Contrary Pleasure

by John D. MacDonald

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “I’ll be out in the jeep,” she said, and went out and off the porch and glanced up at the stars, beyond which, in childhood, had sat an old old man with beard and white robe and look of pity and mercy. She heard him yell to Bobby that they were leaving. He came out and thumped into the jeep.

  He drove silently, with a vicious recklessness. They did not speak. He passed wherever he came to a slower moving car, close to hill chests, close to curves. She knew he was waiting for her to object. She had often complained about his driving. She sat with her hands clasped in her lap, squeezing them together at the dangerous places until her knuckles hurt.

  She sensed from his driving, as they neared Clayton, that his mood was changing. As they neared the Jolly Pig Stand he asked gruffly, “Barbecue?”

  “No thank you.”

  He did not speak again until they were nearing her house. His voice was softer. “All I can say, Ellen, is I’m sorry as hell. I guess it was the bourbon. Or the fire or something. I got out of control. I’m really sorry, kid.”

  “I’m afraid that as far as I am concerned, that is an entirely meaningless statement. I couldn’t possibly care less.”

  “Aw, Ellen. Snap out of it, kid. I said I’m sorry.”

  “And that ends it, I suppose. Now I’m supposed to get all flushed and rosy and grateful and let you kiss me. I’ll put it in language you can understand: The hell with that noise, buster.”

  She took her things and got out of the jeep.

  “I’ll give you a ring tomorrow. We got to talk this over.”

  She was walking away. She turned and said, “Don’t bother. Please don’t bother!”

  And that was it. The record of a truly dreadful day. Dreadful all the way around. And she remembered that he was there in the bedroom, in the darkness, grinning at her. She went over and fumbled for his picture and found it, and folded up the stand and lowered it soundlessly into the plastic wastebasket and hurried back to bed. There were things to send back. The Christmas bracelet. The little musical box. The three Brubeck records.

  Once she had decided to wrap them up and get them mailed, she felt vastly better. And she began to wonder if she had ever really liked him. Lots of times he had been fun. He was the most fun in games—tennis and swimming and golf. Not so much fun when there was a party with dancing and so on. But it had always been nice to be his girl. Because he was big and everybody knew him, and a lot of the kids had been after him. But liking him, really and truly. Well, there was something about him that was so … so darn beefy. Thick-like. And never shy or humble or anything. Almost but not quite a wise guy. It would happen someday, but not with him. With somebody different. Dark and shy and gentle and humble and loving. Sort of a Gregory Peck type. Ethereal, sort of. Not like Clyde who sort of made you think of a bull or something. You kind of instinctively knew that if it was Clyde the first time, it would hurt something awful. Because he was so impatient about everything.

  And then she started to think of Norma and Bobby and how it was inevitable that they would be caught in bed together, and what a hideous scene it had probably been up there, with Norma crying and Mr. Franchard cursing and raving and Mr. Rawls all ashamed and bitter about it. It would be awful. Norma would make it easier on herself by blubbering. She could start crying anytime she wanted to, just like that. Well, the group was gone now, for good. Today had busted it all up. Today had ruined a lot of things but it had made things easier, too, in a funny way. I wish we could leave this darn place. All of us. Just go away and never come back because I am truly desperately sick of it.

  She sat up and flounced the pillow again and tried the other side, hands under her cheek, knees high. All warm and soft and sleepy and like falling.…

  Wilma Delevan was awake and thinking of what Ben had mumbled to her when she had come to bed. So odd, a question like that.

  “Willy?”

  “Yes, dear. I thought you were asleep.”

  “Willy, are you having a good time? I mean are things the way you want them?”

  “What a funny question!”

  “Well, I just wondered.”

  “I guess I just don’t think about it. I … I wish you didn’t have to work so hard. And I wish you and Brock would get along better. And I wish Ellen would make some different friends. She needs to make new friends. Those other children are too old for her. She’s easily led, you know. Impressionable. I wonder if we ought to keep her another year before she goes away to school. She could take postgraduate at the high school and learn typing and things like that, and it would be good for her.” She stopped and heard Ben’s heavy sleep-breathing.

