Contrary Pleasure

by John D. MacDonald

  You are dead in the dust there because there are new heroes.

  Your bags have been packed for you and they took back your pin and the tables are stacked and the Chinese lanterns folded away and now they are tearing down the bunting while tired musicians pack away the tarnished brass horns.

  So there is nothing much to do anymore. It is a good thing to lie alone in the dark room with music not quite audible. Then in the darkness you can savor the stink she left on you. Inhale it deeply. Finger the marks she left on you. Remember her teeth and her softness. Roll in the sourness of her, as a dog returns to filth.

  Downstairs are the strangers. And they listen to the distant anguish of television. Here you are, on the hill of the Delevans in the middle house, your face clan-marked, and yet you are no longer one of them.

  The records stop and this time you do not stir. You touch the plaster beside you. It is rough and cool. There is time to go over it all again. And then maybe it will be time to sleep.

  You walked right up to the door of the lab that April day and then, for no reason, you turned around and left. And if you go over it enough times, there will be a time when you walk up to the door of the lab and pause … and shrug … and walk in.

  Chapter Three

  Fremont is a very old street in the city of Stockton. It had been very narrow at one time, a street of big Victorian houses, sitting tall and narrow and secluded, like spinsters thinking quietly of what might have been. There had been iron fences, and the quiet metal deer under the elm shade, bird-spattered and noble. There had been money on that street. Money from the lumber mills, which chewed and chased the good hard woods all the way from the valleys back up into the faraway hills—so that each year the money was less. But it had been invested in heavy parchment, embossed and engraved, with red seals and gold seals and bits of silk ribbon, testifying to a share in the interest of the old Commodore Vanderbilt, of the shifty, mercurial Jay Gould. Money in railroads, in textiles, in steamships.

  But the wars came and they were fought, and the giants died, and for those on the street a good world crumbled quickly away, leaving the great houses which had been built with the conviction that they should last through eternity. Behind all the silly scrollwork, the fan windows, the pretentious turrets, the stone and the beams were sound and true and good.

  The street was widened, and widened again. It was a good route to the heart of the city, The street widened like a stone river until the sidewalks touched the steps of the old houses. The metal deer and the iron fences were gone.

  Now there are not many of the old houses left. There are supermarkets there, and a great metal river of traffic flows endlessly by. There are many gas stations, and there are green-and-yellow city buses that chuff at the corners and grind away. It is a street of people who are strangers to each other, because no one stays long anymore. The few old houses that are left have been cut up into apartments and into furnished rooms. There is no dignity left in the old houses. The new partitioning is flimsy. The lawns are gone and the trees are gone, and the houses are naked to the traffic. In the houses shrill voices saw at the nerves of children, television screens flicker as the trucks roll by, men leave in surly humor for the swing shift.

  Quinn Delevan, as he ate dinner with Bess, was constantly aware that on this Wednesday night he would go down to Fremont Street again, down to the girl who waited for him. They ate together in the breakfast booth off the kitchen, and he had asked his usual meaningless question about David, and she had answered as always, “He took his dinner out to his studio.”

  They ate and she talked a great deal, talked about Robbie and his new bride, and she ate as she talked and he wished for a dining room table of baronial proportions, so that she could sit at one end of it and he could sit at the other, and then she would be muted by the distance, reduced to life-size. In the booth there was no escaping her. When he was quite small, his mother had read him the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. It had made a horrid impression on him and caused many nightmares. The giant would grab him and hold him in a big damp fist and, grinning, lift him slowly toward the big wet red cave of his mouth and he would wake up screaming. Now it often seemed to him that he had indeed married a giant. She talked at him. She directed herself at him, talking of trivialities with such a dreadful energy that the very burst and flow and torrent of her in that constricted space, under the bright light, seemed to shrink him, dwindle him, dry him to a dusty husk. She was a movie where you had to sit too far forward. The whites of her eyes were blued with the health of her, and her white teeth chewed, and the red membranes of her mouth were busy, and he would get a dazed dizziness by looking at her, so that her head would seem to be the size of a bushel basket, all glistening and bobbing and chomping and making loud sounds at him that he could not quite understand. The torrents of her washed and buffeted him.

