Contrary Pleasure

by John D. MacDonald

  He bellowed in the shower. He liked French cuffs. Every year he tried to start a vegetable garden. He bought a lot of insurance. He played catch with the twins. After dinner on spring evenings he would sort fishing tackle, clean his reels. He told funny stories and then laughed a bit too loudly at them. And he was somebody who came over into her bed with gentle hands and lusty frequency and hoarsely whispered endearments, with stallion ardor which would alter so abruptly into the long sigh, the slowing lungs, the inevitable first snore. He had a snore which awed the children and seemed to rattle windows.

  This stranger she lived with. She wondered what in God’s name was wrong with her this year. Her eyes had started to see again, and she had preferred the country of the blind. She stood at the kitchen door, looking at where the car had been. Sam, an old man made of roots and sweat and leather, trudged in trance behind the power mower, walking on the pool-table smoothness, following the bow waves of chopped green, a green with a strong smell of childhood.

  Back in the house she could hear Mrs. Bailey teasing Sandy in a sugary way to take her nap. Alice turned and called through the house. “Sandy!”

  Complaint turned into obedience. “Okay, Mom.”

  She could see Ben and Wilma’s driveway, an edge of the terrace. A jeep wrenched and coughed into the driveway and stopped, throbbing like an indignant insect. The horn made a small humiliated beep, and Alice heard Ellen’s yelp of acceptance. She came into vision, walking across to the jeep, tennis racket in frame swinging from the loose wrist, can of balls in the other hand. She wore white shorts, very brief, very starched-looking above the lovely golden legs, wore a fire-red halter, wore a dark-blue cap with a long bill. She climbed into the jeep in a leggy way. Alice saw the Schermer boy grasp the bill of the cap and yank it down over Ellen’s eyes. The jeep poised, swiveled, and was gone, coughing and banging as it went down the hill, leaving the afternoon in sudden silence while Sam squatted and prodded at the blades of the still mower.

  A sudden hot fierce wave of envy of the child startled Alice. She felt as though she had never laughed.

  Behind the property were the birches, formal as children’s drawings. Beyond them the slow hills, squared off in the block fields. Alice went to their bedroom, changed to walking shoes, to dull-red corduroy slacks. She had a great many pairs of slacks, preferring them high-waisted in cut, knowing she looked well in them, knowing that the best clean lines of her body were from the indent of waist down the long, taut, slim line of her hips. It had hurt her and puzzled her when George said he didn’t like her in pants, so she tried never to wear them when he was around. She put her cigarettes in one pocket of the red-and-white-checked shirt, and her lighter in the other.

  Mrs. Bailey came from Sandy’s room. “Going walking again?” she asked, pleasantly enough but with obscure accusation.

  “Sandy was up late last night. Keep her in bed until at least two thirty, Mrs. Bailey.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She left and she walked on the shoulder of the road, away from the village. She settled into the steady swing of her walking, liking the feel of the flex and pull and clench of her muscles. She turned and looked back and saw the three houses set white against the green. Sam was marching again, in his geometric pattern. The next time she glanced back, a curve of the upwinding road hid the houses. She turned left on a familiar dirt road. It climbed steeply. The dirt was damp-packed but not muddy.

  She walked hard and fast, so that when she reached the high crest of the hill, she was winded, sweating lightly. There was an old stone wall in the shade, beyond the ditch. She stepped long-legged across the ditch and squirmed up onto the wall and sat there and lighted a cigarette, shifting until the hollows of the rocks fitted her more comfortably.

  What is going to become of me?

  Though the question was inevitable, it left a bad taste. There was too much bathos in it—too much of an aroma of self-pity. Pollyanna should count her blessings. And know they were not enough. And sense also that the world this year was full of silly, sighing women who fingered constantly the superior texture of their souls and yearned for an appreciation and understanding denied them.

