Contrary Pleasure (32 page)

He walked across to
Bonny’s
entrance, snapping
his fingers as he walked, making the crisp dry sounds like things breaking,
taking pleasure in the little sounds because it was something he had always
been able to do well. Alice could whistle better.

Rattled his fingers dry on the door, seeing the light pattern from her
window onto the grass, feeling with tongue tip a rough place on one filling as
he waited, hearing her steps coming, grate of knob, clack of latch,
tink
of spring hinge, then light washing out at him,
yellow-pale on his face, and her voice soft, “Quinn, I worried. Come in.”

Went in and stood dry and godlike, watching her mouth move and seeing the
expressions go and come across her face, and knew, without hearing the words,
that it was about the mustache again and he wished that they would stop talking
about it. Over here in this other place.

She came close to him, her face fattening against his eyes like a
trick-movie shot, and she kissed him, taking a quick, shy, sly nibble at his
underlip
, and the face moved back again, moving into
proportion. Then smaller than proportion as she grew tiny and the room slid in
upon itself. These things you had to watch on the other side. Slyly, but
showing nothing.

Stood smiling and watching her, watching the nervousness of her grow as
he said nothing. Saw that she sensed that he now knew of the tricks. Go down
three steps and open the door and a bell will ring and an old man will come out
of the back, and there you can buy all the tricks there are. Itching-powder,
lipstick, dribble glasses, breasts, worms to put in drinks, round thighs,
disappearing coins, white bellies, rubber daggers, red lips… He has everything
there, and everything is for sale. And in the dusty stillness of the shop you
can hear the old echoes of strained laughter. Like
sobbings
.

Looked at the trick body of her and the trick eyes and the growth of
fright and laughed. Looked down at his own hand and saw that the knuckles under
the skin were truly marble, ancient and avenging. Caught her as she turned in
sudden wildness. Swung her back and timed the blow of the steel and leather arm
and marble hand. Timed it into thick sound and redness. And held and struck and
held and struck, and brought limpness up with mighty effort to strike once more
and release and watch the red doll rolling, pleased to see the special
precision. Arms just so. Legs just so. Red spreading out from under the still
cheek. Not knowing it was precise and right until you saw it thus and thus and
perfectly so.

He turned off the light and went out and closed the door quietly behind
him. He went to his car and got in and sat for a long time. He looked through
his pockets for his keys. He felt a strange rippling of uncertainty. He got out
and walked down to Fremont and turned down Fremont.

Blur of places and light and sweat. Juke blast. Liquor bite. And a place
with stools. Late. The god stuff gone. Felt furtive touch, looked down saw
thigh-pressed the haired hand, looked into stranger face, with its stubble and
grin of broken teeth and hit out at the face. Bump of head on wooden floor and
then sirens, head hurting. Yanking, pulling at him—
whatsyourname
—
wheredyalive
—
whatsyourname
—Yank
and slap. Leave me alone. Let me rest. Give me silence.…

Brock followed his father down the corridor to the room where a high
counter stretched across half the room. Brock stood at his father’s side, a
half step back. There was an institutional smell. Green cakes of deodorant,
dust, varnish, cleaning compound and ammonia salts.

“I’m Benjamin Delevan. You phoned me about my brother.”

“We got him.” Bored voice. Voice of Saturday night.

“Suppose you tell me the details and tell me how I can get him out of
here, then.” The hard authoritative cut of his father’s voice surprised Brock.
He looked at his father in surprise. He looked no different.

“Yes, sir. Ah… Car twelve made the arrest. He was in one of those queer
joints on lower Fremont. Pretty drunk. Fighting. No keys or wallet or anything.
We got his name off the label in his coat. About the same time his car was
spotted. There was a pickup on it and it was in a gas station. It’ll be towed
in. He’s been booked, so you want to take him along with you now, you got to
post a hundred bucks bond.”

“I brought the money. Do I give it to you?”

“Yes. I’ll give you a receipt. Have him in here Monday morning at nine. Joe,
go get me that D-and-D out of the tank. The tall one with the knee out of his
pants. Name’s Delevan.”

Brock watched the money counted out on the counter top. The man behind
the counter put carbon paper in a pad of forms and began to make out the receipt.
His father turned and locked his hands behind him and began to stare at a
bulletin board on the wall. Brock couldn’t tell if his father was reading the
dusty notices or just staring into space.

