‘I just want you a whole lot. I’m crazy about you.’
‘I love you, Willie, but I just wish we could get straightened out again. I need for things to be clear and good with all three of us.’
‘Of course,’ he said, sliding in easily. When occasionally they did it a second time, it always felt different in her. She seemed bigger, looser, wetter. He was taking his time and driving into her and at the same time he was building a wall and it was rising and rising, the wall of a garage, a garage with a second floor room on top, and it was rising and rising and on the other side of that building, in its shade, he was strolling over to Dinah’s and he was in her bed driving into her, just like this, like this, like this.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
DINAH
‘I thought you’d stopped nude sunbathing because you’re afraid of skin cancer from the thinning of the ozone layer.’ Jimmy was squinting at her back, Dinah could see in the vanity mirror.
She was clutching a terry robe around herself, pulled down to bare her skin where Jimmy was daubing calamine lotion. ‘I got the bites taking a dip.’
‘Interesting stroke you must have, that sticks your ass up in the air.’
‘More nurse, less wise guy.’
‘The health agent says to put in a washer, you have to go to a whole new septic system – new holding tank, leaching field, all that. An extra bathroom with a dish washer – won’t that improve life?’
‘If Susan wasn’t pissed at me, none of this would be necessary.’
‘If Susan wasn’t pissed at me, you wouldn’t be getting slave labour out of me, so let’s keep smiling through. Tommy Rindge is coming today.’
‘Tell Willie to keep Bogey inside. Tommy’s dog always wants to fight. I better keep both cats in. On such a hot day, everybody’s going to be testy.’
‘Dinah, you’re so funny, the way you talk to the cats. Now, people, you say, what’s wrong with Shore Dinner today? Now which of you people knocked over my vase?’
‘People is any gentle beings you live with. Even men. I’m just used to privacy.’
‘Do you want to turn into one of those feisty crotchety spinsters who live with their cats and talk to themselves and keep a loaded shotgun in the corner?’
‘Why not! Sounds kind of attractive to me.’
‘There’s some weird building competition going on with you guys. I went to see Tommy about the septic system and he says he’d do it in two weeks or so when he put in Willie’s. Willie says to me, Oh, didn’t I tell you? We’re building a garage with a room upstairs. I’m out and they’re expanding.’
‘That’s news to me. Are you sure?’
‘Maybe he’s sweetening Mother with it. She’s always wanted a room to work in, but she has never been willing to take Johnny’s or mine. She’s always been martyred how Willie has his own studio and she has to work in their bedroom.’
‘Ah,’ Dinah said. Willie was keeping his part of the bargain. He was softening Susan up with a studio for herself. Excellent! Susan deserved her own space, and ever since Dinah had met them, they had been talking of a garage. They were near enough to the ocean for the winter winds laden with salt to rub the finish off their truck. She felt a tremendous sense of relief. Willie was finally active in turning Susan around.
‘I have to go to Tanglewood in ten days,’ she warned Jimmy. ‘My piece is premièring there.’
‘Going to see Itzak Raab?’
‘How could I miss him? He’s performing it.’
When Itzak’s name was mentioned, Jimmy projected a fog of disapproval. Like her, Jimmy wanted the triangle reconstituted. They were allies. Maybe the thing with Laurie would work out. Certainly she looked like a new woman, almost pretty lately, with much more to say.
She spoke to Nita the next day. Nita was already at Tanglewood for the summer. ‘Kyle is jealous, honey,’ Nita said. ‘He feels put in the shade, professionally.’
‘Because Itzak played the piece in New York that I wrote for Kyle?’
‘Well, that didn’t help matters, as you can guess.’ Nita giggled, stopped to yell at Tanya to turn the TV down. ‘But he’s got a bug in his ear about what you’ve written for Itzak. I love the way it starts. But I think there’s a mistake in the score you sent me …’
‘I’ll get my copy. Hold on. You know, I’m still making changes.’
