Craig has brought two women with him, unexpectedly. They are tall, blond, silent, and look like twins but are not. Their clothes are permeated with marijuana. When they were introduced, one was wearing a Sony Walkman and the other had a tortoiseshell hair ornament in the shape of a turtle.
Now it is getting dark and we are all having spritzers. I have had too many spritzers. I feel that everyone is looking at everyone else’s naked feet. The twins who are not twins have baby toes that curl under, so you can see the plum-colored polish on only four toes. Craig has square toenails and calluses on his heels which come from playing tennis. Oliver’s long, tan feet are rubbing my legs. The dryness of his soles feels wonderful as he rubs his feet up and down the sticky sweat that has dried on my calves. Barbara has long toenails, painted bronze. Sven’s big toes are oblong and shapeless, the way balloons look when you first begin to blow them up. My toenails aren’t polished, because I can hardly bend over. I look at Oliver’s feet and mine and try to imagine a composite baby foot. As Sven pours, it is the first time I realize that my drink is gone and I have been crunching ice.
In our bedroom, Oliver cups his hands around my hard stomach as I lie on my side facing away from him and kisses my hair from underneath, slowly moving down my spine to where his lips rest on one hipbone.
“My glass of ice water just made a ring on the night table,” he says. He takes a sip of water. I hear him sigh and put the glass back on the table.
“I want to get married,” I mumble into the pillow. “I don’t want to end up bitter, like Barbara.”
He snorts. “She’s bitter because she kept getting married, and when the last one died he left almost everything to Craig. She’s bored with Sven, now that his pictures aren’t selling anymore.”
“Oliver,” I say, and am surprised at how helpless I sound. “You sounded like your mother just then. At least talk sense to me.”
Oliver slides his cheek to my buttock. “Remember the first time you rubbed my back and it felt so good that I started laughing?” Oliver says. “And you didn’t know why I was doing it and you got insulted? And the time you got drunk and sang along with Eddie Fisher on ‘Wish You Were Here’ and you were so good I laughed until I got the hiccups?” He rolls over. “We’re married,” he says. He slides his cheek to the hollow of my back. “Let me tell you what happened on the crosstown bus last week,” he goes on. “A messenger got on. Twenty or so. Carrying a pile of envelopes. Started talking CB chatter to the baby on the lap of a woman sitting next to him. The woman and the baby got off at Madison, and between there and Third he started addressing the bus in general. He said, ‘Everybody’s heard of pie in the sky. They say Smokey in the Sky. Smokey the Bear’s what they call the cops. But you know what I say? I say Bear in the Air. It’s like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—LSD. LSD is acid.’ He had on running shoes and jeans and a white button-down shirt with a tie hanging around his neck.”
“Why did you tell me that story?” I say.
“Anybody can get it together to do something perfunctory. The minute that messenger got off the bus he tied that tie and delivered that crap he was carrying.” He turns again, sighs. “I can’t talk about marriage in this crazy house. Let’s walk on the beach.”
“It’s so late,” I say. “It must be after midnight. I’m exhausted from sitting all day, drinking and doing nothing.”
“I’ll tell you the truth,” he whispers. “I can’t stand to hear Barbara and Sven making love.”
I listen, wondering if he’s putting me on. “That’s mice running through the walls,” I say.
Sunday afternoon, and Barbara and I are walking the beach, a little tipsy after our picnic lunch. I wonder what she’d think if I told her that her son and I are not married. She gives the impression that what she hasn’t lived through she has imagined. And much of what she says comes true. She said the pool would crack; she warned Craig that the girls weren’t to be trusted, and, sure enough, this morning they were gone, taking with them the huge silver bowl she keeps lemons and limes in, a silver meat platter with coiled-serpent handles, and four silver ladles — almost as if they’d planned some bizarre tea party for themselves. He’d met them, he said, at Odeon, in the city. That was his explanation. Craig is the only person I know who gets up in the morning, brushes his teeth, and takes a Valium blue. Now we have left him playing a game called Public Assistance with Sven, at the side of the pool. Oliver was still upstairs sleeping when I came down at eleven. “I’ll marry you,” he said sleepily as I climbed out of bed. “I had a dream that I didn’t and we were always unhappy.”
I am in the middle of rambling on to Barbara, telling her that Oliver’s dreams amaze me. They seem to be about states of feeling; they don’t have any symbols in them, or even moments. He wakes up and his dreams have summarized things. I want to blurt out, “We lied to you, years ago. We said we got married, and we didn’t. We had a fight and a flat tire and it rained, and we checked into an inn and just never got married.”
“My first husband, Cadby, collected butterflies,” she says. “I could never understand that. He’d stand by a little window in our bedroom — we had a basement apartment in Cambridge, just before the war — and he’d hold the butterflies in the frames to the light, as if the way the light struck them told him something their wings wouldn’t have if they’d flown by.” She looks out to the ocean. “Not that there were butterflies flying around Cambridge,” she says. “I just realized that.”
I laugh.
“Not what you were talking about at all?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Lately I catch myself talking just to distract myself. Nothing seems real but my body, and my body is so heavy.”
She smiles at me. She has long auburn hair, streaked with white, and curly bangs that blow every which way, like the tide foaming into pools.
Both sons, she has just told me, were accidents. “Now I’m too old, and for the first time I’d like to do it again. I envy men for being able to conceive children late in life. You know that picture of Picasso and his son, Claude? Robert Capa took it. It’s in Sven’s darkroom — the postcard of it, tacked up. They’re on the beach, and the child is being held forward, bigger than its father, rubbing an eye. Being held by Picasso, simply smiling and rubbing an eye.”
“What wine was that we drank?” I say, tracing a heart in the sand with my big toe.
“La Vieille Ferme blanc,” she says. “Nothing special.” She picks up a shell — a small mussel shell, black outside, opalescent inside. She drops it carefully into one cup of her tiny bikini top. In her house are ferns, in baskets on the floor, and all around them on top of the soil sit little treasures: bits of glass, broken jewelry, shells, gold twine. One of the most beautiful is an asparagus fern that now cascades over a huge circle of exposed flashbulbs stuck in the earth; each summer I gently lift the branches and peek, the way I used to go to my grandmother’s summer house and open her closet to see if the faint pencil markings of the heights of her grandchildren were still there.
“You love him?” she says.
In five years, it is the first time we have ever really talked.
Yes, I nod.
“I’ve had four husbands. I’m sure you know that — that’s my claim to fame, and ridicule, forever. But the first died, quite young. Hodgkin’s disease. There’s a seventy-percent cure now, I believe, for Hodgkin’s disease. The second one left me for a lady cardiologist. You knew Harold. And now you know Sven.” She puts another shell in her bikini, centering it over her nipple. “Actually, I only had two chances out of four. Sven would like a little baby he could hold in front of his face on the beach, but I’m too old. The body of a thirty-year-old, and I’m too old.”