Secrets & Surprises

A Reasonable Man

She is waiting for the telephone to ring. It has not rung for at least six days, which is most unusual. Usually there would be a wrong number, or some sort of salesman trying to sell something she has never considered buying or that she did not know existed. In fact, it might be more than six days. At first she may not have been conscious that the phone was not ringing. You don’t notice something being absent for a day or two: a mislaid pen, clouds. It may well not have rung for quite some time.

She tells the man this at dinner, remarking on how unusual it is. The man likes to know exactly why she mentions things because he often cannot follow her. So she is in the habit, now, of mentioning something and commenting on it, explaining why she mentioned it at all. Of course, this is often more trouble than it’s worth, so their dinners are sometimes silent from beginning to end. They are good dinners. She is competent in that area. A home economics major, she fixes dinners that are not only good to eat, but balanced and nutritious. They rarely have colds. They have never had a major illness. Tonight they eat cream of asparagus soup, a salad of beans and pears on chopped lettuce, broiled chicken with mushrooms, a glass of white wine and baked custard.

“For heaven’s sake,” the man says. “It might have rung when you were out getting groceries. If you had been downstairs, it might have rung and you wouldn’t have heard it.” He raises a single green bean to his lips. She smiles at him. He chews swallows and smiles. Everything he says is logical. She follows perfectly. She does not believe that the phone rang when she was out buying groceries, and anyway, she bought groceries three days ago. She was not downstairs today, or yesterday. She frowns. Did she go down there yesterday? He lifts another piece of food to his mouth. He notices that she is frowning. “You see that, don’t you?” he says. Of course. She understands everything the man says.

The phone has not rung for seven days — assuming that it will not ring tonight. In a novel she is very fond of the main character tries to bring on her period by sleeping in white, on fresh bed sheets. She tries to think what she could do to make the phone ring. Perhaps make love to the man. That may be a little difficult, though, because he is still at a meeting and will be tired and hungry when he comes home. She will feed him and then seduce him. Another thing she might try, if this doesn’t work, is showering.

The man comes home. He looks as though he has been in a windstorm. He confirms that it is very windy out. “Look,” he says, pointing her toward the kitchen window. Leaves that they did not rake up during the winter blow across the yard. She is so glad! Usually her procrastination results in nothing good, but there are the leaves, blowing through the air and across the grass, which is already turning green.

“Didn’t you go out today?” the man asks.

“No. I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t have anywhere to go.”

“But you went out yesterday, I presume.”

“Yesterday?” (She is not a good liar.)

He nods again.

“I don’t think I went out yesterday. No.”

He sighs heavily. Seducing him will not be easy.

He brightens a bit at the table when she serves him marinated herring. He likes fish very much. The main course is beef stew, which he also seems to enjoy. They have oranges for dessert, coffee with milk.

“Tomorrow I guess you’ll be going out to do some errands,” he says. “Would you take my gray suit to the cleaners, please?”

“Certainly,” she says. She will tell him that she forgot. That will work for one day. But the day after tomorrow she will have to go to the cleaners. That might not be so bad: the phone might ring tomorrow, and then the next day she would have no reason to wait home because the phone would have rung recently. She smiles.

“Aren’t you going to answer me?” he says.

“I did answer. I said I would.”

He looks at her blankly. His eyes are blank, but his mouth is a little tight.

“I didn’t hear you,” he says, with syrupy graciousness.

She thinks that she, too, might have a hearing problem. After dinner, alone in the kitchen, she puts down the dish-towel and goes to the phone, puts her ear against it. Shouldn’t it hum like the refrigerator when it isn’t ringing? There is always some slight noise, isn’t there? She’s had insomnia in the past and felt as though there were a war going on in the house, it was so noisy. The faint hum of electrical appliances, the glow in the little box in back of the television when it’s not on. There must be something wrong with her hearing, or with the phone.

