Contrary Pleasure

by John D. MacDonald

  There was the one thin call and that was all.

  They all heard the car sound, the high, hard roar of the motor, and though they could not see the car, they heard it leave the drive, shrill onto the pavement, take the long, fading plunge down through the dusk of the hill. Bess started to stand up and sank back, making no sound. Ben met Wilma’s glance, saw that her lips were tightly compressed. Alice stood with the plate of hors d’oeuvres, poised, still, head tilted a bit to one side, her expression odd—the look of a person who has forgotten something and gets the first vague mental clue as to what it was that was forgotten. Then she bent and smiled and passed the platter to the bride, who took one, smiled her thanks upward, raised it to the fresh, red lips, white teeth biting firmly, delicately.

  Ben met George’s glance and nodded at him and they moved ponderously, too obviously, out of the group and met over on the lawn.

  “Drunk as a hoot owl,” George said softly.

  “I know. Too damn drunk to drive like that. He’ll kill somebody or himself. What a time to pick.”

  “What should we do about it?”

  “I’ll go in and use your phone, George. Ask to have him picked up. It’ll be easier to hush it up if we ask, if they don’t just grab him. I’ll tell them to phone me at the club.”

  “I guess that’s best. What got into him, Ben?”

  “I rode him pretty hard the other day.”

  “That isn’t enough reason. Is there something else? Is he in some kind of a jam?”

  “I frankly don’t know. I better phone.”

  “Go right ahead. Use the extension in the bedroom. So Bailey won’t get an earful.”

  George whispered it to Alice. Ben came back and whispered it to Wilma. Ellen overheard her mother being told. She found a chance to tell Brock. Robbie asked Ben and Ben told him. And later, as they were going to the cars, after Mr. Shelter had arrived to be on hand in case David got upset, after Alice had kissed Sandy good night, Robbie whispered to his bride. So it was known by all of them. And there was a brittle covering of suspense over the life and movement and color of the evening.

  Ben, in his nervousness, drank too much both before and after dinner. No word had come through. He tried to tell himself that drunks and fools have wry angels who protect them. He knew he had reached the point where, though in control of all physical faculties, he would talk too much and too often. He watched Brock dancing with Ellen, to the music of the four-piece orchestra that played at the country club every Saturday during the summer. Piano, drum, clarinet and muted trumpet. Balding, blank-eyed men who never referred to written music. Music that was for dancing, specifically, rigidly, uncompromisingly for dancing—One two three four. One two three four. Oh, it’s only a paper moon shining over a tea for two …

  He went through the side doors and across the terrace and down the four stone steps to the grass and heard the scrape of leather on stone behind him and turned to see his new sister-in-law slimly silhouetted against the light that escaped to the terrace.

  “Mr. Delevan!”

  “Ben. It’s too confusing around here to call me anything else, Susan.”

  “I’ve been looking for a chance to talk to you.”

  “Come on then, I need some air. We’ll walk and talk.”

  She walked beside him, silently for a time. They approached the first tee. He felt the bench and it was just a bit damp. Not too damp. “We can sit and talk.”

  “Sure,” she said. He peeled the cellophane from a cigar, bit the end off, lit it carefully, turning it in the match flame. The music came across to them from the lighted club.

  “Is something the matter?”

  “Mr.… Ben, I mean. I don’t know how to start. Well, because I don’t want to sound disloyal to Robbie. I love him. That doesn’t mean that love has to be blind. He’s so … trusting about everything. And I don’t want him to put you … or the rest of the family on a spot.”

  “How do you think he can do that?”

