by Irwin Shaw
What she should have done when Oliver sent Jeff out of the room and accused her, was to get up and say, “Please give me fifteen minutes alone. I want to arrange everything exactly, correctly, in my mind, because this is too important to rush.” Then she should have gone into her own room, by herself, and thought it all out and come back and begged for forgiveness.
Only she hadn’t done that. She had behaved instinctively, like a guilty child, in a gush and brainless female flurry of tricks, thinking only of protecting herself for the moment, no matter what losses it would mean later on. Instinctively, she thought. Well, my instincts are no damned good.
When she went back into the house, she decided, she was going to make it all up. She was going to be calm and sensible and she was going to say, “Please forget everything I said tonight. Now, this is the way it happened …”
And she would also promise never to see Jeff again. She would keep the promise, too. It would be easy—because as soon as she had seen Oliver and Jeff together, in the same room, Jeff had vanished, he had become nothing, he had become once more just a nice little boy who was hired to teach her son how to swim and to keep him out of mischief for a few weeks in the summertime.
If only Oliver hadn’t been so stubborn, she thought, with a little twinge of anger against him, if only he had taken her home with him when she’d asked him to, in July, none of this would have happened. If he hadn’t complained that night over the phone about that garage bill. Let him take some of the blame, too. Let him understand that there were consequences for him, too, in always making other people do what he wanted them to do. Let him understand that she was a human being, not a block to be pushed, a piece of material to be shaped, that her feelings were signposts, danger-signals, appeals, and were to be considered.
Maybe this was all to the good, she thought—this event—this, this accident. Maybe, she thought optimistically, this will shake our marriage into its proper final shape. Maybe from now on, the rights and privileges and decisions will be more equally divided.
She saw shadows moving across the light, behind the living-room curtains and she wondered what the two men were saying about her, who was attacking her, who defending, what judgments they were reaching about her, what revelations, criticisms, what plans for her future. Suddenly, it was intolerable to think of them alone together, debating her, exposing her, settling her. No matter what happens, she thought, it is going to happen in my presence.
She hurried across the wet grass and into the house.
When she opened the door, she saw Jeff standing there, in the middle of the room, with his phonograph under his arm, ready to leave. He looked small and defeated and unimportant, and she knew immediately that whatever Oliver had wanted from him he had got.
Oliver was standing on the other side of the room, impassive and polite.
Lucy glanced once at Jeff, then turned to Oliver. “Are you through?”
“I believe so,” Oliver said.
“Lucy …” Jeff began.
“Go ahead, Jeff,” she said. She was still holding the door open.
Miserably, looking disciplined, Jeff went out, the bulk of the phonograph under his arm making him walk awkwardly.
Oliver watched him leave. Then he lit a cigarette deliberately, conscious that Lucy, standing rigidly near the door now, was following his every movement. “Quite a nice young man,” Oliver said finally. “Quite nice.”
I can’t go through with it, Lucy thought. Not tonight. Not while he’s standing there, looking amused. Not while he’s patronizing and in control. She felt herself shaking and she couldn’t remember what she had decided to do while she was out at the edge of the lake. All she knew was that she had to get through the next ten minutes somehow, anyhow.
“Well?” Lucy asked.
Oliver smiled wearily at her. “He seems … very attached to you.”
“What did he say?” Lucy demanded.
“Oh—the usual,” said Oliver. “I don’t understand you. You’re pure and delicate. It was all his fault. He’s glad it happened. It’s the greatest thing in his life. He wants to marry you. Very gallant. No surprises.”
“He’s lying,” Lucy said.
“Now, Lucy,” said Oliver. He made a tired small movement of his hand.
“He’s lying,” Lucy repeated, stubbornly. “He’s a crazy boy. He was up here last summer. I never even met him. But he followed me around, watching. Never saying a word. Just watching. All summer.” She rushed on, speaking very quickly in an attempt to overwhelm Oliver, to keep him from interrupting. “Then this summer,” she said, “he came up just because he found out I was going to be here. Then one night I did something foolish. I admit it. It was silly. I let him kiss me. And it all came out. How he was in love with me from the first minute he saw me. How he followed me. How he wrote me dozens of letters during the winter and didn’t mail them. How he couldn’t bear not to be near me. All the childish, extravagant things. I was going to call and tell you about it. But I kept thinking, if I told you you’d be worried. Or you’d make a scene. Or you’d think it was a trick on my part to get rid of him. Or you’d make fun of me for not being able to handle a boy like that myself. Or you’d say it’s just like her—always needing help and not being able to take care of herself like everybody else. I kept thinking, It’s only for six weeks, it’s only for six weeks. I kept him off. I used every trick I knew. I ridiculed him. I was bored, I was angry, I suggested other girls. But he was always there. Always saying, Eventually. But nothing happened. Nothing.”
“That isn’t his story, Lucy,” Oliver said quietly.
“No, of course not. He wants to make trouble. He told me himself. Once he even told me he was going to write you and say we were lovers so that you’d kick me out and I’d have to turn to him. What can I do to make you believe me?”
