Contrary Pleasure (9 page)

The tears ceased and she leaned back. In the faint light her face looked
thin and white. “I wasn’t going to come down.”

“I know.”

“I saw the taillights. I pulled the shade down. I walked and walked in my
room. Then I would look and tell myself each time before I looked that you
would be gone. But you weren’t. And the last time I was afraid you would go and
I ran.”

“I shouldn’t have been here. I shouldn’t have waited so long.”

“How long would you have waited?”

“I don’t know, Bonny. I don’t know.”

“Drive someplace, Mr. Delevan. Please. I don’t want to stay here. It
keeps making me feel like crying.”

He drove slowly out of the city. She wore a perfume that was too heavy
for her. It did not suit her. He drove on back roads he had never seen before.
And after a long time he began to talk to her, not looking at her, just talking
as though he were alone in the car and he had to tell himself what he was and
what he had been. All of it, all the continuing knowledge, never before
admitted even to himself, that he was dead weight in the firm, that a large
area of him was dead. And there were the dreams of things you would do, and
found you had waited too long, and there were the sterling resolutions that
always seemed to degenerate into a sort of mild and meaningless futility. The
words went on and on, draining thinly out of him. He talked to the night and to
the girl’s silence, his voice growing hoarse as the words exhausted him. And
with a complete despair he realized that even here honesty was denied him, that
as he tried to explain himself and what he was, a sly censor kept coloring the
facts and dreams, adding dramatic highlights, spicing the hopelessness, so that
the dusty plots became drama, and drama became a tool of seduction. He was the
adolescent lover who combats his girl’s indifference by inventing a unique and fatal
disease for himself, selling himself so heartily that, in self-pity, his tears
become genuine.

He stopped at a crossroads and trained his spotlight on the road signs
and found an arrow that pointed to Stockton sixteen miles away. He felt weary
and disgusted with himself. Ashamed of contrived emotions. What had all this
meant to the silence beside him? An embittered complaining bore, whining about
his life. She could tell her girl friends about it. It would be a fine story,
particularly if she had any gift for mimicry. They could all giggle.

“I’ll take you back,” he said, his tone dulled.

“Please stop a minute,” she said.

He pulled over in the darkness and turned the car lights off. “Dandy
evening for you, Bonny. Maudlin. A cheap movie.”

In the darkness she moved to him almost harshly and her cold hands went
flat against his cheeks and she put her lips hard against his and turned her
head back and forth as she did so, so that her mouth was ground warmly against
his and his hands found the long fine line of her back. Then she pulled his
head down a bit and kissed his eyes, her lips releasing the tears of self-pity,
and she murmured, “Quinn—oh, Quinn darling—oh, Quinn honey.” And lips and
murmurings and the giving warmth of her tuned the drama of self just a bit
higher so that the harshness of his first sob was almost completely genuine to
him, and even as he tried to believe in it, something inside him was cool and
sneeringly disdainful of this method which won her so easily and so completely.

When it was over, he assumed a gruffness, a colonial manner of
understatement, saying, “Dreadfully sorry. Didn’t mean to crack up like this.”

“I’m glad you did. I’m glad I understand you now.”

And now the promise of ultimate victory could be neatly countersigned, so
he said, “I hope you’ll let me see you again.”

“Of course… Quinn.”

“Even though we both know it’s wrong and we shouldn’t.”

“It’s too late… for shouldn’t, I think. When, Quinn? When?”

“Not tomorrow night. I have to go to a dinner party. The next night?
Eight thirty.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, Quinn. I like saying your name. I like to hear you
say my name.”

“Bonny.”

“I never liked it before. Now I like to hear you say it.”

He drove her back. This time she looked back from the lighted porch, made
a small gesture of parting, a furtive wave before she was gone into the house
darkness.

