Contrary Pleasure

by John D. MacDonald

  Brock kept it under control and said that he thought he would read and went to his room and shut the door. He had not been holding his breath, but when he heard the click of the door latch he had the feeling that now he could take a deep breath. He moved mechanically, taking LP records at random from their cardboard envelopes, stacking them on the spindle of the player. He turned the record player on and turned out the light over the bed and stretched out. The volume was low, so low that the bass was like the slow, deep pulse of someone who lay beside him in darkness. The trumpet sounds were thin, far away, like summers at the lake when you were little and in bed and they were dancing across the lake, over at the pavilion. The only light in the room was the tiny light of the dial on the player. It was good to have the lights off in the room. When they were on, you could see the kid stuff. Framed high-school pictures. The football enameled white with the score painted on it in red. STOCKTON—14, SYRACUSE HIGH—13. A sleek gray model of a PT. A yellow highway sign that said DEER CROSSING. A lot of kid stuff that some other Brock Delevan, some smug untroubled kid, had collected and stuck in the room. A punk kid. A high-school wheel.

  He lay there and waited for it to happen to him, knowing that it would. It was not pain, but it was like pain. It was like a time long ago, when he had been little and very sick, and faces had loomed over the bed and gone away, faces that were too big and sort of twisted looking. It kept coming then, a pain, and it came like a red light down a track, like a train that made a noise too loud and then faded away, but was on a circular track so it would come back.

  It came then, as the pain had come long ago, a great wave that made him tighten his fists and lock his throat. Not me. It didn’t happen to me. Not a thing like that. I’m Brock. Remember me? They looked at me with pride. Pride kept me warm. It gave me dignity. So I shamed them and the pride is gone. Why? That was the thing. Find out why I did it. How could I have done it?

  And so it was necessary to go over it all again. An old ritual. A nightly searching. A going back and looking for clues. Because you could not accept a flat statement that it happened because that is the way you are. There are the good guys and the bad guys. All your life you are sure you are one of the good guys. And then this.

  They hadn’t even let him stay at the University long enough to take the exams. He would have made a mess of them. So perhaps it was a good thing to have gotten out of them. It was funny how that first year, the freshman year, had gone so well. The grades had been pretty good. He’d made the basketball squad and been pledged to a good fraternity.

  The trouble had started in April. There was a good smell of spring that last April. Clear days, warmer than they should have been, and the sort of lazy air that made you feel as if you wanted something without knowing exactly what you wanted. It was the crazy season. You couldn’t learn anything out of the books. People took all the class cuts they could afford. People pulled kid tricks or got in fist fights for no reason. And the girls looked good. They looked wonderful with that warm spring air teasing their skirts, and wonderful the way they walked arm in arm and giggled and looked back at you.

  He met her on an April afternoon. He had a two o’clock lab. And he walked right up to the door of the lab building and turned around and walked away. He knew he would have to make up the cut. But it was an afternoon when you couldn’t spend two hours in there in the stink, setting up an experiment, making the dull notations. He dropped his lab book off in his room in the fraternity house. The house was deserted. His feet on the staircase made empty echoes. He walked for a time, feeling free and guilty. He went into a campus beer joint, a cellar place with steins and mottoes and sawdust. He hooked an elbow on the bar and he drank and felt a curious mixture of listlessness and excitement. The place was narrow and there was a row of rustic booths across from the bar. He saw her sitting there alone. He could tell that she wasn’t one of the coeds. It was the way she was dressed, and she looked a bit older. She was using the straight pretzel sticks to make designs on the table top. She wore her black hair long, and it swung forward as she leaned over the table and every once in a while she would comb it back with her fingers. She was small and trim and dark and she looked blue. He watched her, with that feeling of inevitability and excitement growing inside him. He had some more beers and it was like remembering the time the other kids had jumped off the garage roof into the snow and he had waited a bit too long before jumping, and stood there, frozen, the others taunting him until at last he had shut his eyes and jumped.

