In the hall below, she stood at the foot of the stairs and wondered what it was she had come down for. She had come for a specific reason, she remembered, but she could not remember what it was, and now that the dizziness had passed and she had been a little revived by the shower, she had completely forgotten about not having eaten and the necessity for food. She was only aware that whatever had followed her from sleeping to waking had also followed her from the bedroom to here and would follow her wherever she went in the house, and that it was therefore necessary to get out of the house at once. She went out the front door and around the house into the back yard and down all the way to the swing near the edge of the bluff overlooking the river valley. A few nights ago, she recalled, she had sat here and told Avery the truth about herself. There had been a kind of satisfaction in it at the time, but it had not come to anything, apparently, and in fact nothing had been said about it since, and she suspected that this was another example of his God-damn depressing kindness that was always placing her under some sort of moral obligation. The yardman, she noticed, was no place to be seen or heard. No doubt he had found it too hot to work, and it was indeed excessively hot. It was dry and blistering heat, destructive heat, the kind that could easily kill you if you weren’t careful. It was, as a matter of fact, far too hot to be sitting in the swing, it was already getting unbearable, and the only thing to do was to go back into the house in spite of whatever was waiting there. In the house she could probably find some gin and soda and lemon juice and make a tall Tom Collins and drink it slowly in the living room, which was air-conditioned. In this way, it would be possible to wear out the time until Avery came home to take her to the party she wasn’t going to, and maybe tomorrow would be a better day, but this was hardly likely.
She got up and went back into the house and found the ingredients for the Tom Collins and made it. In the living room, she sat in a large chair and looked out through a window into the bright still day and sipped the cold drink slowly, and by sitting quietly and thinking as little as possible she was able to induce a kind of semi-trance through which the remainder of the afternoon slipped silently in an illusion of peace. The only time she moved from the chair was when she became aware that her glass was empty and got up to fill it. She returned at once and was still there when the light outside had lost its brightness and Avery came home.
He came into the living room and said, “Hello, Lisa.”
“Hello,” she said.
“How was your day?”
“Rotten. My day was rotten.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Please don’t be sorry. I’m sick of people being sorry about things.”
“Perhaps the party will cheer you up. You need to get out more.”
“Do I? Is that what I need? It’s very comforting to know that there is someone around who knows immediately just exactly what it is that I need.”
“I don’t want to quarrel with you, Lisa. Are you drinking a Tom Collins?”
“Yes. That’s what it is. It’s my second one, and earlier I had two straight whiskeys, or maybe three.”
“I wouldn’t drink too much before the party if I were you.”
“I know you wouldn’t. That’s because you are a stronger character than I. You are not I, however, which is your good luck, and it doesn’t matter about the party, anyhow, because I have decided not to go.”
“Not go to the party? Why?”
“Must I have a reason? Very well. I’ll give you several and you can take your pick. I hate the club. I hate your sickening friends. I hate dull parties. I just prefer to stay at home. Is any of those satisfactory?”
“I think you are being unreasonable.”
“Do you? No doubt I am.”
“It would be different if you were ill.”
“Is that what you want me to say? All right, I’m ill. I’m ill and can’t go to the party. That’s what I had planned to tell you, anyhow, and it would have been simpler if I had done it to begin with.”
He was silent for so long a time that she turned her head and looked at him, and she was surprised to see that his face was deathly white with the mouth so distorted that it looked like an ugly, ragged wound. She realized that he was very angry and was controlling himself by a monstrous exertion of will. She had never seen him angry before, and she felt suddenly a stirring of excitement, almost a sense of exhilaration. After a moment, he stepped forward deliberately and slapped her across the face. It was a strong blow that knocked her head around and would have sent her sprawling from the chair if the arm had not prevented it. Her glass dropped from her hand and rolled across the carpet, leaving a trail of wetness and spread slowly through the pile.
“I will tell you something,” he said. “You will go to the party tonight.”
The blow struck, the excitement was gone. In its place was utter acceptance of the inevitable in the belief that nothing could ever have been different from what it had been and nothing could be changed from what it was bound to be. She was a fool ever to have thought otherwise. The bad day was going and the worse night was coming, and she had survived the one in order to fulfill her commitment to the other. So much was quite simple and quite true. She leaned her head back against the chair and closed her eyes.
“All right,” she said. “If you want me to go, I will go.”
SECTION 2
The Corinth Country Club hired a live orchestra every Saturday night. Once in a while, for something special, it was an orchestra from Midland City, and sometimes it was even one of the name bands you had probably heard on radio or had at home on platters, but usually it was the Corinth High Flyers, which it was tonight. Besides the piano, there were six instruments in the orchestra, seven if you counted both the saxophone and the clarinet, which were played at different times by the same Flyer, and people were always saying that it didn’t make much sense to lay out all that money for an outside organization when you had something just as good or better right at home. The girl vocalist was good too, a damn sight better than most of the girls up in big time, and it was just one of those things that she wasn’t up there herself, but of course everyone knew that the breaks made all the difference in that sort of success, and for each one who made it there were at least a dozen just as good who didn’t. The vocalist was billed as Flame Farrell, a platinum blonde whose name alluded to temperament and not pigmentation. According to Merlin Collins, who claimed to have learned from experience, her temperament could be incited to fever heat by the sight of a twenty-dollar bill.
