“Do you think we ought to be seen together?”
“I guess not.” Lulu reached out and hugged him again. “Oh, Charley, I love you an awful lot. Do you know you have real dignity now?”
It was a decent compliment, Eitel thought, for what was dignity, real dignity, but the knowledge written on one’s face of the cost of every human desire.
“It’s nice of you to say that, Lulu,” he said, and then he smiled. “You know, I wouldn’t want this to get around, and I don’t suppose I’ve told it to anyone in years, but my mother was a French maid before she married my father. Of course she worked only in the best homes.”
“Oh, Charley, Charley,” Lulu said, and they laughed then together. “Why didn’t you ever know,” she asked, “that you were my big love?”
He kissed her softly on the cheek and watched her drive away. In his ear he became aware of the sound of the surf, and he wandered down to the beach and watched the Pacific waters ride gently, steadily, onto the shore. It was early yet, he did not have to hurry home, and shivering a little, he sat down and stirred his fingers in the sand, remembering, from what seemed out of another life, the time he watched the girl with the surf board and tried to make her interested in what he said. It came over him with the force of forgotten pain how he had lusted for her that day, as if she were the entrance to a life he had never quite known.
Eitel was sad, but it was pleasant sadness. He was looking forward to going home; after days of indifference he felt tender toward Elena now, as he invariably felt tender after he had been unfaithful. Before they went to sleep he would hold her and tell her that he loved her. She did not need these words as much as she had needed them once, but still she would be happy, and Eitel thinking back over the few years they had been married was thankful they were passed. The first year had been bad; there had been gossip and memories and for months it had not always been easy for them to approach each other. But that too had passed, and if with the loss of his jealousy he had also lost an emotion he once had felt, they still had a bedroom and it was better than most.
The last serious trouble had come when Elena discovered herself pregnant. She had been terrified of abortion and he had felt chained for life. But the child had come and now he loved it or at least he did his best to love it, and as Lulu said, Elena had improved. She could keep house, she could run the servants, she could even entertain. In those ways she had grown and there were many people who envied his marriage. Eitel sighed. Was it not possible after all that there was no such thing as Love, but only that everybody loved in their own way and did the best they could? “Life has made me a determinist,” he thought in passing.
He got into his car and drove home at a tired pace and climbed the drive which led up to the house they had bought in the hills of the capital, and then he parked in his garage, waited a minute to put himself together for Elena, and went to join her in the living room. She looked up from the book she was reading and he saw at a glance that she was moody. But then she often seemed moody on nights when he had been unfaithful, and he wondered if she knew or if it were merely his uneasiness, and he marveled at how little he understood of what went on in her mind.
“How is Victor?” he asked as he came in.
Elena smiled drowsily. “He was very cute today,” she said. “I have a story to tell you about what he did.”
“Fine,” Eitel said, “I want to hear it. But first I need a drink.” Alcohol would wash his mouth of Lulu and prepare him for Elena. As he kissed her on the cheek, he tried to be a touch remote so she would expect nothing of him when they went to sleep.
“Was the conference all right?” Elena asked.
“It was fair.”
“Why can’t Collie make up his mind?” she said crossly. “He’s so changeable.”
“He is,” Eitel agreed, and sat down beside her.
“I missed you tonight,” Elena said. “I was disappointed when you called at lunchtime.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Oh, baby, I’m tired,” he said softly. “Don’t scold me.”
“I wonder when we’ll have an evening together,” Elena said in a dispirited voice.
“Over the week end. I promise you. Maybe Friday night.”
“I have my dance group Friday afternoon. I’ll be tired then,” she said. In the last year she had begun to take dancing lessons again, probably more to keep her figure than from any deep ambition, but she was good, and once or twice when they had company, she consented to perform for them.
“No, we’ll make time over the week end, sweetheart,” Eitel said. He pushed himself farther back into the sofa, took a comfortable sip on his drink, and rubbed his eyes. “How did you spend today?” he asked.
“I played bridge this afternoon.”
“Fine.”
“I hate bridge,” Elena said.
She was clearly not in a good mood, and as fatigued as though he had actually undergone a conference with Collie, Eitel sat up and stroked her arm. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“I saw my analyst this morning.”
“Well, you still see him twice a week,” Eitel said.
“Yes, I know, Charley, but I had a fight with him this morning.”
It was worth thirty-five dollars an hour that she should fight with someone else. “What caused it?” Eitel said tentatively.
“I don’t want to talk about my analysis.”
