Contrary Pleasure Read online

  “I’m a director of Loomarite, Mr. Delevan. Thank you for your time.”

  “Just a minute. What’s the next step if we should agree to the proposition?”

  “I’ll make a recommendation to Varnen. Then their attorneys will meet with yours to establish the routine. When the papers are signed, they’ll send up a plant manager with staff.”

  Griffin left Benjamin Delevan’s office. He felt that he had handled it adequately. He had caught Delevan off balance, and had given an impression of great organization, of monolithic power behind him. It would be very natural for Delevan to feel subconsciously that the situation had been taken out of his hands. And it was of comfort to find Delevan a man who looked tired and unwell. Delevan carried a heavy load. The fact of its being a family firm added an imponderable factor of sentimentality. Except for that one factor, he sensed that he had won. But he did not trust factors which could not be measured.

  It took him forty minutes to see all he wished to see. The employees gave him sidelong curious glances. But visitors were common in every plant. They came from federal, state, and local agencies. They walked about and looked and made requests for reports. Each agency attempted to increase its own size and importance. Thus many of the requests became quite strange. And the overhead costs of industry went up—with whole sections of the offices engaged in making reports which bore no relationship to the efficiency of operation. Thus the cost of the goods manufactured went up. And taxes went up, in order to pay the salaries of the field men who went about conceiving and demanding ever more intricate reports and surveys. It was a destructive spiral that Griffin was well aware of. An inevitable result of the police function of government insofar as industry was concerned. And so he knew that his visit through the mill was unlikely to start rumors.

  From time to time he stopped, and, seeming not to see any special thing, saw everything. Like the captain of many ships and many years who walks on a strange vessel while she is at dockside and knows at once what her response will be to heavy weather. And this was an old ship. She had come close to foundering too many times. She had rolled and shuddered in heavy seas.

  When he turned and left, he knew all he had to know.

  When the door closed beyond Griffin, Ben Delevan sat down behind his desk. So that was Thomas Marin Griffin. Creature of many fables. And not at all what he had expected. You deal with many men and learn the many little ways in which they can be moved and turned and twisted. It is a primary function of the executive mind to be able to detect which way any man can best be controlled. After many years it is a function which becomes automatic. And thus it was shocking to Ben Delevan to meet a man who presented such an absolutely featureless surface. There was nothing to be grasped or triggered. He was as remote as a distant line of hills, and as immediate and personal as death. You sensed at once that he was a tool without handles. The coldness seemed to extend from his eyes down to the bottom of his soul. It was, Ben realized, the personality you would expect in a professional assassin. The man could not be bought or bullied or kidded or hurried or delayed. Yet with all that coldness, the man was not as impersonal as a machine. Not when he radiated that strange force. A force and hardness that was as immediately noticeable as any physical deformity.

  Ben could not imagine Griffin laughing aloud, kissing a woman, casting a trout fly. He was as perfectly designed for his function as a scalpel or an axe. He was a symbol of the facelessness of the great corporations, and a symbol of this new era of management.

  Ben realized that his own self-confidence had suffered an alarming decline. Compared with Griffin, his own thinking and functioning were fuzzy, erratic, emotional. Griffin would never operate by hunch. He would never have to.

  He looked down at his scratch pad and saw that he had doodled some chubby dollar signs. He tore the sheet off and made a quick computation of his own personal net worth. Equity in insurance policies. Fair valuation on house and land. Savings and investments. Conservatively, seventy-five thousand. Add two hundred thousand worth of Varnen stock. And a one-year contract. Then what? House of glass and tile and cypress on a Florida bayou? … My name is Ben Delevan. Yes, I was in textiles. Ran a mill up North. Family outfit. Sold out to a big firm. Moved down here. You can’t beat this sunshine. No, sir. We had our roots sunk deep up there. Family firm for generations. So we cut those roots right off. Right off. Man can get too infatuated with his own traditions. Job would have killed me by sixty. Down here I’ll live forever. Man has to think of himself sometime. Doesn’t he? Wouldn’t you say he had to? No, sir, you couldn’t get me back in that rat race. Not for a million bucks.

