by Alfred Hayes
She wished to talk.
“What would you like me to talk about?” I said.
“Your wife.”
“There isn’t, really, much to tell.”
When the wind blew, the snow on the skylight ridged. She held the roses to her. I thought of the unquenchable health that allowed her to recover so quickly from the Lithuanian.
“She cheated on you, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
She meant, I could see, that she didn’t think I’d be the one who’d do the cheating.
“Where? In your house or his house or at a motel?”
“It’s not that pleasant a story,” I said.
“Neither was mine.”
Which was true. She, in bed, and I, in the chair, had both had unpleasant things done to us.
“Where?” she repeated. The locale seemed important. The measure evidently of a woman’s iniquity, at least to them, was bound up with where she chose to apply the horns.
“At a tennis club.”
I could see her look at me. It sounded idiotic. As a matter of fact, that was what had made it even more painful; it was idiotic. Even the worst things that happened to me refused to have dignity when they happened.
“A tennis club?” she said.
“Yes. I used to play tennis. I don’t any more.”
“I can see why.”
There was something sexual about tennis. I meant: there was something about it that made you sexually aggressive. Particularly, in mixed singles.
“Really?”
She didn’t know if I was being serious. I was. It was a serious theory: like eating seafood. You got out on a court with a woman on the other side of the net, and you started to volley and there was a sort of temptation to drive the damn ball right at her. As hard, and as sneakily, as you could. The thing was, you were ready of course with the most profuse apologies if the ball did thuck with a most satisfying accuracy right where her tight shorts offered that fabulous target. But it always took a great deal of restraint to at least not aim. Anyway, it was at a tennis club and with a tennis player.
“Was he the club pro?”
No. He wasn’t the pro. She didn’t quite go for the pros. It was just somebody who played at the club. Mixed singles. It was all mixed singles. I played a lousy game of tennis. It wasn’t really my game. Although what my game was I didn’t know. One of the reasons I was so bad at tennis was that I couldn’t stand all that naked sweating to win, and since I didn’t much care for losing all the time I wound up with a very erratic game. But, as I was saying, my wife played tennis. I watched it. From the baseline, of course. In a canvas chair. With a cold drink beside me. He would serve and she’d return. He gave her pointers on her backhand, which was weak; she helped him with his net game. They used to come off the court together deliciously drenched in sweat. I would go with them into the club bar, and she would order a gimlet, her drink, and he would order a daiquiri, his. Over the edges of their respective glasses, their eyes continued to volley. It was perfectly obvious to me what locker he had taken to keeping his racquet in.
I should make the point here that this was all happening at the same time that the other thing was happening to me, too. I mean, the way the jobs disappeared, the people hanging up on the phone, the being turned into a ghost. They do that to you, you know: they ghostify you.
Well, we had two cars. Mine was the smaller one. One afternoon, I left the club early and told her I was going home. She was at the bar, still in those tennis shorts. I went out of the club and I drove my car a block or two away from the club and parked it and then I went back to the club parking lot. I waited until the colored boy who parked the cars had gone into the club and then I opened the trunk of my wife’s car and crawled into it and pulled the cover shut.
I can see now that it was stupid. Worse than stupid: ridiculous. Hiding there in that trunk airless in almost a foetal position for nearly two hours. I thought I was doing it because I absolutely had to have the truth. I had to catch them at it. But, of course, that wasn’t what I was after at all. It has taken me all this time in New York to find out why I really got into the trunk of my wife’s car. The why is very interesting.
I did it because I wanted to be smashed totally flat.
Yes.
I wanted to be demolished. Utterly. To go under. Really, under. To be eliminated. From all the fucking tennis games this world consists of.
The killer games.
Yes.
You know: the court is really nicest when it’s empty and the net sags a little, and all the players have gone home. It’s very peaceful then and almost beautiful.
