“What about the baby? You ought to think about that. Did you ever stop to think about the baby?”
At last she began to cry. He gave her his handkerchief.
“Please,” he said. “Even if these people can’t understand English, they can’t ignore a sobbing woman.”
She stiffened a little.
“You care what they think, don’t you?”
“There, you see, you’ve stopped now.”
“I could say it in Italian,” she said. “I could stand up and say it in very simple Italian. This is my husband who is making me cry. My husband is always making me cry. My husband is always sleeping with other women. When I find out about it we leave. We are always leaving places.”
“You know what they’d say? They’d say, why don’t you leave him? The logical answer.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Harry said. “I never really thought of it until just now.”
“You can’t even imagine it. After all this time, you can’t even conceive of my leaving you. Now that I’m pregnant, you’re certain.”
“Do we have to go through all this?”
“You can’t even imagine my leaving you, can you?”
“No,” he said. “To tell you the truth I can’t.”
“All right,” she said. “Suppose I don’t. Suppose I just stay. Then what?”
“Everything,” he said, smiling wonderfully. “Then everything. We’ll begin again. No reason why not. We could go up to Paris. I know some people there.”
“Why not home?”
“Why not?”
“Are you serious? Would you really go home?”
“I might even go to work,” he said. “Idle hands …”
“The awful thing,” she said, “is that I never know when you’re telling the truth. I never know whether I can trust you.”
He signaled for the waiter.
“I suppose you’ll have to,” he said, “I suppose you’ll just have to take that chance.”
They crossed the street and edged into the crowd walking along the bank of the river. It was getting dark now and the mountains to the north were only a bulk of heavy shadows. The mountains were disappearing and the river was dark. She could smell the river and she could hear it, but she could only see it where light fell. She felt dazed, as if not only Harry but the whole world was unreal, vanishing. It gets dark and the mountains go away.
“Where does everything go in the dark?” she had asked when she was a child.
“Things just goes to sleep,” the colored nurse had said. “They just curl up and go to sleep.”
They moved across the bridge with the crowd and then they were on a narrow cobbled street with cafes and restaurants and movie theaters. They heard a military band playing faintly somewhere and they heard the laughter and the rich syllables of the language all around them. Farther along the street they entered a small square. At the corner there was a tight circle of people around a single figure. The man was very pale under a light, powerfully built, in bathing trunks and sneakers. He stood relaxed, slump-shouldered, while a short fat man, his bald head shining in the lamplight, walked slowly around the circle of viewers displaying a placard with a picture of the man in bathing trunks.
“What is he?” she asked. “A magician?”
Harry laughed. “No,” he said. “He’s some kind of a strong man. Do you want to watch?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen one.”
“Let’s.”
There was a hush as the man began his performance. He lifted heavy weights over his head, straining, his pale muscles bulging and the sweat glistening all over his body. When he had finished, the short man passed through the crowd taking a few coins in his hat. The strong man leaned against the lamppost breathing heavily. She thought he looked so lonely out there in that zone of light, alone and almost naked. He did not seem to be looking at anyone or anything. He seemed unaware of the crowd. He only rested, breathing hard, tautly aloof like a beast in a cage. She took Harry’s hand in hers.
“Let’s go,” Harry said. “This is a bore.”
“Wait,” she said. “He’s going to do something with ropes.”
Two men from the crowd carefully wrapped him in a net of knotted ropes. When they had finished, he could not move his hands or his feet, and they stepped back into the crowd. The strong man remained still for a moment. Then he closed his eyes and began to strain against the ropes. Sweat was slick on his forehead. The large veins in his neck showed blue and swollen against his skin. Very slowly, painfully it seemed, he began a shrugging motion with his shoulders. The ropes left raw red lines where they bit into his flesh. For a desperate moment it seemed to her that he would never be able to free himself, but then he twisted sharply and somehow freed one arm. The crowd clapped and the short man passed the hat again while the strong man finished wriggling free of the rest of the ropes.
“He’s going to try chains next,” she said. “Let’s see him get out of chains.”
“It’s just a trick. Don’t you see that? Come on.”
“I want to see it.”
“For Christ’s sake!” Harry said. “Oh, all right.”
This time he was wrapped tightly in chains. He stood looking blankly into the faces of the crowd while two men wrapped him in chains.
The strong man started with his whole body twisting against the chains. Abruptly he slipped and fell and there was a gasp and the brute sound of iron on stone. He lay as still as a fallen doll on the street.
“Let’s go,” Harry said.
“I want to watch,” she said. “I want you to stay and see it.”
“He’ll never get loose now. They’ll have to set him free.”
“I don’t think so.”
“This is silly,” Harry said. “I can’t see any earthly reason why we should have to stand here and watch this.”
“Look!” she said. “He’s moving now.”
The strong man began to writhe on the street. He moved along on his back, tense and fluttering like a fish out of water. He rolled over onto his stomach and now they could see blood on his lips and the glazed, fanatic concentration in his eyes.
“You don’t have to look,” she said. “Close your eyes if you don’t want to look at it.”
