Contrary Pleasure (21 page)

“I like this time of day,” he said.

“I don’t know. Mornings I guess I like best.”

“I’m a grouch in the morning. I don’t seem to get up on my hind legs and
operate until noon.”

“I guess most people are that way.”

There was a silence. He said, “Like Italian food?”

“Love it.”

“There’s a pretty good place down in Stockton. Then we could go to the
drive-in movie on the way back.”

“That sounds fine.”

And that’s the way the evening was. Too many silences. When they talked,
they didn’t say anything. He could think of no way in which he could make them
say anything, nor did he know what it was he wanted to say. He felt inadequate
with her. Too young for her. And he had the feeling that had he not met her
mother, had there not been that incomprehensible scene, had they been able to
go directly on from the poolside mood, it would have been fine. As it was, he
felt as though both of them were discharging some unavoidable obligation in
going out together, and were thus pledged to this quiet formality, this frigid
sociability.

They ate and the food was good, candles in Chianti bottles, pepper seeds,
meat sauce, spaghetti al dente, tart red wine, and hot sauce. They drove
through the summery night and parked in the amphitheater of the shining cars,
hooking the brassy speaker on the lowered window, sitting apart and watching
the vast screen, digging into the buttery cooling popcorn in the box between
them, careful to take alternate turns so that their hands did not meet. The big
figures in impossible colors shifted and spoke and fought, and when it was
ended, he turned on the parking lights and nosed out with the others in the
obedient line which the traffic light released in thirty-car segments.

He drove her back and the cottage was dark and he did not know if her
mother was still out or had returned and was in there asleep, her face in
lined, simian repose, and did not wish to ask. He got out with her in the
darkness and, with something near despair, reached and found her shoulders and
pulled her toward him, kissing cool, unmoving lips and feeling the tension in
her body, the restraint, almost to the point of her running away.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s all right. It’s all right, Brock.”

“It didn’t seem to be,” he said.

“I know… but I didn’t mind.”

“Now you can tell me you had a good time.”

“You’re mad at me now, aren’t you?” she said, and he could not see her
face in the darkness. “I had a good time, Brock. I did. In a way I can’t tell
you. Don’t be mad.”

“Okay. I’m sorry. I seem to keep saying that.”

“Don’t say it anymore. I’m sorry. For a lot of things.” And she thrust
herself quite quickly at his lips in a briefest of kisses, a sister-kiss, but
with lips warm this time, and turning, she was gone, hand a whiteness waved,
and nothing of her, just the white skirt and the white hands and faint
suggestion of hair, disembodied. Until the cottage was lighted inside and he
drove away, looking back to see her move across the lighted window, walking
slowly.

He drove slowly back. Thoughtful. Curious. The evening had left an odd
taste. It was the sort of evening that should keep you from ever wanting to
come back for more. So you tell yourself, defiantly, a dim type. A damp lassie.
A wilted wench. But knowing more than that. Seeing something behind it. So that
it was all a barrier to be broken. So the thing could be seen clearly. And once
seen, the very seeing would make a princess-change. The kiss in the brambly
courtyard, and all the frozen things coming to life. And, driving there with a
fifty-
ish
sedateness, he returned to knowledge of
himself, and remembered that this was, indeed, no gleaming knight to awaken the
virgin princess. Not with these lips besmirched. There were, of course, the
prior adolescent investigations, those back seat, beach picnic, church cellar,
hallway episodes, the darkened fluttering
strainings
—small
spots on the armor, readily removed with E-Z-Way and steel wool. But this final
corrosion was beyond the resources of any body and fender works. So you can’t
bitch, boy, if you get a dim evening from someone like her.

But for the first time he had forgotten for a little while. And that felt
good.

And he wanted to go out with her again. Would go over to the club in the
morning. Act like the last few minutes of the evening had not happened.

He put Bess’s car in their garage. It was quarter to twelve. Their house
was dark. He walked across the lawn to his house. The kitchen lights were on.
He went in. There was no one in the kitchen. The rest of the house was dark. He
guessed they had been left on for him. He started to turn them off.

