Selections

by Theodore Sturgeon

It was better to be angry, and to lose myself in uselessness. Now I am not angry and I have no choice but to think usefully. I have lived a useful life and have built it all on useful thinking, and if I had not thought so much and so carefully Grace would be here with me now, with her voice like a large soft breeze in some springtime place, and perhaps tickling the side of my neck with feather-touches of her moving lips … it was my useful, questing, thirsty thought which killed her, killed her.

  The accident was all of two years ago—almost two years anyway. We had driven all the way back from Springfield without stopping, and we were very tired. Grace and Mr. Share and I were squeezed into the front seat.

  Mr. Share was a man Grace had invented long before, even before we were married. He was a big invisible fat man who always sat by the right-hand window, and always looked out to the side so that he never watched us.

  But since he was so fat, Grace had to press up close to me as we drove.

  There was a stake-bodied truck bowling along ahead of us, and in the back of it was a spry old man, or perhaps a weatherbeaten young man—you couldn’t tell—in blue dungarees and a red shirt. He had a yellow woolen muffler tied around his waist, and the simple strip of material made all the difference between “clothes” and “costume.”

  Behind him, lashed to the bed of the truck just back of the cab, was a large bundle of burlap. It would have made an adequate seat for him, cushioned and out of the wind. But the man seemed to take the wind as a heady beverage and the leaping floor as a challenge.

  He stood with his arms away from his sides and his knees slightly flexed, and rode the truck as if it were a live thing. He yielded himself to each lurch and bump, brought himself back with each recession, guarding his equilibrium with an easy virtuosity.

  Grace was, I think, dozing; my shout of delighted laughter at the performance on the bounding stage before us brought her upright. She laughed with me for the laugh alone, for she had not looked through the windshield yet, and she kissed my cheek.

  He saw her do it, the man on the truck, and he laughed with us.

  “He’s our kind of people,” Grace said.

  “A pixie,” I agreed, and we laughed again.

  The man took off an imaginary plumed hat, swung it low toward us, but very obviously toward Grace. She nodded back to him, with a slight sidewise turn of her face as it went down that symbolized a curtsey.

  Then he held out his elbow, and the pose, the slightly raised shoulder over which he looked fondly at the air over his bent arm, showed that he had given his arm to a lady. The lady was Grace, who, of course, would be charmed to join him in the dance … she clapped her hands and crowed with delight, as she watched her imaginary self with the courtly, colorful figure ahead.

  The man stepped with dainty dignity to the middle of the truck and bowed again, and you could all but hear the muted minuet as it began. It was a truly wonderful thing to watch, this pantomime; the man knew the ancient stately steps to perfection, and they were unflawed by the careening surface on which they were performed. There was no mockery in the miming, but simply the fullness of good, the sheer, unspoiled sharing of a happy magic.

  He bowed, he took her hand, smiled back into her eyes as she pirouetted behind him. He stood back to the line waiting his turn, nodding slightly to the music; he dipped ever so little, twice, as his turn came, and stepped gracefully out to meet her, smiling again.

  I don’t know what made me look up. We were nearing the Speedway Viaduct, and the truck ahead was just about to pass under it. High up over our heads was the great span, and as my eyes followed its curve, to see the late afternoon sun on the square guard posts which bounded the elevated road, three of the posts exploded outward, and the blunt nose of a heavy truck plowed through and over the edge, to slip and catch and slip again, finally to teeter to a precarious stop.

  Apparently its trailer was loaded with light steel girders; one of them slipped over the tractor’s crumpled shoulder and speared down toward us.

  Our companion of the minuet, on the truck ahead, had finished his dance, and, turned to us, was bowing low, smiling, looking up through his eyebrows at us. The girder’s end took him on the back of the head. It did not take the head off; it obliterated it. The body struck flat and lay still, as still as wet paper stuck to glass. The girder bit a large piece out of the tailgate and somersaulted to the right, while I braked and swerved dangerously away from it. Fortunately there were no cars coming toward us.

