Contrary Pleasure

by John D. MacDonald

  And Ellen was aware, even as she laughed, that had Clyde and Bobby been younger, were they still in high school, it was entirely possible that they would dress in a way that, though not as extreme, would show the influence of this latest fad, this rebirth of the prehistoric zoot suit, this sartorial derivative of what they now all seemed to call healthy music. But Clyde and Bobby were lost and gone into the Cornell costume, moccasins and white socks and flannels and padless shoulders, a uniform that seemed derived in equal parts from Dartmouth and Princeton. She recognized one of the boys and knew she had seen the other one around. The one she knew was Jack Sheddler, and she remembered that his father worked at the mill, had some sort of job in the office.

  There was a derisive unpleasant note in Clyde’s braying laughter, and Ellen put her hand on his arm to silence him. The young boys looked very uncomfortable, and Ellen was no longer amused.

  “Please,” Ellen said to Clyde.

  He pulled his arm away and leaned across the table and said to Bobby, “A rolling stone gathers no moss.”

  “A penny saved is a penny earned,” Bobby said.

  “A stitch in time saves nine,” Norma added. The two boys got up from the booth, Clyde carrying a half glass of coke.

  “What were you saying?” Ellen asked Norma.

  “Oh, it’s a kind of a code. Coining phrases. Just watch. This will kill you.”

  As they walked behind the two boys on the stools, Bobby pretended to trip Clyde. Clyde stumbled awkwardly and the half glass of coke jetted onto the back of the brightest of the two jackets, the salmon-colored one the Sheddler boy wore.

  Clyde turned around and roared at Bobby, “What the hell you tripping me for?”

  “I didn’t trip you. You fell over your own big feet.”

  Clyde turned to the two boys. They had turned around. The Sheddler boy looked as if he were close to tears. Clyde said, “All right, you wise guys. Which one of you tripped me?”

  Ellen got quickly out of the booth and walked to the door and went out. She turned instinctively toward the jeep and then turned away from it and began walking down the shoulder of the highway, remembering after she had gone fifty yards that her racket and case were still in the jeep, but not wanting to go back after it. She kept thinking of the way the Sheddler boy had looked. It was funny the way they had come in and looked around, but maybe they had had that sneery look because they were maybe shy about the new clothes. Like the time her mother had taken those stitches in the front of her formal and she had gone into the girl’s room and cut the stitches and pulled the thread out and then gone back out onto the floor, walking more boldly because she felt shy. This day had certainly dropped dead. This day was a mess. The Sheddler boy would have recognized her. Big deal. That Delevan girl with her college friends. Big older guys who threw coke on your new threads just for kicks. She felt ashamed. And she felt as if, all of a sudden, she didn’t like Clyde anymore. Or Norma or Bobby. Or anybody she could think of.

  She heard the feet, the sound of running coming behind her, and she walked on, not looking around, neither quickening nor slowing her pace. Clyde took her arm roughly and pulled her around. His face looked heavier and thicker, the way it always did when he got angry.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “As soon as you let go of my arm, I’m going home.”

  “What’s the matter with you anyway?”

  “You know what the matter is.”

  “That gag? You’ve got no sense of humor. You should have heard Norma laugh.”

  “Norma likes a lot of things I don’t like.”

  “What do those punk kids mean to you? Are they your high-school boyfriends or something?”

  “I just don’t think it was funny.”

  He began to look uncertain. “Okay, so maybe it wasn’t exactly a riot. So what?”

  “So it was cruel.”

  “Cruel! My God, I was doing the human race a favor. Those punks, they’re … unnatural.” The jeep swung off the road onto the shoulder close to them, Bobby at the wheel.

  “How you doing?” he asked.

  “She didn’t like the gag,” Clyde said.

  “Get in, honey,” Norma said.

  “I’m going home,” Ellen said.

  Clyde sighed heavily. He said, “I give up, Ellen. You win. It wasn’t a good thing to do and I’m sorry about it.”

  She looked at him searchingly. “Do you mean that?”

  “Of course I mean it. I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it. I shouldn’t have done it. We shouldn’t have done it. Right, Bobby?”

  “Right!”

