by Alfred Hayes
“What did he say to you?”
“Who?”
“At the door.”
“Oh?” She glanced at me. “He asked me to dance.”
“Would you like to?”
“Of course not.”
Nevertheless, I remember thinking: what had he seen that, apparently, I could not see?
11
I DROVE her home. She called: kitty, kitty, kitty. The cat came bounding out of the geranium bushes. It purred, glad to see her, its tail high. “What have you been doing?” she said to the cat. We stood there a moment, in the darkness. “Would you like to come in?” she asked, the keyring in her hand. I thought not; it was rather late. We shook hands.
“I’ll call you again.”
“If you like.”
She went into the house, with the cat, and I walked back to the car, and drove home. I doubted that I’d see her again; it was that atmosphere of negation she moved in; it clung to me all the way home. I wondered what the illness was she’d spoken of. I supposed it had something to do with her going to the doctor. It must have been, I thought, an illness of a special kind: it seemed to me only that could have driven her to consult a doctor of the sort Ritter was. Then I shrugged. It didn’t really concern me, and the sympathy I felt was limited. I was quite sure that I wouldn’t call her again. What I’d forgotten was that I knew very few girls in town, and that I was, after all, quite lonely too.
12
WE WERE sitting in the car when the earth shook. It was a gentle shaking: that of a sleeper turning over, a sigh from a vast lung. I turned, thinking something had shaken the car. But there wasn’t anybody or anything on the dark road in the canyon. I had been kissing her in the car. Now the dogs began to bark. They’d been disturbed, too, by the unexpected movement of what was not supposed to move. I’d kissed her. It had been a tentative exploratory kiss and I’d half expected it to be refused; but she’d allowed it, closing her eyes, dropping her head upon my arm, and then the earth shook in that mild, unhappy way as though turning over, or as though suddenly cold, and all the dogs had barked. It had interrupted the kiss. She seemed not to have noticed the slight trembling of the ground. She did not seem startled by the dogs. Possibly she had expected more than the initial kiss, possibly she was waiting for the vague advance of my hands or the descent of my mouth to her throat, pale and so near, and I had disappointed her. It was odd, the earth moving then at that moment. It was strangely disturbing, and changed the familiar gesture, made so often before: the descent toward a girl’s mouth: but the earth moving had given the kiss a somewhat ominous quality. In the morning it was in all the papers: the earthquake.
13
ONE NIGHT (this was after I had kissed her in the car) she said, abruptly: “How long have you been married?”
I hesitated. It was a familiar hesitation. How often, in the past, had I paused, confronting that question? I’d lied before, when it was expeditious to lie; I thought now (since I wasn’t conscious of any great desire for her: it was odd, this only mild sexual attraction, for she was undoubtedly pretty) that the issue wasn’t important enough to require lying: besides, I felt I was tired enough of the past to tell the rather dismal, self-diminishing truth now. “Why do you ask?” I said to her.
“I wondered.”
“Fifteen years,” I said deliberately.
It had a sound like a weight falling. It struck the scene between us with an uncalculated heaviness; everything sagged a little. “No,” she said, disbelievingly. “It’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“Fifteen years!” She seemed to flicker: evidently it struck her as an immense time. “I was eleven years old and you were already married.” A great distance opened between us. “I can’t believe it.”
“Does it sound that large a time?”
“For you.”
“Why?”
“I’d have sworn it was three or four or possibly five years. How old is your little girl? It is a little girl, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“How old is she?”
“Eight.”
“She was born when I was seventeen. My God. You are married, aren’t you?” she said, giving it an emphasis I didn’t much like.
“I seem to be.”
“Funny. You don’t look like a person who’d be married fifteen years. You don’t look like a person who’d be anything very long.”
I’d been twenty-two. It seemed an historically remote time. There had been the bad years, and the bad things done during those years. We’d come at last to something that resembled a truce. It may have been only a mutual exhaustion; it may have been only that I had more money now. I thought of the years. Where had they gone? The calendar showed its bleak discarded pages. Had something been wasted which a little courage, some determination, and a mutual honesty might have prevented being wasted? A wave of some obscure hopelessness, of an obscure shame, swept over me. But perhaps I was wrong: my wife insisted I was wrong: what I had might, unknown to myself, be after all good. The life I had might possibly be the best of the lives I could have or which were allowable to me. Did I feel somewhere cheated? I was old enough to know we all felt somewhere cheated. Did I seem shrunken to myself? It was a common sensation among my friends.
I wanted suddenly not to be with this girl, here at my side. An echo of the old misery came back. She had set it off: she had ignited it again. I resented anyone who did.
Besides, out there, where my dissatisfaction pointed, there was nothing out there. I had been a little way out, and there was nothing out there. A little colder, a little lonelier: at least, here, together, even unhappily together, there was a semblance of warmth, there was a kind of light, there was a habitation of a sort.
“One always feels a little too young to be married, doesn’t one?” I said.
“No. It seems to me nice to be married young.”
“Have you been?”
(Because I hadn’t asked.)
“No,” she said.
“Perhaps that’s why it seems nice.”
