Contrary Pleasure (27 page)

She looked at him then, a clear, bright, almost startled expression, and
got up quickly and went to the edge of the drop and stood with her back to him.
He did not know how to react, what to say.

“Betty?” His voice was uncertain, tentative.

“It’s all right,” she said, her tone flat. “That was a mistake. I thought
I could be bright and sassy. But it’s too close. And it isn’t something I can
just sit and smile and talk about. Even though I feel as if I ought to.”

“Then maybe you better not try.”

She walked back slowly, scuffing her heels. The high sun made bright
spots through the trees, touching the brown, soft bed of needles, the split and
peeling bark of the rustic furniture. She sighed as she sat down again and gave
him a slightly wan smile.

“Anyway, with Daddy gone, she’s been living my life instead of her own.
They shoved me out. I learned my defenses. I got behind my wall. Now I’m
supposed to act as though nothing had ever happened. She needs me and I know
she needs me, but I can’t feel warmth. She’s a neurotic sort of woman, Brock.
And possessive. And kind of overpowering. Maybe I was trying to escape from
her. I don’t know what it was. But I got into… a bad mess at school. I don’t
want to talk about that. Mother said it was vulgar and impossible. Maybe it
was. He was older. So she took me off to Mexico. I told her and told myself
that nothing would ever change the way I felt. Now he’s gone sort of vague in
my mind. You know? The outlines aren’t clear anymore. And I can’t tell her
that… her plan is working because that’s too much of a defeat to take right at
this point. So here I am. She keeps riding me about it. When I’m twenty-one, I
get the money Daddy left. It isn’t very much. But enough to be free on. In the
meantime I do as she says. I wouldn’t really have to. I know I could work. I
know I could get along. But… it would do something to her that I don’t want to
do. I wish I could be ruthless, but I can’t. And if I tell her now that she was
right, it means that there will be just that much less of me.”

“I know what you mean. Mine wasn’t that way. The mess I got in. Because I
was wrong and they all know I was wrong and I know I was wrong, and what do you
do then?”

“How do you mean?”

“There was a girl. I guess I went a little crazy. I let everything go to
hell and then I got kicked out.”

“Because of your marks?”

He looked at her. All he had to do was nod. It wouldn’t even take words,
this lie. But there had to be a starting place. “I got kicked out because she
needed money and so I stole it from a fellow I knew.”

Her eyes went wide with concern. “Oh, Brock, how awful for you!”

“Awful for my people, I guess. It seems to me as if it really didn’t
happen. But I know it did. And so that makes me not what they thought I was.
You know a funny thing? They want you to be something. They want it so bad that
sometimes you have to kick it all apart, like kicking over furniture. Just to
be something that is entirely yourself, good or bad. Last night I felt sorry
for the old man. I mean that business about Ellen rocked him. He feels things.
They get at him. He doesn’t show it much. Not usually. So I went into an act.
And got myself all sewed up. Job this summer and enlist in the fall. You know,
noble and sorry and trying to make it up and so on and so on. I like to talk to
you. You know what I’m talking about. You said awful for me. I liked that.”

He realized that he had spoken too intently and he felt his face get hot
as he looked away from her. She said, “You have just heard our weekly broadcast
of the confession hour, friends. Be with us this coming week at the same time
and once again we will… now I’m stuck.”

“We will hand out towels to the studio audience.”

“I’ll buy that.”

They talked for a time of other things, and the sun patterns moved and
then they stood ready to go back down, and she traced with her finger the
ridged, gray scar tissue of the old tree carving, as he stood beside her.
“Marian
Brastlehauer
,” she said softly, “with one
crooked tooth. Does she think about this place?”

“I don’t know. Like I said, I never could tell what she was thinking.
That was part of her charm. She never said anything.”

“And you kissed her here.”

“With my heart trying to jump right out my chest.”

She turned to him. “I need a young kiss. A child kiss. The kind you had
with Marian
Brastlehauer
.”

