by Walter Blum
“The other night—” he said suddenly.
She looked at him, wide-eyed. “Yes?”
“Why—I mean, what was the reason—?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you do. You must have had a reason.”
Her hands were clenched tightly, and he could see the knuckles whitening. “I know what you’re thinking. You think I deliberately set out to hurt you, that I must be some kind of monster to do what I did. But I’m not like that. I know you’ve been punished enough. I know how much you’ve suffered for something you never meant to do. I didn’t want to hurt you. I tried to stop. I fought it every inch of the way.”
“We could have talked.”
“It wouldn’t have done any good. It was like being in a car without brakes, rolling down the side of a mountain. Talking would only have postponed the inevitable.”
“You didn’t trust me?”
“I didn’t trust myself. I knew I was in the wrong, but I tried to put the blame on you. You were there, and you were handy, and you were willing to accept me for all my sins, so I took advantage of you and that was the worst of it. Oh, God, Adam! I’m so sorry about this. I’m so terribly, terribly sorry.”
He reached across the table and touched her hand. “It’s all right,” he said. “Now that I know, we can change all that.”
“No, we can’t.”
“Nothing’s inevitable.”
Her eyes were filled with tears. “Adam, you’re such a good person. You don’t deserve someone like me. What you need is a wife whose hands are pure, someone who will meet you at the same place without any lies or deception. What you don’t need is a woman with a past.”
“I don’t care about the past.”
“You have to. The past is what makes us who we are, that decides the kind of people we’ll be.”
“I have a past, too.”
“Not like this.”
“All right. What do you want to do now?” She pulled back her hand, and he let it go. “We can’t continue like this.” He had been brought up to solve problems, not to let them simmer on a back part of the stove where they couldn’t be touched. He hadn’t realized until now how little he understood about her. “Do you want a divorce?”
“No.”
“Do you want to give it another try? We could experiment for a while and see how it turns out.”
She shook her head.
“I’m afraid of what we’ll find.”
“Maybe nothing.” He pushed the chair back from the table. “Well, I think I’d better get back to the office. I’m already overdue.”
“You haven’t finished your lunch.”
“I’m not that hungry,” he said, getting to his feet. He put his napkin down on the table, resisting an urge to fold it neatly in place. She walked him to the door. They stood there for a few minutes, murmuring banalities, standing on opposite sides of the chasm and waiting to see if somehow a bridge would appear to connect the two. It was Adam who reached for the door and opened it. She started back toward the kitchen, and then turned, took a detour into the living room and came back.
“You forgot your raincoat,” she said, holding it out to him.
He took the coat by its collar, and as he did, he could feel her pulling on it like a tow rope, taking hold to keep him from drifting away. The next thing he knew his body was against hers, their mouths were joined and he was being enveloped the way a butterfly, beating its wings in ecstasy, is drawn into a net.
And then just as suddenly, she pulled away. She tore the raincoat from his hands and bolted across the room, turned, and began climbing backwards up the stairs, holding the raincoat in front of her like a matador’s red cape.
He knew what she wanted. They’d done this before, but it was all happening too fast and he couldn’t stop it. The moment had caught him up. He knew that if he refused to follow, if he hesitated for just one minute, she might change her mind and that would be unbearable. The blood was pumping, throbbing, racing through his veins. Halfway up the stairs she leaned over, holding the raincoat in front of her and exposing her breasts so that he was seized with a stab of naked lust, so powerful it nearly disabled him.
At the top of the stairs she dropped the raincoat and disappeared into the bedroom. The next thing he knew they were naked, tumbling on the bed and he was burying himself in her body, absorbing the scent she offered in place of perfume, running his hands down her back, being caressed in return, hungering for more, wanting, aching.
“I guess you’re not going to need your raincoat,” she whispered in his ear when it was over.
He leaned back against the pillow. Usually, there was a pack of cigarettes on the night table beside him, but since she had been sleeping alone…it didn’t matter. He leaned his head against her and smelled the sweet talisman of love made manifest. Then a heavy drowsiness came over him. He had never made a habit of sleeping in the afternoon, but the temptation now was irresistible. Dreams flitted just beyond consciousness, tender filigrees he could taste and fondle and wrap his mind around.
He didn’t come back to the office until the next day. No one said a word. He wondered if they had any idea, even a suspicion, of what he’d been doing all that afternoon.
He didn’t care.
24
It was a moment to be tasted, a double stop in the long winter that had marched over and under the paragraphs of life. It was the sweetest time to be young and in love and married to the most wonderful woman on God’s green earth.
Even the city obliged. A soft, warm fleece had settled around its neck, slowing the streets, spilling across the fields, soaking up the juice of a thousand memories. Children opened their arms. Old people smiled, welcoming the blanket that soothed their pains and raised their spirits, that laid their ills to rest.