Nita kept sending her reviews of Itzak’s concerts and records, interviews, articles. Nita was an Itzak Raab fan club of one, a clipping service devoted to his fame. Every couple of weeks an envelope would come with Nita’s return address. Inside would be a joke card signed with Tanya’s scrawl and Nita’s newest tidbits on Itzak.
After she had given Nita the correction, she asked, ‘Nita, what do you think of it? Can you tell? I’m scared.’
‘I think it’s close to the best thing you’ve written. It’s going to be tough bringing it off on two days’ rehearsal. It’s going to be a stretch for some of them, the demands you make. Eli and Robby I worry about. And you know how some of those bozos are when a woman conducts.’
She found herself kneading her belly with her hands. Was the suite as good as she could make it? The première had to be a success. If she had fucked up, if the performance did not come off, she would have blown something really important. Why had she got involved with him? This was too important for her professionally to have taken that risk. For a moment she was furious with herself that she had paid any attention whatsoever to her private life in the last four months. ‘How is it this year?’
‘Giselle’s coming down in August. I have the same house I had last year.’
‘I liked the one you used to get, up on the mountain.’ Dinah saw herself with Nita and Tanya splashing in the Stockbridge Bowl, picnicking on the grass. Tanya was a baby on a blanket. Tanya was a toddler, then a little girl. Usually Dinah managed to steal away for a week with them.
‘That went condo.’ Nita sighed. ‘I presume you’re staying with me?’
‘You still have that convertible bed on the sun porch?’
‘The furniture in this house hasn’t been changed in thirty years. The same stain on the kitchen wall, the same sad beds. When are you arriving?’
‘I thought I’d drive there maybe Wednesday. What do you think?’
‘I’m real curious what happens with Itzak and you. Everyone’s gossiping about it, you know that. My roommate says, If you die, can she have him?’
‘No, but I expect you to take my cats.’
‘Don’t say that in front of Tanya, or she’ll put out a contract on you.’
Itzak called the next evening from New York. Tangle-wood was on his mind too. She had not been conscious of any great desire to see him. In fact, she had been thinking that now that she was connected to Willie again and expecting to reconcile with Susan, she was not sure she had the time or energy for Itzak in her life. That relationship had been a survival strategem of the spring, likely to peter out after the première. They weren’t living in the same state or the same style. His life was out in public, on the road, in the intense glare of celebrity. She was at home in the country, in the woods. Every night in New York, he dropped fifty to a hundred for a meal, take-out or rushing to fancy restaurants. He was used to people staring and murmuring when he walked into a room. His luggage cost more than anything she would ever put into hers. It was a gross mismatch.
‘I rented a cottage on the Bowl. I have it for two weeks, but I won’t get there until Tuesday. That will give us two days to rehearse. Then I play the Telemann and the Escher with Kyle and the Second Brandenburg with the BSO … I’ve been hoping you can share the cottage with me and stay on.’
‘I was going to stay with Nita Banuto. She’s an old friend of mine.’
‘Oh, if you’d rather …’ He sounded desolated. She felt as if she had slapped him in the face. She felt like an idiot.
‘I didn’t know what your plans were,’ she said lamely. ‘I’d just be sleeping on her screened porch.’ Was she giving
in because she really did like him, because she didn’t want to hurt him, or because he was potentially important to her career? Was she using him? She had a brief desire to crawl off into a cave and sleep for a month. Maybe he just liked to arrive with a woman instead of wasting energy fighting off pursuit?
‘Great!’ he said briskly. ‘We’ll share the cottage. It’s my treat, don’t worry about it. My assistant took care of the arrangements already. When can you come?’
She ended up agreeing to drive to Tanglewood Tuesday. After all, with Jimmy in the house, her cats would be fed and cared for, her garden would be watered. She felt guilty for having hesitated. They could work on the piece more intensely if they stayed in the same place. That made a lot of sense, as did coming a day early. She would call Nita at once. She perceived herself as pulled between them. When she thought of little Tanya, she felt gypped. Often when she stayed with Nita in the city, she only saw Tanya at supper, and then it was bedtime. At Tanglewood, Dinah had always taken care of Tanya while Nita was rehearsing and performing. It was her time of surrogate motherhood, and now she would be giving that up. Perhaps she had let herself be bribed by what would surely be more sumptuous accommodations – they could hardly be less luxurious. On the other hand, if there was a possibility of a serious connection with Itzak, surely staying with him would promote discovering that or finally dismissing it.
