WHEN I WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING VERY BRIGHT SUN was shining in the window of the bedroom and Beverly and Belinda, in their red bathrobes, were sitting on the bed. Belinda held a huge pair of scissors and was cutting little pieces out of a section of morning paper, whereas Beverly, more serious, was reading a book.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Hi,” Beverly said. “Would you like me to read to you?”
She wiggled a little closer.
“Don’t, Beverly,” Belinda said, throwing her sister a dark look. “I’m cutting!”
“So what, I can’t sit still forever,” Beverly said. “Besides, you aren’t cutting anything out. You’re just making a mess.”
“Still cutting!” Belinda insisted, as Jean came through the door. She too was in a red bathrobe, and she held two mugs of coffee.
“I hope you like company in the morning,” she said. “Around here you get it whether you like it or not.”
“He likes it,” Belinda said.
Jean sat one mug on the bedside table and carefully climbed on the bed, holding the other.
I felt vaguely troubled about the night, since I found I had no memory of having made love. The bed was very comfortable, and I had been very tired. I had a vague sense that something might have happened, later in the night, but I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps I had just gone to sleep and slept all night.
Still, if I had been a big disappointment, Jean seemed to be weathering it nicely. She looked quite happy, sitting on the bed with her girls. They formed a bright ensemble in their red bathrobes. Belinda sat across my feet, so that it was not easy for me to sit up and drink my coffee. There was a nice smell in the bed, namely the smell of young females and one woman, mixing with the smell of the hot coffee.
Jean and the girls were exchanging merry, conspiratorial looks, as if they were in on some secret that I didn’t know.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Then I happened to glance at the room and saw that all the furniture was covered with sheets or bedspreads. None of the primary antiques were visible at all.
I must have looked surprised, because Jean and Beverly laughed and Belinda went into a paroxysm of giggles. She giggled so hard that the others began to laugh at her.
“It certainly is cheerful around here in the morning,” I said.
Belinda lay across my legs, gasping for breath and waving the scissors around.
“Be careful with those scissors, Belinda,” Jean said. “Don’t you think it’s time you girls got cracking?”
“I do,” Beverly said. She left. Belinda continued to loll across my legs.
“Get going, Belinda. Play school,” Jean said.
“Sleepy,” Belinda said. “He’s still in bed.”
“Yeah, but he isn’t being picked up in ten minutes.”
“He could take us in the soft car,” Belinda suggested.
“Nope, get going,” Jean said in firm tones.
Belinda yawned. “Got up too early,” she said.
Seeing that her words had no effect, Jean picked her up and carried her off. As she was being carried Belinda fixed me with an upside-down look.
“Come and get us in the soft car,” she said.
“Don’t make her any promises,” Jean said.
In a few minutes I heard a honk and raised up to look out the window. The girls, dressed now, were being picked up by a woman in a station wagon. Beverly was going willingly, Belinda dawdling across the yard, urged on by Jean, who was still in her bathrobe. Belinda’s movements were so slow as to be imperceptible. Finally, with several people yelling at her, she gave up and went on to the car, which immediately left.
A minute later Jean came back to the room and hopped on the bed.
“I’ve never known a child who could dawdle like that,” she said. “She’s always up to a contest of wills, whereas I’m not, always. Sometimes I win, sometimes she wins.”
“It must make life interesting.”
“It makes it exhausting,” Jean said.
But she didn’t look exhausted. She looked out the window for a moment, as if trying to remember something. She appeared to be extremely fresh and alert. I had no idea what thought or thoughts she might be busy with.
“It’s very interesting, that you’re never quite free of kids,” she said, slipping out of her bathrobe. She got back under the covers with me. “What’s gonna happen now is that Belinda’s gonna fake being sick. She hates school because she can’t dominate it, plus she doesn’t want to miss whatever might happen with you here. I know her so well I can imagine every move she makes. Today she’s gonna fake a stomachache, vaguest of all ills. Who can disprove a stomachache?”
“How long do we have before this happens?” I asked.
