by Belva Plain
“No dessert?” Mrs. Dickson remonstrated. ’ “You don’t know what you’re missing! They have the most fabulous desserts! The pineapple—”
But Hazel had already risen. “I don’t want any,” she said steadily. She walked to the door. Martin excused himself and followed her. They got into a taxicab.
“Hazel,” he began.
“I don’t want to talk,” she said.
In the hotel elevator, she faced forward. He tried to place himself where she would have to look at him, so that by some expression, perhaps, he might convey to her what words could not But she did not let him meet her eyes.
In their room she took off her coat and hung it in the closet. Then she went into the bathroom. Martin walked to the window. Lights festooned the great bridge. Lights quivered on the bay, where little boats moved festively and people were all free of care. He turned back into the room, the quiet, pearl-gray room that spoke of money and the serenity that can go with it. His lips were dry with dread.
Hazel came out of the bathroom. She stood leaning against a table. It shook, and her purse fell to the floor. She didn’t pick it up.
“So you did see her when you were in England,” she said at last.
“Yes.”
“Why did you lie to me?”
“I didn’t lie. We just never talked about it.” And immediately he was ashamed of the cheap evasion. “You made love to her.”
He had a sense of standing at a crossroads. With one syllable, “yes,” he would take a turning from which there could be no retreat. Also, he had a feeling of déjà vu, as if he had always known that this might happen, although really that made no sense. The chances of its happening must have been one out of a thousand, at least. Yet here he was.
“You made love to her,” Hazel repeated.
“Yes,” he said.
“It wasn’t just one time. You stayed together.”
“Yes.”
She clapped her hands to her face and dropped them.
“I wouldn’t have minded other women, prostitutes least of all! Believe me! I understand that a man can’t be away for three years without—But her! Why did it have to be her?”
She began to weep without changing expression. Her face was smooth and uncontorted, a fixed face, with streaming tears. And this strange control dismayed him more than a frenzy would have done.
“Why?” she cried.
He trembled. What could he say? He thought of something.
“I came back, didn’t I? Doesn’t that tell you anything?”
“Yes. It tells me that you loved your children. Especially Claire.”
“No, no. It was more than that.”
“Your career, then, your precious career.”
“I thought of you,” he said.
“Oh, I believe that one! I surely do believe that one!”
“But it’s true.”
Hazel began to speak rapidly, with mounting pitch and force. “You were my whole life, do you know that, Martin? You were what I lived for. And to think that all the time, every loving word you ever spoke to me was a lie! That everything, everything was an act and a rotten lie! Oh my God, I understand what that poor cripple went through! What is this woman, anyway? What sort of whore is she, that she couldn’t leave you alone? Not once, but twice?” She sobbed now, she pulled at her hair. Her mouth was twisted in the mask and grimace of grief. “A whore, that’s what, a whore!”
“Ah, don’t,” Martin said. “Ah, don’t.”
“First her sister. But it wasn’t enough to ruin one marriage, was it? Oh, I could tear her eyes out! If it weren’t for my children I would kill her. Oh my God, I hope she dies in agony with cancer! Cancer!”
“I want,” he began, “I want to tell you—” and stopped.
What did he want to tell? Had it been anyone other than Mary, some WAC or nurse or English village girl he might have said: I couldn’t stand being alone anymore, and might have expected to be half understood. But Mary was different, and more’s the pity, Hazel knew it.
Yet he tried again. “I can only beg you to understand my conflict. My weakness, if you like. Weigh this against our years. I’ve been a good husband to you, you know I have—”
“Claire’s marriage,” she interrupted. “I see it now. No wonder you can’t bear the thought of it! No wonder!” She flung herself on the bed. “Get out I want you to get out.”
“Be reasonable, Hazel. Please. I’ll get you some medicine, a pill, to help you get through this tonight.”
“I don’t want a pill. Do you know something, Martin? I hate you. I wouldn’t have believed a human being could change as I have in just five minutes. Whatever I felt for you all these years is gone. It left me at the table in that restaurant. Just left me.”
“You’re frantic and I don’t blame you. But can you try to put everything aside till the morning? We’ll talk it over more calmly, we’ll straighten it out, I know we will.”
“I don’t want to talk. In the morning I’m going home to my children.”
“All right, well go home, then. Will you lie there quietly while I go out for medicine?”
“I’m not taking any.”
“You have to pull yourself together. Never mind how you feel about me. You’ve got three children to think of.”
The crowded street was almost as bright as day. It was easy going down the hill. One almost had to hold back to keep from hurtling forward. Two prostitutes with crayon pink cheeks approached him. Except for their hard bright eyes, they looked like children. They couldn’t have been older than sixteen. Their scornful laughter followed him.
In a shop window he saw the bronze Kwan Yin which Hazel and he had looked at on their walk that afternoon. It seemed now to have been a month ago. It seemed to have been a month ago that he had read the letter about Claire. And he stopped again to study the merciful goddess, perhaps to find in her benign expression some comfort for his raging pain.
Ah, he would give anything, anything, even his precious hands, not to have done this to Hazel!
Mary, Mary, he thought then.
