Her fingernails hung on skin slack as an empty wallet. Her kiss was consolatory—and at the same time desperate beyond belief, her lips shrunken tight and probably bloodless under the remnants of lipstick.
The pity he saw was that she had needed reassurance this night worse than he. One had dragged the other into quicksand, and it was odds even who needed support more desperately now. If they had not both needed a successful night so much—the theory that would never stop again continued—it would have been easy to go on pretending as long as they had to that everything was all right. He knew that much and wished he didn’t.
“Sweet dreams,” he said. “Tomorrow we’ll get back on an even keel.” He rolled away from her. Stiff on his back, he covered his eyes with his forearm. “Sorry,” he said presently. You shoulda listened to me, stupid Brother Fulker said. You shouldn’t think you could let that Colonel take Ready-Evachukky home and get out of it scot-free. She spotted what was wrong with you. You go down there and catch a sociable disease and bring it home to your wife. You should always have lissuna me.
Mandy Tabor died, leaving her skin empty as a snakeskin on the table between him and Jaeger. The truth was (as he saw it now in ghastly, convalescent clarity) that he had been in a state of hallucination since the day of that emergency in the operating room. Of course, according to all the laws of probability, Mandy had died. He had simply refused to recognize it until now. He had had that fuss with David Lloyd and gone to Caracas with the delusion that he had saved her. Dave had simply been too much the gentleman to tell him the truth bluntly, but when the dice fell eight instead of nine, he should have understood that meant Dave had already scored with her in the alley and Vendham Smothers had heard all about it on his silly transistor radio with the earplug. Everyone knew but Ben.
He could not go on refusing to admit that people were dead, no matter if the happiness of Aunt Peg and Leslie and all the others who counted on him depended on sustaining the lie. He had to wake up to the truth so he could lie more consistently to others. Tomorrow he would make up a new set of lies. He would recommend religious consolation to the Tabors. He would send some very old, dried-up flowers to the Kirkland family in Kansas. He would take a pair of surgical scissors (or lawn shears) and cut the cord to the earplug on Smothers’ radio. He would forgive Leslie her romp with David. Then.…
Mabye they would all let him rest.
“You’re tired,” Leslie said huskily, out of the pitch-dark.
“No. Yes. Very.”
“It was unforgivable of me not to realize how tired you were. I wanted you, lover. Selfish toujours. Want me to rub your back?”
“I’m all right.”
“Of course you’re all right. Of course. My man.” She began to nibble at his jawbone with tiny kisses. They felt like the mouths of many small fish, painless but alien.
“Don’t,” he said, managing a bit of a laugh. “Whatever you feel, it only tickles me. I don’t need a back rub.”
He sensed that the panic which had grabbed them both was subsiding. It eased back into the darkness like some ice-cold tidal wave. They were going to be all right in spite of … the things he was not yet ready to think about.
But then she said, “What happened?” He recalled exactly the moment of discovery when the cacophony of thought had made him impotent. Recalled and would not have spoken of it aloud if she had not trespassed on his vulnerability by saying, “Too much Teresa in her bikini?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Leslie.” He took a very deep breath. “Why, may I please be told, are you wearing a diaphragm? I didn’t know you had one any more.”
“Was that it?”
“It was more than a faint surprise.…”
Now it was her turn to withdraw into silence. He heard the rhythm of her breath begin to accelerate before she said, “All right, so I married a goddamn doctor. I wasn’t quite expecting a goddamn vaginal examination, you know.”
“Sorry,” he said. A pause. “Let’s not talk about it tonight. O.K.?”
She didn’t answer. He was trying to fight down his anger, calling it childish, then finding it compounded just because it was childish, because, by some combination of personalities and circumstance, he had just now been reduced to being a child again, mad as when he pulled the brake lever and let the something run over something; they could not do this to him. Too damn bad, he thought with perfect clarity, the thought absolutely disconnected from what preceded and what followed it, that Billy Kirkland is dead. Is not here to kill again.
