Contrary Pleasure

by John D. MacDonald

  “Then maybe you better not try.”

  She walked back slowly, scuffing her heels. The high sun made bright spots through the trees, touching the brown, soft bed of needles, the split and peeling bark of the rustic furniture. She sighed as she sat down again and gave him a slightly wan smile.

  “Anyway, with Daddy gone, she’s been living my life instead of her own. They shoved me out. I learned my defenses. I got behind my wall. Now I’m supposed to act as though nothing had ever happened. She needs me and I know she needs me, but I can’t feel warmth. She’s a neurotic sort of woman, Brock. And possessive. And kind of overpowering. Maybe I was trying to escape from her. I don’t know what it was. But I got into … a bad mess at school. I don’t want to talk about that. Mother said it was vulgar and impossible. Maybe it was. He was older. So she took me off to Mexico. I told her and told myself that nothing would ever change the way I felt. Now he’s gone sort of vague in my mind. You know? The outlines aren’t clear anymore. And I can’t tell her that … her plan is working because that’s too much of a defeat to take right at this point. So here I am. She keeps riding me about it. When I’m twenty-one, I get the money Daddy left. It isn’t very much. But enough to be free on. In the meantime I do as she says. I wouldn’t really have to. I know I could work. I know I could get along. But … it would do something to her that I don’t want to do. I wish I could be ruthless, but I can’t. And if I tell her now that she was right, it means that there will be just that much less of me.”

  “I know what you mean. Mine wasn’t that way. The mess I got in. Because I was wrong and they all know I was wrong and I know I was wrong, and what do you do then?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “There was a girl. I guess I went a little crazy. I let everything go to hell and then I got kicked out.”

  “Because of your marks?”

  He looked at her. All he had to do was nod. It wouldn’t even take words, this lie. But there had to be a starting place. “I got kicked out because she needed money and so I stole it from a fellow I knew.”

  Her eyes went wide with concern. “Oh, Brock, how awful for you!”

  “Awful for my people, I guess. It seems to me as if it really didn’t happen. But I know it did. And so that makes me not what they thought I was. You know a funny thing? They want you to be something. They want it so bad that sometimes you have to kick it all apart, like kicking over furniture. Just to be something that is entirely yourself, good or bad. Last night I felt sorry for the old man. I mean that business about Ellen rocked him. He feels things. They get at him. He doesn’t show it much. Not usually. So I went into an act. And got myself all sewed up. Job this summer and enlist in the fall. You know, noble and sorry and trying to make it up and so on and so on. I like to talk to you. You know what I’m talking about. You said awful for me. I liked that.”

  He realized that he had spoken too intently and he felt his face get hot as he looked away from her. She said, “You have just heard our weekly broadcast of the confession hour, friends. Be with us this coming week at the same time and once again we will … now I’m stuck.”

  “We will hand out towels to the studio audience.”

  “I’ll buy that.”

  They talked for a time of other things, and the sun patterns moved and then they stood ready to go back down, and she traced with her finger the ridged, gray scar tissue of the old tree carving, as he stood beside her. “Marian Brastlehauer,” she said softly “with one crooked tooth. Does she think about this place?”

  “I don’t know. Like I said, I never could tell what she was thinking. That was part of her charm. She never said anything.”

  “And you kissed her here.”

  “With my heart trying to jump right out my chest.”

  She turned to him. “I need a young kiss. A child kiss. The kind you had with Marian Brastlehauer.”

  He kissed her. She felt tall in his arms. It was a light kiss, without hungers, and then they held away and grinned at each other and started down the path.

  She went first. He watched her and saw how she was quick and good in the steep places, where you had to grab the small trees for support. He watched the way she handled her body. They went up the first hill, she above him, and in looking at her, the look of her changed for him. He had watched Marian long ago in this same way, but not in this same way. There had been the old imaginings then, of soft and hidden delights which could only be devised from pictures, from passages in forbidden books, from washroom whisperings. Because they were not yet known. And now these things were known to him, so that he saw clearly as she climbed the reach and flex of flank and hip, and watching her he felt a deepening heaviness of loins, a specific want that was, not as in the times of Marian, direct and known and channeled. She turned suddenly and unexpectedly to say something to him and it was inconsequential. He heard her voice change in the middle of the short phrase and knew she had seen too much on his unguarded face.

  When they moved down from the second crest toward the valley and toward the tiny erratic figures of the golfers, she did not move with the same easiness, but with a narrowed look of shoulders, a look of conscious compression about her hips and her carriage.

  He knew that in that interchange of knowingness, something had been lost for them. There could never be another mild and Brastlehauer kiss on a high place. It made him feel stained and coarse, as though he walked thickly on hooves, hair matted in a jungly way. He knew she would think she had told him too much, and there was no good way to keep her from thinking that. He wanted back what had been lost, and yet at the same time he felt the excitement of this so sudden change in the relationship. Though he wanted it to be boy-and-girl, it was clearly man-and-woman, with all the racial awareness of full ability to breed true, with that deep instinctive knowledge, unaltered in ten thousand years, that these were the months of mating—yet it had all gone too complicated now in this time and place for the young.

