T. Boyle - Riven Rock

“Your underwear?” She was stunned. “Stanley, the train is leaving in forty-five minutes. If we don’t go right this instant we’re going to miss it. This is no time to worry about underwear.”

“No, no, no,” he said, gesturing, the limp garments draped over both arms, “you don’t understand. You see, I order my longjohns specially from Dunhill & Porter in London, and they come in eight gradations of weight so as to meet every possible contingency, from, from, well snow to the sunshiniest day in August, when, of course, one wouldn’t want to suffocate — and he let out a strange hollow yelp of a laugh. ”Don’t you see?“ he said, bending now to the steamer trunk and patiently folding the garments in his arms. She could see that he was laughing still, chuckling to himself and shaking his head. ”She wants me to freeze—“ he said, addressing the depths of the trunk, ”—my own w-wife.“

She crossed the room to him, murmuring, “Here, let me help,” but he stiffened and turned away from her. “Stanley,” she said, “please. It’s not cold at all — it must be fifty-five or sixty degrees out there — and they’re sure to be having Indian summer weather in Paris this time of year….”

He paid her no mind, but kept folding and unfolding his underwear and carrying it from one bag to another, and no sooner did he settle on a place for it than he pulled it back out and started the whole process all over again.

“We’re going to miss the train,” she said. “Stanley. Are you listening to me? We’re going to miss the train.”

His eyes went suddenly to hers and there was a pleading look in them, a look that both begged for help and rejected it at the same time. “I can‘t,” he said. “I’m, I’m not ready. I can’t.”

Her mother’s voice came up the stairwell then, tremulous and interrogatory: “Katherine?”

“Leave it,” Katherine urged. “Leave it for the servants to send on. We’ll buy you new things as soon as we get in, better things, Parisian things, and all this will be on the next train if you need it. Come on,” she said, taking him by the arm, “come on, Stanley, we’ve got to go.”

He wasn’t violent, he wasn’t rough, he wasn’t pettish or peevish, but he was immovable all the same. He looked down at her from his height, looked at her hand urgent on his arm, and said, simply, “No.” Then he pulled away from her and crossed the room to his suitcase, trailing the vacant legs of his longjohns behind him like pennants.

Suddenly she was angry. “Stanley!” she snapped, and she couldn’t help herself, honeymoon or no honeymoon. She stamped her foot; her voice shot up a register. “You stop this now!” she shouted, and here she was, shrill as a fishwife on the second day of her marriage, but her patience was at an end and the train was rolling into the station and she wanted to go, to go now, and no more frittering or vacillating or neurotic displays.

She was about to stalk across the room and take his arm again when she started at a sound behind her and turned around, expecting her mother. It wasn’t her mother. It was Stanley’s mother, Nettie, the ogre herself, the rain beaded on her hat and caught in a fine sparkling mist on the collar of her fur coat. Her jaw was wet and her mouth barely moved as she spoke. “I’ll handle this,” she said.

Nettie did finally get Stanley moving — how, Katherine would never know — and they both emerged from the room within half an hour, the suitcases and trunk neatly packed and secured and standing watch at the door, Nettie on Stanley’s left arm, his coat draped over his right, but still they missed the first train and the evening was ruined as far as Katherine was concerned. There was some satisfaction in finally getting under way, sitting there in the intimacy of their compartment with her erect and proper husband at her side, even if she did have to share him with his mother and hers, but it wasn’t what she’d hoped for. They made small talk, gazed out the window at the dark French countryside and the flitting lights, dined pleasantly enough, but all the while Stanley seemed tense and wooden, nodding his head automatically at any remark addressed to him, his hand — the hand she held in hers — as stiff as a marionette’s. And if he was wooden, if he was a puppet, then who was pulling the strings? Katherine gazed at Nettie’s tight self-satisfied smile as the train shot smoothly through the night and they talked in small voices of French painting, escargot, people they’d known in Chicago and the unsuitability of birds as pets, and she felt as depressed and deflated as she’d ever felt in her life.

When they finally arrived, Stanley was visibly drained. The whole business of the wedding and the move out of his hotel to Prangins for a night and then out of Prangins for Paris must have wrought havoc on his nerves. He was emotionally delicate, Katherine knew that, and she appreciated that in him — he was sensitive, artistic, retiring, as kind and thoughtful as any man in the world, the sort of husband women dream of. But the exhaustion was written on his face for anybody to see and when finally they were shown to their suite at the Elysée Palace, he merely wished her good night, ducked into his room and shut the door firmly behind him. She stood there a moment in the center of the salon, exhausted herself, thinking she should go to him, if only to pet and comfort him, but then she heard the sudden sharp rasp of the latch falling into place on the inside of the door and she sank into the nearest chair and cried till she was all cried out.

In the morning, Stanley was his old self, smiling and relaxed, and Katherine felt renewed too — they’d both been tired, that was all. They breakfasted in their room, treating each other with the exaggerated tenderness of a couple celebrating their golden wedding anniversary, and everything seemed right, the way she’d pictured it, gentle and soothing and intimate. Until Nettie showed up, that is. She burst in on them at nine, wanting to know if Stanley had taken his fish-oil capsule and if they were still planning to tour the Musée du Jeu-de-Paume or the Louvre. Immediately, Stanley’s mood changed. A moment before he’d been gay and communicative, slathering his toast with butter and reminiscing about how he and Harold used to play at Indians when they were boys and steal out into the yard to eat their toast dry beneath the shrubbery, and now suddenly the words died in his throat. No, he admitted, he hadn’t taken his fish-oil capsule, but he had it right here somewhere, and he would, and yes, they were planning on the Louvre, but he needed time to finish, well, his breakfast, and he hoped his mother wouldn’t be too disappointed if they left at ten?

If Stanley’s mother was going, then it was only right that Josephine should go too, and Katherine tried to make the best of it, chatting with her mother and snuggling beside Stanley in the carriage on the way over. But as they strolled through the galleries, Stanley quietly commenting on one painting or another, he unconsciously took his mother’s arm, and Katherine and Josephine were left to bring up the rear. Then there was lunch. Nettie had invited some horrid missionary’s wife who apparently ran a boardinghouse where Stanley had stayed while under the tutelage of Monsieur Julien. Her name was Mrs. van Pele, a dumpy, opinionated, undistinguished woman in her sixties, and Stanley nearly jumped out of his skin when she entered the room. He shot up from the table so precipitously he nearly knocked it over, his face flushing, and if it weren’t for the potted palm behind him he might have fled the restaurant altogether. “Adela,” Nettie chirped, trying to cover Stanley’s confusion while the waiter looked on suspiciously and Katherine and Josephine gaped in bewilderment, “how nice of you to come. You know Stanley, of course, and this is his wife, Katherine, and her mother, Mrs. Josephine Dexter.”