She came out finally and got in the car and I felt it start. There isn’t much point in describing how I felt or what I thought inside the trunk except to say that by now the one thing I didn’t want her to do was drive home. That is, I didn’t want her to be innocent. I had nothing to be afraid of there: she wasn’t.
The car stopped. The car door slammed. I waited. When I thought I had waited long enough I let myself out of the trunk of the car. It was dark. Her car was parked in a driveway. The street sloped. His house had a lawn. I crept across the lawn. There was a bush with some large white heavy flowers on it. The bush screened most of the window. I got around or rather into the bush and I looked into the window. They were on the floor in the living room.
When I say on the floor I don’t mean prone on the floor. I mean sitting on the floor. Prone is what comes later. It winds up prone. I was watching the introductory rites. The stuff that goes with sitting on the floor with the hi-fi and the uncorked bottle on the rug under the piano with the pouring her glass full with the seeing the lights aren’t too bright the atmospheric stuff the lead-up. She had on a short tweed skirt and a sweater. The sweater I may add was of a very good English wool and bought by me. He was wearing a polo shirt with short sleeves. So actually the only things naked at the moment were his arms and her face. Very often that’s enough.
I recommend that at one time or another in a busy life devoted to marital, extra-marital or premarital copulations everybody ought to do a little Peeping Tomism. I tell you it sure looks different as a spectator sport. It has to be one of the funnier things man does.
Not that I was out there in the bush laughing. Nor enjoying myself hugely as he filled her glass and she filled his and they clinked their glasses in a soft toast and drank. No. What I was as a matter of fact thinking of was going to the nearest fire-box and smashing the glass and turning in at least a three-alarm fire call. I thought of telephoning a sheriff’s substation and reporting a burglary. My house had been broken into.
They exchanged smiles: they exchanged kisses; he fondled her knee; he bent forward tenderly and kissed the woolen swell of her breast. My wife has undistinguished tits. It was grotesque: that this comedy of hands tongues knees should be causing me this suffocating anguish. That it should push me so close to the edge of an obscene madness.
I couldn’t hear anything: I tried lip-reading. It didn’t do me any good to say to myself that I’d clothed fed housed the bitch inside. One doesn’t feel betrayed. Or cheated. One may say that to oneself but I don’t think that betrayed is the word for what one feels. I think the thing that was driving me mad crouched there in the bush outside his window was that some sort of parody seemed to be going on. So I, once, had stroked her leg, bent down and kissed a stockinged toe. Manipulated my tongue so thrusting it into her mouth. It was that sort of mirrored obscenity that was doing it to me. I could feel a scream begin to accumulate in me.
I was hidden from the street. Her back was toward me. She squatted with her weight on her right buttock her right arm supporting her at a stiff angle to the floor. She had the glass it was a long-stemmed wineglass in her left hand. I could see her profile. Her lips looked faintly swollen, her eyelids heavy. He was full-length on the floor on his elbows cupping his wineglass in both his palms his head above her skirted thighs. He had thin fair hair, a thin narrow face. Now suddenly
he sort of snaked himself forward on his elbows, an Indian in the tall corn, still holding the wineglass cupped and put his mouth to the swollen wool of her sweater at precisely where the invisible nipple was. This time he kept it there. He chewed on this gently for a while then as gently bit it then not as gently demonstrating a rising passion pushed his face deeper into the soft expensive wool. It was a cue, a signal, the flare sent up in the night. Her chin went up. She put her head back. Her short hair fell away from her skull. She closed her eyes in a modest ecstasy. He nibbled for a while. Apparently he decided that the taste of even good English wool had its limits. He withdrew his mug. He carefully put the long-stemmed wineglass down. With his left hand he rolled up the front of her sweater. There was her suntanned abdomen the waistband of the skirt tightly ridging it. His right hand expert covert and sure went about her to make its way under the sweater to unhook her brassiere.
I crawled out of the bush away from the window and I started to run. My only safety lay in flight. I knew if I stopped I’d howl. Humped raw cringing wounded to death I’d howl into the night. But I didn’t howl.
