Experiment in Springtime

by Margaret Millar

  “Does that matter?” Her hand still lay in his. Sometimes, when they were making love, her hands seemed boneless and soft as cotton, fragile as a bat’s wing. But now they were heavy as lead, big capable hands useful for scrubbing or gardening or wringing a chicken’s neck. They gave the lie to the softness of her eyes and the gentle molding of her mouth. Here, the hands implied, is what Martha is really like—practical. She will never do what won’t be best for herself in the long run. She’s no passion’s child. Going to bed with you was a novelty, a banquet after a series of sketchy lunches with Charles. But don’t kid yourself—Martha prefers her food real. Spaghetti’s more filling than sex. Both were nice, though.

  “If we’re going to be married,” he said, “we’d better make a few plans.”

  “Plans?”

  “The things we made last night, remember? You were to go out and ask Charles for a divorce. You screwed up that little plan, so let’s make some more.”

  “You use some of the vilest language.”

  “If you were really a little lady, darling, you wouldn’t know it was vile.”

  “I never swear, and you know it.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, darling. Do you honestly think in that cute little brain of yours that it’s a virtue not to swear?”

  “If you’ve got such a great brain why don’t you go and make something of yourself?”

  “Like Charles?” he said dryly.

  “You needn’t be so contemptuous of Charles. His posi­tion requires a great deal of intelligence.”

  “Charles’s position would bore me to death. Besides, you’re forgetting I was away for a few years, a little matter of a war. I thought I’d better take a long rest. In bed.”

  “You’ve got your rest. Now what?”

  “Now I take my fifteen hundred dollars and twenty-two cents and buy an old car and get my job back on the paper. I’ll make enough to support us if you’re careful, and maybe

  we can afford a child next year. If we get a two-bedroom apartment, your mother and Laura can live with us. It’ll be a bit crowded, but then we’re so crazy about each other, I’m sure a little crowding won’t matter.”

  She was silent.

  “Nothing will matter except that we have each other, eh, Martha?”

  He wasn’t certain whether he was being serious or ironic or both. But Martha was. She swooped down with a magnet in each hand and picked out the irony.

  “Oh, stop your fooling,” she said harshly.

  “I’m not fooling. What did you expect when you married me?—that we’d live with Charley and call him uncle?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Look, Martha, you wanted to marry me before on any terms . . .”

  “You backed out.”

  “And now you’re backing out.”

  They had reached the end of Jane Street. Steve said to the driver, “We’ll get out here.”

  While he was being paid, the cab driver looked them both over without curiosity. He realized vaguely that they’d been quarreling, but he hadn’t heard a word of the quarrel. He saw too many people to have any real interest in them. People were, after all, just people. They all did the same things. They got up in the morning, dressed, ate, talked, worked, undressed, made love, slept, and finally died, leaving room for some more people. No matter how hard they tried, their distinctions were slight because they had so many necessities in common. There was only one real difference: some people were women. And that was all right.

  “Hot night,” he said, for a tip.

  A dime. A nickel a word.

  He headed back to town.

  He cruised a bit, took a couple of old ladies home from a bingo game, picked up a shabby big guy about forty who was looking for a clean house. He didn’t know of any. No sir, he didn’t. You do. I don’t. You’re lying. You must be nuts. Come out here and say that, you son of a bitch. You’re goddamn right I’ll come out there and say that.

  He ended up in jail. His wife bailed him out at 3 a.m. She had her hair in curlers and she was mad. She nagged him for hours. He got mad, too. He threw a lamp. The lamp cost $12.95. He cried like a baby. Never you mind, what’s a lamp anyway, his wife said, and fried him four eggs.

  The big guy found a house all by himself.

  The old ladies had won a blanket at the bingo game.

  Laura went to bed without washing her face.

  Charles dreamed he got sheet burns on both his knees.

  The bartender put a dab of Lash-Lustre on his mustache.

  The dragons roared amiably back to their sheds with empty bowels.

  The string of beads broke as the lights went out. An old but ever-stimulating monosyllable had been added to the walls of Luigi’s.

  The night cooled off suddenly. To hell with the sun.

  20

  He made love to her though neither of them intended it to happen. In fact, Martha said, “Don’t touch me, don’t come near me,” as if he were a wild beast that had to be kept at bay.

  “Don’t worry,” he said wearily. “I won’t.”

  “I just meant that I . . .”

  “Whatever you meant, it’s okay with me. Shall I take you to the front door?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Well, good night, then.”

  The pebbles of the driveway were moist and slippery with dew. He reached down and scooped up a handful.

  “When I was a kid I used to like throwing rocks,” he said. “Usually at windows. But sometimes I’d throw them at the moon. If I didn’t hear them fall some place, I figured they must be on their way to the moon. It made me feel pretty powerful. Once, though, I imagined that one of my rocks hit the king of the moon square in the eye. He was pretty mad, naturally, and came over to get me. But he got lost in space or else he’s still on his way.”