In Merlin Collins’ opinion, virility was an obligation. His own was uncertain, as a matter of fact, and he was therefore constantly trying to prove that it wasn’t by attempting to seduce as many women as possible, preferably the wives of his friends in order to give them an idea of what they were missing in their routine engagements. It was part of his technique to call all women baby. Take the average woman at the right time, he always said, you could do almost anything with her if you called her baby. They all liked it, every damn one of them, even the ones who pretended they didn’t, and the ones who liked it most were the ones who were getting a little older than they liked to admit. Like the one old Avery Lawes had picked up in Miami, for instance. Chances were she was pushing thirty, and she tried to act like she was in cold storage or something, but, by God, she was a damn attractive woman in a snotty kind of way, and that was the kind that surprised you. The reserved ones, that was. It was really something to see the way the reserved ones fell apart in the end, all of a sudden with a God-damn bang, and there was always a fire inside. That was why they always acted so cold and snotty, of course, because they knew the fire was there and had to be watched all the time to keep it from getting out of control.
The night had been bad from the beginning, just as Lisa had known it would be, and it kept getting worse as the party progressed, which was
true only because it was part of the pattern of degeneration and not because of any particular pressure the party itself imposed. Actually, it was a very casual party, and Lisa’s obligations as hostess were practically nil. Three tables had been pushed together to accommodate the guests in a group and to serve as a base of operations, and once the guests had been greeted and orientated, it was mostly no more than a matter of letting them alone to operate, and of picking up the tab afterward, which was Avery’s concern and not hers. Emerson and Ed Page had not yet come, however, late as it was, and this disturbed her and aroused in her an unreasonable fury, because it was perfectly apparent that they were delaying their arrival in order to deprive her as long as possible of the only pleasure she might have in the party, which was at best a masochistic pleasure, and it was even possible that Emerson had lied to hurt her, had promised that he would come and bring Ed when he really had no intention of doing so at all. She began to curse them silently, calling them in her mind the vilest names she could think of, and when at last she saw them enter the room and come toward the tables, all the strength that had been shored by anger ran out of her like so much water, leaving her drained and depleted and a little ill.
Avery had also seen Emerson and Ed enter, and he went to meet them and escort them to the table, and she understood that he had been watching for them and was anxious to make them feel welcome and at ease in company that was new to them. He started introducing them to the people who were present at that moment, and Lisa watched and waited as they approached her place, and as she waited she listened with accustomed ears to the thin, despairing cry of her desire in the wasteland of her heart. In Ed tonight there was more than loveliness. There was awareness of loveliness, and a pride in it, a conscious assumption of pride made essential by shyness and the necessity to assure herself that she had nothing to fear or to feel ashamed of. And above all, though she didn’t know it, she was the siren of the shining, deadly island, a high, sweet voice in lotus-laden air.
They reached Lisa finally, and Avery said, “Here are Ed and Em, Lisa.”
She looked up at them and hated them because they had caused her anguish and were causing her anguish now and weren’t even sensitive enough to know it, and she thought that it would be much better and easier to bear if only they knew or were capable of knowing.
“I had given up,” she said coldly. “I thought you weren’t coming.”
Emerson looked apologetic. “Because we’re late? We’re sorry about that. We had trouble getting away at the last moment.”
“It doesn’t matter. It was inconsiderate of me to invite you in the first place. You will probably find it a very dull party and wish that you had stayed away.”
“I’m sure we won’t. I’m sure we’ll enjoy ourselves.”
“Are you, really? I must say I doubt that very much. I find it impossible to believe that anyone could enjoy one of our parties. However, now that you are here, you might as well try. Why don’t you have a drink the very first thing? I find that it helps if you start drinking immediately. And you mustn’t stop. Whatever you do, you mustn’t stop.”
Avery laughed. “That’s what I call good advice. I think we could make almost anything out of the stuff on the table here. What will you have?”
“A martini?” Ed said.
“Certainly. How about you, Em?”
“That’s good for me too, but couldn’t we make them ourselves?”
“Not the first one. After this, you’re on your own.”
He made the martinis and poured them and handed them to Ed and Emerson.
“As you can see, this is pretty casual,” he said. “People just wander off and wander back. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Of course not.” Emerson tasted the martini and found it below Roscoe’s average. He turned to Ed. “Would you like to dance, honey?”
“I’ll finish this first. Perhaps Lisa will dance with you.”