  All she could do, he decided, is give me a real chill job, so he carried his beer over and stood by the booth, hoping he looked casual and relaxed, hoping the tautness didn’t show, and when she looked up at him blankly, he said “Know the match game?”

  She looked up at him, unsmiling, and he saw that she was not quite as good-looking close up. Her cheeks were a bit roughened and pitted with scars of adolescent acne, and her pallor had that faintly waxy look of Latin women. He guessed she was maybe twenty-five. He was glad he’d changed to his good sports jacket when he dropped his lab notebook off at his room.

  “I’ve played,” she said, looking amused.

  “Play you for a beer?”

  “Sure.” He sat across from her. They played with the pretzel sticks. She won. Her lipstick was dark red and she had applied it a bit carelessly. She wore a frothy white blouse, a dark, severe suit. Her purse was big and red and she wore no hat. He realized she was a little bit high. Her eyes were very black and very alive, and her small face had a pertness to it, a triangularity which, with its overtones of coarseness, excited him.

  Her name was Elise, and she said Brock was a nice name and she asked him if he was a senior. That made him feel good. He said he was and he told her he was twenty-one and she told him he was just a kid, which annoyed him because she seemed to be laughing at him.

  “What do you do, Elise?”

  “I’m a singer. I sang at the Golden Room for a while. Singing and pantomime. But it was like this. There was this fellow. He used to go wherever I was singing. And always trouble. That was him. Always making a stink about something. You know the type guy. It got me fired a couple times, him and his big mouth, so then the booking agent, he didn’t want to handle me anymore, and that makes it tough, trying to get something on your own, so in between times I’ve been working at waitress work. It’s hell on your feet. This last place I was at, it’s the Tavern Chop House. They got good steaks and it’s I guess three blocks from here. There’s a lot of college trade. You ever eat there?”

  “Twice. Maybe three times.”

  “Artie, he’s the manager, he’s a little louse, believe me. All the time he’s got to get his hands on you. Well, brother, did I ever tell him off, so here is Elise again. Unemployed as usual.”

  She made a face. She looked so small. It made him feel protective about her. She talked sort of tough, but her voice had such a whispery husky quality to it that it seemed to give everything she said a special meaning.

  “The hell of it is,” she said, “I got me a little studio apartment right near the restaurant so it would be handy. What I ought to have is a car. You got a car, Brock?”

  He had to say no and it made him feel inadequate. They sat a long time and talked and he bought her quite a few beers. She said her name was really Mrs. Archie Berris, but she used her maiden name Elise Lewis on account of he was killed overseas. Brock said he was sorry about that and then there were tears in her eyes and in his too, and they felt closer. Yet not close in the way he could be close with someone from his own background. She made him think of a girl he used to watch in high school, a pretty Polish girl who wore cheap, tight dresses, who looked wise and knowing, who was the entrancing subject of conversation of his friends. He had not dated her. He sensed that this Elise was much the same sort of person. From a more forthright world. Being with her like this made him feel both shy and sophisticated.

  “Brocky, you hurl a lot of big-sized words around. You going to grow up and be a
professor?”

  “I’ll probably go into the family business. It isn’t exactly exciting. But that’s what I’ll probably do.”

  “What kind of a business?”

  “It’s a textile mill. My grandfather started it. It used to make a lot of money. It hasn’t made so much for a long time. My father and my uncle run it.”

  “My God, I had a girl friend worked in one of those in Alabama. She quit it on account of it drove her nuts not knowing what the weather was. It hadn’t any windows. All air conditioning and artificial light and a coffee break in the morning and a coffee break in the afternoon and they gave her uniforms and so on and I said she was nuts but she said she had to work in a place where you could look out and see if maybe it was raining—What’ll we do for food, Brocky? I’m empty like a bass drum.”

  They left the place. Standing, she was a little taller than he had expected her to be. Long-legged and a little broad across the hips. She held his arm tightly and walked in stride with him, her dark hair bouncing against her shoulders, red purse swinging. He thought of how the evening might end, and it made him feel weak and dizzy. One moment her coarse vitality would make him feel weak and trapped—caught in something beyond his depth. And the next moment he would feel strong and possessive and excited.

