A Big Storm Knocked It Over Page 9

  Jane Louise herself had been hit on by a number of famous and not so famous people at these parties. She had once been invited by Hamish to a small dinner given for an author over whose book she had slaved. At this party liveried servants hovered in the dining room, and Emerald, in black satin and Victorian jewelry, fussed over everyone regally. Upstairs you could hear the barking and snuffling of their brace of pug dogs. Their children, almost grown, were either at drama school in London or banking school in Switzerland.

  Just as Jane Louise had had a few unsuitable paramours, so had she endured a number of lousy jobs. Just out of art school, she had worked for a slave-driving, maniacal designer who threw tantrums, threw objects, and expected Jane Louise to vacuum her rug.

  By the time she had been through a few of these places, the press appeared to her a beacon of reason and calm. Day after day a nice lady named Lillian answered the telephone as she had done for forty years. A number of people had been hired by Hamish’s old father, and their loyalty to the firm was prodigious. Year after year the press produced the kinds of books a person might like to take home and read or send to friends.

  “What will become of us?” Jane Louise asked.

  “One day,” said Sven in his caressing voice, “we’ll be working all alone in a small office together. It will be a Saturday, and no one else will be in the building. Your husband will be off in the country helping his mother rototill, and Edwina will be somewhere with Piers. There will be a huge, scary thunderstorm, and only the two of us in here on a rain-soaked afternoon.”

  Jane Louise gave him a long, bland look. “I’ve heard this somewhere before. What’s next? I know: ‘His hot hands ripped at the frail fabric of her blouse, and he pressed her to his throbbing need.’”

  Sven gave her a bland look. “Cute,” he said. “Where’d you get it from?”

  “I used to read romance magazines as a kid.” She put her head down. “If we get bought, will that be the end?”

  “You look as if you were going to cry, Janey.”

  “These things scare me.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Sven said. “Roll with the punch. You buy a company because you like what it does and the people who do it.”

  This did not console Jane Louise. Teddy had once worked for a company that had been sold to a group of investors who then decided they had no interest in plant chemistry. They had sold it to a group of Germans who offered everyone severance or jobs in Düsseldorf. Teddy had been briefly out of a job, but these things didn’t bother him overmuch; he knew he would always work. In fact, he had turned down jobs for lots of money at places he didn’t want to work and for work he didn’t want to do.

  He was interested in creating an environment free of poisons, and Jane Louise often felt that this was an appropriate urge in someone who felt that his childhood had been polluted by two well-meaning people perpetually at war. He liked a nice, clean space. Jane Louise did, too.

  “When Teddy’s company was sold, they put his division out of business,” Jane Louise said.

  “You never know.” Sven shrugged. “This place makes some money, but Hamish doesn’t need capital. Whoever buys it will turn it into a real business.”

  Jane Louise sighed. She knew what that meant: early retirement for the faithful retainers. No more laid paper for the poets. No more poets. No more parties, no more biographies of obscure literary figures. No four-color jackets except on potential bestsellers. No beautiful typefaces that were hard to find. No illustrations in the text. . . .

  “What does Erna think about this?” Jane Louise asked.

  “Oh, Erna,” Sven said. “She’s waiting to see which is the winning team before she joins it. She’s the sort of person who is already learning the new national anthem as the invading army approaches.” He stared at Jane Louise. “You poor kid,” he said. “We know you wouldn’t learn the national anthem of the invading army, would you? We know you’d join the underground, or quit, or get fired. Right?”

  “How about getting out of here?” she said.

  Sven looked hurt, but he left, and Jane Louise closed the door behind him.

  She put her head down on her desk, as tired as if she had just had a three-hour crying jag. A great many things she did not want to think about flapped across her brain.

  I should never have married Teddy, she said to herself gloomily. He should have married some cheerful Christian who would give him a great big family and a pack of dogs. Someone who likes rabbits, and dreams of little Brownies and Cub Scouts running all over the place. Someone who belongs to the Congregational Church and does good works. I am anxious, Jewish, over the hill. What if my ovaries have withered? What if I do have a child and I’m a grouchy mother?

