The Night of Trees

by Thomas Williams

  “It was mean,” Opal said. “Seven miles.”

  Shim grinned.

  “He even likes to listen on the car radio to ’Strike It Rich.’ You ought to see him.”

  Shim grinned wider.

  “All those miserable people crying,” Opal said.

  “People,” Shim said. “Just poor old plain stupid nasty weeping bitches. They pay to see each other! I think it’s funny as hell.”

  “You’re a misanthrope, Shim,” Richard said, and then looked Shim in the eye so that he wouldn’t pretend not to know the word.

  “Maybe I got some people I like,” Shim said, but he approved of the title.

  After supper, at which he saw no sign of wild veal, Richard got one of the books he’d brought with him and went into the living room to read. In the kitchen Zach had brought out his portable television and set it up in front of his chair on the kitchen table. For a while Richard had watched it too, fascinated by the old man’s strict, inscrutable attention to something called “Private Secretary.” Zach didn’t laugh at the jokes; he just paid attention, and the canned laughter, coming in little waves, left him solid as granite.

  From the living room Richard could barely hear, now, the soft whirls of giggles. His book, a satirical novel about commuters, failed to interest him very much: the jokes were so self-confident, the villains, the middle-class boors, too powerful and too stupid. It was as if the author had given him a wink and said, “You’re a cultured man—get it?” And he got it, but it seemed so familiar. He sipped his coffee and thought of making a fire in the great stone fireplace.

  He went to the kitchen to ask Opal if she would mind, and she turned on her platform and said eagerly, “Oh, let me make it, Please! I love to make fires! I’ll be through in a minute.” He watched her rinse out and stack the rest of the dishes (he’d asked her if he could wipe, but she said she never wiped, and besides, he was a paying guest and didn’t come to be domestic), deciding that she knew he was watching and thinking about her, and that she didn’t mind. Possibly the movements of her arms, hips, shoulders, and the cant of her well-kept little head, were just a little exaggerated. She, too, knew what she looked like. He wondered if he would have so obviously watched her if Shim had been there watching him. She was being consciously female in his sight. A strange little bird.

  She wore a plain, light-blue denim dress, like a toy dress, a play dress; she must not have had many of those plainly mechanical troubles with straps, belts, and plackets that larger women had. And he thought of Rachel and her long, tapered thighs—a mansized woman: he shivered, shook all over for part of a second, for Rachel, and saw her again in the dream, walking sadly and gracefully away from him.

  When Opal had finished the dishes and wiped up the sink, she turned toward him on her platform and held out her arms. He didn’t really have time to think before some immediate, polite nerve made him reach out for her—it seemed so much like a little girl’s saying, “Help me down.” And she, too, had a choice; really she was only straightening out arms that must have been cramped from her work, and at the same time sliding her plastic apron off her shoulders. Her choice might have been one of courtesy too, since his gesture was too obvious to go unexplained. She let him take her by the waist and lift her to the floor, her face warm and confused. She seemed to give off a little buzzing sound, then tried to smile and say, “Thank you,” with the proper, light inflection. It came out hot, low, and embarrassed.

  She weighed nothing—nothing because his reaction to her tiny weight and lively waist was unexpectedly, immediately male. He hadn’t expected it at all, and the surge of strength that caught him in the arms and belly made him for a moment unable to undo her embarrassment. And so the moment for explanation went by, and between them as they walked into the living room was a thick, irritatingly exciting sense of possibility.

  Now she walked demurely, without any suggestiveness at all—although with his quickened sensitivity to her he wondered, knew, that this indicated that the femaleness of her (Stop that!) was alive and churning. She bent her knees and squatted to get the paper and kindling, the hemispheres of her behind like a small, inverted heart below her narrow, narrow waist, and tight beneath the fabric of her dress. He could see the line where the hem of her panties circled around and down: dark hinges, he thought, this from another poem, not Murray’s. And then of course he said to himself, Stop that, grinned in the middle of a yawn, felt like sneezing, did. Stop this!

