Against the Season (24 page)

“l am.”

“And want to marry me just now because… because you feel threatened… old…”

“There’s that,” Peter agreed, in an honest amusement of his own.

“And forget how little you want to worry about anyone.”

“Or see that there are worse things than worrying.”

“What?”

“Not.”

“Would you want… a church? That sort of thing?”

“That’s up to you.”

“An old-fashioned prude would,” Harriet said. “Why does Mr. Hollinger have to be dead? Why?”

Peter could put an arm around her then, lined up as they were together on the couch.

“And tomorrow, at the funeral, we’ll have to pretend we don’t know about Miss Setworth, her secret kept by probably half the people in town so that she won’t know that we know. Love: the terrible secret people are suspected of unless they’re married. Then one always suspects they don’t. People must talk about us now. Are we guilty or not? Are we? If I died today, if you died today…”

“Don’t, darling,” Peter said.

“I’m worrying you.”

“We can stop being secretive. We can marry.”

“Yes, all right.”

The kiss she offered him tasted of salt.

“The only decent thing for us to do is get married,” Cole said, loading up the garbage to take out while Agate washed the dishes. “I’ve thought about it.”

Agate yawned.

“Agate?”

“The thing about kid’s books and songs that’s always bored me rigid is the repetition.”

“I’m prepared to marry you.”

“Circumcised, anointed, and the lot?”

“Can’t you ever be serious, not even for a minute?”

“Sure. I can hold my breath that long, too, if you like.”

“Great!”

“Or my nose.”

“Why don’t you want to marry me?” Cole demanded.

“Why should I want to?”

“Well, you can’t just keep…” Cole began, but trailed off.

“Whoring around? Why not?”

“What if you keep the baby?”

“Who said I was going to keep it?”

“You did, sort of. I mean, that night, you said you might if…”

“Well, that’s none of your business,” Agate said, and turned her energy to a pan.

Cole stood by the kitchen door and watched her, seeing the full, closed beauty of her face.

“Sometimes,” he said, “it feels to me as if the baby were mine.”

Agate plunged the pan to the bottom of the sink and threw her head back, opening golden eyes to a sympathetic, cynical audience on the ceiling. “The only thing of yours I might give birth to is an Adam’s apple, and it wouldn’t come out of my navel, either.”

“That isn’t what I mean. I mean, when I lie beside you sometimes, when I feel it move, it’s as if…” but he didn’t finish.

“Go dump
all
the garbage.”

“It’s wrong to give it away,” Cole said fiercely. “Even an animal doesn’t do that. Even an animal…”

“You don’t want to live in an animal world,” Agate said, tight but aloof from his challenge. “It makes you sick to your stomach.”

“It is an animal world,” Cole said bitterly. “This house is like a human farm, bloody with birth or slaughter, nothing in between.”

“Say, that’s not bad, only human husbandry and human husbands aren’t exactly the same thing.”

“You think I’m not man enough. You think…”

“You still want me to make up a sad story about Agate and the skinny faggot? You still want to be hung up about that? Saved by a bad woman from a fate worse than death. Stow it.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“You don’t know what you mean.”

“Neither do you,” Cole said, “You’re always pretending. You’re no better than I am. You don’t know any more than I do.”

“You’re a backward pupil,” Agate said, grinning.

“You’re a cow!”

They heard Amelia’s heavy footfall beyond the kitchen door and froze.

“Enough bad temper here for me to think there’s going to be a thunder storm,” Amelia said. “Are we going to have a game of hearts tonight or not?”

“Hearts,” Cole said, “yes. I’m just dumping the garbage.”

“Is he ever!” Agate agreed.

“We’re all tired,” Amelia said, swinging herself over to a kitchen chair.

“Cole said you went to the grave.”

“Yes,” Amelia said. “It’s what one does.”

“Like walking to your own. It’s no wonder you’re tired.”

“I wanted to say something to Ida. I couldn’t think of anything. Sister would have sensed it. She would have told me or anyway stopped me from saying such awful things in the first place.”

“What awful things?” Agate asked, drying her hands now.

“I said on the night he died it was an easier solution to his loneliness than marrying again. I hadn’t any idea he and Ida were thinking of it. It never crossed my mind until Rosemary told me the next day.”

