The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  “No reason why he shouldn't, except that you know damn well he doesn't want to be.”

  His casual hardness made Lucy draw away from him. Then, with amazement, she realized the underlying import of what he had been saying. Apparently he exempted her entirely from the shy hesitancy he saw in Bruce Fraser. What did he think she was?

  “It's not his fault,” she said. “Things haven't been too easy for him. But you're right about the school-teaching. He doesn't really like it. I wish he had a chance to travel. Living the way he does, he hasn't been able to measure himself against anyone, and he can't find out whether he's good or not. I suppose that's the trouble with most people in small places.”

  “He ought to bat around. My family – my mother's side of it – tried to make me settle down. I wouldn't let them.”

  He told her a story of which he was obviously very proud. There had been a kid living on the outskirts of Trenton when he had been at school at Lawrenceville, and the kid had been tough. His name was Joe Boyce. Lassiter had got into a fight with him once, and this had been the beginning of a friendship. Boyce had found an old Mack truck in a junkyard and Lassiter had bought the remains for thirty dollars. Then Boyce had worked on it for two months, and in the time he could get away from Lawrenceville, Lassiter had come over to his backyard to help him. When the truck was able to march, they began hauling a few small payloads for farmers into the Trenton and Princeton markets, and then they decided to set out across country to San Francisco, with the general idea of making the trip pay for itself by picking up any loads they could find along the way. One Saturday afternoon Lassiter had walked out of Lawrenceville with his bag in hand on the pretext of going home for the weekend. He didn't get back to Lawrenceville until three months later.

  “We were laying plans for the big trucking service that was going to make our fortunes. We didn't do so badly, either. We got to Stockton, Kansas, before the old truck fell apart. But before it did, we saw a lot of country. In a November freeze we broke down in the Pennsylvania mountains and it was so cold that when the sweat came through our jerseys it froze our backs to the road while we were working under the car.”

  As he went on talking about Joe Boyce, Lucy noticed that he seemed a much younger man than he had half an hour ago; and somehow less genuine, for he was not really admiring Boyce so much as he was admiring himself for once having been intimate with a man like that.

  “You ought to see Joe now. He owns and operates one of the biggest trucking services in the United States. You should see the trailers rolling out of his main depot in Chicago. And Joe sits up there in his office with diamond rings on his fingers that he doesn't even stop to take off if he has to step out to slug a guy. He's still got a picture of the two of us standing beside the wreck of that old Mack truck in Stockton. And I'm telling you, he's a hell of a lot more real than an uncle of mine who reads all the time and tells people the engineers are destroying the world, when he doesn't know enough engineering himself to take the front wheel off a bicycle.”

  It was twilight and then it was dark. For about half an hour they drove without saying much, while a half-moon slowly dominated the sky. Far on the left its beams quivered on the lake, making the surrounding darkness a mauve colour. But on the highway the headlights of the cars flickered thickly all the way to Toronto. The headlights kept coming at them. The lights would grow hard against their eyeballs; then for a second their car would be in a blaze of rushing brightness; then the light would flash behind and the pupils of their eyes would slowly expand again.

  “What have you been thinking about?” he said.

  “That's a wide question to have to answer.”

  “I've been talking too much, and you've been saying nothing. I always talk too much to girls I like.” He put his arm about her shoulder and drew her against his side. She stiffened involuntarily against him.

  “What's the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  He took his arm away and pushed the accelerator down to the floor. “I'm restless. Do you like speed?”

  “Perhaps, I don't know.”

  “Then let's see what we can do.”

  He pushed the LaSalle up to eighty-eight and the trees swirled by. Leaning back out of the slipstream that snatched at her hair, Lucy saw the galaxy stationary in a vast, waving splash across the sky. Lassiter slowed for an abrupt turn and did not try to build up the speed again.

  “You'd like flying,” he said. And a moment later, “I've always wanted to build airplanes. It must be good fun to do what you want.”

  “Don't you like what you're doing now?”

  “It's a hell of a business. Bathtubs and toilet bowls – can you see any startling changes in a business like that?”

  She had nothing to say.

  “Meanwhile other people are just beginning to scratch the surface of speed. Pretty soon they'll be going as fast as sound. That will be the next frontier. When you reach the speed of sound, vibrations develop that tear you apart unless you shoot through that danger area fast enough. But they'll do it. Meanwhile, I'm a plumber.”

  “Why does speed mean so much to you?”

  He made no answer directly and for several minutes he made no answer at all. They entered the small town of Marlborough, passed through the pool of light thrown over the road by the Shell station on the outside corner, then through the main street with its dark shop fronts and past the local movie and the lighted drugstore with the kids and loafers standing outside and the radio blasting through the screen door.

