Status Updates From Couples (Crest P1252)

Ken Whitman watched silently from near the wall, beneath an African mask. Ben Saltz eagerly hunchbacked, fetched radishes and bread to the buffet table. Carol carried two bottles of burgundy black tar in the candlelight. Being passed a plate, Piet chewed without saliva; his mouth felt full of ashes that still burned. Suddenly old, he sought a chair. His knee did hurt.

Foxy went out into Freddy's tiny front yard, which held a crabapple tree, skeletal and spidery without leaves. The post-office flag was already at half-mast. Divinity Street was so silent she heard an electric sander working well down the block. She saw shadows huddled around radios through the plate-glass windows of the pizza shop, the Tarbox Star, and the shoe repair haven that was also a bookie joint. (...)

The stars had wheeled out of all recognition. They were as if seen from another earth, beyond the Milky Way, rich in silence and strangeness. Treading lightly upon the rime-whitened grass, ice to his bare soles, he finally located, southward above the barn ridge with its twin scrolled lightning rods, a constellation gigantic and familiar: Orion. The giant of winter, surprised in his bed. (...)

One windy weekday afternoon Piet, rounding the green in his pickup truck, saw Ben putting up storm windows. They stacked them, a leaning deck of great glass cards at the side of the house, and Ben was puzzling over the numbers. Wanting to hail him, yet afraid to slow down and be caught, Piet gave himself only a glimpse, but it was a glimpse, shockingly, of happiness. Ben was letting his beard grow back. (...)

Amid laughter, beer, and white wine, the play was passed around through the odors of brine and tennis sweat. It bore no title. The writing, beginning at the top as a careful ornamental print, degenerated into Freddy's formless hand, with no decided slant and a tendency for the terminal strokes to swing down depressively.

He meant her to fling him open and discover his secret, awed and enchanted by it, and decipher and nurture its intricate life with him. But, enclosed in the alternative world - a world exotic yet strict, mixing a lover's shamelessness and a father's compassion - arising from her lap, she did not respond. (...)

(...)
Without willing it, without wanting it, not knowing at what instant she passed, averting her head into tears, Foxy began in fatigue and confusion to cry, and it was clear to all of them, except Angela and Ben, that as they had suspected, she was seeing Piet.

(...)
She had become their pet, their topic. They could not understand her claustrophobia and indignation and discussed her 'problem' with her as if it might lie anywhere but with the three of them.

Harold opened for her the door that entered from the lawn on the lower level of the house, where the children slept and the laundry was done. The laundry room smelled of cement and soap and, this morning, sourly, of unwashed clothes heaped around the dryer. The gardening and carpentry tools and shelves of paint, grass seed, and lime were ranged along the other wall, which reeked gasoline from the power mower. (...)

He had laughed - his laugh came from deeper within him than the laugh of most men, was warmer, a bit disconcerting, more invading.

Ken drove swiftly down the road they already knew by heart, so both leaned a little before the curve was there. "Well," he said after silence, "I hope this basketball isn't a clue as to how he builds houses. He plays a pretty crusty game."

They went to bed up a staircase scarred and crayoned by children they had never seen. Foxy assumed that, with the revival of her appetite, she would enjoy a great animal draught of sleep. Instead, Ken kissed her shoulder in token of the love they should not in this month make, turned his back, and quickly went still. His breathing was inaudible, and he never moved. (...)

(...)
He closed his eyes and imagined sap rising in blurred deltas about him. A wash of ashes. A chalky warmth. A pleasant bridal taste. Shyly, fearing to wake him, his elder daughter's touch came into the palm of his hanging hand, the hand holding the frond welcoming Jesus to Jerusalem.