Away from Home (35 page)

“I was too tired,” he said. He stood up and put on his bathrobe quickly and walked out of the room to the bathroom.

Helen lay on the scarcely wrinkled sheet with her hands opened flat beside her, reaching and empty, and she looked at the lamp on the dresser and the dresser itself and the mirror above it as if she had never seen these simple things before. She felt as though Bert had hit her. If he had actually struck her, slapped her or done something impulsive and regrettable out of anger, she could have borne it. But she was filled with terror now because what he had done had been much worse. She heard Bert running the shower in the bathroom and she had the devastating feeling that he was trying to wash off the touch of her love-making.

She sat up with a great effort and walked slowly and weakly to the mirror. She looked at her face very closely, and then took a step back and looked at the upper half of her body. Suntanned shoulders and arms, white breasts, then tan again to the waist where the dresser obscured her view. Was she still attractive, or not? She didn’t know, she couldn’t know now, and she wondered if she were still attractive to him. She might as well have been looking at the body of a stranger for all the pitiless scrutiny she gave it. She was nearly thirty—she would be thirty in a year and a half—and she had never before thought of this as a milestone. She would be thirty years old with a husband she knew well and two children who were growing up to be wonderful human beings. Despite what she had said jokingly to Bert, thirty had not been anything to view with alarm, but simply another year. She stepped back another few feet and looked at the rest of her body. The stretch marks on her stomach from carrying the children had always been almost imperceptible, but now she ran her fingertips over them and peered at them critically. They said you could tell a woman’s age from her legs. She had always had nice legs. Now she looked at them doubtfully. Did they reveal something she could not see?

She turned quickly when Bert came back into the room and put on her silk robe, belting it tightly around her and putting the collar up. She felt as though she could not breathe. “I’m … sorry,” she said.

“Well, so am I.” He smiled, and she smiled at him, and she wondered why they were smiling at each other. She put her hands on his chest and looked up into his face. His smile vanished and into his eyes came a trapped look. That inadvertent look, as if he thought she wished him harm, as if he really thought she would try to pull him beyond the limit of his endurance for her own selfish reasons, hurt her more than anything he might have said. She put her hands quickly into her pockets.

“I love you,” she said.

His voice was tense. “I know,” he said.

“It’s late,” she said lightly. “We’d better go to sleep.”

His damp bath towel was hanging over its rack in the bathroom and the air smelled of dampness and steam and faintly perfumed soap. The bath mat was kicked into little ridges. She looked at her face again closely in the mirror over the sink. She looked tired; there were little lines under her eyes, but perhaps they were only lines from the sun. She whirled and almost violently turned on the water in the shower. The sooner she washed away the memory of this night the better, although she knew it was not over with or forgotten, because neither of them had said anything more.

When Bert had been gone for a day and a half Sergio telephoned. It was early: nine o’clock in the morning. So this was how it happened. If she could have imagined how the moment of decision would be, it would never have been like this, at nine o’clock of an ordinary morning, in her calm household, with the sun shining through the windows and the maid clearing away the breakfast dishes from the dining-room table. But the moment she heard Sergio’s voice the everyday world disappeared, and Helen was alone with the receiver cupped in her two hands, listening to his voice, her face as alive as if he could see her standing there. He had to go to the farm unexpectedly for business the following morning. He had to leave very early, so they could drive through the hottest part of the city before the day became too unbearably hot. He would be gone overnight and the next day, and drive back at night. Could she go with him?

Helen hesitated, but reluctance now was a slow, lovely pleasure, the last instinctive wile of woman, not a thing of conflict and indecision. She knew she would say yes, and hesitated now only because it made the final acceptance more of a relief to herself.

“The farm? Is it far?”

“Six hours by car,” he said. “Five if I drive fast. Don’t you want to go?”

“Isn’t your wife …”

“She is in Rio. She came here for a week to have some new dresses made. I … please come with me. If you want to.” His voice was gentle, almost diffident.