  He laughed softly. “Maybe that’s the reason I don’t like to go to bed alone. It’s not that I like women. It’s because I’m afraid the king of the moon is still after me, and a woman is a magic charm for my protection.”

  “Any woman, any time?”

  “No, you. Now.”

  He tossed the pebbles and they fell in a spray on the lawn.

  “I heard them fall,” she said.

  “No, you didn’t. I’m sure you didn’t.”

  She was staring at the grass, trying to discern the pebbles. He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around to face him.

  “You mustn’t look for them, that’s not fair. You must take certain things on trust.”

  Her eyes were black and somber in the faint light.

  “Must I?” she said.

  “Certain things, for a certain length of time. When I tell you the pebbles are on their way to the moon, you must believe me, if only for a minute. Tomorrow morning when the sun is up, you can crawl around on your hands and knees and gather them all up and throw them in the garbage. You can do it now if you want to. I have a box of matches.”

  She stirred in his arms. She had heard the pebbles fall, and what difference did it make anyway?

  “Martha,” he said, “if you asked me tonight if I would die for you, I would say, yes, gladly. But tomorrow morn­ing, when the firing squad comes in, I’d say to hell with it. The important thing is that right now, this minute, I love you enough to die for you.”

  “Words,” she said.

  “Certainly, words. I can love you two ways, by actions and words. You don’t want me to touch you, so I’m telling you.”

  “Well, I’d rather . . .” She stopped and bit her underlip.

  He was regarding her dryly. “So would I rather. Will you come into my parlor?”

  “No!” She stepped back out of his reach. “It wouldn’t seem right, not now.”

  “It used to.”

  “Well, it doesn’t now,
not tonight.”

  “When did it suddenly stop ‘seeming right’? When you saw Charles this morning?”

  “That was the beginning.”

  “And then when your mother told you what she thought of me? And again when I took you to all those nasty, nasty bars and tried to pick up a girl behind your back?”

  “Did you?”

  “What?”

  “Try to pick her up.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I suppose you never tried to make love to Beatrice, either?”

  “That’s right. I kissed her once in a rather uncousinly fashion. She liked it all right, but I didn’t. That’s all.”

  “It isn’t all. She’s crazy about you. You only have to look at her face to see that.”

  “Well, you only have to look at my face to see I don’t give a damn about her. What in hell started you worrying about Beatrice?”

  “I’m not worried about Beatrice. She’s just a symptom, like Laura. There must be dozens of women whose names I don’t know who are crazy about you.”

  “Thousands,” he said quickly.

  “I don’t know what line you hand them all, probably the same one you handed me. ‘You are my beloved, my wife.’ Your wife, my foot!”

  Her viciousness caught him off guard. He felt a little sick, as if she’d suddenly hit him in the stomach when he was expecting a kiss.

  He conjured up the ghost of a smile. “Did I say that? I must have been—must have been plastered.”

  “Well, I never believed any of it, thank Heaven! Not even for a minute.” She mimicked his tone. ‘You must take certain things on trust, Martha, for a certain length of time.’ You and your damned talk!”

  Denial was useless, but he couldn’t stop himself saying, in an incredulous voice, “You must have believed me. I meant it.”

  She didn’t hear him. “You and your two-bedroom apart­ment! It’d be all right for you, certainly. You’d never come near the place unless you were hard up. Imagine anyone trying to domesticate you—you—you stallion!”

  She stopped with her mouth open, as if she had shocked herself into silence.

  “Stallions,” he said in a flat voice, “are so domesticated that they can no longer have sex relations with a mare without the aid of people. Jackrabbit would be a better name. Or stoat. There’s only one name for you, though. You’re a bitch.”

  She began to cry, holding her face tight against the sleeve of his coat.

  “Now you’re a crocodile,” he said, quite gently.

  “I don’t know—why I said those things—I . . .”

  “You said them because you thought them.”

  “No, no. I . . .”

  “And you’re confused, darling. We’re both confused.” His mouth touched her hair. “We’re caught in a trap and we can’t get out without hurting ourselves. But it doesn’t matter, don’t cry, it doesn’t matter. We’ll get out. Don’t worry. We’ll go away together.” He stroked her hair. “We’ll go away before Charles comes back. You don’t have to have an apartment. We could get a house. Would you like that, darling?”

  She rubbed her face up and down his coat sleeve in agreement. “A house . . .”

  “Charles will give you a divorce. He won’t try to keep you if he knows you love somebody else. As you do, don’t you?”

  She nodded again.

  “A house in the country, maybe, where you could have a garden. You like gardens, don’t you? And look, you don’t have to have a kid if you don’t want to, if you’re afraid it would grow up like me.” He smiled, feeling the sting of tears in his eyes. “Don’t cry, darling, everything’s going to be swell. We’ll have a wonderful life.”

  They both believed it for a whole minute.

  “She’ll be surprised,” Charles said. “Don’t you think she’ll be surprised, Forbes?”

