Fandom: Falsettos.
Author: Epigone.
Pairing: Marvin/Trina, Marvin/Whizzer.
Rating: PG.
Warnings: Spoilers for In Trousers.
Archivists: Ask first.
Summary: Trina learns how to survive the night
Date Written: November-December 2004.
Author's Notes: Written in the Yuletide 2004 Obscure Fandom Secret Santa Project for Petronelle, the other half of this lovely Fandom of Two. With thanks to Amber, who came and saw and beta-ed; and to all the people who listened to my vague natterings over AIM, in particular Carmarthen, Abyssinia4077, and Ella.
Feedback: Can be sent to kmaru1701 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com, and is much appreciated.
Surviving the Night
The motions of Grace, the hardness of the heart;
external circumstances.
--Pascal, "Pens�e 507"
Through her school years, she grows up plain and thin and unpoetic as a fencepost: small bones, narrow face, bobbed hair, muddy eyes. She doesn't develop a figure until after she leaves her parents' house, doesn't develop a reputation until someone leaves her house years down the road. At high-school reunions, people who saw her daily for four years will still mispronounce her name.
If Trina makes it out of public school without attention, she also makes it out unscarred, all her forthrightness intact. It takes a few years, during which she drifts from state university to secretarial work, from a childhood home in a crease of the Hudson called Closter to a small apartment on the edge of New York City--it takes those years and miles and petty disillusionments, but finally men begin to notice her. They are mostly men who have reached an age and a place where looks matter less than simple physical presence. She herself is only pushing thirty, but she knows her prospects here.
She brings them home with her sometimes, these men who would make her mother cry if she mentioned them in her phone calls home. Down-and-out actors, reporters for floundering two-bit papers. A few married men. A few Gentiles, even; her mother would prefer the adulterers. Trina learns from them the strangely complex footwork of casual romance, and the rhythm of finding each other on her wire-frame bed that they make bump up against the wall like a metronome. What they will not teach her is what comes after. What is supposed to fill the hours, gray and static and low-hanging as New York smog, that make up the rest of her life between dusk and dawn. They will not stay through the night with her.
All roads lead to NYC, she's always believed, to this Mecca of the East Coast. In fact, most roads only dead-end there.
Trudging the ten blocks from work on a Wednesday in July, when even at seven o'clock the heat makes the sidewalk shine, she falls in beside a man. As they emerge from the business district, the crowd thins, but he remains. He is nearly a head taller than her, and it's all in the legs. He should be taking one stride to her two, but every time she sneaks a sideways look, he is still level with her, as though he doesn't know where to put his feet.
She is smugly contemplating her own skill in maneuvering the streets when the heel of one of her shoes snaps and she almost goes sprawling. The man catches her by the elbow, formally and at arm's length, but when he finally looks at her and smiles, it is as though he has extended to her his entire list of credentials.
They're not inconsequential, either. Young--her age, she judges, which is different for a man anyway. Dark hair, not yet thinning. Dark eyes. (Jewish, she thinks, quite possibly Jewish, as though that matters.) And the narrow, even, compact smile.
"Deadly weapon," he says, nodding at the shattered shoe she picks up off the pavement.
"Yes," she agrees, smiling back with a pang. He has that somehow underhanded tone of someone who can call on deep reserves of cleverness, and knows it. She has never been able to fully engage with such people, for whom one word may have multiple meanings. Life--her life--is linear, does not diverge.
"You need a hand or something?" he asks
"No," Trina says, trying to adjust to traveling on this angle. "Thank you, I'm fine. Almost home."
He drops his head slightly and swings back into his off-kilter gait. Without quite knowing why, she opts not to turn off at her street, but to continue walking with him, her shoe dangling from her hand, her side beginning to ache with the exertion of imbalance. Ten minutes later, he stops and says, "That looks uncomfortable. Do you want me to call you a cab?"
"I can walk." He appears unconvinced, so she adds, "Just used up the last dollar in my wallet."
"I'll pay," he says. "What the hell."
She looks at him fixedly, and at last says, "That'd be really nice of you."
