William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice

by Styron, William

  Later, after a fine lunch with wine at a North Shore restaurant we sat far into the afternoon on a terrace splashed with dappled, leafy sunlight. Riders on horseback cantered past us; somehow again I thought of Wendy. Thoughtful, contented, stripped of the nighttime’s high frenzy, and holding Celia’s hand in his own, Mason told me what to expect in Europe—he’d been there, after all, and I hadn’t. “You won’t find it all pleasant, Peter, it’s still recovering from the war. And there’s a dead, dead feeling everywhere. Art really has come to a finish over there, and that’s why—though I love to travel—I could never live anywhere for very long, except in America. I don’t mean to sound platitudinous, but we are the nation of the future and anybody who cares, really, and who casts his lot with Europe—permanently, that is—is simply missing out, in my opinion. The so-called treasures of the past are all very well—a necessary experience, in fact, for anyone who pretends to culture—but significant form, as Clive Bell calls it, is dependent upon constant change, constant renewal from the resources of the present, a perpetual shaking-up and reordering, and this it is beyond the powers of Europe ever to do again. Which is why without any embarrassment at all I’m proud to call myself unswervingly modern.” Yet, relieved of this—about his only heavy statement of the day—he went on to describe the fine things I would find in Europe ( “If you look at it as a kind of stillenchanted playground, you won’t go wrong.”)—Paris and the sunny delights of the Midi and the Cote d’Azur, the fantastic beauty of the Alps, the Costa Brava, the Balearics. And I sat studiously, rapt, listening to this travelogue; he made magic of the scenes he described, the people he knew ( “Here, I’ll write a little note to Papa Albert. The greatest coquilles St. Jacques in Lyon, which is to say in all the world. A one-legged little fellow …”), the sanctums and hideaways, the cafes and beaches, the sheltered inlets unbeknownst to any American save himself… .

  He made magic of these, and infused it all again with his own brand of bright hilarity; Celia would gaze at him with longing, tickled half to death, her teeth biting down charmingly over her lower lip, repressing laughter. Then out it would come, and all of us would laugh, and as we sat there in the lengthening shade of this gay spring day, with its smell of salt air and its white sails aslant against the distant blue and the nearby graveled spatter and crunching of riders along the paths, I thought how fortunate I was, after all, to know this vivid and inexhaustible young man, and count him as a friend. Rich, gloriously handsome, erudite, witty, gifted, a hero of the war, with a wife over whom the goddesses must grind their teeth in rage—what else could a man wish to be? Could the earth hold more youthful promise? Beside him that day, suddenly, I felt pitifully small, and I gloomed over all that was so paltry and commonplace in myself—that forbade me to see all that I disapproved of in him as a superb Renaissance spilling-over, manly as a stud horse, instead of corruption.

  Of course—to mention only one thing that allowed me to view him somewhat less poetically—he was not a hero of the war at all. To be more exact, he was a draft dodger (the scar on his leg he picked up as the result of a bicycle collision at Princeton during his luckless semester), and as for Yugoslavia, he had come no closer to it than an enthusiastic reading of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb, Grey Falcon—from which he had acquired enough color and historical minutiae to gull far less credulous souls than myself. How did I know all this? Celia told me.

  She told me that same night, during what I suppose you might call a visit to me. It was morning, rather—it must have been past three, while I was still packing for my trip, when it happened: a frantic rapping at the door, the door itself flung open without a pause, and there was Celia. It had been raining outside. Her hair was plastered down around her forehead and her cheeks. She stood there for a moment and gazed at me with a most stricken look of pain and anguish; her lips parted as if to speak, then her hand went up to the back of her head, came down again, covered with blood. She said nothing at all. After a moment she stared at her red and trembling fingers, once more opened her mouth as if to say a word, and then collapsed in a heap upon the floor. Sweet Celia. I was shocked.

