Three Short Novels (11 page)

While he put on his clothes, she waited for him in the yard, and they walked for miles along the highway, past motels and cabins and streams. Not only the exercise but the immense, vertical, judicial monotony of the forest was tiring. She saw the forest as austere and disinterested, but she knew that, if they were to rest again among the trees, the judicial aspect would dissolve within the heat and the silence.

On the way back they ate supper at a small restaurant in another motel, sitting at a green Formica table; then they returned to their cabin and lay down on their beds, flat on their backs, with their dusty shoes still on. The air was cool with the onset of evening and the yard light in the trees began to filter into the room as the twilight deepened. He slipped off her sandals and tucked around her feet the Indian blanket that lay folded at the foot of the bed. After taking off his shoes he lay down again on his bed, watching her. In the yard a group of guests were talking together. She knew by their voices and laughter who they were—provincials, churchgoers, probably off a tour bus.

“Sounds like a bunch of fools,” she said. She sat up, lit a cigarette, and, leaning back against the wall, with the red glass ashtray on her lifted knees, she comically mimicked the voices, the cackling laughter, attempting to destroy the importance of the ones who saw no
reason within the unreasonable and who never forgave an aberration. But she knew that her ridicule would fail if only because she wanted it to fail. She wanted those densely stolid persons out in the yard to interfere. They were judges, a convocation of judges.

David lay gazing at her, absorbed by the suspect interplay of her low voice with their loud ones. When the group wandered away, she got up, covered him with a blanket, then lay down again under her own blanket. Later in the night she heard him undressing in the dark and lying down again. A wind was rising, rattling twigs against the roof, and she fell asleep within the mingling of darkness and wind and trees.

17

T
hey returned to the city in the morning and found the house unlocked and all her husband's belongings gone. He had taken nothing more than his personal possessions—his clothes and his papers and his few books on real estate and his skis, but all that was left, everything that belonged to the house and to her, was less, as if most of the intrinsic value was gone. After a few days, this devaluation of the objects passed and she began to cherish each one as if each were proof of her attempt to build a sound and lasting marriage. She polished silver, fine wood, and brass, and when everything was polished and the settlement arrived at—after hours in her attorney's office haggling with Russell's attorney—and the house and its furnishings hers and the divorce filed, she was again alienated from the house. Each time a man was gone from her life she felt that the time with him had deprived her of all sorts of possibilities with another, with others. She felt that she had forfeited another kind of life for herself.

In the fall David began his first year in high school. Often he did not return home until a few minutes before supper, and after supper
he wandered out again. She began going out to parties, as much to be with her friends as to avoid her son's avoidance of her, and sometimes she was the last to leave a party, coming home in the early morning.

With her cousin Teresa she opened a shop where imported craft was sold—brassware from India, sweaters from Sweden, glass from Mexico, something from almost everywhere. The shop was located in a block of other small, high-class shops—a florist and an interior decorator and a designer of chic maternity clothes. Sitting in a crimson sling chair all day, reading paperbacks, she was more bored than she had ever been in her life. With a graceful gliding down of her hands to pick up an object for a customer, with a graceful cupping of the object, stroking it as if it were alive, she attempted to engross herself in the shop, in the objects tinkling and glittering, fragile, transparent, iridescent, gilded. But the attempt failed, and she sold her interest and looked for another occupation to keep her away from the house and to engage her.

She served as a volunteer saleswoman in a shop operated by the young matrons' league to which she belonged; clothes discarded by wealthy women were sold there at very low prices and the proceeds given over to charity. The hours dragged while she fended off, with her cigarettes and mint chocolates, the stale smell of the place, of the dry-cleaned clothes mixed with the smell of shop dust. One afternoon, alone, she found the staleness unbearable. The staleness had got into the nice, clean garments that hung in rows under discarded prints of van Gogh and Currier & Ives and Chagall, also for sale; the staleness was in the shoes, worn to the shape of the past owners' feet and whitened or blackened, and with new rubber heels; the staleness was in the thin carpet whose colors and pattern were worn down to a drab gray; it was in the table on which her elbows rested, the scars evident under the coat of chartreuse paint. It seemed to her that the staleness had been present in the garments even while they were being worn by whoever had bought them first, and that it was
present in everything that covered the body or decorated the house because, soon enough, the dress and the vase and the rug and the necklace would all belong to the past. A light, cold rain was falling; the Chinese paper lantern with its silk tasseled cord, hanging from the ceiling, shook a little, and the wind suddenly banged against the door with the weight of a falling body. She put on her raincoat and locked the door.

