The demon that infused her when Jim came took the form of a fever. She had expected to be bored and on edge for two days, doing her best to keep him from making a pass. She wanted to behave from the moment he arrived so that he would have no false hopes and Lucy no reason to be upset.
It should have been easy, for Jim was not a difficult person. From the moment he stepped into the house Lucy was for him. He was so quiet, diffident, nice, polite—Lucy all but adopted him. He was just the kind of boy she liked, for despite his diffidence he was in high good spirits and was anything but solemn. Everyone smiled when they saw him—even the gardeners.
She herself was the only one disturbed by Jim’s presence, and before the first evening was over she was very disturbed. Things didn’t go as she had supposed they would. She had imagined that she would have to make the conversation, and keep making it as an obstacle to his becoming romantic. But when they sat down alone to dine on the patio, she felt no desire to talk. Jim carried the conversation and it was she who was silent. She felt more than silent; she felt heavy and a little sullen. He still wanted her; obviously he did. The glances he sent her way held a clear longing, but he was as respectful and careful as he had been in Amarillo. It irked her. He looked so young and so fresh, in a short-sleeved blue shirt and white pants and loafers, his blond hair worn longish in imitation of the Californians. She had lost completely all the good emotions she felt for him in Amarillo. She didn’t feel that she could be good for him, gentle with him, loving or tender or wise, the mistress-mother-confidante that she had once vaguely envisioned herself. She no longer wanted to restore his confidence in himself and send him back to his young wife experienced and secure. She felt something much coarser and didn’t like it at all. It was a shock, but it was there. The formality and respect and conversation merely irked her. When she looked at his young face, his clean hair and tanned skin, she didn’t feel loving or considerate, she felt an awful rapacious emotion that she had never felt before for a man so young. She could not put the sensation down, and his talk began to annoy her terribly. If he would only stop talking about French movies and make the pass he had been wanting to make for weeks he could have her. She could touch his fine skin. She had never felt such a desire to use a person physically as she began to feel for Jim. He was too nice. She had an urge to despoil him in some way. He continued to talk and didn’t make the pass, and finally, appalled at his timidity and her own desire, she excused herself on the feeble grounds of a headache and he went downstairs to the library to read.
Alone, she felt very strange. How could she want such a child, so hotly and so incongruously, when she had never been so attuned to Sonny? She sat on her bed feeling dull and sad, wishing very much that Sonny would call and bring her back to herself. It was nonsense; she had never before in her life had the slightest desire to seduce a young man. They had flirted in Amarillo, and she had embroidered the flirtation a bit, but no such fever ought to have followed from it.
She didn’t sleep well, and the next day all the people of the ranch walked small around her. She was quiet, but her quietness had passion beneath it, and anger, and the people who knew her kept their distance. Lucy talked little, and of the merest nothings. The foreman was careful too; he had just discovered that six yearlings had been poisoned by oil waste but he decided to hold the news until the weather was better at the big house.
Jim was the only one who didn’t know anything was wrong. He breakfasted with Eleanor on the patio, and to him she looked great. There were shadows under her eyes, but they merely made her face seem lovelier, her beauty richer. At breakfast Eleanor tried to starve the fever. She starved it by looking at the land and not at Jim, by chatting about a John Cheever story, by eating more than she usually did. It was ridiculous; she was not going to enter on a sluttish middle age. If she loved him, then of course; but any glance told her that she didn’t love him. Nothing could induce her to keep him two weeks, and probably not two days. What she wanted of him wouldn’t take more than an hour, if he would only start it.
Jim did notice that Eleanor looked at him differently than she had in Amarillo. She seemed moody and withdrawn, but he did not suspect the reason. Yet he wanted her very much and was very excited by the fact that she had invited him to the ranch. He hoped a moment might come when they would be close enough that he could touch her. He had imagined the moment many times. Eleanor was so much kinder to him than Patsy, so much gentler, and so much more considerate. She really seemed to see him, whereas Patsy only seemed to need him—or else hate him. But he was a little surprised by the change in Eleanor. In Amarillo she had been relaxed and warm and talkative. At the ranch she was silent, and there was something a little threatening about her silence. She was much more reserved than she had been; he was puzzled and didn’t know how to break through the reserve.
