All These Condemned (9 page)

It wasn’t until dinner that I got the idea. It happened this way:

Wilma and Randy were talking about something in low tones. And Wilma raised her voice and you could hear it all over the room when she said, “For God’s sake, stop blithering and dithering!” and Randy turned meekly to his plate. Right at that moment I happened to glance at Noel Hess. I saw on her face an expression of complete contempt. It was a look that included Wilma and Randy and perhaps the surrounding area for a good half mile. She turned then and caught me looking at her, and blushed and began to eat again.

There was no pry bar to use on Wilma. But here was a dandy little brunette pry bar with which I could bring Randy right up on his tiptoes. I had never particularly noticed her before. She was a subdued type, which seldom appeals to me. Pale and a bit thin-faced, with a long upper lip and rather small dark eyes. But as I made a more careful inventory, I saw things about her that I liked. I did a quick review to see if I’d said anything to her or near her that would spoil my pitch. No, the Steve Winsan impersonation had been unfractured. I wondered if Wilma had told Randy that she and I had been intimate. If so, maybe Randy had told Noel. And, if so, that might cancel me out before the starting gate opened. She had given Wilma that sort of look. And she was doubtless all too well aware of Randy’s consistent infidelities prior to Wilma’s acquisition of Gilman
Hayes, aware of the complete range of the services performed. Suddenly, thinking of the whole thing, I felt a little ill. We’d been a bunch of dogs trotting after Wilma, tongues lolling in the country sun. And now I was going to try to complicate it with deliberate seduction. I wondered if, at this late date, I was getting a weak stomach. A man saves himself first. She’d maybe already started an interesting career of getting even with Randy. But she didn’t look the type, somehow. She even looked a little bit like a girl I’d once known in the Methodist Sunday School in Deephaven, Minnesota, back in the days when I’d attend with my hair pasted down and watch her for the full hour and wonder how I was going to tell her that I was perfectly convinced I was going to be a famous surgeon and I wanted her to wait for me. Back in the days when I was full of dreams and glories and a girl was a sweet and fragile and precious thing.

I knew the plan wasn’t too good. I might get nowhere. And even if I did, it was no guarantee that I could get her to put the pressure on Randy. And if she consented to that, and if Randy told Wilma he’d reconsidered, Wilma could still tell him she’d already made up her mind.

But at least it was a plan, and even if it didn’t work, it promised a less boring week end.

I didn’t get much of a chance after dinner. Wilma and I got into our usual gin game, noisy and deadly serious. Randy dithered. That silly Dockerty bitch danced with Muscle Boy. The others played Scrabble. And Noel, unfortunately, went off to bed. I watched for some reaction on Wilma’s part to the dance team. She didn’t seem to notice them. As this was an atypical reaction on Wilma’s part, I
began to suspect that Gilman Hayes might lose more than my PR representation before the week end was over.

Once when Wilma was shuffling I leaned back and looked around at the shadows and silences in the big room, at the tricky spots on the game boards, at the glass and the dancing and the groomed softness of the women, all of us here interlocked with each other in curious ways in this architectured thing of warmth and careful lights, while outside there were the lake and the contours of the hills, which would not change a tenth of an inch in ten of our lifetimes. Bass would be drifting deep by the rocks, gills straining the cool water, and deer would be bedded down up the slopes away from the lake. But I had walked for a long time on a narrow and dangerous place that grew ever narrower, and to turn around and walk back was a feat of balance beyond my abilities.

“Wake up, dreary,” Wilma said. “Take a dull card.”

I took a card and I had to look at it longer than usual before I saw that it was a six of spades and that it fitted so neatly with other sixes that I was able to go down for seven.

When I woke up in the morning with a barbiturate taste, it took the usual chill shower and the usual Dexedrine before my motor started to turn over smoothly. This would be, I suspected, muscle day. Wilma likes to exhaust her guests. If she can send them back to the city with aching bodies, she thinks they remember it as a good gay time. It was warm and breakfast on the terrace was fine in the sunlight, and finer still when I was able to sit at a table with Noel. I had
given the gambit some careful thought. I had to make her curious about me as a person, and it had to contain a strong hint that I was not like the others.

