yellow French crockery into her suitcase by seamailing all her clothes home from Paris. She had had replayed conversations between Vera and someone called Dr. Holleys Wiener, a director of the soon-to-be-built Rees-DeGroot Library for Handicapped Citizens, conversations revealing that Vera had discovered design angles to help the handicapped that even he, Dr. Holleys Wiener, an expert in the field, had never imagined.

  She had, of course, met Vera. Soon after Billy and Francis had been introduced, Francis thought it a jolly idea to invite his new friend and his new friend’s husband for dinner. The yellow crockery, Billy recalled, had been much in evidence. Since she had already been told the yellow crockery story at least once, she spent a good deal of the dinner party wondering how Vera had gotten all those plates, cups, saucers, and bowls, to say nothing of an oversized platter and a number of serving pieces, into a suitcase.

  Vera had been wearing a black dress with bat sleeves, black stockings, black high-heeled sandals, and a necklace of African amber. She was wiry, lean and chic, and wore her chestnut-colored hair piled on top of her head in a stylish knot. She had small, strong, efficient-looking hands, and Billy had already been told a number of times that Vera was an ace cook who had been trained at a cooking school in France.

  In the dining room, next to the carving knife and fork and the oversized yellow platter, Billy had noticed two hat pins, one topped with amber and one with coral. She could not imagine what hat pins were doing on a sideboard, but she found out.

  Dinner was glazed duck, and while Francis attended to the wine, Vera prepared to carve. She rolled up her bat sleeves and stuck a hat pin in each one to keep it from unrolling while she sliced. Whenever the thought of Vera kept Billy up at night, she usually appeared in her black dress about to carve the ducks with the hat pins through her sleeves.

  And now she was sitting in a crummy delicatessen with Vera’s husband, who was reading the paper and checking out the local movies.

  “I think we should see It Oozed from Mars and Ghost Dogs from Outer Space,” Francis said. “They’re playing right around the corner.”

  Billy knew that Vera, who liked a film with high social or artistic content, would never go to see any such film. At the same time she felt a combination of longing and despair because Ghost Dogs from Outer Space was just the sort of movie Grey liked to see, although Billy would never have told Francis so.

  Billy never told Francis anything about Grey. Every no
w and again he said: “You never talk about Grey.” If Billy told him something—that Grey knew how to play fives, that Grey had been taught to knit as a child, that Grey knew Russian and read about astronomy—a terrible blank look came over Francis’s features and Billy would say: “You asked.”

  She did not know which was worse—the huge bundle of information she was constantly given about Vera, or to get no information at all. Of course, the things they really wanted to know were unaskable.

  Billy fell asleep in Ghost Dogs from Outer Space but woke up just in time to see an asteroid destroy the entire canine ghost fleet. She was hungry and she said so.

  “You have the metabolism of a child,” Francis said. “You’re either hungry or sleepy. In between, you’re cranky.”

  “Little children don’t have complications in their emotional lives that tire them out,” said Billy.

  “Oh,” said Francis. “Am I a complication?” He seemed thrilled with the idea.

  Just as they had a lunch haunt, so did they have a dinner spot—a Chinese restaurant in which they had never seen another Occidental. It was not a very pretty place. It had tile walls, worn linoleum on the floor, and the menus were soft with age. Taped to the wall, on shirt cardboards, were the specials of the day, written in Chinese. Billy and Francis always had the same meal: flat noodles with meat sauce, steamed broccoli, and fried fish. As they began to eat, it began to rain so dramatically that it was impossible to see across the street.

  “Did you ever notice how often we’re together in extreme weather?” Francis observed.

  It was true. They had kept company during the two worst blizzards in fifty years, through the hottest December on record, the coldest June, the rainiest October, and they had seen snow squalls in April and had once broken up on a day when a tornado watch had been in effect.

  “Just think,” Billy said, “if someone says to you ‘Remember the ice storm of two years ago?’ you will be forced to remember that you spent it messing around with me.”

  Francis did not say, as he often did: “I wish you wouldn’t use the term ‘messing around.’” He stared out the window and remarked that the rain seemed to be letting up.

  Of course it was hard to know what other people remembered. Did Billy remember each blizzard, each drought, each heat wave by Francis’s presence during it? That was the thing about a love affair. It went by frame by frame, unlike ordinary life, which unrolled slowly and surely, whose high moments did not tear your heart apart when you thought of them because they were affixed, as surely as a turquoise in a silver bracelet, in context. The time Billy and Francis spent together had a beginning and an end. The middle was full of moments, of one sort or another. It was like a movie—it was like a French movie, Francis said, in which the lovers leave a Chinese restaurant, as they did now, when they thought a rainstorm had let up, only to find themselves pressed together in the doorway of an Oriental grocery store, penned in by what looked like a monsoon. Francis could see the raindrops on Billy’s face, and he would see them many times again, just as he frequently conjured her up putting on her shabby clothes or standing under a ginkgo tree in autumn and letting the yellow, fan-shaped leaves drift past her shoulders.

  Billy was half asleep in the car on the way home. Love was full of shadows. Even a child of three knew that the illicit lover and his wife were stand-ins for the mother and father. She looked over groggily at Francis. He did not remind her of her father. She yawned and squirmed. She longed to be home alone in her rightful bed with her head pressed against Grey’s pillow and to go to sleep as if she were innocent again and the way before her was straight as a shot arrow.

