“I told you I should go away,” she said, “and now I will go.”
“Break your promise?”
“I think you are now willing to relieve me of it.”
“No. I am not.”
“Why? Do you want me to stay so that you can punish me in some way? If you do, I will not blame you.”
“I don’t want to punish you. I am in no position to assume a judicial role, God knows.”
“Then why do you want me to stay?”
“Because I am obligated by the fraud I practiced on you, which was as great, in spite of what you say, as the one you practiced on me. Because I cannot release you without first trying to help you. What does it matter? You have made a promise, and I will hold you to it.”
“You are being kind, and I wish you wouldn’t. No good has come of kindness. Carl was kind, and you can see what it has come to.”
“I will take you somewhere for treatment.”
“I won’t go. No good has come of treatment, either. If you have faith in treatment, why haven’t you sought it for yourself?”
“I don’t know. At any rate, I won’t try to force you to do anything you don’t want to do. Do you intend to stay?”
“If you still want it.”
“I do. I am trying to think why it is that I want it, and I believe it is because I am convinced that this is the last chance for both of us, and if it can’t be the beginning of something better, it should at least be the end of everything bad.”
“All right. If I am going to stay, I had better tell you that I invited Emerson and Ed Page to the party Saturday night.”
For a moment he did not understand what she had said, his mind struggling to adjust to the incredibly quick shift of hers from their personal tragic relationship to such petty business. Actually, the shift was not so abrupt nor the new subject so unassociated as they appeared, but this was something he did not know.
“Party? Oh, yes. Em and Ed? Why did you do that?”
“Because I wanted them to come. They are the only people in Corinth I can tolerate. Do you object?”
“No. Of course not. I’m a little surprised that they accepted.”
“It was he who accepted. I don’t think he wanted to, but I rather tricked him into it.”
“Well, they’re welcome. I like Em. Perhaps he’ll help to make the evening bearable.” He opened his eyes and stood up slowly, as if the action required tremendous effort. “I’m going up to the house now. Are you ready to come?”
“Not yet. I want to sit here a little longer.”
“Will you be all right?”
“Perfectly. If you are afraid I may throw myself off the bluff after all, you needn’t be. I am really too great a coward.”
Turning, he walked away. She listened to his footsteps receding on the dry grass. The valley of the river was filling with darkness.
CHAPTER VI
SECTION 1
Awakening very early in the morning, she knew at once that it was going to be a bad day. Bad days were in her life nothing unusual, of course, but some days were bad even in comparison with other days that were bad, and it had been that kind of day when she had taken the barbiturates quite a while ago, and it had been that kind of day when she had gone to the park and met Bella, and every time a day like that came along she knew that she would be far better off if she didn’t have to live it. She lay quietly in bed with the still house around her and the bad day ahead of her, and pretty soon she realized that it was Saturday, the day of the party at the country club, and that, however bad the day might be, the night would certainly be worse. Lying there with her eyes closed and not moving a muscle, she tried to think of a way to avoid the bad day and the worse night, but she couldn’t think of a way for the simple reason that there wasn’t any, and then she thought that she would continue to lie quietly in the darkness behind her lids until she went to sleep again, thereby at least-shortening the day if not the night, but she couldn’t do that, either. She opened her eyes and began waiting for whatever was going to happen to start happening.
In due time, she heard Mrs. Lamb, the housekeeper and cook, who slept out and came in early, clump across the back porch below and let herself in the back door with her own key. Later she heard the yardman working in the yard beside the house, though God knew what work there was for him to do with the grass and all the flowers seared and sapped by the relentless sun, and later still Avery came out of his room and down the hall and stopped outside her door. When he knocked softly, she twisted her head on her pillow and looked at the door but did not speak nor move in excess of the twisting of her head. She kept her eyes on the knob, waiting to see if it began to turn, and when it did begin she immediately closed her eyes and kept them closed. He came into the room and stopped a few feet from the bed and was silent for a minute before he spoke her name. She could hear him breathing and smell his shaving lotion, and she could see him in the dark and private little world behind her lids as he leaned forward slightly from the hips and peered at her to try to determine if she was waking or not. She did not answer, and he spoke again, and she still did not answer, and he went out and closed the door. Hearing his footsteps descending the stairs, she opened her eyes again and began to wonder what made some bad days so much worse than other bad days.
It is not, she thought, anything in the days themselves. Looking back on them, it is impossible to find any reason at all why these were the days when one particularly wanted to die, or to have others die, or felt that it was absolutely essential to do something to change the intolerable procession of degrading days, while at the same time one was irrationally terrified of any change whatever. No, it is not in the day but in oneself that the badness begins and grows with no discernible logic in its beginning and growing today rather than yesterday or tomorrow, and it is not a result of overt misfortune but of intangible oppression that builds and builds to the absolute certainty of proximate destruction. Therefore, since it is in oneself that it begins and grows, and since there is no logic in the beginning and growing, it follows that there is nothing to be done about it, except to bear it and get through it, and if one is lucky this is something that can be done.
