The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  Jim would say, “and you will have become One with the heart of Reality, Truth, Nature, God and Peace.”

  Gaunt did not want to hunt, that evening, for his mandala.

  His expectations of the night were therefore meager and in no way anticipated its ironic shock.

  He had been reading Gestalt psychology, a branch of speculation which required inclusion in his digest. He intended to give his time to it until sleep finally overtook him.

  It might be morning then. He might have eaten again in the night. What matter? There was no reason to come or go, start or stop, do or refrain. His wife, his family, the basic unit of humanity, was lost. In a world without women, only the fathers of young boys had, any longer, connection with a Plan.

  But now, as Gaunt went upstairs to his bed and the stacked books beside it, as he switched on lights, relieved not to have to read by the inadequate flame of candles, he felt suddenly disinclined to continue his intellectual efforts. He stood awhile, as he always did, in front of Paula’s portrait, which he had moved from the living room. It was a good likeness, painted some years before by Lescompte, in Paris. Paula in a blue-green evening dress, low cut, with a full skirt. Paula on a chaise longue. She had refused to stand or sit for the painting.

  He addressed the picture, as he often did. “Come back!”

  He thought he heard, and this was new to his experience, not words but the murmur of her voice in the distance—downstairs or possibly in the garden. He seemed to hear also a few footsteps that were hers. On the impulse, he ran down the steps, crying,

  “Paula!” But there was nothing in the lower rooms save a sleepy spaniel and the gray glow of the moon; nothing on the lawn but a brighter grayness.

  A little shaken, he went back. Another time, he would resist such impulse. It would not do to get hallucinations. He had worked too hard, pondered too much. It occurred to him that Connauth’s recital had touched several long-buried recollections.

  These, even though they referred to other women, referred also to Paula. Somehow.

  How? He cast aside the question.

  He needed a change of chores, something to do rather than something to read or to consider or to write. His haphazard cleaning of the house came to mind. He looked, now, at the single, large upstairs room where he slept and Paula had. This room, also, needed attention. Both bedside tables were stacked with books, magazines and scribbled notes.

  Both wastebaskets were overheaped. In the corner, on Paula’s desk, was a cascade of letters opened and unopened, of bills, receipts, canceled checks, invitations, telegrams and other things which needed sorting. The untidy pigeonholes above them invited arrangement.

  So he set to work, first picking up the litter, then emptying the baskets, and finally seating himself to execute the almost superstitiously postponed task of straightening Paula’s desk. The bills required classification: when the New Economic System was put in effect, and that would be soon, old accounts would be payable and there would again be credits to pay them.

  For an hour he sorted the paper heaps. Then he began to read the letters and messages. To do so gave him a sense, at once painful and pleasurable, of Paula’s personality. Here were thanks for donations she had made; here, requests. Here were notes she had written and not yet mailed: a tart, humorous missive to a furrier; a forthright letter to a charitable organization which, in Paula’s opinion, had abused its privileges; here was a shopping list; a neatly kept appointment book, a letter to Edwin and several letters from their son, tied together.

  Gaunt went on to investigate the pigeonholes and then the drawers. One, the upper right drawer under the desk lid, was locked. Since Gaunt had never investigated his wife’s papers, he assumed the drawer was locked against the prying of servants, or children. He thought, too, that it might contain Paula’s cashbox. And, partly owing to the fact that cash was still restricted (but not wholly denying his curiosity) he decided to force the drawer. He went down to the tool rack in the car porte and returned with hammer and chisel. It took only a moment to break the small lock.

  Inside was the cashbox, as he had suspected, and it required some while to rend the metal. The box contained twenty-five one-dollar bills, a good deal of silver (for making petty cash payments at the door, he thought) and five one hundred dollar bills: Paula’s emergency fund. He’d often heard her refer to it. The “hurricane money,” she called it. “In case the banks blow over or get flooded.”

  Beside the cashbox were several bundles of letters, tied together with ribbons. Of the ribbons, some were mildewed and faded. Gaunt supposed, owing to this earlier finding of Edwin’s bundled correspondence, that these were more communications from the children. Letters Edwinna had written from boarding school, perhaps, or little Theodora’s notes, or V mail from Edwin when he was overseas. But he soon saw that the handwriting was not familiar and that each bundle was addressed by a different person.

  Letters, then, from strangers, or strangers to him; letters, at any rate, not from the family.

  He undid one bundle and idly withdrew the topmost note from its envelope. There were several pages and he turned to the last. “Always,” it was signed, “Your Ed.”

  Ed, he thought. Who the devil would that be? Some old beau? He turned to the salutation: “Darling Paula.” But there was a date: “May 19, 1944.” During the war—

  when he’d been working for the government. He began to read.

  “Darling Paula—The look, the touch, the every recollection of you seems nearly as exciting as the fact of night before last.”

  Gaunt put the letter back in the envelope. For a long while he sat without moving.

  At last he opened another bundle. These were from a “Bill” but not Bill, her husband.

  “Hello, redheaded magic,” the first began. Gaunt winced and looked through the all-too-expressive rest of it. One line was particularly significant: “I think it’s pure damned foolishness to write this sort of thing in a letter. But if you want something to remember me by in your old age, why, you already know, your caprice is my law.”

