The Tunnel of Love

by Peter de Vries

  I cast a glance over my life and temper. I could point to days when I just damn well didn’t see how I could go in to the office. Why weren’t those blocks? I was on salary, true, but there were weeks on end when I was in a “funk” about my work, had no “stomach” for it whatsoever. Those stretches, why couldn’t I call them periods of being immobilized about the magazine game if I wanted? As to the shortcomings-as-persons that are the bruited hallmark of talent, why, I could adduce instances in my own case, of which such things as treating tradesmen shabbily and spasms of irritability with my wife and children were only the beginning. There were times when I think I could honestly say there was no living with me. There were other things along these lines. I couldn’t reasonably expect much in the way of public testimonials from my wife on that score, but I felt I had a right to at least as much loyalty as the commercial artist got from his. So I brought the subject up as we were driving from the party in question to another party, and we had a spat about it.

  “Why don’t you ever build me up?” I asked her, out of what she no doubt took to be a clear sky.

  “What do you mean, build you up?” she asked.

  “You know very well what I mean. The way other wives build their husbands up.”

  “I don’t see how you can say I don’t build you up. Why, only tonight, at the card table, I was saying how pleasant you are at breakfast.”

  “Sure, make me out a cheerful moron,” I said. “How about the dumps I get into about my work, and then the states. I’m a dethroned elder child, remember. My temper isn’t so damned long as you sometimes like to think!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sometimes I wonder if you ever know.”

  She had been slumped abstractedly down in her seat, but now straightened up.

  “Really!” she said.

  ‘Yes, really,” I said, feeling the wrangle was going well; feeling that if some of our fine-feathered friends could hear me now they wouldn’t think I was such a bland mediocrity.

  “Have you been drinking?” my wife asked me.

  “No, but it’s an idea. I need one—all that guff tonight. That commercial artist’s wife going on about the stews he gets into. Chewing-gum posters, for Christ’s sake! Who the hell does she think he is? I should think you’d resent it. Why, there are days when I come home limp as a rag from tension. You know that. I’m just as tied up in knots as he is any day. I’m just as much as any of these bastards around here. And don’t you forget it!”

  She gave a weak shake of her head and looked out the window. “I never know what you want,” she said.

  Well, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to be treated with some respect in my home community. I wanted to be regarded as somebody. After all it wasn’t as though I was a magazine hack; I was creative to a large extent in my work, suggesting changes and even complete switches to artists that they might never have thought of themselves, working with them from the idea stage, and so on. My editorial contributions were thus an integral part of the generative process, in whose extreme ferments I often as not wore my secretary thin. I was in any case fed up with being branded as levelheaded, which I felt certainly to be unwarranted.

  I was still brooding on these matters when we reached our destination, a lawn party at some friends named Winchester. The party is important because it was there that Augie gave me my first inkling of the scale on which he practiced what he preached.

  There was on hand a nobly hewn blonde who had arrived with a local painter, the spoils of a recent excursion into the theater, which had consisted of his doing the sets for a musical comedy. She wore a shimmering coral gown which advantageously set off her arms and shoulders and the snowy cleft between. Looking accidentally in Augie’s direction I caught his long, carnivorous glance as she crossed the grass to take her seat, but gave it no second thought, there being not a man there on whom her vibrations did not rain. She even made me salivate; I say even me because I am normally plunged into despair rather than excitement by such presences, which are but part of the world’s weary wasted stimuli. As intimated, it has become somewhat my pleasure to see women qualify on the more abiding ground of colloquy, and so when I heard the newcomer remark, on her entrance, “Tom has been handing me the usual baloney about how long women take to dress,” I knew she was not likely to be among those guests who were regularly seen at Moot Point. Augie was not so given to caviling. Early in the evening he was à deux with her on the lower slopes, helping her to seconds from the buffet spread as well as from his store of learning concerning the living habits of the great. Once I saw her throw back her head and laugh at something he’d said, and it was not much after that that I didn’t see either of them at all. I learned afterward that his progress was based in part on her impression that he was a playwright with a work nearly ready for production, a misunderstanding he did nothing to correct and may have done something to create. This all came to a head quickly, to the consternation of more than a few people.

  The grounds here were of estate size, almost a small park, an expanse of lawn and manicured privet in the center of which lay an oval pond. Augie in piloting his friend from view had skirted the outer hedgeworks and come up well out of the dusky glow of the Japanese lanterns; but the damn fool had not reckoned with the notorious acoustics of open water. We could hear every word he said, the ten or dozen of us who were sitting just then at the side of the pond near the house. We were presently treated to an aphorism.

  “Most women only strike the quarter hour, some the half,” came Augie’s voice in a murmur transmitted with high fidelity across the calm water. “A few strike the hour. You’re one of those.”

