Contrary Pleasure Page 3

  Often it seemed to him that Elaine had been his wife, that the others were his children. Quinn and Alice, now thirty-six, were their mother’s children. Her tallness and reserve and odd pride. Robbie seemed to have a bit more of Big Mike in him. And the very reserve of the twins had seemed to drive them into the arms of extroverted people. Alice, married to George Furmon. And Quinn marrying warm and husky Bess who, at thirty-five, made Ben think of haymows and milkmaids.

  From Alice’s restrained and antiseptic body George Furmon had acquired the twins, happy, energetic, uncomplicated boys of thirteen who had been bundled off early to camp this June, and Sandy, the ten-year-old girl, she of the grave energies, the solemn absorptions. Yet from Bess’s warm sturdy body Quinn had achieved no issue. The only child was her child, David, the odd one. A crazy, tragic, runaway marriage when she was seventeen, and David born when she was eighteen, so that he was seventeen now, the same age as Ellen. Strange David, full of ancient despair.

  No, there could be no room at the plant for Robbie, if that was his intention. Not with the dead weight of Quinn Delevan on the payroll as vice-president. It was a blessing that George Furmon had his contracting business and did well at it. The Stockton Knitting Company was too enfeebled to carry much on its back. It irritated him, very often, that they could not or would not understand. When they thought of the plant at all, they seemed to think of it as a sort of inexhaustible General Motors, Junior Grade. They did not know how truly precarious was the Delevan security and way of life, so delicately balanced on the keen edge of his daily decisions.

  He drank half his drink and undressed and carried the rest of it into the bathroom. It was curious how impossible it was to tell them the true state of affairs. Ben is worrying again. You know how he worries. They thought that because it had always been there, making money in greater or lesser amounts for the family, it always would be there. And if it slipped fatally and he lost it, and it fell and smashed, they would all stare at him in fear and accusation and say, “Why didn’t you tell us how bad things were?”

  He stepped, dripping, out of the shower and finished his drink, sucking the sliver of ice that remained until it dissolved on his tongue. His mood was brightening a bit. A drink and a shower could always do it. If Robbie wanted to stay around, maybe George Furmon could be talked into taking him on. George, of all of them, was the only one who understood about the plant. On the other band, George, for all his expansiveness and his expensive personal habits, was not known to throw money away.

  Half-turning as he reached for his towel, Ben caught an entirely unanticipated glimpse of himself in the full-length mirror set into the inside of the bathroom door. It was not pleasant. His was indeed an unlovely nakedness, male frame softened by the years and the offices and the luncheons, until the belly was suety and the thighs raddled and the haired breasts matronly and the buttocks flaccid, with only the shoulders remembering the look of drive and power. He looked at himself with disgust. You felt like a man, and then you saw something that should go in a waddling run across a vaudeville stage being beaten around the ears with a bladder.

  Where did it all go? The good years and the taut muscles. “Ben, you mustn’t run up and down the stairs that way!” And all the times of walking in the night and singing aloud. All the quickenings, now buried in grossness, in the staleness of the body. He turned away from himself. Now you can stop looking. It is left there in the mirror. Now you deceive. You hide it all behind tailoring and fabrics. So far from the body. Today the bright fabrics are our new skin. A new sort of animal that walks the world, wide and stately and full of ponderous dignity.

  He rubbed the back of his hand along his jaw and decided not to shave until morning. He put on baggy gray slacks he loved, and a clean plaid shirt in lightweight wool. He went to the window and looked out toward the terrace. George and Alice and their Sandy had left, and so had his own two kids, Brock and Ellen. His half-brother, Quinn, still sat there, relaxed and slim and brown and handsome, holding a highball glass moodily in both hands, elbows braced on the chair arms, while Wilma talked with Bess. Ben refilled his glass in the kitchen. Two more cubes and a generous amount of bourbon. He went out. The sun was gone. It was dark under the trees. Birds made settling-down sounds in the elms. He sighed as he sat down.

