Secrets & Surprises

The Lawn Party

I said to Lorna last night, “Do you want me to tell you a story?” “No,” she said. Lorna is my daughter. She is ten and a great disbeliever. But she was willing to hang around my room and talk. “Regular dry cleaning won’t take that out,” Lorna said when she saw the smudges on my suede jacket. “Really,” she said. “You have to take it somewhere special.” In her skepticism, Lorna assumes that everyone else is also skeptical.

According to the Currier & Ives calendar hanging on the back of the bedroom door, and according to my watch, and according to my memory, which would be keen without either of them, Lorna and I have been at my parents’ house for three days. Today is the annual croquet game that all our relatives here in Connecticut gather for (even some from my wife’s side). It’s the Fourth of July, and damn hot. I have the fan going. I’m sitting in a comfortable chair (moved upstairs, on my demand, by my father and the maid), next to the window in my old bedroom. There is already a cluster of my relatives on the lawn. Most of them are wearing little American flags pinned somewhere on their shirts or blouses or hanging from their ears. A patriotic group. Beer (forgive them: Heineken’s) and wine (Almadén Chablis) drinkers. My father loves this day better than his own birthday. He leans on his mallet and gives instructions to my sister Eva on the placement of the posts. Down there, he can see the American flags clearly. But if he is already too loaded to stick the posts in the ground, he probably isn’t noticing the jewelry.

Lorna has come into my room twice in the last hour — once to ask me when I am coming down to join what she calls “the party,” another time to say that I am making everybody feel rotten by not joining them. A statement to be dismissed with a wave of the hand, but I have none. No right arm, either. I have a left hand and a left arm, but I have stopped valuing them. It’s the right one I want. In the hospital, I rejected suggestions of a plastic arm or a claw. “Well, then, what do you envision?” the doctor said. “Air,” I told him. This needed amplification. “Air where my arm used to be,” I said. He gave a little “Ah, so” bow of the head and left the room.

I intend to sit here at the window all day, watching the croquet game. I will drink the Heineken’s Lorna has brought me, taking small sips because I am unable to wipe my mouth after good foamy sips. My left hand is there to wipe with, but who wants to set down his beer bottle to wipe his mouth?

Lorna’s mother has left me. I think of her now as Lorna’s mother because she has made it clear that she no longer wants to be my wife. She has moved to another apartment with Lorna. She, herself, seems to be no happier for having left me and visits me frequently. Mention is no longer made of the fact that I am her husband and she is my wife. Recently Mary (her name) took the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. She broke in on me on my second day here in the room, explaining that she would not be here for the croquet game, but with the news that she had visited New York yesterday and had taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. “And how was the city?” I asked. “Wonderful,” she assured me. She went to the Carnegie Delicatessen and had cheese cake. When she does not visit, she writes. She has a second sense about when I have left my apartment for my parents’ house. In her letters she usually tells me something about Lorna, although no mention is made of the fact that Lorna is my child. In fact, she once slyly suggested in a bitter moment that Lorna was not — but she backed down about that one.

Lorna is a great favorite with my parents, and my parents are rich. This, Mary always said jokingly, was why she married me. Actually, it was my charm. She thought I was terrific. If I had not fallen in love with her sister, everything would still be fine between us. I did it fairly; I fell in love with her sister before the wedding. I asked to have the wedding delayed. Mary got drunk and cried. Why was I doing this? How could I do it? She would leave me, but she wouldn’t delay the wedding. I asked her to leave. She got drunk and cried and would not. We were married on schedule. She had nothing more to do with her sister. I, on the other hand — strange how many things one cannot say anymore — saw her whenever possible. Patricia — that was her name — went with me on business trips, met me for lunches and dinners, and was driving my car when it went off the highway.

When I came to, Mary was standing beside my hospital bed, her face distorted, looking down at me. “My sister killed herself and tried to take you with her,” she said.

I waited for her to throw herself on me in pity.

“You deserved this,” she said, and walked out of the room.