  There was, of course, a long, mixed-up, horrified sequence of the two truck drivers, the one ahead and the one who came down later from the viaduct and was sick. Ambulances and bystanders and a lot of talk … none of it matters, really.

  No one ever found out who the dead man was. He had no luggage and no identification; he had over ninety dollars in his pocket. He might have been anybody—someone from show business, or a writer perhaps, on a haywire vacation of his own wild devising. I suppose that doesn’t matter either. What does matter is that he died while Grace was in a very close communion with what he was doing, and her mind was wide open for his fantasy. Mine is, generally, I suppose; but at that particular moment, when I had seen the smash above and the descending girder, I was wide awake, on guard. I think that had a lot to do with what has happened since. I think it has everything to do with Grace’s—with Grace’s—

  There is no word for it. I can say this, though. Grace and I were never alone together again until the day she died. Died, died, Grace is dead.

  Grace!

  I can go on with my accursed useful thinking now, I suppose.

  Grace was, of course, badly shaken, and I did what I could for her over the next few weeks. I tried my best to understand how it was affecting her. (That’s what I mean by useful thinking—trying to understand. Trying and trying—prying and prying. Arranging, probing, finding out. Getting a glimpse, a scent of danger, rooting it out—bringing it out into the open where it can get at you.) Rest and new clothes and alcohol rubdowns; the theater, music and music, always music, for she could lose herself in it, riding its flux, feeling and folding herself in it, following it, sometimes, with her hushed, true voice, sometimes lying open to it, letting it play its colors and touches over her.

  There is always an end to patience, however. After two months, knowing her as I did, I knew that there was more here than simple shock. If I had known her less well—if I had cared less, even, it couldn’t have mattered.

  It began with small things. There were abstractions which were unusual in so vibrant a person. In a quiet room, her face would listen to music; sometimes I had to speak twice and then repeat what I had said.

  Once I came home and found supper not started, the bed not made. Those things were not important—I am not a fusspot nor an autocrat; but I was shaken when, after calling her repeatedly I found her in the guest room, sitting on the bed without lights. I had no idea she was in there; I just walked in and snapped on the light in the beginnings of panic because she seemed not to be in the house; she had not answered me.

  And at first it was as if she had not noticed the sudden yellow blaze from the paired lamps; she was gazing at the wall, and on her face was an expression of perfect peace. She was wide awake—at least her eyes were. I called her: “Grace!”

  “Hello, darling,” she said quietly. Her head turned casually toward me and she smiled—oh, those perfect teeth of hers!—and her smile was only partly for me; the rest of it was inside, with the nameless things with which she had been communing.

  I sat beside her, amazed, and took her hands. I suppose I spluttered a bit, “Grace, are you all right? Why didn’t you answer? The bed’s not—have you been out? What’s happened? Here—let me see if you have a fever.”

  Her eyes were awake, yes; but riot awake to me, to here and now. They were awake and open to some elsewhere matters… . She acquiesced as I felt her forehead and cheeks for fever, and while I was doing it I could see the attention of those warm, pleased, living eyes shifting from the
things they had been seeing, to me. It was as if they were watching a scene fade out while another was brought in on a screen, so that for a second all focusing points on the first picture were lost, and there was a search for a focusing point on the second.

  And then, apparently, the picture of Helmuth Stoye sitting next to her, holding one of her hands, running his right palm across her forehead and down her cheek, came into sharp, true value, and she said, “Darling! You’re home! What happened? Holiday or strike? You’re not sick?”

  I said, “Sweetheart, it’s after seven.”

  “No!” She rose, smoothed her hair in front of the mirror. Hers was a large face and her appeal had none of the doll qualities, the candy-and-peaches qualities of the four-color ads. Her brow and cheekbones were wide and strong, and the hinges of her jaw were well-marked, hollowed underneath. Her nostrils were flared and sensuously tilted and her shoulders too wide to be suitable for fashion plates or pinups. But clothes hung from those shoulders with the graceful majesty of royal capes, and her breasts were large, high, separated and firm.