  I brought her around easily enough, with cold water on the brow and instant coffee, hastily made. As for the wound at the back of her head, there was a lump the size of an egg but the cut itself was small and shallow; soon the bleeding stopped of its own accord, and she lay back with a soft moan against the pillow, breathing heavily, and with one arm flung across her eyes.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “Oh, my head hurts!”

  “What in God’s name happened?”

  “He hit me with a plate,” she said.

  “A plate? What kind of plate?”

  “A Lowestoft plate. A kind of platter. Oh, my head hurts!”

  I gave her a couple of aspirin tablets and now (for she had begun to tremble violently) covered her with a blanket, insisting that we call a doctor. But she would have none of this: she would be all right—he had, after all, hit her before, and harder than this, much harder.

  “The bastard,” I said. “The swine. Why did he do it? Has he hit you often?”

  “Oh, I don’t know why he hit me, Peter.” She made a move beneath the blanket, as if to rise; I gently pushed her down. Now she opened her eyes and I saw how red they were from weeping. “I shouldn’t have come here, Peter,” she said. “I’m really terribly sorry. But I get so terrified of him sometimes. And you were so—well, you were close and I just didn’t know …” Her voice trailed off. “No, he doesn’t hit me often.” (A wifely remark, loyal even in extremis, if I ever heard one; you either hit your wife often, or not at all.) “I’m really very sorry, Peter,” she said again.

  “Don’t be sorry, Celia,” I said. “Don’t be. I just wish I’d known about it sooner.” Inside I had begun to feel a great helpless stormy torment of outrage: that someone should do violence to this warm, gentle little lark of a girl seemed, at least then, in the midst of my distant infatuation, the foulest of all foul sins. “Where is he now?” I said bitterly. “Where is the bastard? I’ll lay him out.” I would have, too, or tried.

  She had come around a bit and now, after easing herself up on her elbows, sat propped with her legs curled beneath her and with her head pillowed against the wall. In this pose—smeared hair, dirty bloodstained fingers, red-rimmed eyes and all—she looked both lovely and cruelly hurt, a flower upon which has been impressed the print of a dirty boot. For an instant I came very close to throwing my arms around her and telling her how madly and completely I adored her, but I was brought up short by her words, which mingled incredulity and desolation within me in equal parts.

  “Don’t call him those names,” she said gently. “I love him, Peter. I love him, you see. So you mustn’t call him things like that. Please don’t. I love him.”

  “You what?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said placidly.

  “After that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why, for God sake?”

  It was simple, she said. She loved him because he was funny (it certainly wasn’t money, her Long Island family was terribly well fixed), because he made her laugh, because he had taught her so much. And not the least—would you believe it?—because he was so good-looking! And she would go on loving him, no matter what. “I’m just mad for him,” she said. There was a preposterous, avid, debutante tone in her voice which for an instant made me want to show her the door. But of course I did nothing like that. I sat listening instead; for two hours or more I sat listening while she told me of her life with Mason—of what it was, and what it had been, and what even now (a shadow passed across her face, and her fingers went up lightly, though still trembling, to the place where he had struck her) she hoped that life could be. No, she was not going to whitewash him; she knew his faults as well as anyone. He was a liar, yes, that she knew; the Yugoslavia business was an example of that, and he had used—well, some kind of influence—to escape Army service. That scar on his leg? Oh, it was just
some kind of traffic accident. But really, didn’t I see? Didn’t I see how all of his wild lying was only a part of that breadth and vastness of his whole personality, part of his vision of life, which was so broad and encompassing that it just had to include exaggeration and stretchings of the truth? Didn’t I see that? Didn’t I see how necessary it was for him to tell these things—they were harmless, after all, they could hurt no one but himself —if only because they represented left-over energy, expansion of his whole terrific imagination? Didn’t I understand that?

  “I’m trying to, Celia,” I said.

