The Tight White Collar (13 page)

“Nothing, except that the whole town is convinced that he's your lover,” replied Polly.

“Well, he's not and he never will be,” said Lisa, almost shouting with anger. “And as far as getting talked about in Cooper Station, it seems to me that there was plenty of that going on before Anthony ever stepped a foot into this house.”

Polly shrugged. “I know how you feel,” she said, “but you have to remember how things look, too. Every single morning Anthony troops into Gage's store and comes out with a bag full of beer bottles, then he heads right for this place like a damned homing pigeon. What do you expect people to think?”

“What do you think?” asked Lisa very quietly.

“I don't care if you sleep with every broken down writer in the world,” said Polly angrily. “You're my friend. All I ask is that you take care a little.”

“Damn you!” cried Lisa. “I'm not sleeping with Anthony Cooper. I'm in love with my husband and believe me he's got more in bed than I could ever need or use. One man is too much for me, what the hell do you think I'd do with two of them?”

Polly sighed. “I know that,” she said. “You know it and I suppose Chris knows it. But I know Cooper Station, too, and all I'm saying is that you're getting yourself talked about.”

“Let them all talk,” said Lisa. “Let Doris Palmer get up a petition to have me run out of town while she's at it. I don't care anymore.”

“You're not doing Chris's cause any good, you know,” said Polly.

“To hell with Chris's cause,” said Lisa. “Ever since I've been old enough I've had to cope with Chris's causes. First the goddamned university, then a job that didn't pay any money, then West Farrington, then Marmington and now Doris Palmer and her lousy petition. It seems to me that I should be allowed something of my own once in a while.”

“And Anthony Cooper is it?”

“For as long as he wants to be bothered to come here and talk to me,” said Lisa. Then she added, “We don't even have conversations, Polly. He just sits and talks at me.”

Polly sighed again as she stood up to leave. “I was just trying to help,” she said. “I hope you're not going to be mad at me.”

“I'm not mad, Polly,” said Lisa. “And I'm glad you stopped by. Come tomorrow if you can.”

“Sure,” said Polly, “if I can.”

The next morning Anthony Cooper sat at Lisa's kitchen table holding his inevitable bottle of beer and talking about Bertrand Russell when all of a sudden Lisa looked down at his hands. They were long, slender-fingered hands, and with something that was almost a blow in her stomach Lisa began to wonder how they would feel against her bare skin. She stood up quickly and went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer. As she uncapped it, Anthony stopped talking.

“What's this?” he asked in exaggerated surprise. “I thought you never drank beer and especially in the morning.”

“I just feel like it today,” said Lisa curtly.

“Your hands are shaking,” observed Anthony.

“Well, so what?” demanded Lisa angrily. “I've seen yours shake plenty of times.”

“Yes, you have,” agreed Anthony. “But then I never get up without a hangover and I know damned well that you haven't got any such ailment as that.”

“Why don't you just shut up and go home?” cried Lisa and slammed her beer bottle down on the table.

Anthony got up slowly and stood looking down at her. Then he circled her body and put his hands under the curve of her buttocks.

“The first thing I ever noticed about you is the way your behind moves when you walk,” he said in the same conversational tone he used when he spoke of poets or philosophers. “There's sort of an up and down piston-like action to it that's the most exciting thing in the world.”

It was only when Lisa tried to move backward, away from him, that he tightened his hold on her and when he bent to kiss her he was smiling.

“Get out of here!” cried Lisa, breaking away from him. “Get away from me and don't ever come back.”

Anthony still smiled. “I'll be back,” he said.

“If you come back I won't let you in,” cried Lisa, “so just take your lousy beer and go drink it at your own house. Just don't come back here.”

But he was back the next morning and he acted as if nothing had happened between them. He opened his bottle of beer and began talking about how he had felt when he had finished writing his first novel.

“I imagine it was a little the way a woman must feel when she is finally delivered of a child after a long and painful labor,” he said.

Lisa tried to match his matter-of-fact attitude. “How would you be able to imagine such a thing?” she asked. “No man can possibly imagine what it's like.”

“Then tell me,” said Anthony and leaned back comfortably in his chair.

Lisa began to talk and too late she realized that she was speaking of one of the most intimate experiences a woman ever has and that the thought excited her and frightened her at the same time.

“I don't want to talk about it anymore,” she said abruptly.

“All right,” said Anthony agreeably and went back to talking about his novel.

But Lisa could not stop the trembling inside her and now when Anthony pulled her gently to her feet she leaned against him and let him hold her.

