Spring Song of the Frogs

Women’s lips are paler again. They wax and wane, from season to season. They haven’t been this pale for years; not for fifteen or twenty years at least. Will can’t remember when it was, when he last saw those shades of rich vanilla, of melting orange sherbet, of faded pink satin, on women’s mouths. Some time before he started really noticing. All this past winter the lips were dark instead, mulberry, maroon, so that the mouths looked like the mouths of old-fashioned dolls, sharply defined against the china white of the skin. Now the skins are creamier, except on the ones who have ignored whatever wordless decree has gone out and have begun to tan.

This woman, whose name is Robyn, has a mouth the colour of a fingernail, the wan half-moon at the base. Her own fingernails are painted to match: someone has decided that they should no longer look as if they’ve been dipped in blood. She has on a loose cool dress, cotton in a pink so faint it’s like something that’s run in the wash, with buttons down the front, the top three undone. By the way she’s glanced down once or twice, she’s wondering if she’s gone too far.

Will smiles at her, looking into her eyes, which are possibly blue; he can’t tell in this light. She smiles back. She won’t be able to keep staring him in the eye for long. After she blinks and shifts, she’ll have three choices. The menu, on grey paper with offset handwriting, French style, which she’s already studied; the view off to the side, towards the door, but it’s too early for that; or the wall behind him. Will knows what’s on it: a framed poster advertising a surrealist art show of several years back, with a drawing on it, fleshy pink with pinky-grey shadows, which suggests a part of the body, though it’s difficult to say which part. Something about to grow hair, become sexual in a disagreeable way. Either she’ll react to it or she won’t see it all. Instead she’ll glance at her own reflection in the glass, checking herself out as if she’s a stranger she might consider picking up: a deep look, brief but sincere.

The waitress arrives, a thin girl in a red brushcut, with a purple feather earring dangling from one ear. She stands as though her head is fixed on a hook and the rest of her body is drooping down from it, with no tendons. She’s wearing what could be tuxedo pants. The restaurant is in a district of second-hand clothing stores, where foreign-looking women with stumpy legs and black hair pulled back into buns come to shuffle through the racks, and also where girls like this one get their outlandish costumes. The belt is wide red plastic, and could be either twenty-five years old or brand new; the shirt is a man’s dress shirt, with pleats, the sleeves rolled to the elbow. The girl’s arms, bone-skinny and white, come out of the puffs of cloth like the stems of peonies that have been grown in darkness.

Her thighs will be much the same. Will can remember the thighs in the ancient men’s magazines, the ones that were passed around when he was at school, black-and-white photos on cheap paper, with no air-brushing, the plump women posed in motel rooms, the way the garters would sink into the flesh of thighs and rump. Now there’s no flesh, the thighs have shrivelled up, they’re all muscle and bone. Even the Playboy centrefolds look as if they’re made of solid gristle. It’s supposed to be sexy to show them in leg warmers.

Will asks Robyn if she’d like something to drink.

“A Perrier with a twist,” says Robyn, looking up, giving the waitress the same smile she’s just given Will.

Will orders a Bloody Mary and wonders if he’s made a mistake. Possibly this waitress is a man. He’s been here several times before, never without a slight but enjoyable sense of entering forbidden territory. Any place with checked tablecloths gives him this feeling, which is left over from when he was a student and thought he would end up being something other than what he has become. In those days he drew illustrations for the campus newspaper, and designed sets. For a while he kept up the drawing, as a hobby, or that’s what his ex-wife called it. Maybe later he’ll go back to it, when he has the time. Some days he wanders into the galleries down here, to see what the young kids are up to. The owners approach him with cynical deference, as if all he has to offer, to them or anyone else, is his money. He never buys anything.

The waitress returns with the drinks, and Will, in view of the two slight bumps visible on her ribcage, decides that she really is a woman after all.

“I thought for a minute she was a man,” he says to Robyn.

“Really?” Robyn says. She glances at the waitress, now at the next table. “Oh no,” she says, as if it’s a mistake she herself would never have made. “No. Definitely a woman.”

