Authors: Hortense Calisher
Four legs she has, at least ten arms and an indeterminate number of leaf-fingers—and still growing. Yet she is thinking, all this time. A woman in sex—in
brood
—is in her highest state of intellection. Vanity’s gone from the head, into the trunk. The body ripples with humor arboreal.
And the best destiny of a coconut is to fall.
We’re across the road on the riverbank on this dais of lawn, and will never get to the dock. Why should we? Kevin is propped against a large stone. I am propped against him. From our toes, the river below flows south. And against all logic, the night is getting deeper.
“Are you well and sacred?” he says with a laugh, looking down at himself. His tongue sounds sleepy. “Used to say that to us, at Collegiate.”
“Am now.” I’m sleepy too. “Glad to get out of there. I don’t like that pool. Too many faces in the water.” Including her own. All staring with marble-eyed fright into underwater living. Saying to their lack of image “This is not my true life.”
North of them, on the great ugly causeway the village fought against and yearned for, the cars one after the other go bombing into town. It’s a sound not unlike smashing. Leaving quiet air behind.
Just beyond their heads is the cottage where the defective boy-man sits all day on the porch, making true sounds. We all live with his criticism. Never making reply. At night, when bidden to come in, he tosses his toy—a pair of shoes, a woman’s—over the side. The shoes remain on the landfall off the basement porch below until morning. Does the legend of the girls his mother hires really happen? Maybe it’s happening now. Everybody’s secret is safe with somebody.
Kevin’s on his elbow. “Vital signs not good, Lexie. Guess I can’t. We left it too long.”
Lying on her elbow alongside him, her own need half-leaked away, she turns up her other palm, to the dark. No, it’s not the liquor. It’s the past; we’ve had too much, yet not enough of it. If we’d just met, we’d’ve clapped together. Or if we’d lived together once—there’s profundity in that.
Her mouth’s against his chest. “No it’s the past. It’s between us. Like a limp cock.”
“Lucky me—I have two of them.” He pats the top of his swimming trunks. Under the elastic she feels a bottle, stashed there like a holster. He hauls it out.
“No Kevin. Don’t.”
But he’s already leaning into the bottle gripped between his knees, his bent thumb-knuckle pressing like the expert campaigner he is.
Prying it. As he should be prying me.
The cork pops.
“There I go,” she said.
Drinking first, he chokes. “You’re a comic.”
He always drinks first. As if at the back of his mind there’s a wine-waiter, totting him up.
With eyes opening to the dark, she can do that for him. A flint-white broad forehead, Sheridan’s—a fine nose. A mouth never vulgar, even when a bottle’s in it. But what’s there about this handsomeness that makes you feel nostalgic for it even while you’re face to face with it?
When he offers the bottle this time, she accepts. So they drink, by turns into his mouth, into hers.
So this is sex.
She sees it—for him. For her. Those times, in his flat. The moment when with loins still locked, not breathless but absolved from breathing, when they should have been floating in the holy nimbus won for them by their own contractions—and he’d reached sideways for the bottle, pulling at it deep. Saw her shock; laughed. And she saw what he maybe wanted her to see: “I repudiate.” The shock went beyond any insult to her, or to women generally. It was always for him she felt it.
But now she feels—bottle passing over to him—that he doesn’t drink against what life does to him—bottle passing over to her—but against what life could do for him.
He’s asleep? Not asleep. A man in profile’s what Sheridan is. His belly shines at her, full-face. She puts her face on it, nuzzling. Sliding down. When she takes him in her mouth like a bottle, he groans assent. The warm-raspberry aura of the drinker is in his flesh. No taste. As she moves, learns to move, her mouth’s not her mouth but another opening, linking slowly to her own core. Never done more than kissing before, never asked to. Never urged down, the face blotting faster, teeth shivering like a thoughtful animal’s. I was once serviced by mouth by Day, but at the end with him, always loins. Now my face is my loins. Obliterating slow. I become my lovers. I—am not. This I do, not even knowing the correct name for it. In the imaginary journal of her mind—barely admitted to but always kept—she is doing this in the imaginary journal of her mind.
Now. Now she’s face-to-face with her own willed sub-dominance. This yearning posture that flows under all household service; she recognizes it. As if she’s doing a domestic service for him. Relieving him, tribally—as nursing mothers gave their extra milk to their men, or to dogs. How good to bend the forehead blindly, in the humble posture excused. All doctrine disappears in the doing. Blessed to bend the neck, the last vertebral resistance gone crack. I am understanding—obedience. Which is the other rhythmic of giving birth. This is the other side of birth, of giving it. I’m swallowing what comes of human intercourse. I’m in the humility of the task.
