On the day of her lover’s return from Japan, he telephoned at midnight, speaking to her with a teasing, insinuative voice, and in another twenty minutes he was there, roving his voice, which he seemed to have realized on his trip might be a means of arousing a woman, over her neck and down over her breasts within the white negligee she had bought a few days before. They went up the stairs together, his hand moving over her back under the negligee. In her room, her lover sat down on the velvet bench, drawing her to stand between his knees as if she were attempting to escape him, delighting her with that vise. She put her hands on his head to brace herself against the languor that was pulling her down, against his unbalancing of her as he moved his knee between hers to open her thighs.
She closed her eyes, sensing that her son was in the doorway and must be driven out, and, opening them again, saw him there, his small figure in pajamas, gone before her lover could turn to see what had caused her to push him away. She hid her face, clotted with shame and anger, cursing her son for intruding upon the heart of her privacy, yet knowing that neither shame nor anger was as strong as she was making it appear. With a twist of the brass knob she locked the door and lay down on her bed, stricken silent by the commotion within her.
Leland, still on the bench, untied his shoes, laughing softly. When he came down beside her, there was a remainder of laughter in his mouth and in his teasing body, and not until after their loving did she ask, “Why did you laugh?” But he was already asleep and she already knew the answer. He had laughed because the years with her were to lead to nowhere, and so he could make light of her son’s curiosity and even use it to their advantage.
With the end of the affair, the false anger she had felt against her son became true. She was angry with him because he had always baffled her conscience, and she recalled, often, the shock of his small figure in pajamas, there in her doorway. She avoided him and he avoided her; he went to school, did all that was asked of him, and avoided her, besides.
One morning, when she had not heard from her lover for several weeks, wanting to impress upon him her remorse for asking for certitude when no one’s future gratification was ever certain, she telephoned him at his office and was told by his secretary that he had gone to Japan again. She locked herself in her room and wept as if someone else had locked her in. She walked the room, smoking and weeping. A woman alone was obviously a sinner, had obviously not done something right or done all things wrong, and the aloneness was inflicted upon her to bring her to a comprehension of the enormity of her sin. She longed to be forgiven by her son for the time she had struck him across the back, for if he forgave her for that, then it would serve as a forgiving of more, of all her sins, those she knew about and those she did not. He had seen her in her worst moments and in her best, and, though he was a child, she felt he sensed who she was more than any other person sensed or cared to sense. Nobody else knew her so well. Nobody else was so near, so near he could walk into the heart of her privacy, knowing that her anger could never make him less a son, less than the dearest one.
10
Up in the hills above the Russian River, her father owned a farm inherited from a bachelor uncle who had grown apples and raised sheep. He went there in the winter, taking a few friends, to hunt deer and quail. Nothing was grown with purpose anymore. The trees went on blossoming, the apples went on ripening, and there was a small grazing flock of sheep, a few chickens, a few pigeons. Everything was watched over in its cycles by an elderly woman who had been a painter in the city and who preferred the solitude on the farm, wearing old jodhpurs and hiking boots, her hair peppery gray and cut as short as a man’s.
In the late fall of David’s ninth year, her father suggested that she bring her son to the farm on the same weekend that he was there with a few friends; he would take the boy hunting and teach him how to handle a gun. She drove up with David a day before her father and his friends were to arrive, and in the evening they strolled out into the orchard. The sheep, wandering in the fields and under the apple trees, trotted up to them. Several were afflicted with colds and made burbling noises as they breathed, and out in the twilight and the cold she felt a sympathy for them as for neglected children. Down below, a long drift of white fog, touched by the daylight still in the sky and by the moon rising, was moving along above the river, fog more silent than the fogs on the bay that came in filled with sound, the deep and high sounds of horns on the bridges and the ships. The call of the quail was fading into the night, into the bushes and groves of trees. Strolling out with David, their sweater collars turned up against the cold, against the darkness sifting down over the low hills around them, she longed to feel in communion with him. The distance was still between them. After school he stayed away, doing whatever it was that boys together kept secret from their parents and that gave him a wordless wildness, an aura, at night, of the entire day of boys and secrecy, his face like the face of a leader recalling treason or of a follower recalling humiliation. On this stroll with him in the orchard, he told her nothing of himself, though the possibility for closeness was there in the beauty all around, the silver fog below, and the rising moon.
While David slept way up in the attic, she sat with the woman in the parlor. The wood-burning stove sent out its waves of heat, and the large parrot hung upside down in his cage and hid behind the tasseled shade of a standing lamp, curling his claws and tongue in a cawing, clucking, moronically cunning flirtation. The woman was knitting a red sweater; under the yarn her thighs were heavy in the faded jodhpurs. She had been gregarious in the city, a ponderous raconteur over cheap wine, a good friend of Adele’s; but in the four years up here on the farm she had become a hermit. For an hour Vivian leafed through several magazines, chatting with the woman about their friends in the city, and, going up early, she felt that the woman was not offended and even preferred to be left alone.
