“Accepted what? I didn’t say I’d done anything.”
“Oh Jesus. Darling, it’s three in the morning. Hours ago we agreed.… I put it as gently as I could. I didn’t throttle you. I—”
Now she had the signal for tears. “Does it occur to you that I’m dying? That the reason I won’t—and I won’t—discuss it with you is that there isn’t anything left of me? I’m being crucified. Damn it, I can’t stand what’s happened. I love you.”
“You can’t stand a dangling—”
“Goddamn you. Goddamn you.”
“Just stop telling yourself it’s you who made me—sweet Ben, dear Ben—talk so bad. This is me talking. Goddamn it, I’m somebody. I am yelling. I’m tired of this mealymouthed farce of a marriage where you have to give your permission before I can say anything. Fuck you. Fuck you.”
Then both of them, like actors in some delirious dream, faced each other and laughed uproariously. It was too unbearably ridiculous to go on with.
“All I want to know is for Christ’s sake who?” he said.
“Why?”
“Because you’re unwilling to tell me, I guess.”
“That means it’s important,” she assented gravely. “I guess you’re right again. Again.”
“Who?”
“I won’t tell you,” she said. “Please don’t. I can’t stand any more. Please don’t.” Hearing the timbre of her own voice then, she looked up in terror. It was as if she were in another scene, begging another man not to make a woman of her. And both of them there now recognized, however obscurely, what echo they had heard.
“Who?” he said.
“Please don’t. Please don’t ask. I’m not going to tell you.”
Neither slept that night. What sleep they got for the remainder of the week was largely the result of drugs and a painfully careful protocol of politeness they worked out with each other. They managed to see friends. They seemed—even to each other—to be unchanged from the times before, as long as they were with others. Alone together, they had no recourse left except the frigidities of politeness or the heat of quarreling.
Monstrously—both of them knew it was monstrous—they broke into the very peak and pitch of their quarrels to try the bed or couch. They talked for hours, like two ancient Viennese professors about how, the circumstances being strained, they ought not, they really shouldn’t, even come close to sexual excitements.
And fell on each other like dogs, moaning and whining and tearing each other for what they could not have.
There was no neat or dramatic terminus for that period of the summer. Only as the days went on, there seemed to be a kind of withering in the fury that flung them together and kept them apart. There were times when each could tell himself that time was healing the wound.
Ben stopped asking who had been her lover. She sometimes used the formula, “If I were sure it made no difference, of course I’d tell you. He—the man—isn’t of any importance at all. He’s no one I care about. You know that.”
“And isn’t that the pity of it.”
“It makes me pretty disgusting,” she agreed.
They thought they were getting well. They thought they were turning into zombies. Carefully they avoided talking about children—South American children, the children Leslie might bear, Ben’s patients. Any children at all.
But they found that summer that the subject matter for quarreling is limitless. With the root of their marriage cleft—or exposed as never having been more than an illusion—and not to be healed or made real by any force they could yet imagine, they sharpened their wits on each other. Talked. Endless talk about why, exactly why, precisely why, why indeed Leslie had worn her girdle to the airport. The knowledge that this was not what they meant soured them both.
Yet, as strong as anything that pulled them apart, something not yet defined seemed to find its strategems for renewing them, teasing them—if that was what it amounted to—with promises that the best might come out of this worst. Slowly and doggedly they seemed to be approaching an honesty about the past beyond anything they had thought possible or needed before. The frankness of despair turned out sometimes to be better than the evasions of complacency. The mere fact that they treated a crime like an affliction was surely, they each thought, a promise that the chief things uniting them were still intact.
Not quite miraculously they began to make love again in the hot nights. Cripples mating on crutches. The image popped into their earnest dialogue without appalling them. They were scared and fighting for their lives. Cripples, then—but there was a new tenderness and a new respect that led on to the tempting hope that two new people were emerging from a chrysalis of nastiness and suffering.