  Yet for all her width and flatness and strength, for all her powerfully-set features, she was woman all through; and with clothes or without, she looked it.

  She said, “I had no idea … after seven! Oh, darling, I’m sorry. You poor thing, and no dinner yet. Come help me,” and she dashed out of the room, leaving me flapping my lips, calling, “But Grace! Wait! Tell me first what’s the mat—”

  And when I got to the kitchen she was whipping up a dinner, efficiently, deftly, and all my questions could wait, could be interrupted with “Helmuth, honey, open these, will you?” “I don’t know, b’loved; we’ll dig it out after supper. Will you see if there’re any French fries in the freezer?”

  And afterward she remembered that “The Pearl” was playing at the Ascot Theater, and we’d missed it when it first came to town, and this was the best night … we went, and the picture was fine, and we talked of nothing else that night.

  I could have forgotten about that episode, I suppose. I could have forgotten about any one of them—the time she turned her gaze so strangely inward when she was whipping cream, and turned it to butter because she simply forgot to stop whipping it when it was ready; the times she had the strong, uncharacteristic urges to do and feel things which had never interested her before—to lose herself in distances from high buildings and tall hills, to swim underwater for long, frightening minutes; to hear new and ever new kinds of music—saccharine fox-trots and atonal string quartets, arrangements for percussion alone and Oriental modes.

  And foods—rattlesnake ribs, moo goo gai pan, curried salmon with green rice, Paella, with its chicken and clams, headcheese, canolas, sweet-and-pungent pork; all these Grace made herself, and well.

  But in food as in music, in new sensualities as in new activities, there was no basic change in Grace. These were additions only; for all the exoticism of the dishes, for example, we still had and enjoyed the things she had always made—the gingered leg of lamb, the acorn squash filled with creamed onions, the crepes suzettes.

  She could still be lost in the architecture of Bach’s “Passacaglia and Fugue” and in the raw heartbeat of the Haggard-Bauduc “Big Noise from Winnetka.” Because she had this new passion for underwater swimming, she did not let it take from her enjoyment of high-board diving. Her occasional lapses from efficiency, as in the whipped cream episode, were rare and temporary. Her sometime dreaminess, when she would forget appointments and arrangements and time itself, happened so seldom, that in all justice, they could have been forgotten, or put down, with all my vaunted understanding, to some obscure desire for privacy, for alone-ness.

  So—she had everything she had always had, and now more. She was everything she always had been, and now more. She did everything she had always done, and now more. Then what, what on earth and in heaven, was I bothered, worried, and—and afraid of?

  I know now. It was jealousy. It was—one of the jealousies.

  There wasn’t Another Man. That kind of poison springs from insecurity—from the knowledge that there’s enough wrong with you that the chances are high that another man—any other man—could do a better job than you in some department of your woman’s needs. Besides, that kind of thing can never be done by the Other Man alone; your woman must cooperate, willfully and consciously, or it can’t happen. And Grace was incapable of that.

  No; it was because of the sharing we had had. My marriage was a magic one because of what we shared; because of our ability to see a red gold leaf, exchange a glance and say never a word, for we knew so well each other’s pleasure, its causes and expressions and associations. The pleasures were not the magic; the sharing was.

  A poor analogy: you have a roommate who is a very dear friend, and together you have completely redecorated your room. The colors, the lighting, the concealed shelves and drapes, all are a glad communion of your separated tastes. You are both proud and fond of your beautiful room … and one day you come home and find a new television set. Your roommate has acquired it and brought it in to surprise you. You are surprised, and you are happy, too.

  But slowly an ugly thing creeps into your mind. The set is a big thing, an important, dominating thing in the room and in the things for which you use the room. And it is his—not mine or ours, but his. There is his unspoken, under-manded authority in the choice of programs in the evenings; and where are the chess games, the folk singing with your guitar, the long hours of phonograph music?