By taxi she went up the hill to the Mark Hopkins hotel and, after ordering a drink in the bar off the lobby, she telephoned the man she had spent the night with two nights before, a married man who kept an apartment of his own as a condition for remaining with his wife and two children. She wanted desperately to lie with him in the afternoon while others were at work, while others engaged in their acts of charity, while everything went on that always went on. She required his need of her in an hour when he ought to be engaged in something else, in whatever was the protocol, the ritual, the complexity of his occupation; she required the certainty that she had persuaded him to come to her for that hour and to postpone all else.

“So I ran out,” she said, leaning back against the wall of the booth, her voice down low in her throat, her mouth close against the phone. “Let me tell you I couldn't get out of that smelly place fast enough. I felt like I was smothered.”

“Listen, Viv,” he interrupted. “I'm snowed under here.”

“Me too, me too. Nicky, love, I know just how you feel.” She was unable to let him go, unable to get set for the plunge down into panic. “Listen, can you drop everything for a minute and come up here? I mean we can go and sit at the top, if you want, and watch the rain come down on the roofs way down beneath us. Don't you think that'd be exciting?”

“I can't,” he said, his voice impersonal suddenly. “I'd love to, but I can't.”

“Well, if you'd
love
to, you've got to do it,” she said. “Think of all
the opportunities you've had in your life to do the things you'd love to do and didn't do. I met a man the other night whose brother just threw everything over and went to Tahiti. Thriving, really, a canning executive, just like you, only in St. Louis, can't remember, or Iowa, and never came back. Got six mistresses over there, no seven, and all that beautiful scenery. If you'd try and make a list of all the things you let yourself miss, you couldn't, you'd break right down and cry. Go on, start making your list. You don't have to write it down, just make it in your head. Go on.” She gave him a few seconds and felt the loss of the hour, of the man, of whatever value she wanted him to impart to her with his acquiescent desire. “Listen, if you don't want a drink, you might want to do something else,” she said, afraid that he had not understood the reason for her call. “You might want a different kind of break in the middle of the day. You want to go up to your place? You want to meet me there?”—trying with her husky voice, with the murmurous volition of her voice, to convince him of his need of her at that hour.

“There's nothing I'd like better,” he said. “But there's nothing I can do about it.”

“Nicky, baby. Baby, you there?” she pleaded, her voice like her voice in his ear or over his body.

“Viv,” he begged.

“Listen, baby, I'll die if you don't,” she said. “I'll pass out in the lobby here. That's what they pass out from, those women you see passing out in lobbies. They tell you—I mean when they're carried off and revived—they tell you they just had a tooth extracted or they ate something, but they're lying. They die of what you're doing to me.”

“Viv, where are you?” he asked, when she was silent.

“You haven't been listening. The first thing I said to you,” she reminded him, “was, ‘Nicky, baby, I'm at the Mark.' ”

“You want a taxi home?” he asked. “I'll call you a taxi to take you home.”

“Nobody was ever so good to me!” she cried. “Like sit way over in his office and call me a taxi way over here. God, you have no idea what that means to me. Nobody ever.”

“Viv, come off it,” he begged.

“You know what I think of a man who puts a woman in a taxi? I don't care whether he's right there on the curb or a mile away. The man who puts a woman in a taxi and turns around and walks the other way has got no intimation of what's going to become of her. He doesn't know and he doesn't care. That's what I think of a man who calls you a taxi.”