  Sometimes he would realize, almost with a feeling of shock, that she was, after all, a woman of just slightly more than average size. She was five feet eight inches tall to his six feet. She weighed one hundred and forty as against his one seventy. Those moments of realization would occur when he happened to stand beside her, as when they stood at church, or when he saw her clothing on a bed or a chair. A shoe, a bra. In such moments he guessed that it was her sheer health and energy that made her seem so vast at other times. Early in their marriage he had played the part of the aggressor, and Bess had accepted a frequency based, after the first month of marriage, on his lesser energies. But by the third year of their marriage the roles had become reversed, and even though he felt that a certain amount of masculine pride and honor was thus sacrificed, he was glad to be rid of the burden of decision. As her needs were stronger than his, and due to her persistence, once she was the aggressor, his energies were reduced after a time to the point of impotence. This, added to the reversal of roles, troubled him to the extent of seeing a doctor, though he waited a long time before taking that step. If his relations were shameful, they were at least private. Only he and Bess knew the true state of things. He waited until he went on a business trip and then he picked the name of a doctor out of the phone book and made an appointment, giving a false name.

  He realized later that he had been fortunate in the choice of doctors. The man was sallow and quiet and wise. When Quinn Delevan faltered, the doctor drew him out with carefully casual questions so that Quinn betrayed far more of himself than he intended.

  At last he was finished and he sat back, sweating. The doctor turned so that he looked out a large window across the city. “Would you say, sir, that you have been torturing yourself with suspicions of a … repressed sexual deviation?”

  “I guess I have, Doctor.”

  “That is nonsense of course. You feel lacking in masculinity because of your wife’s strong sexual energies. You hear your friends talk in locker rooms, in smoking cars. Tales of great prowess. You begin to think you are unique. You suspect that your marriage relationship is … unhealthy. Uncommon. Nonsense! You would be surprised. In many marriages the male is the aggressor. In many others both partners assume that role almost alternately. And in a great many the female is consistently the aggressor, the more active partner. That is the way it should be. But out of pride and out of lack of knowledge, you have forced your own response to her until she has literally exhausted you.” The doctor smiled. “It is the privilege of the passive partner to say no, as many wives have learned. You are too tired. You are not in the mood. This is most easy. Above all, do not think about it too much. You have been doing that. Because your own marriage relationship is divergent from the popular ideas of married love, it does not mean that it is either unhealthy or abnormal. I will stop being professional for one moment and express a certain personal envy. You are a fortunate man, sir. When you go home, I want you to sit quietly with her and tell her that you came to me and tell her what I said. It will make it better for both of you, because she may be as uninformed as you were.” The doctor walked him to the office door and smiled
broadly and said, “Above all, do not be impressed by those men who wink and brag. They are the very ones least likely to possess the sexual prowess they talk about.”

  When he got home, he could not make himself tell Bess about the visit. But it had helped him a great deal. Because of the advice given him, they were able to find a new rhythm of adjustment. But always there would come the dark nights when she would be at him, a relentless rubbery vastness about her, a giant eagerness that wrenched at him with a smothering strength until she sighed off into a placid mound of sleeping warmth, leaving him aged and bitter and dry, lean and devoured in the night.

  But now it was all changing. Now there was escape, delicately and carefully contrived, and the awareness of it made the booth seem less cramped, made the avidity of her casual conversation easier to bear. He looked at his watch and frowned.

  “Oh, darn it, dear! Do you have to go out tonight?”

  “It’s Wednesday,” he said, faintly accusing.

  “That meeting again. I forgot about it. I wish you could give that one up, dear. You never seem to be home anymore. What darn good does it do for you to keep going to that meeting?”

  “Political fences. Part of the job. We have to stay on the right side of the city and county fathers, Bess. One little hike in assessment could hurt a lot.”