In the afternoon of his second day at the ranch Eleanor fell into an annoyed boredom. It was a hot still afternoon, with not a breath of breeze. White thunderheads hung motionless above the browning land. There was nothing to do but talk, and she was sick of that. With Sonny there, she would have shut Lucy out of the bedroom and lounged on the bed all afternoon, she reading and drinking iced tea, Sonny napping or drinking beer. But she could not shut Lucy out of the bedroom for Jim, even if Jim had done anything to make it necessary, which he hadn’t. Annoyed, she put on some duck trousers and field boots and a khaki shirt and told Lucy to fix a thermos of icewater and one of iced coffee. She asked Jim if he would like to see the ranch. He said he would and changed into Levi’s. She got a .22 and some shells and the two thermoses and they got in the old high-axeled station wagon she used for ranch trips. The station wagon itself was like an oven, but Eleanor didn’t mind. There were times when she liked the breezeless August heat. Soon they were both sweating. Her temples and upper lip were beaded, and a line of sweat dripped out of Jim’s sideburns, bisecting his cheek.
“I thought we might drive across the ranch,” she said. “This feed road goes straight through it. It’s about eighteen miles.”
But the drive worked no better than anything else had worked since he came to the ranch. They drove west, off the level plain where the headquarters stood, into rolling mesquite country, cut by gulleys and crisscrossed with low ridges. In contrast to the white clouds the sky seemed almost yellowish with heat. The road dust and the mesquite and even the car seats smelled hot. Eleanor didn’t care—the heat at least was positive. The sun came straight through the window and shone on them, making their clothes hot. She kept the thermos open and drank iced coffee as she drove. Jim irked her terribly. He sweated and listened attentively to her offhand remarks about one pasture and another, as if he were a child being taken through a museum.
Six or eight miles into the ranch she abandoned the idea of driving across it. It would be too tiresome a drive back, and the ranch got rougher the farther west she went. She grew tired of easing the station wagon across creek beds. There was a large lake up a side road to the north and she turned and drove to that. The bank had tall cottonwood trees shading it and a good covering of green Bermuda grass. The water was as still as a sheet of brown glass, its surface broken only when a dragonfly or a wasp dipped into it. They got out, taking the thermos and the gun, and walked up the bank, both glad of the shade. Eleanor thought he might use his imagination, or if not his, some novelists’, and suggest they go swimming, sans suits, but if such an idea entered his head he didn’t voice it. Instead they did some shooting. They found cow chips and sticks and a few beer cans some fisherman-cowhand had left behind, and threw them in the water; they ran two boxes of shells through the .22 shooting at them. Jim was a better shot than she was, to her surprise. A hawk alit in the flat behind the tank while they were shooting, and she shot at it and missed it clean. Jim’s shot hit the branch the hawk sat on; the hawk slowly took flight and alit again, out of range.
When they had used up all their shells and were amusing themselves by plinking the shell cases into the brown wate
r Eleanor felt some pressure ease. She told Jim he shot well, and he looked pleased. She grew ashamed of herself for being irked with him—he was very nice. He clearly knew very little about women and had not suspected or understood her fever. Her own expectations had gone awry; perhaps he loved his wife more than she had supposed. She lay back on the Bermuda grass, her eyelids pressed down by the heat; she dozed a bit and when she awoke Jim passed his hand across her damp forehead and stroked her hair. She smiled and closed her eyes again, waiting, but he did little more, only stroked her hair and once her arm. She did not become angry. He was young. Perhaps he could not imagine making love to someone in the grass, by a tank. It was not the young who were reckless in that way. She was expecting the wrong thing of him again. Probably it would seem too Lady Chatterley to him; he was shy and conventional, and screwing an older woman in midafternoon on a bed of Bermuda grass was not conventional. It would require a different kind of ardor entirely from the sort he had. She had never been the older woman before and decided it required patience and kindness and a willingness to lead. She had never been inclined to lead, but she could not feel angry at Jim. Perhaps his feelings were as confused as hers. If he were merely confused there was no point in her being cruel.
