Contrary Pleasure (4 page)

There could have been other tunnels. Other roads. Maybe one that would
not have dulled the shyness of her, the awareness. A life of more simplicity,
without all this jangling, these tin noises and
twistings
.
A place where he could have been a hard, brown man with outdoors in his eyes
and the gift of quietness and long thought.…

He smiled at himself. Plow jockey. Peasant life. Cottage with a dirt floor,
mulled wine, and potato pancakes, for God’s sake.

You started with a woman and she was magic and she was mystery and that
was the way it was supposed to be. And then you grew into each other and
learned each other so that what had been high adventure became a comforting, a
warmth, a reassurance of existence. Good gal, you can say. Contentment, you can
say. But, oh, where did the shy one go, the shy wild one of all the awareness,
of magical blue vein on porcelain breast, who loved earth under her hips, eyes
strained shut against sunlight. She went to the same place, Ben, as did that
great walker and talker and dreamer of a thousand things. They look out of the
old muddy prints and they are still together. Every tunnel is right and every
tunnel is wrong. Choice is immutable.

“What in the world are you doing out there, dear?”

“Thinking, I guess.”

He went into the kitchen, blinking at the lights. “Kids around?”

“Ellen had a date. They picked her up while you were showering. Brock’s
in his room.”

“Who did Ellen have a date with?”

She put her hand on his arm. “Darling, listen to me a minute. Please try
to be nice to Brock tonight. Just try. You don’t know how it is for me, you two
sitting there like wooden dummies. I’m right in the middle. You know, you just
can’t keep on treating him like a criminal for the rest of his life.”

“It seems to me that that particular label was applied in a very
accurate—”

“Ben!”

“All right. All right. I’ll try. Who did Ellen go out with?”

“Thank you, darling. Oh, she went out with the
Schermer
boy again. In the jeep. There was another couple. I think she said they were
going to the drive-in movie.”

“You think!”

“Don’t bark at me. Goodness! Look, aren’t these nice chops?”

He said they looked very fine indeed and he mixed himself another drink
and carried it into the living room, aware of her silent disapproval. He turned
on the television. A grave man sat behind a big desk with his hands gently
folded and looked Benjamin Delevan directly in the eye and said grave sensible
things about people and nations. Apparently the most sensible thing that could
be said about nations was that every effort must be made to alleviate the
tension in the family of nations, and the tension seemed inevitable. If you
looked at him while he said it, it seemed to make sense. If you thought it
over, it made no sense. But they didn’t want you to think it over. They wanted
you to look at the next item. The next item was a grinning shot of the
President as he boarded a plane. Then there was the man at the desk again. And
then a clock that said Calcutta under it, and then a crowd of dark people in
white pajamas waving illegible signs and hollering, and then a toy airplane
crushed against an artificial mountain. Ben sipped his drink. The grave man
spoke about the product which sponsored his services. He spoke with greater
gravity than before. He went away and there were little line drawings of people
knocking on a bar and singing about beer.

Benjamin sat and sipped his drink. The program made him feel curiously
diffused. One Ben sat there. One contested a robot on Oilman Hill. A naked one
stood inside the bathroom mirror. One still sat in the office silences. And
there was one out on the grass, standing on his land, standing in a circle
painted in white on the grass. He frowned and wondered what in the hell that
circle meant.

Brock Delevan was glad when the
dinner hour was over and he could get up from the table and go back to his room
and be away from them. This dinner hour had been bad in a different way. He
could not decide which was worse—the sour silence of other dinner hours, or the
false cheer of this one, with the old man’s conversation sounding as if it had
been lifted, complete and shining, from the fillers in the
Reader’s Digest.
The conversation could not have been more forced, even if there had been a
microphone suspended over the table, a television camera aimed at them. Dinner
with the happy
Delevans
.
Sorry, folks, Ellen could
not be with you tonight, but turn to channel thirteen tomorrow at this same
time and
—

It made Brock want to bang his fist on the table, bouncing the dishes
into the air. He had guessed at once that his mother had spoken to the old man
about it. During the joyous hour she had looked both pleased and uncertain.

