Pay the Piper (3 page)

In their dating days, back in Greenwich Village, William commented then that she could drink him under the table—all that bourbon and branch water she'd taken for granted. She had explained people she knew drank like that in the South; there wasn't much else to do in her part of the country. She had added, “I had an Irishman to teach me,” and told him about Kevin Shea—a boy William would thereafter refer to as the double Irishman and sometimes, rather piercingly, as her first husband. “My parents had it annulled,” she would say. “It doesn't really count.” Several teenage couples that summer, after graduating from high school, went to a justice of the peace in Mississippi, beyond Delton's city limits. It was something to do, I suppose; she had shrugged, telling the story. Nobody had expected to settle down in a vine-covered cottage, or at least she hadn't. She never knew what Kevin had in mind, for by the time she went off and got married to him, she half perceived that he was stupid as hell. “Why would you go through with it then?” William asked, who that summer had been a virgin camp counselor in Maine lusting after the somehow nubile mothers of his campers. Now at her New England window, Laurel remembered touching Kevin's high school fraternity pin dangling over her bosom—they'd been going steady for two years—and telling him she wanted to change her mind. Wildly, in his manner, he drove into a weedy ditch bank and told her he'd leave her. The thought had been so terrifying she'd gone ahead down the highway and faced the old man with tobacco juice on his galluses. Since she cried during the ceremony, the justice thought she was a trembling, happy bride, but she knew better.

William, on that date in the village, had said his mother strongly disapproved of alcohol. She would not let him drink a soda after dinner, afraid he'd get used to something fizzy at night. Then he told her about his mother's accomplishments and about his Aunt Grace, who was a landscape architect ahead of her time. He told of an uncle who wrote tomes about naval history and of one who died an untimely death just after being appointed to the Supreme Court. She listened to him mention lawn bowling at the family seaside summer place—lawn bowling? Without asking, she quickly imagined what it must be. And there was Roque, a complicated croquet, William added. Oh, yes; she nodded affably. Every evening at bedtime, his mother read him Dickens.… Laurel lost track of his words, wondering where she might have been if she'd had parents who had heard of Dickens. She only told William she spent childhood summers at her maternal grandmother's in Mississippi, forty-five miles from Delton, and had loved it there, without saying her grandmother kept a cache of Garrett snuff in her closet, or that she had uncles who were what her father called dirt farmers; William got a kick, like everyone else, out of the fact her father sold dynamite—that's a blast, Rick had said.

The enormous differences in their backgrounds had not been insurmountable, and the problems she and William had they would have brought to any marriage. What seemed important was how they reacted to each other's insecurities.

In this different milieu to which she'd brought herself, unlike her original one, she'd learned iceberg lettuce was considered fit only for rabbits, and despondently she washed the head bought yesterday. Ennui filled her at the idea of having to pat dry all those cupped leaves on the counter. There were patches of snow, still, under forsythia bushes only beginning to flower, while in Delton spring's full flowering was almost over and summer nearly begun. When she thought of the place, she smelled sweet scents, warm earth, as if April were there perpetually.

Usually, she did not telephone anyone in the morning because of her working schedule, but this morning was different: the book group was coming, and with an incipient hangover she could not think. She decided to phone her mother, to break up her mother's routine of silence in the morning. Laurel pictured her watering the geranium in the kitchen while her solitary egg boiled. The radio would be on for company. A puff of breath sounded against the mouthpiece when her mother answered, and then she coughed several times. A smoke ring would be in the air, Laurel thought. Living alone, her mother said her voice grew husky from not being used. Sometimes she phoned Information, making up a name, just to use her vocal cords. Laurel hoped without hope her mother would ask her something important, like, How's your novel coming? rather than always asking what she was having for dinner, what train William was taking, or what she was going to do with a bloodhound. Too frequently, her mother's conversation held dire hints that things would go wrong. In turn, Laurel wished she might confide something close to her heart or on her mind.

I'm dying for a cock between my legs.

