Contrary Pleasure

by John D. MacDonald

  After he was back in his office, he made up sour little histories. She had a boy friend about twenty-three years old, a vet, who clerked in a supermarket—a dull young man of the bovine type who loved her very much indeed and they were both saving money toward the marriage.

  In spite of the very delicate and very lovely configuration of her face, she would be supremely dull. She would buy confession-type comic books, and she would have one of those little record players and a collection of sweet-and-low records, and she would have a whole collection of sticky pet names for her bovine friend.

  He told himself that he was a stable and well-adjusted thirty-six, and it was a bit too early for the reputedly dangerous forties. And he told himself he couldn’t possibly get acquainted with her without the whole damn mill knowing about it, snickering behind his back at this lurid spectacle of this mustachioed chaser of mill girls, this Eros-smitten executive, this deviant Delevan.

  But he found Lefferts Avenue and drove down it and found Number 60 and noted its shabbiness and the smeared window signs which told of furnished rooms to rent.

  Counterbalancing the sour case histories he made up there were the warm bright dreams. And those dreams sent him walking in the mill, walking by her station as often as he dared. He knew that she had become aware of him and of his interest. She showed that by her intent preoccupation with her routine task when he was near, by the faint coloring of cheek and throat, by a certain self-conscious awkwardness of movement.

  He learned more about her. He learned that she walked back and forth each day and he learned the route she took. Yet he did not quite dare take the next step. Yet knew that he would take it. Soon. Knew that he had to. Knew he was being driven by something more involved and ornamented than a simple lust for the girlness of her.

  And there came an early evening near the first of April when he left the parking lot as the factory girls were leaving. It had been unseasonably warm and there was a line storm moving on the city, yellowing the western sky, muttering with the first untried thunder of the year. He started to drive home. The first fat drops spattered the asphalt, thrummed on the canvas top of his car. He saw how it could be and he turned recklessly and bulled his way back through traffic, intersecting the route she took. He looked for her, imagining how she would look running through the rain. And he nearly missed her. He caught a glimpse of her, standing in the doorway of a small store. He braked quickly and the car behind him yelped in surprise and indignation before swerving around him. He backed up when he could and opened the door on her side. The city was dark with the rain. He touched the horn ring and saw her look rigidly in the other direction, purse hugged in her arm.

  “Bonny!” he called and saw her start and stare toward the car and knew she hadn’t recognized him, knew she could not see him clearly. She took two slow steps out into the heavy rain and then scampered across the wide sidewalk and then stopped, half in and half out of the car, looking at him with recognition and uncertainty.

  “Get in before you drown,” he said.

  She got in with that young awkwardness and pulled the heavy door shut, and with it shut he could smell the wet fabric of her. She laughed in a thin nervous way and, sitting far forward on the seat, said, “I’m getting your car all wet.” Her voice disappointed him a little. It was thin, childish, a bit nasal.

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “How did you know my name, Mr. Delevan?”

  “I guess I heard one of the other girls talking to you. Something like that.”

  He started the car up. She accepted his answer. She moved her legs a bit, with a sort of slow caution. She still held her purse hugged tightly against her. He sensed her uneasiness, her shyness. This, after all, was an executive. One of the owners.

  “You turn left at the next corner, Mr. Delevan, and then—–”

  “I know,” he said, speaking before he thought. And he waited for her to ask him how he knew. She glanced at him quickly, but she did not ask.

  He pulled up in front of the rooming house. The rain was beginning to diminish and he was afraid he would lose her without having said anything. She put her hand on the door handle and he felt despair. And then the rain suddenly increased again. The dash lights glowed green. The wipers swept back and forth. He could not hear the motor. They were shut in a small private world in a dark city and the rain hammered the canvas and the steel, and the cement around them.

  “Relax. Wait until it lets up a little.”

  “I don’t want to hold you up. I’m wet anyway.”

  “I’m in no hurry. You’re not as wet as you’ll get running for the porch.”

  She took her hand slowly from the door handle. “All right,” she said. She leaned back tentatively. Her voice was small.

  They sat there and he felt the silence between them grow into an electric and monstrous thing. He did not dare turn and look at her. He did not know what to say. She sat in stillness. He felt ancient, helpless, grotesque, soiled. The rain slackened again and suddenly it was gone, dragging a white curtain down the street and away into the east. She slid forward and opened the car door and turned toward him and said with quaint formal courtesy, “Thank you very much, Mr. Delevan, for—–”

  He put his hand on her arm, quickly, and shut his fingers hard on the thin aliveness of that arm under the bulky damp wool of her coat, and the quickness stopped her words with a small gasping.

  He looked at her then and her eyes shifted away and he said, “I’ve got to see you again, Bonny.” He cursed his own clumsiness, knowing that this would invite down upon him a twittering coyness, an alarmed coquettishness. He released her arm quickly. And she turned and looked directly at him.

  “Why?” she said. It was a child’s question and she gave it the gravity and dignity children have.

  “I don’t know. No, I mean I wish I knew. I keep walking into the mill just to see you.”

  “I thought that. I thought you did that. I wasn’t sure. But I pretended that was what you were doing.”