The next day she goes to the cleaners. There’s a way to make the phone ring! Go out and leave it and surely it will ring in the empty house. She is not as happy as she might be about this, though, for the obvious reason that she will not have the satisfaction of hearing the phone. Driving home, she tries to remember the last phone conversation she had. She can’t. It might have been with her neighbor, or with some salesman … a relative? If she kept a journal, she could check on this. Maybe now is the time to keep a journal. That way she could just flip back through the pages and check on details she has forgotten. She parks the car and goes into a drugstore and buys a blue tablet — actually it is called a theme book — and a special pen to write with: a black fountain pen, and a bottle of ink. She has to go back for the ink. She has never thought things through. At vacation time the man would stand at the front door saying. “Do you have beach shoes? Did you bring our toothbrushes? What about a hat for the sun? I know you brought suntan lotion, but what about Solarcaine?” She would run to her closet, to the bathroom, take down hatboxes, reopen her suitcase. “And Robby’s raft — did you put that in the trunk?” Yes. She always thought a lot about Robby. He always had the correct clothes packed, his favorite toys included, comics to read in the car. She took very good care of Robby. She does not quite understand why he must live with his grandmother. Of all of them, she took the best care of Robby. She does understand why he is with the man’s mother, but she does not like it, or want to accept it. She has been very honest with the man, has told him her feelings about this, and has not been converted to his way of thinking. She never did anything to Robby. He agrees with this. And she does not see why she can’t have him. There they disagree. They disagree, and the man has not made love to her for months — as long as the disagreement has gone on.

She is so frustrated. Filling the pen is harder than she thought — to do it carefully, making sure not to spill the ink or put too much in. And what details, exactly, should she write down? What if she wanted to remember the times she went to the bathroom the day before? Should she include everything? It would take too long. And it would seem silly to write down the times she went to the bathroom. The journal is to make her feel better. What would be the point of flipping back through her journal and seeing things that would embarrass her? There are enough things that embarrass her around the house. All the bowls that the man likes so much are a tiny bit lopsided. He agrees with her there, but says no value should be placed on a perfect bowl. Once he became very excited and told her there was no such thing as perfection — it was all in the eye of the beholder. He went on to talk about molecules; fast, constantly moving molecules that exist in all things. She is afraid of the bowls now, and doesn’t dust them. He wants her to dust them — to take pride in them. He talks and talks about the negative value of “perfection.” He put the word in quotes. This, he explained, was because he, himself, did not think in those terms, but it was a convenient word. He left the note on the door one morning before leaving for work, and she found it when she went into the kitchen. She asked about it. It is established that they can ask about anything. Anything at all. And that the other has to answer. She would like to ask him if he has had the phone disconnected. She can ask, but she is frightened to.

The man’s mother pays for her to take the crafts classes. In the summer, June through August, they spun the bowls (they could have made vases, plates, but she stuck with bowls); September through November they learned macramé, and for Christmas she gave all of it away — a useless tangle of knots. She had no plants to hang in them, and she did not want them hung on her walls. She likes plain walls. The one Seurat is enough. She likes to look at the walls and think. For the past four months they have been making silver jewelry. She is getting worse at things instead of better. Fatigue at having been at it so long, perhaps, or perhaps what she said to her teacher, which her teacher denied: that she is just too old, that her imagination is insufficient, that her touch is not delicate enough. She is used to handling large things: plates, vacuums. She has no feel for the delicate fibers of silver. Her teacher told her that she certainly did. He wears one of the rings she made — bought it from her and wears it to every class. She is flattered, although she has no way of knowing whether he is wearing it out of class. Like the garish orange pin Robby selected for her in the dime store, his gift to her for her birthday. He was four years old, and naturally the bright orange pin caught his eye. She wore it to the PTA meeting, on her coat, to show him how much she liked it. She took it off in the car and put it back on before coming in the house — just in case the baby-sitter had failed and he was still awake. Now, however, she would never consider taking off the pin. She wears it every day. It’s as automatic as combing her hair. She’s as used to seeing it on her blouse or dress as she is to waiting for the phone to ring.