Suppose she just blurted that out, she thought; though since she was forty-one and married, she guessed her mother assumed a cock was available. However, she was certain that if she mentioned sex, her mother would reply, “Ugh.”

“Mother, what's a surefire way of turning out an aspic ring?” She spoke with a happy, ringing voice to indicate her mother was a necessity in her life.

“Don't talk so loud, I'm not deaf,” Mrs. Wynn said. Then she said, “There's not any way.”

“Mother, I remember something you used to do.”

“Nope. Put a hot dishtowel over the bottom.”

Laurel closed her eyes, telling herself she ought to be used to these non sequiturs.

“William take his umbrella? It's raining in Washington.”

“Yes,” Laurel lied, to spare herself conversation about how she and William ought to look at television more so they'd know the weather.

“At least, with him gone, you get a rest from cooking those two damn dinners every night, Rick's and then yours. I don't know how you've stood it. You've cooked more than I ever did in my entire life.”

She wished to say, You didn't do any housework, Mother, because you lived in the South, but that would leave her open to the remark that she hadn't had to leave home.

“Your bourbon and lettuce leaf club coming?”

Laurel thought she answered in a level voice, but Buff flickered pretty eyelashes her way. “My book group,” she said between her teeth, though what right had she to feel this way? Because wasn't her mother maddeningly right, as usual? She had an uncanny habit of speaking to the truth of matters she knew little about, and this month Laurel had not even bothered to get the selected book.

William, in his infectious jovial manner, laughed about Mrs. Wynn's common sense, and she would say, “You mean I'm country.” “Not at all,” he would cry truthfully, and jolly her back to a good humor; he and her mother were uncommonly close. Mrs. Wynn had been moved to remark, “I feel sorry for William. I feel I'm the only mother he's ever had,” and he would tell anybody, “What do you think of a guy having a mother-in-law who gets up and gives him the most comfortable chair when he walks into a room?”

“He get his briefcase fixed?” Mrs. Wynn asked.

“It's not fixable. He just carries it anyway.”

“That banged-in case? To New York? To Washington?”

“You know what aplomb William has,” Laurel said.

“I swear,” said Mrs. Wynn.

Not wishing to be disloyal to William, Laurel thought his behavior had been silly when he bashed his briefcase on the hood of a cab on Sixth Avenue because the driver started up too fast while William was still crossing with the light; the case was an expensive ostrich-skin one she had given him, and she hated its demise. William carried it on into the city, and now to Washington, where in his raconteur's way he'd regale everybody with the story, turning it into a fable about how the tables were turned on him, imitating perfectly the cab driver's New York accent when he cried, “I don't want no altercation with no individual!” Rick, laughing when he heard the story, had said, “Dad,” meaning inimitable Dad. Was she the only one who thought William's behavior a bit cuckoo?

However, she thought about a man earning money and having to share so much of it with his family, and how William put suede patches on the elbows of his jackets, and had the lapels of his overcoat covered with velvet when the edges wore out, starting a fashion trend in his office. “Why don't we go in together and get him another case?” she asked.

“Why should I?” said Mrs. Wynn. “I didn't ruin that one.”

“Never mind.” Laurel had another inspiration. “Mother, why don't you get a kitten?”

“I don't want a goddamned cat in this apartment. A cat box! Are you crazy?”

“Yes,” said Laurel.

“What?”

“Nothing. I have to go. The fuel guy's here.”

“Go on. I'm not stopping you. Don't make the towel too hot.”

Wait! How hot's too hot? She held the dead connection, feeling, as she often did, that she wanted to call right back and tell her mother something, or ask her a question. Something was unfinished, something languished that needed saying; all their conversations about nothing were wasted moments, when something important should have been accomplished.