  “Tired, dear?” Wilma asked. Stimulus and response. He would sigh and she would say that, precisely that. Last time. Next time. Marriage seemed to be largely a Pavlov experiment on a more intricate scale.

  “Little bit,” he said, giving the equally meaningless response.

  “Feel guilty,” Quinn said, “getting out for a round of golf on a day like this. Had to do it though.” He yawned hugely, mouth cavernous behind the carefully unkempt mustache, that British colonial mustache which went with his terse, rather abrupt manner of speech.

  Yes, Ben thought, you had to do it all right. Who was it this time? The second cousin of the brother-in-law of the county tax assessor? Your reasoning gets more remote every year. “How did it go?” Ben asked.

  “I had something going on the back nine and then I blew up on that dog of a seventeen. Came in with five over par.”

  Bess was hunched forward in her chair, her expression serious. As usual, she had a curiously rumpled look. She was always shining clean, but oddly disorganized. She was a big, strong-bodied, high-breasted woman who seemed to be always pulling and wrenching at her clothes. They never seemed to fit, always too tight or too loose in the wrong places, slips showing, sweaters coming out of skirts, heels coming off shoes, straps breaking. She seemed to be in continual stubborn conflict with her clothing, unable to subdue it. She had too much pale brown hair of a texture so silky that it would never stay the way she wanted it.

  For a long time after knowing her, Ben had wondered how a woman who always managed to look rumpled could emit such a strong flavor of desirability. She seemed so utterly unconscious of her body, so perfectly willing to collapse into any posture regardless of how unflattering it was. And then it had come to him that she was one of those people to whom nakedness is a natural state. She was tight in her skin, resilient with health, uncomplicated as a puppy. He had felt an amused and pleasant desire for her for a long time, and he was certain she was unaware of it, and equally certain that nothing would or could ever come of it. The advantage was that it always made him feel good to be near her. He liked her and knew she liked him. Sometimes he had a strong urge to smooth back that glossy brown hair and, perhaps, scratch the nape of her neck.

  Eighteen years ago she had run away from Sarah Lawrence and married a wild and improbable young man named Carney, a black Irishman, a brawler, a laborer, a poet of sorts. Three months later, in Philadelphia, he took violent exception to a comment about his bride, a comment made in a place to which he never should have taken her. He did mighty damage and walked out with her, walking casually, taunting them, laughing low in his throat, walking a dozen feet before someone threw a knife into the back of his neck, dropping him in the quick spineless death which is a bull ring art. She came back to her father’s house, wearing a disturbingly vacant smile, her emaciation accenting the first evidences of pregnancy. She was eighteen and Quinn was nineteen when David was born. They had been playmates. Quinn, for perhaps the first time in his life, felt needed. The families approved the marriage. Not only did it seem sound emotionally, but it looked like a healthy move for the Stockton Knitting Company. Bess’s father’s firm had weathered the early depression years very well, but not so well but that both firms could not benefit from a merger. The difficulty, Ben discovered later, resulted from the very thoroughness of the audit which had to precede any merger agreement.

  Not long after the marriage, while the audit was in process, her father went home from the office in the middle of the afternoon and drew a hot tub and opened his wrists with a single-edged Gem razor blade and drifted peacefully out of life, listening to the afternoon game on the bathroom radio, lasting long enough, perhaps, to hear the Yankees pile up a subst
antial lead in the bottom of the fifth. His badly depleted stock interest in his own firm had to go on the block to cover his speculations, and the interests which took over control wasted no time in moving everything movable to a low-wage area in the backwoods of Tennessee where, ever since, they had profited mightily.

  Ben heard a note of uncertainty in Wilma’s voice as she said, to Bess, “Well … I suppose if Alice did volunteer … but I do think we ought to have them stay here with us.”

