A Fox Inside

by David Stacton

  Suddenly she thought: suppose it isn’t Charles, but someone else. She thought of the professor with an affection for Budapest. She put him aside. She thought of Luke and the tropical warmth of Puerto Rico, or a lot of sailors on shore leave, lurching slim-hipped through unfamiliar streets. She put them all aside. No, she had to pretend she was drifting down to some cinematic ideal, though she could not give the illusion any features. She could only remember how some things had once felt at night, things that had nothing to do with her daytime life, or this white dress, or anything she would probably spend the rest of her life doing; but by the time she had reached the car she had concentrated an imaginary blond with a drawling voice, wide shoulders and beefsteak hands, completely selfish, but at least clean. Someone as unlike Charles as escape could make him.

  She did manage to get through the wedding without looking at his beard and the reception by smiling at everything and pretending to be in a daze; but soon enough she would be alone with him. It did not occur to her then that he did not want to be alone with her, either. She smiled nicely for the photographer as she cut the cake. Half-way up the stairs, because the photographer expected it, she threw the wedding bouquet, which was heavy and Victorian, down at the stupid gaping faces instead of into an ashcan; and she was very, very glad she was not a virgin. At least she had had something. Then she turned and ran up the stairs so she shouldn’t see Lily following her. For Lily had to speak to her for a minute or two. It was the customary, the obligatory thing that had to be done.

  When Lily did come in Maggie was buttoning up the front of a pale brown jersey dress that had about umpteen shiny, slippery buttons. She was also looking angrily at herself in the mirror. She had taken two more quarter grain phenobarbital, but they did not help. Nor did Lily try to. Lily leaned against the door.

  “Well, that’s over,” she said.

  “Yes.” Maggie went on with the buttons, determined not to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” said Lily.

  “It’s over now,” said Maggie. “And I don’t suppose you’re that sorry.”

  Lily leaned more heavily against the door and somehow her fat had recently got out of hand. She watched her daughter, and when Maggie turned to pick up her coat she saw that she was still watching.

  “I wish you hadn’t said that,” said Lily drily. Her voice was oddly flat.

  “There’s nothing else to say.” Maggie threw on the coat.

  “No,” said Lily. “I suppose not.” She stood aside as Maggie went towards the door, but did not follow her through it. And Maggie did not want to see her mother cry.

  *

  They went to Del Monte for five agonizing days. Charles seemed in some secretive way to enjoy them. They did not stay at the hotel but at the lodge over the golf links, though Charles did not play golf. They had a corner room where the light woke her up too early. When she found out that he did not play golf she played it herself, and that made him mad. “I don’t play golf,” he said tartly at the bar, when she suggested it. But the second day she went out he was there and played well, considering there was a bad offshore wind. So she stopped playing golf. It was a pity because she had a good style and she liked the salt spray and the water slapping at the rocks in small coves between the holes.

  That left them riding, so they went riding. Charles rode well, though with a mechanical alertness and sense of form. He did not so much ride as practise equitation in a yellow suede vest and a knobbly tweed sports coat like an illustration in a manual of the English style. She went riding in jeans and a black and white checked shirt, and it occurred to her that she had never seen a book on riding that had photographs western style. Also her saddle creaked. Riding gave her an excuse to soak in privacy in a big, foamy, scented tub. He watched her like a hawk to see if she made mistakes of any kind, but he couldn’t very well watch her with the bathroom door closed and locked. Why did he expect her to be gauche?

  So they went riding, usually not along the coast but through those well-swept, clinical, somehow German-looking woods around the hotel. They were attractive woods. She watched him ride ahead of her, at a careless gallop, and wondered how she would feel if he hit his head on a lower limb and fell off and cracked his skull, but he didn’t. He ducked for low limbs with a regular, well-practised rhythm. He was also annoyed. When they got back to the lodge he wanted to hide her.

  “For God’s sake go upstairs and change,” he said, looking her over. “This isn’t a dude ranch.”