The next time they were together they talked and they kissed often, and
they laughed and there was fondness in the laughter. And a new fierceness in
the kisses. And the next time after that he drove her thirty-five miles from
Stockton and she made a small protesting sound in her throat as he turned in by
the sign that said CABINS. The lights there were dim. A fat woman asked for
five dollars and she gave him a key wired to a piece of wood a foot long and
told him where to go. Bonny sat far over on her side of the front seat of the
car. He drove up across dark ruts and parked by the cabin. One lighted orange
bulb hung over the door of the cabin. He went around the car and opened the
door on her side. She sat there. “Quinn. Quinn, should we?”

“I need you, Bonny.” His voice trembled. He held his hand out to her. She
gripped it very tightly with thin cold fingers and she got out of the car still
holding his hand, not speaking again. He made the key work and the door creaked
open. The place smelled of dampness and linoleum and it was colder in there
than outside.

He found the light switch and turned on the overhead bulb and she stood
looking down at the floor and whispered, “Please turn it off.” He turned it
off. He kissed her. Her lips were dry-cool and her body trembled.

“Has it ever happened before, Bonny?”

“Y-yes. But not like this.” Their eyes were used to the orange light from
the outside bulb. It was against the two windows, like a distant fire.

“Let’s skip it,” he said, his voice pitched a bit too loudly. “Let’s skip
it, Bonny.”

She pushed at him. “Don’t look at me. Look out the window.” He turned his
back to her. He heard the quick fabric sound of her undressing, a muted chattering
of her teeth, a creak of springs and a sharp intake of breath as she slid
between the icy sheets. He looked at her then. Her head was a darkness on the
far pillow, her face turned to the wall, her thin body lost under the lumpy
spread. He undressed quickly and slid in beside her. He warmed his hands
against his own body. He reached for her. She was far over, against the wall.
He found the soft, secret, concave place of her waist, his hand large enough so
that the ring finger and little finger were up-canted by the swell of her hip
while between thumb and forefinger he could feel the rigid delicacy of the rib
cage, feel the rib cage swell and subside with her quickened breathing. He
sensed the resistance of her, a stiffness that was an amalgam of fear and
shyness. He moved a bit closer to her and waited a long time and their body
heat slowly warmed the sagging, musty bed. She shuddered and then he felt her
body soften, and she turned toward him, turned into his arms, her whole body
flattened against him, all the silk of her and all the urgency of her exploding
against his heart.

When they floated at last to rest from the places of the dark
movings
, the slow
searchings
, the
quick findings, when they glided and slid down and away from that bright high
place of final breaking, and her head was on his shoulder, mouth inward, breath
a small moist furnace on his naked chest, he ran his fingertips down the
gracile
line of her cheek with a feeling of awe and wonder,
and with a brute pride of conquest.

Then, in the orange night, for the first time, she talked of herself,
talked in a voice contented and far off, a voice like cat
purrings
.
He liked listening to her. He would hear only the sound of her voice for a time
and not the meaning and then he would catch the sense of the little stories she
was telling. For a time he resented her tales of herself and did not know why,
then realized he resented her having had any previous existence. He rather
wanted her to be something he had created in the moment of first awareness of
her, with no past but that which he formed with her. She was a person beyond
his own self-considerations and once he had learned the reason for resentment,
he was able to listen to her and even take pleasure in learning her.

It was about her father, “… killed when I was four. I don’t remember much
about him. They say he was big. I remember him as big, the way the house shook
when he walked. There was Irish in him, and French-Canadian and some English I
think, and some Mohawk Indian. His grandfather had been a trapper and guide, up
near Saranac. We all lived in the house at Frenchman’s Lake that his father had
built. When I was ten, twelve, fourteen, around there, they were still talking
about the way he died. They talked around the stove in the store in the winter.
He was topping a big tree. They do that, climb up and saw the top off so there
is just a straight stick standing that they use to fasten the cables to when
they use the donkey engine as a sort of hoisting engine. He had his safety belt
around the tree. He sawed and as the top started to go, the stub split. It
expanded inside his safety belt. They used to tell how he screamed twice and
then there was silence and then he gave a great laugh and he was dead.”