‘He wants me to stay with him in his cottage. How would you feel about that? We’ve always shared your house.’
‘Because we don’t have the money for something fancier. Well, do it,’ Nita said. ‘Just don’t move to New York. I’d miss you too much.’
‘Nita, once he performs The Cat in the Moon, it’s all over. It was just convenience, coincidence.’
‘You aren’t crazy about him, are you? Yet when you got back from New York, you sounded hooked.’
‘I hardly know him yet. I don’t dare take it seriously. I can’t really believe in it, you know? Right now I’m more worried about my piece than I am about Itzak.’
‘Well, honey, if it doesn’t work out staying with him, remember we have a nice lumpy couch on the leaky screened porch just waiting for you!’
Chapter Thirty
LAURIE
Tyrone usually called Laurie once a week, no matter where he was. He was calling this time from Tokyo, where he had gone on business. He sounded rather tired and she did not think he was alone. Again she did not tell him about Jimmy.
She used as an excuse his fatigue and the sense she had that the conversation was being overheard. She suspected that she needed all the time she could steal alone with Jimmy before Tyrone and his entourage arrived and began judging the relationship. It felt fragile, but she wanted to keep it. Therefore, she was not really lying to Tyrone, just waiting for the best time to tell him. She imagined his translator as the woman in the room with him.
He always used the same translator and Laurie had noticed Celeste and the maid before her, Carmella, packing presents, expensive presents, to carry to Tokyo. She had never met the woman but had an idea of her appearance from photographs taken in groups over the years. Tyrone never brought Laurie along to Tokyo, nor his wives. It was always business, but Laurie suspected that there was also a temporary mistress, the lady translator with her downcast eyes and birdlike hands.
After all, Laurie was Tyrone’s daughter. Perhaps she was learning to use her charm as he always did. Perhaps she was finally coming to have charm to use. If Tyrone were spending a year in the country, he would find himself some nice local woman to prevent loneliness, to care for him. Maybe she could present the relationship with Jimmy acceptably to Tyrone in some such guise? She did not really think of Jimmy that way, but if she could persuade Tyrone that she did, the relationship might be less annoying to him.
Jimmy worked to exhaustion. She was unused to a man who did physical labour, for Tyrone of course worked tremendously hard but also played hard, since he did nothing more strenuous physically than lifting a telephone receiver. Tom had not had a job the second year they were married. When she dragged herself home from the gallery, he had been bored and demanding.
Although Jimmy did not lack his demanding side, the balance was different. She had moved into the boathouse, which she suspected would always be referred to that way, no matter how long she lived in it. She realized how awkward things would be if she were still in the big house when Tyrone arrived. Whether he had foreseen such a possibility or not, she understood that a place of her own was vital; once again she was amazed by his acumen.
She was engaged in fixing up the boathouse. She had hung two of her own paintings and some drawings she had bought at a discount while working at Manning Stanwyck’s gallery. She shopped for curtains, but she could not find anything that was not ticky-tacky, so she decided to make them herself. That sounded almost sweet. She was still looking-for material, wondering if she’d have to go to New York, when she learned there was a place in Hyannis that carried Marimekko fabrics. She found a perfect chintz and decided she would make simple drapes. She loved the idea of being able to say she had done it. That would sabotage her old klutz image.
That afternoon when she got back from the beach, she drove herself and her fabric to Susan’s. Susan served her iced peppermint tea and chocolate chip cookies, as they spread out the material they had cut together. Susan could help her with the difficult parts. Susan could make a sewing machine do tricks, and her machine was big and sophisticated. Laurie was generously allowing Susan to make up for being weird about Jimmy and her. Laurie had almost stopped speaking to Susan after she had thrown Jimmy out of the house. Susan ought to be glad, not half crazy, over their getting together. What could Susan want for him that was better than herself?