He makes that motion with his head again--in no way a show of humility, but rather like assent--and steps off the curb. She recognizes then what it is in him that appeals to her: not just the awkward stride, but his entire bearing, even the way he speaks when caught off-guard. A little out of step, somehow never exactly what she expects, like an actor who hasn't quite internalized his role.
The next cab that comes grinding down the gravelly street slows at his signal. He takes her arm with one hand, opens the door with the other, and nudges her in.
"Where to?" asks the driver, and she blushes when she gives him the address of a complex a few blocks back. When the man leans over to pay her fare, she can see his smile in the car's jaundiced interior light, but he says nothing.
She makes as if to touch him, but instead asks, "What's your name?"
"Marvin," he says, holding the door as stiffly as he held her.
"I'm Trina. Do you have a long walk, Marvin?"
He shrugs. "Fairly. About ten more blocks this way."
"Could I give you dinner or something?" That feels too extravagant, so she amends it: "Or just tea, coffee, whatever you drink? I mean, thank you. Can I repay you?"
He stands with his weight resting against the door, peering in at her. "Okay," he says slowly. "Tea sounds good."
He climbs beside her into the cab, and a few hours later into her bed. There he comes at her like a battering ram, all mass and muscle bearing down, until she presses her palms against his chest and says Calm down and guides him in, like slipping on a glove. Afterward he kisses her and does not get up. He tells her that actually he doesn't live ten blocks away. His car broke down coming from work, and he was going to try to walk all the way home to a suburb she recognizes as very affluent. She doubts that he lied to spare her lower-middle-class feelings; in fact, she doubts he even knows why he lied. Somehow, that touches her more.
"Do you want me to go?" he asks.
"No," she says. "Oh, no. You're the first to even ask."
He is very quiet for a long time, so long that she thinks he's fallen asleep. She rolls onto her side and watches the light from passing cars out the window scudding across the opposite wall, listens to the Doppler-distorted drone of faraway sirens.
"In this city," he says at length, "you have to try to find a way to survive the night." He slips a hand up along her naked back, skimming the knobs of her spine. "We just might survive the night."
For more than six months they continue their fumbling toward permanence, until Trina begins to get sick in the mornings. Her belly mounds up white and full as the moon, and one night while they eat dinner in her apartment--she still hasn't seen his house--she says without preamble, "So what are we going to do?"
Marvin says, "Have it?" and takes a drink.
"Easy for you to say," she retorts.
He blinks at her over the rim of his glass and says, "I wasn't planning on going anywhere, Trina."
"Were you planning on telling anyone?"
"Telling anyone?" He turns his glass, examining it as though it is her question that he holds in his hand. "Telling whom?"
"I don't know, Marvin, your parents?"
"I don't want to tell my parents."
She sweeps his empty plate out from between his elbows and marches to the sink with it. Over the hot hum of running water, she says, "I want to tell mine. I wanna call."
"So call." He gets up, removes the phone from its perch on the wall, and offers it to her.
She takes it gingerly and tucks it in the groove between her shoulder and neck; leans against the counter with her palms flat behind her on the Formica surface. "Stay here," she says, as though he has anywhere better to go, and she dials home.
Her mother picks up halfway through the first ring. Doubtless, Trina thinks, she always has an ear open for this very sound. Her voice is dry, rubbed raw, like old bone. She's not that young anymore; Trina idly contemplates the possibility that this will kill her. But Trina's never been one for dissembling.
"Ma," she says, "it's Trina. I'm gonna have a baby."
The line buzzes, vicious and insectile.
"Ma?"
"Trina?" her mother asks. "A baby?"
"A baby."
Again the buzz, and then: "Trina, how can there be a baby, you're not married--"
Trina's father takes the phone. It startles her, not because she didn't realize he was there--she knows he listens in on her phone conversations with her mother--but because she hasn't heard him in so long. He is a presence, not a voice, but here he is saying, "Trina, is this right? There's a baby?"
"Dad," she manages. "There's... there's gonna be, yeah."
Marvin raises his eyebrows. "This is serious, if Daddy's in on it." He leans his head against hers to eavesdrop, and distractedly she reaches up and lays her free hand on the back of his neck, burrowing her fingers into the fine hair. Holding him against her this way, pressing his cheek to hers, she says more clearly, "Yes, I'm going to have a baby."
