Another Marvelous Thing Page 7

  “I don’t notice you hanging up in protest, miss,” Francis said.

  “I have reservoirs of kindness about which you know nothing,” Billy said. She gave him the merest grin, a sort of twist of her downy upper lip.

  “Well, then,” Francis said. “You’re quite definite?”

  “Quite,” said Billy.

  “All right,” said Francis, in a not uncheerful voice. He liked to take these breakups seriously, but they never lasted very long and made him feel that at least he had made some sort of effort. “If we are going to break up, let’s go upstairs and say good-bye properly.”

  “You mean you want to go upstairs to my study so you can hurl yourself at me,” said Billy.

  “I wish you could put it more delicately,” Francis said. “Throw, for instance, or pitch. Let’s go.”

  “I think it’s a pretty stupid idea,” said Billy.

  “Is that going to stand in your way?” Francis said.

  “Obviously not,” said Billy, with a sigh.

  Francis had an affection for Billy’s study, since many of life’s sweet moments had been passed on her nasty little couch. How often he had looked around him, to the plain office desk, the gray metal shelves, the white filing cabinets, and wondered about the woman in his arms. At these moments she was in some way more alien than ever. He pressed her head against him. Her hair smelled of wheat biscuits. Francis looked at her lovingly.

  “About our little chat,” she said.

  “All right,” said Francis. “Let’s get out of here and go for a walk.”

  They drove in Francis’s car to a quiet park far from their households. When they were not breaking up, they might walk with their arms around each other, or kiss by the stone wall. On the way they did not discuss their future. Instead, they discussed the coming holiday.

  “And you’re going to that cousin of Grey’s—what’s-her-name—Vanessa?—in Boston?” Francis said. His voice had the formal paternal tone he used when referring to Billy and her lawful wedded husband.

  “Yup,” said Billy. She knew this was her cue. “And you all,” she said chirpily, “are staying here.”

  “Yes,” said Francis, with relief. “Quentin is bringing his girl friend and Aaron is bringing his college classmate Joe and Joe’s little sister Amy. Their family is all scattered.”

  Billy, who was used to hearing descriptions of Clemens family gatherings, said, “Oh, poor little Joe and Amy. Little waifs and strays. How lucky they are to have the bosom of your family to nestle in.”

  Francis did not respond.

  “Oh, cheer up, Frank,” said Billy. “Tell me who else is coming.”

  This actually did cheer Francis. It made him feel for a moment that he had a fighting chance to have a simple life—one in which people had family Thanksgivings and no love affairs. Billy did not think that family was a fit subject for lovers, but to Francis it was as necessary as oxygen to a fire.

  “Never mind,” said Billy. “I’ll tell you all about Vanessa and her husband, Arthur. Their children are called Leda, Amos, Ben, and Matilda, and two of them have broken arms. Now, isn’t that thrilling?”

  Francis was only half listening. He could never get Billy to realize how hard it was to concentrate on conversation while looking for a place to park.

  “Thrilling,” he repeated.

  What a terrible time of year! During the holidays a heavy fire screen of family was thrown in front of passion. The park opened before them. As they walked down the broad, central path the ground was thick with yellow leaves and the unnaturally hot weather caused tiny beads of moisture to gather on the pine branches. The sky was the color of chrome.

  Francis led Billy down a lane. He had no plan in mind. When they came to the low stone wall, Francis put his arms around his mistress and kissed her. He could not deny that kissing her was like slaking a long thirst with cool, fresh water. He pulled her very near. Often he found himself holding her so tight that he could feel her ribs. Her cheek was moist next to his and he was happy to notice that she clutched him as fiercely as he clutched her. He always hoped that if he kissed her enough, if he held her tight enough, she would finally reveal something to him. Francis liked to be told things, and Billy’s reluctance on certain points made him guess. The fact that she was as willing a participant in this love affair as he for some reason did not set his mind at rest. How much did she love him? Or miss him when they were apart? He unhooked himself from her and held her back so he could see her.