  “He wants to work for the company. I mean he thinks that it’s all right. Just to ask for a job and get it, and maybe he feels you sort of have to take him on because of the stock and so on. He’s talked about the company a lot. It’s not so much what he’s said as what he hasn’t said. And I’ve had business training, Ben. Even if I have been in government, I’ve worked for men who have been in industry. And, well, I’ve wondered about something. I mean there’s hardly any dividends on the stock. Maybe you’re modernizing or expanding or something and that’s why. But he told me how old the company is. I guess I better be perfectly honest. He was going to resign. I made him take a leave of absence. I told him that maybe I wouldn’t like it here. I gave that as the reason. I love it here. But I wouldn’t want us to be … that kind of a family charity.”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s a funny question,” she said with some heat. “I’m his wife. I want him to be somebody. And he can be somebody. I know that. He’s intelligent. There just isn’t enough push to him. I can provide that. I intend to—without being obvious about it. But I can’t if he is in some job where he just goes and sits in an office and looks important and draws a salary for it. Why did you ask me that?”

  “I wanted to make sure it was true. I wanted to make sure that there is another pair of shoulders in the family.”

  “Is … is it like that?”

  “Just like that, Suzy. Maybe I’ve had just enough to drink so I can gripe. They all think everything is automatic. They all think their world has got … reinforced-concrete pillars that reach down to bedrock. They all think … the hell with it. I talk too much.”

  “No you don’t. You don’t.”

  “You know what I would give him? You know what I’ll give him if he asks?”

  “What, Ben?”

  “Work clothes, Suzy. Sweat and sore muscles and pay to match. And they’ll think I’m a bastard. He can take it or leave it. I can see how shocked he’ll look. Me? Me! You can’t mean it, old Ben. I make mistakes, Suzy. Bad ones. But never twice. Never, never the same bad one twice.”

  “You mean Quinn?”

  He stared at her in the darkness. “By God, girl, you astonish me.”

  “It wasn’t hard to guess. It couldn’t be anyone else, could it?”

  “No. I guess not. So there it is. So I’m glad you didn’t let him resign. Because he wouldn’t take it.”

  “He’ll take it, Ben. I’ll see that he takes it if you promise one thing. If you promise that you will do no single thing to make it softer or quicker or easier for him, and fire him if he needs it and promote him if he earns it.”

  “Yes, but—–”

  “We have some money saved. We’ll gamble it. I couldn’t risk letting the outside standard of living drop too far. But on that basis, I’ll see that he takes it. And I think I know him well enough to know that he won’t disappoint you.” Her voice changed then, became deeper and more resonant. “You see, Ben, we’re a good team, Robbie and I.”

  He waited long moments. “I moved too fast, Susan. There’s something else. I mean something that may change the whole thing.

  “What’s that?”

  “I haven’t talked about it to anybody but Quinn. And it was a mistake to talk to him. I haven’t talked to Wilma, anybody. And I’m not going to. It’s a decision I have to make by myself. And soon. There are a lot of … factors. A lot of things that don’t have values you can write down and add up. I remember when I was little I saw a brown cow. She’d tried to jump a fence and got the front end of her over and hung up there, bawling and rolling her eyes. That’s where I am. With no farmer coming to use cutters on the top strand. So keep him from asking anything until—–”

  She touched his arm lightly. “What’s that? Listen.”

  The amplifier system they used for the music blurred the human voice, but they could hear it dimly and fill in enough of the blanks.

  “Mr. Delevan. Mr. Benjamin Delevan. Telephone.”

  “Quinn!” he said so
ftly and got up quickly and hurried toward the club and the telephone, with a feeling of something cold spreading through his belly.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Quinn walked over with Bess and met the bride and greeted Robbie. He held the bride’s hand in his for a moment, and her hand was a bit clammy and he knew she was nervous, meeting them all. He was given a drink and the others came and he let the conversation become meaningless to him. If you listened just to the sounds of the words and not the meaning, listened mostly to the vowel sounds, then suddenly it would be as though they spoke a foreign language—and their words would come through in a hollow, meaningless way, like the voices of parents when you were a child and half-asleep in the back seat of the car.

  The world had turned strange for him. It had happened on Thursday, driving home. An odd change in all things. A thin transparent membrane stretched slack across the road so that the front end of the car touched it and, speeding, began to pull it tighter and tighter so that at last the car thrust forward into a glistening pouch, and he could see through it but all colors were swarmy, like oil on water. And in a last moment of tension the membrane burst and the car drove through into this other world on the other side where nothing was quite the same. Where things were almost the same, but you had to be careful about them because they were different.

