Contrary Pleasure

by John D. MacDonald

  “Is he all right? Is he hurt? Is he hurt, Ben?”

  “He isn’t hurt. He’s drunk.”

  They walked him into the light, his head bobbing. Bess said, “Darling! Your trousers! Your best suit. Oh my darling! What did they do to you?”

  She fluttered in front of them and they got him into the kitchen. Ben said, “Where do you want him?”

  “I can take him from here,” she said.

  “Better let us. He’s pretty heavy.”

  The fluttering stopped and she stood close and took Quinn’s arm. “I said I can take him from here. Thank you very much. I can handle it very nicely by myself.” She was proud and angry.

  “Okay. We can stand by, Bess.”

  “I’d rather you’d go home, really. Ben, I don’t mean to sound angry. I appreciate your doing this. But … it’s my problem. Good night, Ben, Brock. Come on now, darling. Go ahead. Lean on Bess. Lean hard, baby. Come on. That’s the way, darling. That’s the way, my poor darling.”

  “Come on,” Ben said to Brock.

  Once they were out in the night, Brock said, “Brother! That certainly took a half hitch in the evening.”

  “It could have been one hell of a lot worse.”

  “I know. I know it could.”

  “Tone it down for your mother, will you? And … thanks for helping, son.”

  Brock felt a sudden surge of pride that nearly choked him. Pride in awareness of strength and maturity. In knowing that he had done a small thing, but done it quietly and well and without excitement or silliness, or assigning exaggerated values to what he saw or to his own participation. There had been a manual training teacher in grade school. Brock remembered his saying one day with unexpected heat, “If a man can drive one nail perfectly and that is part of something he is building, then it is a special thing for him to do.” The class had thought the old joker was nuts. Some of the time he’d acted half-crazy. Taking botched work and slamming it on the floor and stamping it with his heavy carpenter’s boots. It began to make strange sense, now, that business about one nail. Do one small thing well. And then the next small thing. And maybe they will be a part of something big and good. But if you try to do the whole big good thing at once …

  He drove the car back to their garage while his father walked across the lawn. He had to go out onto the main road and into the next drive. As he turned in he saw the light go out suddenly in the guest annex George had added to the Furmon house. He saw it go out and thought of his young uncle and the tanned, pale-headed bride and his hands felt sweaty on the wheel. He had been astounded at Robbie’s luck. Even after seeing the picture of her, he had expected the flaws he saw in all wives. Dumpy ankles or a silly voice or a broad beam. This was Wife but it was also Girl. And that made it confusing. Somehow unfair that Robbie should have been able to acquire the legal and unassailable right to take her to bed, this magical girl, with the full knowledge and consent of everyone. That it was, in fact, expected of him. Her very desirability seemed to indicate that possession of her was something to be accomplished in stealth, in awareness of guilt.

  Sitting there in the dark silent car in the dark garage for a few moments, he thought of his father and his mother. So there, too, there must have been a time when she was both Wife and Girl. Magical and legal and wonderful. A strange overlapping. It made him uncomfortable to think about that. It was funny. You knew the words. You knew the associations. But they were just words and sort of hollow, unfilled-in facts, and then there would come a moment of comprehension like this and you would fill it all in and the words would have new meanings. Like the trick where you ask somebody to pronounce first MacDermott, then MacLaughlin—spelling them out each time—and finally MacHinery. With the last word expanding abruptly into a new dimension.

  He got out of the car and stopped in the driveway and looked in the direction of the dark windows, then plodded toward the lighted kitchen of his home, thinking of the stranger they had brought out, the mumbling man, all stench and apology.

  Robbie held her head against his shoulder and scowled into the darkness. “Hell, I don’t know why I should feel apologetic. I mean it is my family and all that, but if Quinn wants to be a damn fool—–”

  “You’re not your brother’s keeper.”

  “You think I could have—–”

  “Don’t take that as criticism, darling. I meant you actually are not his keeper.”

  “Anyway, I found out this certainly isn’t a thing that has been going on. He hasn’t done this before. But you see, I feel as if I were convincing you of something. As if you had a right not to believe me.”