Brock kept it under control and said that he thought he would read and
went to his room and shut the door. He had not been holding his breath, but
when he heard the click of the door latch he had the feeling that now he could
take a deep breath. He moved mechanically, taking LP records at random from
their cardboard envelopes, stacking them on the spindle of the player. He
turned the record player on and turned out the light over the bed and stretched
out. The volume was low, so low that the bass was like the slow, deep pulse of
someone who lay beside him in darkness. The trumpet sounds were thin, far away,
like summers at the lake when you were little and in bed and they were dancing
across the lake, over at the pavilion. The only light in the room was the tiny
light of the dial on the player. It was good to have the lights off in the
room. When they were on, you could see the kid stuff. Framed high-school
pictures. The football enameled white with the score painted on it in red.
STOCKTON—14, SYRACUSE HIGH—13. A sleek gray model of a PT. A yellow highway
sign that said DEER CROSSING. A lot of kid stuff that some other Brock Delevan,
some smug untroubled kid, had collected and stuck in the room. A punk kid. A
high-school wheel.

He lay there and waited for it to happen to him, knowing that it would.
It was not pain, but it was like pain. It was like a time long ago, when he had
been little and very sick, and faces had loomed over the bed and gone away, faces
that were too big and sort of twisted looking. It kept coming then, a pain, and
it came like a red light down a track, like a train that made a noise too loud
and then faded away, but was on a circular track so it would come back.

It came then, as the pain had come long ago, a great wave that made him
tighten his fists and lock his throat. Not me. It didn’t happen to me. Not a
thing like that. I’m Brock. Remember me? They looked at me with pride. Pride
kept me warm. It gave me dignity. So I shamed them and the pride is gone. Why?
That was the thing. Find out why I did it. How could I have done it?

And so it was necessary to go over it all again. An old ritual. A nightly
searching. A going back and looking for clues. Because you could not accept a
flat statement that it happened because that is the way you are. There are the
good guys and the bad guys. All your life you are sure you are one of the good
guys. And then this.

They hadn’t even let him stay at the University long enough to take the
exams. He would have made a mess of them. So perhaps it was a good thing to
have gotten out of them. It was funny how that first year, the freshman year,
had gone so well. The grades had been pretty good. He’d made the basketball
squad and been pledged to a good fraternity.

The trouble had started in April. There was a good smell of spring that
last April. Clear days, warmer than they should have been, and the sort of lazy
air that made you feel as if you wanted something without knowing exactly what
you wanted. It was the crazy season. You couldn’t learn anything out of the
books. People took all the class cuts they could afford. People pulled kid
tricks or got in fist fights for no reason. And the girls looked good. They
looked wonderful with that warm spring air teasing their skirts, and wonderful
the way they walked arm in arm and giggled and looked back at you.

He met her on an April afternoon. He had a two o’clock lab. And he walked
right up to the door of the lab building and turned around and walked away. He
knew he would have to make up the cut. But it was an afternoon when you
couldn’t
spend two hours in there in the stink, setting up an experiment, making the
dull notations. He dropped his lab book off in his room in the fraternity
house. The house was deserted. His feet on the staircase made empty echoes. He
walked for a time, feeling free and guilty. He went into a campus beer joint, a
cellar place with steins and mottoes and sawdust. He hooked an elbow on the bar
and he drank and felt a curious mixture of listlessness and excitement. The
place was narrow and there was a row of rustic booths across from the bar. He
saw her sitting there alone. He could tell that she wasn’t one of the coeds. It
was the way she was dressed, and she looked a bit older. She was using the
straight pretzel sticks to make designs on the table top. She wore her black
hair long, and it swung forward as she leaned over the table and every once in
a while she would comb it back with her fingers. She was small and trim and
dark and she looked blue. He watched her, with that feeling of inevitability
and excitement growing inside him. He had some more beers and it was like
remembering the time the other kids had jumped off the garage roof into the
snow and he had waited a bit too long before jumping, and stood there, frozen,
the others taunting him until at last he had shut his eyes and jumped.