  Grey was due back Friday afternoon, and Vera on Saturday at noon. On Thursday morning the sky cleared and after a week of clouds and rain, the sun came out. Francis appeared at Billy’s door with a bouquet of flowers in green florist’s tissue.

  “It’s too beautiful to stay indoors,” he said.

  “Is ‘stay indoors’ a euphemism for going upstairs and have you throw yourself at me?”

  “We’re going for a walk,” said Francis. “In your closet is a yellow dress with short sleeves. I’ll pay you to take off those repellent trousers and put that dress on.”

  Billy went upstairs obediently and changed her clothes. She knew from past experience that Francis had a reluctance, like Vera’s about sharing drinks, about sharing Billy the day his wife was about to return home. These niceties made less difference to Billy, who lived with her conflicted feelings as if they had been a broken leg.

  When she got downstairs, Francis was reading her mail—he did this every chance he got.

  “The Medieval Society,” he said, holding up a pamphlet. “The telephone bill. Why don’t you ever get any interesting mail? What’s this?” He picked up an air letter, clearly from Grey, which Billy plucked from his fingers.

  “This is my interesting mail,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  They drove to an out-of-the-way park they had discovered quite early in their love affair.

  “What an entertainment you are,” said Francis as Billy yawned next to him. Billy was exhausted. She had been with Francis every day and it made her feel as if she had been living in the weird atmosphere of another planet—like a ghost dog from outer space. Gesture, nuance, feeling, poignancy—how draining these things were!

  The air in the park was perfectly still. The sun poured down.

  “Maybe we should knock it off for a while,” said Billy as they walked to the park gate.

  “A first,” Francis said. “A breakup in nice weather. Do you remember the first time we came here?”

  Billy remembered. It had been winter and the park lay under snow. The cardinals, starlings, and blue jays called from the bare trees. The great, gnarled mulberry tree had been gray and empty. The following June, Francis and Billy had taken a sun-bath near it and watched two Slavic ladies gathering ripe mulberries into a basket.

  Now the park was in its early blossom, blooming with pink and orange azalea. The dogwood and magnolia were out, and the path was scattered with petals. The scotch broom was covered with little waxy yellow flowers.

  They walked without speaking, each thinking a million things. Real life opened before them: their spouses home in their rightful places. In July and August, the Clemenses went to a house in the South of France. In August, Billy and Grey went to Maine.

  The next time Billy and Francis came to this park—although they might part for good and never come back—the leaves would have turned from green to red and yellow. The cedar waxwings would be eating the last of the crab apples. The light would have turned from gold to silver and the air would be chill.

  But now the sunshine warmed them. They walked with their arms entwined. Francis kissed the top of Billy’s hair, which was warm and sweet.

  A few violets bloomed beneath a birch tree. Francis picked one and stuck it behind Billy’s ear. Billy picked a spray of broom and put it through Francis’s buttonhole.

  Thus bedecked, they ambled. Actually they were killing time and putting a spin on their last moments all at once. They might part forever—it hardly mattered. These moments, so vivid and intense, were as enduring and specific as a piece of music, and could be replayed over and over again.

  As they walked through a grove of poplar trees, the light speckled their arms. Above them cardinals, starlings, and chickadees called to one another. The lawn was dotted with dandelions and buttercups. This pleasant afternoon might be temporarily forgotten, but with the merest effort surely it could be called back in almost perfect detail.

  A Little Something

  Late one Saturday afternoon at the beginning of the new year, Francis Clemens sat at a dining room table waiting for his soup to cool. In his own household, the food was generally excellent, but he was not in his own household and the soup he was about to eat had come straight from a can. It was accompanied by two sad-looking pieces of toast that had the texture and taste of corkboard. The butter on this bread tasted,
as his wife, Vera, would have said, “a little iceboxy.”

  Francis wore twill trousers, a blue shirt, and a pair of socks. His shoes and underwear were upstairs, and his wife was in Hawaii redesigning the house of a famous dancer.

  Across from Francis, nibbling a saltine, was Billy Delielle. As usual, she was sleepy. She dipped the end of her saltine into her soup and licked it absently. She looked like a baby learning to eat.

  “What a sight you are,” said Francis tenderly. She was not quite awake.

  “You look rather sweet,” she said. “You look like a ruined satyr. Your hair is all mussed.”

  Francis patted his hair into place. “When we finish this awful soup, let’s go upstairs and take a nap.”

  “Nap,” snorted Billy. “That’ll be the day.”

  She was wearing his sweater which made Francis’s heart flutter. He could never quite get over her, even if he had just seen her three seconds before. He peered to see if she was going to finish her soup. He was starving and he knew he had eaten the last of the bread. He reflected that he never got enough to eat at Billy’s and that, no matter how much he got of her, his hunger for her never quite abated. He looked out the window to see that it was sleeting. The idea of going out into the cold to get a decent lunch held little charm. Under the table he nudged her with his foot.

  “Hey,” he said.

  Billy looked up. She was half asleep. “Hey what?” she said.

  “I’m starving.”

  “Hmm,” said Billy.

  “I require an egg,” said Francis. “More soup. Anything.”

  “There aren’t any eggs,” Billy said. “I ate the last one.”

  “Soup,” said Francis.

  “There isn’t any more,” said Billy. “This is the last can.”

  “A saltine.”

  “This is the last saltine,” said Billy. “Do you want half of it?”