“So? You re right.”

“No, child, I’m not. I’m wrong.”

“You might have married him. You might have gotten away with it. But Miss Setworth? Not in a million years.”

“I?” Amelia asked. “What an extraordinary idea!”

“Why?”

“You don’t have the sense of what it is to be as old as I am.”

“It’s only that you don’t think in formalities, and you never did, did you? You just go ahead and love people.”

“Ida’s loved people,” Amelia said. “She loved Sister.”

“I wish I could have met your sister, just once.”

“I always could walk to the grave,” Amelia said. “Walking away from it is what I can’t do. I haven’t got anything to say except ‘accept it’”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s no comfort to anyone, and it’s not good advice since no one can accept it.”

“Don’t you?”

“No,” Amelia said. “I haven’t accepted anyone’s death ever. I think I should, that’s all.”

Cole came back in with the empty garbage cans.

“Maybe you’d rather go to a movie,” Amelia said.

“No, cards is fine,” Cole said.

“Or down to Nick’s.”

“I’ve had enough of Nick’s,” Cole said.

“Peter told me the other day that you were an excellent dancer,” Amelia said.

“Not really. I learned a couple of the steps is all.”

“He said he was hoping he and Harriet would see you next week.”

“I hope so. I might…”

“That’s what I told him,” Amelia said. “I told him you were working overtime quite a bit lately.”

“It’s not…”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Cole!” Agate burst out. “What’s so polite about all the lies? You don’t want to see him, so you don’t want to see him. Why not say so?”

“It isn’t that I don’t want to see him. I…”

“Let’s play cards,” Amelia said, hoisting herself up. “There will be rain before morning, and we’ll all feel better.”

Rosemary lay listening to it on the flat roof above her head, wondering if across town it had wakened Dina. Or had it wakened Ida? She would listen to it falling on the new grave, and probably there would be poems in her head. Rosemary caught a line for herself, “Though you should lean above me brokenhearted, I shall not care,” fished out of her adolescence somewhere. She never had read the hard poems willingly, only the romantic nonsense that nourished the crushes she couldn’t expose in any other way. Less good-looking, she would have been said to moon. As it was, her mother would complain that she was brooding again. Brooding. But hatching nothing. It had always been easier to be loved, to let someone else play the fool. Like her father. Like Beatrice. Like Ida. The loved ones, who never made the promises, who never admitted the needs, who could always say, when it was over, “It was never anything but nonsense anyway.” After a week, after three months, after five years, it didn’t matter how long. But finally when you could see the pattern repeating and repeating itself, the defense wore thin. If it really was never anything but nonsense from the beginning, then you couldn’t just assign humiliation at the end without taking some share in it. Not time and again. Saying to Jane’s back, “I’m sorry. I just can’t be melodramatic about it. If you need to get away, you need to get away.” And to the lack of reply. “I don’t take emotional tests. There isn’t any point.” And finally Jane had said, as tired of her own anger as Rosemary was, “I know, love: you didn’t ask to be born, you didn’t ask to be beautiful, and you certainly didn’t ask to be loved. It’s only the rest of us who are fools like that. We never quite believe what a bad joke it is, on you, too.” Beatrice’s bad joke. Not having to ask. But with Dina, Rosemary had. She had said, like the fool, “I love you. I want
you
like that.” What good had it done? None.

“I want to be melodramatic about this,” Rosemary said at the tempoed roof. “I want to pass the test.”

A fool, in such a circumstance, would then go ahead and be melodramatic, invent the test—and fail it, for what would Dina say but “A Greek, to marry well, must be a virgin” or “I don’t sleep in front of people” or not reply at all, except with the skilled sexual answers she had used from the beginning against which Rosemary wanted no defense. Why couldn’t she say to Dina, “I’m no more tired of being loved than breathing in. It’s just that I want to breathe out. Reach out, before it happens again, before I stand there uncommitted at the crisis, and let you walk away, or walk away myself. Dina, I do love you. I do want you like that.”

Why not? Rosemary got out of bed and turned on a light. Two in the morning. She put on slacks and a shirt, combed her hair, but left her face alone. Then she looked for shoes. Why bother? Barefooted, bareheaded, barefaced fool. In the rain.