  “Robbie, Robbie. Oh, darling, you don’t see how much there is here.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Things I didn’t have. Ever. A sort of warmth and trust and love, and people taking care of each other. My father used to walk me down to the store. And we’d go in. And there’d be people there and he’d laugh in a funny way and say in a big loud voice, ‘Suzy and me had to get out of the house before the old woman drove us both nuts.’ It was one of his ways of taking revenge on her. Later I realized she had her own ways of doing the same thing. They, both of them, ran around to the whole world holding their hands out and saying love me and hate the other one. Don’t apologize for your people, Robbie.”

  “Do you like them?”

  “I like them all except Ben. You see, I love Ben. Not the way I love you. I like the rest of them. I didn’t get a chance to really meet Quinn, of course. Or … is it David?”

  “He’s the weird one. Brock told me there isn’t much change. Damn sad thing. Gosh, this has been some day, wife.”

  “Say it again.”

  “Wife. Wife. Wife. Has a funny sound when you keep saying it. Ever do that when you were little?”

  “Oh, yes. Say words over and over at night until they didn’t mean anything at all. Until they got kind of creepy. There was one that was one of my favorites. Burner. Like on a stove. Try it.”

  “Burner, burner, burner, burner, burner, burner … hey, that does get sort of wild.”

  “What would somebody think of this conversation?”

  They both began to giggle. And turned toward each other. And her soft laughter began to change. And falter. And become something else entirely. There in the night on Gillman Hill. And thunder rolled toward them out of the southwest. Rolled and grumbled and then cracked loudly. Later the hard rain came. A thick-bodied rain that sounded like trains passing. When it stopped, toward morning, it left a thin layer of water in the rain-washed glass beside the terrace, the glass Quinn had dropped, the glass Mrs. Bailey had overlooked when she picked up after the others had left, when she had tidied up, wearing around her mouth that tight, sucked-in look of disapproval habitual with her when removing the evidences of drinking and smoking and carrying on.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Quinn awoke on Sunday morning at ten thirty. After he had looked at his watch and let his arm fall back, he knew that he was sore and sick. There were unaccountable aches and bruises all over his body. His forehead pulsed, his mouth tasted sick, his thirst was enormous. So immediate was his discomfort that it left no room in his mind for more than the contemplation of discomfort. He was but dimly aware that beyond this immediacy there crouched black things waiting, like patient animals. He got out of bed in gingerly stages, wincing at the brutal increase in head pain that resulted from each change of position. He made the four steps to the bathroom doorway and stood and held onto the doorframe, his eyes closed. His heart made a dry, hammering sound. He opened his eyes and saw the puffed and reddened knuckles of his right hand, flesh bloated so that the knuckles themselves seemed to be dimples rather than the customary bony knobs. But there was no room to think about that.

  He held onto the edge of the lavatory and found the yellow plastic glass. He rinsed it out and drank the water eagerly. The first glassful had a faint and nauseating peppermint tinge of toothpaste. He drank five glasses, and the water bloated
him. He adjusted the shower, peeled off his pajamas, damp with night sweat, and stepped under the water, leaning his shoulders against the cool wall of the shower, standing with face upturned, the rush of water stinging his face and chest. He stood there for a long time. When he went back, dried, naked, uncombed, into the bedroom, he felt uncomfortably tall, tottery, fragile. The head pulse had dulled. The long shower had puckered his fingertips. His long, white feet looked pulpy. Tan stopped at his throat and his biceps. The rest of him was the color of soap.

  He put on nylon shorts, heavy, white wool socks. He went back into the bathroom and shaved himself with great care, though awkwardly because his right hand was stiff. His face was not marked. There was a bluish bruise under his heart, and his right knee was barked, freshly scabbed. He rubbed a lanolin tonic into his hair and combed it carefully. In the bedroom again he put on pale-tan slacks, loafers, a lightweight wool shirt, brown-and-white houndstooth check.

