Riven Rock

by T. C. Boyle

  He was shy, Stanley, furtive still, the boy who burrowed, but there was something about Katherine that made him want to open up, turn himself inside out like a glove or a sock, to hide nothing, to spill it all, fears, dreams, hopes, predilections, theories, fixations. They reminisced about Chicago, and when they’d gone round for the second time and remembered everything twice and exhausted the roster of mutual acquaintances and experiences, he saw the light fading in her eyes—she was tired? bored? sated with Monsieur LaBonte and Prairie Avenue and Bumpy Swift?—and he felt a terrible tension rising in him. He had to hold her there, he had to, even if it meant reaching out to touch her wrist where it lay so casually, so nakedly perfect on the table before him, touch it and seize it and pull her to him, though he knew he could never do that, even if he’d sat beside her every night for a thousand years. But if she left him, if she got up from the table, if she danced with Morris Johnston or yawned and put a hand to her mouth and excused herself to turn in for the night or even to use the ladies’ room, he would die. His mouth was full of ashes, his heart was pounding, and even as she leaned toward this other one, this Butler Ames, a whisper on her lips, he felt the voice tighten in his throat and heard himself blurting, “Have you read Debs’s Unionism andSocialism?”

  It was the key, the first principle, the beginning. And so much was engendered there, the broken wall, the burning roof and tower, because the key fit and the key turned, and from that moment on he wooed her with the sweetest phrases from the driest texts, with reform, the uplifting of the poor, the redistribution of wealth and the seizing of the means of production for the good and glory of the common man.

  In the morning, at first light, he was outside her door, rapping. He needed to talk to her, but he didn’t want to disturb her, didn’t want to spoil her sleep or upset her schedule—they’d been up past one, after all—and so he rapped gently. Very gently. So gently he could barely detect the sound himself. There was no response and he knew he should leave it at that, but he needed to talk to her—he’d been up all night with the need of it—and he rapped harder. And when that got no reaction he began to thump the door with the heel of his hand, louder and progressively louder, until finally he forgot himself altogether and he was boxing with that mute stubborn unreasoning slab of wood, left/right, left/right, and he set up such a racket that the janitor came running with his mop and an old woman in a cap poked her head out of the next door up the hall and chastised him with a look that wilted him on the spot. “Shhhhh!” she hissed. “Get away from there now. Are you crazy?”

  He ducked away, shamefaced, and let his shoulders sag beneath the weight of his criminality, but ten minutes later he was back at Katherine’s door again, rapping. This time, the instant his knuckles made contact with the wood, her muffled voice rose wearily from some buried niche of her room: “Who is it?”

  “It’s me, Stanley. I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “Who?”

  “Stanley. From last night?”

  A pause. “Oh, Stanley.” Another pause. “Yes. All right. Just let me get dressed.”

  “That’s fine,” he said, raising his voice so she could hear him through all that rigid cellulose and the vacant space of her sitting room, “because I wanted to tell you what I’ve done with my ranch in New Mexico—that’s where I’ve spent the better part of the past two years, you know, roughing it like a cowboy in all that fine air and dramatic scenery, you should see it, you really should—but what I wanted to tell you is that I’ve organized the ranch as a cooperative concern where we all share equally in the profits, from the meanest hand to the one-legged Mexican cook, every one of us equal under the western sun, and you might not know that I’m the one who instituted the profit-sharing scheme at the Harvester Company, against my brothers’ objections, and I set aside the money for the McCormick Factory Workers’ Club too—”

  And then the door opened and there she was, Katherine, the sweetest compression of a smile, her eyes searching his, and she was dressed in her tennis whites, a racquet dangling casually from her hand. “Do you play?” she asked.

  “I—well—yes—I—well, in college, at Princeton, that is—”

  “Singles?”

  “Sure.”

  “You don’t mind playing before breakfast, now? Because if you do, don’t be afraid to tell me.” She was smiling up at him as if he’d just bought her all of Asia and laid the deed at her feet. “You’ll play then?”

  “Sure.”

