Love Among the Cannibals

by Wright Morris

  “It won’t be long now,” she said, matter-of-factly, and wheeled slowly around—she is a big girl—and with the walk that a big Lachaise bronze would have had, crossed the yard to the house. She was gone until the yard had almost darkened, then she came out. I opened the door and she took a seat in the car. I turned around in the drive, went out through the gate, and at the flower bed curve to the road the last of the light from the sky streamed into the car. I slowed to a stop, turned to look at her face. She held my gaze until I said:

  “Greek, close your eyes,” and she closed them. Like a man testing glasses that he doubted, I stared at her mouth. The lips were parted. I could feel the coolness of her teeth. Never in my life had I seen anything so beautiful. Never in my life had I felt anything so desirable. “You can open your eyes,” I said, and when she did I examined her eyes. My throat was dry. I had to wet my lips before I could speak.

  “What would you like to do?” I said, and saw on her face, amused but softly melancholy, the Mona Lisa smile.

  “Is there anything else?” she said, and I moved my raincoat out of the seat, drew her over closer to my side. I put the car in neutral, let it drift down the grade. At the corner of Sunset, I said:

  “Any particular place?”

  “Any place.”

  So we drove west on Sunset to the sea, as it has been done in ten thousand phony movies, a million phony songs, and twice that many mortgaged cars. For the second time that day I took the coast highway to Malibu. Just beyond Malibu, on a rise, where a row of cabins had a view of the sea, I pulled in under a sign that said OFFICE. A man came out.

  “We are in love,” I said, “and want something good.”

  The freshness of the cliché disarmed him. He winked at me, wiggled his finger, and I followed him down to a cabin at the front, a window on the sea, a bed, and a fireplace. To give it charm it was strewn with shells and driftwood, and hung with strips of net. I tipped him well to indicate that it was beautiful. He watched, through the curtains at his window, while I led the girl along the walk, and I tortured him unnecessarily by taking our time. As we stepped inside the door she stopped and kicked off her high-heeled shoes.

  Some love stories stop right there, others start. This one moved imperceptibly into a quieter gear. Our cabin contained shells, fish nets, strips of wood, a lamp, a table, a bathroom, and a bed. No chairs. A simple facing up to the facts.

  I hung my clothes on the hooks behind the door and she tossed hers, as they came off, on the bed. One of the shoes she had kicked off at the door had landed there. There was still a bright afterglow in the sky, and it cast her shadow on the wood floor. A big shadow. I was able to undress in the shade of it. We both stripped down like people who were anxious for a dip before the pool closed, saying nothing, just getting duds off and out of the way. She was tanned all over, I mean all over, the way Madame Monroe is blonde all over, and I was so struck by it that I said:

  “How the devil did you manage?”

  She turned to see what I meant.

  “Oh—” she said, “I just swim out to the rocks.”

  I didn’t doubt it. She was built like something intended to float. I could almost see her, through our window, floating like a raft in that wild blue yonder with her nose, her toes, and the nipples of her breasts showing. She looked at me, carefully, and indicated that what she saw was all right. I suppose every man has a dream of being like Adam and Eve with a woman, without shame or embarrassment, and that’s how it was. I looked at her lovingly and said:

  “How did you do that?”

  She looked down her front to see what I saw, and ran the tips of her fingers along the scar. It looked to be about eight inches along, up the center of her abdomen.

  “I nearly died,” she said.

  “An accident?” I said, knowing that it wasn’t.

  “A Caesarean,” she replied, and went into the bathroom. She came back for her plastic handbag, then went in again. I stood at the window, gazing at the rocks, the Sargasso Sea of kelp near the shore, and then farther out to sea where just a week before I had seen a whale spout. A man on the beach had suddenly leaped up, shouted, “Thar she blows!” But nobody had believed it. If he had hollered “flying saucers” there would have been ten thousand witnesses. In the bathroom I could hear the water running and the scrubbing sound of a brush on her teeth. When it stopped I said:

  “I want to tell you that I haven’t really eaten since I first saw you. I haven’t slept, and my knees will bend both ways.”