  They are there, of course, ready for you every moment; no one has taken them away. But now the room is different. It can continue to be a happy room; only a petty mind would resent the new shared riches; but the fact that the source of the riches is not shared, was not planned by you both. This changes the room and everything in it, the colors, the people, the shape and warmth.

  So with my marriage. A thing had come to Grace which made us both richer but I did not share that source; and damn, damn my selfishness, I could not bear it; if I could not share it I wanted her deprived of it. I was gentle; beginning with, “How do you feel, sweetheart? But you aren’t all right; what were you thinking of? It couldn’t be ‘nothing’ … you were giving more attention to it than you are to me right now!”

  I was firm; beginning with, “Now look, darling; there’s something here that we have to face. Please help. Now, exactly why are you so interested in hearing that Hindemith sketch? You never used to be interested in music like that.

  It has no melody, no key, no rhythm; it’s unpredictable and ugly. I’m quoting you, darling; that’s what you used to say about it. And now you want to soak yourself in it. Why? Why? What has changed you? Yes—people must grow and change; I know that. But—growing so fast, so quickly, in so many different directions! Tell me, now. Tell me exactly why you feel moved to hear this thing at this time.”

  And—I was angry, beginning with, “Grace! Why didn’t you answer me? Oh, you heard me, did you? What did I say? Yes; that’s right; you did … then why didn’t you answer? Well? Not important? You’ll have to realize that it’s important to me to be answered when I speak to you!”

  She tried. I could see her trying. I wouldn’t stop. I began to watch her every minute. I stopped waiting for openings, and made them myself. I trapped her. I put on music in which I knew she would be lost, and spoke softly, and when she did not answer, I would kick over my chair with a shout and demand that she speak up. She tried…. Sometimes she was indignant, and demanded the peace that should be her right. Once I struck her.

  That did it. Oh, the poor, brutalized beloved!

  Now I can see it; now!

  She never could answer me, until the one time. What could she have said? Her “I don’t know!” was the truth. Her patience went too far, her anger not far enough, and I know that her hurt was without limits.

  I struck her, and she answered my questions. I was even angrier after she had than I had been before, for I felt that she had known all along, that until now she h
ad withheld what she knew; and I cursed myself for not using force earlier and more often. I did. For not hitting Grace before!

  I came home that night tired, for there was trouble at the shop; I suppose I was irascible with the compositors, but that was only because I had not slept well the night before, which was because—anyway, when I got home, I slammed the door, which was not usual, and, standing there with my raincoat draped over one shoulder, looking at the beautiful spread on the coffee table in front of the fireplace, I demanded, “What’s that for?”

  There were canapés and dainty round and rolled and triangular sandwiches; a frosty bluish beverage twinkling with effervescence in its slender pitcher; there were stars and flowers of tiny pickles, pastes and dressings, a lovely coral potato chip, and covered dishes full of delicate mysteries.

  There were also two small and vivid bowls of cut blooms, beautifully arranged.

  “Why, for us. Just for us two,” she said.

  I said, “Good God. Is there anything the matter with sitting up to a table and eating like a human being?” Then I went to hang up the coat.

  She had not moved when I came back; she was still standing facing the door, and perhaps a quarter of her welcoming smile was frozen on her face.

  No, I said to myself, no you don’t. Don’t go soft, now. You have her on the run; let’s break this thing up now, all at once, all over the place. The healing can come later. I said, “Well?”

  She turned to me, her eyes full of tears. “Helmuth …” she said weakly. I waited. “Why did you … it was only a surprise. A pretty surprise for you. We haven’t been together for so long … you’ve been …”

  “You haven’t been yourself since that accident,” I said coldly. “I think you like being different. Turn off the tears, honey. They’ll do you no good.”

  “I’m not different!” she wailed; and then she began to cry in earnest. “I can’t stand it!” she moaned, “I can’t, I can’t … Helmuth, you’re losing your mind. I’m going to leave you. Leave you … maybe for just a while, maybe for ..”