Contrary Pleasure (3 page)

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 hand, 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 substantial 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.