Museums and Women (28 page)

Incredibly, they were traversing a cloverleaf, an elevated concrete arabesque devoid of cars. Their massed footsteps whispered; the city yawned beneath them. The march had no beginning and no end that Richard could see. Within him, the fever had become a small glassy scratching on the walls of the pit hollowed by the detonating pills. A piece of newspaper spilled down his legs and blew into the air. Impalpably medicated, ideally motivated, he felt, strolling along the curve of the cloverleaf, gathered within an irresistible ascent. He asked Carol, “Where are we going?”

“The newspapers said the Common.”

“Do you feel faint?”

Her gray braces shyly modified her smile. “Hungry.”

“Have a peanut.” A few still remained in his pocket.

“Thank you.” She took one. “You don’t have to be paternal.”

“I want to be.” He felt strangely exalted and excited, as if destined to give birth. He wanted to share this sensation with Carol, but instead he asked her, “In your study of the labor movement, have you learned much about the Molly Maguires?”

“No. Were they goons or finks?”

“I think they were either coal miners or gangsters.”

“Oh. I haven’t studied about anything earlier than Gompers.”

“Sounds good.” Suppressing the urge to tell Carol he loved her, he turned to look at Joan. She was beautiful, like a poster, with far-seeing blue eyes and red lips parted in song.

Now they walked beneath office buildings where like mounted butterflies secretaries and dental technicians were pressed against the glass. In Copley Square, stony shoppers waited forever to cross the street. Along Boylston, there was Irish muttering; he shielded Carol with his body. The desultory singing grew defiant. The Public Garden was beginning to bloom. Statues of worthies—Channing, Kosciuszko, Cass, Phillips—were trundled by beneath the blurring trees; Richard’s dry heart cracked like a book being opened. The march turned left down Charles and began to press against itself, to link arms, to fumble for love. He lost sight of Joan in the crush. Then they were treading on grass, on the Common, and the first drops of rain, sharp as needles, pricked their faces and hands.

“Did we have to stay to hear every damn speech?” Richard asked. They were at last heading home; he felt too sick to drive and huddled, in his soaked, slippery suit, toward the heater. The windshield wiper seemed to be squeaking
free-dom, free-dom
.

“I wanted to hear King.”

“You heard him in Alabama.”

“I was too tired to listen then.”

“Did you listen this time? Didn’t it seem corny and forced?”

“Somewhat. But does it matter?” Her white profile was serene; she passed a trailer truck on the right, and her window was spattered as if with applause.

“And that Abernathy. God, if he’s John the Baptist, I’m Herod the Great. ‘Onteel de Frenchman go back t’France, onteel de Ahrishman go back t’Ahrland, onteel de Mexican, he go back tuh—’ ”

“Stop it.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t mind them sounding like demagogues; what I minded was that godawful boring phony imitation of a revival meeting. ‘Thass right, yossuh. Yos-
suh
!’ ”

“Your throat sounds sore. Shouldn’t you stop using it?”

“
How
could you crucify me that way?
How
could you make this miserable sick husband stand in the icy rain for hours listening to boring stupid speeches that you’d heard before anyway?”

“I didn’t think the speeches were that great. But I think it was important that they were given and that people listened. You were there as a witness, Richard.”

“Ah witnessed. Ah believes. Yos-suh.”

“You’re a very sick man.”

“I know, I
know
I am. That’s why I wanted to leave. Even your pasty psychiatrist left. He looked like a dunked doughnut.”

“He left because of the girls.”

“I loved Carol. She respected me, despite the color of my skin.”

“You didn’t have to go.”

“Yes I did. You somehow turned it into a point of honor. It was a sexual vindication.”

“How you go on.”

“ ‘Onteel de East German goes on back t’East Germany, onteel de Luxembourgian hies hisself back to Luxembourg—’ ”

“Please stop it.”

But he found he could not stop, and even after they reached home and she put him to bed, the children watching in alarm, his voice continued its slurred plaint. “Ah’ze all raht, missy, jes’ a tetch o’ double
pneumonia
, don’t you fret none, we’ll get the cotton in.”

“You’re embarrassing the children.”

