Three Short Novels

by Gina Berriault

  Her father came in with Adele and with the actress who was to have helped Paul into the movies, a woman small and delicate, with a broad, flat-boned, powdered face, her shoulders emerging tense and arrogant from her ample fur coat. With her was the actor Max Laurie, a tragic comedian, always in each of his movies in love with the hero’s woman. A civilian at the table next to them, whose shoulder was near to Max’s, leaned over between him and the actress, gazing with a pretense of idolatry from one to the other, amusing his two companions, two men, with his intrusion into the glamorous company.

  “It’s a sad day,” he said to Max. “You agree with me it’s a sad day?”

  “We agree,” said the actress.

  The man turned his head to look at the actress appealingly, a flicker of ridicule crossing his face. “Anybody who disagrees is a dog,” he said.

  “Nobody disagrees,” said the actress.

  “You ever met him?” the man asked. “They say he liked the company of actors and actresses. Banquets and entertainments, he liked that. Like a king, you can say, with his jesters. I thought you might have met him.”

  “Never did,” she said, turning her back on him, drawing up her fur coat that lay over her chair so that the high collar barred his face. Then she turned abruptly back, as she would have on the screen, while the man’s face was still surprised by the fur collar. “Are you envious because you won’t die great?” she asked him.

  “I’m living great, that’s all I want,” he said, and his companions laughed. “If you want to know another fact of life, because you don’t know all of them, it’s this: If you’re living great, the odds are you’ll die great. Like in the arms of some beautiful woman, right smack in her boodwah.” And while his companions laughed, he looked around at Max and at Vivian and at her father, and since they were not regarding him with annoyance, he looked again, boldly, into the face of the actress.

  “He was a wonderful man,” said Max, his rich voice conciliatory, simple. “I met him myself. A bunch of us were out making speeches for him, can’t remember if it was his first term or his twelfth.” He had a way of lowering his eyes when everybody laughed and glancing up with a smile that suspected, shyly, that he was lovable.

  “What was your name?” the man asked.

  “Max Laurie,” he said.

  “Is that Jewish or is it Scotch?” the man asked and everybody at both tables laughed. “He loved everybody, didn’t he?” he went on, striking their table with his palm. “Regardless of race, color, or creed. He had no discrimination—is that the word?” and overcome by his joke he bowed back over his own table, in silent tussle with his laughter.

  Vivian left the table to sing again, and when she returned, the actress had moved to the chair Vivian had vacated, and she sat down in the actress’s chair, nearer now to the intrusive man, and saw that he was observing her, his face that of an outsider, desirous, recriminative. “I guess he thought he was going to live forever,” he said to her. “You could tell he thought so by the way he smoked that cigarette in the longest holder I ever saw outside of the movie queens back in the flapper days.”

  “You saw his picture when he was at Yalta?” she asked him, repeating an observation she had heard earlier. “He looked sick then, his face looked as if it got the message he was going to die. He had a blanket or an overcoat around his shoulders.”

  He patted her wrist. “You’re sweet,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you got nursey eyes. ‘He looked sick at Yalta.’ Did you hear that?” he asked his companions, who were no longer listening to him. “You got nursey eyes.” He took her hand between both of his, caressing it between his palms, attributing to her, with that pressure of his hands, a sympathetic knowledge of all men. “Go on.”

  “Go on what?” she asked.

  “Tell me some more.”

  “More of what?”

  “Oh, they got so much on their minds they don’t take care of themselves. More of that. You know when a man gets a lot on his mind what happens to his body? Look at Gandhi—that’s what’s the matter with me. I’m as skinny as Gandhi only more because I’m twice as tall as he is. I think big thoughts. My head is big, see, but all my hair has turned white and my body is skinny.”

  “What big thoughts?” she asked him.