“All right.”
“It’s just that we always talk about the same things.”
He made a point of saying, “Do you mean your analyst or me?”
“Oh, darling, you know I mean the analyst. He’s very smart, but I don’t know if I need him any more.”
“Then quit.”
“I think I will … except …”
“Except what?”
“It was a stupid fight,” Elena said, not answering him directly. “I told him about the new house we were talking of buying if your picture is a success, and we discussed it, and it came out … well, Charley, what came out was that I don’t want to buy the new house.”
“You don’t?” She had seemed so excited the day they looked at it.
“Well, I do and I don’t. We uncovered some ambivalences I have.”
“Yes, yes.”
“Now, don’t get angry. I won’t use those words any more than I have to, but what we discovered is that I feel the house is too big and that we’ll just be too rich.”
“All right, I can understand feeling that way.” But he was annoyed at her. For in another few years, whenever she was ready, she would want a bigger house than the one he planned to buy now.
“The analyst didn’t like what I said. He told me I was regressing and being childish, and that it was my attitude toward money and toward you and a sign of weak ego.” As Elena spoke, he listened critically to her voice. She was more articulate these days, and her voice had lost most of its coarseness, but there were ugly tones returning now.
She touched his hand. “I don’t know what happened, Charley, but I started screaming at him, and I told him he was a fine one to talk with his twenty-room house, and that he was a smug fat slob, and I couldn’t stand the way he was so satisfied with himself, and if he didn’t like the way I talked, well nobody was asking him to take my money and …” She lapsed into silence. “It was just awful.”
“That kind of thing has happened before.”
“Yes, but Charley, this time I meant it. That’s what I do think of him, and I don’t trust him any more, and next time I won’t make a scene when I tell him, I’ll just let him know how unattractive he is. Because you see I don’t want the same kind of life for me that he thinks I should have.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s true I owe him a lot, but he doesn’t understand me. He really doesn’t.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Charley, I know how you feel about that new house. You want it more than you think y
ou do, and I suppose we’ll get it because we always end up doing what you want.”
“Is that fair?”
“Maybe it isn’t, but what I’m trying to say is, I mean, we have the baby, and we’ll probably have another baby, and I have good relations with the servants and I do love the dancing classes, and Charley, I love you, I can tell because I still get scared at the thought of losing you, but Charley, listen to me, I don’t know if you understand how much I love Vickie, I keep worrying that I won’t be a good enough mother to him, but is that enough? Is Vickie enough? I mean where do I go? I don’t want to complain, but what am I going to do with my life?”
Eitel caressed her. “Sweetheart,” he said, and his voice throbbed with a little emotion, “you’ve grown more than anybody in the time I’ve known you, and I won’t be worried about you, I can’t be worried about you, because I just know that whatever you do, you’re going to get better and more good all your life.”
There were tears in her eyes. He had spent the evening watching women cry. “No, Charley,” Elena said, “you see, that doesn’t answer it. I can’t talk to you unless you’ll understand this. What am I going to do with my life?”
He held her to him, and fondled her hair, feeling a sense of protection which bid her to stop here and ask no more; for of all the distance she had come, and he had helped her to move, and there were times like this when he felt the substance of his pride to depend upon exactly her improvement as if she were finally the only human creation in which he had taken part, he still knew that he could help her no longer, nor could anyone else, for she had come now into that domain where her problems were everyone’s problems and there were no answers and no doctors, but only that high plateau where philosophy lives with despair. He felt a portent in himself that she would grow away from him, and in years to come, many years to be sure, it might be that he would need her, and would she be forced to stay out of kindness and loyalty and boredom too?
“I’m sorry, Charley,” she said. “You’re tired and it’s not fair to bother you,”
But he was indeed too tired for enthusiasm, and he had a moment holding her in his arms where he entered into himself, and with a bleak hatred he thought of Elena, and was maniacal with the contempt he felt for what he had said to her. It was nonsense, it was the weak cowardly cheek-blossomed flower of his sentimentality, for the future was unknown, and it was equally possible that Elena would go on with him until in her slow way she had learned a little more of becoming a lady, and then loyalty or no, Victor or no, memories—what they were—or no, she would begin, biologically, imperatively, to look for another mate, some young crude producer whom she could try to train to be a gentleman while the producer was training her to be still more a lady, and he, Eitel, would be left … he smiled with his dry sour eighteenth-century smile, he would be free at last to look for a nurse and a servant. And Victor would come to visit. Everyone who stayed alive had at the least a consolation prize. But this was much too far to go, and so he stopped and said good-bye to the unused artist’s depths of his intelligence, noticing with what perceptive comfort it provided him that on this night it was Elena who fell asleep first.
