Burnt Offerings (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (15 page)

“I just
don’t
.”

“We won’t do anything,” he whispered; “promise. Just lie together, like before.”

He held her closer, his hands covering her back, and for just a moment she felt herself loosening, until the house appeared above his shoulder, and the red draped windows, like a floodlight suddenly let loose on them. She said, “Ben . . .” and it came out like a warning. Her eyes were fixed on the windows, and if she concentrated hard enough she could see the carved door beyond the windows and hear the hum, like the sound of the filter somewhere behind her. And what she wanted more than anything right now was somehow to be able to project herself into the peace and insulation of that room, to elevate herself above his touch and the stifling closeness.

She felt the grass under her and Ben’s weight forcing her down. She said, “Ben!” even more urgently, covering the sound of her own name and whatever it was he was pleading. He was lowering her to the grass, very gently, and then it was wet and cold against her back and his full weight was on her, holding her to the ground. She raised her eyes, searching through the blur of stars for the house, like some magnetic pole; and then it was there again, above her in the distance, with the two windows hanging like votive lamps.

She brought her arms up, gripping the back of his shoulders, and his skin was hard under her nails. She twisted under him, trying to pull back, and her voice rose with the movement, saying, “Not here. You can’t. Not
here
.” He had squirmed between her legs, the pleas more insistent, and for all the strength above her, gentler and more vulnerable.

“Don’t you understand?” she cried out. “You can’t.
You can’t!
”

He stopped moving suddenly and looked down at her. Marian closed her eyes on his face. “
Please
!
” she whispered. She felt the weight lift and slip off her, silently. When she opened her eyes, his back was to her; he lay absolutely still, one hand under him, the other clutching the grass. She tried to rise, then fell back with the effort and stared at the sky for a few seconds, listening to the filter working in the silence, and the sound of Ben’s deep, even breathing.

She got to her feet, embarrassed again by her nakedness, pulled on the terrycloth robe and gathered up her clothes. She stopped to look down at him, brushing the still wet hair back against her temples.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

His hand moved against the grass in a gesture of dismissal. “There’s nothing to be sorry about, Marian.” The voice was spent and toneless.

“It’s just that . . .” She stopped, wondering whether she should say it, whether the feeling that something between them had terminated would pass eventually. She said it anyway: “It’s not the same.”

“That happens, I suppose,” Ben said casually. He raised himself slowly and faced the pool. “Once again I seem to have gotten carried away. I ought to look into that, I suppose.” He half-turned. “I promise I won’t put you in that kind of situation again. Go back to the house, Marian.”

She waited for him to say something more, something that might trigger sorrow or guilt or whatever it was she should be feeling. He said nothing, and nothing sympathetic was triggered.

Marian went back to the house; to their bedroom first. The thought that Ben might come in made her apprehensive and uncomfortable. She left the room and went into a bathroom adjoining one of the vacant bedrooms, where she showered for a long time. That night she slept sitting up, in the gold brocade chair, in peace and insulation.

She had wrapped the untouched chicken and the string beans in tinfoil (it would be her lunch) and was lifting the egg coddler out of the boiling water when David came into the kitchen. He kissed her good morning and took a package of Yankee Doodles out of the breadbox.

“That your entire breakfast?” she asked.

David said, “Yup,” and started to go to the television set in the sewing room.

“It’s not even eight o’clock,” Marian said. “What could possibly be on TV?”

“Cartoons,” he said.

Marian lifted Mrs. Allardyce’s breakfast tray. “Take a napkin,” she called out to him. “And watch crumbs, please.”

Their bedroom door was closed when she went to the sitting room, and thankfully, closed when she came out ten minutes later. She would have to face Ben eventually of course. How? Pretend nothing had happened, or whatever had happened was a momentary aberration on both their parts? It had all been clear enough to her last night, in the sitting room. It wasn’t now, and unfortunately a large part of her life would have to be lived outside the confines of the sitting room. How had it happened; how could she find herself, all of a sudden, sheltering two such distinct and contradictory personalities? And if it continued, then how to resolve the problem? Choose? How could she, when the choices themselves were still so indistinct.

She was giving herself problems, manufacturing complexity again, and when she came downstairs she heard the blare of the television set with something approaching gratitude. Anything, even an annoyance, as long as it distracted her.