“Shecks, doan min’ me, chilluns. Ef Ah could jes’ res’ hyah foh a spell in de shade o’ de watuhmelon patch, res’ dese ol’ bones … Lawzy, dat do feel good!”

“Daddy has a tiny cold,” Joan explained.

“Will he die?” Bean asked, and burst into tears.

“Now, effen,” he said, “bah some un
foh
-choonut chayunce, mah spirrut should pass owen, bureh me bah de levee, so mebbe Ah kin heeah de singin’ an’ de banjos an’ de cotton bolls abustin.’ .. an’ mebbe even de whaat folks up in de Big House kin shed a homely tear er two.…” He was almost crying; a weird tenderness had crept over him in bed, as if he had indeed given birth, birth to this voice, a voice crying for attention from the depths of oppression. High in the window, the late-afternoon sky blanched as the storm lifted. In the warmth of the bed, Richard crooned to himself, and once cried out, “Missy! Missy! Doan you worreh none, ol’ Tom’ll see anotheh sun-up!”

But Joan was downstairs, talking firmly on the telephone.

The Taste of Metal

M
ETAL, STRICTLY, HAS
no taste; its presence in the mouth is felt as disciplinary, as a
No
spoken to other tastes. When Richard Maple, after many years of twinges, jagged edges, and occasional extractions, had all his remaining molars capped and bridges shaped across the gaps, the gold felt chilly to his cheeks and its regularity masked holes and roughnesses that had been a kind of mirror wherein his tongue had known itself. The Friday of the final cementing, he went to a small party. As he drank a variety of liquids that tasted much the same, he moved from feeling slightly less than himself (his native teeth had been ground to stumps of dentine) to feeling slightly more. The shift in tonality that permeated his skull whenever his jaws closed corresponded, perhaps, to the heightened clarity that fills the mind after a religious conversion. He saw his companions at the party with a new brilliance—a sharpness of vision that, like a camera’s, was specific and restricted in focus. He could see only one person at a time, and found himself focusing less on his wife, Joan, than
on Eleanor Dennis, the long-legged wife of a municipal-bond broker.

Eleanor’s distinctness in part had to do with the legal fact that she and her husband were “separated.” It had happened recently; his absence from the party was noticeable. Eleanor, in the course of a life that she described as a series of harrowing survivals, had developed the brassy social manner that converts private catastrophe into public humorousness; but tonight her agitation was imperfectly converted. She listened for an echo that wasn’t there, and twitchily crossed and recrossed her legs. Her legs were handsome and vivid and so long that, after midnight, when parlor games began, she hitched up her brief shirt and kicked the lintel of a doorframe. The host balanced a glass of water on his forehead. Richard, demonstrating a headstand, mistakenly tumbled forward, delighted at his inebriated softness, which felt to be an ironical comment upon flesh that his new metal teeth were making. He was all mortality; all porous erosion save for these stars in his head, an impervious polar cluster at the zenith of his slow whirling.

His wife came to him with a face as unscarred and chastening as the face of a clock. It was time to go home. And Eleanor needed a ride. The three of them, plus the hostess in her bangle earrings and coffee-stained culottes, went to the door, and discovered a snowstorm. As far as the eye could probe, flakes were falling in a jostling crowd through the whispering lavender night. “God bless us, every one,” Richard said.

The hostess suggested that Joan should drive.

Richard kissed her on the cheek and tasted the metal of her bangle earring and got in behind the wheel. His car was a brand-new Corvair; he wouldn’t dream of trusting anyone else to drive it. Joan crawled into the back seat, grunting to
emphasize the physical awkwardness, and Eleanor serenely arranged her coat and pocketbook and legs in the space beside him. The motor sprang alive. Richard felt resiliently cushioned: Eleanor was beside him, Joan behind him, God above him, the road beneath him. The fast-falling snow dipped brilliant—explosive, chrysanthemumesque—into the car headlights. On a small hill the tires spun—a loose, reassuring noise, like the slither of a raincoat.

