He sat back, flushed. After a long time his father said softly, “No penalties and no rewards. That’s the way you look at it?”
“That’s the way I look at it.”
“And there’s no … kicks in the old words. Decency, a sense of personal honor. Respect. Self-sacrifice.”
“That’s twisting it. I wasn’t talking about me. I guess those words mean something to me. But they don’t to most people. Most kids, I mean. And when you haven’t got those words, there has to be something else to keep you in line. And what used to keep them in line is gone now.”
“I’d like to think those words meant something to you and Ellen.”
“I think maybe they mean more to Ellen than they do to me.”
“Is that a car coming?”
They both got up. Brock heard the familiar sound coming up the hill.
“Jeep,” he said. “Could be Clyde’s.”
It turned into their drive and the lights were turned off. They heard steps on the gravel and a heavy voice say something, and heard Ellen say in a waspish voice, “Don’t bother. Please don’t bother!”
There was a surly grunt and the jeep engine started again and the wheels skidded viciously on the gravel.
They went into the kitchen and Ellen came in. Her eyes looked puffy. She carried the blue case and her tennis racket. There was a long, fresh scratch on her chin and a bruised place under her eye and her hair was mussed.
“Exactly where have you been?”
She looked at her father, startled. “I’ve been out with that—Oh, gosh!”
“What’s the matter?”
“I forgot to phone. I was … going to stay with Norma and then I decided not to.”
Brock had moved off to one side. He could see his father’s face. “You’re lying, Ellen.”
Ellen flushed. “Yes, I guess I am.”
“Mrs. Franchard phoned here. You better tell the truth.”
Ellen put the case and the racket on the kitchen table. She spoke quickly. “They had this idea—about the four of us going up and staying in Bobby’s family’s camp overnight. A dumb idea, I guess, and we were—the girls, that is—to make out like we were staying at each other’s house. I was the last one to phone and Mom said I could and then … well, walking back to where they were, I thought it would not be the right thing to do and I guess to be perfectly honest I was scared and so I told them Mom said no instead of yes like she said, and then we drove up there just to leave Norma and Bobby up there and we were going to go pick them up in the morning, but as far as I’m concerned, Clyde can go pick them up by himself. As far as I’m concerned, Clyde can take himself a big running leap and drop dead.”
“What happened to your face?”
“I fell.”
“Call your mother, Brock, and tell her Ellen is home and she’s okay.”
“Where’s Mom?”
“Over staying with Mrs. Franchard while Mr. Franchard and Mr. Rawls are making a trip up to that camp.”
As Brock hurried to the phone he heard his sister say, in an awed voice, “Oh, brother!”
He got hold of Mrs. Franchard first and then his mother. He gave her the message. She started to ask questions he couldn’t answer, and then said she’d be right home. As he had been talking he had heard the low voices of his father and Ellen in the kitchen. When he went back out he saw Ellen smiling and he knew that things were all right. She’d always been able to get around the old man. And never got away with anything with Mom. It worked just the other way with him. The books said it was supposed to be that way. But it seemed funny sometimes.
Ellen, still smiling, moved gingerly onto the offensive. “I guess I ought to be kind of mad about you thinking I’d do that, Dad, stay up there all night.”
“And I could have a few things to say about you running around with a couple who will stay up there—would have stayed up there.”
Ellen took the new advantage. “I’m through with them. They’re sickening. So is Clyde.” Her face began to break up. “Oh, why can’t we all go away from here? I just hate it here. I hate it!” And she fled. They heard the door of her room bang. A few minutes later his mother drove in, came hurrying into the house, asked where Ellen was, and went off toward Ellen’s room. His father asked him to please put the car away. When Brock got back into the kitchen, his father was pouring two glasses of milk.
He gave Brock a twisted smile. “Confusing evening. Milk?”
“Thanks.” Brock took it and sat on the counter near the sink. His father leaned against the refrigerator.
“You were right about Ellen, Brock.”
“She’s okay. She’s a little mixed up.”
“What about that Clyde?”
“I don’t much like him. I never have. He goes around bulging his muscles. I guess he’s okay, though.”
“But if Ellen had agreed to stay up there, he would have liked that?”
“Why not? I don’t like him, but he isn’t crazy.”
His father frowned. “Is that the attitude you all have? About nice girls?”
“If they won’t, they won’t. If they will, they will.”
“That’s pretty damn cynical, son.”
“Is it? I never thought about it. Look, Dad, suppose I look around for something to do this summer.”
“I hoped you would. But I wasn’t going to mention it.”
“Then enlist in the fall. They’re going to come after me sooner or later. I can get that over with and then be squared away to try to get in school someplace when I get out. What do you think?”
“I want you to finish college. I don’t care when or how, but I want you to finish.”
“I want to. I thought I knew what I wanted to do. Now I’m not so sure. So maybe with a break in the middle, I’ll be smarter about what courses I want later on.”