  For an instant she looked dreamy and unfocused. Then she said: “Isn’t it banal?”

  “Isn’t what banal?” said Francis.

  “Us, sneaking off to this park to hug and kiss before a major holiday. Perhaps we should exchange menus and you can tell me Vera’s recipe for chestnut stuffing again.”

  “I told you Vera’s recipe?” Francis said.

  “I’m positive she didn’t call to tell me,” said Billy. “You’ve recited it four or five times. I also heard it last year at Thanksgiving time.”

  Francis swallowed. Had they actually been seeing each other that long?

  “Come on, Frank,” she continued. “Be realistic. How do you feel looking up from your turkey at your swell family when you’ve just crawled out of bed with me?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say ‘crawled,’” said Francis.

  “Okay,” said Billy. “Hobbled. Well, how do you feel?”

  “Divided,” Francis finally said. This sort of conversation always gave him a headache in back of his eyes. He could never have compared his mistress to a summer day, but rather to one of those gray, overcast days in middle autumn when the angle of the light makes everything very clear. He looked at her. She did not pout or snicker. She simply looked serious. The sight of her made Francis’s heart melt. Rarely did she ever look so undefended, and, when she did, Francis was reminded how deep an enterprise this was.

  “I mean,” Billy was saying, “I’m not going to leave Grey, and you’re not going to leave Vera, and we’re not going to run off to some cozy little island together.”

  Though this was a perfectly accurate summary of the facts of the matter, it rattled Francis nonetheless. Being in love, he often felt, was like having a bird caught in his hair.

  Billy walked a little bit ahead of him. From her awful-looking clothes you could not imagine how sweetly she was made. Her faded skirt—had it once been green?—and the mouse-colored sweater that had belonged to her little brother touched him.

  Francis caught up with her. “Look,” he said. “Today is Monday. Thanksgiving is Thursday. Let’s not see each other for the rest of the week. We won’t talk on the telephone, either. We’ll take a vacation from this love affair and see each other next week.”

  “Very convenient,” said Billy. “Let’s change the subject. Aren’t you hungry? Let’s have lunch.”

  They took their lunch as they often did in a neighborhood delicatessen near the park. At this hour of the afternoon, it was almost empty. On one mirrored wall was a cutout sign, laminated with silver, red, and green, that read: LET US CATER YOUR NEXT AFFAIR, which Francis never failed to read aloud.

  “Huh,” said Billy. “They certainly catered this one.”

  After lunch Francis drove her home, and that was the manner in which they broke up for the seventh or eighth or ninth time.

  The following Monday found Francis and Billy hanging around in Billy’s kitchen. Their little vacation had made them shy. Billy gave Francis a cup of tea with which he paced, trying to reestablish himself. He opened the refrigerator to see if there was anything to nibble on, but there was only bottled water, wheat germ, eggs, and a tin of imported oatmeal.

  Francis was about to ask politely after her Thanksgiving when the telephone rang. Of course, he would never know who was on the other end. Billie had a wonderful telephone murmur—you would have had to kiss her to hear her—and she would never say who it was. While she was whispering into the phone, Francis amused himself by pawing through the D
elielle mail, which was open and lying on the kitchen table.

  His eye fell on a form letter. The letterhead read RICK’S REPTILE VILLAGE (FORMERLY RICK’S HERP HUT). It began:

  Hi there, fellow herp collector!

  We have moved to larger quarters here

  in Tashkent, Illinois. Our snakes, reptiles,

  and amphibians are of the highest quality.

  We ship only if the herp is feeding and we

  guarantee live delivery.

  Billy hung up and turned to him. “Why don’t you just ask what you want to know instead of snooping around?”

  “What an interesting letter from Rick’s Reptile Hut. Do you keep reptiles of which I am unaware?”

  “Just you,” snickered Billy. “Besides, if you’re going to read my mail, you may as well get it right. It’s Rick’s Reptile Village.”