“Doctor?” he asked with helpless sarcasm. “Anyone with a finger, my dear, would have noticed.”
“Not everyone uses fingers,” she said, her spite tuned to his.
“Well,” he said. “Well, I guess … I guess … I guess they don’t.” He sat up, struggling to silence himself, struggling to find the eye of the needle through which he might escape this unbearable room.
“I really … am tired, hon.” He gathered up his pillow and the bedspread in his arms and left the room. He heard her sit upright as though to speak to him before he left, but she said nothing.
He lay with his teeth clenched, telling himself over and over again that he was sorry—terribly sorry—that Billy Kirkland was dead. That appeasement seemed a necessary preparation for all the processes of order he must apply to his thoughts. One of the difficulties he had in this phase of the incoherent night was in trying to keep Billy distinctly separated from the little colored boy who had died with his brain full of lead.
But then he began to get used to the living room couch, just as on the last several nights he had got used to hotel beds, and, without having thought of Leslie again (that he dared not think of tonight), he began to review his talk with Maureen about Sandra Peterson. Maureen was convinced that the child’s palpitations were functional and she wanted to get her to a psychiatrist. “If you get an electrocardiogram, you’ll never convince her parents, never, that the trouble isn’t organic, Ben. What have you got against psychiatry these days?” And he was replying—as he had not replied this afternoon in the actual conversation with Maureen—“It leaves too many things out of account.” He was on the verge of saying, It leaves God’s will out of account, but he omitted that—and at the same time knew that tomorrow he was going to do as Maureen recommended and that it would be against his best judgment. All right. Better men than he had used a crutch when they needed it. The important thing was to know when you needed one.
He thought he had managed sleep (he was not sure; his mind was still active) when he saw a light in the room and Leslie was standing close to the couch.
“Can you forgive me?” she said pitifully. “Can you ever?”
“What for?”
“For what I’ve done to you.”
“You didn’t do anything to me. I’m nervy. Edgy. That’s all. It really appears that I’ve lost some of my detachment about my patients. I’ve been thinking about Sandra Peterson. Really, I worried more about those kids while I was gone than I do when I’m here.”
“I don’t want to mess you up,” she said. She knelt beside him and with infinite, humble delicacy reached out to touch his cheek. Tentatively, waiting to see if he would accept it, she smiled at him.
“You’re my God,” she said. “Everything I do is for you. Do you understand that, Ben? I’m not a self any more. I just pray that I can keep myself straightened up so I’ll be all right for you.”
He was uneasy with suspicion of her tenderness. He said, “I love you. You love me.”
“I took the thing out,” she said. “Ben, please. Please!”
Now she crowded onto the couch beside him. “God,” she said, “Oh God, you excite me. I didn’t know men could be like you.”
When they had failed again, she said, “Was it the light? Would it have been all right if I had turned it off? I wanted it so much. I thought if we were quick—”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think we need rest.”
“Will you come back to
bed with me?”
“Oh yes. Yes, may I?”
“Please,” she said. With their arms around each other’s waist they went back to their right places in the bed.
“Sleepy?” she asked. “Want to talk? I’d like to talk a little bit if you don’t mind. You don’t want a beer, do you? May I have one? But if we talk, you won’t be in any shape for tomorrow.”
He promised gently that he would be all right, would take a speedball if necessary.
So she began, with wonderful and for him unslackened, hypnotic charm, to tell him about many secret things that had begun to clear in her mind while he was gone. She told him about the “fat girl” and how, on that day she was sure he remembered in her apartment on Grove Street, she’d almost literally had a vision of the fat girl lying disgustingly in his arms. She thought the fright she had taken then had always blocked her. It had made her sex less than it rightfully should have been and—who knew?—it might have something to do with the bad mystery of why she couldn’t get pregnant. She told him about the cop who had “hurt her,” and who had driven away all the childish fantasy about the fat girl—or more likely had driven it into a deeper level of her unconscious where it did more harm than ever.