And at the same time, an ancient childself, once hung for nine months on its own mother, is suckling. So it goes, from fleshgiver to fleshgiver, like the needle sewing, over and back. This man-mother—mother him. Her mouth is filled with nacre, as so often her lower body has been. Once. Now. Before.
Afterwards peace, without fire. Honor is not involved. The mouth, like the anus or the nose, can be wiped with grass. Ah grass, kind polygraph, writing voluminous.
Standing above her, he’s shrunken. He’s bending to her; they bend too. Pearled with her sweat. Touching her sleepy hair.
Going, he says. Driving back.
“Naked?” Her mouth. Strange to speak with it.
No, all’s quiet over there. Past three o’clock. He’ll pick up his clothes, and drive back. Is she all right? Will she be? Can he leave?
He is all travel-sounds.
There’s satisfaction. In being the one left.
Yes, leave me here. On home ground.
In that nest of whispers, maybe. “Naked?” was all she said.
In her state of sexual grace, she lies comfortable. Savoring the nakedness for a spell.
Going down; that’s the name of it. Into the hairy glade.
Where, belly up, the enemy lies, mothering.
Now lie here, waiting to be discovered. In the name of all those who must drive home clothed.
Lying there, she drowns in her own life, upward. Discovers it.
So the body on the riverbank slips its moorings—
Cargo coming in!—
and heads for its past. Nobody knows how long these interior journeys really take. Under the eternal starlight of the self-fixed eye.
Meanwhile outside, other facts will be authenticating. Some still buried deep in that travel-log of tickets to nowhere, excursions unwilled and letters unmailed but finally received—which all families keep without knowing it: Others already scattering broadside among the village coroners.
Who’s to record them, who’s to pay for them? Haunted messages flying like terns over the body of this narcissist. Attaching silently as banners, to guide her barge. Out toward those shoals where the catering is never over. Where the smashing never stops.
For shortly before, Arthur the butler, glass in hand, has come out to the Kellihy gate. The goblet holds Bajan rum—sugar-cane rum of a double strength you usually get only in his native islands, plus a sweetening called Falernum, and the proper dab of lemon-sugar rubbed against the peel, and ice. Last drink of the day, and his only one; the rest of the time he secretly drinks fizzy water, and carries on the responsibilities of the house.
He’s still in a state of beatitude caused by the pageantry of the party and how well he looked there, which at his age is all the extra he asks of physical life. The loveliest time of a party—especially at Master Bob’s—is when it’s satisfactorily over, and you can watch yourself memorably backwards in its mirroring eye. He’s still wearing the orange loincloth which exactly complements his nutmeg skin; his platinum dye-job is the best he’s ever had; at sixty-nine and a half, he remains a caution to stare at—as even Violet, who has a tongue like an adder, admits—and most important, he’s not yet ugly to himself.
What he likes, all he wants is to have his comforts artistically arranged, down days which promise some sort of freakiness, in a hightone way—and can do it steadily. For much of his life the Kellihys have given him that wish, and he reveres them for it. Nightclub work—which he’d tried for a short, fearful term after finishing rearing his surrogate family—isn’t in it for kicks; plus the hours are wrong—and he’s a domestic man. Up here, when the country palls, he can take himself into the city for a marvelously tripartite day. First selling his silverware in the Village, with enough gay overtones to keep his hand in on that gossip, he then visits old friends in Harlem, some on Sugar Hill, some not so well-placed, and some in hospital—where his silver-money makes him a generous giftgiver. By the time the Harlem horrors had about got to him—and the envy—he’d be safely having tea with Mr. Bob’s mother, on Park. “You’re my real crony, Arthur.” Though by nightfall she’ll be drunk enough to have to be helped to bed, they’re both pleased he no longer has the job of doing it. By day, she keeps herself up as well as anybody in
Town & Country,
where her picture appears often, in the crisp clothes and hairdos which enchant them both. For him, the tea is always tea. “What you wear to that sodality thing, Miss Lorna—your blue? Just right. And that new man has got the real tone of your hair.” She’d never blued it—too snappy a dish for that, thank God.
