“FELLER WISHES I WOULDN’T be seen by myself at Nick’s. By myself means not with him. Feller wishes I’d find something constructive to do. Other women get themselves involved in church groups or charitable organizations. Rosemary Hopwood won’t let a pregnant girl in the same block with me. Is she jealous? I could at least be a den mother. Cubs! As if my own three didn’t gnaw at my bones enough now. At least, Feller says, I could stay home more often in the evening. To watch him get a hard on over his court cases or dividends and then want to take it out on me? I hate men.”
Grace stamped out a cigarette and looked at Dina, sitting away from her in the armchair.
“Do I have to get myself a drink?”
“No,” Dina said, and she got up and took the glass from Grace.
Grace followed her out into the kitchen.
“You don’t care whether I live or die. That’s what I like about you. I don’t think you even care whether I keep my clothes on and go home, do you?”
“No,” Dina said.
“I don’t either. That’s a fact,”
“You’re getting drunk.” Dina handed Grace a fresh drink.
“That’s right.”
“Why don’t you get something to do?”
“Pardon me?”
“I said…”
“Pardon me? Pardon me?”
Dina shrugged and went back into the living room.
“I have got something to do,” Grace announced to Dina’s back. “Something very interesting.”
Dina didn’t respond.
“But I have to plan it carefully. Take my time about it. I don’t want it just to be uncomfortable for that faggoty bastard. I’m going to see him run out of town.”
“Your own husband?” Dina asked.
“No, sweetheart—that cock sucker, Fallidon.”
“What have you against him?”
“His money-colored eyes.”
“He’s a better man than we’d get again in a long time.”
“Man?”
“Man,” Dina said.
“He’s probably being blackmailed by every sailor off that ship.”
“Why did you tell him you wanted money to invest in my business?”
“Pardon me?”
“I said…”
“Pardon me? Pardon me?”
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Dina said. “There are so many people who could do so much to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that.”
“Look, nobody tells Mrs. Feller Hill to bugger off and gets away with it.”
“Anybody can. I can.”
“Baby? You aren’t mad at me?”
“I’m tired of you,” Dina said.
“But you’re not mad at me?”
“I could be.”
“Please don’t be mad at me. Please.”
“Then don’t be stupid. Don’t hurt yourself any more.”
“If I could just have some money. If I could just have a little bit of money …”
“What you need is a little sense.”
“I’m nothing but a bloody slave. Just because Feller knows, just because he can hold it over my head…”
Dina closed her eyes for a moment.
“You don’t have to worry,” Grace said. “You don’t care anyway, do you?”
“No.”
“I could go home right now…”
“This is the last time,” Dina said.
“That’s what I say.”
“And now it’s true.”
“Doesn’t matter to me.”
“I know,” Dina said.
“Or you.”
“No.”
Harriet had imagined that, on the night they went out to dinner, she and Peter would talk about it. Then, out of understanding, she would say it was best for them not to see each other. She had worried mainly about how that could be arranged. They would have to telephone each other more often to assure not meeting than they ever had to be together. But they mustn’t go on seeing each other simply because it was easier. What had never occurred to Harriet was that the subject would not come up. At dinner they chatted about everyone else. Then they sat in customary side-by-side absence from each other through a movie. Harriet wasn’t troubled. Over Miss A’s recipe for hot chocolate or something stronger back at her apartment, they would talk. Peter didn’t come in. She could not even tell that he was evading anything. He seemed simply tired.
“Would you like to take a drive on Sunday, maybe out to the beach? I haven’t been yet this summer,” he’d offered instead.
“Shall I bring a picnic?”
So here she was chopping celery, slathering mayonnaise across bread, still dutifully keeping her side of what was no bargain at all.
“I like your tuna fish sandwiches,” Peter would say.
“Thank you,” she would answer and then look for something as innocuous to compliment him with. “What a nice place you’ve found for a picnic.”
He would smile, with his teeth, his potentially grief-stricken eyes uninvolved.
“Actually they’re seasoned with arsenic, you… heel!”
If she ever did dare to get angry with him, that would be exactly the trite sort of thing she’d come out with, sitting scrawny-thighed and sharp-elbowed in as apologetic a bathing suit as she could find at Harden’s, which carried nearly nothing but bikinis in her size. “The figure of a girl still,” her mother said, in a tone of dubious surprise. Picturing herself on the beach with Peter, she had an inverted image of the Charles Atlas cartoons: a spindly, nearly breastless woman having sand kicked in her face by 40-26-39, Peter dashing off on muscular, hairy legs after breasts and beach ball.