  He had stayed home on Friday to better consider the differentness of things and test his steps in this world on the other side. The words of them were meaningless around him. He sat and considered the bride, sidelong and wary. And drank and thought of her. The mincing, simpering bride, securing poison candy inside her taffy hips. And black groom like a hammer. Like a blind club. Like a darkened machine for pounding soft things in factory silences. Two of them, sitting in their sated arrogance there, with their fleshy stink of evil, all tissue and fluids and the hidden pumps and churnings of the membranous bodies. So a God-thumb could come out of the sky and rub them both at once in a dark wet shining smear across the terrace stone. And cleanse itself on the grass, removing an unpleasant stickiness from the giant whorls and ridges.

  Drank and watched sidelong her depraved legs, evil cup of lips. Drank and sensed the stickiness of all the others around him, the fatty rub of tissues together. Drank and stared obliquely at the giant breasts of his wife. All of them around him, heated in their flesh, veined and glandular, fat marbling the red meat of them, throats working wet, stomachs fisting shut and opening, fisting shut and opening, on the bits of food cut smaller than their hungers.

  Got up before the scream began and walked away from them and felt the scream subside before it was born, felt it curl and nestle down, a soft rustling amid dryness of him. Walked tall with a shadow long beside him scissoring its dark legs. Sat in the car and turned the brass thing and thumbed the chrome thing and trod on the rubber thing and the motor roared back at all of them. Dived down the hill, fingers like dried leaves on the wheel. Dived godlike and straight, closing god eyes for a little time and opening them slowly, casually, still aware of straightness, of precision like lines drawn.

  When he was on the highway, after the shrieking, wrenching turn around the square, after the truck that filled his vision and fell away to one side, after the tree that swung across in front of him, he took his foot from the gas pedal. It took a long time for the car to slow down almost to a stop. Then with delicacy he used his foot which was now carved of finest wood, to touch the gas pedal and bring the needle up to thirty-five. The needle did not waver. Dry-leaf hands and wood-dried and carved and polished. Clockwork heart and silver loins. Steel-dry teeth and cordovan tongue. Jeweled eyes and paper lungs. Function, balance, precision. Intersection of lines. Roll of bearings. Predictable rotation of stone planet.

  It was dark when he drove down Fremont Street. He drove to the closed gas station. The night light was on. He was surprised that it had taken so long. He parked the car and turned off his lights and got out. He bounced the keys in the palm of his hand. Ignition key and trunk compartment for both cars. Front door, back door, studio door. Office door. Locker at the club. Desk drawer. Bonny’s door. Eleven keys. They were on a chain. There was a charm on the chain. A silver peso with a hole bored through it. Worn smooth from years of carrying it.

  He grinned ice-lipped at the night and wound up with the exaggerated formality of the backyard years. He threw the keys up and out and high, arching in the night, hurting his shoulder, seeing a brassy flicker of them as they passed the street lamp into blackness. For the moment there was no traffic on Fremont. And he heard them strike on a roof and bounce and slide, slide faster into a second of silence before landing on tin.

  He walked across to Bonny’s entrance, snapping his fingers as he walked, making the crisp dry sounds like things breaking, taking pleasure in the little sounds because it was something he had always been able to do well. Alice could whistle better.

  Rattled his fingers dry on the door, seeing the light pattern from her window onto the grass, feeling with tongue tip a rough place on one filling as he waited, hearing her steps coming, grate of knob, clack of latch, tink of spring hinge, then light washing out at him, yellow-pale on his face, and her voice soft, “Quinn, I worried. Come in.”

  Went in and stood dry and godlike, watching her mouth move and seeing the expressions go and come across her face, and knew, without hearing the words, that it was about the mustache again and he wished that they would stop talking about it. Over here in this other place.