I was being fed intravenously in my left arm. I looked to see if my right arm was hooked up to anything. It hurt to move my head. My right arm was free — how free I didn’t know at the time. I swear I saw it, but it had been amputated when I was unconscious. The doctor spoke to me at length about this later, insisting that there was no possibility that my arm was there when my wife was in the room and gone subsequently — gone when she left. No, indeed. It was amputated at once, in surgery, and when I saw my wife I was recovering from surgery. I tried to get at it another way, leaving Mary out of it. Wasn’t I conscious before Mary was there? Didn’t I see the arm? No, I was unconscious and didn’t see anything. No, indeed. The physical therapist, the psychiatrist and the chaplain the doctor had brought with him nodded their heads in fast agreement. But soon I would have an artificial arm. I said that I did not want one. It was then that we had the discussion about air.

Last Wednesday was my birthday. I was unpleasant to all. Mrs. Bates, the cook, baked me chocolate-chip cookies with walnuts (my favorite), but I didn’t eat any until she went home. My mother gave me a red velour shirt, which I hinted was unsatisfactory. “What’s wrong with it?” she said. I said, “It’s got one too many arms.” My former student Banks visited me in the evening, not knowing that it was my birthday. He is a shy, thin, hirsute individual of twenty — a painter, a true artiste. I liked him so well that I had given him the phone number at my parents’ house. He brought with him his most recent work, a canvas of a nude woman, for my inspection. While we were all gathered around the birthday cake, Banks answered my question about who she was by saying that she was a professional model. Later, strolling in the backyard, he told me that he had picked her up at a bus stop, after convincing her that she did not want to spend her life waiting for buses, and brought her to his apartment, where he fixed a steak dinner. The woman spent two days there, and when she left, Banks gave her forty dollars, although she did not want any money. She thought the painting he did of her was ugly, and wanted to be reassured that she wasn’t really that heavy around the hips. Banks told her that it was not a representational painting; he said it was an Impressionist painting. She gave him her phone number. He called; there was no such number. He could not understand it. He went back to the bus stop, and eventually he found her again. She told him to get away or she’d call the police.

Ah, Banks. Ah, youth — to be twenty again, instead of thirty-two. In class, Banks used to listen to music on his cassette player through earphones. He would eat candy bars while he nailed frames together. Banks was always chewing food or mouthing songs. Sometimes he would forget and actually sing in class — an eerie wail, harmonizing with something none of the rest of us heard. The students who did not resent Banks’s talent resented his chewing or singing or his success with women. Banks had great success with Lorna. He told her she looked like Bianca Jagger and she was thrilled. “Why don’t you get some platform shoes like hers?” he said, and her eyes shriveled with pleasure. He told her a couple of interesting facts about Copernicus; she told him about the habits of gypsy moths. When he left, he kissed her hand. It did my heart good to see her so happy. I never delight her at all, as Mary keeps telling me.

They have written me from the college where I work, saying that they hope all is well and that I will be back teaching in the fall. It is not going to be easy to teach painting, with my right arm gone. Still, one remembers Matisse in his last years. Where there’s a will, et cetera. My department head has sent flowers twice (mixed and tulips), and the dean himself has written a message on a get-well card. There is a bunny on the card, looking at a rainbow. Banks is the only one who really tempts me to go back to work. The others, Banks tells me, are “full of it.”

Now I have a visitor. Danielle, John’s wife, has come up to see me. John is my brother. She brings an opened beer and sets it on the windowsill without comment. Danielle is wearing a white dress with small porpoises on it, smiling as they leap. Across that chest, no wonder.

“Are you feeling blue today or just being rotten?” she asks.

The beginnings of many of Danielle’s sentences often put me in mind of trashy, romantic songs. Surely someone has written a song called “Are You Feeling Blue?”

“Both,” I say. I usually give Danielle straight answers. She tries to be nice. She has been nice to my brother for five years. He keeps promising to take her back to France, but he never does.

She sits on the rug, next to my chair. “Their rotten lawn parties,” she says. Danielle is French, but her English is very good.

“Pull up a chair and watch the festivities,” I say.

“I have to go back,” she says, pouting. “They want you to come back with me.”

Champagne glasses clinking, white tablecloth, single carnation, key of A: “They Want You Back with Me.”

