The Self-Enchanted

by David Stacton

  The justice of the peace turned out to be a short, nondescript man who looked sleepy and whose collar was loose. His manner was affable and he did not seem at all surprised. He said they would need witnesses, so Christopher sent for the bell-boy, who came back with the night manager. The justice of the peace smiled distantly at Sally, as though he did not care whether she lived or died. His hair looked artificial. The bell-boy was shorter than she was, and looked up at her critically, probably wondering how she had pulled it off. Christopher’s face was expressionless. They all got through it somehow, and then, when the justice of the peace abruptly stopped talking, she realized that they were married, and that the bulky, frightened man beside her was her husband. She glanced away from him.

  They were all waiting for something. Abruptly Christopher turned to her, and she felt him kiss her. His lips were moist and hot and trembled. She tried to draw away, and he felt that, and held her more firmly. She saw his eyes so close to her, and saw that they were murky and in some way strangely sad. She wanted very much to cry.

  Then, with a sudden movement, Christopher got rid of them all. The door closed behind them and she was alone. She sank into a chair, grateful for this one minute, gazing at the door behind which, no doubt, Christopher was paying them off. She flinched when the door opened and he came in again. He pretended not to notice.

  He seemed at a loss. “I’m afraid it was pretty shoddy,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind too much.”

  She shook her head, afraid to speak. She looked up at him, wondering who on earth he was and what on earth they would do together or say to one another. What do people say to one another when they feel nothing?

  “Get into bed,” he said almost gently. He went into the bathroom and closed the door behind him. She pulled herself together and did as she was told. She lay there, too tired to move, and stared up at the ceiling.

  She shivered, hearing the toilet flush, turned over on her stomach, and waited. He came into the room and switched off the light. In the unexpected darkness she heard him get into bed, and moved away. She could smell the heavy sweaty smell of him. He reached out to her, and she could feel those short stubby hands moving over her, and the heaviness of his body. He was trembling, not with desire, but with a terror to possess.

  Only much later, dragged up from sullen sleep, into the light of day, did she turn and see him sleeping, his sensual mouth slightly parted, his face gilded with exhaustion, and noticed, as he lay there, that he was crying in his sleep.

  It was that, more than anything else, that made her try to understand. He sighed, turning restlessly, fell against her, and flung out his arm. He threw a naked, hairy leg over her, and even as she flinched, she once more fell asleep.

  PART THREE

  XI

  In the morning he was a total stranger.

  The sunlight was strong and malicious. She pulled herself up in bed and looked round the room. She felt dirty from head to foot, and wanted to take a shower, but was afraid to wake him, for she did not want to see him just yet. At last she slipped out of bed and went to the window. Below her the town was an untidy checkboard, with the desert and the mountains beyond. There were people far below her in the street.

  Turning, she saw that Christopher was awake. He pulled himself gingerly up in bed, for when he woke in the morning he was totally helpless. It was like watching someone move under water. He sighed, and said “Oh, God”, and reached across to the night table for a cigarette, like a wounded animal struggling up from a trap. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You should smoke,” he chuckled. “It helps.” He held the pack out to her, as though trying to coax a timid dog. “Have one. And put something on. You’ll catch cold.”

  She did as she was told. In possession of himself now, he sat up watching her. Disconcerted, she went into the bathroom and locked the door behind her, turning all the taps of the shower full on. When she came back to the bedroom he was sitting up in bed, smoking still another cigarette, but his manner was watchful. She dressed slowly, wondering what to do once she was dressed. Silence was heavy in the room.

  “Why don’t you go down to breakfast?” he asked. “The coffee shop in the hotel is pretty good.”

  “I can’t go like this.”

  “This is Reno. What does it matter what you wear?”

  “It matters to me.”

  “I want to be alone,” he said. She thought he looked startled. “Wait downstairs. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

  Again she did as she was told, and it seemed to her that everyone in the lobby seemed to be staring at her. She had no money with her, and she knew no one in Reno. She was on a leash, chained to Christopher. It was not a situation she exactly liked. She waited half an hour for him, sitting facing the elevators.

  When finally he came down he was walking stolidly and his face was pale. He took her arm, leaning against her so hard that he hurt her, and they went into the restaurant. The seats were narrow, so she had to sit up stiffly. She glanced round her at the large coloured photographs of Nevada that decorated the walls. One of them showed the valley, a view of the lakes in autumn. She did not want to ask whether or not they were going back there. She eyed Christopher furtively. Some colour had come back into his face. He tried to smile wryly.

  “Do you know Reno well?” he asked.

  “No. Dad used to bring me here sometimes.”

  “Finish up and come along,” he said. “We’ll go buy some clothes. You can’t dress like that.”

  He led her outside. The shopping was his own idea, and she didn’t have much say in the matter. He seemed to enjoy it. They went into a shop and sat down. Eventually the saleswoman appeared, a slim woman of fifty, with a face so accustomed to being pulled into the contours of fashion that it no longer had any features of its own.

  “This is Mrs. Barocco,” said Christopher. “She’ll be opening an account here.”