“I do want to.”

“Good! Can you be ready at seven o’clock?”

“Seven?”

“I usually go at six. But I will go at seven for you. No later. It gets very hot.”

It seemed so strange to be talking about time and transportation and weather this way, as if she were actually going to the farm only out of curiosity about what a Brazilian
fazenda
looked like. “All right.”

“I wait for you in a taxi at the corner in front of your apartment. It is safer. You look for a taxi.”

“Yes.”

“And then we take the car. Does it sound like a spy melodrama?”

She laughed, relieved. “Yes.”

“I love you.”

“What?”

“I tell you tomorrow,” he said. He hung up.

Helen stood there motionless for a moment and then replaced the receiver slowly. She felt happiness illuminating her face, as if she were giving off light or endless energy.
I
love you
. It was not something to analyze or to doubt or to argue against. He loved her now, and he would love her tomorrow and the day after. He would make love to her with love. Love always changed, she had learned that now, but this was new love, and fresh, and freely given, so that even for the moment it mattered and was important. Sergio would never love her only a little; he had told her that when they had first met. I love you too, she thought, realizing even as she said it to herself that it was the first time she had ever dared to think those words. The feeling of love rushed through her, making her feel strong and alive again. How bright the floors were here in the hallway in the sunshine, polished and rich and clean! How beautiful everything was in this room, as if she had noticed it all for the first time.

Julie came trailing down the hall, wearing her new bikini, carrying a partly deflated rubber beach ball for her mother to blow up for her. Helen knelt beside her and put her arms around her child’s small, compact body, filled with love for her, and kissed her cheeks and forehead and silky hair.

“Oh, Julie, you’re going to be so beautiful when you grow up!” she said. “So beautiful!”

CHAPTER 17

The small plane was airborne at eight in the morning. It was already a hot day; the night mists that were left at the rim of the land burned quickly away. There were six other passengers on the plane, and it would make three stops. Bert was not sleepy at all. He lighted a cigarette and looked down out the window at the last markings of city and civilization disappearing under the wing and he felt the first, free exhilaration that always hit him at this moment, as if suddenly they were flying into rarer air.

He had with him a canvas flight bag filled with rough, worn clothes, his boots, a carton of American cigarettes, and a fifth of good Scotch. The seat next to his was unoccupied, so he took his bag from under his own seat and put it on the empty one so he would have more room to stretch his legs. He yawned, moved his ankles back and forth until he felt the faint crack, dragged on his cigarette, and felt fine.

Below was an ocean of trees. He looked down at it, seeing only the beauty and endlessness of it; and then he reminded himself of what was really down there, awakening in himself the slight fear, the prickling knowledge of danger, and liking that feeling more than the awareness of beauty. Those trees were enormous, ancient, joining their leaves to block out the sky. Below them it was dark and damp, filled with the screeches of unseen wild creatures, the clicking and clacking of life unknown, gibberish and howls, and sometimes sudden silent death. A man dropped into that jungle, a plane downed there with survivors, would be lost forever. There was no way out; the vastness of that leafy, vine-choked land prevented it. You could run until you had to walk, walk until you had to crawl, reduced to the level of the animals who were your sole companions, and finally, unlike those animals, you would pay for your weakness and superiority by dying. But animals died too, down there. The constant chain of killing and eating went on; kill to eat, eat to live, live to die and nourish, nourish so that he whom you nourished would grow into rich food for another stronger claw and fang that would then devour him, you, all. There was death in the jungle, but there was never nothingness, for whatever died, fed, even if it fed only those strong vines thicker than a man’s arm, those deep roots sturdier than his body.

Between the trees there were sometimes rivers, like thin threads, yellow or brown. Miles, miles, miles of trees, on and on, punctuated only by those occasional rivers, and nowhere was there man. After several hours of flying there would be a town, and then the jungle again, with no way in between but the air. The amethyst mine with its mining town was at the end of this trip, a remote and vigorous world where Rio was an image, a name, nothing more.