  “Does it matter?” she replied.

  “I may not give a good account of myself.”

  “You’re a man, not a boy,” she said, matter-of-factly. “You’ll do all right.”

  If she hadn’t said that I very much doubt it. I state it as a simple fact. She came out of the bathroom without her bag and walked to where she stood right before me. Without her high-heeled shoes our eyes were level, our lips were exactly level, and when I kissed her she put an arm around me as if to hold me up. Then she drew away and said:

  “I’ve got to get back by twelve o’clock.”

  I had left on my wrist watch, which I then took off and gave the stem a few winds before putting it on the table. It was five past ten. Light from the rising moon cast shadows on the beach. She was lying with her eyes closed when I turned, so relaxed there was something unearthly about her, so much at peace she seemed dead and on the other side of what we call life. I stood a moment looking at her parted lips.

  “You’ll do all right,” she said, as if to reassure me, but her fears were unfounded. I mean my fears. I was a man and not a boy—as she said—and I did all right.

  I had the fingers of one hand, when I woke up, in the curls at the scruff of her neck. Gripped. The way a cat lugs a kitten around the house. The way you might do it in a dream, I began to laugh. I don’t know whether she had been asleep or just lying there, relaxed and waiting, but when my diaphragm began to bob she began to laugh too. No questions or answers. We just lay there and laughed. I had never before been with a woman who could bear my amusement without questioning, let alone the humor of a man who had just been lying with her. She didn’t care. We lay there and laughed like a crazy pair of kids. When it had died down, naturally, I said:

  “Not that it matters, but what is your name? I might need to know it sometime.”

  “Baum,” she replied.

  “Baum?”

  “Tree,” she said, “in German.”

  “I’ll call you Greek,” I said. “Is that all right?”

  “I like it.”

  “My name is Earl Horter,” I said, hoping she would have something else to call me. But she didn’t.

  “Earl Horter,” she said, repeating the words. That was all.

  “I’m a writer of lyrics,” I said, thinking she might have heard the name. “You see it on sheet music. You might have seen it in movies sometimes.”

  I thought that might impress her. She didn’t seem to care.

  “I don’t have time for movies,” she replied.

  I was about to say something, then didn’t. Wasn’t it plain enough where her time went?

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “I will be forty-one in September.” I waited for her to say that I didn’t look it. She said:

  “Is that all? You are lean and wiry like older men.”

  I am—but I am still human. I closed my eyes and she said:

  “Are you married?”

  “No. Are you?”

  Her head wagged from side to side on my arm. Then she said, “I was once. I was married at fourteen.”

  “Fourteen?”

  “Oh, I was old enough,” she replied.

  I could believe it.

  “When I was fifteen I nearly died. The child was turned wrong in the tube. I was dead. They said I was dead and came back to life.”

  Something like a tremor passed through my body and she turned, pulled the sheet up on me, “You cold
?”

  I shook my head, then said, “No.” She turned on her elbow and looked at my face in the dark. I could see the pearl in the ring she wore at her ear. “If you had died—” I said, “you wouldn’t be here.” She made that purring sound in her throat, the sound she had made just before I kissed her. “Is that why you are?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Here,” I said, and gripped her by the scruff.

  “When I’m afraid—” she began.

  “You afraid?”

  “Oh, I’m often afraid. But when I’m afraid I tell myself I was once dead.”

  “That gives you courage?”

  “This life I have is a gift,” she said. “Why should I hoard it? I have a life to give.”

  I cannot tell you about her voice. It is like trying to tell you about a new flavor, like a mango, for instance.

  “You don’t like that?”

  I kissed her. After the kiss I said, “I’m lean and wiry. I have only one life. I am a selfish and hungry middle-aged man. I don’t like to hear about all you have to give.”