  We writhed as if sitting on nests of ants. Someone called, “Who’s for dancing?” To which an eager chorus demanded that the radio be gotten out and going on the terrace without delay. Then there was silence. Into which came Augie’s voice again:

  “Who was it that said, ‘Let us all be terribly Spanish, for there is not enough time to be Greek’?”

  It was no doubt the speaker’s acting on the injunction to be Spanish that brought the next sound we heard—that of the smart clap of a hand on a cheek. It’s one of the most rending adult sounds witnessable, and is almost never heard in real life. Whatever its effect on its object, that on our group was to disperse it like a dropped shell. We scattered in all directions, angrily demanding what was keeping the music.

  My wife couldn’t wait to get into our car, when the party broke up. She had been among the witnesses to the incident, which thank God hadn’t included Isolde.

  “Well, what did I tell you?” she said, before I had the car quite in second.

  “Hm?” I said, being concerned with a stuck window on my side, and also mentally engaged in weighing the merits of garroting, strangulation and poison for Augie. “How’s that?”

  “You know what I mean. About your fine friend. I told you so.” She sighed and shook her head. “I’m surprised at him.”

  “You told me so, but you’re surprised at him.”

  “That’s just an expression. I’m really not surprised at all. Really! Making a pass at another woman. Well, what do you think of your boy now?”

  I steered the car around a large hole in the road. “It goes on all the time,” I said.

  “You certainly don’t sound as if you disapproved of it.”

  “I’m no censor of other people,” I said. “The trouble with you is you don’t take people as they are.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, with as much an air of repartee as the nature of the exchange permitted.

  We rode on in silence for a while. I could sense that she was a pod bursting with contention. At last, sighing sharply now rather than meditatively, she said: “That’s the male viewpoint all right. Sticking together like—union members!”

  “I don’t think it was the male sex that started what went on tonight. That dress—designed solely for the purpose of showing off her excellent
recreational facilities.” My wife made a repressed, grinding noise. I shrugged and said. “It’s one-thirty.”

  “Don’t you condemn that sort of thing?” she inquired abruptly.

  “Yes, it was a foolish thing to do. At a party and all.”

  “That’s not what I mean and you know it. Don’t you condemn it as such?”

  All might yet have been well if she only hadn’t said “and you know it.” That was what stoked me up again. I could not find it in my heart to say, “Yes,” and make an end of it. I asked:

  “Who was it that said life would be perfectly enjoyable if it were not for its pleasures?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Why, that the by-products and botherations that go with pleasures make it hardly worth it. Sex is supposedly life’s greatest pleasure and look what it gives you. That,” I said, jerking a thumb over my shoulder at what we had left, “and—this.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. We’re the victims of our morality as much as of our sins,” I continued acutely, guiding the car around another pock in the road. “Perhaps more. If marriage wasn’t made so much a corral in which to confine us we’d all be more content to stay inside it. All you have to do to make Augie forget that bag of sachet is make her available. As it is, he’ll probably spend the night tossing and turning.”

  “I see. Free spirits.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “Maybe you wish you were just dropping me off instead of going home with me.”

  “Make no mistake about that!” I said, piloting the car into the garage, for we had reached the house.

  “Well, go right ahead!” she said, slamming the car door behind her after getting out.

  “All right I will!” I said, following her up the walk to the front door.

  Mrs. Goodbread took her money, summarized the evening, and left without having to be taken, for she lived only a few houses up the road. I locked the door behind her and turned to find my wife, who had checked on the children, walking into our bedroom. “You’re right about one thing,” she said from in there. “There are times when you’re impossible.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Retirement was a travesty. We occupied our respective beds in one of those marital silences that are so much more corrosive than any words can be. Each lay building up his charge of static electricity, not only out of the friction of the moment but out of the materials of ancient grievances as well: in her case the long maternal grind, thanklessness, fatigue; I as the tethered male who could identify himself with a friend’s digression.

  “I suppose this isn’t just general talk. Maybe you’re trying to pave the way for the future. When you might have an affair of your own some day?”

  I punched my pillow somewhat and said: “Intellectually speaking, there’s no good ground for condemning it categorically. Why is at least one affair almost universal among couples we know? Most anthropologists agree man is not naturally monogamous, remember.”

  “I’ll remember.” She settled on her side. “Any time you want to hole up in town with some flea bag, go right ahead. It’s O.K. with me.”

  “Hole up in a flea bag,” I corrected her. “With a floozy, in a flea bag. I wish you’d get terms like that straight. It reflects on me.”

  I spent the night tossing and turning. When I arose the next morning, Sunday, about ten o’clock, I found her alone at the breakfast table. The children were playing outside in the bright sunshine. She was behind the New York Times. I poured myself some coffee and “joined” her. I slipped a slice of bread into the toaster and sat nervously watching for it to pop. She cleared her throat.

  “I see Reverend Bonniwell—that minister Mother went to school with, you know—died,” she said.

  “Death is no respecter of parsons.”