He kissed her. She felt tall in his arms. It was a light kiss, without
hungers, and then they held away and grinned at each other and started down the
path.

She went first. He watched her and saw how she was quick and good in the
steep places, where you had to grab the small trees for support. He watched the
way she handled her body. They went up the first hill, she above him, and in
looking at her, the look of her changed for him. He had watched Marian long ago
in this same way, but not in this same way. There had been the old imaginings
then, of soft and hidden delights which could only be devised from pictures,
from passages in forbidden books, from washroom whisperings. Because they were
not yet known. And now these things were known to him, so that he saw clearly
as she climbed the reach and flex of flank and hip, and watching her he felt a
deepening heaviness of loins, a specific want that was, not as in the times of
Marian, direct and known and channeled. She turned suddenly and unexpectedly to
say something to him and it was inconsequential. He heard her voice change in
the middle of the short phrase and knew she had seen too much on his unguarded
face.

When they moved down from the second crest toward the valley and toward
the tiny erratic figures of the golfers, she did not move with the same
easiness, but with a narrowed look of shoulders, a look of conscious
compression about her hips and her carriage. He knew that in that interchange
of knowingness, something had been lost for them. There could never be another
mild and
Brastlehauer
kiss on a high place. It made
him feel stained and coarse, as though he walked thickly on hooves, hair matted
in a
jungly
way. He knew she would think she had told
him too much, and there was no good way to keep her from thinking that. He
wanted back what had been lost, and yet at the same time he felt the excitement
of this so sudden change in the relationship. Though he wanted it to be
boy-and-girl, it was clearly man-and-woman, with all the racial awareness of
full ability to breed true, with that deep instinctive knowledge, unaltered in
ten thousand years, that these were the months of mating—yet it had all gone
too complicated now in this time and place for the young.

She walked beside him toward the distant clubhouse. “Faraway, Brock?”

“Uh-huh. What are you planning to do?”

“I have to go into the city with Mother. Some shopping and then dinner
and a movie afterward. Are you coming around tomorrow?”

“My youngest uncle is coming to show off his bride. He just got married.
It’ll be a big wingding around the place. I guess I’ll have to stay around.
Maybe Sunday, if I can work it. Monday I’ll have to hunt for a job for the
summer.”

“What sort of job do you want?”

“Something on the rugged side, I think. Labor.”

Where she turned off to go to the cottage they stopped and she thrust her
hand out with an awkward gesture. They shook hands and felt slightly ridiculous
about it. He went out on the highway. He tried unsuccessfully for a ride and when
the Clayton bus came, he got on and rode to the foot of the hill and walked
slowly up through the four o’clock sunshine.

As he neared his house he saw Quinn standing out by the shoulder of the
road. Just standing there. He had never felt close to Quinn. Yet it was not
because Quinn seemed to have too much adult reserve. His reserve seemed of
another breed. The distant politeness of a bored child. They made conversation,
and it was usually meaningless. But something that had to be done.

There seemed to be an indefinable oddness about the way Quinn was
standing there. An odd place to stand, and nothing in particular to look at. It
gave Brock the feeling that Quinn had lost something and had been hunting for
it along the shoulder and had now given up the search and stood trying to think
of some other place to look.

He turned as Brock came up to him. “Hi, Quinn. What are you—Hey! You
shaved off your mustache!”

Quinn seemed oddly startled for a moment. And he ran his knuckle across
his upper lip. His upper lip was pale against the golfing tan of his lean quite
face. “Yes, I shaved it off,” he said, using the words carefully, as though
trying to achieve precision and understanding. Almost as though he spoke a
foreign language, having learned it out of a guidebook.

Brock could see why Quinn had worn the mustache ever since he could
remember. The upper lip was too long, and it was faintly convex from the root
of the nose down to the thin lip, so that it gave him a mildly
rabbity
look, putting something thin and blinking and
nervous into his face that had been hidden before by the bold, heather
harshness of the carefully unkempt mustache. Brock stood, wanting to go on, not
knowing quite how to break away.

