Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  Just then, the telephone rang—two longs and a short. Alarm crossed every face; it was so late, after midnight. Warren moved to answer it, but Jane, swift as an eagle, in her black shawl and black skirt, darted across the room and pounced on the phone before he could get to it. “Who? Who?” she said, warding him off with her elbow when he tried to listen too. He was sure it must be bad news of some sort, but then her tall figure relaxed a little, and she motioned to Martha. “It’s John,” she announced. The others tried to make conversation while Martha talked, but Jane stood beside her, with a face of unabashed curiosity, taking in every word. “No, I’m not,” Warren could not help hearing Martha protest. “Not very, anyway. Do I sound funny? . . . Of course not. Dolly’s here. . . . All right, all right. Good-bye, darling.” “He says I sound tight,” she remarked, ruefully, to Jane. “Where is he?” Jane demanded. “In Boston.” “In Boston?” Jane stared. “You mean he’s spending the night?” “Curiosity killed the cat, Jane,” observed Harriet. “No, no; he’s just leaving,” said Martha. “He’s at an all-night garage. He had to have the car fixed.”

  Jane seemed strangely concerned. “Why, he’ll never get back tonight,” she prophesied. “In all this storm. He should have started sooner.” “It’s only three hours,” said Martha. “Four, in this weather,” said Jane, dourly shaking her locks. “I’ll bet he stops for the night at one of those little road-places and doesn’t get home till noon tomorrow. He’ll be so exhausted he’ll oversleep.” Martha laughed. “You don’t know John,” she said. “He’ll be here, a little after three.” But Jane continued to take a gloomy view. “He’ll probably have an accident,” she said. “Hurrying. On these slippery roads.” “Jane!” said Warren sharply. She had always had a tendency to pry, which he accepted in her, because she was a woman, but now the thought crossed his mind that she might be a little demented. If so, it was his fault; he was too absorbed in his work and left her with nothing to think about but other people’s doings. “Calamity Jane,” chuckled Harold. “Why don’t you let Martha do the worrying? He’s probably had a date with a blonde.” Jane recovered herself; she shook her big body like a collie dog. “Martha’s a blonde,” she pointed out, in her practical way. “A brunette, then,” emended Harold.

  Dolly rose. The good-natured Hubers seemed to bore her. “I’ll take you home,” she said to Martha. Warren’s heart sank. “Oh, stay,” he pleaded, offering her another glass of port. But Dolly was adamant. She was painting from nature, she explained, and had started a picture for which she needed the early morning light. “Oh,” said Warren sadly. He turned to Martha. She could stay a little longer, he argued. It was out of Dolly’s way to take her; Dolly lived just over the dunes and Martha was on the other side of the peninsula. The Hubers would take her, when they returned Paul to the village. And she had not finished her drink yet. “I’ll take her,” said Miles, peremptorily. Martha hesitated, glancing from face to face. “A little longer,” she said nervously. “Are you sure, Martha?” said Dolly, with a keen look into her friend’s brilliant, excited eyes, which veered away from her. “I might as well be hanged for a sheep,” said Martha, settling back in her chair. Warren beamed. “Wonderful!” he said. “Gee, it’s funny you should say that,” he added, after a moment’s consideration. “What?” said Martha. “About a sheep,” confided Warren. “Jane and I are going to get some. She fixed it up today, with the high-school principal. I knew I had something to tell you. Remind me when I get back.” He took the flashlight and led Dolly out; Martha turned back to Miles.

  Nine

  AN HOUR and a half later, he was making love to her on the Empire sofa in her parlor. She would not let him carry her into the bedroom, where they could have done their business in comfort. Straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel, as the Good Book said—that was milady Martha. He settled a small sofa pillow firmly under her hips, but the position was still not right. The sofa was too short and narrow and slippery as the devil—covered with some horsehair material that was probably all the rage now. It groaned as his bare knees sought to get a purchase on it, and moreover he was cold. Their little house, which was pretty enough, did not have central heating, and the coal fire, glowing in the grate, cast romantic shadows over the white paneling without giving any real heat. The room temperature, he reckoned, must be about 62°. There were no shades that could be drawn—only some white ruffled curtains of a thin material. He had turned the lights out when he had finally persuaded her to take her clothes off, but the fire illuminated the room so that anybody, looking in the window, could have seen their shadows, playing the beast with two backs, enlarged on the wall.

