Contrary Pleasure

by John D. MacDonald

  “Look, is something wrong? Is there anything wrong you ought to tell me, Quinn? You really are acting odd, you know. You’re acting as strange as can be.”

  “I’m all right.”

  She held the back of her hand against his forehead. “You don’t seem to have any fever, dear. But you don’t look or act right to me. I think you’re coming down with something. Why don’t you take a nice hot bath now, and put on your pajamas and robe, and then go to bed right after dinner. It will make you feel better. Weren’t you listening to me, dear?”

  “I heard you,” he said.

  “Well?”

  “I’m going. I’m going in a minute. Any minute now.”

  “You don’t have to positively snarl at me! Anyway, I want to tell you what the doctor said today about David.”

  She stood over him and told him in great detail. He sat there and did not change expression.

  “Well?” she said.

  “I’ll go take my bath now,” he said, getting up.

  “Haven’t you got anything to say about what Dr. Endermann said?”

  “Is there anything to say? You settled it, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know if there’s anything wrong with you or not, but you’re certainly in a terrible mood. And that’s always the first sign when you’re coming down with something. You always get grouchy. Take an antihistamine. They’re on the second shelf in the linen closet. The big blue ones the color of robin eggs.”

  He was through the doorway and he did not answer. She sighed and went to the kitchen. She opened the deepfreeze and looked in. If he was coming down with something, he’d like something bland. There was a package of frozen shrimp. She decided she could cream them and have them on toast. There were still two of the huge steaks left. She would use those when they had Robbie and Susan to dinner. They would have to have them to dinner. And if David was having a good day, it might be possible to have him eat with them. Then it would have to be at the table. David could never manage a buffet dinner. She hoped Susan wouldn’t be one of those critical ones. Things seem to get in a mess so fast. David’s curtains aren’t done. The house could stand a thorough cleaning.

  She hitched impatiently at her skirt and tugged at her bra straps. Get things started and then change to something comfortable.

  Why in hell had he shaved off his mustache just now?

  She began to organize the evening meal, clomping around with cheerful heaviness, banging pans, her mood improving enough so that finally she began to sing in her true, husky untrained voice, singing something old about darkness on the delta and saying dum-de-dum at the parts where the words were gone.

  Ellen, curled in the big chair, saw Brock come in slowly. “Hey!” she said softly and he turned sharply, startled.

  “Didn’t see you. What are you doing home?”

  “Nursing a fat eye.”

  He came over to her. “Let’s see,” he said, putting his fingers under her chin, tilting her face up to the light. “Hmmm. Not bad. Sort of a smudge, like. Like dirt.”

  “Were you at the club?”

  “Yes. Tennis and a swim with the Yost girl.”

  “She’s nice. Was … Clyde there?”

  “Didn’t see him if he was. What’s the word?”

  “Norma called me. She was real bitter sounding. I guess it was a hell of a hassle last night when their fathers got there. She was alone in the house, so she could talk. Seems first off, her father and Bobby’s father were sort of united front about it. Then Mr. Rawls said something about a little tramp—something like that anyway—and Mr. Franchard hit him and then they grabbed each other and rolled around on the floor grunting. When that was over, Mr. Franchard tried to hit Bobby and they started it all over again. Well, they got in the car and nobody said much of anything all the way back and right at the end Mr. Rawls said he wasn’t going to see his son spoiling his life with any little baggage like Norma and Mr. Franchard said that the furthest thing from his mind was letting Norma ever see his delinquent son again. Now Norma says it looks like they want to keep her in the house every evening all summer and send her to a real strict school in the fall. But she says that given all summer to work on them, she figures she can get them to ease up, but it’s going to take a lot of crying. And Bobby is already gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “His people put him on the train this noon. Out to some place in South Dakota where there’s an uncle who has a farm implement business, and Norma said he didn’t phone or anything before he left. She says he’s been getting tired of her. She suspected it and now she’s sure of it and it just gave him a chance to sneak out.”

  “She sound sad?”