  “She can do it so much easier, Wilma,” Bess said. “She’s got that cute little guest wing George put on last year, with the little terrace and private bath and everything and the little stove-refrigerator gadget for breakfasts. Newlyweds don’t want to be right in the middle of the family. That’s the way they’d have to be here or at my house. Besides, she’s got Mrs. Bailey to help and the cleaning girl that comes three days a week. You heard her say she’d be glad to. And the twins are away.”

  Ben knew Wilma enough to sense the relief behind her hesitant words. “All right. I mean, I guess it’s all right. But let’s not let Alice do any entertaining for them. That’s our job, Bess. She’s doing enough just having them there.”

  Bess stood up and stretched and yawned. She put her hand on Quinn’s shoulder. “Come on, honey. These people want to eat.” Quinn unfolded his lazy length out of the chair and set his empty glass on the tray. They said good night and walked away through the late dusk toward their house.

  Wilma banged glasses on the tray and said in a low voice, “I wish that once, just once, she’d at least carry stuff into the house after one of these parties that just happen. I want the chance of at least telling her not to bother. I even wish I had the gall to not offer when we have a drink over there. I do, though. Every time. And she says sure. Honestly, Ben, sometimes it makes me so damn mad.”

  “She just doesn’t think about it, I guess.”

  “At her age she ought to start thinking about it. I guess it’s a good thing Robbie and Susan won’t be staying with her. Susan would be working her head off.”

  “David might make it difficult.”

  “I guess he would make it difficult.” He picked up the pitcher and shaker and followed her into the house. She turned on the white amphitheater glare of the kitchen lights. She turned to him as she put the tray down. “You better do something about those cushions. The dew has been heavy these nights.”

  He walked out and collected the canvas cushions off the wrought-iron chairs and put them on the shelf in the pump house. He bent over, grunting a bit, and touched the grass with his fingertips. It was a bit damp already. He was far enough behind his own house so that he could see through the trees the lights in Quinn’s house and in George’s. There was a dim trace of color in the west, a dull orange, low to the horizon. He lit a cigarette. Day is done and the Delevans are in their nests and all of us have gotten through this one. Fifty is a time when you think too much of all the things that can happen. Twenty is a time when nothing can happen.

  Turning, he could see through the kitchen windows, see Wilma walking back and forth. She was a stranger in a tricky stage setting. Suburban matron. The billowing breasts and the rigorously girdled waist and hips, so that she seemed balanced in a rather topheavy way on the legs which for some reason had remained as slim and smooth and unblemished as when she had been young. She used some sort of blue tint in her white hair, and it was carefully sculptured, looking in that light as cold and rigid and planned as marble. There were two deep lines between her eyebrows. And a compressed look about her lips. He had heard her described, quite often lately, as a handsome woman. Perhaps it was the way her features were cut. A certain bold clarity.

  And he suddenly felt ashamed because he had looked at her so coldly. What right had he to indulge himself in a critique. Both of them had changed in the same slow way, the same terrifying day-by-day way, so that the faces in old photographs became the faces of strangers. A strange girl in a muddy print, looking out with shyness, and the young man beside her—that fast walker, that fast talker, that one who bounded up stairs and sang and knew a thousand things and told of them well, and perhaps too often. There had been a thousand things in the world and a thousand risks to take gladly.

  It was, he thought, like a network of tunnels. A thousand choices. And the next year five hundred choices. And each year the choices were fewer and finally one day there were featureless walls on either side of you and nothing to do but keep on going forward toward your inevitable death, hoping only that you would be given as much time as possible, and not too much. Hoping that it would not end in pain. Hoping that it would be as right and good as it could be for both of you. He saw this very clearly, and for a moment it was like that time of awakening in the night and suddenly knowing the answer to everything. But as you try to grasp it, it slips away and down and back into the sleep you have left behind you. The idea seemed good and then it was gone and he stood there, feeling the evening dampness, looking at his wife in her kitchen, feeling his hunger for the evening meal, feeling the faint edge of the liquor. A man standing on his land.

