Contrary Pleasure (7 page)

Now you come up and the big back flexes in that power swing and you turn
and watch it out of sight over the roof of the left-field stands.

There was the dream where you floated down through the tropic sky and
pulled the shroud lines and landed like a cat and cut the chute loose and
buried it and that night
moulded
the plastic
explosive to the bridge trusses and hid while the train burst in red fatness.

Now they stand down there and look up and as you swing close enough the
finger tightens on the trigger…

Your putt stops short of the hole and you watch Player tap his in.

You walk down the dusty street, spurs jingling in cadence and fingers
hooked and ready, but you are a bit slow and lead spanks dust out of your shut
and later they all come out of their hiding places and look at your body there
in the road, and they congratulate the hero.

You are dead in the dust there because there are new heroes.

Your bags have been packed for you and they took back your pin and the
tables are stacked and the Chinese lanterns folded away and now they are
tearing down the bunting while tired musicians pack away the tarnished brass
horns.

So there is nothing much to do anymore. It is a good thing to lie alone
in the dark room with music not quite audible. Then in the darkness you can
savor the stink she left on you. Inhale it deeply. Finger the marks she left on
you. Remember her teeth and her softness. Roll in the sourness of her, as a dog
returns to filth.

Downstairs are the strangers. And they listen to the distant anguish of
television. Here you are, on the hill of the
Delevans
in the middle house, your face clan-marked, and yet you are no longer one of
them.

The records stop and this time you do not stir. You touch the plaster
beside you. It is rough and cool. There is time to go over it all again. And
then maybe it will be time to sleep.

You walked right up to the door of the lab that April day and then, for no
reason, you turned around and left. And if you go over it enough times, there
will be a time when you walk up to the door of the lab and pause… and shrug…
and walk in.

Fremont is a very old street in the
city of Stockton. It had been very narrow at one time, a street of big
Victorian houses, sitting tall and narrow and secluded, like spinsters thinking
quietly of what might have been. There had been iron fences, and the quiet
metal deer under the elm shade, bird-spattered and noble. There had been money
on that street. Money from the lumber mills, which chewed and chased the good
hard woods all the way from the valleys back up into the faraway hills—so that
each year the money was less. But it had been invested in heavy parchment,
embossed and engraved, with red seals and gold seals and bits of silk ribbon,
testifying to a share in the interest of the old Commodore Vanderbilt, of the
shifty, mercurial Jay Gould. Money in railroads, in textiles, in steamships.

But the wars came and they were fought, and the giants died, and for
those on the street a good world crumbled quickly away, leaving the great
houses which had been built with the conviction that they should last through
eternity. Behind all the silly scrollwork, the fan windows, the pretentious
turrets, the stone and the beams were sound and true and good.

The street was widened, and widened again. It was a good route to the
heart of the city. The street widened like a stone river until the sidewalks
touched the steps of the old houses. The metal deer and the iron fences were
gone.

Now there are not many of the old houses left. There are supermarkets
there, and a great metal river of traffic flows endlessly by. There are many
gas stations, and there are green-and-yellow city buses that
chuff
at
the corners and grind away. It is a street of people who are strangers to each
other, because no one stays long anymore. The few old houses that are left have
been cut up into apartments and into furnished rooms. There is no dignity left
in the old houses. The new partitioning is flimsy. The lawns are gone and the
trees are gone, and the houses are naked to the traffic. In the houses shrill
voices saw at the nerves of children, television screens flicker as the trucks
roll by, men leave in surly humor for the swing shift.

Quinn Delevan, as he ate dinner with Bess, was constantly aware that on
this Wednesday night he would go down to Fremont Street again, down to the girl
who waited for him. They ate together in the breakfast booth off the kitchen,
and he had asked his usual meaningless question about David, and she had
answered as always, “He took his dinner out to his studio.”

They ate and she talked a great deal, talked about Robbie and his new
bride, and she ate as she talked and he wished for a dining room table of
baronial proportions, so that she could sit at one end of it and he could sit
at the other, and then she would be muted by the distance, reduced to
life-size. In the booth there was no escaping her. When he was quite small, his
mother had read him the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. It had made a horrid
impression on him and caused many nightmares. The giant would grab him and hold
him in a big damp fist and, grinning, lift him slowly toward the big wet red
cave of his mouth and he would wake up screaming. Now it often seemed to him
that he had indeed married a giant. She talked
at
him. She directed
herself at him, talking of trivialities with such a dreadful energy that the
very burst and flow and torrent of her in that constricted space, under the
bright light, seemed to shrink him, dwindle him, dry him to a dusty husk. She
was a movie where you had to sit too far forward. The whites of her eyes were
blued with the health of her, and her white teeth chewed, and the red membranes
of her mouth were busy, and he would get a dazed dizziness by looking at her,
so that her head would seem to be the size of a bushel basket, all glistening
and bobbing and chomping and making loud sounds at him that he could not quite
understand. The torrents of her washed and buffeted him.

Sometimes he would realize, almost with a feeling of shock, that she was,
after all, a woman of just slightly more than average size. She was five feet
eight inches tail to his six feet. She weighed one hundred and forty as against
his one seventy. Those moments of realization would occur when he happened to
stand beside her, as when they stood at church, or when he saw her clothing on
a bed or a chair. A shoe, a bra. In such moments he guessed that it was her
sheer health and energy that made her seem so vast at other times. Early in
their marriage he had played the part of the aggressor, and Bess had accepted a
frequency based, after the first month of marriage, on his lesser energies. But
by the third year of their marriage the roles had become reversed, and even
though he felt that a certain amount of masculine pride and honor was thus
sacrificed, he was glad to be rid of the burden of decision. As her needs were
stronger than his, and due to her persistence, once she was the aggressor, his
energies were reduced after a time to the point of impotence. This, added to
the reversal of roles, troubled him to the extent of seeing a doctor, though he
waited a long time before taking that step. If his relations were shameful,
they were at least private. Only he and Bess knew the true state of things. He
waited until he went on a business trip and then he picked the name of a doctor
out of the phone book and made an appointment, giving a false name.

