Luís’s Reviews > Couples > Status Update

Loss became real and leaden only later, in the afternoon. Walking along Divinity Street with an empty skull and aching loin muscles, he met Eddie Constantine, back from the ends of the world. Eddie was rarely in town anymore, and perhaps Carol had just filled him in on a month's worth of gossip, for he gleefully cried in greeting, "Hey, Piet! I hear you got caught with your hand in the honeypot!"

(...)
Pleased with his rebuttal, he waited to hear Angela agree, but she slammed the screen door. Outside, in sudden moist air, he stepped sideways into the pruned lilacs and was stabbed beneath an eye and wondered if he were drunk and thus so elated.

Downstairs, Piet, having poured himself one more bourbon, had grown cold beside the dying fire, bored and outraged. He tried to use his parka as a blanket, but it was too small. He tiptoed up the stairs, listened at his door, and tapped at Georgene's. He tested the lock. It gave. (...)

The front door was pushed open. Deftly Piet replaced the receiver and faced the hall as if he had been looking in the mirror. Nancy stood there, swaddled with snowy clothes. Her cheeks were aflame. Wide-eyed, she held out to him on one wet leather mitten what he took to be a snowball; but it was half-gray. It was a frozen bird with a gingery redhead and a black spot on its chest, a tree sparrow caught by the blizzard

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. (...)

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.