  There could have been other tunnels. Other roads. Maybe one that would not have dulled the shyness of her, the awareness. A life of more simplicity, without all this jangling, these tin noises and twistings. A place where he could have been a hard, brown man with outdoors in his eyes and the gift of quietness and long thought.…

  He smiled at himself. Plow jockey. Peasant life. Cottage with a dirt floor, mulled wine, and potato pancakes, for God’s sake.

  You started with a woman and she was magic and she was mystery and that was the way it was supposed to be. And then you grew into each other and learned each other so that what had been high adventure became a comforting, a warmth, a reassurance of existence. Good gal, you can say. Contentment, you can say. But, oh, where did the shy one go, the shy wild one of all the awareness, of magical blue vein on porcelain breast, who loved earth under her hips, eyes strained shut against sunlight. She went to the same place, Ben, as did that great walker and talker and dreamer of a thousand things. They look out of the old muddy prints and they are still together. Every tunnel is right and every tunnel is wrong. Choice is immutable.

  “What in the world are you doing out there, dear?”

  “Thinking, I guess.”

  He went into the kitchen, blinking at the lights. “Kids around?”

  “Ellen had a date. They picked her up while you were showering. Brock’s in his room.”

  “Who did Ellen have a date with?”

  She put her hand on his arm. “Darling, listen to me a minute. Please try to be nice to Brock tonight. Just try. You don’t know how it is for me, you two sitting there like wooden dummies. I’m right in the middle. You know, you just can’t keep on treating him like a criminal for the rest of his life.”

  “It seems to me that that particular label was applied in a very accurate—–”

  “Ben!”

  “All right. All right. I’ll try. Who did Ellen go out with?”

  “Thank you, darling. Oh, she went out with the Schermer boy again. In the jeep. There was another couple. I think she said they were going to the drive-in movie.”

  “You think!”

  “Don’t bark at me. Goodness! Look, aren’t these nice chops?”

  He said they looked very fine indeed and he mixed himself another drink and carried it into the living room, aware of her silent disapproval. He turned on the television. A grave man sat behind a big desk with his hands gently folded and looked Benjamin Delevan directly in the eye and said grave sensible things about people and nations. Apparently the most sensible thing that could be said about nations was that every effort must be made to alleviate the tension in the family of nations, and the tension seemed inevitable. If you looked at him while he said it, it seemed to make sense. If you thought it over, it made no sense. But they didn’t want you to think it over. They wanted you to look at the next item. The next item was a grinning shot of the Presiden
t as he boarded a plane. Then there was the man at the desk again. And then a clock that said Calcutta under it, and then a crowd of dark people in white pajamas waving illegible signs and hollering, and then a toy airplane crushed against an artificial mountain. Ben sipped his drink. The grave man spoke about the product which sponsored his services. He spoke with greater gravity than before. He went away and there were little line drawings of people knocking on a bar and singing about beer.

  Benjamin sat and sipped his drink. The program made him feel curiously diffused. One Ben sat there. One contested a robot on Gilman Hill. A naked one stood inside the bathroom mirror. One still sat in the office silences. And there was one out on the grass, standing on his land, standing in a circle painted in white on the grass. He frowned and wondered what in the hell that circle meant.

  Chapter Two

  Brock Delevan was glad when the dinner hour was over and he could get up from the table and go back to his room and be away from them. This dinner hour had been bad in a different way. He could not decide which was worse—the sour silence of other dinner hours, or the false cheer of this one, with the old man’s conversation sounding as if it had been lifted, complete and shining, from the fillers in the Reader’s Digest. The conversation could not have been more forced, even if there had been a microphone suspended over the table, a television camera aimed at them. Dinner with the happy Delevans. Sorry, folks, Ellen could not be with you tonight, but turn to channel thirteen tomorrow at this same time and—

  It made Brock want to bang his fist on the table, bouncing the dishes into the air. He had guessed at once that his mother had spoken to the old man about it. During the joyous hour she had looked both pleased and uncertain.