Contrary Pleasure (23 page)

She stood, breathing hard, her eyes watering from the sting of the bump
of her cheekbone against the floor. With Clyde ten feet away, sitting on his
heels, braced with one knuckled hand, arm straight, against the floor in front
of him, the pose of a football lineman, though horridly different, and no light
but the red coals so that half his face was red and the other half in
blackness, and the creaking had stopped.

It was a frozen time and she felt the stony purpose of him there, waiting
for him to come at her, thinking that when he moved, she would grab the chair
near her right hand and hurl it at his legs and take that moment to run out
into the night.

But it seemed to stop in him as suddenly as a motor stops. He stood up
slowly, turning away from her, fixing his clothing.

“You better take me back now,” she whispered.

“Damn you, Ellen. Damn you to hell.” His voice was too loud.

“Just take me back,” she said. “Don’t talk to me. Just take me back
home.”

“Suppose I don’t want to?”

“I’ll go out to the highway and hitchhike.”

“You would, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Just tell me one thing. What are you saving it for? What makes you think
you’re so damn invaluable? You ought to wake up. You better snap out of it, kid.
I don’t like a teaser. You don’t know how close you came to taking a hell of a
beating.”

“You scare me, Clyde. See how I’m shaking? I’m terrified.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“I’ll be out in the jeep,” she said, and went out and off the porch and
glanced up at the stars, beyond which, in childhood, had sat an old
old
man with beard and white robe and look of pity and
mercy. She heard him yell to Bobby that they were leaving. He came out and
thumped into the jeep.

He drove silently, with a vicious recklessness. They did not speak. He
passed wherever he came to a slower moving car, close to hill chests, close to
curves. She knew he was waiting for her to object. She had often complained
about his driving. She sat with her hands clasped in her lap, squeezing them together
at the dangerous places until her knuckles hurt.

She sensed from his driving, as they neared Clayton, that his mood was
changing. As they neared the Jolly Pig Stand he asked gruffly, “Barbecue?”

“No thank you.”

He did not speak again until they were nearing her house. His voice was
softer. “All I can say, Ellen, is I’m sorry as hell. I guess it was the
bourbon. Or the fire or something. I got out of control. I’m really sorry,
kid.”

“I’m afraid that as far as I am concerned, that is an entirely meaningless
statement. I couldn’t possibly care less.”

“Aw, Ellen. Snap out of it, kid. I said I’m sorry.”

“And that ends it, I suppose. Now I’m supposed to get all flushed and
rosy and grateful and let you kiss me. I’ll put it in language you can
understand: The hell with that noise, buster.”

She took her things and got out of the jeep.

“I’ll give you a ring tomorrow. We got to talk this over.”

She was walking away. She turned and said, “Don’t bother.
Please
don’t bother!”

And that was it. The record of a truly dreadful day. Dreadful all the way
around. And she remembered that he was there in the bedroom, in the darkness,
grinning at her. She went over and fumbled for his picture and found it, and
folded up the stand and lowered it soundlessly into the plastic wastebasket and
hurried back to bed. There were things to send back. The Christmas bracelet.
The little musical box. The three Brubeck records.

Once she had decided to wrap them up and get them mailed, she felt vastly
better. And she began to wonder if she had ever really liked him. Lots of times
he had been fun. He was the most fun in games—tennis and swimming and golf. Not
so much fun when there was a party with dancing and so on. But it had always
been nice to be his girl. Because he was big and everybody knew him, and a lot
of the kids had been after him. But liking him, really and truly. Well, there
was something about him that was so… so darn beefy. Thick-like. And never shy
or humble or anything. Almost but not quite a wise guy. It would happen
someday, but not with him. With somebody different. Dark and shy and gentle and
humble and loving. Sort of a Gregory Peck type. Ethereal, sort of. Not like
Clyde who sort of made you think of a bull or something. You kind of
instinctively knew that if it was Clyde the first time, it would hurt something
awful. Because he was so impatient about everything.