She watched the man in chains and she felt a strange exhilaration. She felt her own body move, tense with the subtle rhythm of his struggle. One arm free, then, slowly, very slowly, the other, and, at last sitting up, he twisted his hurt legs free. While his companion passed the hat, the strong man sat in the street and looked at his legs, smiling a little. She turned away and looked at Harry. Poor Harry would never understand. Whatever she finally decided to do, Harry would never understand.
“Let’s go back to the hotel and have dinner,” he said.
They walked back the way they had come, and as they crossed the bridge over the Arno she saw that there was a new moon and she could see the dark shape of the mountains. They were still there, and she could feel the strength and flow of the river, and she could feel her child, the secret life struggling in her womb.
SEPTEMBER MORN
WHEN THE NEW GARDENER CAME Lily couldn’t resist calling her husband. She dialed his office at the library. He answered, brisk, abstracted, professional.
“Professor,” she said. “This is Lady Chatterley.”
“Hi,” he said. “Anything wrong?”
“The new gardener arrived. Sexy and surly. Sort of a poor man’s Marlon Brando.”
“Can you protect yourself?”
“I don’t know,” she said laughing. “Maybe you’d better come home and take care of me.”
“Oh you can take care of yourself all right.”
“Play tennis this afternoon?” she asked casually, hopefully.
“Can’t make it.”
Lily had really hoped he would want to play. Neither of them could play well. But, dressed in crisp white, however clumsy they might be
in the softly flaming arena of autumn, the maples extravagant around the courts and the air chill in the late afternoon, there was something significant about their playing together. She was better, more graceful and deft in driving long forehand shots to the back line. Each game began with this feminine aggression of hers, forcing him to respond. He’d become a little angry; not wishing to show it, he’d smile and take his time between serves, and this pleased her. Power was his next attempt. Savagely, even crudely, he’d slam the ball back to her, missing more often than not, the lines of anger becoming more explicit as he sweated and lunged to take command and she, teasing, exasperating, returned his shots. At last, crafty, taking control of the game, John would depend on soft shots, lightly arcing lobs and placed junk shots that made her run. Something would stir in her, thrive as he gained confidence, bloom as he mastered himself and then overpowered her. Of course he was unaware of all these things happening to her, though he would be pleased with himself, petulant and sly as a child.
“That was fun,” she’d say as they walked back to the car, watching the other games. “We ought to do it more often.”
“Yes,” he’d invariably agree, “I don’t get much exercise these days.”
Lily finished the breakfast dishes and watered the plants in the dining room. She looked over their green confusion through the window and saw him raking leaves. He was sweating already and, she thought, a lazy young man. He reached far out with the rake and urged the leaves toward him with an easy stroke, moving himself as little as possible. She supposed she’d have to talk to him. He’d stopped working for a moment and leaned against an elm, smoking. The grapes in the far corner of the lawn were almost ripe. She might take a basket and see if they were ready.
“It’s very warm for September, don’t you think?” she said.
He grinned and wiped his hand across his face, whipping the sweat off.
“Why don’t you take off your shirt and be comfortable?”
Without a word he unbuttoned his khaki shirt and hung it on a knot of the tree.
“I can’t get used to this American weather,” he said. “Hot days, cold nights.”
He was dark-skinned and soft, his body rounded, indulgent, for she could easily discern the angled lines of his male power, the bulked shape of muscle beneath the puffed contours of his torso. It was the broad powerful body of a wrestler, perhaps, but indolently disguised. It offended her that he could be so careless with himself. Lily had been a fat girl. Rigor and severity kept her lean now, and only a certain stiffness, a woodenness about her movements, revealed that she lived in an attitude of constraint. He smoked and patted the fine hair on his stomach, his glance never diverted from her eyes. She looked down. She felt that he was laughing at her, as if he could see around her, or perhaps through her, the shape of the fat girl she had been. Women have spoiled him, she thought. He takes admiration for granted.
“My husband was in Italy during the war,” she said.
“So?” he said, actually laughing now.
“He was there for two years.”
“And you were alone? The war was a great pity.”
She could look at him unflinching now. She met the arrogance of his look, the slight glow of irony in his eyes with perfect control.
“I was in the Navy,” he said. “Not much war.”
“Oh yes,” she said, “the Italian Navy.”
“That’s true,” he said. “It was not like the mountains and the winter. We were mostly in port.”
He smiled widely. She pictured him doing the things she imagined sailors do, idly dripping paint, sunbathing on the hot deck with all around him the fantastic blue and the brightness of an ideal port. She pictured him swimming with a crowd of tanned equals, and in the evening in his tight-fitting uniform swaggering in the warm lights pooled into the street from dusky rooms where there might be laughter and music. Lily had a picture of her husband on the bureau, tall, thin, as ill-fitted in his fatigues and mud-stained boots as a recruit, posed against a barren hillside. Everything in the picture was splashed with gray.
“The Army is a bad life,” he said. “I hate the cold.”
“No,” she said, “I suppose you wouldn’t like the cold.”