  For a moment she felt annoyed, and then it changed to a feeling of being puzzled. It was an odd question for him to ask.

  “I’m happy,” she whispered into the sleeping night. And with a shade of defiance she whispered gain, “I’m a happy woman.”

  And then lay as though waiting for something or somebody to give her an argument.

  Chapter Nine

  A girl of twenty-five with tousled, pale hair awoke in a strange room knowing only that her sleep had been heavy and the room was strange and her name was Susan Walton. Sleep had been so heavy that curiosity stirred sluggishly, and it was not important to know more. She shifted a bit and her naked hip came in contact with warm flesh and in that microsecond of first contact she knew at once that she was Susan Delevan, in love, on her honeymoon, in a Washington hotel room on a sunny morning in June, now warmly and safely married, and in a little while Robbie would be awake and then they would make morning love on this sunny morning, and it was a good thing to think about, both before and after, because it was a thing that truly kept improving with them even after you had definitely decided that you stood on the highest peak of all.

  She moved gingerly away from him, not wanting him awake yet, removing the contact which might bring him up out of sleep in his ready need.

  It was a nice luxury not to have to get up and become the brushed and brisk Miss Walton, she of the quick neat heel-tapping sound down the governmental corridor, bright hair strained back and bunned so tightly it seemed to tilt her gray eyes, all trimly and sexlessly girdled under the neat office clothes, the efficient and decorative and discreet Miss Walton, unfrivolous and highly valued for her tact and accuracy and promptness.

  Yet it was a luxury tinged a bit with sadness because she had enjoyed the role. She had been hired in Washington when she was nineteen. CAF-2. Clerk-typist. Assigned to the Pentagon, to a subcommittee of the National Security Resources Board. After all the sympathy notes had been answered and the flowers acknowledged, back there in Cleveland. She had sold the house in which she had been born, sold the house and everything in it except what could be placed in two heavy suitcases, and she had purchased her one-way bus ticket to Washington, checked the bags at the station, taken the bus to the cemetery for one last look at the plot, at the old grave of Dad, the older grave of Bud, the raw new grave of Mother. And stood there and said a silent prayer that her life would not be as theirs had been, that her home would not be a place of sullen strain, of concealed bickering, of raw-nerved continual warfare that deprived the children of a chance to love them.

  And got a seat by the window of the bus, and got off at one in the morning in Washington and took a taxi to the Y.W.C.A., and the next day made arrangements to transfer the substantial bank balance to a local bank, and rented a pleasant room with surprising ease, and settled herself in, and went to the Commission the next day, was tested and hired, and began work right after lunch for a very young man with an air of international importance.

  The tensions that had soured her home during childhood had made her alert, watchful, secretive—quickmoving, with closed face, immaculately clean in body and habit. And it had given her a taste for intrigue, an instinctive perception of mood, an almost chameleonlike knack of melting into background and emerging at precisely the right time. It was these attributes, acquired for self-preservat
ion, which had made her so quickly successful in government work. She inspired trust and never betrayed it. She gave any office a look of efficiency and importance. Yet she never let herself forget that she wished to be married. She never let herself be deluded into thinking that the world of files and reports, corridors and buck slips was her predestined environment.

  She soon found that Washington was a city of attractive young women who shared her own desire. They pursued their objective in many ways, ways that had only the common denominator of ruthlessness. Sometimes she despised herself for this carefully calculated future, sensing a coldness of purpose. Then, alone in her bed at night, touching her soft breasts, she would know it was not coldness but the need for warmth and love and safety. And in the morning she would search her face, looking at the skin around her eyes, the skin of her throat, looking for the hard tiny lines, the look of crepe that would be the first sign of the hardening into a rigid spinsterhood amid the organization charts, the babble of officialese, the terror of departmental budgets.