“That bad, huh?” he asked.

“No,” said Lisa. “Not really. I don't know what came over me. It wasn't all that bad and Dr. Cameron was wonderful to me.”

“Was he very gentle with you, my darling?” asked Anthony against her hair.

“Oh, yes,” said Lisa. “He was just wonderful. He kept trying not to hurt me. I could tell.”

Anthony began to caress her back. “You like to be gentled, don't you, baby?” he asked softly.

Lisa leaned her whole weight against him with a feeling of such relief that she almost sobbed.

“Oh, yes,” she sighed. “I love everything to be gentle and soft and nice.”

He undressed her with great care and even when he carried her into the bedroom he was very careful not to jar her or to set her down too quickly. He held her for a long moment against his chest and kissed her with soft, gentle kisses that clung to her mouth. His touch on her body was the lightest she could ever imagine and it awakened every single nerve under her skin until she quivered and almost cried out. Now he was stroking her with a gentle, feathery touch and he breathed softly into her ear.

“Come on, baby,” he whispered. “Come on, baby. Give it to me. Give it all to me.”

And then it was as if his hand were a magnet and she made of some resistless material that could not help but be drawn up tighter and tighter against his touch.

“I can't stop!” she cried out. “I can't stop.”

“Don't, baby,” he whispered. “Don't try. Come to me.”

She could feel the scream forming in her throat and still he would not stop and then it was too late.

He held her while she shivered afterwards and he kissed her cheek and her neck and smoothed back her hair.

“It was becoming too much,” he laughed against her mouth. “I mean all those poets and philosophers and ancient Greeks. Now I can teach you about love.”

He began to caress one of her breasts. “And I'll teach you, darling, I'll teach you everything.”

Practically everyone in Cooper Station took sides in the question of Christopher Pappas and for those who seemed to be hugging the middle of the road there were plenty of people to help convert them to one opinion or the other. Of course there were a few who started out on one side of the fence and then by strength of persuasion or force of out-and-out threat were soon convinced of the folly of their thinking. One of these was David Strong, who taught music appreciation at the Cooper Station high school and in addition gave private piano lessons at his home. David held out against the pressure of Doris Delaney Palmer's determination for almost a week and then he squeezed his temples in frustration and said,

“All right, Mrs. Palmer. All right. I'll sign your petition.”

“Believe me, Mr. Strong,” said Doris Palmer with her small smile, “you're doing the right thing. A man like you has stature in this community and I'm sure you'd never want it said that you approved of someone as undesirable as Christopher Pappas.”

David often thought later that he would perhaps have been stronger with Doris if she hadn't put her extra pressure on him on a Friday. Fridays were always bad for David because on that day he gave five piano lessons in a row and when he was finished his nerves screamed and his head pounded with the sound of piano keys being manipulated by inexpert fingers.

Still and all, thought David, Friday or not, I shouldn't have signed that petition. It's not right. I'm not that good a teacher myself that I should sit in judgment of another.

The courses in music appreciation which David taught at the Cooper Station high school were electives and he knew very well what most of the students thought and said.

“Snap course,” they told each other. “An easy two credits.”

They soon learned differently, though, thought David in satisfaction.

His examinations in music appreciation were no snap.

Then they swore. “Jesus! I took the damned thing for an easy two credits and now I'm flunking that lousy course!”

Clods, thought David. Each and every one of them, clods. They were almost as bad as the nitwits who took piano lessons. Almost, but not quite. Nobody could possibly be as bad as the frizzy-haired girls who looked at him with moist eyes and said, “Oh, Mr. Strong. How long do you think it'll be before I'll be able to play something pretty like ‘The Maiden's Prayer' or ‘The Lost Chord'?” or the greasy-faced boys who had mothers who insisted that their darlings were loaded with talent and who said to David, “Look, Professor, I don't like this any more than you do but it's the only way I can get my allowance every week and you're getting paid, so let's get it over with.” No, thought David with a small shudder, nobody could be as bad as the ones who took piano lessons.

But perhaps it was because he wasn't much of a teacher that he had so much trouble while Pappas, he had heard, was a very good teacher who not only loved his work but who could instill the desire to learn in young people.

I shouldn't have signed that petition, thought David again. I'm nobody to hold a man's mistakes against him. I've made too many myself.

Then he gave himself a severe mental shake. Stop it, he commanded himself. It's Friday. No more piano lessons until Monday and tonight Mark is coming to visit. I've got to get busy and clean up this place. It looks like a sty. Damn it, right or wrong, I have to think of myself once in a while. Mrs. Palmer is a big influence in education here and if I hadn't signed her petition she might hold up my contract for next year. It isn't as if one name more or less were going to change things.