"By who?" barks her father.
"This is amazing," says Marvin breathily in her ear, with almost scientific raptness. "It's like he's talking about racehorses: `by who.' `And it's A Little Accident, out of Trina by Marvin--"
"Shut up," Trina hisses, and into the receiver says, "Someone I've been seeing. His name's Marvin. He's here now." A little vindictively, she thrusts the phone at Marvin, who recoils and says in an artificial voice, "Hi, sir, this is Marvin."
When Trina gets back on the line, it is again silent.
"Dad?" she says. "Listen, he's a good guy, really." No reply. "Dad?" She tightens her hold on the nape of Marvin's neck, so that he squirms. "Dad, what'll I do?" She doesn't know why she asks, except maybe she has preserved somewhere in herself an ideal of paternal behavior.
"Do?" he says. "Don't ask stupid questions. You'll marry." And he hangs up, with his wife's aborted wail in the background: "Oh, Trina, is he at least a Jew?"
They marry one month later. Marvin's parents pay for the honeymoon and fix them up with a stately house in the suburbs twenty minutes from their own. (Around this time, it comes out that Marvin has been living in his parents' home since college, not out of financial insolvency but inertia.) By the time they've furnished the house, the baby has arrived: delicate, red-faced, finicky little Jason.
Trina quits her job to be with him, but Marvin's income is more than enough to support them, even enough to hire "help," a term Trina has never heard before. Sometimes after work Marvin complains about the hours or the submoronic employees, and considers maybe going back to school someday; or sometimes Jason is colicky and troublesome; but these are mere dropped stitches in the tight weave of her life. Mostly Jason sleeps soundly down the hall, and Marvin sleeps hard and contoured beside her, and she survives each night in turn.
* * * * * * * * *
On Fridays, Trina takes off from her new job early--early enough that the hotshot lawyer whose phone she answers can't pat her on the rump on her way out. Early enough, too, that she can be the one to pick up Jason from Little League practice rather than the babysitter, who--Jason confides to her with righteous indignation that she thinks misplaced in an eight-year-old--fails to offer sympathy on his biweekly humiliation at the plate.
She starts dinner as soon as she gets home, though they don't keep the Sabbath anymore. They held out for the first few years, but somehow it got lost among the myriad other rituals of their lives. Marvin never even seemed to notice. When she brought it up one night while he was rubbing her back, she felt his fingers pause on the curve of her shoulder for a moment before he laughed and said, "I was raised a pretty secular Jew, Trina. Judaism lite." Her mother bemoans their lapse when she visits on occasion (not nearly as often as Marvin's parents, who are underfoot almost as much as Jason), but Trina has begun to savor this harmless transgression.
It occurs to her sometimes, when she and Jason take a trip to the grocery store for dinner ingredients. He leads her up and down, reading her even the most difficult labels with perfect fluency, and it occurs to her: this is her life, regular as the aisles. This is the smell of her life, the fresh-cut vegetables and the ink-and-coffee odor of the office. This is the weight of it, Jason drowsing in her arms when he forgets he is supposed to be too old for carrying, and Marvin shifting the mattress when he slips into bed.
This is all: all she expected and all she can imagine.
One Friday Marvin comes home later than usual. Trina has already put Jason to bed and stored the roast in the refrigerator when she hears his key turn in the lock. She stops in the middle of the kitchen, listening to his clumsy entrance, the sound of his voice too low to make out. When he comes in from the hall, she steps forward to kiss him. She isn't sure what stops her: the unfamiliar scent of alcohol or the way that he turns his head slightly so that she notices the man standing beside him.
"I brought a friend from work for dinner," he says, as simultaneously guileless and canny as Jason when he wants candy at the grocery-store checkout.
"Oh," she says. "Oh. Well, that's--that's fine. I'm sure we have enough to go around."
"Trina, this is Whizzer Brown," Marvin says, not quite looking at her.
She almost repeats it incredulously--Whizzer?--but instead says only, "It's good to meet you" and gives him her hand.