The man says it is remarkable that they always have such good meals when she shops so seldom. She went out two days ago to the cleaners, and she showed him the stub, so he knows this, but he is still subtly criticizing her failure to go out every day. She gets tired of going out. She has to go to crafts classes Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, and on Sunday she has to go to his mother’s house. She says this to him by way of argument, but actually she loves to go to his mother’s house. It is the best day of the week. She does not love, or even like, his mother, but she can be with Robby from afternoon until his bedtime. They can throw the ball back and forth on the front lawn (who cares if they spy on them through the window?), and she can brush his hair (she cuts it too short! Just a little longer. He’s so beautiful that the short hair doesn’t make him ugly, but he would be even more beautiful if it could grow an inch on the sides, on the top). He gives her pictures he has colored. He thinks that kindergarten should be more sophisticated and is a little embarrassed about the pictures, but he explains that he has to do what the teacher says. She nods. If he were older, she could explain that she had to make the bowls. He rebels by drawing sloppily, sometimes. “I didn’t even try on that one,” he says. She knows what he means. She says — as the man says to her about the bowls, as the crafts instructor says — that they are still beautiful. He likes that. He gives them all to her. There is not even one tacked up in his grandmother’s kitchen. There are none on her walls, either, but she looks through the pile on the coffee table every day. She prefers the walls blank. When he comes with Grandma to visit, which hardly ever happens, she puts them up if she knows he’s coming or points to the pile to show him that she has them close-by to examine. She never did anything to Robby, not one single thing. She argues and argues with the man about this. He goes to business meetings at night and comes home late. He does not fully enjoy the meals she prepares because he is so tired. This he denies. He says he does fully enjoy them. What can she say? How can you prove that someone is not savoring sweet-potato soufflé?

“How do you cook such delicious things when you shop so seldom?” he asks.

“I don’t shop that infrequently,” she says.

“Don’t vegetables … I mean, aren’t they very perishable?”

“No,” she says. She smiles sweetly.

“You always have fresh vegetables, don’t you?”

“Sometimes I buy them fresh and parboil them myself. Later I steam them.”

“Ah,” he says. He does not know exactly what she is talking about.

“Today I was out for a walk,” she says. No way he can prove she wasn’t.

“It’s a late spring,” he says. “But today it was very nice, actually.”

They are having a civilized discussion. Perhaps she can lure him into bed. Perhaps if that works, the phone will also ring. Hasn’t he noticed that it doesn’t ring at night, that it hasn’t for nights? That’s unusual, too. She would ask what he makes of this, but talking about the phone makes him angry, and if he’s angry, he’ll never get into bed. She fingers her pin. He sees her do it. A mistake. It reminds him of Robby.

She sips her wine and thinks about their summer vacation — the one they already took. She can remember so little about the summer. She will not remember the spring if she doesn’t get busy and write in her book. What, exactly, should she write? She thinks the book should contain feelings instead of just facts. Surely that would be less boring to do. Well, she was going to write something during the afternoon, but she was feeling blue, and worried — about the telephone — and it wouldn’t cheer her up to go back and read about feeling blue and being worried. Her crafts teacher had given her a book of poetry to read: Winter Trees by Sylvia Plath. It was interesting. She was certainly interested in it, but it depressed her. She didn’t go out of the house for days. Finally — she is glad she can remember clearly some details — he asked her to go to the cleaners and she went out. She did several errands that day. What was the weather like, though? Or does it really matter? She corrects herself: it does matter. It matters very much what season it is, whether the weather is typical or unusual. If you have something to say about the weather, you will always be able to make conversation with people, and communicating is very important. Even for yourself: you should know that you feel blue because the weather is cold or rainy, happy because it’s a sunny day with high clouds. Tonight she feels blue. Probably it is cold out. She would ask, but she has already lied that she was out. It might have turned cold, however.

“I was out quite early,” she says. “What was the weather like when you came home?”

“Ah,” he says. “I called this morning.”

She looks up at him, suddenly. He sees her surprise, knows she wasn’t out.

“Just to say that I loved you,” he says.

He smiles. It is not worth seducing him to make the phone ring. She will shower, wash her hair, stand there a long time, hoping, but she won’t make love to the man. He is a rotten liar.

In the morning, when he is gone, she finds that she remembers her feelings of the night before exactly, and writes them down, at length, in the book.

On Friday night he no longer picks her up after crafts class. He has joined a stock club, and he has a meeting that night. The bus stop is only a block from where the class meets; it lets her off five minutes from where she lives. It is unnecessary for the man ever to pick her up. But he says that the streets are dangerous at night, and that she must be tired. She says that the bus ride refreshes her. She likes riding buses, looking at the people. There is good bus service. He smiles. But it is not necessary to ride them; and the streets are dangerous at night.