  What if there were to be no baby?

  Jane Louise felt ardently that Teddy deserved to have a baby of his very own, one who looked just like him and could grow up to dispel some of the things that had haunted him.

  Furthermore, she was sure she would soon be out of a job. Hamish would sell the company to people who would install time clocks and go in for genre fiction instead of belles lettres. Her beautiful designs would be ruined, her artful jackets wrecked.

  She did not notice how dark it was in her office until Sven had opened the door and put his head in.

  “Hi,” he said. “I was just checking up.”

  Jane Louise looked at him with a kind of loving hatred. “Fuck you,” she said.

  “No bad language and no weeping,” Sven said. “I told you it was a rumor.”

  “Please go away, Sven,” Jane Louise said.

  “Okay,” he said. “No more brooding. Keep your pecker up.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The enormous manuscript of In the Polar Regions, by Hugh Oswald-Murphy, had been placed on Jane Louise’s desk three times and taken back three times by Erna Hendershott. Then, just as Jane Louise felt she had a grip on what this thing should look like, Erna would appear in a tearing rush and inform her that the author had added to it or taken something away, or that most likely it had been pushed off the spring list or that he had decided that some Eskimo artist would do little line cuts to be scattered throughout and, furthermore, that his photographs—still to come—would have to be keyed in.

  Jane Louise finally made Erna sit down in her office. This had never happened before: Erna did not sit down in the offices of others. She stood and watched over the peons, who sat. She was a magisterial woman, the sort of person who might be in training to be an empress or to be the person in the world most like Theodore Roosevelt. She had a clear voice, a firm stance, and long, strong legs with dancer’s calves. Her clothes bordered on the matronly, but she had not changed her style since college. Erna wore the kind of suit one’s mother wore—cherry red wool, or soft, heathery tweed—with silk blouses and pearls. She was a clubwoman to the tips of her Italian pumps, except that her club was made up of important journalists, distinguished writers, renegade lawyers, or political figures with literary notions. She was a man’s girl. Jane Louise watched her with the utmost fascination, as if she were a giant bug. She would have liked to take Erna home in a jar and study her.

  These flying visits from Erna drove her crazy and often made her angry. Erna did not much like it when the peons acted like regular folks with civil rights and work of their own. Therefore, when Erna crashed into her office breathless, as if her secretary were running after her with a cordless telephone, Jane Louise decided she would stare her down and get her to behave.

  “You’ll have to sit down, Erna,” Jane Louise said. “I have preliminary specs on that book, unless you’re here to tell me we’re killing it.”

  “Killing it! Polar Regions?” Erna shrieked. “Dear girl! This is the sort of book you stop press for.”

  Jane Louise had heard this song before. Erna’s books were often the sort of book you stop press for.

  “Well, there’s a little problem with the book as it stands,” Jane Louise said. “It’s extremely long. With no illustratio
ns or photos, it’s going to be unbelievably expensive. With photos—out of sight.”

  “We have to cut, but Hugh isn’t ready for the editorial process,” Erna said.

  “Then I can rip up these specs, right?”

  “Well, can’t you get me at least a sample page so he can see the type?”

  “Show him the Jacobsohn book on Scottish domestic architecture,” Jane Louise said. She knew exactly where the Oswald-Murphy file was but was having a lovely time making Erna wait. “It’s exactly what you want.”

  “Not a bit of it!” said Erna. “I want something plainer and grander.”

  “It is plain and grand,” Jane Louise said. “You said so yourself. I did exactly what you asked, and I think it came out perfect.”

  “I’ll look into it,” Erna said. “I think we’ll have an absolutely finished manuscript in a month, and I want you to have a clear desk for it. Okay?”

  Jane Louise glared at her with what was now bleak hatred.