“Some bread?” Will says. The bread here is placed in tiny baskets, suspended over the tables by a sort of rope-and-pulley arrangement. To get to the bread you have to either stand up or lower the basket by unhitching the rope from where it’s fastened on the wall; which is awkward, but Will enjoys doing it. Maybe the theory is that your food will appeal to you more if you’re allowed to participate in it, or maybe the baskets are just some designer’s fiasco. He always has bread here.

“Pardon?” says Robyn, as if bread is a word she’s never heard before. “Oh. No thanks.” She gives a little shudder, as if the thought of it is slightly repulsive. Will is annoyed, but determined to have bread anyway. It’s good bread, thick, brown, and warm. He turns to the wall, undoes the rope, and the basket creaks downwards.

“Oh, that’s very cute,” says Robyn. He catches it then, the look she’s giving herself in the glass behind him. Now they are going to have to make their way through the rest of the lunch somehow. Why does he keep on, what’s he looking for that’s so hard to find? She has generous breasts, that’s what impelled him: the hope of generosity.

The waitress comes back and Robyn, pursing her pastel-coloured lips, orders a spinach salad without the dressing. Will is beginning to sweat; he’s feeling claustrophobic and is anxious to be gone. He tries to think about running his hand up her leg and around her thigh, which might be full and soft, but it’s no good. She wouldn’t enjoy it.

Cynthia is white on white. Her hair is nearly blonde, helped out, Will suspects: her eyebrows and eyelashes are darker. Her skin is so pale it looks powdered. She’s not wearing the hospital gown but a white nightgown with ruffles, childish, Victorian, reminiscent of lacey drawers and Kate Greenaway greeting cards. Under the cloth, Will thinks, she must be translucent; you would be able to see her veins and intestines, like a guppy’s. She draws the sheet up to her chest, backing away from him, against the headboard of the bed, a position that reminds him of a sickly Rosetti madonna, cringing against the wall while the angel of the Annunciation threatens her with fullness.

Will smiles with what he hopes is affability. “How are you doing, Cynthia?” he says. There’s a basket on the night table, with oranges and an apple; also some flowers.

“Okay,” she says. She smiles, a limp smile that denies the message. Her eyes are anxious and cunning. She wants him to believe her and go away.

“Your mum and dad asked me to drop by,” Will says. Cynthia is his niece.

“I figured,” says Cynthia. Maybe she means that he wouldn’t have come otherwise, or maybe she means that they have sent him as a substitute for themselves. She is probably right on both counts. It’s a family myth that Will is Cynthia’s favourite uncle. Like many myths, it had some basis in truth, once, when – just after his own marriage broke up – he was reaching for a sense of family, and would read Cynthia stories and tickle her under the arms. But that was years ago.

Last night, over the phone, his sister used this past as leverage. “You’re the only one who can talk to her. She’s cut us off.” Her voice was angry rather than despairing.

“Well, I don’t know,” Will said dubiously. He has no great faith in his powers as a mediator, a confidant, even a strong shoulder. He used to have Cynthia up to the farm, when his own sons were younger and Cynthia was twelve or so. She was tanned then, a tomboy; she liked to wander over the property by herself, picking wild apples. At night she would wolf down the dinners Will would cook for the four of them, five if he had a woman up – plates of noodles Alfredo, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, fried chicken, steaks, sometimes a goose which he’d bought from the people across the way.

There was nothing wrong with Cynthia then; she wore her hair loose, her skin was golden, and Will felt a disturbing sexual pull towards her which he certainly doesn’t feel now. The boys felt it too, and would tease and provoke her, but she stood up to them. She said there was nothing they could do she couldn’t do too, and she was almost right. Then they got into their motorcycle-and-car phase, and Cynthia changed. All of a sudden she didn’t like getting grease on her hands; she began painting her nails. Will sees this now as the beginning of the end.

“It’s an epidemic,” his sister said over the phone. “It’s some kind of a fad. You know what she actually said? She actually said a lot of the girls at school were doing it. She’s so goddamned competitive.”

“I’ll go in,” Will said. “Is there anything I should take? Some cheese maybe?” His sister is married to a man whose eyebrows are so faint they’re invisible. Will, who doesn’t like him, thinks of him as an albino.

“How about a good slap on the backside,” said his sister. “Not that she’s got one left.”

Then she began to cry, and Will said she shouldn’t worry, he was sure it would all turn out fine in the end.

