Contrary Pleasure (31 page)

His face was masklike in the fading light, and his movements were
wooden-toy, wind-up movements, almost audible the crinkling of coil spring, the
brass biting of the little gears. And turned, saying nothing, empty glass falling
on the grass at the edge of the stone, and walked away on stilt legs, back
rigid, feet feeling for the grass and for the mechanical balance. In the
silence of his leaving, his shadow moving long across the grass, Bess called
out to him, called his name, trying to make her voice casual. But he did not
turn and her voice, a flat cry, seemed to reecho among them, and then was
covered with the conversation which dismissed him with its jauntiness, yet
underlined his absence with the little edges that showed through.

Here was a new daughter brought from a far tribe, and they wanted to show
her the solidities, the huts staunchly thatched, the crops tended, the good
washing-stones by the river, the boldness of warriors, the fertility of women,
the grace of their dancing, and the respect for taboos. But one of the greeters
had violated taboo and shamed the tribe.

There was the one thin call and that was all.

They all heard the car sound, the high, hard roar of the motor, and
though they could not see the car, they heard it leave the drive, shrill onto
the pavement, take the long, fading plunge down through the dusk of the hill.
Bess started to stand up and sank back, making no sound. Ben met Wilma’s
glance, saw that her lips were tightly compressed. Alice stood with the plate
of hors d’oeuvres, poised, still, head tilted a bit to one side, her expression
odd—the look of a person who has forgotten something and gets the first vague
mental clue as to what it was that was forgotten. Then she bent and smiled and
passed the platter to the bride, who took one, smiled her thanks upward, raised
it to the fresh, red lips, white teeth biting firmly, delicately.

Ben met George’s glance and nodded at him and they moved ponderously, too
obviously, out of the group and met over on the lawn.

“Drunk as a hoot owl,” George said softly.

“I know. Too damn drunk to drive like that. He’ll kill somebody or
himself. What a time to pick.”

“What should we do about it?”

“I’ll go in and use your phone, George. Ask to have him picked up. It’ll
be easier to hush it up if we ask, if they don’t just grab him. I’ll tell them
to phone me at the club.”

“I guess that’s best. What got into him, Ben?”

“I rode him pretty hard the other day.”

“That isn’t enough reason. Is there something else? Is he in some kind of
a jam?”

“I frankly don’t know. I better phone.”

“Go right ahead. Use the extension in the bedroom. So Bailey won’t get an
earful.”

George whispered it to Alice. Ben came back and whispered it to Wilma.
Ellen overheard her mother being told. She found a chance to tell Brock. Robbie
asked Ben and Ben told him. And later, as they were going to the cars, after
Mr. Shelter had arrived to be on hand in case David got upset, after Alice had
kissed Sandy good night, Robbie whispered to his bride. So it was known by all
of them. And there was a brittle covering of suspense over the life and
movement and color of the evening.

Ben, in his nervousness, drank too much both before and after dinner. No
word had come through. He tried to tell himself that drunks and fools have wry
angels who protect them. He knew he had reached the point where, though in
control of all physical faculties, he would talk too much and too often. He
watched Brock dancing with Ellen, to the music of the four-piece orchestra that
played at the country club every Saturday during the summer. Piano, drum,
clarinet and muted trumpet. Balding, blank-eyed men who never referred to
written music. Music that was for dancing, specifically, rigidly,
uncompromisingly for dancing—
One
two three four.
One
two three
four.
Oh, it’s only a paper moon shining over a tea for two…

He went through the side doors and across the terrace and down the four
stone steps to the grass and heard the scrape of leather on stone behind him
and turned to see his new sister-in-law slimly silhouetted against the light
that escaped to the terrace.

“Mr. Delevan!”

“Ben. It’s too confusing around here to call me anything else, Susan.”

“I’ve been looking for a chance to talk to you.”

“Come on then, I need some air. We’ll walk and talk.”

She walked beside him, silently for a time. They approached the first
tee. He felt the bench and it was just a bit damp. Not too damp. “We can sit
and talk.”

“Sure,” she said. He peeled the cellophane from a cigar, bit the end off,
lit it carefully, turning it in the match flame. The music came across to them
from the lighted club.

