Contrary Pleasure (29 page)

On the way home he had stopped at one light and had seen the parked cars,
the long bar, the dim turbulence of the juke in the back of the place and had
been half tempted to park and go in and soak the hard, white crinkling of
brittle nerve ends into a welcome limpness, speaking to no one,
ungregarious
, taking the shots with the somber method of
the diabetic measuring morning insulin.

But it was late, as it usually always was on Fridays, and he went on
home. He got out of the car feeling thickened and coarsened and pulpy,
wrinkled, sooty. An ancient sergeant who had made no brave charges this day but
had manned the familiar walls, shooting without hope or fear at the half-seen
figures on the murky plains.

“Hello, kids,” he said, unsmiling, and stopped and looked at Ellen and
noted in a corner of his mind how something young and careless had gone out of
them in a single moment and how they stood with a certain wariness. “Was that
the
Schermer
boy’s jeep that was tearing down the
hill?”

“Yes, it was—”

“He came up here a few minutes ago, Dad, and she chewed him out and
chased him off.”

“Where’s your mother?”

“She said it was a committee meeting about the flower show. She said it
might turn into a battle and she’d be late. I’ve done what she told me about
dinner.”

And he plodded into the house and poured bourbon on two ice cubes and
carried the drink to the bedroom and set it aside to cool as he took off the
uniform of the day: the dull gray armor—fifty percent wool, fifty percent
dacron
, the mailed boots—Nettleton, size 10 C, the
breastplate—white broadcloth with button-down collar, the battle
colors—four-in-hand, maroon and gray diagonal stripe, from Miss Meyer,
Christmas two years ago.

He sat white and heavy in his underwear on the side of the bed and looked
at the wall and sighed and scratched his hairy thigh and sighed again and took
two long swallows at the now cold drink. The warmth spread and ran through
hidden brittle passages and he was able to turn his mind outward then, the
sounds of the summer early evening beginning to come to him as though a volume
control were slowly turned up. As though he had lived in the silences inside
him all day, hearing only what he directed himself to hear, as though it were a
special deafness, an aid to concentration—coming out of that still place now to
be alive, yet still retaining a lingering coldness, the memory of a day that
was like a closed fist.

The world on
that June evening rolled the band of dusk shadow from east to west. The sun had
heated the eastern third of the United States for many days. The high pressure
area was moving north and east and below it, coming up out of the southwest,
was a mass of cooler air, bringing line storms and turbulence and bright snakes
of lightning.

In Washington
the headwaiter, smiling, holding his stack of vast aqua menus, asked the couple
if they would like a table now and the young man, with a questioning glance at
the young woman, said they would have a drink in the lounge first. Robbie
followed his bride into the lounge. Her shoulders were bare, her wrap over her
arm, and the tan of her was that perfection of Mexican tan which, instead of
being a harshness on the surface, seems to glow up from a deeper layer. And as
she swung her arm and walked tall, he saw the movement of the small muscles of
her shoulder and he thought of her and how she was, so that it made him feel
dazed in that place, dizzy with the knowledge of his luck, so much in love with
Susan that he wished for great deeds and a sad dying in proof of it all.

Miss Meyer sat
alone on the wide porch of an ornate old frame hotel overlooking Lake
Wannolana
. As the light faded she glanced up from her book
several times and at last closed it, storing the page number in her memory with
a tiny click. She looked out across the deepening color of the water, knowing
that in a few moments the dinner gong would make its long sound, full of
overtones, decaying slowly, and she would then go in to her table. After
dinner—tonight it would be the New England boiled dinner—she would talk in the
lounge with some of the others who always came back here, or read more of the
book, or watch television. Knowing that this was one more day that could now be
counted off before she could go back. Back to that grave, warm, and wise man she
loved with all her heart. Back to that good sense of being a team,
understanding his exasperations, his little irritations, making each day for
him as smooth and safe and easy as she could make it, because once you had
given up the hope of anything more than that, given it up long ago in awareness
of the empty places in the road ahead, you took what was there, grasping it
firmly, making it do in lieu of all the rest.

After Sam ate
his evening meal, he took out the letter from his son and read it again. It was
the same old story. Give up the place and come live with us. It’s warm here the
year round. You can fish. You shouldn’t work so hard. You don’t have to. Sell
the place. And he knew he would give the same answer as before. The
Crestholms
had been on this land for three generations. Not
much left now. The old place and four acres. Barn falling down. No stock. The
Delevan land used to be the south pasture. Three hundred acres they’d had. But
you work the land. You marry and have the kids and work and they grow up and
they go away and she dies. How do you tell the boy? That even if you don’t own
it, even if you work for wages, there is something good about making things
grow on that land. Not yet, boy. Later he went out and looked at the sky and
smelled the change of weather coming. And went back into the old place which
was forever creaking and settling and sighing and held within it all the known
smells and flavors of boyhood, manhood, all the memories that were so strong
that there always seemed to be somebody in the next room, so it was never what
a man would call lonely. Not really.

And Quinn
Delevan lay in bed, looking at the very last light of the day against the
ceiling, smelling the soapiness of his body from the long hot bath, hearing the
insect uncertainties of the sewing machine, feeling, in his belly, the thick,
unmoving mass of the creamed shrimp she had insisted he eat. He made the
surface of his mind a flat, silvery thing, taking care to see that it stretched
evenly, covered all areas. And there was a thing in the middle of it that kept
trying to bulge up and break through the flatness and
silveriness
,
and each time it did so, he pressed it back firmly down and smoothed the
surface and
rucked
the edges in just so, because that
dark horror must not be permitted to hump its back and brace knotted legs and
burst up through to where it could be seen.

