The Self-Enchanted (9 page)

I
n the morning he was a total stranger.

The sunlight was strong and malicious. She pulled herself up in bed and looked round the room. She felt dirty from head to foot, and wanted to take a shower, but was afraid to wake him, for she did not want to see him just yet. At last she slipped out of bed and went to the window. Below her the town was an untidy checkboard, with the desert and the mountains beyond. There were people far below her in the street.

Turning, she saw that Christopher was awake. He pulled himself gingerly up in bed, for when he woke in the morning he was totally helpless. It was like watching someone move under water. He sighed, and said “Oh, God”, and reached across to the night table for a
cigarette
, like a wounded animal struggling up from a trap. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“You should smoke,” he chuckled. “It helps.” He held the pack out to her, as though trying to coax a timid dog. “Have one. And put something on. You’ll catch cold.”

She did as she was told. In possession of himself now, he sat up watching her. Disconcerted, she went into the
bathroom and locked the door behind her, turning all the taps of the shower full on. When she came back to the bedroom he was sitting up in bed, smoking still another cigarette, but his manner was watchful. She dressed slowly, wondering what to do once she was dressed. Silence was heavy in the room.

“Why don’t you go down to breakfast?” he asked. “The coffee shop in the hotel is pretty good.”

“I can’t go like this.”

“This is Reno. What does it matter what you wear?”

“It matters to me.”

“I want to be alone,” he said. She thought he looked startled. “Wait downstairs. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

Again she did as she was told, and it seemed to her that everyone in the lobby seemed to be staring at her. She had no money with her, and she knew no one in Reno. She was on a leash, chained to Christopher. It was not a situation she exactly liked. She waited half an hour for him, sitting facing the elevators.

When finally he came down he was walking stolidly and his face was pale. He took her arm, leaning against her so hard that he hurt her, and they went into the restaurant. The seats were narrow, so she had to sit up stiffly. She glanced round her at the large coloured
photographs
of Nevada that decorated the walls. One of them showed the valley, a view of the lakes in autumn. She did not want to ask whether or not they were going back there. She eyed Christopher furtively. Some colour had come back into his face. He tried to smile wryly.

“Do you know Reno well?” he asked.

“No. Dad used to bring me here sometimes.”

“Finish up and come along,” he said. “We’ll go buy some clothes. You can’t dress like that.”

He led her outside. The shopping was his own idea, and she didn’t have much say in the matter. He seemed to enjoy it. They went into a shop and sat down.
Eventually
the saleswoman appeared, a slim woman of fifty, with a face so accustomed to being pulled into the contours of fashion that it no longer had any features of its own.

“This is Mrs. Barocco,” said Christopher. “She’ll be opening an account here.”

“Is there anything in particular madam had in mind?”

“Something simple,” said Christopher, and that was as far as Sally got. Christopher even chose her perfume, blandly assuming that he should. By the time they were through she was in a fury of tears and embarrassment. But though she was angry, she could not help admiring him. The hair at the back of his neck folded together in a precise curly way, as though it had been beaten out of metal. It was a little section of him that was not
contrived
, and that was therefore vulnerable and touching.

“I think you’ve made me afraid of San Francisco,” she said.

“Why the devil should you be afraid of San
Francisco
? Besides, we’re going back to the valley for a while.”

She thought that over. “I embarrass you, don’t I?” she asked.

He turned round in the crowd angrily. “What on earth gave you that idea?” he demanded.

“You don’t seem to know what to do with me.”

He shrugged. “I don’t see what you’ve got to
complain
of,” he said shortly. He began to walk faster. “You’d better make the best of where you are.”

“I could get a job,” she said. She didn’t feel
particularly
happy.

“As a waitress in some cheap hash-house?”

There was nothing for her to say to that. She was in a trap. “I could go back to the house.”

He looked acutely uncomfortable. “It burned down,” he said. “The night we left. I’m sorry. I should have told you.”