  “The women in my family – on my mother's side – want to turn the whole United States into one goddam big museum. Their brows are so high I don't know where they leave room for the hair. They fill their houses with old colonial chairs that break when you lean back on them. I have one aunt who talks about Mister Emerson and Mister Thoreau as if they were still alive, but if she'd met Wilbur and Orville Wright when she was at college she wouldn't have noticed anything but a couple of bicycle mechanics from Ohio. My father hated the guts of that whole family. He wasn't their kind and they let him know it. When he finally lost his money in the crash, my mother's family were so glad to see him fall it made you sick to hear them talk. All they'd ever done with their money was to sit on it like incubating hens, but my father took chances. He knew what counted. That's why I got into engineering, even though I do have a friend who tells me I'm a sucker to stay with it.”

  He pushed his foot down to the floor and the car leaped. The wind drummed past, and soon the needle stood at eighty again. Occasionally as the car swung to a curve the wind smashed in and struck Lucy's face a solid blow. For a few seconds she was frightened. The rough defiance in his voice made her wonder what was the matter with him, if he was safe to be with in a car or anywhere else. Then she saw his hands clutching the wheel and knew he was at least safe in a car. There they were on the wheel, dimly visible in the light of the dash, strong enough to break her wrists. But they were also carefully groomed, and she remembered how he had touched her at the dance, delicately, as though his finger tips felt that her flesh was precious. Then he slowly raised his foot from the accelerator and let the car run down until all the wind-noise ceased and the needle of the speedometer fell back to fifteen. He turned off the highway onto a rutted dirt track which ran beside a row of willows through oatfields to the lake. At the end of the road he stopped in an open space where the grass was dusted with blown sand from the beach. For a moment the headlights flared out into the moon-path on the water, then he snapped them off and cut the engine and sat hunched behind the wheel staring ahead.

  Presently he turned to her. “If I weren't alone so much I probably wouldn't talk so much.”

  His arm went about her shoulder and drew her close. She lowered her chin and felt the roughness of his tweed jacket against her face.

  “You do like me, don't you?”

  “Yes, but –”

  His arm tightened around her, and through the cloth of his jacket she felt his heavy
muscles mass and shift. She was acutely conscious of her own fragility and inexperience.

  “The first time I saw you in the library –” he began.

  Then he tried to kiss her and she resisted, holding her face down against his shoulder.

  “Don't do that, Lucy.”

  She did not move.

  “For people like us, the way things are now, moments like this are all that's left.”

  “Stephen,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You don't know anything about me. I don't know anything about you.”

  “More than you think.”

  His hand came up against her chin, trying to lift it so that her lips would be below his. She resisted the movement, but something uncontrollable made her lower her lips and brush them against the back of his hand, and when he felt them touch his skin he murmured in her ear and pressed her more closely.

  “Don't do this to yourself, Lucy. No one with lips and eyes like yours should…”

  “No,” she said. “Please, I've got to tell you something.”

  He relaxed the pressure of his hand on her shoulder. “Go ahead.”

  “You've been imagining things about me that aren't true.” She took a deep breath and her voice was calm. “Whatever you thought you saw in my face that day in the library simply wasn't there. I was embarrassed to death, that was all. You see, I'd told my sister I'd met you, when I hadn't. It was a perfectly silly thing to say, but when women live alone with each other they always say foolish things and make mountains out of mole-hills. I was so – so embarrassed when I realized Nina would find out I didn't know you that I spoke to you as if we had already met.”

  “And from that you think I formed the wrong idea of you! What a darling you are.” He chuckled. “So Grenville really is as strict as it looks on the outside!”

  “Oh, it's not Grenville. It's just – you see, Nina really did want to meet you.”

  “Nina would want to meet any new man in town. Don't worry about that young sister of yours. She's going to do all right for herself, even though she'll never get all she wants – you know it as well as I do – because she'll never give enough to get it.”

  Not until Lucy drew away did Lassiter realize that he had probably broken another code of manners in Grenville by talking so candidly to a girl about her sister.

  “Lucy,” he said. “I may sound crude to you, but I'm honest. I've grown up in a society that says what it thinks. When I said that about your sister I wasn't thinking of her as a member of your family but as someone who has hurt you again and again. I don't know why but I do know how. Someone has got to say these things to you. I'd only be thinking about you if I said another thing I believe – that Nina is the last girl, as a type, that a wise man would choose to go to bed with.”

  Lucy was utterly still at his side.

  “Do you see how I'm only trying to help you by saying that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, give me your hand again and let me explain.” Her hand was still in his. “If a man doesn't admit to himself that it would be a pleasure to go to bed with a girl it means one thing. It means he doesn't respect her as a woman. It doesn't mean he's going to do it. It means that other things being equal it would be a pleasure. That's always been a fact and today it's more true than it ever was. Look at the way most people live today. Most of them never see anything but paved streets and brick walls and ashcans along the curbs. They don't have trees and flowers around them the way you have here. I've met people to whom a spruce tree is something you buy on Third Avenue at Christmas. But there's one thing they have got. They've got pictures of beautiful women to look at on every billboard. For ten cents they can buy a magazine full of naked girls with beautiful bodies. That's why sex is the city man's poetry.” He grinned at himself in the dark. “Maybe I'd better pipe down or somebody'll think I'm taking myself seriously.”

