These episodes were really rather embarrassing to Madelaine, and so it was a relief that they occurred as rarely as they did in the beginning, and that they occurred hardly ever as time went on. She was capable of giving perfect fealty to such a relationship, and she did. But Brad could not and did not, and that was the trouble.
Yes, she thought, that was the trouble.
But it was getting late, trouble or none, and dinner was to be early.
She stopped brushing her hair and dressed and went downstairs.
6
HE HAD BEEN in the hotel cocktail lounge almost an hour when Cornelia came, and it was indicative of his changing attitude toward her that he was annoyed because she was late, although he really was in no hurry to meet her and would actually have preferred it if she had failed to come at all. Seeing her enter in the mirror behind the bar, he slipped off his stool and moved toward a small table in a shadowy corner. They met there and sat down.
“Have you been waiting long, darling?” she said.
“Almost an hour, I think.”
“I’m sorry. Would you like to go right up?”
“No. I’d like another drink or two first. Will you have a Martini? That’s what I’m having.”
“A Martini will be fine.”
He ordered the Martinis, and they drank them slowly. The truth was, he was reluctant to go upstairs at all, having a fear of failure, and he was merely delaying as long as possible what he knew he could not agreeably prevent. It was quickly apparent, however, that she did not share his reluctance, quite the contrary, and after two more Martinis had been slowly consumed in the better part of another hour, she arose abruptly and spoke urgently.
“Darling, let’s go up.”
“All right. You go ahead. I’ll follow.”
“Hurry, darling. Come right away.”
“You knew very well that we have to practice some sort of discretion. We can’t afford to be obvious.”
“I know. Come soon, though. Don’t wait too long.”
“I’ll be there soon. What room are you in?”
“607. I’ll be ready, darling.”
He did not watch her as she left the lounge. Feeling now a kind of negative urgency himself, the desire to get finished with what he couldn’t avoid, he waited only a few minutes longer, and then went upstairs to his own room on the fifth floor. He stayed there only long enough to remove a robe from his bag, which was still unpacked and then he walked upstairs with the robe folded compactly under his coat and knocked on the door displaying the number 607 in chrome. He did not wait for an answer to his knock, but opened the door and entered, snapping the lock behind him, and Cornelia was lying on the bed in the light of a bedlamp. She was, as she had promised, ready.
“Darling,” she said, “I’ve been waiting and waiting.”
“Not long,” he said. “Only a few minutes.”
“It seemed like forever. Come quickly, darling.”
Driven now by his negative urgency, he undressed with a rush and went to the bed, where he was drawn downward at once into the hot heart of her importunate hunger, and was even incited by it, after a while to an importunate response.
He was quicker than she and sooner done, spent and ready to quit while she was still importunate and insatiate, a demanding redundancy that had become almost an imposition, and he wondered how in God’s name he had ever found her exciting and challenging, and why the excitement and the challenge must always be reduced to the exhausting repetition of this stale act.
Compelled to a kind of frenetic exertion by a fear of failure, he felt tricked and trapped by adhesive flesh that would never release him except in shame, and it was with an exorbitant sense of escape that he achieved at last, just when he thought with despair and anger that he never would, her final carnal fury.
He lay for a minute gathering strength, and then he stood up abruptly, breaking with brutal impatience the embrace of arms. She stirred and sighed, turning her head on her pillow. He stood for another minute looking down at her in the soft light of the bedlamp, observing with clinical and contemptuous detachment, now that he had survived again the ordeal of her importunacy, the bald display of her satisfied flesh — the large firm breasts and heavy thighs above and below the soft swell of belly. He would have preferred darkness in the end, in the submission that was necessarily his as well as hers, but she always wanted light and demanded it and always had it.
“Darling,” she said, “come back.”
“In a minute,” he said, wondering with instant annoyance why she always told him to come back in that imperious way, when he had in fact hardly left, as if he could return at once as he had been before to do what he had just done, although she knew perfectly well it was impossible.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“In here,” he said, cursing silently the foolish answer to a foolish question that did not need asking or answering. He resisted with an effort the temptation to say instead that he was going anywhere at all that was away from her, and he wished for God’s sake that she would put up her hair and put on her clothes and go away somewhere too.
“Don’t be long,” she said.
He put on a robe that he had brought from his own room in the hotel and went into the bathroom and sat down, pretty soon, on the edge of the tub. There were cigarettes and matches in the pocket of the robe, and he lit one of the cigarettes with one of the matches. Then he began to think about the problem of Cornelia on the bed, or Cornelia anywhere, and how he could bring to an end without recriminations or any ugly display of emotions a relationship that was no longer worth sustaining, and was threatening, besides, to get out of control.
He had been betrayed originally into false assumptions by Cornelia’s practiced air of sophistication. Now he was forced to accept the unfortunate truth that the sophistication was more apparent than real and did not rise to a casual evaluation of all it invited. There would certainly be, in brief, a nasty fuss when he broke things off. But the time for breaking was surely due, or overdue, and tonight, when he was determined, would be better than tomorrow or next week, when he might not be.
