4
F
rancie, in her bedroom, stripped off the heavy brown wrapping paper and had a good look at
oh garden, my garden—
the best kind of look, alone, private. She’d bought it on her way home from the office for $950, unable to resist, now that it was for Ned. The artist hadn’t cared at all whether the buyer was Francie or the foundation. His only request had been for payment in cash. Francie hadn’t anticipated that, but on reflection it suited her fine. Standing at the foot of her bed, with the painting propped up on the pillows, she liked it more than ever.
There was a knock at the door. She almost said “Who is it?” but who else could it have been?
“Dear? Are you awake?”
Francie slid the painting under the bed, kicked the wrapping paper in after. “What is it?” she said, thinking,
dear?
“Can I come in? Into the matrimonial chamber?”
“It’s not locked, Roger.”
The door opened. Roger came in, wearing a Harvard-crested robe over his shirt and tie and carrying two tumblers. “You’re in your nightie.”
“I’m going to bed.”
He sat down on the end of it, held out a tumbler. She noticed that his feet were bare; legs under the robe, bare, too. “Care for a drink?”
“Thank you, Roger,” she said, laying it on the dresser. “But I’m a little tired.”
He gave her a long look, as though he was trying to communicate some emotion. She had no idea what it could be. “Is something the matter?” she said.
He laughed, that single bark he’d been using for laughter the past year or so. “We haven’t played tennis in some time, have we, Francie?”
“No.”
He
hadn’t played in years. But they’d met on a tennis court: Francie, on her college team; Roger, a few years out of Harvard, helping the coach after work. Francie was a good player, if not in Roger’s class, but good enough so there were boxes of mixed-doubles trophies somewhere in the house. Had he come to set up a match? She almost laughed herself but lost the impulse when she saw him staring at her thighs.
Roger licked his lips. “I understand you know Sandy Cronin.”
“We’ve met.”
“I had breakfast with him today.”
“How did it go?”
“Quite well.” Roger took a sip from his glass, a sip that became a long drink. Silence. Then: “Do you know the word
putz
?”
“Yiddish for
prick
.”
His eyes glazed at the word, or maybe the word coming from her mouth. What was going on? He touched her hand. “Let’s go to bed.”
That would have been her last guess. The perfect reply, the honest reply, came to her immediately:
I’m a one-man woman, Roger. I don’t sleep around
.
“Is something funny?” Roger said. His hand was still touching hers, not holding it, just touching the back. An odd gesture—not friendly, not warm, not erotic.
“No.”
“Sit down, Francie.”
“Why?”
“Is that a lot to ask?”
She sat down. His hand covered hers, stroked slowly up her arm: a hard, horny hand, like that of a manual laborer, which Roger was not.
“Have you been drinking?” she said.
“That’s not a very nice suggestion,” said Roger. “And inaccurate. I’m feeling uxorious, if you must know.”
His hand reached her shoulder, jerked quickly down, took possession of her breast. Francie recoiled, but he hung on to her nipple, manipulating it in various ways, as though hoping to stumble on some combination that would change her mood, like a safecracker fiddling with a lock.
“Roger, for God’s sake.” She tried to push him away. He fell on her—was much bigger and stronger—and as he did she noticed for the first time that although there wasn’t a single white hair on his head, his nostrils were full of them. His Harvard robe fell open, his penis pressed against her, and at that moment—unbidden, ill-timed, insane—the image of Ned’s penis appeared in her mind.
Roger’s, almost a schematic in contrast, butted against her rigid body.
“Stop it now,” she said. And then his mouth was on hers, his tongue probing. This wasn’t him at all. She twisted her head, tried to roll away, but Roger got his hand under her ass, pulled her close, forcing his penis against her. At the same time, she felt his finger moving behind her.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Spicing up our marriage. You are my wife.”
“You’re sick.” Francie struck out at him, barely aware of what she was doing.
He stopped moving, stopped pressing, raised himself. Four scratches ran across his cheek, blood welling in the deepest. Their eyes met. Roger’s eyes: but behind them could have been anybody, and the face was the face of a man who resembled Roger. It reddened under her gaze; at the same time, his penis dwindled, as though all the blood had drained to his head. He got off her, rose, straightened his robe; his tie remained perfectly knotted. He went to the door, opened it, turned.
