“I expect you did mention it.”
“Well,” she conceded, “we weren’t on the same wavelength.”
“Honey?” Pure plea. Hear my tone. Does it matter what I say?
“What?”
“I really missed the hell out of you while I was gone. I think we’re abnormally attached—as we keep saying—and better face it. I’ve got something to tell you tonight.” He heard her catch her breath—the microscopic sound like a scratch on some mystery whose outlines even he could not yet grasp. “There’s a place up the river I want to take you. I’ve told you about it before. I’ll be home in twenty minutes. Lay me out some clothes and we’ll get away before the rush-hour traffic. I want to hear you. You understand?”
“I know,” she said. “This morning was agony, wasn’t it?”
“Agony?”
“Well, I mean—”
“It wasn’t that bad. Was it?”
“I can’t quibble,” she said. “Is it worth quibbling?”
When he went back into Maureen’s office, Keith Lazio was there, returning a set of X-rays. Keith was an orthopedic surgeon, the one Ben and Maureen usually called when they had fracture cases. This afternoon he had a story to “end all popular psychiatry” or outlaw it.
It seems that a certain woman of whom he had just heard, mother of two, a four-year-old boy and baby girl, was conscientiously determined that her son should have no inhibitions about being male. She had so encouraged him to value his penis that neither the neighborhood girls nor his baby sister were safe from his predations. “And the payoff, the payoff was when his mother got him a doll. Or he got a doll, whoever gave it to him. The kid was all in an uproar because the thing didn’t have a penis. So, so you know what that damn-fool mother did? You know what she did?”
He waited just a second too long for his punch line, and Ben said, “She painted a horrible scar and stitches on the body.”
Lazio showed his canine teeth and shook his head in pure outrage. “You need a rest, Ben. You had a rest? Take another.”
“I’m sorry I spoiled your story. What did Mother do?”
“She sewed one on. Next time I tell it, though, I guess I’ll use your ending.”
“Just don’t attribute it to me,” Ben said with a shivery laugh. “It was just a passing fancy.”
“I see,” Lazio said. “I see.
“Maybe I’d better not adopt any little Latins until I have myself checked out,” Ben said to Maureen in the form of a farewell.
He labored that night in the restaurant by the river—he could tell himself later that he really labored—to make some kind of order out of the utter, humorous, sour disorder of the day of his return. And again and again details that should have remained without significance swelled like bubble gum out of Leslie’s pretty mouth and his own.
“Why did you ask where I was, then?” Leslie wanted to know about his call to her.
“No reason. I told you I’d forgotten you were going out. After all, I don’t know who Garland Roberts is.”
“But you never used to ask where I was,” she persisted. “I don’t ask where you are.”
“I’m a doctor. I work.”
“I know that. I know that,” she soothed. “But I come in tired and hot and utterly out of sorts with that girl. I’m supposed to account for where I’ve been.”
“What did Garland do?”
“She’s all right. I was out of sorts.”
“Why?”
No answer—except for a purely theatrical smile and a blinking of eyelashes over a highball glass. As he very well knew, from having been told at least four times, it was a mannerism she had learned in high school to make herself “fascinating.”
Submitting to the poisonous circularity of their talk, he said, “It was a purely offhand question. You usually volunteer all information.”
She was not really offended. “I suppose I do suffer a kind of verbal diarrhea. End of a great wishful career as a writer. Big mouth. Nothing else.”
Now they were finishing their second cocktails on the verandah above the boat landing. The afternoon breeze had fallen into an evening hush. The maple leaves around them, like a green stage curtain they were sitting too close to, hung moist and limp, green arrows pointing down to the dock where the evening boatmen set forth in their outboards under the antennae of glass poles, and the bright stretches of the river whose farther shore was blocked from view.