  But this was a conundrum, a real conundrum. It weighed on him as he hurried back to his room to change into his tennis things while she waited just outside the door, and he was still worrying it as he won service on a spin of the racquet and took his position behind the baseline. He’d never played tennis with a woman before and he didn’t know the etiquette involved: he didn’t want to overpower her—that wouldn’t be gentlemanly, not at all—and yet he didn’t want her to think he was playing down to her either. And so he tried to moderate his serve accordingly, putting the first one right in the center of the box at what must have been half the usual velocity, and with a very nice straightforward bounce to it. She surprised him by driving it directly back at him, and the surprise showed: his return was a bit tardy and he slapped the ball impotently into the net. She was glowing, beautiful, her hair pulled back in a tight chignon beneath the straw boater that was cinched under her chin with a strip of white muslin. “Love-fifteen,” she chirped.

  “I’m sorry,” he called, “I’m afraid I’m a bit rusty, I’ve been so busy lately with the Harvester business and the ranch and a thousand and one other things I just haven’t had time to, to—”

  The ball was in the air, rising above the arc of his racquet as if it had a life of its own, and he served again, this time with a bit more muscle, and again she drove it right back, a wicked slashing shot into the far corner he just managed to return with a flailing backhand, and he felt a momentary thrill of satisfaction over that effort until she caught the ball at the net and put it away with a stroke as efficient as it was elegant. He admired that, he really did, a woman so athletic and fit, so nimble—she was like an Olympian, like Diana the huntress with her bow, only in this case the bow was a tennis racquet, and as he bent to retrieve the ball he congratulated himself on his evenhandedness and restraint, though of course he would have to assert himself before long, etiquette or no. “Love-thirty,” she called.

  By the fourth game he was down three games to one and sweating so copiously you would have thought he’d been in for a swim with his clothes on. Katherine, on the other hand, was barely ruffled, as neat and composed as she’d been when she emerged from her room an hour ago. She was a master, it seemed, at putting the ball just out of his reach and whipping him from one end of the court to the other with a whole grab bag of trick shots, lobs, aggressive net play and stinging ground strokes. He began to strain, hammering his serves as if the object of the game was to put the ball right through the turf and bury it three feet deep in the ground, and of course, the harder he tried the wilder his shots became. He double-faulted, then double-faulted again. By the end of the first set, which she won, six games to one, he was panting just like a—well, a dog.

  “Are you all right?” she asked. She was standing at the net, preparing to switch sides. There wasn’t a mark on her, not so much as a single bead of sweat, though it was a muggy morning, the temperature eighty already—at least.

  “Oh, no, no—I—its just—well, I do admire the way you play. You’re really quite good.”

  She gave him a mysterious smile, but she didn’t say a word.

  Later, over breakfast on the patio, he sank into his chair and swatted gnats while she told him all about her career at the Institute, the circulatory systems of snakes and toads and her hopes for the emancipation of women. And how did he feel about it? Did he believe women should have the vote?

  Well of course he did—he was right-thinking and progressive, wasn’t he? And he told her so, but he didn’t really elabo
rate, because he was exhausted, for one thing—all that motor travel, his frayed nerves, up all night, three sets of tennis—and because he was fixated at that moment on the way Katherine’s lips parted and closed and parted again to reveal her even white teeth and the animated pink tip of her tongue as she spoke, her eyes flashing, her knuckles drilling the table in declamatory fervor. He realized then, in that gnat-haunted moment with the sugary scent of new-mown grass on the air and his melon getting warm and his eggs cold, that he wanted to kiss those lips, touch that tongue with his own, and more, much more: he wanted her, all of‘her, right down to and including the problematic whiteness at the center of her. Katherine, he wanted Katherine. He wanted to marry her, that’s what he wanted, and the knowledge of it came to him in a moment of epiphany that made him shudder with the intensity of his longing and the nakedness of his need.

  “Are you catching a chill?” she asked, scrutinizing him with her ice-blue gaze.

  “No,” he said.

  “And you’re not eating—don’t tell me you’re not hungry after all that exercise?”