Bert felt happiness and contentment seeping through him as though they were drugs he had taken. Flying into the sun there was a small sun on the glass of his window, golden, sending off sparks. The plane throbbed like a heart. How far he had come from the past, only nine years ago, and paradoxically how much farther from the years that followed directly after!

He remembered those years of the past dreamily now, with benevolence and a touch of poignance, although he knew (and this was perhaps what made the poignance) that he never wanted to go through all that again. Smiling now, he remembered himself as he was in those lost days, striding to work on the first fall mornings of his first job. The city seemed his city then, and the office buildings of New York seemed very clean and bright against the blue autumn sky, their windows catching the sun. He would emerge from the gloom of the train tunnel and join the people of his city, the others who were out to conquer it too and the ones who had long since given up hope, and he felt as though he would outstrip them all. It was a secret belief, and one he would have felt embarrassed to confide to anyone, even to Helen.

He and Helen were first married then, and he knew she was still in their tiny apartment in Riverdale, cleaning the place. He would think of her fleetingly for an instant, but his thought was mainly a mind picture of an unmade bed and a table with coffee cups on it, and the machinations that women perform to alleviate all this disorder before sundown. It was not his world back there in that apartment, although it was his home. It was more like his chrysalis, from which he had emerged the way a bright, vigorous butterfly does, leaving the shards behind. This was his world, the morning city, and the offices full of ambitious people. I am doing it all for her, he would tell himself sentimentally, because he was in love; but at heart he knew this was not true. He was doing it for himself. It was his life force, as if his strength and youth entered and interreacted with the receiving life force of the working world, thrusting, straining, giving, and finally at the end of each day withdrawing, spent. Being young and intelligent and full of enthusiasm and vigor, he was always successful, so that although he was tired at the end of the day it was the kind of tiredness that only needs a night of deep sleep to be gone.

Once Helen had said to him, laughing, “I really think you’re having a love affair with your job.” He had been surprised and had pretended to be offended. “Honey,” he had said, looking put upon and unappreciated, “I’m trying to make a life for us and the children. I’m knocking myself out for you.”

“I know, darling,” Helen had said quickly. Then she was the one who tried to cover up. “I didn’t really mean it.”

Every Christmas, during those first years, he became nervous and tense, because he knew the raises would be given out. It seemed almost as though Christmas should have been called the Season of Reckoning; the bills came in and so did the raises, and you knew then what you had wondered and worked for all year—whether or not you were worth what your spending said you thought you were. It was not that he and Helen were extravagant, or even extraordinarily materialistic. Helen, especially, like many girls who have been brought up in good families who have never known either extreme want or extreme waste, adapted very well to the stringencies of living with a young man who was just beginning to earn a living. She liked to save money for him. But still, it was Christmas, and there were the children, and he loved his wife, and you couldn’t be a piker. Money was a symbol, Bert liked to think. It was a symbol of whether you were appreciated. It didn’t matter whether you agreed with the system or not. You might despise it. But still, if the boss thought he didn’t have to give you a raise this year, then five years from now he might not think he had to give you a promotion, and twenty-five years from now you would still be slaving in the same underpaid job, doing other people’s work, and all you would have to show for it would be a gold watch.

During those pre-Christmas days, when the streets were filled with the music of tiny bells, and fat and thin Santa Clauses cried out by their multiplicity the falseness of the legend, Bert would walk to work with his face set grimly, looking as if he had never heard of Christmas spirit. If I don’t get the raise I asked for I’m going to quit, he would mutter to himself. It’s the only way I can keep my dignity. I’ll leave and find another job. It’s the only way. And then, finally, he would get the raise. He always did. But it never mattered; every Christmas the tension would be the same, because it had to be proven to him that he had done well; it had to be
shown
.