“Is something the matter?”

“Mr.… Ben, I mean. I don’t know how to start. Well, because I don’t want
to sound disloyal to Robbie. I love him. That doesn’t mean that love
has
to be blind. He’s so… trusting about everything. And I don’t want him to put
you… or the rest of the family on a spot.”

“How do you think he can do that?”

“He wants to work for the company. I mean he thinks that it’s all right.
Just to ask for a job and get it, and maybe he feels you sort of have to take
him on because of the stock and so on. He’s talked about the company a lot.
It’s not so much what he’s said as what he hasn’t said. And I’ve had business
training, Ben. Even if I have been in government, I’ve worked for men who have
been in industry. And, well, I’ve wondered about something. I mean there’s
hardly any dividends on the stock. Maybe you’re modernizing or expanding or
something and that’s why. But he told me how old the company is. I guess I
better be perfectly honest. He was going to resign. I made him take a leave of
absence. I told him that maybe I wouldn’t like it here. I gave that as the
reason. I love it here. But I wouldn’t want us to be… that kind of a family
charity.”

“Why not?”

“That’s a funny question,” she said with some heat. “I’m his wife. I want
him to
be
somebody. And he
can
be somebody. I know that. He’s
intelligent. There just isn’t enough push to him. I can provide that. I intend
to—without being obvious about it. But I can’t if he is in some job where he
just goes and sits in an office and looks important and draws a salary for it.
Why did you ask me that?”

“I wanted to make sure it was true. I wanted to make sure that there is
another pair of shoulders in the family.”

“Is… is it like that?”

“Just like that, Suzy. Maybe I’ve had just enough to drink so I can
gripe. They all think everything is automatic. They all think their world has
got… reinforced-concrete pillars that reach down to bedrock. They all think… the
hell with it. I talk too much.”

“No you don’t. You don’t.”

“You know what I would give him? You know what I’ll give him if he asks?”

“What, Ben?”

“Work clothes, Suzy. Sweat and sore muscles and pay to match. And they’ll
think I’m a bastard. He can take it or leave it. I can see how shocked he’ll
look. Me? Me! You can’t mean it, old Ben. I make mistakes, Suzy. Bad ones. But
never twice. Never, never the same bad one twice.”

“You mean Quinn?”

He stared at her in the darkness. “By God, girl, you astonish me.”

“It wasn’t hard to guess. It couldn’t be anyone else, could it?”

“No. I guess not. So there it is. So I’m glad you didn’t let him resign.
Because he wouldn’t take it.”

“He’ll take it, Ben. I’ll see that he takes it if you promise one thing.
If you promise that you will do no single thing to make it softer or quicker or
easier for him, and fire him if he needs it and promote him if he earns it.”

“Yes, but—”

“We have some money saved. We’ll gamble it. I couldn’t risk letting the
outside standard of living drop too far. But on that basis, I’ll see that he
takes it. And I think I know him well enough to know that he won’t disappoint
you.” Her voice changed then, became deeper and more resonant. “You see, Ben,
we’re a good team, Robbie and I.”

He waited long moments. “I moved too fast, Susan. There’s something else.
I mean something that may change the whole thing.

“What’s that?”

“I haven’t talked about it to anybody but Quinn. And it was a mistake to
talk to him. I haven’t talked to Wilma, anybody. And I’m not going to. It’s a
decision I have to make by myself. And soon. There are a lot of… factors. A lot
of things that don’t have values you can write down and add up. I remember when
I was little I saw a brown cow. She’d tried to jump a fence and got the front
end of her over and hung up there, bawling and rolling her eyes. That’s where I
am. With no farmer coming to use cutters on the top strand. So keep him from
asking anything until—”

She touched his arm lightly. “What’s that? Listen.” The amplifier system
they used for the music blurred the human voice, but they could hear it dimly
and fill in enough of the blanks.

“Mr. Delevan. Mr. Benjamin Delevan. Telephone.”

“Quinn!” he said softly and got up quickly and hurried toward the club
and the telephone, with a feeling of something cold spreading through his
belly.

