Group Sex Page 9

  Baby Joshua and little Beth had fallen asleep on the hearthrug, curled together like puppies, with their rumps up. They were still asleep, puffing wetly through their mouths, at eleven o’clock. Dinner had been served very late, though not late according to Pom. She had spent her junior year abroad in Valladolid, which allowed her to declare Spanish hours when she was behind schedule.

  Paul had arrived at seven-thirty. Frances kept a wary eye on him while they sat in the living room. He had been raised by a grandmother who believed in demand feeding and a mother who fed him on a rigid program. These rival nurturers had addled his infant metabolism, and anxiety about mealtimes made him prey to a mood he called chemical anger. Frances could see he was in its grip; she knew all the signs. He was jiggling his foot, narrowing his eyes, and taking his pulse. She grew warier and warier, until she had no attention for anyone else. He drank six bottles of diet cola and finished off a basket of humid corn chips. By ten o’clock she feared he might eat the ferns, then start on the children.

  At eleven Pom was starting to serve dessert. They were having strawberries, with crème fraîche she had fermented herself. Toby and Paul were leaning back in their chairs and talking. Paul’s chemical anger had been appeased by good rare beef. Frances trotted back and forth with dirty plates while Pom chattered, and hulled and halved the berries.

  “I asked her if I could make the quiche and she said I’ve got the quiche, so I said I’d bring the pâté and she told me she had the pâté. Then I told her I’d get the Brie but oh, no, she had the Brie. I don’t see what else I could have done, do you, Frances?”

  Pom spewed and sputtered like a little teakettle. She was grieving over Mrs. Albion Harwood’s self-sufficiency. Pom wanted Toby to be the next president of Harwood. She pushed and worried the issue, and kept it right in the front of her mind. In the same vein, she would tear the cloth when she was cutting out a pattern, lacking the patience to keep opening and closing the scissors. For this reason, mainly, Frances did not believe in the Wards and the De Lessières. Yet why did Pom even hint at them? No true company wife would obstruct her own goal with scandal.

  Frances took the bowl of strawberries in both hands, and set her hip against the swinging dining-room door to open it. She stopped at the door sill. Apparently her thoughts had been partially telepathized. Paul was describing the practice of group marriage in the Sinusian Islands. Spite and mischief were upon him, the transmutation of chemical anger. He was going to smoke out the Fosters, those false polygamists.

  Briefly, Frances thought of dropping the strawberries. That would halt the conversation, but would it change it? She could hear Toby’s drawled responses. She was sure he had on his ape face, the face she hated. So far, Paul was being merely anthropological. It seemed the Sinusians imitated the customs of their ancestor gods. Group marriage, Paul expounded loftily, was of proven benefit to children, who grew up believing all men were truly brothers. These short, gray-skinned islanders had an answer that evaded civilized Westerners. As she stood there eavesdropping, Frances had to stiffen her cheeks to keep from laughing. Delight at Paul’s strategy slackened all her governess-reflexes. Clyde Beatty also knew when it was useless to restrain a tiger.

  Baby Joshua and little Beth were upstairs in their cribs. To save dishes, Pom brought the coffee in Styrofoam cups. Opposite one another, on facing love seats, sat Toby with Frances, and Paul with Pom. Paul had one arm stretched out behind Pom’s back, like a teenager poised to make a snaky move at a drive-in. Frances dug well into her end of the couch, crossing her arms over her chest and wrapping her legs around each other at the knees and ankles.

  Paul still had the floor. He had a look on his face like Suslov, the Soviet military tactician, all mind, burning behind the rimless eyeglasses. Under the force of so much intellectual fervor, Pom slid down in her seat, leaned back, and let the top of her head graze the underside of Paul’s arm.

  “My community of actors,” Paul concluded, “is a group marriage in all but sexual practice. And many of us feel we are almost ready for that ratification.”

  Toby clamped the back of his hand to his mouth, as if to quell a rush of saliva. “Literary m-movements also have an orgiastic, or pseudo-orgiastic, drive,” he said. Frances thought he had told her his early stammer had been cured.

  Paul shook his head, and smiled with sweet compassion.

  “I’m talking about fellowship, and you bring up degradation.”

