A Charmed Life (17 page)

“But why
shouldn’t
they live like that if they want to?” Dolly had been saying to herself, over and over again, in a plaintive voice, alone in her shack, as she answered the Sinnotts on behalf of these New Leedsians whom she had never been permitted to meet. “Why
should
they work if they don’t have to?” She herself was industrious, even in her pleasures, like a sober little girl making mud pies, but it seemed to her that it was unfair of the Sinnotts to expect the rest of humanity to be like
them.
Moreover, she was curious, which was, she felt, her right as a woman. She was restive, living in an idyl, with two omniscient beings cautioning her not to open Pandora’s box, not to light Psyche’s taper, not to eat the apple.

“Yes!” she cried, jumping up, when Sandy Gray proposed that she come for a walk in the woods with him.

“Why
shouldn’t
I if I want to?” she said aloud, rubbing her pale curls thoughtfully, as if she were just waking up. She let him lead her off up a hidden trail, leaving her easel where it was and her brushes unwiped. It was a wonderful walk. He knew the woods better than John and Martha; he showed her foxholes and deer tracks and where a skunk had its den. They explored an old Jogging trail, very much overgrown. He helped her climb over trees that had been blown down by the last hurricane. Brambles tore her stockings and a hornet stung her, but he hurried down to a little stream and made a mud plaster to put on her cheek. They scaled a high ridge, going cross-country, and found a place where you could look out and see seven ponds. Outdoors, he was a different person, courteously doing the honors as if nature were his home. His hand was always ready, at her elbow, to guide her up a steep spot when she needed it, and he looked the other way when she had to stop to take the stones out of her shoes. They talked about the difficulties of painting from nature, which was always changing just as you got your colors set, and about chess and the Great Barrier Reef. Just before lunch-time, they saw a fawn.

“It looks like you,” he said, turning to scan her with a short, gusty laugh. “The startled fawn.” Dolly colored; it was not the first time she had heard this allusion made. Nevertheless, she
liked
him, she said to herself, as she peered into the little mirror that was tacked up over the kitchen sink. She was a sight. There were burrs in her hair and her face was streaked with mud, but her cheeks were glowing. He was still there, in the living room, drinking a glass of white wine while she fixed them some lunch: Portuguese bread and hard salami and tomatoes and cheese. He was telling her about his children, who had been handed over to his third wife by a court order when his fourth wife left him. He was suing to get them back. His lawyer was going to show that she was living with a French Canadian truckdriver, down on the bay front, in a house made of cement blocks, and using the maintenance money to buy her paramour presents. “Which one?” called Dolly, slicing the salami. “You mean the fourth or the third?” He meant the third, he said, but the fourth wife was here too, working at the counter of the grille. All his wives were here, except the second one; the first was in the graveyard, up by the high school—a very fine woman, he observed, used to be a singer, older than he was, one of the pioneer artists to settle in New Leeds. For some reason, the dead woman’s presence seemed obscurely shocking to Dolly. Remembering the Sinnotts’ stories, she did not dare ask what she had died of, lest she hear that she had burned up or fallen down a stairway. “What about the second one?” she murmured, setting down the plate of bread and cheese before him and slipping into the place opposite.

A dour expression darkened his face. “Ellen,” he said, slowly, munching a piece of bread. “You’ve heard about Ellen?” Dolly shook her head. “You must have,” he exclaimed. “Your friend Martha must have told you.” Dolly shook her head again. Fear tightened her throat; it was the first time Martha had been mentioned between them, and there was something ugly, a sneer, in the way he pronounced her name. Yet why
should
he like Martha, she asked herself; after all, Martha did not like
him.
“That beats all,” he remarked. “Why?” said Dolly, faintly, after a silence. “They were best friends,” he said. “Thick as thieves.” “Oh?” Dolly quavered, filling his glass with wine and pouring milk for herself. “I loved Ellen,” he said, chewing. “She was the only one I loved.” “But what happened?” said Dolly. “She left me,” he retorted. “Seven years ago.” Dolly drew a quick breath. “Martha Murphy,” he said, “put her up to it. I have proof. I found the letters. I pieced them together from the wastepaper basket.” “Letters?” “From Martha to Ellen—general delivery,” he said impatiently. “Urging her to leave me, for her soul’s sake. Ellen was weak. She didn’t want to leave me. She did it because she was told she ought to. Everything Martha did, she copied.” Dolly bit her lip; she could see the possibility of this all too clearly. On the other hand, she could see that Martha might have had reasons. The more he spoke of Ellen, who had been young and blond and beautiful and was disowned by her parents when she married him, the more Dolly felt that the marriage had been unsuitable. “Where is she now?” she inquired, pushing a bowl of grapes toward him. “In Mexico.” She had gone through her own money, it seemed, and was living with a Mexican on the alimony from her second husband. But Sandy Gray still loved her and still wanted her back. Now that he was between marriages, he had started writing to her again, and she had answered….