“Who sent you?” I ask.

“John. But I think Lorna would like it if you were there.”

“Lorna doesn’t like me anymore. Mary’s turned her against me.”

“Ten is a difficult age,” Danielle says.

“I thought the teens were difficult.”

“How would I know? I don’t have children.”

She has a drink of beer, and then puts the bottle in my hand instead of back on the window sill.

“You have beautiful round feet,” I say.

She tucks them under her. “I’m embarrassed,” she says.

“Our talk is full of the commonplace today,” I say, sighing.

“You’re insulting me,” she says. “That’s why John wouldn’t come up. He says he gets tired of your insults.”

“I wasn’t trying to be insulting. You’ve got beautiful feet. Raise one up here and I’ll kiss it.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” Danielle says.

“Really,” I say.

Danielle moves her leg, unstraps a sandal and raises her right foot. I take it in my hand and bend over to kiss it across the toes.

“Stop it,” she says, laughing. “Someone will come in.”

“They won’t,” I say. “John isn’t the only one tired of my insults.”

I have been taking a little nap. Waking up, I look out the window and see Danielle below. She is sitting in one of the redwood chairs, accepting a drink from my father. One leg is crossed over the other, her beautiful foot dangling. They all know I am watching, but they refuse to look up. Eventually my mother does. She makes a violent sweep with her arm — like a coach motioning the defensive team onto the field. I wave. She turns her back and rejoins the group — Lorna, John, Danielle, my Aunt Rosie, Rosie’s daughter Elizabeth, my father, and some others. Wednesday was also Elizabeth’s birthday — her eighteenth. My parents called and sang to her. When Janis Joplin died Elizabeth cried for six days. “She’s an emotional child,” Rosie said at the time. Then, forgetting that, she asked everyone in the family why Elizabeth had gone to pieces. “Why did you feel so bad about Janis, Elizabeth?” I said. “I don’t know,” she said. “Did her death make you feel like killing yourself?” I said. “Are you unhappy the way she was?” Rosie now speaks to me only perfunctorily. On her get-well card to me (no visit) she wrote: “So sorry.” They are all sorry. They have been told by the doctor to ignore my gloominess, so they ignore me. I ignore them because even before the accident I was not very fond of them. My brother, in particular, bores me. When we were kids, sharing a bedroom, John would talk to me at night. When I fell asleep he’d come over and shake my mattress. One night my father caught him doing it and hit him. “It’s not my fault,” John hollered. “He’s a goddamn snob.” We got separate bedrooms. I was eight and John was ten.

Danielle comes back, looking sweatier than before. Below, they are playing the first game. My father’s brother Ed pretends to be a majorette and struts with his mallet, twirling it and pointing his knees.

“Nobody sent me this time,” Danielle says. “Are you coming down to dinner? They’re grilling steaks.”

“He’s so cheap he’ll serve Almadén with them,” I say. “You grew up in France. How can you drink that stuff?”

“I just drink one glass,” she says.

“Refuse to do it,” I say.

She shrugs. “You’re in an awful mood,” she says.

“Give back that piggy,” I say.

She frowns. “I came to have a serious discussion. Why aren’t you coming to dinner?”

“Not hungry.”

“Come down for Lorna.”

“Lorna doesn’t care.”

“Maybe you’re mean to her.”

“I’m the same way I always was with her.”

“Be a little extra nice, then.”

“Give back that piggy,” I say, and she puts her foot up. I unbuckle her sandal with my left hand. There are strap marks on the skin. I lick down her baby toe and kiss it, at the very tip. In turn, I kiss all the others.

• • •

It’s evening, and the phone is ringing. I think about answering it. Finally someone else in the house picks it up. I get up and then sit on the bed and look around. My old bedroom looks pretty much the way it looked when I left for college, except that my mother has added a few things that I never owned, which seem out of place. Two silver New Year’s Eve hats rest on the bedposts, and a snapshot of my mother in front of a Mexican fruit stand (I have never been to Mexico) that my father took on their “second honeymoon” is on my bureau. I pull open a drawer and take out a pack of letters. I pull out one of the letters at random and read it. It is from an old girl friend of mine. Her name was Alison, and she once loved me madly. In the letter she says she is giving up smoking so that when we are old she won’t be repulsive to me. The year I graduated from college, she married an Indian and moved to India. Maybe now she has a little red dot in the middle of her forehead.