  She was perfectly aware that it wasn’t, so she went into the bar and had a drink. He did not follow her. When she went upstairs her jodhpurs had been taken out and laid on the bed, with no comment. She did not see him until dinner-time. She thought it over and when they rode she went on wearing jeans. They stopped riding.

  He had made a fuss about the room. He was furious about it, though she couldn’t see why, and he wasn’t pretty when he was angry. He was then dangerous in the way that someone hysterical is dangerous. He had asked for a corner room and they had given him one. But apparently it was not the right corner. He wanted the one on the south side. He got the one on the south side. She could not see that it made any difference.

  He went to bed with her only twice and it was not pleasant. He had a Brooks Bros. body. A Brooks Bros. suit is all very well, but a Brooks Bros, body is not. It requires the clothes. She had to pretend that he was someone else, someone wiry and muscular and masculine and hot. He was none of those things. He was thin and deliberate and thorough, and he paid no attention to her at all. He was willing to kiss her in public, but in bed he simply didn’t bother. And he had that slippery, oleaginous, sweaty, somehow artificial skin that does not seem to cover flesh so much as some kind of wooden machinery, like an eighteenth-century wooden clock that expanded in damp weather and so stuck.

  Most people at least changed, or became excited, or dived down an animal tunnel, in the midst of things, but he did not change at all. He might just as well have been wearing his clothes. He went to bed with her the first night and the next morning. And that, quite simply, was the end of it. He got no satisfaction out of it. He didn’t even bother to close his eyes. It was vegetable and obscene, and his flesh always glistened with that tepid sweat that made her want to take a shower immediately afterwards. In the morning she did, but could not get rid of an elusive rhubarb smell that also seemed a part of him. She wondered what it was and realized it was the sticky, glutinous smell of freshly sliced okra in a pot, before you add water. She turned the shower full on.

  He seemed quite content; though it had been such a failure, as she twisted away from his beard, that she would have expected him to be angry. She thought in some obscure way he was getting even, though she could not figure out how or for what. She visualized suddenly, what she never had before, that he had gone to bed with Lily. She wished that she had not visualized that.

  But next morning when she woke up he was actually whistling in the shower. She took her chance and dressing rapidly went down to breakfast alone. By the time he came down she was ready for him. She looked at the disembowelled grapefruit in its melting ice crater and felt such contempt for him that she could face him cheerfully. After breakfast he took her to Marsh’s, without bothering to say where they were going, as though he had the complete five days planned out in his head and this was what he had planned to do on the fourth day. He picked out a jade pendant and made her wear it. She agreed that it was lovely.

  “But”, she said, “it doesn’t suit me. It’s for an older woman.” She didn’t want a souvenir of these five days.

  “I know,” he said. “We’ll take it.” And he made her wear it, too, though she never wore it once they had returned from Del Monte. She put it in a drawer when they got back and forgot about it, nor did he ever inquire about it.

  The thing she really hated was the march of the fish. She could not stand that.

  Usually they had dinner early. She came down first and went into the long salon that faced the sea, for on the
ground floor the lodge was a series of interconnecting rooms on the sea side. The largest and the darkest was this one. At one end were the closed doors to the dining-room. There was a feudal-size fireplace and sofas. The room was about fifty feet long and dreary, though it was supposed to be cosy, for it was only effective at night, with the firelight, and at eight it was still evening.

  At about ten to eight the guests would begin to gather. The hotel had a permanent series of elderly Jewesses of great gravity and port. They lurched down the length of the room like ungainly sea mammals, followed by their paid companions, scurrying like pilot fish; and through the years they had so timed their progress that they would reach the doors just as two flunkies appeared to fold them back, giving what was designed, no doubt, to be a magical glimpse of the bright dining-room beyond, with its Hawaiian plants and crystal chandeliers. It was the timing that bothered Maggie, for at about seven minutes to eight, perhaps because he walked faster than the Jewesses, being younger, Charles would appear, wearing brown as did the displaced dowagers, and as he approached her she knew that she would rise, at six to eight, as he had planned, to meet him, and that, allowing the dowagers to enter first, they in turn would enter the dining-room, for all she knew, at 8.01.30. She hated that. She felt that he was building a machine around her. And she was quite right: he was.