  Sinnott could not possibly be back for another hour and a quarter. Miles had looked at his watch, to check, before having at her, when he had downed his highball. He could have done without the drink, but Martha, being what she was, had had to go through the pretense of having asked him in for a nightcap, and they had wasted fifteen minutes, making polite conversation, looking over the house and admiring the big old fireplaces and the wide boards of the floors. He had been curious, as a matter of fact, to see how they lived: she was still a good housekeeper, evidently, and the rooms reflected her personality, at once gay and austere; he could see Sinnott’s influence in the number of art books scattered about and in the nice old Victorian sets in the white bookcases. He would have preferred, however, to prowl around on some other occasion, without Martha at his heels, explaining the history of everything. There was nothing here he could identify as belonging to the period of their marriage; the few family things her mother had sent her, old Swedish stuff mostly, had gone up in the fire. Yet he had a queer sense of recognition. Some of the chairs, the wallpapers, the frying pans hanging in the kitchen, the wire lettuce basket, a violet cushion, all looked like old friends to him. She had built her nest again, like a bird, out of the same materials. It agitated him to see this. “You had this before,” he said, almost accusingly, picking up a little bronze Italian figure and turning it over in his hand. “No,” she averred, but when he pressed her, she admitted that she had had one something like it.

  As he stood in the kitchen doorway, watching her make the drinks (he and Helen had a bar in the living room, with a vacuum jug that was kept full of ice cubes), her familiar tussle with the ice tray plucked at the strings of his memory. “Let me do that,” he said, when she started trying to open the soda water. He took the opener and the bottle from her, noting her quick flush of surprise. She was thinking, of course, that he had never helped her before. He followed her back into the parlor, observing the motion of her hips, which pranced a little as she walked, with short, incisive steps, in her high-heeled shoes. Up to that moment, he had not been sure whether he wanted to dally with her or not. But now the old Adam in him sat up and took notice. They were alone, hubby was gone—why not? He stood by the fireplace, pretending to examine a picture. She sat down on the sofa opposite him. There was one of those pregnant silences. He tossed off his highball, wiped his lips, took a quick look at his watch, and started across the room for her.

  She had struggled at first, quite violently, when he flung himself on top of her on the sofa. But he had her pinioned beneath him with the whole weight of his body. She could only twist her head away from him, half-burying it in one of the sofa pillows while he firmly deposited kisses on her neck and hair. Her resistance might have deterred him if he had not been drinking, but the liquor narrowed his purpose. He was much stronger than she was, besides being in good condition, and he did not let her little cries of protest irritate him as they once might have done. The slight impatience he felt with her was only for the time she was wasting. She wanted it, obviously, or she would not have asked him in. The angry squirming of her body, the twisting and turning of her head, filled him with amused tolerance and quickened his excitement as he crushed his member against her reluctant pelvis. He had no intention of raping her, and it injured him a little to feel how she pressed her thighs, which she had managed to cross, tightly togethe
r to protect the inner sanctum, when all he wanted, for the moment, was to hold her in his arms.

  Her hair slipped from its pins, and he seized the long tress eagerly in his hands, pressing his mouth into it and inhaling deeply. From the sofa pillow came a muffled cry of disgust; when she turned her head, finally, to mutter “Stop,” he planted kisses on her cheek and ear. Breathing in the fragrance of her hair, nuzzling in her neck, he grew almost worshipful and ceased to hold her securely. Seeing this, she at once scrambled over onto her stomach and lay taut, as if waiting. Encouraged, he sought the zipper on the side of her dress—women’s clothes always bamboozled him—but she took advantage of his preoccupation to struggle up to a sitting position and began to push him away, with her small hands against his chest. She was wearing a high-necked black dress of thin wool; he could see her small, full breasts, like ripe pears, straining against the material, and he bent down to taste them through the wool. But she would not permit this; her hands sprang up, blocking his approach, as he bore her down again. He kissed her white neck and the hollow of her throat, but whenever he tried to reach her mouth, she turned her head away sharply.

