Contrary Pleasure (14 page)

She walked hard and fast, so that when she reached the high crest of the
hill, she was winded, sweating lightly. There was an old stone wall in the
shade, beyond the ditch. She stepped long-legged across the ditch and squirmed
up onto the wall and sat there and lighted a cigarette, shifting until the
hollows of the rocks fitted her more comfortably.

What is going to become of me?

Though the question was inevitable, it left a bad taste. There was too
much bathos in it—too much of an aroma of self-pity. Pollyanna should count her
blessings. And know they were not enough. And sense also that the world this
year was full of silly, sighing women who fingered constantly the superior
texture of their souls and yearned for an appreciation and understanding denied
them.

But it was a question which she could not ask of herself down there, down
in that white house that George had built. What is going to become of me? She
had asked that same question before, long ago, in the old house in town in that
empty season after she had come back from college. That unreal time in the old
house. But she had known then that something was waiting for her. Something
wild and wonderful, as yet unknown. So it had been a good game. What will become
of me? This is my life and now I am ready to step into it. Exhilaration in the
question then. But not now. Now a question that is dry and withered. This was
the life I stepped into and now it is not enough.

Does that make me a malcontent? Do I think life should be a skyrocket
thing, all thrills, chills, and
shudderings
of
ecstasy? All unbearable joys? Sweats and swoons and hysterias? Surely that must
be immaturity. Like the bride who believes that every breakfast will be like
the husband-and-wife breakfast shows—without the commercials. Am I like this
only because there is more growing up to do?

This can’t possibly be enough. This can’t be all there is.
Remember
this season smart hostesses will be keeping hors d’oeuvres piping hot over the
cheery charcoal glow of a genuine Japanese hibachi.
Try
for that
exciting touch of madness by wearing unmatched earrings and see who will be the
first to comment.
Do
use an ice cube in a saucer as a stamp moistener
when sending out those scads of invitations to your next really important
party.
Watch
those smart gals this season who don’t begin to fray at the
edges because their drink—and they are sticking to it—is vermouth on the rocks.
Be
bold and merry by sewing an ordinary hardware store bolt and latch to
the new dark blouse.
Respond
to the needs of your community by being
active in at least two worthy fund drives each year.
Use
one of our tape
recorders in your home as an aid in correcting your own voice level.

There has to be more.

More than the rancid joke wheezed into your ear on the dance floor at the
club; more than the
overboldness
of the hand of the
man who sells insurance and is named Chester something; more than the tiresome
sexual gossip of the bridge group; more than the bitching about the cost of
help, the price of meats, the way salesclerks don’t seem to
care
anymore.

But what do you substitute?

A dream of yourself in a cold-water flat devoting your life to some
unsung young genius? Or hurrying down the dim corridor to where the
postoperative patient is calling you? Do you want to be a fiction story in a
slick magazine?

A loving husband, a nice home, healthy intelligent children. Mrs. Bailey
to do the drudgery. Why couldn’t it

be enough? If the sexual adjustment had been better, would it be enough?
She could not guess. This was an unreal year. Full of a lost restlessness.

She thought back to the best time of her marriage. When George was just
getting started. How they’d spread out drawings on the floor and sit and argue.
“No housewife is going to like that arrangement, George.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Now don’t yell. The way you have it, she’d have to walk just miles more
than she should have to.”

And then the slow change in his face as he studied the drawings again.
“Hmmm,” he would say. And sketch the change. Then ruffle her hair.

That was good. But it did not last long. Not when there were three small
children and no help. Not after George began to get more work and began to gain
confidence.

She sat on the shaded rocks of the old stone wall, her face still and
withdrawn. No longer was there any sense of excitement or anticipation in any
of her days. When she awakened in the morning, it was with an acceptance of the
day ahead and a full knowledge of what it would bring. George, in his own way,
had gone away from her. There was no talk anymore. There was nothing to say
anymore. George accepted her as a part of his home, as a quiet mechanism that
supervised the efficient functioning of the home aspects of environment.

She knew that her mind was good. But this was a problem too vague to
handle. Directionless discontent. A small ship adrift, guided by no wind, no
stars, ripe for some unknown tempest. There was always the suspicion that there
should
be nothing else. That this was what people had. Only this.
Symptomatic of the times. An aloneness. A disease of “now” when all values had
become diffused. As one of Mr. Gibbon’s Roman ladies, on the slave-made patio,
hearing, without interest, the far roars of spectacle in the amphitheater.

It was not diversion that was needed, but purpose.

The disease of “now,” searching for purpose. Looking in all the wrong
places. In the PTA and the League of Women Voters and the Little Theater and
the Garden Club and the Auxiliary of this and that until the voices of all the
women in all those places began to sound distressingly like a chicken yard. And
then they would look—those others—for another purpose in the discreet code, the
sly, kitchen
kissings
, the knowing glance, the
engineering assignation—cold and glossy as a helical gear, measuring safety
against mutual trust. And the other ways out, the spot of watercolor, the bit
of sculpting, the book review. Trying them all meant an eventual confusion of
activity with meaning, a part so thoroughly overplayed that everything became
drawing-room farce.

But there had to be more. It was quite clear that there should be more.
Otherwise you were unused. You were something that stood in a corner and
rusted.

Life could not turn out to be like one of those endless rainy days of childhood—Mommy,
I’m tired of myself—a listless wandering through the dull rooms where there was
nothing to do. No dolls to dress, no books to color. Mostly there was no one to
talk to.