Whizzer shakes it and smiles at her. He has a nice smile, boyish if a little too fast. (She entertains the absurd fancy that Marvin has coached him on this, told him how to offer it up like a passport.) His whole manner is boyish, really, in a way different from Marvin's flashes of zealous energy. He takes a step into her kitchen and looks around unselfconsciously, Marvin staying at his elbow like a chaperone.
"Good to meet you, too," Whizzer replies.
"Sit down, please. I just put the roast away. If I'd known you were coming, I'd've made something better--"
"My wife," says Marvin archly, "has an inferiority complex about her food." Trina, rummaging in the refrigerator, glances back at him, but he doesn't meet her eyes.
When she returns to the table with the plates, Whizzer has settled himself in her chair. In a moment more she will be composed again, but Whizzer looks up in time to see her expression before she pulls out Jason's chair instead. He half-rises, saying, "I'm sorry, should I sit somewhere else?"
"We don't have assigned seats," interjects Marvin. Whizzer frowns, but Trina says, "Of course we don't; that would be silly," sets the platter down, and sits across the table from him and Marvin. It's the only time she sees him blush the entire evening.
They eat in a silence punctuated by a few stabs at conversation. Whizzer seems most interested in Jason and his Little League exploits; he says he's played a little ball in his time. Watching the precise movements of his body (despite the awkwardness of someone who doesn't often sit down to dinner), Trina believes him. She tells him about Jason's problems at bat, his leggy run, the way the coach bawls him out--reaffirming for herself the close matrix of life in this house, the nucleus that is Jason and Trina against abrasive coaches and lecherous bosses and friends from work, with Marvin fixed in his orbit passing through nightly.
Whizzer finishes first and stands abruptly. Trina looks up at him, hoping to find him ill at ease--to find him understanding his displacement here, how he upsets the equilibrium of the room. But when he reaches across the table and takes her hand again, there is nothing but coolness there, even a sort of courtliness.
"This was great"--a pause while he seems to strain to remember the etiquette of names--"Trina, great dinner. Thank you. But I've gotta get going."
"Big weekend assignment for work," observes Marvin, sitting at his side. "You need help with the dishes?"
"No," says Trina, feeling the pressure of Whizzer's hand closing on hers and then releasing. "No. Thank you for coming, Whizzer." She doesn't stumble over the name at all.
"I'll show you out," says Marvin, getting to his feet, touching Whizzer lightly on the elbow. As they disappear into the unlit hall together, Trina hears Whizzer say "Marvin, I don't need showing out," and then the metallic rattle of the screen door against its frame. She clears the table and loads the dishwasher, and still doesn't hear the screen door again. She goes upstairs.
Marvin comes in nearly an hour later, so quietly that she doesn't even realize he's in the room until the mattress dips: Marvin, changing the balance of the bed. He lies down behind her, on top of the sheets. After a moment, he starts to rub her back, and she rolls toward him and kisses him. Kisses him on the corner of the jaw, because in the dark she misses his lips. She loosens the cord on her robe so that the fabric pools around her hips.
"Trina," Marvin says petulantly, and edges away. "I've had a really long week." He smells the same as always--maybe that odd edge of beer, but otherwise just aftershave and a whiff of winter in his hair, the same.
In time he will bring new surprises home to her. There will be an afternoon when he comes from work and tells her gently that he's got a couple of infections that maybe she ought to get tested for, too. There will be an evening when Whizzer visits again and, passing the door between the kitchen and the den, she will see them together on the sofa. There will even be a morning when Marvin puts down his tea and says, "There's something we need to talk about, Trina" and "Just listen to me, Trina" and "Please stop crying, Trina." Somehow, though, this is the worst. This first shock of understanding how his large blank body in the dark changes the shape of the bed; how he changes the shape of her life.
* * * * * * * * *
The things she can accommodate never fail to surprise Trina. By October, not long after Whizzer's visit, Marvin has begun spending a few nights a month out. She sets down three plates at the beginning of dinner and puts one away again at the end on such nights, by rote, without a hitch. Sometimes he'll already be lying warm and foreign at her side when she wakes up in the morning, and sometimes he'll saunter in at breakfast with the old standby, I had to work late. Whizzer doesn't even work with him, she knows now; they met in some bar. It doesn't matter: Marvin will always be home again.