35
I sat quite still. There was pity in her eyes. My throat was dry. How nice it was to have the snow on the skylight, the room so warmly lit. She got up abruptly from the bed.
I was alarmed. She still had, I thought, the medicated pad packed into her. The doctor had said she was to remain in bed. She mustn’t risk a hemorrhage.
“A hemorrhage! Oh, Asher,” she said. “What am I going to do with you?”
The color she’d had seemed to have faded. She wore a nightgown. She started to walk about the studio.
Something tightened in me: I was suddenly and unaccountably scared. I couldn’t understand why. But something, obscurely, was warning me.
She stopped. She was in the far end of the room where the skylight slanted into the wall and she stopped as though something had occurred to her. I said: “Darling, you’ve got to get back in bed.” She ignored me. She went to Michael’s desk. I was sitting near the desk. She opened a bottom drawer and reached in and found a manila envelope. She opened the envelope and looked into it. I was near the desk and I was watching her. The envelope was empty. She hadn’t, I could see, expected to find it empty.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, no.”
Now she went rapidly to the closet. The closet was near the stairs as you came up into the studio. It was closed with a hook-and-eye. I could still feel the tight anxiety in me: what was going on I knew was connected with me. She had opened the closet. There was on the shelf in the closet pushed back a cardboard box. Such as one got in a department store. The box was tied with string. She tore off the string. I was all tight now. She opened the cardboard box. She took something out and shook it free and held it up.
It was a Japanese kimono.
Possibly I should have known. From the beginning. Possibly not. I may not have wanted to know. They played complicated games. Why did I assume I would not be an object in a game they had decided to play? But I had confessed my own abasement. I had not thought anything could follow my confession. I’d gutted myself. There I was, on the bloodied board. Nothing could follow that.
The kimono was not quite the shade mine was, and the pattern wasn’t exactly identical. But it was close enough.
“He promised he wouldn’t,” she said. “He swore he wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t what?”
“Touch the money.”
She meant the manila envelope secreted in the drawer of the desk. Oh, what a fool she’d been. She should have known. But he’d sworn he wasn’t going to touch it. It was just really to see if I’d give it to her. To see, really, the expression on my face.
“Expression?” I said stiffly. There wasn’t any end to it. All the slings, the whole damn quiver of arrows: I was getting them. “What expression did you and Michael expect to see?”
“Oh, Asher. I’m so sorry. I feel just awful.”
“What expression did you and Michael expect to see?”
“Oh, God. You know. I’d come to you. And I’d say: Asher, I’m knocked up. I need help. And then you’d get that expression.”
“I see. I’d get it. Did Michael tell you exactly what that fascinating expression I’d get was going to look like?”
“Well. You know. Sympathetic.”
“Oh?”
“You do get it, Asher. You look so wounded. So hurt. You get moist.”
“Do I?”
“This close to tears.”
“And, of course, there wasn’t any trip to Jersey, via a tube fallopian or otherwise, was there?”
“No.”
“And the nightgown? The huddling in bed?”
“Well: you said you were coming tonight. And I was supposed to have been to Jersey.”
“The Lithuanian was pretty graphic.”
“Oh. There was a Lithuanian. But not this trip.”
“I see. We’ve been that route, is that it?”
“Once.”
“And it happened at a party?”
“Well: it was a kind of party.”
“So you just exercised a tenacious memory, is that it, darling?”
“Yes.”
I nodded. I was very calm now. I wasn’t even angry. It belonged: with the window, with the jobs that were gone. The wind blew and the snow ridged on the skylight.
“So,” I said. “No tumor. No school bill. No bun in the oven. No Lithuanian. That was quite a performance.”
“Oh, Asher. Please. I’m just sick about it.”
“And Michael wasn’t going to touch the money?”
“No.”
“What did you intend to do with it: give it away to an institution for retarded adults?”