  “Honey, I bet with those shoulders you play football, do you?”

  “Not at this place, Elise. I used to in high school, but they’ve got guys they pay to play. Coal heavers. Gorillas.”

  “I had a boyfriend once used to play pro ball for a truck company. He was real punchy. He was a tackle and they were for always hitting him on the head.”

  They ate in a small dark Chinese restaurant and she said, “I love this gunk, but it don’t stay with you. It kinda goes right on through and you’re hungry all over again.”

  And in the dark spring night, back out on the sidewalk, she clung to his arm, swaying a little and her voice was lower and huskier and she said, “I bet you don’t think I’m a singer at all. I bet you figure I was throwing a big snow job.”

  “I believe you, Elise.”

  “You know what you’re going to do, Brocky boy? You’re going to come up and I’ll put a record on and I’ll show you I’m a singer, see.”

  It was a narrow building, crowded in between stores. The street door wasn’t locked. They went up three flights of stairs, and the air in the stairwell had a musty flavor. Her room was small, with a vague smell of laundry and dust. It had a kitchen alcove, a small bathroom with noisy plumbing. The studio couch where she slept was not made up from the previous night, and by the head of the couch, beyond the rumpled pillow, cigarette butts had been squashed out on the varnished floor beyond the edge of a dark-brown rug. He felt sick and hollow inside. There had been girls. A very few. Back seats of cars. Blankets under the trees. Once a back hallway. But girls. Not women.

  They drank what was left in a bottle. She had a record player and she put on a blues record and sang along with it, slurring her way into the notes, snapping her fingers, swaying in exaggeration of the mannerisms of torch singers. In the dim lights of the room she had a feral, overpowering look. He wanted to leave and he couldn’t think of any way to get out of it without looking like a fool, like a fool kid. She had sort of taken it all for granted.

  She made him sit and watch her sing and then she came over to him and kissed him hard and turned off the floor lamp near the day bed. It was different than ever before. It was a kind of delirium, and a devouring, and a sense of evil.

  He awoke and the two windows were gray and the light was in the room, insipid on the litter and the spilled clothing. She was asleep, breathing heavily through her mouth. He was on the outside and he slid out with great caution. He looked at her as he dressed. She was on her side, one arm high, showing the dark patch of armpit hair, one breast like a sagging white gourd. She was a stranger he had never seen before. A strange woman, and in that light she looked forty.

  He had his door key and he got into the fraternity house without waking his roommate, and managed to wake up when the alarm went off after nearly an hour’s sleep. The night with her was like something dreamed. In class he felt like something dead. Through the drone of the lecture he would think of her and something would turn slowly in his stomach and the backs of his hands would prickle. It was a nauseous excitement.

  He went back to the beer joint that afternoon. He knew he shouldn’t. But he had to go back and on the way there he told himself she wouldn’t be there.

  She was in the same booth and she was looking directly at him as he came through the door. She wore the same suit but this time her blouse was yellow. He felt ganglingly awkward as he walked to the booth. He knew he was blushing.

  “You snuck out like a mouse or something, Brocky,” she said, and he wanted to shush her because her voice was too loud.

  “Had to make morning classes, Elise.”

  She reached across the table and held his hand strongly and said, “We had fun, Brocky. We had fun, didn’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want you should think I’m like that. I mean that I’d do that with anybody.”

  He wished she wouldn’t talk so loud. “I don’t think that.”

  “It’s on account of it was you. Cute Brocky. With the shoulders.”

  He wished he could stop blushing and that she would let go of his hand. And the day became a replica of the previous day. And it was at her place, his arm around her, that she said, “You’re going to think I’m awful when I tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “Archie, he wasn’t overseas. He isn’t dead. I wish he was but he isn’t. He’s a seaman. He’s on an oceangoing tug. Right now he’s down somewhere in the Caribbean. They’re hauling some kind of dredge down there. He’s a genuine bastard, Brocky. He goes away, he thinks I ought to lock myself up and wait for him or something. I should be dead or something all the time he’s gone. I got to have fun, don’t I? This time, and he’s been gone seven months now, he doesn’t send a damn nickel. How do you like a guy like that?”