I try to remember loving Alison. I remember loving Mary’s sister, Patricia. She is dead. That doesn’t sink in. And she can’t have meant to die, in spite of what Mary said. A woman who meant to die wouldn’t buy a big wooden bowl and a bag of fruit, and then get in the car and drive it off the highway. It is a fact, however, that as the car started to go sideways I looked at Patricia, and she was whipping the wheel to the right. Maybe I imagined that. I remember putting my arm out to brace myself as the car started to turn over. If Patricia were alive, I’d have to be at the croquet game. But if she were alive, she and I could disappear for a few minutes, have a kiss by the barn.

I said to Lorna last night that I would tell her a story. It was going to be a fairy tale, all about Patricia and me but disguised as the prince and the princess, but she said no, she didn’t want to hear it, and walked out. Just as well. If it had ended sadly it would have been an awful trick to pull on Lorna, and if it had ended happily, it would have depressed me even more. “There’s nothing wrong with coming to terms with your depression,” the doctor said to me. He kept urging me to see a shrink. The shrink came, and urged me to talk to him. When he left, the chaplain came in and urged me to see him. I checked out.

Lorna visits a third time. She asks whether I heard the phone ringing. I did. She says that — well, she finally answered it. “When you were first walking, one of your favorite things was to run for the phone,” I said. I was trying to be nice to her. “Stop talking about when I was a baby,” she says, and leaves. On the way out, she says, “It was your friend who came over the other night. He wants you to call him. His number is here.” She comes back with a piece of paper, then leaves again.

“I got drunk,” Banks says on the phone, “and I felt sorry for you.”

“The hell with that, Banks,” I say, and reflect that I sound like someone talking in The Sun Also Rises.

“Forget it, old Banks,” I say, enjoying the part.

“You’re not loaded too, are you?” Banks says.

“No, Banks,” I say.

“Well, I wanted to talk. I wanted to ask if you wanted to go out to a bar with me. I don’t have any more beer or money.”

“Thanks, but there’s a big rendezvous here today. Lorna’s here. I’d better stick around.”

“Oh,” Banks says. “Listen. Could I come over and borrow five bucks?”

Banks does not think of me in my professorial capacity.

“Sure,” I say.

“Thanks,” he says.

“Sure, old Banks. Sure,” I say, and hang up.

Lorna stands in the doorway. “Is he coming over?” she asks.

“Yes. He’s coming to borrow money. He’s not the man for you, Lorna.”

“You don’t have any money either,” she says. “Grandpa does.”

“I have enough money,” I say defensively.

“How much do you have?”

“I make a salary, you know, Lorna. Has your mother been telling you I’m broke?”

“She doesn’t talk about you.”

“Then why did you ask how much money I had?”

“I wanted to know.”

“I’m not going to tell you,” I say.

“They told me to come talk to you,” Lorna says. “I was supposed to get you to come down.”

“Do you want me to come down?” I ask.

“Not if you don’t want to.”

“You’re supposed to be devoted to your daddy,” I say.

Lorna sighs. “You won’t answer any of my questions, and you say silly things.”

“What?”

“What you just said — about my daddy.”

“I am your daddy,” I say.

“I know it,” she says.

There seems nowhere for the conversation to go.

“You want to hear that story now?” I ask.

“No. Don’t try to tell me any stories. I’m ten.”

“I’m thirty-two,” I say.

My father’s brother William is about to score a victory over Elizabeth. He puts his foot on the ball, which is touching hers, and knocks her ball down the hill. He pretends he has knocked it an immense distance and cups his hand over his brow to squint after it. William’s wife will not play croquet; she sits on the grass and frowns. She is a dead ringer for the woman behind the cash register in Edward Hopper’s “Tables for Ladies.”

“How’s it going?” Danielle asks, standing in the doorway.

“Come on in,” I say.

