Contrary Pleasure (8 page)

Yet perhaps Alice, his twin,
suspicioned
an
emotional change. Their emotional involvement was intricate, beginning in the
shared womb, evolving through the slow days of childhood, so that without
conscious thought, with no exercise of logic, with nothing observable, she
could yet sense change, the information transmitted along channels unknown to
the
untwinned
and only suspected by the twinned. It
had always been that way. A wordless knowing. And lately he had gone out of his
way to avoid being alone with her. This was a physical reaction she could
observe and he knew she had. But awareness of change had antedated his caution.
She would never ask. He knew that she would never ask because they had always
known what the other one was willing to talk about.

Yet he was afraid he would tell her. Not because she was his twin.
Because, rather, of the wish to have someone know about it. Someone who would
do nothing. Perhaps the way a man will brag of a successful crime to someone
who is a known criminal. Not that Alice had ever erred in this way. But being
twin, she shared guilt.

“Alice, I am having an affair with one of the girls in the mill.”

Not even one of the office girls. A mill girl. He would say that and
Alice would not see Bonny. She would see some crow-voiced wench or rolling
haunch and brows plucked to thin lines and too much makeup. Or maybe she would
see Bonny without being told, and know how Bess and David were a part of it,
making it happen.

Making it happen in such a strange way. There had always been, for him, a
quickening male excitement in going out there where the looms roared and
clattered, where the factory girls called shrilly to each other over the
continual din, moving with
practised
sturdy
swiftness, deft and sweaty, with knowing eyes filled with promiscuous
insolence, daring him to take closer notice of buttocks and breast. It always
made him think of a peasant village where the magpie girls worked the clothes
white on river-bank rocks. They managed to bring to these dingy clattering
floors a flavor of gossip and intrigue and speculation and body awareness.

One day in March he had left his office where sleet was crinkling against
his windows, and he had gone restlessly to wander through the narrow aisles
where the girls worked. It was late in the afternoon, and nearly dark outside.
He saw a girl he had not noticed before. She was waiting for the checker and a
new setup. There was a slimness about her. A daintiness and the wilted look of
physical tiredness. He walked slowly. She did not see him. She stretched then
as he came near her, and she yawned, fists next to her ears, feet planted wide,
arching her back so that as he watched her the shirt she wore pulled free from
her slacks and he saw in the shop lights the smooth miracle of her young waist,
the downy spinal crease at the small of her back, and there was about her,
poised there, the breathtaking perfection of ancient statues, of sun-warmed
marble. She stretched the long, young muscles and, poised there, turned her
head, and he had stopped, looking at her, so that she looked directly into his
eyes six feet away. Her eyes were dulled with tiredness, and her mouth was
yawn-stretched. Then her eyes changed and she stood utterly still, as he did.
It seemed like a very long time. She turned hastily away, tucking her shirt
into her slacks, her cheeks darkening, looking down then. He moved on along the
aisle, seeing nothing else, feeling as though he had been blinded by her. Her
face was very young. The weariness told him that she was new, that her body had
not yet conditioned itself to the demands of the working day.

Back in his office he kept thinking about her. There was an excitement in
it, and he told himself that there was no harm in learning more about her. It
became a game, because he could not ask any direct questions. The next day at
closing time he stood by the bulletin board near the time clock for her
production floor. He pretended to be reading the notices on the board. The
noise of the equipment began to diminish at five. It faded rapidly. Within a
minute there was nothing left but an almost stunning silence, a single whirring
that died away. Then, as though to replace the production sounds, the babble of
the girls increased in volume. There was a tinny banging of locker doors, and
shrill laughter, and heels clamped hard against the floor, and snapping of
compacts and purses. They filed behind him, snatching cards, inserting them in
the clock, the soft bell of the clock ringing constantly.