  This was the time to tell her how he felt, this was the time for sweet talk, for lovers’ banter, the time to say, How can mere food hope to sustain me when I have the vision of you to feast on?, but he didn’t tell her that, he couldn‘t, and he fiddled with his fork a minute before lifting his eyes to hers. “When the masses have enough on their plates,” he said, “when the tenements have been torn down and good decent housing erected in their stead and on every table a leg of lamb and mint jelly, then I’ll eat.”

  Two days later, Katherine was gone. Her vacation was over, the new semester beginning, her thesis beckoning. Before she left, she gave him a blue bow tie and a box of maple sugar candy molded in the shapes of squirrels, rabbits and Scotch terriers, and he gave her a copy of the Debs pamphlet and a first edition of Frank Norris’s The Pit. He’d begged her to stay, prostrating himself at her feet, all wrought-up with speeches about conditions in the textile mills, settlement houses and the immigrant poor, but he never mentioned love—it wasn’t in his power—and she had to go, he understood that. Still, he was devastated, and no sooner had she boarded the train than he was off for Boston in the Mercedes. He packed hurriedly, with none of the indecision that had plagued him in recent years, and he brought Morris Johnston along with him, both as a sympathetic ear he could fill with praises of Katherine and as a buffer against any subversive lavatory mirrors that might spring up like windmills in his path.

  On arriving, he took rooms at a hotel near Katherine’s mother’s place on Commonwealth Avenue and began his siege. He sent flowers daily, whole greenhouses full, and he called each evening on the stroke of seven, his palms sweating, heart thumping, eyes crawling in his head. The maid greeted him with a sentimental smile, and Mrs. Dexter, Katherine’s mother, beamed and prattled and plied him with an endless array of sweetmeats, sandwiches, fruits, nuts and beverages, while he sat awkwardly in the parlor and thought of Katherine dressing in the empyreal realms above him. And did Mr. McCormick appreciate how clever her daughter was? Mrs. Dexter wanted to know. She’d tried to discourage her with this scientific business from the beginning, heaven knew, because science just wasn’t a lady’s provenance, or hadn’t been, until Katherine came along to tackle it with her keen intellect and persevering nature, but now she had to admit that her daughter couldn’t have made her prouder, and would he like another chocolate?

  And Katherine. She was receptive, very sweet and encouraging, a paragon, especially during his first few visits, and that made him soar with a kind of elation he’d never known, but by the end of the week she’d begun to beg off on account of her studies and he found himself spending more and more time with Mrs. Dexter, a teacup balanced on one knee and a plate of sandwiches on the other. She had to study, of course she did—she was a brainy intellectual young woman and she’d been working eight years for this—but still it threw him into a panic. What if she were using her studies as an excuse, a way to get rid of him early so she could slip out at nine or ten and flit around with Butler Ames, whom he’d already encountered twice on her very doorstep? He was beside himself. He couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. And he didn’t dare look in the mirror.

  But on Friday she consented to go to dinner and the theater with him, and he took her and her mother to dine at his hotel and then to a very amusing production of The Importance of Being Earnest. At least Stanley found it amusing, and Katherine seemed to enjoy herself too, laughing in all the right places, but he worried that it might be too frivolous for her, not enough concerned with the pressing issues of the day, and when they got back to her place he started in on Debs again, by way of compensation. “Do you know what Debs says?” he began as Mrs. Dexter made a discreet exit and the maid set down a plate of poppy seed cakes and vanished.

  Katherine sat across from him, in an armchair. Outside, it was raining, the streets shining with it, the sound of the horses’ hoofs magnified in the steadily leaking night air. You could hear them—clop, clop, clop—and that was all, but for the hiss of the rain and the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. “No,” she sighed, tucking her feet up under her skirts and settling into the chair. “I don’t really know.”