David began to move about, picking up things and straightening out what he called his studio.

But still, he thought, it wasn't right.

David Strong lived in a house owned by a woman named Valerie Rutgers on the northeast edge of Cooper Station. He lived there because he had a passion for Victorian architecture and Mrs. Rutger's house, which was painted dark red and trimmed with white gingerbread, was just about as Victorian as a house could be. It had a large, round room leading off the second floor and Val Rutgers called this room the tower while David, who rented it from her, called it the studio. Under the street-side windows in his room, David had a wide couch upholstered in dark-green raw silk and decorated with many small satin-covered pillows. He had a large refectory table in the center of the room on which he kept copies of music and theatre magazines and two small brass ashtrays, while the opposite side of the room was completely taken up with his Steinway concert grand piano, a gift from his father on the occasion of David's graduation from the Cincinnati Conservatory. On the wall over the piano were two small water colors which had been done by a friend of David's in Paris. The studio also held a glass-topped coffee table, three armchairs covered in chintz, a Capehart radio phonograph, a small, red leatherette bar with shelves of bottles behind it and a fireplace with two brass candlesticks on the mantle and a pen-and-ink sketch of David on the wall above.

“He's got more junk in that room than a secondhand shop,” Val Rutgers often told her friends. “But I'll say one thing for Mr. Strong. He keeps the place up good. Neat as a pin, he is.”

And sometimes David himself waved a deprecating hand around the studio and said, “We're a little cluttered here, but cozy, and that's what really counts.”

There were some people in Cooper Station who thought that David Strong was a little peculiar. After all, it wasn't natural for a man to wear cologne or to polish his fingernails, even if he did use colorless polish, or to be so finicky about his food.

“Peculiar, hell!” said others, who were not so kind. “That guy's a fairy if I ever saw one.”

“You're crazy,” said David's defenders. “He's been living here in town since right after the war, and nobody ever heard of him doing anything out of the way.”

“I'll vouch for that,” said someone else in mincing exaggeration. “Heaven only knows, I've given him every chance in the world and he never tried anything fresh with me.”

“Maybe you're just not his type, sweetness.”

“Oh, stop that, you!”

“Well, I don't care what none of you say. As long as he keeps his hands on the piano and off anyone in Cooper Station, I say he's all right.”

“You'll see!”

“And as far as that goes, it seems to me I heard a saying once. It takes one to know one.”

David, of course, knew that he was different from other people. His own mother had told him so many times, whenever anyone had laughed at him.

“Whenever people laugh at anyone, David,” Mrs. Strong had said, “it's only to cover their own wicked envy of that person. Do not be disturbed, my dear. Just put your faith in God and everything will come your way.”

So David knew that the people who ridiculed him were just so many boors and he went right on being careful of what he wore, how he smelled and what he ate. As far as eating went, he had to watch his diet because he had a nervous stomach. Even the army doctors had admitted that when they classified him for limited service only during the war.

David enjoyed the years he spent stationed at an air force base in Brazil. As a second lieutenant in charge of a special service group, it was his job to plan entertainment for the troops and to stage productions for the officers' club. It was warm in Brazil and David had developed a taste for South American music and had learned a smattering of Spanish and Portuguese. He also met people who understood him and he didn't want to come back to the United States when he was demobilized. But he came back, and, as he often told himself, here he was stuck in Cooper Station, a town with a complete disinterest in culture, and his nervous stomach had turned into a vicious case of ulcers. He knew he had ulcers even though that damned Jess Cameron argued that he hadn't.

“The x-rays show that you don't have a sign of an ulcer,” Jess had told him. “But I warn you, if you keep on the way you're going, you soon will have. Is there something bothering you, David? I mean, something other than this constant worry about your stomach?”

“Please, Jess,” David laughed and put up a protesting hand. “Don't try your psychosomatic theories on me. If you don't know what to do for me, just say so, and I'll find someone who does know.”

His remark hadn't fazed Jess Cameron in the least. The doctor continued his insistent prying until David lost his temper completely and stamped out of Jess's office in an absolute rage. Jess didn't understand him any more than did anyone else in Cooper Station.

But even in a community as drab and rustic as this one, David was sometimes lucky enough to run across someone who was different, someone who did understand him. Someone like Mark Griffin. Mark had known instinctively how to talk to a sensitive soul like David.