  “Hello, What-a-woman!” another by this “Bill” began.

  I have been married, without knowing it, Gaunt mused, to “redheaded magic,”

  and to “what-a-woman!”

  (Or is that fair? What terms have I employed which are acceptable only because they were never written down?)

  The time has come, he thought, for the philosopher to prove he is a philosophical man.

  (But damn it all. Damn them. Damn what? Who? And what about your advice to Connauth? The first stone. You explained you had long since told Paula you deplored a society with separate standards for the two sexes. And, besides, any violation of woman’s precepts involves not just a man but a woman also.)

  (What a masquerade! How perfectly she carried it off! I was four times cuckold-he had counted the bundles—by the record! And I never guessed of one!) (Yet before calling her a hypocrite, he had to try the term on himself. He’d confided once or twice with Paula, obliquely, and probably to salve his conscience.) Then—why be angry?

  (He wondered what she had written back.)

  And, most of all, he seethed over one particular author of these foolish and fatuous missives. (She could have spared me that!) Teddy Barker.

  Athletic Teddy with his shoulders and his hair-oil smell and his absurd innocence of everything. Teddy, who was (he thought) nothing more than a large male ornament to the phallus.

  (What about the secretary in Washington? Was she bright—? Heaven knew she was not! An ornamental extension of the procreative organs and their accessories.

  Nothing else.)

  He began to check dates, now, with a fevered fascination.

  And in so doing he felt only the more committed. These excursions of Paula’s had taken place invariably when he was far from home and lasted an afternoon or an evening; one, for a week.

  (Out of twenty-six years, he could not keep his mind from reckoning, she gave you every minute an
d hour and day but something like a hundred hours which, evidently, she bestowed enthusiastically on others. A Samoan would assent; an Eskimo would encourage her. What am I? Lesser?)

  A Scotch Covenanter, his mind ran on, with the concept of the Scarlet Letter stuck in every scarlet cell of my blood and manufactured anew each day, with the enzyme of its bitter prejudice.

  He went downstairs and pulled a chair out onto his lawn where the moon would bathe him. He was sweated from head to foot.

  (If she were only here and I could talk to her!)

  It was that thought which, after a long while, brought easement to the hurtling alternation of his emotions.

  He came abruptly face to face with what many, nowadays, were calling “The Absence” and some “The Curse” and others “The Famine.” He saw himself as multitudes were seeing themselves, in a new light, brighter and contrite. He felt purer sources of sensation than those corroded by the past times, customs, habits, dead traditions, and obsolete moralities.

  What in hell did it matter?

  Would he, tonight, reject a returning Paula because she had deceived him?

  No.

  Had he not assented to deceit itself, long ago?

  Yes.

  Would he upbraid her for what she had done, what he had?

  No.

  And if he knew, his mind went on, that Paula returned would be a Paula who would conduct herself in the future as she had in the past, would he object?

  He endeavored to be honest. What had he so recently felt? Rage? Jealousy?

  No.

  Hurt ego; that was the fact entire. His wife could do no wrong in any man’s eyes; but she had done what was wrong in the eyes of many, which made him ridiculous and shamed, in many eyes. His wife had listened to his credo and followed it; but she had not told him. And that was painful. She had, moreover, selected for her evanescent loves one man, at least, whom he had regarded with amiable disdain and condescension.

  Who, Gaunt thought, would he have chosen for her?

  Barker, as he had already admitted to himself, was no more or less than the male equivalent of countless young women he, and most men, found alluring.

  He was not satisfied he had guessed the true causes of her behavior; that might take time.

  But this much he did know: what she had done, when compared to the whole woman, to love and marriage, to life, was of scant importance now.

  With the woman gone, with the species staring at extermination and passing time itself the executioner of humanity, a man could feel in his heart that to love and to make love was more important than any particular system of mating.

  Gaunt walked tiredly into his house and up the stairs again, determined to read all the letters, so there would never be in his mind a further wondering. So that, when he grew familiar with what had really happened, he would not feel he had balked at truth or refrained from digesting it through some false chivalry disguised as rejected curiosity.

  He was very glad he did that, whether or not he had rightly analyzed his motive.

  At the bottom of the last bundle of letters was an envelope addressed in Paula’s hand to him.

  My darling:

  You probably will never see this. There are so many reasons why you may never see it! I may live longer than you. I may decide to burn these letters when I am older.

  And if I am the first to go [his breath caught] you may—characteristically—file and forget, unread, this little collection of billets-doux. But if you ever, for any reason, do come upon them and do read them, I would like you to read this, too; I wouldn’t want you to learn these small truths without hearing more about them, from me.

  What’s love? It’s what I’ve felt for you, I think. The tides, at first, of physical passion, of possession and of being possessed. Security and sanctuary and a program; the beginning of special design; the leaving behind of formless search. I was a young woman when we married but I do not believe I have wasted a minute of the years, since, regretting that it was you who married me, and I, you.