  She came close to him, her face fattening against his eyes like a trick-movie shot, and she kissed him, taking a quick, shy, sly nibble at his underlip, and the face moved back again, moving into proportion. Then smaller than proportion as she grew tiny and the room slid in upon itself. These things you had to watch on the other side. Slyly, but showing nothing.

  Stood smiling and watching her, watching the nervousness of her grow as he said nothing. Saw that she sensed that he now knew of the tricks. Go down three steps and open the door and a bell will ring and an old man will come out of the back, and there you can buy all the tricks there are. Itching-powder, lipstick, dribble glasses, breasts, worms to put in drinks, round thighs, disappearing coins, white bellies, rubber daggers, red lips.… He has everything there, and everything is for sale. And in the dusty stillness of the shop you can hear the old echoes of strained laughter. Like sobbings.

  Looked at the trick body of her and the trick eyes and the growth of fright and laughed. Looked down at his own hand and saw that the knuckles under the skin were truly marble, ancient and avenging. Caught her as she turned in sudden wildness. Swung her back and timed the blow of the steel and leather arm and marble hand. Timed it into thick sound and redness. And held and struck and held and struck, and brought limpness up with mighty effort to strike once more and release and watch the red doll rolling, pleased to see the special precision. Arms just so. Legs just so. Red spreading out from under the still cheek. Not knowing it was precise and right until you saw it thus and thus and perfectly so.

  He turned off the light and went out and closed the door quietly behind him. He went to his car and got in and sat for a long time. He looked through his pockets for his keys. He felt a strange rippling of uncertainty. He got out and walked down to Fremont and turned down Fremont.

  Blur of places and light and sweat. Juke blast. Liquor bite. And a place with stools. Late. The god stuff gone. Felt furtive touch, looked down saw thigh-pressed the haired hand, looked into stranger face, with its stubble and grin of broken teeth and hit out at the face. Bump of head on wooden floor and then sirens, head hurting. Yanking, pulling at him—whatsyourname—wheredyalive—whatsyourname—Yank and slap. Leave me alone. Let me rest. Give me silence.…

  Brock followed his father down the corridor to the room where a high counter stretched across half the room. Brock stood at his father’s side, a half step back. There was an institutional smell. Green cakes of deodorant, dust, varnish, cleaning compound and ammonia salts.

  “I’m Benjamin Delevan.
You phoned me about my brother.”

  “We got him.” Bored voice. Voice of Saturday night.

  “Suppose you tell me the details and tell me how I can get him out of here, then.” The hard authoritative cut of his father’s voice surprised Brock. He looked at his father in surprise. He looked no different.

  “Yes, sir. Ah … Car twelve made the arrest. He was in one of those queer joints on lower Fremont. Pretty drunk. Fighting. No keys or wallet or anything. We got his name off the label in his coat. About the same time his car was spotted. There was a pickup on it and it was in a gas station. It’ll be towed in. He’s been booked, so you want to take him along with you now, you got to post a hundred bucks bond.”

  “I brought the money. Do I give it to you?”

  “Yes. I’ll give you a receipt. Have him in here Monday morning at nine. Joe, go get me that D-and-D out of the tank. The tall one with the knee out of his pants. Name’s Delevan.”

  Brock watched the money counted out on the counter top. The man behind the counter put carbon paper in a pad of forms and began to make out the receipt. His father turned and locked his hands behind him and began to stare at a bulletin board on the wall. Brock couldn’t tell if his father was reading the dusty notices or just staring into space.

  They brought Quinn in. He walked with a curious shambling limp and his eyes looked loose in his head. He tried to smile at them. They could not understand what he tried to say. He smelled of vomit.

  “Here you are, sir. Nine o’clock Monday. Handle him okay?”

  “We can handle him.”

  They each took an arm. He would have fallen on the steps outside had they not supported him. They got him into the back of the car. Ben got in with him, saying, “You drive.”

  “Sure.”

  It was a silent trip back. Quinn mumbled twice. Brock drove as close as he could to Quinn’s back door. As they were getting him out of the back, Bess came out of the kitchen door. She had changed from her party dress to a robe.