  “But if I have it to give—”

  “Love—” I said, but went no further. What, after all, did I know about love? In a cabin just north of Malibu I lay in bed with a girl whose name I had just learned. What did I want? I wanted to lie there with her every night. I wanted to keep what I had found all to myself.

  “You do not sleep with girls?” she asked.

  “Greek—” I began, “what time is it?”

  She held up her wrist so I could see the watch.

  “It is twenty past eleven,” I said. She pushed up, yawning. I heard her scratch a bite on her leg. “In answer to your question,” I went on, “I do not sleep with girls to make them happy. When I feel a great desire, as I do with you, then I sleep with them if I can.” I stopped, then added, “But it’s been damn seldom in forty-one years.”

  “If you had died,” she replied, “you would feel different.” She threw back the sheet and sat on the edge of the bed. I lay there watching her put her clothes back on. When she stood up to put on her bra I could see the white cups against her dark skin, and I rose up in bed to reach for her, pull her back down.

  “You can see how much will power I have,” I said.

  She pushed me away and said, “But that is will power. The mind is in the body.”

  The phrase she had used, coming when it did, almost made me laugh. I was glad it was dark and she could not see the expression on my face.

  “So the mind is in the body?”

  “It is in yours and mine,” she replied, which I liked to hear, then she added, “and a lot of other people who don’t seem to know it,” which I didn’t like. “Hurry up,” she said, matter-of-factly, “I can’t be late.”

  I got up and slipped on my pants. “You like this job?”

  “It’s a job, and I don’t want to lose it.”

  “You looked mighty professional,” I said. She didn’t bother to reply. In the bathroom I could hear her splashing water on her face. When she came back into the room I said:

  “What did you do before this—?”

  “School. I’ve just finished four years of college.”

  In a woman like that it seems strange when the girl speaks up.

  “What did you major in?” I asked, curious.

  “Music. I play the piano.”

  I wondered if I’d heard that right, then said, “Did you hear me say I was a song writer?”

  “I’m serious,” she said. “I play the classics.”

  While I finished dressing she sat on the bed and smoked.

  “What do you plan to do?” I said. She didn’t answer right away, and I added, “With yourself.”

  “Something always turns up.”

  “That’s not much of a plan, is it?”

  “You can’t plan your development,” she replied.

  I had stepped into the bathroom to comb my hair. I stood there facing the mirror. I’m sensitive to the word development. Meaning to kid her a little I said:

  “What part of your development am I?”

  “I suppose I’m tired of boys,” she replied.

  I let the water run for a spell, then I said:

  “Got all they have to give, is that it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just know I’m tired.”

  I came back into the room and put on my shirt and coat. I felt cheated and ashamed. When I slipped on my coat I felt in the inside pocket for my billfold. The empty room, the mussed-up bed, the rafters garlanded with nets that looked like cobwebs, suddenly looked fake.

  “Is there any little thing,” I said, “that I did that these boys couldn’t do?”

  I wanted to hurt her, I suppose, the way she had hurt me. I stood near the window, my hand held to my chest as I strapped on my wrist watch, the pale light from the sky on the face and the silver band. When she didn’t reply I turned to look at her, just the outline of her head and shoulders. The hand resting on the bed at her side held the glowing cigarette. Although I could not see her face I felt her steady gaze. “Is there?” I repeated, certain that there wasn’t.

  “You arouse my desire,” she said.

  In the floor of the cabin I could feel the pounding of the surf. I had set my eyes on a light, a planet perhaps, to the north of Catalina, on the rim of the sea.

  “I suppose that’s not to be sneezed at, is it?” I said.

  She made no comment. Her cigarette glowed brightly as she inhaled, then she dropped it on the floor and stepped on it. I walked to the door and let the light from the driveway stream in. Several cars besides our own were now parked out in front.