  Love is home, and the place home gives you in society. Love is the opportunity to work with (and on!) a man, as a woman. For me, at least, love was quite a bit giving up things—the prospect of what was then called a “bachelor girl” existence, freedom, career, a chance to know many men in every way. And that last desire, at least for me, was strong and seemed to be valid. I mean by that, natural.

  Love’s a family, of course. The effort and the anxiety are measures of love; the successes, measures of love rewarded. The failures—like Edwinna—I imagine to be in some obscure way the proof of imperfect love. But whether imperfect because we are selfish, or ignorant, or because of our customs, I’m not certain.

  I loved you, Bill, truly and tremendously. I loved you, I mean, as bigly as I was able. Sometimes it maybe wasn’t very big. But, nearly always, you were my whole existence.

  You filled me and fulfilled me to such a degree that there was very little “me”

  which did not constantly participate in our joint life. But there was some. These letters prove that, don’t they? What were the elements that made up the leftover fraction? I know several. I don’t know all.

  One was, of course, you and your attitudes. The first time you were unfaithful to me, I was horribly hurt and shocked; shocked even more because I did suffer over it. I was able to be annoyed with you about it long afterward—even after I’d caught myself having the same momentary urge toward other men. I don’t believe you ever fooled me, Bill; you always had a little look of mystery, a shade of guiltiness, and a cover-up of faint pompousness that made me realize you’d strayed. It wasn’t often or intensely, I know.

  And then, you believed so firmly, in your head, that what you did was innocent!

  I never quite could copy your ideology. But I had the feelings, occasionally. So I decided, long, long ago, that if I ever gave in to them, I’d keep the indiscretion to myself.

  I did—as you see. And why? Why? I tormented myself with it—why? Because I am a woman, Bill, and because I think no woman is that impossible character she is supposed to be, in our society. Not by miles! A woman’s world is fascist, Bill! She lives under a tyrant called Respectability and that is a horrid way of life, of marriage. I rebelled.

  You were away. There was a man, a very gentle, sweet guy, who confessed he’d never made love to a woman. He was too timid and inhibited. You away, the opportunity came along, I couldn’t resist and I seduced him. Another, I was curious about—plain, physically curious! There is such a thing as being hungry for a man, also. For any man, pretty nearly, for the being-together with a male. Mischief, spite, maternalism in disguise, vanity, a desire to see if I still could be that alluring, such things! But I honestly believe, Bill, that most of all, I felt myself and life itself to be so real and valuable that I could not quite face death with the thought that I, Paula, owing to sheer social intimidation had been born and lived and died and never known anything more about men than the loving touch of one! That probably is neurotic, or something. But that’s as near as I can come to explaining.

  So here are my sins. In some deep fashion, I must not want them to pass unknown to you. I feel it would be less honorable than the rest of our life together. It has been many years since the latest of these so-called indiscretions. I am not likely to commit any others, though I would never make a promise. Who knows what she will do or think, feel or believe, even one year away? I don’t want you to forgive me because I never felt there was much to be forgiven. If you are angry at any of the writers of these notes—I mean, when you stop being angry at me, if you are—I have misjudged you.

  I think you won’t mind, too much. I wish I could have told you directly. But with our upbringing, there’s no good way. It’s stronger than we are, that dictatorial background! I have, in my mind’s eye, a little vision of you. I kept the letters—asked for them, in fact—partly for my own sake but partly because of that vision. I see you, an old, old man, going through my effects and thi
nking, at that age, it was a fine life we’d led. I see you loving me so much you’d also think, a little sadly, it was a pity my life had been confined—when compared to your life. Then, if you had felt like that about me, which I believe you would have, these letters could be one more thing to love me by. They represent a kind of being true to myself. Good, bad, or immaterial, they are part of me.

  And that, darling, if I have estimated rightly what really makes you tick, is the sort of thing you cherish most: truth. If you come upon this accidentally, if it estranges us, then I have made a bad guess indeed concerning you, me, and life—and I’ll have to take the consequences of that, whatever they are. But I am not very afraid.

  Your

  PAULA

  10

  IN WHICH THE DAUGHTERS OF TWO REVOLUTIONS MEET ON THE

  RIVER.

  In May, the surviving American women made their first attempt to re-establish a central government. By that time the great fires in the cities had burned out or had been put out. Millions of urban women had found housing of some sort in the country. Most of them, though ill qualified for farm work and resentful of being bossed by farmers’ wives, were making efforts to plant crops and tend stock. Other millions had returned to the devastated metropolises and set up sleazy, communal forms of living in the ruins. Trucks, and even a few trains, were beginning to serve such areas. Some radio stations operated and a random mail service had been initiated, although no attempt had yet been made to restore telephone and telegraph service. A few, single-page newspapers were being printed.

  Canned goods had been rapidly exhausted, usually owing to looting. But even where food had been commandeered in quantity and carefully rationed, it had not lasted long. Some power plants were in operation but in May no refineries had yet commenced to produce gasoline or kerosene. No coal was being mined. Here and there, natural gas was available. The stocks of petroleum and petroleum products had largely burned; the remaining supply was jealously doled out. Household hardware was unobtainable save by weary searching through masses of charred debris.