She went toward the door. A young man stared through the glass panels, and she saw herself as an idle rich housewife still in her nightclothes. “I've got a cold,” she told him, opening the door and standing back. He came in and stood so close she read tiny yellow stitching on the pocket of his brown uniform:
Earl
. What's up, Earl? she thought, flooded by memory of a plumber telling her and William the suburbs were a field day for service people while “you gray flannel types,” he'd said, eyeing William, “are in the city.” Nobody could know how many times he answered a call to find a housewife in a revealing negligee, he'd said.

Having told Earl the problem, she led him to the basement, feeling his breath at her back and aware of the rising and falling movements of her behind under the robe; it caught in her crack and mercifully released itself, for she'd never have had the nerve to reach around and pull it out.

The house suddenly seemed too large for three people, and she was embarrassed, though Earl had no idea who lived here. There was a difference in a house when a man was in it. It seemed more solid. Laurel wanted to turn and cry out to Earl her troubles since William had been gone, ask him to solve her pencil sharpener's falling off the wall and scattering incomprehensible screws, have him change the burned-out bulb that wouldn't come unscrewed and figure out if the iron's cord was dangerous now that Jubal had chewed it.

When he knelt her robe brushed softly across one of his boots. They were both acutely aware of each other. Quickly she moved to the staircase. But had he lifted his bent head, his face would have met her crotch. Her pubic hair tingled. He busied himself inspecting the leak and announced they needed fiberglassing. Were they on a maintenance plan? She had no idea and bit back saying she'd phone her husband, but he was out of town. Earl said he would phone the main office in Bridgeport and followed her back to the kitchen.

He hung up, stuck a pencil into his pocket, and looked directly at her. Laurel moved toward the door, yanking and tugging at Jubal's collar as if he were as dangerous as a tiger. He'd do the work in a few days, Earl said, and don't worry in the meantime. “Thanks a lot,” she said, and watched him back from the driveway with his truck ringing its shrill warning to the unwary. If she had wanted a quickie, what move should she have made? Laurel had no idea.

The tap water ran warm. Ought she to boil water for the towel? On the fingers of one hand, she could count things her mother had mentioned to fit her daughter for life: eggs stayed fresher in their own carton in the refrigerator; glasses that held milk washed out more easily if you ran cold water in them as soon as they were empty; oranges squeezed better if you rolled them under your hand; a finger down the throat for too much alcohol. By herself, she had assimilated her mother's method of cooking leg of lamb. “That's all, folks,” she told her canine audience, who said nothing. When the phone rang, the two dogs looked at her questioningly, and she said, “You know who.”

“Did your mold come out all right?”

“I didn't know how hot's too hot.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Another smoke ring must have appeared; her mother puffed against the speaker. She would have pulled her dainty lady's chair close to the phone, her television turned to a soft pitch, her cigarettes and lighter handily nearby. Laurel said, “Mother, I've got to go. They'll be here soon, and I'm not dressed.”

“Go on. I'm not stopping you.” She hung up.

How did she always leave herself open to this? Laurel thought. Her telephone pad caught her eye. The message scrawled across a page looked as if some half-literate had written it. Only now the memory came back of a man phoning William. She had stood here last night trying to keep her voice on an even keel and trying to understand his words, though he seemed at the end of a long yellow funnel. She had been sober enough to realize she was crocked, and wondered if he could tell. She wrote the message over, hoping his telephone number was right. What scared her, though, was to think the whole incident had erased itself from her memory.

Sunday nights after Rick was asleep it was her habit to grow maudlin before TV, drinking Scotch and watching the Judy Garland show. She liked growing weepy and shedding tears. Judy, aging, was still her idol, the way she had been when Laurel was growing up star-struck in Tennessee and herself unable to carry a tune. Over the years, she and Rick always watched any rerun of
The Wizard of Oz
, and Laurel cried when Dorothy clicked her red heels and said twice, “There's no place like home.” After a while Rick began to wait for that moment, already turning to watch her, laughing at her as she laughed at herself, but always a little puzzled as to what caused those tears to course down his mother's cheeks. She knew she thought of the South as a home she had left. But wasn't there something else too?