Contrary Pleasure (13 page)

There were more pictures on the walls now, but the room had not changed.
He walked slowly around the room, looking at the pictures in the dimness, not
wanting to raise the shades. Pictures of forgotten company picnics. Of the
company booth at an exposition. The Columbian Exposition. Somewhere among his
things there was a fifty-cent piece from that exposition. His grandfather had
worn it shiny. Next to that picture was one of himself, younger, trimmer. 1944.
Accepting a scroll from the Quartermaster General. And then a picture of his
grandfather, that beaked pirate face with its flamboyant mustache and look of
amusement.

“What did you get out of it, you old bastard?” Ben asked softly. “What
did you get out of it?”

The original Benjamin Delevan was family legend. He had taken the rewards
of his own shrewdness in traditional earthly fashion, lifting the flounced
skirts of the eighteen hundreds from Atlanta to Paris, drinking brandy from
Buffalo to Silver City in Jim Fiske’s private car, and once winning a reputed
five thousand dollars from Fiske by guessing at a distance of fifty feet the
exact circumference of the most meaty part of the calf of a dancer in New
Orleans. According to the legend, Fiske underestimated. He had founded the mill
and it had profited and he made it his life to spend that money in the ways
that pleased him best and those ways were both ribald and expensive. He got all
that out of it, and in the end he got the hillside plot and the tall, granite
marker and the name of Delevan carved deeply enough in the tough stone to last
ten thousand years.

The world had changed. Laughter was no longer Gargantuan. It was marked
with acid. And the world was full of gray faces this year. Men walked with an
awareness of defeat.

At the door of the board room Ben turned back and looked at the face of
his grandfather again. “You wouldn’t have liked it,” he said quietly. “You
wouldn’t have liked it at all.” And went out and closed the door, closed it
with a ceremonial carefulness typical of headwaiters and undertakers. At other
times of crisis the shabby old board room had restored him. Today it had little
meaning for him.

When he got back to his office, he found the new girl had gone to lunch.
This irritated him out of all proportion to the severity of the offense against
the code. His face felt hot. He sat at his desk. She had left letters there for
his signature. He read them. He found two small errors that could have been
corrected with an erasure. But he checked them so heavily with his pen that the
stub point caught in the fiber of the paper and spattered droplets of ink out
toward the margin. He realized at once that he was being spiteful and childish.
But it was too late to repair that particular bit of damage. He could not
imagine Thomas Marin Griffin doing a thing like that.

Alice
Furmon
stood in the kitchen doorway and watched her husband plod heavily out to the
big green car. He turned and grinned and waved, slammed the car door and swung
in a fast circle and was gone. She was left with the faint aroma of the cigar
he had lighted after his hasty lunch, left with the fading sting where he had
given her a lusty affectionate slap as he left the kitchen.

It was hard to remember the man she had married fourteen years ago, when
she was twenty-two. There had been almost a Viking look about him, and the
clear strong lines of his big body had made her feel almost faint when she had
looked at him. He had been tender and humble in his approach to her, making her
feel fragile, delicate, and adored. They had been able to talk, back in those
days. Really talk. There had been so much he didn’t know, and yet he seemed
anxious to learn. It had made her feel good to think that she could get inside
that warm slow mind and teach him perception and awareness. He had been
twenty-four then, an ex-college-athlete, working for a construction firm,
making an extra fifty dollars every Sunday playing tackle on a pro football
team. She had graduated from college that June, and she was living in the big
house in town with Ben and Wilma and Brock and Ellen. Brock was five then, and
Ellen three. Quinn and Bess were living in an apartment, and David was two.
Robbie was fourteen and away at preparatory school that fall.

The big house in town had been sold for a long time. It had been a gloomy
pile of reddish stone, and Alice remembered how it matched her mood in that
strange vague summer when there was all of life ahead and no idea of what could
or should be done with it. Quinn had gone apart from her into another life when
he had married Bess. Ben and Wilma had their own full existence. The silences
of the big house, the rusty scrape of tree limbs on the roof edges, the long
high hallways—all had given her a curiously disembodied feeling, a haunted
sense of drifting out of control. She would see herself in unexpected mirrors,
tall and silent and slow.