  “We all got a stake in it,” he said. “Those who stayed at home as much as those who laid down their lives. Got two factories going day and night, one down in El Segundo, out near the beach where the aircraft factories are. We make a small part that you girls would call an itsy-bitsy part, but without it the plane couldn’t fly. It couldn’t fly. Got another factory up here, feeds the shipyards with another itsy-bitsy part. When the general goes marching through the surf up to his neck, we’re right along with him, you and me. You and me, we’re right there when he delivers the coop de grace. The coop de grace belongs to you and me.”

  He brought their clasped hands into her lap and, opening her hand, he began to smooth it flat, palm up, insistently smoothing out her fingers that curled again after his hand passed over them.

  8

  On the night when the lights of the city came on again, she walked several miles before she hailed a taxi, elated by the glitter and glow of the signs, by the suffusion of colors, by the colors pulsing through the tubes, crackling and humming; by the animation of the signs whose borders ran in a demented pursuit of themselves, or each letter of the letter before it; and by the lights reflected on dark windows and gliding along the windows of passing cars. She saw the change of colors upon her white coat and upon her legs as she walked and knew that her face was tinted with the colors that she walked through as were the faces of other strollers, and this coming on again of every light was like an absolving of everyone in the city and like a mindless promise of further experiences that might call for further absolving.

  The Manufacturer—she called him that, amusing herself with the anonymity of it—appeared again in the lounge. He brought no friends with him and he spoke to no other patrons. Their first night, when everyone had left her alone with him, she had gone up to his room and she had been delightedly aroused. Yet, after, she had wanted to seem uncaring if he were not to return, she had wanted to seem as elusive as she expected him to be, and with that she had brought him back to her. When they lay together again, his hands caressing her seemed to be discovering her for the first time, not having truly known her that other time.

  He stayed four days in the city and promised to return in two weeks. Now that the war was over, he said, he would be in the city more often, conferring with his brother-in-law who was an investment banker. She no longer called him, jokingly, the Manufacturer. His name was Leland Talley, and she bought him six fine handkerchiefs with his initials in blue silk thread, and read her intimate knowledge of him in those fancy letters that could be felt under her thumb.

  When he returned in two weeks and telephoned her from the hotel, she asked him to come to the house. It was early afternoon and David was home from school. He stood up from the floor, where a number of his toys were set about in some inviolable scheme, and shook hands with the visitor. Talley’s manner with the boy was brusque and affable, his eyes veering away, distracted by other things; he seemed to resist being charmed by the boy’s beauty, as though to be charmed by it was a sign of weakness on his part and the boy’s also. David engaged in a fervent telling of an involved and unfollowable tale, his voice high and nervous and monotonous, his face without expression as he talked on and on intrusively, as if he had gone deaf and could not hear her and her visitor talking between themselves, as if he saw their mouths moving without voices.

  Up in her room she dressed to go out to supper with her lover, who sat on the bed, his drink in his hand, watching her every move—the lifting of her arms for the slip to slide down, her hips within the slip as she walked to the chair, and the extending of her leg as she drew on the stocking with a graceful working of her fingers. Whenever she glanced at him
as she talked, he narrowed his eyes, as if caught at some speculation that she was not a party to. Was he thinking that a serious affair with her might break up his marriage? She resented his hardheaded thinking about it, and yet was pleased that his resistance to her was falling away in her presence.

  While she was brushing her hair and he sat watching her lifted arms and the pale curls springing back from the brush, David slipped in through the half-open door and, speaking at once, bowing his head over a toy he carried, he walked directly to the man on the bed. Something was wrong with the toy, he said, some wheel, some part was lost or stolen. “Right here, right here,” he said, his voice high and hypnotized, “here, here. It’s a clock. The lost wheel pushed the blue wheel. It was a red wheel but it got lost. The hands don’t go. The big one—it was yellow—fell off and this one is loose, the little one, the green one. The wheel is gone on the other side. Right here, you see? The red wheel is gone.” His complaining voice was a high, driving chant that, possibly, could endure to the end of the night. She called to him, but he failed to hear her. She called his name again, but he would not look at her or come to her. Instead, he sat down on the floor, his head still bowed over the clock. “Right here, right here, it used to be a big yellow hand. It used to go around when you wound it here. You could make it any time you wanted, you could make it any time of day.” He went with them down the stairs and to the front door, the clock left behind on her rug, warning them about the dog next door, instructing them as to what they were to do if the dog attacked them.