Lisa shook her head and said coldly, “No, thank you. I don’t think I care to dance.”
At the other end of the room the High Flyers quit playing one tune and began playing another.
Avery excused himself and went off to see about something.
Emerson and Ed finished their martinis and went off to dance.
Almost everyone finished something and went off to start something.
Except Lisa. Lisa sat in a posture of primness and listened to the crying of her desire.
And at the time that must have been established for it, Merlin came and sat down in the chair beside her.
She looked at him with a feeling of contempt and revulsion, and she would certainly have got up and walked away if she had known that he was the catalyst that would change despair to ruin, but this was something she did not know nor even suspect. In fact, she was achieving gradually a precarious remission of emotional tension and was beginning to regret her rudeness to Avery and to Emerson and Ed, and she was thinking that surely she could wear out the rest of the terrible party with superficial friendliness at least.
And so she smiled and said, “Avery’s gone off to see about something. Everyone else is dancing, I think.”
“Except you and me, baby.”
He used the two personal pronouns with a nuance of intimacy that made her flesh crawl, as if he had created an improper understanding between them merely by speaking the words in conjunction, but she only smiled again, feeling inordinately proud of her ability to do it, and lifted the glass she had been holding with the fingers of one hand.
“That’s right, of course,” she said. “Except you and me.
“You like to dance with old Merlin?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Do you mind?”
“No. Rather not dance myself, to tell the truth. Don’t care much for dancing. Consider it a waste of time.”
He laughed windily and wetly, blowing a fine spray. Some of the spittle struck her cheek, and she jerked her free hand up automatically to wipe it away. He was quite drunk, however, and did not notice either his offense or her reaction. His face was flaccid, the skin loose and ugly under his eyes, the muscles sagging at the corners of his mouth. Fumbling a case out of his pocket, he offered her a cigarette. She took the cigarette and put it between her lips, and he found his lighter after a short search and provided flame. She pulled smoke through the tobacco and into her lungs in an acrid and soothing cloud, creating on the cigarette a bright red head.
“How about a little air?” he said. “Hot in here, don’t you think?”
“It’s hotter outside.”
“Oh. Guess so, at that. No air-conditioning outside. Have to think of a better excuse. Let me see, let me see. Got it. Darker outside. How’s that? Tempted? Does its being darker outside suggest any advantages over being inside?”
“None that I can think of.”
“Really? Old Avery must be neglecting your training. Suspected as much, to tell you the truth. If you don’t mind my saying so, you’ve got a frustrated look. Damn shame. Beautiful women shouldn’t be frustrated. Come on, baby. Let old Merlin unfrustrate you. Greatest little unfrustrater around.”
He leaned forward abruptly, and she felt the minor trespassing of his hand under the table, and then there was a shrill scream of pain, like a woman’s scream, and he was standing on his feet with his chair turned over behind him and one hand clapped to his cheek and tears running out of his eyes, and in the eyes were fear and a kind of foolish incredulity, and he kept saying over and over with a bubbling sound, “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” and she understood after a moment, though she could never remember the action specifically, that she had thrust the red coal of her cigarette into his face.
Everyone was looking at them, naturally, everyone arrested and fixed in a terrible tableau, and even the High Flyers trailed raggedly to silence in the realization that something had hap
pened and was terribly wrong. Then Merlin turned and ran out of the room with an awkward, loping gait, still holding his seared cheek and whimpering with pain and saying Jesus, Jesus over and over, and someone who turned out to be Avery detached himself from the fixed members of the tableau, and right away the tableau began to break and move in its many parts, and the High Flyers began to play again, and everyone started pretending that nothing had happened. And Avery approached Lisa in the desolate ruins of the worse night that had become worst.
“For Christ’s sake, what have you done?” he said.
“It seems that I have burned the cheek of Merlin Collins with a cigarette.”
“Why? Can you possibly tell me why?”
“Because he is a fool and deserved it.”
“Are you in a position to condemn fools? Anyhow, that is no reason for doing a thing like that.”
“Isn’t it? Then I did it for no reason.”
“I insist on knowing why you did it, Lisa.”
“I have told you the reason. If you don’t believe me, you had better ask Merlin.”
“I shall. I shall also ask him to forgive you for what you have done, though God knows why he should.”
“You may do as you wish. First, however, I would like to go home.”
“It’s impossible. I have guests. I can’t take you home now.”
“I will not stay here any longer. I didn’t want to come, and you compelled me, and now I will not stay any longer.”
She could see that he was angry again, as he had been at home in the living room, and she thought that the only reason he did not strike her now, as he had then, was that they were now exposed to the public. His anger did not disturb her. She regretted a little, perhaps, that she was causing him so much trouble, for she felt sincerely that he did not deserve it, but it was quite evident by now that the trouble was inevitable, something to which she was party but over which she had absolutely no control, and so the regret was really futile and not worth expressing.
Desperate Asylum Page 18
