boy squirmed for a moment. “I’m at level eight on Deathmaster VI.”
“I’m not sure how much of a draw that’ll be,” Vivy said, and was surprised to see her son’s face cloud over. “What?”
“I just want to do something,” he muttered. He looked away from her roughly, and Vivy had to check her impulse to pull him to her. In the last few months he’d started to get moody, flinching away from her touch. Previews of coming attractions, she’d told Sam.
“We can work something out,” she said, studying the back of his head and his reddening neck. “Maybe Fredd could teach you to juggle.”
“Never mind.”
“We could have a talent show for kids.”
“I never said anything, okay?” He sidled over to the refrigerator and started pounding it with the side of his fist, thump-thump-thump, then thumpetty-tap, tap-thump, a little performance. Vivy flattened her hands on her hips. Nothing made her feel so helpless as her children. She looked at Sam, who shook his head and asked Annie what she’d done in school today. They were halfway through dinner before she concluded her account of the songs, the butterflies, the teacher’s moss collection. Somewhere in the butterflies Laszlo lifted his head and started eating, and the fist around Vivy’s heart relaxed. Still, she wondered what new hunger the boy was feeling.
Not until after dinner, when the kids had crashed their way through cleanup and Vivy and Sam lingered over coffee, did Sam bring up Cecilia again. Vivy was startled. Lost in Laszlo’s unhappiness, she had forgotten about Cecilia. “Just keep her in mind,” Sam was saying. “Schedule her for some middle-of-the-week night when you can’t get anybody else. You don’t want to go only backwards, retrieving the old acts. You want to go forward, too.”
“I am going forward. Fast-forward.” Vivy leaned toward him and separated the dark curls on his forehead into separate ringlets. Seeing the sheen of moisture on his nose and cheeks, she fanned the air above his face. “I hope you’re this gallant when I need defending.”
“I’m way more gallant than this,” he said, and then, after a moment, “You never need defending.”
“Guess I’ll have to work on that.” She pushed back her chair. “Time for me to go earn the family bacon. Can you pick up groceries? We’re all out of lettuce, and the kids haven’t eaten anything green in a week.”
“I’ll go to Safeway if you’ll think about booking Cecilia.”
“I won’t think about anything else all night.”
In fact, she intended to think about everything except Cecilia, but once she and David were installed on their shift—early evening, midweek, business slow despite the repaired air conditioner—Vivy found her mind circling back to Sam. Despite that plastered-on grin when he talked about Cecilia, his voice had been pleading. Ten years ago he would have managed the request with more dexterity.
Ten years ago they had struggled with accounts books and argued with boorish auditorium managers while lithe bodies slid into splits at their feet. In the mornings Vivy would stumble yawning into the living room and find half the members of Strikes and Spares, wearing only their skivvies, practicing handstands, their shapely legs scissoring the air. One of the legs usually managed to wrap itself around her on her way to the kitchen—sometimes it took her half an hour to get the coffee made. In those days she and Sam had juggled two or three flirtations apiece, and a pleasant, electrical thrill surged through their days. Some tantalizing body was always stretching nearby, heating up desire until it boiled over into Vivy and Sam’s sex life, and Vivy said, laughing, that she couldn’t keep track of how many people their imaginations pulled into bed with them.
Their marriage had never been fully open, but its door was left ajar. Neither Sam nor Vivy saw any reason to forego romance and excitement just because they were married. They sneaked phone calls, arranged lunches, collapsed into illicit, engulfing embraces from which they emerged tingling—never quite in bed, but not far from one. And when they weren’t falling into those embraces themselves, they watched each other with quick eyes.
In those days Vivy thought of her marriage to Sam as a game that depended on hot grace as much as cunning; the winner of a round was the one who managed to signal an infatuation with the least fuss, the fewest clues. Or perhaps the winner was the partner who ignored signs of dalliance, too preoccupied to notice the other’s sighs, long walks, lunges for the telephone. Either way, the loser was the one who broke down and demanded to know exactly what was going on, leaving the other to smile and say, “What are you talking about? You shouldn’t get so worked up.”
Vivy had loved the game, which kept her marriage just enough off balance that she could feel the tip and roll under her feet. Every day promised adventure. She and Sam fairly leaped out of bed in the mornings. But when the business dissolved, they lost their intimacy with muscular, sexy performers who didn’t think much of such middle-class concepts as somebody else’s marriage.
Instead, Vivy and Sam worked elbow to elbow with Nancy and Paul and David and Cecilia, who believed marriage was a state in which two people merged without boundaries or divisions. As if a little air and scandal, secrecy and fun in a marriage would destroy it. As if a good marriage required border guards and razor wire. Mottoes. Meetings. “We gather in order to build better marriages with our shared strength.” She had gone into Life Ties with a willing spirit, but five years of meetings had taught Vivy that she and Sam had a better marriage back in the days when they could tantalize each other. Now every moment of every day was filled with duty, and Vivy felt as if the supple canoe that used to bear them had been turned into a barge.
Over the store stereo the carefully inoffensive CD—ocean waves, French horns, chanting—came to an end, and Vivy released a breath she hadn’t meant to be holding. Sam might have an awkwardly lovesick heart, but he was right to point out that they needed some decent music in there. As the next CD started in with birdcalls and some kind of whistle, a kid at one of the tables cocked his finger like a gun at the speaker. Vivy called to him, “Have you got anything else?”
She had to repeat herself twice before the boy understood that she was talking to him. He shook his head. “I don’t exactly carry spare CDs around with me.”
Vivy ignored the sneer. “Bring something in next time. If I’m here, I’ll put it on. If it doesn’t chase people out, we’ll play the whole thing.”
“Deal.” The kid smirked while the other boys at his table shoved him.
David, who was polishing the length of the counter with cleanser and a sponge, said, “I might be one of the people who gets chased out.”
“Come on. Anything would be better than these symphonies for wind chimes and groaning whales. I hear those damn whales in my nightmares.”
“I don’t mind whales. At least you don’t have to worry about the lyrics.”
“You don’t know that. Whales might be rapping. We could be listening to them singing, ‘It’s time to take a stand. Kill the fisher man. Huh.’”
“You’re funny, Vivy.”
“Just trying to keep the troops entertained.”
He smiled and sponged around the freezers with his usual meticulous pep, sweating lightly despite the regulated, seventy-two degree air. Leaning back against the counter, Vivy considered him: soft, rounded body; brown arms; stiff beard that stuck away