  After that day, the appearance of her lover, every few weeks, did not result in her son’s acceptance of the man. Instead, David avoided him, apparently ashamed of his behavior that first time, or not ashamed but brooding over some other way of appeal. He kept apart from them and was not inquired after by her lover, who brought a gift for him occasionally but left it lying on the sofa or on a table. And in the early months of her desperate love for the man, she could not, she knew, be tolerant of her son’s intrusion if he were driven to intrude. In the time between her lover’s visits she was consumed by her longing for the man. She thought of him incessantly, and on his visits underwent a complete abandon at the first touch of his hand. She lay in his hotel room for hours while he went out into the city to attend to his appointments, waiting for him to return to the bed and to her body.

  She no longer sang in the hotel lounge because the time there sometimes interfered with his visits. The months—almost without her consciousness of them, because the present was a combining of longing and fulfillment—ran on through the first year, and each last day and last night of his visits were always for her the peak of that combining. It was understood, at the beginning, that his wife was ailing and that he could not, now, approach her about a divorce, and that, since his factories were in a state of upheaval with the end of the war and his plans were to move with his wife to San Francisco and to become a partner in his brother-in-law’s investment firm, for a time their love must await the stabilizing of the other factors in his life. Over supper tables and in his hotel room or her bedroom, he talked a great deal about his factories, about conversion. There were complications in his reports that were unsolvable for her, and yet she felt that he was not really attempting to establish the truth, the reality, for her, because he thought it too much for her to comprehend, that he was not telling her much of anything, only the skimming, only the jokes repeated by the clerical help, only the froth that rose from the turbulence of the business, from the heavy maneuvering. But this was enough, it was all she wanted to know, the rest was his domain.

  With the diminishing of the intensity of their times together, in the second year, some certainty of the future had to compensate for the lessening. When he and his wife moved up to Hillsborough, a few miles from the city, his constant proximity, then, was a substitute for that certainty, was an approach to it. And yet, as the months went by, that proximity of both himself and his wife in a colonial-style home upon several acres of landscaped grounds served to make the certainty grow more distant.

  He was as aware as she of the slow abating, but he was not apprehensive of the end; he did not appear to believe that the end was approaching simply because the zenith was passed. He was now involved with his brother-in-law in plans for investment in Japan and the Philippines, and something of his optimism was transmitted to their affair.

  “Listen, there’s going to be big things in Japan,” he told her. “Got to start their exports going, got to help them rebuild. I’m going over and take a look around. You want to fly over with me?”

  The invitation to go with him to Japan was an intimation of something more, a return to the zenith, even a promise that she was to be his wife; it served for several months as proof of the constancy of their love. Then he left without her, promising to take her along the next time, explaining that this time was to be for a minimum of days.

  She drove him to the airport, and as they stood together in the corridor he said to her, to the crown of her head as she was fingering the buttons of his overcoat, “You know why we’re crazy about each other? It’s because we’re apart so much. If we go on like this, it’ll go down in history, won’t it? With those great passions? If we lived together, some of that crazy wildness might get lost, and I don’t want to lose a fraction of it. We’ve got something I don’t think anybody else ever had.”

  She looked down at him crossing the ground to the plane, ready to wave should he look up at her in the window of the waiting room. He seemed a man designated to bring about a prosperous future for all concerned, and his stride appeared so quick and purposeful she wondered if he might always be worried about missteps. The morning wind was flapping his trouser legs and lifting his white hair in tufts. He bent his head to enter the plane, a habitual bowing in doorways that were high enough.

  When he disappeared into the plane, she was seized by fear, convinced the plane was to fall from the sky, plunging into the ocean. Out in the parking lot, trapped in the roar of planes flying in low and planes rising and vanishing into the high fog, she asked herself if she would want him to die rather than leave her willfully. Then she wondered how much she loved him or if she loved him at all, if such a question could cross her mind. Dismayed by her own mind, she wandered the parking lot, lost, unable to recognize her own car.