Quinn walked over with Bess and
met the bride and greeted Robbie. He held the bride’s hand in his for a moment,
and her hand was a bit clammy and he knew she was nervous, meeting them all. He
was given a drink and the others came and he let the conversation become
meaningless to him. If you listened just to the sounds of the words and not the
meaning, listened mostly to the vowel sounds, then suddenly it would be as
though they spoke a foreign language—and their words would come through in a
hollow, meaningless way, like the voices of parents when you were a child and
half-asleep in the back seat of the car.

The world had turned strange for him. It had happened on Thursday,
driving home. An odd change in all things. A thin transparent membrane
stretched slack across the road so that the front end of the car touched it
and, speeding, began to pull it tighter and tighter so that at last the car
thrust forward into a glistening pouch, and he could see through it but all
colors were
swarmy
, like oil on water. And in a last
moment of tension the membrane burst and the car drove through into this other
world on the other side where nothing was quite the same. Where things were
almost the same, but you had to be careful about them because they were
different.

He had stayed home on Friday to better consider the differentness of
things and test his steps in this world on the other side. The words of them
were meaningless around him. He sat and considered the bride, sidelong and
wary. And drank and thought of her. The mincing, simpering bride, securing
poison candy inside her taffy hips. And black groom like a hammer. Like a blind
club. Like a darkened machine for pounding soft things in factory silences. Two
of them, sitting in their sated arrogance there, with their fleshy stink of
evil, all tissue and fluids and the hidden pumps and churnings of the
membranous bodies. So a God-thumb could come out of the sky and rub them both
at once in a dark wet shining smear across the terrace stone. And cleanse
itself on the grass, removing an unpleasant stickiness from the giant whorls
and ridges.

Drank and watched sidelong her depraved legs, evil cup of lips. Drank and
sensed the stickiness of all the others around him, the fatty rub of tissues
together. Drank and stared obliquely at the giant breasts of his wife. All of
them around him, heated in their flesh, veined and glandular, fat marbling the
red meat of them, throats working wet, stomachs fisting shut and opening,
fisting shut and opening, on the bits of food cut smaller than their hungers.

Got up before the scream began and walked away from them and felt the
scream subside before it was born, felt it curl and nestle down, a soft
rustling amid dryness of him. Walked tall with a shadow long beside him
scissoring its dark legs. Sat in the car and turned the brass thing and thumbed
the chrome thing and trod on the rubber thing and the motor roared back at all
of them. Dived down the hill, fingers like dried leaves on the wheel. Dived
godlike and straight, closing god eyes for a little time and opening them
slowly, casually, still aware of straightness, of precision like lines drawn.

When he was on the highway, after the shrieking, wrenching turn around
the square, after the truck that filled his vision and fell away to one side,
after the tree that swung across in front of him, he took his foot from the gas
pedal. It took a long time for the car to slow down almost to a stop. Then with
delicacy he used his foot which was now carved of finest wood, to touch the gas
pedal and bring the needle up to thirty-five. The needle did not waver.
Dry-leaf hands and wood-dried and carved and polished. Clockwork heart and
silver loins. Steel-dry teeth and cordovan tongue. Jeweled eyes and paper
lungs. Function, balance, precision. Intersection of lines. Roll of bearings.
Predictable rotation of stone planet.

It was dark when he drove down Fremont Street. He drove to the closed gas
station. The night light was on. He was surprised that it had taken so long. He
parked the car and turned off his lights and got out. He bounced the keys in
the palm of his hand. Ignition key and trunk compartment for both cars. Front
door, back door, studio door. Office door. Locker at the club. Desk drawer.
Bonny’s
door. Eleven keys. They were on a chain. There was
a charm on the chain. A silver peso with a hole bored through it. Worn smooth
from years of carrying it.

He grinned ice-lipped at the night and wound up with the exaggerated
formality of the backyard years. He threw the keys up and out and high, arching
in the night, hurting his shoulder, seeing a brassy flicker of them as they
passed the street lamp into blackness. For the moment there was no traffic on
Fremont. And he heard them strike on a roof and bounce and slide, slide faster
into a second of silence before landing on tin.