  “ ‘The few who own the machines do not use them,’ ” Stanley quoted, leaning forward with a sage look. “ ‘The many who use them do not own them. ’ You see? Simple, direct, brilliant. And of course the result is the sort of inequity you and I see and abhor every day but that the rest of the world seems to turn its back on. He wants national laws to protect workers against accidents on the job, unemployment and old age insurance programs, public works for the unemployed—and until workers take over the means of production, a decrease in the work hours as production increases—”

  She didn’t seem to be listening. She was stirring a cup of tea with a demitasse spoon, her eyes unfocused and vague.

  “He says,” Stanley went on, “he says—”

  “Stanley?”

  “I—um—yes?”

  “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but while I admire your commitment to the progressive causes, I really do, don’t you ever stop to wonder why you seem, well, so obsessed with them?”

  “Me? Obsessed?”

  She laughed then, and he didn’t know whether to laugh with her or to bristle because she might have meant it as a barb, the tiniest dart that would tear his flesh open, a wound that would grow wider and wider till there was room enough for all the Butler Ameses of the world to march right on through him. His face was blank. He reached for a poppy seed cake and got it halfway to his mouth before he thought better of it and set it back carefully on the plate.

  “Could it be a defensive reaction, do you think? I mean, because you and I have so much in contrast to the poor?”

  “Well—I—yes. Yes, of course. My father, you see, he’s the one. He wouldn’t allow a union in his shop, the Haymarket Riots, all that, and it’s not right, it’s not. My father—” he said, and he found he couldn’t quite organize his thoughts beyond that, because his head was suddenly filled with the image of that cranky imperious old man with his jabbing rapier of a beard, filling the halls of the house with his roars and his bile and his unloving fierce stifling presence. “My father—” he repeated.

  Katherine’s voice was very soft, so soft he had to. strain to hear it over the noise of the rain, the plodding horses, the ticking of the clock that rose suddenly in volume till it was like a whole symphony of clocks all beating time in unison, tearing away at the hours, the minutes, the seconds he had left before she got up and dismissed him. “I know it must be hard,” she said, “but you have to put it behind you. And as admirable as progressive reform may be, there are other things in life—music, painting, all the arts—and when a man and woman are alone together, when they’re as intimate as you and I are now, don’t you think there are more appropriate things to talk about?”

  “Well, yes,” he said, but he didn’t have a clue.

&nb
sp; Another sigh. “Oh, Stanley, I don’t know about you. You’re very sweet, but really, you do have a lot to learn about the art of wooing.” And then she stood and the maid was there and the evening was over.

  He was back the next day, undeterred, ready to hire Cyrano to rehearse his speeches for him, anything, but he couldn’t seem to get socialism out of his head. In the afternoon, he took Katherine and Mrs. Dexter to the art museum, and he was able to talk knowledgeably about Titian, Tintoretto and the Dutch masters and fill them in on his experiences as a pupil of Monsieur Julien in Paris, but inevitably he found the conversation veering back toward social welfare and reform, because what was art after all but a plaything of the rich? Katherine couldn’t dine with him that evening—she was busy preparing for the following day’s classes—and he brooded over a long tasteless repast, which he interrupted three times to wire his mother on the subject of Katherine and her perfection, her intellect, her beauty, and his mother wired back almost immediately: WORRIED SICK STOP HAVEN’T HEARD FROM YOU IN A WEEK STOP VERY INCONSIDERATE STOP KATHERINE WHO? STOP YOUR LOVING MOTHER.

  Then—and he couldn’t help himself; he felt he’d explode like an overbaked potato if he had to look at those pallid hotel-room walls another second—he took a stroll past Katherine’s house. A stroll, that was all. A constitutional. For his health. He had no thought of snooping, no thought of encountering Butler Ames or his ilk on the doorstep or catching Katherine slipping into a coach in her dinner clothes, nothing of the kind. It was raining again. He’d forgotten his umbrella and his silk hat was like a lead weight bearing down on the crown of his head and the shoulders of his overcoat were soaked through by the time he’d made his eighth circuit of Katherine’s block. And when he became conscious of that, the wetness beginning to seep through now, he just happened, by the purest coincidence, to be passing by the front entrance of Mrs. Dexter’s neat and prim narrow-shouldered stone house at 393 Commonwealth Avenue.