  Francis was actually stunned. His mistress got mail from reptile dealers. He had spent hours in her company and this fact was entirely unknown to him. She had never so much as mentioned a worm or lizard. “Well?”

  “When we joined the North East Nature Conservancy we got on a lot of mailing lists,” Billy said with reluctance.

  “How quaint,” Francis said. “I had no idea you were so inclined toward the natural sciences. I was led to believe that was the province of your husband.”

  Billy was silent.

  “Is that what those notebooks were about?” Francis said. In her bare kitchen his voice seemed to echo.

  “What notebooks?” Billy said defensively.

  “You know very well which ones,” said Francis. “The ones you wouldn’t let me see last summer before you went off to Maine.”

  Billy was silent again. She looked as abashed as a schoolboy.

  “They’re my nature notebooks,” she finally said.

  “Indeed,” said Francis fiercely.

  “I make notes in them,” said Billy, as if confessing to an unusual crime.

  “A strange use for a notebook,” said Francis. “Explain yourself further.”

  Billy sighed.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “When we’re in Maine, we go bird walking,” Billy said. “We go nature hiking. We go canoeing in swamps. Each summer I like to read one naturalist. Last summer I read Gilbert White. I take notes on what I read, and I like to take notes on what I see. Does it make you happy to know that?”

  In fact it made Francis miserable to know that. A vision of Billy and her husband, in matching twill walking shorts with rucksacks on their backs and field glasses around their necks, rose up before him.

  “How fetching you must look at your nature activities,” said Francis. His voice, he found, was ever so slightly uneven in pitch. He looked at his mistress. She looked exhausted and distressed.

  “You wanted to know,” she said, staring at the floor.

  “I did,” said Francis.

  “Well, now you know,” she said and, turning from him, she leaned against the sink and began to cry. The sight of Billy in tears was such a rarity that it quite startled Francis. He knew by instinct that she believed that it was bad form to cry in public, and she would rather have hidden in the cellar. It was quite the wrong thing to approach her, but he could not hold himself, off for very long. In his arms she was as unyielding as an ironing board.

  “Are there any more things I don’t know about you?” murmured Francis into her hair.

  “Yes,” said Billy, who pulled herself away from his now wet shirt front and immediately reclaimed her composure. “I’m married.”

  “That isn’t funny,” Francis said.

  “Gee,” said Billy. “I thought it was.”

  Imagine, Francis later thought as he sat alone in his own kitchen, getting so upset about a form letter from a snake breeder. After all, it was only one of five million things they did not know about one another. Marriage, of course, was as deep as a well, as rich as the unicorn tapestries and with as many stitches and as much detail. Married people suffered and rejoiced over and over and over and over again. Marriage was a trench dug by time, a straight furrow, the mighty oak that has grown year after year after year from a tiny acorn. Lovers were, by comparison, little scratches in the ground.

  Francis stared at the surface of his kitchen table and put his head in his hands. His kitchen, unlike Billy’s drab, industrial-looking, functional space, reminded one that cooking is not mere science. It was agleam with copper pots, French crockery, baskets from New England. The table was over one hundred years old. Thousands of days of family life were etched into its surface. Francis’s wife used those copper pots. He had spent years at this table chatting to Vera while she put together one of her delicious meals. At the moment she was in Chicago consulting on the renovation of something called the Talisman Foundation, whose headquarters were being redesigned.

  Francis’s dinner was a ham sandwich he had bought at the local delicatessen and a tall glass of beer. Had Vera been home, he would have been staring at a wonderful-looking plate of something or other.

  This sandwich, Francis thought, was rather like Billy: unadornedly what it was. It was without butter or mayonnaise or mustard, anything to dress it up. Unlike Billy it was dry and satisfied his hunger. Sitting alone in the kitchen added gloom to heartache as Francis thought he might take his beer and sandwich and sit before his television set if there was a football game on. He felt he needed some distraction of a rough, traditional masculine sort.