  And yes—well, Carole too. His sex life. No, she wouldn’t pretend that it made her happy. It had caused her worry, pain—all right, then, real anguish. Sometimes at night she had gotten into such a lonely and frenzied state that she could barely stand it. And Carole wasn’t the first. There had been Anya and Nancy and Kathy and—oh, she couldn’t count them all. But wouldn’t it be some kind of poor excuse for a wife who, married to a man of such incredible animal magnetism, such vitality and genius, couldn’t put up with a thing like that? Yes, those parties—she knew about them, all right. They were disgusting. Childish even, to get right down to it. And those pictures. He’d made her look at them (O.K., it was blind of him to think that that would excite her, when, as anyone should know, dirty pictures don’t excite women—very much anyway) and they’d done nothing but make her squirm. But after all, he was a man, and a different kind of man, too; he had needed those kinds of things, as the expression of ambivalence—the good and the bad—that is bound to be mixed up in such—well, in such a really enormous personality. He was an adventurer in the arts, a discoverer, and he just needed to have this kind of release, that’s all… .

  I asked her how she knew he needed it. I had begun to pace the floor. Despite my passion for her, she was losing ground with me, steadily, each time she opened her mouth.

  She said he just needed it, that’s all. He had told her he needed it, explained it all very philosophically from the artist’s point of view. And she had understood. And she had complied. It wasn’t too much of a sacrifice to make, was it?

  Because otherwise he was so good to her. Oh, if I only knew how much he had taught her. And the places he’d taken her, and the books he’d made her read. Well, to be sure, it wasn’t all a bed of roses. What marriage ever was, really? Most of his friends bored her, especially the Village crowd, who were just a bunch of grownup babies, actually. And as for the rest—well, he had no real friends, she knew that. They were all dreadful spongers, mostly. Mason knew that, he’d told her sadly that a rich person has no real friend but himself… .

  And—well, yes, their tastes weren’t exactly the same. And he was difficult about it sometimes. Music. Ever since she was a child she had loved music. Brahms. Chopin. Wagner. Especially Brahms. How she loved that wondrous sad finale of the C-Minor Symphony, and the Academic Festival. They reminded her of far-off, dark, sweet, autumnal things—twilight and woods with falling leaves and mountain lakes covered with evening mists. Brahms. He must have been a man who knew how to grow old, who welcomed growing, and maturity, and even age. And Mason —well, no, sometimes she found it hard to take. He never let her play those kinds of records—oh, every now and then, yes. But never it seemed when she was in the mood. And she remembered one time when she longed to hear Brahms so that she took a taxi all the way to Thirty-fourth Street and sat smothered up in a recordstore booth for a whole summer afternoon, listening and listening… .

  No, sometimes things like that were hard to take. She would admit that. But didn’t I see how a wife had to defer to her husband in such matters? After all, it was the husband who was the—well, if you want to call it that, the guide. It was his career, not hers, that really mattered. And if he was so dedicated and devoted to his work (and it was going to be such a wonderful play, full of swagger and wit; no, she hadn’t read it but he’d told her about it—the Yugoslavian scene, the young American officer, the lovely Dalmatian girl), if he was so dedicated, then nothing mattered really, even if one wanted babies … She stopped talking.

  Outside, the weather had cleared again. Dawn was draining silver down the air shaft, and across the way the old men were setting up a noisy commotion in the plumbing. Along the avenues, far off, buses began to growl, and when I turned from the window I saw that Celia’s head was bent down, exposing the raw and sorry wound, and that she was weeping now, silently and hopelessly. I sat down beside her and took her in my arms and for a long time we remained there, amid the debris of departure, saying nothing.

  When finally she raised her head, she said in a low voice, so faint that I could barely hear it: “Once when we were first married we had a house upstate, in the country. It was really a nice place, simple but comfortable, you see. I don’t know, Mason was somehow—different then. I mean, he believed in, well, simpler things. We were going to live there and we were going to have children, and he was going to write his plays. I’ll never forget when we moved in and that first night, when we stayed up until dawn. It was fall and it was cold—but that dawn, I remember how clear and beautiful it was outside. I remember how Mason went out to burn some trash and how I sood there beside him all bundled up, watching him, watching the quiet countryside getting light, and the cold with a sort of wonderful promise in it, and Mason standing there by the fire with the wind whipping his hair and the fire blazing up in the dawn. And then he put his arms around me, I remember, and we shivered and laughed and I remember thinking how happy I would be there in the country with him, having children and helping him while he wrote his plays. What more could a girl ask for? I thought. There were ducks flying across the sky. He hadn’t ever hit me then.”

