Presence: Stories Page 17

  “He has a perfectly beautiful wife. Those children too. He was here tonight. With a girl. A perfectly ghastly girl.” And once again she demanded of him, as though he must certainly know, being a man, “Do you know why that is happening? To everybody?”

  Her driving need for an answer pierced him because the question was his obsession these days. It seemed very strange she had reached into him and had grasped precisely what bewildered him.

  “It seems to me,” she went on, “that almost everyone I know is going crazy. There doesn’t seem to be any other subject any more. Any other thing—” She broke off again and drew in a long breath and wiped a strand of hair out of her eyes. Then she turned back to the fire, unable for the moment to continue looking at Joseph’s resolute face. She wanted to weep, to laugh, to dance—anything but to sit here at this disadvantage. For an instant she remembered the warmth in Madame Lhevine’s eyes, the feeling she was being enfolded by one more powerful, and she longed desperately to be taken up and held.

  Her tone of supplication told Joseph that he was moving into a false position, for he dared not betray his own feelings of bewilderment. If they were both at a loss they would join in their miseries, and he could not, on even larger grounds, declare himself dumbfounded by life. “I know what you mean,” he said, careful to direct his mournful tone toward unspecified others and away from himself and Cleota. “I see it myself all the time.”

  She looked at him from the fire. “Do you?” she asked, demanding he go on.

  “I don’t know the answer,” he said and only glanced at her with this. “I guess it’s that there is no larger aim in life any more. Everything has become personal relations and nothing more.”

  The blurred sensuousness drained out of her eyes, and she seemed alert to him again. “Is there something more?”

  “Sure. That is, there might be.”

  “What?”

  “Well . . .” he felt like a schoolboy, having to say that the welfare of mankind, the fight for justice, caring for the oppressed, were the something more. But as he began to evoke these thoughts their irrelevancy choked off his words, their distance from the suffering he saw in this woman lying back in the wicker chair with her knees fallen outward and the drink at her feet. She was lusting for a truth beyond what he possessed, yet he had to go on. “It’s a law of history. When a society no longer knows its aims, when it’s no longer dominated by the struggle to get food and safety, the private life is all there is. And we are all anarchists at heart when there is no greater aim. So we jump into each other’s beds.” God, what a fraud all ideas were—all anyone wanted was love!

  “Joseph,” she began, her voice very soft, her eyes on the fire, “why is it happening?”

  He felt her proposal stretching out its wings, testing the air. He finished his drink and stood up. “I’ll go, Cleota,” he said.

  She looked up at him, blinking lazily. “That woman said Stowe would die before his sister.”

  He could not speak; her belief in the prophecy shocked and persuaded him. He saw Stowe dead. He reached down and pressed his hand on hers awkwardly. “You can’t believe that nonsense, can you?”

  “Why are you going?” she asked.

  Her simplicity terrified him. “I’ll have one more drink,” he said and got the bottle and set it on the floor beside his chair and sat again, taking as long as he could with the business. And again he damned his suspicious mind—she was simply frightened for Stowe, for God’s sake! He would stay until she either fell asleep or came out of her fright.

  Through the warm haze that surrounded her she saw that Joseph had suddenly come to life. How young he really was! His hair was not even graying, his skin was tight, and there was no judgment coming to her from him, no orders, no husband’s impatience; her body felt new and unknown. “A larger aim,” she said, her words muffled.

  “What?” he asked.

  She stood up and thrust her fingers into her hair and, breathing deeply, walked to the door. He sat still, watching her. She stopped at the pane and looked out through the mist, like a prisoner, he thought. He took a long swallow of his drink, resolved to leave. She stood there ten yards away with her hands in her hair, and he admired the angled backthrust of her torso secreted in her gray woolen dress. He saw her in bed, but all he could feel was her suffering. And then Stowe would return sometime, and the three of them in this room? The weedy morass of that scene shuddered him.