“Nothing,” Oliver said. “Because you’re a liar.”
“No,” Lucy said. “Don’t say that.”
“You’re a liar,” Oliver said. “And you disgust me.”
Her defenses overrun and all pretense suddenly abandoned, she walked blindly toward him, her arms out in front of her. “No … please, Oliver …”
“Keep away from me,” Oliver said. “That’s the worst part. The lies. The unforgivable part. After a while, maybe I could forget your summertime college boy. But the lies! Especially the lie about Tony. Good God, what were you trying to do? What kind of a woman are you?”
Lucy slumped into a chair, her head down. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said dully. “I’m so scared, Oliver. I’m so scared. I want so much to save us, both of us, our marriage.”
“God damn such marriages,” Oliver said. “Lying in his arms, laughing about me, complaining. Telling him between kisses that I was cold, I was a tyrant. With your son outside, peering through the window, because you were too eager to jump into bed to make sure the blinds were drawn properly.”
Lucy moaned. “It wasn’t like that.”
Oliver was standing over her now, raging. “Is that the marriage you’re so anxious to save?”
“I love you,” she whispered, her head still down, not looking at Oliver. “I love you.”
“Am I supposed to be melted by that?” Oliver asked. “Am I supposed to say now that it’s all right that you’ve lied to me for fifteen years and all right that you’re going to lie to me for the next fifteen? Just because, when you’ve been found out, you’re brazen enough to say you love me?”
“This is the first time,” Lucy said hopelessly. “I never lied to you before. I swear it. I don’t know what happened to me. You shouldn’t have left me alone. I begged you not to. You said you were going to come up and you never did. I told him I wasn’t going to see him again. You can ask him.”
Suddenly Oliver picked up his hat and coat and overnight bag. Frightened, Lucy looked up. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” Oliver said. “I’m getting out of here.”
Lucy stood up, pu
tting out her hand toward him. “I’ll promise anything,” she said. “I’ll do anything. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t.”
“I’m not leaving you yet,” Oliver said. “I have to get off by myself till I can decide what to do.”
“Will you call me?” Lucy asked. “Will you come back?”
Oliver took a deep breath. He sounded exhausted. “We’ll see,” he said. He went out of the cottage and a moment later Lucy heard the car start. She stood in the middle of the room, dry-eyed, drawn, listening to the sound of the engine. The door from the hallway was flung open and Tony came into the room.
“Where’s Daddy?” he asked harshly. “I heard the car. Where did he go?”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said. She put out her hand to touch Tony’s shoulder, but he pulled away and rushed onto the porch. She could hear him running down the road, his voice growing smaller and smaller, calling after his father, and the noise of the car diminishing and then vanishing in the distance.
12
FOR THE NEXT TEN days and nights, Oliver kept to himself as much as he could, spending as little time as possible in his office and avoiding all his friends. He gave the colored maid the time off, telling her that he was going to eat out, and she went down to Virginia to visit her family, leaving him alone in the house.
Each night, after coming home from the office, Oliver prepared his dinner and ate it, with austere and solitary formality, in the dining room. Then he neatly washed the dishes and went into the living room and sat in front of the fireplace until one or two o’clock in the morning, not reading, not turning on the radio, but merely sitting there, staring at the cold swept hearth until he felt tired enough to go to sleep.
He didn’t call or write Lucy. When he finally got in touch with her, he wanted to know exactly what he was going to do. All his life Oliver had come to decisions unhurriedly, after long and thoughtful examination. He wasn’t a vain man, but he wasn’t modest, either, and he believed in his intelligence and his ability to reach conclusions that would stand up to the test of events. Now he had to come to a conclusion about his wife and his son and himself and he gave himself time and solitude for the process.
The process was long and more difficult than he had imagined it would be, because instead of reasoning out the problem, he kept imagining Lucy and Jeff together, the murmur of their voices, the low laughter in the darkened room, and the intolerable gestures of love. At those moments, alone in the empty house, he was tempted to write Lucy and tell her it was all over and that he never wanted to see her again. But he didn’t write the letter. Perhaps in a week or two, the letter would be written, but it would come as a result of severe reflection, not as a result of self-torment. He had given himself this time to regain control of himself; when the control was re-established, complete, he would act.
His jealousy, if that was what it was, hit him harder than it might have hit another man, who was accustomed to being jealous. The jealous man secretly believes in his own betrayal. He is in a state of siege and is convinced that somehow, somewhere, the wall will be breached, and makes his pessimistic adjustments beforehand to cope with his defeat. Oliver had never imagined that he might be betrayed and was unprepared for it and found himself, for the first few days, disarmed and overrun.
Curiously, he thought of what other men must have done in similar situations. After all, it was a common enough phenomenon. What were the lines of Leontes?
“There have been
Or I am much deceived, cuckolds ere now, And many a man there is, even at this present,
Now, while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm,
That little thinks she has been sluiced in ’s absence …”
He didn’t remember the rest of the speech, but he remembered it was apposite. He got up and took down a big volume of Shakespeare’s plays and opened it to The Winter’s Tale and thumbed through the pages until he found the passage.