The heat and the nap had relaxed her. She sat up yawning, and Jim wanted to hold her hand. She let him, and they sat by the tank until the sun was falling, chatting pleasantly. He told her she was beautiful and she smiled and said nothing; they chatted of things unrelated to their confusion. Eleanor had no thoughts. Sometimes she came to the tank with Lucy, who loved to fish. She sat under the cottonwoods reading, or merely thinking, while Lucy kept an intense watch on three or four poles. Finally she got up and led Jim to the station wagon. They drove back to the ranch with the sun behind them. The sky turned blue again as the air cooled.
Eleanor drove slowly, looking at the pastures and the clouds. She would have liked her own feelings to cool and clear like the sky, but they didn’t. The time on the tank dam had been a respite. The fever came back, stronger and more hateful than it had been the day before. It was an awful urge. When they got to the ranch house she left the station wagon in the circular driveway and strode inside. “Come on up,” she said to Jim and he followed her upstairs. The patio was in shade, but Eleanor did not go out. She stopped at the desk in her bedroom and turned to watch him, gripping the edge of the desk with her hands.
“I’m glad we didn’t go the other ten miles,” he said, waiting for her to come to the patio. “What now?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Eleanor said, tossing her hair free of the high-collared shirt. “I feel kind of wild.” He looked at her in surprise and she tried to smile, but a smile did not go with her emotions. She felt wrong, too bold, too exposed. If only he would move toward her—any sort of touch would begin it—and cover her again.
But Jim was not sure, and for a moment he was afraid to gamble. It had sounded like an invitation, but he wasn’t sure. Her look was wild and a little frightening. She kept pulling one hand through her heavy blond hair. He didn’t know. A canyon lay between them, deep with ambiguities. He was not sure what her look meant, and he didn’t leap. The moment stretched as slowly as a shadow.
“I guess I should shower,” he said uncertainly.
“Yes, so should I,” Eleanor said and looked down at her feet, her face at once changed, as if she had felt a rain of cold water on it. Then Jim started to her; something in the change of her face convinced him, but she had stopped looking at him. She moved slowly toward the patio, as if she had suddenly grown tired. When he took her arm she looked at him with contempt, but he held her, anyway, and she let him kiss her. But she had gone flat, and the kiss was flat. She had wanted him to kiss her all day, but she had suddenly stopped wanting it. Jim was the opposite. He wanted desperately to make up for having moved too late. Eleanor felt like herself again but heavy and cold. Finally she shook free, crying a little, and went to the patio and sat down in a chair. He followed but she wouldn’t let him kiss her again.
“Don’t, now,” she said. “Please go and take your shower.”
“No,” he said, kneeling awkwardly by the chair. She let him have her hand. He was so upset that she tried to smile, but she could not really smile.
“You don’t know much about women,” she said quietly, looking off the balcony. Eight cowboys were coming into the barn, riding abreast across the dairy pasture.
“I guess I don’t,” Jim said. “I’ve fallen in love with you and I don’t know what to do about it.”
Eleanor smiled sadly and shook her head. “Please go shower,” she said. “Then we’ll eat some supper.”
When he left, reluctant and abashed, she felt a moment of keen relief. At least it was finished, it was clear, it was done, whatever it had been. She felt quite without fever. No one was dead and she had not been allowed to be the slut she had wanted to be. In her relief she called in Lucy and briskly ordered supper, and by the time Jim returned, clean but gloomy, she had showered and put on a white dress and felt immeasurably better. It was a fine feeling, having got through something without a real catastrophe. For an hour she felt grateful and at peace.