He had been here before once, and the view toward the water had reminded him of a painting of Monet’s of a summer resort spot on the Seine below Paris. He had brought Leslie here so that, as a sort of preparation, a celebration of all the sensibilities they shared, he could call that similarity to her attention. Now, sweating and uncomfortable, he thought it literally impossible to form the words for such an idea. It was no longer merely politic for him to feel the blame for their inability to communicate. He had a strong sense that all day his attention had been insufficient and that now he was paying the accumulated price.
Then Leslie was saying, “The trouble with us is we’ve always gone out of our way for people with problems. Jesus, we have our own lives to lead. Take Garland for an example. That girl is like she had been coached just to be my nemesis. She makes an absolute minimum demand for my sympathies—just enough to get me hooked—and then when she’s got me off balance, she leads.”
“Tell me about it.”
Leslie spun her hands like a woman winding wool. “I just did.”
“Oh.”
“You mean the details? I don’t know. Well, I’d promised her to go look at some clothes. She didn’t need help. She knows her figure like a dressmaker. The thing is that since puberty she’s never weighed one pound more or less than she should have. She made me feel I’d gone along for the ride. That’s all.”
“I despise the wooden little bitch,” Ben said agreeably.
That was not all. All too vividly Leslie remembered the moment of the afternoon when Garland had lifted sea-blue eyes and said, “Some people think a girl shouldn’t go with a shorter boy. But your husband’s shorter, isn’t he, Mrs. Daniels?”
The answer was no—but the answer was blocked by the instantaneous recognition that Garland meant someone else.
Garland was holding a white-and-blue print dress against herself. She was not smiling, nor insistent, nor fishing for information, since neither gossip nor guile could be of any use to her, who needed nothing. She was just registering a fact of life when she said, “He’s a living doll. I hope he didn’t think anything when he saw me riding with that boy so early Sunday morning. We were only turning around in your driveway. Not parked.”
Leslie had mumbled in a hopefully reassuring way. No one thought anything.
“I mean I wouldn’t want Mr. Smothers to know,” Garland said.
“He’s so interested in me. I mean my mind.” And there was no way to say to her that if she didn’t tell Mr. Smothers whom she had seen, then Leslie certainly wouldn’t. But she had felt the misery of being in any way at a disadvantage before Garland—as if that, that of all her miserable entanglement, were something that counted hugely.
Anyway, as she reviewed the afternoon and told herself for the fifteenth time that the chances of Garland’s ever dropping the right fragment of information into the right ear at the right time were infinitesimally small, she was grateful that Ben felt like talking.
His absorption (and her pose of attention, leaning toward him, eyes fixed on his, an earnest nod now and then) permitted her to review what needed reviewing (I’ve handled it all very well so far. I’m ready for what he expects when we go home. He won’t miss anything that was his.) and left her the luxury of drifting far away on thoughts quite disconnected from the last few days. She remembered one weekend at Smith (when she had been as young as Garland and at least a better person if not as happy—at least a better person) when her date from Amherst had not showed up. She and Sarah had gone for a long walk under the bare, groaning trees, talk
ing about love. She remembered the feel of her fur collar against her cold cheeks in the dark and how she could withdraw her face deeper and deeper in its depths to escape the wind. And she had said to Sarah, had actually said these words, “I feel that incredible sadness of being young.”
How far away was the time when she could talk like that! How silly it seemed, and yet now (perhaps because of what had happened, all of it) she felt eagerly close to the point at which she could say such things again. “I feel that incredible sadness of being—” What? A woman, perhaps. She felt very womanly tonight, with her secrets as well as with the receptivity she was offering to Ben. She had so much to tell him. He must not—must not—expect her to put it in words. He must—and would—receive it. Receive it all, at last.
She rose on the peak of an immense love for him (who?) and it occurred to her that the great gift she had to offer was just in being “not a woman but a network.” Elated in her privacy, she felt as if she was “running the mile” again, about to go. And it seemed that the salt Sargasso Sea of her life was now ready to discharge its booty of treasures and flotsam—for in her adultery she seemed to have found the moral test that could call up reserves of strength that nothing else had. It was incredible and ghastly (looked at one way) but she was in process of mastering it, of bringing it safely into calm waters and their lives (all of them, oh, all of them) into a new harbor.