  She walked beside him toward the distant clubhouse. “Faraway, Brock?”

  “Uh-huh. What are you planning to do?”

  “I have to go into the city with Mother. Some shopping and then dinner and a movie afterward. Are you coming around tomorrow?”

  “My youngest uncle is coming to show off his bride. He just got married. It’ll be a big wingding around the place. I guess I’ll have to stay around. Maybe Sunday, if I can work it. Monday I’ll have to hunt for a job for the summer.”

  “What sort of job do you want?”

  “Something on the rugged side, I think. Labor.”

  Where she turned off to go to the cottage they stopped and she thrust her hand out with an awkward gesture. They shook hands and felt slightly ridiculous about it. He went out on the highway. He tried unsuccessfully for a ride and when the Clayton bus came, he got on and rode to the foot of the hill and walked slowly up through the four o’clock sunshine.

  As he neared his house he saw Quinn standing out by the shoulder of the road. Just standing there. He had never felt close to Quinn. Yet it was not because Quinn seemed to have too much adult reserve. His reserve seemed of another breed. The distant politeness of a bored child. They made conversation, and it was usually meaningless. But something that had to be done.

  There seemed to be an indefinable oddness about the way Quinn was standing there. An odd place to stand, and nothing in particular to look at. It gave Brock the feeling that Quinn had lost something and had been hunting for it along the shoulder and had now given up the search and stood trying to think of some other place to look.

  He turned as Brock came up to him. “Hi, Quinn. What are you—Hey! You shaved off your mustache!”

  Quinn seemed oddly startled for a moment. And he ran his knuckle across his upper lip. His upper lip was pale against the golfing tan of his lean quite face. “Yes, I shaved it off,” he said, using the words carefully, as though trying to achieve precision and understanding. Almost as though he spoke a foreign language, having learned it out o
f a guidebook.

  Brock could see why Quinn had worn the mustache ever since he could remember. The upper lip was too long, and it was faintly convex from the root of the nose down to the thin lip, so that it gave him a mildly rabbity look, putting something thin and blinking and nervous into his face that had been hidden before by the bold, heather harshness of the carefully unkempt mustache. Brock stood, wanting to go on, not knowing quite how to break away.

  “Back early from work,” Brock said.

  “I didn’t go today.”

  “Oh, are you sick?” And Brock was aware of the awkwardness of never having known precisely what to call Quinn. When he was little, he had called him Uncle. But that had seemed to become unsuitable when he was about eight years old. And as that had been too early to start calling him Quinn, he had slid into the perpetual awkwardness of calling him nothing at all.

  “No. I just didn’t go to work today.”

  “I see,” said Brock, feeling as though he had been tricked into the position of inquisitor, wanting to get out of it and not knowing how.

  “How … uh … does Aunt Bess like the way you look without the mustache?” And Brock smiled, and felt as though his lips were stiff.

  Quinn knuckled his naked lip again. “I … I guess I haven’t seen her yet. She went off with David. His shot, you know. Glutamic acid. They’re experimenting.”

  “Yes. I know. Well … I’ll see you around.”

  “Yes,” Quinn said.

  Brock walked on. He turned and looked back. Quinn still stood there. Brock stopped and for a moment had the feeling that he should go back. Quinn stood in a way that suggested nothing. Not thought, nor patience, nor dejection. He was the figure of a man who stood quite still on a June afternoon. Brock half shrugged and went on toward the house. There was a small truck in the drive. There was a man on the kitchen floor, tinkering with the innards of the dishwasher. The front panel was off. Brock made himself a thick peanut-butter sandwich and poured a glass of milk. He sat on the counter top and ate and watched the man and listened with quiet amusement to the man’s complete and utter condemnation of the manufacturer who had created this piece of junk, the plumber who had installed it, the electrician who had wired it, and the civilization which had spawned all of them.

  Chapter Twelve

  Bess walked back to the car from the doctor’s office with David. It had simplified matters a great deal when Dr. Endermann had moved his office out to Clayton, closer to his home. Dr. Endermann was always so good with David. The way Mr. Shelter was good. But there was always that feeling that, good as they were, they didn’t like him. No matter how gently they spoke to him, understanding how to achieve his always reluctant cooperation, Bess had the feeling that they did it because it was profitable and because it was their job, and if anything happened that changed the arrangements, they would not want to see him again.

  There had always been so many shots. So many deficiencies to make up. It was Mr. Shelter who had suggested that he be taken to the doctor’s office. At first it had been awkward because, unlike the shots taken at home, having them in a strange place had made David wet his pants. And so she had to bring changes each time. It was odd how David, so easily frightened and embarrassed by many things, did not seem dreadfully upset when he made a mess like that. He stood in horselike patience and waited to be handed the clean clothes, and went into the next room with animal docility. But he had not done that for a long time.

  She was aware of her son walking tall beside her, and it was pleasant to think of just that, of walking by a tall son while the children in the park made the light quick sounds of play. Better to just think that and not glance up into his face, with the beard hairs beginning to fringe the pimpled mouth, the funny constricted way he walked.

