“If you really want me to.”
“Of course I want you to. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t ask. I’m quite sweaty, aren’t you?”
“Yes. It’s still very hot playing in the sun.”
“Do you suppose we could go inside and have a shower?”
“In the school?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t know about that. I don’t think we’re supposed to use the showers except after gym classes.”
“Oh, come on. What could be the harm in it? You have a locker in the dressing room, don’t you?”
“Well, yes. Everyone has a locker.”
“I don’t. I haven’t been assigned one yet. Come on. I’ll just share your towel, if you don’t mind.”
“I ought to be getting home.”
“That’s all right. I have my father’s car. I’ll drive you home afterward, and you’ll be there just as soon.”
The arm around Lisa’s waist was imperative, directing her in the way it wanted her to go, and they walked up from the tennis court to a rear entrance to the school and up on the inside to the dressing room on the girls’ side of the gymnasium. Miss Mackson, the physical education teacher, was not in the dressing room when they entered, nor was anyone else. Lisa’s excitement was out of proportion to the circumstances, but she was also a little uneasy, for she had an idea that there would be trouble if she and Alison were discovered showering after class hours. Her mother and father would be very angry with her if she got into trouble at school, and it would, besides, be very humiliating to have to go before the principal or something. Wishing to get finished and away, she began to undress quickly, sitting on the bench in front of her locker to remove her tennis shoes and socks. Then, standing to complete the undressing, she was conscious all at once of a strange inner conflict, reluctance and eagerness at odds over taking off everything in front of this rather confusing and compelling girl she had only just met and could not quite understand.
Hesitating, she looked at Alison and saw that the other girl was already naked and was watching her with the small smile on her lips that seemed to be the emotional antithesis of the intent smile that expressed her dislike. Stripped, its smooth brown broken in two places by bands of white the sun had not reached, Alison’s body had a hard clean look of grace that even her thin shirt and brief shorts had not completely shown, her hips assuming in nakedness a boyish narrowness, her shoulders an added breadth.“What’s the matter?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“What are you waiting for?”
“I’m not waiting for anything. I’ll be ready in just a minute.”
She finished undressing in a hurry, and they went back to the shower stalls and stood for quite a while under the hot water and for a few seconds under the cold, and then Alison shut off the water and turned to Lisa, and it was perfectly plain all of a sudden that they had come to the time for some kind of decision, but afterward, when Lisa thought back to it, there didn’t really seem to have been any decision or choice at all, but only something that had to begin and did. At first, for some time after the first time, there was a fear that sometimes assumed the dimensions of terror, and there was a feeling of guilt that was based less on a conviction of transgression than on the certainty that her mother and father and brother and practically everyone else would consider it so. But against the burden of fear and guilt, which gradually lightened, there was the compensation of Alison and Alison’s special friendship. They were together almost all the time, and spent nights at each other’s house and all things like that, and everyone thought how inseparable they were and that it was really quite sweet and charming; and everything was fine, except for the sickness of fear and guilt, all through the fall and the winter and right up into the spring, which was the time Miss Mackson found the note.
Lisa had written the note to Alison and was going to pass it to her when she got the chance, and this was nothing new or different, because she wrote a note every once in a while to tell Alison again how wonderful it was to be her friend and just how she felt about everything, but perhaps it was foolish to put it down on paper that way when you couldn’t possibly expect anyone else to understand about it if it became known. It wasn’t really necessary to write the notes, of course, because all that was in them could have been spoken, but somehow it seemed easier to find just the right words for it when there was time to select them carefully and write them down. Anyhow, the note was written, and it was in her jacket pocket when she went in to gym, and later, when she came out, it was gone. She was very frightened and went back to the dressing room to look for it, but it wasn’t there. After that she didn’t know what to do, and though she didn’t know it yet, there was nothing to be done at all, because Miss Mackson had found it.
What followed was something she tried afterward to repress, and she had no clear recollection of it, the natural sequence of events, but of only an incoherent kaleidoscope of ugly and terrifying scenes. She found herself trapped inside a hard perimeter of danger, a circle of cold faces set in lines of revulsion—her father’s, her mother’s, her brother Carl’s. Beyond them, in the darkness beyond the perimeter, were all the vicariously aggrieved and violated, and she knew for the first time in her life the loneliness and terror of the one who was different in a way that was unacceptable, the person apart. Her isolation, for a while, was actually physical. In her room, quarantined, she watched from her window the assumption of spring by earth, the progress of green growth and the early rain and the assaults of gusty wind, and she thought of Alison and wanted Alison and wondered when, if ever, she would see Alison again.