“I just came upstairs to go to the bathroom. The cook is in the one downstairs.”

She comes in and looks out the window.

“Do you want me to get you anything?” she says. “Food?”

“You’re just being nice to me because I kiss your piggies.”

“You’re horrible,” she says.

“I tried to be nice to Lorna, and all she wanted to talk about was money.”

“All they talk about down there is money,” she says.

She leaves and then comes back with her hair combed and her mouth pink again.

“What do you think of William’s wife?” I ask.

“I don’t know, she doesn’t say much.” Danielle sits on the floor, with her chin on her knees. “Everybody always says that people who only say a few dumb things are sweet.”

“What dumb things has she said?” I say.

“She said, ‘Such a beautiful day,’ and looked at the sky.”

“You shouldn’t be hanging out with these people, Danielle,” I say.

“I’ve got to go back,” she says.

Banks is here. He is sitting next to me as it gets dark. I am watching Danielle out on the lawn. She has a red shawl that she winds around her shoulders. She looks tired and elegant. My father has been drinking all afternoon. “Get the hell down here!” he hollered to me a little while ago. My mother rushed up to him to say that I had a student with me. He backed down. Lorna came up and brought us two dishes of peach ice cream (handmade by Rosie), giving the larger one to Banks. She and Banks discussed The Hobbit briefly. Banks kept apologizing to me for not leaving, but said he was too strung out to drive. He went into the bathroom and smoked a joint and came back and sat down and rolled his head from side to side. “You make sense,” Banks says now, and I am flattered until I realize that I have not been talking for a long time.

“It’s too bad it’s so dark,” I say. “That woman down there in the black dress looks just like somebody in an Edward Hopper painting. You’d recognize her.”

“Nah,” Banks says, head swaying. “Everything’s basically different. I get so tired of examining things and finding out they’re different. This crappy nature poem isn’t at all like that crappy nature poem. That’s what I mean,” Banks says.

“Do you remember your accident?” he says.

“No,” I say.

“Excuse me,” Banks says.

“I remember thinking of Jules and Jim.”

“Where she drove off the cliff?” Banks says, very excited.

“Umm.”

“When did you think that?”

“As it was happening.”

“Wow,” Banks says. “I wonder if anybody else flashed on that before you?”

“I couldn’t say.”

Banks sips his iced gin. “What do you think of me as an artist?” he says.

“You’re very good, Banks.”

It begins to get cooler. A breeze blows the curtains toward us.

“I had a dream that I was a raccoon,” Banks says. “I kept trying to look over my back to count the rings of my tail, but my back was too high, and I couldn’t count past the first two.”

Banks finishes his drink.

“Would you like me to get you another drink?” I ask.

“That’s an awful imposition,” Banks says, extending his glass.

I take the glass and go downstairs. A copy of The Hobbit is lying on the rose brocade sofa. Mrs. Bates is sitting at the kitchen table, reading People.

“Thank you very much for the cookies,” I say.

“It’s nothing,” she says. Her earrings are on the table. Her feet are on a chair.

“Tell them we ran out of gin if they want more,” I say. “I need this bottle.”

“Okay,” she says. “I think there’s another bottle, anyway.”

I take the bottle upstairs in my armpit, carrying a glass with fresh ice in it in my hand.

“You know,” Banks says, “they say that if you face things — if you just get them through your head — you can accept them. They say you can accept anything if you can once get it through your head.”

“What’s this about?” I say.

“Your arm,” Banks says.

“I realize that I don’t have an arm,” I say.

“I don’t mean to offend you,” Banks says, drinking.

“I know you don’t.”

“If you ever want me to yell at you about it, just say the word. That might help — help it sink in.”

“I already realize it, Banks,” I say.

“You’re a swell guy,” Banks says. “What kind of music do you listen to?”

“Do you want to hear music?”

“No. I just want to know what you listen to.”

“Schoenberg,” I say. I have not listened to Schoenberg for years.

“Ahh,” Banks says.

He offers me his glass. I take a drink and hand it back.

“You know how they always have cars — car ads — you ever notice … I’m all screwed up,” Banks says.

“Go on,” I say.

“They always put the car on the beach?”