  “Sho’ nuff, massa,” she said, but Erna had already left.

  Jane Louise, who was diligent and organized, had already taken the huge, untidy manuscript home and read every word. It had had a curious effect on her. She found the prose an impediment—vast reaches of stately, important sentences. She said as much to Teddy: “This guy leaves no musk-ox unturned.”

  Yet Jane Louise, who was almost relentlessly domestic, whose idea of a nice time was to stay home, found herself enthralled, creeped out by, and totally taken over by the idea that actual people lived at the top end of the world, people who had no access to wood except what drifted to shore, or metal except what fell out of the sky in the form of meteors; who made their clothes, food, implements, and houses out of animal parts, bones, and hides, and tusks. The idea of endless snow, of ice floes, of a place where there was nothing but silence, seemed to call out to her.

  One night Teddy came home from playing squash with Mokie to find her stretched on the couch reading Admiral Peary. He came over and kissed her on the nose.

  “‘Civilization began to lose its zest for me,’” Jane Louise intoned. “‘I began to long for the great white desolation, the battles with the ice and the gales, the long arctic night, the long arctic day, the handful of odd but faithful Eskimos who had been my friends for years, the silence and the vastness of the great, white, lonely North.’”

  “They don’t write like that anymore,” Teddy said.

  “I could live without the handful of old but faithful Eskimos,” said Jane Louise.

  “It’s the imperialist, white-supremacist Zeitgeist,” Teddy said.

  Jane Louise raised her eyebrows. “What have you been reading all day?”

  “Long-winded German letters about distillates,” Teddy said. He flung himself on top of her. “Let’s have a baby,” he said.

  “It isn’t spring yet,” Jane Louise said.

  “It was the equinox weeks ago,” Teddy said. “Besides, we might not get it right the first time. Come on, we’re getting older every day.”

  “You’re crushing my book,” Jane Louise said. She could barely look at Teddy. He seemed in this instant a perfect stranger for whom she was nothing more than a vehicle for his heirs. She was a faceless, personless thing that by a trick of biological nature could produce a little infant. Her heart pounded.

  “You don’t want me,” she said. “You want a baby.”

  When Teddy was not defensive, he was very persuasive.

  “In order to get the baby, I have to have you,” he said. “Unless you don’t want me.”

  “What happens if I can’t have a baby?” Jane Louise said.

  “We’ll buy one,” Teddy said. “Or we’ll rent one on a long lease.”

  Jane Louise was suddenly struck by the apersonality of it all. She was an egg; Teddy, a box of seeds. They could be anybody. They could be a couple of overheated teenagers in the back of a pickup truck. They could be two people who met five minutes ago on a blind date. They could be Eskimos or impoverished South America Indians. The whole machinery of baby production had to do with luck and timing, both mysterious and beyond anyone’s control. The whole enterprise involved karma and destiny.

  And out of just such machinations had come Jane Louise herself and Teddy, who were about to start the whole thing all over again. It was not just your own personal baby you were creating, but a piece of the future, a citizen, a person who would one day have little to do with you but might run things, or go to jail, or change the face of North American art or commerce, perhaps be the first person to do something or other.

  To embark on such a project seemed heroic, impossible. And furthermore, you passed your own inheritance, genetic and otherwise, on to these fragile new people who did not ask to be born. Here was Teddy, who seemed to walk between the dark and the light, trying always to be even-handed and steady, and who revealed his sadness only when it was unbearable. Or Jane Louise, whose passion for spareness, order, and a plain, stripped-down style of decor was simply a cry for peace and order against chaos—a way of quelling anxiety. Would this baby be long and skinny and anxious, a good swimmer with a head for math? Prone to fits of depression? A plant chemist or book designer with an almost adequate salary?

  The whole enterprise was fraught with risk and peril. Jane Louise seemed unable to move. If you were about to try to conceive a child, oughtn’t it be done with great solemnity—wasn’t that the spirit of the thing?—in a proper bed, perhaps with candles or torches? She said as much to Teddy, who was much more lighthearted about these things than she was.