There was a light above the shop. Dina was awake. Rosemary got out of her car and let herself in quietly with the key Dina had given her. She moved easily past the shapes of furniture into the workroom and up the dark stairs. At the door she hesitated, about to knock, but that was not the stance she had chosen. She opened the door instead and stepped into the room. There, in the bright red dressing gown sitting on the couch was a woman Rosemary had never seen before.

“Who are you?” Rosemary asked, baffled.

“What is it?” Dina called from the kitchen.

“Somebody’s here,” the woman said, without moving. “Somebody’s just walked in.”

“Rosemary!”

She could have retreated with an ironic apology. It was in her to be able to. But she didn’t.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said easily. “I saw your light on. I thought maybe I’d have a drink…”

“Of course,” Dina said. “Come in.”

“Thank you.”

“Well, in that case…” said the woman on the couch getting up.

“Don’t rush off without getting dressed just on my account,” Rosemary said.

The woman nearly lost her balance in her drunken attempt at dignified withdrawal into the bedroom.

“Do you want your clothes?” Rosemary asked, lifting up the neat pile on the chair.

The woman snatched them from Rosemary and slammed the door. Rosemary turned to the kitchen where Dina was fixing her drink.

“I don’t need half the bottle, darling,” she said. “Are you drunk?”

“Yes,” Dina said.

“Who is she?”

Dina shrugged.

“You don’t even know her name?”

“Alice.”

“Alice,” Rosemary repeated.

“I didn’t know you’d be coming over, or I…”

“A customer, is she? Interested in a rocking chair?”

“She’s a friend of Sal’s and Dolly’s. We were all drinking.”

“Oh.”

“She’s had a row with her husband and didn’t want to go home right away.”

“Oh.”

They stood in the kitchen and waited until they heard the bedroom door slam again and the main door open.

“Aren’t you going to see her out?” Rosemary asked. “It’s pretty dark down there unless she’s been here often and knows her way.”

“She’ll be all right,” Dina said.

“Will she?”

Dina moved out into the living room and through her bedroom to the bathroom. When she came back, she had washed her face and combed her hair. Rosemary sat on the couch still warm from Dina’s recent visitor.

“You’re angry,” Dina said.

“Wouldn’t you be?”

“I?”

“Yes, if you came to my house and found someone else there.”

“Like that? I would be… embarrassed.”

“I was lying in bed,” Rosemary said. “I was listening to the rain. I wondered if it had wakened you. I wondered if I came here how I would find you, awake or asleep. It was a silly idea. But then it was all nonsense, wasn’t it, from the beginning?”

“Nonsense?”

“Yes,” Rosemary said, hating her coolness, her irony, but choosing it. “A pleasant sort of nonsense.”

“Not for me,” Dina said. “You’re my friend.”

“I’m another one of your pieces of furniture!” Rosemary shouted, and this was out of character, something she hadn’t ever done before. “An object! Just like Alice: stripped down, oiled a bit, polished…”

“I do what people want,” Dina answered.

“George,” Rosemary said, her voice still strained with unfamiliar volume. “Good old George. Why haven’t I had a bill?”

Dina put her hand out, as if to shield herself from offensively bright light. Rosemary got up and walked over to her.

“Don’t,” Dina said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t.”

Rosemary put her hand down on Dina’s head and felt the dampness of her hair from its fresh combing, smelled the faint odor of sex and furniture oil that clung to her clothes.

“Take those off.”

“What?”

“Take those off. They smell of her.”

“I’m sorry,” Dina said. “I’ll change.”

“There’s no need to,” Rosemary said. “I’m spending the night.”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“I’m very drunk.”

“I know you are,” Rosemary said, as she began to unbutton Dina’s shirt without any urgency. “I’ll put you to bed. And don’t tell me you don’t sleep in front of people. There’ll be no more slogans tonight.”

Dina did not feel in control of what was happening. She only knew that Rosemary had seemed very angry and now was not, insistent instead that Dina get out of her clothes and go to bed. Dina wanted to cooperate. She wanted to do anything Rosemary wanted her to, but she couldn’t seem to move. She tipped her head against Rosemary and put her hands on those familiar thighs.

“Come on,” Rosemary was saying.

She must get out of her clothes. Rosemary didn’t like the smell of her clothes.