“You may fool other people,
dear,
but you don’t fool me. Never have. And now you’re a dried-up cunt as well, no matter what anyone else thinks.” He went out, closing the door softly, never touching the wound she had made.
Francie didn’t start crying until she was in the shower, hot as she could stand, scrubbing and scrubbing, bathroom door locked. Crying: from not being able to stop, to realizing it wasn’t doing any good, to stopping. Getting out of the shower, she saw her wretched face, fogged in the mirror, and turned away. She dried herself, brushed her teeth, brushed her hair, but stopped abruptly in mid-stroke:
no matter what anyone else thinks.
What did that mean? She thought back, searching for some mistake in her spycraft, found none. Then who was
anyone else
? Sandy Cronin? Was his behavior tonight some form of sexual competition? With a noncompetitor, of course, and still he had lost. Clear in her mind theoretically, the disconnection between sex and rape had now been demonstrated as well.
Francie put on a fresh nightie—flannel, to her ankles—and went to bed, curled up in a ball. She tried to keep her mind from doing anything, but failed. It went right to her most vulnerable spot. Why wouldn’t it, after what had just happened on the bed, and with the skateboarding girl underneath?
Francie’s most vulnerable spot, in three acts. Act one: the months of frequent, if not passionate—how could it be passionate when it was regulated by doctors, ovulation calendars, thermometers?—fucking that had preceded the discovery that it was Roger’s fault. Not fault, but contained in his body: low sperm count, and what sperm there were, deformed. Act two: sex in a petri dish, forcing the coupling of her eggs with the best of the deformed sperm—also a failure. Act three: a conversation repeated many times in different words, but first held as they left the doctor’s office for the last time. Francie:
I guess that leaves us with adoption
. Roger:
What would be the point of that?
That same act three might have done double duty as the beginning of the last act of their marriage as well, a long, attenuated denouement with this twist of Roger’s job loss at the end, and a second twist after that, if you counted Ned. Roger’s question—
What would be the point of that?—
had illuminated some long-concealed but essential difference between them, masked by Roger’s early dominance: his intelligence, education, worldliness, and his good manners, which she’d perhaps mistaken for kindness. Would a child have made it all better? Francie didn’t know; she just knew she had wanted one, wanted one still. Roger, in the end, had wanted to pass on his genes.
Francie thought again of Em: how she would like to meet her, even see her from a distance. Her mind moved on to Ned and quite abruptly, like a heat-seeking detector, to that earlier inappropriate mental image of his penis. Magnificent, like those on a Grecian urn—or were they too mannered? The comparison was probably to some simpler art, more robust, more iconic, even primitive: the Sumerians, perhaps; a Babylonian stone carving, for example.
My God,
she thought suddenly.
How can I be thinking of sex?
But she was. Ned drove everything else out of her mind; he was deep inside her, and not even there. After a while, her body unfolded, her hand came up under the flannel nightie, and she found herself as ready as she’d ever been. What was this all about? The power of love, she decided, strong enough to keep Ned with her all the time, Roger reduced to nothing. A calming thought, but the glowing numbers on her clock kept changing, and still she didn’t sleep. She picked up the phone and called the only person she could call at that hour.
“Hello?” said a sleepy-sounding man.
“Bernie?” Francie said.
“Yeah?”
“What’s your last name, Bernie?”
“Zymanzki, with two Z’s. Do I know you?”
“Put Nora on.”
Rustling sounds, fumbling, a grunt. And Nora:
“Francie?”
“Yup.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Tell me about divorce.”
“I’m a big believer; you know that. I believe in it more than I believe in marriage.”
“And in my case?”
“Unless I’m missing something, it’s long overdue. Stop it, Bernie.”
Nora paused for a moment, long enough for Francie to supply the missing piece. She remained silent.
“Francie?” said Nora. “Are you crying?”
“Why do you ask?”
Pause. “I’ve got a court on Tuesday, sugar, five-thirty.We’ll talk.”
* * *
Francie lay awake all night, got up at dawn. She dressed, packed her briefcase, went downstairs to Roger’s door. She knocked. No answer. She opened the door. The room was dark, except for the glow of the computer screen. Roger sat before it, his back to her.