After a few banalities, I found the silence I wanted and said, “With a few thousand years of selective breeding, Noel, I could really make an improvement in the race. I was thinking about it last night.”

“An improvement?”

“We ought to have a setup like the lizards do. After you grow a little older and wiser, then you shuck off your skin and become somebody else. You become a better image of yourself. The way it is now, if you change, the way people inevitably do, you’re still trapped in your old life, in the way you’ve always looked. It hardly seems fair.”

I saw the awakening of interest in her eyes and saw at the same time that her eyes were a good shade of brown, a very dark brown that perhaps you could see only in sunlight, with some very tiny flakings of gold around the pupils.

“What do you want to change to, Steve?”

“Undecided. Just something different. I’m sort of a bright young man emeritus at this point. Can’t afford to look tired. Got to keep running fast. Sort of maintaining an impersonation. How about you?”

“I guess this is just female, Steve, but I’d like to be big and golden and shiny instead of a sort of … brown mouse. I sit in too many corners and watch too much and think too much. Maybe I just want to be part of the act.”

I allowed myself a look of contempt. “This act?”

“No, not this act. This one is worn out. I want a better act. New and fresh, with trumpets and drums.”

“I’ll book that. I’ll plant releases. We’ll pack the house.”

And I looked into her eyes very seriously and intently and saw her eyes widen just a bit before they moved away, saw the faint color of pinkness on her throat, and knew that I had created in her an awareness of me and a curiosity. It’s smart tactics to stick pretty close to what you really believe, because that way you can achieve a feeling of sincerity and reality that you can’t get if you pick too fictionalized an approach. She wouldn’t be difficult. She was too mixed up and tired of her life and Randy and Wilma and herself. It didn’t take a trick shot. You could nearly fire blind and knock her off the shelf. For a little while I thought I’d better not, because it was too easy. But a man has to save himself in any way he can.

Later, during the morning swim, after I spilled Hayes off his skis, I had a chance to stretch out on the dock and talk to her some more. Sermon on the emptiness and artificialities of our special segment of civilization. The need to get back to something clean and honest. No honesty any more. All angles. And she gave me all the little clues of a growing recklessness. Even in the way she walked, conscious of herself and of me. She began to glow from the inside, and it softened her mouth and made her laugh more often. And made her tip up the drinks. And Randy was a great help to me, in the feverish way he took care of the little errands Wilma gave him. And she gave him a great many.

The croquet game was a special shambles. Paul Dockerty had got almost alarmingly drunk. And it was evidently the Mavis-Hayes Mutual Admiration Society that had set him off. Noel and I exchanged glances of commiseration, wry smiles, and, with increasing frequency, the reassurance of a light touching of hands. Lunch was late and very liquid and
people were folding up gently to gain strength for the coming evening. I had José find me a thermos and I made up a batch of stingers and told Noel there was a place on the lake I wanted to show her. It was the critical move. She agreed readily, almost hastily, and we went down and I took out one of the runabouts and dizzied her with the speed and the curves and the roar of the water along the hull. I took her to the small island and I went over the side and towed the boat ashore and helped her out and up to the grassy bank near the familiar clump of sumac.

She was full of areas of resistance. Some were soothed with words and others were eased with caresses. And a few were melted by the thermos. We were utterly alone, the boat out of sight of the house, the water and mountains in front of us. Capitulation, though delayed, was inevitable. And I found her full of unexpected frenzies, far too many tears, far too many of the broken words denoting a permanence that I had not expected or wanted her to feel. It gave me the troubled, confused, nervous feeling of having taken on far too much. She had never been unfaithful to Randy before. And she was convinced that now we were together forever and ever. I knew it was a rationalization. She could not excuse what she had permitted, and so she had to label it a great love. I knew that I could not keep on being evasive about this forever-and-ever deal. I could see the beginning of suspicion in her eyes. So I had to go along with it. I told her that unfortunately, my fortunes were temporarily tied up with Randy and Wilma and the others, so we would have to be very careful, make good plans, avoid impatience.

“But it has really happened, my darling,” she said, smiling at me.

“Really.”

“I never expected to find you here. I’ve waited for you so long. So very, very long, Steve.”

“It has surprised me too,” I said in momentary honesty.

“But we’ll be together.”