  He began to get the idea. The thing was to respect her scruples. She did not seem to mind if he kissed her arms and shoulders; it was her breasts and mouth she was protecting, out of some peculiar pedantry. And yet she was not really frightened. She did not scream or try to hit him or scratch him, as she might have, and he, on his side, did not try to raise her skirt. The struggle was taking place in almost complete silence, as if they were afraid of being overheard. There was only the sound of their breathing and an occasional muffled “Stop” from Martha. They made him think of a pair of wrestlers, heaving and gasping, while taking care to obey the rules. A string of beads she was wearing broke and clattered to the floor. “Sorry,” he muttered as he dove for her left breast.

  He heard Martha laugh faintly as she pushed his head away from her tit. The humor of it was beginning to dawn on her, evidently. She was too ironic a girl not to see that one screw, more or less, could not make much difference, when she had already laid it on the line for him about five hundred times. His hunger for her now, when he was so well fixed up at home, was a compliment, which she ought to accept lightly. That was the trouble with intelligent women; there was always an esprit de sérieux lingering around the premises. They lacked a sense of proportion. But she was commencing to see it from his angle; her struggles were becoming more perfunctory. “You want it, say you want it,” he mumbled in her ear. He was getting exasperated, foreseeing that he would be nervous during the act itself if she did not stop procrastinating.

  She shook her disheveled head and wrenched away from him, but just then he found her back zipper. He tugged, and the steel moved on its tracks; the back of her dress fell open. He could feel her stiffen, as he moved his hand, carefully, under her slip, up and down her spine and over her smooth shoulder blades. He bent down to kiss her there, and she did not try to stop him; her back, apparently, was not covered by the ground rules. She lay almost torpid, and he ventured to try to pull her dress off the shoulders in front. “Don’t,” she cried sharply, as the material started to tear. She sat up in indignation, and his hand slipped in and held her breast cupped. “Take it off,” he urged, speaking of her dress in a thick whisper. “I can’t,” she whispered back, as his other hand stole in and grasped her other breast. They began to argue in whispers. She mentioned Helen, the Coes, New Leeds, but not—and this was curious—her husband. “Please don’t,” she begged, with tears in her eyes, while he squeezed her nipples between his fingertips; they were hard before he touched them; her breath was coming quickly. She had caught his lower lip between her teeth, and there was a drawn look on her face, which meant that she was ready for it. “Stop, Miles, I beg you,” she moaned, with a terrified air of throwing herself on his mercy. “It won’t make any difference,” he promised hoarsely. She shook her head, but as they were arguing, she let him slip her dress off her shoulders. He freed her breasts from her underslip and stared at them hungrily. Martha’s eyes closed and she took a deep breath, like a doomed person. “All right,” she said.

  Glancing at her wrist watch, she got up and took her dress off and put it on a chair while he hastily undressed himself and turned off the lights. But to have allowed this interval was a mistake. Women were funny that way—give them time to think and the heat goes off, downstairs; he had often observed it. Now he found, once he had got well started, with her arms and legs where he wanted them, that she was no longer responding. She had a lot of will power and she had probably figured out, while she was undressing, that she would not “really” be unfaithful to Sinnott if she did not come to climax. Or else she had begun feeling remorseful. She was nice enough about it; she went through all the motions, trying to give him a good time. But he could not really rouse her, and it took the heart out of him. He regretted the whole business before he was halfway through. He detected that she was trying to hurry him, which made him stubborn, though he was colder than a witch’s tit and anxious to get home. Her movements subsided; her limbs became inert. It occurred to him, with a start, that she was actually very drunk, though she had not showed it especially. Compunction smote him; he ought not to have done this, he said to himself tenderly. Tenderness inflamed his member. Clasping her fragile body brusquely to him, he thrust himself into her with short, quick strokes. A gasp of pain came from her, and it was over.

