“Carson?” Stephen frowned, then gave a sudden start. “S.H. Carson?”
“I think so. Yes, that was it.”
“Well, for God's sake!” His voice had come alive. “He's the man I was named after!”
“So he told me.”
“I told you myself. When we were first married.”
She smiled. “Not me. But he's a good man to have been named for.”
Stephen rubbed his face again. “I'd forgotten his existence. If I'd been told he was dead ten years I wouldn't have been surprised. Mother used to think he was wonderful. He was her second cousin and according to Marcia she was in love with him once. What was he doing here?”
“Consulting someone at the Flexner, he said. He got our address from alumni files at the university and he seemed surprised to find us right here in Princeton.”
Stephen pulled himself up from the bed. “He used to be a civil engineer, but he was a crazy duck and for years he wouldn't work in the United States. The last time I heard he was in China. Dad never thought much of him. What's he doing now – raising money for Chiang Kai-shek?”
“He's connected with the Shasta Dam. He was terribly sorry to miss you. I'm sorry, too, because I liked him a lot.” She paused and waited for him to turn around. When he did she looked into his eyes and said, “He wants you to work with him, Stephen.”
“What do you mean, work with him?”
“He's got a job for you on the Shasta Dam.”
“In California?” He made a wry face. “That's the other end of nowhere. What kind of a job?”
Again she sensed his defensiveness; this time it moved over her like a wave of cold air. “He left some papers for you to look at,” she said. “They'll explain everything, he says. I didn't mention it last night with Carl around, for obvious reasons.”
Lassiter sat down on the bed again. His hair was tousled and his pajamas rumpled, but his face was alert.
“Funny,” he said. “Somebody still remembers I'm an engineer.” Then more sharply, “Does he know what I'm doing now?”
“I told him.”
“What did he say?”
What Carson had said had been precisely what she knew Stephen himself had thought many times: an engineer's business is making things, not writing words about others who do.
She looked at her husband. “He has a job he thinks you can do better than anybody else he knows at the moment. I don't understand what it is, but the papers will probably give you some idea.”
“Do you realize,” Stephen said defiantly, “that I haven't done any real engineering for years? Do you realize it's highly specialized work?”
“Of course. But Mr. Carson said he wanted you for something to do with personnel management.”
“Like my job with Ashweiler?” He laughed shortly.
“No. It would require a trained engineer who could also handle men.”
“Do you think I could do it?”
“Of course. But it's not for me to decide what kind of work you do, Stephen.”
“Since when?”
She held one hand tightly in the other. “Since always. I've never pretended to know anything about your business.”
“I suppose he wanted to know why I wasn't in the army, too.”
“He didn't mention it.” She smiled and touched his hand. “You agreed to stop brooding about that long ago.”
The silence between them enlarged rapidly and she got up from the bed, picked up a sweater she saw lying on a chair, and put it in one of the drawers of his chest.
“Would you mind telling me something?” he said. “For just how long have you been ashamed of the work I'm doing?”
He was watching her closely now, watching her as if she were a stranger, but her old Grenville habit of masking her face had returned and he could read nothing from her expression. She closed the drawer with her knee and said quietly as she turned around, “I liked Mr. Carson very much and I know you'd like him, too. He's everything that Carl isn't. If you worked with a man like that everything in the world would seem different to you.”
“Different from what?”
“Oh, darling – don't pretend you don't know what I mean!”
But her eyes moved away as she saw the defiance in his. Long ago she had learned what most women never know, that when men say they want their wives to understand them they seldom mean it. What Stephen wanted was to be taken for granted by his wife, not understood. She sat on the window ledge, wondering what to do or say next, and her whole soul longed to cry out, “Stephen, I don't care what you do so long as you're happy. If you're satisfied with yourself, we'll all be happy.”
What she did say was, “You've always been generous to me. I never forget that for a minute. So please be generous enough to admit to yourself that I'm not criticizing you. I never talk about Carl. I don't want to now.”
“If a man wants to eat,” he said, “he's got to compromise.”
She made a quick gesture with her hand. “Stephen, you aren't cynical by nature and you can't make yourself cynical by habit and get away with it. There's death in a man like Carl. Ultimately he kills whatever he touches. And the worst thing about him is that he knows exactly what he's doing.”
“What do you expect me to do – reform his character?” His hostility was growing. “For God's sake, what kind of a world do you think we live in? When I first met you I told you I didn't make the rules. That was one thing I learned early. People like you and me don't ever make the rules. We learn them. And while we're talking about it – why don't you try to remember that the work I'm doing doesn't happen to be the same stinking stuff the rest of them do? There's a considerable difference between handling an account for the best medium bomber in the United States Army Air Forces and dreaming up seduction scenes for underwear or men's cosmetics.”
He reached for the bedside table, pulled open a drawer, took out a package of cigarettes, and lit one. She felt the weight of his irritation with her and her impulse was to leave the room, but she knew if she did she would not be with him, either in body or spirit, for at least another week. He would take his bath, eat his breakfast, and spend the rest of the weekend with Carl and his Princeton friends.