There had been a few friends that summer. A pale,
dandruffed
boy who had recently discovered Kafka. And a fat, pimpled girl who brought over
the music of Hindemith and Stravinsky and laboriously pecked out passages on
the out-of-key piano in the old music room. They sat often on the floor and
they talked of many things that summer in the house coolness while the street
baked.

She had gone one afternoon to the club with Ben and Wilma and the kids to
swim in the newly opened pool. George
Furmon
had come
into her life that day. Thor-muscled, splendid. Like a roof tilted to let
sunlight in. His employer had brought him there that Sunday afternoon.

They were married in November. It was a big wedding at church, a
reception that brought the old house alive. She was a virgin bride, filled with
all manner of clinical knowledge and emotional ignorance. She remembered the
dry cluttering sound of the rice as it fell from her undergarments onto the
tiled floor of the bathroom of the hotel in Montreal. He had been tender and
gentle with her. He had known many women. Yet in the dark moment of
consummation all the tremulous desire he had awakened in her was obliterated by
the nightmare panic, like the dreams of childhood when some great beast had
gotten at her, panting and straining. She knew she had disappointed him. And,
out of her clinical knowledge, she knew that this phase of marriage had to be
right. And she knew what was expected of her. During the honeymoon she tried.
And at times she found fleeting moments of an electric pleasure which
tantalized her because they were like a coin that is seen frozen in sidewalk
ice, visible, but impossible to grasp. At last, with a histrionic ability that
startled her, and a sense of shame and deceit, and yet with the determination
that she could at least give him this much, she pretended to achieve that which
he desired for her. In that way she trapped herself, for in his joy he no
longer practiced the restraint she had not known he was using. And he wanted
her and took her very often. He was a virile man, and their days and nights
seemed to be full of this meaningless action which pleased him, full of her
stylized response, so that she felt physically beaten, dazed, too worn and
weary to recapture even those moments of incomplete pleasure she had been able
to achieve, whereas George appeared to gain in strength, in virility, in need.

Two months after they came back from Canada, she found she was pregnant.
The twins, Michael and Richard (named for her father and his) were born three
weeks before their first wedding anniversary, and she had enjoyed the final
months of pregnancy because they meant a respite from George’s needs. On their
anniversary night she found that she was once again trapped in her role. And
she found then that George did not require evidence of her pleasure each time.
Cooperation sufficed. The ersatz frenzies were used less often and she learned,
in self-disgust, that she was more inclined to pretend participation in his joy
when there was something she wanted of him. A coat, a hat, a trip, a pair of
shoes.

Sandy was born when the twins were three. By the time she was eighteen
months old, it became evident that Sandy, like Mike and Dick, was distinctly
George’s child. Aggressive, extroverted, muscular and very active. It seemed to
her as though the very pallor of her own contribution to the uxorial act had in
some way suppressed the potential contribution of her own genes—as though she
had acted merely as receptacle and incubator. She loved them. George adored
them, spoiled them. Her discipline was cold and certain and predictable and
fair.

At times she found it difficult to remember or believe that she had given
birth to these three brown noisy ruffians. In fact, their birth had seemed to
leave her body unmarked. She had been unable to nurse them. At thirty-six she
was slender, lean of hip, with the half-formed breasts of a young girl, with something
cool and withdrawn and unaccountably virginal about her.

George and the children had filled all her days and nights, until this
summer. In the early years, before Sandy was born, Ben and Quinn had made the
proposition to George. Build us our homes on Oilman Hill. We will give you
advance payments. Enough to get you started. George had jumped at the chance.
Alice knew her brothers had done it to help. She knew they had done it a bit
dubiously. But the houses were good. Before they were finished, he had other
jobs. It was a full year before he was able to begin their own house. It seemed
to her that almost from the first day he was in business for himself, she had
lost him, that little of him she had once owned.