  For a time out of loneliness and despair she drifted into a halfhearted affair with a lean and melancholy naval officer who sat slunched deep in chairs and fingered his hawk nose and said wry things that made her want to laugh and cry.

  Finally there came a day when, after she had worked up through many ratings and had become an administrative assistant to an important man, that man offended someone he should have flattered. And she stood nearby, feeling sad, as the big wise bumbling man cleared out his own desk, wishing to do that little task himself, already speaking in his soft growling voice about being back in industry where, by God, he belonged and should never have left in the first place.

  And looked up at her and slanted a hairy eyebrow and said, “Suzy, how about coming with me?”

  “I really appreciate that. But thanks … no, sir.”

  “What do you really want, Suzy? Everybody wants something most.”

  And to her own horror she blurted, “I guess I want to get married.”

  He had grinned at her. “Tough proposition right here, Suzy. Let me see. Resignation or no, I can still do a little something. You better not hear this phone conversation, child. Wait in the other office.”

  After a time he came out and winked at her and said, “All set, but you don’t know anything about it.”

  Twenty days later she was in Rome with State, learning the clerical intricacies of visas and quotas and permits.

  Even the sound of the name of the city now made her feel slightly ill. That year had been a fiasco. Not professionally. Her work had been praised. She had worked even after her heart had been torn and trampled, worked harder than before. A complete emotional fiasco. She should have known. She sensed the selfishness in him in the very beginning. But he had that warmth. Mike, he of warmth and good laughter and the sensuous strength that pulled her down with him into that small spring-blinded world, into an affair which, she had believed, shook both of them and brought them together for forever. But she learned that she had been the only one who had been shaken. That it was Mike who always knew all the words and who could pretend to anything, and who, when restlessness moved him again, got up from her bed and mildly and apologetically, and even shyly, said farewell and it has all been dandy. As directionless and unguidable as a breeze in summer. Not cruel, even kind. But utterly free, and that was the way he wanted to be and the way he would forever be until he was an old man, and even then there would always be people around him because of that warmth and his innate courtesy and the way everyone always liked him.

  When the transfer to Mexico City had come through, she had left Rome in much the same mood as she had left Cleveland nearly five years before—with an intensity of cold purpose and a refusal to look back. She went in with two other girls in an apartment in Chapultepec. Tile floors and deep narrow windows and always the smell of charcoal burning. Mexico City was high and clear and bright, and it was there that she first saw the hard little lines barely visible around her eyes. And in the bathroom with its too high ceiling, and the cranky rapido for hot water, which was anything but, she had locked the door and stripped and stood on the closed toilet lid, looking back over her shoulder, feeling more than a little ridiculous, but wanting to look at the backs of her thighs, suspecting even before she saw them the little puckered areas where the flesh had lost young firmness, a matching condition to the slight but noticeable sagging of her breasts where tissues had been weakened by the years of the taut constrictions deemed suitable for office wear.

  She had wept later. Not from any idea that the chance had passed her by. She knew she would marry. But the gifts were less. They had been lessened by the morose naval officer and by Mike and by the years. And so the bargain she could make would be less good and someone as yet unknown had been cheated in a way in which she had not intended to cheat him.

  Remembering the tears, with Robbie asleep there beside her on this sunny morning, she smiled in a rueful way at the Susan of those first weeks in Mexico City. Because not long after that she had met Robbie. To walk hand in hand with him down Juarez and into the park across from the Del Prado. To drive in that brisk little MG that belonged to his Chief of Mission out to the Plaza de Toros on Sunday afternoons at four for the drinking of manzanilla, the whistles when the torero danced fearfully away. To have dinner at Jena, or El Parador, or Las Casuelas with its raucous music on the absurdly tiny balcony over the tables. To eat, with a sense of danger and daring, the freshly opened oysters from Vera Cruz at the little restaurant in the public market. To walk and talk about everything under the sun. And they rode the hills in the little car and picnicked at high places and smelled the wood smoke made by the charcoal men and were in love. She could not tire of looking at him. The good brow and the good jaw and the darkness. His apartment was next to that of his Chief of Mission so they could not go there. And they could not use her apartment. And a Mike-born caution made her squelch so firmly his first tentative suggestion about a weekend at the Hotel Victoria in Taxco that he made no such suggestion again. Yet she felt that even had she accepted, they would still have been married. But it was a point that she was glad that she had not tested, even if it did seem to give marriage the flavor of an asking price.