For Adam and Susan, it meant a weekend drive into the mountains, to a lodge beside a lake that was, in fact, a reservoir kept in pristine state by the state department of recreation where fishing and boating were taboo and the nearest town, little more than a general store and a gas station, was ten miles away. Here beneath the firs, an intimate community, half a dozen couples, were put up in rough log cabins in an area smelling of pine needles and spruce. By day, there were shouts from the lake and the volleyball court. At night, the smoke from half a dozen barbecues, sizzling with hamburgers and steaks, filled the air and afterwards the muffled sound of half a dozen lovers consummating their passion. A steady buzz of joy sifting through the cabins under the gaze of a cloudless, star-filled sky.
They stayed a week, and when they returned to Canelius, to their house with the verandah in front and the big tree on the lawn, it was as if everything had changed. From basement to attic the place glowed, and Adam ascribed it to Susan. How could it be otherwise? She seemed to be engaged in a constant search for ways to please him, to bring a smile to his face, and this in turn inspired little acts of adoration from him—snippets of poetry, for which he had almost no talent; a rose on her breakfast tray each morning until there were enough to fill a vase beside the fireplace; kisses that made her gasp with pleasure; words to excite the arcane caverns of her soul.
He hadn’t forgotten the pain she had caused him. He couldn’t go that far. He knew the wound would never heal, not completely, but he managed to push it into the back of his mind. It was like being in a theater, watching the episodes of his life parade before him. The past was a scrim, a thin, darkly lit curtain hanging over the stage. Little by little the backlights would rise and multiply and illuminate the stage behind it until, at last, the present emerged and took over. But it was always there. In the end, there were two stages existing one in front of the other, two tenses, one on top of the other, two ways of looking at things, depending on how you squinted and what you saw when you thought you were seeing.
A kind of euphoria took over. They went places they had never been before. A new Chinese restaurant opened in Canelius. Adam, who never knew anything but chow mein and fried rice,
found himself fascinated with the banquet of Cantonese dishes, some featuring pork, which his father would have frowned upon. Friends started inviting them over, people they had been only marginally familiar with. There were cocktail parties to attend, functions where Adam felt as though he were wearing a suit of neon bulbs and everyone was staring at them, but he didn’t mind. He wanted people to see how they looked because this was the moment they would always remember, even after time silvered the air about them and age brought the carnival to an end.
Weekends, they would rent bikes as they had before they were married and take short trips into the countryside. A blue one for him, a red for her. He would have preferred a tandem, but when she pointed out that two bikes meant more freedom, he went along, although he still thought tandems more fun. Invariably, they ended up at the same state park they’d been to before, opening a picnic basket on the same grassy knoll with its spectacular view of the valley and Canelius in the distance. They stretched out on a blanket, sharing kisses and confidences and lingering almost until the sun went down, when it became necessary to make it back to town in a hurry because they both agreed it wasn’t safe to ride around after dark.
Everyday life became endurable. Adam went back to work, pretending he understood how investments were made; Susan immersed herself at the library. Max came to visit from time to time, usually for dinner. They made polite noises and laughed at each other’s jokes, but Adam knew that, although the man was his employer and Susan’s father, there would always be an invisible barrier between them. Some things can’t be forgotten, and the most one can hope for—under the best of circumstances—is a kind of silent truce.
Winter turned into spring and collided with the approach of summer. Toward the end of June, the weather turned hot. For two weeks, it seemed all anyone ever talked about was the humidity and how sultry the air felt. Nothing moved. Flags hung limp on their masts, and even the birds found it an effort to swoop down for a much-needed drink. Drenched in sweat from their weekend bicycle trip, Adam and Susan, immediately dove into a cool shower and reveled in standing under the water, belly to naked belly, caressing each other.
Meanwhile, Gwen and her friends on the Midsummer Ball committee—which included Susan—made frequent visits to the house. The windows were thrown open wide to catch what faint hints of coolness might arise. The house was filled with the hum of their voices, notes of frequent high-pitched laughter and whispered mysteries that Adam could only assume were aimed in his direction. He didn’t care. In a world whose very sameness and bland consistency could dull the soul and fatigue the palate, people needed to wonder and plot.
Well, let them wonder. It was of no importance. There would always be rumors going around about this marriage, about the reasons why a seemingly perfect relationship had so soon teetered on the brink. But no one knew the truth. No one had any right to know. Only he and Susan and of course Max Goldman had any idea of the forces that were fingering them from the void, threatening them with deadly claws that could never be entirely contained.
He made a deliberate attempt to stop thinking about it, and the moment he did that the clouds seemed to lift, the darkness scattered and the world brightened as if a storm had passed them by. Now that the Bell Tower was closed and his evenings were free, they could enjoy long, leisurely dinners at home or send out for pizza from the new pizzeria in Southgate. They even went to a couple of Hawks games and on one occasion sat in the announcer’s booth with Sam O’Neill, who the new WCAN owners had agreed to keep on because, after all, a contract’s a contract—and besides, the games’ sponsor, the big Ford dealer west of town, would have pulled all his business from the station if the games hadn’t continued.
“You actually like the new owners?” Adam marveled.
“Well, they’re not bad people,” Sam said lazily. “They just don’t know much about baseball.”