At the moment he doesn’t believe it. He looks around the room, searching for a chair. There is one, but Cynthia’s sky-blue dressing-gown is across it. Just as well: if he sits down, he’ll have to stay longer.

“Just okay?” he says.

“I gained a pound,” she says. This is intended to placate him. He’ll have to check with the doctor, as his sister wants a full report, and Cynthia, she claims, is not accurate on the subject of her weight.

“That’s wonderful,” he says. Maybe it’s true, since she’s so unhappy about it.

“I hardly ate anything,” she says, plaintively but also boasting.

“You’re trying though,” says Will. “That’s good.” Now that he’s here, he wishes to be helpful. “Maybe tomorrow you’ll eat more.”

“But if I hardly ate anything and I gained a pound,” she says, “what’s going to happen? I’ll get fat.”

Will doesn’t know what to say. Reason, he knows, doesn’t work; it’s been tried. It would do no good to tell her she’s a wraith, that if she doesn’t eat she’ll digest herself, that her heart is a muscle like any other muscle and if it isn’t fed it will atrophy.

Suddenly Will is hungry. He’s conscious of the oranges and the apple, right beside him on the night table, round and brightly coloured and filled with sweet juice. He wants to take something, but would that be depriving her?

“Those look good,” he says.

Cynthia is scornful, as if this is some crude ploy of his to coax her to eat. “Have some,” she says. “Have it all. As long as I don’t have to watch. You can put it in your pocket.” She speaks of the fruit as if it were an undifferentiated mass, like cold porridge.

“That’s all right,” says Will. “I’ll leave it here for you.”

“Have the flowers then,” says Cynthia. This gesture too is contemptuous: he has needs, she doesn’t. She is beyond needs.

Will casts around for anything: some hook, some handhold. “You should get better,” he says, “so you can come up to the farm. You like it there.” To himself he sounds falsely genial, wheedling.

“I’d be in the way,” Cynthia says, looking away from him, out the window. Will looks too. There’s nothing out there but the windows of another hospital building. “Sometimes I can see them doing operations,” she says.

“I’d enjoy it,” Will says, not knowing whether he’s lying. “I get lonely up there on the weekends.” This is true enough, but as soon as he’s said it it sounds like whining.

Cynthia looks at him briefly. “You,” she says, as if she has a monopoly, and who is he to talk? “Anyway, you don’t have to go there if you don’t want to. Nobody’s making you.”

Will feels shabby, like an out-of-work man begging for handouts on the street. He has seen such men and turned away from them, thinking about how embarrassed he would be if he were in their place, shuffling like that. Now he sees that what counts for them is not his feeling of embarrassment but the money. He stands foolishly beside Cynthia’s bed, his offering rejected.

Cynthia has a short attention span. She’s looking at her hands, spread out on the sheet now. The nails are peach-coloured, newly polished. “I used to be pretty, when I was younger,” she says.

Will wants to shake her. She’s barely eighteen, she doesn’t know a thing about age or time. He could say, “You’re pretty now,” or he could say, “You’d be pretty if you’d put on some weight,” but either one of these would be playing by her rules, so he says neither. Instead he says good-bye, pecks her on the cheek, and leaves, feeling as defeated as she wants him to feel. He hasn’t made any difference.

Will parks his silver BMW in the parking space, takes the key out of the ignition, puts it carefully into his pocket. Then he remembers that he should keep the key handy to lock the car from the outside. This is one of the advantages of the BMW: you can never lock yourself out. He drove a Porsche for a while, after his marriage broke up. It made him feel single and ready for anything, but he doesn’t feel like that any more. His moustache went about the same time as that car.

The parking space is off to the left of the farmhouse, demarcated by railroad ties and covered with white crushed gravel. It was like that when he bought the place, but that’s what he probably would have done anyway. He keeps meaning to plant some flowers, zinnias perhaps, behind the railroad ties, but so far he hasn’t got around to it.

He gets out, goes to the trunk for the groceries. Halfway to the house he realizes he’s forgotten to lock the car, and goes back to do it. It’s not as safe around here as it used to be. Last year he had a break-in, some kids from the town, out joy-riding. They broke plates and spread peanut butter on the walls, drank his liquor and smashed the bottles, and, as far as he could tell, screwed in all the beds. They were caught because they pinched the television set and tried to sell it. Everything was insured, but Will felt humiliated. Now he has bolt locks, and bars on the cellar windows, but anyone could break in if they really wanted to. He’s thinking of getting a dog.

