Adultery & Other Choices (9 page)

Richard was a lean, tall, energetic man with the metabolism of a pencil sharpener. Louise fed him everything he wanted. He liked Italian food and she got recipes from her mother and watched him eating spaghetti with the sauce she had only tasted, and ravioli and lasagna, while she ate antipasto with her chianti. He made a lot of money and borrowed more and they bought a house whose lawn sloped down to the shore of a lake; they had a wharf and a boat-house, and Richard bought a boat and they took friends waterskiing. Richard bought her a car and they spent his vacations in Mexico, Canada, the Bahamas, and in the fifth year of their marriage they went to Europe and, according to their plan, she conceived a child in Paris. On the plane back, as she looked out the window and beyond the sparkling sea and saw her country, she felt that it was waiting for her, as her home by the lake was, and her parents, and her good friends who rode in the boat and waterskied; she thought of the accumulated warmth and pelf of her marriage, and how by slimming her body she had bought into the pleasures of the nation. She felt cunning, and she smiled to herself, and took Richard's hand.

But these moments of triumph were sparse. On most days she went about her routine of leisure with a sense of certainty about herself that came merely from not thinking. But there were times, with her friends, or with Richard, or alone in the house, when she was suddenly assaulted by the feeling that she had taken the wrong train and arrived at a place where no one knew her, and where she ought not to be. Often, in bed with Richard, she talked of being fat: ‘I was the one who started the friendship with Carrie, I chose her, I started the conversations. When I understood that she was my friend I understood something else: I had chosen her for the same reason I'd chosen Joan and Marjorie. They were all thin. I was always thinking about what people saw when they looked at me and I didn't want them to see two fat girls. When I was alone I didn't mind being fat but then I'd have to leave the house again and then I didn't want to look like me. But at home I didn't mind except when I was getting dressed to go out of the house and when Mother looked at me. But I stopped looking at her when she looked at me. And in college I felt good with Carrie; there weren't any boys and I didn't have any other friends and so when I wasn't with Carrie I thought about her and I tried to ignore the other people around me, I tried to make them not exist. A lot of the time I could do that. It was strange, and I felt like a spy.'

If Richard was bored by her repetition he pretended not to be. But she knew the story meant very little to him. She could have been telling him of a childhood illness, or wearing braces, or a broken heart at sixteen. He could not see her as she was when she was fat. She felt as though she were trying to tell a foreign lover about her life in the United States, and if only she could command the language he would know and love all of her and she would feel complete. Some of the acquaintances of her childhood were her friends now, and even they did not seem to remember her when she was fat.

Now her body was growing again, and when she put on a maternity dress for the first time she shivered with fear. Richard did not smoke and he asked her, in a voice just short of demand, to stop during her pregnancy. She did. She ate carrots and celery instead of smoking, and at cocktail parties she tried to eat nothing, but after her first drink she ate nuts and cheese and crackers and dips. Always at these parries Richard had talked with his friends and she had rarely spoken to him until they drove home. But now when he noticed her at the hors d'oeuvres table he crossed the room and, smiling, led her back to his group. His smile and his hand on her arm told her he was doing his clumsy, husbandly best to help her through a time of female mystery.

She was gaining weight but she told herself it was only the baby, and would leave with its birth. But at other times she knew quite clearly that she was losing the discipline she had fought so hard to gain during her last year with Carrie. She was hungry now as she had been in college, and she ate between meals and after dinner and tried to eat only carrots and celery, but she grew to hate them, and her desire for sweets was as vicious as it had been long ago. At home she ate bread and jam and when she shopped for groceries she bought a candy bar and ate it driving home and put the wrapper in her purse and then in the garbage can under the sink. Her cheeks had filled out, there was loose flesh under her chin, her arms and legs were plump, and her mother was concerned. So was Richard. One night when she brought pie and milk to the living room where they were watching television, he said: ‘You already had a piece. At dinner.'

She did not look at him.

‘You're gaining weight. It's not all water, either. It's fat. It'll be summertime. You'll want to get into your bathing suit.'

The pie was cherry. She looked at it as her fork cut through it; she speared the piece and rubbed it in the red juice on the plate before lifting it to her mouth.