So, reassured, she must listen to Ben. The rest of this night was his.
He was saying now, somewhat grumpily, “All right, all right. This adoption was just an idea.” He ordered them another drink and, almost in panic, told himself that he had failed, again, to make contact. He had been so full of his idea of the adoption that one more time he had failed to pay attention to her. Now he could look back and be sure that she was leading up to something important in her tentative comments about Garland Roberts.
He wiped his face with a napkin. After all, he had merely indulged himself in his attempt to establish intercourse with her. The trip—which had given him perspective and time to think about where their lives stood—had led him to an emotional excess. His notion of taking into their lives some hopeless waif from another continent had been probably just a fantasy of trying to repeat his own rescue (and therefore make it seem more solid, less a freak or fantasy than he sometimes, still, feared it was). All this he had compulsively discharged on her. Now he needed her to help him sort it out, trim away the dream and excess, and examine it for merit.
“It was just an idea,” he said. “But surely you have some comment on it. You know me.” (Did she?) “You know yourself, us.” (Who? Personalities were fictions of an old dream that meant to dream itself out to the end.) “Just tell me what you’re thinking.”
She nodded and prepared to answer him out of the deep thoughtfulness with which she had been listening.
With guileless loving eyes she said merrily, “Why is it I’m always bumping into blind men?”
“What?”
“It’s true. This afternoon with Garland, I wasn’t watching where I was going. Thump. I ran into someone. It was a blind man with a stick. I realized that I’ve been doing it ever since high school. The people I bump blindly into are invariably blind.”
She waited for him to catch the piquancy of her discovery, to smile with her. The smile would unite them, show once again how deeply in accord their tacit recognitions were. All he had to do was recognize. Then he could have everything.
But he was looking at her with bewilderment and hostility—like a man who suddenly understands that it is not he but his beloved who has been listening to another dialogue instead of theirs. Or, as the woman thought, suddenly and unexpectedly taken in adultery: like any husband who has found out “everything.”
chapter 16
HE KNEW NONE OF THE FACTS yet and still did not realize that he had to find them out. If they had been presented to him like laboratory findings, typed neatly on appropriate forms and sheathed from soiling in a manila folder, he would have accepted and read them for one reason only—that to concentrate on them was to postpone confronting the truth they implied. As that summer went on without visible disaster, cooled, ended, and fall came, he would begin to scratch for facts, but in the facts he was not so much trying to learn the truth as to immunize himself against it before it fully invaded his life. In his first panic he guessed that the events of his absence (and he only said to himself then, “Whatever they were”) had not so much changed the relation between him and Leslie as demonstrated it had never been what he absolutely had had to assume.
Do you know? Dolores Calfert had asked him. Do you know the kind of bargain it takes with life to get permission from it to love another human being?
Yes, he knew—nothing except that for a certain time hunger, anxiety, lust, and egotism had been kept within tolerable limits by a bargain he was not even asked to understand. His presence had been required. He had been asked for things. If he had loved, that was his own business, an indulgence, quite unnecessary to the deathward passage of their days. Dolores had not eluded him more successfully by her death than Leslie by offering him her constant company. He had held her like a boy snipe-hunter, crouching faithfully by a creek bank in the dark, holding the bag, hearing the water gurgle past but no snipe call except in his eager imagination—while elsewhere someone laughed at his mistake. She had always hung her body on his like a decoy, while she whored elsewhere, deserting not only the firm limbs and belly soft as overripe fruit, but the very nerves that should have answered I when his love said Thou.
Did he know now what his first nightmare in Caracas meant? Yes, he knew. The pistol pointed at his head was the threat of Nothingness, warning him to go no further in his attempt to find out who she was.