I suppose it was all there in my voice—the mixed, the contradictory emotions which I so carefully tried to keep under control. Now I found myself resentful of the fact that I’d talked about them at all. Besides, she’d heard it before: I was sure she’d heard it all before. Possibly in a scene that was a close duplicate of this: the car parked in the hills, and two cigarettes, and the town below looking as hell might with a good electrician. What had he said, the married man she’d known? Had the excuse been that he was attending a class in Spanish twice a week, or had there been meetings, financially inescapable, with a producer whose habits required script conferences at night?
She flushed, angrily. “I never asked,” she said. “And I didn’t care.”
But she knew it all: the lies, the hasty appointments, the inevitable tears; one adultery was like another. A bitter note had intruded itself, despite all my efforts, into my voice. I’d always found it impossible to tell the truth about my marriage. I exaggerated, and I wanted to avoid exaggeration; everything emerged, somehow, falsified. I knew that what I said wasn’t quite the way I said it was. There were justifications omitted, and motives left out. When I was bitter, later the bitterness sounded false. It was only something I had said because the girl was pretty. In the car, now, she seemed to withdraw; and that, too, annoyed me, as though a relationship had been subtly established where I did not want any relationship to exist. I anxiously tried to dismiss the subject. It was depressing to talk about a marriage I no longer understood, a marriage in which I was a partner because of a necessity fifteen years younger than I was now, a marriage to which I apparently clung for reasons I could not understand, a marriage which, because of something deeply buried in me, seemed unbreakable. Did she think of it, as I spoke, as unbreakable? Was the unbreakableness in my voice, my simplest gesture, my most guarded look? I’d shrunk in the telling; I felt smaller, oddly depleted; yet obstinately I detested her now for having question
ed me, and detested myself for having even partially answered. Didn’t she know, with that experience I was sure she had, that there were no answers? There were only elaborate explanations, always, with the years, growing more elaborate, and bringing with them increasingly elaborate questions. She’d been in love with a married man; surely she knew that. She said, in that muted voice: “It isn’t necessary, though, is it—for a marriage to be like that?”
She meant that crushing.
“I suppose not,” I said.
She seemed to struggle against the idea. Wasn’t it possible for marriage to be a rich, a rewarding experience? I loved the child, didn’t I?
Yes: that I could answer truthfully. That much was unquestioned.
And once, years ago, I’d loved my wife too, hadn’t I? Because there must have been a time when we were in love for the marriage to have taken place. And if that were so, if I had, once, at the beginning, for the first few years, loved her, why was it inevitable that the love should seem to wither as it did, why should the time come when, as now, in a car, above a town like this, my voice should have in it that note of hopelessness, why should I seem to be caught in this net from which there was no escape?
I hadn’t said I felt there was no escape.
“No,” she said, “that’s not true. It’s what you feel. You feel hopeless.” And how could I go on if I felt there was no hope? Because there had to be, didn’t there, a hope of some sort, an expectation of a kind?
Which I thought odd, coming from her. She’d been the hopeless, the despairing one. She’d been the one who’d tried the Pacific.
I said: “If I explained, you wouldn’t understand.”
“Why wouldn’t I? She’s intelligent, isn’t she, your wife?”
“Yes.”
“She was with you when you didn’t have any money and she never complained, did she?”
“No,” I said wearily, “she never complained. She’s what you say: intelligent, decent, self-sacrificing.”
“Then why can’t you explain?”
“Because it would sound ugly.”
“What would?”
I looked at her. I didn’t really care now about concealing it. “I don’t like any more to go to bed with her. I can’t touch her.”
Below, the lights guttered. Did she know what it was for a man to come to that point in his life when he found it impossible to touch the body of his own wife? To look at it; and to feel nothing. Not to desire it, at all, when the flesh was inert and dead and meaningless? To have the act of love become (with one’s own wife) the most meaningless of all acts?
She said, finally: “Is it so important?” She had averted her head a little.
I didn’t answer. It struck me as a stupid question: the importance seemed self-evident. “Aren’t there things between a husband and a wife that are more important than that?”
“What? The gas bills?”
“A life together.”
“When there’s a woman in the house you don’t desire, she might as well be the maid.”
She paused. Then she said, in a small burst that wasn’t quite anger: “Perhaps it’s difficult for your wife!”
“Difficult?”
I thought it the least difficult of acts.
Because I was a man. A man would think that. He’d see no reason why for a woman it might not be like that at all. Wasn’t there something stupid in the lying down on one’s back? O not that she thought it stupid for everyone. Some women had no difficulty about it at all, and she supposed even enjoyed it. She rather envied them. Yes, she did, really, she really envied them. But think about it: wasn’t it, after all, a little abject, a little ridiculous and abject?
No, I said: some women found it a triumphal position.
Did they? She supposed so. She looked suddenly tired. It was no concern of hers, anyway; and she wasn’t that much interested in my wife. It was my problem.
Yes, I said, with a grimace: it was.
“Will you take me home?” she said. “Please.”
Neither of us (I resentful for having talked of it at all, and she thinking whatever it was she thought) said anything in the car as I drove down the hill. She said good night as though she were saying good-by. I didn’t kiss her at the door.