“Only I’m over that now,” she said mournfully. “I don’t know what got me over it unless it was Dolores’ death. I guess your being so far away had something to do with it, too. Maybe. Psyches are such queer things. The important, funny thing is that I feel just now ready to be your wife. I guess that’s why I was so … shy … with you all day. As if this were the beginning of something. You remember little Pie Sundberg with his two kids and his squeaky line ‘I’m not old enough to be a father.’ Well, maybe you didn’t know him. I feel like that. That I’m old enough now. Want to marry me, sport? This is the last time I’ll propose.”
“Yeah,” Ben said. “I’ll marry you.”
So she told him a “funny thing.” The funny thing that she had never had the courage to confess to him until this crucial, promising present was about her coming. Before they were married she’d been able to come sometimes and sometimes she hadn’t. Somtimes “fairly big” and sometimes “hardly anything at all; barely; outside.” But the times she had come were always the “impossible” or the “disgusting” times when she was most ashamed of what she was doing.
“You knew about Claude? About me and Claude Peepers?” she asked.
“No.”
“I should have told you. I want to tell you. Yes, it’s true. I had an affair with him. Just gruesome. Why, Maggie was in the hospital delivering young Martin. We went to his house. It was hideous.”
“But it was good.”
“Well … well, yes. I suppose women are supposed to come. It says so in the books. Yes. I think the reason is just that it was so revolting to everything I believed was right. Then … do you want to hear this?”
“Yes.”
“But it’s so late. Anyway, I guess that wasn’t the worst. With some men, not always, once or twice, I’d not only not love them but I’d have all these dirty fantasies while I was doing it.”
“And that worked for you?”
“Yes. Well, it worked. I suppose when you feel a tickle in your nose you want to sneeze. And that’s the way it was. I’d feel so soiled afterward. So the only time you made me do it, I didn’t like it. I didn’t want things to be that way between us. I love you. I’ve always loved you so much. I thought those dirty fantasies would come back if I—”
“Came?”
“Yes.”
“So you never have,” he said. His voice was level enough. Level with the stone foundations of some imaginary, soundless dungeon in a dark valley. The fact seemed sufficient unto itself, to require neither comment nor amplification. Like the fact of nothing. What was to say about it?
“No. Yes.” Between the no and the yes, what note of panic uncertainty? Some glint of hope like a faraway candle in the waste? Pure hopeless lie? “Women aren’t like men,” she said impatiently. “It’s hard to say.”
“Yes or no aren’t hard to say.”
“It’s always been good with you,” she said gamely.
“You should have told me.”
“There was nothing to tell. It was good. I didn’t—don’t—have any complaints. What I’m trying to lead up to is this: Do you remember how ghastly stubborn I always was about psychiatry and the terms and all? Well, wasn’t I just afraid that someone would take my nasty little secret away from me and force me to be a woman and not a child?”
“Maybe.”
“Damn right. Well, I know that now. I really think I know. I mean it when I say I want to marry you. Be your woman. Hank called on Sunday—oh, you’re supposed to call Mother and tell her she’s not dying; I’ll explain later—and began to tell me why he wouldn’t have analysis. And there’s something wrong with every damn member of my family. I saw it then. I was ready to see that, finally. To admit it. And I do want, now, to welcome your mind. All of you. I want you to know things about me. Like, of course, my wearing a girdle to meet you at the plane was the same sort of symbol as putting that damn diaphragm in tonight. I’m not going to fight you ever again when you point out things like that.”
“I didn’t …” he said. Then it seemed to him that whatever she was babbling, and whether he believed her or not—or believed already that she was throwing a red herring in her panic that he would find out what she was not willing to tell—it seemed that he heard a note of longing in her voice that would, if it had to, take the place of hope.
He heard it thrilling and far off, like a morning bird in the trees of their lawn. It seemed to him that it was the only thing that counted.