  He went to the bureau for keys and wallet, cigarettes and lighter, pocket change. He could not find the keys. He stood with his hand poised in the automatic gesture of picking them up. And saw a brassy arc through the night, heard a slithering clatter. Something dry turned inside his throat, and a tremor as of excitement went through his chest. But excitement in which there was a flutter of terror. And no wallet. There was no memory to fit the loss of the wallet. No memory of going to bed.

  He walked carefully to the kitchen. He wished he did not feel so grotesquely tall and fragile. As though he should duck for doorways. Yet they were high enough for him. All the colors of the house seemed richer, more clearly defined. The corners sharper.

  Coffee stood over low blue flame. Note on the table:

  There’s lots of juice in the refrigerator. Coffee on the stove. Rolls in the oven. I’ve taken David to the drive-in church. Back by quarter of twelve. Hope you don’t feel too bad. B.

  He poured a cup of coffee and took it over to the booth, cup jingling in the saucer as he carried it, coffee slopping into the saucer as he set it down. He put his elbows on the table, straddling the cup, and pressed the heels of his hands hard against his eyes. Pressure made green and violet things shimmer against blackness. “God,” he said aloud. It was a loud word in the stillness of the house, in the scrubbed and burnished place with its odd littered places where Bess had projects half-completed.

  Memory was a child’s kaleidoscope. You sipped the coffee. Then looked through the little hole and turned the tube. Sometimes the things would turn into a meaningful pattern. Most times they were just bits of colored junk. Hairy hand, cell door, keys in the air, Brock driving, siren, yellow, broken teeth.

  The coffee did not taste right. He poured it into the sink. He opened the refrigerator and looked at the tall glass of juice. The orange of it seemed bright enough to hurt his eyes. He shut the door against the color of it.

  So you got drunk. So it happens to everybody. So why do you feel you have come back from some far place. Welcome traveler. Why is your mind all blurred about the mustache? How many days have you been drunk, you great damn fool? You schoolboy.

  And he suddenly remembered Robbie and his bride. And a great wave of crimson shame suffused his face, beading his forehead with sweat. He went outdoors. The world was washed and new. It smelled fine. His lips felt heavy and chapped.

  Where the hell did you go? Who did you fight with?

  He stood there, hands in the pockets of his slacks, looking down at the vivid green of the grass. He wondered if he had made a damn fool of himself with Bonny.

  BONNY!

  red doll rolling, red, dead, ragged, rolling.

  Stood there in the terrible out-of-doors, in light of the frightful sun, stood small on the outer skin of the daylit world under the god eyes, figure at the wrong end of the lens, and the focus of that lens bubbled the gray brain fat under the bone sheath, under the animal pelt trimmed to fashion.

  There are the troublesome mornings-after. When in the head are jumbled the unstitched pieces of long conversation, intermingled with corrupt bits of the night’s dark dreams so that reality cannot be truly sieved from all the rest of it, and the day is spent in half remembering, half disbelieving, walking about full of a wary conjecture.

  And he had reached down into the cooling pot and brought up this clear fragment, true and undeniable and horrid. He looked down at his right hand. It seemed far away from his eyes. The knuckles were puffed and sore. Right hand made sore by the girl-bones, by the girl-face, by the temple structure under that slightly coarsened skin across her cheeks. Girl who kept hurt things in boxes. Girl with a body-shyness, whose very fierceness had a timidity.

  He turned and looked at the house behind him with faint surprise that it should be there, unchanged, that it had not become a Disney house for witches, dark windows for eyes and picket-fence teeth. He went in and the house was gay and bright and sharp and clear inside. It was a stage setting. They had been very clever about the lighting, using offstage floods that really looked like sunlight. And things were just enough worn, just far enough off the edge of shopwindow newness so you would swear it was a house where people had lived. But, of course, the play had not started. So he could walk through it inspecting it to make certain it would be satisfactory for the players. Stand here for this line, and then walk to there, and stop and turn and wait just long enough, and then say that dramatic thing, that line he could not remember but which was so suitable.

  Didn’t they usually wear their hats in the house? Identifiable typecasting. Or was it now polite young men who could be lawyers or insurance people or practically anything, asking permission to smoke and using the ashtrays properly.