  “Yeah, I do.” Forbes kept his eyes on the road ahead. His hands were gentle on the steering wheel. It was the last time he would drive the little car, and he was saying goodbye to it as if it were his dog, reassuring it by petting, and wondering if the new owners would be kind to it and feed it properly. The car had been as real a factor in his life as if it had had blood instead of oil running through its veins. He had treated it right; it was healthy and full of beans, and though its heart was mechanical and could be stopped at will, it couldn’t always be started at will. It beat for some people and not for others. Pearson, for instance, couldn’t handle the car any better than he could his wife. His manner toward them both was too timid and half-hearted, as if he expected them to meet him halfway.

  “Maybe you should have phoned her,” Forbes said. “Women don’t like to be surprised.”

  “Don’t they?” Charles murmured.

  “Not that I know anything about it, but I read once, women don’t like to be surprised.”

  Charles was amused. Whenever Forbes talked of women, he herded them all together, threw a rope around them and retreated to a safe distance to observe. At that distance they lost their distinctions and became as mysteriously active and alike as a box of ants. Forbes had once read or been told that women didn’t like to be surprised, and he accepted it as a fact because it made as much sense as any­thing else about a group of people as completely incom­prehensible to him as women.

  “Some of them do,” Charles said absently.

  They had reached the outskirts of the city. The bill­boards and gas stations and hot dog stands and cocktail lounges and steak houses were multiplying in heterogene­ous profusion like a mixture of small animals that had been bred artificially in a lab to produce hybrids. Hot-dog stands that looked like schoolhouses turned out to be cocktail lounges. Gas stations sold road maps and chocolate bars, fresh flowers and contraceptives, provided pinball machines, clean rest rooms, free literature on Christian Science, and information on all subjects from food to hair tonic.

  Here and there a church spire rose in contemptuous dignity above all this squalid mismating.

  They passed one now. The bells were ringing and some people were standing on the lawn outside, stiff as statues, as if the rigidity of mind and purpose that was required once a week by their religion had extended to their bodies. Every Sunday morning they climbed into their iron suits and clanged away to church with righteous noise, looking narrowly through

  their visors at the ungodly and the other-godly.

  “What time is it?” Charles said.

  “Nine.”

  Nine o’clock Sunday morning on a summer day. It seemed good to Charles, a good time to start all over, to begin a new life.

  “It’d be kind of nice to be religious,” Forbes said. “You wouldn’t feel so much responsibility for yourself, you know. It’s like passing the buck to Jesus. But me, I’m not built for it. I’m a moral man. I don’t have to have any morals read to me out of a book by some little squirt with his collar on backwards, who couldn’t make a living any other way than by shooting off his mouth.”

  Charles thought, the ungodly, too, peer through visors.

  “An uncle of mine got religion,” Forbes said. “He went out to California and became a monk in one of those new religious places. They milked him of all his money and he died in an asylum. They have a lot of places like that in California. Maybe the sun goes to their heads out there.”

  “As someone has already said, it’s the last point west for the desperate. After California, comes the Pacific Ocean.”

  Perhaps he would take Martha there some day for a holiday. She had always said she didn’t care to travel, but he realized now that it was because she never had traveled. She was a little afraid, just as she used to be afraid of eating in restaurants because she wasn’t accustomed to it.

  He must be careful how he approached her though. There was no use asking, “Would you like to go to Cali­fornia?” She would instinctively refuse. He must b
e more definite about it and decisive. “Come on, we’re going to California.” She was, in many respects, like a child. Children function better within clean-cut boundaries and rules; given their choice about everything, they lose the ability to make a choice at all. The possible and the impossible become equally possible, and in this confusion they must be guided.

  He would be firmer, much firmer about everything. Money, for instance. She wasn’t extravagant by nature, but she had been spending money recklessly the past year and they had lived beyond his income. It was entirely his fault, he admitted. He wanted her to have everything and he had set her no limits. Consequently, she had spent the money without thought and probably without pleasure. Her checkbooks were always in a mess, and she never knew within a thousand dollars how much money she had in her account because she never bothered to open her bank statements. She piled them all up, neatly and in order of date, in a corner of her desk. He smiled, thinking of how orderly she was even about bank statements that she had no intention of reading.

  Perhaps he would give her an allowance every month, or they would have a simple discussion of the facts. My income is . . . My assets are . . . My liabilities are . . .

  He hadn’t the faintest doubt that she would be reason­able. She might even enjoy saving money. He’d frequently suspected her of being a little stingy.

  A trip to California; a firm hand; an allowance—small pegs to hang a future on, but he was confident, and sure, not of her, but of himself. He had one fact in his favor: his profound conviction that his marriage was the core of his existence. It was necessary to preserve it, no matter how many personal sacrifices he had to make or how many petty spites and triumphs he had to forego.

  He was aware that the most difficult part would be to stop himself from worrying about whether she loved him, or cease carrying around inside his head the little scales on which he weighed her feeling for him down to the last ounce. He must destroy the scales, accept it as a reality that she didn’t, and couldn’t love him as much as he loved her; and then go on from there to have as good a life as possible.

  The really important thing was that she didn’t love anyone else. On that small negation he based his hopes.