“Your mother isn’t going to like it.”
“I figured that.”
“Let’s sleep on it.”
“Sure. Night now.”
“Good night, Brock.” And there was a tentative touch on his shoulder in parting, the first shy gesture of affection since Fiasco. Brock went to his room. He heard the muted feminine voices of sister and mother. The affectionate gesture had pleased him. But, as he prepared for bed, the pleasure faded. He realized that for a brief time in the dark living room he had talked directly and honestly, as himself. But in the bright kitchen he had slipped into a new role. The staunch penitent. The noble prodigal. Good God! A job that would louse up the summer completely. And then basic training to top it off. All that had been spur of the moment, like a toddler holding up a newly found green leaf in hopes of a pat on the head.
After his light was out, he lay in darkness and wondered if he were truly totally lacking in that something called sincerity. Play a moody part for a time and then slide from that into temporary honesty and then into a new part. Now he would have to be bluff and cheery and brave for a long time. What in hell was it that he really wanted? What were you supposed to want? Approval? He had placed a big mortgage on the future to obtain a tiny morsel of that. Maybe the best thing to want was no trouble. Smooth and easy. Food and a sack and some records to play and some thoughts to think and a girl to chase.
After the boy had gone to bed, Ben sat in the silent kitchen, the empty glass, milk-streaked, in front of him. He thought of his daughter. He had wanted to go with the other two men but had not quite dared. For fear of what they would find. Fear of himself and how he would react if they found it. For it was more than protection of the sweet young daughter. There was, and perhaps there had to be in these years of their father-daughter lives, a faint yet not unhealthy tinge of the incestuous. Both he and she becoming aware, almost simultaneously, of her as woman. And so in the rage which he feared, there would be the murderous intent of the betrayed, as well as the fever of the protective parent. He well knew that one day she would marry. And the wedding night would be, to him, a form of peculiar torture. A physical jealousy that coul
d not be admitted.
And so he had not dared go up there. And had been reprieved.
But the true oddness of the evening was in the boy. The way Brock had talked had given Ben a strange nostalgia for his own youth, for those years when you thought often about the why of things, when philosophical discussions lasted until dawn. I think, therefore I am. What is God? All those old thoughts had slept uneasily in his mind.
Brock’s words had brought them awake again, to stand on awkward legs, blinking at the light. What Brock had been saying was basically the old discussion of good and evil. It hid behind new words. Purpose and lack of purpose. Creation and destruction. Meaningfulness and lack of meaning. Once upon a time it had been the most important problem in all the world, in all of life.
But you grew up. And grew into acceptance, not of good and evil, but of a world in which they were so curiously intermixed, so mutually interdependent, that it became far easier to accept the inevitability of all compromise. Or was it because it just became so much more comfortable not to think.
You could not go into the men’s bar at the club and start talking about the meaningfulness of existence. Not sober, at least. You would embarrass them and, perhaps, alarm them. An old friend would take you aside and suggest a physical checkup.
Or start the same discussion with your wife and she would interpret it as a general dissatisfaction with life, and she would put it in her personal frame of reference and see an implied criticism of her.
There wasn’t anybody to talk to anymore. Even when your own son opened the subject, you could not talk to him without attempting to instruct or command.
So the thoughts went to sleep. You kept them quiet. You made them sleep. If they started to stir in their sleep, they could be safely Miltowned or martinied. Or eclipsed by the excitement of the new flesh of a stranger.
These are the things that put the doubts to sleep, but there are other ways to weaken them if they stir into wakefulness. Repetition, endlessly, that life has to be good. Because the white walls are pristine, because the dishwasher kills germs as well as washes the dishes, because the lawns are free of crabgrass this year, because there was enough left after taxes to buy some more Hudson Fund, because the doctor stood—grave, smiling, bakelite of the stethoscope hanging against starchy white—saying you were healthy as a horse [why is it always a horse?], because the joke you were dubious about, the joke that kicked off the speech [the tightrope walker and the four-dollar beer] convulsed them all, because the newsletter reports that dealers’ stocks are moving rapidly, that retail sales are up 2.7 percent over the same month last year, that rails and motors are leading a market resurgence, because the twenty-pay-life is at last paid up, yes, yes, because of all these things it is good and it has to be good, and nobody has it any better, and no generation in any time of history ever had it any better, it has to be good, and pray leave us have no juvenile, adolescent, sophomoric maunderings about truth and beauty, good and evil, and man’s destiny. Merely be the little engine that could, that has, and is, and will continue to be.