  She had the paper and kindling arranged in the andirons, and again he was impressed by her strength as she placed two birch logs, crunch, on top. A matter of leverage, he supposed, in the short, neat shafts of her bones—their fulcrums—the round arms full of firm muscle. She had to go back to the kitchen for a match, and he sat back into the davenport to look at the unlit fire. Just a match to the neat little triangle of paper she’d left sticking out, and it would burn nicely, well curbed by the stone and firebrick; a pretty fire, economical and well planned.

  When Rachel built a fire, into it went everything (this in the city, where birch logs cost fifty cents apiece because they were pretty—others cost twenty-five), milk cartons, kindling, usually with paint or putty on it; New York Times Magazines whole, so that they merely curled and charred, and stopped the draft; plastic odds and ends that just wrinkled and dripped. Sometimes half the paper and kindling would go on top, and she’d light the whole mess from the top, like a candle. But he liked to repair Rachel’s fires, and get them going again, and he thought she liked to have him take over and do it. That’s what he’d thought once upon a time: Can you get pleasure out of doing something badly? Have it sit and stink? Do the things you, you lovely woman, are beautiful at doing! He loved her, and all of a sudden, now, again, this crazy thing he thought she’d got over, this going away from him.

  And when Opal came back he was free, at least, of the tingle in the nose he’d got from Opal’s dark places and new shyness. He had troubles he had come here to solve, and the adventures he wanted were the pure and tiring ones that had to do with the other part of him as a man. “I’m not an indoor hunter,” he said to himself; “not an indoor man.” He’d done his work and his fighting and his hunting outside living places, in his plants, in the army, in the mountains, and come home to Rachel, into Rachel, loving Rachel: he had thought himself to be such a lucky, lucky man.

  Opal turned on her little haunches, after she had lighted the fire, and quickly looked at him.

  “That’ll burn very well,” he said. “A very nice fire.” His voice calmly erased the embarrassment that had been developing between them. As far as he was concerned, the situation was one that was, usually, easy to control. He feared only that Opal might want him to keep it up, and that would be a bother. He had never played around that way, not really. Certain tensions had developed between him and other women—his friends’ wives, one or two of his employees—but he was by nature faithful, and those tensions had eventually cured themselves. He knew that a woman had to be asked, and he would not ask. After having decided, almost by habit, not to fool with Opal, he looked at her again as she stood aside to look at the fire, and wondered what it would be like. He had never considered such imaginings to be acts of unfaithfulness.

  So different from his Rachel! She was so small, this tiny replica of a woman, that she made him feel big, extremely strong, and he would probably have to wonder if he might hurt her. But enough of that. Even if he did pursue this foolish twinge of desire it would lead to no more, probably, than a young wife’s pretense at outraged virtue. Messy and unnecessary, he concluded, no matter which way it might have turned out.

  Later that evening he had to reconsider these resolutions.

  He had noticed in Opal’s attitude toward Shim certain odd things: she would move toward him, for instance, but would not touch him, as if he were fascinating to her, yet basically abhorrent. Richard’s first impression was that perhaps she thought of Shim in toto as she might a naked phallus, and that his masculinity itsel
f attracted and repelled, like the guns she wanted to watch but didn’t want to touch. They had been married for six months or so, and by that time, presumably, they must have decided who would do what to whom. But then he thought of the homework he had done during Rachel’s analysis, and though he found much of it hard to believe—who knew? His own sexual “adjustments” had never seemed like “adjustments” at all—they were just there, and hadn’t needed any adjusting. And neither had Rachel’s, as far as he could see. Until he read those cold translations, each of which was written in what he took to be the most inhuman and unsurprised of Germanic prose styles, he had considered himself to be a usual man. What had seemed to him to be the rather fine animal desire Rachel had at certain times to be thrust into with nearly brutal strength—a strength she gave him—turned out to be “masochism.” This he interpreted to mean a desire to be hurt. But it didn’t hurt. He asked her, “Doesn’t that hurt?” and she said no, it felt good. If it felt good, wasn’t it good? Neither good nor bad, the cold voices implied, but…

  He read them—Freud, Jung, Krafft-Ebing—all that were recommended to him, and dutifully learned the new language. It had even been suggested that he undergo analysis too. He’d answered: “Just ask me what you want to know. I’ll tell you straight off, as well as I can remember.” He didn’t feel quite interested enough in himself to take all that time and spend all that money. There were so many other interesting things in the world to do and to learn about.