  “Is there anything in particular madam had in mind?”

  “Something simple,” said Christopher, and that was as far as Sally got. Christopher even chose her perfume, blandly assuming that he should. By the time they were through she was in a fury of tears and embarrassment. But though she was angry, she could not help admiring him. The hair at the back of his neck folded together in a precise curly way, as though it had been beaten out of metal. It was a little section of him that was not contrived, and that was therefore vulnerable and touching.

  “I think you’ve made me afraid of San Francisco,” she said.

  “Why the devil should you be afraid of San Francisco? Besides, we’re going back to the valley for a while.”

  She thought that over. “I embarrass you, don’t I?” she asked.

  He turned round in the crowd angrily. “What on earth gave you that idea?” he demanded.

  “You don’t seem to know what to do with me.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t see what you’ve got to complain of,” he said shortly. He began to walk faster. “You’d better make the best of where you are.”

  “I could get a job,” she said. She didn’t feel particularly happy.

  “As a waitress in some cheap hash-house?”

  There was nothing for her to say to that. She was in a trap. “I could go back to the house.”

  He looked acutely uncomfortable. “It burned down,” he said. “The night we left. I’m sorry. I should have told you.”

  *

  They were in Reno for two weeks. Christopher left her and he did not even bother to ask her how she filled up her time. She had no one to talk to and nowhere to go. “If you want anything, tell them who you are and charge it,” he told her. But she was afraid to do that. On the third day there she received a letter from a local bank, informing her that five hundred a month would be deposited to her checking account. That puzzled her.

  “What will I spend five hundred a month on?” she asked.

  “You’ll find out soon enough.”

&
nbsp; She even ate her meals alone. She bought copies of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and studied them carefully. She took long walks through Reno, past the divorce courts and the square. She stood on the bridge over the Walker River, to see if she could see any wedding rings under the water, which was where divorcées were supposed ceremoniously to throw them. She wrote one or two cheques, to see how it would look, and then tore them up. She did not feel like Sally Barocco at all. And Sally Carson seemed dead.

  “I can’t sit alone in my room all day,” she told him at last.

  He had been looking at a magazine. He put it down. “In that case we’ll go out. We’ll go to dinner and then do the places. We may as well see them. We’ll be leaving in the morning.”

  He treated her like that. They drove out to a restaurant in Sparks, ten miles away. It was a very good restaurant and it made her nervous.

  “Why?”

  “I’m not used to people fawning on me.”

  That seemed to please Christopher. “I always get good service here,” he said. “I put them in business.” He looked at her quizzically. “You’ve always wondered what I did,” he said. “Well, I’ll show you, if you like.” He pushed his chair back and went to speak to the chef, who made himself pleasant. Sally did not like to see people servile. She waited outside.

  Once in the car Christopher seemed in a better mood. They went to a sprawling casino which had entrances on two streets. It was ornamented with mirrors and fake nineteenth-century prints, and it was full of slot machines. Christopher went over and spoke to a dealer at one of the crap tables, and to a girl at the end of it, who was a shill. Then he came back. “Want to see more?” he asked. He took her arm and led her upstairs. “That’s where the real gambling goes on. Did you ever see anybody lose a lot of money? It’s fascinating. But the phoney cheques get to be a headache.”

  There was an escalator, and standing on it she felt like one of those pigeons which ride up ramps at shooting galleries. They came out in a smaller, darker, much more crowded room, in the centre of which played an electric organ. Christopher pushed through a swinging door and down a short corridor. He opened a door on the left. She found herself in a small anteroom. A girl sat working at an adding machine. Beside her, perched on a desk chair, was a girl of about six, with streamers of adding-machine paper curled in her hair. Columns of figures in red and black ran over the strips of paper.

  “Hello, Mabel,” said Christopher. “How are things?”

  Mabel said that things were pretty good. “Don’t keep that kid of yours up too long,” said Christopher, and introduced Sally, and explained she was his wife.

  “Oh,” said Mabel, looking at Sally more closely. ‘Congratulations.’

  “Mabel, Mr. Carmody dropped ten thousand.”

  “He never learns, does he?”

  “You might check on his bank.”

  “I checked last night,” said Mabel. “He’s on a binge.”

  Christopher nodded and beckoned Sally into an inner office. It contained only a desk, a wall safe, and two chairs. “Well,” he said, getting up, “what do you think of it?”

  “What am I supposed to think of it?”

  “You can take it or leave it. I thought you might like to see how money gets made.”

  She looked at him, wondering why he wanted to show off, and knowing that he had shown her nothing. His expression was not revealing. Now they were married they were more strangers than ever.

  “Would you mind flying back to-night?” he asked. “We could be there by dawn.”

  “I should pack.”

  He smiled slowly. “You’re packed already.”

  “You like these displays of authority, don’t you?”

  “Doesn’t everybody?” he asked.

  “I don’t like being shunted around as though my life weren’t my own.”

  “It saves time,” he said, getting up.

