Evening Performance

by George Garrett

  “I had to take Bunny because Everett couldn’t or wouldn’t go along. Everett isn’t what you would call the picnic kind of man. He has always been possessed by the demon of irony. He has just enough of it to make him uneasy. So I had to take Bunny. Everybody had a fine raucous old time. Or so it seemed to me. We swam and cavorted like fillies, drank and ate well. We even ended up singing a little and came home weary and happy. At least the rest of them did. I had noticed something peculiar about Bunny when we first arrived. She wandered off in the woods to change into her bathing suit. When she came back to the Springs—really not to be believed in a dark, form-fitting, one-piece bathing suit, you would have believed in her as the voluptuous femme fatale then, Mary. I had never even imagined Bunny in a bathing suit before and I didn’t know whether to be shocked or charmed out of my mind. A little of both would be a decent reaction. Anyway, when she came back, she looked flushed and upset, and a kind of pouty purse to her lips, eyes flashing anger, spots of color on her cheeks.

  “ ‘What’s wrong, darling?’’ I said.

  “She sighed, she started to say something, then put her hands firmly on her hips and looked out at the swimmers in the Spring.

  “ ‘I am going to have a good time,’ she said. ‘I am not going to let anything spoil it.’

  “ ‘What on earth could spoil it?’ I asked.

  “But already she had dived into the Springs, gracefully, with scarcely a ripple to prove where she had vanished. When she bobbed up again she was chilled and smiling. She laughed and seemed to be having a good time, and I thought nothing more of it.

  “When we left it was much the same thing. She came back to the car as grim as Medusa. I tried to cheer her up with chatter and nonsense, but she was having none of that. Finally I even tried the radio, but she switched it off. I stopped by the side of the road.

  “ ‘What’s wrong?’

  “ ‘Oh, just drive me home, Sam. Don’t stop and interrogate me. Just take me home.’

  “I was at once persistent and solicitous until she told me what had happened to her. This time she was completely dry-eyed. No tears, just cold anger.

  “ ‘That man,’ she began. ‘That horrible little man! When I went to change into my bathing suit, when we had just arrived, I was in the midst of undressing when I heard a little rustle in the bushes nearby. I looked up and there he was, peering out from among the leaves. With his beard and his thin face and his little, beady eyes he looked just like an animal, some kind of a rodent. The beard is what made me think of an animal, I suppose.’

  “ ‘Ernest? Ernie Cooley?’

  “ ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ she said. ‘What do you do without making a scene? I decided that if I stared back at him, looked right into his eyes, he would be ashamed and go away. Well, he didn’t. We stood there and stared at each other awhile. Then I ignored him and put on my suit. What else could I do?’

  “ ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘under the circumstances.’

  “ ‘It was bad enough,’ she said, ‘but anyway I thought that would be the end of it. I imagined that he had “drunk his fill,” so to speak.’

  “ ‘Imagine that!’ I said. ‘Ernie Cooley, a voyeur. A window-peeper!’

  “ ‘Don’t make jokes about it,’ she said. ‘It isn’t funny. To tell you the truth I was having such a good time at the picnic that I nearly forgot about it. Until just now, when we started home. I went back to where I had put my clothes, and do you know what he had done? He had tied everything in knots. Just like a nasty little boy. I was trying to undo the knots, so mad my fingers were trembling, when I heard that noise in the leaves again. And there he was in the same spot, beard and all, staring at me and grinning this time.’

  “ ‘What did you do?’

  “ ‘What could I do? I wasn’t going to call for help or give him the pleasure of seeing me burst into tears again. I simply ignored him. And he simply stayed there. For all I know he may be there yet.’

  “ ‘I doubt it,’ I said.

  “ ‘What should I do, Sam?’

  “ ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I suppose you can tell Everett about it.’

  “ ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. Everett would never understand.’

  “ ‘No, I don’t suppose he would,’ I said.

