Trust Me (12 page)

“I thought he was perfectly pleasant,” Gwen said frostily, and turned her back to remove her silvery, snug party dress. As she wriggled it down over her hips she turned her head and defiantly added, “He had a
lot
to say about tax shelters.”

“I bet he did,” Pygmalion scoffed feebly, numbed by the sight of his wife frontally advancing, nude, toward him as he lay on their marital bed. “It’s awfully late,” he warned her.

“Oh, come on,” she said, the lights out.

The first imitation Gwen did was of Marguerite’s second husband, Marvin; they had all unexpectedly met at a Save the Whales benefit ball, to which invitations had been sent out indiscriminately. “
Oh-ho-ho
,” she boomed in the privacy of their bedroom afterwards, “so you’re my noble predecessor!” In an aside she added, “Noble, my ass. He hates you so much you turned him on.”

“I did?” he said. “I thought he was perfectly pleasant, in what could have been an awkward encounter.”

“Yes, in
dee
dy,” she agreed, imitating hearty Marvin, and for a dazzling second she allowed the man’s slightly glassy and slack expression of forced benignity to invade her own usually petite and rounded features. “Nothing awkward about
us,
ho-ho,” she went on, encouraged by her husband’s laughter. “And tell me, old chap, why
is
it your child-support check is never on time anymore?”

He laughed and laughed, entranced to see his bride arrive at what he conceived to be a proper womanliness—a plastic, alert sensitivity to the human environment, a susceptible responsiveness tugged this way and that by the currents of Nature herself. He could not know the world, was his fear, unless a woman translated it for him. Now, when they returned from a gathering, and he asked what she had made of so-and-so, Gwen would stand in her underwear and consider, as if onstage. “We-hell, my dear,” she would announce in sudden, fluting parody, “if it weren’t for Portugal there
rally
wouldn’t be a
bear
able country left in Europe!”

“Oh, come on,” he would protest, delighted at the way her pretty features distorted themselves into an uncanny, snobbish horsiness.

“How did she do it?” Gwen would ask, as if professionally intent. “Something with the chin, sort of rolling it from side to side without unclenching the teeth.”

“You’ve got it!” he applauded.

“Of course you
knoaow
,” she went on in the assumed voice, “there
used
to be Greece, but now all these dreadful
Ar
abs …”

“Oh, yes, yes,” he said, his face smarting from laughing so hard, so proudly. She had become perfect for him.

In bed she pointed out, “It’s awfully late.”

“Want a back rub?”

“Mmmm. That would be reawy nice.” As his left hand labored on the smooth, warm, pliable surface, his wife—that small something in her that was all her own—sank out of reach; night after night, she fell asleep.

O
NE OF MY STUDENTS
the other day brought into class a nautilus shell that had been sliced down the middle to make a souvenir from Hawaii. That’s how far some of these kids’ parents get on vacation, though from the look of the city (Mather, Massachusetts; population 47,000 and falling) you wouldn’t think there was any money in town at all.

I held the souvenir in my hand, marvelling at the mathematics of it—the perfect logarithmic spiral and the parade of increasing chambers, each sealed with a translucent, curved septum. I held the shell up to show the class. “What the poem doesn’t tell you,” I told them, “is that the nautilus is a nasty, hungry blob that uses its outgrown chambers as propulsion tanks to maneuver up and down as it chases its prey. It’s a killer.”

I sounded sore; the students stared, those that had been listening. They know your insides better than you do, often. The shell had reminded me of Karen. Karen Owens, former wife of the late Alan. She had loved Nature—its fervent little intricacies, all its pretty little survival kits and sexy signallings. There was a sheen to the white-and-pale-orange nacre, here in the staring light of the tall classroom windows, that was hers. As I diagrammed on the blackboard the spiral, and some up and down arrows, and the dainty siphuncle whereby the nautilus performs its predatory hydrostatic magic, I was remembering how she, to arouse me in the brightness of the big spare bedroom at the back of her house, would softly drag her pale-orange hair and her small white breasts across my penis.

Arousal wasn’t always instant; I would be nervous, sweaty, guilty, stealing time from the lunch hour or even—so urgent did it all seem—ducking out of the school in a free period (classes run fifty minutes in our system) to drive across town to spend twenty minutes with her and then drive the fifteen minutes back again, screeching that old Falcon Monica’s parents had given us into the high-school parking lot under the eyes of the kids loafing and sneaking cigarettes out by the bike racks. They may have wondered, but teachers come and go; kids have no idea what it takes or doesn’t take to keep the world running, and though studying us is one of their main ways of using up energy, they can’t really believe the abyss that adult life is: that what they dream, we do. They couldn’t know, no matter what their lavatory walls said, that Karen’s musk was really on my fingertips and face and that behind my fly lurked a pearly ache of satisfaction.

She and Alan lived in the Elm Hill section, where the mill-owners and their managers had built big Victorian clapboard houses. The high school, new in 1950, had been laid out on
an old farm on the other side of the river. With less than the whole dying downtown between us, we might have had time to share a cigarette afterwards or talk, so that I might have come to understand better what our affair meant from her side, what she was getting out of it and where she saw it going. My father had worked in those empty mills. He had me late in life and had coughed and drunk himself to death by the time I was twenty, and a kind of rage at the mills and him and all of Mather would come over me when, in a panic to be back to my next class, I would get stuck in the overshadowed streets down in the factory district. The city fathers had made them all one-way in some hopeless redevelopment scheme.