  On the fifth day they left. He had business in town, or so he said. He was more likely bored with it. They motored up. But she could still remember the dowagers and the futility of that corner bedroom.

  Their life went on. He watched her, but he left her alone. In two years she got to learn why. It was his way of softening her up for those few times when he needed her to help him entertain, or wished to be seen out with her. He was good at softening. He knew that if she was alone long enough she would be glad to see almost anyone. He was quite right: she was.

  She had no friends. She couldn’t go out and pick up casuals and strays; and anyone they did meet who liked her he nipped neatly and efficiently, one way or another, in the bud. Even Lily avoided them. Whether and when he saw Lily or not she did not know. She did not want to know. Mostly she sat alone in that awful house, or used the car, or went shopping. She had a few outside acquaintances, but only a few, left over from college and re-animated by the wedding, but he did not exactly encourage a cosy social life, and he made it clear he didn’t think much of her friends. Well, maybe she didn’t think much of them herself; but they were the only friends she had, and after he had been scathing to them once or twice, she saw less of them. She knew the trouble: he did not find them useful. Maybe Lily had been right about the wrong sorority business after all, if this was what a marriage was.

  She developed a routine. She would decide to do something on Thursday, any crazy thing, like getting creamed spinach in wax canisters for the cook, at a restaurant that specialized in creamed spinach in wax canisters. But then she would go over and do it on Wednesday, even though that meant keeping it in the icebox overnight, because she didn’t have anything else to do on Wednesday and she happened to be down town. She always had shops send packages, too: it meant that she could have the pleasure of having them come late and phoning up the shop or some damn thing like that.

  She needn’t have worried about the bed side of it. It wasn’t a personal marriage and she saw that she had known that it wouldn’t be. It wasn’t really any marriage at all.

  She could have moved out and got a job as a clerk in a store, except that she didn’t have any experience or know what a clerk in a store exactly did. The phonograph collection got pretty large, but music did not interest him. He was quite content. But sometimes, when they did have guests, he watched her so closely that she could have screamed. She didn’t. If she had he would only have groomed her for the looney bin.

  In her own right she had just enough money, in a legacy from an uncle that Lily couldn’t touch, to pay for the upkeep of her car and things like that. She didn’t even go away for week-ends, because she was too dispirited, and besides, she was learning to be afraid of him. She could not do anything about it, but she thought it best to keep a sharp eye on what he was doing. She found herself eavesdropping. There was something about Charles that evoked eavesdropping.

  He was a very clever man.

  She got to taking too much phenobarbital and broke down. Charles whisked her off to a doctor of his own choosing, and besides, what could she tell a doctor or what could a doctor do? The thing she liked best was either to take a drive by herself and so get free for a while; or else to wander through Chinatown or North Beach, to watch the living people she could not touch or speak to, except over the counters of shops.

  In North Beach she found the damndest monument, just an obelisk, with a big plaque on it stating that it was to be opened for the benefit of posterity in 1964. Sometimes at night she realized that in 1964 she would be thirty-nine and wondered what was in the obelisk. Did it, like Joanna Southcott’s chest to be opened only in time of England’s peril, in the presence of thirty-nine bishops, contain revolvers, or had some eccentric put his personal possessions there?

  Often, alone in her room, she wondered whether or not Charles was in his room. She could frequently tell, for the atmosphere in the house then became thicker. She looked round her room in which he had chosen everything including, she perceived, herself.