She walked faster toward the sewing room and the loud cartoon sound effects. She stopped in the dim passageway running the length of the servants’ wing and glared into the room. David was sitting directly in front of the set, too close as always, with the remnants of two packages of Yankee Doodles in front of him.

“Will you lower that set please, honey?” she said. “And you’re too close; move back.” He turned down the volume and pushed himself back a few inches. “I hate to be a pest, but how about cleaning up that mess?”

“I will,” David said, absorbed in the cartoon which was Japanese, of all things, and violent.

“Now,” Marian insisted.

He muttered a complaint, scooped up the papers, and walked past her heavily, toward the kitchen. He was barefoot but Marian couldn’t find the energy for another nagging comment. Besides, something in the passageway had caught her eye – a closet which she must have seen before even though she couldn’t remember it immediately. The door was slightly ajar, and immovable when she tried to push it closed. She flicked on the light in the passageway – a low-watt naked light bulb which would have to go, but fast – and opened the closet door.

Even in half-light, and unpolished, the collection was staggering: felt-lined shelves filled,
crammed,
with silver – salvers and punch bowls and vases embroidered with enameled flowers, and tea sets, and filigree-work baskets. And gold as well – brass, she thought at first, but no, gold: candlesticks and service plates with elaborately worked rims, and goblets – ten, eleven, twelve of them – large, like liturgical chalices, and an exquisite pitcher carved with pendent grape clusters. And more, a quietly glittering mass of it, packed into the dark recesses of the closet.

The discovery overwhelmed her, the suddenness of it. And the wave of depression that had come over her when she left the sitting room, the troubling thought of facing Ben and trying somehow to repair the damage of the previous evening – it all dissolved in front of the incredible richness she only had to reach out to touch. She would have seen the closet eventually of course, and investigated it, but to have come upon it just then, so accidentally – what could it be but providential, like so much else in the house?

She lifted the pitcher like something consecrated, passing her fingers over the curve of the handle and the scalloped rim.

“Beautiful,” she said aloud, “absolutely beautiful . . .”

And if there was anything to depress Marian at that moment, any one thing in her life she could truly regret, it wasn’t the distance she found growing between Ben and herself, or even that disturbing, contradictory presence slowly rooting itself inside her; it was the simple fact that in less than two months now it would all, cruelly and unfairly, pass back to the Allardyces.

David came back into the passageway, and Marian found herself holding the pitcher closer, protectively.

Ben drank his breakfast, juice and coffee only, standing up in the kitchen. He could hear the television set in the sewing room, and footsteps travelling from the rear passageway to the dining room, with an occasional metallic sound. Marian must have heard the coffee cup rattling or the sound of the refrigerator being closed; she called, “Ben?” from outside the kitchen and he called back, “Yes.”

She peered in, and there was just a slight pause before she said, “I’ll have your breakfast in a minute.”

“I’m having it,” Ben said, holding up the coffee cup.

“Nothing else?”

He shook his head, and there was another pause.

“I’m involved at the moment,” she explained.

“Go ahead,” Ben said, and when the door swung closed after her he realized that, as painful as it might be, what he should have said was, “Got a minute?” or “Can we talk about it?” Marian obviously wasn’t ready, and if his instincts were to be trusted, neither was he.

He poured the rest of his coffee into the sink and waited, staring out the kitchen window. The sounds continued busily in the dining room. Finally, he called out to her, “I’m going to work on that driveway,” and Marian said, “Good idea,” without coming into the kitchen. When the door opened, it was only David who asked, “Can I come and help?”

“You’d just be in the way, chief,” Ben said, looking beyond him into the passageway. “Help your mother.”

David made an unpleasant face and slapped a bare foot against the linoleum floor which was worn, faded and gleaming with fresh wax.

“Anything you want done here?” Ben tried again.

“Nothing,” Marian called back.

Ben left through the outside kitchen door while David grumbled, bored and abandoned.

He gathered the scythe, clippers and a large hacking knife, all of which he had sharpened recently, into the car, and drove the winding half mile or so to the narrow opening in the woods. The house slipped in and out of the rearview mirror, smaller and smaller, until the car turned left, into the field of high grass, and it was gone. Out of sight and for a few hours, hopefully, out of mind.

He had been thinking about it more and more recently, the house, finding the old suspicions returning, and with them a growing conviction that, however ambiguous the evidence might be, there was something inimical to them in that house. Or to him. Something almost chemically antipathetic in the atmosphere of the place. It was unreasonable, of course, an improbable assumption; it was after all a house, a rambling mass of stone and wood shingle, and the only accusation he could level at it (at a house) was that it had furnished them with a pool and Marian with a houseful of expensive toys to work into an obsession.