  “Shut up,” he suggested, kissing her.

  It seemed a good idea for the time being. Jane Louise relaxed. Perhaps they would have a baby, perhaps not. She was a leaf, a twig, a crumpled bus transfer floating on a breeze, or a feather rushing on top of white water. She was as effortless as a salmon or a porpoise. She was as concentrated as a waterfall. As she moved toward Teddy, her heart gave an inward lurch, and her destiny, unknown to her, unfolded before her.

  CHAPTER 15

  For a while everything stood still. It did not seem to Jane Louise that she was pregnant, and it did not seem that the press was going to be sold any minute. Jane Louise felt that her life was a time bomb. One day she would wake up, feel queer, and have a baby. One day she would walk into her office and be told that it had changed utterly and that she was out of a job. Or one day she would discover that she could not have a baby and she could slink off into the darkness, leaving Teddy to find some fertile, uncomplicated woman who would never give him a moment’s pause and present him with a big, fine family.

  It rattled Teddy to see her so worried: She tried to mitigate her feelings. It was her job, she felt, to be breezy, efficient, to get the job done cheerily, even if she felt she had a stone for a heart, one that was radiating terrible waves of panic.

  Suddenly it was spring. In Mrs. Berger’s little front yard, crocuses began to bloom. Teddy came home one night with a flat of primroses and a pot of paper white narcissus. In the mornings the sunlight woke Jane Louise up. Nothing woke Teddy; he was an ardent and unflappable sleeper.

  On the weekends Jane Louise let Teddy sleep. She closed the bedroom door and had coffee in the living room by herself. On Saturdays she and Teddy knocked around. Often they knocked around separately and met for lunch. As the weeks went by, Jane Louise began to wonder why she felt so bereft. She and Teddy seemed, to her, as happy as possible in the modern world. They liked where they lived. They had jobs they liked. And yet, as they wandered around holding hands, Jane Louise felt an empty space that got emptier and emptier.

  On the morning she woke up feeling terrible, she realized that what was missing was a child. She prayed she felt terrible because she was pregnant.

  It was Sunday, cloudy and gray and not entirely warm. Teddy was fast asleep—he had had a week of conferences and presentations. For a country boy, he was a late riser. Jane Louise had her coffee, quietly got dressed, and kissed him on the head. She felt queasy. He stirre
d in his sleep, opened one eye and said, “Where are you going?”

  Jane Louise said, “It’s very early. I’m going to the flea market, and I’ll wake you when I get back.”

  Jane Louise was not an acquirer like Edie, who collected everything: old rolling pins, straw hats, old lace tablecloths, white clothes from the turn of the century, rayon dresses of the forties, homespun linen, floral tablecloths.

  She herself was after plain white ironstone and table silver, and on Sunday mornings she went to the flea market in a parking lot to hunt. Even at the crack of dawn it was crowded with dealers, with traders, with hunters like herself who were similarly addicted. She knew the real estate agent with the pink glasses and the fancy jackets who looked for picture frames. Or the tall man in black who wore a top hat and collected old teddy bears. And the tourists, and the antique linen and button collectors. It seemed to Jane Louise that there was a dealer for anything a person might have a passion for.

  Jane Louise had, from her earliest recollections, gone for the very plain, the unadorned. She hated anything with gold on it.

  The idea that objects had rich personal histories, totally unknown to her, filled her with a kind of grief. At a tag sale in the country Teddy had bought for Jane Louise a potlike vase, made by a child whose name, Scott, had been scratched on the bottom. It had an unintentionally elegant shape and had been glazed a fierce robin’s egg blue. Made by a child, and someone had sold it! Had it been left behind when a house was sold? Had Scott broken irreparably with his parents? Had he grown old and died, or sold that object himself—a grown-up, with no more connection to the child that had been?