Random Winds (22 page)

“If I looked like Fern, you wouldn’t have to be.”

“I am not ashamed, I tell you!” He was so weary of having to cope with this again! Maybe in the morning when he felt fresher he would do better, but not now at the end of the day. He sighed and recited, “Actually, you do look very much like Mary. You’ve said so yourself.”

“Why will you keep on calling her Mary?”

“She likes the name.”

Jessie’s mouth twisted. “You know, Martin, you don’t fool me. You never have.”

“What in blazes are you talking about? Who’s trying to fool you?”

“You never say, ‘I love you.’ Do you even realize that?”

“I’m not much for words. Maybe that’s a fault Yes, I guess it is. But actions are something else, aren’t they? How do I treat you? You should ask yourself that.”

“You’ve been—exemplary. You made a bargain and you’ve stuck with it to the letter. Honorably. You couldn’t get my sister, so you took me.”

As it is said, the best defense is a good offense. “I am not, positively not, going to stand here—” and catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror, with one half of his face covered in shaving lather, Martin felt ridiculous and irritated with himself. “You’re making trouble where there is none, Jessie.”

“Don’t fence with me. Father warned me before we were married. People don’t know how shrewd Father is, because he’s closemouthed when he wants to be. But he knew it was Fern you wanted and he warned me not to marry you. He was right.”

“He warned you?” Martin was totally confused.

Jessie twisted a hankerchief. She began to cry. Two red blotches appeared on her cheeks. “Yes, yes, he only wanted this for me after I convinced him. Maybe he wanted to be convinced, I don’t know … You were, after all, a solution for me, weren’t you?”

He was stunned. For a moment there was no sound in the room.

“Why am I telling you this? I’ll be sorry tomorrow—”

Anger surged in Martin and quickly died. After all, what difference did it make now who had or had not conceived the marriage?

“I loved you, Martin. We were alike in a way; we were prisoners. Your prison was poverty and mine was my body. And I thought—I thought perhaps we could make each other happy. It would be a kind of trade-off.”

He stood in a fog. Thickly it settled, a heavy weight of hopeless fatigue, so that it seemed he could never make the effort to move through it.

“I thought—oh, I gave it hours of thought, believe me—I thought, although you didn’t love me, as you might have loved Fern if she hadn’t gone away, or loved some other woman, still you liked me tremendously. I knew you did. I believed we could manage with that It’s been done before.” And Jessie looked up half timidly, half in defiance.

Prison
, she had said and it was true, except that he had already escaped from his and she never would.

“Jessie,” he said softly, “Jessie … you’re wrong. You
think I don’t love you … but I do.” And that also, in its way, was true.

A small doubting smile fled from her face. “Don’t, Martin, I’m too smart for that.”

He made a helpless gesture. “Then I just don’t know. If you won’t believe me—”

She sighed. “It’s my own fault. I took advantage of your need. It was my fault.”

“Who’s talking about fault? We’re here, now, today. And we have so much—” Suddenly his energies revived and he began to speak eagerly. Holding his fingers spread, he counted, “We have a home. We have friends and will have more. We have a beautiful child. We can’t allow this sort of thing to go on, for her sake, if for no other reason.”

“That’s true.”

“Well then?”

She stood up and laid her head in the hollow of his shoulder. “I’m drifting. I’m floating with nothing to hold to.”

He put his arms around her and held her gently, as one holds a troubled child. “You have me to hold to.” He stroked her hair, the jaunty curls on the sad, bent head. “I wish I could make you feel the way you did when we used to ride around on house calls. Remember how we’d talk and talk? You had ideas about everything in the world.”

“I felt I was a part of things then. It’s different here. You’re gone all day, climbing up in the world, and I’m left out.”

“But this is what it was all for! It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“I know. I planned the whole thing, and at the start I was happy; I was! But now it’s all got complicated … I don’t make any sense, do I?”

“Well, plenty of people don’t make any sense. But you’ll climb out of the slump. I’ll pull you out of it. Now let’s hurry, shall we? How fast can you dress?”