She heard the yardman start the power mower and wondered why on earth he was starting the mower when there was no grass to cut. She heard Avery’s Caddy go past the house in the drive and wondered if Avery would be back before evening and hoped that he wouldn’t. She heard Mrs. Lamb’s heavy tread on the stairs and in the hall and waited for Mrs. Lamb’s heavy rapping to sound on the door. It did, and she took her time deciding whether to tell Mrs. Lamb to come in or go away or simply to ignore the rapping altogether, as she had done with Avery’s. After a while she decided that it would be just as well on the whole to get Mrs. Lamb in and out and finished with as quickly as possible.
“Come in,” she said.
Mrs. Lamb opened the door and stepped inside the room, leaving the door open behind her. She was a strong, blocky woman with a massive chests so tightly bound that it gave the appearance of being undivided, and Lisa had once, seeing the remarkable chest, had a joke pop into her head about it, a kind of humorous analogy with one part to be supplied, and the analogy was, what is to a woman as a dromedary is to a camel? The answer was, of course, Mrs. Lamb. There were several things wrong with the analogy, however, and as a joke it really had something wrong with it too, which was that it wasn’t, after all, a very funny joke. It was impossible, anyhow, to imagine Mrs. Lamb being amused by it.
“Good-morning, Mrs. Lawes,” Mrs. Lamb said.
“Good-morning, Mrs. Lamb.”
“Will you have breakfast this morning?”
“No, thank you.”
“You didn’t have breakfast yesterday morning.”
“I seldom eat breakfast.”
“Nor day before yesterday morning.
”
“I know.”
“You ought to eat breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day. When you start having children, you will wish you had eaten your breakfast.”
“I consider it unlikely that I’ll ever start having children, Mrs. Lamb.”
Which was worse than the repudiation of a sacred function. It was dereliction of duty not to produce a Lawes, specifically a male Lawes, in an apprehensive world that was presently in the precarious position of having only one left. Mrs. Lamb was privately of the opinion that this production should have begun some months ago, and she was totally incapable of understanding how any woman could be reluctant to do the producing. She would have been almost willing to undertake it herself.
“I could bring it up in a tray,” she said.
“I do not want any breakfast, Mrs. Lamb.”
“Very well. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Yes, there is. You can go away and leave me alone.” Mrs. Lamb flushed and left, slamming the door, and Lisa began immediately to wish that she hadn’t said what she had, and then she began to wonder if it would be possible to remember even a fraction of the times she had said something and wished afterward that she hadn’t, and she knew that it would not. Oh, Christ, what a bitch you are, she thought. What a bitch you are, and what a day it has begun to be with your very gracious treatment of this woman who wished for nothing but to be kind and to bring you your breakfast on a tray. It is quite apparent already that this is a day which should be eliminated, that it would be a good thing to skip at once to tomorrow, but it is also quite apparent that the only way to eliminate a day is to live it, so there is nothing to be done, and after the day is the night, and what in Christ’s name is to be done with the night?
She was beginning to feel uncomfortable, and so she got out of bed and went into the bathroom and then returned and lay down on the bed again and began to think of those she had known, of Alison and Bella and others, who were no longer threats in themselves but were symbols of the threat that survived them. This was not good, was part of the bad day getting worse, and she tried thinking of Carl, how remarkably kind he was, and of Avery, how even more remarkably kind he was, and she wished to God they would quit crucifying her with their cursed kindness, and this wish made her feel guilty and debased and contributed more to the bad day getting worse than Alison and Bella and the others. Trying to achieve a kind of neutrality in her thinking, she considered the party at the country club, but this was no help because the party was assuming the proportions of a terrifying ordeal. And that, of course, was the clue to the bad day. When the past is a depressant and the future is a threat, the bad day is a trap between them, and there is no escape unless you can find it in a bottle.
Thinking of a drink, she began to want one badly, but it would never do to drink today because of tonight, which had to be gotten through somehow and would be difficult enough at best and could be survived only by drinking just ahead of time and just enough to establish and secure the lift that was her only protection. There had been other times when she had resolved not to drink, either for some specific reason or just because she was convinced that drinking was bad for her and should be stopped, and she had then tried substituting coffee for alcohol on the grounds that it was easier to do without something if you immediately put something else in its place instead of leaving an emptiness where it had been. Every time she had wanted a drink and was in danger of submitting, she had made or bought a cup of coffee and drunk it, but eventually she had given up this technique simply because it was impossible for anyone to go on drinking that much coffee indefinitely. Now, however, though it had never worked before, she decided that she would try it again, just for this one day, and she got off the bed and put on slippers and a robe and went downstairs to the kitchen.