Jim’s gloom at supper was even endearing. She felt warm toward him, and forgiving, and kept Lucy with them, so he could have no chance to launch into protestations of love. She wanted him to believe that missing whatever they had missed was really for the best—missing it had saved their friendship. But Jim was no longer interested in their friendship. He didn’t want it and it didn’t please him that she had become gracious and friendly again. He did not accept his mistake in the bedroom as being definitive. He knew she had wanted him, and he did not believe she had stopped completely just because he had hesitated at the wrong time.
Eleanor knew that he was in the throes of an intense disappointment. She blamed herself and was as nice as she could be. She knew he was going to make another effort and made no attempt to avoid it. They went back upstairs after supper, and when he came near her on the patio and told her again that he loved her she thought she was prepared to be kind and tolerant.
“You don’t, really,” she said. “You’ve just never known anyone like me.”
“I do, though,” he said. “I do love you.”
He was sincere. Eleanor sighed. He kissed her, trying as hard as he could. The fine clarity that had come to her in her relief began to slip away. Her feelings were a jumble, and in the jumble somewhere were all the bad feelings she thought she had thrown out. It seemed for a moment that she herself had been scattered, thrown away. She was somewhere there, if he could salvage her and put her parts together again.
Jim tried, but he couldn’t find all of her. When she ceased to feel clear and tolerant and kind she dropped into a stupor of discouragement and merely felt dull. In the dullness she let him close to her again—she had no shame in the dullness—and took his kisses leaning back against the patio wall, where anyone walking across the courtyard might have seen her. She let him kiss her as long as he wanted to, let him stroke her hair and her throat, let him move his body against hers. Once he stopped kissing her, discouraged by her discouragement.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“It’s hopeless.”
“No it isn’t.”
Eleanor smiled a little. He tried to show her it wasn’t hopeless, but she felt as heavy and sluggish as mud, and when he did something that caused her to tremble it was not the trembling of passion but the kind of motion mud makes when it is shaken. She let him move her to the bed in her bedroom, hoping he would find her. She would have welcomed the fever, but it didn’t come. Her skin might have been dead, her nerves disconnected. Every touch was flat. Sometime, somehow, she had set her brakes. Perhaps Jim could release them. She wanted him to, and he tried. He brought all his eagerness to the task, but eagerness was not sufficient. Her brakes stayed on. Whether they talked or whether they embraced the brakes were on. She would not undress. They twisted on the bed, rumpled, exhaus
ted, separately frantic, not knowing what to do. Eleanor kept hoping for the fever long after she had ceased to expect it. Finally she despaired of it and slid off the bed to the floor. She sat with her back against the bed. Dim moonlight filled the open doors of the patio.
Jim was silent, and very depressed, she knew. Once her dress and her hair were straightened, she felt better. A little clarity came back. Once they stopped touching some of the deadness went away. She looked around at him and stretched out a hand for him to hold. He held it and looked at it in a way that amused her a little.
“You’re looking at my hand as if it held the answer to all mysteries.”
“I wish it did.”
“It’s just a woman’s hand.”
“Do you want me to go away? I mean leave the ranch?”
“No,” she said, lying. “Don’t be silly.”
But the question piqued her. “For a smart young man you ask awfully stupid questions,” she said. “It’s not really necessary to talk to women, you know. Sometimes it’s pleasant and other times it’s very stupid.”
She checked her anger with difficulty. She wanted to tell him he could have had her practically any time in the last two days. No one should be so stupid—particularly no one who had been married for almost three years.
“Maybe you ought to go back to your wife,” she said finally. “I imagine she needs you. I don’t, really.”
“I don’t know what she needs,” he said stiffly, as if offended that she would mention Patsy at such a time.
Moving On Page 61