“I don’t want to go tonight, Martin. Truly. You can go without me. I won’t mind. And I’ll be all right. Really.”

She expected him to stay with her, he knew. And, pity
or no, he felt suddenly perverse. He wasn’t angry, he wasn’t being stubborn; he was simply weary of yet another “scene.” Moreover, he had wanted to hear
Otello
.

“All right then. I’ll go,” he said. “Have a good sleep. You’ll feel different in the morning.”

The singers had taken their final bows, and the departing crowd moved slowly through the lobby. Alex Lamb touched Martin on the shoulder.

“Hello there! Where’s Jessie?”

“Didn’t feel up to par tonight. She went to bed early.”

“Come back to our place for a spot of supper. It’s my birthday and some friends are coming.”

“Well, I really ought—”

“Come on, you can spare an hour or two for your brother-in-law. Jessie must be asleep by now, anyway.”

The Lambs’ table was bright with iris and narcissi, flowery porcelain, laughter and wine. The women were so lovely! Even the older ones had a pearl glow, not from the candlelight, but from something within. And in Martin, too, a subtle warmth began to stir.

“Fern hasn’t been able to shake the cough.” Alex was speaking to someone at the far end of the table. “The children had it first, and it’s gone from one to the other. So I’m insisting she take a week on the Riviera to get over it.”

“You’re not going?”

“I can’t. There’s too much on the fire at the office. But she’ll be happy on the beach with a pile of books.”

A woman called, “That’s the most splendid necklace, Fern! I’ve been meaning to tell you all evening.”

Everyone turned to look at the necklace; a filigree of gold and garnets, it rested as in a velvet case on Fern’s naked shoulders; the heavy pendant lay on white silk between her breasts.

“Her present for my birthday,” Alex explained, with a smile of a fond husband.

Observing that smile and Mary’s answer, Martin felt, among all the converging streams of his emotions, a cur
rent of soft compassion. Of all the people in that room, he was almost surely the only one who knew their truth. How capricious, how reckless was life! Once he had seen it as a steady journey: for some a dull plod, for others a triumph, but in any case something with direction, that one
controlled
. He had, of course, been very young when he had thought so.

For nothing he had done or willed had brought him to where he was now. And where was he now? Quite simply, he was a man in love, a man obsessed with loving, filled with it, driven by it Something had forced him to love this woman from the first moment And never, in spite of all his self-denials, had he ceased to love her.

How was it possible? Who could say? It was, after all, the human condition! A natural phenomenon: a simple thing! But light and water were simple things, too, as long as one didn’t try to explain them.

And, sitting at that festive table, Martin had now a sense of total recall: the white room with her pictures on the wall; her face raised to his when he came in; that incredible blue gaze; the paint spot on the sandal. The moment, the arrested moment, in which everything had changed, although he had not known then how much.

But she? What of her? He had no way of knowing, dared not try to find out. And he thought of her, living her sham; he thought of Jessie—and he thought his head would burst with futile thinking. The warmth and sparkle seeped out of the room, seeped out of his spirit.

Someone was addressing him. “So you’ll be leaving us, going back to America, I hear?”

“Yes, soon,” he replied.

Someone remarked to Fern, “You’ll miss your sister.”

She made some acknowledgment. Glancing up at the sound, he caught her gaze. And a strange thing happened: she did not turn away. Eyes normally move toward the sound of voices; they come to rest on one face, then another; they flicker over a table and across a room. But hers did not. They fastened on Martin’s eyes and held there.

Talk bubbled around the circle as wine bubbles in a
glass; still the eyes held to each other. His—his heart was in his eyes, that’s all he knew. Hers—hers had such a look … He wanted to believe it, had to believe it Unmistakably it said: If you want me, I shall not refuse.

Wild, tremendous, reckless joy surged in him.

His right-hand neighbor, an agreeable, gray-haired lady, looked concerned. “Is anything wrong?”

“Wrong?” he repeated confusedly.

“You put your fork down so abruptly, I thought you weren’t feeling well.”

“No, no. I just remembered something, that’s all.”

