A Fox Inside

by David Stacton

  Seeing him outside herself, and away from herself, with another woman, that air of watchfulness of his, that had once seemed bright and amusing, was more clearly opportunism. She wondered how anybody could be taken in by it. Yet Lily had looked happy. Well, it had made her happy, too, if she confessed the truth of the matter. She began to understand Charles’s secrecy. It had the secret in it that his charm only worked on one person at a time and he knew that. It gave her an idea.

  He did not see her for a month and that made her angry. There was no reason for his being so obvious about casting her off. Nor was she to be cast off that easily. He might do as he pleased with other people, but she was determined that he should not do so with her, if only out of a sense of the fitness of things.

  One thing he would not do was that he would not allow her to telephone him at college. She did not telephone him at college. She was angry. She telephoned him at the Barnes house. The maid answered, laid down the phone, and Miss Marie could hear voices in the background. When he came to the phone he was clearly rattled. Good, she thought, and was deceptively sweet. She asked him to come to see her. He had always wanted to meet the Sterns, for theirs was another house he had not entered and which he felt it was important for him to enter, even though they were Jewish. She said she had arranged it for Saturday. She knew that would work. He was still envious of houses he had not been in.

  She hung up. She knew he would come, not so much because of the Sterns as because she had frightened him by phoning the Barnes house. And he did come. She even knew he would come early to embarrass her by catching her before she had dressed, so she dressed at six-thirty. Then, quite contentedly she settled down to wait.

  She did not intend to feel any of the emotions that a cast-off woman feels. She did not feel them, really. She tried to, but could not quite manage it, because she understood him too well. However, she had spent eight years teaching him everything she knew and she did not intend to let him forget it. She pursed her lips and drank a glass of sherry and waited. The trouble was that she was fond of him. That one loves a well-trained dog does not necessarily make it lovable. It does not even have to be lovable to be loved. On the other hand one is not pleased when it begins to run away, or prefers the neighbours’ house down the street, the neighbours who never had to housebreak it and therefore feel it is cute. And one doesn’t much like the neighbours down the street either. They only just moved in. They don’t belong to the neighbourhood.

  He came early, as she had expected. He had taken a taxi up the hill. That must have made him angry for she never gave him money. Lily, she supposed, did.

  “You’re almost a stranger,” she said, when she answered the door. Then she turned her back on him and marched into the living-room, letting him follow her.

  “You shouldn’t be so open about it,” she told him, when she had poured him some sherry.

  “Open about what?”

  “About dropping old friends.” She settled back in her chair. She saw he was wearing a new suit, better cut than she had seen him wear before. He was learning about luxury, she thought, and also thought how he must hate to do so, for she knew instinctively how he was learning. You can always tell when people have just been to bed with each other and she had seen him with Lily in town, after all. No doubt he felt a young man on his way up has to do many things that bore him. He had already grown his beard. He hid behind it. He had even learned how to control his temper. He had not yet learned how to control his eyes.

  “You didn’t pick me,” he said slowly. “I picked you.”

  She knew exactly what he meant and she snorted. “You didn’t have much choice in those days,” she said. “And perhaps even so you made the wrong one. I know a lot about you, Charles.”

  His eyes contracted slightly and she was pleased with what she had said, though it made her feel curiously tired. Really, it was not worth the bother. His sister had died two years before and he had been relieved when he found out. He found out because she told him and she had found out because the brother-in-law had asked her to pay for the funeral, which she had not done. That left his brother-in-law and she supposed a few people in Carpenteria who wouldn’t remember him now, with his beard. It had never before occurred to her that men grew beards to avoid their own pasts as well as their own selves. She thought for an instant of the bearded nineteenth century and saw that beards, looked at that way, explained a good deal. “You won’t do anything,” he said.

  “I don’t have to.” She had said enough and did not want to pursue the subject. She rose. “We’d better go. We’re due at the Sterns’.”

  He was sulky. “I don’t want to meet the Sterns,” he said. “They’re Jewish.”

  She blinked. It sounded so silly coming from him. Lily, she supposed, must be anti-Semitic. She looked at him contemptuously and he got up and put on his coat.

  She greatly enjoyed seeing the Sterns again. She had known that they would not like him and they did not. Like so many Jewish families they were most themselves as a group. Charles tried to charm Mrs. Stern, but her daughter was also there, watching from the side. Charles’s charm was based upon a curious felinity that worked well with middle-aged women and some businessmen, but confronted with the young and androgenous charm of a Jewish family, where the men are nothing until they are fifty, and the women everything until then, and where it is impossible to tell who is the most important member of a family because it is the family itself that is important, Charles was at a loss. They thought he was young, brash, silly and perhaps also stuck up and rude. She was very pleased. She had made him his first enemies. It was about time he acquired a few enemies and she was delighted when he realized that something had gone wrong. It gave him someone else to avoid and that was the only way to hedge him in.