In time, of course, she was restored to the forms of normalcy, to the associations and relative freedom of school, but she was now disturbed and uncertain in relationships she had formerly sustained with ease, and though she was aware that the secret of her transgression was guarded by a few, she could not lose her sense of separation, of acceptance irrevocably repudiated, and she felt rejection in every contact. This feeling did not begin and end at the door of her home. She felt it most of all in her own family, in inverse ratio to their stiff efforts to conceal it, and after a while she actually began to pity them in their confusion and shock, their utter inability to understand or accept what had happened. Not so much to her, really, as to them. The terrible threat to their respectability.
She saw Alison, and there was nothing altered, in spite of disaster and disgrace, in the way she felt about the other girl, or in the degree of her longing. She wanted to speak to her and to touch her and to receive the assuring commitment of the small smile, but this was now impossible. She wondered if Alison had suffered and was unhappy and above all if she was angry because of the note. She could not bear the thought of Alison’s being angry. Of the multitude of threats in the strange and transformed world, this was the one that caused her, when she considered it, the greatest despair. Looking to Alison for reassurance, for the slightest sign in passing, she received nothing, no smile, no gesture, no word dropped softly. The truth was, Alison seemed entirely unaware of her, as if there had never been between them a discovery or a dedication or any feeling whatever.
The year aged and spring passed and school closed, and after the closing of school, with even the brief sight of Alison in passing now denied her, Lisa could bear the separation no longer. She began to walk by herself, when she could get away, along the streets near Alison’s home, and once she saw the other girl with her father, and several times with her mother, and at last, as she had been hoping, alone. They were on opposite sides of the street at the time, and Lisa, crossing over, felt in the space of the crossing a mounting and hurting happiness that reduced to insignificance all that had happened because of Alison or might ever happen because of her later. “Alison,” she said.
Alison stopped and turned. It was not the small smile she displayed, however, but the antithetic scowl. “What
do you want?-”
“I just want to talk with you, Alison. I’ve been so lonely for you.”
“Have you? Well, you’d better get used to it, I guess, because you’ll be lonely for me for a long time as far as I’m concerned.”
“Haven’t you missed me? Aren’t you glad to see me?”
“No. I wish I wasn’t seeing you now, and I hope I never see you again.”
“Why? Why, Alison?”
“Because you’re a fool, that’s why.”
“Because of the note?”
“Yes, because of the note. Only a fool would have been so careless.”
“I’m sorry. I admit it was careless.”
“Well, I should think sol You damn near ruined me.”
“I said I was sorry, Alison. Please don’t be angry.”
“Of course I’m angry. Do you understand what I’ve been through? Do you think I like being looked at as if I were filthy or something? Do you think I enjoy being watched all the time and hardly ever allowed to go anywhere alone? If I were even seen talking with you, I’d be in trouble all over again.”
“Does it matter so much? It doesn’t to me. I’d be in trouble too, but it doesn’t matter at all if only you won’t be angry and we can be friends again.”
“Are you crazy? It’s impossible.”
“Please, Alison. It’s all been so terrible, and no one understands anything about it. How it really was, I mean. I’ll kill myself if you won’t be friends.”
“Oh, don’t be so stupid.”
“I will. I swear I will.”
“Well, go ahead and kill yourself, then. I’m sure I’d be better off if you did.”
“Don’t talk like that. Please don’t.”
In the urgency of her supplication, Lisa moved forward and lifted a hand, and Alison backed away. Lisa’s intensity frightened her a little, and she wondered uneasily if the crazy little fool were actually capable of killing herself after all. She hadn’t really thought so, and that’s why she had spoken so brutally, but she wouldn’t actually want anything like that to happen, because she would surely be implicated herself, under the circumstances, and would have to suffer for it one way or another.
“Don’t touch me,” she said.
“I won’t hurt you, Alison. I only want you to be kind to me again.”
“Go away.”
“Please, Alison.”
“Go away, I tell you. If you don’t go away and leave me alone, I’ll tell my father that you molested me. Then you’ll really be in trouble.”
Turning abruptly, Alison walked back the way she hid come, the long legs that had been strong and brown in the late summer sun carrying her away swiftly. For a moment Lisa was on the point of running after her, but the desperate moment passed and was gone, the moment and Alison gone together and for good, and she stood there fixed and trembling, the incredibly beautiful name dying in her throat with an ugly strangled sound.
So it ended. So it died on a sidewalk with a whimper. Lisa carried the corpse of it home inside her and sat over it in her room. She considered dying herself, how it might best be done, but what she wanted was merely to die and not to kill herself, which are different things, and so she continued to live and entered a long armistice, precariously balanced between this way to go and that way, the way before Alison and the way Alison had shown her, and it could have been in that time, depending upon circumstances, either of the ways.
Then there was one summer, a short while one summer, when she was at a certain lake resort on vacation with her family, and there was a girl there she had come to know, and something had started and grown between them and had eventually ended in the way things end that are a part of a summer and are not expected to survive it. Afterward it had not been thought of much or remembered long, except as an infrequent associate of some subsequent incident, and even yet, even after the second overt time, there was still the other way available, though it had become, because of the summer at the lake, just so much less likely.