“Well, as long as it was something happy,” she said brightly.

The talk kept on swirling. He did not hear it. At last people pushed their chairs back and left the table. Then someone put music on the record player. Dancing began in the hall.

From the arc of the bay window in the drawing room a balcony projected, a little space affording room for no more than two or three to stand and look down upon the square. Mary leaned against the railing. When he stepped behind her she did not move.

The square was still. It was late; distant traffic only murmured now, as distant water rushes in a country place, light globes hung among the trees like white balloons and a powerful scent of wet earth rose from the shrubbery.

“Who stole my heart away? Who—” The little tune floated with a poignant sweetness from the room at their backs.

In the tiny space among the potted plants their shoulders touched. Still neither of them moved. Someone inside turned a lamp on; the beam of its light fell over a blossoming azalea in a tub, turning the white buds rosy, the color of flesh.

“My God,” Martin said. He was shaking.

She looked at him.

“What are we going to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“We have to do something about it. Don’t you know that?”

“Don’t,” she whispered. “I’m starting to cry.
I
won’t be able to turn around if someone comes.”

He understood that tenderness would bring more tears. So he waited a minute or two and then spoke quickly.

“I’ll be in Paris at a conference next week.
I
can leave after the second day. Will you—”

“Yes … Yes.”

“Where will you be staying?”

“At the Georges Cinque …”

Voices passed and passed again in the room behind them. Still they stood, hostess and guest, looking out at the lovely night.

“Darling,” Martin said. It was the first time he had said the word aloud. “Darling Mary.”

They had six days. Eastward through the Provençal spring they drove, past olive orchards and round hills dressed in lavender. On cobbled squares they parked the rented car and drank cassis while old men played boules. They came down out of the hills to the sea on a morning when light showered from the sky and broke into a hundred thousand sapphires over the bay.

How beautiful, oh God, how beautiful!

And they came to a white town, to a house with tall, blue-shuttered windows, where the air smelled of lemons and everything glittered in the sun.

“We’re here,” Mary said. “Menton.” She laughed.

“ ‘Glücklich wie Gott in Frankreich.’ ”

“What does that mean?”

“It means ‘Happy as God in France.’ It’s one of the few things I still remember in German.”

“Do you remember enough French to ask for a good room?”

“We already have one.”

“Then shall we go upstairs right away?”

“Do you want to?”

“You know I do.”

Light, coming through the blinds, drew bars of dusty gold across her thighs. Outside it was still afternoon, but within the tall old room dusk had settled.

She made a little sound, an indrawn breath, part sigh, part cry. He turned in the bed and put his lips on the soft hollow where the sound had caught in her throat. His thudding heart had slowed; now it started up again. They had been lying in that sweet peace which follows ultimate attainment. Surely no other woman in the world, he
thought, had ever or could ever—Over and over they had dissolved and merged and become one. There were no words for it. All the millions of words that had been written came down to nothing.

In the evening, they sat and talked. They went back to the beginning.

“What did you really think, Mary? Didn’t you
know I
wanted you? Why didn’t you come home? Why did you marry Alex? Tell me. Tell me.”

“Oh,” she said, “what had I seen or known? I had never been touched by anyone. Yes, you touched me … I thought when I came back from Europe, we’ll see each other again and after a while—”

“But I was dying for you, Mary!”

“But your letter! You were so proud and glad about Doctor Albeniz—”

“You remember the name!”

“I remember everything. I understood then that your work would always come first. I thought perhaps I had imagined the other—about me. And I felt ashamed. Then that same week I met Alex.”

Martin was silent. Yes, of course she would have welcomed Alex then, with all his cheer and strength, with all the color and movement of the life he offered! Offered without postponement!

“I understand,” he said.

“Would your work really have come first, Martin? Would you have asked me to wait three years?”

He wanted to be completely honest, both with her and with himself. “I don’t know. I’ve thought about it, foolishly I suppose, asking myself whether you would have waited for me, whether I would have given up the offer if you hadn’t been willing to wait or what I would have done if my father hadn’t died. My God, what a tangle it was—and is!”