Three Short Novels (6 page)

“Listen, there's going to be big things in Japan,” he told her. “Got to start their exports going, got to help them rebuild. I'm going over and take a look around. You want to fly over with me?”

The invitation to go with him to Japan was an intimation of something more, a return to the zenith, even a promise that she was to be his wife; it served for several months as proof of the constancy of their love. Then he left without her, promising to take her along the next time, explaining that this time was to be for a minimum of days.

She drove him to the airport, and as they stood together in the corridor he said to her, to the crown of her head as she was fingering the buttons of his overcoat, “You know why we're crazy about each other? It's because we're apart so much. If we go on like this, it'll go down in history, won't it? With those great passions? If we lived together, some of that crazy wildness might get lost, and I don't want to lose a fraction of it. We've got something I don't think anybody else ever had.”

She looked down at him crossing the ground to the plane, ready to wave should he look up at her in the window of the waiting room. He seemed a man designated to bring about a prosperous future for all concerned, and his stride appeared so quick and purposeful she wondered if he might always be worried about missteps. The morning wind was flapping his trouser legs and lifting his white hair in tufts. He bent his head to enter the plane, a habitual bowing in doorways that were high enough.

When he disappeared into the plane, she was seized by fear, convinced
the plane was to fall from the sky, plunging into the ocean. Out in the parking lot, trapped in the roar of planes flying in low and planes rising and vanishing into the high fog, she asked herself if she would want him to die rather than leave her willfully. Then she wondered how much she loved him or if she loved him at all, if such a question could cross her mind. Dismayed by her own mind, she wandered the parking lot, lost, unable to recognize her own car.

9

O
n the way to her room, at midnight, she entered her son's room. The window was up a few inches and a cold wind was stirring the curtains. Out on the bay the foghorns were sounding, expectantly repetitive, like a deep-spoken word. She sat on the edge of his bed, shivering in her negligee, watching him, his face plump with sleep, his arms flung above his head. If now, at the end of the affair, she doubted that she had loved, if her life was spent in seeking and pleasing some man, if her life was spent in need of his need of her, was love nothing but desperation passing for love? Was the only love that was not a delusion her love for her son?

The confusion, the terror she had experienced out at the airport returned and she began to weep, wanting to waken him with her weeping, wanting him to come up out of sleep to a consciousness of her. She lay down on his bed, facing him, facing his small, awake, alarmed face. After a time, realizing, perhaps, that her weeping was not caused by him, was not his fault, he began to stroke her hair and her cheek. Her love for him was not a delusion. He was the person in whom reality was posited; he was abiding, he was constant. Since
the room was cold and she was lying on top of the blankets, he threw the top quilt over her, smoothing it around her so that it formed a cocoon, and she slept that way for a time.

Olga had left them, returning to Idaho some months before, and Vivian, rising early in the morning, went down to prepare breakfast for her son. After she had called him several times, he came down, still in his pajamas, and she saw his sullen resistance to her, a stubborn contesting with her, as if too much had been exacted of him the night before. He sat at breakfast with his eyes down, and when she asked him if he were going to school in his pajamas, he told her he was not going that day. When she tried to tug him upstairs to dress, he went limp, and, unable to drag him, she left him there, a small figure in blue and white striped pajamas, lying on the stairs. He remained all day in his room in his pajamas, coming down for his meals and going up again and closing his door.

The following morning she forced him out of bed by pulling down the covers and dressing him herself. He ate his breakfast and permitted her to slip his yellow raincoat over his back and over his limp arms and jerk the hood of it over his head. In the moment before she thrust him out the front door, she saw his small face, smaller within the yellow hood and paler in the gray light of outdoors, gaze out with a failing of his resistance to her, enthralled for that moment by the mingling of fog and rain, by the change of weather. The first rain of fall made the streets and sidewalks dark and glistening, and the leaves of the slender trees in their wire enclosures by the curb were moved erratically by the drops. She thrust him out, and he sat down on the steps. At ten o'clock, looking out the round glass in the door, she saw him still on the top step, throwing pebbles from the potted plant. The drifting rain, slow and unabating, glistened on his yellow raincoat and hood from a long accumulation. The small, stubborn figure forecast a future of contesting: they were to be alone together, and whatever was to trouble her would be for him only a reason for contesting.
She called him in from the neighborhood's sight and, when the door was closed, turned him to face up the stairs and struck him across the back. With no retaliation, no anger, he went up the stairs, and the paradox of the fragility of his very young body and the power of his will led her to strike him again across his back.