  The job could kill you. It was a monstrous task, fighting the creeping neglect of two generations. Little by little he was gaining. Bit by bit he had been pulling manufacturing costs down through a modernization program that crept as slowly as a glacier. Griffin was right, though. A recession would set the whole thing back. They were still not competitive in the market. For the last two years he had had a very good man in New York. He was paying him well. They were getting a better share of the high-style fabrics, and the shopmen were performing miracles with the antiquated equipment to turn out the desired weaves, to deliver on time. High style meant risk and a consequently bigger margin. The bigger margin meant that more could be plowed back into new looms, into new attachments for old looms, into shoring up rotting floors, pointing up flaking brick walls, improving factory lighting. A Stockton fabric had always meant something. Maybe it could mean even more.…

  And yet he was so damn tired. Most of the time the old mill seemed like a big debacle tottering along on its inevitable way to complete chaos. So damn tired. He went out of the office, nodding blankly at the new girl, forgetting to tell her where he was going. He went down the old corridor to the old-fashioned board room. The shades were drawn and the air was dusty. He closed the door behind him and walked to the head of the table and sat in the ornate oak chair. Benjamin Delevan, President and Chairman of the Board of Directors—Grandson of the Founder—Past President of the Stockton Rotary Club—Member of the Board of Governors of the Stockton Club—Chairman of the Board of Admissions of the Oak Dell Country Club—Deacon of the First Presbyterian Church of Clayton—Husband—Father—He who with Childish Faith always stays in the pot with a Pair of Sixes—He who can never remember a bawdy story or tell it properly.…

  So very damn tired.

  Every reason in the world to accept the offer. But he felt a dulled urge to block it. And wished he knew why he felt that urge. Maybe it was a stubborn pride that came from making something run when there were so many reasons why it shouldn’t, kicking it along, prodding it, outguessing the fat-cat competition, carrying the whole scheme and plan of everything that concerned the family, carrying it all on plump tired stubborn shoulders. A horse in a worn harness, so used to traveling this known road that it distrusted all others. There had to be more reason than blind habit for this reluctance. He would have until Wednesday to see if he could find the reason. And if that was all the reason there was—then accept.

  He got up and the big chair tilted and came back down hard on its front legs. He pulled the shade away from the window frame and looked out at the mill. As always, the metal ventilators on the roof looked to him like the woman on the Dutch Cleanser cans. He heard the sound of the mill. It was not like the sound of the heavy industries, where metal was shaped and ground and peeled and polished. Those places sang deep in their chests, with counterpoint of the tortured molecular scream. His mill, at a distance, had a hissing, clittering, rushing roar, thin-voiced, feminine.

  He was a small boy. He sat beside his father and they rode down to the mill in the big car. He heard the sound of the mill. And wondered if it was like the sound ships made when they moved before the wind under full sail. The men who worked for his father always laughed down at him from their tallness and made jokes with him. He sat at a table in his father’s office while his father worked, and he drew pictures of ships on the big yello
w pads of paper, the kind of paper you only saw when you went down there with your father. And they had come into this room and he had sat in the ornate oak chair at the head of the table and pretended it was the captain’s chair and this was the dining room of a great ship.

  There were more pictures on the walls now, but the room had not changed. He walked slowly around the room, looking at the pictures in the dimness, not wanting to raise the shades. Pictures of forgotten company picnics. Of the company booth at an exposition. The Columbian Exposition. Somewhere among his things there was a fifty-cent piece from that exposition. His grandfather had worn it shiny. Next to that picture was one of himself, younger, trimmer. 1944. Accepting a scroll from the Quartermaster General. And then a picture of his grandfather, that beaked pirate face with its flamboyant mustache and look of amusement.

  “What did you get out of it, you old bastard?” Ben asked softly. “What did you get out of it?”

