Once, when he was down in the village buying oranges, he saw Lily in a caterer’s shop. She was bending over an excelsior filled bin, plump and judicious, with a sly grin on her face, while the clerk watched her with exasperation. Luke watched her himself. She was wondering if the peaches were ripe. She took first one and then another, splitting them expertly in half to see. She laid the halves down, carefully, and he could see their yellow flesh and the scarlet capillary filaments gripping their stones. She smiled vaguely and chose six more. She rejected the broken peaches. The clerk looked at those with anguish: he would have to pay for them himself. Lily was like that. About her daughter he was not so sure.
He took to remembering Maggie at night. It made him sleepy for his morning classes. At eleven he went to the co-operative cafeteria to bring himself to. It smelled of too many people, rancid toasted cheese, young pine wood, and a sort of self-satisfied masturbation. It was always filled with the deliberately stylized awkwardness of the very well brought up young. He was thinking about that when she sat down beside him. She seemed a little uncertain.
“I haven’t seen you in ages,” she said.
“No, you haven’t.”
“Things got complicated,” she explained. “Don’t be a damn fool.”
“Maybe I am a damn fool.”
She sighed and twiddled with the straw of the iced coca-cola she had brought with her. “Don’t be mean,” she said. “Sometimes it isn’t so easy for me. I want to go somewhere.”
“Sure. Any old back street will do.”
She looked at him swiftly. “I want to.”
‘O.K. You want to.”
She looked at him again, curiously, piece by piece, and as she did so he could feel his image shaping in her mind, starting with the hair, a little too long and greasy perhaps (it was a year of crew cuts), the mouth, which was too full and too red, a pretty good neck, the sweater, the dirty trousers, a little vague and hasty this, and then down to his shoes. He was wearing blue and white argyles.
She took out her keys. “Sam’s away,” she said. “He’s out on a drunk.”
He knew Sam slightly. He was a St. Louis Jew, mournfully handsome, with lupanar proclivities. His family, prosperous psychiatrists in St. Louis, paid him to stay away from Missouri, and he was putting himself through college that way. He had an apartment in town. Luke felt a slight pressure in his groin that told him he would go. They got up to leave. Some people noticed them and some did not. They got into her car, which she drove, with the same worried fury that her mother drove with. He did not like her always to drive. It made him feel like a clay pigeon coasting down the treads of a water shoot. But the car meant something to her, and she would only let him drive in the open country where there was no one to watch them. They didn’t say a word all the way down to the village.
The university was a tribute to Henry Richardson, but since it had red tiles it passed for Spanish. For the building boom the village had mocked the Spanish, too. The apartment was in the midst of an aborted paseo. There was a courtyard with a fake well. The effect owed more to Humperdinck than to Lazarillo de Tormes. The ground floor cloisters were devoted to gift shops. They got out and climbed steep, dank, smelly, monastic stairs to the front door. She got out Sam’s keys and opened the door. They stepped into the upper part of a studio about twenty feet high, but very small. It smelled musty. The gallery led to the kitchen, cluttered with dead soldiers and plates of half-eaten toast. Steep stairs, more like a plastered ladder than anything else, led down to the tiny studio itself, which had big windows closed with cracked, yellow bamboo blinds. They went downstairs, found half a bottle of Noilly Prat, and drank it. There wasn’t any radio. They were thrown back upon themselves and on the Noilly Prat.
“I love you,” she said. The vermouth was stickily cloudy. It left rings on the table. The room was too small. It never got a proper airing.
“No, you don’t. You’re only here for spite.” As soon as he had said it he knew it was true.
She knew it was true, too. She did not answer him. She got up uncertainly and tried to pull out the bed, which slid on casters into the wall below the gallery. They had done that before and had giggled about always expecting to find a corpse in it. Once they had found Sam in it. He always hid there when his hangovers got too bad.
He went to help her. The bed was not made and that made him sentimental, or perhaps the vermouth did. He knew he wasn’t really a tough guy. He looked like hell in jeans and besides he wasn’t tall enough to master the proper stride. He was sentimental as mush.
When she was doing something like this her movements were too practised and deft and automatic. She was virginal up to a point and then experience broke through.
The real trouble, though, was that there wasn’t any radio. It made them both awkward and self-conscious. He would have liked to be romantic and undress her, but she would not let him do that. She did not like to be looked at. He began to shuck his clothes. He might be small, but he had nothing to be ashamed of. She watched him with that frightening divided attention that always made him want to slap her awake. He never knew whether it was insolence or hysteria. Besides he could not love her in bed for in bed her personality disappeared. He only loved her afterwards when he was sleepy.
It did not work out very well. She was nervous. He felt as though he were being watched, and as the daylight grew less, for they stayed there a long time, they became introspective and gloomy.
“I can’t stand it here,” she said.
“It’s the only place we’ve got.” He was angry both with himself and her, for the nothing that had happened. With her, very often, nothing did.
“No,” she said. “Let’s go home.”
She had never suggested that before. He did not like the idea.
“Yes,” she said. She got up and went into the bathroom, carrying her clothes. “It’s okay. Mother’s out with Charles.”