Discarding his cigarette in the commode, he went back into the bedroom and sat down on the side of the bed and lit another.
Cornelia was still lying as he had left her, and this made things doubly difficult, if not impossible, for a woman is not inclined to be reasonable in absolutely nothing.
“There’s something we need to talk about, Cornelia,” he said.
“No, don’t talk.” She spoke with her eyes closed, and her voice had a thick, drugged sound. “Lie down beside me,”
“Damn it, Cornelia, I want to talk without distractions. Are you listening?”
“I’m listening, but I’m getting very sleepy. Darling, I feel so good and so sleepy. Couldn’t we talk later? In the morning?”
“I’ll be gone in the morning before you’re awake. You know that.”
“What a shame! It would be nice in the morning if you had no place to go. Then we could talk and do other things and have a wonderful time.”
“Listen, Cornelia. You must listen to me. The time has come to discuss reasonably what we are going to do.”
“Do?” Her lids parted slightly, and he thought he could see, watching her intently, a quickened awareness under the shadow of lashes. “Is there something we have to do?”
“It should be apparent that something must be done. About you and me, I mean. Obviously we can’t go on like this indefinitely.”
“Has something happened that I don’t know about? Has someone learned about us and begun talking?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. Not yet. But it’s something that will certainly happen sooner or later.”
“I don’t care. I don’t give a damn,” she murmured in sleepy irritation.
“Don’t talk like that. It’s irresponsible. Of course you care, and so do I. We both stand to lose too much from a scandal. We could hardly survive it in our positions.”<
br />
“We’ll be very careful, darling. Haven’t I always been careful? Have I ever been the least bit reckless?”
“We’re being a bit reckless right now, it seems to me,” he stated.
“Yes, I suppose we are. I didn’t realize that it frightened you, however.”
“I’m not frightened. I’m only trying to be realistic.”
“Darling, you’re concerned over nothing. I’m sure of it. Everything will be all right until summer, at least, when the term is over. Then we can decide how to arrange matters most easily and quietly so that it won’t matter any longer what anyone sees or says or thinks about us.”
She was watching him now as intently as he was watching her. The light of the lamp seemed to gather and glitter in the pupils of her eyes, giving her a sly and calculating look. He reacted inwardly to the clear implication of her words with such horror and anger that he was in danger, for a moment, of being sick to his stomach. He was conscious at the same time of having developed suddenly a tic in his left eyelid. This, because it was absurd, had the effect of increasing his anger and complicating his effort to control himself.
“What in God’s name are you talking about?” he said. “I don’t understand you at all.”
“I’m talking about us and what we must do. Isn’t that what you wanted? I agree that we can’t go on like this indefinitely, although I don’t agree that there is an immediate urgency to change. Summer will be early enough. We had better get positions in another college for the fall, I think. It would be much better all around. You can get a divorce in the summer, or let Madelaine get one, and everything should be settled without difficulty by September.”
He was stunned by the extent and particulars of her planning. He had never dreamed that she had made such gross assumptions, or that she would be willing to make such fantastic commitments. He had completely misjudged her, and the consequences were beginning to look disagreeable.
Standing, he walked away from the bed and the light into the shadows of the room. Turning, he watched her from a distance.
“Jesus,” he said. “You’ve got it all worked out beautifully, haven’t you.”
Her eyes widened at the harshness of his voice. She sat up slowly in the bed, leaning back against the headboard and peering to see his face clearly in the shadows.
“You sound angry,” she said. “Have I said something to displease you? It’s only that I think we should wait for a time to settle things when it can be done quietly.”
“What in God’s name, I’d like to know, ever gave you the idea that I wanted to settle things that way at all?”
“What other way is there? You said yourself that something must be done.”
“So there must. We must simply quit meeting like this. Here or any place.”
She apparently had not heard him or could not understand him, for she continued to probe the shadows for his face with only the slightest expression of anxiety, as if she were waiting for the laugh or word or sign that would give away his brutal joke.
“What did you say?” she said. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“Oh, come off, Cornelia.” He tried to achieve a quality of lightness that would secure a reasonable response. “You know very well that there has never been any suggestion of permanence between us. We were two reasonably intelligent adults who knew what we wanted, and we’ve had it, and now it’s time to quit. It will be better for both of us if we do, and better now than later.”
However he may have expected her to react to this, it was certainly not as she did. Her face was older all at once, and she was apparently incited not so much to anger as to shame. An ugly flush suffused her flesh, and she reached down with one hand to pull up a sheet and cover her nakedness.
“You’ve tricked me,” she said. “You’ve told me lies.”
“No. I never tricked you. I never lied to you.”
“You deliberately let me believe what wasn’t true. That’s as bad or worse.”
“I thought we understood each other. I’m sorry if we didn’t.”
“And I thought you loved me. I had every right to think so.”
“You had no such right. I never said so.”