  He looked at the clock: it was seven thirty. He had left Billy at five thirty. How heavy the hours seemed! Now he had the long road of an evening before him, a man in his prime, a man who had just spent a few hours on a hard lumpy couch in his mistress’ study with his warm, pliant mistress in his arms, forced to sit alone with a dry ham sandwich for sustenance and a football game for company.

  Francis knew he did such a good imitation of a conventional man, a solid family man who might be musing about his investments, or the achievements of his children, that a passing stranger or a close friend might have been fooled. Who would have thought that this man was prey to a fit of longing, and for a woman who was not only not his wife, but who was not tender, did not cajole or pet him, who was loath to put on as much as an earring to cheer him up!

  He finished his sandwich. He did not have the heart to watch a football game. Instead, he reread the morning papers, paid some bills, and fiddled at his desk until Vera called, and then he went to bed. That night, like many other nights, Francis felt he was wrestling with demons. Here, in the same city, not even such a long walk away, under the same canopy of night, his mistress slept. How odd that such a small area contained them! How odd that ordinary life went running on around the stupendousness of their secret!

  The next day Francis practically flew to her side. It was Billy’s morning to teach and Francis knew at exactly what time her class broke. It was a cinch to park himself in the hallway near her classroom. He had done it many times before. He often wondered aloud if the students thought he was her husband, and Billy always said they thought she was his nurse.

  They walked down the college path. A few wet leaves drifted off the trees. The air was alternately icy and warm. The sky was very low.

  “I’ve got the car over here,” Francis said. He felt a little out of breath. When they were both sitting in the car, Francis said, without thinking: “Do you ever miss me?”

  “I thought we were supposed to discuss breaking up,” said Billy, who was looking straight ahead.

  “Later,” Francis said. “Answer my question.”

  His mistress did not give him the benefit of a face for him to read. After a long time she said, almost into her lap: “Last summer I was walking by myself in a field, in Maine. I had just seen a black-billed cuckoo—I think it was a black-billed cuckoo—and I missed you so much it felt like a stomach pain and I sort of doubled over.”

  She said no more.

  For lack of an adequate response, Francis started the car. It gave him something to do and fi
lled the air around them with noise. He had no idea where they might be going, but at least he felt they might be about to go somewhere.

  Billy was silent beside him. For once he was glad not to see what she was expressing or trying not to express. It was just as well that she was like the dark opaque side of a stained glass window. He felt he could not have stood to see her complicated lights and shadows. She was wearing less awful clothes than usual—her tweed teaching outfit—but she looked tired, sad, and full of dark thoughts, thoughts she was not going to share with Francis. Sometimes she brought out in him a streak of tenderness that bordered on the parental, and also on the violent. He wanted to take her in his arms and hear her bones crack.

  Billy looked up. “Stop looking at me as if I were the daughter you never had,” she said.

  “You are nothing of the sort,” sniffed Francis.

  “Then perhaps it’s true that you are abnormally attached to one of your sons,” she said.

  “I am abnormally attached to you,” said Francis. “Now, what shall we do? Shall we go and have a spot of lunch?”

  “Let’s just go home,” said Billy, referring to her dwelling. She and Francis, of course, had no home.

  They sat in the car in front of the Delielle house.

  “About breaking up,” Billy said.

  “Yes,” said Francis jauntily. “Let’s do.”

  “I can’t do this any more,” Billy said.

  “I guess I can’t either,” Francis said.

  “It’s very unsettling,” said Billy.

  “It isn’t making me calm and placid, either,” said Francis.

  Silence fell, in the manner of a guillotine.

  “If you’re going to give me up,” Francis said, “I want a cup of tea before you send me into the cold.”

  “This isn’t what I call cold,” said Billy.

  “You know exactly what I mean,” Francis said.

  As soon as they were in the kitchen, they faced each other with a wild look. Francis grabbed her arm.

  “If we’re going to part, let’s at least have a swan song,” he said.