“It's so peaceful here in your ivory tower, David,” Mark said. “When you play things like that fugue, Davy, all the tenseness in me just flies away.”

And David could talk to Mark. He could tell Mark anything and everything. Well, just about anything and everything. There were some things he would never tell anyone in spite of Jess Cameron and his nosiness.

“The smart thing to do, David,” Jess had said, “if something is bothering you, is to get it off your chest.”

“For heaven's sake, Jess, don't be so damned Freudian. The next thing I know, you'll be asking me about my sex life!”

“What about your sex life, David?” Jess had looked sharply at him. “Is that what's bothering you?”

“Well,
really
!”

“David, let me help you. I can't do anything for you if you won't let me.”

“The only things you can do for me, Jess, are to give me something for my stomach and then leave me to hell alone. I don't need anyone to go about prying into my past to find out whether or not I had a wretched childhood and the effect this has had on me. When I feel the need, Jess, of a couch and a psychiatrist, I'll go out and find one.”

And again David strode out of Jess's office in anger. He had read a little psychology himself, he thought angrily, and he certainly didn't need anyone like Jess Cameron to tell him that his childhood had been completely miserable. David just thanked God that he had been intelligent enough to rise above the influence of his parents. But sometimes, even now, his stomach knotted itself when he remembered how it had been.

David's father, Alan Strong, was a black-haired, black-browed giant of a man who had made a fortune with his acres of virgin pine in the state of Maine. When he started he had dealt in lumber exclusively and had built a small paper plant as a side line, but as the years went by and lumbering in Maine became an industry of the past, the Strong Paper Products Company grew and spread. Alan Strong closed his sawmills and devoted himself to paper. He manufactured paper towels, cups, napkins, plates and other such small items and he grew enormously wealthy, but his greatest pride always remained the fact that he had started with nothing but a handsaw and the tall pine of Maine. He had always pushed the paper angle, though, and in the old days he used to go out to solicit orders himself and as he prospered he found himself going as far south as Boston to see prospective customers. That was how he met Julia Bancroft. He happened, one day, onto a small printing shop in Stuart Street and in the absence of the owner, Harold Bancroft, Alan spoke to Bancroft's daughter, Julia. As he spoke he watched the color come and go in her pale cheeks and noticed the softness of her brown hair piled high on her head. He never saw the thinness of her lips nor the almost gaunt look of her cheekbones. He went back home but suddenly all the fun was gone from his life.

Alan Strong had been in the habit of going into town on Saturday nights with his men where he drank with the best of them and spent the hours after the saloons closed with one of the painted women who hung around the hotels during the logging season. It was his boast that he could make any whore alive yell “Uncle” before he was through with her and when this pleasure, too, lost its savor, Alan was surprised, worried and upset. The only time he seemed able to work up any enthusiasm about anything was just before he went to Boston on a selling trip. It took him three months to discover that what he wanted was a good woman to manage his house, bear his children and look after him. And then he began to court Julia Bancroft in earnest. He plied her with candy and flowers and loaned money to her father when the print shop seemed on the verge of bankruptcy. Gentleness settled in him for the first time when he noticed how tiny Julia's waist was. There were times, of course, when he wanted to plunge his hands into the wavy, brown mass of Julia's hair and kiss her until she became aware of the heat in him, but he controlled himself.

They were married in Boston and after a two-week trip to New York and Philadelphia, Alan brought his bride home to Berlinton. Within a month he realized that he had made the one big mistake of his life. At first, he had accepted Julia's reluctance as natural for a virgin, but before the month was gone, he knew that he was married to a frigid stick of a woman who resented her marriage to an ignorant brute of a man who had dragged her from civilization to a wilderness of brawling men and loose women.

“If I had known then what I know now,” was Julia's favorite prefacing remark.

“I thank God that my poor mother cannot see me now,” said Julia damply.

“Filthy drunkard!” shouted Julia.

“Beast!” cried Julia on many a Saturday night.

They had been married for three years when David was born. During Julia's pregnancy she almost went out of her mind and drove Alan out of his, but when her time finally came, she kept him at her side during her entire labor. She clung to his hands with a fantastically strong grip and she screamed in terror when he tried to leave her. Alan saw his son born and he swore that he would never again be compelled to watch such a procedure. He never had sexual relations with Julia after that, and although she was thankful for this at first, there grew in her a terrible anger that she should be so ignored. She devoted the rest of her life to her son, David, and to the task of purging the father's blood from the veins of the boy. Toward her husband she maintained a cold courtesy and she called him Mr. Strong to the end of her days.