It was very hot in the kitchen, because it was not air-conditioned like some of the rooms in the house. She found the glass pot of coffee that had been left over from Avery’s breakfast and put it on the stove and switched on the electricity and sat down to wait in a straight chair by the table. She could hear Mrs. Lamb vacuuming in the front part of the house. The power mower started up again outside and ran a little while and died, and she decided that the yardman was adjusting the motor or something, and that was why he was running it even though there was no grass to cut. It was really extremely hot. A still, oppressive heat in which you could hear, if you listened intently, a whisper of menacing movement. Perspiration gathered in her armpits and trickled down over her ribs. Strangely, the perspiration felt icy cold. She listened to the menacing whisper in the still heat and was suddenly aware that she was about to scream. She closed her throat abruptly upon the scream, and it died with a whimper in a spasm of pain. Getting up, she went to the cabinet where the china was kept and got a cup and carried it to the stove. She poured coffee into the cup and returned with it to her chair at the table. Sitting with her elbows on the table and her head supported by her hands, she stared down into the black liquid and knew that it wasn’t going to work this time either, the technique of substitution, and that she was certainly going to have a drink in spite of all tricks and resolutions. Once this truth was accepted, it was only reasonable to believe that the drink had as well come now as later. Leaving the coffee untasted in its cup on the table, she went into the hall and down the hall to the library, where there was a liquor cabinet. She got a bottle and a glass from the cabinet and carried them upstairs to her room.
Just one, she thought. Just one small drink will be quite sufficient, and there will be no need for another until tonight, when drinking will be expected and acceptable.
She poured the drink and drank it and lay down again on the bed and began to think about the party at the country club that night. It was going to be only a small party with a few people there to whom Avery thought he was obligated for one thing or another, and she had safely gotten through several more formidable affairs since she had come to Corinth, and there was actually no reason at all why it should be dreaded so excessively. She lay there and told herself this, but it did no good, and no matter how she diagnosed the situation or tried to see it for the small matter that it should have been, she understood that the party was somehow established in a pattern of peril, the consummation of the bad day that had started with waking, and that it should., if possible, be avoided at any cost. This was at first a feeling, but it was soon a conviction, and avoidance of the party was essential to survival. She started scheming how this could best be accomplished, and she came to the conclusion after quite a while that she would simply say that she was too ill to go. This would not be, anyhow, an absolute lie, for she was really not feeling at all well. She had slept poorly in the night, and there was a terrible pressure inside her skull. What she needed, she thought, was to go back to sleep, and if she had another small drink she might possibly be able to do it.
She had it and began to think about Ed Page, who had been there waiting to be thought about all the time but had been resisted up to this point. Now she thought about Ed deliberately in all the ways she had thought about her over and over again, and this was a mistake, as she very well knew, for Ed was the siren of a shining, deadly island, the symbol of a particular ruin. In the torment of thinking, however, there was at least a kind of release from depression, the insubstantial peace of submission. Inviting Eel and Emerson to the party at the club had been a suicidal thing to do, exceeding even her usual proclivity for doing suicidal things, and she had alternated afterward between excitement and dread, and finally had refused to think about it at all. But now it was different. Now there was nothing to be lost in thinking about it, because she was herself not going to the party, and it no longer mattered. She lay and thought, and in the uneasy peace thus established, because she was exhausted, she eventually went back to sleep.
She awoke in the middle of the afternoon with the feeling that she had been on the brink of d
isaster and had awakened just in time, not to avoid it, but to delay it. Her heart was beating hard and fast, and she lay and listened to its beating, feeling the force of it against her ribs. Danger had slipped with her from the sleeping to the waking world and was hovering with infinite patience in the silent room. She got up abruptly and the room, with the motion, became violently alive, its parts merging and spinning and absorbing in an instant all the light of the world. She sat down on the edge of the bed in darkness until the dizziness passed, and she remembered that she had eaten nothing all day and would certainly have to take something into her stomach soon, even though the thought of it made her feel faintly nauseated. Mrs. Lamb was surely gone, because she worked only a half day on Saturdays, but perhaps she had prepared a cold lunch of some kind before she left. If so, it would be in the refrigerator, and she decided that she would go down and see, but first she would have a shower and get dressed.
She removed her robe and gown and stood looking at herself in the full length mirror of her dressing table. It was very strange how she felt about her own body, fiercely possessive with a kind of wild and terrible sadness, as if it were something apart that had been assigned to her custody for the care and protection she could not provide. It was like a child, her own child, and she had somehow failed it. Sometimes, looking at it, she would stroke it and croon to it and feel like crying because it was not stronger and lovelier and more like other bodies she had known. But now she saw it and felt only despair and wished never to see it again. Going into the bathroom, she had the shower and then returned a few minutes later to the bedroom and covered the body with clothing without looking at it again, except partially and quickly as was necessary in dressing.
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