“Roger?”
No reply. No sound but the tapping of his fingers on the keys.
“It’s time to talk about divorce.”
No reply. The tapping didn’t stop. Perhaps he bent a little closer to the screen. Francie closed the door and left.
Roger stopped typing, leaving twenty-nine across—hell, in ideal form—blank. He went upstairs, into her bedroom—their bedroom—suddenly felt dizzy, sat on the bed. As the dizziness passed, Roger noticed torn wrapping paper sticking out from underneath the bed, investigated, found a painting. He studied it for a few moments—an amateurish effort—and put it back.
Divorce: unthinkable. Loss of job, breakup of marriage, what a hideous cliché. And he’d devoted most of his adult life to Francie, was certainly responsible for that polish of hers that so impressed the Sandy Cronins of the world. Plus they’d done so much together—at that very moment, he remembered a gorgeous running top-spin lob she’d made to win a key point in the Lower Cape mixed-doubles championship ten, perhaps fifteen, years before. Those legs of hers, like a dancer’s, and she was still beautiful, in some ways more than ever, as the Sandy Cronins pointed out. The bastards envied him. Corollary: she was an object to be proud of. Perhaps they’d hit a bad patch, but didn’t every marriage? As soon as he landed a suitable job, everything would be all right. Until then, that fifty grand she brought in was essential. No, divorce was out of the question. He would be ready with an apology the moment she got home. He could swallow his pride, up to a point, even though denied his marital rights. And perhaps there’d been something wanting in his approach last night, probably due to rustiness. That, too, could be fixed.
What kind of flowers did she like? He thought of calling one of her friends to find out, but he didn’t really know her friends. Except Nora, whom he didn’t like, and Brenda. Where was Brenda? London? Paris? Rome? All easily reached by phone. He found Francie’s address book in her kitchen desk.
Brenda. Rome. He dialed the number, heard a female voice:
“Questa è la segretària telefònica di . . .”
Roger had no Italian and wasn’t aware that he’d reached an answering machine until he heard the beep. He hung up without speaking.
Tulips? Petunias? Gladioli? Probably not gladioli—weren’t they associated with funerals? Roger’s mind leaped to another thought: what if something happened to Francie? The fifty grand would be gone, and while he had life insurance, she did not. Who was that insurance peddler—Tod? Tad?
Roger put on a suit and tie and went out to hunt for flowers. It was snowing, fluffy snow that quickly spread a thick carpet on the sidewalk. Roger’s ankles were cold; he glanced down, saw he was still in his slippers. He stepped back inside, put on his L. L. Bean boots, decided to try Brenda again. God was in the details: the flowers had to be right.
“Pronto,”
said a voice, again female, but not the answering machine. He felt a change in the way his luck was running.
“Brenda?”
“Sí?”
“This is Roger Cullingwood.”
“Roger?” Pause. Then: “Is Francie all right?”
“Very much so. I’m having a little dinner for her tonight, in fact.”
“I can’t possibly make it on this kind of notice, Roger.”
He laughed and heard the echo of the laugh in the line—a strange barking sound, surely distorted by the Italian phone system. “I know that. The problem is I can’t remember her favorite flower.”
“And you called me in Rome? Aren’t you sweet. Lilies, of course.”
“Lilies. Thanks very much.” He was about to say good-bye when she asked, “How’s the cottage, by the way?”
“Cottage?”
“You know—Francie looks in from time to time. I hope.”
“I wasn’t aware.”
“On the Merrimack. In it, rather.”
“In it?”
“I’ve got another call, Roger. My love to Francie.”
When Francie came home from work, there were lilies on the hall table and in the kitchen, lobsters steaming in the pot, champagne on ice. The dining room, unused for at least a year, maybe longer, was lit with candles, the table set with the Sèvres that had belonged to Roger’s grandmother.
“My apologies, Francie,” said Roger. “I don’t know what got into me. I was drunk, as you said, but that’s not an excuse. I’m deeply sorry.”
Francie was speechless. She hadn’t even expected to find him upstairs.
“No need to say anything.” He sat her down, filled her glass. The scratches on his face were invisible. Francie saw he’d covered them with face powder, probably from her drawer, since it was too dark for his complexion. “Recognize this champagne?” he asked.