Laurie felt it was important for her to talk openly about Jimmy around Susan. ‘Don’t you miss having Jimmy home?’
Susan looked as shaken as she always did when Laurie mentioned Jimmy. That was one of the reasons Laurie did it. ‘He’s right next door … You spoke to Tyrone Monday? He hasn’t called me. Does he know yet?’
‘Not yet. He’s in Japan, after all. He was full of his trip and I could hardly slip a word in.’ If she didn’t yet have any idea how serious she was or wasn’t about Jimmy, at least that was an improvement that would have made her old shrink proud of her. (You want commitment, Laurie, commitment when you do not even know whom you are trying to pry commitment from, and to what? It is the commitment you desire, and not the man, wouldn’t you agree? That was her goal-oriented therapist, not the nondirective therapist.)
Further, she doubted if Jimmy had any idea what he wanted from her. Oh, he knew he wanted her, and he had all kinds of sweet ways of showing that. He was more affectionate than Tom had been or Rick. Nobody had acted so lovingly toward her since she was a little girl, back when her mother was happy with her father. ‘As his mother, don’t you think Jimmy is an extraordinary man? The better I get to know him, the more depths I find in him.’
‘He’s like me,’ Susan said unwillingly. ‘He’s extremely emotional. He covers it up in daily life better than I do – I suppose as a boy, he had to.’
Since Laurie had become involved with Jimmy, she found herself feeling strong in comparison to Susan, larger, surer. In reality she was perhaps an inch taller than Susan, but it was as if Susan were hunched over now, protecting her vital organs. Susan had always seemed to her the perfect mother, calm, giving, the woman who could set anything right, who had created a cute homey cottage in the woods. Other people’s houses might smell of expensive French scents or of furniture polish, but Susan’s house always smelled of cooking, of canning, of wood-smoke. Now she realized she had always idealized Susan. Maybe envying Jimmy for his mother had been unjust to him. Susan was certainly being unfair about their involvement.
It was good for them to work on the curtains together. Laurie was letting go of a piece of her adolescence at last, the idealization of Susan. She could remember when she had stopped imagining Willie was a grea
t artist, in art school when she had learned how out-of-date his work was. Nobody did political work any longer. She had realized then that she had grown beyond him, and she had let go of her adolescent adoration.
That evening she explained some of that to Jimmy, the part about Susan only. He agreed. ‘All you summer kids were inclined to see her as the perfect Madonna, Our Lady of the Pond. She liked playing that role.’
They were lying in her bed up in the loft, with the skylights still open to the long early July twilight. She noticed swallows zooming past. She had loved them since she was a child and her mother told her they ate mosquitoes. They were neat sleek birds who moved like nothing else, so she could always recognize them and never be mistaken and feel like an idiot when some knowledgeable adult like Willie corrected an identification she made. Swallows were like robins, guaranteed but not as prosaic.
Jimmy and she were naked, had just made love and were not yet ready to face the problem of supper. Because she had stayed so late with Susan, she had not thought about it; but then Jimmy did not seem to expect that she would.
‘I used to feel she preferred the summer kids to us,’ Jimmy said. ‘Although Johnny felt that more strongly than I did.’
‘Susan hates it when you call Siobhan Johnny.’
‘It was a ghastly name to give her. No one can pronounce it. No one can spell it. No one who sees it written ever says, Sha-van, but something tooth-breaking like See-obe-han.’
‘What made you feel Susan preferred us?’ She ran her nail lightly down his satiny back until he shuddered.
‘You were all so much better dressed and better educated, just the way she would have liked us to be. I could see her imagining not so much adopting you but getting you to adopt her.’
Laurie laughed. ‘I wanted to be her daughter. I didn’t want to be anybody’s daughter but Daddy’s, but by the time I was in high school, my mother drove me crazy. I never knew what I was coming home to, super mom or this creature who cried and carried on about Daddy and betrayal and her life ruined, like some one-horse soap opera. I was so ashamed of her I was afraid to bring friends home. Yet I felt guilty because she was so needy and she was my mother.’