His father’s voice startled him. It came from the dark living room. “What
did you say?”

“Leave the lights on, please.” There was a funny note in his father’s
voice.

He went to the doorway, peering into the darkness. “Is something wrong?
Where’s Mom?”

“Sit down.”

He felt his voice go thin and childish and the fear come up in his
throat. “Has something… happened to Mom?”

“No. It’s your sister. Don’t interrupt. She isn’t hurt or anything. I was
late getting home. Your mother told me that Ellen was staying overnight with a
friend of hers named Norma
Franchard
. You know her?”

“Yes. I saw her today. With Bobby Rawls, and Clyde and Ellen at the
club.”

“As your mother was cleaning up after dinner, she got a phone call from
Mrs.
Franchard
. She was calling to tell Norma
something. Norma had asked permission to stay overnight here with Ellen.”

“But—”

“We were frantic. I talked to Mr.
Franchard
. He
said he would phone the Rawls’ house and call me back. He did. Their son had
phoned and said Clyde was taking him up in the jeep to their camp to stay
overnight and get the camp open for the summer. Put the dock in the water and
so on. No phone up there.
Franchard
told me that he
and Mr. Rawls were leaving immediately to drive up there. We think the four of
them are up there.”

“Where did Mom go?”

“She drove over to stay with Mrs.
Franchard
until we get word.”

They sat in the dark room. His father said sharply, bitterly, “I don’t
suppose you have a damn thing to say. I suppose this is just one of those
things. A sign of the times or something.”

Brock thought of how Ellen had looked, of Clyde sprinkling the grass on
her, of how she had looked there, lazy-bodied and brown in the sun,
physiologically a woman—labeled a child by the society into which he had been
born. It made him feel a jealous illness.

“I don’t believe it,” he said with more firmness than he felt.

“Explain what you mean.”

“There’s a foul-up someplace. A misunderstanding.”

“The kind of a misunderstanding I thought there was when that dean phoned
me?”

“We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about Ellen. And if they did
go up there—”

“If they went up there to stay all night, then what?”

But Brock had remembered the Norma-Bobby relationship. They had never
made a secret of it with the other kids, not after that time way back when they
had been sophomores in high school and Stella something-or-other’s kid brother
had caught them doing it in his tree house and they’d given the kid five
dollars to keep his mouth shut but the kid had told Stella anyway, and she had
told it all over the high school. So Brock didn’t answer.

His father’s voice was different when he spoke again from the darkness.
Heavier. Sadder. “I’m talking about Ellen. And I’m talking about you too. And
about Fred
Harn’s
boy.”

“Joey hung himself.”

“That’s what I mean. And the
Selinger
girl—they’re trying to cure her drug addiction. And the Carroll boy killing
those two old people with his father’s car last year and trying to run.
Harns
,
Selingers
,
Carrolls
. They’re good people. Good stock. They try to do
what they think is right. Wilma and I have tried to do what we think is right.”
He sounded puzzled. “What the hell are people being punished for these days?
What have we done?”

“I… don’t know.”

“There used to be a place for us. God, you have to work for something.
Now it’s like some force was trying to make us extinct. Eating our young.
Breaking the bloodlines. Taking away pride. I read something a while back. Some
fellow guessing as to what happened to the dinosaurs. He thought something
pretty agile that liked to eat eggs developed. And they couldn’t protect their
eggs. So the egg eaters multiplied and then there were no more dinosaurs.
There’s something agile in the world that’s eating our eggs. So what does it
leave a man? Just work with no end result. No goal. I don’t entirely go for
this crap about leading your life for your children alone. A man has his own
pleasures. But when things are rugged, children are one of the reasons why you
keep plugging along. If that reason is gone, about all a man has left is just
plain damn endurance.”

