Clemmie (29 page)

There he goes. There goes Fitz. Had a good grip for years, but the seat of his pants started to slide just a little, and then it goes fast. But he’s carrying enough anaesthetic. He won’t feel a thing.

Is that why I did it? To stop thinking? To stop having to think? After the seventh drink nothing in the world is seriously wrong, or terribly important. It is a superior grade of Miltown. It is a thunderous cure for the anxieties and neuroses of our times.

What were they all saying?

Olson arrived at four, a square, strong woman whose only detectable expression was that of faintest contempt.

“Miss Bennet sends me.”

“Oh, I thought you’d probably come in the morning, Mrs. Olson.”

“Just Olson. I stay until all is finished. Just show where are cleaning things, please.”

He showed her and said, “Please do the bedroom first, Olson. I think I’ll be taking a nap. The house is a mess, I’m afraid.”

“Yes sir.”

As she went up the stairs, he bent and picked up all the crumpled balls of typing paper he had thrown on the floor. He dropped them in the wastebasket beside the desk, kept one in his hand and opened it at random. “Dear Maura, There is no excuse for what I am about to do to you, and to our marriage. I have met a twenty-three year old girl named …” That was all to that one. The others were as fragmentary.

He knew he should eat. These attacks of weakness were probably partially due to malnourishment. He looked in his wallet and found that he had a little over a hundred and eighty dollars. He looked at the checkbook. Five checks were missing, with no notation on the stubs. He called up the stairs that he was going out for a little while.

He learned within one block that it was a mistake to think the walk would do him good. After two blocks he had to stop in the shade of a tree that grew close to the sidewalk. He leaned against the trunk with his eyes shut, his shirt soaking with sweat, his heart stuttering.

When he arrived at the small restaurant, he was too exhausted to eat. He sat hunched over coffee for a long time. Finally he was able to eat a small steak, potatoes, salad, and drink milk. The day was still as hot when he walked back to his home, moving very slowly, carefully and fragily. He could hear Olson working in the kitchen.

“I’m going to take a nap now. I may sleep a long time. Can I pay you now?”

“All paid,” she said.

The bedroom gleamed. Clean sheets were crisply white, the bed made up without a wrinkle, and turned back for him. There was no sight or scent or sound of Clemmie left. He sank, sighing, into the softness of the bed.

He awakened violently in the middle of the night, sitting bolt upright, eyes staring, trembling, mouth working, with the echo of a scream seeming to remain in the far
corners of the upstairs rooms. He could not remember the dream. He wanted a drink. There were dry little fingers in every cell of his body, moving like cilia, waving in every direction, searching for a drink. He lay back to wait until his heart stopped thumping with unremembered fear—and awakened again in a gray world and could not tell if it was dawn or dusk.

It was not long until the sun came up and he knew it was very early. He felt hungry, ravenously hungry. He went down in his robe and searched the kitchen. He toasted stale bread, found a can of chili, heated it and poured it over the toast and ate greedily until, just before he finished, hunger left so completely he could not touch another bite. After a time he was nauseous, but not for long. Olson had been most thorough. He inspected the house. Furniture was not exactly in the same position as before. The changes were subtle, but enough to give the living room an alien look, a look of strangeness. It had changed. The house had changed. The four nights had changed the house; it would never be the same again for him, nor could it be the same for Maura. It had been an ugly house, always, and he had not felt any special fondness for it. Yet it had been marked by living.

He sat in the living room. Morning traffic on Federal Street was light this early. He contrived those pictures in his mind which, through contrast, could give him the highest flood tide of sick shame. When the girls were smaller, they would come bounding in on cold Sunday mornings in winter and burrow down into the warm bed. Maura would tell them not to awaken their father, but their whispers would be stage whispers, their gigglings inadequately muffled. Later, after Maura had gone down to start breakfast, there would be the ritual of the funny papers, one solemn golden child on each side of him while, propped up, he would read, and stop to answer questions when the action was confusing.

And in that same bed there had been hair not clean spread dark over the pillows, ashes and tobacco crumbs and spilled liquor and the sour-sweet odor that was a lingering byproduct of nights and days of sweaty, drunken love.