  “Well … okay,” Ellen said dubiously. Bobby and Norma stood up and got over into the back. Clyde got behind the wheel. Ellen went around and got in beside him. Clyde found a hole in traffic and wrenched the jeep out onto the highway again.

  “We’ve got to make a grocery stop, old pal, old buddy,” Bobby said.

  “Are you going to stay up there?” Ellen asked.

  “She talked me into it,” Bobby said. “She plain old ordinary talked me into it. I’ve got no sales resistance at all.”

  After they picked up the bag of food, Ellen found that she was in a better mood again. They sang on the way up to the camp. Dusk was on the way. The hills were blue. Clyde had a good, steady baritone.

  When Brock was on his way back to the cottage to pick up Betty, he found himself hoping that Mrs. Yost would not be there, and that Betty would be the Betty of tennis court and pool. He had rechecked with Bess on the use of the car, told his mother he would be out for the evening, changed to good slacks and jacket. The sun had burned him just enough so that he was conscious of the scratch of his clothes against his body. There was a good soreness in his muscles, and the skin of his face felt tight.

  The sun was nearly gone when he walked across the grass to the cottage. He could see a foursome holing out on the eighteenth, standing in the long-shadowed, grassodored quiet, standing in an almost devotional patience for the cramped and measured click, the long, white run of the ball toward the hole while putter swayed in anguished guidance and far out on the rolling fairway the next group waited and swung the impatient flashing clubs at the inevitable dandelions. On the club terrace the clinked and chittered cocktail throng made insect sounds while waiters moved among them. And a woman’s laugh was like something silvery and wild that flashed quickly through the long tree shadows.

  She was sitting where her mother had been and she got up as he came toward her. She wore a white, fleecy skirt and a black sweater and green beads. In tennis clothes and in her swim suit there had been a suggestion of ranginess about her body, an illusively rawboned look. But dressed she looked softer, more feminine. She looked older and more poised. She looked very special.

  “Mother left a few minutes ago,” she said, as though she had been able to read his mind.

  He felt awkward with her. “Got any suggestions?”

  “This is your town.”

  “Well, it used to be. I’ve been away.”

  “Do you want a coke or a beer or something while we decide?”

  “A beer would go fine,” he said too heartily. “Can I help?”

  “No thanks. You sit down. I’ll bring them right out.” Another chair had been brought out. He sat and waited, heard the chunk of the refrigerator door. She came out with a tall glass in each hand and he stood up and took one and lighted her cigarette and his own and they sat down and sipped, and smiled at each other.

  “I like this time of day,” he said.

  “I don’t know. Mornings I guess I like best.”

  “I’m a grouch in the morning. I don’t seem to get up on my hind legs and operate until noon.”

  “I guess most people are that way.”

  There was a silence. He said, “Like Italian food?”

  “Love it.”

  “There’s a pretty good place down in Stockton. Then we could go to the drive-in movie on the way back.”

  �
�That sounds fine.”

  And that’s the way the evening was. Too many silences. When they talked, they didn’t say anything. He could think of no way in which he could make them say anything, nor did he know what it was he wanted to say. He felt inadequate with her. Too young for her. And he had the feeling that had he not met her mother, had there not been that incomprehensible scene, had they been able to go directly on from the poolside mood, it would have been fine. As it was, he felt as though both of them were discharging some unavoidable obligation in going out together, and were thus pledged to this quiet formality, this frigid sociability.

  They ate and the food was good, candles in Chianti bottles, pepper seeds, meat sauce, spaghetti al dente, tart red wine, and hot sauce. They drove through the summery night and parked in the amphitheater of the shining cars, hooking the brassy speaker on the lowered window, sitting apart and watching the vast screen, digging into the buttery cooling popcorn in the box between them, careful to take alternate turns so that their hands did not meet. The big figures in impossible colors shifted and spoke and fought, and when it was ended, he turned on the parking lights and nosed out with the others in the obedient line which the traffic light released in thirty-car segments.

  He drove her back and the cottage was dark and he did not know if her mother was still out or had returned and was in there asleep, her face in lined, simian repose, and did not wish to ask. He got out with her in the darkness and, with something near despair, reached and found her shoulders and pulled her toward him, kissing cool, unmoving lips and feeling the tension in her body, the restraint, almost to the point of her running away.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It’s all right. It’s all right, Brock.”