  Frances was dazzled. Paul had mastered the art of shaming intellectuals; all he did was speak the role of the natural man. He had used the same knack with critics: if they disagreed with him, they must be deficient in human feeling. Some of these critics, poor hydrocephalic husks, had appealed to Paul, and begged to be reunited with their bodies. He had undertaken the rehabilitation of several of them, especially the younger ones, who wrote for Manhattan Showcase. His biggest success had been Marty Julius, who joined a mime troupe, forswearing the written and spoken word forever.

  Frances had never before seen Toby at a loss. He looked like a child in a Christmas pageant whose halo had slipped. He gave her a pleading glance, then addressed himself to Paul.

  “You can’t involve a girl like Frances in your experiment.” Toby reached for her hand, or as much of her hand as she would extend, the tips of three fingers. He was trying on the cloak of womanhood’s knight and champion.

  “I’ve been in on all the planning sessions,” said Frances. “I helped draw up the charter. We’ve even scheduled periods of abstinence, like meatless Fridays.” She could see from the flash in Paul’s eye that she had passed the audition.

  Pom was scratching behind her ears as if she had fleas. Toby had hired a black editor and published Soviet runaways. Many full-page protest ads had appeared in the newspapers, signed by both Fosters. No one had told them, about this new movement, or asked them to join. She would have to pipe up, to show that they had the credentials.

  “We’ve been approached,” said Pom, as if it were a matter of sorority bidding; “quite recently, too, wasn’t it, Toby? Four times, actually, I don’t mean by four people, it was two couples twice. We turned them down, didn’t we, Toby? We weren’t sure they were really committed. Toby said they were dilettantes. Besides, they didn’t have any children.”

  Frances spoke very carefully, because Pom did not trade in logic. “What does childless or not have to do with it?”

  “You know, fellowship,” said Pom brightly. She was parroting the lesson. “That was the real thing for us, to be a family.”

  Paul lowered his voice with a crash. “I’ll bet you ran like a rabbit.” He was turning mean, losing patience with the game just as Frances was learning to play.

  “That’s the liberal dodge,” said Paul, “watching and talking. Mincing around on the edges. All talk and no action.”

  He got up from his seat so fast he collapsed the cushions. “On your feet, Frances. It’s late, I need my sleep.”

  He nodded and waved, like the Queen from her carriage, as he swept her by the Fosters, the stiff-armed wave with stiff fingers, performed from the elbow. On the stairs Frances wriggled around and looked below. Pom and Toby dangled bleakly in their places, as if their strings had gone slack.

  In their room Paul fell on the bed and removed his loafers. He let them drop, one by one, on the floor. They were large, loud shoes.

  “You’ve got no stamina for anything but art,” Frances was whining. “All that great material down the drain. You could have held out one more hour.”

  Paul raised the window and put his head way out. He seemed to be measuring the distance from the sill to the ground.

  “They’re too easy,” he answered, and ducked back inside. “It’s like jacking off.”

  “We can’t leave now,” said Frances. “We’ll go after breakfast.”

  “I won’t sit knee to knee with those owls. Is there a clock in this room?”

  “All right, all right.” She pointed. “Over there. You set it for six. I can w
rite them a nice bland note.”

  The moon left a broad white wake across the bed. The shades were up, because Frances could not sleep in the dark. In her own apartment, two and a half rooms and an alcove, she patrolled each night, jerking aside the clothes in the closets, and peering behind the shower curtain. She was not sure if what she feared most was burglars or vampires. She slept deeper with Paul in the bed, but she still needed light. He lay on his side and she pressed up against him, clamping her arm over his chest, fitting her knees into the bend of his legs. They came apart several times in the night, then recombined.

  Paul, in sleep, was a nerveless creature. He could have slept through the battle of Midway. He had long refreshing dreams, with plots, in which he shot current enemies with machine guns or set spectacular fires. Sometimes he dreamed a new scene for his play, and would use it intact. Frances believed that coherent dreams were a sign of genius, since her own were vague and disguised, and hung on to make her morbid all day long. No dream-symbol dictionary, popular or learned, had ever helped solve them.

