3
With a grudging look of curiosity, her brother came into the lounge with a friend, a young resident doctor. She had met him, her brother told her, at her wedding, and she pretended to remember him. The young man, George Gustafsen, came in alone a few nights later and, talking with her, accidentally knocked his glass off the table.
He declared his undying love for her the first time he took her out and made the demand of her to love him as much. This declaration and demand were made while he sat apart from her in his car, then, without preparatory caressing, he threw himself upon her. She resisted him because his sudden ardor struck her as comic and because he was not pleasing to her physically—his face plump, his hips high and jutting; and he had the pomposity of her brother, as if he were emulating the other. After a few times with him, however, when he did not throw himself upon her but continued to declare his love and to demand that she marry him, she felt that his choosing her to be responsible for his happiness the rest of his life elevated her higher than anyone else had ever done, and she fell in love with him because of that oppressive honor and because a man so much in love, so possessive, so broodingly jealous, would surely take care of her forever and be true to her forever.
When she refused to go with the radio announcer to his apartment, he taunted her for her youth, predicting, with a pitiable meanness in his thick cheeks, her panic and loneliness at his age. She never saw him again. Even though she was sorry for him, some belief that no man was ever as helpless as he appeared to be, prevented her from feeling deeply about his condition. To think that a man was helpless was like thinking that the sun was helpless because it could not be other than a burning light.
The marriage to George Gustafsen took place in the home of her Aunt Belle, her mother’s sister, in St. Francis Woods, the house strewn with red roses and a fashionable pastor officiating. The guests were relatives and close friends, but, reserved and small as the wedding was, Vivian felt that it was more than it ought to be, even as she had felt about the first wedding that it was not as much as it might have been. By this time she mocked all marriage ceremonies except the brief, civil kind, and made a practice of glancing derisively through the society section of the newspapers for nuptial items that told the fraternity of the groom, the sorority of the bride, the color and material of the bride’s mother’s gown, and for photographs of happy pairs, startled-eyed in all their trappings and suspicious of what the years were to bring in spite of blessings from God and pastors and parents and the bureau of licenses.
She gave up her singing in the lounge and sat at home evenings with her husband—the evenings he was not on duty—and with her son, who was at the time of her wedding almost two. She was again a wife, and although it was expected of her to be desirable to other men, she was to cease the overt demonstration, as in the lounge, of her desire for them. They bought a modest, two-story house in a neighborhood of narrow, stylish houses not far from her parents but not as commodious as the houses of her parents’ neighborhood. She selected the decor with her mother, who was greeted by every manager in the six-story store, and in this decor, while David slept in his room upstairs and her husband read his medical journals and his Time and Fortune magazines, she sat curled up on the couch, knitting. She was acting, she felt, the role of a woman who has caused something important to happen to herself, and she was convinced that her husband was also acting; that his was the role of the young husband on his way to prominence and prosperity, content to be at home evenings with his wife, and proud that he was a loving father to another man’s child. His legs were stuck straight out to the velvet footstool as if ordered in that position by some director of the scene. It seemed to her that he was like a boy imitating some perfect adult in everything he did from paring his nails to lifting the child into the air, from clearing his throat to predicting Hitler’s next move. She sympathized with him, for this need of his to perform as others expected him to, but again, as with her lover, as with Paul, her sympathy was baffled by the conviction that because he was a man he was not in real need of sympathy, that he got along very well without it, and that to grant it to him was to take away some of his maleness—the more sympathy granted him the more of his maleness was taken away, and the less she thought of him. It was this troubling conflict that led her one evening to sit on his lap, for to be close against him, to be enveloped by his presence, would rid her of her conflict, and she slipped onto his lap with the innocence of a woman in the sway of her own femininity, placing herself within his arm that held the magazine and laying her head against his chest.
She pretended to be as absorbed as he in the magazine, but the close-set type in narrow columns gave her the same feeling of ignorance and insufficiency that was given her by blueprints and the financial sections of the newspapers. When he turned the page and a picture of Mussolini appeared, of his big face haranguing a crowd, she was instantly intrigued. She touched the dictator’s chin with her index finger and the gesture was like taking a liberty with the man himself, repulsing him and flirting with him at the same time.
“What’s that for?” her husband inquired.
“Isn’t that a monster of a chin?” she asked, afraid that he had guessed her trick of access into the lives of famous men. The only way she could get close enough to them to see that they were human was to imagine them making love.
“It isn’t that bad,” he said.
She waited for him to say something more and knew, unmoving in his lap, that there was to be some clash to enliven their evening and that both welcomed it and were tensed by it, and yet would have preferred to let the day go by without it.
“He excites you?” he asked, his voice as strained as if the Italian dictator were their next-door neighbor.
She felt a laugh readying itself in her chest at the comicalness of his jealousy, while her mind prepared itself for the seriousness of it. “I imagine he makes love like a bull,” she said placatingly.
“You’ve imagined it?”
She shrugged. “Don’t you imagine things?”
“There are other things to think about. . . . ”
“Oh, yes,” she agreed.