But with it all, there went the grim suspicion that to condone the cause of their strife would be to surrender themselves unconditionally. Then they would be impersonal digits in an amoral population. If what Leslie had done did not matter, then why not expect her to do the same thing again at the dictates of chance and circumstance? This prospect was more ominous to Leslie, really, than to Ben. More than he, she hungered for some formula of retribution that would dignify her lapse (as she sometimes thought it now). If scarlet letters had been in fashion, she would have worn one on every light summer dress and her bathing suit as well.
Her period was two weeks late in August. The preciousness of each day, finally each hour, was augmented by a swelling hope that she was pregnant. Secretly, almost breathlessly, she began to conceive that her adultery with Don Patch was a modern semi-demi-psychological-metaphysical equivalent of the Annunciation. (“No angel with a lily for this girl,” she growled to herself—rather thrilled, nevertheless, to think that ancient mysteries were being so coarsely disclosed to her. All the dirty jokes she had ever heard about Mary and Joseph “took on a new psychological dimension,” she thought. The child she would bear would be Ben’s, of course, but “not quite” Ben’s. Of course this line of fictional speculation was nothing she could discuss with him. It was her secret, the glory of her mania.)
She superstitiously hid from Ben the fact that she was late. At least she avoided calling his attention to it. But in a house full of charts that diagramed her menstrual cycle it was hard to suppose he had not noted. In his cell of silence he was waiting as hopefully as she.
She spent one weekend on hands and knees cleaning and waxing every floor in the house, crawling in a torpid rapture of conviction that the heaviness in her body could mean only one thing.
The stain of blood on Monday morning told her that she had lied to herself again. Everything had lied to her. Her body and its most animal promptings had been part of the deception she had taken in good faith, had been the bait for a worse disappointment than any so far. Worst of all, the blood told her she had failed Ben again. Had failed him from the very peak of her conviction that she “could do anything.” She had been to hell and back this summer, she thought, and all she had to show her husband was sore feet from the trip.
It was all so simple, she thought. She had lied about so many things, why had she never lied about the right thing before?
“Whooooo. Whooooeeee. Let me get my breath.”
Count ten, fifteen, twenty, to pretend the convulsion had really interrupted her breathing. Then stir ever so softly like the Sleeping Beauty who knows the Prince is on the premises and in just a jiffy will remember the utterly dynamic kiss he bestowed.
“Jeez,” she said, “huh-uh, no, wait. Don’t move. Too tender. Whhhoooosh! Everything changes.”
Count twenty-five, thirty, forty, fifty, to give him time to remember that last glad yelp and pitch with fingernails thrust madly in his ribs. While counting, think fondly what a dear, naïve goose he is to attach so much importance to it, anyway, as if only that could prove him a man to himself. Love him for your generosity to him. Remember how silly of Violet Snavely to interpret such fakery as the product of hate.
Give him the grand, dispassionate kiss of a French general distributing medals, to
show not only that all passion is spent, exploded, consumed, used up in the prescribed manner but that you recognize his devotion beyond the call of duty in waiting for you.
Count fifty, sixty, seventy, while you wrestle with feelings of envy a little bit sharper than the nights when there was no fakery. But hold your goddamn tongue.
Then spoil the whole charade by talking so much and so extravagantly that a fifteen-year-old sheepherder would see through the whole rotten performance. Better than anybody, ever. Like that one time I told you about, only without any black fantasies or needing to feel punished. Like the first time I did it myself only without all that icky undergraduate guilt. Did I tell you what I was singing that time in the shower when it first dawned on me I could? That Whiffenpoof song.…
Ben took it all quietly, though if she had wanted to—cared a good goddamn (at the moment she didn’t care about anybody or anything)—she could have put her finger right on the sentence when he stopped believing she had really made it with him.
So he lay pretending he was well pleased and going to sleep. But then when he thought she was asleep, he put on his light robe and pussyfooted to the kitchen. She heard the icebox door open. Heard ice tinkle. Thought, My God, was it so bad he’s got to drink to forget it?
All right. She had done her best, and he might as well hear that she was tired of being blamed for the whole problem, which, as he might remember, did not date exactly from this July. She hunted her own robe, followed him out. She mixed a drink as big as his.
