‘Hi! Guess what! I bought a house!’
‘Nat! Great! Where?’
‘West End.’
‘West End! Wow! Really moving up!’
Mira poured wine and soda for them. The house, Nat told her, had ten rooms, two and a half baths, two fireplaces, dishwasher, and wall-to-wall carpeting. It backed on the country club golf course, had an acre plot, and they would become automatic members of the club, which Nat was already referring to as simply ‘the club,’ as if she’d been a member all her life.
The thing was beyond even Mira’s envy. ‘When did you decide to do this? Why?’
The Meyersville house was too small, they needed more room, and that meant finishing the attic or putting on an extension and that was expensive and you might not get a return on it when you went to sell. The girls were getting older and they argued all the time and should have their own rooms. ‘Besides, I’m sick of this place. What is there to keep me here?’
Mira felt reproached. Without thinking, she asked. ‘Do you ever see Paul?’
‘Paul? No. Why? Oh! That bastard! No.’ Then she smiled. ‘But I am interested in someone else.’
‘Who?’
‘Lou Mikelson. I’ve known him for years, of course, and I always loved him, but …’ She gave a childlike delighted smile.
‘I thought Evelyn was your best friend.’
‘She is! I love Evvy! Adore her! But she has those two creepy kids, she has no time for Lou.’
‘The oldest one is in an institution, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, but Nancy’s still home. And you know, she’s big, she’s eleven and an awful handful. Still has to have diapers changed, and although she’s been walking for a couple of years now, she’s always bumping into things – she doesn’t see very well. She still has to be fed.’
‘Nightmare. Babyhood protracted into forever.’
‘And Tommy’s no angel either. I mean, at least he’s normal, but he’s always in some kind of trouble. I don’t think Evelyn would mind. She’d probably give me her blessing.’
‘Well, are you actually involved?’
‘No.’ Natalie’s voice lingered over the syllable. ‘It’s in the early stages,’ she smiled. She was very nervous. She kept picking at her hands, which were covered with a rash and peeling skin.
‘Well, that’s great about the house, Nat. I’m glad for you.’
‘Yeah. Of course it needs redecoration. I want to take you over there someday – as soon as the people move out. It has this really nice family room, you know, that I think would look gorgeous if I put in all sliding glass windows …’
She was off. Mira listened to the thousand plans she had for the house, thinking that it was nice, that it was enough to keep her occupied for several years, enough to keep her mind from dwelling too much on the other. Mira did not take seriously the business about Lou. She’d seen Lou and Natalie at parties too often: they always flirted in a friendly, almost familial way. She mentioned Lou to save her pride, which seemed to require that a man find her attractive. But we are all like that, she thought. We all want it, anyway. It doesn’t seem so important to men. Women, victims again. Why should men be so important to us and we not to them? Is that nature too? She sighed and went on reading her male psychologists.
17
Bliss searched the room. Hugh Simpson – ‘Simp’ – came sidling over to her with his glass in his hand.
‘Looking pretty snazzy tonight, eh, Bliss?’ He never made a statement without sounding as if he were intimate with one, and as if the grounds of the intimacy were some shared dirty secret.
‘The old hair going pretty fast there, eh, Bill?’ He had said the same thing at the three preceding parties, and Bliss was annoyed, but she smiled gracefully and said, ‘I’m hoping he gets to look like Yul Brynner.’ She looked at Bill with a loving smile as she said it, and he giggled and patted his bald spot. Bill was regaling Simp with his latest dirty story, which Bliss had heard four times in the past week. She made a face at him, an angry-Momma-scolding-little-boy face and said, Not again, Billy.’ Then she smiled and he grinned a little-boy-is-being-naughty-but-he-knows-Momma-will-forgive grin back at her and said, ‘Just one more time, Blissy.’ She laughed and bent her body lightly, excusing herself, and went into the kitchen.
Paul was standing with Sean near the sink; they were speaking in soft voices and laughing. Bliss approached them with her head cocked to one side, a knowing smile on her face.
‘I can just guess what you two are talking about,’ she said. Paul put his arm out and she walked into it, and he closed it around her gently.
‘We were discussing the ups and downs of the market,’ Sean smiled.