Dolly glanced at him thoughtfully from beneath lowered brows. Here was a man, she perceived, who was living on hope. Ellen, his children—he expected to get them all back at once and start a new life. He had no idea, apparently—she thought with pity—that anything was ever finished. He was still toying with the notion that he might have sued Martha for alienation of affections, along with his mother-in-law, who had also written letters. Miles Murphy had told him he should have done it when he went to him as a therapist. The word,
therapist,
prickled Dolly’s sensibilities. He had a number of jargon terms that embarrassed her and she did not care for his Americanisms, which sounded awfully queer in his Australian voice. And his table manners were disturbing. He talked earnestly, with his mouth full, and particles of food kept falling into his beard. All that was unimportant, she said to herself, watching him spit the grape seeds out onto his plate. He had a fearsome sincerity that made good manners seem false.

This sincerity appalled Dolly, for his sake. He was living here in the woods like a mole in a tunnel. The outside did not exist for him, evidently. He was utterly free of self-consciousness—the consciousness, that is, of how he might look to others. It made Dolly feel guilty even to question his hopes, to peep at him through the eyes of the judge in Trowbridge or through the eyes of the woman, Ellen, whose snapshot he took out of his black breast pocket to show her. She held the snapshot at arm’s length, narrowing her eyes to appraise it in the light of his expectations. It was a pretty blond girl, thin, with a long bob and a pearl choker, wearing a sun dress. Dolly felt as if she knew her; she had known the type in college—the strained, squirrelly debutantes who dropped out in the sophomore year to make a reckless marriage.
She will never come back to you,
she said to herself, remorseful for her percipience. “She’s lovely,” she said aloud, handing back the photograph. He nodded, stowing the picture away with a little pat of satisfaction.

He remained, musing, at the table, drawing on his pipe, while Dolly washed the dishes. He did not offer to help her, and she was grateful for this. There was not room for two in the little kitchen, Dolly had found; when John Sinnott washed up for her, they kept bumping into each other. She did not want to be at such close quarters, indoors, with Mr. Sandy Gray. In the house, his clothes gave off a slightly sour, musty smell, like that of an unaired closet. His fingernails were clean—she had looked to see—but she could not rid herself of the notion that his white soft skin was dirty, underneath his clothes, which she could not imagine ever going to the cleaners’ and coming back on hangers, like middle-class apparel. If he bathed at all, she conjectured, it must be in the pond. She could picture his long white form immersing itself naked, as if in a baptism, with a cake of Ivory soap.

“Would you like a swim?” His voice came suddenly from the sitting room. Dolly started. More than once, she had had the uneasy feeling that he could read her thoughts. “No, thanks,” she answered, in a muffled voice. He would expect her to take her clothes off. Even the Sinnotts had been surprised, the first afternoon, when she produced her gray wool bathing suit. “You don’t need that here,” said Martha, but John had been more tactful and left his underdrawers on, in the water, while Martha had swum nude. After that, they had both brought bathing suits, whenever they came, which Dolly felt was an imposition on them, for the whole point of New Leeds—she could hear Martha saying it—was that you could go in naked.

“Good!” came the voice from the sitting room. “Most people swim too much here.” Despite her relief, Dolly again was troubled; she felt that her friends were being criticized. And what was wrong with swimming? She dared not ask. “The natives never swim,” the voice answered her silent inquiry. “It’s a city person’s fad, like cooking in the fireplace.” “Good Lord!” said Dolly, raising a stricken hand to her cheek. “Wasn’t that what they were used for, originally?” she ventured, hanging up the dish towel. “Hell, yes,” he said. “They did it from necessity. Now it’s phoney, an artifice. Oh, I adore these old fireplaces,’” he quoted in falsetto.

