His confession touched her. She had a picture of him reading at night when he was tired and would have preferred to sleep or do something for pleasure, heavy books that actually only confused and frightened him all the more, the light of the reading lamp showing his scalp through his fine, thin hair. She wanted very badly to approach him and to touch him, but she was afraid he would be offended. Revolted, even. In her fingertips she actually had the sensation of his skin crawling away from her touch.
“Thank you,” she said. “It was kind of you to do that.”
“Not at all. It was not a question of kindness. I have wished more than once that you would die.”
“I have wished it more than once myself.”
“In that case, why haven’t you tried to change?”
“It’s not so simple. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. Perhaps it’s a matter of reaching the time for it. Just the right time. I don’t know why I couldn’t change, any more than I know why I couldn’t die. Dying would have been easier.”
“Tell me. Will you leave with me tonight?”
“If you ask me. You will have to ask me.”
“All right. I ask you to leave with me.”
“Will you take me home?”
“No. If you have any idea of ever going home again, you had better give it up.”
“Do they hate me so much?”
“Hate? I don’t think it’s that. They pretend that you are dead. No. More than that, really. They pretend that you never lived at all.”
“Where will you take me, then?”
“That’s something we’ll talk about. Now you had better get ready to go. Do you have much to pack?”
“Not much that I want to take. Excuse me, please.” She went into the bedroom, and got a bag from the closet and began to put things into it. During the time that she and Carl had talked, Bella had stood smoking her cigarette with obvious indifference, blowing out clouds of smoke and watching each one disperse before she blew out another. From her position, she could see through the door into the bedroom, and now she watched Lisa packing with the same air of indifference, the cigarette acquiring a long ash in her fingers. She paid no attention whatever to Carl, as if he had removed himself from the earth with the payment of the five thousand dollars, which still lay on the floor by the chair, and she said nothing until Lisa returned from the bedroom after a few minutes, wearing a coat and hat and carrying the bag. Then she spoke.
“Go, then,” she said. “Go, God-damn you. I’ll come spit on your grave, when you’re dead.”
Her attitude of indifference had seemed so genuine that the vitriolic fury in her voice was a physical shock. Not to Lisa, who had experienced it before, but to Carl. He felt cold and withered inside, and a little frightened, and immediately ashamed of the fear. Stepping forward, he took the bag from Lisa’s hand and put a hand on her arm. It was the first time he had touched her for years, and it did not disturb him, though the thought of ever touching her again had disturbed him many times.
They went downstairs and outside into the street. She was acutely conscious of his hand on her arm and was exorbitantly grateful for it. The wind in the street was quite strong and very cold. She was grateful for the wind too. It cut through her coat and inner clothing and was like an astringent on her skin. She lifted her face into the wet snow.
“I left the car a block over,” Carl said. “The grade to this street is rather slick, so I didn’t try it.”
They walked to the corner and turned right across the intersection and under the light which had first shown him to her as she looked down from the window. In the car at the foot of the grade, he turned on the heater at once. The air sucked in by the fan was still warm, and she regretted this and wished that he had left the heater off, because the cold acted upon her as a kind of scourge, as the whip is a scourge to the flagellant, lifting her depression a little and easing the burden of her guilt.
“Where are we going?” she said.
“To a hotel. I’ll leave you there for a day or two and come back for you later.”
“What then?”
“I’ve been ill with pneumonia. The doctor has recommended a few weeks in the sun, and I’ve decided to go to Miami. Would you like to come with me?”
“If you want me to.”
“That’s settled, then. You needn’t make any preparations. I’ll take care of reservations, and you can buy clothing there.”
She was overwhelmed by his kindness. She had thought that he would surely never speak to her again, or recognize her in any way, and now he had come out into the cold and snowy night to help her and was offering to take her with him to Miami. Her eyes felt hot and her throat constricted, and she was on the verge of crying, which would have been a good thing, but it had been so long since she had cried that she seemed to have lost the capacity for it.
“Thank you,” she said, and could find nothing to add. Exercising excessive caution on the snow-covered streets, he drove slowly to a small hotel in a quiet section of town, and they went together into the warm, drab lobby where an old man sat facing the window and the night, and another dozed in a chair beside a rubber plant, an evening newspaper unfolded across his lap. Carrying Lisa’s bag, Carl went ahead to the desk and arranged for the room, paying in advance, and then turned and came back to her, and she thought again, seeing his face in the harsh blue light of the lobby, that he looked very ill and tired.
“It’s all arranged,” he said. “Are you sure you have enough money to last you a couple of days?”
“Yes, thank you. I have plenty.”
“Is there anything you need now?”
“I would like some cigarettes.”
“Of course. I still don’t smoke, you know, so I would never have thought of them.”
