Edith Pearlman - Honeydew - Stories

McCauley watched the two women confer, Andy’s soft freckled beauty facing Lois’s profile. The sweet awning of the caterer’s upper lip did not quite cover the uncorrected teeth. Her husband was still in the kitchen, looking out the window. There were probably rabbits in the backyard; there might also be coyotes. Rabbits with their rapid hearts, 335 beats a minute in some breeds, can go into shock when a coyote comes close: convenient for the predator. But McCauley saw as he too neared the window that there were no rabbits just now. The mathematician was staring at something else, maybe the birches, white as the snow.…The man’s pulse was seventy to eighty if his heartbeats were normal. McCauley estimated them to be on the slow side.

He positioned himself in the dining room so he could see both husband in the kitchen and wife in the living room. He already knew that the caterer was competent and reliable, and she probably was master of the renunciation you often saw in people who cooked for a living: she knew she must taste only enough of her creation to test its merit and not enough to satisfy her appetite. But she had that streak of inventiveness Andy had reported…He shook his big head. Other people! Other people’s marriages! He himself could be considered imperfect as a husband: he never noticed clothes, he’d be damned if he’d make the bed. As for Andy: she buried herself in idle novels, talked forever on the telephone, played tricks on people. All is lost. Fly —once she had telegraphed this message to her cousin, an importer of wines; and the fellow did leave town for a while…She forgot to buy toilet paper and pick up his shirts and complain to the electric company about the bill. But he loved her tolerant nature and ready arms and generous bosom and the light laugh when he reached his peak — he was still capable of it, even if the postcoital heartbeats had become more irregular and the breathlessness more prolonged. Then she’d laugh again, again lightly, while his slow detumescence brought her to her own pleasure. All couples have their peculiarities. Suddenly he wanted to get rid of the skinny pair who had invaded their house to do their work so capably, like dancers who knew each other’s moves.

“Darling,” he said to Andy and Lois. “I think you’ve obsessed enough about the pianist; just make sure the minions keep his glass filled.” And then, gliding into the kitchen, his belly shaking just a little, he said to the mathematician, still staring out the window, “You must be sure to come back in the spring and see the three hundred tulips I planted last October, like the October before, and the October before that. Many of the old ones keep coming up. Nature has its way with us.”

Daniel had not been looking at anything in the yard. Instead he’d been recalling an episode he’d witnessed earlier. It was brief, and soundless, and reversed — he’d seen it through the black mirror of the window, superimposed on the backyard geometry. He had been standing here then as he was now. All the stuff had been brought in. His dogsbody role had been played and he was at liberty. Lois was rearranging a tray of carved carrots and little pots of condiments. The Bells had been standing in the dining room behind Daniel. That is, in reality they stood behind him, but reality be damned; they were stationed right before his eyes in the very middle of the backyard. McCauley’s left arm slid across Andrea’s shoulders. Her right hand busied itself unseen, no doubt thrusting itself into his back pocket, curving her fingers around his pouf of a buttock. They didn’t look at each other, but she moved her head a couple of millimeters so her hair would tickle his nostrils, and he bent his head to ensure that result. That was all, decorous foreplay reflected in a window, yet he’d felt as if one of Lois’s wooden spoons was stirring his entrails. He roiled first with jealousy and then with painful relief: for why envy the fat cardiologist his unkempt wife when he had as his own companion a gentle-voiced person who had painted all the rooms of their house gray and had grayed the rest of his life too, just the way he’d wanted it, perfect for contemplation. She’d even developed an interest in Scriabin. But such consideration must be commutative, or should be — what had been placed on her side of the equation?

And so, three days before Valentine’s Day, he’d ordered the gladioli.

Oh, the roses? Lois had sent them to herself — perhaps they would light a flame, and fan it…

And the lilacs? They were paid for in cash at the Boston florist’s — both Daniel and Lois separately winkled that information out of the proprietor. But the lady would say no more — probably knew no more. So Lois had to be content with the discovery that the deception she had concocted had doubled itself. Apparently she did have an admirer. It would not be the first time.

Daniel’s interior was again contorted with anxiety. Two other bouquets! His wife was so desirable that unknown persons — persons unknown to him, anyway — sent flowers to her. Attention must be paid. And you can say this of him: he had a good memory, a strong resolve, and an ability, once something was brought to his notice, to keep noticing. Certain attributes could not be changed — he found numbers more interesting than anything else — but an affection that had once been planted in his heart now belatedly flourished. Nature does have its way with us.

After a time Lois found herself smiling more readily.

The day after the birthday party the Bells went to the Caribbean, and on Valentine’s Day they were still there. Early that morning, while Andy still slept, McCauley padded to the office of the little resort, and collected the camellias he’d ordered, and took his pill. He returned to the cabin and strewed the petals over her naked form. Brushed by this silken shower, she opened the hazel eyes that had brought many men to their knees, some literally, and smiled at the one she’d chosen, and slipped out of bed to go to the bathroom, disturbing only a few blossoms. She came back and lay on the petals and opened herself to her husband. As he was entering, she remembered the lilacs she had impulsively arranged to be sent anonymously to her caterer and wondered if they had done mischief or good or anything at all, and then — Oh, my love, my darling, McCauley panted — she stopped thinking about the flowers and devoted herself to the work at hand.

Amanda Jenkins was having a little trouble with her article, “Connubis.”

“ Not cannabis,” she explained to Frieda, the girl from downstairs. “Do you really think anybody would read yet another dissertation on grass? Be your age.”

“I’d rather be yours,” said Frieda, who was fifteen to Amanda’s twenty. “What’s connubis? ”

Amanda hesitated. Ben Stewart, eavesdropping from the bedroom, could hear for a few moments nothing but the sound of crockery being stacked. He and Amanda had agreed that dishes would be her task, laundry his. Now, at five thirty in the afternoon, she and her young friend were washing last night’s plates, which had lain odorously in the sink all day.

“Connubis,” Amanda resumed, “a coined word, refers to being married. Or being as if married.”

“Like you and Ben,” Frieda said.

“More or less.”

Ben wondered why she was so wary. They were indeed living together as if married, a conventional enough arrangement these days. Only the difference between their ages was exceptional. But that difference was a mere ten years…

“Actually,” Amanda was saying, “I am not Benjamin’s lover but his daughter.”

“Stop it,” Frieda sighed.

“His niece,” Amanda smoothly corrected. “By marriage,” she further invented. “His relationship with my aunt soured considerably when he fell in love with me. We eloped. Now we live in fear of detection. If a large weeping gray-haired woman should one day appear — Ben’s wife, my aunt, is a great deal older than me — please tell her…” She paused. Frieda waited. Ben waited too.