“As soon as we can make the arrangements without knocking my business in the head.”

“She can have him. Gladly. I give him up. He’s a useless thing, Steve. He has been, for a long time. He blundered into the web and she wrapped him up, and when he couldn’t move, she sucked him dry. You’re a man, Steve. He hasn’t been a man for a long time. Oh, I’m so glad we found each other. Hold me close, Steve. Remember what you said this morning? I’ve shed my skin, you know. I’m all golden and shiny. I’m not a brown mouse any more.”

“The new skin is fine. I like it. It’s an improvement. Extra-soft. Extra-fine texture. Guaranteed imperishable.”

“Stop staring. You’re making me blush.”

“Hummm, when you blush it seems to start about here.”

“Steve!”

We stayed there until the summer dusk and the end of the sun. And the end of the thermos, our bodies growing heavy and slow-moving with the dragging sweetness of outdoor love. I felt uneasy about entering into an implied contractual relationship for all eternity. But it was fruit on the bough that had happened to grow within reach. And I could create delay after delay, with excuses that at first would be very reasonable, and would slowly grow less reasonable, and eventually it would be a pose that we maintained as a rationalization, the idea of “someday.” And it would eventually end, as such things have ended before for
me, and as they will end again, because pleasure without purpose feeds on itself until it is finally consumed and the thing is dead.

We went back, her face so luminous with fulfillment that I was glad it was near dark when I came into the dock and saw Randy standing there, frail and still.

“Where have you been?” he asked in a quiet voice.

Noel laughed in the silence, in the dusk. She gave a rough and unmistakable imitation of Wilma’s voice. “Why, we seem to have been on a picnic or something, dahling. Miss me?”

He turned and walked away. He seemed to be spending the week end walking away from me. “A little too rough, honey,” I said to her.

“Was I? How can he afford self-righteousness? How—”

“Ssh, honey. Please.”

I gave her my hand and helped her out of the runabout. She came up onto the dock and leaned against me for a moment, light as a whisper. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I feel reckless, I guess.”

“Keep it bottled up. Just for a while.”

“Of course, darling. Anything you say. Anything.”

But I kept an eye on her. The night was warmer than any I had seen at the lake. We ate. The stars came out. We brought bottles and glasses and ice and mix down to the dock. The lake was black and laughter sounded good. Noel had acquired a little drunken giggle. Wilma was the one who suggested we kill the lights and do our swimming the way nature had perhaps intended we should. It seemed like one of the better ideas. Judy, Randy, and Wallace Dorn backed out. I went up to the box to turn off the lights. I
turned them off. I waited a few moments and then turned them back again. There were yells of imitation anger. I put the lights off for good and felt my way back down. We were all there except Paul Dockerty. I found someone in the water. It was Mavis and she thought I was Gilman Hayes. We straightened that out quickly. I found Noel. We floated on our backs, holding hands, looking at the stars. She was fish-sleek in the water. All very gay. All very childish. Oh, we were delightful irresponsible people. There was some sort of disorganized game of tag for a time, with the rules getting continually more complicated. Randy, I think, was sulking. There was a bit of hysteria in Mavis’ laughter. I had the feeling that we were a pack of circus seals, performing for Wilma’s amusement.

I wondered why Gilman Hayes was calling Wilma so loudly.

I WAS MOST DEFINITELY HAPPY
that I did not have to join that undignified scramble for clothing in the dark while Winsan ran to switch the lights back on. I heard their wet panting. And it alarmed me a bit to recall how close I had come to joining their little debauch. I had, indeed, been tempted for a few moments, thinking of the dark lake-wet flesh of women in the night. It is the mood of recklessness that Wilma knows how to develop, going at it quite coldly, for all the impression of warmth that she gives.

I wondered what Wilma had been thinking as the water had closed over her. Knowing her, I would judge that it had been a feeling of vast impatience, of plans interrupted. Not fear, I believe, because I feel that she, like a child, would be utterly incapable of objectively contemplating her own demise. She had a nice knack of making others die a little. Now she had died a lot. Thoroughly. And I found it quite
pleasant to think about, actually. For me it was an extraordinarily convenient death. We had had our little chat. Death made her decision meaningless, as I had intended that, somehow, that decision should be made meaningless.