  Once more she was silent, but now I felt a tremor run through her body. “He scares me when he hits me like that.” Her lips were trembling and I held her very close against my side, as I would a little girl. “But that’s all right,” she blurted out suddenly. “I’m mad for him, just positively mad for him!” Now she had begun to shake and twitch violently, all over, and she pulled away from me and gazed straight into my eyes. “He can do anything to me,” she said, her voice rising, “anything at all! I’m just mad for him!” And I too pulled away, for it seemed to me she was telling me something that lay deeper than her words.

  Can one detect in the eye—like a mote of dust or a beam of light—the peculiar glint of madness? I do not know. Perhaps it was only the echo of that word she used over and over, like an incantation. But now as she slid with incredible speed into hysteria, I did know that whatever Mason was doing to her, hitting her with plates was not necessarily his worst oppression.

  “He hasn’t made love to me in two years!” she cried. “But it’s all right! Because babies! His career, you see! I mean it’s all right if we don’t have children! Don’t you see! I mean as he says, bringing innocents into this hellish world! It’s all right! And for the best! Anything he does! I’m still just mad for him!”

  I finally had to take her around the corner to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where they were very sympathetic: they gave her a sedative and put her to bed. She would pull out of it in a while, they said, and they would send her home. But as I left there in the full light of day—with a kiss on her cheek, the saddest of my life—she was still babbling.

  Ask me why, after all this, I came to see Mason in Sambuco, and my answer would be a vague one. But maybe what happened on shipboard that same morning would partly explain it.

  I was quite without sensation when, four hours later, I entered my economy-sized cabin on the Queen Mary. And for a moment I thought I had gotten the wrong accommodations. Crammed into that tiny space was the most outlandish assortment of delicacies that I had ever seen: not a single bottle but a whole case of champagne, two enormous wicker baskets of fruit, a flat box of candy the size of a paving block, a high stack of books on the floor, a clutch of whiskey bottles neatly done up in a huge red ribbon, and several baskets of nodding flowers which, shoved together for want of s
pace, had already begun to shed their soft fresh petals upon the floor. Other luxuries were heaped up: half a dozen cartons of cigarettes, a pile of magazines, and an iced tin of caviar. As my eyes took in this scene I was aware of the smoke which in rich blue swirls wreathed the room, and of its smell, which had a pungent herby fragrance that only for the briefest moment I couldn’t define. Then as I took one step forward, trying to penetrate the gloom, my eyes made out two huddled forms squatting on a bunk: a sallow young man, throttled by a turtle-neck sweater, with evasive, foxy eyes, and a Negro boy of twenty or so who wore velvet ballet pants and a purple jersey and who, shifting now sluggishly in the darkness, leaned out toward me into the light of the porthole, which cast a bright oval of sunshine onto his thinly mustachioed, inky-blue, and cataleptic face. It was a den full of vipers, I knew, and I backed out in haste calling for the steward, who came on the run and in emphatic Cockney tones insisted that I had the right cabin. So I eased back in, introducing myself with as much hardiness as I could muster to the two youths on the bunk, and when I got no response except what sounded like a soft teehee—far-off, indistinct, almost ethereal, as if it came from outer space—I turned to examine the candy occupying my bunk, and saw by the card it was for me: “For Petesy from his old daddy.” Intently then, with anger and shame, with gathering resentment yet with some left-over feeling, too, of warm, degrading gratefulness, I went among the other gifts: they were all for me, to each one was attached a card—"For Petesy"—and in my chagrin I burst out into a fit of sneezing, to which the colored boy, in a voice softly modulated and faraway, said: “Gesundheit, man. You’re just gonna have to excuse this here fog.”