Dolly came reluctantly into the sitting room. Her fireplace was not old, but her two wire broilers and an asbestos glove stood beside it, bearing witness against her. She could not make out whether he had seen them. And his point of view was mysterious to her; she could not locate where he stood, with such an uncompromising air. New Leeds, he declared, was being ruined by an influx of smart people with money and artificial standards. Dolly rubbed her eyes. Who did he mean, she asked herself wonderingly. The Sinnotts, if he meant them, had no money. And who else could answer to this description? She could only suppose that he must be referring to her. “Who?” she interrupted. “Who are you talking about?” He smiled. “My dear girl,” he said. “You must have met them and been entertained in their homes.” Dolly shook her head. “I don’t know who you mean,” she said stubbornly. He puffed on his pipe. “The Coes,” he said finally. “The Hubers.” And he named off the very people whom Martha had said she could see. Dolly pressed her lips firmly together to stifle the laughter that was bubbling up. “The Coes!” she cried faintly. “You’re dreaming.” She started to add that she had been served a drink in a jelly glass in their establishment, but prudence closed her mouth just in time; she did not want him to find her with an artificial standard showing. “The Coes are all right,” he conceded. “But they’re rich people and they want to set the tone. They’ve formed a choice little group: your friend Martha, of course, and poor old Miles, when they can snag him.”

Dolly laughed uncomfortably. “I thought you liked Mr. Murphy,” she protested. Sandy Gray nodded. “Miles was my friend,” he said somberly. “Now I don’t know him any more. Or he doesn’t know me. It’s this damned change. He’s got a new woman and he’s gone respectable. He drives around in a Cadillac, wearing a sports jacket. If I ask him to drop in to see me, he explains that his white-wall tires won’t take these back roads or his wheels will get out of alignment. Or he’s busy with his philosophical work. There’s something slick and hard about the guy now that he’s got his life fixed up. ‘First things first,’ I said to him the last time we met and he stared at me like a boiled lobster.” Dolly smiled bleakly at the comparison; she felt touched and troubled by what she was hearing. “Perhaps he
is
busy,” she suggested. The fact that she herself had seen him the other day at the Coes’ weighed heavy on her conscience. “First things first,” Sandy Gray repeated. “Let me give you an example. I went down to see him last month, on my motorbike. I had the idea that I might get him to testify for me, professionally, as a psychologist, about the kids’ condition. Miles knows Clover, my third wife, from way back; she grew up here; her father wrote for the pulps. He knows she’s an unfit mother; she used to take care of his kid for him when he was living with Martha. I figured he could drop in to see her now and report what he found to my lawyer.” Dolly’s brows furrowed; a deep sense of horror overcame her; her stomach felt queasy. Her sympathies, by instinct, flew to the mother’s side and repelled the idea of spying on her. But she immediately felt rebuked by another inner voice that told her she was being conventional. Many fathers, she knew, made better parents than many mothers; it was only tradition that shrank from the facts. Moreover, there was spying and spying; in a good cause, she supposed, it was justified. “I told him the whole story,” Sandy Gray was relating. “And he sat there at his desk, in that damned windmill, listening, tapping his foot and doodling on a piece of paper. “So what happened?” said Dolly. “Did he refuse you?”

Sandy Gray snorted. “He never gave me the chance to ask him. He cut me short in the middle of a sentence. ‘Well, well,’ he said, getting up and looking at his wrist watch, the way he used to do when the hour was over. ‘Interesting case, Sandy. It will make a judgment of Solomon when it comes to the court in November.’” Despite herself, Dolly laughed. “And that was all?” she murmured, sobering her face. “That was all. He had an engagement, he told me. He went to the door and rang a bell for his wife.”

A silence fell. Dolly herself became conscious of the passage of time. She dared not look at her wrist watch, but the sun had left the windows and it must be, she realized, at least three o’clock. In an hour, the sun would set, and nothing was accomplished. She had not gone for the mail or bought her groceries; her brushes and paints and easel were still outside. Yet she tried not to think of these things, which were mere details, she told herself. Her work, her life, her mind were cluttered with detail. “First things first,” she muttered under her breath, like a lesson. An hour ago, she had been on the edge of something—a straightforward relation with a man. And now suddenly it was spoiled, by her having, so to speak, underthoughts. The silence, as it continued, propagated trivia; she looked about her and saw crumbs and tobacco everywhere, which she could not wipe up because it would be conventional. The need to make conversation became an uncomfortable urgency, but she could think of nothing to say but something about the weather. Moreover, she was afraid that John and Martha might come. And on top of everything else, she had to go to the bathroom.