In the knobbed darkness lit by the green speed gauge, Eleanor, showing a wealth of knee, talked at length of her separated husband. “You have no
idea
,” she said, “you two are so sheltered you have no idea what men are capable of. I didn’t know myself. I don’t mean to sound ungracious, he gave me nine reasonable years and I wouldn’t
dream
of punishing him with the children’s visiting hours the way some women would, but that
man
! You know what he had the crust to tell me? He actually told me that when he was with another woman he’d sometimes close his eyes and pretend it was
me
.”

“Sometimes,” Richard said.

His wife behind him said, “Darley, are you aware that the road is slippery?”

“That’s the shine of the headlights,” he told her.

Eleanor crossed and recrossed her legs. Half the length of a thigh flared in the intimate green glow. She went on, “And his
trips
. I wondered why the same city was always putting out bond issues. I began to feel sorry for the mayor, I thought they were going bankrupt. Looking back at myself, I was so
good
, so wrapped up in the children and the house, always on the phone to the contractor or the plumber or the gas company trying to get the new kitchen done in time for Thanksgiving, when his silly,
silly
mother was coming to visit. About once a day I’d sharpen the carving knife. Thank God that
phase of my life is over. I went to his mother—for sympathy, I suppose—and very indignantly she asked me, what had I done to her boy? The children and I had tunafish sandwiches by ourselves and it was the first Thanksgiving I’ve ever enjoyed, frankly.”

“I always have trouble,” Richard told her, “finding the second joint.”

Joan said, “Darley, you know you’re coming to that terrible curve?”

“You should see my father-in-law carve. Snick, snap, snap, snick. Your blood runs cold.”

“On my birthday, my
birthday
,” Eleanor said, accidentally kicking the heater, “the bastard was with his little dolly in a restaurant, and he told me, he solemnly told me—men are incredible—he told me he ordered cake for dessert. That was his tribute to me. The night he confessed all this, it was the end of the world, but I had to laugh. I asked him if he’d had the restaurant put a candle on the cake. He told me he’d thought of it but hadn’t had the guts.”

Richard’s responsive laugh was held in suspense as the car skidded on the curve. A dark upright shape had appeared in the center of the windshield, and he tried to remove it, but the automobile proved impervious to the steering wheel and instead drew closer, as if magnetized, to a telephone pole that rigidly insisted on its position in the center of the windshield. The pole enlarged. The little splinters pricked by the linemen’s cleats leaped forward in the headlights, and there was a flat whack surprisingly unambiguous, considering how casually it had happened. Richard felt the sudden refusal of motion, the
No
, and knew, though his mind was deeply cushioned in a cottony indifference, that an event had occurred which in another incarnation he would regret.

•  •  •

“You jerk,” Joan said. Her voice was against his ear. “Your pretty new car.” She asked, “Eleanor, are you all right?” With a rising inflection she repeated, “Are you all right?” It sounded like scolding.

Eleanor giggled softly, embarrassed. “I’m fine,” she said, “except that I can’t seem to move my legs.” The windshield near her head had become a web of light, an exploded star.

Either the radio had been on or had turned itself on, for mellow, meditating music flowed from a realm behind time. Richard identified it as one of Handel’s oboe sonatas. He noticed that his knees distantly hurt. Eleanor had slid forward and seemed unable to uncross her legs. Shockingly, she whimpered. Joan asked, “Sweetheart, didn’t you know you were going too fast?”

“I am very stupid,” he said. Music and snow poured down upon them, and he imagined that, if only the oboe sonata were played backwards, they would leap backwards from the telephone pole and be on their way home again. The little distances to their houses, once measured in minutes, had frozen and become immense, like those in galaxies.

Using her hands, Eleanor uncrossed her legs and brought herself upright in her seat. She lit a cigarette. Richard, his knees creaking, got out of the car and tried to push it free. He told Joan to come out of the back seat and get behind the wheel. Their motions were clumsy, wriggling in and out of darkness. The headlights still burned, but the beams were bent inward, toward each other. The Corvair had a hollow head, its engine being in the rear. Its face, an unimpassioned insect’s face, was inextricably curved around the pole; the bumper had become locked mandibles. When Richard pushed and Joan fed gas, the wheels whined in a vacuum. The smooth encircling night extended around them, above
and beyond the snow. No window light had acknowledged their accident.