And what has this got to do with that so cold and so functional Thomas Marin Griffin, he who walks his jungle paths alone with never the click of claws or gnawing sound of teeth, and who now in all fairness and honesty and remorseless logic is waiting to chew you up and spit out something that is no longer you—is instead a man in a bright shirt and beaked, straw cap and fat legs sunburned, fishing from a tidal bridge, and boring his neighboring catcher of sheepshead, and grunting stories of ancient glory, of ivoried splendor of work sheets which now mellow and yellow in the green file, of warrior methods of forgotten sales meetings, of bold jousting with obsolescence. Saying it just right. To convey shrewdness without self-glorification. To hint of this and that, dropping names that land solidly. And one of the names would be, of course, Thomas Marin Griffin.
He looked around the kitchen with the sudden impression, close to alarm, that he was in a strange place, in a room he did not know. And his heart hastened with an excitement he did not understand. Then he got up and rinsed the glass and set it on porcelain with a tiny click and turned out the lights, the mercury switches soundless, and went to bed, hearing wife and daughter still talking in low voices, wondering what they still found to say to each other, wondering if he would sleep well and hoping that he would because this had been a bad day, all in all, and Friday would not be any easier.
After her mother had gone, and after the lights were out, Ellen sat up and flounced her pillow and turned onto her side, palms flat together and under her cheek, knees hiked high, feeling the warmth of herself in bed and trying to think only of coziness and warmth and curled up and warm and soft and each slow breath like falling softly off something into deeper warmth and softness.
Then she grunted and rolled over onto her back, flapping one arm down in exasperation, lying spread and rigid and wondering. What would it have been like?
The boys had brought their trunks and took a swim in the dusk-cold lake, the frigid, spring-fed lake, while she and Norma had made the sandwiches, feeling very housewifey in the old camp kitchen, giggling at the barbarisms of the camp equipment, and then the boys had come howling and blue up into the camp, into the kitchen, jumping and flapping in an agony of coldness, and the sun-golden hair of arms and legs pasted flat, but springing and curling and standing out again when towel-rubbed. Clyde had built the big fire in the fireplace and then they had dressed and Bobby had poked around, muttering and slamming cupboard doors until at last with cry of triumph had held aloft the bottle, almost full, saying that now they could get warm on the inside too.
So the boys had drunk a lot of it and Norma almost as much and she just enough so she felt far away from herself, numb-lipped, making faraway laughter at everything and nothing. So that the sandwiches were things eaten in a half-remembered state. And somehow time got mixed up so that a second was a long, long time. Or an hour was nearly nothing. So that she was on the floor, curled, facing the fire, Clyde behind her, knees against the backs of her knees, arm around her, so that the fire coals were steady warmth against the front of her, and Clyde warming close the back of her, and she kept drifting off and coming back with a start when his hands would move on her and she would push them away, not wanting to be touched, but just held like this.
Then pushing his hands away became too much trouble and she let him touch her, and the touch made things seem to slowly shift and melt inside her, made her feel as if she were enormously heavy, a sweet-swollen, dreamy, helpless thing there, unprotesting when he turned her around so gently, and his lips were stone against the soft membrane of her own lips. And then it began to turn into a fumbling, into an awkwardness of fumbling that broke the mood, so that she frowned against his lips. Then heard, in the camp stillness, in the night-lake silence, an odd sound, an odd regular sound. It could not be translated and then, in a moment of shock and horror she realized that it was the dogged, insensate, blinded creak of springs of one of the old camp beds in the nearby bedroom, and she began to fight Clyde silently and with all her strength. He fought to take her. They grunted and gasped, rolling dangerously near the fire, and she wrested one arm free and hammered twice at his stone face with her fist, holding it as though she were stabbing with a knife. Then, wiggling free and pulling her leg out from under him and half rising to run as he caught her ankle, she fell but pulled free and rolled and jumped up and backed away.
She stood, breathing hard, her eyes watering from the sting of the bump of her cheekbone against the floor. With Clyde ten feet away, sitting on his heels, braced with one knuckled hand, arm straight, against the floor in front of him, the pose of a football lineman, though horridly different, and no light but the red coals so that half his face was red and the other half in blackness, and the creaking had stopped.
It was a frozen time and she felt the stony purpose of him there, waiting for him to come at her, thinking that when he moved, she would grab the chair near her right hand and hurl it at his legs and t
ake that moment to run out into the night.
But it seemed to stop in him as suddenly as a motor stops. He stood up slowly, turning away from her, fixing his clothing.
“You better take me back now,” she whispered.
“Damn you, Ellen. Damn you to hell.” His voice was too loud.
“Just take me back,” she said. “Don’t talk to me. Just take me back home.”
“Suppose I don’t want to?”
“I’ll go out to the highway and hitchhike.”
“You would, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Just tell me one thing. What are you saving it for? What makes you think you’re so damn invaluable? You ought to wake up. You better snap out of it, kid. I don’t like a teaser. You don’t know how close you came to taking a hell of a beating.”
“You scare me, Clyde. See how I’m shaking? I’m terrified.”
Contrary Pleasure Page 17