  “We drove on. I offered to speak to Ernie myself, to arrange some kind of an apology. Bunny wasn’t interested. She had decided to let well enough alone, to forget the whole thing. Now that she had told me about it she felt better.

  “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The whole thing was so absurd, hilarious, and sad. I didn’t even know whether to believe her. It seemed entirely possible that she had made it all up. People do things like that, you know.

  “Evidently she forgot about it. Relations were all very charming at the next rehearsal. I seemed to be the only one who remembered it, and, as the world knows, I have a dirty mind.

  “Nothing new happened until the evening we were giving a little concert for the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Hospital, a charity affair, almost at the end of the term. We were all very grand in our costumes. We had just finished ‘The Swan,’ by Gibbon. That I must admit, is my great favorite. It has my favorite lines in English poetry.

  ‘Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,

  Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:

  “Farewell, all joys; oh death, come close mine eyes.

  More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.” ’

  “Anyway we had just ended on that happy note when Ernie stood up and walked over and whispered something in Bunny’s ear. Heaven knows what he said. He took just about enough time to say ‘Let’s go.’ Then he stepped off the stage and walked up the aisle and out of the room. She followed him. It was rather unusual, but we went along anyway and managed to finish the concert.

  “It was the next morning before I found out what had really happened. Very early—it was still pitch dark—the phone started ringing and it was Bunny. She sounded calm and composed, guarded even, as though maybe she had carefully rehearsed what she was going to say. She asked me to please come at once to the Timblerline Motel. I asked her how soon she would like me to be there and she said, still perfectly calm, that if I started right now and hurried, that would be fine. I shaved and dressed and had a cup of instant coffee—I detest instant coffee—and drove out to the motel as fast as I could. I found them fully clad and quite serious in Cabin Number Seven. Ernie made a wan remark about lucky numbers, then lapsed into silence and let Bunny do the talking. She explained that they had asked me to come there because I, of all the people she knew, was Most Likely to Understand. In a very matter-of-fact way, as if she were summarizing the plot of a movie she had seen or a story she had read, she told me that she and Ernie were very much in love. She said that they were both unhappily married, that each of them had given a great deal of thought to the matter and that, weighing all, they had reached the conclusion that nothing was more important than the chance for happiness they felt they had together. They were planning to leave in a very few minutes to have a kind of honeymoon together in a place Ernie knew of. Of course, they planned to be married as soon as they were legally divorced. I must not try to dissuade them or even discuss the matter. It was settled.

  “I ventured the impertinent question as to what, precisely, they expected of me? Did they need my blessing or benediction or what?

  “ ‘No,’ Bunny said with a sad, reproachful smile. ‘Dear Sam, we just want to ask you to do a favor.’

  “She gave me two envelopes, one for Everett and one for Queenie and asked me to deliver them. I protested that perhaps my position as a messenger might be misunderstood, that either Everett or Queenie or both might with all good reason be entitled to take a dim view of my part in the business, perhaps looking on me as the Pandarus of the little drama. Bunny assured me that all was thoroughly and tactfully explained in the letters. They had spent most of the night composing them. She said I had nothing to do ex
cept to deliver the letters. I thought it over a moment and agreed.

  “They rose, put on their coats, and we all walked to the parking area.

  “ ‘We have been thinking about this for months,’ she said. ‘Last night we both got the nerve to do it at exactly the same moment.’

  “She seemed aware that I had noticed, with a curious glance anyway, that they had no luggage with them, just the clothes they had on and their costumes—which, by the way, they wanted me to return to the Madrigal Group. Bunny laughed.

  “ ‘Not really planned, though,’ she said. ‘I don’t even have a toothbrush with me.’

  “I kissed her and waved good-bye as they drove away to live in sin. Then I went back to town and had a decent breakfast before I started the rounds with my epistles of doom.

  “The funny thing was the way the two stay-at-homes took it. I was surprised; exactly the opposite of what I expected. Queenie, after serving me a cup of very good coffee while she read through the letter a couple of times, burst into gales of laughter.