  But it was a question which she could not ask of herself down there, down in that white house that George had built. What is going to become of me? She had asked that same question before, long ago, in the old house in town in that empty season after she had come back from college. That unreal time in the old house. But she had known then that something was waiting for her. Something wild and wonderful, as yet unknown. So it had been a good game. What will become of me? This is my life and now I am ready to step into it. Exhilaration in the question then. But not now. Now a question that is dry and withered. This was the life I stepped into and now it is not enough.

  Does that make me a malcontent? Do I think life should be a skyrocket thing, all thrills, chills, and shudderings of ecstasy? All unbearable joys? Sweats and swoons and hysterias? Surely that must be immaturity. Like the bride who believes that every breakfast will be like the husband-and-wife breakfast shows—without the commercials. Am I like this only because there is more growing up to do?

  This can’t possibly be enough. This can’t be all there is. Remember this season smart hostesses will be keeping hors d’oeuvres piping hot over the cheery charcoal glow of a genuine Japanese hibachi. Try for that exciting touch of madness by wearing unmatched earrings and see who will be the first to comment. Do use an ice cube in a saucer as a stamp moistener when sending out those scads of invitations to your next really important party. Watch those smart gals this season who don’t begin to fray at the edges because their drink—and they are sticking to it—is vermouth on the rocks. Be bold and merry by sewing an ordinary hardware store bolt and latch to the new dark blouse. Respond to the needs of your community by being active in at least two worthy fund drives each year. Use one of our tape recorders in your home as an aid in correcting your own voice level.

  There has to be more.

  More than the rancid joke wheezed into your ear on the dance floor at the club; more than the overboldness of the hand of the man who sells insurance and is named Chester something; more than the tiresome sexual gossip of the bridge group; more than the bitching about the cost of help, the price of meats, the way salesclerks don’t seem to care anymore.

  But what do you substitute?

  A dream of yourself in a cold-water flat devoting your life to some unsung young genius? Or hurrying down the dim corridor to where the postoperative patient is calling you? Do you want to be a fiction story in a slick magazine?

  A loving husband, a nice home, healthy intelligent children. Mrs. Bailey to do the drudgery. Why couldn’t it be enough? If the sexual adjustment had been better, would it be enough? She could not guess. This was an unreal year. Full of a lost restlessness.

  She thought back to the best time of her marriage. When George was just getting started. How they’d spread out drawings on the floor and sit and argue. “No housewife is going to like that arrangement, George.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Now don’t yell. The way you have it, she’d have to walk just miles more than she should have to.”

  And then the slow change in his face as he studied the drawings again. “Hmmm,” he would say. And sketch the change. Then ruffle her hair.

  That was good. But it did not last long. Not when there were three small children and no help. Not after George began to get more work and began to gain confidence.

  She sat on the shaded rocks of the old stone wall, her face still and withdrawn. No longer was there any sense of excitement or anticipation in any of her days. When she awakened in the morning, it was with an acceptance of the day ahead and a full knowledge of what it would bring. George, in his own way, had gone away from her. There was no talk anymore. There was nothing to say anymore. George accepted her as a part of his home, as a quiet mechanism that supervised the efficient functioning of the home aspects of environment.
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br />   She knew that her mind was good. But this was a problem too vague to handle. Directionless discontent. A small ship adrift, guided by no wind, no stars, ripe for some unknown tempest. There was always the suspicion that there should be nothing else. That this was what people had. Only this. Symptomatic of the times. An aloneness. A disease of “now” when all values had become diffused. As one of Mr. Gibbon’s Roman ladies, on the slave-made patio, hearing, without interest, the far roars of spectacle in the amphitheater.

  It was not diversion that was needed, but purpose.

  The disease of “now,” searching for purpose. Looking in all the wrong places. In the PTA and the League of Women Voters and the Little Theater and the Garden Club and the Auxiliary of this and that until the voices of all the women in all those places began to sound distressingly like a chicken yard. And then they would look—those others—for another purpose in the discreet code, the sly, kitchen kissings, the knowing glance, the engineering assignation—cold and glossy as a helical gear, measuring safety against mutual trust. And the other ways out, the spot of watercolor, the bit of sculpting, the book review. Trying them all meant an eventual confusion of activity with meaning, a part so thoroughly overplayed that everything became drawing-room farce.

