"He hated even to correct anybody at work," Sukie went on, as the sublime music—its diabolical rhythms, its wonderfully cruel demands upon her dexterity— slowly faded from Jane's mind, and the sting from the side of her left thumb, where she had been ardently pressing the strings. "Though once in a while he would blow up at some proofreader who had let just oodles of things slip through."
"Well darling, it's obvious. That's why. He was keeping it all inside. When he blew up at Felicia he had thirty years' worth of rage, no wonder he took off her head."
"It's not fair to say he took off her head," Sukie said. "He just kind of—what's that phrase everybody's using these days?—wasted it."
"And then wasted himself," prompted Jane, hoping by such efficient summary to hasten this conversation along so she could return to her music; she liked to practice two hours in the mornings, from ten to noon, and then give herself a tidy lunch of cottage cheese or tuna salad spooned into a single large curved lettuce leaf. This afternoon she had set up a matinee with Darryl Van Home at one-thirty. They would work for an hour on one of the two Brahmses or an amusing little Kodaly Darryl had unearthed in a music shop tucked in the basement of a granite building on Weybosset Street just beyond the Arcade, and then have, their custom was, Asti Spumante, or some tequila milk Fidel would do in the blender, and a bath. Jane still ached, at both ends of her perineum, from their last time together. But most of the good things that come to a woman come through pain and she had been flattered that he would want her without an audience, unless you counted Fidel and Rebecca padding in and out with trays and towels; there was something precarious about Darryl's lust that was flattered and soothed by the three of them being there together and that needed the most extravagant encouragements when Jane was with him by herself. She added to Sukie irritably, "That he was clear-minded enough to carry it through is what I find surprising."
Sukie defended Clyde. "Liquor never made him confused unusually, he really drank as a kind of medicine. I think a lot of his depression must have been metabolic; he once told me his blood pressure was one-ten over seventy, which in a man his age was really wonderful."
Jane snapped, "I'm sure a lot of things about him were wonderful for a man of his age. I certainly preferred him to that deplorable Ed Parsley."
"Oh, Jane, I know you're dying to get me off the phone, but speaking of Ed..."
"Yes?"
"Have you been noticing how close Brenda has grown to the Neffs?"
"I've rather lost track of the Neffs, frankly."
"I know you have, and good for you," Sukie said. "Lexa and I always thought he abused you and you were much too gifted for his little group; it really was just jealousy, his saying your bowing or whatever he said was prissy."
"Thank you, sweet."
"Anyway, the two of them and Brenda are apparently thick as thieves now, they eat out at the Bronze Barrel or that new French place over toward Pettaquamscutt all the time and evidently Ray and Greta have encouraged her to put in for Ed's position at the church and become the new Unitarian minister. Apparently the Lovecrafts are all for it too and Horace you know is on the church board."
"But she's not ordained. Don't you have to be ordained? The Episcopalians where I fill in are very strict about things like that; you can't even join as a member unless a bishop has put his hands somewhere, I think on your head."
"No, but she is in the parsonage with those brats of theirs—absolutely undisciplined, neither Ed or Brenda believed in ever saying No—and making her the new minister might be more graceful than getting her to leave. Maybe there's a course or something you can take by mail."
"But can she preach? You do have to preach."
"Oh I don't think that would be any real problem. Brenda has wonderful posture. She was studying to be a modern dancer when she met Ed at an Adlai Stevenson rally; she was in one of the warm-up acts and he was to ask the blessing. He told me about it more than once, I used to wonder if he wasn't still in love with her after all."
"She is a ridiculous vapid woman," Jane said.
"Oh Jane, don't."
"Don't what?"
"Don't sound like that. That's the way we used to talk about Felicia, and look what happened."
Sukie had become very small and curled over at her end of the line, like a lettuce leaf wilting. "Are you blaming us?" Jane asked her briskly. "Her sad sot of a husband I would think instead should be blamed."
"On the surface, sure, but we did cast that spell, and put those things in the cookie jar when we got tiddly, and things did keep coming out of her mouth, Clyde mentioned it to me so innocently, he tried to get her to go to a doctor but she said medicine ought to be entirely nationalized in this country the way it is in England and Sweden. She hated the drug companies, too."
"She was full of hate, darling. It was the hate coming out of her mouth that did her in, not a few harmless feathers and pins. She had lost touch with her womanhood. She needed pain to remind her she was a woman. She needed to get down on her knees and drink some horrible man's nice cold come. She needed to be beaten, Clyde was right about that, he just went at it too hard."
"Please, Jane. You frighten me when you talk like that, the things you say."
"Why not say them? Really, Sukie, you sound infantile." Sukie was a weak sister, Jane thought. They put up with her for the gossip she gathered and that kid-sister shine she used to bring to their Thursdays but she really was just a conceited immature girl, she couldn't please Van Home the way that Jane did, that burning stretching; even Greta Neff, washed-out old bag as she was with her granny glasses and pathetic pedantic accent, was more of a woman in this sense, a woman who could hold whole kingdoms of night within her, burning. "Words are just words," she added.
"They're not: they make things happen!" Sukie wailed, her voice shrivelled to a padietic wheedle. "Now two people are dead and two children are orphans because of us!"
"I don't think you can be an orphan after a certain age," Jane said. "Stop talking nonsense." Her ‘s's hissed like spit on a stove top. "People stew in their own juice."
"If I hadn't slept with Clyde he wouldn't have gone so crazy, I'm sure of it. He loved me so, Jane. He used to just hold my foot in his two hands and kiss between each pair of toes."
"Of course he did. That's the kind of thing men arc supposed to do. They're supposed to adore us. They're shits, try to keep that in mind. Men are absolutely shits, but we get them in the end because we can suffer better. A woman can outsuffer a man every time." Jane felt huge in her impatience; the black notes she had swallowed that morning bristled within her, alive. Who would have thought the old Lutheran had so much jism? "There will always be men for you, sweetie," she told Sukie. "Don't bother your head about
Clyde any more. You gave him what he asked for, it's not your fault he couldn't handle it. Listen, truly. I must run." Jane Smart lied, "I have a lesson coming in at eleven."
In fact her lesson was not until four. She would rush back from the old Lenox place aching and steamy-clean and the sight of those grubby little hands on her pure ivory keys mangling some priceless simplified melody of Mozart's or Mendelssohn's would make her want to take the metronome and with its heavy base mash those chubby fingers as if she were grinding beans in a pestle. Since Van Home had come into her life Jane was more passionate than she had ever been about music, that golden high-arched exit from this pit of pain and ignominy.
"She sounded so harsh and strange," Sukie said to Alexandra over the phone a few days later. "It's as if she thinks she has the inside track with Darryl and is fighting to protect it."
"That's one of his diabolical arts, to give each of us that impression. I'm really quite sure it's me he loves," said Alexandra, laughing with cheerful hopelessness. "He has me doing these bigger pieces of sculpture now, varnished papier-machd is what this Saint-Phalle woman uses, I don't know how she does it, the glue gets all over your fingers, into your hair, yukk. I get one side of a figure looking right and then the other side has no shape at all, just a bunch of loose ends and lumps."