  The original Benjamin Delevan was family legend. He had taken the rewards of his own shrewdness in traditional earthly fashion, lifting the flounced skirts of the eighteen hundreds from Atlanta to Paris, drinking brandy from Buffalo to Silver City in Jim Fiske’s private car, and once winning a reputed five thousand dollars from Fiske by guessing at a distance of fifty feet the exact circumference of the most meaty part of the calf of a dancer in New Orleans. According to the legend, Fiske underestimated. He had founded the mill and it had profited and he made it his life to spend that money in the ways that pleased him best and those ways were both ribald and expensive. He got all that out of it, and in the end he got the hillside plot and the tall, granite marker and the name of Delevan carved deeply enough in the tough stone to last ten thousand years.

  The world had changed. Laughter was no longer Gargantuan. It was marked with acid. And the world was full of gray faces this year. Men walked with an awareness of defeat.

  At the door of the board room Ben turned back and looked at the face of his grandfather again. “You wouldn’t have liked it,” he said quietly. “You wouldn’t have liked it at all.” And went out and closed the door, closed it with a ceremonial carefulness typical of headwaiters and undertakers. At other times of crisis the shabby old board room had restored him. Today it had little meaning for him.

  When he got back to his office, he found the new girl had gone to lunch. This irritated him out of all proportion to the severity of the offense agaist the code. His face felt hot. He sat at his desk. She had left letters there for his signature. He read them. He found two small errors that could have been corrected with an erasure. But he checked them so heavily with his pen that the stub point caught in the fiber of the paper and spattered droplets of ink out toward the margin. He realized at once that he was being spiteful and childish. But it was too late to repair that particular bit of damage. He could not imagine Thomas Marin Griffin doing a thing like that.

  Chapter Five

  Alice Furmon stood in the kitchen doorway and watched her husband plod heavily out to the big green car. He turned and grinned and waved, slammed the car door and swung in a fast circle and was gone. She was left with the faint aroma of the cigar he had lighted after his hasty lunch, left with the fading sting where he had given her a lusty affectionate slap as he left the kitchen.

  It was hard to remember the man she had married fourteen years ago, when she was twenty-two. There had been almost a Viking look about him, and the clear strong lines of his big body had made her feel almost faint when she had looked at him. He had been tender and humble in his approach to her, making her feel fragile, delicate, and adored. They had been able to talk, back in those days. Really talk. There had been so much he didn’t know, and yet he seemed anxious to learn. It had made her feel good to think that she could get inside that warm slow mind and teach him perception and awareness. He had been twenty-four then, an ex-college-athlete, working for a construction firm, making an extra fifty dollars every Sunday playing tackle on a pro football team. She had graduated from college that June, and she was living in the big house in town with Ben and Wilma and Brock and Ellen. Brock was five then, and Ellen three. Quinn and Bess were living in an apartment, and David was two. Robbie was fourteen and away at preparatory school that fall.

  The big house in town had been sold for a long time. It had been a gloomy pile of reddish stone, and Alice remembered how it matched her mood in that strange vague summer when there was all of life ahead and no idea of what could or should be done with it. Quinn had gone apart from her into another life when he had married Bess. Ben and Wilma had their own full existence. The silences of the big house, the rusty scrape of tree limbs on the roof edges, the long high hallways—all had given her a curiously disembodied feeling, a haunted sense of drifting out of control. She would see herself in unexpected mirrors, tall and silent and slow.

  There had been a few friends that summer. A pale, dandruffed boy who had recently discovered Kafka. And a fat, pimpled girl who brought over the music of Hindemith and Stravinsky and laboriously pecked out passages on the out-of-key piano in the old music room. They sat often on the floor and they talked of many things that summer in the house coolness while the street baked.

  She had gone one afternoon to the club with Ben and Wilma and the kids to swim in the newly opened pool. George Furmon had come into her life that day. Thor-muscled, splendid. Like a roof tilted to let sunlight in. His employer had brought him there that Sunday afternoon.