  What happened, later that night, seemed almost to have been arranged; sometimes he thought it had been, sometimes not. Shim had gone off somewhere, probably to work on the old automobile engine that ran the T-bar ski tow, and Opal, after watching the fire for a while, went back to finish up in the kitchen. He tried his novel again, and in spite of its strikingly visual caricatures Richard could not get interested in it, so he decided to go for a drive in his new car. He told Zach and Opal that he would be back at ten or so, and left. The dew was almost like mist as it fell, and along the car’s black flank it had gathered in little silver beads, like the eyes of frogs. In spite of the cool night’s dampness he put down the top. The car started nicely, held him firmly in the leather bucket seat, and he drove slowly down the mountain on the gravel road. When he reached the asphalt the engine was warm, the little dials informed him of the car’s health, and he began to drive faster, to hold his speed on the banked corners of the Cascom River road just a little more than he would if he were simply going somewhere. He drove and thought only of driving and the subtly changeable purchase of his wheels at speed. After an hour of this intense exercise he headed back toward the mountain, his head cold and clear, his upper body actually cold, but pleasantly so because the heat of the engine warmed his legs and feet.

  When he came back into the parking space he sat in the car for a moment, letting it cool at idle, then switched off the engine and lights and sat for a while, his hands on the wheel that was suddenly unresponsive, listening to the creaks and sighs of the cooling engine and the faint bubble and hiss of the radiator.

  Then he heard, from the barn, the cry of a cat. Low, humming, as if it had originated as a hiss, it deepened into a hum with overtones of the higher scream that always seems to be a response to pain. Then it turned human, and stopped short. A light was on in the converted barn, and he stepped quietly to one of the small, original barn windows and looked in.

  In the middle of the bare room between the triple-decker bunks, the light shining bright and harsh upon bare pine and the uncovered mattress ticking, Shim and Opal stood side by side, not quite looking at each other. Neither moved, and Richard thought immediately of a terrible fight he had once seen between a cat and a raccoon who had stood thus for whole seconds, then, as if at a signal, struck, yowled, and resumed attitudes of extreme quietness and attention again. The cry he had heard suggested a previous moment of violence.

  He didn’t think of going away. He watched with the same sense of discovery and privilege he would have had at observing wild animals in the woods. And some woods sense must have been operating here too, like the quietness that means invisibility to animals; he knew that the window screen would keep him from being seen.

  Shim spoke, but Richard could hear only the lower ranges of sound—a hum. Shim’s arm suddenly bent at the elbow and then viciously skewered the air, his cuff open so that the arm and fist shot out, shining and golden, from his green sleeve. Opal didn’t move, although the fist had come past her cheek. Richard felt that if it had hit her it would have struck her dead. She circled toward the door on precise little feet, and Shim jumped like a dancer in front of her. Then they were motionless again. Shim spoke, and this time he pointed with a spasmodic arm toward one of the unmade bunks. Again they danced the taut circle, she in little steps, he in a quick leap that brought him beside her in the last possible moment before she reached the door. She didn’t seem to be afraid, just watchfully cool, and she seemed cool even when he grabbed her and threw her into one of the bunks; it was still like a dance, and she bounced on the mattress, against the wall, back to the mattress all contained and prepared, as if her flight in the air had been rehearsed. Shim leaped onto her and began to tear at her with both hands, and Richard had time to think, My God! The man is raping his wife!