“Michael swore he’d return it.”
“But he didn’t, did he? He likes kimonos. Silk ones. And just like mine.”
“It was all just supposed to be a crazy joke, Asher.” She sounded a little desperate, but now I wasn’t sure. The fake had its own authenticity: hadn’t that been Michael’s point?
I said: “I seem to be the center of a lot of crazy jokes lately.”
“Oh, Asher.”
“Yours isn’t less funny than the others. It’s just I can’t seem to laugh. Not spontaneously.”
“Oh, Asher.”
“The one thing I don’t really understand yet is why. Why, Aurora?”
“Oh, Asher,” she said. “Believe me. I honestly didn’t want to. I said to Michael: Asher’s been so nice to me. And he’s had all sorts of trouble. With his wife and all, I said. And I didn’t even know then exactly how humiliating it must have been for you, I mean in that silly trunk and all. I really hesitated. But Michael said we weren’t going to do anything bad. I mean, blackmail you, or break into your suite while you were drinking a martini out of my white boots or anything gruesome like that. It was just that Michael said it was well like you know: the dogs? With the you know: bells? I mean, an experiment, you know? Oh, Asher, darling. Please don’t look like that. I’m the sorriest. But really I am. I’m just so stupid that’s all it is. I mean Michael can coax me into anything I mean well he just knows I’m coaxable. Michael said he was going to give you the money back. I swear. The thing was I should have my head examined leaving it here with Michael that’s all. I should have kept the money with me. But I was afraid I mean carrying all that money around with me in my purse I mean what if my mother saw it? Of course I wasn’t so sure Michael was doing it just to be you know scientific. Or even well you know doing it Asher because you’re oh God so square. I mean what I really thought was Michael was jealous. Get that. I mean that’s what I told myself when I said yes all right I’ll do it. I thought Michael was jealous because you were trying to get me into the hay. Now, Asher. Of course you were. Oh, I mean you didn’t try to jiu-jitsu me but, admit it, you were, darling.
“Well. I just might. Now. To teach that little rat a lesson. Buying himself a kimono. And just like yours. And after he promised me,
too.
“Oh, Asher.” She was looking at me. “It’s not that terrible. I’ll get the rest of your money back.”
“It isn’t the money,” I said.
“But Michael promised me,” she repeated. “What else could I do?”
“You could have said no, Aurora,” I said softly.
But I understood. She really couldn’t have said no. A joke: the pail of water over the transom, the trick cigar: it didn’t involve anything criminal. They hadn’t really gotten to that yet. That was when the joke darkened. She couldn’t have said no. I imagined her giggling. I imagined it appealing to her, finally. It would be fun to try. Just to see. Whether I would, or not. Whether she could, or not. It was just a little bit wicked. It was just a little bit nasty. It had just the slightest edge of cruelty to it. It would be fun. I understood. She couldn’t have said no.
I got up. It would, of course, have to take place with her in a nightgown. That clung or folded itself to her. I felt as though hospital orderlies had just released me from a strait jacket. As though, on my arms and chest, if I looked, I’d find the marks of straps.
“Do you know where Michael is playing poker?” I said.
36
Michael had two sets of friends. This was his poker set. There were seven players. First there was a hunchback in a checkered vest. He was a lay analyst. There was a thin nervous one with a green eyeshade. He was a patient of the lay analyst. There was a woman with bleached hair who wore flowered hostess pajamas and smoked her cigarettes in a long ivory cigarette-holder. She was married to the lay analyst. She sat next to a Hungarian who played the violin in a Viennese coffee-house on 72nd Street. There was a New England girl with a leg deformed in childhood by osteomyelitis. She was married to the violinist. She was shy. Michael sat beside her. There was one who was fat, asthmatic and bushy-browed. He sat beside Michael. He was dealing. The poker game was a weekly institution.
“Jacks or better,” the fat, asthmatic, bushy-browed one said as we came into the apartment, and riffled the cards.