  “It didn’t seem to be,” he said.

  “I know … but I didn’t mind.”

  “Now you can tell me you had a good time.”

  “You’re mad at me now, aren’t you?” she said, and he could not see her face in the darkness. “I had a good time, Brock. I did. In a way I can’t tell you. Don’t be mad.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry. I seem to keep saying that.”

  “Don’t say it anymore. I’m sorry. For a lot of things.” And she thrust herself quite quickly at his lips in a briefest of kisses, a sister-kiss, but with lips warm this time, and turning, she was gone, hand a whiteness waved, and nothing of her, just the white skirt and the white hands and faint suggestion of hair, disembodied. Until the cottage was lighted inside and he drove away, looking back to see her move across the lighted window, walking slowly.

  He drove slowly back. Thoughtful. Curious. The evening had left an odd taste. It was the sort of evening that should keep you from ever wanting to come back for more. So you tell yourself, defiantly, a dim type. A damp lassie. A wilted wench. But knowing more than that. Seeing something behind it. So that it was all a barrier to be broken. So the thing could be seen clearly. And once seen, the very seeing would make a princess-change. The kiss in the brambly courtyard, and all the frozen things coming to life. And, driving there with a fifty-ish sedateness, he returned to knowledge of himself, and remembered that this was, indeed, no gleaming knight to awaken the virgin princess. Not with these lips besmirched. There were, of course, the prior adolescent investigations, those back seat, beach picnic, church cellar, hallway episodes, the darkened fluttering strainings—small spots on the armor, readily removed with E-Z-Way and steel wool. But this final corrosion was beyond the resources of any body and fender works. So you can’t bitch, boy, if you get a dim evening from someone like her.

  But for the first time he had forgotten for a little while. And that felt good.

  And he wanted to go out with her again. Would go over to the club in the morning. Act like the last few minutes of the evening had not happened.

  He put Bess’s car in their garage. It was quarter to twelve. Their house was dark. He walked across the lawn to his house. The kitchen lights were on. He went in. There was no one in the kitchen. The rest of the house was dark. He guessed they had been left on for him. He started to turn them off.

  His father’s voice startled him. It came from the dark living room. “What did you say?”

  “Leave the lights on, please.” There was a funny note in his father’s voice.

  He went to the doorway, peering into the darkness. “Is something wrong? Where’s Mom?”

  “Sit down.”

  He felt his voice go thin and childish and the fear come up in his throat. “Has something … happened to Mom?”

  “No. It’s your sister. Don’t interrupt. She isn’t hurt or anything. I was late getting home. Your mother told me that Ellen was staying overnight with a friend of hers named Norma Franchard. You know her?”

  “Yes. I saw her today. With Bobby Rawls, and Clyde and Ellen at the club.”

  “As your mother was cleaning up after dinner, she got a phone call from Mrs. Franchard. She was calling to tell Norma something. Norma had asked permission to stay overnight here with Ellen.”

  “But—–”

  “We were frantic. I talked to Mr. Franchard. He said he would phone the Rawls’ house and call me back. He did. Their son had phoned and said Clyde was taking him up in the jeep to their camp to stay overnight and get the camp open for the summer. Put the dock in the water and so on. No phone up there. Franchard told me that he and Mr. Rawls were leaving immediately to drive up there. We think the four of them are up there.”

  “Where did Mom go?”

  “She drove over to stay with Mrs. Franchard until we get word.”

  They sat in the dark room. His father said sharply, bitterly, “I don’t suppose you have a damn thing to say. I suppose this is just one of those things. A sign of the times or something.”

  Brock thought of how Ellen had looked, of Clyde sprinkling the grass on her, of how she had looked there, lazy-bodied and brown in the sun, physiologically a woman—labeled a child by the society into which he had been born. It made him feel a jealous illness.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said with more firmness than he felt.

  “Explain what you mean.”

  “There’s a foul-up someplace. A misunderstanding.”

  “The kind of a misunderstanding I thought there was when that dean phoned me?”

