A Fox Inside (18 page)

Lily drove her up to town. The car was piled with luggage. There was not much to say. At least the house, when they got there, would be a familiar place.

It wasn’t. Even Lily was somewhat taken aback. Charles had had the decorators in and nothing was where it belonged and nothing was the same. That was the first real shock she had, and the next came right
afterwards
. Charles was in the living-room, fussing with the flowers, which he shouldn’t have been doing. She saw at a glance that everything in the room, most of it new, was arranged exactly and immutably, as though he had a blue-print of it all, down to the ashtrays, perpetually in his head. Some imperceptible movement of Lily’s made Maggie realize that she had not seen the two of them together since the whole miserable engagement had commenced; and now, as she stood between them, for she had gone into the room first, she saw that she
was
between them; and that, just as they were doing now, they could exchange a glance over her head that even if they made each other uncomfortable now, she was not tall enough to intercept. She looked at them both and rushed upstairs, and a strange maid helped her dress. Charles had hired the servants, too.

They left her alone. The only thing they needed her for was the wedding itself. And she wondered what they were talking about downstairs. But when Lily came out in the hall and called up to her—was she afraid to come up?—and she came to the top of the stairs, she thought her mother looked strained and white and old, perhaps because she was trying to pretend it was a gala occasion and a good reason for a cry.

It was all pretty brutal. Maggie took some
phenobarbital
. She had to take something and a bride doesn’t drink. It occurred to her that the only reason they were going through with the wedding was so Lily and
Charles, in different places, could read the same guest list in the same papers the next morning, with the same mental reservations about the names. She herself did not know who half the people were. Charles and Lily had arranged the wedding. Though there were to be people there she had known at college, the attendance had been arranged between their parents and Lily.

The car was waiting at the door, a hired limousine. Charles would go separately. Foster was the best man.

Lily watched her as she floated down the stairs,
holding
up her skirt, for that was the only way to move in that ancestral dress, and Maggie wondered if she looked like a fresh-faced eager bride, as they would say next day, or like a rather third-rate actress elevated to the rank of Trilby to other men’s means.

Suddenly she thought: suppose it isn’t Charles, but someone else. She thought of the professor with an affection for Budapest. She put him aside. She thought of Luke and the tropical warmth of Puerto Rico, or a lot of sailors on shore leave, lurching slim-hipped through
unfamiliar
streets. She put them all aside. No, she had to pretend she was drifting down to some cinematic ideal, though she could not give the illusion any features. She could only remember how some things had once felt at night, things that had nothing to do with her daytime life, or this white dress, or anything she would probably spend the rest of her life doing; but by the time she had reached the car she had concentrated an
imaginary
blond with a drawling voice, wide shoulders and beefsteak hands, completely selfish, but at least clean. Someone as unlike Charles as escape could make him.

She did manage to get through the wedding without
looking at his beard and the reception by smiling at everything and pretending to be in a daze; but soon enough she would be alone with him. It did not occur to her then that he did not want to be alone with her, either. She smiled nicely for the photographer as she cut the cake. Half-way up the stairs, because the
photographer
expected it, she threw the wedding bouquet, which was heavy and Victorian, down at the stupid gaping faces instead of into an ashcan; and she was very, very glad she was not a virgin. At least she had had something. Then she turned and ran up the stairs so she shouldn’t see Lily following her. For Lily had to speak to her for a minute or two. It was the customary, the obligatory thing that had to be done.

When Lily did come in Maggie was buttoning up the front of a pale brown jersey dress that had about
umpteen
shiny, slippery buttons. She was also looking angrily at herself in the mirror. She had taken two more quarter grain phenobarbital, but they did not help. Nor did Lily try to. Lily leaned against the door.

“Well, that’s over,” she said.

“Yes.” Maggie went on with the buttons, determined not to cry.

“I’m sorry,” said Lily.

“It’s over now,” said Maggie. “And I don’t suppose you’re that sorry.”