  9

  On the way to her room, at midnight, she entered her son’s room. The window was up a few inches and a cold wind was stirring the curtains. Out on the bay the foghorns were sounding, expectantly repetitive, like a deep-spoken word. She sat on the edge of his bed, shivering in her negligee, watching him, his face plump with sleep, his arms flung above his head. If now, at the end of the affair, she doubted that she had loved, if her life was spent in seeking and pleasing some man, if her life was spent in need of his need of her, was love nothing but desperation passing for love? Was the only love that was not a delusion her love for her son?

  The confusion, the terror she had experienced out at the airport returned and she began to weep, wanting to waken him with her weeping, wanting him to come up out of sleep to a consciousness of her. She lay down on his bed, facing him, facing his small, awake, alarmed face. After a time, realizing, perhaps, that her weeping was not caused by him, was not his fault, he began to stroke her hair and her cheek. Her love for him was not a delusion. He was the person in whom reality was posited; he was abiding, he was constant. Since the room was cold and she was lying on top of the blankets, he threw the top quilt over her, smoothing it around her so that it formed a cocoon, and she slept that way for a time.

  Olga had left them, returning to Idaho some months before, and Vivian, rising early in the morning, went down to prepare breakfast for her son. After she had called him several times, he came down, still in his pajamas, and she saw his sullen resistance to her, a stubborn contesting with her, as if too much had been exacted of him the night before. He sat at breakfast with his eyes down, and when she asked him if he were going to school in his paj
amas, he told her he was not going that day. When she tried to tug him upstairs to dress, he went limp, and, unable to drag him, she left him there, a small figure in blue and white striped pajamas, lying on the stairs. He remained all day in his room in his pajamas, coming down for his meals and going up again and closing his door.

  The following morning she forced him out of bed by pulling down the covers and dressing him herself. He ate his breakfast and permitted her to slip his yellow raincoat over his back and over his limp arms and jerk the hood of it over his head. In the moment before she thrust him out the front door, she saw his small face, smaller within the yellow hood and paler in the gray light of outdoors, gaze out with a failing of his resistance to her, enthralled for that moment by the mingling of fog and rain, by the change of weather. The first rain of fall made the streets and sidewalks dark and glistening, and the leaves of the slender trees in their wire enclosures by the curb were moved erratically by the drops. She thrust him out, and he sat down on the steps. At ten o’clock, looking out the round glass in the door, she saw him still on the top step, throwing pebbles from the potted plant. The drifting rain, slow and unabating, glistened on his yellow raincoat and hood from a long accumulation. The small, stubborn figure forecast a future of contesting: they were to be alone together, and whatever was to trouble her would be for him only a reason for contesting. She called him in from the neighborhood’s sight and, when the door was closed, turned him to face up the stairs and struck him across the back. With no retaliation, no anger, he went up the stairs, and the paradox of the fragility of his very young body and the power of his will led her to strike him again across his back.

  The next day he got ready for school, ate his breakfast, and left, all with the casualness of a habit that had not been broken. Some time in the days that followed, before Leland’s return from Japan, the conflict that had gone on between herself and her son roused her to an awareness, more than ever before, of the boy’s separateness. He was someone unknown. And she acknowledged the pleasure for her in that unknownness. She took pleasure in his strong will. In those days of her lover’s absence, she grew fascinated with her son’s beauty, with the slender shape of his bare feet, with the thick, dark hair with its cast of amber red, with the hard blue of his eyes, with all the particulars of his face, the pliability of his lips. He had grown shy about his body without her realizing it. When the shyness had begun she could not recall, but her awareness of it now led her to become less concealing of her own self. With only a negligee around her she drank her coffee at the table while he ate his breakfast, the translucent, ruffled garment falling away from her breasts; with the door to her room open, she undressed or drew on her stockings while she sat in her slip; and she returned from her bath to her room with the negligee clinging to her body.