Dale Loves Sophie to Death (23 page)

He sat in front of the news, eating his meals and taking an obscure and chilling comfort in the disasters of the day. His sorrow was there at every moment; in fact, he felt that in its amplitude it encompassed the earth like a mist. But his sorrow and pity were easily attributable. He knew their cause. He watched the numbing ordeal of the Cambodians with despair and with rage. Murders and rapes and fires touched him with impotent horror, as they would any person of even meager imagination, but lurking turbulently beneath these clearly defined disasters and atrocities was a knowledge so devastating to him that he knew there was danger there. He had finally understood the transience of the earth. What awaited him, if he was unable to exhaust his anxiety on immediate concerns, was the knowledge, for instance, of black holes, of a finite sun, of the vast and godless universe.

Martin was even made miserable by his own intelligence. He knew that it was ultimately a threat to his own ego that he was fending off, and yet apathy encroached from all sides. He had hours, sometimes days, when he could not think of a reason to lift a finger, write a word, have a child. If he could not manage to keep his imagination engaged, he drifted off into a nether world of all the consequences of life and growth and change and motion.
This
was the sorrow that held him most securely: the final despair at the idea that, indeed, continuity was the one vision he must abandon.

Martin’s little cart, carefully set with his knife and fork and a lamb chop or a bit of roast chicken, was a tentative barrier thrown up against a menacing havoc of ideas, and it worked out very nicely for almost a week. It worked out fine until the evening when he was arranging everything tidily in the cool, high-ceilinged kitchen—he was broiling a hamburger for his supper—and it dawned on him that he could have achieved even greater efficiency by placing the pan of food itself on the impervious metal surface. When this thought occurred to him, the charm of the whole enterprise collapsed like a house of cards. He could have adopted this plan, and it would even have enlarged his menu; he could have soup, salads, spaghetti…But Martin replaced all the appliances on the metal cart, rolled it back to its place by the stove, and ate his meals from then on off the everyday china and at the kitchen table. He was gravely depressed that he had expended so much determined thought and energy on such a small and essentially frivolous exercise.

Martin missed the Hofstatters, and he knew that they would welcome him; they were not petty, but he couldn’t bring himself to face Ellen’s grim disapprobation. Besides, in those moments when he could wrench his thoughts back to earth, he—on his part—felt a certain disapproval of her. He suspected there was something slippery and perturbing beneath the surface of her unique interpretation of morality. The most fearsome thing about Ellen was her unnerving tendency to say exactly what she thought, and in this case she had been unusually strident in her anger.

She had sat waiting for him one day when he emerged from the pond. He had straggled out to see her regarding him with a narrowed, steely look. “I think you ought to know something, Martin,” she said as he began to dry himself. “I think you ought to know that you’re beginning to disgust me! I wouldn’t have thought that you would be unkind. To anyone. But especially not to Dinah.”

He was taken aback, because his and Claire’s lovemaking had been going on for several weeks, and he hadn’t thought Vic and Ellen cared one way or another. It certainly hadn’t made much of an impression on Claire, who went mildly through the days, just as always. It hadn’t even made much of an impression on him, although he had never had any sort of affair before. He hadn’t, until that moment, even considered it an affair. It seemed far too menacing a description when he thought of it that way. As he tried to towel the murky water out of his hair, he made an attempt to turn and lighten the conversation. “Ellen, I think I’m still a good and proper man.” He meant to instill this with enough self-disdain to satisfy her.

“Well,” Ellen said, looking straight at him, unnervingly, so that he was aware of a slight roll of flesh over the waistband of his suit, “I’m just sorry I know what you are. I’m sorry to find out. It’s just too bad I know, because you’re not much more than ludicrous! In fact, I’m sorry to see that you’re almost pitiful.”

He became angry now himself. “You sure as hell are righteous today, aren’t you?” He still wanted to deflect this confrontation. He just wanted her to back off.

