The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (9 page)

X Edward

So.

It is possible that there was something slightly coarse about Marta. It is possible that the sort of gypsy musk she gave off aroused my earliest crudest boyhood memories — the smell of cats mating in alleyways, the pungent furtiveness of mill-hands and girls from the spinning rooms groping in the hedges at the back of factories.

It is possible. I am trying to be dispassionate. No doubt Mrs Weatherby saw Marta as … well, gauche — always having confidence I would rise above my lower instincts.

It is also possible that there was something of the hermit in me (cooped in too long by discipline and cerebration, by a fear of poverty and a fear of taking a wrong step, by a fearful memory of father coming in late smelling of whiskey and other women); and something of the temptress in Marta.

But to be honest, to be quite simply honest, I believe it was beyond explanations, beyond a need for justification. A cataclysm of nature. Of the order of Paolo and Francesca, Antony and Cleopatra, Anna Karenina and Vronsky — doomed as such passions always are. I do not think I am exaggerating. I am too old to deceive myself.

This is how it was.

After that first dinner party I became aware of her in the uncanny almost psychic way of one who loves totally and helplessly; the way of the fly, trapped but tranquillised, watching the slow ballet of the beautiful deadly spider. I knew without looking when she had entered a room by a certain displacement of breathing air, a change in blood pressure. I knew by an abrupt sensation of vacuum if she left town for a day. I knew when I was about to see her. I would be walking along a street thinking of anything or nothing and my hands would sashay into an unaccountable jitterbug routine of such flamboyance that I would have to push them deep into my pockets. Marta! I would think. And indeed she would appear, just turning the corner ahead, Just walking through the park with her little daughter, just coming out of someone's front door.

Oh
rage! rage! against the dying of the light.

To have lived like that.

To have come to this.

See how the squirrels mock me. See them chattering over a hoard of stolen tulip bulbs, desecrating the gazebo with their feverish chewing and spitting.

I will smash out the screen, I will throw myself into the lilacs, I will scream, I will go mad.

“Bessie!!”

Here she shuffles, here she blows.

In torment, one finds ease only in causing pain. When cornered, one must lash out.

“Where are the Wilsons?” I bellow, as though she has stupidly mislaid them along with my clean underwear and socks. (She does that, she does that, damned abstracted woman.) “Whatever happened to them after the war?” My eyes glare: you have wilfully withheld this information all these years. (She has, she has, to try me.)

Why am I doing this? We know what happened. We know that Joseph was killed in New Guinea, that Marta moved to New York. I repress this knowledge. I have forgotten it daily for half a lifetime. Did she remarry? Is she still in New York? It would be madness to inquire. Like a reformed alcoholic, I censor out all knowledge of her life. Otherwise, how would the tissue of duty hold me?

God. Oh god. Still when Bessie does that, still after fifty years, when she goes into that birdlike suspension, her breath trapped in her throat, her veins bleating in her neck, I still want her. What mockery when my systems go on strike more often than the teamsters, when I have this tin box stitched into my left chest, when my useless legs wilt over the chair edge, what mockery that the wanton and adolescent blood, too stupid to know it is old, goes thumping around my genitals.

God. She is white as a saint piled around with faggots, her eyes have known all along. How brutish I am. From the mud of a mill town I came, to mud I shall return. If I shout at her again, she will shatter like fine crystal.

“And the Roxtons,” I grumble. “And Feder, that young teacher who was shipped to Africa? And the Stanton girl that went into the nursing corps?” Playing it up now, the delirious old man rambling in the garbage of his past. “What happened to all those people we lost track of after the war?”

“Ah Edward,” she says, her lost voice fluttering back to her from limbo. It is trembling, her hands are trembling. “Who knows where the time goes?”

(Elizabeth)

Liz, he was saying. Oh Liz, oh my god.

And then chaos …

Elizabeth puts a hand out to steady herself, clasps a chair back. She strains to remember something. How much later was it — a week? a month? — when Marta measuring her as a duellist might measure a rival, said levelly: “My baby's due after Christmas.”