“That one’s had a bit too much,” the soldier had said when Martin passed that night in London, all those thousands of miles away and so long ago.
Too much.
When he had got the medicine, he walked back up the hill. Cable cars were still running, but he forced himself to climb. It took the last of his breath.
She was undressed, lying in bed, neither reading nor sleeping, just lying there. Her eyes were swollen. She looked ugly, and this moved him terribly, the fact that she looked ugly because of him. He came over to the bed and stood looking down at her.
“Is there anything I can do? Anything that can be undone?”
“I don’t see what.” She spoke quietly now. “You never got over her.”
“But I love you,” he said, not denying the other. “Can’t I make you believe me?”
“No, Martin, you never did.”
“You’re wrong. I did and I do.” He knelt down at the side of the bed so that his face was level with hers. “Please, Hazel. Please.”
“Please what?”
“You know. Understand. I never wanted it to happen.”
“You couldn’t help it, you mean?”
“No.”
“That makes it worse, doesn’t it?”
He didn’t know what to answer.
“You spent two years with her. Two years out of your life while you were married to me.”
How to explain? How to say that there are different kinds of love? That there are circumstances, timing, fate, enchantments—ah, call it what you will. He stroked her head. He wished he could feel the way she wanted him to. Indeed, he did feel something very deep, but it was not what she wanted and he knew it.
In the morning they packed their belongings and flew home. On the way to the airport, the cabdriver was chatty, which would ordinarily have been an annoyance. But this time, Martin found relief from awful silence in the flow of talk.<
br />
They boarded the plane. Their seats were three abreast, Martin at the window, because Hazel never liked to look out, and on her other side, a man, a lawyer or accountant, very likely, who was deep in documents. Martin had a newspaper and a paperback, but couldn’t concentrate on either.
As clouds parted, one saw the speeding shadow on the plain in ink-blue wash. Ahead, clouds curved like the drooping petals of enormous peonies. A river ran in a red-rock canyon where ocean fossils lay five thousand feet below the surface of the ancient earth.
What matter any of our transient sorrows in the face of these?
Hazel was crying again. He didn’t dare to look in her direction. He heard the click of her purse as she got a handkerchief out, and hoped for her sake that the man on the other side wouldn’t notice. The embarrassment would crush her.
Long hours later, somewhere over Pennsylvania, the sky grew dark. The plane lurched and the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign came on. Then began the long descent toward the million lights of eastern cosmopolis. Thunder crashed around the rocking plane as they came down into the storm, and a woman in the seat behind cried out in fright.
“Don’t be afraid,” Martin said to Hazel. “We aren’t going to crash.”
She turned to him. He saw that she was dry-eyed. “Do you suppose I care if we do?”
He thought of the ride out to California, of yesterday’s euphoria and elation. And now this.
Oh God, help our fevered struggles.
Book Five
LOSSES
Chapter 27
For two months gloom like a heavy shroud had lain on the house. On an evening in mid-September, Martin sat alone on the screened porch. It was hot, but not with the sweet heat of summer. This oppressive heat was lasting past its season into the time of fleeing birds and silence. He wished they were back in the city. With no particular logic, he thought it might be better there. At least he would be able to walk over to the office at night and do some paperwork. Anything to get out of the house. But school would not open for another week, and Hazel had wanted to stay here as long as possible, obviously because she could hide more easily in this place where they were merely summer transients and very few people knew them.
He could hear her moving about in the kitchen. Every evening now after the maid had gone upstairs, she found occupation in the kitchen cooking and baking. He got up to stand in the doorway. Ginger and sugar scented the warm air. The complicated paraphernalia which Hazel had brought from home—pots, molds, terrines and cookbooks in glossy jackets—shone in a yellow light. And still it seemed to Martin that rot lay over everything.
She took a pie out of the oven. It had a high meringue, colored delicately brown, like toast. He wished she would stop filling the children with stuff like that! Marjorie was big and rawboned like Hazel’s mother and had already gained ten pounds over the summer.
Hazel set the pie on the counter. “Can I make you a cup of tea?” She spoke politely as one does when a neighbor has unexpectedly dropped in.
“No, thank you.”
Her eyes, with their round, pure whites, had always in their mild innocence been appealing. Tonight they were dull. Stubborn, he thought, and was ashamed of the thought Suddenly he saw that she had grown very thin-She must have been losing weight for weeks.
“You’ve lost weight,” he said.
She wiped the sink and hung the dish towel on the rack. “What difference does it make?”
“A great deal. If you lose any more, we’ll have to check into it.”
“Why? You think it’s cancer? I’d be out of the way, then, wouldn’t I?”
“Don’t be a fool! This sort of talk won’t work, Hazel. There’s a limit to sympathy, as with anything else.”
“You want to know something? I really don’t care whether I have your sympathy or not.”
“What do you care about, then?”
“I should think anyone could see what.”
“The house, you mean? The children? Yes, you’re doing everything according to the book and better. But there are other things.”
“Yes, there are other things, and it’s a little late for them.” She pushed the loose hair back from her forehead. “I’m going up,” she said wearily.