  They exchanged confidences. She knew he was not such a fool as to think her a virginal twenty-five. He told her of a silly-sounding affair in New York, and a rather grotesque-sounding intrigue of long ago. She suspected more but rested content with that. And told him of Mike, making it longer ago as it had been too recent, changing his name, leaving his character relatively intact, and killing him off in a satisfactorily heroic way in the war. Even watered down, it turned him pale with physical jealousy.

  He told her of his family. She told him of hers, and told him the entire truth of it, so that he wept at the vision of the quick, pale, light-stepping girl in that Cleveland house of acid things, because more than she meant to tell of it had gotten into her voice, more than she had ever told anyone.

  Now warmly, safely, and excitedly married. More than the bald word. Married to Robbie—which gave a different impact to the word. Made it more than that goal so long sought. More than what had either been bargained for or, perhaps, deserved.

  Tomorrow she would meet the family and that would be a serious and important thing.

  She turned in a stealthy way so that she could watch him asleep. It gave her a vague feeling of guilt to watch him sleeping, and gave her pleasure.

  Yes, this was the giving up of the crisp and brisk Miss Walton. And she was realist enough to know that many aspects of that life would be missed. Yet, as she had begun to understand Robbie, begun to see what he was, the sort of person he was, she detected that taint of weakness in him. It did not make her love him less. Rather love him more because she knew that only through his weakness could there be for her an outlet for her own executive and administrative talents, her efficiency, her subtlety, her knack of gentle guidance. Were he a strong and determined and self-sufficient man, m
arriage would be less satisfying. To be so objective as to be almost cruel to Robbie, she could characterize him as a large and amiable and decorative man who had been reasonably successful in his chosen field merely because of his impeccable background, knack of light conversation, willingness to take orders, and lack of any dangerously observable ambition. He was a good aide.

  Perhaps, as she had been looking for him, he had been looking for her. Looking in foreign places. And now, having found her, wished to carry her back proudly to the place from whence he had come. It would, she knew, be a good life for them. He was confident that his older brother, his half-brother, would take him into the family firm. There would be a house to build, his career to guide, a social stature to attain, children to have. A good warm safe life, and in this home there would be laughter and there would be love and the ready evidence of love. It would be the home she had made believe about those times when they used to lock her in her room.

  His weakness was not in any way offensive, because he was not aware of it. He believed in his own strength of purpose because he had nothing to measure it against. Ruthless people and ruthless actions puzzled and annoyed him. He was sure of his place in the world and thus was not easy to hurt or disconcert. She knew that she would maintain his own illusions for him so long as they both should live. She seemed to amuse him when she seemed slightly vague. And he obviously liked to have her ask him questions. Very well. The role she accepted was the role he wanted.

  She lay watching him and marveled at the length of his eyelashes. His night-grown beard bristled in delightful maleness. There was a little scar at the corner of his mouth. She had never noticed it before. She would ask him what caused it. There was a nostril hair which fluttered at each exhalation. A pockmark over his right brow. Several enlarged pores at the base of his nose. All the mysteries of maleness here sleeping beside her while she watched and thought of many things. And smiled at him. And now stopped thinking of things with that alert and ready mind and began to think with the tissues and fibers of her body. Began the thoughts of his hands and of the breadth of his smooth back and of the strength of his long thighs, and felt then the good tingling of herself, the tiny glowings, the muted throat-tightening inner shiftings. And leaned over and pressed her lips against his sleeping ones, her eyes open so that she saw his eyes flash wide open and then his lips came alive under hers, and his eyes narrowed from their surprise, crinkling a bit, and she whispered good morning against his mouth as his hands found her and were good against her.