“The thing is,” she said, more softly, “you aren’t even
thinking
about what you’re doing. Dinah couldn’t stand it, you know. This is something she just couldn’t stand. You ought to know that you’re causing real injury.” She held up her hand to keep him from protesting. “Even if Dinah
never
knows, you ass!” She had worked up a keen anger once more. “Even if Dinah never knows, she
is
as much what she is in your mind as she is a person in her own right! That’s what couples are, you know. And you know what you and Dinah are! You can’t ever really be two separate people again.” She didn’t say anything for a moment, and he had nothing he could say, although he knew that in a little while he would discover some way in which he disagreed with her. Right now she had jumped the gun on him. “Besides,” she went on, “you have no right to impose this on us. Vic and I think of you and Dinah together. You just don’t have the right to make this our burden, too.”

Martin stalked off to the house to get dressed. He didn’t believe that Ellen even liked Dinah very much. After a fairly silent dinner with Vic and Ellen and Katy, he and Claire were sitting alone in the yard while Katy ran around, full of energy. Martin spoke out to Claire and said something he immediately regretted: “I think Ellen’s just jealous for her own sake.” There was less arrogance in this than there seemed to be, because Martin had an intense knowledge of Ellen’s passion for control, but Claire had almost sneered at him when she smiled at that. “Oh, no. No, no. If Ellen wants something, she just about always gets it. She’s put off by something else this time,” she said.

But Martin didn’t believe this entirely. He put Claire’s opinion down to the tendency of people to overestimate the influence of their siblings or their parents. Those early battles form an indelible impression of the victor’s strength, so that it is easily forgotten that the protagonists are never evenly matched. Martin couldn’t imagine that Claire, so much younger and less certain than Ellen, could ever have triumphed.

Since Martin had given up visiting the Hofstatters, Claire and Katy often came by to visit him. Claire was always cheerful and friendly, but since Katy was with her, he and she couldn’t have gone upstairs to bed. He didn’t care much, and Claire didn’t seem even to think of it. When he had made his bed on the long leather couch at the Hofstatters’, after the others had gone upstairs for the night, Claire had taken to staying downstairs with him. It had become a matter of course to end up lying there together making love. But Martin didn’t know why he made love to Claire; it took on a masturbatory regulation, because it changed nothing in the long run, and neither of them had any intention of changing anything. There was a disturbing sense, too, of never being able to touch Claire at all. It surprised him to make love to someone who seemed to regard it simply as an easy way to bide one’s time. He did like Claire very much, but one of them—or perhaps both of them—lacked passion. He felt
some
guilt, of course, because he knew that Ellen was right in one respect. Dinah couldn’t have borne being compared to this young girl, and in a sense he did compare them—it was impossible not to. What he never did think of, however, was one as opposed to the other. He noticed the differences in their bodies, but he never considered the question of preference. His guilt was not the slightest bit profound, because there was never any decision to be made about where his affections lay. He felt, as a matter of fact, sorry for himself in some ways, because he knew that Dinah would be baffled and hurt if she ever found out about Claire. He was so bound to his own wife that her sorrow would be intolerable to him. She might experience the sorrow;
he
would really suffer it. As to the sex, he just enjoyed it, without any careful introspection. He had a mild regret, now and then, that he was not sixteen, when he had been almost incessantly interested in the bodies of women—interested in the fact that he might have access to the legs, hips, breasts, arms of women’s bodies—but now he was thirty-eight, and he had lost the pervasive intensity of that sweet obsession.

When Claire came to visit him now, in his house, he was glad to have her company. Katy played with some of his children’s toys he had found for her, and they sat at the table in the kitchen, where he and Claire drank a beer or instant iced tea. Claire was an undemanding guest; she seemed to be equally content wherever she was or whatever the conversation. She tended to be placid or reserved at the same times that Ellen would have been vocally judgmental. Martin knew now that if he had thought about it early on he would have seen that, inevitably, he would have ended up sleeping with Claire, given the way his summers wound their way out. He suspected, as well, that Ellen had foreseen it, too, and he resented her solicitude for Dinah on
Dinah’s
behalf, really. Of all the feelings Dinah might have about his attachment to Claire, surely Ellen’s pity would have roused her most bitter reaction. But Martin was glad to see Claire now, because the hours during which he had company kept him busy observing the soothing demands of the social amenities. Any visit was a respite from his new and constant awareness of eventual cosmic grief.