The room was dark. It seemed a time of privacy. Of thinking out loud.
Somehow, in spite of the worry about Ellen, it made for Brock a special moment.
It brought his father, for the first time in his life, into perspective. So
that he could truly see him. A stocky tired man whom he had shamed. And who was
now being shamed again.

And encouraged by the darkness, warmed by this new vision, Brock said,
“You can’t talk to parents.”

“Just what do you mean by that kind of a remark?”

“Don’t get hard with me again or I can’t say what I want to say.”

“Go ahead. I’m interested in your opinions.”

“I don’t think you are, really. You want me to have your opinions. Not my
own. You want me to think the way you think and believe in the things you
believe. You can’t make it so by wanting it to be so.”

“You won’t have to prove that statement, young man.”

“There you go again. Okay, so maybe the kids are rough these days. I mean
really rough. Not this kind of a jam. Or even the kind of a jam Ellen is in, if
she is in one. I mean rough. Killing strangers to prove you’re not chicken. I
mean grabbing girls and ganging them. I mean busting up stuff all over just
because you want to. I read what they say. They talk about broken homes and
working mothers and overcrowded schools and low-paid teachers and television
crime and comic books. Then why do the real rough ones come from all kinds of
homes? I’ve thought about it. I mean, I’ve really thought about it.”

“And you have the answer, I suppose.” Brock was emboldened by darkness.

“You’re damn well told I have the answer. It’s because nothing can happen
to anybody anymore. Nothing very good and nothing too bad. I’m not saying this
right. You’ve got to try to understand. Nobody starves. The government takes
care of that. And nobody makes a million. The government takes care of that
too. So everybody is squashed right in the middle. Everybody gets to be alike.
Take the things you can be. A doctor? So when I get to be one, I find out I’m
working for the government. A businessman? Ulcers and taxes. A minister?
Nothing in the churches but old ladies with hats and lots of politics.
Government? Nuts. Anywhere you turn, you come out at the other end with a
pension. So kids want to do crazy things. They get caught and some psychologist
says they’re just sick. I mean, Dad, suppose you had a big football game where they
let you do anything but make a score. And let the other guy do anything except
score on you. How hard is anybody going to play? You take my last year in high.
We didn’t even get marks, remember? You were either satisfactory or
unsatisfactory. So with no marks, all you do is try to just get by. Look at
George. He used to really try to build good houses. Now he’s got some
percentage designs and he just builds those. And take you. The harder you work
the more money you make. The more you make, the more the government takes. So
why not just look around for kicks?”

He sat back, flushed. After a long time his father said softly, “No
penalties and no rewards. That’s the way you look at it?”

“That’s the way I look at it.”

“And there’s no… kicks in the old words. Decency, a sense of personal
honor. Respect. Self-sacrifice.”

“That’s twisting it. I wasn’t talking about me. I guess those words mean
something to me. But they don’t to most people. Most kids, I mean. And when you
haven’t got those words, there has to be something else to keep you in line.
And what used to keep them in line is gone now.”

“I’d like to think those words meant something to you and Ellen.”

“I think maybe they mean more to Ellen than they do to me.”

“Is that a car coming?”

They both got up. Brock heard the familiar sound coming up the hill.

“Jeep,” he said. “Could be Clyde’s.”

It turned into their drive and the lights were turned off. They heard
steps on the gravel and a heavy voice say something, and heard Ellen say in a
waspish voice, “Don’t bother.
Please
don’t bother!”

There was a surly grunt and the jeep engine started again and the wheels
skidded viciously on the gravel.

They went into the kitchen and Ellen came in. Her eyes looked puffy. She
carried the blue case and her tennis racket. There was a long, fresh scratch on
her chin and a bruised place under her eye and her hair was mussed.

“Exactly where have you been?”

She looked at her father, startled. “I’ve been out with that—Oh, gosh!”

“What’s the matter?”

“I forgot to phone. I was… going to stay with Norma and then I decided
not to.”

Brock had moved off to one side. He could see his father’s face. “You’re
lying, Ellen.”

Ellen flushed. “Yes, I guess I am.”