  They were married in November. It was a big wedding at church, a reception that brought the old house alive. She was a virgin bride, filled with all manner of clinical knowledge and emotional ignorance. She remembered the dry chittering sound of the rice as it fell from her undergarments onto the tiled floor of the bathroom of the hotel in Montreal. He had been tender and gentle with her. He had known many women. Yet in the dark moment of consummation all the tremulous desire he had awakened in her was obliterated by the nightmare panic, like the dreams of childhood when some great beast had gotten at her, panting and straining. She knew she had disappointed him. And, out of her clinical knowledge, she knew that this phase of marriage had to be right. And she knew what was expected of her. During the honeymoon she tried. And at times she found fleeting moments of an electric pleasure which tantalized her because they were like a coin that is seen frozen in sidewalk ice, visible, but impossible to grasp. At last, with a histrionic ability that startled her, and a sense of shame and deceit, and yet with the determination that she could at least give him this much, she pretended to achieve that which he desired for her. In that way she trapped herself, for in his joy he no longer practiced the restraint she had not known he was using. And he wanted her and took her very often. He was a virile man, and their days and nights seemed to be full of this meaningless action which pleased him, full of her stylized response, so that she felt physically beaten, dazed, too worn and weary to recapture even those moments of incomplete pleasure she had been able to achieve, whereas George appeared to gain in strength, in virility, in need.

  Two months after they came back from Canada, she found she was pregnant. The twins, Michael and Richard (named for her father and his) were born three weeks before their first wedding anniversary, and she had enjoyed the final months of pregnancy because they meant a respite from George’s needs. On their anniversary night she found that she was once again trapped in her role. And she found then that George did not require evidence of her pleasure each time. Cooperation sufficed. The ersatz frenzies were used less often and she learned, in self-disgust, that she was more inclined to pretend participation in his joy when there was something she wanted of him. A coat, a hat, a trip, a pair of shoes.

  Sandy was born when the twins were three. By the time she was eighteen months old, it became evident that Sandy, like Mike and Dick, was distinctly George’s child. Aggressive, extroverted, muscular and very active. It seemed to her as though the very pallor of her own contribution to the uxorial act had in some way suppressed the potential contribution of her o
wn genes—as though she had acted merely as receptacle and incubator. She loved them. George adored them, spoiled them. Her discipline was cold and certain and predictable and fair.

  At times she found it difficult to remember or believe that she had given birth to these three brown noisy ruffians. In fact, their birth had seemed to leave her body unmarked. She had been unable to nurse them. At thirty-six she was slender, lean of hip, with the half-formed breasts of a young girl, with something cool and withdrawn and unaccountably virginal about her.

  George and the children had filled all her days and nights, until this summer. In the early years, before Sandy was born, Ben and Quinn had made the proposition to George. Build us our homes on Gilman Hill. We will give you advance payments. Enough to get you started. George had jumped at the chance. Alice knew her brothers had done it to help. She knew they had done it a bit dubiously. But the houses were good. Before they were finished, he had other jobs. It was a full year before he was able to begin their own house. It seemed to her that almost from the first day he was in business for himself, she had lost him, that little of him she had once owned.

  But the children left little time for introspection. George had changed so slowly she had not seen it. Now, with the twins away, with enough help so that she had leisure, she was seeing him all over again, making the inevitable comparisons. He was a stranger she lived with. There was no real talk. No good talk. He came home tired. He played with the kids. He needed his drinks before dinner, his drinks after dinner. He read the paper and the trade magazines. He watched certain TV shows, mostly sports telecasts. He kissed her with genuine affection. He smacked her bottom frequently, with lusty good humor. He smelled of cigars and good rye and wool. He was solid and powerful, but his belly was vast, and he was often short of breath. She wondered if he ever really looked at her. A man’s man. A straight-flush, panatela, daily-double, locker-room, membership-badge man. A good provider, a man of even humor, a generous man. Henry, meet the little woman. Al, here’s a picture of my three kids. Took it down on the Cape last August.…