  Her hand was warm in his, but she still sat motionless beside him.

  Presently he went on, speaking more slowly. “Canadians are still pretty religious, aren't they?”

  “I don't know. All of Canada isn't like Grenville.”

  “Well, so far as I can see it's dying out back home. The same principle works there that works in industry. If a technique stops paying off, it's scrapped.” After a long silence he said, “You and I aren't so different from each other, you know. You're honest and so am I. And I like you very much.”

  Again he put his arm around her, and though she did not draw back this time, she gave him no co-operation.

  “I'm not used to men, Stephen,” she said finally.

  Now that she had said it, she felt as empty as a spilled pail. She stared out at the lake. There it was, this flat expanse extending out of sight in the darkness down to the United States. She felt his hand tighten over hers.

  “No, Lucy – I don't believe you are!”

  She could feel the flicker of curiosity pass along his muscles, through his fingers into her hand as he held it, and surprisingly a small anger hardened within her. The powerful intuition developed by solitary women who live observing others, protecting themselves against others, resigned to being spectators, informed Lucy as clearly as if she were looking at words printed on paper that her inexperience was like a veil making Lassiter think her more interesting and more desirable than she could ever be to any man. He put his arms about her with eager power.

  She heard her own voice say, “Please don't try to teach me anything.”

  He paused, hunched massively beside her, and slowly his head went back. Then he laughed.

  “You certainly know how to let a man have it.” He laughed again. “And was I wide open for that one!”

  “It's just that I don't think I'm –”

  “Lucy, honestly – I may be crude but I'm not a bastard.”

  “I know.”

  “You're lovely,” he said softly. “You're a lovely girl. You're marvellous.”

  She drew away from him. “You know perfectly well I'm quite plain.”

  He saw her face white in the moon, clean cut and averted, its lines sharpened by all absence of colour, and he realized that without the softening effect of her changing expressions the bone-structure made her face look dominant and almost statue-like. With a certain sense of shame he understood how he had underrated this woman. Even though he had sincerely liked her, he had still assumed she was more or less like all small-town girls. One way or the other, they always guarded their vanity against the city man's assumption that they knew nothing of the world.

  She turned and faced him. “I know that tonight is just another evening for you. That's all it should be, for you have your work and you don't live in a place like Grenville. But for me it's so unusual that even though I know it doesn't mean anything I'll never be able to forget it. And that makes – well, it makes the situation between us unequal.”

  “I told you last night you made me feel happy. I told you it was a feeling I hadn't had much of lately. Does that make it unequal?”

  She breathed deeply and looked away. “I don't know. I'm too confused to know, I suppose.”

  “Are you sorry you came out with me?”

  The trace of a smile flickered about her eyes. “No.”

  He relaxed and took out his pipe. Slowly he stuffed it with tobacco and lit it.

  “What have you been doing all these years in Grenville?”

  “So little I'd be ashamed to mention it.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well, both my parents are dead and…”

  “Mine are too. Yes, and you live with Jane and Nina. Jane I've seen and Nina I've met. Tell me some more.”

  “I read books. I keep the house.”

  “You must have friends?”

  “In a town like this everyone knows everybody, but that's not the same as having friends. I've had friends, of course. But my two best friends aren't here any more. I never see them. One is married and lives in Victoria. The other works in Toronto.” She smiled.
“I hardly need add they were both girls.”

  He regarded her quietly. “And you've been to college. Nina told me that when I was talking to her on the porch of the club. As a matter of fact, she said you'd been quite brilliant at college.”

  “Did she?” Lucy smiled again. “I have a large garden, too.”

  “Which you like better than keeping house?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I see it? Say tomorrow afternoon – after work?”

  Lucy stiffened involuntarily, wondering what to tell him. Then she wondered if she would have to tell him anything. For a moment, frightened of the newness she had discovered in herself, she was sure she would never dare to see him again. Then she knew the thought was foolish. She would see him again, if he came to her.

  She looked at the clock on the dashboard, bending forward to see the position of the hands.

  “We'd better go back now,” she said.

  “Why? It's still early.”

  “My sisters will be waiting. Jane worries a lot.” She looked at him and he held her eyes. “Please forgive me if I've seemed stiff and stupid tonight. An evening like this is new to me.”

  The tobacco glowed rhythmically as he puffed his pipe.

  “Is your family queer?” He turned a key in a lock. “Excuse me for putting it like that, but most families these days are queer. I know families in New York that are all in the hands of psychiatrists. But yours must be a different kind of queerness. For a girl who looks like you, to be what you say you are – it isn't normal.”

  She laughed then, and felt the relief of it. “My father was queer, but it was such a Scotch kind of queerness we never noticed it till after he was dead. Jane doesn't realize it even now.”

  She spoke a little more about herself while he listened. Then he talked about his work for a time, and told her how much he disliked Cleveland, and speaking like this, alone with each other on the lake shore, now that he no longer pretended anything and she no longer tried to protect herself, they drew together naturally and inevitably as they opened doors and showed a little of the loneliness inside.