Stolen Pleasures (24 page)

A candle. The candle she'd been looking for was on the table in plain sight, an average one, white, flickering away as candles do, showing her the plates and glasses and paint tubes around it, the clothes on the chair, his orange nude against the wall, Molière's plays on the bed, the covers over the sleeping man beside her and over herself, not alone and yet alone. If she were to take that candle up to the ward, a light for any woman leaving at any time, even when she herself wouldn't be there anymore, would that be going too far? An actress, carried away by her role?

Once again, Dan was bidding her a good morning. She heard his voice along the ceiling of the ward as she went up one aisle and down another, carrying the white candle in its wooden holder. In the ward's daylight its tip of flame was probably not discernible by the women at a distance, but surely they knew the candle was lit and the women who were closest to it knew.

At her back now, Nurse Nancy. “What's this all about?”

“The Gypsy woman,” said Angela. “Her children asked me to bring a candle.”

“That was yesterday,” said Nurse Nancy, the only nurse with gray hair and whose step was flat, wearier than the other nurses' steps. “They've got their own to-do, whatever they do. They've got their own candles.” Searching Angela's eyes to see if this act confirmed a strangeness within.

“I thought the women might appreciate it,” said Angela.

“The other ladies don't know she's gone. They've got their own problems.”

And Nurse Nancy blew out the flame, with a breath that failed to be strong and unwavering but did the job anyway.

Lightly, then, a touch at Angela's elbow and a touch at her back, touches to assist her to stay on her feet and to point her in the right direction. Or were they touches of complicity?

O
N THE WEEDY floor of the valley lie the mud-brown matchboxes, each a row of ten rooms under one flat roof, and a narrow wooden porch runs the length of it, each man's porch his neighbors also. Four boxes face each other to form a square, the earth of it hard as rock in summer, rutty with holes in the rain, and the many boxes and their squares are a maze that covers the valley. A few small trees, straggling lines of them hardly as high as the low dwellings, prettify the roads that intersect the project. Sometimes a loud, topheavy flickering and haggling of sparrows make a tree's presence known, or they make themselves known in the spring by their sun-green foliage, but for most of the year they are lost in the barren scene, under them stripped cars rusting or new ones, red and pink and blue-jay blue, reflecting the sun in their chrome.

The hills rise around three sides of the valley and thick upon them are more dwellings, but up here the houses are in pairs, family houses, standing back to back, and crowding in upon the highest of them are groves of oak and eucalyptus and madrona. Up here,
the tenants can see the islands and the bay, can see, across a narrow inlet, brown hills casting brown reflections and the white egrets standing on their matchstick legs in the shallows; can see, farther out, the high cliffs of Belvedere with the raw, flesh-colored frames of the new houses hanging out over the water; can see the traffic on the highway that runs past the project—the huge trucks with their names read half a mile away and the cars swerving around the trucks on the long climb up to the bridge.

On Sunday, the men who dig the earth for the foundations of the houses all over the county, pour the concrete, carry the lumber on their shoulders, light the early morning fires for the carpenters to warm their hands by, on Sunday, some of them, some of the younger ones, lounge in their cars way up on the rim of the project. They sit in their cars and drink from beer cans and bottles, and their high-low laughter, their richly loud voices sound among the trees behind them, along with the fall of the cans on the carpet of wrinkled pods and acorns. They sit up here and survey all.

Their women are left to themselves. They do their household tasks as they do on weekdays; they go to church in the morning, and in the afternoon they visit next door, an hour or so over a beer, with the door open onto the common porch, a rock for a doorstop, to let out the heat from the room and the smell of mustard greens and the kerosene that feeds the stove, and then they go back and lie down on their beds and nap, and the sweat breaks out in rings around their eyes. In the hot weather there is no current of air, and in the cold, the high, capricious heat is piped along above the ceiling, all along the rooms. This Sunday abandonment happened to Myra Hall, young as she was, comely as she was, slender and tall,
with her head high and her eyes always down, her skin the color of the madrona tree when the bark peels away, and as smooth.

It began at the end of the first year of their marriage. Before that, she and Lionel did things together on Sunday. They drove up to visit his brother's family on the outskirts of Petaluma, spending the day there, and when they walked around the yard, holding hands, she would scuffle up red chicken feathers with the toes of her high-heeled sandals. She was a city-bred girl, born in San Francisco and never away from there in her nineteen years. The country delighted her, and sometimes, because she liked to see her hands clutching his shirt, she exaggerated her response to a garter snake, a tomato worm, a spider with a body like a cherry. On other Sundays they went fishing in Sausalito, out on the old ferry slip, picnicking on fried chicken and pie. All around them the seagulls sat on pilings or walked close on the planks to see what was to be done with the bait and the fish. The seawater thudded and smacked around the old timbers, and far across the water the white fog blew in, its feathery edges melting in the sun and the shining towers of the city floating above it; and once in a while he would duck his head and kiss her nipple, take sweater and nipple into his mouth, and her eyes would narrow down and all she could see was a long glitter, like a glittering wave. Or they stayed in their room all Sunday, the door still locked from the night and the green blinds down and the lace curtains closed, and while people passed along the wooden porch and cars pulled in and out of the lot and dogs tumbled and growled together against the door and a mixed-up cat meowed at the crack and the heavy, dusty Sunday weighed down upon all the flat roofs, they stayed in there to love. With the covers thrown down at the
foot of the bed, they slept. They took turns fixing something to eat, and when she stood in her dark nakedness by the stove he would say, “Come here, come back, forget that.” All those Sundays belonged to the first year; then he began to go out without her.