“Everything will be all right,” he said.
“If we make it be. I don’t want to deny anything,” she said. “I can do anything. Do you understand? I can do anything. I’ve got some glimpse of how strong I am.”
As if cheered on by her own shout, she turned to him for the third time that night. In sheer desperation she carried him with her, clawing him frantically onto her, into her, ignoring everything but the sheer ceremony of bringing him to orgasm.
There was a touch of dawn in the sky before they succeeded. And if the success was pitiful and botched, at least afterward both of them could sleep.
He knew—perhaps at the instant he found her prepared against conception—that she had slept with another man while he was in South America. But there was a long pilgrimage from that knowledge to the time when he was ready to let her know he had her secret. Why should he let her know he knew how, in her confession, she had been lying—since he had heard beyond any mistaking the note of hope and love for him that had probably dictated the lie itself? If she had slept with someone else and had got a damn good scare from it and was cured of her wanderlust—was that not all the better? Like deliberately exposing a child to an epidemic disease. Henceforward, would she not be immune? Wasn’t that exactly what she was trying to tell him in her dishonest confession (dishonest for his sake, perhaps, more than hers)—that she felt herself immune? More to the point, was it not a tacit promise not to repeat her straying?
Thus the diagnostician reasons, not too brilliantly—neither requiring nor possessing nor in this case wanting the immediate certainty of the clairvoyant, rather making reason and logic into the brake that slows the deadly pace of intuition. He reasons thus while he clings to the precautions of methodology that he has earned with so much effort. (“Tomorrow we can see it all more clearly, Mother. If young Dick is still not taking nourishment in the morning, then we’ll see.…”)
The weeks went on evenly. The summer was indivisible after all. There was no before and after. Before Ben went to Caracas they had been in trouble. They had tried to voice their trouble when he came back. They had twisted in their chains, rattled them, then stopped rattling.
Disaster was shown up to be only a game—one of Leslie’s games which, after all, Ben had cautioned himself not to confuse with reality. Reality was t
he continuity of their lives in which they bought, consumed, admired, exploited, despised, endured—the seamless continuity of citizenship in which they swam like fish in a tank, a fluid medium that swept away the waste of their quarrels at the same pace as it took their pleasure. They went on as before because they could, because it was, finally, easier, than not to do so. If something was lacking, they didn’t notice it—much.
Nor even often. They lived like picnickers, very little disturbed by ants in the salad, a little dirt on the jelly sandwiches. There was more to be gained by ignoring it than by noticing. Ben, when he once characterized himself as a fraternity boy who thought that the good he performed as a doctor was sufficient, had at least characterized the conditioning of a major part of his life.
Neither dreams nor guilt could prevail against the conditional health of indifference. If they had played house by their own rules, no one forbade them to go on playing.
In late July Leslie worked consistently on promotion for Frontierland at the Studio. She was rewarded with a fistful of tickets when the new attraction opened alongside the old amusement park. Most of these tickets went to Ben’s patients. They were a greater success than the harmonicas, especially with the four-to-nine age group.
One night Ben and Leslie went with the Lazios and their children. They found pretty much what they expected. Frontierland was a bore. The frontiersmen were plaintly recruited from the Salvation Army and their buckskin clothes looked newer than plastic. Leslie said that if the Sardis Alcoholics Anonymous had blown a whistle to call its membership, the whole surly tribe of Indians would have gathered in one of the tepees to testify. The hourly attack on the fort was noisy all right. The staged gunfight in a Western street splashed a lot of powder smoke on the night air. But there was nothing for kids to do except watch. They might as well have been home in front of TV.
In comparison, Leslie thought, the amusement park next to Frontierland had a positively robust air of tradition. Ferris wheels, motordomes, shooting galleries, stands where you could buy cotton candy, a roller coaster, and a Sky-Dip did more to recreate a sense of the past than all the exploding muskets and six-guns of Frontierland.
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