My grandfather came over from Italy to help build those mills, brick by brick. My oldest brother is a former auto mechanic who now owns a one-third share in a parts-and-supplies store and never touches a tool except to sell it. Our middle brother sells real estate. They had me set to become a Boston doctor, but with the lint’s getting my father’s lungs so early I was lucky to get through college. I picked up the education credits and an easy master’s and now teach general science to ninth- and tenth-graders. A while ago I was made assistant principal, which means two classes a day less and afternoons in the office. I had hoped originally to get out of Mather, but here is where our connections were—my father’s old foreman was on the school board when they hired me—so here I still am. Fall is our best season, and in recent years some high-tech has overflowed Route 128 and come into the local economy, giving it a shot in the arm. It needs it. But cities aren’t like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.

Alan’s father, old Jake Owens, had owned Pilgrim, one of
the smaller mills and about the last along the river to close down. That was the late Forties, long after the bigger outfits had all sold their machinery south. Some in town said Jake showed a touching loyalty to Mather and its workers; others said the Owenses never had had much head for business. They were drinking and shooting men, with a notion of themselves as squires, at home in their little piece of industrial valley with its country club, its Owens Avenue, its hunting and skiing an hour or two north in New Hampshire. When his father died in the mid-Sixties, Alan came home from the West Coast with his Stanford law degree and his red-haired wife.

Karen was from Santa Barbara, thirtyish, pretty, but parched somehow. All that Pacific sun was beginning to produce crow’s-feet and little creases fanning out from her quick, maybe too quick, smile. She was small, with a tight cute figure that had been on a lot of beaches. She had majored in psychology and had a California teacher’s certificate and put her name in at the high-school office as a substitute. That was where I first saw her, striding along our noisy halls, her hair bouncing between her shoulder blades. She was no taller than many of the girls but different from them, a different animal, with the whippy body and seasoned voice of a woman.

When we did talk, Karen and I, it was out in the open, on opposite sides of the fence, about the war. There was a condescending certainty about her pacifism that infuriated me, and a casual, bright edge of militance that possibly frightened me. I can’t imagine now why I imagined then that the U.S.A. couldn’t take care of itself. I felt so damn motherly toward, of all people, LBJ. He looked so hangdog, even if he was a bully.

“Why do you talk of people being
for
the war?” I would ask Karen in the teachers’ room, amid the cigarette smoke and
between-the-acts euphoria of teachers offstage for fifty minutes. “It puts you people in such a smug no-lose position, being not for the war. Nobody’s for any war, in the abstract; it’s just sometimes judged to be the least of available evils.”

“When is it the least?” she asked. “Tell me, Frank.” She had a tense way of intertwining her crossed legs with the legs of the straight wooden school chair so that her kneecaps jutted out, rimmed in white. This was the heyday of the mini-skirt; female underpants, sure to be seen, had sprouted patterns of flowers. When she crossed her legs like that, her skirt slid up to reveal an oval vaccination scar her childhood doctor had never thought would show. There were a number of awkward, likable things about Karen in spite of the smug politics: she smoked a lot, and her teeth were stained and slightly crooked, in an era of universal orthodontia. Her hands had the rising blue veins of middle age, and a tremor. I loved the expensive clothes that what with the Owens money she couldn’t help but wear. Though her sweaters were cashmere, they always looked tugged slightly awry, so that a background of haste and distress seemed to lie invitingly behind her smooth public pose.

“Maybe you don’t realize the kind of town you’ve moved to,” I told her. “The VFW is where we have our Saturday dances. Our kids aren’t pouring pig blood into draft-board files. Their grandparents were damn glad to get here, and when their country asks them to go fight, they go. They’re scared, but they go.”

“Why does that make it right?” Karen asked gently. “Explain it to me.” The old psychology major. She was giving up the debate and babying me, as a kind of crazy man.

Her hair in its long brushed flower-child fall was not exactly either orange or red, it was the deep flesh color of a
whelk shell’s lip; and the more you looked, the more freckles she had. She was giving me an out, of sorts—a chance to shift out of this angry gear that discussion of the war always shoved me into. LBJ had been a schoolteacher, as I was now, and it seemed to me that the entire class, from coast to coast, just wasn’t
listening
. And he was trying to be so good, so suffering-on-our-behalf—our crooked Christ from Texas.

“It just
does
,” I told Karen, in my very lameness accepting her offer, surrendering. “I love these kids.” This was a lie. “I grew up just like them.” This was half a lie; I had been much the youngest child, pampered by my brothers, prepared for something better, out of Mather. “They give us great football teams.” This was the truth.

The peace movement in Mather amounted to a few candle-bearing parades led by the local clergy, the same clergymen who would invoke the blessings on Memorial Day before the twenty-one-gun salute shattered the peace of the cemetery. When the first local boy died in Vietnam, he got a new elementary school named after him. When the second died, they took a street intersection in his part of town, called it a square, and named it after him. For the third and the fourth, there wasn’t even an intersection.

The Owenses’ house on the hill had a big living room overlooking the city through tall, proprietorial windows. It had walnut wainscoting and a maze of ball-and-stick woodwork above the entranceways; the room could easily hold meetings of fifty or sixty, and did. At Karen’s invitation, black men imported from Roxbury spoke here, and white women imported from Cambridge. Civil rights and feminism and the perfidy of the Pentagon and the scheming, polluting corporations had
become one big all-purpose issue, and the Owenses had become the local chieftains of discontent, at least in the little circle Monica and I were drawn into. CMC, we called ourselves: Concerned Mather Citizens.