  She felt exhausted. It had been a strange unnerving session with Dr. Endermann after he had taken her into the other office, leaving David with the nurse. Dr. Enderman had seemed uneasy about it.

  “Mrs. Delevan, I’ve been talking with Ralph Shelter about David. Understand I wouldn’t talk like this if I didn’t have some … professional basis for my opinion.”

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  “As you know, Mrs. Delevan, we have never been able to find any evidence of actual damage to the brain or central nervous system. Physically he is what we call a constitutional inadequate. And his slowness and inability to cope have given him a serious emotional situation. So serious, you understand, that we have never been able to do any serious testing of his intelligence. Shelter tells me that at times there will be a flash of … well, call it a form of brilliance. Adolescence has been very difficult for him. Relatively speaking, he is worse now than when he was twelve.”

  “But he is ever so much better than …”

  “Relatively speaking, Mrs. Delevan. Please understand me. He is more integrated than when he was twelve. Easier to handle. But the gap between him and the norm has widened. Now he is approaching sexual maturity. In spite of his poor coordination, he is very strong. I guess you know that. With his emotional difficulties it is entirely possible—now, understand that I am saying possible, not probable—that he might take it into his head to approach some female person.”

  She had stared at him. “That’s idiotic, Doctor. He’s much too shy. Why, it’s—–”

  “If we could communicate with him more successfully, Mrs. Delevan, it might set my mind at rest. But it is difficult to know what he is thinking about. Shelter reports an increase in sexual curiosity. We can expect that. We cannot predict how he will attempt to satisfy that curiosity.”

  “You’re talking about him as though he was a criminal or something! Why are you talking like this?”

  “It might be time to reconsider what we have talked about many times.”

  “Send him away? Absolutely not! He’s making fine progress. Mr. Shelter is very pleased with his progress. You should see the—–”

  “Mrs. Delevan, I thought you would react this way. But I felt obliged to suggest it again. You don’t hope any more than I do that we’ll see a change for the better soon.”

  Her indignation faded slowly. “What can change him, Doctor? What can change him now?”

  He shrugged thick shoulders. “It’s hard to say. The shock treatments two years ago were a failure. We might try again.”

  “No. They were dreadful.”

  “You have to think of him as being in a sort of prison, Mrs. Delevan. A captive. Maybe he will be released some day, quite suddenly. Maybe, instead, there will be a slow increase in the learning curve. And maybe he will never change. We are dealing with something without a specific name. A severe emotional shock might jiggle the mechanism just enough so that the wheels would begin to mesh. Or it might break the mechanism beyond even its limited ability to function.”

  “You see,” she said, leaning toward him a bit, her face frowning and soft and earnest, “his father and I, we were very healthy people and it just doesn’t seem right that—–”

  “Genetics is a tricky thing, Mrs. Delevan. Mitosis is something we half understand, and cannot explain. The whole area of birth and growth is so enormously complicated that I sometimes wonder that so many functioning human beings are born, that the percentage of chromatid error is so small. I’m sorry I’ve upset you, but I felt that I had to say this to you.”

  And she had stood up, picking up her purse, thanking him, walking out with David.

  “There are a lot of children playing in the park today,” she said with that bright and special voice she used for him.

  “Playing in the park today,” he said in his deep, rusting voice. And she knew that he was far away now, hidden and safe somewhere behind the things that fenced him off from the world, making no effort now to see over or between the interstices of the barrier, responding only by repeating mechanically the last few words of anything he heard. There was a differentness about him that was subtle. Strangers would glance at him and see only a gangling, awkward, ugly young m
an. And would glance again and sense the alien, the stranger among them. And look a third time and then at her and then glance away, aware of some unknown guilt.

  He started to go by the car but she stopped him and he merely stood, not questioning why he was stopped, and then she said, “Get in the car, dear.”

  He looked at it and got in quietly and sat and looked straight ahead while she got behind the wheel and drove around the park and up Gilman Hill. This was not one of his good days. This was one of the days when he was remote, unreachable. Oddly enough it was on such days that he seemed most deft about the mechanics of living, of dressing and feeding and undressing, washing and combing and tying knots. On the days of more awareness he fumbled more and forgot things.

  She parked the car and after she spoke to him, he got out and walked directly toward the studio, not looking back, a thing that had been wound up and placed on tracks and thus followed the tracks without curiosity, awareness or interest.

  She went into the house. The light was odd in the living room, the late sun slanting from behind Quinn, where he sat in his usual chair. He was not reading and the television set was dark. He sat there and looked toward her as she came in.

  “Do you feel better, dear?” she asked.

  “I’m not sick. I told you that.”

  She went to him preparing to hold the back of her hand against his forehead and stopped and stared at him, the hand partially raised.

  “What happened! Where’s your mustache?”

  “I cut it off.”

  “But why? It always looked so nice, dear. And Robbie is coming tomorrow and … really, Quinn. You look so dreadfully naked. Why on earth did you have to do that now?”

  He frowned a little and touched his lip. “I don’t know. I just thought about it, so I cut it off.”

  “It will grow back, dear.”

  “Yes, I guess it will.”