But she was a person, not a cartoon. And so was he. If she could only talk to him. Well, she did talk to him. She had told him a lot about her family, her growing up, the books she read. In some ways she talked more easily with Peter than she did with anyone else. And he talked with her, too, told her things about the bank he wouldn’t have told anyone else. He had even spoken several times with a mild, distant bitterness about his mother and sisters. She knew he still sent money home but did not, in other ways, have anything to do with his family. They simply didn’t talk about themselves, having established from the first that there was nothing to say.
“There is something to say, Peter.”
“What is that?”
All the things to be said were, of course, for him to say, and if he wouldn’t, couldn’t, didn’t know, then what could she do?
“Why don’t you love me?”
“Because you’re a prissy, bony, dull, no longer young woman…”
“Those aren’t the real answers, are they? Are they? Am I really stuck with those?”
All the badly invented conversation. She should be grateful it never did take place.
Peter was knocking at the door.
“That’s a pretty dress. Is it new?”
“You always notice.”
She wasn’t going to be able to bear it. Not for a whole afternoon, the terrible nourishment to her starved vanity that simply being with him was. Why did he have to be so cruelly good-looking, so markedly polite, so indifferent? But there he was picking up the picnic basket. Then there she was sitting in his car, a rare treat which was being offered for the second time within a week. Crumbs. Birds lived and sang on them. And enjoyed the air.
“It’s lovely air,” Harriet said.
“I wish I could remember to enjoy it the way you do.”
From F Street they turned onto Main and drove along the seawall. There on the walkway was the awkward line of pregnant girls, setting out into the Sunday sky.
“I wonder how Cole’s getting along with Agate,” Peter said.
“I think they’re making friends. He helps her a good deal now that she’s nurse as well as cook.”
“He’s such a self-conscious kid. He reminds me of me at his age.”
“Were you like that?”
“Sure. When you don’t have a father to watch or teach you, or when your father doesn’t know even as much about the world as you do, when there isn’t anyone to ask all the stupid questions… Do you know what Cole wanted to know? Where he should eat because Miss Larson was sick in bed.”
“Poor Cole.”
“And it is a matter of life and death,” Peter said. “If you don’t learn, you harden into a different sort of hysteria.”
“How do you mean?”
“You… close out.”
For fear of making a gross mistake, Harriet did not reply. Was he trying to explain himself? He couldn’t be. He did know where to eat. He had found the answers to all the stupid questions. Was he trying to say something to her then? For certainly she hadn’t learned. And she did close out. She was closing out now. But she didn’t know what else to do.
“Does this look like a good place?”
“You always find good places.”
Now what would she say when he spoke about the sandwiches? She and Cole.
“Did you bring a suit?” Peter asked, seeing only her towel on the back seat.
“I have it on underneath.”
“Oh.”
“The material they make them of now dries right away.”
“I guess it does. When I was nine, I had a good case of sitting in wet wool, and I’ll never trust a suit again, no matter what the label says, even if it’s true.”
Harriet laughed. “I did that, too.”
“What kids are missing nowadays!”
Then they were walking along the beach, looking for agates, and Harriet, absorbed in the search for the light-struck clarity of those small stones, forgot that there was anything to be nervous about.
“There. There’s one,” and she picked it up, brown filtering to amber. “She does have odd eyes, doesn’t she?”
“Who?” Peter asked.
“Agate.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“She’s beautiful in a way I’m not used to,” Harriet said. “I’ve never seen anyone like her before.”
“Vulgar.”
“Is she?”
“I think so,” Peter said.
“But I’d think she came from a good family.”
“That doesn’t prevent vulgarity, even encourages certain sorts.”
It was that sort of confidence in him Harriet envied. Nobody from good families here was vulgar, nobody born into them anyway. She saw another agate.
“There. That’s the color of Dina’s eyes.”
“Yes,” Peter said, looking… Harriet was about to say the only interesting thing she had to say about Dina, but she remembered, in time, why she shouldn’t.
“I wish there were more people in this town like Dina,” Peter said.
“Oh?”
“She has real business sense. I wouldn’t be surprised if, before she’s through, she could buy and sell some of the people who treat her as if she were just one step up from the junkman.”
“Does anyone treat Dina like that?”
“Sometimes I think all of us do, but she’s too proud to care.”
A hard judgment, unless you agreed that everyone treated everyone else with some indifference.
“Is this a good place to stop?” Peter asked.
“Yes, lovely.”