  “But when will he—–”

  “You relax, honey. He won’t be back for a long time. Now you kiss Elise. Kiss her nice. There. That’s my boy with shoulders. That’s my good boy. Do you like this, darlin’? Do you?”

  The April days were like that. The April days and April nights. She had taken him down with her into some dark place. Nothing else mattered. Classes were vague things. They talked about work he did not understand. He dozed often. He prepared nothing. He moved through a world that was like a dull dream, moving each day closer to that single vivid reality of her body. He knew she was a liar. He learned she had never sung. He knew she was sloppy, ignorant, opinionated, dull of wit. But that did not matter. It did not matter what mind or spirit went with that practiced body. Each day was time that must be gotten through somehow, because the hours led inevitably to her bed in the musty room. Sometimes they would cook there, and he would buy food and bring it to the room. She was an indifferent cook. She liked to have him bring a bottle.

  His allowance, compared with the average, was generous. But he soon found that it was not nearly enough. She didn’t have any money at all and she wasn’t working. He had to give her lunch money. And on May first she had to have thirty-five dollars for the rent on the tiny, shabby apartment. She kept needing things. Stockings. A new bra. Repairs to her wristwatch. A pair of shoes. When she wanted something and he could not provide it, she became sulky and she wouldn’t let him near her. He knew precisely what she was doing. He raised money in every way he could think of. He wrote home for money for imaginary textbooks, for a fake dental bill, for new shoes. He started selling his possessions to other students, hocking things at a pawn shop, borrowing from the guys in the house. At first it was easy to borrow. A five here, and two dollars there, and a ten-dollar bill from his roommate. Then they started making excuses and he could borrow no more. He knew they sensed the change in him. He felt as if he were fa
lling through space toward the inevitable smashup. And it didn’t matter.

  He cut so many classes and did so poorly in classwork that he had to have an interview with his faculty advisor. He promised everything with great sincerity, trying to cut the interview short because Elise was waiting in the usual place. Everything was going to hell, but it didn’t matter. He thought that he might get a chance to crack the books just before exams and squeak through somehow. His watch was gone, and most of his clothes, and that helped a little, but June first came inevitably closer and with it the need for another thirty-five dollars in one chunk. He didn’t want to think beyond June first. He had a vague idea of getting a job there in the city during the summer so that they could go on as before. Elise began to ask a bit nervously about the rent, but he told her he knew where he could get it.

  It wasn’t until nearly the last day that he remembered Marty. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of Marty before. During his freshman year he had been required to live in the dormitories with a roommate selected by lot. He had drawn Marty Greenshine. At first he hadn’t liked him at all. A strange guy, older than the others. Serious as a judge. And bright. Disconcertingly bright. And Marty always had plenty of money. After a time he had learned that, behind all that seriousness, there was an off-beat sense of humor. An obliqueness. Marty would have the money. He had heard Marty was still in the dormitory, in one of the single rooms. He stopped at the gate office and checked the number. Number 312, Lowman Hall.

  It had been a long time since he had been in one of the dormitories. He went up to Marty’s door and knocked. He remembered that it had been a little after twelve when he knocked on the door. And a bright, good-smelling day because it had rained in the morning and the whole world was washed clean and new. He could hear some guys playing catch down in the quad, pock of ball into glove. And somebody singing somewhere, in a deep resonant voice, a trained voice. When there was no answer, he started to turn away and then tried the knob. The door opened. He saw Marty’s clothes laid out neatly on the bed. He remembered Marty’s habits. Marty would put his robe and slippers on, lay his clothes out, and then go down the hall to the shower. He checked the closet and saw that Marty’s wooden clogs were gone. Marty usually spent a long time in the shower room. He looked out the window. Maybe Marty would be sore that he hadn’t been over to see him. Maybe Marty would go off on one of his queer stubborn streaks and refuse to lend the money. Or maybe Marty had heard that he had been borrowing from everybody.