And Bess guided
the gay yellow material through the little metal mouth of the machine, making
it take neat little needle bites, clucking her tongue when the stitches were
not perfectly straight.

Bonny Doyle had
washed her hair and done her nails and eaten her solitary dinner. Now she sat
on the studio couch under the light in robe and slippers trying to think of
things to put in a letter to her brother. It was hard to make a letter long
enough lately, even when you wrote big. She bit the pencil in between the short
sentences. From time to time she would listen intently, but there was no sound
of his approach. He’d certainly acted funny. A lot of the time he was hard to
understand. She sighed and considered the letter again and remembered something
she could use.

Today a big woman named Christine I don’t know her
last name started to fool around when the foreman wasn’t around and she made
another girl named
Blacky
anyway they call her that
sore and she tripped Christine into a rack of spindles and got her cut up so
Christine is reporting she slipped on an oil place on the floor because if she
squealed on
Blacky
who is pretty tough there would be
people to give Christine a bad time maybe on her way home some night. Now don’t
worry about me because I say some of the girls are tough. It is
all right.
I don’t make them mad at me for anything and I get along. You can stop telling
me about the wonderful jobs you can help me get out there. I appreciate it and
all but I
like
it here and it is good money and I am happy. My best love
to you and Sally and the kids and write soon.

Your loving
sister, Bonny

She read it over and put it in the envelope. It wasn’t much of a letter,
but at least it was off her mind. She wished she could write about Quinn. But
she could never put it in a letter so he would understand. She couldn’t write
it the way it was. And it would sound terrible to him, a married man and all,
and it would be just like him to get off his job for a time and come roaring
here and spoil everything because he wouldn’t even try to understand. He
wouldn’t see how Quinn was so sort of funny and helpless, and not really able
to understand what life was all about.

And with Sandy in bed and Alice out making a last check on the little
guest annex where the newlyweds would stay, George
Furmon
sat hunched over the unrolled
sheafs
of house plans,
jotting down cost estimates. The tide of pride and recklessness had crested
during the day and he had made many decisions that could not now be changed.
Now, without customary evening stimulant, and with the tide in full ebb, he sat
and felt afraid. God, it could really go wrong. He didn’t quite understand why
he had taken so many irrevocable steps. Alice had jolted him, certainly, and
made him take a good look at himself, not liking what he saw, but did that mean
a man should try to change everything? Maybe if he had edged into it bit by
bit.

Well, no sense in crying about it now. Get to work, boy. This is a new
kind of corner cutting. Giving the client the most for the least money. Now the
shower. Ceramic tile comes too high. Scored plaster with waterproof paint won’t
hold up. Plastic tile needs a pretty fair surface. Okay, so we try
Marlite
. Run it all the way up and then use molly screws
for the curtain rod, and the rod better be chrome over brass. Terrazzo base,
then run the vinyl floor up over the raised edge, and for a neat job, build the
lavatory in and use the same vinyl on the counter-top effect. He tossed the
pencil aside and bit his lip. And sighed and picked it up again as he began to
wonder if you couldn’t use a metal, prefab shower-stall and have some automobile
place undercoat the sides that would be concealed, so that it wouldn’t have
that cheap, tinny sound when you hit your elbows on it or when the water
drummed against it.

And Clyde
Schermer
stood and watched the girl
who sat alone in a booth, watched her slide her eyes across him until he was
absolutely sure, and then dropped his cigarette and turned his foot on it and
started for the booth, taking in that moment the image of Ellen and forcing it
back and down and out through a convenient trap door in the back of his mind,
and giving the girl the hard practiced smile.

And Thomas Marin Griffin sat alone in his apartment. It was a hotel
apartment uptown, just far enough off Madison so he could hear the more hurried
sound of the uptown-downtown traffic. In the long day many things had come to
his attention. As there had been no time to consider them, he had filed in his
memory those factors he considered significant. Now he took them out. Assorted
facts of many varieties. A court decision on a minority stockholders’ suit.
Discovery of a new natural gas field. A serious and expensive bug in a new
transmission out of Detroit. A cut in the import duties on small motors.

He had learned long ago that creative thought is largely the discovery of
relationships. In industry the most sensitive and accurate gauges are
themselves gauged by metal blocks machined to an almost incredible accuracy of
dimension. They are kept in a specific temperature and humidity range so that
expansion and contraction will not prejudice their accuracy. So perfect are
their mirrored surfaces that when two of them are pressed firmly together, the
dry metal surfaces cling and they cannot be pulled apart but must instead be
slid apart to break the molecular bond between them.

And in Thomas Marin Griffin’s mind were those facts, the new ones of this
day, and all of the known facts from all the rest of his days. And he sat in
silence and sought relationships between these facts which were like the mirror
surface blocks with which the gauges are tested. He turned them this way and
that, pressing the surfaces together, seeking creative and profitable
relationships. When two facts stuck together in the illumination of an
inevitable relationship, he felt a warmth and satisfaction. When he could make
three or more cohere, he felt a flush in his cheeks and a rippling flutter of
excitement that seemed to start under his breastbone and spread both up and
down. And when the inventiveness of his mind began to stale, he filed away the
newly discovered relationships, setting himself a schedule of the action he
would take on them. It was not greed that moved him, nor the need of power so
much as the hard flutter of excitement, better than a woman, that came when
surfaces matched, when corners were lined up, when two unrelated things became
related and hence profitable by the strength of his disciplined mind.

He was forever setting up and arranging things that other men thought of
just a bit later.

And in the studio David Delevan’s thoughts crawled through his mind like
small random animals which crawled under a dusty rug, making little places over
their furry backs that moved with them. And when two of the moving places would
converge and touch, there would be a moment of strain and motionlessness and
they would diverge and move about again, in furry, dusty aimlessness.