  Moments went by and she did not turn from the door. She was waiting for him, he saw. Goddam! Why had he stayed? He saw that he had acted falsely, a role, the protector’s part. Beneath his character and hers, beneath their very powers of speech, was the anarchy of need, the lust for oblivion and its comfort. He sat there reddening with shame at having misled her, his manhood spurious to him and thought itself a pretense.

  She turned to him, still at the door, lowering her arms. The amateurishness of her seduction pained him for her sake as she stood there openly staring at him. “Don’t you like me?”

  “Sure I do.”

  Her brows came together densely as she walked to him and stood over him, her hands hanging at her sides, her head thrust forward a little, and as she spoke her open hands turned ever so slightly toward him. “What’s the matter with you?”

  He stood up and faced her, unable to speak at the sight of the animal fury in her face.

  “What’s the matter with you!” she screamed.

  “Good night,” he said, walking around her toward the door.

  “What did you stay for?” she screamed at his back.

  She came toward him unsteadily, a smile of mockery spreading on her face. She could feel, almost touch, his trembling, and she clenched her teeth together with the wish to tear with them. She felt her hands opening and closing and an amazing strength across her back. “You . . . ! You . . . !”

  She stood up close to him, saw his eyes widening with surprise and fear. The taste of her stomach came into her mouth; her disgust for him and his broken promise brought tears to her eyes. But he did not move a hand to her; he was pitiless, like Stowe when he stared through her toward Alice, and like Alice moving in and out of this house. She wept.

  Joseph touched her shoulder with his hand and instantly saw Stowe’s laughing face before him. She neither accepted his touch nor rejected it. As though he had no importance for her any more. So he raised the immense weight of his arms and held her. The stairs to the second floor were a few yards away; he would almost have to carry her. She would be half conscious on the pillow; toward dawn the countryside from the bedroom window would be littered with hair, with bones, with the remnants of his search for an order in his life. Holding her to him, he feared her offering was an accusation of his complicity, a sign of their equal pointlessness. But he tightened his arms around her to squash out of her any inkling she might have of his unwillingness to share her world’s derangement.

  She encircled his waist and pressed her body against him. To love! To know nothing but love!

  He took hold of her head and turned her face up to forestall the next moment. Her eyes were shut and tears were squeezing out of their corners, her skin hot in his hands. Cleota! Cleota Rummel! But without love? he thought, without even desire? He once again saw Stowe in this room, saw himself bantering with him, discussing, felt Stowe’s bumbling warmth. How easy to ruin a man! From tomorrow on he could ruin Stowe with their usual handshake and the clap on the back. The power to destroy shaped itself in his mind like a rising rocket, astounding him with its frightfulness and its beauty, an automatic force given to him like a brand-new character, a new power that would somehow finish a struggle against the meaninglessness of life, joining him at his ease with that sightless legion riding the trains and driving the cars and filling the restaurants, a power to breathe the evil in the world and thus at last to love life. She pressed her lips against his throat, surprisingly soft lips. Disastrous
contempt if he should try to leave her now, but to take her upstairs—his practical mind saw the engineering that would entail. A willed concussion of skeletons. He knew it was not virtue loosening his embrace but an older lust for a high heart uncondemned, a niggardly ambition it seemed to him now as he summoned his powers to say, “Good night, Cleota,” and in such a tone as would convince her that he did not dislike her in his arms.

  She opened her eyes. God, he thought, she could kill! “Whaz a matter with you?” she asked him.

  “Nothing’s the matter with me,” he said, dropping his hands to his sides but blushing.

  “What?” She swayed, peering at him through bewildered eyes, genuinely asking, “Whad you stay for?”

  A good question, he thought, damning his naïveté. “I thought you didn’t want to be alone,” he said.

  “Yez. You don’t like me. I’m old. Older and older.”