Jean looked at the bedside clock.
“A couple of hours, if we’re lucky,” she said.
I was still feeling guilty because I couldn’t remember the night.
“Did anything at all happen last night?” I asked.
Jean looked amused. “Nothing appropriate to such a grand evening,” she said. “How many hours had you been awake before you hit this bed?”
I tried to count up, mentally.
“Never mind,” Jean said. “It doesn’t matter. I got to watch you at a time when you were totally defenseless, which was interesting.”
“Did you reach any conclusions?” I asked.
Jean rolled on top of me, looking me in the eye from very close range. She ran a finger across my lips. Her eyes were green flecked with brown. She didn’t weigh much and she seemed to be in an awfully good humor. Looking at her alert face an inch away I felt myself sliding quickly down into love. The feeling was exactly analogous to one of the first feelings I could remember, that of sliding down the big slide on the school playground in Solino, Texas, when I was a young boy. It was a very slick slide. Once you climbed to the top all you had to do was lift your hands and whoosh, you were gone so rapidly that it created a funny sensation in the stomach and the groin. Looking into Jean’s eyes, I felt the same sensation. I had lifted my hands—now I was gone.
“I love you,” I said.
“Ha,” she said. “You better do something about it before Belinda persuades them she’s got cancer.”
“You could take the phone off the hook,” I suggested.
“No, because you never know,” she said. “She might really get sick. A swing might hit her in the head and give her a concussion. A lot of things can happen to tiny kids. It worries me to have it off the hook.”
“Forget it,” I said.
Fortunately the morning passed without the phone having rung a single time. We talked several times about getting up but we didn’t get up. Finally we both noticed that we were so hungry we felt hollow, so Jean went downstairs and made two enormous tuna fish sandwiches, and brought them back to the bedroom. We wolfed them down, and drank some milk.
“It’s amazing how good tuna fish can taste when you’re really hungry,” Jean said. “It’s almost better than sex.”
“Last night you said it would probably be nice if we got married,” I reminded her.
She shrugged. “That was last night,” she said. “What makes you think it would work? It practically never does.”
“I think I’m ready for it,” I said. “I don’t think I was before.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “How can you ever know if you’re ready for a marriage when you’re not in it? All you do is fantasize about the nice parts. Then you actually get in it and lose track of the nice parts. Or else what was once nice stops seeming nice.”
“I think you’re being deliberately pessimistic,” I said.
Jean rubbed my hair again, as if I were a dog.
“Well, you’re sweet but it’s no deal,” she said, grinning. “I think I’d rather hold you in reserve, for the occasional orgy.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to get bored with you,” she said. “Nor do I want you to get bored with me. I’d rather marry someone I was already a little bored with. Then there’d be no decline.”
“You wouldn’t really marry someone you were bored with, though,” I said. “That would be insanity.”
“That would be practicality,” she said. “But you’re right. I’m not capable of it. Still, it doesn’t affect my position vis-à-vis you.”
I was beginning to feel a little sad, suddenly. Jean seemed awfully clearheaded. I knew it was simplistic to think that love always followed sex, but I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that way. We had had a fairly passionate morning, but the passion hadn’t wrought any great changes, as it was supposed to. It had made us fonder and closer, but apparently it had not been all-consuming. Jean was cheerful, but she was far from consumed. I was getting depressed at the thought that I might not get to live with her.
I guess my worry showed. Jean sat her plate on the TV and came back into my arms. I couldn’t think of what to say next. We held hands for a while.
“I like the thought of you being out there, you know,” she said. “Off in odd states, where I’ve never been, finding things at flea markets. I think that’s your life. I know it’s charming to wake up in this lovely bedroom, with my delightful daughters piled on top of you. No doubt the three of us could keep you amused by one means or another for quite a while. But I just don’t think it’s your life. You’re just getting scared of being lonely or something, so you think you want it to be.”
“But my life is such a peculiar life,” I said. “All I do is buy things. I spend all my time at flea markets or in junk shops or at auctions. Don’t you think I’m capable of a more normal existence?”