The neighbors smell blood. For eight years they've waited in their neat patchwork yards, unfailingly civil and helpful, almost clich� in their insistence on offering her gardening advice or a cup of sugar. By now, though, they've deciphered the code of Marvin's comings and goings, the sweeping of his headlights down the cul-de-sac at unholy hours. When Trina wanders out to kiss him goodbye again in the driveway each morning, she knows a few housewives watch her balefully from their stoops. No one gives her anything anymore, as though her weakness is contagious.
But he is always home again. Let the neighbors speak in whispers when she goes by. Let the mailman leer at her. Even let Jason, nearly nine and with a vocabulary bigger than he is, turn to her at dinner one night and say, "Daddy is a prick." ("But that's what Mrs. Madison says!" he cries, a faint red mark appearing like a blush on his cheek where she slapped him.) Marvin is always home again. And if every now and then she misses him, that is no great tragedy either. She misses him even when he's here.
One Saturday morning in that unreasonably frigid month, she wakes up alone. She makes the bed, feeds Jason and drops him off for a play date at a friend's house, and cooks breakfast for two: all her small, conventional gestures at order and continuity. With the French toast and tea still steaming on the table, she wanders her house like an explorer, examining a curtain here and there, picking up the minor artifacts that are Jason's toys and Marvin's dirty socks and the nuggets of stale food wedged in among the sofa pillows.
(And yes, maybe last week she did see Marvin and Whizzer here among the sofa pillows too, just for a moment, a blur lurking on the periphery. And maybe afterward she did mention to Marvin in passing that he ought to be more discreet at least; and looking guiltier than she'd expected, he'd exploded, "Trina, I just want--"
"No. You don't know what you want. Talk to me about it when you do."
And maybe he did say, "I only don't know what to do with it." Maybe he did. So what? What does it matter if he holds someone else, too? Isn't he still here?)
This her house, this her life: these the obscure Atlantises beneath the surface of this time and place, the dark continents uncharted by any cartographer. Here there be dragons.
Absently, she goes over to the answering machine sitting on the coffee table, the new piece of technology that Marvin excitedly bought when his office acquired one, and then took months to install. She replays the messages that have been languishing there for days.
One is Dr. Mendel reminding Marvin that he promised he'd bring his wife along to a session again. This she deletes, wincing at the memory of their first attempt. Mendel was perfectly nice--attractive, even, in a wiry and almost ascetic way--but that only made his eventual questions about their sex life worse. She doesn't really understand the concept of psychiatry, the context in which it becomes possible to talk that way. Nor does she want to know what Marvin talks about.
The second message is Marvin's mother reporting once again on his father's health. ("The vicarious hypochondriac," Marvin once called her.) The recording cuts off halfway through a recitation of ailments from the past two years, and Trina smiles without humor. The wives and mothers, they never get to finish anything. She thinks of her own mother, trying to get in a last word on her daughter's pregnancy.
"Oh, Marvin," Trina says to the little machine that goes on whirring emptily, "is he at least a Jew?" She laughs when she remembers that Whizzer said he is only half-Jewish.
Then she lies down full-length on the sofa. She can still detect Marvin's scent clinging to it, can still feel how he fills up the room when he walks through the door with stars of snow shining in his hair, can still hear the rhythm of his stride as he comes up the driveway, that stride that never quite evened out. She falls asleep.
The second time she wakes up on Saturday, she is still alone. In the kitchen, the clock reads 1:21--past time to pick up Jason, past time to prepare the next meal. Through the window she can see the empty driveway and the frosting of new, unmarred snow on the yard. The French toast has long since turned soggy, half-submerged in its ocean of syrup like a capsized ship. The tea is cold.
She clears the table neatly and efficiently. Draws the curtains across the window, sits down, and plans out her dwindling hours of daylight without undue anxiety. After all, in the end surviving the night really isn't the trick. What comes after, the getting up in the morning--that is what you will never be prepared for at all.
~Fin~
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