The way he said it, the way he used the word still, it sounded as if he were deliberately recalling old times, trying to get them reestablished on old terms, and she watched him walk over to the tobacco counter for the cigarettes with her intense and oppressive sense of guilt in conflict with her gratitude. The truth was, she had never liked him much even in the old days, even in the good days before the bad days. She had considered him dull and stuffy, possessed even in adolescence of an abortive maturity, and she wondered why she had never suspected his capacity for kindness, that he would be the one, of all she had known, whose compassion would rise in the end above fear and indignation.
He returned with the cigarettes and handed them to her and, taking her arm again, guided her to the elevator. A bellhop had appeared at last and had assumed control of her bag and was waiting with it in the car. At the door, Carl stopped.
“I won’t go up with you,” he said. “Will you be all right?”
“Yes. Perfectly.”
“I’ll call you to let you know just when we will leave. It will be soon. Within two or three days, if possible. If I were you, I would stay in the hotel.”
“I’ll not leave.”
“Well—good night, then.”
“Good night.”
He turned abruptly and walked away through the lobby, and she went up in the elevator and down to her room with the bellhop, and after the bellhop was gone, she sat down and lit one of the cigarettes and began to think again about going back in her mind to a certain time and place, the point of deviance, and though it was probably impossible to isolate it so neatly from all other times and places, since everything is a growth and a result of many causes, there was, nevertheless, the apparent time, the time of understanding, and so she reached it and began to think naturally of Alison.
SECTION 2
Hardly ever, when she remembered, did she go beyond Alison in time, even though Alison was comparatively recent, and this was because Alison was the first beauty and the first trauma and was therefore the beginning of everything th
at counted later. Even the name had contributed to the sum of factors assuring a certain growth, for the name of Alison was to Lisa altogether beautiful, the kind of name she would have chosen for herself if the choosing had been hers. But she was glad, of course, that the name was not hers after all, but really Alison’s, because it is a pleasure, a kind of mild masochism, to have all the beautiful things belong to someone you love and none to yourself.
The truth was, though Lisa had never realized it and still didn’t, that Alison was not exceptional at all. At the time she started attending Lisa’s school she was sixteen years old, one year older than Lisa herself, and she was a tall, slim girl with brown hair and eyes who was very good at games, especially tennis. Lisa also liked to play tennis, and it was at the courts behind the school that she and Alison met. Lisa was sitting on a bench in the sunlight beside a court, watching a pair of boys finish a set that had gone from deuce to advantage and back to deuce, and she was wishing for someone to come along looking for an opponent, and all of a sudden here was this very attractive girl she had only seen a few times around the school recently, and she was saying hello in the most ordinary sort of way, just exactly as if it were something perfectly routine and not an end and a beginning and something that could never be forgotten.
“My name is Alison Hall,” the girl said. “Are you waiting for a game?”
Lisa stood up and smiled and said that she was.
“I’m Lisa Sheridan,” she said. “Would you like to play?”
“Are you very good?”
“No. I guess I’m pretty bad, really. I only started playing a few months ago.”
“That’s all right, then. I’m pretty bad myself.”
This was not true, as Lisa soon discovered; it was so great a deviation from the truth, as a matter of fact, that it couldn’t be explained or justified as simple modesty or honest self-deprecation. It was Alison’s practice to belittle her ability in anything competitive for the dual purpose of minimizing her opponent’s accomplishment if she lost and exaggerating her own if she won. This might have been considered a character fault by some, but Lisa would never acknowledge it or think about, it or listen to anyone who suggested it. Not then, that first day she was subjected to it, or ever afterward.
They sat down on the bench together, waiting for the boys to finish their set, and Alison stretched her legs out in front of her and flexed the muscles in them. It was still September, still very warm, and she was wearing white twill shorts that were very brief, like the shorts the boys wore rather than the longer kind worn by most of the girls, and her legs were long and deeply tanned and quite lovely. Lisa considered her own legs much too thin and was secretly rather ashamed of them. Moreover, her skin was very fair and did not tan properly. Now, her eyes following the lines of Alison’s flanks and calves, she thought they were the loveliest legs she had ever seen and wished that hers were even half so good. Lifting her eyes, she saw that Alison was watching her with a strange little smile on her lips, and she was certain, all at once, that the other girl was aware of her thoughts and was waiting for her to express them.
She did, though she had not intended to.
“You have lovely legs,” she said.
“You think so?”
“Yes. They’re very lovely.”
“Well, yours are nice too.”
“No. You’re just saying that. They’re much too thin.”
“I think they’re nice. And you shouldn’t be so modest. You’re really a pretty girl. I’ve noticed you before, and I don’t mind admitting I’ve been planning to meet you. Boys always like that pale kind of hair you’ve got. Almost silver. I’ll bet you have plenty of boy friends.”