They brought Quinn in. He walked with a curious shambling limp and his
eyes looked loose in his head. He tried to smile at them. They could not
understand what he tried to say. He smelled of vomit.

“Here you are, sir. Nine o’clock Monday. Handle him okay?”

“We can handle him.”

They each took an arm. He would have fallen on the steps outside had they
not supported him. They got him into the back of the car. Ben got in with him,
saying, “You drive.”

“Sure.”

It was a silent trip back. Quinn mumbled twice. Brock drove as close as
he could to Quinn’s back door. As they were getting him out of the back, Bess
came out of the kitchen door. She had changed from her party dress to a robe.

“Is he all right? Is he hurt? Is he hurt, Ben?”

“He isn’t hurt. He’s drunk.”

They walked him into the light, his head bobbing. Bess said, “Darling!
Your trousers! Your best suit. Oh my darling! What did they do to you?”

She fluttered in front of them and they got him into the kitchen. Ben
said, “Where do you want him?”

“I can take him from here,” she said.

“Better let us. He’s pretty heavy.”

The fluttering stopped and she stood close and took Quinn’s arm. “I said
I can take him from here. Thank you very much. I can handle it very nicely by
myself.” She was proud and angry.

“Okay. We can stand by, Bess.”

“I’d rather you’d go home, really. Ben, I don’t mean to sound angry. I
appreciate your doing this. But… it’s my problem. Good night, Ben, Brock. Come
on now, darling. Go ahead. Lean on Bess. Lean hard, baby. Come on. That’s the
way, darling. That’s the way, my poor darling.”

“Come on,” Ben said to Brock.

Once they were out in the night, Brock said, “Brother! That certainly
took a half hitch in the evening.”

“It could have been one hell of a lot worse.”

“I know. I know it could.”

“Tone it down for your mother, will you? And… thanks for helping, son.”

Brock felt a sudden surge of pride that nearly choked him. Pride in
awareness of strength and maturity. In knowing that he had done a small thing,
but done it quietly and well and without excitement or silliness, or assigning
exaggerated values to what he saw or to his own participation. There had been a
manual training teacher in grade school. Brock remembered his saying one day
with unexpected heat, “If a man can drive
one
nail perfectly and that is
part of something he is building, then it is a special thing for him to do.”
The class had thought the old joker was nuts. Some of the time he’d acted
half-crazy. Taking botched work and slamming it on the floor and stamping it
with his heavy carpenter’s boots. It began to make strange sense, now, that business
about one nail. Do one small thing well. And then the next small thing. And
maybe they will be a part of something big and good. But if you try to do the
whole big good thing at once…

He drove the car back to their garage while his father walked across the
lawn. He had to go out onto the main road and into the next drive. As he turned
in he saw the light go out suddenly in the guest annex George had added to the
Furmon
house. He saw it go out and thought of his young
uncle and the tanned, pale-headed bride and his hands felt sweaty on the wheel.
He had been astounded at Robbie’s luck. Even after seeing the picture of her,
he had expected the flaws he saw in all wives. Dumpy ankles or a silly voice or
a broad beam. This was Wife but it was also Girl. And that made it confusing.
Somehow unfair that Robbie should have been able to acquire the legal and
unassailable right to take her to bed, this magical girl, with the full
knowledge and consent of everyone. That it was, in fact, expected of him. Her
very desirability seemed to indicate that possession of her was something to be
accomplished in stealth, in awareness of guilt.

Sitting there in the dark silent car in the dark garage for a few
moments, he thought of his father and his mother. So there, too, there must
have been a time when she was both Wife and Girl. Magical and legal and
wonderful. A strange overlapping. It made him uncomfortable to think about
that. It was funny. You knew the words. You knew the associations. But they
were just words and sort of hollow, unfilled-in facts, and then there would
come a moment of comprehension like this and you would fill it all in and the
words would have new meanings. Like the trick where you ask somebody to
pronounce first
MacDermott
, then
MacLaughlin
—spelling
them out each time—and finally
MacHinery
. With the
last word expanding abruptly into a new dimension.