  Then, one week-end, by accident, she found out what it was that he and Lily had done. She had not said anything. She put the papers back. She waited a week, watching him. She had torn them into shreds in anger and then returned them to the drawer. When she at last looked at the drawer again they were gone, but he did not mention them. He went away that week-end, and the more she thought about what he had done the angrier she became. She got into her car and drove up to Bolinas after him.

  She did not tell Luke about that part of it. She bit her lip and stopped talking. She rolled towards Luke and buried her head on his shoulder and felt his hands stroking her hair and could not help crying.

  “You don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes I would wake up every night, for nights on end, dreaming that someone was there to keep me warm or love me a little, and there wasn’t anybody. I tried to pretend there was, but you can’t go on pretending forever. Sometimes you can’t sleep alone. Sometimes you can’t pretend.”

  “Yes, I know.” He let her cry and she did not cry for long. She did not need to cry now. He hoped she would not need to again. She had not loved him in the past and perhaps he had not loved her then, either. It was not necessary to say so. They loved each other now.

  Maggie sat up. “She could ruin us,” she said.

  “Not any more.”

  “She tried. She told me about it.”

  “Not here,” he reassured her. “I don’t think she wants to any more. And besides, I’m not up here. I’m down south.” He realized that was not what she meant. “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing.” Her voice was muffled against his chest. “She was pretty threatening about Charles.”

  “It doesn’t matter now. We’ll get you out of this somehow and start over again. Or maybe just start.”

  “Can we?”

  “You bet we can,” he said. “We’d better get dressed and go back.” He released her and looked around the arena, which was much darker now without the moon, and faintly disturbing. It might have meant something to her once, but it didn’t have to mean anything to her any more. It was the past she had to get away from. She’d never had a chance to live in the present. And when he touched her, he thought maybe he could bring it off after all. He certainly knew he had to. He had wakened up alone like that in the middle of the night sometimes himself, and he thought he began to know what marriage was for: it was to save you from the middle of the night.

  He helped her dress and they went back to the house.

  It was still dark upstairs, but someone had turned on the hall light. They walked across the gravel towards the door. Once inside she turned to him pleadingly.
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  “No,” he said. “Go upstairs.” She looked at him. He smiled at her and, taking her arm, he led her up the stairs in the dim light of one wall bracket. Very artistically arranged, he thought, but nobody stopped them. They turned down the corridor towards Maggie’s room, the door of which was open, and a night light burning, again artistically. He pursed his lips. Maggie looked at him questioningly.

  The door to Lily’s room opened behind them. He pushed Maggie through her door and turned around. Lily was standing in the pool of light from her room. She had not even undressed.

  “Oh,” she said. “Luke. It’s so late.”

  “That’s all right. I’m staying.”

  She glanced beyond him, but Maggie had gone into her room. “Nothing’s made up,” she said. “I’d better wake Ethel.” She looked at him with a curiously dead face and put her hand up to her forehead, to push back her hair. She seemed faintly puzzled.

  “You needn’t bother,” he said. He went into Maggie’s room and shut the door behind him. He knew she wouldn’t follow him. They did not have to bother with Lily any more, but an object lesson did no harm.

  XVI

  IT WAS FUNNY ABOUT POWER, thought Luke. It moves in a world where nothing but itself exists. Even the wealthy can only hear dim echoes of public opinion, no matter how hard they listen; and the powerful hear not at all. They are protected by an isthmus; and then the sea breaks through and floods them all. The sea recedes; somebody steals the abandoned brick for new foundations, in another valley, where the isthmus seems firmer.

  It is like this city, he thought, looking at the sullen surface of the bay. It looks firm. But when they wanted to expand it they threw all the immediate past into the water—old brigantines, round cheeses, Conestoga wagons, crates of disused machinery, a few dead bodies, and God knows what else besides, to push the water out. Then they build on top of such foundations, but the ground settles a little more every year and the water will flood back in time. San Francisco was a vertical place and top heavy. It might fall over at any time. Or maybe it would just rot.