Raw Silk (9781480463318)

by Burroway, Janet

  So I didn’t pull in. Instead I drove over the shoulder and onto the grass across from the gate, switched off and sat a minute in the moonlight. The fifteen miles had taken me over an hour; the moon had come out after a gray day, and now caught at the leaves of the dense hawthorn hedge that lined the field. Between me and the hawthorn was a grassy drainage ditch about eight feet across and six feet deep. It sloped gently into a muddy rivulet at the bottom, which took the moonlight prettily, weaving around stones and roots. I lit a cigarette and watched the water.

  I’ll smoke this cigarette, I thought, which will take about fifteen minutes. If Oliver comes to rescue me before I put it out, then we’ll discuss it. If he doesn’t, then I’ll deal with my car, which is unfit for human transportation.

  This seemed to me a very reasonable, a very ordered sort of decision, a reasonable start at putting things in order. I contemplated the angle of the ditch and visualized the slope of the mini’s side, tested my grip on the steering wheel so that my head wouldn’t hit the roof too hard. I tucked my handbag under my hip. All that was all right. I was quivering through the thighs and torso but not with fear; I knew perfectly well I was in no danger. On the contrary, I was averting danger by preparing to dispose of a death trap, clearly so designated by an expert bloke. The violence I was about to perform was a violence of statement merely; the manifestation of a manifesto I had not had ordinary verbal courage for, rather as if I should draw patterns on my hand with an X-Acto knife.

  I watched the cigarette burn down, neatly tapping the ash, bounced it out and closed the tray. Nobody was approaching. I turned the motor on and shifted into first, edged parallel with the ditch before I began the descent, then inched forward in a shallow slant. I was halfway down before she rolled, and the left tires left the bank lazily, as if sucked back by the wet grass, so that the right fender broke the fall, and the bonnet and roof did a balletic somersault, slow motion, comfortable and satisfying. I hung onto the steering wheel and felt quite weightless as I turned over, the air circulating under me. I didn’t hit my head at all. My handbag was released and slithered past me to the roof. The car rocked once and settled. The motor died. It was deliciously quiet.

  The mini was not quite upside down, and my weight was sliding sideways, looking for its natural relation to gravity; so I simply let my feet come to rest against the far door, hooked my bag on my wrist, and climbed out. I was now on the far side of the ditch, so I had to take my shoes off and wade through. I looked back at the mini, lying askew with all four tires in the air, and I rather wished I had closed the driver’s door, which stuck at an undignified angle in the air. As I thought this it began to creak, shifted and slammed to. It seemed a good omen. I went on into the house.

  I bathed at length in some expensive Swedish stuff that I hadn’t used since I began to steal my money, cut my toenails and shaved my legs, put on my gown and robe and went down to the living room to collect the Carnaby Commission’s letter. I’d forgotten about the one from my dad, which I now read, with some difficulty because the handwriting was rather bad. It said that the hydrangeas were up to the window and the bougainvillea had knitted the aerial to the port roof; and that he’d been helping Sid Beckelstein build a fence on the marina side of the court but had to stop on account of his kidneys; and that I should write him at the Long Beach hospital for the next few weeks because some dumb doctor thought he should have a lot of tests.

  I read the letter again. It seemed to me that order was occurring. I carried both letters up and put them in the drawer of the nightstand on my side of the bed, went to turn out the light on the landing, heard Oliver’s car door slam and his running steps on the back path; and waited there, lounging on the newel post.

  “Ginny?!” he yelled up over the whack of the kitchen door as it hit the plaster. “Ginny?!”

  “I’m up here.”

  He bounded up the steps to me, goggle-eyed and drop-jawed. The first thing he said was: “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  He grinned astoundingly, without a smidgen of humor in it. Like Batman’s Joker. If Oliver doesn’t want me to see him as a cartoon, he shouldn’t look so cartoonlike. The second thing he said was. “What happened to the car?”