She went up the narrow stairs that were lit by the globe in the hallway on the second floor. The door to her room was open and the lamp on, and she could see the bed covered with a reddish quilt, and the dresser with a long white cloth, and on the cloth a hand mirror with a tarnished silver back. Reluctant to enter her room, she climbed the staircase to the upper reaches of the house to look in at her son. He might be regretting his choice of sleeping quarters and willing to accept a small bedroom of his own on the second floor. Climbing the staircase that was enclosed by age-darkened walls and lit with a dim globe for the convenience of her son, a globe that would not be lit the other nights when the woman was alone, she was afraid for herself, a fear that, someday, she, too, would be able to be alone, like the woman alone in this house.
The top floor was not partitioned, as below, with bedrooms. It was one large room under a peaked roof that came down to the row of casement windows at each side, and, on one side, under the windows, were three cots. In the middle cot she saw the small, dark hump David’s body made under the olive-drab blankets. From up here, the fog along the river was seen in its dimensions; from the window it had a breadth and a depth that seethed with moonlight. Way down in the yard and out in the woods and the orchard, the silence appeared to be the moonlight, to be tangible. She crossed the bare floor to the other side of the room and leaned on the sill to look out the open window, but a low hill, its top at a level with her eyes, seemed to crowd against the house, an obstacle to the view she had expected, and the trickery of the scene increased her fear. She went down again to the parlor, hearing on the way down the woman talking to the parrot. She explained to the woman that it was difficult for her to sleep in a strange house, and she sat down on the sofa, leafing through the same magazines and chatting again until eleven o’clock, when they parted.
With her father came two friends, the actor Max Laurie and a man younger than both, whom she had not met before. The three men in winter jackets and boots got out of her father’s gray Chrysler and began to cross the yard to the house. The men turned when she and David, on higher ground up in the orchard, called to them. In a row,
they watched her and her son approach, and the memory of her fear, the night before, was dispelled. The farmhouse and the cold orchard and the yard in which they waited for her—everything was filled with the presence of the men as with a clap of thunder or a flooding of hot sun. When they began to turn away, because it was a long way for her to approach, and to look around the yard and lift up their faces toward the hills and the water tower, she took her son’s hand and ran with him, and the running passed for a welcome from a woman unaware of herself in her happiness at seeing them. She threw her arms around her father and around Max and shook hands with the young man who, up close, was not so young, was in his late thirties, the coarse skin of his face incongruous with the young stance of his body as he had watched her approach.
She walked with him to the house, while David walked ahead of them between his grandfather and Max, and the presence of the men was the reason for her presence on the farm. She admired her father’s build, his erect back and his elegant head; and admired the small figure of her son in the pearl-gray sweater her mother had knit for him, his straight legs in jeans; and admired the self-conscious sprightliness in the actor’s body. They brought her—the three men—the excitement of pleasing them, the pleasure of pleasing them. She was glad that none of them had brought a woman. She was the only woman. The old woman in her hiking boots did not count as a woman; she was a past woman.
They had drinks together in the parlor. David drank hot cocoa and sat by Max, with whom he exchanged riddles and jokes and she, the only woman, listened to her father and Russell talk about the nightclub they were to finance in partnership with a shipping-company executive, and, engaged with them, she felt the riches of her womanness—in her gestures, in the ease of her laughing, in the appreciation in her eyes and in her body of all they told to interest her and amuse her. And she saw that the man who was new among them, Russell Maddux, was glancing at her with that alternating peculiar to some men, a desire for her and a concealing of desire that passed over his eyes like a curtain shutting off their depths.
They all went out into the woods early in the afternoon to hunt quail. She and her son were each given a shotgun, Russell instructing her in the use of hers and her father instructing David, and in a line they went through the brush and among the trees. Russell was to her left and Max beyond him, and to her right David and then her father. For the first time David had a gun in his hands, and she saw that he strove for an ease in his walk, an experienced hunter’s grace, but was stiff in the knees and the elbows. The space that was between her and him; his face, glimpsed in profile, set forward timorously, transfixed by the quail that might rise up in the next moment; the awkwardness and the grace of his small, slender body; the blindness of his feet in sneakers—all roused in her a desire for him to remain as he was, the only one and the closest one, the dearest, incontestably more dear than any man who was to become her lover and who was now a stranger. While she was bound over to the lover, her son might leave her forever. Walking three yards away from him—walking gracefully because the man to her left was a few feet behind her for a moment and was perhaps noting the movement of her buttocks in the tight, trim slacks—she felt a strong desire to embrace her son and to beg him not to allow another man to lessen her closeness with him, not to allow her to give herself over to another lover.