“Let me ask you something,” he said, and asked her then the question she knew he had been wanting to ask her ever since he met her. “Did you sleep with any man besides Paul?”
“No,” she said, and laughed. “I was saving myself for you.”
Their bodies became intolerant of each other and still she sat unmoving, hoping with the closeness of bodies to force that satisfaction in union for which they had married.
“You weren’t saving yourself for anybody,” he said.
She struck aside the magazine and got up. “You’ve been aching for me to confess ever since you met me,” she cried, walking back and forth in her black satin mules, a hand on her hip, knowing how her buttocks moved in the black slacks, every movement substantiating what he suspected of her. Since their wedding she had felt a restriction on the grace of her body. He seemed, if she were graceful, if she were almost unconsciously provocative as she undressed, to suspect her of remembering someone else for whom she had learned those movements or of anticipating appreciation by someone other than he, and he would sometimes not touch her when she lay down beside him. But now in this promenading that preceded her confessing whatever little she had to confess, she recaptured her gracefulness, flaunting it because she had, for months now, suppressed it in fear of his displeasure and of his rebuff. She could not, however, confess her affair. It was the only thing she had to confess, but to confess it was to deny her right to it, to violate the secret matrix where knowledge about herself was forming like an embryo. She told him, instead, of the men she had been told about by the two dancers who had lived in the apartment below hers and Paul’s in Los Angeles, but claiming those men as her own lovers. She told him the stories she had heard from the dancers who had talked endlessly of their lovers, enthralling her with not only each story but with the extraordinary powers they seemed to
possess because of their profusion of men. If one man meant as much to them as to her, she had thought, what meaning there was in the profusion! And when the girls had laughed about each man’s idiosyncrasies, she had wondered, and wondered now as she repeated their mockery, why they retaliated for that profusion of love. She threw herself into a chair, swinging her leg over its wide arm, to tell him in that sprawling position about her lovers, while he walked the room like a man mortally wounded and attempting to prove to himself that he was not. After a time he lay down and closed his eyes, but she knew that he still listened and would listen as long as she spoke.
She lay alone in their bed, her head filled with the surfeit of stories she had told, with the memory of her harsh voice claiming to know the frailties and prowess of men she had never seen, angry with him for imposing that surfeit upon her and the reluctant excitement of it. Almost everything she had ever done, it seemed to her now, was done at other persons’ urging, whether they spoke their urging or did not speak it. The way she had walked around the room, and the way she flung herself across the chair, and the untrue confession, all were imposed by him. There did not seem to be any core within herself that was unaffected by him, by the men of her life, by her father and brother, by Paul and by her lover, and by her son.
At two in the morning she went down to shake him off the sofa. “When I didn’t know you existed, why should I have waited for you?” she cried. “Why should I have waited even if I knew you existed? Can you tell me why?”—shouting down the opposing voice within her that said she ought to have waited because he had wanted her to, that all that was necessary was his wanting her to, even though he had not known her then, that his wanting was more than enough.
Upstairs, David began to wail. Unable to stop her trembling, she did not go up to him. Her husband, glad of the excuse to escape her, went up to the boy, closing the door after him.
She lay on her back, alone again in her bed, her hands clasped below her breasts, enticing sleep with that position, enticing with that innocent position a blamelessness for the use she had made of her womanness. That use of it as a weapon was not the use she wanted for it, and she was as dismayed by that use as she was by the entire eruption that followed upon her flirtatious finger on Mussolini’s chin.
George wept dryly in her arms the first night he returned to their bed, after several nights on the couch in David’s room, and she covered his head with kisses and confessed that she had lied and urged him not to weep, for she was unable to bear the sounds in his throat that were as unreasonable as their discord had been.
When the Japanese bombed the U.S. fleet in Hawaii, a change was brought about in their marriage. Because they were now plunged into momentous times, swept into war and the unknown with the rest of the world, because of the imminence of separation or death, what it was that each feared in the other seemed not so fearsome, and they became inseparable. They seemed to have been mated by destiny—the condition that her husband had desired in the beginning.
In the blackouts they held hands, and, if David was still awake, they picked him up and held him and looked out the window at a dark city, imagining the suspense everybody must be feeling—the anti-aircraft men and the sailors on the ships in the bay and the people at all their windows. She was aware of the thousands, the millions of people who held one another in the dark of other cities in Europe and Asia. She was aware of tremendous armies, of the magnitude of the seas and the land, and she was alive, as never before, to the near particulars of the earth—the tree in the street below and a solitary seagull soaring, its white breast made visible by the natural light in the sky.
George enlisted in the army medical corps and was flown East for training, and Vivian and her son were left alone. Before the child went to sleep, she told him about the heroic exploits his stepfather was to perform, rescuing wounded and dying soldiers, saving every life. But as she told her tales of heroism, lying on her bed with the child, her mind was not on the absent man but, with pleasurable fear, on the encroachments of the world on her life.