  “ ‘That nutty little bastard!’ she said. ‘Isn’t that a damn fool thing to do? It takes the cake. Just like Ernie! Well,’ still apparently highly amused, ‘he is going to get the surprise of his life this time. When he comes back with big sad eyes, dragging his tail behind him, he is going to find the front door shut and locked.’

  “Everett, on the other hand, fell apart like a card house. A professional ironist, an educated man, a wise man of the world in the best sense, he had always seemed to me perfectly rational, skeptical, fully aware that this is a world of fools and knaves. Fully aware that this is a very bad old world and not likely to be a better one. Well, Everett read the letter and fell apart completely. Tears and a dreadful scene. Rage and self-pity, guilt and remorse, all in a wink like a chameleon moving swiftly from one color to another. He went into a state of shock. I called the college and arranged for someone to take over his classes and duties. I sat him down with a bottle of scotch while I bundled the astonished children off to school. By the time I got back he was thoroughly drunk and maudlin. He wanted to confess all, sadly, his inadequacies, their whole history of shabby troubles, his perfect contempt for her and his overwhelming need for her. And so on. It was obvious that the thing that bothered him the most was not her adultery, but the final and public way she had gone about committing it. It was a terrible blow to his pride for other people to know about it. He could never forgive her for the shame it was bound to cause him. He carried on in the high style like a cuckold in a Restoration play.

  “It was all very sordid and depressing. I bled quarts of pure sympathy and finally he was drunk enough to be led up to bed. I left him snoring peacefully and went about my own affairs.”

  Sam paused to sip his drink.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “Not what you may imagine. Honestly, the rest is anticlimax. They came back inside of two weeks. Everything possible, it seems, went wrong. Ernie had taken her away to a rustic cabin by a lake in Canada. It should have been idyllic. But it rained the whole time and they were damp and cold and miserable. At night swarms of mosquitoes ate them alive. They both developed bad colds. Something happened to Ernie’s car and they were at least ten miles from the nearest phone. In a very short time they were sad and homesick and quarreling bitterly.

  “Ernie went straight home, bearded the lioness, and succeeded. She took him back. I saw them the other night at a little party and they seemed fine. It was all as if it had never happened, or, rather, as if something very amusing had happened to both of them. Happy as a couple of cherrystone clams.

  “Of the others, I am sad to report no such news. When Bunny returned from her adventure, she stayed in a hotel a few days, wringing her hands and pacing her cage in the grand manner. I had to arrange a private meeting for them behind the Observatory. It was terribly theatrical, with the Observatory on one side of them and the old cemetery on the other and old Sam right in the middle of everything. They embraced and wept and thanked me profoundly. Everett led her off to the car and took her home.

  “Now everything seems so different. Poor Bunny has aged about twenty years. Of course she dresses differently now, but she really seems to be an old woman all of a sudden, gray and sad. Everett is not much better. He is like a tired old man, palsied, one foot in the grave. They are in an absurdly perfect equilibrium, as if somehow age, decay, humiliation, and frustration were what they had to offer each other and what each one wanted most.

  “It’s really a little as if those breathless lovers who fled away from the cold castle in The Eve of St. Agnes had come dragging back later on, footsore and heartsore, disspirited and disillusioned, worn and weary. All the romance has gone out of the world. Even the Madrigal Group is kaput. There will be no heynonny-nonny next term.”

  “You bastard,” Mary said. “What do you mean coming here to tell us that?”

  Sam looked astonished, mumbled a few words, but Mary was already halfway out of the living room, headed for the stairs.

  “On my first night home I am sick to death of it,” she said. “Is that what you wanted?”

  The question was rhetorical. She stamped up the stairs and slammed the door to our room. Sam looked at me, puzzled.

  “I am sorry,” I said. “She’s tired. We’ve had a hard day and I guess she had a little too much to drink.”

  “No,” Sam said. “I’m sorry. In a way it was very tactless of me. I had no idea Bunny and Mary were close friends.”