And then she started to think of Norma and Bobby and how it was
inevitable that they would be caught in bed together, and what a hideous scene
it had probably been up there, with Norma crying and Mr.
Franchard
cursing and raving and Mr. Rawls all ashamed and bitter about it. It would be
awful. Norma would make it easier on herself by blubbering. She could start
crying anytime she wanted to, just like that. Well, the group was gone now, for
good. Today had busted it all up. Today had ruined a lot of things but it had
made things easier, too, in a funny way. I wish we could leave this darn place.
All of us. Just go away and never come back because I am truly desperately sick
of it.

She sat up and flounced the pillow again and tried the other side, hands
under her cheek, knees high. All warm and soft and sleepy and like falling…

Wilma Delevan was awake and thinking of what Ben had mumbled to her when
she had come to bed. So odd, a question like that.

“Willy?”

“Yes, dear. I thought you were asleep.”

“Willy, are you having a good time? I mean are things the way you want
them?”

“What a funny question!”

“Well, I just wondered.”

“I guess I just don’t think about it. I… I wish you didn’t have to work
so hard. And I wish you and Brock would get along better. And I wish Ellen
would make some different friends. She needs to make new friends. Those other
children are too old for her. She’s easily led, you know. Impressionable. I wonder
if we ought to keep her another year before she goes away to school. She could
take postgraduate at the high school and learn typing and things like that, and
it would be good for her.” She stopped and heard Ben’s heavy sleep-breathing.

For a moment she felt annoyed, and then it changed to a feeling of being
puzzled. It was an odd question for him to ask.

“I’m happy,” she whispered into the sleeping night. And with a shade of
defiance she whispered gain, “I’m a happy woman.”

And then lay as though waiting for something or somebody to give her an
argument.

A girl of twenty-five with
tousled, pale hair awoke in a strange room knowing only that her sleep had been
heavy and the room was strange and her name was Susan Walton. Sleep had been so
heavy that curiosity stirred sluggishly, and it was not important to know more.
She shifted a bit and her naked hip came in contact with warm flesh and in that
microsecond of first contact she knew at once that she was Susan Delevan, in love,
on her honeymoon, in a Washington hotel room on a sunny morning in June, now
warmly and safely married, and in a little while Robbie would be awake and then
they would make morning love on this sunny morning, and it was a good thing to
think about, both before and after, because it was a thing that truly kept
improving with them even after you had definitely decided that you stood on the
highest peak of all.

She moved gingerly away from him, not wanting him awake yet, removing the
contact which might bring him up out of sleep in his ready need.

It was a nice luxury not to have to get up and become the brushed and
brisk Miss Walton, she of the quick neat heel-tapping sound down the
governmental corridor, bright hair strained back and
bunned
so tightly it seemed to tilt her gray eyes, all trimly and
sexlessly
girdled under the neat office clothes, the efficient and decorative and
discreet Miss Walton,
unfrivolous
and highly valued
for her tact and accuracy and promptness.

Yet it was a luxury tinged a bit with sadness because she had enjoyed the
role. She had been hired in Washington when she was nineteen.
CAF
-2. Clerk-typist, Assigned to the Pentagon, to a
subcommittee of the National Security Resources Board. After all the sympathy
notes had been answered and the flowers acknowledged, back there in Cleveland.
She had sold the house in which she had been born, sold the house and
everything in it except what could be placed in two heavy suitcases, and she
had purchased her one-way bus ticket to Washington, checked the bags at the
station, taken the bus to the cemetery for one last look at the plot, at the
old grave of Dad, the older grave of Bud, the raw new grave of Mother. And
stood there and said a silent prayer that her life would not be as theirs had
been, that her home would not be a place of sullen strain, of concealed
bickering, of raw-nerved continual warfare that deprived the children of a
chance to love them.

And got a seat by the window of the bus, and got off at one in the
morning in Washington and took a taxi to the
Y.W.C.A
.,
and the next day made arrangements to transfer the substantial bank balance to
a local bank, and rented a pleasant room with surprising ease, and settled
herself in, and went to the Commission the next day, was tested and hired, and
began work right after lunch for a very young man with an air of international
importance.