Depression became an uncontrollable factor in her life. Whereas it had previously come infrequently with a discernible logic, the specific result of causes that could be isolated and examined, it now came without apparent reason, just came and remained for longer and longer periods, was often just there waiting for her when she awoke in the morning, or came to her in the middle of the night, or while she was going about her affairs in the course of the day. Because of this, she deliberately took an overdose of barbiturates when she was twenty-one, but she did not die and was sent by her frightened parents to a psychiatrist who learned a great deal about her but did very little for her. This happened in her third year in Midland City College, and in her fourth and last year there was an associate professor in the Department of Foreign Languages. The associate professor was a young woman named Jeanne Marot who spoke with a French accent and had actually been born and educated in France. She was quite attractive in a sleek, angular way, like a clothes model in an expensive fashion magazine, and she was, besides, as it developed, quite aggressive when she was reasonably certain of the response to her aggression, and it seemed for a while that she was the answer to everything, but of course she was not. This was perfectly apparent after a few months, and, anyhow, the affair had become by then extremely precarious and threatening.
The summer after the last year in college was the worst in her life, a period of chronic melancholia that made the performance of the simplest act, a monstrous burden and a terrifying threat, as if any change in condition at all might destroy her precarious balance and place her in incomprehensible peril, and when she thought back to the summer afterward she could never understand how she survived it and sometimes wished that she hadn’t. Because the summer was so bad, because it was necessary to survival to do something, almost anything, it was quite simple in the end to make the decision about Bella. They met in a park where Lisa had gone because home had long since become intolerable and because the park was simply a place to go that was not home, and their common denominator was something not difficult to establish by simple techniques of approach and response. They met the next day in the same place, seemingly by accident, and the next day after that openly by appointment; and a week later Lisa moved into the apartment on the south side of the city, and Bella was someone to adhere to, an object to give allegiance, the symbol to Lisa of what she considered a definitive decision. She left home after an icy scene with her family in which horror was disguised as anger and everything was understood but not mentioned.
* * * *
And now, in a strange room in a strange hotel, she realized that the deviate way was a way that had cured no ill and established no peace, and that she would have to return after all to the other way, the way she had thought rejected forever, and she would not return because she wanted to do so for any reason that was essential to her real needs and hungers, but simply because she did not possess whatever qualities were necessary to survival among the perils and oppressions of aberrance.
Rising from the chair, she went to a window and looked out and saw that neither the snow nor the wind had diminished. And at that moment in Corinth, three hundred miles away, Emerson and Ed Page were lying asleep in their bed, each in the arms of the other; and Avery Lawes, in the brick house on High Street, was also lying in bed but was not asleep and in no one’s arms.
CHAPTER III
SECTION 1
There was a terrace in the sun, and a swimming pool below the terrace, and beyond the swimming pool, sand and the ocean. Around the pool and on the sand and sometimes in the ocean there were brown men and brown women who were not quite naked, and after a while, after the passing of hours and days, he was able to look at them with practically no feeling of any kind. He sat on the terrace in a bright canvas sling, which was really half sitting and half lying, and the white light was softened by th
e thin filters of his closed lids to red that sometimes deepened to black, and in the soft red-and-black world behind his lids were a beautiful golden woman who had been dead a long time and a frozen gray man who had been dead a short time; and it was necessary to see them now, if he was to see them ever, without perversion or distortion and in true relationship to himself.
This is how it was, he thought. This was the beginning of awareness, and it was night, and I lay in my room in the house on High Street, and because I was very young I was supposed to be asleep, but I wasn’t. Lying in my bed, I could look out to the east and see the moonlight on the crest of the ridge beyond the river, but I couldn’t see the river itself because it was hidden at the foot of the bluff that dropped away at the lower end of the back yard, and I thought about the river, how it would look silver in the moonlight, and pretty soon I heard a car come up the drive from the street and stop in the portico, and I knew it was my father and mother coming back from wherever they’d been, and I thought it was pretty early for it. I quit looking at the crest of the ridge and thinking about the river and started waiting for the sounds of the door opening and closing in the lower hall, and the heavy steps and the light steps coming up the stairs, and the heavy voice and the light voice talking and laughing and passing in the upper hall, all very softly and subdued because of me, because it was supposed that I was sleeping. This night, though, as I lay and listened, the door opened and closed as usual, and the steps came and passed as usual, but there was no sound of voices, no restrained talking and laughing, and this was not usual and not at all right.
The acoustics of night are very strange. At night you can hear many things that are not heard in the day, the creaks and whispers and sighs of sound, and you can hear voices in a room with a thick wall between. You cannot hear precisely what is said, the significant arrangement of vowels and consonants, but you can hear their inflections and determine their temper and know by their quality if they are spoken in love or amity or anger. As I heard and knew, lying and listening in my room to the hard voices in the room of my parents.
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