  What she saw, at that moment, was a normal image from her dreams. Two pale, bare figures were gliding into the room. Misty, doleful figures, holding hands at the foot of the bed. Frances blinked. The door was open, but she knew Paul had shut it. Her mind was drowsy. Perhaps it was the children, walking in their sleep or wanting a drink of water. Her eyes cleared. She jabbed Paul hard, in the kidneys. He sat up in bed and let out a strangled yelp.

  “Hit the deck! They’ve got guns!”

  He was not awake. The two ghostly figures shrank back, but they held their ground. Paul kept one hand on Frances’s head, mashing her into the pillow. He thrashed at the sheets with his knees and reached for the bed table.

  “Stay down! I’ve got them!”

  He yanked the lamp out of its socket and hurled it. The lamp grazed Toby on one twinkling buttock as the two figures fled.

  Paul bounded across the room and threw his body against the door. It slammed with a bang, but no harder than Frances was laughing. She tried to think what Paul could be dreaming. That Indians had surrounded the Conestoga wagon? That the Spanish Inquisition had raided a cell of heretics?

  “Wake up!” she called out. “Brave fellow!” Tears of laughter streamed down her face.

  “I’m awake,” he said. “Get up quick. Those scabby little perverts might come back.”

  Frances swallowed her laughter. “I thought you were dreaming about Indians!”

  “Oh, no,” he said, opening the suitcase. “I had to save face. Theirs and ours. I egged them on, after all.”

  “You’re a very great man,” said Frances.

  “I am if you say so,” said Paul. “We make good team-mates.”

  They packed and dressed in the dark, except for their shoes, and moved out down the hallway barefoot. The house had a flight of back stairs, which did not creak. As they crossed the front lawn toward the car, Paul tripped on the sprinkler. He picked it up by the neck and spoke to it.

  “I’m not finished here yet.”

  He went up the porch steps and set down the sprinkler, aiming it at the door. He screwed it into the fixed position, so it wouldn’t revolve. Frances did not have to wait for orders. She followed the hose to the side of the house and opened the spigot.

  They watched the shower, for a moment, entranced.

  “Can’t we lurk across the street and watch them get it?”

  Paul yanked her arm for an answer. They got into the car. With the sun coming up, they left Boston, hitting seventy-five miles an hour. It was the first time Frances had ever begged Paul to drive faster.

  III

  SEX LIFE

  FRANCES WAS WORKING A night shift and a day shift. By night, she worked for Paul; by day for Harwood. Since Paul was directing The Winter’s Tale in Kansas, Frances had a month of evenings to herself. The first week, she stayed at home and caught up on her reading. She soaked in the bathtub, since Paul disapproved of baths. She liked steeping with open pores in her own juices. She liked lounging on her bed, with no higher goals or plans. She liked watching Lewis, the black-and-white bob-tailed cat, who could open the kitchen cabinets with his claws. The second week, Frances was busier, but she set her own hours. By the third week, her unscheduled evenings had dwindled to two; the long arm of Paul Treat could reach across half a continent. He needed some books from his library (special delivery), relating to previous productions in Sweden and Moscow. He needed four jars of hand cleanser made with tar, sold only at a druggist’s supply house in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He needed a bear for the play (Act III, Scene 3), a live bear, no question of using a man in a bear suit. There was no bear for hire at the Kansas City Zoo. Frances balked at the bear, but she knew Winter’s Tale by memory; there were shepherds in Act IV, which portended an order for sheep. Frances wondered if the Mortenson Theatre had dismissed its propman, or if Paul set her tasks to test her love and allegiance.

  The fourth week was carefree and slothful, like the first week—slothful in Paul’s terms, since her work did not benefit him. She rewrote large sections of a manual on healing with gemstones, and stayed up very late indexing a life of the Lunts. Paul’s reaching arm and its extension, his dialing finger, were occupied with technical run-throughs and dress rehearsals. At this stage of a play, Frances never had access to Paul. If The Winter’s Tale were opening in Manhattan, Paul would sleep at the theatre, fully clothed, on the set or in the aisles. If he summoned Frances to his side, he made one condition: no sexual congress until after opening night.