He got out of the car and stopped in the driveway and looked in the
direction of the dark windows, then plodded toward the lighted kitchen of his
home, thinking of the stranger they had brought out, the mumbling man, all
stench and apology.

Robbie held her
head against his shoulder and scowled into the darkness. “Hell, I don’t know
why I should feel apologetic. I mean it
is
my family and all that, but
if Quinn wants to be a damn fool—”

“You’re not your brother’s keeper.”

“You think I could have—”

“Don’t take that as criticism, darling. I meant you actually are not his
keeper.”

“Anyway, I found out this certainly isn’t a thing that has been going on.
He hasn’t done this before. But you see, I feel as if I were convincing you of
something. As if you had a right not to believe me.”

“Robbie, Robbie. Oh, darling, you don’t see how much there is here.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Things I didn’t have. Ever. A sort of warmth and trust and love, and
people taking care of each other. My father used to walk me down to the store.
And we’d go in. And there’d be people there and he’d laugh in a funny way and
say in a big loud voice, ‘Suzy and me had to get out of the house before the
old woman drove us both nuts.’ It was one of his ways of taking revenge on her.
Later I realized she had her own ways of doing the same thing. They, both of
them, ran around to the whole world holding their hands out and saying love me
and hate the other one. Don’t apologize for your people, Robbie.”

“Do you like them?”

“I like them all except Ben. You see, I love Ben. Not the way I love you.
I like the rest of them. I didn’t get a chance to really meet Quinn, of course.
Or… is it David?”

“He’s the weird one. Brock told me there isn’t much change. Damn sad
thing. Gosh, this has been some day, wife.”

“Say it again.”

“Wife. Wife. Wife. Has a funny sound when you keep saying it. Ever do
that when you were little?”

“Oh, yes. Say words over and over at night until they didn’t mean
anything at all. Until they got kind of creepy. There was one that was one of
my favorites. Burner. Like on a stove. Try it.”

“Burner, burner, burner, burner, burner, burner… hey, that does get sort
of wild.”

“What would somebody think of this conversation?”

They both began to giggle. And turned toward each other. And her soft
laughter began to change. And falter. And become something else entirely. There
in the night on Gillman Hill. And thunder rolled toward them out of the
southwest. Rolled and grumbled and then cracked loudly. Later the hard rain
came. A thick-bodied ram that sounded like trains passing. When it stopped,
toward morning, it left a thin layer of water in the rain-washed glass beside
the terrace, the glass Quinn had dropped, the glass Mrs. Bailey had overlooked
when she picked up after the others had left, when she had tidied up, wearing
around her mouth that tight, sucked-in look of disapproval habitual with her
when removing the evidences of drinking and smoking and carrying on.

Quinn awoke on Sunday morning at
ten thirty. After he had looked at his watch and let his arm fall back, he knew
that he was sore and sick. There were unaccountable aches and bruises all over
his body. His forehead pulsed, his mouth tasted sick, his thirst was enormous.
So immediate was his discomfort that it left no room in his mind for more than
the contemplation of discomfort. He was but dimly aware that beyond this
immediacy there crouched black things waiting, like patient animals. He got out
of bed in gingerly stages, wincing at the brutal increase in head pain that
resulted from each change of position. He made the four steps to the bathroom
doorway and stood and held onto the doorframe, his eyes closed. His heart made
a dry, hammering sound. He opened his eyes and saw the puffed and reddened
knuckles of his right hand, flesh bloated so that the knuckles themselves
seemed to be dimples rather than the customary bony knobs. But there was no
room to think about that.

He held onto the edge of the lavatory and found the yellow plastic glass.
He rinsed it out and drank the water eagerly. The first glassful had a faint
and nauseating peppermint tinge of toothpaste. He drank five glasses, and the
water bloated him. He adjusted the shower, peeled off his pajamas, damp with
night sweat, and stepped under the water, leaning his shoulders against the
cool wall of the shower, standing with face upturned, the rush of water
stinging his face and chest. He stood there for a long time. When he went back,
dried, naked, uncombed, into the bedroom, he felt uncomfortably tall, tottery,
fragile. The head pulse had dulled. The long shower had puckered his
fingertips. His long, white feet looked pulpy. Tan stopped at his throat and
his biceps. The rest of him was the color of soap.