“Never said so? Did you say you never said so? Oh, God, that’s quite amusing. That’s really very amusing. I must merely have assumed it. Yes, that’s surely what I did. Forgive me, please, for assuming that you loved me, even though you never said so. I must have been confused by the way you acted. I assumed from the way you acted that you loved me. Isn’t that what they call what we have just done? Making love, I mean?”
She began to laugh softly, with desperate intensity, and he realized with apprehension that she had reached, almost instantly, the edge of hysteria. This was another reaction he had not expected, and he stood helplessly, wondering what to do, until she stopped laughing after a few moments as suddenly as she had begun, staring at him with a strangely abstracted expression, as though she could not remember what had amused her so. Then she began to scream.
Fortunately, it was more of a wail, a softer cry of anguish, and after his initial frozen terror at the possible consequences if she were heard outside or in another room, he leaped to the bed and gathered her into his arms and smothered the wail against his chest.
She was shaking violently. Her body was cold. To quiet her and to dispel the present threat that she was, he began to tell the lies that he had denied telling. She clung to him, her fingers like talons fixed in his back, and he thought with despair that he would have to try again in another place at another time, and that now, very soon, there would be no escaping another dreary pretense of passion that was, as she had charged, the greatest lie of all.
7
COUCHANT ON THE FLOOR, belly down and her chin cupped in her hands, Maggie was watching television. On her face was a small frown of the most intense concentration — two vertical lines running parallel between her brows and her short nose. Her lips moved silently, forming the shapes of words, and she appeared to be repeating the words that were coming miraculously through her set all the way from Kansas City, and this was, in fact, exactly what she was doing.
Repeating things in this way was a habit of hers that gave her some sort of secret satisfaction. It was often disconcerting to people when they first became aware of it and were unused to it.
Lying there on the floor where she had been for twenty full minutes since seven o’clock, fixed and utterly still except for the slight movement of her lips and the barely perceptible movement of her breasts in breathing, she was so absorbed in what she heard and saw that she was even unaware of being a little cold because of being completely naked.
This was also a habit of hers around home, being naked, which was also disconcerting to people when she occasionally opened the door to them before remembering.
On the twenty-one inch screen, Brad was teaching algebra in black and white. He was talking about something called a quadratic equation, and Maggie had a vague notion that this was a way of solving problems that she had been exposed to at some time or other in the past, but now she knew nothing about it of any significance, and it did not matter in the least that she didn’t, for she was only watching and listening because it was Brad she was seeing and hearing.
She wished that he could see her too, exactly as she was, just for the fun of watching his reaction in the box with his blackboard and his silly piece of chalk. This struck her as being a very entertaining speculation — what Brad would do if he could suddenly see her as she was, with nothing on at all. She smiled a little and kept thinking about it, but all this while, although she was not conscious of a single thing he said, her lips kept forming exactly the shape of every word.
After a bit, tiring of speculation, she again became conscious of the words, their meaning as nearly as she could grasp it, and she admired him tremendously for what he knew that she didn’t. Mostly, however, she admired him for looking so handsome and talking so cleverly, with just the merest tone of conde
scension for his unseen students. As a matter of fact, relative to her feeling in these matters, admiration was by no means the proper word for it. Whatever the word was, the feeling had something itchy in it.
Behind her, on a tousled bed pulled down into the room from a compartment in the wall, Buddy Jensen stirred and grunted and rose on one elbow.
He was a stocky young man with swarthy skin, thick shoulders and a dark sullen face that was given a cast of ferocity by black brows and thick curly hair, also black, that grew rather low on his forehead and always needed combing. His body matching Maggie’s in its present condition, was hard and powerful. It was the body of an athlete, though this was a kind of natural deception since he abhorred exercise of all sorts — physical and mental alike.
He had met Maggie about a year ago in another town, where she had been at loose ends, restless and bored but living fairly comfortably on the wages and fringe benefits of a temporary job as a waitress in a fancy bar, and there had been between them almost immediately a kind of dark combustion. Buddy had also been in comfortable circumstances at the time, thanks to a careless gentleman, slightly drunk and very lucky, who had been in a poker game that Buddy had been kibitzing in the back room of a cigar store. The gentleman had also been indiscreet, which was where his luck ended, and he had wakened later in an alley behind the cigar store, by which way he had left the game, with a splitting head and an empty wallet. The almost two thousand dollars that had been in the wallet were by that time in Buddy’s pocket, although Buddy was the only one who knew it. Not even Maggie ever knew it, although she helped spend the money.
Buddy’s parents were reasonably prosperous folk who had disowned him after paying off his third bad check, and he was himself at loose ends at this time. He had been going to college when the third bad check was written, but he was now unemployed and unoccupied and wondering what to do with himself. He was, in fact, wondering if it was worth while doing anything at all at the time he met Maggie. She had given him a sort of illicit purpose, justification for a bad life, and she had become, in fact, his only reason for wishing to live in a world that was generally threatening and inhospitable. Consequently, when she had decided later in the summer to leave town and enroll in college, without apparent logic from his point of view, he had quite naturally followed her to the town in which they now were, and had himself even enrolled in college again to keep her company. To finance all this, he robbed a filling station.
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