‘You never used to eat pie,' he said. ‘I just think you ought to watch it a bit. It's going to be tough on you this summer.'

In her seventh month, with a delight reminiscent of climbing the stairs to Richard's apartment before they were married, she returned to her world of secret gratification. She began hiding candy in her underwear drawer. She ate it during the day and at night while Richard slept, and at breakfast she was distracted, waiting for him to leave.

She gave birth to a son, brought him home, and nursed both him and her appetites. During this time of celibacy she enjoyed her body through her son's mouth; while he suckled she stroked his small head and back. She was hiding candy but she did not conceal her other indulgences: she was smoking again but still she ate between meals, and at dinner she ate what Richard did, and coldly he watched her, he grew petulant, and when the date marking the end of their celibacy came they let it pass. Often in the afternoons her mother visited and scolded her and Louise sat looking at the baby and said nothing until finally, to end it, she promised to diet. When her mother and father came for dinners, her father kissed her and held the baby and her mother said nothing about Louise's body, and her voice was tense. Returning from work in the evenings Richard looked at a soiled plate and glass on the table beside her chair as if detecting traces of infidelity, and at every dinner they fought.

‘Look at you,' he said. ‘Lasagna, for God's sake. When are you going to start? It's not simply that you haven't lost any weight. You're gaining. I can see it. I can feel it when you get in bed. Pretty soon you'll weigh more than I do and I'll be sleeping on a trampoline.'

‘You never touch me anymore.'

‘I don't want to touch you. Why should I? Have you
looked
at yourself?'

‘You're cruel,' she said. ‘I never knew how cruel you were.'

She ate, watching him. He did not look at her. Glaring at his plate, he worked with fork and knife like a hurried man at a lunch counter.

‘I bet you didn't either,' she said.

That night when he was asleep she took a Milky Way to the bathroom. For a while she stood eating in the dark, then she turned on the light. Chewing, she looked at herself in the mirror; she looked at her eyes and hair. Then she stood on the scales and looking at the numbers between her feet, one hundred and sixty-two, she remembered when she had weighed a hundred and thirty-six pounds for eight days. Her memory of those eight days was fond and amusing, as though she were recalling an Easter egg hunt when she was six. She stepped off the scales and pushed them under the lavatory and did not stand on them again.

It was summer and she bought loose dresses and when Richard took friends out on the boat she did not wear a bathing suit or shorts; her friends gave her mischievous glances, and Richard did not look at her. She stopped riding on the boat. She told them she wanted to stay with the baby, and she sat inside holding him until she heard the boat leave the wharf. Then she took him to the front lawn and walked with him in the shade of the trees and talked to him about the blue jays and mockingbirds and cardinals she saw on their branches. Sometimes she stopped and watched the boat out on the lake and the friend skiing behind it.

Every day Richard quarrelled, and because his rage went no further than her weight and shape, she felt excluded from it, and she remained calm within layers of flesh and spirit, and watched his frustration, his impotence. He truly believed they were arguing about her weight. She knew better: she knew that beneath the argument lay the question of who Richard was. She thought of him smiling at the wheel of his boat, and long ago courting his slender girl, the daughter of his partner and friend. She thought of Carrie telling her of smelling chocolate in the dark and, after that, watching her eat it night after night. She smiled at Richard, teasing his anger.

H
E IS ANGRY
now. He stands in the center of the living room, raging at her, and he wakes the baby. Beneath Richard's voice she hears the soft crying, feels it in her heart, and quietly she rises from her chair and goes upstairs to the child's room and takes him from the crib. She brings him to the living room and sits holding him in her lap, pressing him gently against the folds of fat at her waist. Now Richard is pleading with her. Louise thinks tenderly of Carrie broiling meat and fish in their room, and walking with her in the evenings. She wonders if Carrie still has the malaise. Perhaps she will come for a visit. In Louise's arms now the boy sleeps.

‘I'll help you,' Richard says. ‘I'll eat the same things you eat.'