  “I just want to see you again.”

  “It’s not right. I mean it’s something I can pretend, Mr. Delevan, and that doesn’t hurt anything. Just to pretend. To make up things. But it shouldn’t happen for real.”

  “I’ll come here tomorrow night and I’ll park down there beyond the streetlight. At eight thirty. I’ll wait for you right there.”

  “Don’t. Please don’t. It makes me feel almost sick inside. No, not sick. Dizzy inside, sort of. Please don’t, Mr. Delevan.”

  “I’ll be there tomorrow night.”

  “I won’t come out,” she said. And she got out quickly and swung the door shut. He watched her go up the steps and into the shabby house. She did not look back. The next evening he lied to Bess and drove to the city and parked where he said he would park. He arrived a little before eight thirty. He left his parking lights on. She did not come out. He had kept away from her in the mill that day, staying close to his office. She had not come out by nine o’clock. He decided to wait fifteen minutes more. At nine fifteen he said he would give her until nine thirty. At nine thirty he said five minutes more. At twenty minutes of ten she pulled the car door open and slid in beside him and yanked the big door shut and she was crying. He did not speak to her or touch her. She sat there and he felt her sadness. He felt as if they were both involved in tragedy not of their making, like passengers on a plane that falters inevitably toward a wide wild sea.

  The tears ceased and she leaned back. In the faint light her face looked thin and white. “I wasn’t going to come down.”

  “I know.”

  “I saw the taillights. I pulled the shade down. I walked and walked in my room. Then I would look and tell myself each time before I looked that you would be gone. But you weren’t. And the last time I was afraid you would go and I ran.”

  “I shouldn’t have been here. I shouldn’t have waited so long.”

  “How long would you have waited?”

  “I don’t know, Bon
ny. I don’t know.”

  “Drive someplace, Mr. Delevan. Please. I don’t want to stay here. It keeps making me feel like crying.”

  He drove slowly out of the city. She wore a perfume that was too heavy for her. It did not suit her. He drove on back roads he had never seen before. And after a long time he began to talk to her, not looking at her, just talking as though he were alone in the car and he had to tell himself what he was and what he had been. All of it, all the continuing knowledge, never before admitted even to himself, that he was dead weight in the firm, that a large area of him was dead. And there were the dreams of things you would do, and found you had waited too long, and there were the sterling resolutions that always seemed to degenerate into a sort of mild and meaningless futility. The words went on and on, draining thinly out of him. He talked to the night and to the girl’s silence, his voice growing hoarse as the words exhausted him. And with a complete despair he realized that even here honesty was denied him, that as he tried to explain himself and what he was, a sly censor kept coloring the facts and dreams, adding dramatic highlights, spicing the hopelessness, so that the dusty plots became drama, and drama became a tool of seduction. He was the adolescent lover who combats his girl’s indifference by inventing a unique and fatal disease for himself, selling himself so heartily that, in self-pity, his tears become genuine.

  He stopped at a crossroads and trained his spotlight on the road signs and found an arrow that pointed to Stockton sixteen miles away. He felt weary and disgusted with himself. Ashamed of contrived emotions. What had all this meant to the silence beside him? An embittered complaining bore, whining about his life. She could tell her girl friends about it. It would be a fine story, particularly if she had any gift for mimicry. They could all giggle.

  “I’ll take you back,” he said, his tone dulled.

  “Please stop a minute,” she said.

  He pulled over in the darkness and turned the car lights off. “Dandy evening for you, Bonny. Maudlin. A cheap movie.”

  In the darkness she moved to him almost harshly and her cold hands went flat against his cheeks and she put her lips hard against his and turned her head back and forth as she did so, so that her mouth was ground warmly against his and his hands found the long fine line of her back. Then she pulled his head down a bit and kissed his eyes, her lips releasing the tears of self-pity, and she murmured, “Quinn—oh, Quinn darling—oh, Quinn honey.” And lips and murmurings and the giving warmth of her tuned the drama of self just a bit higher so that the harshness of his first sob was almost completely genuine to him, and even as he tried to believe in it, something inside him was cool and sneeringly disdainful of this method which won her so easily and so completely.

  When it was over, he assumed a gruffness, a colonial manner of understatement, saying, “Dreadfully sorry. Didn’t mean to crack up like this.”

  “I’m glad you did. I’m glad I understand you now.”

  And now the promise of ultimate victory could be neatly countersigned, so he said, “I hope you’ll let me see you again.”

  “Of course … Quinn.”

  “Even though we both know it’s wrong and we shouldn’t.”

  “It’s too late … for shouldn’t, I think. When, Quinn? When?”

  “Not tomorrow night. I have to go to a dinner party. The next night? Eight thirty.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, Quinn. I like saying your name. I like to hear you say my name.”

  “Bonny.”

  “I never liked it before. Now I like to hear you say it.”

  He drove her back. This time she looked back from the lighted porch, made a small gesture of parting, a furtive wave before she was gone into the house darkness.