  “We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about Ellen. And if they did go up there—–”

  “If they went up there to stay all night, then what?”

  But Brock had remembered the Norma-Bobby relationship. They had never made a secret of it with the other kids, not after that time way back when they had been sophomores in high school and Stella something-or-other’s kid brother had caught them doing it in his tree house and they’d given the kid five dollars to keep his mouth shut but the kid had told Stella anyway, and she had told it all over the high school. So Brock didn’t answer.

  His father’s voice was different when he spoke again from the darkness. Heavier. Sadder. “I’m talking about Ellen. And I’m talking about you too. And about Fred Harn’s boy.”

  “Joey hung himself.”

  “That’s what I mean. And the Selinger girl—they’re trying to cure her drug addiction. And the Carroll boy killing those two old people with his father’s car last year and trying to run. Harns, Selingers, Carrolls. They’re good people. Good stock. They try to do what they think is right. Wilma and I have tried to do what we think is right.” He sounded puzzled. “What the hell are people being punished for these days? What have we done?”

  “I … don’t know.”

  “There used to be a place for us. God, you have to work for something. Now it’s like some force was trying to make us extinct. Eating our young. Breaking the bloodlines. Taking away pride. I read something a while back. Some fellow guessing as to what happened to the dinosaurs. He thought something pretty agile that liked to eat eggs developed. And they couldn’t protect their eggs. So the egg eaters multiplied and then there were no more dinosaurs. There’s something
agile in the world that’s eating our eggs. So what does it leave a man? Just work with no end result. No goal. I don’t entirely go for this crap about leading your life for your children alone. A man has his own pleasures. But when things are rugged, children are one of the reasons why you keep plugging along. If that reason is gone, about all a man has left is just plain damn endurance.”

  The room was dark. It seemed a time of privacy. Of thinking out loud. Somehow, in spite of the worry about Ellen, it made for Brock a special moment. It brought his father, for the first time in his life, into perspective. So that he could truly see him. A stocky tired man whom he had shamed. And who was now being shamed again.

  And encouraged by the darkness, warmed by this new vision, Brock said, “You can’t talk to parents.”

  “Just what do you mean by that kind of a remark?”

  “Don’t get hard with me again or I can’t say what I want to say.”

  “Go ahead. I’m interested in your opinions.”

  “I don’t think you are, really. You want me to have your opinions. Not my own. You want me to think the way you think and believe in the things you believe. You can’t make it so by wanting it to be so.”

  “You won’t have to prove that statement, young man.”

  “There you go again. Okay, so maybe the kids are rough these days. I mean really rough. Not this kind of a jam. Or even the kind of a jam Ellen is in, if she is in one. I mean rough. Killing strangers to prove you’re not chicken. I mean grabbing girls and ganging them. I mean busting up stuff all over just because you want to. I read what they say. They talk about broken homes and working mothers and overcrowded schools and low-paid teachers and television crime and comic books. Then why do the real rough ones come from all kinds of homes? I’ve thought about it. I mean, I’ve really thought about it.”

  “And you have the answer, I suppose.”

  Brock was emboldened by darkness. “You’re damn well told I have the answer. It’s because nothing can happen to anybody anymore. Nothing very good and nothing too bad. I’m not saying this right. You’ve got to try to understand. Nobody starves. The government takes care of that. And nobody makes a million. The government takes care of that too. So everybody is squashed right in the middle. Everybody gets to be alike. Take the things you can be. A doctor? So when I get to be one, I find out I’m working for the government. A businessman? Ulcers and taxes. A minister? Nothing in the churches but old ladies with hats and lots of politics. Government? Nuts. Anywhere you turn, you come out at the other end with a pension. So kids want to do crazy things. They get caught and some psychologist says they’re just sick. I mean, Dad, suppose you had a big football game where they let you do anything but make a score. And let the other guy do anything except score on you. How hard is anybody going to play? You take my last year in high. We didn’t even get marks, remember? You were either satisfactory or unsatisfactory. So with no marks, all you do is try to just get by. Look at George. He used to really try to build good houses. Now he’s got some percentage designs and he just builds those. And take you. The harder you work the more money you make. The more you make, the more the government takes. So why not just look around for kicks?”