And Elizabeth, going for the main artery: “So is mine.” She had been going to say more, to throw shrapnel, but Marta had turned white and had leaned back against… her car door? a tree in the park?

“What a savage bitch you are, Elizabeth,” she said. Tlien she began to cry silently and helplessly.

“Oh Marta.”

They had almost embraced.

All that time gone, all that time. Wlto knew where it went?

“Ah Edward,” she says. “Who knows where the time goes?”

“My cushions,” I mumble, growling a little, wanting to make amends, to give her a chance to offer comfort. (I am not, after all, so very barbaric. I have gone on letting her love me.) “My back … my cushions have slipped …”

She plumps them, she rubs my back. Gruffly I stroke her forearm with my fingers and she is startled. I feel the tiny tremor, as of butterfly wings almost still on a bough. She is standing behind my chair, she bends over and kisses the nape of my neck. My blood crashes about, my eyes water, for an instant I feel: it has been a warm and comfortable marriage. But then I think of drooling Victoria, of Jason bristling with pedantry and contempt, of Emily, my freewheeling slut. My irritation rises, as constant and internal as phlegm.

“Isn't it hot enough,” I snarl, “without having a body all over me like a blanket?” (I wish I would not talk like this. I wish she would not provoke me to this extreme.) “Cooped up in the house” — by way of extenuation — “without a breath of fresh air.”

“Shall I turn on the fan?” she asks. “Or would you like to be taken into the garden?”

Out in the garden! To sit in the gazebo! How my foolish blood jangles about again. But she knows I will not submit to that utter circus, the neighbours' sons called in, the cheap adolescent cheeriness, the easy strength with which they hoist my weightless torso into the hammock of their hands. Never.

It is perverse of her to ask and I do not deign to answer. She ought to be able to read my mind. She has had fifty years' practice. I wait for her to bring the fan. She continues to stand, pretending not to know what I want, pretending to listen for my answer. We will see who wins this battle of wills.

Two minutes and she has not moved. How can I hope to compete with the sanitised stillness, the perpetual abstraction of her dreamtime?

“Well?” I rage. “Will I have a fan by September, do you think?”

See her startle! She had forgotten I was here. Back with the Wilsons, exploring that pain, sliding back into that white shock. I want her gone before I see that in her again, before the ceaseless tide of guilt and brutishness returns to swamp me.

“Leave me, leave me. For gods sake, leave me be, woman!”

Gone. I won't willingly cause her pain. She looked that way, I recall — that
winded
bruised way of frightening stillness — the night it ended, the night Marta and I came together in the gazebo like worlds on fire, the night we parted. It was a party, we must have been observed, must have been missed. How did it begin? Scotch. I remember the taste of Scotch. I remember Marta's flesh cool as honey dew melon. Bessie's face — like bones bleached on a shoreline, gaunt, motionless, deathly pale. People everywhere like shadows moving in, it; must have been a party …

There had been a party. Twenty to thirty people perhaps, the mood one of determined revelry stretched tight as a membrane over the universal anxiety. The talk in that summer of 1942 was all of the war. Would the tide be turned against Japan? They all drank a great deal and danced and talked endlessly. There were, of course, more women than men, and most of the men were in uniform.

Not Edward yet, and not Joseph Wilson, selective service priorities valuing teachers.

Standing by the French windows drinking Scotch, the fire slithering down his throat. Yes, and there were other details clear as yesterday. Clearer. He knew that Marta was watching him from across the room, could feel her gaze on the back of his neck, summer-warm. Desire rampaged through his body like a tidal wave.

Something would happen soon, he knew. Before the end of the summer, something irrevocable would happen. It was as inevitable as a thunderstorm after days of steamy torpor. His dammed-up passion would roar across the retaining wall of his caution, smashing propriety like matchwood, foaming and spuming into magnificent chaos.

He knew it was the same with Marta. It was as though nothing else, not even the war, was real for either of them. In a crowded room, on a downtown sidewalk, he performed for her alone, she for him. He was like an organ-grinder's monkey, going through rehearsed actions and speeches. Look at me, look at me!
“The purple testament of bleeding war,
” he murmured at one gathering half aloud, playing a role of abstracted reverie, being poetic for
her.
And Marta, in a soft aside, as though no one else was on stage, had said: “Oh yes!
Richard II.
How apposite, Edward.”