‘It’s unpredictable, you know. You throw a little into many investments, and suddenly one of them pays off.’
‘I see,’ Bliss smiled at Paul. Their faces were close together. ‘You don’t, I take it, have any favorite stock.’
‘Of course.’ Paul nibbled at her ear. ‘But you can never be sure that one will bring a return.’
‘And you’ll accept any return that occurs.’
‘I just love speculating.’
‘Why don’t you speculate me up a drink?’
‘I’d have to take my arm away.’
‘That isn’t irreparable.’
Sean drifted off. Paul moved and poured two drinks.
‘I remember one night you took your whole self away from me,’
Bliss taunted. ‘At least tonight you won’t have to go anywhere.’ The party was at Natalie’s house.
Paul made a face at her. ‘It wasn’t you I left, it was Adele.’
‘I was there.’
‘And offering nothing. A man has to do something with it. If the woman who arouses him won’t come through, he’s got to find someone else.’
She grimaced. ‘That’s the poorest excuse I’ve ever heard for just not having any standards.’ She took the drink from his hand. ‘Of course,’ she added airily, ‘there’s no accounting for tastes.’
‘Some women are sexy and some only act sexy.’
‘Oh? How can you tell?’
‘I can tell.’
‘It’s possible to put it another way: some women have standards.’
He looked at her intensely. During their interchange, smiles had never left their faces. ‘And do I meet yours?’
‘Do you care?’ She arched her body and let it ripple, and walked away.
Norm was in the study alone. He switched the television set off guiltily when Bliss entered. He gave her a naughty-boy look.
‘Just checking the late scores. Mira has a fit if I turn on TV at a party.’
She gave him her mock-scolding look. ‘And I’ll bet you’re afraid to take a walk unless Mira says you can. Aren’t you?’ She touched his nose lightly with her finger. ‘And I’m going to tell on you.’
He cringed comically. ‘Oh, please don’t tell. I’ll do anything!’
‘Okay. I won’t tell if you dance with me.’
He put his hands to the sides of his head. ‘Oh, not that! Not that! Anything but that!’
She kicked him lightly with her instep, and he crumpled, bent, held his leg. ‘Ooh! Ow! She’s lamed me for life. Okay, okay, I give in!’ And followed her, limping, into the big living room.
Natalie had rolled up the carpet in this room so people could dance. This was her farewell to Meyersville, and she had invited sixty people. Her house had more rooms than the others, and could hold such a crowd.
Mira was sitting with Hamp when Norm and Bliss came into the room. She watched them dance; it was a clowning dance, as it was whenever Norm danced with anyone but her.
‘I think Norm would like to have an affair with Bliss,’ she said.
‘Do you care?’ Hamp and Mira had become friends at these parties. If Hamp didn’t read, at least he knew about books, and he provided her with what felt like a safe island. But they had not talked much personally.
‘No,’ she said, shrugging. ‘It might do him some good.’
Hamp looked at her glitteringly. She was not looking at him. She was watching Roger put his possessive arm around Samantha and lead her to the dance floor. She wanted to leap up and protect Samantha, to push him away from her. But Samantha was walking with her little mechanical doll wiggle, and her doll’s face held a wide smile.
‘I feel so out of things,’ she said to Hamp. ‘So out of all the people I know. I guess I’ve always felt out.’
‘You’re too good for them,’ Hamp said, and she turned to him with surprise.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Just what I said.’
‘I don’t see how one person can be better than another. I don’t know what that means.’
Hamp smiled and shrugged. ‘They’re all bums.’
‘Oh, Hamp!’ She felt uncomfortable and tried to think of a way to get away from him politely. ‘I think I’ll get another drink,’ she came up with finally.
She passed Nat in the kitchen talking loudly about the beauties of her new house. She had spoken of nothing else for the past months. Bliss was near the wall with Sean, talking in low voices, smiles on their faces. Bliss was taunting, teasing; Sean, superior, enjoying it, deciding whether or not to pounce. Roger was standing at the sink talking to Simp. He had his back to her, and she heard him say, ‘Cunt is cunt. The only difference in it is some is wet and some is dry.’ She walked to the sink and stood beside him to pour her drink. She did not look at him or greet him. She walked into the small living room. Oriane was sitting with Adele, talking about children. Oriane was looking almost as harassed as Adele: she had just had a long ordeal in which her two younger children came down in alternate weeks with measles, mumps, and chicken pox and her oldest child, a boy, had nearly ripped his hand off in a bicycling accident. Adele looked purely terrible. Mira sat down with them.