  But there had to be more. It was quite clear that there should be more. Otherwise you were unused. You were something that stood in a corner and rusted.

  Life could not turn out to be like one of those endless rainy days of childhood—Mommy, I’m tired of myself—a listless wandering through the dull rooms where there was nothing to do. No dolls to dress, no books to color. Mostly there was no one to talk to.

  Here I am, she thought, sitting on a damn wall, feeling sorry for myself. About to break into big sobs of self-pity. In disgust she swung her long legs around and over the wall and dropped to the other side and took the path that led down a briared slope to the open pastureland. She walked slowly in the sun on the uneven ground and closed her mind to everything but the sensuous warmth of the June sun, the relaxed flex and pull of the long muscles of her legs. With a fresh cigarette in the corner of her mouth, she jammed her hands deep in the pockets of the slacks, spreading her fingers flat against her thighs, feeling the alternate tightening and loosening of either leg, head bent, hair brushing crisp against the back of her neck, focusing inwardly upon a body-awareness, summoning up such a formless eroticism that after a time she felt a tingling of breast, a false and hollow excitement under her heart.

  She had read widely. And she knew the clinical psychological explanation of this body-excitement she was able to induce in herself. It was, the books said, such a clear evidence of sexual immaturity. An indication that the individual had never progressed far beyond the status of self-love, that infantile first awareness which should have progressed through a brief period of homosexual longings to the mature status of heterosexual love. And the books said that the self-love status could be indefinitely prolonged if the individual during that period had a strong feeling of emotional insecurity.

  So, with that evidence, it was easy to say that this discontent was an evidence of immaturity, sexual and emotional. It was too easy to say that. And thus excuse everything—including the inadequacy of the physical relationship with George, including a social coldness, including nameless fears, and the hidden shyness, and this sick excitement she could generate in herself, an excitement which sometimes, in shame and loathing and desperation, she would build to a bitter and lonely and conscience-stricken climax, swearing each time that it would never happen again.

  She quickened her steps, swinging her arms, looking about her, thrusting her mind away from herself, and in that way came to the far side of the pastureland to where a line of trees divided the pastureland from the cultivated field beyond, and where the old wire of the patched fence ran deep in the grooved places of the bark of the trees.

  The field beyond was tilted and blackly fertile, with June-green rows of something tender and young thrusting up from the dirt. A yellow tractor made a throbbing sound in the stillness and she saw it on the far side of the field, the man stripped brown to the waist, watching carefully as he cultivated the new greenness. She stood in the screen of trees and watched him, and she could smell the warm rawness of the dirt. She knew that his name was Harker. She had seen it on their rural mailbox at the small farm beyond the crest of the hill of the dirt road where she had sat on the stone wall. She knew he drove a rattly old gray pickup, and he had waved to her when he had passed her during her walks, after stopping that one time to ask her if she wanted a lift. Walking by the farmhouse, she had seen small children in the sun, seen a stocky young woman hanging out clothes. She stood and watched, enjoying the colors of the scene, yellow of the tractor, brown of his broad young back, dark of the field, paleness of the new growth.

  Spring grass grew high and lush in the field beyond him, and as she watched, she saw the woman coming from the direction of the unseen farm, thigh-deep in the new grass, wearing a blue dress, carrying something. She angled toward the moving tractor and then the man saw her and the tractor stopped, the throbbing sound stilled. He swung down and walked across the rows and met her at the edge of the grass, standing tall beside her, and Alice saw him take a handkerchief from the hip pocket of his jeans and wipe his forehead. They were too far away for her to hear their voices, but she thought she heard the high note of a woman’s laugh. They stood close together and it wasn’t until he tilted his head back and drank that she realized the woman had brought him something to drink, knowing perhaps that the day had grown warmer and he had brought nothing with him. They stood there for a time and she saw them both turn and look down toward the farmhouse. Then the man turned to look across the field and Alice moved quickly and instinctively back beyond the protective trunk of one of the larger trees.