The tensions that had soured her home during childhood had made her
alert, watchful, secretive—quick-moving, with closed face, immaculately clean
in body and habit. And it had given her a taste for intrigue, an instinctive
perception of mood, an almost
chameleonlike
knack of
melting into background and emerging at precisely the right time. It was these
attributes, acquired for self-preservation, which had made her so quickly
successful in government work. She inspired trust and never betrayed it. She
gave any office a look of efficiency and importance. Yet she never let herself
forget that she wished to be married. She never let herself be deluded into
thinking that the world of files and reports, corridors and buck slips was her
predestined environment.

She soon found that Washington was a city of attractive young women who
shared her own desire. They pursued their objective in many ways, ways that had
only the common denominator of ruthlessness. Sometimes she despised herself for
this carefully calculated future, sensing a coldness of purpose. Then, alone in
her bed at night, touching her soft breasts, she would know it was not coldness
but the need for warmth and love and safety. And in the morning she would
search her face, looking at the skin around her eyes, the skin of her throat,
looking for the hard tiny lines, the look of crepe that would be the first sign
of the hardening into a rigid spinsterhood amid the organization charts, the
babble of
officialese
, the terror of departmental
budgets.

For a time out of loneliness and despair she drifted into a halfhearted
affair with a lean and melancholy naval officer who sat
slunched
deep in chairs and fingered his hawk nose and said wry things that made her
want to laugh and cry.

Finally there came a day when, after she had worked up through many
ratings and had become an administrative assistant to an important man, that
man offended someone he should have flattered. And she stood nearby, feeling
sad, as the big wise bumbling man cleared out his own desk, wishing to do that
little task himself, already speaking in his soft growling voice about being
back in industry where, by God, he belonged and should never have left in the
first place.

And looked up at her and slanted a hairy eyebrow and said, “Suzy, how
about coming with me?”

“I really appreciate that. But thanks… no, sir.”

“What do you really want, Suzy? Everybody wants something most.”

And to her own horror she blurted, “I guess I want to get married.”

He had grinned at her. “Tough proposition right here, Suzy. Let me see.
Resignation or no, I can still do a little something. You better not hear this
phone conversation, child. Wait in the other office.”

After a time he came out and winked at her and said, “All set, but you
don’t know anything about it.”

Twenty days later she was in Rome with State, learning the clerical
intricacies of visas and quotas and permits.

Even the sound of the name of the city now made her feel slightly ill.
That year had been a fiasco. Not professionally. Her work had been praised. She
had worked even after her heart had been torn and trampled, worked harder than
before. A complete emotional fiasco. She should have known. She sensed the selfishness
in him in the very beginning. But he had that warmth. Mike, he of warmth and
good laughter and the sensuous strength that pulled her down with him into that
small spring-blinded world, into an affair which, she had believed, shook both
of them and brought them together for forever. But she learned that she had
been the only one who had been shaken. That it was Mike who always knew all the
words and who could pretend to anything, and who, when restlessness moved him
again, got up from her bed and mildly and apologetically, and even shyly, said
farewell and it has all been dandy. As directionless and
unguidable
as a breeze in summer. Not cruel, even kind. But utterly free, and that was the
way he wanted to be and the way he would forever be until he was an old man,
and even then there would always be people around him because of that warmth
and his innate courtesy and the way everyone always liked him.

When the transfer to Mexico City had come through, she had left Rome in
much the same mood as she had left Cleveland nearly five years before—with an
intensity of cold purpose and a refusal to look back. She went in with two
other girls in an apartment in Chapultepec. Tile floors and deep narrow windows
and always the smell of charcoal burning. Mexico City was high and clear and
bright, and it was there that she first saw the hard little lines barely
visible around her eyes. And in the bathroom with its too high ceiling, and the
cranky
rapido
for hot water, which was
anything but, she had locked the door and stripped and stood on the closed
toilet lid, looking back over her shoulder, feeling more than a little
ridiculous, but wanting to look at the backs of her thighs, suspecting even
before she saw them the little puckered areas where the flesh had lost young
firmness, a matching condition to the slight but noticeable sagging of her
breasts where tissues had been weakened by the years of the taut constrictions
deemed suitable for office wear.