In that genteel neighborhood changes took place. Late at night doors were slammed and voices were heard in the street, and sometimes she was wakened by curses and by footsteps running down the hill. She went for walks with David, who was three years old and ran ahead of her and off on tangents, up porch steps and into stores; she sat on a bench in the park while he played on the grass; they had lunch often at her mother’s or at her aunt’s or at her cousin Teresa’s; she wrote every day to her husband and she read the newspapers; and her restlessness increased, the impatient waiting for the chaos around her to break in upon her. The country was in an uproar, millions of people were moving across the continent, whole families moving, armies moving from one coast to the other. She felt the vibrations of the city at work in the night; woke for a moment at midnight and knew that people were moving through the city on trolleys and in cars, going to and from the shipyards; heard the long convoys of brown, canvas-covered trucks rumbling through the streets in the hours before dawn; and knew, at dawn, that people were rising from their beds in rooms they had moved into the day before. It seemed to her that whole regions of people were moving into the city; she heard dialects that were like foreign languages, and strange intonations, strange pitches. Around her everything was in flux, and when she lay down beside David during the blackouts, the time of hiding in darkness with the rest of the people in the city was like a step into further mingling with them. She felt that she was using the child as ballast, as a mooring, and that, without him, if he did not exist, she might step out the door into the flood of change.
One night, before they fell asleep together, she kissed him over his face and head fervently, in need of protection from him, trying to kiss him into that condition of stability that she had desired from her husbands and that her kisses of adoration deluded her into believing they possessed. With her kissing of her son she wanted to persuade him to become at once a man and protect her from her desire to run out into the chaos. David whimpered against the fervency of her kisses, and she released him and lay back, turning her face to the window. The night was faintly illumined by the moon that was rising in that part of the sky not visible to her. She felt an exhaustion as after love and the dissatisfaction that at times combined with it, that desire for something more, as if something more had been promised her that was not yet given.
4
A friend of her mother’s owned a dress shop off the lobby of one of the larger hotels, and she accepted a job there as a salesgirl. She wanted to sing again in a lounge, but that would be like an act of infidelity. Even her job at the hotel might seem like that to her husband, and when he returned for a few days before he was sent to England, she did not tell him that she was working.
The shop’s windows faced the lobby and the street, both, and so the shop, with its gilded, high-domed ceiling, was like a display case for her. The hotel guests glanced in at her and she glanced out at them. She saw them as also on display, a passing display of generals and officers, industrialists, and diplomats. The hotel was like a hub for the entire war-frantic city. She saw them arriving and departing in immaculate uniforms and perfect suits, their faces not so preoccupied with their great tasks that she went unnoticed.
She sold dresses to wealthy women, some of them her friends and her mother’s friends, to discontented young women and young women delighted with their lives, and to elderly women whose sagging flesh was held up by elaborate corsets. Since her own mother was slender, Vivian had never seen women’s bodies compressed and thrust up, and when these women took a long time to feel cloth between their fingers, or to decide for or against a ruffle or pleat, or to turn around and around again, in gowns and negligees, before the triple mirrors, their contemplation and deliberation seemed to her so futile. The war was not their concern; their anxiety was for their reflection in the long mirrors in the dressing room, whether they grew old like queens, as if age were an accretion of power, or sweetly, to placate the in
evitable, or grew old retaliatively, as if everyone were cheating them of life. Among these elderly ones she felt a species apart, herself the only one of her kind, never to grow old and never to die.
In this gilded room with claret carpet and chairs of ocher velvet and rows of gowns on black velvet hangers, in this room fragrant with cologne sprayed into the air, where she was visible from the street and the lobby, she underwent a constant shifting of emotions. Her curiosity about the men who passed through the lobby or who came into the shop to buy gifts for women was chastened by her own need for fidelity, a yearning for her husband, and this shifting itself was exciting, a constant tremor of the heart.
She felt, at this time, estranged from her son. She had hired a woman to take care of him, and the woman, Olga, lived with them—a spindly, aging woman with gray and orange hair and dark grape lipstick, who, because of an intolerance for racket, could not work in the shipyards, one among a few women, as she said of herself, not making a fortune sorting rivets and counting bolts. With no husband around who was generous with the child, as George had been, Vivian lacked the example. With no husband around to devote herself to, she had no desire to devote herself to anyone. She was with David only an hour or so in the morning and in the evening, and the impatience with him that had always been present now declared itself only as an uneasy deafness to his small, complaining voice and his screams of joy; since she was not so bound to him, she no longer felt so impatient with him.
She began to stay away evenings, serving as hostess at a U.S.O. center for soldiers and sailors. She enjoyed dancing with them, the change of bodies against hers, the many strange bodies responding to the strangeness of hers. Some of the men were appealing to her, the appeal of the few made stronger by the presence of the many. Teresa, her cousin, whose husband was also in England, took men home with her, but, for Vivian, taking a strange man to bed for one night was like taking a first step into that freedom which she preferred to titillate herself with rather than experience. Every day she wrote her letter or added to an unfinished letter. She wrote that she loved him, and she was sure that she did, but as she wrote her words of love, she imagined all the things he would condemn her for if she did them.
Three Short Novels Page 2