“Mr. Bob seeing to your rum, and what’s that other stuff?” she answers. For thirty-five years she’s seen to Arthur’s tipple, and can never recall its name. Certain of his other comforts over the years she properly ignored. But has always remembered the sacred anniversary of his mother’s death as well as he does, though the two had never met. And always has a mass said, at St. Pat’s. What she won’t do is put money in his pocket—or on his future. “Burns a hole there, Arthur Manderville—how’s that nephew of yours, by the way?” Back at the University of the West Indies again, and not so hearty, as she knows well. And is always glad to hear. “Money
sent,
Miss Lorna—it’s no good to them. He’s as bad as Mr. Bob.”
They confab over it. Yes, he’d see to the new baby’s christening—neither wanted Sister to put her nose in—and he since had. Though naming the baby for him outraged him even more than it did Miss Lorna; over the wire, she’d had to calm
him
down. “After all, you
are
Church of Rome.” And yes, he’d smootched Miss Bets’ way with the priests here, who really want none of her. Both he and the old lady—who is two months younger than he—trust no woman except herself. But no, she wouldn’t yet “arrange” for the Catholic home in which he hopes to spend a classy old age—which meant pay for it. “No sirree. You’re not ugly enough yet. I can still look at you. And I’ve been thinking, Arthur—maybe you should start depending on Mr. Bob for that. It would be good for him.” And good for you too, Arthur. Steadying. “Right, Miss Lorna. If I could ever get to him when his pockets are full.” Next time she sent Bob money, she said, she’d let Arthur know well ahead. She’d promised it. “Then you can get your innings in, Arthur. Before Bets.”
A wicked woman, on money matters. And when she sticks to tea. His only chance with her is if she falls ugly, as they both call it, before he does. “Then I’ll want you to see to me.” In which case she has it all set for him to come along early, to the same home she’s going to. “It’s all at my lawyer’s, Arthur. A co-ed home too, don’t you fear. Priests we can get. Company’s what we’ll crave.” And when he pays his hospital visits—as friend after friend fell ugly from all the diseases which could take pieces out of you or hang gadgets on you—he has to agree with her. “So
that’s
settled. Now tell me, Arthur, is it true that a colored man is head of the government of Barbados?” Just reminding him—in case he has any private thoughts of going back there instead. “Yes, the Governor, Arthur. I’m sure that’s what Monsignor said.” She knows he cannot approve of it. “And you can bet that British daddy of yours Arthur, I don’t either.” She’s the best company, not barring Violet. He and she have the same tone.
Which tells him he isn’t really to credit her on that lawyer. So he’ll have to depend on Bob. He has a plan for it.
“Tone, tone—” Arthur says aloud. Like to have that moon, on a silver salver. Take my picture carrying it.
Tomorrow’s going to be the kind of day he and Violet, long-term fellow Kellihy-addict and straw-boss, will spend happily. Plenty leftover booze for her, enough cozy little tasks-in-solitary for him. Straightening up the spare-room allotted him for his silver-work—where Miss Bets also sometimes struggles with a gentleman on the couch, but according to Violet never quite gives in to them. Or tidying up, from every bush and vine within yards of the pool, pleasant reminders of the party, and of how he’d looked there. He’s already made the baby’s formula, enough for two days; what Miss Betsy will do with her own milk is for her to say—he’s weaned her babies before. A batch of his work-tools is already sloshing toward a fine clean-up in the huge dishwasher the caterers have left, not even saying they’ll be back for it. Crocked worse than the guests, they’d ended up leaving the high-slide as well—and the boy. Violet already has her old phonograph crackling—she won’t have radio—and is this minute frying up crab she’d made little Roddy seine for all day yesterday, saying to the poor kid “You drown, I’ll kill you. And set fire to you first, with your own matches. Lay off those from now on, by the way. One garage a year is all we can handle. Try the school.”
Violet is the only real anarchist he knows; in her daily life she hews to it. Women ought to be expert liars, cheats, thieves, she says—whatever they could get away with. “And Miss Betsy could be as good as me at all of it. But she won’t only swap.” After breakfast, he’d get Roddy and Dodo off to the day-camp, which was so important an activity to all adults in the house that he and Violet often chipped in to pay the bill for it. After that a nap, then some poker maybe, he and she playing for baby Arthur’s Greek coins from his Uncle Sean, divvied between them, or Violet’s subway slugs, that big Arthur always made for her. And when those ran out—maybe for the caterer’s boy.