‘You’ve had quite an ordeal,’ she began.
Oriane laughed and rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, it was charming!’ The
banter began again: whatever she had been discussing with Adele had been serious, and was now put away in favor of the public mode. Mira remained, restlessly, and got up as soon as she could. She wandered.
‘No, Theresa and Don don’t come to parties anymore. I don’t even know if Nat invited them. Terry says she can’t afford to give one, so she doesn’t want to come. But I think it’s silly to isolate yourself like that, don’t you?’ Paula said.
‘Pride. You have it where you can have it,’ said a firm voice.
Mira turned. She liked the person who said that. It was Martha, a newcomer to the group. Mira walked toward them. ‘Theresa reads a lot,’ Mira said.
18
Bliss flirted mildly with the bridge teacher. He would take her to a bar on nights when Bill was out on a flight, and talk to her about himself, his loneliness, and his marriage. Bliss smiled a lot and teased him. He would drive her back to the shopping center where she parked her car, and they would sit for a few minutes kissing. Finally he asked her to go to a motel with him. She said she had to think it over.
Bliss did not delude herself that her problem was moral. She had been brought up in a hard country, where people acted wild and even savage: Cars full of drunk teenaged boys had contained more than one of her high-school girlfriends. Her aunt, deserted by her husband early in her marriage, had had an unending series of lovers; some even said she made her living that way. Bliss had been too poor to afford the luxury of middle-class morality. She figured that if her aunt had gotten something out of those men, good for her. She had a deep snarling contempt for people who confused an essentially economic situation with a moral one. And the relation between men and women was economic.
Economic and political. Bliss had no fancy words for any of this: she would have had difficulty in expressing it abstractly. What she said to herself was, you have to play it, and you have to play it their way. She recognized the master class, she recognized its expectations from a woman. She played the game by the rules that had been laid down long before she was born, laid down, as far as she could tell, in ancient times. There was only one thing Bliss wanted: to win. Nothing mattered more, except in some fierce inner place with few occupants –
her mother and her children, and her mother was dead now. But she would have fought for her children’s survival just as her mother had fought for hers. Somehow, her children knew that. Although it was their father who teased and joked with them, and their mother who usually was the one to scold, they sensed her fierceness and her love, and returned it. Their gay independence was settled on a foundation they knew to be unshakable.
Bliss had never been one of the girls in the cars. Sex and romance had been part of the great market basket of niceties she could not afford. But she had been eating a bit better of late, and her body was reaching out. She had sold herself to Bill knowing perfectly well what she was doing, and with honorable intentions. She would uphold her part of the bargain. She would be consort, maid, and brood mare, and he would pay for her services. She would be faithful, since that was one of the conditions. And Bill had upheld his part. They were not what is called ‘comfortable,’ but they ate. And he was faithful to her, of that she was sure, regardless – or perhaps because of – all his tales of stratospheric shacking up. He would, in time, earn decent money. He was Security.
To risk that was terrifying. She sat and pondered this deeply. She went over and over in her mind the possibilities. At the worst, he would divorce her: he was not a killer. If he divorced her, she might be able to get a job in New Jersey, but with her Texas diploma, so looked down on in the North, she might not be able to teach. Even if she could teach, all she could earn was six or seven thousand a year, a salary Bill had passed years ago. It would be hard for her and the children to live on that without someone to do what she did – the unpaid labor: she would have to pay after-school babysitters, pay for laundry done, pay someone to stay with the kids if they were sick. And if she could not get a teaching job, she would earn even less. Sometimes when Bill was away, she read all the Help Wanted Ads for women. Only crack secretaries earned more, and she could not even take dictation. She could be a clerk in an office, in a department store, or in a dry cleaning shop. She could work in a factory. She could go to New York with her diploma and be a fancier clerk, earning more but having to spend more on clothes and commutation.