  “Like I said, bitter. I told her I was through with Clyde. She said we better find ourselves a couple of boyfriends quick. I said I’d call her up sometime, for lunch or something.”

  “Will you?”

  She looked up at her brother and felt the unexpected sting of tears in her eyes. “Darn it, Brock, I don’t want to see her. I don’t want to see anybody. They’re going to make me take a p.g. year at the high school. I didn’t do anything. It’s a mess. I just wish I was dead or something.”

  “Down, girl. Easy,” he said softly.

  “What about you? Is what they said true? I mean enlisting.”

  “I opened my mouth at the wrong time.”

  “I wish I could. I just wish I could do something like that. You like the idea, don’t you?”

  She saw his reflective, self-questioning look. “Maybe I do. It seems corny. Tom Swift and his Brown Suit. But maybe I like it.”

  “I just wish I knew what I was going to do with myself this summer. It started out so good and now—Sshh!”

  She listened, heard the familiar jeep sound, the popping of gravel under the tires, the plaintive peep of the horn. She stood up uncertainly and said, “Brock, please. Go tell him to go away.”

  “If I tell him, he’ll be back. You tell him. Only you better get him on his way before Dad gets here. He’s due.”

  She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders and patted her hair and went on out. Clyde stood on the far side of the jeep, face moody, thick arms crossed and resting on the top of the windshield.

  “Get in, Ellen. We got to have a talk.”

  She stopped a neat distance away and felt neat and prim and cold and contained. And she looked at him in a new way, seeing that he looked sulky and petulant and difficult, and not caring.

  She looked at him across the hood of the jeep and said, “There isn’t anything to say, Clyde.”

  “I don’t blame you for being sore.”

  “But I’m not sore. I’m not the least bit angry with you.”

  She saw his look of surprise. “What?”

  “I’m not anything. All of a sudden I’m not anything. I think maybe I’ve outgrown you, Clyde. If I feel anything at all, it’s sort of pity. Like being sad at looking at old pictures. Now get in your jeep and go away and find yourself some girl who thinks muscles are lovely.”

  “Outgrown me?” His face turned red and then the color faded. “You’re just a high-school—–”

  “Good-bye, Clyde. Have a nice summer.”

  For a moment he looked like a child watching the other children go to the party down the street. And she was touched a bit. Then his face hardened and he got behind the wheel and drove away, and she felt an enormous and wonderful relief, knowing that he wouldn’t be back. Brock stood in the doorway watching her approach. She dusted her hands together as she walked, grinning, up to him.

  Ben saw his children standing there together as he turned into his driveway at ten of six. This day had been bad. It had not been a day of recurrent crises, of threat of catastrophe. Those days were, somehow, easier to bear than a day such as this one. Because crisis seemed to generate a sharpening of mind and instinct, a quick-footed caution, so that in crisis there was something of the stalk and the hunt and the kill, and the exhaustion afterward was healthier. But this day
had been like driving uphill over cobblestones in an ancient, gasping, springless car, with the cumulative effects of the tiny joltings sandpapering his nerves. In descending order of importance there was the Griffin offer, there was the scene with Quinn and his unexplained absence, there was the absence of the vacationing Miss Meyer, there was an expensive cancellation, a lost shipment, two minor accidents in the mill that would bring around both the insurance investigators and the state people, a troublesome breakdown of equipment, a wrangle about discount. Nothing in itself that had the smell of crisis. Just a day full of things pressing on him, and a trip home that, instead of releasing pressure, merely shifted a new load—the load of Robbie, of Brock, of Ellen—and the overlapping burden of Quinn. Quinn was not going to be permitted to be a petulant child punishing the world because his feelings had been hurt.

  On the way home he had stopped at one light and had seen the parked cars, the long bar, the dim turbulence of the juke in the back of the place and had been half tempted to park and go in and soak the hard, white crinkling of brittle nerve ends into a welcome limpness, speaking to no one, ungregarious, taking the shots with the somber method of the diabetic measuring morning insulin.