“Yeah.”

“I was thinking about doing a thing with a great big car in the background and a little beach up front.” Banks chuckles.

Outside, the candles have been lit. A torch flames from a metal holder — one of the silliest things I have ever seen — and blue lanterns have been lit in the trees. Someone has turned on a radio, and Elizabeth and some man, not recognizable, dance to “Heartbreak Hotel.”

“There’s Schoenberg,” Banks says.

“Banks,” I say, “I want you to take this the right way. I like you, and I’m glad you came over. Why did you come over?”

“I wanted you to praise my paintings.” Banks plays church and steeple with his hands. “But also, I just wanted to talk.”

“Was there anything particularly—”

“I thought you might want to talk to me.”

“Why don’t you talk to me, instead?”

“I’ve got to be a great painter,” Banks says. “I paint and then at night I smoke up or go out to some bar, and in the morning I paint … All night I pray until I fall asleep that I will become great. You must think I’m crazy. What do you think of me?”

“You make me feel old,” I say.

The gin bottle is in Banks’ crotch, the glass resting on the top of the bottle.

“I sensed that,” Banks says, “before I got too wasted to sense anything.”

“You want to hear a story?” I say.

“Sure.”

“The woman who was driving the car I was in — the Princess …” I laugh, but Banks only nods, trying hard to follow. “I think the woman must have been out to commit suicide. We had been out buying things. The back seat was loaded with nice antiques, things like that, and we had had a nice afternoon, eaten ice cream, talked about how she would be starting school again in the fall—”

“Artist?” Banks asks.

“A linguistics major.”

“Okay. Go on.”

“What I’m saying is that all was well in the kingdom. Not exactly, because she wasn’t my wife, but she should have been. But for the purpose of the story, what I’m saying is that we were in fine shape, it was a fine day—”

“Month?” Banks says.

“March,” I say.

“That’s right,” Banks says.

“I was going to drop her off at the shopping center, where she’d left her car, and she was going to continue on to her castle and I’d go to mine …”

“Continue,” Banks says.

“And then she tried to kill us. She did kill herself.”

“I read it in the papers,” Banks says.

“What do you think?” I ask.

“Banks’s lesson,” Banks says. “Never look back. Don’t try to count your tail rings.”

Danielle walks into the room. “I have come for the gin,” she says. “The cook said you had it.”

“Danielle, this is Banks.”

“How do you do,” Banks says.

Danielle reaches down and takes the bottle from Banks. “You’re missing a swell old time,” she says.

“Maybe a big wind will come along and blow them all away,” Banks says.

Danielle is silent a moment, then laughs — a laugh that cuts through the darkness. She ducks her head down by my face and kisses my cheek, and turns in a wobbly way and walks out of the room.

“Jesus,” Banks says. “Here we are sitting here and then this weird thing happens.”

“Her?” I say.

“Yeah.”

Lorna comes, very sleepy, carrying a napkin with cookies on it. She obviously wants to give them to Banks, but Banks has passed out, upright, in the chair next to mine. “Climb aboard,” I say, offering my lap. Lorna hesitates, but then does, putting the cookies down on the floor without offering me any. She tells me that her mother has a boyfriend.

“What’s his name?” I ask.

“Stanley,” Lorna says.

“Maybe a big wind will come and blow Stanley away,” I say.

“What’s wrong with him?” she says, looking at Banks.

“Drunk,” I say. “Who’s drunk downstairs?”

“Rosie,” she says. “And William, and, uh, Danielle.”

“Don’t drink,” I say.

“I won’t,” she says. “Will he still be here in the morning?”

“I expect so,” I say.

Banks has fallen asleep in an odd posture. His feet are clamped together, his arms are limp at his sides, and his chin is jutting forward. The melting ice cubes from the overturned glass have encroached on the cookies.

At the lawn party, they’ve found a station on the radio that plays only songs from other years. Danielle begins a slow, drunken dance. Her red shawl has fallen to the grass. I stare at her and imagine her dress disappearing, her shoes kicked off, beautiful Danielle dancing naked in the dusk. The music turns to static, but Danielle is still dancing.