  “Well, Ben seems to be able to spend his evenings with his family.”

  “He puts in more hours at the office than I do.”

  “Sometimes I think he takes advantage of you, Quinn. I really do. You’re so decent about it.”

  He slid out of the booth, picking up his plate, cup, and saucer and carrying them over to the drainboard of the sink, feeling within him the curious division of emotion that her words gave him. A guilt-shame balanced pleasurably on the slick edge of intrigue. Wanting her to say more to bring on the self-punishment, and at the same time dreading it.

  “I shouldn’t be too late, honey,” he said.

  “I think I’ll start on the new curtains for David’s studio. That monk’s cloth is drab, sort of. And yellow will be cheerful. I forgot to tell you, dear, when I used your car yesterday and put the gas in it, the man in the station said all that clicking is valve springs or something like that. Maybe you ought to take it into town tomorrow and leave it at the garage. Don’t you think he’ll like yellow?”

  “What?”

  “You weren’t listening again. The curtains for David’s studio. They say yellow is a cheerful color.”

  “That sounds fine.”

  He went to the bedroom and retied his tie, took the new shaggy sports jacket from his closet, and slipped it on. There was a coiling and shifting of excitement in his middle, cyclical-like hunger pangs, and when the spasms were most taut, they shallowed his breathing. He looked at himself in the mirror and was gratified to see that nothing of what he felt showed in his face. He looked mildly back at himself, lean and brown and bored and casual. When he went back to the kitchen, she was rinsing the dishes and placing them in the dishwasher. He put his hand on her shoulder and she turned around and he kissed the corner of her mouth. She gave his tie a quick adjustment and tilted her head a little and looked at him and said, “You look very nice, dear. Don’t be too late, please. And see if you can stay out of those card games after the meeting like last time.”

  “Sure. But don’t wait up if you’re tired, honey.”

  After he was out of the house, he stopped in the driveway and lighted a cigarette and looked for a moment at the stars. The studio windows were lighted. It was beyond the garage, about forty feet from the back door of the house. He thought of David in there, and he hunched his shoulders a bit and walked quickly to his car and got in and turned around and drove out the length of the driveway, pausing by the rural mailbox, then turning toward the village, the heavy convertible dropping swiftly down the twelve-degree grade, falling smoothly down through the night by the lighted windows of the old houses on the hill. He turned toward Stockton and felt good that it had been so easy this time, and felt slightly querulous because it had been so very easy, felt a contempt for Bess for making it that easy. They did not know—not one of them knew—how great had been the change in him in the past few months.

  Yet perhaps Alice, his twin, suspicioned an emotional change. Their emotional involvement was intricate, beginning in the shared womb, evolving through the slow days of childhood, so that without conscious thought, with no exercise of logic, with nothing observable, she could yet sense change, the information transmitted along channels unknown to the untwinned and only suspected by the twinned. It had always been that way. A wordless knowing. And lately he had gone out of his way to avoid being alone with her. This was a physical reaction she could observe and he knew she had. But awareness of change had antedated his caution. She would never ask. He knew that she would never ask because they had always known what the other one was willing to talk about.

  Yet he was afraid he would tell her. Not because she was his twin. Because, rather, of the wish to have someone know about it. Someone who would do nothing. Perhaps the way a man will brag of a successful crime to someone who is a known criminal. Not that Alice had ever erred in this way. But being twin, she shared guilt.

  “Alice, I am having an affair with one of the girls in the mill.”

  Not even one of the office girls. A mill girl. He would say that and Alice would not see Bonny. She would see some crow-voiced wench or rolling haunch and brows plucked to thin lines and too much makeup. Or maybe she would see Bonny without being told, and know how Bess and David were a part of it, making it happen.

  Making it happen in such a strange way. There had always been, for him, a quickening male excitement in going out there where the looms roared and clattered, where the factory girls called shrilly to each other over the continual din, moving with practised sturdy swiftness, deft and sweaty, with knowing eyes filled with promiscuous insolence, daring him to take closer notice of buttocks and breast. It always made him think of a peasant village where the magpie girls worked the clothes white on riverbank rocks. They managed to bring to these dingy clattering floors a flavor of gossip and intrigue and speculation and body awareness.