  The next time they were together they talked and they kissed often, and they laughed and there was fondness in the laughter. And a new fierceness in the kisses. And the next time after that he drove her thirty-five miles from Stockton and she made a small protesting sound in her throat as he turned in by the sign that said CABINS. The lights there were dim. A fat woman asked for five dollars and she gave him a key wired to a piece of wood a foot long and told him where to go. Bonny sat far over on her side of the front seat of the car. He drove up across dark ruts and parked by the cabin. One lighted orange bulb hung over the door of the cabin. He went around the car and opened the door on her side. She sat there. “Quinn. Quinn, should we?”

  “I need you, Bonny.” His voice trembled. He held his hand out to her. She gripped it very tightly with thin cold fingers and she got out of the car still holding his hand, not speaking again. He made the key work and the door creaked open. The place smelled of dampness and linoleum and it was colder in there than outside.

  He found the light switch and turned on the overhead bulb and she stood looking down at the floor and whispered, “Please turn it off.” He turned it off. He kissed her. Her lips were dry-cool and her body trembled.

  “Has it ever happened before, Bonny?”

  “Y-yes. But not like this.” Their eyes were used to the orange light from the outside bulb. It was against the two windows, like a distant fire.

  “Let’s skip it,” he said, his voice pitched a bit too loudly. “Let’s skip it, Bonny.”

  She pushed at him. “Don’t look at me. Look out the window.” He turned his back to her. He heard the quick fabric sound of her undressing, a muted chattering of her teeth, a creak of springs and a sharp intake of breath as she slid between the icy sheets. He looked at her then. Her head was a darkness on the far pillow, her face turned to the wall, her thin body lost under the lumpy spread. He undressed quickly and slid in beside her. He warmed his hands against his own body. He reached for her. She was far over, against the wall. He found the soft, secret, concave place of her waist, his hand large enough so that the ring finger and little finger were up-canted by the swell of her hip while between thumb and forefinger he could feel the rigid delicacy of the rib cage, feel the rib cage swell and subside with her quickened breathing. He sensed the resistance of her, a stiffness that was an amalgam of fear and shyness. He moved a bit closer to her and waited a long time and their body heat slowly warmed the sagging, musty bed. She shuddered and then he felt her body soften, and she turned toward him, turned into his arms, her whole body flattened against him, all the silk of her and all the urgency of her exploding against his heart.

  When they floated at last to rest from the places of the dark movings, the slow searchings, the quick findings, when they glided and slid down and away from that bright high place of final breaking, and her head was on his shoulder, mouth inward, breath a small moist furnace on his naked chest, he ran his fingertips down the gracile line of her cheek with a feeling of awe and wonder, and with a brute pride of conquest.

  Then, in the orange night, for the first time, she talked of herself, talked in a voice contented and far off, a voice like cat purrings. He liked listening to her. He would hear only the sound of her voice for a time and not the meaning and then he would catch the sense of the little stories she was telling. For a time he resented her tales of herself and did not know why, then realized he resented her having had any previous existence. He rather wanted her to be something he had created in the moment of first awareness of her, with no past but that which he formed with her. She was a person beyond his own self-considerations and once he had learned the reason for resentment, he was able to listen to her and even take pleasure in learning her.

  It was about her father, “… killed when I was four. I don’t remember much about him. They say he was big. I remember him as big, the way the house shook when he walked. There was Irish in him, and French-Canadian and some English I think, and some Mohawk Indian. His grandfather had been a trapper and guide, up near Saranac. We all lived in the house at Frenchman’s Lake that his father had built. When I was ten, twelve, fourteen, around there, they were still talking about the way he died. They talked around the stove in the store in the winter. He was topping a big tree. They do that, cli
mb up and saw the top off so there is just a straight stick standing that they use to fasten the cables to when they use the donkey engine as a sort of hoisting engine. He had his safety belt around the tree. He sawed and as the top started to go, the stub split. It expanded inside his safety belt. They used to tell how he screamed twice and then there was silence and then he gave a great laugh and he was dead.”

  And her mother, “… was pregnant and LaRue, that’s my brother, he was six and I was four. One time she had cooked for the camps. She turned our house into a restaurant. She looked sort of weak, but she could work twenty hours a day and sing while she worked. She named it Doyle’s Pinetop Restaurant. It was a long time before it made any money at all. In the winter we’d get the local trade and hardly break even, but in the summer with the cottages and the camp grounds full, we’d make money. I quit high after two years because she started getting too tired and I had to do more and more of it. Then two years ago some people wanted to buy us out but Mom didn’t want to sell. We borrowed money from the bank and had a big addition put on and hired more girls for the summer trade. Then a year ago a big restaurant firm came in and put up a big chain restaurant on the corner diagonally across from us, with a big parking lot and everything. I think that’s what killed her, but they said she had been sick for a long time without admitting it. She worried so much. LaRue came back for the funeral. We couldn’t get enough business to keep the place going. The bank took it over and it was sold to meet the mortgage thing for the addition, but it didn’t bring much on account of the new place being so close. After it was all settled up, LaRue and I got four hundred dollars each. I didn’t want to stay up there. I mean working all those years and then nothing. We lived off it, but it had been hard. So I came down here and got a job as a waitress. Then one of the other girls quit and came to work at the mill because the pay is better. She said I should try it and after a while I did.”