He realized later that he had been fortunate in the choice of doctors.
The man was sallow and quiet and wise. When Quinn Delevan faltered, the doctor
drew him out with carefully casual questions so that Quinn betrayed far more of
himself than he intended.

At last he was finished and he sat back, sweating. The doctor turned so
that he looked out a large window across the city. “Would you say, sir, that
you have been torturing yourself with suspicions of a… repressed sexual
deviation?”

“I guess I have, Doctor.”

“That is nonsense of course. You feel lacking in masculinity because of
your wife’s strong sexual energies. You hear your friends talk in locker rooms,
in smoking cars. Tales of great prowess. You begin to think you are unique. You
suspect that your marriage relationship is… unhealthy. Uncommon. Nonsense! You
would be surprised. In many marriages the male is the aggressor. In many others
both partners assume that role almost alternately. And in a great many the
female is consistently the aggressor, the more active partner. That is the way
it should be. But out of pride and out of lack of knowledge, you have forced
your own response to her until she has literally exhausted you.” The doctor
smiled. “It is the privilege of the passive partner to say no, as many wives
have learned. You are too tired. You are not in the mood. This is most easy.
Above all, do not think about it too much. You have been doing that. Because
your own marriage relationship is divergent from the popular ideas of married
love, it does not mean that it is either unhealthy or abnormal. I will stop
being professional for one moment and express a certain personal envy. You are
a fortunate man, sir. When you go home, I want you to sit quietly with her and
tell her that you came to me and tell her what I said. It will make it better
for both of you, because she may be as uninformed as you were.” The doctor
walked him to the office door and smiled broadly and said, “Above all, do not
be impressed by those men who wink and brag. They are the very ones least
likely to possess the sexual prowess they talk about.”

When he got home, he could not make himself tell Bess about the visit.
But it had helped him a great deal. Because of the advice given him, they were
able to find a new rhythm of adjustment. But always there would come the dark
nights when she would be at him, a relentless rubbery vastness about her, a
giant eagerness that wrenched at him with a smothering strength until she
sighed off into a placid mound of sleeping warmth, leaving him aged and bitter
and dry, lean and devoured in the night.

But now it was all changing. Now there was escape, delicately and
carefully contrived, and the awareness of it made the booth seem less cramped,
made the avidity of her casual conversation easier to bear. He looked at his
watch and frowned.

“Oh, darn it, dear! Do you have to go out tonight?”

“It’s Wednesday,” he said, faintly accusing.

“That meeting again. I forgot about it. I wish you could give that one
up, dear. You never seem to be home anymore. What darn good does it do for you
to keep going to that meeting?”

“Political fences. Part of the job. We have to stay on the right side of
the city and county fathers, Bess. One little hike in assessment could hurt a
lot.”

“Well, Ben seems to be able to spend his evenings with his family.”

“He puts in more hours at the office than I do.”

“Sometimes I think he takes advantage of you, Quinn. I really do. You’re
so
decent about it.”

He slid out of the booth, picking up his plate, cup, and saucer and
carrying them over to the
drainboard
of the sink,
feeling within him the curious division of emotion that her words gave him. A
guilt-shame balanced pleasurably on the slick edge of intrigue. Wanting her to
say more to bring on the self-punishment, and at the same time dreading it.

“I shouldn’t be too late, honey,” he said.

“I think I’ll start on the new curtains for David’s studio. That monk’s
cloth is drab, sort of. And yellow will be cheerful. I forgot to tell you,
dear, when I used your car yesterday and put the gas in it, the man in the
station said all that clicking is valve springs or something like that. Maybe
you ought to take it into town tomorrow and leave it at the garage. Don’t you
think he’ll like yellow?”

“What?”

“You weren’t listening again. The curtains for David’s studio. They say
yellow is a cheerful color.”

“That sounds fine.”

He went to the bedroom and retied his tie, took the new shaggy sports
jacket from his closet, and slipped it on. There was a coiling and shifting of excitement
in his middle, cyclical-like hunger pangs, and when the spasms were most taut,
they
shallowed
his breathing. He looked at himself in
the mirror and was gratified to see that nothing of what he felt showed in his
face. He looked mildly back at himself, lean and brown and bored and casual.
When he went back to the kitchen, she was rinsing the dishes and placing them
in the dishwasher. He put his hand on her shoulder and she turned around and he
kissed the corner of her mouth. She gave his tie a quick adjustment and tilted
her head a little and looked at him and said, “You look very nice, dear. Don’t
be too late, please. And see if you can stay out of those card games after the
meeting like last time.”

“Sure. But don’t wait up if you’re tired, honey.” After he was out of the
house, he stopped in the driveway and lighted a cigarette and looked for a
moment at the stars. The studio windows were lighted. It was beyond the garage,
about forty feet from the back door of the house. He thought of David in there,
and he hunched his shoulders a bit and walked quickly to his car and got in and
turned around and drove out the length of the driveway, pausing by the rural
mailbox, then turning toward the village, the heavy convertible dropping
swiftly down the twelve-degree grade, falling smoothly down through the night
by the lighted windows of the old houses on the hill. He turned toward Stockton
and felt good that it had been so easy this time, and felt slightly querulous
because it had been so very easy, felt a contempt for Bess for making it that
easy. They did not know—not one of them knew—how great had been the change in
him in the past few months.