Here I am, she thought, sitting on a damn wall, feeling sorry for myself.
About to break into big sobs of self-pity. In disgust she swung her long legs
around and over the wall and dropped to the other side and took the path that
led down a
briared
slope to the open pastureland. She
walked slowly in the sun on the uneven ground and closed her mind to everything
but the sensuous warmth of the June sun, the relaxed flex and pull of the long
muscles of her legs. With a fresh cigarette in the corner of her mouth, she
jammed her hands deep in the pockets of the slacks, spreading her fingers flat
against her thighs, feeling the alternate tightening and loosening of either
leg, head bent, hair brushing crisp against the back of her neck, focusing
inwardly upon a body-awareness, summoning up such a formless eroticism that
after a time she felt a tingling of breast, a false and hollow excitement under
her heart.

She had read widely. And she knew the clinical psychological explanation
of this body-excitement she was able to induce in herself. It was, the books
said, such a clear evidence of sexual immaturity. An indication that the
individual had never progressed far beyond the status of self-love, that
infantile first awareness which should have progressed through a brief period
of homosexual longings to the mature status of heterosexual love. And the books
said that the self-love status could be indefinitely prolonged
if
the
individual during that period had a strong feeling of emotional insecurity.

So, with that evidence, it was easy to say that this discontent was an
evidence of immaturity, sexual and emotional. It was too easy to say that. And
thus excuse everything—including the inadequacy of the physical relationship
with George, including a social coldness, including nameless fears, and the
hidden shyness, and this sick excitement she could generate in herself, an
excitement which sometimes, in shame and loathing and desperation, she would
build to a bitter and lonely and conscience-stricken climax, swearing each time
that it would never happen again.

She quickened her steps, swinging her arms, looking about her, thrusting
her mind away from herself, and in that way came to the far side of the
pastureland to where a line of trees divided the pastureland from the
cultivated field beyond, and where the old wire of the patched fence ran deep
in the grooved places of the bark of the trees.

The field beyond was tilted and blackly fertile, with June-green rows of
something tender and young thrusting up from the dirt. A yellow tractor made a
throbbing sound in the stillness and she saw it on the far side of the field,
the man stripped brown to the waist, watching carefully as he cultivated the
new greenness. She stood in the screen of trees and watched him, and she could
smell the warm rawness of the dirt. She knew that his name was Marker. She had
seen it on their rural mailbox at the small farm beyond the crest of the hill
of the dirt road where she had sat on the stone wall. She knew he drove a
rattly
old gray pickup, and he had waved to her when he had
passed her during her walks, after stopping that one time to ask her if she
wanted a lift. Walking by the farmhouse, she had seen small children in the
sun, seen a stocky young woman hanging out clothes. She stood and watched,
enjoying the colors of the scene, yellow of the tractor, brown of his broad
young back, dark of the field, paleness of the new growth.

Spring grass grew high and lush in the field beyond him, and as she
watched, she saw the woman coming from the direction of the unseen farm,
thigh-deep in the new grass, wearing a blue dress, carrying something. She
angled toward the moving tractor and then the man saw her and the tractor
stopped, the throbbing sound stilled. He swung down and walked across the rows
and met her at the edge of the grass, standing tall beside her, and Alice saw
him take a handkerchief from the hip pocket of his jeans and wipe his forehead.
They were too far away for her to hear their voices, but she thought she heard
the high note of a woman’s laugh. They stood close together and it wasn’t until
he tilted his head back and drank that she realized the woman had brought him
something to drink, knowing perhaps that the day had grown warmer and he had
brought nothing with him. They stood there for a time and she saw them both
turn and look down toward the farmhouse. Then the man turned to look across the
field and Alice moved quickly and instinctively back beyond the protective
trunk of one of the larger trees.

The man had his arm around the woman’s waist and they walked a short
distance into the deep new grass, and Alice did not understand until she saw
them stop and saw them melt down then, into the grass, and she could not see
them at all. A bird sang valiantly over her head. She looked across the field
at the silent deserted tractor, at grass bending in the gentle wind. She felt
hollow. She had never seen anything remotely like what had happened. She felt
on the verge of some strange, wide truth. It was not that there was a
coarseness or a casualness about what they had done. It was the inevitability
of it, a peculiar lightness to it, so that it touched her deeply. She was
ashamed of having been there to see, yet glad at the same time. She wanted to
cry. They were over there, nested in green tall grass, sun-warmed, and
performing a wild, warm, outdoor act of love. She stood outside some warm place
and looked through glass. There was a peasant directness to it, like in old
stories of the countryside of France. And a great humanness to it, beyond class
or strata.

And she realized that what was strongest in her was a vast and desperate
envy of that woman who had so frankly accepted, who knew in such an
uncomplicated way what can be done with love and a warm June afternoon, who
perhaps had known down there in the farmhouse kitchen and, with inward flutter
of excitement, had brought him a drink he did not need, because the world
smelled of spring, filling her body with its strong demands.

It made Alice feel silly and shallow and decadent, a neurotic ghost of a
woman without loins or breasts or truth. She stood with the bark of the tree
harsh against her forehead and, feeling a tickle, watched a red ant run
frantically along her wrists.

She tried to mark the imagined scene with evil, and could not. She tried
to re-create disgust of all such scenes and memories and imaginings, and could
not. For the scene beyond was function, and her function also, and the stocky
woman her sister, and in function there was no place for fear or withdrawal or
shame, no place for a muted acceptance, no place for blank endurance.

After the earth had turned a little bit, and the red ant had run home to
tell of alien horrors and the bird had flown to sing from a distant tree, the
man sat on the tractor seat and the woman walked to where the grassy hill
slanted down. When only her head and shoulders could be seen, she turned and
waved at the man, a quick wave in which there was a certain shyness. The man
did not wave back. He sat and watched the place where she had disappeared. Then
he started the tractor and watched the new growth with care. And moved along
the field.