  He reached out his hand to her, afraid she would fall, and she slapped it away, sending herself stumbling sideways, banging against the wall, where she held herself upright, her hair fallen over half her face. “Whaz a matter with all of you! All of you and all of you!” She was sobbing but seemed not to know it. “And if he dies before she does? Doesn’t someone have to . . . have to win before the end?” She bent over, thrusting out her hands in a strangely theatrical gesture of supplication—how awkward she had become! How false all gracefulness is! And dredging up her arms from near the floor, her fingers wide, she called, weeping, a furious grimace stretching the two tendons of her throat, “Don’t you have to win before it’s over? Before . . . it’s overrrr!”

  He could not stop the tears in his eyes. “Yes,” he whispered. The attempt to speak loosened some muscle in his stomach, and he fled weeping from the house.

  • • •

  The thumping resounded through his dreamless sleep. Boom, boom, boom. He opened his eyes. Boom. Again. He got out of bed and staggered. The whisky, he thought. He was dizzy and held on to the window sill. The booming sounded again below. He pulled up the shade. The sun! A clear day at last! The sun was just starting to come up at the far edges of the valley. The booming sounded again below. He pulled the window up and started to lean out but his head hit the screen. Now he saw Cleota’s car in the road before the house, parked askew as though it had been left there in an emergency. The booming noise went on, now violently. He called out, “Yes!” then ran to the bed as though it were a dream and he could go back to sleep now that he had realized it.

  But it was truly dawn and the noise was a knocking on his door, a dreadful emergency knocking. He called out “Yes!” again and got into his pants, which were lying on the floor, and struggled into his shirt and ran down the stairs barefoot and opened the door.

  She was standing there, morning-fresh except for the exhaustion in her eyes. But her hair was brushed and she stood tall, herself again, if one did not know that she had never looked so frightened, so pleadingly at anyone in all her life. Suddenly he thought her beautiful with the sparkling air around her head. He was still passing up through the webs of his sleep, and she was part dream standing there in his doorway in a fox-collared coat of deep, rich brown, looking at him as though she had sprung from the grass without a history except that of earth and the immense trees on the road behind her. He reached out his hand, and she took it and stepped into the hallway. He was freezing in the icy breeze and started to close the door, but she held it and looked desperately up at him, wanting back what she had given him.

  “I beg your pardon for last night,” she said.

  It was entirely askew to her; he was standing there trying to keep his eyes open, obviously undisturbed, she felt, by what she had done. Obviously, she saw now, he had had many women, and her coming here now was idiotically naïve to him. She felt such shame at her naïveté that she turned abruptly and pulled open the partly closed door, but he caught her arm and turned her to him.

  “Cleota . . .”

  Drawing her to him, he caught a scent of cherries in her hair. The sheer presence of her body in his house astounded him. Only now was he drunk. He lowered his lips to her but was stopped by the surprise in her eyes, a surprise that had something stiff-necked about it, a resistance, a propriety he would have to overcome, and suddenly he felt he wanted to.

  His hesitation, like respect, moved her; but he was unnecessary to her now that she could feel his demand. Raising her hand, she tenderly touched his chest, relieved that he wanted her a little. They were accomplices now and she could trust his silence. She straightened before him, and a smile softened her face as she recognized his open need.

  He saw a little of her old stance returning, her self-respect, but it was no longer necessary to obey it. He kissed her cheek. But she was less beautiful to him now that her despair was going; she was Cleota again, well-brushed, clear-eyed, and profoundly unapproachable.

  “Take care of yourself,” he said, meaninglessly, except for the brittle-shelled tone, the bantering voice they both knew so well. But how alive their simulation had become, how much more interesting it was now, this propriety, than it used to be!

  “Would you like breakfast?” she asked.

  Safe and sound, as on a shore they had finally reached, he said he had to go back to sleep for a while yet.

  “Come later then,” she said warmly, deeply satisfied.

  “Okay.”