The next day he got ready for school, ate his breakfast, and left, all with the casualness of a habit that had not been broken. Some time in the days that followed, before Leland's return from Japan, the conflict that had gone on between herself and her son roused her to an awareness, more than ever before, of the boy's separateness. He was someone unknown. And she acknowledged the pleasure for her in that unknownness. She took pleasure in his strong will. In those days of her lover's absence, she grew fascinated with her son's beauty, with the slender shape of his bare feet, with the thick, dark hair with its cast of amber red, with the hard blue of his eyes, with all the particulars of his face, the pliability of his lips. He had grown shy about his body without her realizing it. When the shyness had begun she could not recall, but her awareness of it now led her to become less concealing of her own self. With only a negligee around her she drank her coffee at the table while he ate his breakfast, the translucent, ruffled garment falling away from her breasts; with the door to her room open, she undressed or drew on her stockings while she sat in her slip; and she returned from her bath to her room with the negligee clinging to her body.

On the day of her lover's return from Japan, he telephoned at midnight, speaking to her with a teasing, insinuative voice, and in another twenty minutes he was there, roving his voice, which he seemed to have realized on his trip might be a means of arousing a woman, over her neck and down over her breasts within the white negligee she had bought a few days before. They went up the stairs together, his hand moving over her back under the negligee. In her room, her lover sat down on the velvet bench, drawing her to stand between his
knees as if she were attempting to escape him, delighting her with that vise. She put her hands on his head to brace herself against the languor that was pulling her down, against his unbalancing of her as he moved his knee between hers to open her thighs.

She closed her eyes, sensing that her son was in the doorway and must be driven out, and, opening them again, saw him there, his small figure in pajamas, gone before her lover could turn to see what had caused her to push him away. She hid her face, clotted with shame and anger, cursing her son for intruding upon the heart of her privacy, yet knowing that neither shame nor anger was as strong as she was making it appear. With a twist of the brass knob she locked the door and lay down on her bed, stricken silent by the commotion within her.

Leland, still on the bench, untied his shoes, laughing softly. When he came down beside her, there was a remainder of laughter in his mouth and in his teasing body, and not until after their loving did she ask, “Why did you laugh?” But he was already asleep and she already knew the answer. He had laughed because the years with her were to lead to nowhere, and so he could make light of her son's curiosity and even use it to their advantage.

With the end of the affair, the false anger she had felt against her son became true. She was angry with him because he had always baffled her conscience, and she recalled, often, the shock of his small figure in pajamas, there in her doorway. She avoided him and he avoided her; he went to school, did all that was asked of him, and avoided her, besides.

One morning, when she had not heard from her lover for several weeks, wanting to impress upon him her remorse for asking for certitude when no one's future gratification was ever certain, she telephoned him at his office and was told by his secretary that he had gone to Japan again. She locked herself in her room and wept as if someone else had locked her in. She walked the room, smoking and
weeping. A woman alone was obviously a sinner, had obviously not done something right or done all things wrong, and the aloneness was inflicted upon her to bring her to a comprehension of the enormity of her sin. She longed to be forgiven by her son for the time she had struck him across the back, for if he forgave her for that, then it would serve as a forgiving of more, of all her sins, those she knew about and those she did not. He had seen her in her worst moments and in her best, and, though he was a child, she felt he sensed who she was more than any other person sensed or cared to sense. Nobody else knew her so well. Nobody else was so near, so near he could walk into the heart of her privacy, knowing that her anger could never make him less a son, less than the dearest one.