He understood that the subject had been switched off again. “I’ll stay and let Enoch in. And Claire. You remember she has two days off this week?”
“The room’s ready for her. And you needn’t wait for Enoch, he’s staying overnight with his friend Freddy.”
The ceiling light made hollows and shadows on her cheeks. For a moment she stood there as if she were looking for something and had forgotten what, and Martin felt a mixture of pity and exasperation.
“Well, I’ll be going up,” she said again. “Good night.”
“Good night.” He went back to the portable television on the porch. A heated drama was taking place on the screen, a drama about doctors. He recognized the hero and could have written the plot, in which the intern, pure in his astounding brilliance, solved with no trouble at all the problem that had been baffling the most renowned specialists in the world. Idiocy! He switched it off and wandered into the living room, picked up the newspaper, and finding it filled again with repetitious litany of murders and burglaries, of bankrupt cities, defense budgets and election speeches, put it down. He sighed and wondered whether the returning owners would feel any emanations of his frustrated spirit in their house. He thought he could feel theirs, from the faded cretonne with its stiff maroon chrysanthemums, to the Victorian desk in the corner with its rosewood fretwork, solid as a cathedral and inherited from either his or her great-grandmother.
He reconstructed the family. It was a game, a pastime for him. Their silver would be inherited with their politics—Republican, naturally. On their inherited Lenox china they would eat their formal meals of thin roast beef, clear watery soup and mint-green gelatine dessert. He hadn’t liked this house when they rented it because it had the spirit of bleak, repressed emotions. The man in the yellowed photograph wore a nineteen-twenties’ straw boater at a jaunty angle, but the face was no Scott Fitzgerald face of celebration: the lips were pressed too thin. Furthermore, the house had smelled of wet bathing suits and tar-stained sneakers on the day they had walked in. Still, it was on the water, and after all, that was what they had sought for the summer. One good thing, though: the master bedroom had twin beds. He wondered how they would have managed during these past weeks if Hazel and he had had to share a bed. Next week back home they would have to.
He had been trying to straighten things out. Oh, how he had been trying, since that ghastly night at the restaurant in San Francisco! She would sigh. “Why are you sighing?” he would ask, and she would answer, “Was I? I didn’t realize it.” Maybe she didn’t. Often a sigh was only unconscious relief of tension. Her tears brimmed unexpectedly. They’d gone to the movies a few times, and there in the darkness he’d heard that snap of the pocketbook opening and shutting as she got out a handkerchief. In the reflection from the screen he could see the wet glisten of tears and had known they couldn’t possibly have been caused by the banal and silly story on the screen. Sighs and tears. Two or three times he had gone over to her bed and put his arms around her. She hadn’t pushed him out, only lain there like an unresponsive lump as if to say: “Take it or leave it; it means nothing to me.” He had grown quite empty of whatever complex feelings had brought him to her in the first place: need for sexual release, tenderness, sorrow, a wish to heal. All had simply drained away and he had lain stiffly beside her thinking of what he might say to break through, and then finding no way, for he had many times used up all the words he could summon, had gone back to his own bed.
He wondered now how long a family could hold together like this. Enoch, at least, must sense something. This summer he’d been counselor at a day camp for retarded children. He related to the rejected and the weak. He wasn’t—fortunately—one of them; still, he would never make an Ivy League college or be on Law Revi
ew. He wasn’t the type to lift his head high above the crowd. He’d be a good teacher of the young, especially the troubled young. He wouldn’t sympathize with me if he were to know the truth, Martin thought. Youth can be awesomely puritanical. It takes seriously what we teach, till it discovers what we really are.
But surely Enoch must know something? he asked himself again. There’d been one quarrel when they’d first come back from California, during which Hazel’s voice had been loud enough to be heard across the road. She had been in a rage, pounding her fists on the wall. He hadn’t known she was capable of such passion, of whatever sort. Afterward she had been contrite and trembling, as if ashamed of having given such offense. And this docility had sickened him as much as the rage, which was, after all, not abnormal in the circumstances. For he had pulled the rug out from under her emotional security.
They had sat down at the dinner table and Hazel, smiling, had served the salad and sliced the cake. But her eyes had shown pink swollen lids under the heavy powder. He wondered why Enoch had never asked about that, and then thought maybe the boy didn’t want to know. He had an instant’s flash-view of supper tables, millions of supper tables all over the country, of families sitting with a man and a woman and the children in between. How thin the fabric which held them together! My God, you know nothing from an outward view! And he remembered that doctor across the hall in his building, a distinguished obstetrician, an amiable grandfather with a refined and pretty wife. One afternoon he had suddenly closed the office door for good and gone to Arizona with his secretary. Was anything, was anyone, ever simple, direct and clear?
He got up and, from the drawer of the desk which he had appropriated for the summer, took out a folder. “The Institute,” he had scrawled on the cover. This at least was direct and clear. Every detail had its purpose, whether scientific, technical or artistic. Across the entrance, below the pediment, he wanted a single sentence to be carved in the stone. Searching, he’d gone back again, as he had always done, to the Greeks. No other culture before or since had been able to express either in words or stone, probably in music also if one could only know, such fundamental truths with such comely grace.
