“This could turn out to be important, Fred.”
“If it does I’ll let you know.”
“What’s come over you? You never talk back to me, Fred. You always try to make me feel as if I’m persecuting you. Now all of a sudden you’re making with flip remarks.”
“It’s the moon. I’m having my period. Why all the sudden interest in the Senator?”
“He’s news, isn’t he?” She tossed her head back to drink from the pint and after a while she said, “Look at those billboards. Constant appeal to envy and fear and greed—a whole population dedicated to making the world safe for time-release antiperspirants. It’s about time we started tearing the whole thing down so we can build something decent, isn’t it?”
“You sound like my son.”
“Then you’ve got a bright son.”
“Alec? Clever sometimes; not bright. I had hopes for him once, but he had endless sieges of asthma and mononucleosis—he’s twenty-two and he’s only a sophomore; you can hardly call that bright.”
“Will you all now turn to page seventy-two in the hymnal.”
“I’m sorry. You got me off on it.”
“You’re upset, aren’t you? What’s on your mind, Fred? Lie down on the couch and tell me all about it.”
He looked at her. “It’s a stinking trap we’re in, isn’t it?”
“I hope this is just a mood, Fred. Just a stage.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a little late for you to think about going back and changing anything.”
“Did I say I wanted to?”
“The signs are showing. You’re having second thoughts. Male menopause. I don’t suppose you’ve mentioned it to Celia.”
“No.”
“Naturally. If you had she’d have rammed something up your ass to stiffen your backbone. Celia can get more militant than that hairy son of yours.”
He thought of Alec, hands always in his pockets, his unbreakable facial apathy, his scorn for the adult world which he somehow intended to reject and enter all at the same time.
She said, “It’s my job, Fred, you know that. I’m obliged to remind you of certain things whenever I see signs of—uncertainty—among us. I’ve been entrusted with this duty and that means I can’t let any of you spoil things because it would reflect on me if you did. Now you’ve got Celia and you’ve got Alec and Barbara and somewhere a long way from here you’ve got a mother and two sisters and three brothers, and all of them can be reached.”
“You don’t have to shout warnings at me, Nicole.”
“You can go now, Fred. If anybody saw us together and happens to ask, tell them I asked you about Forrester’s tour of inspection. Incidentally, you never did tell me when he’s coming.”
“I didn’t, did I?” He got out of her car and walked over to his own.
He drove west into a tired old residential district. Big trees, leafless, arched the street and threw patterns of spindly shade that fell long and surreal in the late-afternoon sunlight, and the stately old houses clung to a decaying dignity.
The houses on Stewart were small and the lawns parched. Celia had the lawn sprinklers going and Alec’s bright yellow car squatted at the curb on its bald tires. Winslow drove into the dirt alley behind the house and parked in the open because they had converted the garage into a party room last year.
He found Celia cold-creaming her skin against the dry air. She glanced in the mirror and said, “I do look a fright.”
“You look fine.” He kissed her cheek and picked up the glass of whiskey and ice that stood beaded on the dressing table. “You look gorgeous.” He took a sip and went into the bathroom stripping off his uniform as he went, showered and shaved and lay on the bed in his underwear, waiting for the after-shower sweat to dry.
“Should I wear this dress?”
“Why not?”
“Fred, you haven’t even looked at it.”
She stood by the open closet holding a loosely pleated yellow dress on a hanger, spreading it out over her forearm and giving it the uncertain appraisal of a shopper in a department store. She had always been lean and she had become a little bony the past few years—there was folded flesh at her elbows—but her posture was very good, she didn’t have the caved-in slump of underweight middle age. She was in her bra and slip and her breasts looked full and round in the thin pink hammocks. Her face was chiseled and lovely but strong rather than warm. She had the power to attract men’s second looks, and she did not look like the mother of a twenty-two-year-old son. Winslow said, “The dress is fine. Come here.”
“No. You’d muss my hair, I’d leak all night, and anyway we haven’t time.”
“So damned practical.” He rolled his feet to the floor and started to dress. “I saw the yellow car outside. Alec in his room?”
“He’s writing a paper for one of his courses.” She pushed the straight brown hair back from her eyes and gave him a smile that was distant and distracted; she presented her back to him and he zipped her up and she waited without moving until he gave her rump the ritual hand pat.
She went to the closet to get her sandals. She had the legs of a fashion model and he thought, I’m lucky; why can’t I just think about that? But he was profoundly depressed. What was survival worth if it meant the need for endless caution? Mere existence wasn’t enough: there had to be the promise of freedom from terror, there had to be hope.
She said, “Barbara’s letter is on the table next to you.”
He read it with a creeping sense of guilt. He rarely thought of Barbara except when her letters arrived, punctually every week, and when the headmaster mailed her monthly report card.
Her letter was full of the impatient strugglings of a nonverbal teen-ager to find something to say. Last Christmas she had come home for two weeks and shocked him—her skirt as high as her fanny, coping with adult bras and her first pair of false eyelashes. He was too concerned to be amused: she was fourteen and he wondered how soon she would be experimenting with grass and pills and vaginal foam and her first orgasm, if she hadn’t done already. In a few years’ time would she be freaked out in a pad somewhere with walls papered with posters of Fidel and Mao and the Panthers? The orthodontist says my braces can come off in May. At least she could spell. He remembered the ridiculous silver-frosted paint she had put on her fingernails. Oh, Daddy, I mean, it’s only sort of, like, you know, everybody wears nail polish, hey?
He put a clean shirt on. “I’ve told them and told them and told them no starch in the collars. Christ.”
“What’s come over you?”
“Nothing.”
“Rubbish.”
“Forget it.”
“Fred.”
“Do we have to talk it to death? All right, look, we’ve somehow turned into middle-aged, middle-class Americans. Doesn’t that frighten you? With a slightly retarded son in college and a disgustingly typical fourteen-year-old daughter. We—”
“He’s not retarded! For God’s sake.”
“All right, he’s dumb.”
“He’s as bright as you are. It isn’t his fault he’s a couple of years behind the rest of them; he was ill. But he’s perfectly—”
“Fine,” he conceded. “Let’s not argue the point. Whatever they are, they’re ordinary American kids—doesn’t that scare you?”
“Why ever should it?”
“What on earth is going to happen when Alec and Barbara find out?”
“Fred.”
Her tone was different and he straightened from his shoelaces to look at her.
She said, “Do you know the risk we take just having this conversation?”
“We have to trust each other, don’t we?” But he knew what she meant. When they had serious things to discuss privately they always went outdoors.
He rammed his shirt tails into his trousers and started into the hall. “Want a drink?”
“Yes.”
He went to the little portable bar in the living room. From the back of the house he heard the muted racket of the radio, a hard-rock beat that meant Alex had opened his door. In a moment his son appeared in sandals, tight chino pants and a fatigue shirt. Alec mumbled something by way of greeting and Winslow said, “Taking five?”