  They drove out to the airport in silence, with the window rolled down to the cold night air. The airport was deserted. The runway was icy. Christopher’s amphibian was rolled out in front of one of the hangars. He helped her into the plane, and then the door closed on them. She did not like to be alone with him. She was afraid of him. She knew it now definitely, and knew that he knew it, and that it was what he wanted. She looked at her watch. It was two-thirty.

  “When did you learn to fly?” she asked.

  He laughed. “On the Mexican border,” he said, “ferrying wetbacks. It seemed a good idea at the time.”

  Before she realized it they were off the ground. Looking below her, she saw the absurdly small and bright lights of Reno, receding in the distance. Then they were in the open country, with nothing but the menacing shadows of the mountains for a guide.

  He had forgotten her. He sat forward, concentrating on the controls, absorbed in some secret battle with an unnamed enemy. This was a side of him she could never know, but it was the one that interested her most, perhaps because she was a woman, and women do not like the secret lives of men. But in the tight muscles of his back she could feel a hatred that he felt for her, and how glad he was to be in the plane, which was more a part of him than she was.

  Looking to the east, she saw the faint glow of false dawn. And as she looked, the mountains grew higher around her. She had never been above them before, and realized how small people were within them.

  “I had a cook and a houseboy flown in from San Francisco, in case you’re worrying about that,” he said.

  “I thought we’d get someone from the valley.”

  “They’d spy on us all the time,” he said. “Or did you want to show off before your former friends?”

  She did not answer. She knew these people from the city would see everything she did wrong and gossip about it. And probably he had hired them to watch her.

  “You’ll learn how to handle them,” he said, and dismissed the subject. But it startled her to have him read her thoughts. Picturing those servants, and seeing the mountains, she felt as though she were flying into a tomb. It was not even her tomb. It was his.

  *

  It was even worse than that.

  She stayed in her room as much as she could, to avoid the servants. The cook was Finnish, and the houseboy a Filipino with tiny features and black teeth. She did not know what to say to them, and soon discovered that Christopher gave them their orders anyway. She saw little of him, and was glad of it. He stayed in his study and had most of his meals sent in on a tray. And the Filipino watched her all the time. She told Christopher about it.

  “He’s a Filipino. And you’re a woman,” was all she got out of him.

  One day, when she could stand it no longer, she took the car and drove down to the village. It looked strange to her now. She drove on to the Carson place, and looked at the charred timbers of the house, sticking up in the snow. She had not really believed that her house was gone. Now, looking at the blackened fragments, she believed that her past had been quickly and methodically destroyed. Whether Christopher had done it or not, there was no place for her to turn back to. Her last root here had gone.

  It was in the same spirit that she ploughed through the snow to the obelisk. The inscriptions were buried in the snow, and only the shiny black shaft stuck up into the air. It looked puny and foolish. Nothing of her life remained but this ridiculous, half-buried piece of polished stone. Even the ledge on which she had taken refuge in the past was inaccessible in winter.

  She went back to the village and into Mrs, Grimes’s store. To her surprise and relief Mrs, Grimes was not there, but against one wall she saw some skis, and that gave her an idea. She liked to ski. If she could get away from the house and back into the open she might be able to bear life the better. She ran her hands along the surface of the skis, which were not good ones, and she bought a pair of boots and some poles. The poles were not the right length, but they would do.

  She was sitting on the terrace of the house, tying on her boots, when Christopher came out and saw her. “Where d
id you get those?” he demanded.

  “I bought them in the village.”

  “Who gave you permission to go down there?”

  She stood up. “I wasn’t aware that I needed permission.”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean. Do you think I want every bitch in the village gossiping?”

  He cut himself off, and the silence was not pleasant. She looked at him and saw that he was really upset. He looked scared, as he often did these days, and she knew that she was not in for an easy night. When she went into the hall she saw a large wooden packing case standing there. She remembered then that she had heard a heavy truck while she was in the valley. Christopher seemed very much aware of the case, but she pretended not to notice it. She was more worried about the coming night, for the nights were unendurable. He never came near her by daylight, and she understood why. He did not want to see her, nor did he want her to see him. But the understanding made things no easier to bear.

  Her bedroom was cold and immense. The sheets were always cold at first. She liked the delicious feeling of getting warm in them. Then she would wait. Sometimes she would read, sometimes she would sit up in the dark, smoking. She had begun to smoke heavily these days. But mostly she left the light on, for as long as she left the light on she knew she was safe. With the light off it was worse. Christopher refused to have draperies or curtains for many of the windows, so that the mountains seemed to bear down on her directly from every side. And as she was dozing off, she would hear the whine of the sliding door from the dressing-room to his bedroom, and her body would go rigid.

  Usually he said nothing. To-night he paused in the doorway, watching the room, and she could tell, through half-open eyes, that something was wrong with them. He started across the room, but seemed to walk with difficulty. There was never any love in him. And there was a rank smell pouring out of him that nauseated her.

  He was strong and he liked to cause pain. It seemed to be the only thing that satisfied him. It was as though he wanted to destroy her.