He looked at her, the tall American lady in her wool skirt and high-buttoned long-sleeved blouse, her hair severely knotted back, the whole an effect of restraint and simplicity, and he looked at himself, familiar, appraisingly as if he were looking at the body of an animal.
“My husband is a professor at the university,” she said. She tried to speak simply as she might speak to a child. She wasn’t sure how much English he knew. He raised his eyebrows.
“Then he must be wise.”
She wasn’t certain whether or not he meant that as a question.
“He can speak Italian very well.”
“Good,” he said, throwing the butt of his cigarette into the grass. “We can talk sometime.”
He picked up the rake and began again to rake the leaves into a pile. She started across the lawn, past the flower garden, toward the tangle of grape vines where the careful lawn disappeared into the woods. She passed close by him.
“Signora,” he said in a soft voice, not looking up from his task, “does the Signora have any children?”
“No,” Lily said, as she walked briskly past him. “We have no children.”
The grapes were not ripe yet and she was glad that there was nothing else to do outside. She walked back into the house and climbed the carpeted stairs. She wanted to be busy and she decided to change the sheets. She tore them off the bed and neatly, tightly tucked in the clean ones. All this time she knew that she wanted to look at herself in the mirror, but she knew that she shouldn’t. She caught only glimpses of herself passing in the mirror on the bureau and the mirror on the closet door while she made the bed.
There were so many things to do. She could vacuum and there was shopping to do and there were letters to write and a few telephone calls, but she felt weary. She wanted to lie between the clean, cool sheets. She knew this was silly, but perhaps she did need a nap, and she threw a blanket over the bed and pulled the pillow over her face. Dozing, she heard the gardener whistling and she smelled the smoke of leaves burning.
She saw herself as a girl in the big drafty house, alone in her room in the afternoon. September afternoons were so lonely. The summer had ended and school—she felt a kind of dread remembering the press of bodies, the shrill hall, the monotone and the smell of the classrooms—school had not yet begun, and she wanted most of all to be alone in her room. The chill would be coming on and there would be a fire downstairs, but also her mother knitting, and teacups, and her sister, her older sister, the frail beautiful Margaret. She would be alone in her room, naked against the harsh wool blanket, and closing her eyes she became the Sleeping Beauty, milk-colored, long-limbed, half-dozing, waiting for the sound of hoofs and the heavy boots of the horseman on the stairs.
Suddenly the telephone was ringing. She rose up from her half-dream and snatched the receiver. She heard her husband’s voice.
“Lily,” he said, “I think I can make that tennis this afternoon.”
“Can you?” she asked, eagerly.
“We haven’t played for quite a while,” he said.
“What time?”
“Oh, about three-thirty. I’ll pick you up. I’ll beat you,” he said. “You better be ready.”
She felt relieved, yet sad, somehow, inexplicably sadder than if he hadn’t called. She got up and straightened her skirt and blouse. She washed her face and smiled at herself in the mirror. She was exactly the same as before. She went to the window and saw him squatting by the fire. The leaves were burning slowly, going up in pale smoke, and he was whistling a tune she didn’t know.
THE RARER THING
HE SPRAWLED INDOLENTLY, propped on one elbow, spinning the earth around with his index finger. He’d put his finger on the white cap of the North Pole and spin the whole multicolored globe first
one way and then the other. She hated that casual abandon. It was so like him, she quickly decided. She watched him smiling to himself like a shower of gold on his slovenly beauty. Beauty, yes, but slovenly was the right word for it. He had a corrupted athlete’s body, flesh that had once been trained and trim, that had once been utterly possessed by energy and rhythm, the spring and dance of anxious blood. She could easily imagine how it had been, his face taut-skinned, his shoulders round and smooth and well-defined, his stomach flat from navel to lean loins and ridged with a delicate washboard pattern of muscle, and his legs knotted and angular as whittled wood, but lively, twitching with inner life like the glossed nervous body of a good racehorse. He had been a runner in college some years before, she knew that. But now, careless as a god, he seemed to flaunt his decay. She could see the softness of his torso rise and fall beneath the light summer sports shirt as he breathed. His face, coarsening, puffing at the jowls; his neck, once a clean thick sinewy line like rope, bulged now, overflowed at the open collar. Strangely, though, the whole impression was one of constriction rather than self-indulgence. It was as if he had deliberately confined all the life in him, disguised his surplus of vigor in shapeless flesh, as if he wore a magic cape or shawl. As he looked up at her, his eyes traveling the short pilgrimage of her body as if she were no more than some vague object, sleepy-eyed, indifferent as well to whatever she might be thinking of him, she despised him for what he had done to and with himself. But more than that she hated (or was it envy?) his male freedom to do whatever he pleased with himself. That was what wounded her, the way even now one could tell at a glance what he had been and could be if he really wanted to and how he used that image of himself, the imagined one that dogged his real presence like an attentive shadow, with squandering ease to mock and make fun of the world of appearances, to sneer especially at every kind of striving, burning, longing within that world, like her own. Unsettled by these thoughts, she decided to accept this more rationally as only another intolerable example of the crude vanity of insensitive maleness.
Evening Performance Page 6
