managed it? With the exception of one man farther down the table who seems to be unattached—the tall, rangy dark one who James has cannily not placed next to her—all the men are connected with the public health.
After coffee, she walked out on the terrace James had made of the roof—after re-annexing the top-floor for his own use, once the playwright and James’s own wife were gone. The room behind it, where the rest are still having liqueurs, had been the house’s ballroom once. Her nostalgia doesn’t extend that far back.
Her right-hand dinner partner had been speaking of an eye-surgeon who was diagnosing myasthenia gravis from the degree of elasticity in the lid. “Your own are fine,” he’d said, testing them. Not his field, of course. He himself is just returned from a village in South India where the incidence of multiple-breasted women is remarkable. “Four?” she cries. “Sometimes only three,” he says. Giggling when she sparks “You needn’t test me for that.”
Down the long table which James has had made in Kyoto and shipped home in parts, packed lotus-style, which her own children have helped to put together, the conversation, itself reassembled from so many parts of the world—and of humans—has an eely life of its own, superior to the men who are making it. Composed as their talk is of bread-for-villages and birth-control-for-the-planet, it dignifies their civil-service lips and country-squire cheeks; as they spoke she saw chains of the human colon girdling the globe, foetal armies clashing for stance on it. While down the table, wives chime with assents learned from their husbands, in whose fields, socially speaking, they too specialize. One new young wife, until recently head nurse of a maternity ward, on introduction first-names every woman there, as if they are all due her in hospital the next morning. But others like Lexie are silent, aware now that parties are their only events really, as well as their second-hand way of touching the world professionally. So that their lives, like hers, stalk these parties, and when arrived at them, sit sexually dreaming.
She leans out on James’s artfully safe fence, which the children, encouraged by her, have helped to paint. She wants the children to have the taint of city air. Even though it hadn’t done for her what it might have, it rings familial still, with the vying parental voices. And for all the dirt, with certain baby-clean hopes. Like the white smoke that sometimes twists from these dark stacks. From the head of his table, James had stared at her in his concentrated way, as if she were a starving village, perhaps. Or that suffering one in whose pipes the visiting epidemiologist from the UN—her lefthand neighbor—had found arsenic.
A woman leaning on a parapet has an animal grace the woman herself can feel. She knows she has a forty-ish beauty now, summonable at parties, or suddenly arriving on her at a corner curbstone, as a truckdriver whoops to it. From Kevin, though he hadn’t strictly said, she knows its peculiar ingredient. The tigerish attraction, intent from ambush, of the incomplete. She’s still wearing the blue-black dress.
“What are you doing out here?”
Smart, this one must be. He senses she’s doing something.
“I was streetwalking.”
“No, no,” he says. “That’s not for you. At least—may I telephone?”
Their connection, except when in the bed his first call leads to, has been entirely that way; it’s for him that she’d had the third telephone installed. Through all their passages in bed, he remains exactly as seen that first evening. Day Folger, Texan, veteran of women but still single and five years younger than she—in age only—with a fine, mashed-ugly face that reminds one of the movie-star whose name one can never remember, and Indian hair. His folks have a ranch near the King ranch, though not as large; his mother was born on a slice of what was once the Shirley plantation in
After coffee, she walked out on the terrace James had made of the roof—after re-annexing the top-floor for his own use, once the playwright and James’s own wife were gone. The room behind it, where the rest are still having liqueurs, had been the house’s ballroom once. Her nostalgia doesn’t extend that far back.
Her right-hand dinner partner had been speaking of an eye-surgeon who was diagnosing myasthenia gravis from the degree of elasticity in the lid. “Your own are fine,” he’d said, testing them. Not his field, of course. He himself is just returned from a village in South India where the incidence of multiple-breasted women is remarkable. “Four?” she cries. “Sometimes only three,” he says. Giggling when she sparks “You needn’t test me for that.”
Down the long table which James has had made in Kyoto and shipped home in parts, packed lotus-style, which her own children have helped to put together, the conversation, itself reassembled from so many parts of the world—and of humans—has an eely life of its own, superior to the men who are making it. Composed as their talk is of bread-for-villages and birth-control-for-the-planet, it dignifies their civil-service lips and country-squire cheeks; as they spoke she saw chains of the human colon girdling the globe, foetal armies clashing for stance on it. While down the table, wives chime with assents learned from their husbands, in whose fields, socially speaking, they too specialize. One new young wife, until recently head nurse of a maternity ward, on introduction first-names every woman there, as if they are all due her in hospital the next morning. But others like Lexie are silent, aware now that parties are their only events really, as well as their second-hand way of touching the world professionally. So that their lives, like hers, stalk these parties, and when arrived at them, sit sexually dreaming.
She leans out on James’s artfully safe fence, which the children, encouraged by her, have helped to paint. She wants the children to have the taint of city air. Even though it hadn’t done for her what it might have, it rings familial still, with the vying parental voices. And for all the dirt, with certain baby-clean hopes. Like the white smoke that sometimes twists from these dark stacks. From the head of his table, James had stared at her in his concentrated way, as if she were a starving village, perhaps. Or that suffering one in whose pipes the visiting epidemiologist from the UN—her lefthand neighbor—had found arsenic.
A woman leaning on a parapet has an animal grace the woman herself can feel. She knows she has a forty-ish beauty now, summonable at parties, or suddenly arriving on her at a corner curbstone, as a truckdriver whoops to it. From Kevin, though he hadn’t strictly said, she knows its peculiar ingredient. The tigerish attraction, intent from ambush, of the incomplete. She’s still wearing the blue-black dress.
“What are you doing out here?”
Smart, this one must be. He senses she’s doing something.
“I was streetwalking.”
“No, no,” he says. “That’s not for you. At least—may I telephone?”
Their connection, except when in the bed his first call leads to, has been entirely that way; it’s for him that she’d had the third telephone installed. Through all their passages in bed, he remains exactly as seen that first evening. Day Folger, Texan, veteran of women but still single and five years younger than she—in age only—with a fine, mashed-ugly face that reminds one of the movie-star whose name one can never remember, and Indian hair. His folks have a ranch near the King ranch, though not as large; his mother was born on a slice of what was once the Shirley plantation in
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