“Should all despair,” Oliver read,
“That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind
Would hang themselves. Physic for ’t, there’s none;
It is a bawdy planet.”
Oliver closed the book and put it down and chuckled, briefly. Shakespeare, for once, made it simpler than it was. A bawdy planet, the poet said, poetically, and that was explanation enough for him. After fifteen years of marriage, Oliver thought, this didn’t explain Lucy to him. He tried to clarify for himself just what he did think of his wife. Reserved, devoted, moderate, he thought, anxious to please him and win his approval. Generally obedient, he thought, grinning sourly at the echo of the wedding ceremony, given only to the lesser sins of sentimentality, inefficiency, timidity.
Necessary to him.
Ten days’ reflection, he thought grimly, and it comes down to that. Necessary.
I accepted her too lightly, he thought, as one reflects upon a friend who has died and whose value, too late, is suddenly appreciated. I wasn’t careful enough.
He thought of what it would be like with just himself and Tony in the house. Tony, with his mother’s eyes, and the same delicate cheekbones, and so many of the same gestures, roughened a little by his maleness and made cruder and a little comic by his awkwardness and adolescence. Whatever else happens, Oliver thought, I couldn’t stand that.
He tried to think of what it must be like now up at the lake, Tony and Lucy together day and night, confronting each other, after the rainy evening ten days ago. Oliver supposed that he should have taken Tony home with him, for Tony’s sake. If he hadn’t rushed around like a stabbed bull, perhaps he would have done so. Only it would have made coming to a proper decision that much harder. Well, he comforted himself, let him have a rough week or so—in the long run, we’ll all profit by my being allowed to figure this out, undisturbed.
Oliver got up to go to bed. He put out the light and went upstairs to the bedroom that he shared with Lucy. It was a big room with a bay window, looking out through the foliage of an oak tree at the quiet street below. Oliver made the bed each morning, turning it down so that it would be ready to sleep in at night. The room was neater than it ever was when Lucy was there, and it suddenly seemed artificial and unfamiliar to Oliver because of that.
Lucy had left her silver-backed toilet articles on the dressing table and the first morning that Oliver had done the housework, he had arranged all the things, the brushes, the combs and nail-files, the carved hand-mirror, in a severe geometric pattern on the glass surface. Now they seemed like articles put out for sale in the shop of a man without much imagination. Oliver went over to the table and lifted the mirror. It was heavy and the silver handle was cool and he remembered the hundreds of times he had watched Lucy, getting dressed to go out, holding the mirror up, her head twisted, to see the back of her head and make sure her hair was all right, and the small, soft indefinite movements with which she pushed strands of hair in place. He remembered the mixture of tenderness and irritated amusement with which he had regarded her, pleased with her beauty, annoyed because she was taking so much time and making them late for wherever they were going, accomplishing nothing, as far as he could tell, with the hesitant, undecided movements of her hand.
He threw the mirror down carelessly, changing the pattern on the table. Then he put out the lamp and sat for a long time in the dark on the edge of the old bed.
Reserved, devoted, moderate, he remembered. That’s what I thought. Shakespeare, no doubt, would have a different opinion. And what about her own opinion of herself? Lying next to him for so many years, plotting, resentful, mocking his estimate of her, cherishing other qualities, closing her eyes, turning secretly away from him in the same bed, the twisting, stubborn inhabitant of the bawdy planet.
If I were another kind of man, he thought wearily, sitting fully dressed on the side of the bed in the dark room, I wouldn’t stay here alone, suffering, like this. I would drink or I would find another woman or I would do both. Then, satiated and loose, I’d arrive, sidewise, and with less pain, a
t a decision. For a moment, he thought of getting into the car and driving to New York and registering in a hotel there. Women wouldn’t be hard to find in the city, and, in fact, there were one or two whom he knew who had made it plain that all he had to do was ask. But even as he turned it over in his head, he knew he wouldn’t call anyone. He doubted, even, that he could manage to take another woman. He was a passionate man; he knew he was much more avid than other men his age—but it had all been channeled into the one direction. This is a hell of a predicament, he thought, grinning malevolently to himself, for a uxorious man.
Necessary.
What a goddamn summer, he thought, and stood up and undressed in the dark and got into bed.
The next morning, there was a letter in the mail from Lucy. Oliver was just leaving the house when the postman came, and he stood at the door, in the warm, early sunshine, turning the envelope over in his hand, conscious of his neighbors setting out to work, saying good-bye to children, hurrying to catch trains and buses, moving through the greenness of trees and lawns, against a background of flowers, moving through the bright summer morning, the men already grayed over a little, Oliver thought, by the shadows of the offices and factories that were waiting for them.
Oliver didn’t open the letter immediately. He looked at the familiar inscription on the envelope—backhand, childish, not quite controlled, always a little hard to read. Where had he heard that that kind of handwriting, backhand, was evidence of repression, hypocrisy, self-consciousness? He didn’t remember it accurately. Perhaps it was another kind of handwriting and he’d mixed it up. Some day, he’d get one of those books and look it up.