They talked as they walked behind him, and he sensed that some of them,
glancing at him, talked more quietly, and some of them raised their voices to a
higher pitch. “… I don’t see what the hell he’s got to kick about if I ask you
to come along… You never tasted such glop and she calls it Chinese cooking for
the love of… and told me I ought to stay off my feet… so he says to her look I
can get a job anytime I feel like it and she says then why… then they marked
them down again and I figured it was the last markdown so I… don’t be so damned
late like last time, you hear…”

And out of the corner of his eye he saw her coming along alone, and he
was very aware of her as she passed behind him and he turned his head just
enough the other way so that he saw her hand take her time card. Second row,
third slot down. He turned further and watched her put the card in the out
rack, the same slot, and go through the doorway.

They were all gone and he heard the last of the fading voices. He took
the card out of the slot. His fingers trembled and he turned it toward the
light. Bonita Doyle. She was probably called Bonny. Bonny Doyle. He liked it.
It seemed to suit her.

The next morning he invented a weak reason for looking at the files in
the personnel office. Unobserved, he took out her big yellow card and studied
it. The picture of her in the upper left-hand corner was poor. She was twenty
years old, and five feet six—she had looked taller—and one hundred and ten
pounds, and her physical condition was perfect, and she got a high mark in
manual dexterity, and her intelligence was good enough so that she was marked
for on-job training beyond the requirements of the job she was hired for, and
she had two years of high school, and before this job she had been a waitress
for Blue Ribbon Restaurants, Inc. for ten months, and she had been born at
Frenchman’s Lake, a small town he vaguely remembered as being up in the hills,
up in the resort section of the Adirondacks, and in case of accident please
notify
LaRue
Doyle, 14 Orange Avenue, Bakers-field,
California. Relationship—Bro. He turned the card over and saw that her local
address was 60
Lefferts
Avenue. And she had been with
them ten days.

After he was back in his office, he made up sour little histories. She
had a boy friend about twenty-three years old, a vet, who clerked in a
supermarket—a dull young man of the bovine type who loved her very much indeed
and they were both saving money toward the marriage.

In spite of the very delicate and very lovely configuration of her face,
she would be supremely dull. She would buy confession-type comic books, and she
would have one of those little record players and a collection of sweet-and-low
records, and she would have a whole collection of sticky pet names for her
bovine friend.

He told himself that he was a stable and well-adjusted thirty-six, and it
was a bit too early for the reputedly dangerous forties. And he told himself he
couldn’t possibly get acquainted with her without the whole damn mill knowing
about it, snickering behind his back at this lurid spectacle of this
mustachioed chaser of mill girls, this Eros-smitten executive, this deviant
Delevan.

But he found
Lefferts
Avenue and drove down it
and found Number 60 and noted its shabbiness and the smeared window signs which
told of furnished rooms to rent.

Counterbalancing the sour case histories he made up there were the warm
bright dreams. And those dreams sent him walking in the mill, walking by her
station as often as he dared. He knew that she had become aware of him and of
his interest. She showed that by her intent preoccupation with her routine task
when he was near, by the faint coloring of cheek and throat, by a certain
self-conscious awkwardness of movement.

He learned more about her. He learned that she walked back and forth each
day and he learned the route she took. Yet he did not quite dare take the next
step. Yet knew that he would take it. Soon. Knew that he had to. Knew he was being
driven by something more involved and ornamented than a simple lust for the
girlness
of her.

And there came an early evening near the first of April when he left the
parking lot as the factory girls were leaving. It had been unseasonably warm
and there was a line storm moving on the city, yellowing the western sky,
muttering with the first untried thunder of the year. He started to drive home.
The first fat drops spattered the asphalt, thrummed on the canvas top of his
car. He saw how it could be and he turned recklessly and bulled his way back
through traffic, intersecting the route she took. He looked for her, imagining
how she would look running through the rain. And he nearly missed her. He
caught a glimpse of her, standing in the doorway of a small store. He braked
quickly and the car behind him yelped in surprise and indignation before
swerving around him. He backed up when he could and opened the door on her
side. The city was dark with the rain. He touched the horn ring and saw her
look rigidly in the other direction, purse hugged in her arm.

“Bonny!” he called and saw her start and stare toward the car and knew
she hadn’t recognized him, knew she could not see him clearly. She took two
slow steps out into the heavy rain and then scampered across the wide sidewalk
and then stopped, half in and half out of the car, looking at him with
recognition and uncertainty.