“I think you’re just getting lonely,” she said. “You’re leading a more interesting life than you think. You just don’t realize it’s interesting.”
She gave me a quick kiss.
“I think you’re romanticizing all this middle-class domesticity we’ve got around here,” she said.
“But I don’t even know if I still like scouting,” I said. “The part that’s beginning to depress me is seeing all the hope people invest in those objects.”
Jean grew a little somber. “That’s true,” she said. “It’s mainly all those women, hoping it’ll be better if they can just find the right thing to buy. I used to do that myself.”
“Such as the day I took the icon away from you?” I asked. “You must have been pinning a lot of hopes on that icon.”
Jean nodded. “I did,” she said. “I thought about it for a whole week. It took my mind off everything else. But it’s good that you got it. The thrill would only have lasted a day or so and then I would have felt guilty about spending the money. My life wouldn’t really have become any different.”
“Although”—she paused—“this bedroom would be different. I was gonna put it on that wall, over my dower chest.”
She jumped out of bed and whipped a sheet off the dower chest. It was indeed a wonderful chest. German rococo, decorated with nymphs and cherubs and still with its original paint, which was cracking, but cracking nicely.
Jean jumped back in bed. “Isn’t it great?” she said. “God I love that chest.”
She had a fine eye. The chest and the icon were nothing alike, but on her wall they would combine beautifully.
“I’m giving you the icon now,” I said. “It belongs on that wall.”
She looked me over for a moment. “Okay,” she said.
Then she grinned. “I knew right away I’d get it from you,” she said.
She looked out the window.
“Being a scout was sort of my dream once, before I got these girls,” she said. “But I would never have been as good at it as you are. I’m too half-assed, plus I don’t have any money and I’m not brave enough to drive all over America by myself. Besides, I was just basically lookin’ to have myself a couple of girls.”
“Okay,” I said. “What I’ve got is the opportunity to drive about one hundred thousand miles a year in order to buy forty or fifty really nice things. Who are you to tell me that should be my life?”
“The woman who’s not going to marry you,” she said. “You really find wonderful things. It’s a kind of art. You shouldn’t give that up just because you’ve met a woman with a couple of cute kids.”
“That’s exactly what Beulah told me I ought to do,” I said.
I told Jean about Beulah and the Valentino hubcaps, about her increasingly miserable yard sales, about the vodka and Kool-Aid, about the phone-book table. The story about the phone-book table touched Jean so that she couldn’t speak. Tears came into her eyes, she fell into my arms, and we made love again.
“That’s a terrible story,” she said later, rubbing my shoulder. “That’s probably how I’ll end up.”
“No it isn’t,” I said. “You’ll end up with lots of nice grand-kids.”
Jean sighed. “Well, it’s how I would have ended up if I had been true to my vision of my calling. You better see it’s how you end up. I should really admire you if you ended up that way.”
“Why are we talking about ending up?”
She shrugged. “We’re not kids,” she said. “The years will pass, and both of us will end up. I think it’s an important thing to think about.”
I thought of Goat Goslin, a man who had certainly been true to his vision of his calling to the end.
Jean suddenly looked decisive. She got up and began to dress. I sat up, too, but I had no sense of what to do next.
“Get out of here,” Jean said. “Hit the road. Find me something wonderful. You can’t come back till you do.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. It seemed like a pointless order. Jean was standing by her dresser, sort of listlessly brushing her hair. She didn’t have a great deal to brush. As I was putting my boots on she burst into tears. She didn’t come over to me. She just stood there, crying.
“It’s hard not to hope for things that can’t really be,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind marrying you, to tell the truth.”
“It could really be,” I pointed out.
“Sure, and you’d end up a fat antique dealer with five or six fags working for you,” she said. Then she went downstairs, leaving me to dress alone.
When I got downstairs she was standing in her kitchen, wiping her eyes and making tea.
“It seems a stern fate you’ve assigned me,” I remarked.
“I didn’t assign it,” she said, with a flash of anger. “You chose it. Only now you want to wiggle out of it, when in fact the thought that it’s fate is what tempts me about you.”