The air inside the house smells dead, as if it has heated and then cooled, absorbing the smells of furniture, old wood, paint, dust. He hasn’t been here for several weeks. He sets the bags down on the kitchen table, opens a few windows. In the living room there’s a vase with wizened daffodils, the water stagnant and foul. He sets the vase out on the patio; he’ll empty it later.

Will bought this place after his marriage broke up, so he and the boys would have somewhere they could spend time together in a regular way. Also, his wife made it clear that she’d like some weekends off. The house was renovated by the people who lived here before; just as well, since Will never would have had the time to supervise, though he frequently sketches out plans for his ideal house. Not everything here is the way he would have done it, but he likes the board-and-batten exterior and the big opened-up kitchen. Despite some jumpiness lingering from the break-in, he feels good here, better than he does in his apartment in the city.

His former house is his wife’s now; he doesn’t like going there. Sometimes there are younger men, referred to by their first names only. Now that the boys are almost grown up, this doesn’t bother him as much as it used to: she might as well be having a good time, though the turnover rate is high. When they were married she didn’t enjoy anything much, including him, including sex. She never told him what was expected of him, and he never asked.

Will unpacks the groceries, stows away the food. He likes doing this, slotting the eggs into their egg-shaped holes in the refrigerator, filing the spinach in the crisper, stashing the butter in the compartment marked BUTTER, pouring the coffee beans into the jar labelled COFFEE. It makes him feel that some things at least are in their right places. He leaves the steaks on the counter, uncorks the wine, hunts for some candles. Of the pair he finds, one has been chewed by mice. Hardened droppings are scattered about the drawer. Mice are a new development. There must be a hole somewhere. Will is standing with the chewed candle in his hand, pondering remedies, when he hears a car outside.

He looks out the kitchen window. Since the break-in, he’s less willing to open the door without knowing who’s outside. But it’s Diane, in a car he hasn’t seen before, a cream-coloured Subaru. She always keeps her cars very clean. For some reason she’s chosen to back up the driveway, in memory, perhaps, of the time she got stuck in the snow and he told her it would have been easier to get out if she’d been pointing down.

He puts the candle on the counter and goes into the downstairs bathroom. He smiles at himself, checking to see if there’s anything caught between his teeth. He doesn’t look bad. Then he goes out to welcome Diane. He realizes he hasn’t been sure until now that she would really turn up. It could be he doesn’t deserve it.

She slides out of the car, stands up, gives him a hug and a peck on the cheek. She has big sunglasses on, with silly palm trees over the eyebrows. This is the kind of extravagance Will has always liked about her. He hugs her back, but she doesn’t want to be held too long. “I brought you something,” she says, and searches inside the car.

Will watches her while she’s bending over. She has a wide cotton skirt on, pulled tight around the waist; she’s lost a lot of weight. He used to think of her as a hefty woman, well-fleshed and athletic, but now she’s almost spindly. In his arms she felt frail, diminished.

She straightens and turns, thrusting a bottle of wine at him, and a round of Greek bread, fresh and spongy. Will is reassured. He puts his arm around her waist and hugs her again, trying to make it companionable so she won’t feel pressured. “I’m glad to see you,” he says.

Diane sits at the kitchen table and they drink wine; Will fools with the steaks, rubbing them with garlic, massaging them with pepper and a pinch or two of dried mustard. She used to help him with the cooking, she knows where everything’s kept. But tonight she’s acting more like a guest.

“Heard any good jokes lately?” she says. This in itself is a joke, since it was Diane who told the jokes, not Will. Diane was the one Will was with when his marriage stopped creaking and groaning and finally just fell apart. She wasn’t the reason though, as he made a point of telling her. He said it could have been anyone; he didn’t want her to feel responsible. He’s not sure what happened after that, why they stopped seeing one another. It wasn’t the sex: with her he was a good lover. He knows she liked him, and she got on well with the boys. But one day she said, “Well, I guess that’s that,” and Will didn’t have the presence of mind to ask her what she meant.