*

They were in Reno for two weeks. Christopher left her and he did not even bother to ask her how she filled up her time. She had no one to talk to and nowhere to go. “If you want anything, tell them who you are and charge it,” he told her. But she was afraid to do that. On the third day there she received a letter from a local bank, informing her that five hundred a month would be deposited to her checking account. That puzzled her.

“What will I spend five hundred a month on?” she asked.

“You’ll find out soon enough.”

She even ate her meals alone. She bought copies of
Vogue
and
Harper’s
Bazaar
and studied them carefully. She took long walks through Reno, past the divorce courts and the square. She stood on the bridge over the Walker River, to see if she could see any wedding rings under the water, which was where divorcées were supposed
ceremoniously
to throw them. She wrote one or two cheques, to see how it would look, and then tore them up. She did not feel like Sally Barocco at all. And Sally Carson seemed dead.

“I can’t sit alone in my room all day,” she told him at last.

He had been looking at a magazine. He put it down. “In that case we’ll go out. We’ll go to dinner and then do the places. We may as well see them. We’ll be leaving in the morning.”

He treated her like that. They drove out to a restaurant in Sparks, ten miles away. It was a very good restaurant and it made her nervous.

“Why?”

“I’m not used to people fawning on me.”

That seemed to please Christopher. “I always get good service here,” he said. “I put them in business.” He looked at her quizzically. “You’ve always wondered what I did,” he said. “Well, I’ll show you, if you like.” He pushed his chair back and went to speak to the chef, who made himself pleasant. Sally did not like to see people servile. She waited outside.

Once in the car Christopher seemed in a better mood. They went to a sprawling casino which had entrances on two streets. It was ornamented with mirrors and fake nineteenth-century prints, and it was full of slot
machines
. Christopher went over and spoke to a dealer at one of the crap tables, and to a girl at the end of it, who was a shill. Then he came back. “Want to see more?” he asked. He took her arm and led her upstairs. “That’s where the real gambling goes on. Did you ever see anybody lose a lot of money? It’s fascinating. But the phoney cheques get to be a headache.”

There was an escalator, and standing on it she felt like one of those pigeons which ride up ramps at shooting galleries. They came out in a smaller, darker, much more crowded room, in the centre of which played an electric organ. Christopher pushed through a swinging door and
down a short corridor. He opened a door on the left. She found herself in a small anteroom. A girl sat working at an adding machine. Beside her, perched on a desk chair, was a girl of about six, with streamers of adding-machine paper curled in her hair. Columns of figures in red and black ran over the strips of paper.

“Hello, Mabel,” said Christopher. “How are things?”

Mabel said that things were pretty good. “Don’t keep that kid of yours up too long,” said Christopher, and introduced Sally, and explained she was his wife.

“Oh,” said Mabel, looking at Sally more closely. ‘Congratulations.’

“Mabel, Mr. Carmody dropped ten thousand.”

“He never learns, does he?”

“You might check on his bank.”

“I checked last night,” said Mabel. “He’s on a binge.”

Christopher nodded and beckoned Sally into an inner office. It contained only a desk, a wall safe, and two chairs. “Well,” he said, getting up, “what do you think of it?”

“What am I supposed to think of it?”

“You can take it or leave it. I thought you might like to see how money gets made.”

She looked at him, wondering why he wanted to show off, and knowing that he had shown her nothing. His expression was not revealing. Now they were married they were more strangers than ever.

“Would you mind flying back to-night?” he asked. “We could be there by dawn.”

“I should pack.”

He smiled slowly. “You’re packed already.”

“You like these displays of authority, don’t you?”

“Doesn’t everybody?” he asked.

“I don’t like being shunted around as though my life weren’t my own.”

“It saves time,” he said, getting up.

They drove out to the airport in
silence, with the
window
rolled down to the cold night air. The airport was deserted. The runway was icy
.
Christopher’s amphibian was rolled out in front of one of the hangars. He helped her into the plane, and then the door closed on them. She did not like to be alone with him. She was afraid of him. She knew it now definitely, and knew that he knew it, and that it was what he wanted. She looked at her watch. It was two-thirty.