As absurd as the feeling was, it was preferable to the alternative which was, as he had told Marian, that he was on the verge of a breakdown. What else would explain the blank he still drew whenever he tried to recreate the incident with David, or the loss of control last night, or the sleeplessness and the waking fantasies bordering on hallucination? The fact that he couldn’t work, that when he closed the library door, his mind seemed to turn itself off and two pages out of three of a simple sophomore-level novel would be lost minutes after he had read them? Or that he would seize upon the excuse of a
house
to quiet his fears?

He had reached the opening in the woods. He turned off the ignition and stared into the driveway which rose and then turned out of sight. And if there was anything he wasn’t up to at that moment, it was climbing out of the car and hacking away at that jungle.

He did, after a while, trying to find the spot he had been working on a few days before. Wherever it was, it had covered itself over again.

The base of the foliage had spread well over the gravel on both sides, leaving an opening just wide enough to accommodate the small Camaro. Even the area at the end of the drive, which Ben remembered as relatively open and thin, was wild with new growth. Overhead the branches grew into a lowering ceiling of green, completely blocking out the sun.

He had taken off his shirt and hung it on the car aerial, and pulled on an old pair of gardening gloves. He used the clippers first, working on the thinner branches sticking out over the gravel. The sweat began to fall into his eyes, clouding them, and to pour, cool, down his chest and sides. He worked the clippers faster, feeling the sweat and the pull in his arms and in the back of his legs. How long was it since he’d done something purely, invigoratingly physical, something not confined by the walls of a classroom or an apartment? Shelving his mind for a while, whatever was left of it, and using only his body which had actually been good at one time and without the slight thickening he was beginning to notice around the middle. (Marian had noticed it as well last night, during the cock-teasing.) It was therapeutic: the effort, the sound, the branches falling away, and that blessed emptying of his mind as he cut deeper into the drive.

He dropped the clippers and picked up the knife, hacking away at the branches which rustled above him and fell cracking into the gravel. He had been right: some time away from the house was what he needed to clear his mind, away from Marian, David even, from the pool and the bedroom and that suffocating study she had set up for him with all the best intentions in the world. Pretend the vines and branches were the tangle that had somehow begun to grow around his brain.

His brain, his mind – why this obsession with it? The self-destruct syndrome all over? Think your way into a breakdown? If he truly lived in his mind, if it were being taxed by something a little more elevated than what the sum of his life really was –

The knife sliced through the vine growing over the drive and stopped. There was a sound somewhere in front of him – a car moving over the gravel and heading toward him. The sweat rolled into his eyes. He listened. Visitors? Not likely, though the idea, after almost two weeks of isolation, was appealing. A wrong turn, more likely. He straightened and passed his arm over his eyes. The sound came closer, unmistakably a car; he could hear branches scraping against the sides. He lowered his arm and when he opened his eyes it was all a green blur, except for the vague black shape which had maneuvered the turn and was creeping forward, crushing the gravel beneath it. And then it stopped, no more than ten feet away. All he could hear was the sound of the motor idling. Even without seeing clearly he knew what it was, from the instinctive reaction of his body to the sound.

A trick, he told himself, an hallucination – if he could just rub the sweat out of his eyes and catch his breath it would disappear, and the sound with it.

He dropped the knife and pulled off his gloves, rubbing his fingers into his eyes. It wasn’t there. He knew that. It didn’t exist, not outside those childish and unreasonably frightening nightmares. There was absolutely no way something could creep back from the distant past and be real; or out of the tiny, vulnerable part of his brain where the image had lodged itself. And be real and no more than ten feet away from him.

He opened his eyes. It was there. So clear, so palpably real, with the branches pushed forward around it. He could reach out and touch it, touch the chauffeur behind the tinted glass.

It’s not there, he repeated to himself. And if it was the child in him that had called up the image, then it was reasonable to speak to that part of himself and say, “It’s not there, and if something is really not there then you can’t be seeing it.” Pick up the knife and continue to clear away the branches.

He did, with his back to the car, hacking away at the foliage as if there were nothing making that steady throbbing sound in the driveway. He cut faster, moving closer to the sound and blocking it out of his mind, until he felt the bumper pressing against the back of his leg.