Martin worked over some of the revised articles for the
Review
, but it was just work; he did it because he knew it must be done by a certain time. He didn’t do it with even a flicker of ardor or excitement. He wandered around the house, and he diverted his mind a good deal by the physical task of cleaning it up. He had been much surprised one morning when he realized that the living-room floor was still littered with the remnants of the wrappings of Katy’s birthday presents from such a long time ago, and he began there, clearing those away, and then moved on to freshening the rooms that were filled with stale heated air and sticky dust from having been closed off for so many weeks.

He had conversations with Dinah on the phone; he thought he had taken to calling her so often because he knew he had betrayed her; he could never think of much to say, but he liked to make the connection. He also had discussions with her in his head, often while he sat in the kitchen eating his meals. He defended himself against her criticism when he sprinkled his scrambled eggs with lemon pepper. In his mind he justified himself to her for liking his lamb chops well done. He agreed with her on the interpretation of almost every national event. For the most part, though, Martin wandered around the rooms or watched television, with a vague hope that he might discover the philosophy he sought. He wished to be dissuaded—or somehow to dissuade himself—from the reality he now perceived.

One afternoon he saw Vic arrive carrying an armful of papers, and Martin was irritable when he greeted him at the door, because he had been comfortably settled on the couch and absorbed in a television documentary on a primitive culture—the first inhabitants of Easter Island—that seemed to be addressing all the issues he feared. But he had only seen the problems laid out; he had to switch it off before he saw them explained away or resolved. In the back of his mind, however, he knew that it was a good sign that he did not want to be caught watching television in the afternoon.

He and Vic sat in the kitchen at the table with the manuscripts between them, and Vic took it upon himself to pour them both a beer. It was a hot and humid day, and the greenery outside the windows was unusually still and without vitality. The landscape had the flat look of a painted stage set. Martin was still thinking of the program he had been watching. “Do you know anything about Easter Island?” he asked Vic while they were still sipping from the froth of their beer and before they began sorting through the manuscripts.

Vic just shook his head and took a long swallow of beer, but he looked up attentively, because he was always willing to have a conversation. It was one of his chief pleasures, Martin had always thought. Martin was quiet a minute, trying to arrange what he would say. The things he had just found out on television seemed momentous to him, and as he had been watching the program, he had been mildly surprised that it had been scheduled at such an obscure hour. But Martin was a modest man, and in everyone’s company save Dinah’s he tended to skirt gingerly those subjects about which he felt most passionate. Even his academic environment had never convinced him that the display of intellectual passion wasn’t really a vanity as base as any other. He despised vanity, but in this case he plunged in, not meaning to be persuasive in any way, but just intending to give Vic information.

“In the pre-Polynesian civilization on Easter Island,” he said, “the island was apparently quite lush. It may be the most isolated spot in the world, so the original population didn’t have any access to other resources. They only had what the island offered.” Martin was sheepish. “This is simply conjecture, of course. Well, there was a program about it on television…But what it all comes down to is that they exhausted their timber. Their food supplies dwindled. They took to living in caves. Well, they abandoned their gods, of course. I mean, those gods weren’t
working!
And they took up a peculiar religion. They worshipped the bird-man. A man who could fly, you see. Who could escape.” There was quite a pause. Vic was leaning back in his chair with his chin on his chest in an attitude of weighty consideration.

“Well,” Martin went on, a little hesitantly, “doesn’t that put you in mind of the astronauts? Of course, it
does
. But the
outward
quest?” He simply couldn’t reveal himself any further, and Vic was nodding agreeably in any case.