Lily leaned more heavily against the door and
somehow
her fat had recently got out of hand. She watched her daughter, and when Maggie turned to pick up her coat she saw that she was still watching.

“I wish you hadn’t said that,” said Lily drily. Her voice was oddly flat.

“There’s nothing else to say.” Maggie threw on the coat.

“No,” said Lily. “I suppose not.” She stood aside as Maggie went towards the door, but did not follow her through it. And Maggie did not want to see her mother cry.

*

They went to Del Monte for five agonizing days. Charles seemed in some secretive way to enjoy them. They did not stay at the hotel but at the lodge over the golf links, though Charles did not play golf. They had a corner room where the light woke her up too early. When she found out that he did not play golf she played it herself, and that made him mad. “I don’t play golf,” he said tartly at the bar, when she suggested it. But the second day she went out he was there and played well, considering there was a bad offshore wind. So she stopped playing golf. It was a pity because she had a good style and she liked the salt spray and the water
slapping
at the rocks in small coves between the holes.

That left them riding, so they went riding. Charles rode well, though with a mechanical alertness and sense of form. He did not so much ride as practise equitation in a yellow suede vest and a knobbly tweed sports coat like an illustration in a manual of the English style. She went riding in jeans and a black and white checked shirt, and it occurred to her that she had never seen a book on riding that had photographs western style. Also her saddle creaked. Riding gave her an excuse to soak in privacy in a big, foamy, scented tub. He watched her like a hawk to see if she made mistakes of any kind, but he couldn’t very well watch her with the bathroom door
closed and locked. Why did he expect her to be gauche?

So they went riding, usually not along the coast but through those well-swept, clinical, somehow
German-looking
woods around the hotel. They were attractive woods. She watched him ride ahead of her, at a careless gallop, and wondered how she would feel if he hit his head on a lower limb and fell off and cracked his skull, but he didn’t. He ducked for low limbs with a regular, well-practised rhythm. He was also annoyed. When they got back to the lodge he wanted to hide her.

“For God’s sake go upstairs and change,” he said, looking her over. “This isn’t a dude ranch.”

She was perfectly aware that it wasn’t, so she went into the bar and had a drink. He did not follow her. When she went upstairs her jodhpurs had been taken out and laid on the bed, with no comment. She did not see him until dinner-time. She thought it over and when they rode she went on wearing jeans. They stopped riding.

He had made a fuss about the room. He was furious about it, though she couldn’t see why, and he wasn’t pretty when he was angry. He was then dangerous in the way that someone hysterical is dangerous. He had asked for a corner room and they had given him one. But apparently it was not the right corner. He wanted the one on the south side. He got the one on the south side. She could not see that it made any difference.

He went to bed with her only twice and it was not pleasant. He had a Brooks Bros. body. A Brooks Bros. suit is all very well, but a Brooks Bros, body is not. It requires the clothes. She had to pretend that he was someone else, someone wiry and muscular and
masculine 
and hot. He was none of those things. He was thin and deliberate and thorough, and he paid no attention to her at all. He was willing to kiss her in public, but in bed he simply didn’t bother. And he had that slippery, oleaginous, sweaty, somehow artificial skin that does not seem to cover flesh so much as some kind of wooden machinery, like an eighteenth-century wooden clock that expanded in damp weather and so stuck.

Most people at least changed, or became excited, or dived down an animal tunnel, in the midst of things, but he did not change at all. He might just as well have been wearing his clothes. He went to bed with her the first night and the next morning. And that, quite simply, was the end of it. He got no satisfaction out of it. He didn’t even bother to close his eyes. It was vegetable and
obscene
, and his flesh always glistened with that tepid sweat that made her want to take a shower immediately afterwards. In the morning she did, but could not get rid of an elusive rhubarb smell that also seemed a part of him. She wondered what it was and realized it was the sticky, glutinous smell of freshly sliced okra in a pot, before you add water. She turned the shower full on.