“Stephen,” she said quietly, “this isn't a thing to quarrel about. I won't let you misunderstand me deliberately and make a quarrel out of nothing. Apparently I'm very bad when it comes to using words.”
“I've always thought you were pretty good with them.”
She let the remark pass. “Your work – your personal work – has always been your own business. You know I've never criticized it and you know that's not what I'm talking about now. It's something else and I'm not sure how to say it. You're with Carl five days a week and you're down here only for two. Surely you don't have to bring him here so often. I can't help wondering sometimes if you do it simply because you don't want to be alone with me.”
She saw a flash of warmth and tenderness cross his face. He sat looking down at his hands and the smoke of the cigarette trailed up between them.
“Our life together,” she said, “is the only thing that's ever mattered to me. I feel now as though I never lived at all before you came to Grenville and took me away. But sometimes now I feel quite helpless. Perhaps I'm not hard enough. Perhaps I'm not gay enough, and you do deserve someone who knows how to have fun in your own way. But I think it's more than that. You're not happy, Stephen.” She watched him get up and move across the floor. He pulled a clean shirt out of the chest and looked for a tie in the closet to match it. “I wish you didn't have to work with people you don't respect,” she went on, “trying to convince yourself that you don't make the rules, thinking about money far more than you have to. But maybe I don't understand because I'm a Canadian. I hope that's all it is. And I wish you wouldn't shut me out.”
His expression was softening and she could almost feel the workings of his conscience. When he hurt her, he hurt himself at the same time. It was one of the things she dreaded most o
f all, for it made her too much of a burden to him.
He swung around and put his arms about her. “You're a funny girl sometimes,” he said. He placed a finger under her chin and lifted it until their eyes met. “I think you're just being a Cameron today – a little crazy because you're more than a little Scotch, and still very much a Calvinist.”
She mustered up a smile. “Probably.”
“The Scotch are a wonderful people, but they certainly make things tough for themselves.” He put both hands on either side of her head and her hair was pressed flat against her temples as he looked down at her. “What you need is a change. You spend too much time out here with nobody but the kids to talk to. As soon as the gas ration's lifted we'll get the hell out of here and go across the continent again.”
She wondered as she smiled back at him if they ever would. Stephen began to hunt in the drawers again for socks and shorts and her mind went back to the first time they had crossed the continent before the war. That was when she had fallen completely in love with him; it was the time when she had really come to know him, when she had discovered that New York was almost as foreign to him as it was to herself. The farther west they went, the better he liked the country. In Stockton, Kansas, he had hunted for the old junkyard where he and Joe Boyce had sold the remnants of their first truck after they had run away from school. Miles west of Stockton he had stopped the car on a rise of ground and pointed to a distant water tower stark in the afternoon sun and without speaking had handed her the field-glasses he had bought especially for the trip. Looking at the tower through the prisms she had deciphered the words Lassiter City.
“Where my grandad settled.”
The name sounded queer to her, but she was pleased because he was pleased. “You never told me, Stephen!”
When they reached the place it was a ghost town of empty shacks with brown dust driven against bleached wooden walls. A few rusted ploughs lay half submerged in patches of nettle and tumbleweed behind broken fences, and grasshoppers puffed as high as their shoulders when they stepped out of the car beside the road. There was a filling station with a single pump served by a lone survivor who looked as if the years of blowing dust had eroded him; the dust was pitted into his skin and it had browned out the blue of his overalls. “Everything's bin agin us out here, Mister. Ain't bin gittin’ any rain in years. Folks moved out quite a time back. Went West, most of ’em. Guess some went East, too. But it used to be mighty purty once, standin’ on this hill and lookin’.”
After the tank was filled Stephen had hunted for the graveyard, found it near a bleached and cracked wooden church, and Lucy had jumped back as a copper-coloured bull snake crawled away from a headstone. “Thomas Lassiter – the Founder of This Town. Born 1827 – Died 1899.” The snake slithered out of sight, the tumbleweed rattled in the wind, the grasshoppers rose in clouds as they walked away, and their nostrils smarted with the fine, drifting dust. The place had moved Lucy far more than it moved Stephen. She learned then a little of what it meant to be an American with a press of lonely, hopeful men behind you, still carrying within yourself something of the belief which had brought Thomas Lassiter here from Missouri, and his father to Missouri from Ohio, and behind him the long line of lean men threading west out of New England, no poetry in them, no music, but the necessity of believing that westward things were better, over every mountain a valley richer than the last, carrying wherever they went the qualities that made them unlike any other people who had ever lived, the great refusal to be satisfied, to rest and sit down, the unwillingness to be content which was as hard as a rock in the soul. First the Lord had hounded them, and when the Lord grew remote, they had hounded themselves.
“The old boy should have known he couldn't count on water in a place like this. It isn't a plain, it's a plateau,” Stephen said.
She asked if he remembered his grandfather.
“Never saw him. And Dad never talked about him much, though I think that was Mother's fault. Let's get out of here.”
The grasshoppers fretted her legs as she went with him to the car, and she knew the lonely sighing of the tumbleweed had entered her ears to stay.