She helped him spread the towels and anchor them with rocks. Then she opened the picnic basket and set out sandwiches and fruit, poured the iced tea from the thermos. They sat. Peter picked up the plastic bag from his place and opened it. Harriet watched him look at the sandwich and then bite into it. He chewed carefully and then swallowed.
“I like your tuna fish sandwiches,” he said.
“Why don’t you love me, Peter?”
For once the expression of his mouth and eyes coincided, tense with surprise. Then he said, “You don’t love me, do you?”
That she should, whether he did or not, had never occurred to her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You’ve never let me try. I mean, you haven’t wanted me to. I’ve tried not to. I don’t know. I want to, but not if…”
“Not if what?”
“No,” Harriet said. “That would be as bad a bargain as the one we’ve already made, Isn’t it funny? I never heard that before.”
“What would be as bad a bargain?”
“Loving you only if you loved me.”
“I don’t see why. Loving someone who can’t love you is simply painful.”
“It’s not a bargain.”
“Harriet, I do care about you … more than I’ve let you know, perhaps, more than I realized myself until the night you didn’t turn up at the concert. I was terribly worried about you. I found it very painful. That’s all.”
“What do you mean, that’s all?”
“I wasn’t relieved when you were all right. I was angry.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to worry, not about anyone.”
“Well, no, of course not.”
“I can’t stand it,” Peter said.
“I think what I want to say,” Harriet continued carefully, feeling oddly calm, “is a warning. I know you don’t want to love me. I do want to love you, and I’m going to try. I don’t mean I’m going to try to seduce you. I’d be too embarrassingly bad at it. I’m simply going to go ahead and worry about you when I feel like it. If you can’t stand that…”
“I can’t stand worrying about you.”
“Ill try not to worry you then.”
“You are worrying me right now.”
“I’m surprising myself,” Harriet said. “I love your face when it goes together like that, even in a frown.”
“Harriet…”
“I might even kiss you before this day is out. I won’t compete with the tuna fish. I won’t chase you down the beach. I’m a prim, shy woman. But even prim, shy women sometimes kiss people.”
“You’re a very pretty, appealing woman, but I…”
She put a hand over his mouth. “Stop there. That’s all I want to hear. Just go ahead and eat your sandwich.”
He held her hand and kissed her palm gently. Then he gave her the first smile she had ever seen in his eyes also, rueful, guarded. And he gave it to the sandwich as well, as if it might easily be poison, whether he liked it or not.
“Is something the matter, Dina?” Rosemary asked, pulling a footstool nearer the chair Dina was sitting in.
“I couldn’t say.”
“Why not?”
“If you have a real friend,” Dina said, “you begin to see that all the things you just don’t say to other people you can’t say anyway. You don’t know how.”
“Try.”
Dina shook her head.
“Are you afraid I wouldn’t understand?”
“You have degrees in understanding,” Dina said, smiling.
“What is it?”
“Do you ever try to help someone and make it worse instead? Because you find out you really can’t like, don’t care, are even a little afraid?”
“Yes,” Rosemary said.
“What do you do?”
“Call in someone else, usually.”
Dina gave a short laugh. Then she looked at Rosemary seriously. “If you got a little afraid of me, who would you call?”
“I don’t think I could be afraid of you like that. I was talking about my job.”
“Who would I call then?” Dina asked.
“If you felt like that, you wouldn’t have to call anyone. You’d just go away, wouldn’t you?”
“I’m talking about Grace Hill,” Dina said flatly. “To begin with, it was like the kids: better at my place than on the streets. I don’t have to like every one of them. I don’t even have to pay much attention. Furniture’s my job. So a woman needs sometimes, occasionally… a place. She comes occasionally.”
Dina gave Rosemary a clear, uncommitted look.
“And you … don’t even necessarily have to like every one of them,” Rosemary said quietly.
“They come in. They…”
“The way I did,” Rosemary said.
“Yes… like that.”
“And you say, ‘up to you.’”
“Mostly.”
One of many. Like the kids. Well, what else could be true?
“What does Grace want now?” Rosemary asked.
“What she’s always wanted and got: some repairs and refinishing,” Dina said. “One day her husband’s going to get impatient. One day…”
“Can’t you stop her? Can’t you tell her you don’t want…”
“She knows that. Nobody wants Grace Hill. There are people like that.”
“You feel sorry for her,” Rosemary said.
“I don’t really care.”
“I don’t think I know what you mean.”
“I’m only sorry she’s the way she is. She’s a mistake.”
“Will she come whether you tell her she can or not?”
“I never tell her she can.”