He seemed quite content; though it had been such a failure, as she twisted away from his beard, that she would have expected him to be angry. She thought in some obscure way he was getting even, though she could not figure out how or for what. She visualized suddenly, what she never had before, that he had gone to bed with Lily. She wished that she had not visualized that.

But next morning when she woke up he was actually whistling in the shower. She took her chance and
dressing 
rapidly went down to breakfast alone. By the time he came down she was ready for him. She looked at the disembowelled grapefruit in its melting ice crater and felt such contempt for him that she could face him cheerfully. After breakfast he took her to Marsh’s, without bothering to say where they were going, as though he had the complete five days planned out in his head and this was what he had planned to do on the fourth day. He picked out a jade pendant and made her wear it. She agreed that it was lovely.

“But”, she said, “it doesn’t suit me. It’s for an older woman.” She didn’t want a souvenir of these five days.

“I know,” he said. “We’ll take it.” And he made her wear it, too, though she never wore it once they had returned from Del Monte. She put it in a drawer when they got back and forgot about it, nor did he ever inquire about it.

The thing she really hated was the march of the fish. She could not stand that.

Usually they had dinner early. She came down first and went into the long salon that faced the sea, for on the ground floor the lodge was a series of
interconnecting
rooms on the sea side. The largest and the darkest was this one. At one end were the closed doors to the dining-room. There was a feudal-size fireplace and sofas. The room was about fifty feet long and dreary, though it was supposed to be cosy, for it was only effective at night, with the firelight, and at eight it was still evening.

At about ten to eight the guests would begin to gather. The hotel had a permanent series of elderly Jewesses of great gravity and port. They lurched down the length of the room like ungainly sea mammals, followed by
their paid companions, scurrying like pilot fish; and through the years they had so timed their progress that they would reach the doors just as two flunkies appeared to fold them back, giving what was designed, no doubt, to be a magical glimpse of the bright dining-room
beyond
, with its Hawaiian plants and crystal chandeliers. It was the timing that bothered Maggie, for at about seven minutes to eight, perhaps because he walked faster than the Jewesses, being younger, Charles would appear, wearing brown as did the displaced dowagers, and as he approached her she knew that she would rise, at six to eight, as he had planned, to meet him, and that, allowing the dowagers to enter first, they in turn would enter the dining-room, for all she knew, at 8.01.30. She hated that. She felt that he was building a machine around her. And she was quite right: he was.

On the fifth day they left. He had business in town, or so he said. He was more likely bored with it. They motored up. But she could still remember the dowagers and the futility of that corner bedroom.

Their life went on. He watched her, but he left her alone. In two years she got to learn why. It was his way of softening her up for those few times when he needed her to help him entertain, or wished to be seen out with her. He was good at softening. He knew that if she was alone long enough she would be glad to see almost anyone. He was quite right: she was.

She had no friends. She couldn’t go out and pick up casuals and strays; and anyone they did meet who liked her he nipped neatly and efficiently, one way or another, in the bud. Even Lily avoided them. Whether and when he saw Lily or not she did not know. She did not want
to know. Mostly she sat alone in that awful house, or used the car, or went shopping. She had a few outside acquaintances, but only a few, left over from college and re-animated by the wedding, but he did not exactly
encourage
a cosy social life, and he made it clear he didn’t think much of her friends. Well, maybe she didn’t think much of them herself; but they were the only friends she had, and after he had been scathing to them once or twice, she saw less of them. She knew the trouble: he did not find them useful. Maybe Lily had been right about the wrong sorority business after all, if this was what a marriage was.

She developed a routine. She would decide to do something on Thursday, any crazy thing, like getting creamed spinach in wax canisters for the cook, at a restaurant that specialized in creamed spinach in wax canisters. But then she would go over and do it on
Wednesday
, even though that meant keeping it in the icebox overnight, because she didn’t have anything else to do on Wednesday and she happened to be down town. She always had shops send packages, too: it meant that she could have the pleasure of having them come late and phoning up the shop or some damn thing like that.