“Vivian, for the love of God, hang up,” he pleaded. “So I don't have to hang up on you.”

“Say uncle,” she said.

“Oh God—uncle.”

She went back to her table in the bar and sat very erect on the banquette, flushed with shame. She lived, as she had learned a long time ago, by delusion and desperation, but there was nobody worth the agony, no man, not even God, nobody worth the desperation to entice and to impress, nobody worth the delusion that she was invaluable to him and he invaluable to her. She ordered another drink, caressing the back of the waiter's hand when he set it down before her. They were friends, she knew him by name, and she knew he was prepared, if she glanced up, to wink at her consolingly. When the glass was empty, she put on her raincoat with the waiter's help and went out through the lobby to where the taxis came in under the canopy.

She called to her son from the doorstep, her harsh voice grating her throat. She had no idea of what she would do with her anger if he were home; perhaps strike him across the back as she had done that once when he was a small child, strike him with her fists while he hung his head, unwilling to prevent her because he knew why she was
striking him. She called to him again when she entered the house.

David came from the kitchen, another boy behind him, both young faces apprehensive.

“Ah, you've got friends!”

“We're cooking supper,” he said. “I thought you weren't coming home.”

“Am I invited?” She looked past him to his friend, who stood with his thumbs hooked in his pockets, a boy who knew something about her, something told him by David. In his eyes, in his face was his expectation of her as an exciting woman, a woman who had lovers. She was pleased with that expectation, enjoying and deprecating with her own glance his germinal knowledge of her.

“Well, don't we introduce people around here?” She threw her raincoat over a chair in the kitchen, and, learning his name, she shook hands with the boy. He peeled off his sweater, wanting to hide his face from her for the few seconds the sweater went up over his head.

She ate the fried eggs and ham with more gusto than they, sitting indolently sideways at the table so that her crossed legs were around the corner from the boy, almost under his elbow; enjoying his appreciation of her as a woman who complimented him with her nearness, gauche as he was, adolescent as he was. None of the desperation remained from her encounter on the telephone, for in the presence of a stranger her desperation gave way to a charming vivacity. She laughed at the friend's jokes, told in a voice cracked with change and timidity. Then, carried away by her exuberant response to him, he told her a joke that was a joke boys kept among themselves, and she laughed so heartily that she had to hold her head in her hands, elated for that moment by his sight of her as a beautiful, laughing woman who knew boundless more than he did about the joke's meaning.

The friend was the same age as David, fifteen, perhaps a few months older, and with a remarkable symmetry of features. She could, she thought, introduce him to his manhood. She could leave
her impression upon him for the rest of his life; she had only to ask him to return. But the boy was not desirable; he was desirable only in a brief fantasy because the fantasy was desirable, animating her body and alleviating the burden of her son's sulking face, that face more beautiful than any face in the world, that face deserted, left out from her involvement with his friend and sensing why it was left out.

She took up her raincoat, slinging it over one shoulder, and, as she went around the table to the door, she trailed her hand across the friend's shoulders and her son's, her touchan endorsement of their friendship that she had not intruded upon but had only fortified—she, the young mother who knew their yearnings more than other women, other mothers.

18

S
he brought into her home her father's friend, Max Laurie. Years ago he had played the hero's accomplice or confidant, roles that called for an actor of ambiguous looks, either handsome or homely in an attractive, manly way. She remembered him in the movies as having great, dark eyes, a broad face, and a forehead made low by the bangs of black hair; now he was in his fifties, his hair gray, his body smaller. He had been an actor with a name, and he had lost most of his money to three wives and two children. She knew that in his youth he had been virile, that he had basked in women's flirting, and that his grateful surprise with their flirting had endeared him to them. The night she had first met him, years ago during the war—when he had come into the lounge with her father, her father's mistress, and the actress in furs, the night of the day Roosevelt had died—she had been attracted to him. And after he moved up to San Francisco, she had been attracted again whenever she had met him in the company of her father or of some divorced socialite.