And her mother, “… was pregnant and
LaRue
,
that’s my brother, he was six and I was four. One time she had cooked for the
camps. She turned our house into a restaurant. She looked sort of weak, but she
could work twenty hours a day and sing while she worked. She named it Doyle’s
Pinetop Restaurant. It was a long time before it made any money at all. In the
winter we’d get the local trade and hardly break even, but in the summer with
the cottages and the camp grounds full, we’d make money. I quit high after two
years because she started getting too tired and I had to do more and more of
it. Then two years ago some people wanted to buy us out but Mom didn’t want to
sell. We borrowed money from the bank and had a big addition put on and hired
more girls for the summer trade. Then a year ago a big restaurant firm came in
and put up a big chain restaurant on the corner diagonally across from us, with
a big parking lot and everything. I think that’s what killed her, but they said
she had been sick for a long time without admitting it. She worried so much.
LaRue
came back for the funeral. We couldn’t get enough
business to keep the place going. The bank took it over and it was sold to meet
the mortgage thing for the addition, but it didn’t bring much on account of the
new place being so close. After it was all settled up,
LaRue
and I got four hundred dollars each. I didn’t want to stay up there. I mean
working all those years and then nothing. We lived off it, but it had been
hard. So I came down here and got a job as a waitress. Then one of the other girls
quit and came to work at the mill because the pay is better. She said I should
try it and after a while I did.”

And about herself, “Me? Gosh, I don’t know. I guess I was always sort of
shy and funny. I couldn’t walk down the road without thinking people were
looking at me and talking about how skinny my legs were. And it was awful
forcing myself to leave the kitchen and go out on the floor and wait on
strangers when I was old enough. I liked it best to go off in the woods alone.
I love the woods. Then I was always pretending. You know, making up kid games.
I was a princess and a wicked witch had changed all my subjects into birds and
animals. When you stand still for a long time, they stop being afraid and come
out. Red squirrels, porcupines, and beavers working. The best was finding a
fawn once. All flattened out and hardly breathing. They don’t have any scent
when they’re little. I hid where I could see. After a long time the doe came
and got him out of there and pushed him along. He wobbled on his legs.”

She talked and then she yawned and so they left, dressing in the
darkness, going yawning to the car. They went back once, but it was not a good
place even if it was the first place. They talked and they decided they both
wanted a place where they could be safe and alone together. She solved that for
them. She found a ground-floor apartment in the back of one of the old houses
on Fremont Street. The apartment had its own private entrance. They came
nearest to a quarrel when he insisted on being permitted to pay at least the
increase in her rent. And she was shy about accepting presents—the little
radio, the silver bracelet, the perfume which was lighter in body than what she
had been using, and thus was better for her…

Now he drove swiftly to the city, eager to see her again, trying to
forget all the implications of this intrigue, trying to think only of her and
of tonight. It was odd how she was the one who thought up the little devices
which protected their deceit. He had paid to have her telephone installed. The
desk man at the club had been appropriately bribed. Should anyone phone him at
the club, the desk man would say he would have Mr. Delevan call back. And he
would phone
Bonny’s
unlisted number and give Quinn
the message, and Quinn would phone from there.

And it had been Bonny who insisted on his parking behind the gas station
a full block away, and taking the short cut through the alley to her private
entrance.

The gas station floodlights were off, just the night light shining
inside. He parked and walked down Grant Street to the alley, and through the
alley to the scrubby lawn, and across the lawn to her narrow walk, to her
private door. He tapped on the door and she opened it, smiling, and he closed
it behind him and took her in his arms. Then he held her off at arm’s length.

“New blouse?”

“It’s the white one. I dyed it.”

Now it was a pale blue. It brought out the subtle golden tints in her
skin, and it was good with her hair. Now that the warm weather had come, she
had started taking the sun outside her door, behind a low concrete wall that
kept the wind from her. The sun streaked her hair, making it pale at the
temples. It was coarse hair, alive, and he had seen it crackle blue in darkness
when she drew a comb through it. There were little folds of flesh at the
outside corners of her eyes that gave them the illusion of slanting down.
Unplucked
brows were a furry brown. Her cheekbones had a
massive look, too heavy for the fragile jaw.