  One day in March he had left his office where sleet was crinkling against his windows, and he had gone restlessly to wander through the narrow aisles where the girls worked. It was late in the afternoon, and nearly dark outside. He saw a girl he had not noticed before. She was waiting for the checker and a new setup. There was a slimness about her. A daintiness and the wilted look of physical tiredness. He walked slowly. She did not see him. She stretched then as he came near her, and she yawned, fists next to her ears, feet planted wide, arching her back so that as he watched her the shirt she wore pulled free from her slacks and he saw in the shop lights the smooth miracle of her young waist, the downy spinal crease at the small of her back, and there was about her, poised there, the breathtaking perfection of ancient statues, of sun-warmed marble. She stretched the long, young muscles and, poised there, turned her head, and he had stopped, looking at her, so that she looked directly into his eyes six feet away. Her eyes were dulled with tiredness, and her mouth was yawn-stretched. Then her eyes changed and she stood utterly still, as he did. It seemed like a very long time. She turned hastily away, tucking her shirt into her slacks, her cheeks darkening, looking down then. He moved on along the aisle, seeing nothing else, feeling as though he had been blinded by her. Her face was very young. The weariness told him that she was new, that her body had not yet conditioned itself to the demands of the working day.

  Back in his office he kept thinking about her. There was an excitement in it, and he told himself that there was no harm in learning more about her. It became a game, because he could not ask any direct questions. The next day at closing time he stood by the bulletin board near the time clock for her production floor. He pretended to be reading the notices on the board. The noise of the equipment began to diminish at five. It faded rapidly. Within a minute there was n
othing left but an almost stunning silence, a single whirring that died away. Then, as though to replace the production sounds, the babble of the girls increased in volume. There was a tinny banging of locker doors, and shrill laughter, and heels clamped hard against the floor, and snapping of compacts and purses. They filed behind him, snatching cards, inserting them in the clock, the soft bell of the clock ringing constantly.

  They talked as they walked behind him, and he sensed that some of them, glancing at him, talked more quietly, and some of them raised their voices to a higher pitch. “… I don’t see what the hell he’s got to kick about if I ask you to come along.… You never tasted such glop and she calls it Chinese cooking for the love of … and told me I ought to stay off my feet … so he says to her look I can get a job anytime I feel like it and she says then why … then they marked them down again and I figured it was the last markdown so I … don’t be so damned late like last time, you hear.…”

  And out of the corner of his eye he saw her coming along alone, and he was very aware of her as she passed behind him and he turned his head just enough the other way so that he saw her hand take her time card. Second row, third slot down. He turned further and watched her put the card in the out rack, the same slot, and go through the doorway.

  They were all gone and he heard the last of the fading voices. He took the card out of the slot. His fingers trembled and he turned it toward the light. Bonita Doyle. She was probably called Bonny. Bonny Doyle. He liked it. It seemed to suit her.

  The next morning he invented a weak reason for looking at the files in the personnel office. Unobserved, he took out her big yellow card and studied it. The picture of her in the upper left-hand corner was poor. She was twenty years old, and five feet six—she had looked taller—and one hundred and ten pounds, and her physical condition was perfect, and she got a high mark in manual dexterity, and her intelligence was good enough so that she was marked for on-job training beyond the requirements of the job she was hired for, and she had two years of high school, and before this job she had been a waitress for Blue Ribbon Restaurants, Inc. for ten months, and she had been born at Frenchman’s Lake, a small town he vaguely remembered as being up in the hills, up in the resort section of the Adirondacks, and in case of accident please notify LaRue Doyle, 14 Orange Avenue, Bakersfield, California. Relationship—Bro. He turned the card over and saw that her local address was 60 Lefferts Avenue. And she had been with them ten days.