10

U
p in the hills above the Russian River, her father owned a farm inherited from a bachelor uncle who had grown apples and raised sheep. He went there in the winter, taking a few friends, to hunt deer and quail. Nothing was grown with purpose anymore. The trees went on blossoming, the apples went on ripening, and there was a small grazing flock of sheep, a few chickens, a few pigeons. Everything was watched over in its cycles by an elderly woman who had been a painter in the city and who preferred the solitude on the farm, wearing old jodhpurs and hiking boots, her hair peppery gray and cut as short as a man's.

In the late fall of David's ninth year, her father suggested that she bring her son to the farm on the same weekend that he was there with a few friends; he would take the boy hunting and teach him how to handle a gun. She drove up with David a day before her father and his friends were to arrive, and in the evening they strolled out into the orchard. The sheep, wandering in the fields and under the apple trees, trotted up to them. Several were afflicted with colds and made burbling noises as they breathed, and out in the twilight and the cold
she felt a sympathy for them as for neglected children. Down below, a long drift of white fog, touched by the daylight still in the sky and by the moon rising, was moving along above the river, fog more silent than the fogs on the bay that came in filled with sound, the deep and high sounds of horns on the bridges and the ships. The call of the quail was fading into the night, into the bushes and groves of trees. Strolling out with David, their sweater collars turned up against the cold, against the darkness sifting down over the low hills around them, she longed to feel in communion with him. The distance was still between them. After school he stayed away, doing whatever it was that boys together kept secret from their parents and that gave him a wordless wildness, an aura, at night, of the entire day of boys and secrecy, his face like the face of a leader recalling treason or of a follower recalling humiliation. On this stroll with him in the orchard, he told her nothing of himself, though the possibility for closeness was there in the beauty all around, the silver fog below, and the rising moon.

While David slept way up in the attic, she sat with the woman in the parlor. The wood-burning stove sent out its waves of heat, and the large parrot hung upside down in his cage and hid behind the tasseled shade of a standing lamp, curling his claws and tongue in a cawing, clucking, moronically cunning flirtation. The woman was knitting a red sweater; under the yarn her thighs were heavy in the faded jodhpurs. She had been gregarious in the city, a ponderous raconteur over cheap wine, a good friend of Adele's; but in the four years up here on the farm she had become a hermit. For an hour Vivian leafed through several magazines, chatting with the woman about their friends in the city, and, going up early, she felt that the woman was not offended and even preferred to be left alone.

She went up the narrow stairs that were lit by the globe in the hallway on the second floor. The door to her room was open and the lamp on, and she could see the bed covered with a reddish quilt, and
the dresser with a long white cloth, and on the cloth a hand mirror with a tarnished silver back. Reluctant to enter her room, she climbed the staircase to the upper reaches of the house to look in at her son. He might be regretting his choice of sleeping quarters and willing to accept a small bedroom of his own on the second floor. Climbing the staircase that was enclosed by age-darkened walls and lit with a dim globe for the convenience of her son, a globe that would not be lit the other nights when the woman was alone, she was afraid for herself, a fear that, someday, she, too, would be able to be alone, like the woman alone in this house.

The top floor was not partitioned, as below, with bedrooms. It was one large room under a peaked roof that came down to the row of casement windows at each side, and, on one side, under the windows, were three cots. In the middle cot she saw the small, dark hump David's body made under the olive-drab blankets. From up here, the fog along the river was seen in its dimensions; from the window it had a breadth and a depth that seethed with moonlight. Way down in the yard and out in the woods and the orchard, the silence appeared to be the moonlight, to be tangible. She crossed the bare floor to the other side of the room and leaned on the sill to look out the open window, but a low hill, its top at a level with her eyes, seemed to crowd against the house, an obstacle to the view she had expected, and the trickery of the scene increased her fear. She went down again to the parlor, hearing on the way down the woman talking to the parrot. She explained to the woman that it was difficult for her to sleep in a strange house, and she sat down on the sofa, leafing through the same magazines and chatting again until eleven o'clock, when they parted.