  Frances picked up her telephone in the evenings without fear of errands. She started to take her own calls at the Harwood Press. Ruthanne complained. She was bored with typing. She preferred shielding Frances from importunate masculine voices. Paul had sometimes outwitted Ruthanne by disguising his speech, so she had learned to ignore the pleas of any caller with a foreign accent, lisp, or laryngitis. Although Frances’s telephone did not need a monitor, her office door was vulnerable and unguarded. Other secretaries’ desks sat outside their editors’ doors. Ruthanne’s desk lay across the room, at a slight diagonal. This position was more effective, as it happened, for keeping watch without overtly spying.

  Ruthanne looked up from her typing, alert to danger. She saw the new editor, Allan Schieffman, in Frances’s doorway. With his palms against the frame of the door, he pushed in and out, as if to develop the muscles of his arms and chest. He had been there yesterday, and the day before, grasping the top of the doorframe from inside, raising himself off the floor, doing casual chin-ups. Ruthanne Marvin was as loyal as an ocelot. Her loyalty did not stem from blind devotion. She knew, after months of constant observation, that Frances was easy prey to office-hoppers. When Frances listened to people, she looked them in the eye. She did not chew on her pencil or twirl a lock of hair, or glance at the unfinished letter she had been drafting. She was so still, so present, and so attentive that she could have elicited speech from inanimate objects. Ruthanne timed every intrusion by the clock. When ten minutes were up, she called Frances to announce a visitor, or marched into her office with papers that needed her signature. The new editor only stayed for seven minutes, but his gymnastics had aroused Ruthanne’s protective instincts. She watched him leave. He toed in when he walked, like an athlete, but his neck was skinny and his shoulders were stooped and narrow.

  Ruthanne stood by Frances’s desk with her hands on her hips. “He asked you to lunch,” she declared. “I could tell from behind.”

  “He’s married,” said Frances. “He has two lovely boys, five and seven.”

  “If he didn’t, he will. Pop eyes mean a carnal nature.”

  “Perhaps he has goiter,” said Frances. “Or hypertension.”

  “I know what he makes,” said Ruthanne. “It’s a lot more than you do.”

  “He’s older,” said Frances. “He brought in all those New Left authors.”

  “The market is glutted,” said Ruthanne, spouting borrowed wisdom.

 
Frances started to laugh. She pointed at the chair by her desk.

  “Sit down, old lady. I give in. You were right, he asked me.”

  “You can’t go,” said Ruthanne. “He wears terry-cloth sweat-bands on his wrists.”

  “He won’t hurt me,” said Frances. “If the restaurant is brightly lit.”

  “I’ve heard things,” said Ruthanne. Her eyebrows were slanted with anxiety. “I happened to be in the ladies’ room, and those hens didn’t know I was there. …”

  “Faster and funnier,” said Frances. Ruthanne flopped down in the chair.

  “The girl who works for him?”

  “Maude Perkins. Or Parsons.”

  “He made them hire her,” said Ruthanne.

  “Does this get worse?” said Frances. “Should I close the door?”

  “She worked for him at Carver & Duff. He made them hire her, too.”

  Frances stopped teasing Ruthanne. She got down to her level. “His boys are at the French lycée. He said they were ‘spookily bilingual.’” Her tone held the quote at arm’s length, like a piece of litter.

  “I wish that would put you off. But you don’t mind affected people.”

  This odd, piercing remark touched Frances. Ruthanne watched her very closely. In general, close attention made Frances nervous, since the watcher was often looking for faults and finding them. Ruthanne never made black marks or gave gold stars. Ruthanne was twenty and Frances was twenty-seven. From her first day at work, she had made herself Frances’s guardian. She believed, like Wordsworth, that wisdom grows less with age; therefore she, not Frances, was rightly the older person. Unlike Paul, Ruthanne cared whether Frances ate lunch with adulterers. The night before he left, Paul had dealt with the subject of fidelity. He stated his views, and Frances had poor luck rebutting them. Since Frances had refused to accompany Paul to Kansas, he believed they should “see other people,” or feel free to do so. “I didn’t refuse,” said Frances. “I can’t leave Harwood.” “Can’t means won’t,” said Paul. “You’re responsible for the subtext.” “What does ‘see’ mean?” asked Frances. “I don’t like double binds,” said Paul. “Once you make up your mind, you forfeit the right to ask questions.”