  She went down to her car and got in and drove away with a wave of one hand through the window, already slipping out of her coat with the other. She will be digging in her garden soon, he thought.

  He did not go to her later. He lay in bed until the late morning, castigating himself for a coward at one moment, at the next wondering if he ought to be proud that he had been loyal to himself—and, as it turned out, to her as well.

  But it never left the back of his mind that every claim to virtue is at least a little false; for was it virtue he had proved, or only fear? Or both! He wanted very much to believe that life could have a virtuous center where conscience might lie down with sensuality in peace, for otherwise everything but sexual advantage was a fraud. He heard her voice again. “What’s the matter with you!” It rang. But was there really nothing truthful in her morning voice just now, so civilized and reserved, inviting him to breakfast? Once again good order reigned in this countryside. He smiled at a thought—she would probably welcome Stowey more warmly now that she had glimpsed a conquest. He was glad for her. So maybe some good had come of the evening. God! What a ring of fire there always is around the truth!

  He lay a long time listening to the silence in his loveless house.

  • • •

  Alice died toward the end of May, falling asleep in her rocker as she looked at the valley view while waiting for dinnertime. Joseph heard of it only accidentally, when he returned after settling his divorce. He had put his house up for sale and discovered he had no key to the front door to give the real-estate agent. He removed the lock and took it to the hardware store to have a key fitted, and the clerk mentioned the old lady’s funeral. He wanted to ask how Stowe was but caught himself. He returned with the key, installed the lock and closed the place, got into his car and drove off. Before he could think he found himself on the road to the Rummel house. He had not seen Stowe since sometime before his trip to Florida, nor had he seen Cleota since the morning after her fortune was told.

  Realizing he was on their road, he reduced speed. In this fine weather they might be outside and would look up and see him passing. But what, after all, had he to be ashamed of? He resolutely resumed speed, aware now that it was Stowe he would rather not face. Unless, he thought—was this possible too?—Stowe was dead?

  The car traveled the long turn that straightened onto a view of the Rummel house. Stowe and Cleota were walking idly on the road, he with a stick knocking the heads off daisies and peering into the weeds every few yards, she at his side watching, breathing—Josep
h could already see—her breaths of fitness and staring now and then at the newly green valley beyond Stowe’s head. They both turned, hearing the car, and, recognizing it, stood still and tall. Stowe, seeing Joseph through the window, nodded, looked at him, as he had the first time they had met many years ago, with cool and perceptive eyes. Joseph nodded back, angered by his friend’s coolness but smiling, and to both of them said, “How are you?”

  “Very well,” Cleota said.

  Only now could he look directly at her and, strengthened by Stowe’s unjust condemnation, he dared hold her in his gaze. She was afraid of him!

  “Selling out?” Stowe asked with noticeable contempt.

  It dawned that Stowe was condemning him for the divorce; he had always admired Joseph’s wife. Only now Joseph realized how correct his estimate of them had been—they were an old-fashioned family underneath, and Stowe despised those who, at the last moment, did not abide by the laws of decency.

  “I’m trying to sell it,” Joseph said, relaxing in his seat. “But I’ll probably be by again before long. Maybe I’ll drop in.”

  Stowe barely nodded.

  “Bye,” Joseph said. But this time Stowe simply looked at him.

  “Have a good summer,” Joseph said, turning to Cleota, and he saw, with surprise, that now she was observing him as a stranger, as Stowe was doing. They were joined.

  He drove off past them, laughter rising in his heart, a joy at having seen good order closing back over chaos like an ocean that has swallowed a wreck. And he took a deep breath of May, glancing out the side window at the countryside, which seemed now never to have been cold and wet and unendurably dark through so many months.

  When his car had gone and it was silent on the road, Stowe swung his stick and clipped a daisy. For a few yards neither spoke, and then he blew his nose and said, “He’s not much.”

  “No,” she said, “I suppose he isn’t.”

  “There was always some sneakiness in him, something like that.”