  I said, “I scrapped it. It wasn’t safe.”

  He paused to take this in, and the third thing he said was: “What are you going to tell the police?” This turn of mind, that this should be the third thing Oliver would say, caused me a pang of pleasure. I was almost blinded by satisfaction that he should say this. I put both hands on the newel post, and I said, “I am going to tell the police that my car was irreparably unsafe, and that I rolled it in the ditch to get rid of it.”

  He stood on the landing beside me. For the first time it occurred to me that Jill didn’t necessarily have Oliver’s eyes, which I’ve always assumed she did because Oliver’s is the expressive face and Jill’s eyes are so expressive. But the fact is that the mobility of Oliver’s face is muscular. He lives a long ways behind his eyes, in fact, and it’s his mouth and jaw that emanate his mood. He had his mouth pouched slightly forward, quizzical and controlled, his teeth held an eighth inch apart and his jaw a little jutted and prepared. In his eyes there was nothing but retina and jelly. Funny how long you can mistake your own feelings toward the familiar.

  I said, “I’ve decided to accept the Carnaby Award.”

  “Good,” said Oliver, relaxing or preparing to relax.

  “At first I thought I would spend it on Frances Kean, for her hospitalization.” He stopped relaxing. He tensed again, in that one specific area of mouth and jaw. “But I’ve decided against that.”

  “Good,” said Oliver.

  “I think there comes a point when you have to be realistic about things, and the fact is that Frances is committed. There’s no way I can salvage that. I think I have to look to the things that can be salvaged, don’t you agree?”

  “You’ll be able to get a new car,” Oliver suggested.

  “I don’t think so. I’m going to California on the prize money. I’m taking Jill. My father’s in the hospital for tests.”

  “We’ll have to give that some thought,” said Oliver.

  I caressed the newel post. “No, it’s had thought enough. I’m going to send for Jill tomorrow. We’ll go to California. My father’s ill.”

  Oliver’s patience snapped, as Oliver’s patience is apt to do. He made a batting gesture with his hand and a short explosion with his mouth. “You haven’t seen your father for ten years.”

  “Twelve. So it’s about time I saw him, isn’t it?”

  “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

  “I’ll buy the tickets in the morning.”

  “We’ll give it some thought.”

  “No, we won’t.”

  “You don’t even love your father!”

  Then I raised my hands to hit him, but I don’t know why. It never entered my head to hit him. If there’s anything I’ve learned in the interim since the incident of the ashtray, it is that a woman should never hit a man, because when every other form of communication breaks down and the rough stuff starts, she’s lost already. A woman is always for detente in the battle of the sexes because she has inferior arms. That’s what “the frail sex” means; that’s really la différence; that’s the source of passive aggression, of cunning, cajolery, simpering and submission. I never meant to hit him, I think it was the sheer irrelevance of his saying that I didn’t love my father, a subject that might engender considerable interest in me under other circumstances. But not these. My hands left the newel post and clenched in the air at the base of his throat; he picked up one fist and flung it while he slammed my shoulder with the knuckles of his other hand. My shoulder hurt at once. I didn’t feel my ear strike the newel post at all, but everything shot luminous down the banister and I saw the stairs come at me in detail. I saw my bare foot with the fresh-cut toenails kick out under my fluted hem and it occurred to me that I was about to lose�
�as I threw the fingers on the end of the hurt arm out into the empty space it seemed evident that I was losing—as the oak grain flew into focus gnarled and waxy on the tread and splintered where it met the rise I understood pretty well that I had lost, my balance.

  I have put the teacup and the hydrangeas aside; I have nothing really to do but sit and watch the drizzle in the scarred ditch. Dr. Rockforth will not let me go to California to my father’s funeral. I may not even go to London to accept the Carnaby Award, which Oliver will do in my stead. I have no responsibility but to sit absolutely still, and wait till the illusion passes that the window is wobbling and the bed is somehow adrift.