  But it was late, as it usually always was on Fridays, and he went on home. He got out of the car feeling thickened and coarsened and pulpy, wrinkled, sooty. An ancient sergeant who had made no brave charges this day but had manned the familiar walls, shooting without hope or fear at the half-seen figures on the murky plains.

  “Hello, kids,” he said, unsmiling, and stopped and looked at Ellen and noted in a corner of his mind how something young and careless had gone out of them in a single moment and how they stood with a certain wariness. “Was that the Schermer boy’s jeep that was tearing down the hill?”

  “Yes, it was—–”

  “He came up here a few minutes ago, Dad, and she chewed him out and chased him off.”

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “She said it was a committee meeting about the flower show. She said it might turn into a battle and she’d be late. I’ve done what she told me about dinner.”

  And he plodded into the house and poured bourbon on two ice cubes and carried the drink to the bedroom and set it aside to cool as he took off the uniform of the day: the dull gray armor—fifty percent wool, fifty percent dacron, the mailed boots—Nettleton, size 10 C, the breastplate—white broadcloth with button-down collar, the battle colors—four-in-hand, maroon and gray diagonal stripe, from Miss Meyer, Christmas two years ago.

  He sat white and heavy in his underwear on the side of the bed and looked at the wall and sighed and scratched his hairy thigh and sighed again and took two long swallows at the now cold drink. The warmth spread and ran through hidden brittle passages and he was able to turn his mind outward then, the sounds of the summer early evening beginning to come to him as though a volume control were slowly turned up. As though he had lived in the silences inside him all day, hearing only what he directed himself to hear, as though it were a special deafness, an aid to concentration—coming out of that still place now to be alive, yet still retaining a lingering coldness, the memory of a day that was like a closed fist.

  The world on that June evening rolled the band of dusk shadow from east to west. The sun had heated the eastern third of the United States for many days. The high pressure area was moving north and east and below it, coming up out of the southwest, was a mass of cooler air, bringing line storms and turbulence and bright snakes of lightning.

  In Washington the headwaiter, smiling, holding his stack of vast aqua menus, asked the couple if they would like a table now and the young man, with a questioning glance at the young woman, said they would have a drink in the lounge first. Robbie followed his bride into the lounge. Her shoulders were bare, her wrap over her arm, and the tan of her was that perfection of Mexican tan which, instead of being a harshness on the surface, seems to glow up from a deeper layer. And as she swung her arm and walked tall, he saw the movement of the small muscles of her shoulder and he thought of her and how she was, so that it made him feel dazed in that place, dizzy with the knowledge of his luck, so much in love with Susan that he wished for great deeds and a sad dying in proof of it all.

  Miss Meyer sat alone on the wide porch of an ornate old frame hotel overlooking Lake Wannolana. As the light faded she glanced up from her book several times and at last closed it, storing the page number in her memory with a tiny click. She looked out across the deepening color of the water, knowing that in a few moments the dinner gong would make its long sound, full of overtones, decaying slowly, and she would then go in to her table. After dinner—tonight it would be the New England boiled dinner—she would talk in the lounge with some of the others who always came back here, or read more of the book, or watch television. Knowing that this was one more day that could now be counted off before she could go back. Back to that grave, warm, and wise man she loved with all her heart. Back to that good sense of being a team, understanding his exasperations, his little irritations, making each day for him as smooth and safe and easy as she could make it, because once you had given up the hope of anything more than that, given it up long ago in awareness of the empty places in the road ahead, you took what was there, grasping it firmly, making it do in lieu of all the rest.

  After Sam ate his evening meal, he took out the letter from his son and read it again. It was the same old story. Give up the place and come live with us. It’s warm here the year round. You can fish. You shouldn’t work so hard. You don’t have to. Sell the place. And he knew he would give the same answer as before. The Crestholms had been on this land for three generations. Not much left now. The old place and four acres. Barn falling down. No stock. The Delevan land used to be the south pasture. Three hundred acres they’d had. But you work the land. You marry and have the kids and work and they grow up and they go away and she dies. How do you tell the boy? That even if you don’t own it, even if you work for wages, there is something good about making things grow on that land. Not yet, boy. Later he went out and looked at the sky and smelled the change of weather coming. And went back into the old place which was forever creaking and settling and sighing and held within it all the known smells and flavors of boyhood, manhood, all the memories that were so strong that there always seemed to be somebody in the next room, so it was never what a man would call lonely. Not really.