When he and Bessie arrived at a concert, a party, a school function, his eyes would sweep the assembled people until they met Marta's questing for him. Colour would branch in her cheeks like a spill of red ink on blotting paper and she would look away. And yet nothing, not a single verbal innuendo, not a touch of endearment, had ever passed between them. Their daughters, Victoria and Sonia, played together on swings and slides while they fond parents merely, stood talking in public: Do let Tory stay for supper, Sonia loves to have her … Have you bought Sonia a copy of the new illustrated
Grimms' Fairy Tales
? Never an improper word. They were like chaste medieval lovers sleeping with a sword between their bodies.

The question was, however, how much had Bessie noticed? What did Joseph Wilson know? Possibly everything. Was it possible to hide such feelings? He did not dare even pronounce her name. He could not even allude to the Wilsons for fear the air around him would catch fire.

Yes, he was standing at the French windows drinking Scotch. He was conscious of Marta's glances creeping over his back like ivy, massing themselves around his neck and shoulders, looping and trailing around his heart, strangling his genitals with painful want.

And suddenly, through this thicket of desire, there came as it were a wrenching hand, tearing away fistfuls of protective dreams.

It was Joseph Wilson's voice, after the ritual throat-clearing that precedes self-conscious announcements. Going, he said. Next week … just had word. Hadn't even had time to discuss it with Edward … somewhere in the Pacific … couldn't give details naturally

A flowing in of people, a static of talk. Champagne corks popping. But Edward sees two faces: Marta's, Bessie's. Both white. Marta's eyes on Bessie, Bessie's on Marta.

Bessie realises, he thought. What she is looking at so starkly is the almost immediate future, the last barrier down. She is afraid of abandonment. In his heart he cries for her, for his own ungovernable passion, for what he knows he is powerless to prevent.

Bessie's eyes shift to Joseph. Why does she stare at him so fixedly? She pities him as she pities herself— for this blow of fate, for his having to exit and concede the fight.

And Marta, so immobile, so porcelain pale? She feels, Edward decides, as I do, the awesomeness of the inevitable, the weight of destiny, the blood of chaos on our hands.

And here was another detail, ballooning large in memory: Joseph was looking at him, his eyes acknowledging something, saying something, waiting for something. For what? And then Joseph's eyes move, not to his lost wife Marta, but to Bessie. Why? An instant shared perhaps: be brave! Edward wonders: have they discussed the matter?

And then Joseph's eyes are back on Edward. Everyone's eyes are on Edward. What are they waiting for? His hands feel cold and slick as ice. Will they suddenly turn on him, stone him to death? But of course it is a speech they want. Some sort of formal acknowledgment from the principal to his brave young deputy marching off to battle.

Edward clears his throat and says the required things. Stuff this country is made of. Making the world safe for democracy. The men in the jungles. That sort of thing.

Applause and clinking glasses. He leaves them all milling around Joseph. He opens the French windows and walks out into the garden. He sits in the gazebo.

Time passes, he supposes. Guests leave. He hears car engines spitting and stuttering and swearing into the quiet night, an echo of machine-gun fire.

Time passes. And yet time stops. He does not recollect thinking anything at all. Just waiting.

And finally he sees Marta approaching the gazebo from the house. He watches her, scarcely able to breathe.

But at the periphery of his vision, blurred and out of focus, he sees movement. Background only, an insignificant detail, yet strangely disturbing. Through the lighted upstairs window at the stair landing, he can see Victoria, sleepy six-year-old in her nightgown. She has had a bad dream perhaps, she wants milk and cookies, she is looking for Mommy and Daddy. Hesitant and wistful, she leans the upper half of her body over the sill, stares into the night. Her vulnerability pierces him like a spear. What will happen to her now? He is filled with the impulse to stride into the house and gather her into his arms and carry her back up to bed.

But Marta is entering the gazebo, obliterating background. And the war like a hurricane obliterating everything, himself blown into uniform in a matter of weeks and the future to God knew where.