  “They’re not. They hardly know each other,” I said. “Forget it.”

  I poured Sam another drink and we toasted the year behind and the year ahead.

  “That’s a story you ought to write,” I said.

  Sam is our writer on campus; not really, but the nearest thing to a writer on the faculty. He has had a couple of stories published in places like The Georgia Review and he does a good deal of criticism and reviewing of current fiction. He has been working on a big novel for quite a while, and the people who have read parts of it say that it is very good, though not likely to sell many copies. One of these days he will finish it.

  “No,” he said. “Adultery is a fine subject for an anecdote, but not for art. It’s too middle-class, the great sin and sport of the middle class. The middle class bores me, but, after all, what have we got around here?”

  We talked awhile about the problems facing the English Department, who was in, who was out, the prospect of new faces. He was most affable and, at the door when he left, he told me to apologize to Mary for him.

  “Not tonight, in the morning,” he said. “Agree with her tonight.”

  When I came to our room Mary had turned out the lights and was pretending to be asleep. I knew that she wasn’t, though. She is not very good at pretending and had forgotten to simulate the breathing of a sleeper. I switched on the light and she sighed and sat up in bed. I was taking off my shoes, my back to her.

  “All right, say it,” she said. “Tell me how silly I was. Say that my little outburst was uncalled for and that I deserve to be spanked.”

  “Don’t make a big thing out of nothing. Of course I’m not going to be the outraged husband. I do wonder, though, what you have against Sam, why you don’t like him.”

  “He’s your friend, not mine.”

  “That’s no kind of an answer.”

  “All right, I think he is a dirty old fag with a dirty old mind who revels in other people’s misery and misfortune. I think he is destructive and malicious. I think Sam Browne is a vicious man.”

  “You don’t mean that, Mary. You don’t mean that at all.”

  “I know it,” she said, and for some reason she began to sob. She cried, and I made an effort to comfort her.

  “It’s going to be so hard, so hard,” she said. “I hate coming back to this place.”

  “There, there,” I said. “Have a good sleep and you’ll feel different in the morning. You’ll get used to it again in no tim
e.”

  TEXARKANA WAS A CRAZY TOWN

  WHEN I WENT BACK to the barracks for the last time to pick up my stuff, there was Mooney waiting on me.

  “Well,” he said. “You feel any better now?”

  I didn’t answer. I kept busy stuffing things in my duffel bag. I didn’t want any trouble with Mooney. I knew how he felt, like I was running out on him.

  “How does it feel to be a civilian?”

  “How would I know?” I said. “I ain’t even been off the post yet.”

  “You’re making a mistake,” he said. “You’ll be sorry.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe nothing!” Mooney said. “Listen here, boy. You’ve got it made here. You don’t know it. You just don’t know how it is. You don’t know anything else but the Army. It’s going to be tough out there for a guy like you, believe me.”

  “Listen, Mooney,” I kidded him, “you came in the Army during the Depression. They had bread lines and all that then. People selling pencils on the street corners. Things are different now.”

  Mooney grinned. “I may look old,” he said, “but I’m not that old.”

  “You look old to me.”

  “You don’t know anything,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  “We’ve been all through this before.”

  “Never mind about before. I want to know.”

  “I just don’t like being pushed around,” I said. “And that’s all there is to it.”

  “Who’s been pushing you around? You tell me who’s been giving you a hard time.”

  “Nobody,” I said. “It’s just the idea of the thing. I’m sick of it.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Mooney said. “That beats all.”

  Mooney was about the best friend I ever had. I knew him ever since I was seventeen and joined the Army. We had been in the same outfit all along. In the beginning Mooney was my Chief of Section on the howitzer. He made a soldier out of me. Now I was a Chief of Section and he was the Chief of Firing Battery. He could have been First Sergeant if he had wanted to. He turned it down because he wanted to be with the guns. Mooney was what you’d have to call a dedicated man with those guns. He really cared. That’s why he just couldn’t understand why I was leaving.