  The man had his arm around the woman’s waist and they walked a short distance into the deep new grass, and Alice did not understand until she saw them stop and saw them melt down then, into the grass, and she could not see them at all. A bird sang valiantly over her head. She looked across the field at the silent deserted tractor, at grass bending in the gentle wind. She felt hollow. She had never seen anything remotely like what had happened. She felt on the verge of some strange, wide truth. It was not that there was a coarseness or a casualness about what they had done. It was the inevitability of it, a peculiar rightness to it, so that it touched her deeply. She was ashamed of having been there to see, yet glad at the same time. She wanted to cry. They were over there, nested in green tall grass, sun-warmed, and performing a wild, warm, outdoor act of love. She stood outside some warm place and looked through glass. There was a peasant directness to it, like in old stories of the countryside of France. And a great humanness to it, beyond class or strata.

  And she realized that what was strongest in her was a vast and desperate envy of that woman who had so frankly accepted, who knew in such an uncomplicated way what can be done with love and a warm June afternoon, who perhaps had known down there in the farmhouse kitchen and, with inward flutter of excitement, had brought him a drink he did not need, because the world smelled of spring, filling her body with its strong demands.

  It made Alice feel silly and shallow and decadent, a neurotic ghost of a woman without loins or breasts or truth. She stood with the bark of the tree harsh against her forehead and, feeling a tickle, watched a red ant run frantically along her wrists.

  She tried to mark the imagined scene with evil, and could not. She tried to re-create disgust of all such scenes and memories and imaginings, and could not. For the scene beyond was function, and her function also, and the stocky woman her sister, and in function there was no place for fear or withdrawal or shame, no place for a muted acceptance, no place for blank endurance.

  After the earth had turned a little bit, and the red ant had run home to tell of alien horrors and the bird had flown to sing from a distant tree, the man sat on the tractor seat and the woman walked to where the gr
assy hill slanted down. When only her head and shoulders could be seen, she turned and waved at the man, a quick wave in which there was a certain shyness. The man did not wave back. He sat and watched the place where she had disappeared. Then he started the tractor and watched the new growth with care. And moved along the field.

  Alice walked back the way she had come. She crossed the pastureland. She though of herself and how she was, and she thought of that woman and how she was, and she thought of the two lives, lived on the two sides of that same hill and suddenly, with little warning, she was physically sick. Something wrenched and turned inside her, and she stood, bent forward from the waist, feet spread, weak with the helpless spasms of nausea, choking and emptying herself on the pasture grass. It took a long time and when it ended, she felt like a wraith. She turned to where she had seen a brook, and found a small pool where the water moved black and slow. She sat on her heels and dipped a Kleenex in the cold water and bathed her face and eyes. She lay flat and drank from cupped hands and rinsed her mouth. She stood up and used a damp Kleenex to wipe off her spattered shoes and the bottoms of the slacks. She felt lightheaded.

  By the time she clambered across the stone wall, the strength was coming back to her. Her body, chilled by the sudden unexpected sweat, began to feel warm again.

  She walked down the rutted hill, thinking back to the Alice who had sat on the wall in shallow discontent. The reality of what she had seen had done something as yet undefined. It had torn something loose, released something long suppressed.

  She walked slowly for a time, trying to rationalize what had happened to her, trying to poke and pry and finger, trying to lift the edges of things and feel what was underneath. Then she realized it was something that should not be dissected, dismembered, spread apart, and held down with little pins. If something had happened, it should be accepted on the levels of instinct. Maybe all her life she had tried too hard to understand herself, had tried to gauge and measure and weigh each little reaction, seeking a better understanding of self, yet seeking it so intensely that every reaction became suspect, that each flutter of instinct was chilled by appraisal.