“I wonder why Belinda didn’t get a stomachache,” she said a little later. “We better go pick them up.”
When the girls came out of their nursery school and climbed in the car Belinda looked anything but sick.
“I hit a boy,” she remarked.
“Why?” Jean asked.
“Didn’t like him,” Belinda said.
“I wish you’d make her behave,” Beverly said. “Nobody in her class likes her.”
“Un-uh, some do,” Belinda said.
“I can’t make her behave,” Jean said, sniffing. She seemed to want to cry some more.
“I can’t stop thinking about the woman with the phone books,” she admitted.
On the way back we passed a yard sale, or the tag end of one. The sale had been going on all day and only dregs were left. Nonetheless we stopped and looked. The girls contemplated a broken doll and Jean and I poked through a couple of cardboard boxes filled with battered kitchen utensils.
“I could use a new blender,” Jean said, though there were no blenders in the boxes. However, I did find a nice rolling pin, twenties vintage, for 75 cents. There was a woman in Vashti, Texas, who collected them. I could probably get twenty bucks for it if she didn’t have one like it.
“You see,” Jean said. “You can’t help yourself. I didn’t find anything and you found an appealing rolling pin.”
“We found a doll,” Belinda pointed out.
“Forget it,” Jean said. “Let’s go to Baskin-Robbins.”
“What?” Beverly said. “Before supper?”
“I know, Beverly,” Jean said. “It’s a complete breakdown of discipline. However, it’s what I feel like.”
We ate ice cream cones, all except Belinda, who insisted on what she called a banana splut.
“Split, split, split,” Beverly said. “You always use the wrong vowel.” Belinda ignored her.
When we got back to the house the girls spotted a couple of chums sitting on the sidewalk a few houses away. They immediately ran off to join them, leaving Jean and me in the car. We sat and looked at one another.
“I think you’re being too rigid,” I said. “We might get along fine. There’s nothing so great about driving around finding things.”
“Listen, we’re not talking about it,” she said. “I don’t think I’m planning to marry anyway. I’ll just stay the way I am only I’ll receive occasional visitors.”
“Jimmy’s detective is probably taking pictures of us right now,” I said.
Jean made a face. “Who cares?” she said. “Jimmy’s a jerk.”
“I don’t know what my role is supposed to be now,” I said. “Can I at least bring you good antiques to sell?”
“Yeah, you can do that,” Jean said. “Would you like to take the three of us to Disney World?”
“Of course I would. When?”
“Maybe in about a month,” Jean said. “I’ve been promising them for about a year, but I don’t ever seem to get the energy. I hear it’s awfully crowded. I’d probably just lose one of them. Belinda runs on her own track, as you know.”
“Sure,” I said. “About a month would be fine.”
“That would be nice, if we did that,” Jean said. “Then I could stop feeling guilty for not taking them.”
She opened the door and got out. I felt that things were not happening right but I also felt sort of paralyzed. I couldn’t think of how to make them happen any other way.
Jean walked around the car and stood on the curb, looking worried, or maybe just perplexed. Down the sidewalk the four children were conferring. Belinda was looking out our way, watching her mother. Jean came over to my window, her hands in the pockets of her bulgy blue coat.
“I still think that coat’s too big for you,” I said.
She leaned in the window and gave me a quick kiss. For all her defiance I think mention of the detective made her nervous. After all, it was something she had to deal with.
“Go away and stop tempting me,” she said. “This really isn’t your life. But you better be back here in a month. I don’t want to let these girls down.”
She turned and went in the house. I thought of following and trying to make one more attempt to sweep her off her feet, but I knew it wasn’t the kind of gesture she would appreciate. As I was easing away from the curb Belinda came skipping down the sidewalk. The wind, blowing from behind her, blew her curls into a kind of golden hood around her face.
“Where you going?” she asked cheerfully.
“I don’t know, Belinda,” I said.
“I don’t either,” she said. “Jist bring some presents when you come back.”