Four days later they were in a different land, in Boulder City, and Stephen was explaining eagerly the whole system of the dam. She had forgotten its details long ago, but she would never forget the white miracle of that upward-sweeping concrete with Lake Meade resting behind the bastion like a shining blue eye in those terrible mountains scorched by the sun to the colour of slag heaps. “When we came out here,” the man who was showing them around had said, “nothing could live on them, not even cactus. We've come quite a way.” And he motioned toward the cool, shaded streets of Boulder City, the white houses framed by oleanders, the green lawns and children playing on wide porches, with the pride of an American who can think of no greater achievement than making something work where nothing worked before.
Now, thinking of the dam and remembering Stephen Holt Carson, a vision came to Lucy that she knew was sentimental and perhaps impossible, yet it was the kind of vision Stephen himself might have encouraged a few years ago before New York had filtered his enthusiasms: a garden of fruit and flowers belonging to Stephen and herself in a land which once had been a desert but now was the richest growing country on earth, watered by a great and distant dam which Stephen himself, even in the smallest possible way, had helped to build.
He dropped his pajamas and she watched his arm muscles mass as he flexed them to get the blood stirring. She saw him look at his reflection in the mirror on the bathroom door with boyish pride, for his chest and shoulder muscles had retained their solid outlines even if his stomach had not. His expression changed as his eyes dropped lower and his hands gripped the superfluous flesh at his waist.
“God damn it, that looks like hell,” he said.
“As if it mattered! I never notice it.”
“Well, my tailor does.”
She wanted to lay her hand on the offending flesh and feel its warmth.
“Maybe if I got back to tennis,” he said, “I could get some of it off. The trouble is, I'd feel a heel playing tennis in wartime.”
She slipped her arms about him and laid a cheek against his naked shoulder, but with a barely perceptible movement he shrugged her off. He had done the same thing a hundred times in the past year, never positively, never rudely or even consciously, but she had gradually come to take it for granted that his physical desires had cooled. This morning, in a flash of intuition, she realized they had not. He was still looking at himself in the glass. He was the man he had always been; one who loved his own body because he saw it reflected in a woman's eyes.
Lucy was startled by her own white face in the mirror as she turned away abruptly. With perfect certainty she realized that the vague suspicion which had haunted her for months was based on fact. The woman in whose eyes Stephen was seeking his own reflection was no longer his wife.
“Where are those papers Carson left?” he was saying.
“In the right hand top drawer of my desk.”
“I'll have a look at them tomorrow. As a matter of fact, I'd like to see that dam. It's quite a project. I don't suppose Carson mentioned what they'd pay.”
Looking out the window, aloof and numb inside, Lucy said, “Six thousand to begin with.”
She heard his laughter. “Did you tell him what I'm making now?”
“He didn't ask.”
“Well, for God's sake be practical. How could we go on living the way we do on six thousand a year?”
“We couldn't.”
He began to shave and after a moment he said, “You're funny this morning. You think too much, you know.”
She heard the water run in the bathroom and then she felt his arms come about her shoulders and his hands cup her breasts. For an instant she leaned her head back against his chest and guarded a thought she knew was true: this present gesture of his, outwardly false, was inwardly honest. Oh, Stephen, she thought, when will you ever make peac
e with yourself? The world is full of men who have to do work unworthy of them, full of men haunted by injustices they have suffered in childhood, so full of boy-men like you. Why hide from the fact of yourself by looking for confidence in the flattery of women who wouldn't dream of flattering you if they really cared? You can take every woman you meet, one by one, and all they'll do is multiply the mirrors, multiply the reflections, and change nothing.
THE rest of that morning seemed to Lucy to climb upward in a long, jangling ascent. Half an hour later, while she sat at the breakfast table with Stephen, and Sally prattled to him about her own imaginary world, Bratian came in from the garage and sat down at the table. Stephen sent Sally off to play and Bratian asked for another cup of coffee. Lucy went out to the kitchen to pour him a fresh cup and when she returned with it Bratian was talking.
“…she's as thin as a tulip stem, with a pure Greek nose and lips like a white nigger's. A woman born with looks like that could end up only one way. Maybe that's why she's crazy. But she's a hero as well. She won the George Cross in the Blitz in 1940.”
“Why doesn't she go to Hollywood?” Stephen said.
“She can't act and she's smart enough to know it.”
Lucy picked up some plates, stacked them, carried them out, and returned to finish clearing the table. Bratian looked up at her and grinned. “Sit down, Lucy. You'll be interested. We're talking about Lady Pamela Grantchester. Steve hasn't met her yet, but she's going to work for us and I'm using her on the Adams bed account.”
Lucy went out to the kitchen again and stayed there. Through the open door Carl's voice drifted, explaining that for five thousand dollars Lady Pamela was willing to sit on the edge of the bed in a housecoat with a phone in her hand, but for ten thousand she would lie on it in her negligee with her legs in an appropriately informative position. Lucy only half listened. What was reality? Was it what you could become a part of, or what you looked at from the outside? Was it what you knew you were, or what grew over you like a fungus? At the moment she seemed a part of nothing. At the moment she felt nothing but a sort of frozen pain.
The Precipice Page 33