  And Quinn Delevan lay in bed, looking at the very last light of the day against the ceiling, smelling the soapiness of his body from the long hot bath, hearing the insect uncertainties of the sewing machine, feeling, in his belly, the thick, unmoving mass of the creamed shrimp she had insisted he eat. He made the surface of his mind a flat, silvery thing, taking care to see that it stretched evenly, covered all areas. And there was a thing in the middle of it that kept trying to bulge up and break through the flatness and silveriness, and each time it did so, he pressed it back firmly down and smoothed the surface and tucked the edges in just so, because that dark horror must not be permitted to hump its back and brace knotted legs and burst up through to where it could be seen.

  And Bess guided the gay yellow material through the little metal mouth of the machine, making it take neat little needle bites, clucking her tongue when the stitches were not perfectly straight.

  Bonny Doyle had washed her hair and done her nails and eaten her solitary dinner. Now she sat on the studio couch under the light in robe and slippers trying to think of things to put in a letter to her brother. It was hard to make a letter long enough lately, even when you wrote big. She bit the pencil in between the short sentences. From time to time she would listen intently, but there was no sound of his approach. He’d certainly acted funny. A lot of the time he was hard to understand. She sighed and considered the letter again and remembered something she could use.

  Today a big woman named Christine I don’t know her last name started to fool around when the foreman wasn’t around and she made another girl named Blacky anyway they c
all her that sore and she tripped Christine into a rack of spindles and got her cut up so Christine is reporting she slipped on an oil place on the floor because if she squealed on Blacky who is pretty tough there would be people to give Christine a bad time maybe on her way home some night. Now don’t worry about me because I say some of the girls are tough. It is all right. I don’t make them mad at me for anything and I get along. You can stop telling me about the wonderful jobs you can help me get out there. I appreciate it and all but I like it here and it is good money and I am happy. My best love to you and Sally and the kids and write soon.

  Your loving sister, Bonny.

  She read it over and put it in the envelope. It wasn’t much of a letter, but at least it was off her mind. She wished she could write about Quinn. But she could never put it in a letter so he would understand. She couldn’t write it the way it was. And it would sound terrible to him, a married man and all, and it would be just like him to get off his job for a time and come roaring here and spoil everything because he wouldn’t even try to understand. He wouldn’t see how Quinn was so sort of funny and helpless, and not really able to understand what life was all about.

  And with Sandy in bed and Alice out making a last check on the little guest annex where the newlyweds would stay, George Furmon sat hunched over the unrolled sheafs of house plans, jotting down cost estimates. The tide of pride and recklessness had crested during the day and he had made many decisions that could not now be changed. Now, without customary evening stimulant, and with the tide in full ebb, he sat and felt afraid. God, it could really go wrong. He didn’t quite understand why he had taken so many irrevocable steps. Alice had jolted him, certainly, and made him take a good look at himself, not liking what he saw, but did that mean a man should try to change everything? Maybe if he had edged into it bit by bit.

  Well, no sense in crying about it now. Get to work, boy. This is a new kind of corner cutting. Giving the client the most for the least money. Now the shower. Ceramic tile comes too high. Scored plaster with waterproof paint won’t hold up. Plastic tile needs a pretty fair surface. Okay, so we try Marlite. Run it all the way up and then use molly screws for the curtain rod, and the rod better be chrome over brass. Terrazzo base, then run the vinyl floor up over the raised edge, and for a neat job, build the lavatory in and use the same vinyl on the counter-top effect. He tossed the pencil aside and bit his lip. And sighed and picked it up again as he began to wonder if you couldn’t use a metal, prefab shower-stall and have some automobile place undercoat the sides that would be concealed, so that it wouldn’t have that cheap, tinny sound when you hit your elbows on it or when the water drummed against it.