She was, she said, sick of the role of guilt in which he had cast her for the whole damn summer. “I don’t feel guilty,” she said now (meaning that the intense emotions of guilt were transformed by long pain into something more like anger and rebellion). “I never felt really guilty,” she said (meaning that a curtain of forgetfulness was fixed in place and she was ready to attack any reminder from him of just how sick with guilt she had been a few weeks before).
“Other women we know have done it. We’re not the backwoods jokers we’ve been pretending to be. Let’s stop the pretense. I thought it was tacitly understood.…” (Meaning it was understood that a romp in bed was her prerogative as long as there were no consequences.)
Since he was not visibly scarred by the summer of consequences, he could only make her recognize there had been some by emphasizing what divided them. “You understood what you wanted to understand. I never understood anything of the sort.” He remembered when he had weighed the argument of tacit understanding. It seemed a long time ago. All he really wanted now was to be done forever with the overextended nightmare—which had not, thank God, totally eclipsed their lives; they still had work, friends, and good times—which had made their house and their privacy things to be avoided and fled, where once they had been the haven both returned to eagerly.
And as if she sensed his wish to forget and have done, she goaded him back by revealing parts of the truth she had kept from him in June.
Yes, “this man” had made her come. Yes, “big.” Yes, obviously that was why the experience had been so upsetting. Yes, of course her sentiment that now she was ready to be a woman and mother must have sprung from the promptings of an experience she had never had before, a confidence in her own body she had never been given.
Ben said tiredly, “I don’t care about that any more, Les. It would have blasted me apart if you’d told me in June. I think I’m grateful to you for sparing me that. I think I am. What happened one night—”
“Three nights,” she said brutally.
“—three nights, then, isn’t a reality any more. It’s another circumstance we’ve worked over and chewed up and digested until it’s part of us. There isn’t any other man, Leslie. The quarrel was always between you and me. I’ve thought it over. I’ve read this summer. Talked to people. Psychiatry. Psychology of women.”
“Done your homework,” she said with an awful feeling that he was trying to diminish her to nothing and that she must fight to prevent him.
“Yes. It’s probably all I can do for us. I don’t think who the man was or what his technique may have been had anything to do with your … satisfacton. You were wound up. You’ve been winding yourself since you were a little girl. Someone pushed the button—”
She began to laugh savagely.
“—and the spring unwound. You didn’t really need a man there.”
Even as he spoke, he felt the mere ingenuity of his explanation. It had been long and earnestly sought. It was the best his mind and observation could give him. It was nevertheless a substitute for the one piece of information she still steadfastly refused to give: who was the man? (After all, yes, he might have been some fantastic stud, such a figure as only terrors and envy can conceive, not impossibly appearing in the flesh at the right time, the time dictated by chance, to take in one cutting the harvest of virginities she had saved from all her previous bedding. Probably not, possibly yes.)
At any rate he would not ask again who, among strangers or their acquaintances, it might have been. The scar was formed. However important that withholding might have been, he would not open the wound again to probe for the secret.
He wanted out of this summer as he had once wanted out of Kansas and its itching heat. He wanted to be on a train, leaving not only a place and a circumstance to which his strength was unequal, but to leave a time—as if a time and all its contents could be sunk to the ocean’s bottom like a barge of atomic waste.
He had no more questions.
Sarah Coleman Rattner stopped with them for a three-day visit on her way to Reno for a divorce. Leslie had not seen her for nearly four years. They had parted then on less than friendly terms. What did it matter? It had occurred to Leslie that Sarah (who knew nothing of the tight web that had caught her) would be the ideal person to understand it if she knew—as Leslie hoped she never would. Sarah had a crooked mind. So she had written—no cry from the depths, but a bright matronly letter that ignored whatever cause they might once have had to quarrel.
Sarah responded by an offer to appear. How wonderful. Sarah would bring the answer to a riddle she did not even know existed.