“No, I haven’t. I don’t know many boys at all. Not well, I mean.”
“Why not?”
Actually, Lisa had simply never developed an interest in boys, but she only said, “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it much.”
“Do you ever go out with them?”
“Hardly ever.”
“Do you like them?”
“Well, I guess I like them all right.”
“I don’t. I think boys are the most terrific bores.”
She sat on the bench and frowned at the two on the court as if they were the most terrific bores of all. Lisa could not understand her, and she could not understand how it had happened that they were sitting on this bench and talking the way they were, so sort of intimately, when they had only just met. She was not disturbed by it, however, nor in the slightest embarrassed. It was rather exciting, really, not exactly in itself but because it seemed to suggest in a strange way the possibility of excitements that would have to be discovered. What she was most keenly aware of was an intense desire, sudden and consuming, to make a favorable impression, and she regretted, having learned Alison’s feeling toward boys, that she had not been more critical herself. She was trying to think of a way to correct her mistake when Alison turned her head and looked at her.
“Girls are much more interesting,” Alison said.
“That’s right, come to think of it. They are.”
“I’d much rather have a girl friend than a boy friend. Wouldn’t you?”
Was this a subtle offer of friendship? Lisa’s sense of excitement increased even more, and it was extremely pleasant. She had never felt anything quite like it before. She wanted to tell Alison that she would rather have her for a friend than any old boy, but it was too soon, after all, and she wasn’t prepared to do it. Not yet.
“Girls are more interesting,” she said, repeating Alison’s dictum.
“Do you have a girl friend?”
“Oh, yes. Several.”
“I don’t mean like that. I mean a special girl friend. Someone you like to be with and to think about and to do all sorts of interesting things with.”
Lisa thought about it, and it seemed to her that maybe there were a couple of girls who qualified by Alison’s definition, but she had an idea that she thought so only because she did not quite grasp the full significance of Alison’s expression, and so she shook her head and replied that she guessed she didn’t have any friend exactly like that.
“Do you?” she said.
“Not right now. I’m new in town. Didn’t you know that?”
“I thought so. I’ve only seen you around school a few times.”
“You mean you really noticed me?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Why?”
Alison was now looking at her closely, the little scowl on her face that gave her a kind of dramatic intensity, implying that a great deal more than Lisa supposed might depend upon the answer, and Lisa was suddenly shy and dumb, unable to respond, color creeping up under the clear, pale skin of her face.
“You’re blushing,” Alison said.
“Am I? I didn’t know it.”
“Why are you blushing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you want to tell me why you noticed me?”
“I don’t mind.”
“Tell me, then.”
“Well, because you’re so attractive and everything.”
“Oh, go on. You’re just saying that.”
“No, I’m not. It’s perfectly true.”
The declaration came out much more fiercely than Lisa had intended, and this seemed to please Alison immensely. Her scowl was replaced by a small smile that was at once satisfied and secretive, and she stood up abruptly.
“Those stupid boys are finally finished,” she said. “Now we can play tennis.”
They went out onto the court and started to play, and it was soon apparent that Lisa was no match. Alison moved swiftly on her strong brown legs, her reflexes functioning with the speed that is essential to excellence in physical games, and there was a masculine
power in the flat trajectory of her drives. After four games, Lisa had not won a single point, but Alison did not for this reason relax her game in the slightest. There was a deadly, almost vicious purposeness in the way she scored her points, as if she took a savage pleasure in humiliating her opponent. Strangely enough, though, Lisa did not feel humiliated, or even angry. Ordinarily she was not a particularly good loser and would have quit playing when it became obvious that she had no chance to win. But now she found a pleasure in submitting to her beating that was as strange in its own way as Alison’s in giving it to her.
After the final point of the fourth game, more because she was exhausted than because of her inability to score, she left her side of the court and came around the net to Alison.
“You’re much too good for me,” she said.
“Do you want to quit?”
“Yes. I’m very tired.”
“Are you? I’m not. I’m not tired at all.”
“You’re stronger than I am.”
“That’s true. I’m really quite strong.”
“Besides, I have to be getting home. I enjoyed playing with you, but I’m afraid I didn’t give you much opposition.”
Alison laughed suddenly, her teeth flashing white in her brown face, and put an arm around Lisa’s waist. Lisa could feel the strength in the arm and the heat of Alison’s body, was aware intensely of Alison’s smooth flank against her own.
“That’s all right. I’ll teach you.”
“Really? I shouldn’t think anyone as good as you would want to be bothered.”
“Oh, nonsense. The truth is, I like you. I’ve had a feeling right along that we could be very good friends. Would you like to be friends?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s settled, then. Will you play tennis with me tomorrow afternoon?”
Desperate Asylum Page 5