Rosemary had been kneading Dina’s palm with her thumb, and now she felt Dina shift slightly in the chair. Rosemary moved her hand so that it rested lightly on Dina’s arm. She did not want Dina to move away.
“Sal and Dolly are always saying to me, “You’ll get more than you bargained for with that one.’”
“Have they said that about me?” Rosemary asked.
“Yes.”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“What did you think?”
“I thought ‘less.’”
“Who was right?”
“No one.” Dina said. “Do you understand me? Do you understand what I say?”
“Partly,” Rosemary said. “It’s always harder to understand something important when it has to do with me, too, with how I feel and what I want.”
“Yes, I know that.”
“I wish you wouldn’t see her at all. I wish you’d stay here to avoid her.”
Dina shook her head. “I can stop her. I feel guilty about it. And worried. She doesn’t like Peter Fallidon. He wouldn’t lend her money. Now she wants to start some kind of scandal. I can’t stop her at more than one thing at a time.”
“What kind of scandal could she start about Peter?”
“He likes boys,” Dina said. “It’s ridiculous. Men do like boys.”
“You don’t mean he’s homosexual.”
“She would put it that way.”
“But Harriet Jameson…”
“Do you think he’s interested in Harriet?” Dina asked.
“Well, they’re together a lot,” Rosemary said. “No one would pay any attention to a rumor like that, Dina. They’d be crazy to.” As she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. “And, anyway, you can’t ruin your own life to protect someone else from a rumor.”
“It’s not a matter of ruining my life really. I just don’t like her much.”
“Would she try to hurt you?”
“Me? How? There’s nothing to hurt. I don’t owe anyone any money. I’m my own boss.”
“You think Feller might…”
“He might hurt her. He might throw her out finally. She wouldn’t know what to do.”
“He’s got the children to think of.”
“Yes,” Dina said. “She’s not as bad a mother to them as she claims, but she’s not good.”
“Peter could simply say he’d refused to lend her money.”
“Well …” Dina said, and then she reached out and took Rosemary’s chin in her hand. “If you ever don’t much like me, you’ll tell me. Yes? Then I’ll go.”
“That’s not my problem, darling, and I can’t imagine that it ever would be. Am I supposed to say the same thing to you?”
“You’re my friend.”
Rosemary understood now what Dina meant by that. She was singular for Dina that way, not simply another of the women, another of the kids, who left themselves like pieces of furniture to be repaired and renewed at George’s. Rosemary was, at the same time, reassured and inhibited by that knowledge, for what set her apart from the others for Dina also seemed to require that she accept Dina’s sexual isolation. That was impossible, for the more familiar Dina became with Rosemary’s needs and desires, the more obsessed Rosemary was with Dina’s aloof body.
“Why don’t you spend the night?” Rosemary asked.
“I don’t sleep in front of anyone,” Dina said.
Rosemary laughed. “You have such a funny, exact way of saying things sometimes.”
“Because English is my second language and I don’t have a first,”
“That’s the way you think about women, too, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think about women much,” Dina said, turning an amused look at Rosemary.
“It’s dangerous to be so arrogant, Dina Pyros.”
It was such a clear, clearly defined face, like a landscape in the high, bright light of day. Rosemary took Dina’s head in her hands with desires she was not allowed.
“It’s dangerous to be anything else,” Dina said.
“There is something faintly ridiculous about any relationship that’s a matter of choice,” Ida said.
She and Carl were sitting out on Ida’s front terrace, watching the late sun on the sea.
“Essentially ridiculous,” Carl said. “And what relationship isn’t a matter of choice?”
“Blood relationships.”
“Do you think so? Amelia and Beatrice didn’t have to live together.”
“No, but they didn’t have to decide to in any public sort of way either. Why essentially ridiculous?”
“Because what we need of each other is, I suppose,” Carl said.
“What I need is to look proud rather than foolish.”
“And surely that’s ridiculous.”
“I suppose so, but there it is.”
“Do you mean that you’d marry me if it didn’t make you look foolish?”
“I mean I can’t get past that difficulty to consider any of the real and serious problems. There may be a good many.”
“Getting married is really a very temporary embarrassment. We could do it somewhere else.”
“Yes, there’s that.”
“Ida?”
“Yes?” She turned to him.
“I would make you proud.”
“I know you would. That’s what makes me feel so foolish. What would that make of the pride I’ve pretended all these years? I’m sorry to behave like a schoolgirl. Give me a month, Carl. I will think, and then we’ll discuss it seriously.”
“All right.”
“Essentially ridiculous,” Ida repeated, as she might have a line of poetry for the pleasure of hearing it again.