Long after he had failed to be lulled by the quiet rhythms of her breathing, Eitel got up and visited Victor’s room, and looked at his child sleeping, but there was only a small emotion he could feel, and so putting on an overcoat, he stepped out on the balcony of their house and looked down to the checkerwork of houses and streets which filled the valley of the capital, and beyond, far in the distance was the ocean and the lights of automobiles on the highway which bordered it. He had come along that road tonight on the drive back to his house, and he remembered how at a stoplight, just before the neon signs and the hamburger stands and the tourist camps which threw up their shoddy skirts to the capital, he had stared out across the water and seen a freighter with its hold-lights and its mast-lamps moving away to the horizon. It was off on a voyage and the men who sailed it would look for adventure.
Almost idly, for the first time in many months, Eitel thought of me then, and wondered, “Is Sergius possibly on that boat?”
Then the light changed to green and he raced his motor and rode away and forgot the freighter, but now, standing on the balcony of his house, Eitel set out on another voyage, and made the nostalgic journey back to Desert D’Or, thinking wistfully of how once he had adored Elena’s body in that unhappy time which marked—could he say it so?—the end of his overextended youth. It was gone now, gone as the miles on the boulevard past that intersection where he had watched the ship go down the horizon, and with a pang for what is lost forever, he remembered the knowledge he wanted to give to me, suffering the sad frustration of his new middle age, since experience when it is not told to another must wither within and be worse than lost.
“One cannot look for a good time, Sergius,” he whispered in his mind to me, thinking of how I first had come to Desert D’Or, “for pleasure must end as love or cruelty”—and almost as an afterthought, he added—“or obligation.” In that way, Eitel thought of me, and with a kindly sadness he wondered, “Sergius, what does one ever do with one’s life?” asking in the easy friendship of memory, “Are you one of those who know?”
And in the passing fire of his imagination, he made up my answer across the miles and had me say good-bye to him. “For you see,” he confessed in his mind, “I have lost the final desire of the artist, the desire which tells us that when all else is lost, when love is lost and adventure, pride of self, and pity, there still remains that world we may create, more real to us, more real to others, than the mummery of what happens, passes, and is gone. So, do try Sergius,” he thought, “try for that other world, the real world, where orphans burn orphans and nothing is more difficult to discover than a simple fact. And with the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance.”
It was his speech, and he said it well. But I would have told him that one must invariably look for a good time since a good time is what gives us the strength to try again. For do we not gamble our way to the heart of the mystery against all the power of good manners, good morals, the fear of germs, and the sense of sin? Not to mention the prisons of pain, the wading pools of pleasure, and the public and professional voices of our sentimental land. If there is a God, and sometimes I believe there is one, I’m sure He says, “Go on, my boy. I don’t know that I can help you, but we wouldn’t want all those people to tell you what to do.”
There are hours when I would have the arrogance to reply to the Lord Himself, and so I ask, “Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?”
But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in His weary cryptic way, “Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits.”
Then for a moment in that cold Irish soul of mine, a glimmer of the joy of the flesh came toward me, rare as the eye of the rarest tear of compassion, and we laughed together after all, because to have heard that sex was time and time the connection of new circuits was a part of the poor odd dialogues which give hope to us noble humans for more than one night.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in 1923 in Long Branch, NJ, and raised in Brooklyn, NORMAN MAILER was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.
By Norman Mailer
; The Naked and the Dead
Barbary Shore
The Deer Park
Advertisements for Myself
Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)
The Presidential Papers
An American Dream
Cannibals and Christians
Why Are We in Vietnam?
The Deer Park—A Play
The Armies of the Night
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
Of a Fire on the Moon
The Prisoner of Sex
Maidstone
Existential Errands
St. George and the Godfather
Marilyn
The Faith of Graffiti
The Fight
Genius and Lust
The Executioner’s Song
Of Women and Their Elegance
Pieces and Pontifications
Ancient Evenings
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
Harlot’s Ghost
Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery
Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man
The Gospel According to the Son
The Time of Our Time
The Spooky Art
Why Are We at War?
Modest Gifts
The Castle in the Forest
On God (with J. Michael Lennon)
Mind of an Outlaw
The Deer Park: A Play Page 38