14
SHE HAD been ill, and I was curious about the illness. She had referred to it several times, somewhat darkly; and then one night, when I’d made dinner and we were in the small room that had the bullfight posters in it and the bar, and she seemed somewhat relaxed, she told me what the illness had been.
She couldn’t really tell when the phantasy had begun. It all started during that time when, having no money at all, and living in that dark incredible place she had lived in in Santa Monica before she had found the flat she had now and being hungry so much of the time and waiting at the telephone so long for her agent or a man or just anybody to call saying there was a job or an appointment or even simply a date for dinner, and having, too, suddenly, those dizzy spells, existing so much in a silence that opening the icebox or the springs of the bed when she lay on it sounded abnormally loud, having now and then palpitations of the heart (for she thought they were palpitations, feeling often as though her heart were dangerously enlarged and its beat quickened and its sound almost audible), she began constructing for herself what later she knew to be a phantasy but which wasn’t, at least then, a phantasy. She would save whatever money she could and when she had enough she’d buy a pint if she could or if she couldn’t afford that a half pint of gin and she’d come home and nurse the bottle of vermouth which she’d had now for months and mix herself the martinis and put the automatic changer of the victrola on and sit on the floor in front of it and play those records which I discovered she always played when she was drunk enough. She had the cat and the light turned low and the martini on the floor and an ashtray close by and she’d play and drink until somewhere about three or four in the morning when she had drunk enough she carefully took the cat and got into bed with the cat there in her arms the only thing she could endure, murmuring and talking to the cat, and so she’d fall asleep, drugged, heavy, saturated with the music and cigarettes and the gin, and sleep like that, a dead sleep, with the curtains drawn and the room full of smoke, until two or three in the afternoon. It was during this time that she put together that dream which explained everything so perfectly, that accounted for all her difficulties, that made it possible to wait endlessly for the phone to ring. It was, she said, only that which kept her from picking somebody up on the streets and taking him home and making him pay, for she would have, she had gotten to the point where it was only the next brutal step to sitting up prim at a bar and waiting for someone to smile and offer her the drink and say hello. It was because she had this other thing that made it possible for her not to do that.
She found one day in a dish of stewed prunes a tiny sliver of glass. She was eating in a cafeteria. She could feel the hard foreign edge of the sliver in her mouth. She was suddenly quite sure that the sliver of glass had been put deliberately into the dish of prunes. She was utterly convinced at the moment that someone was trying to kill her. It was the only possible explanation. There was an enemy here, in the cafeteria. One of the waitresses most likely. She was sure of it. She would have eaten the glass and she would have died. It was what they wanted. She was dizzy, frightened, abandoned, surrounded by people who hated her. By people who did not wish her to succeed. By people conspiring against her. That waitress, with the sly vindictive eyes; that busboy, plotting.
She was quite sure that they were people (the busboy, the vindictive waitress) who were employed by certain powers at the studios. She was utterly convinced, as though it were a knowledge she had always had, that they (the busboy, the waitress) were agents of those people at the studios and that each week they sent in reports and that the reports were filed away. They were being kept in a large steel vault in a box like a safety-deposit box and the box had her name on it. She knew now why she was followed
on the streets. She was being followed by men the Studio had hired to observe her, and after a while she felt she could pick out which of the apparently innocent pedestrians were the ones detailed to keep her under observation. She was almost positive that the men who approached her at a bar, and smiled at her, and offered to buy her a drink, were men acting under orders to see whether or not she could fulfill the morality clauses in an official and legal contract. The Studio, obviously, did not want girls of a dubious reputation. They wanted girls of good character and, while this was in contradiction to the fact that they also wanted girls for whom all the men wanted to buy drinks, she understood that this was in a way a complex test. It seemed to her she was being made to endure every possible sort of test. When for example her dentist seemed unduly cruel and she suffered a great deal of pain in the dental chair, it was only because they wished to see how far they could inflict on her the rigors and the pain and the privation which went with so difficult an accomplishment as being an actress. She would, if they were on location, and the film was a jungle film, or a particularly realistic Western, where she would be called on to ride or scale a cliff or to be injured by the heavy’s spur, have to be ready to endure pain at least equal to what the dentist, who was surely in their employ since they preferred professional men, was now, with the whirring drill, seemingly so callously inflicting. She began, too, during this period which followed the end of her affair with the married man, to walk with extraordinary care. She had to go very carefully across floors or over lawns because the world was so delicately balanced and because life was everywhere and her foot coming down might injure something, not necessarily an insect, but grass and wood too, for everything was vulnerable to pain and destruction. She did not know how frightfully thin she had become, how luxuriously black her eyes seemed to people who met her and how odd, and diffident, her sentences were, and how they broke off and trailed and were left incomplete. She trembled a great deal, as though cold or afraid; she cried, suddenly and noiselessly, and the tears would fall and she would not wipe them away. She’d cry paralytically, sitting rigid in a chair or walking the street or in a market, cry without knowing she was crying, and not touch her eyes, but continue walking or continue sitting or continue shopping. She explained it all later to Dr. Ritter, and he nodded solemnly that large misshapen heavy head of his, as though yes of course he understood and that was of course how it had been.