He opened up the mike just as the Hawks’ big left-fielder hit a gigantic triple, and for a while was engaged in describing the action and the ramifications of this act until, to everyone’s consternation, the slugger was left stranded on third base to end the inning, at which point he closed the microphone, let the engineer in the control room play a couple of commercials and turned back to Adam with all the nonchalance of a casual bystander, muttering “Damned fool!”
“We don’t have much of a team this year,” Adam observed.
“We never do,” Sam shrugged. “The day the Hawks really make a run for the playoffs, I’ll treat everyone in town to a round of beers.”
It was interesting to watch Sam work. Although he seemed inattentive, one eye remained focused on the action below, listening through earphones for his cue to resume talking. “What about you? Getting used to the team you signed on to?”
Adam nodded.
“Not having any trouble with your new employer?” Sam asked.
“He’s a decent sort,” Adam said with a sidelong glance at Susan, who had remained silent through all this man talk.
The truth was, he missed the others, especially Larry. He missed their long frank talks about things that mattered, the fact that they shared a placemat on the planet, however small. But he knew it couldn’t last. Radio would never be anything more than a way of earning a living, not a way of life. Radio changed too much, too often, to be counted on. From time to time he would turn the dial to WCAN in hopes of hearing a familiar voice, but except for Sam they were all gone. Now, loud, raucous music came blaring from his speakers, and the people who announced the records and delivered the commercials were, he knew, not the sort you would want for friends.
But there were good things to be accounted for. He remembered the long nights, before he and Susan were joined, the loneliness, the wooden houses with their shuttered windows shaking their fists at him. He remembered shouting his defiance back one night—was it aloud or in his head?—he couldn’t tell. Swearing at that darkened world, and yet at the same time promising that he would do anything within reason if the door were opened, the torture ended. Thank God, the angry nights were behind him. Thank God, the emptiness was now filled with wonders.
Never again would he have to shout his fury at the wind.
***
With baseball came the first intimations that the seasons were changing. Canelius, awakened from its long, stiff hibernation and began the slow process of renewal. New shoots in the tobacco fields made themselves known. People yawned and stretched and paid tribute to the long-hidden sun. Vacations were planned, garden chairs and chaise lounges repatriated from dark basements. Men doffed their coats and women got out their cottons. The sound of the Good Humor man was once again heard in the land.
Plans for the Midsummer Ball accelerated, although the actual date was still a long way off. There was a lot of happy talk about decorations and music and the contents of the punch, which by tradition was allowed to be mildly spiked, although in keeping with the times certain elements on the committee were quietly lobbying for a bit more alcoholic content. Nor was it just a matter of alcohol and punch. The Mellow Tones had expanded to a seven-piece band, and some argued that they’d priced themselves too high. But the Mellow Tones were tradition, and in the end the committee decided to hire the group that had made such pleasant sounds in years past.
Adam enjoyed hearing about the preparations for the Ball. He observed with pleasure the way Susan’s eyes lit up when she came home from meetings. She was not the kind to bubble, but he sensed a kind of quiet, happy hum about her. Small, private smiles were exchanged. The periods of depression he had once borne with silent stolidity became more and more infrequent.
He still remembered of course that moment when she walked into the living room, angry and disheveled from her night at the Jefferson Davis Hotel, materializing before her father and her husband as if floating through a daydream, one arm of her dress torn, not a word said, not a sliver of explanation given, marching past them and up the stairs as they listened to the door of the bedroom slam.
But tha
t was yesterday, the misfortune of another time. Let the past stay buried in the past, he decided. Let memories like that stay hidden under blankets of tissue paper in the bottom of the big trunk up in the attic.
One particularly warm day, she managed to wrestle him away from his desk for lunch at the country club. He picked her up at the house in the Chevy, and they drove down County Road 24 through groves of pines and oaks, the foliage spreading above them like the beams of an ancient church, the sun beating in a steady torrent on the car’s rooftop. Adam rolled down the window on his side and let the smell of honeysuckles and daisies wrap itself around them. About a mile from the club they passed a huge old oak, its bark peeling and flaccid, its branches sagging over the road. Adam slowed the car, as though the tree were a danger that had to be avoided.
“They should cut that down,” he said.
“Why?” Susan wanted to know.
“Because it could fall over the road,” he said.
“Oh, no,” she assured him. “It’ll never fall. That tree’s been leaning like that since I was a little girl.” Her voice seemed far away. “I once tried to climb it.”
“Did you?”
“It’s a strong old tree. It’ll be there forever.”
Yes, that’s how it was, he thought. Those trees that lasted were the ones that knew best how to withstand the blasts of the elements and the decay of time. They knew how to bend, how to give when it was needed and yield to a superior force, if that’s what was required. They outlasted the forest. Because, in their wisdom, they had discovered which paths lead to peace, which end in ecstasy. They were old and strong and they could not be defeated by fleeting challenges to their dominance.
“You’re right,” he said.
“You know I am,” she said, leaning her head against the upholstery and turning toward him with a contented smile.