Sarah was thin. She had spent too long living on a model’s diet after she gave up dancing. Hunger had at last taken its toll of her complexion, and the first thing Leslie noted when she met her at the train was the unevenness of her skin under its thick makeup, like a lava bed seen from a great altitude. “Oh darling,” she said and cried a little as she hugged her old friend. Whether she was crying over the ravages of acne or for her own unconfessable trouble, she could hardly tell. At any rate, once she laid eyes on the living Sarah, it was perfectly clear that no help or good counsel would come from that quarter.
Dining with Leslie and Ben at home, Sarah picked at her once lovely chin and defended Adlai Stevenson “in spite of what’s been happening at the UN.” (The past spring had seen Lumumba murdered, Cuba invaded.)
“The point is he was acting under orders,” Sarah insisted sadly. “It wasn’t his policy. Apparently he tried his best but was overruled.” She was sure that things would have been “even worse” if someone else had been Ambassador to the UN.
Who cares? Leslie thought. Once she and Sarah and all the other smart pretty girls in New York had thought that everything would start to be all right if Stevenson were President. How silly and far away that time seemed.
“We might have invaded Cuba if it weren’t for Stevenson,” Sarah said. The Danielses would not argue with that.
After dinner Leslie boiled lemon peel in a bucket of water and made Sarah drape a towel over her head and hold her face in the steam. They talked about King Street and Irene Dale.
“The man she married is making thirty-five thousand dollars a year in the greeting-card business,” Sarah said from inside her towel drapery, “and you remember the time she tried to get me to go dike.”
“I remember everything,” Leslie boasted.
“Well, yeah. Do you still want to be a writer?”
&
nbsp; “I just want to be somebody else.”
A bright, cynical eye popped through a gap in the toweling, staring up out of the steam. “Metaphysics get all of us in the end,” Sarah said thoughtfully. She told what a sonofabitch Rattner had been turned into by the passage of metaphysical time. He really had promise when she married him. “We’ve come such a long way with nothing to show,” she said. “That’s the horror of it.”
But Leslie had already decided that her misery loved no such company, and she balked Sarah’s obvious wish to complain.
They sat up late remembering names, dates, events of a life that did not seem so much to have been used up as swallowed whole, never digested, never even altered from what it had been, just there.
Leslie thought of her adultery. This too is part of the Sargasso Sea. Like everything else. Already it’s no more important than the time I stole Sarah’s bouillabaisse to feed Roger Klein. And realizing this was so made her feel cheated.
chapter 17
HE SUPPOSED, Don Patch did, that he had lucked into something pretty extraordinary when he scored with Leslie Daniels. And that he had lucked back out of it with the same surprising ease. There were times when he thought no part of it was his doing.
He remembered very well when she had first started working part time at the Studio last winter. He had thought then—the first time he saw her, the first he overheard about her from jerks like Seymour Rife and Ozzie Carter—that she was about as far beyond any hopes of his as his grade-school teachers when he first began to think about women. In fact she reminded him of that Opal Hardy who just one winter had taught third and fourth grades down home in Constable, Missouri.
Drawing pictures of spacecraft (always with seats and bunks for just two aboard, always bristling with meticulously drawn cannons and ray projectors) when he should have been studying arithmetic or reading, he had come to terms with Miss Hardy. In real life she might not like him very much (he didn’t care). In the spacecraft she wore the pink-and-purple smock which she’d worn only one spring day in the classroom (probably because the other teachers or possibly the principal had told her it wouldn’t do for work). She sat beside him while he fired the cannons and disintegrated the whole population of Constable and all the Mississippi Valley up to St. Louis, which was as far north as he had ever been, and consequently marked the boundary of the world where all the people he despised and feared seemed to live. (He had no feelings about people he had never seen; it was only those he knew who raised the great obstacles to what he wanted.) Then, while the spacecraft zoomed upward and backward, rearing into the unillumined reaches among spotlight stars, Miss Hardy opened the top of her smock. The features of her face dissolved. She began to heat up like fever. She never said a word, but she squeezed him hard. Then afterward (while the spacecraft spiraled back down toward the chalk-smelling classroom in Constable) she spanked the hell out of him, invariably lowering his overalls to do so.
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