“If my husband ever extended himself in the least with our children, I think I’d faint,” she says good-naturedly. “I’ll be happy to take you up on your offer. If you don’t mind, I’ll have all of them pile into your car tomorrow.”
“No boys!” Cassie shrieks in the background. “They have to take the bus to school, Mommy.”
“She’s as mean to her brothers as they are to her.” Gennine sighs. “How I envy you for having only one child. How we all envy you for the way you’ve worked things out.”
It surprises him that anyone has given thought to his and Francine’s division of responsibility. When he first met Gennine, he was amused because she was something of a flirt, but what she has just said makes him revise his opinion. Perhaps it wasn’t that, but an openness in expressing her admiration for them, conveyed in constant smiles rather than by words.
He tells himself silently, as he often does, that what makes Francine happy makes him happy. Because that is certainly the way it should be, and if he doesn’t let envy or misgivings creep in, if his own problems don’t get tangled up with hers, he can simply share in her happiness.
Feeling almost elated — though he has to fight the thought that his high spirits are because he’s sure he can outskate her, rather than because he’s happy she got the promotion — he puts on a jacket, starts the car, and backs out of the driveway, heading off toward the shopping center. He looks at the empty passenger’s seat and wonders if Julie’s absence is what is making him feel suddenly younger. He clicks a Ziggy Marley tape into the tape deck — something he bought on impulse a month or so before, remembering Bryant Heppelson’s love of reggae — and lets the music transport him back to New York, to a time when he really was much younger. He squints in the strong afternoon sunlight, imagining he is Bryant driving all those hours to Vermont to sing his heart out in a garage band. At a red light he closes his eyes and conjures up Vermont: the road winding above Bristol Falls, the Middlebury ski area; all that green, and blue skies. But just as quickly he realizes that he is picturing the few parts of Vermont he has seen; he doesn’t even know where in Vermont Bryant traveled to. In fact, he’s out of touch with Bryant, except for the annual Christmas card exchange. Bryant and his wife moved to Connecticut the year before. Too much crime and unhappiness in the city to raise children there, he wrote on the card. In the picture he enclosed, Melly looked much the same, though she was flanked by two towheaded boys, three and four. Who could say where that hair came from, with Bryant’s brown hair and Melly’s hair its natural auburn, instead of the pale blond she used to dye it. The photograph had fluttered out of the card and landed on the rug, face up, and Francine had snatched it up as if it were some secret, then looked at it, puzzled, and said: “Oh yes. Of course. Of course they had a second child …” Then she had put the picture to her lips and kissed it.
At the shopping center, he parks and walks to the expensive lingerie store that recently opened. There is no one inside except a teenage clerk. He can read her mind, as he walks to a rack of panties and flips through.
Francine wears size five, and because so many are so pretty and he can’t decide, he selects three: black with appliquéd white lace hearts; a pair of sheer pink, with just a string through the crotch; white ones that would be prim except for the low-cut front, with tiny daisies embroidered there.
He pays cash and has the girl cut off the tags. He gives them to her to tear up and puts the pants in his pocket, knowing he’s shocking her. When Francine gets home, he will shock her, too, by giving her the pants. Or maybe he will wait until they are in the bar and have had a few sips of champagne, then pass them to her under the table and ask her to change into a pair in the ladies’ room.
In the skating rink he feels almost heady with the perfection of their marriage. In the wild circling of the ice-skating rink something shakes loose inside him — some fear, or fears, that he had been holding inside, that he suddenly sees he can just banish.
He finds that he doesn’t want to outskate her, but that he wants his arm around her waist; he feels as romantic, amid the flushfaced teenagers, as a figure in a Currier and Ives painting, gliding on a frozen lake with the most beautiful girl in the world. He says to her, making them both smile, that after one more turn around the rink, long scarves will suddenly materialize around their necks to float backward in the breeze. In his mind’s eye, they already exist in perfect miniature: a painting reduced to greeting-card size, or little figures in a snow dome, who appear to be in motion once the flurry of snow begins to sift down around them.
She had told him, in the bar, that she had a real bias against Brits; she had to force herself to act sanely in spite of her embarrassing prejudice, because to her they were always too pale, and stuffy, and stuck in their ways of thinking. She couldn’t believe he’d think she’d be receptive to Nigel Mawbry’s flirting.
They take a breather and drink Cokes from paper cups at the refreshment stand. An older couple, the man with white, wavy hair, his wife with a still-girlish figure, stand sipping hot chocolate from paper cups. There are one or two couples their age, Stefan realizes, once he’s out of the center of action, surveying it.
Francine’s nose is red. Little ringlets of hair lie plastered to her forehead. He touches the rim of his Coke cup to hers, and they both smile. “Maybe bowling would be fun, too,” she says. “I give you credit for coming up with a very good idea.”
“Need me to fix your skate laces?” he says, nodding his head toward one of the tables.
She swats his shoulder. “The place you got the panties,” she says. “Did the girl really blush when you put them into your pocket? How could you do such a thing?”
When she goes to the bathroom, he pretends he is going to follow her in. A teenage girl looks over her shoulder at him. He tells Francine about that, too, when she comes out.
“I remembered my old high school trick of putting my tube of lipstick in my brassiere,” she says, smacking her brightly painted red lips together. “It all comes back to me.”
“Let me see where it is,” he says, touching his fingertips to her breast and moving closer.
“Stop!” she says. “People will look!”
“I can still scandalize you,” he says. “That’s wonderful.”
“I can still kiss lipstick on your cheek and make both of us look foolish,” she says. “Better watch out.”
Again, they glide onto the ice. The music sounds like music from a carousel. She gives him a little hug before they start to gain speed. As they circle the rink, they begin to say which person they’re passing resembles which animal. The old man with white hair they saw before looks, in profile, exactly like a camel.
“That one’s Melanie Griffith!” Francine says, a little too loudly, as they whiz past.
“Melanie Griffith’s not an animal,” he says.
“I don’t care!” she says. “She does look just like Melanie Griffith.”
“She does look just like Melanie Grifith,” he echoes.
“She does,” Francine says.
“She does,” he says.
She bends forward as he lightly squeezes her ribs.
“I want to come skating all the time,” he says. “Agree, or I’ll never let go of you.”
“Who are you fooling? You know a good thing when you see it. You were never about to let me go. Kissing on the first date!”
“You provoked me.”
“Fucking on the first date,” she says.