afterward. “Wouldn’t you think he’d be something like a sculptor? With gritty fingernails? I expect he treats women badly.” She was recalling how he had looked at her breasts. “Not like Raymond,” she said. “Raymond worships Maya. And he is extremely clean.”
(Raymond has the kind of looks everybody’s mother is crazy about, Maya was to say to Georgia, with slashing accuracy, a few weeks after this.)
The food that Maya served was no better than you would expect at a family dinner, and the heavy silver forks were slightly tarnished. But Raymond poured good wine that he would have liked to talk about. He did not manage to interrupt Harvey, who told scandalous and indiscreet hospital stories, and was blandly outrageous about necrophilia and masturbation. Later, in the living room, the coffee was made and served with some ceremony. Raymond got everybody’s attention as he ground the beans in a Turkish cylinder. He talked about the importance of the aromatic oils. Harvey, halted in mid-anecdote, watched with an unkindly smirk, Hilda with patient polite attention. It was Maya who gave her husband radiant encouragement, hung about him like an acolyte, meekly and gracefully assisting. She served the coffee in beautiful little Turkish cups, which she and Raymond had bought in a shop in San Francisco, along with the coffee grinder. She listened demurely to Raymond talking about the shop, as if she recalled other holiday pleasures.
Harvey and Hilda were the first to leave. Maya hung on Raymond’s shoulder, saying goodbye. But she detached herself once they were gone, her slithery grace and wifely demeanor discarded. She stretched out casually and awkwardly on the sofa and said, “Now, don’t you go yet. Nobody gets half a chance to talk while Harvey is around — you have to talk after.”
And Georgia saw how it was. She saw that Maya was hoping not to be left alone with the husband whom she had aroused — for whatever purposes — by her showy attentions. She saw that Maya was mournful and filled with a familiar dread at the end of her dinner party. Raymond was happy. He sat down on the end of the sofa, lifting Maya’s reluctant feet to do so. He rubbed one of her feet between his hands.
“What a savage,” Raymond said. “This is a woman who won’t wear shoes.”
“Brandy!” said Maya, springing up. “I knew there was something else you did at dinner parties. You drink brandy!”
“He loves her but she doesn’t love him,” said Georgia to Ben, just after she had remarked on Raymond’s worshipping Maya and being very clean. But Ben, perhaps not listening carefully, thought she was talking about Harvey and Hilda.
“No, no, no. There I think it’s the other way round. It’s hard to tell with English people. Maya was putting on an act for them. I have an idea about why.”
“You have an idea about everything,” said Ben.
GEORGIA AND MAYA became friends on two levels. On the first level, they were friends as wives; on the second as themselves. On the first level, they had dinner at each other’s houses. They listened to their husbands talk about their school days. The jokes and fights, the conspiracies and disasters, the bullies and the victims. Terrifying or pitiable school fellows and teachers, treats and humiliations. Maya asked if they were sure they hadn’t read all that in a book. “It sounds just like a story,” she said. “A boys’ story about school.”
They said that their experiences were what the books were all about. When they had talked enough about school, they talked about movies, politics, public personalities, places they had travelled to or wanted to travel to. Maya and Georgia could join in then. Ben and Raymond did not believe in leaving women out of the conversation. They believed that women were every bit as intelligent as men.
On the second level, Georgia and Maya talked in each other’s kitchens, over coffee. Or they had lunch downtown. There were two places, and only two, where Maya liked to have lunch. One was the Moghul’s Court — a seedy, grandiose bar in a large, grim railway hotel. The Moghul’s Court had curtains of moth-eaten pumpkin- colored velvet, and desiccated ferns, and waiters who wore turbans. Maya always dressed up to go there, in droopy, silky dresses and not very clean white gloves and amazing hats that she found in secondhand stores. She pretended to be a widow who had served with her husband in various outposts of the Empire. She spoke in fluty tones to the sullen young waiters, asking them, “Could you be so good as to…” and then telling them they had been terribly, terribly kind.
She and Georgia worked out the history of the Empire widow, and Georgia was added to the story as a grumpy, secretly Socialistic hired companion named Miss Amy Jukes. The widow’s name was Mrs. Allegra Forbes-Bellyea. Her husband had been Nigel Forbes-Bellyea. Sometimes Sir Nigel. Most of one rainy afternoon in the Moghul’s Court was spent in devising the horrors of the Forbes-Bellyea honeymoon, in a damp hotel in Wales.
The other place that Maya liked was a hippie restaurant on Blanshard Street, where you sat on dirty plush cushions tied to the tops of stumps and ate brown rice with slimy vegetables and drank cloudy cider. (At the Moghul’s Court, Maya and Georgia drank only gin.) When they lunched at the hippie restaurant, they wore long, cheap, pretty Indian cotton dresses and pretended to be refugees from a commune, where they had both been the attendants or concubines of a folk-singer named Bill Bones. They made up several songs for Bill Bones, all mild and tender blue-eyed songs that contrasted appallingly with his greedy and licentious ways. Bill Bones had very curious personal habits.
When they weren’t playing these games, they talked in a headlong fashion about their lives, childhoods, problems, husbands.
“That was a horrible place,” Maya said. “That school.”
Georgia agreed.
“They were poor boys at a rich kids’ school,” Maya said. “So they had to try hard. They had to be a credit to their families.”
Georgia would not have thought Ben’s family poor, but she knew that there were different ways of looking at such things.
Maya said that whenever they had people in for dinner or the evening, Raymond would pick out beforehand all the records he thought suitable and put them in a suitable order. “I think sometime he’ll hand out conversational topics at the door,” Maya said.
Georgia revealed that Ben wrote a letter every week to the great-aunt who had sent him to school.
“Is it a nice letter?” said Maya.
“Yes. Oh, yes. It’s very nice.”
They looked at each other bleakly, and laughed. Then they announced — they admitted — what weighed on them. It was the innocence of these husbands — the hearty, decent, firm, contented innocence. That is a wearying and finally discouraging thing. It makes intimacy a chore.
“But do you feel badly,” Georgia said, “talking like this?”
“Of course,” said Maya, grinning and showing her large perfect teeth — the product of expensive dental work from the days before she had charge of her own looks. “I have another reason to feel badly,” she said. “But I don’t know whether I do. I do and I don’t.”
“I know,” said Georgia, who up until that moment hadn’t known, for sure.
“You’re very smart,” Maya said. “Or I’m very obvious. What do you think of him?”
“A lot of trouble,” Georgia said judiciously. She was pleased with that answer, which didn’t show how flattered she felt by the disclosure, or how heady she found this conversation.
“You aren’t just a-whistlin’ ‘Dixie,’” Maya said, and she told the story about the abortion. “I am going to break up with him,” she said. “Any day now.”
But she kept on seeing Harvey. She would relate, at lunch, some very disillusioning facts about him, then announce that she had to go, she was meeting him at a motel out on the Gorge Road, or at the cabin he had on Prospect Lake.
“Must scrub,” she said.
She had left Raymond once. Not for Harvey. She had run away with, or to, a musician. A pianist — Nordic and sleepy-looking but bad-tempered — from her society-lady, symphony-benefit days. She travelled with him for five weeks, and he deserted her in a hotel in Cincinnati. She then developed frightful chest pains, appropriate to a breaking heart. What she really had was a gallbladder attack. Raymond was sent for, and he came and got her out of the hospital. They had a little holiday in Mexico before they came home.
“That was it, for me,” Maya said. “That was your true and desperate love. Nevermore.”