“Who’s Charles?”
“I don’t know,” she said, by which he knew she did not want to say. He sat on the edge of the bed, looking towards the bathroom door. She came out of the bathroom, not looking at him, and went up to the kitchen. He heard her opening the icebox door and stared at his shoes, half-keeled over before him on the floor. Then he began to dress.
“Why do you want to go home?” he asked.
She banged the icebox door. And then she banged it again. It occurred to him that the best thing would be to get her out of there, and as she banged it a third time he struggled into his trousers and shoved his shirt down into them. He knew he had to go with her, for he suspected it was another social test of the sort he had become accustomed to and often flunked. If for no other reason than rage he was determined not to flunk this one. When she was upset or disgusted she liked to scramble above people, for the safety of being able to look down on them. Out of carelessness he had let her do that before this. She would not do it now.
“Okay,” he called up the stairs. “Okay,” and wedged himself into his shoes. If it was not okay, he was not going to let her know it.
So that was how he met Charles. And remembering now how he had felt that night, going to that house for the first time, he thought that in a way he could begin to understand Charles much better.
Outside it was much later than he had thought: they had spent a long time at the apartment. The street lights were on and glowed misty through a heavy somnolent haze off the bay. Palo Alto was not attractive at the best of times. As does any university town that is younger than its college, it had the air of being a squatters’ settlement, necessary but impermanent. Then, he was nervous. Like so many of the insecure he both overestimated and underestimated the rich. He either thought they had more money and more pomp than they had, or else could not conceive of expensive simplicity. For the rich do not only have more money than we do. It is more that they are fresh water fish, in a world four-fifths salt, limited in their ambience, but living in their own element with their own diseases and squalor. Glamour i
s not an interior thing. Once within any charmed circle, and it disappears.
He knew that Lily Barnes, and therefore Maggie, lived in Atherton. It seemed to him sacrosanct, not because there was any exclusive mystery about it, but because he had no reason for going there. It was not precisely hostile territory; but it was a country of which he did not know the language. Besides, he came of one of the shorter races. Life for him was always out of scale and always would be. It gave the Anglo-Saxons an advantage.
It was not far to Atherton. They had only to cross that concrete bridge on the highway and pass through Menlo Park, a squalid town wedged between two better places. In the half darkness the roses along the campus fence glowed the colour of dried blood and their sunbaked leaves rattled in a helpless evening breeze. When they reached Atherton the air felt different. It was not only his imagination. The rich are surrounded by their own silence and their own smell, the smell of those high-piled beige-coloured rugs that spread from wall to wall in fashionable stores, like a universal element.
Atherton pretended to be the country. About its nocturnal insect noises there was something as deliberate as an Esterhazy quartet, and as arrogant. It was orchestrated to soothe. In those days the development was not built up. There were many vacant spaces underneath the eucalyptus trees, so that each house was a dim bulk in a wood. He braced himself as they turned up the drive, between hedges of ivy made to simulate old yew at least by its density. There was no moon and the haze cut out the stars, bathing the world in a diffused, expensive light. They came out of the drive and the house stood across a tousled lawn. He could remember even now the sharp, snake-like slithering of the gravel as the car swirled over it. Maggie had not slowed down. He had only an uneasy impression of the house as it then was, crocketed and draped with wooden lace, with high dormers, a mansard roof, immaculate white, and seemingly hollow.
The car stopped with a jerk under the porte-cochère, and looking out of the window he found himself on a level with a cracked wooden statue of a jockey, once brightly coloured, but weather-beaten now, holding out a brass ring. The paint had peeled from its eyeballs and from its face, so that it looked both scrofulous and blind. Maggie sat fishing through her bag. The house was in darkness.
“We’d better be quiet,” she said. “Ethel’s probably asleep.”
“Who’s Ethel?”
“The maid,” she said, and bit her nails. He knew that was not why they must be quiet. She got out of the car and banged the door. She went on up the steps without waiting for him. Hesitating, he got out and followed her. For some reason he felt like a lackey. He did not know why he was here. He was anxious about the servant. He felt furtive because she was being furtive. She clicked the latch and disappeared into darkness. She did not turn on a light. She turned it on only after he had come inside and closed the door after him.
He had never been in so large a house before. He was not awed. But he was impressed by the weight of solid wealth. When she turned on the light he saw the polished floor and the staircase rising to the landing, where he dimly caught sight of the outline of closed bedroom, if they were bedroom, doors. It was like straying on to a movie set after the technicians had gone home for the night.
She watched him staring up at the closed doors and she clearly did not like it. He was sure they would not go upstairs. He would be allowed to intrude so far, but no farther. People like him had to spend their lives on the ground floors of other people’s lives.
“We’d better have a drink,” she said. She wanted to get him away from the hall. He half-expected an avenging angel to appear on the landing.
She pushed open the sliding doors on the left and flicking on the lights, went into the living-room. It was furnished in blue, gold, and white; and it was very long. She was restless. She did not want to sit down. She moved ahead of him through the house flicking on lights as she went, through the living-room, a glass gallery giving onto the garden, the dining-room, the breakfast-room, and the pantry. He struck the piano in passing and found it was out of tune.