  Bolt

  18

  WE ARE HEADING WEST over Siberia now, with a little turbulence. The big-boned Aeroflot hostess with the screwed-up topknot, which reminds me of the way Mr. Wrain wraps onion tops for the Eastley Flower Show, has just told me to fasten my safety belt.

  “Remain seated, please.” It is not a request.

  The other one, the squat one with the black bobby pins in her blond bob, is bringing brunch—thick-skinned spiced sausage, rich black bread, shirred eggs and caviar. And a quarter bottle of vodka for a shilling, if I want it, which I probably do. The two of them are thumping their heels down on the carpet, balancing cups against their turbulent bosoms, squaring their square gray shoulders at us one after the other, serving trays as if they were subpoenas. For a moment I suspect they are American spies who have set out to confirm the European clichés of Russian womanhood.

  Siberia, on the other hand, surprises me. It strikes me as rather fecund and inviting from this perspective, at this height. The stubbled plains are like a brackish sea, and for color and texture it could be some churning body of water, if it were not for the lakes that break its surface and the rivers that warp through it in lines of fantastic convolution, like the scrollwork on a Pope’s lappet. Not like a snake; snakes are neither so tortuous nor so serene. There is a lot of Siberia, and as a woman headed back to take possession of her four English acres, I find this a significant expiation. There is, after all, land left.

  We had breakfast just out of Tokyo, where it was morning, and now we are having brunch over the eastern plains of Siberia, where it is morning, and we will have lunch before we land in Moscow, where it will be morning some seven hours after takeoff; and this has led the passengers, mainly British and Japanese, to speculate on jet lag and the peculiarities of time. It occurs to me that I may have been suffering from jet lag for some years; ever since I left California my life has been running half a day or more out of sync.

  Also, it is two years since Tyler Peer was posted to Osaka. That time seemed to pass very slowly but is telescoped by its monotony into the few events that broke it: Tyler’s going, Nicholson’s going, Malcolm’s going, and my own. It is less than six weeks since I took off with Jill for Japan, ostensibly to study the organization of the Utagawa design staff in Kyoto, which however I neglected to do. It seems longer, but I can’t say how the six weeks passed. Most of the time too much was happening to notice that time passed, and when it was not I was too ill to notice anything but time passing, thirty disconnected seconds at a time. I must mean mentally ill, though I felt seasick. I had hemorrhoids and trench mouth and some kind of cramp in the glands. Once I made an excuse for not visiting Frances on the ground of the demands on my time. “I have demands on my time,” she replied, half reproachfully and, I suspect, half arrogantly, “but they don’t schedule. I can’t say: on Tuesday I will be shaking from two to four and vomiting from six to nine.”

  It was the new managing director, Simon Cunliffe, who suggested the Kyoto trip to me. Nicholson would never have done so; Nicholson is gauche but not a prick. Nicholson would have seen the blow it would be to Oliver’s pride, and would have weighed the elements and alternatives differently. In fact it was when the residue of ill feeling between Nicholson and Oliver failed to subside that Nicholson opted for early retirement, and for that reason. For that reason Simon Cunliffe was brought in from East Riding to be the new director. Oliver was not made director for the reason that he had not mended his fences. He will never mend them. Oliver is no longer upwardly mobile or mobile in any respect except in the muscles of his jaw and eyebrows, which continue to do office. The pattern of Oliver’s life is set, and if there turns out to be some slack and play still in mine, the more reason that I should move carefully in the precarious pretense that this is not the case.

  After the Utagawa merger Oliver and I found coexistence on—the phrase that comes to mind is “a new level,” but it was not new. There had been the possibility of a change that did not happen, and that it did not happen was the thing that happened, changing everything. Somewhere imperceptibly over twelve years a relationship had moved from promising to hopeless, which is probably the human gamut, and I am not even sure that I correctly identify the stations of its progress. Perhaps the watershed occurred one day that I don’t remember, in a place I don’t remember having been. Put it this way: there are mornings that I mix a palette of clear colors, and for a while dipping the brush from one to another makes them more interesting; they reach out toward each other, they blend and fuse into a pattern of their own. But by the end of the day the palette is mud brown. All the colors are still there but they cannot be extricated to produce anything but brown. I have brown, and brown again, and only brown.

