And so, three days before Valentine’s Day, he’d ordered the gladioli.
Oh, the roses? Lois had sent them to herself — perhaps they would light a flame, and fan it…
And the lilacs? They were paid for in cash at the Boston florist’s — both Daniel and Lois separately winkled that information out of the proprietor. But the lady would say no more — probably knew no more. So Lois had to be content with the discovery that the deception she had concocted had doubled itself. Apparently she did have an admirer. It would not be the first time.
Daniel’s interior was again contorted with anxiety. Two other bouquets! His wife was so desirable that unknown persons — persons unknown to him, anyway — sent flowers to her. Attention must be paid. And you can say this of him: he had a good memory, a strong resolve, and an ability, once something was brought to his notice, to keep noticing. Certain attributes could not be changed — he found numbers more interesting than anything else — but an affection that had once been planted in his heart now belatedly flourished. Nature does have its way with us.
After a time Lois found herself smiling more readily.
The day after the birthday party the Bells went to the Caribbean, and on Valentine’s Day they were still there. Early that morning, while Andy still slept, McCauley padded to the office of the little resort, and collected the camellias he’d ordered, and took his pill. He returned to the cabin and strewed the petals over her naked form. Brushed by this silken shower, she opened the hazel eyes that had brought many men to their knees, some literally, and smiled at the one she’d chosen, and slipped out of bed to go to the bathroom, disturbing only a few blossoms. She came back and lay on the petals and opened herself to her husband. As he was entering, she remembered the lilacs she had impulsively arranged to be sent anonymously to her caterer and wondered if they had done mischief or good or anything at all, and then — Oh, my love, my darling, McCauley panted — she stopped thinking about the flowers and devoted herself to the work at hand.
Conveniences
Amanda Jenkins was having a little trouble with her article, “Connubis.”
“Not cannabis,” she explained to Frieda, the girl from downstairs. “Do you really think anybody would read yet another dissertation on grass? Be your age.”
“I’d rather be yours,” said Frieda, who was fifteen to Amanda’s twenty. “What’s connubis?”
Amanda hesitated. Ben Stewart, eavesdropping from the bedroom, could hear for a few moments nothing but the sound of crockery being stacked. He and Amanda had agreed that dishes would be her task, laundry his. Now, at five thirty in the afternoon, she and her young friend were washing last night’s plates, which had lain odorously in the sink all day.
“Connubis,” Amanda resumed, “a coined word, refers to being married. Or being as if married.”
“Like you and Ben,” Frieda said.
“More or less.”
Ben wondered why she was so wary. They were indeed living together as if married, a conventional enough arrangement these days. Only the difference between their ages was exceptional. But that difference was a mere ten years…
“Actually,” Amanda was saying, “I am not Benjamin’s lover but his daughter.”
“Stop it,” Frieda sighed.
“His niece,” Amanda smoothly corrected. “By marriage,” she further invented. “His relationship with my aunt soured considerably when he fell in love with me. We eloped. Now we live in fear of detection. If a large weeping gray-haired woman should one day appear — Ben’s wife, my aunt, is a great deal older than me — please tell her…” She paused. Frieda waited. Ben waited too.
“Tell her what?” Frieda said at last.
“To peddle her vapors elsewhere,” Amanda said triumphantly.
“Mandy!” shouted Ben.
She appeared in the bedroom doorway, curly-haired and ardent. Her T-shirt said AUTEUR.
“Please stop feeding nonsense to poor Frieda,” said Ben. “What will she think?”
Amanda joined him on the bed and lay on her side, propped on an elbow. “She’ll discount the nonsense and think what she already thinks. That we’re libertines.”
“Ah. And are we that?”
“I don’t know. What are we, Benjy?”
Ben considered the question. He himself — dark, thickset, Brooklyn-born — was a respectful sort of person. He particularly respected Amanda, whose upright Maine family he also respected. Once, years ago, he had loved her older sister, presently married. Now he loved Amanda, but in a casual way. And impudent Amanda — what was she? At the least, an excellent student of literature. He wished that the college kids he taught were as clever.
“I am a conformist,” he said, illustrating his words by curving his hand around her breast. She giggled. He muzzled the Auteur, then put his chin into her curls and noticed that her double stood in the doorway. Frieda’s T-shirt read GODOLPHIN HIGH, CLASS OF ’82. “But, Frieda, you don’t even live in Godolphin,” Ben remarked across Amanda’s head.
“The shirt belongs to my cousin,” Frieda said with her usual blush.
Godolphin was the town — really a wedge of Boston — in which Ben, who worked in New York, and Amanda, who went to school in Pennsylvania, had elected to spend the summer. They had sublet a snug apartment at the top of a three-decker house. On the first floor lived an old couple, and on the second lived Frieda’s aunt, Rennie, a young divorcée with a son at camp. This aunt exhausted herself day and night in her antiques store. Frieda herself was a child of Manhattan. Her parents, both art historians, were spending their summer in Italy, and Frieda had chosen Godolphin over Florence’s I Tatti.
“Your cousin would not recognize his garment,” Ben said gravely to Frieda.
Amanda was on her feet again. “Come into the kitchen with us, Ben,” she said agreeably. “Have you been asleep all afternoon?”
Ben got out of bed. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
He used the bathroom, then paused in the dining room. He and Amanda were in the habit of eating at the round table in the kitchen and reserving the heavy oak table in the dining room for work. Their two typewriters, one at either end, looked like combatants. Each machine was surrounded by papers and books, Ben’s piles orderly, Amanda’s in disarray. Though he had no intention of working at this hour, Ben sat down in front of his typewriter in order to groan.
Frieda had an affinity for jambs. Now she stood aslant between the kitchen and dining room. “What are you writing about?”
“Hawthorne,” he said. “The first novel,” he expanded. “Name of Fanshawe,” he summed up.