They came up short in the kitchen.
“Get some ice,” she said, so he got the ice, swinging open the heavy refrigerator door. The refrigerator was jammed with lettuces, tomatoes, half a honeydew melon, a pot of salmon caviar, fruit, vegetables, and meat whose surface was crystallized with the cold. He got out the icetrays and took them to the sink. They had a long handle, a novelty in those days, by which they could be extracted from the forms, and when he pulled the handle the ice made a ripping sound. She handed him a kitchen bowl to put the ice in and again he followed her through the house. She did not put out the lights behind her. He had the feeling that none of these rooms was ever used.
She took him into a room he had not seen yet and which was different from the rest of the house. It had less the air of empty waiting. It was the library, pine-panelled, but the panelling in an English style, with an elaborate mantel whose shelf was supported by a Greek metope. The lights here were less clinical. He could feel at once that this was a room Lily used, and yet it was a man’s room. Deep windows gave out on the lawn. The sofa and chairs were comfortable, the desk empty, and unlike the rest of the house, there were shallow dishes of flowers on the tables. He put the bowl of ice down on a coffee table and looked around him. The most noticeable object was the large oil painting over the mantelpiece, an old-fashioned society portrait of a man with rather prominent eyes. The sofa and coffee table being opposite it, it seemed to dominate the room.
“That’s Father,” said Maggie, seeing him stare at it. It was the first time she had ever mentioned her father. Not looking at the painting, or at him, she pulled open the bar, fitted into an empire commode, and took out two whisky ponies and a bottle of Black and White. She handed him the bottle and he sat down on the sofa to split the seal with his finger-nail. She sat down beside him, but not close to him, and poured herself a stronger drink than she usually took. And then she drank it. They were both waiting for something.
The house was full of waiting. He was sure she knew for what. It did not help to put him at his ease. The room was out of scale for him. He sat on his coat and it bunched under him. Irritably he pulled it out.
She finished her drink and poured another. He settled uncomfortably against the back of the sofa, afraid of staining the table with his drink, the glass colder than comfort. She suddenly moved around and put her head in his lap, so brusquely that he upset his drink. It soaked into the floor as alarmingly as a bloodstain.
“Leave it,” she said. She began to cry. “What am I to do?”
It was so abrupt, so puzzling, and somehow her grief, whatever it was, made her older than he was, so that he soothed her awkwardly, like a child that doesn’t know what to do when it sees its mother or its father cry. He stroked her hair and let her sob into his lap until his trousers were damp. But while she did that he found himself listening for every noise in the house. And also watching. Because of the way her body was his line of vision was limited, and he saw on the edge of the coffee table a thick smoky jade ashtray, carved in the shape of a leaf, and the pearwood inlay on the table edge and on the leg, and a bit of the pattern of the rug. Usually he never noticed little things in a house. They were only things to use. But now he realized that the ashtray had cost more than he could spend to live on for a month, and that everything in every room of any house cost so much money, and the things in this room probably more money than he had owned in his life; and that other people were more aware of these things than he and would judge his own possessions accordingly. No doubt to Lily he was consciously worth less than that ashtray in which, when he was not here, they stubbed out their cigarettes without thinking about the matter at all. These people were barricaded behind their possessions. He had no business among them. He tried not to look at the ashtray. He tried to concentrate on Maggie. Somehow the ashtray got in the way and made him feel cheated. So he just sat there while she cried.
The front door slammed. They didn’t have any time
to hide, not with all the lights on. His heart jumped. He could feel Maggie grow tense. She straightened up and looked at him with almost terror, as though she was about to be caught out in something she had not even done. She reached for her purse but she had left it in the hall. He gave her his handkerchief. She wiped her face with it. The two whisky ponies stood in front of them, on the table, like pawns.
He wondered, looking at them, if she had wanted him in this house to defy her mother, or to defeat her. The library doors slid open and Lily stood there. Part of the party flush, if she had been to a party, was still on her face. He had the feeling that neither of them, for she was with a man, had expected to find anybody there, but were only puzzled about the lights.
Seen by night Lily was a younger and more determined person. Only her eyes were old. She was not fat, but she had a generous body, still well taken care of, and her hands were shoved down into the pockets of a heavy mink coat whose hairs glistened in the light with the colours and texture of an oilskin. She was wearing a round hat of brown pheasant feathers that made her look chubby and infantile. He did not want to look at her. He looked at the man, whom later he knew as Charles. He was tall, slim, and in evening clothes. He had so little flesh over his bones that his skin had the sweaty texture of cold marble; and his eyes were brown but cold. His hair was slightly awry, high on his temples, and he had a short brown beard. Though he was young there was nothing boyish about him. He looked cool, detached, deliberate, and faintly amused. He glanced swiftly at Maggie. Luke could tell that Maggie did not like him. Then he looked at Luke and from Luke down to the ashtray, whose colour was so much the colour of his own face, and he did not have to say anything. It was that look, now that Luke thought about it, that helped to explain Charles. Charles always knew the cost of everything and sometimes the value as well.
Luke had flushed.
A Fox Inside Page 10