  It was no good. Her silence on receipt of my reply sharpened the constraint and worsened the mood between us, though she seemed not to notice this. She folded the paper, laid it aside and said, “I’ve decided to forgive you.”

  Now this had the misfortune of being precisely what I had planned to do to her.

  “Oh, you’ll forgive me, will you?” I said. “And suppose I refuse to be forgiven. For an argument that’s been made a logical female hash of, like every other—”

  “Don’t give me any more to overlook,” she advised, buttering a remnant of toast.

  “Overlook, forgive. If there’s any forgiving to do around here, I’ll do it! What have you got to say to that?”

  “Nothing,” she replied with spirit, and rose and threw her napkin on the table. “I don’t want to talk to you today or even see you.”

  “That’s easily enough arranged,” I barked in return, rising and chucking down my own napkin. Since she had taken the dramatic offensive by sailing out of the room, there was no way for me to top it except by sailing out of the house, which I accordingly did—out the open front door and slamming the screen door behind me.

  It can be imagined how little placated I was by the sight that greeted my eye—that of Augie and Isolde approaching down the sunlit road, hand in hand. They waved, but awkwardly, for the report of the screen door had echoed like a rifle shot through half of Avalon. I waved tersely back and made for the garage. I climbed into the car and, when the Pooles had passed my driveway, backed out and made off up the road in the opposite direction. I could see them, in the rearview mirror, looking perturbedly after me.

  I had breakfast at a village lunch counter. I roosted on an end stool, perusing some fat metropolitan tabloid and sipping infamous coffee. After about forty-five minutes, I went back home. Augie and Isolde were in the living room, talking with Audrey.

  “Hi,” the visitors greeted me, with some reserve.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Warming up.”

  A few words were exchanged about the threatened resumption of a hot spell we’d just been through. “It’s hard on a person. It gets everyone,” Isolde said, smoothing out a crease in her skirt.

  Augie said, “Audrey here has been telling us you two haven’t had a vacation in four years, apart from some visit of hers to her mother’s. That’s bad. You look a trifle chewed up. Everybody has to have a holiday now and then. Off the old reservation, you know.”

  “I know,” I said, glancing out the window.

  “We’d be delighted to take the kids,” Isolde said. “No, now, I mean that. You could bring us back something terribly expensive from Bermuda or Lake Banff or whatever.”

  When they had gone (looking fresh as daisies), I turned to my wife and said, “Well! Isn’t that fine and dandy? What did you go and tell them?”

  “Tell them? Was there anything left to tell them after that fancy exit of yours? I was in the doorway when they came by, and they waved and stopped, and I told them we had a little spat, to play it down. That at least was better than letting them speculate. By God, I won’t have the neighbors thinking we’re a couple of brawlers!”

  I realized that I had suddenly lost a great deal of ground in the quarrel. And since I had no one to blame but myself, I became twice as hostile toward my wife. Nor did I lose any more time than was necessary in attempting to extract a penalty. I spotted a chance to get even the very next day—by walking the three miles from the station in the broiling heat, under circumstances that I saw a way of pinning on her.

  That Monday, the temperature reached ninety-six, and it was well on its way to it when my wife drove me to the station in the morning. My regular train home was the five-thirty. I told her that I was going to try to clean up my work at the office in time to catch the three-thirty, or at least the four-thirty, but that I couldn’t be sure. I would phone her from the station when I arrived.

  I caught the three-thirty, got to Avalon a little after four-thirty, and entered the telephone booth in the station, sooty and clammy, and hoping that when I rang my number the line would be busy. I needed a grievance of at leas
t that size (the implication that my wife was thoughtlessly chatting on the phone when I might be trying to get through to her) to recover the ground I had lost and get back in the running. Presenting a footsore and bedraggled spectacle at the front door would put her at a distinct disadvantage, one from which she might never really emerge. I dropped my dime in the slot and dialed the number tremulously. I got the busy signal. I clapped the phone on the hook, and, murmuring “Yackety-yack” gratifiedly, folded my crumpled seersucker coat over my arm and began the three-mile trek that was to punish her.

  The sun was still high in the sky and beating down mercilessly. I hadn’t gone a tenth of a mile before my shirt felt like a poultice. I crossed from side to side of the road, in quest of shade where it appeared (not to be too vindictive with her), but this was a technique that I presently realized offset any respite from the sun by adding a marked percentage to my mileage. So after that I stuck to one side of the road.

  I lifted a wet cuff to consult my wrist watch. Five-twenty. I was not a fifth of the way. At that rate I wouldn’t be home before eight o’clock, for much of the journey from there on lay uphill, and it had become increasingly necessary to pause for rest even on the levels. It would be mad to proceed faster than a stroll; a mile an hour was plenty. At that pace, when would my wife begin to wonder? When worry? When grow alarmed? Well before home was in sight, I’d be bound. Two or three motorists slowed to offer me rides, but I shook my head and plodded on.