“Get in before you drown,” he said.

She got in with that young awkwardness and pulled the heavy door shut,
and with it shut he could smell the wet fabric of her. She laughed in a thin
nervous way and, sitting far forward on the seat, said, “I’m getting your car
all wet.” Her voice disappointed him a little. It was thin, childish, a bit
nasal.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“How did you know my name, Mr. Delevan?”

“I guess I heard one of the other girls talking to you. Something like
that.”

He started the car up. She accepted his answer. She moved her legs a bit,
with a sort of slow caution. She still held her purse hugged tightly against
her. He sensed her uneasiness, her shyness. This, after all, was an executive.
One of the owners.

“You turn left at the next corner, Mr. Delevan, and then—”

“I know,” he said, speaking before he thought. And he waited for her to ask
him how he knew. She glanced at him quickly, but she did not ask.

He pulled up in front of the rooming house. The rain was beginning to
diminish and he was afraid he would lose her without having said anything. She
put her hand on the door handle, and he felt despair. And then the rain
suddenly increased again. The dash lights glowed green. The wipers swept back
and forth. He could not hear the motor. They were shut in a small private world
in a dark city and the rain hammered the canvas and the steel, and the cement
around them.

“Relax. Wait until it lets up a little.”

“I don’t want to hold you up. I’m wet anyway.”

“I’m in no hurry. You’re not as wet as you’ll get running for the porch.”

She took her hand slowly from the door handle. “All right,” she said. She
leaned back tentatively. Her voice was small.

They sat there and he felt the silence between them grow into an electric
and monstrous thing. He did not dare turn and look at her. He did not know what
to say. She sat in stillness. He felt ancient, helpless, grotesque, soiled. The
rain slackened again and suddenly it was gone, dragging a white curtain down
the street and away into the east. She slid forward and opened the car door and
turned toward him and said with quaint formal courtesy, “Thank you very much,
Mr. Delevan, for—”

He put his hand on her arm, quickly, and shut his fingers hard on the
thin aliveness of that arm under the bulky damp wool of her coat, and the
quickness stopped her words with a small gasping.

He looked at her then and her eyes shifted away and he said, “I’ve got to
see you again, Bonny.” He cursed his own clumsiness, knowing that this would
invite down upon him a twittering coyness, an alarmed coquettishness. He
released her arm quickly. And she turned and looked directly at him.

“Why?” she said. It was a child’s question and she gave it the gravity
and dignity children have.

“I don’t know. No, I mean I wish I knew. I keep walking into the mill
just to see you.”

“I thought that. I thought you did that. I wasn’t sure. But I pretended
that was what you were doing.”

“I just want to see you again.”

“It’s not right. I mean it’s something I can pretend, Mr. Delevan, and
that doesn’t hurt anything. Just to pretend. To make up things. But it
shouldn’t happen for real.”

“I’ll come here tomorrow night and I’ll park down there beyond the
streetlight. At eight thirty. I’ll wait for you right there.”

“Don’t. Please don’t. It makes me feel almost sick inside. No, not sick.
Dizzy inside, sort of. Please don’t, Mr. Delevan.”

“I’ll be there tomorrow night.”

“I won’t come out,” she said. And she got out quickly and swung the door
shut. He watched her go up the steps and into the shabby house. She did not
look back. The next evening he lied to Bess and drove to the city and parked
where he said he would park. He arrived a little before eight thirty. He left
his parking lights on. She did not come out. He had kept away from her in the
mill that day, staying close to his office. She had not come out by nine
o’clock. He decided to wait fifteen minutes more. At nine fifteen he said he
would give her until nine thirty. At nine thirty he said five minutes more. At
twenty minutes of ten she pulled the car door open and slid in beside him and
yanked the big door shut and she was crying. He did not speak to her or touch
her. She sat there and he felt her sadness. He felt as if they were both
involved in tragedy not of their making, like passengers on a plane that
falters inevitably toward a wide wild sea.