All she could do, he decided, is give me a real chill job, so he carried
his beer over and stood by the booth, hoping he looked casual and relaxed, hoping
the tautness didn’t show, and when she looked up at him blankly, he said “Know
the match game?”

She looked up at him, unsmiling, and he saw that she was not quite as
good-looking close up. Her cheeks were a bit roughened and pitted with scars of
adolescent acne, and her pallor had that faintly waxy look of Latin women. He
guessed she was maybe twenty-five. He was glad he’d changed to his good sports
jacket when he dropped his lab notebook off at his room.

“I’ve played,” she said, looking amused.

“Play you for a beer?”

“Sure.” He sat across from her. They played with the pretzel sticks. She
won. Her lipstick was dark red and she had applied it a bit carelessly. She
wore a frothy white blouse, a dark, severe suit. Her purse was big and red and
she wore no hat. He realized she was a little bit high. Her eyes were very
black and very alive, and her small face had a pertness to it, a
triangularity
which, with its overtones of coarseness,
excited him.

Her name was Elise, and she said Brock was a nice name and she asked him
if he was a senior. That made him feel good. He said he was and he told her he
was twenty-one and she told him he was just a kid, which annoyed him because
she seemed to be laughing at him.

“What do you do, Elise?”

“I’m a singer. I sang at the Golden Room for a while. Singing and
pantomime. But it was like this. There was this fellow. He used to go wherever
I was singing. And always trouble. That was him. Always making a stink about
something. You know the type guy. It got me fired a couple times, him and his
big mouth, so then the booking agent, he didn’t want to handle me anymore, and
that makes it tough, trying to get something on your own, so in between times
I’ve been working at waitress work. It’s hell on your feet. This last place I
was at, it’s the Tavern Chop House. They got good steaks and it’s I guess three
blocks from here. There’s a lot of college trade. You ever eat there?”

“Twice. Maybe three times.”

“Artie, he’s the manager, he’s a little louse, believe me. All the time
he’s got to get his hands on you. Well, brother, did I ever tell him off, so
here is Elise again. Unemployed as usual.”

She made a face. She looked so small. It made him feel protective about
her. She talked sort of tough, but her voice had such a whispery husky quality
to it that it seemed to give everything she said a special meaning.

“The hell of it is,” she said, “I got me a little studio apartment right
near the restaurant so it would be handy. What I ought to have is a car. You
got a car, Brock?”

He had to say no and it made him feel inadequate. They sat a long time
and talked and he bought her quite a few beers. She said her name was really
Mrs. Archie
Berris
, but she used her maiden name
Elise Lewis on account of he was killed overseas. Brock said he was sorry about
that and then there were tears in her eyes and in his too, and they felt
closer. Yet not close in the way he could be close with someone from his own
background. She made him think of a girl he used to watch in high school, a
pretty Polish girl who wore cheap, tight dresses, who looked wise and knowing,
who was the entrancing subject of conversation of his friends. He had not dated
her. He sensed that this Elise was much the same sort of person. From a more
forthright world. Being with her like this made him feel both shy and
sophisticated.

“
Brocky
, you hurl a lot of big-sized words
around. You going to grow up and be a professor?”

“I’ll probably go into the family business. It isn’t exactly exciting.
But that’s what I’ll probably do.”

“What kind of a business?”

“It’s a textile mill. My grandfather started it. It used to make a lot of
money. It hasn’t made so much for a long time. My father and my uncle run it.”

“My God, I had a girl friend worked in one of those in Alabama. She quit it
on account of it drove her nuts not knowing what the weather was. It hadn’t any
windows. All air conditioning and artificial light and a coffee break in the
morning and a coffee break in the afternoon and they gave her uniforms and so
on and I said she was nuts but she said she had to work in a place where you
could look out and see if maybe it was raining—What’ll we do for food,
Brocky
? I’m empty like a bass drum.”