  But it was over too soon for that. Upon the mattress there occurred the hopeless, disorganized movements of Shim’s need. He pulled at her clothes, at his clothes, bared her dark thigh and tore at her, tore at himself as if in a rage of self-destruction as she quickly, efficiently covered herself up again. He pried her legs apart, but they would not stay apart for him. Then Richard heard again through the wood and glass the same cry that had brought him to the window, this time, too, full of pain, but with a high keening in it that suggested sadness and desperation. It came from Shim, who vibrated with a paroxysm entirely and hopelessly independent of the woman he covered. He rolled off the bunk onto the floor, and lay with his face pressed to the wood.

  Opal daintily swung her legs to the floor and pulled up her skirt to rearrange herself, her legs apart, her lips wide, her eyes, behind her strangely undisturbed glasses, wide and straight upon the window, as if she meant to look straight into Richard’s, and to be seen by his.

  He ran swiftly to the house, ignored Zach as he made himself a quick drink, and was sitting guiltily with his book in front of the dying fire when Opal came in. She walked past him and dabbed at the fire with the brass poker, then turned and said, “Did you have a nice ride?”

  He thought: My God! I should be appalled, I should be revolted, I shouldn’t want to touch this with a ten-foot pole. But he looked at her, and felt himself grow. No! he thought, No! But as he answered, he wanted to sneeze, and out came the kind of ambiguous comment he must not dare make. “Very nice, but cold. Cold.”

  “Don’t you have a heater?”

  “Is Shim back yet?” he asked, trying to lie.

  “He went out to the woods,” she said.

  “At night?”

  She shrugged her straight little shoulders and bent gracefully to the fire. He felt that he had been entered, against his will, in a competition, and while he did not want to, his body, like some uncontrollable monster, got ready to try. But then, he thought, it won’t do anything I don’t tell it to. It never has yet.

  5

  THE OCTOBER wind was cold at Murray’s back and around the edges of his clothes, pleasantly cold because he was prepared; that was what his new hunting jacket had been made for. And the fire at his feet, his father sitting against the bole of a blowdown pine, these also were measures against cold and loneliness and the silence of the black mountain. His shotgun, too, where it gleamed along its barrels, breech open, might have been reassuring; but the day’s hunting was over, and with the day his right to be a hunter seemed also to be over. Now, in the dark, wind-filled valleys of Cascom Mountain, better hunters moved.

  He had arrived at the lodge at noon, spent an hour playing with his father’s new car, and when they left
for the mountain it was late, for October. They had hunted too far up the mountain, and by the time they had their limits of grouse the light had gone.

  The fire was old and hot, and he thought: dark fire. Dark because it seemed so native to the dark hills, no interloper, no illuminator of the private night, but another view into the wilderness. One chunk of birch glowed clean through, and it took the shape of a bear in agony. In the wind the ashes brightened, and as if the great beast suffered its death right there before him, the brutish mouth opened and slowly closed. It seemed to him that he could feel, all at once, the weight of all the pain that had ever been inflicted, out of need or pleasure, upon the dumb beasts of the earth. It was just a little frightening, with a night full of animals at his back. He took a stick and poked the bear out of shape.

  In the resulting flame his father’s face stood out against the columns of the trees. The long, handsome face with its black mustache seemed native too, and translucent as the fire; in it he had also seen unpleasant things. Right now, as his father glanced at him, an expression of muted, calm, yet deep worry seemed to have lodged there—worry and a question to which the face had small hope for an answer. He knew his father well enough to know that the man was unaware of his expression, and would never ask.

  “Pretty soon we’ll have a moon—part of a moon—to see by,” his father said, but his voice revealed his preoccupation with other things.

  They were at least a mile from the house, but it was like his father to know that the moon would rise tonight and help them find their way back. It was like his father, so precise and knowledgeable about the physical world, not to feel the reasons for violent gestures. His father blamed himself for Murray’s having quit school, and that was because of the possible divorce.

  Neither of them had mentioned the separation; neither had mentioned wife or mother at all. They had spoken, with elaborate dignity, going to great lengths never to invade in the slightest each other’s private thoughts, of the army. Never a word about the separation.