  It was the only malicious thing she had ever really done and she had enjoyed doing it thoroughly.

  She had challenged him and she wondered how he would solve the problem. He could not get rid of her and she knew too much. For a while, after the evening at the Sterns, he avoided her, for she had taught him a well-needed lesson. She had taught him how much he still had to learn and so had forced him back to that mental Carpenteria that drove him forward through life, away from it. She wanted to know what would happen next. She had begun to enjoy following the folds of that oddly crumpled mind. She wanted to know how he would solve the problem.

  He solved it by making her his confidant. He told her everything that he had done that he knew she would not want to hear. He had turned her to some use after all, for everybody has to talk to someone or else keep a diary, and no doubt he thought she was safer than a diary. Like so many autodidacts he would retain all his life a terror of the written word.

  She got to be pleased with her new role. She derived a certain pleasure from comparing what he was making himself into with what he had been, long ago, on that beach. She had given him the opportunity. And in a way it was a luxury to be insulted, when no one had ever dared to do so before.

  But she did not like it when he told her dirty jokes about what he did with Lily. That was going too far. It showed an essential lack of respect for decorum and for the sexes which she could not admire. He had no respect for men, for women, or for himself. He had only ambition and pride of place, which is no real personal pride at all, but a surrogate personality that protects the inferior from being hurt. All the same, she could hurt him, she knew, if she wanted to. She did not want to anymore. She did not care. When he wormed his way in with Foster at the law firm, she did however ask him what he was going to do next. After all, he could not climb much higher in his own particular world. To go anywhere else he would have to level out.

  “Marry the daughter,” he said.

  She was a Catholic and he was a Catholic, and though that made no difference to him, or at bottom to her, life had other rules and regulations that were even more stringent and binding. He had caught her out this time. He had genuinely upset her. She did not like the idea at all.


  “Nobody’s going to know,” he said.

  “The daughter is.”

  “The daughter doesn’t count. Nobody cares what she thinks. She can be managed.”

  “Then why marry her?”

  He shrugged. “Why not? It seems appropriate somehow. You could come to the wedding.”

  “Thank you. I don’t enjoy farce.”

  “I do,” he said simply.

  Telling her everything seemed to give him great pleasure. But he did not tell her about the marriage. Perhaps he did not know very much about it. He did tell her about the return to the same room at Del Monte though. He thought that was a huge joke. Or did he? She could not be quite sure. It seemed to her that sometimes he was tired of his jokes, or perhaps that was her imagination. Or perhaps he had at last gone too far, even for himself. She knew he had been found drunk, once, not in public, but in one of the better hotels. He must have blanked out completely. He had insisted on taking all his clothes off. He had laughed the matter away, but he had seemed worried when she brought it up. And then he had bought the house at Bolinas, no doubt to drink in, privately.

  So something, she knew, had gone wrong. It could not have done anything else. He had got what he wanted; and anything else he wanted he could not get. He had not the public personality for political office. Certain people would never have him. There was nowhere else for him to climb.

  And Bolinas, she thought meditatively, was not unlike Carpenteria in a different place. The same arroyo cut between similar cliffs to the sea, though the sea up here was more dangerous than it was down there. The beach had the same hump to it, the cliffs the same yellow colour. It was a neglected place, with few visitors, and those not of the first rank. There were even surrounding farms which, if they did not grow artichokes, at least had a good crop of thistles; and the two plants were of the same family. She gathered he went to Bolinas rather a lot, to drink himself silly. Maybe he had tired of it all at last.

  The thought of that made her sorry in a way she could not define. So she had driven up there on impulse, perhaps out of some past tenderness for what he might have been. She had stood in the hall of his house and heard all about Jerome.

  She had not known about Jerome. That was one of the things he had not told her. She turned round and went out instantly, around the side, to the garage. With Jerome he had gone too far. Jerome was someone she had known as a child. Jerome was part of her own life.

  And then when the girl had run out she had gone back in, because of what she had heard. It had never occurred to her before that he would or could touch any part of her world. It had never occurred to her that he would dare. She wanted to have it out with him. She went into the living-room and found him there. She was considerably shaken. The cat came in from the kitchen. She had not known about the cat, either, but she remembered now that there had been a cat in that shack at Carpenteria. It was something else that he had never mentioned. It was obviously spoiled and well taken care of. It was loved and incapable of love, as he had been. Siamese cats are, once they are out of the kitten stage. It stood in the doorway, watching Charles. On an impulse she could not explain, though she hated it on sight, she scooped it up and took it away with her. It scratched her badly before it settled down. She did not like to see animals ill-treated. Perhaps somebody hated it even more than she did.

  She had also taken the photograph. She had found it while searching for something to wrap the cat in, to prevent its scratching.

  So that was that.