But his face does not approach the compassion and determination and love she had seen in Carrie's during what she now recognizes as the worst year of her life. She can remember nothing about that year except hunger, and the meals in her room. She is hungry now. When she puts the boy to bed she will get a candy bar from her room. She will eat it here, in front of Richard. This room will be hers soon. She considers the possibilities: all these rooms and the lawn where she can do whatever she wishes. She knows he will leave soon. It has been in his eyes all summer. She stands, using one hand to pull herself out of the chair. She carries the boy to his crib, feels him against her large breasts, feels that his sleeping body touches her soul. With a surge of vindication and relief she holds him. Then she kisses his forehead and places him in the crib. She goes to the bedroom and in the dark takes a bar of candy from her drawer. Slowly she descends the stairs. She knows Richard is waiting but she feels his departure so happily that, when she enters the living room, unwrapping the candy, she is surprised to see him standing there.

PART TWO

Cadence

to Tommie

H
E STOOD
in the summer Virginia twilight, an officer candidate, nineteen years old, wearing Marine utilities and helmet, an
MI
rifle in one hand, its butt resting on the earth, a pack high on his back, the straps buckled too tightly around his shoulders; because he was short he was the last man in the rank. He stood in the front rank and watched Gunnery Sergeant Hathaway and Lieutenant Swenson in front of the platoon, talking quietly to each other, the lieutenant tall and confident, the sergeant short, squat, with a beer gut; at night, he had told them, he went home and drank beer with his old lady. He could walk the entire platoon into the ground. Or so he made them believe. He had small, brown, murderous eyes; he scowled when he was quiet or thinking; and, at rest, his narrow lips tended downward at the corners. Now he turned from the lieutenant and faced the platoon. They stood on the crest of a low hill; beyond Hathaway the earth sloped down to a darkened meadow and then rose again, a wooded hill whose black trees touched the grey sky.

‘We're going back over the Hill Trail,' he said, and someone groaned and at first Paul fixed on that sound as a source of strength: someone else dreaded the hills as much as he did. Around him he could sense a fearful gathering of resolve, and now the groan he had first clung to became something else: a harbinger of his own failure. He knew that, except for Hugh Munson standing beside him, he was the least durable of all; and since these men, a good half of them varsity athletes, were afraid, his own fear became nearly unbearable. It became physical: it took a penetrating fall into his legs and weakened his knees so he felt he was not supported by muscle and bone but by faint nerves alone.

‘We'll put the little men up front,' Hathaway said, ‘so you long-legged pacesetters'll know what it's like to bring up the rear.'

They moved in two files, down a sloping trail flanked by black trees. Hugh was directly behind him. To his left, leading the other file, was Whalen; he was also short, five-eight or five-seven; but he was wide as a door. He was a wrestler from Purdue. They moved down past trees and thick underbrush into the dark of the woods, and behind him he heard the sounds of blindness: a thumping body and clattering rifle as someone tripped and fell; there were curses, and voices warned those coming behind them, told of a branch reaching across the trail; from the rear Hathaway called: ‘Close it up close it up, don't lose sight of the man in front of you.' Paul walked step for step beside Whalen and watched tall Lieutenant Swenson setting the pace, watched his pack and helmet as he started to climb and, looking up and past the lieutenant, up the wide corridor between the trees, he saw against the sky the crest of the first hill.

Then he was climbing, his legs and lungs already screaming at him that they could not, and he saw himself at home in his room last winter and spring, getting ready for this: push-ups and sit-ups, leg lifts and squat jumps and deep kneebends, exercises which made his body feel good but did little for it, and as he climbed and the muscles of his thighs bulged and tightened and his lungs demanded more and more of the humid air, he despised that memory of himself, despised himself for being so far removed from the world of men that he had believed in calisthenics, had not even considered running, though he had six months to get in condition after signing the contract with the Marine captain who had come one day like salvation into the student union, wearing the blue uniform and the manly beauty that would fulfill Paul's dreams. Now those dreams were an illusion: he was close to the top of the first hill, his calf and thigh muscles burning, his lungs gasping, and his face, near sobbing, was fixed in pain. His one desire that he felt with each breath, each step up the hard face of the hill, was not endurance: it was deliverance. He wanted to go home, and to have this done for him in some magical or lucky way that would give him honor in his father's eyes. So as he moved over the top of the hill, Whalen panting beside him, and followed Lieutenant Swenson steeply down, he wished and then prayed that he would break his leg.