  She got up, staggering a little, and disappeared, with her clothes—into the bathroom, presumably. He dressed himself hurriedly by the fireside and stood, warming his hands, waiting for her to come back. He could not hear a sound, except the gurgling of the fire; in the stillness, the house seemed deserted. Alarm overtook him. He turned on the lamps and at once felt conspicuous, as if in a show window. The room had a sordid, disarrayed look. There were scattered beads everywhere and big bone hairpins; the sofa had skewed around, out of position, and a small rug was caught in the casters. For two bits, he would have gone home, subito, but he was afraid to leave without knowing what had happened to her. It struck him that she might have passed out. He glanced at his watch and at the clock on the mantel, which had stopped, evidently forever, at a quarter of three. He remembered her talk at the Coes’ and he felt as if the eye of eternity were on him, as he paced up and down, irresolutely, smoking a cigarette. When he finished it, he said to himself, he would go and look for her. Suppose he had injured her? Or supposed she had cut her wrists or taken poison, in a fit of self-dramatization? The veins stood out on his forehead. He was tempted, to make himself scarce, while the coast was clear. He stamped out his cigarette, impatiently, and opened his mouth to call “Martha!” in his peremptory baritone. But his vocal cords failed him; he was afraid to make a noise. He waited a little longer.

  Just as he was at his wits’ end, she came back, wearing a pink dressing gown and a pair of slippers, with her hair, combed, down her back. This domestic image made him feel awkward and remorseful, like the sight of his mother in curlers and wrapper, waiting for him on the stairway of their Yonkers house when he had been out roistering with the gang. “Are you all right?” he said, finally, staring into her pale face. Her eyes had turned black, like two big raw prunes, and she looked a little the worse for liquor, though she had put fresh lipstick on. She nodded, smiling faintly. He wanted to assure her, from the bottom of his heart, that what had just occurred would never happen again, but he felt it would sound impolite to say so. “Good-bye, Miles,” said Martha gently. He could not make out whether that was meant to be symbolic or whether she was impatient to get him out of here. He took her hand and kissed her hastily on the forehead. “You’d better clean this up,” he jerked out, with a blunt gesture around the room. Then he turned and beat it. But as he started down the hill to where his car was parked, he stole a look back at the house, and to his relief he could see her through the thin curtains moving about the parlor, busily straightening up.

  Miles had not enjoyed it much
either, Martha said pensively to herself, as she picked up the beads from the parlor floor. It had been like an exercise in gluttony; they had both grasped for a morsel they did not really want. But she did not feel especially bad for what they had done. Now that it was over, it appeared to have been inevitable. She had thought it all out while she had been lingering in the bathroom, dousing her face in cold water to sober herself up and hoping that he would leave, so that she would not have to talk to him again. She had brought it on herself, she supposed. She ought not to have asked him in, knowing that it was a risk, even as they stood in her doorway. But it had been one of those challenges that she always rose to, like a fish to the bait—the fear of being afraid. And she still did not think that Miles had brought her home with the set purpose of seducing her. It had happened all by itself, invitus, invitam. In the end, he had done it, she reckoned, just because it was obvious; it was a kind of strength in him not to fear banality but to step right up to it like a man at a free-lunch counter.

  She could not deny that she had asked for it, if only by her imprudence. Yet when he had first landed on her, she had felt like laughing. She could not take it seriously. All the while she was struggling, she had been suppressing a smile, at his ridiculous searching for her zipper (he had never been able to find anything), at the blunt simplicity of his onset that took her consent for granted. Her chief worry, at first, had been that he would break the sofa. She had not been alarmed for her virtue, feeling certain that she could free herself once he grasped the sincerity of her objections. She was disgusted with him for slavering over her hair, but since she could not stop him, she resigned herself—that was the way he was, and his enjoyment could not harm her. This inability to feel outrage was of course her undoing. Even when her dress was open, she could not summon wrath sufficient to warrant scratching him or kicking him to keep him from exploring her back. Then, once he had touched her breast, she no longer, so it had seemed to her, had the right to refuse him. It was like that thing in law, where if you let somebody cross your property without hindrance, they finally secure a right of way. A drunken notion of equity had been beating at her mind, even as she pushed and parried—the idea that one more time could not possibly count and that she was being preposterous.