  *

  She got up wearily now and went out to the kitchen to feed the cat. She kept it locked up in the kitchen which was at the other end of the house. It would not eat while she was in the same room, so she had to go out again. She moved round restlessly. She did not know what she felt. She did not blame the girl. She did not blame anybody. She did not really want to see anybody punished. He was better dead. But she had found him, and she had brought him up, and she had taught him all he knew. He was all she had. It was not fitting or fair that nothing of all that should be left to her. Someone, somewhere, should have to pay for that. She did not see why it should have had to be, ultimately, Jerome, a man of her own age arid stock.

  Certainly she did not want to wind up feeding a sinuous brown cat. She wanted to reach out and touch someone. She wanted something back. But she was not stupid. She could not have it back. It was gone for good. It never was.

  XXIII

  LUKE HAD A BAD NIGHT. HE could not sleep and he had nightmares. He had left Maggie and gone to his own room. He was faintly ashamed of his own weakness. They were staying at the house in town.

  He thought about Los Angeles. He did not like his apartment there. He did not like his life there. He did not like to live alone. He had never found anybody with whom he could live. He did like his office. He could see it clearly.

  The firm was not an old firm. It had been in business ten years. It specialized in criminal law and the flashier forms of divorce. The business was actually based on the histrionic talents of the senior partner, a squat ugly man who went to the gym twice a week and who had carefully greyed hair. Luke handled race cases, when they came up, and he seemed likely to be popular. He was getting good at it. The offices were finished in cross-sawn cedar and everything else was greyed to match. The lettering on the doors was in a square modern face, carved out of wood and even all the way round. The designing consultant had done a good job. Luke’s own office, though small, was restful and soothing. There was a portable bar and a television set, and he and the senior partner shared the same toilet and shower, though the senior partner had a dressing-room and Luke did not. The other two partners, on the other hand, did not have a shower. He did not have his own secretary, he shared a secretary with the other two partners, but she had, for the past year, put flowers on his desk, even when she did not put flowers on theirs. That is, she put flowers on their desks when she remembered to, but he never had to worry about there being flowers on his desk at all. He liked flowers.

  He had not dropped his Mexican friends. He liked them and liked to get away with them, but recently he had not had much time. He had bought a new convertible a year before and was looking forward to turning it in on a newer one. He had not thought about buying a house because he didn’t need one, but if he had thought about it he could have swung it easily enough. He did not go to the gym, he was not that old yet, but he did go out to the beach on week-ends, both to swim and to do some muscle building, but only if he went out with some of his Mexican friends who had a passion for that sort of thing. He was careful not to overdo it. Too many muscles would not suit him and he had other ways of evening up the social score.

  Swimming kept him in trim: he liked to swim far out. He liked being envied, he liked being admired, he liked his having climbed out of the Mexican ghetto; and he was proud of that, without pushing the issue at any time. But he did not like to think of ever having to go back down into it. He could not go back down into it.

  There was also Maggie. She was awake now and alive. She was older. He felt slightly ashamed of himself for the game he had played with her and with himself when they were younger. He had not known the score then. There was pride in having her know him as he had been and as he was. The difference was perceptible, and if she loved him now he was pleased, for it meant she loved, as he did, what he had made himself. He liked to keep the score. He didn’t mind being remembered for what he had been, even if some of his past gaucheries now made him wince. There had probably been plenty of them. They came back to him sometimes. He didn’t know whether she was in love with him. Nobody can ever really know that, except in bed, for a little while. But he did know she was in love with his body, and he had a good body, and he couldn’t think of any better place to begin.

  He got up and saw it was 4 a.m. He went down the corridor and into her room. The curtains were not drawn and he stood in the doorway, watching her. She was curled up on one side and her body, under the covers, made a long young line that w
as vulnerable and nice. Besides she hated it here as much as he did. She didn’t belong here either. And that was something worth knowing. It helped.

  She stirred and he quickly let himself out of the room and stood at the balustrade, looking down into the crypt of the hall. “Oh, hell,” he said. “Oh, hell.” But he knew he had made up his mind. It made him feel the sturdier for having done so. He went back to his room, flexed his back muscles, because they ached, and lay down on the bed without pulling the covers over him. He smoked a cigarette contentedly, enjoying the luxury of having won out over his own fears about his future. He had taken on a dare. And he supposed it was that young and vulnerable curve of her body under the bedclothes that had made him do it. That was what he had had to see. Deliberately he pitched the cigarette into a corner of the room, and rolling over on his stomach, went blissfully to sleep.

  He woke up at eight, but he did not feel tired. He showered and shaved, in that illogical order, and went into Maggie’s room to wake her up. When she was awake he went downstairs without even bothering to notice the house any more, said hello to the maid, went through to the garage, got Maggie’s car out and drove it round to the front of the house.

  Lily’s car was already parked there. When he saw it he stopped and whistled. He did not see her. He was making his second trip down the stairs with Maggie’s bags when he saw her. She was coming out of the living-room, pulling on her gloves, and she was not wearing black. He stopped and put the bags down half-way up the stairs.

  “You’re both going,” she said.

  “Yes.”