Along about eleven o'clock in the morning, as she was washing dishes in the narrow kitchen that was filled with the smell of bacon and shaving soap, he would open the door and go out into the coming noon, and she never knew where he was going. He didn't know himself, he said, “So how can I tell
you,
woman?” She swore at him when he left and when he returned, and if she was out to a movie or visiting a girlfriend and returned and found him playing solitaire or already in bed, she swore at him then. He would tell her where he had been, with this fellow or that one, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to be with his men friends all day Sunday.

When she got pregnant, unable to express to him the secret pleasures of the experience and, in a way, not wanting to, she fell silent, was sullenly, spiritedly silent, hoping that the pleasureless part of it, the leaning over the toilet bowl and the shuddering return to bed, would rouse his love. But he seemed to think that her bearing a child was the most natural thing in the world and undeserving of his attention. In the early months she almost miscarried. Opal came in from two doors down the porch and did her chores for her; she said, “You cry, you fidget so much, no wonder you gonna lose that baby. You as itchy as a worm in hot ashes,” and left her alone. She lay in the dimmed room with nothing upon its partition walls but a sky-blue placard with gilt letters,
God Bless Our Home,
left by tenants before them. A salmon-pink upholstered chair, a coffee
table, a kitchen table, and the bed on which she lay, a bed with its dark green spread—a room both crowded and bare. The windows were closed against the strong winds that came after hot weather, the blind clicking in the stream of wind that came in through a crack. She lay alone in the room between two other rooms, the one on the west side burnt out, its tattered green blinds hanging at the paneless windows—months ago a kerosene stove had exploded, and the black, damp wood was still like pepper in the nostrils—and the other, an old couple's room, the man lying all day on a sofa by the door, his long, handsome body in soft and clean, yellowy long underwear, tended by his woman with her Old South kerchief on her head that was bent over the Bible she read to him or the bowl of food she fed him. She heard the cindery silence on the one side and the celled-in voices on the other, and remembered a sleepwalking night that Lionel had told her about, laughing, a night that had happened to him when he was a boy on his father's farm near Baton Rouge. He had killed a cricket, and that night the cricket was on him; he had walked in his sleep and seen rabbits swarming up out of the well and woke up out there bawling for his mother. But nothing was on his conscience now for stepping on a woman.

When the cramps weighed like an iron inside her, she went out to the green telephone booth standing like a sentry box by the road and phoned the clinic in the city. “Go back to bed,” her doctor commanded, “and stay there,” and she hung up without asking him about the other method of saving babies she had heard about—they gave the woman a hypo or something—and found her way back, a clothesline making a welt across her face. A colored baby was dirt to them, those smoothy doctors. They didn't care whether a colored
baby got born or not. When she went again to the clinic, as she did each month, and told the doctor that she had almost lost the baby, he said to her, “Calm down or we'll tie you down to a bed here and keep you down until delivery,” and for a while, there in the examination room, in the reception room as she went out past the rows of waiting women, and part of the way home on the bus, she believed that they could do that to her, keep her prisoner because she could not calm herself.

One evening, as she stood by the stove, stirring up potatoes in the frying pan, her hand with the spatula in it was stopped by his slowing down as he took off his jacket; she sensed from his slowness that he was
seeing
her. “Maybe you better refuse them jobs,” he said. “You don't want to be losing it. What you about now?”

She was struck by his concern as by a blow. She spread her hand over her rounding belly, closed her eyes, threw back her head and began to wail with the desire to be close to him again. She stepped to him and clasped his body around, and he, after a moment of surprise, put his jacket on the table and began to stroke her back, but it took a long time before she felt his hands upon her. While he showered, she sat on the toilet lid, and when he stepped from the stall, drying himself with his army towel, she caressed him to prevent his returning again to ignorance of her.

Confined by her behavior, he stayed home that evening. With a small comment about her condition he had triggered an avalanche of affection and he was pinned beneath it. He carried himself cautiously, stiffly, his eyes glancing away from hers. At eight o'clock a friend of his rapped at the door, and he invited him in, a fellow with a loud body and face but no voice. Myra sat at the table with
them while they drank their beer, her eyelids stretched far down over her shifting green eyes that rounded out the lids in the way her pregnancy rounded out her breasts and belly. Only Lionel talked, rubbing and crossing his legs as he told a funny story. The visit was short, but somewhere in the midst of it Lionel slipped out from under her mood. He went out on the porch to say good-bye to his friend, and Myra, still at the table, heard their voices rising released into the night. Just at the moment when she thought he would enter the room again, she heard his voice farther out in the parking lot. For an hour he sat in his friend's car, and when he returned she knew by his face, which was remembering banter, remembering gossip, remembering the clues given him to future joys, that she was again only in the margin of his sight. She sat with her forearms out upon the table, catlike, watching him sit himself down on the big chair's edge and riffle the cards for solitaire on the coffee table. She knew in her heart that he had no other woman, but she also knew that he might have one soon. His return to the company of men stirred up in him the need of pursuit again, and the woman would be somebody else's wife, someone whose husband was in the army or away in Alaska working in the canneries, because having himself a married woman was the next step above having himself a girl. And she knew the way he'd treat that woman, because she'd seen it done by other men:
You can cling to me all you want, woman, hold me around with your arms and your thighs, but I ain't yours, I ain't nobody's,
a way that would drive that silly woman crazy, whoever she was. She crawled into bed with her dress on.