This was the truth he could not postpone forever. At first he only guessed how long it had been stalking him. On the night of his homecoming to Sardis his bravest conjectures about what was happening only made him pity them both. It passed through his mind that he might wake her from her dangerous sleep by shock, but he lacked anger. He feared to aggravate her guilt more than he hoped to gain by slapping her with it.
At the threshold of illicit knowledge, he felt the same intolerable responsibility for the right decision that he had felt when he hunted for the collapsed vein in Mandy Tabor’s leg. He tightened his will for the struggle—and yawned lazily into her questioning gaze. He beamed from a moony face, suggested they complete their reunion celebration at home.
“Isn’t that a daisy idea?” she said, flirting, holding back a little so he would lead her.
“It lacks novelty.”
“Well, I don’t pretend to be Teresa Echeverría-Röhde.” But of course she yearned with her whole, orphaned nature to be someone with a jingly name he might have picked up in an exotic town and loved there once and for all in a single night, immune to the confusion of day after day. If she were only Teresa, named after that most stalwart of female saints, she would show him by a recklessness like martyrdom the giant power of her love. She had power. Corrupted by life, she merely lacked aim.
“Pretend to be her if you want.”
“Take me to Caracas!”
“I’ve just been,” he groaned.
“And I get what’s left,” she said, gnashing her teeth as if she had literally forgotten who gobbled the forbidden feast in his absence. “I’m flattered.”
For the time being, it was enough for him to see how well they could still skim over thin ice. His whole appetite equated ignorance with luck. He took a good look at the stars as they walked from the restaurant to his car, decided not to ask her what their horoscope was for that still unfinished day. All the way home he told her lies about how jolly Caracas had been—not to make her envious, not at all, but so in her necessary fantasy she could go there and spread Teresa’s legs for the norteamericano buccaneer.
Playing her game with a novel fear of it, he was grateful for the dark in their bedroom and superlatively grateful that—whatever he g
uessed to have happened (whatever she would know for sure and be trying to evade by her fantastic jealousy of a woman she had never seen)—the idiot responses of their bodies came gleeful as children who neither remember nor care that they have played the same game hundreds of times before.
Her leg, warm, shaven, and soft, was wrapped sweetly over his. Mouth to mouth they welcomed him home with nicer language than they had found all day. His hands recognized their wife. Her hands claimed a familiar treasure brought home strange from another country, quite unconcerned what dogs had chewed it in the gutter of a Venezuelan nightmare.
All was going well.
Then a cacophony of voices burst into his mind, like drunken fraternity brothers catching him in a happy dream. They meant to pull the covers off and shame him. Why hadn’t he roistered with them like a man tonight? Someone had boffed a Kappa right downstairs on the grand piano while he disgraced the house by turning in with Playboy. Manfully they demanded to know why his sack was always crumby with paper tits. And over their noise he heard the clamor of loudmouthed Brother Fulker (big-eared and gap-toothed and plainly destined for chiropractic, but nevertheless more rightfully one of them than Ben) shouting, “Now’s no time for thee-oh-rizing. Get it inner. Get it inner.”
Without letting Leslie know he was in argument, he tried to answer hastily, “I don’t voluntarily theorize, but the mere fact of an initial unwelcome theory or even of recognition provokes a countereffect of recognizing that I’m theorizing, Brother Fulker. Result: yang and yin simultaneous, mutually canceling, also called abúlia. Inability to act.”
If I weren’t thinking about it, I wouldn’t have to think about thinking about it about thinking about thinking about it.… Veins collapsing in nature’s most vicious circle.
Gone.
“What’s the trouble, darling?”
He could not stand the pity that came from realizing she meant to take care of him—that she had to when his house of cards came down like this. “Nothing,” he said. “Fatigue.” At least the cunning mouth would still work against the rude frankness of the body.
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