“Back early from work,” Brock said.

“I didn’t go today.”

“Oh, are you sick?” And Brock was aware of the awkwardness of never
having known precisely what to call Quinn. When he was little, he had called
him Uncle. But that had seemed to become unsuitable when he was about eight
years old. And as that had been too early to start calling him Quinn, he had
slid into the perpetual awkwardness of calling him nothing at all.

“No. I just didn’t go to work today.”

“I see,” said Brock, feeling as though he had been tricked into the
position of inquisitor, wanting to get out of it and not knowing how.

“How… uh… does Aunt Bess like the way you look without the mustache?” And
Brock smiled, and felt as though his lips were stiff.

Quinn knuckled his naked Up again. “I… I guess I haven’t seen her yet.
She went off with David. His shot, you know.
Glutamic
acid. They’re experimenting.”

“Yes. I know. Well… I’ll see you around.”

“Yes,” Quinn said.

Brock walked on. He turned and looked back. Quinn still stood there.
Brock stopped and for a moment had the feeling that he should go back. Quinn
stood in a way that suggested nothing. Not thought, nor patience, nor
dejection. He was the figure of a man who stood quite still on a June
afternoon. Brock half shrugged and went on toward the house. There was a small
truck in the drive. There was a man on the kitchen floor, tinkering with the
innards of the dishwasher. The front panel was off. Brock made himself a thick
peanut-butter sandwich and poured a glass of milk. He sat on the counter top
and ate and watched the man and listened with quiet amusement to the man’s
complete and utter condemnation of the manufacturer who had created this piece
of junk, the plumber who had installed it, the electrician who had wired it,
and the civilization which had spawned all of them.

Bess walked back to the car from
the doctor’s office with David. It had simplified matters a great deal when Dr.
Endermann
had moved his office out to Clayton, closer
to his home. Dr.
Endermann
was always so good with
David. The way Mr. Shelter was good. But there was always that feeling that,
good as they were, they didn’t
like
him. No matter how gently they spoke
to him, understanding how to achieve his always reluctant cooperation, Bess had
the feeling that they did it because it was profitable and because it was their
job, and if anything happened that changed the arrangements, they would not
want to see him again.

There had always been so many shots. So many deficiencies to make up. It
was Mr. Shelter who had suggested that he be taken to the doctor’s office. At
first it had been awkward because, unlike the shots taken at home, having them
in a strange place had made David wet his pants. And so she had to bring
changes each time. It was odd how David, so easily frightened and embarrassed
by many things, did not seem dreadfully upset when he made a mess like that. He
stood in
horselike
patience and waited to be handed
the clean clothes, and went into the next room with animal docility. But he had
not done that for a long time.

She was aware of her son walking tall beside her, and it was pleasant to
think of just that, of walking by a tall son while the children in the park
made the light quick sounds of play. Better to just think that and not glance
up into his face, with the beard hairs beginning to fringe the pimpled mouth,
the funny constricted way he walked.

She felt exhausted. It had been a strange unnerving session with Dr.
Endermann
after he had taken her into the other office,
leaving David with the nurse. Dr.
Endermann
had
seemed uneasy about it.

“Mrs. Delevan, I’ve been talking with Ralph Shelter about David.
Understand I wouldn’t talk like this if I didn’t have some… professional basis
for my opinion.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“As you know, Mrs. Delevan, we have never been able to find any evidence of
actual damage to the brain or central nervous system. Physically he is what we
call a constitutional inadequate. And his slowness and inability to cope have
given him a serious emotional situation. So serious, you understand, that we
have never been able to do any serious testing of his intelligence. Shelter
tells me that at times there will be a flash of… well, call it a form of
brilliance. Adolescence has been very difficult for him. Relatively speaking,
he is worse now than when he was twelve.”