  Put it more simply: I gave up. I think Oliver gave up too, though we could not say so to each other. Had we been able to do so, it would not have been giving up. Oliver struck a facial attitude of permanent distaste; only occasionally did it occur to me that it was mixed with grief. I settled rigid into long-sufferance, only occasionally encountering the color hate.

  I understand the function of formal discipline better than I used to, down to the stringencies of the Victorian dining table. People do not have the same values, they do not want the same things, and where it is predetermined that one person will submit to another no interruption of routine accomplishment occurs. Servants defer to masters, children to parents, wives to husbands, employees to their bosses, and where this is the case cloth is made, money is accumulated, punctuality is observed, crockery is set in its appointed place. Conflicts are contained behind calm eyes and under the nerve sleeves of unshaking hands. Where it is not the case there are waste and violence and rot. A woman who conceives it as her duty to submit to her husband will still her will in the pride of accomplishing her duty. There is no other power quite like the mastery of one’s own will.

  I had taught myself against genes and training to be a good liar, but now I had no lies to tell that my father would have recognized in his cherry-tree creed. Those lies now seem insignificant. It seems to me that the lies I tell daily are of mortal significance, lies like:

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  And:

  “You look fine.”

  And:

  “No, I’m not tired. I think I’ll read a while.”

  I come up behind Oliver and notice the way his hair has been arranged to clear the collar of his shirt; I see him flipping the crossbar of a cuff link parallel to the crest on the other side; I watch him accepting a canapé between his thumb and third finger and taking a bite of it with his teeth so that his lips are not involved; I see him in pajama bottoms clipping the hairs of his nose with a pair of silver scissors; I watch him asleep with his jaw slack or talking to Cunliffe with his jaw squared; and I say, “No trouble,” and “Thanks, love,” and “Whichever you prefer.” Compared to such lies it is a minuscule matter to plagiarize, steal money, make up a fictitious trip in order to go somewhere else to see someone in secret. I would have felt the same, I think, about adultery, for which I lacked the energy.

  I cried a lot, and hid the crying, and was careful to let Oliver know that I was hiding it. He saw that I was hiding it, and ignored me, and let me see that he was ignoring me; and this minimal dance of retribution and rejection was our marriage bond, wary of disturbance perhap
s to the point of genuine consideration.

  Dillis left East Anglian to have her baby. Malcolm emigrated with Gary Blenwasser to Manitoba. Mom was moved down the block to make room for two of the five new designers. Nicholson retired and Cunliffe was brought in. I lunched in Executive Hall with Oliver and the new administrative Japanese; my work was competent and cold.

  Then one day Cunliffe called me into his office, which used to be Nicholson’s office and has altered alarmingly. The mahogany and overstuffed leather is all gone in favor of suede butterfly chairs and chrome intercoms and a Claude Buffet skyline of Dildo City. Cunliffe is one of those divorcés who turned jock at the age of fifty; he’s into leather jackets and skinny cigars and other people’s wives. He’s in love with big business in a way that makes Oliver look like a soda jerk; since he came we haven’t got night watchmen anymore, we’ve got a Security Surveillance staff.

  Now he told me we were about to order a new hyperautomated silk-screening process from Utagawa, which would treble our output in both dress and furnishing fabrics. There would be an expansion of design staff for which our higgledy-piggledy organization was inadequate. But the Kyoto Design Center of the Utagawa Company was a smooth-running operation of a hundred and fifty people. We needed to know how it’s done. It had been suggested (Cunliffe never takes the credit for his own ideas; even his facts come from impeccable sources) that I should go spend a few weeks in the Kyoto Center.