“When did you learn to fly?” she asked.

He laughed. “On the Mexican border,” he said, “ferrying wetbacks. It seemed a good idea at the time.”

Before she realized it they were off the ground. Looking below her, she saw the absurdly small and bright lights of Reno, receding in the distance. Then they were in the open country, with nothing but the menacing shadows of the mountains for a guide.

He had forgotten her. He sat forward, concentrating on the controls, absorbed in some secret battle with an
unnamed
enemy. This was a side of him she could never know, but it was the one that interested her most, perhaps because she was a woman, and women do not like the secret lives of men. But in the tight muscles of his back she could feel a hatred that he felt for her, and how glad he was to be in the plane, which was more a part of him than she was.

Looking to the east, she saw the faint glow of false dawn. And as she looked, the mountains grew higher
around her. She had never been above them before, and realized how small people were within them.

“I had a cook and a houseboy flown in from San
Francisco
, in case you’re worrying about that,” he said.

“I thought we’d get someone from the valley.”

“They’d spy on us all the time,” he said. “Or did you want to show off before your former friends?”

She did not answer. She knew these people from the city would see everything she did wrong and gossip about it. And probably he had hired them to watch her.

“You’ll learn how to handle them,” he said, and dismissed the subject. But it startled her to have him read her thoughts. Picturing those servants, and seeing the mountains, she felt as though she were flying into a tomb. It was not even her tomb. It was his.

*

It was even worse than that.

She stayed in her room as much as she could, to avoid the servants. The cook was Finnish, and the houseboy a Filipino with tiny features and black teeth. She did not know what to say to them, and soon discovered that Christopher gave them their orders anyway. She saw little of him, and was glad of it. He stayed in his study and had most of his meals sent in on a tray. And the Filipino watched her all the time. She told Christopher about it.

“He’s a Filipino. And you’re a woman,” was all she got out of him.

One day, when she could stand it no longer, she took the car and drove down to the village. It looked strange to her now. She drove on to the Carson place, and looked at the charred timbers of the house, sticking up in the snow. She had not really believed that her house was gone. Now,
looking at the blackened fragments, she believed that her past had been quickly and methodically destroyed. Whether Christopher had done it or not, there was no place for her to turn back to. Her last root here had gone.

It was in the same spirit that she ploughed through the snow to the obelisk. The inscriptions were buried in the snow, and only the shiny black shaft stuck up into the air. It looked puny and foolish. Nothing of her life
remained
but this ridiculous, half-buried piece of polished stone. Even the ledge on which she had taken refuge in the past was inaccessible in winter.

She went back to the village and into Mrs, Grimes’s store. To her surprise and relief Mrs, Grimes was not there, but against one wall she saw some skis, and that gave her an idea. She liked to ski. If she could get away from the house and back into the open she might be able to bear life the better. She ran her hands along the
surface
of the skis, which were not good ones, and she bought a pair of boots and some poles. The poles were not the right length, but they would do.

She was sitting on the terrace of the house, tying on her boots, when Christopher came out and saw her. “Where did you get those?” he demanded.

“I
bought them in the village.”

“Who gave you permission to go down there?”

She stood up. “I wasn’t aware that I needed
permission
.”

“You know perfectly well what I mean. Do you think I want every bitch in the village gossiping?”

He cut himself off, and the silence was not pleasant. She looked at him and saw that he was really upset. He looked scared, as he often did these days, and she knew
that she was not in for an easy night. When she went into the hall she saw a large wooden packing case standing there. She remembered then that she had heard a heavy truck while she was in the valley. Christopher seemed very much aware of the case, but she pretended not to notice it. She was more worried about the coming night, for the nights were unendurable. He never came near her by daylight, and she understood why. He did not want to see her, nor did he want her to see him. But the
understanding
made things no easier to bear.