A covey of quail whirred up, skimming over bushes, flying over the tops of the low trees. One was brought down, her father assuring David that, although both had shot at the birds, he had missed but David had not. David began a babbling prediction of hundreds of more quail brought down, and had to be cautioned by her father to be quiet. After that first shot, David’s attack on quail and cottontail rabbits was almost ridiculously pompous, more confident than the men’s.
They tramped back through the cold woods—in the bag four quail and two rabbits among them all—and on the large round oak table in the kitchen tossed the game down. She was standing across the table from her son and saw his face was flushed from the cold, his eyes narrowed by the intense excitement of the day, and it seemed to her that the span of years between him and the others, the men, had disappeared.
They stayed late around the table after a supper of roast lamb, of fruit preserves—the figs and plums of the hot summer—drinking brandies and smoking, talking about the division of Germany, and Russell about his experiences in the war in Europe, and Max about his entertaining the troops. David stayed with them in the parlor until midnight, listening and recalling at every chance everything about the hunt as if they had not accompanied him and were eager to hear, and when at last he fell asleep on the parlor rug, she roused him and went up with him. He fell onto his cot, too weary to undress, and she pulled off his shoes and waked him enough to undress himself, and he was asleep again the moment he lay down under the covers. As she lay in her bed, hearing below her the considerately low voices of the men in the parlor, their presence below her like depths to float upon, the sense of the loss of her son to the men seemed not so alarming, instead seemed desirable, for the presence of the men in the house, among them David, was to release her into a sleep that was like the expectation of a reward. The men came up quietly, their footsteps on the stairs a sound that in her half-sleep seemed to go on forever. She heard them in their rooms around her, the murmur of their voices, the scrape of a chair, and their number verified their strength. In each was the strength of all three and their strength was in David also, in his cot way up in the attic’s vast reaches.
11
Russell unlocked the door of the nightclub, fumbled on a light, and escorted her down red-carpeted stairs to a large, cold cellar where numerous little tables and chairs were scattered around a stage. The cellar ran under a restaurant and a bar, and the pipes along the ceiling were covered with a false sky—a black cloth painted with many gold moons, both crescent and round, and festooned with gilded gauze. The seepage and the dampness had been taken care of first, he told her; everything was as dry as a bone. The sign above the door—THE CARNIVAL—would be lit next Friday night, when the gossip columnists and some local big names would be wined and dined and entertained by a stripteaser and by a comedian and by a jazz trio who were to appear for the opening weeks. He himself, he said, and her father and the other owner had nothing to do with the details—everything from the plumbing to the entertainers was taken care of by the manager, but the whole works, he said, fascinated him. He did a jig step up on the stage, then stooped down to pick up a wire, and stood gazing upward to trace the origin of the trailing wire in his hand.
Later in the evening, in a quiet bar, he told her that he had been married twice, the first time when he was twenty. His second marriage had ended in the death of his wife, Anna. She had been a very unhappy person, weeping over slights that nobody else, he said, would even think to call slights, and, for days, brooding and miserable for reasons unknown to him. After a year she had decided to have a child because she might, she had said, feel necessary to somebody. But the child, a girl, had failed to bring that certainty to her and she had grown worse, calling herself foul names and wandering away, leaving the child alone in the house. She saw a psychiatrist almost every day, and every night took sedatives to sleep. She slept alone. The child slept in a bedroom of her own and he slept on the couch in the den. One night he was wakened by the smell of smoke and had time only to run into the child’s room and rescue her. That part of the house where his wife slept was already in flames. Under the soft light of the bar lamps, he removed his coat, loosened a cuff link, and pushed up his shirtsleeve to show her the long, heavy scar down his arm.
The rest of the evening he brought up a hundred other topics, his way of apologizing for the story that had checked her vivacity. There was something unlikable about him after the story. She was afraid to be close with someone who had suffered the death of a wife under those circumstances. That he had been on the other side of the burning door, that he had been unable to break through, made it impossible for her to look into his eyes. She
felt that he had been marked for that catastrophe and might be marked for others, and that there was nothing he could do to prevent them, even as he could not prevent his wife dying on the other side of the burning door. Yet, later in the night, lying with him in his apartment, she kissed the long scar on his arm, wondering if her dislike of him, earlier, had been fear of another dimension of reality. Waking in the middle of the night, she drank his brandy and laughed with him over a joke. When he sat up on the edge of the bed, she got up on her knees and kissed the back of his head and his shoulders, unwilling to let him go from her even for a moment, desiring to transform him, with her kissing, into a man who could avert any catastrophe.
The wedding, in the rectory of the church her mother attended, with only Russell’s aunt and her parents and David present, seemed to her the wisest occasion of her life. Her parents liked him. He was a more responsive son, a more companionable son than their own; in addition, he was, at last, a son-in-law as affluent as they were, and perhaps more so.
Three Short Novels Page 5