“That’s your department,” Will says.

“Only because you were so sad then,” says Diane. “I was trying to cheer you up. You were dragging around like you had a thyroid deficiency or something.” She fiddles with her sunglasses, which are on the table. “Now it’s your turn.”

“You know I’m no good at it,” Will says.

Diane nods. “Bad timing,” she says. She stands up, reaches past Will to the counter. “What’s this?” she says, picking up the chewed candle. “Something fall off?”

They eat at the round oak table they bought together at a country auction, one of the local farmers closing up and selling out. Diane has dug out the white linen table napkins she gave him one year, and has lit both candles, the chewed and the unchewed. “I believe in festivity,” she said.

Now there are silences, which they both attempt to fill. Diane says she wants to talk about money. It’s the right time in her life for her to become interested in money, and isn’t Will an authority? She makes quite a lot, but it’s hard for her to save. She wants Will to explain inflation.

Will doesn’t want to talk about money, but he does it anyway, to please her. Pleasing her is what he would like to do, but she doesn’t seem too pleased. Her face is thinner and more lined, which makes her look more elegant but less accessible. She’s less talkative than she used to be, as well. He remembers her voice as louder, more insistent; she would tease him, pull him up short. He found it amusing and it took his mind off himself. He thinks women in general are becoming more silent: it goes with their new pale lips. They’re turning back to secrecy, concealment. It’s as if they’re afraid of something, but Will can’t imagine what.

Half of Diane’s steak lies on her plate, untouched. “So tell me about gold,” she says.

“You’re not hungry?” Will asks her.

“I was ravenous,” she says. “But I’m full.” Her hair has changed too. It’s longer, with light streaks. Altogether she is more artful.

“I like being with you,” Will says. “I always did.”

“But not quite enough,” Diane says, and then, to make it light, “you should put an ad in the paper, Will. The personals, NOW magazine. ‘Nice man, executive, with good income, no encumbrances, desires to meet …’ ”

“I guess I’m not very good at relationships,” Will says. In his head, he’s trying to complete Diane’s ad. Desires to meet what? A woman who would not look at herself in the glass of the picture behind him. A woman who would like what he cooks.

“Bullshit,” Diane says, with a return to her old belligerence. “What makes you think you’re that much worse at it than anyone else?”

Will looks at her throat, where it’s visible at the V-neck of her blouse. He hasn’t seen an overnight case, but maybe it’s in the car. He said no strings attached.

“There’s a full moon,” he says, “We should go out onto the patio.”

“Not quite,” says Diane, squinting up through the glass. “And it’s freezing out there, I bet.”

Will goes upstairs for a plaid blanket from the boys’ room to wrap around her. What he has in mind is a couple of brandies on the patio, and then they will see. As he’s coming back down the stairs, he hears her in the bathroom: it sounds as if she’s throwing up. Will pours the brandies, carries them outside. He wonders if he should go in, knock on the bathroom door. What if it’s food poisoning? He knows he should feel compassion; instead he feels betrayed by her.

But when she comes out to stand beside him, she seems all right, and Will decides not to ask her about it. He wraps the blanket around her and keeps his arm there, and Diane leans against him.

“We could sit down,” he says, in case she doesn’t like the position.

“Hey,” she says, “you got me flowers.” She’s spotted the withered daffodils. “Always so thoughtful. I bet they smell nice, too.”

“I wanted you to hear the frogs,” Will says. “We’re just at the end of the frog season.” The frogs live in the pond, down beyond the slope of the lawn. Or maybe they’re toads, he’s never been sure. For Will they’ve come to mean spring and the beginning of summer: possibilities, newness. Their silvery voices are filling the air around them now, like crickets but more prolonged, sweeter.

“What a man,” Diane says. “For some it’s nightingales, for some it’s frogs. Next I get a box of chocolate-covered slugs, right?”

Will would like to kiss her, but the timing is wrong. She’s shivering a little; against his arm she feels angular, awkward, as if she’s withholding her body from him, though not quite. They stand there looking at the moon, which is cold and lopsided, and listening to the trilling of the frogs. This doesn’t have the effect on Will he has hoped it would. The voices coming from the darkness below the curve of the hill sound thin and ill. There aren’t as many frogs as there used to be, either.