But the children left little time for introspection. George had changed
so slowly she had not seen it. Now, with the twins away, with enough help so
that she had leisure, she was seeing him all over again, making the inevitable
comparisons. He was a stranger she lived with. There was no real talk. No good
talk. He came home tired. He played with the kids. He needed his drinks before
dinner, his drinks after dinner. He read the paper and the trade magazines. He
watched certain TV shows, mostly sports telecasts. He kissed her with genuine
affection. He smacked her bottom frequently, with lusty good humor. He smelled
of cigars and good rye and wool. He was solid and powerful, but his belly was
vast, and he was often short of breath. She wondered if he ever really looked
at her. A man’s man. A straight-flush, panatela, daily-double, locker-room,
membership-badge man. A good provider, a man of even humor, a generous man.
Henry, meet the little woman. Al, here’s a picture of my three kids. Took it
down on the Cape last August…

He bellowed in the shower. He liked French cuffs. Every year he tried to
start a vegetable garden. He bought a lot of insurance. He played catch with
the twins. After dinner on spring evenings he would sort fishing tackle, clean
his reels. He told funny stories and then laughed a bit too loudly at them. And
he was somebody who came over into her bed with gentle hands and lusty
frequency and hoarsely whispered endearments, with stallion ardor which would
alter so abruptly into the long sigh, the slowing lungs, the inevitable first snore.
He had a snore which awed the children and seemed to rattle windows.

This stranger she lived with. She wondered what in God’s name was wrong
with her this year. Her eyes had started to see again, and she had preferred
the country of the blind. She stood at the kitchen door, looking at where the
car had been. Sam, an old man made of roots and sweat and leather, trudged in
trance behind the power mower, walking on the pool-table smoothness, following
the bow waves of chopped green, a green with a strong smell of childhood.

Back in the house she could hear Mrs. Bailey teasing Sandy in a sugary
way to take her nap. Alice turned and called through the house. “Sandy!”

Complaint turned into obedience. “Okay, Mom.”

She could see Ben and Wilma’s driveway, an edge of the terrace. A jeep
wrenched and coughed into the driveway and stopped, throbbing like an indignant
insect. The horn made a small humiliated beep, and Alice heard Ellen’s yelp of
acceptance. She came into vision, walking across to the jeep, tennis racket in
frame swinging from the loose wrist, can of balls in the other hand. She wore
white shorts, very brief, very starched-looking above the lovely golden legs,
wore a fire-red halter, wore a dark-blue cap with a long bill. She climbed into
the jeep in a leggy way. Alice saw the
Schermer
boy
grasp the bill of the cap and yank it down over Ellen’s eyes. The jeep poised,
swiveled, and was gone, coughing and banging as it went down the hill, leaving
the afternoon in sudden silence while Sam squatted and prodded at the blades of
the still mower.

A sudden hot fierce wave of envy of the child startled Alice. She felt as
though she had never laughed.

Behind the property were the birches, formal as children’s drawings.
Beyond them the slow hills, squared off in the block fields. Alice went to
their bedroom, changed to walking shoes, to dull-red corduroy slacks. She had a
great many pairs of slacks, preferring them high-
waisted
in cut, knowing she looked well in them, knowing that the best clean lines of
her body were from the indent of waist down the long, taut, slim line of her
hips. It had hurt her and puzzled her when George said he didn’t like her in
pants, so she tried never to wear them when he was around. She put her
cigarettes in one pocket of the red-and-white-checked shirt, and her lighter in
the other.

Mrs. Bailey came from Sandy’s room. “Going walking again?” she asked,
pleasantly enough but with obscure accusation.

“Sandy was up late last night. Keep her in bed until at least two thirty,
Mrs. Bailey.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She left and she walked on the shoulder of the road, away from the
village. She settled into the steady swing of her walking, liking the feel of
the flex and pull and clench of her muscles. She turned and looked back and saw
the three houses set white against the green. Sam was marching again, in his
geometric pattern. The next time she glanced back, a curve of the
upwinding
road hid the houses. She turned left on a
familiar dirt road. It climbed steeply. The dirt was damp-packed but not muddy.