  Did you know a young woman named Bonita Doyle, an employee of the Stockton Knitting Company?

  With the catch, of course, being the use of the past tense. Yes, I knew her, you might say.

  We’ve lifted your prints from all over her apartment. Lifted? Why was it lifted? Don’t they dust and photograph? Sorry, you’ll have to come with us, Mr. Delevan. Or plain Delevan. Or nothing. Just come with us. For a silent, nervous ride.

  Hurt your hand, I see.

  Drunk, weren’t you?

  How long you been keeping her, mister?

  EXECUTIVE INDICTED IN LOVE NEST SLAYING. Too long. They usually had ways of saying it in a shorter fashion.

  BOSS SLAYS PLAYMATE.

  The house sat still in the washed morning, the world hung out to dry, bright in morning sun. The house was still. He walked through the rooms and he was tall and made of glass. He went into his study and sat at the impressive and ornate desk. Gift from Bess. Split-calf accessories. Gifts from Bess. Brass student lamp. Gift from Bess. A leather file with nothing in it, and drawers full of junk. He opened one and looked in. Medicated, fancy-filtered cigarette holders he had used for a week or two and tossed in the drawer. Lighters that no longer lighted. A small stapler that no longer stapled. And the almost new impedimenta of some half dozen attempts to switch to a pipe. Some dark pennies and a corroded nickel. Packet of colored rubber bands.

  When they went through his effects they found …

  Effects. An effect is something that is produced, is it not? The result of something. So these drawers of junk were the produced results of his life, and thus they were his effects. Along with house, cars, land, some savings, some old pictures, a closet packed with clothes. Didn’t they give away clothes? Salvation Army or something. And did the ones who put on the used clothes wonder for a moment or two about the man who had worn them? The gray flannel was new. Worn twice. Why would a guy give this away? Maybe he dropped dead, you dope.

  And, as he had known he would, known it from the very moment of standing out there in the sun, he opened the bottom drawer. Took out the shallow, heavy box. Opened the cardboard lid. Colt Woodsman Automatic with target barrel. Long rifle. Joint gift from Bess and David last year. He and George had tied cans to strings and tied the strings to limbs and set the cans swinging and walked back from the edge of the woods
and turned and took turns firing and found that it was dismayingly difficult.

  He hefted the three gay little yellow-and-red boxes of the Western Super-X .22 caliber ammunition and found the one that was half empty. He felt far away from himself. His hands worked, busy and remote from him, on clumsy duty of their own assigning while he sat tall above his hands and waited for them to finish. They loaded a clip and pushed it up into the grip and it clicked into place. One held the grip and the other worked the slide and it was ready. He stood up with it and looked around the room and then, wary of his own fragility, of his brittle tallness, his farawayness, he walked to the couch and stretched out on it, knees bent high, feet braced on leather, wrists braced against his canted thighs, one thumb inside the trigger guard. He could see a little way down the barrel. The hole would look big and then little, big and then little, seeming to pulsate in the slow rhythm of his breathing, hypnotic, like standing on a high ledge over the beetle traffic on asphalt ribbon below.

  He exerted a gentle pressure with his thumb, held the pressure and could not increase it.

  It was too far away.

  He got up and went over to the desk, feeling suddenly competent and rather official about it all. He took paper from the leather rack and wrote a quick note to Ben, giving her name and address and stating that he had beaten her to death and nothing more. When he attempted to lick the flap of the envelope, he was surprised to find his mouth too dry. He nibbled at the tip of his tongue until saliva flowed and licked the envelope and sealed it and scrawled Ben on the outside.

  And one to Bess. It was hard to compose. It had to have a certain dignity. Darling—Forgive me for what I am about to do. Try to understand. It was the only course open to me. It was a decision I had to make. With love and regret. Quinn. He read it over twice. It seemed all right. Serious. Competent. Even efficient. And sealed it and wrote her name on the outside of the envelope and put the two of them side by side on the blotter and picked up the gun again. It felt vastly lighter than it had before.