Tonight her instructor asks to speak to her when the class has ended. She has no interest in the thin silver filaments she is working with and says he can talk to her now. “No,” he says. “Later is fine.”

She remains when the others have left. The others are all younger than she, with one exception: a busty grandmother who is learning crafts hoping to ease her arthritis. The others are in their teens or early twenties. They have long hair and wear Earth shoes and are unfriendly. They are intense. Perhaps that’s what it is. They don’t talk because they’re intense. They walk (so the ads for these shoes say) feeling clouds beneath them, their spines perfectly and comfortably straight, totally relaxed and enjoying their intensity. Their intensity results in delicate necklaces, highly glazed bowls — some with deer and trees, others with Mister Moon smiling. All but three are women.

When they have all left, he opens a door to a room at the back of the classroom. It opens into a tiny room, where there is a mattress on the floor, covered with a plaid blanket, two pairs of tennis shoes aligned with it, and a high, narrow bookcase between the pipe and window. He wants to know what she thought of the Sylvia Plath book. She says that it depressed her. That seems to be the right response, the one that gets his head nodding — he always nods when he looks over her shoulder. He told her in November that he admired her wanting to perfect her bowls — her not moving on just to move on to something else. They nod at each other. In the classroom they whisper so as not to disturb anyone’s intensity. It is strange now to speak to him in a normal tone of voice. When she sees her son, now, she also whispers. That annoys the man and his mother. What does she have to say to him that they can’t all hear? They are noisy when they play, but when they are in the house — in his room, or when she is pouring him some juice from the refrigerator — she will kneel and whisper. A gentle sound, like deer in the woods. She made the bowl with the deer on it, gave it to the instructor because he was so delighted with it. He was very appreciative. He said that he meant for her to keep the book. But he would lend her another. Or two: The Death Notebooks and A Vision. The instructor puts his foot on the edge of the second shelf to get one of the books down from the top. She is afraid he will fall, stands closer to him, behind him, in case he does. She has a notion of softening his fall. He does not fall. He hands her the books. The instructor knows all about her, she is sure. The man’s mother visited his studio before she suggested, firmly, that she enroll. The man’s mother was charmed by the instructor. Imagine what she must have said to him about her. From the first, he was kind to her. When he gave her Winter Trees, he somehow got across the idea to her that many women felt enraged — sad and enraged. He said a few things to her that impressed her at the time. If only she had had the notebook then, she could have written them down, reread them.

He boils water in a pan for tea. She admires the blue jar he spoons the tea out of. He made it. Similarly, he admires her work. She sees that her bowl holds some oranges and bananas. She would like to ask what false or unfair things the man’s mother said about her. That would cast a pall over things, though. The instructor would feel uncomfortable. It is not right to blurt out everything you feel like saying. People don’t live like that in society. Talk about something neutral. Talk about the weather. She says to the instructor what the man always says to her: it is a late spring. She says more: she is keeping a journal. He asks again — the third time? — whether she writes poetry. She says, truthfully, that she does not. He shows her a box full of papers that he doodled on, wrote on, the semester he dropped out of Stanford. The doodles are very complex, heavily inked. The writing is sloppy, in big letters that were written with a heavy black pen. She understands from reading a little that he was unhappy when he dropped out of Stanford. He says that writing things down helps. Expressing yourself helps. Her attention drifts. When she concentrates again, he is saying the opposite: she must feel these classes are unpleasant, having been sentenced to them; all those books — he gestures to the bookcase — were written by unhappy people, and it’s doubtful if writing them made them any happier. Not Sylvia Plath, certainly. He tells her that she should not feel obliged to act nicely, feel happy. He thumps his hand on the books he has just given her.

She tells him that the phone never rings anymore. She tells him that last, after the story about the summer vacation, how she and Robby set out to race through the surf, and Robby lagged behind, and she felt such incredible energy, she ran and ran. They got separated. She ran all the way to the end of the sand, to the rocks, and then back — walked back — and couldn’t find Robby or the man anywhere. All the beach umbrellas looked the same, and so did the people. What exactly did Robby look like? Or the man? The man looked furious. He found her, came back for her in his slacks and shirt, having taken Robby back to the motel. His shoes were caked with wet sand, his face was furious. She is not sure how to connect this to what she really wants to talk about, the inexplicably silent telephone.