  As she went ahead of me down the walk I noticed the lint from the diaper on her hip, and in the heel of her right stocking a large hole. Is this the Million-Dollar Baby, new style, I thought? I gave her my hand on the flight of stairs, and she did not draw away. By the time I had walked around the car, lit a cigarette, and slid in behind the wheel, she had climbed in and turned the radio on. She dialed it to a station playing the classics. Rachmaninoff. The pathos of the moment—diaper lint and the classics—the part-time lovers riding home in the moonlight, left such a staleness in my mouth I was almost sick. The thirty minutes it took to drive back we did not speak. At one point she said, “Why do you drive so slow?” and I had to sit and think about it. I thought, then said:

  “I eat ice cream slow. I put off the best bite of everything to the last. I go slow to taste it longer, I suppose.”

  “I don’t,” she replied.

  Up near the end of that road where she lived she suddenly said, “Stop here,” and I stopped. She opened the door on her side and let herself out. When she turned to close it without slamming I caught her eye. There was just enough glow from the dashboard to light her face. She had not troubled to put on more lipstick and the scouring I had given her lips had left them almost puffy.

  “Look, Greek—” I said, but when I leaned toward her she turned and ran, her heels clacking on the drive, her skirts lifted to the point where I could see her garters. Near the gate at the top she turned and said:

  “Call me tomorrow,” then she was gone.

  I drove around for a while, aimlessly, then I went up the canyon to our place where the lights were still on and I could hear a piano tapping out “What Next?” I thought it might be the sound tape, but Mac was playing it himself. Miss Harcum was nowhere in sight, and I said:

  “Well, how did things go?” which he didn’t hear. A good sign. He never hears well when he’s full of heart. The lid of the tape recorder was up and I could see they had run through a spool of the tape. “How’s your new wren?” I said, since he refers to his new songbirds as little wrens. Without glancing at me he replied:

  “Sent her home. She’s got to get her rest.”

  The early nesting phase of Mac’s love routine calls for nursing the little wren back to health. Early to bed, pasteurized milk, filter-tip cigarettes, that sort of thing. He surprised me
by saying:

  “She’s great, man. You know what I mean?”

  “You mean her talk on the tape?” I replied.

  Mac has a smile, when he’s full of heart, which expresses his pity for cynical people, people like myself, who have to get through life without the old pump.

  “Like to hear a song or two?” he said, which was my cue for picking up the glasses, what was left of the bourbon, and heading for the back of the house. I was rinsing glasses when he came in and said:

  “You feel better, man?”

  “I don’t feel too bad,” I said.

  “You get her name all right?”

  I nodded. I so seldom show an interest in the girls that the one feeling he can localize is worry. Chicks break up great teams. He considered us a great team.

  “Any name I might know?” he put in, and took an ice cube from one of the glasses, slipped it into his mouth, then crunched down on it. He knows what that does to me but it’s a sure sign that he’s worried.

  “I’m turning in,” I said, and crossed the hall to where he keeps his barbital, took four of them, then went down the hall to our room.

  “Look man!” I heard him say, and waited there in the hall until he came down and stood before me. “Now whassamatta?” he said.

  ‘To think I picked it up from you.”

  “Look man—picked what?”

  “Look!” I yelled. “Look—look—look!” Then I turned and walked into our bedroom. Two of the walls are glass and the room was full of the damn moonlight. For the second time that night I undressed in the dark. I must be the goddamnedest mimic in the world, since I stood in the center of the room, like she did, and tossed my clothes as I took them off on the foot of the bed.

  “Why you so touchy, man?” Mac said through the door, and I lay in bed listening to him take a shower. He rubs into his hair a formula to prevent baldness which requires that he wear a plastic skullcap at night. It gives him the look of something out of Gilbert & Sullivan. I tried to turn my mind to such practical matters as the opening song for Act Two, for which I had a few lines on the pad I keep by the bed. But what I thought of was the way she had kicked off her shoes—like a horse kicking over the traces—and the number of times, and in how many places, she had done that before. Wide awake, not dreaming, mind you, I sat up in bed and drummed my fists on the wall until I saw Mac, like a corpse wearing a mud pack, rise up from his bed. I waited for him to bellow, “Christamighty, man!” but he didn’t. Not a peep.