After this, no matter what happened, he knew he would
have to go through with it. He had lost any right to even think of any reconciliation with Maura. He had done a filthy thing to marriage, to Maura and himself. Guilt made the separation inevitable. It was the only clean thing he could do for Maura. He realized there were tears running down his face. He had not been conscious of weeping. He wiped them away with the sleeve of the robe.

The letter was finished by eight o’clock. It was longer than it had to be, and it was not a good letter. In it he tried to explain the feeling of restlessness which had made him vulnerable, and the chain of coincidence which had caused him to meet the girl. He had tried to describe her, and had scrapped that page. A description would accomplish nothing, and he was not at all certain he could describe her. She had seemed, in the beginning, small, rather quaint, amusingly uninhibited. Somehow she had grown in the past month so that she even seemed physically taller, stronger, and more dominant. In darkness her body, once so taut and tiny, felt swollen and luxuriant, the hips monolithically fleshy, as though she had gorged on his strength as she took dignity from him.

He had coffee in the kitchen and more toast while he read the letter over. The letter would fall into her life, come crashing down through all the shining things that had looked so durable, and come to rest lodged very deep, shifting the very foundations so that the structure could never again be true or strong. He tried to see her holding it, reading it. He tried to see her face and he could not.

And he would have to think of moving out of this place, taking his things away. Books, clothing, records. He looked at the record shelf and went over and knelt by it and began to pull the records out. Which were his? She had bought some for him. He had bought some for her. Many they had bought together. And it was that way with the books. Was there anything aside from clothing that belonged to him? That was exclusively his, unmarked by her?

He wandered through the house. There were so few things. Three pipes which, at least once a year, he tried to substitute for cigarettes. The gesture never lasted over two
weeks, despite Maura’s contribution of telling him he looked wonderful with a pipe. Tool box. But there had to be basic tools around a house.

He remembered the attic. There would be things up there he should take away. It wouldn’t be too hot up there yet. He put on khaki shorts and went up into the attic.

Two hours later, in the baking heat of the attic, sweat running down his back and chest, Craig sat quite still, surrounded by the contents of the cartons he had opened. He had been sitting very still for a long time, arms resting on cocked knees, head lowered. At first he had started making a small pile of the things he would take away with him, but soon he had forgotten his purpose. He went through cartons and boxes, taking objects out, looking at them, remembering. He held the textures of their life in his hands. In his weakness, in the attic heat, he achieved a clarity of recall that was like a kind of delirium. Each object brought back a scene, a dimensional picture.

A green rubber duck with celluloid eyes—and he remembered the day Penny was three and wandered away, remembered the frantic search of the neighborhood. They found her sound asleep under a bush. That night, after she was asleep in her crib, he had stood with Maura looking down at Penny who slept with the green duck in the curve of her arm, and when he looked at Maura he saw she was crying without making a sound.

A piece of stone half the size of his fist, marked with the delicate traceries of sea shells from a different eon—and he remembered a picnic day when they swam in a deeply shadowed pool, in water so cold it took your breath, while the girls napped in the car parked in the shade. When Maura swam nude under water she was a wavering green paleness. When they came out to get warm in a patch of sun under pines, they had made love in that place, brazen before chipmunks and blue jays, and then went back into the water to wash away the brown pine needles and stains of leaf mold. The stone had come from the edge of that pool. Maura had saved it.

Each object had its special history. He stopped his aimless search when he came across the beret, the ugly and ridiculous hat with the pompom, hat which she had detested and had been forced to wear as a part of her uniform.
He fingered the roughness of it, held it to his face and caught the scent of dust and attics and, so elusive it could have been imaginary, the light clean scent of her hair. And he remembered how, when she would come into the London flat, she would hang it on the back of the gray chair near the door and fluff her hair with her fingertips and, quite often, make a horrible face at it.

With the beret still in his hand, he went down into the relative coolness of the second floor. He sat on the bed, his body sweaty, and phoned Clemmie.

She answered the seventh ring and when she knew it was he, she complained about being awakened, sounding cross.

“Have you written the letter?” she asked.

“Yes. I wrote it.”

“Do you want to bring it over now? You sound so odd.”

“I … I’m not coming over. And I don’t want you to come over here. I’m not going to send the letter. I can’t do it.”

“Craig, you are so incurably and infuriatingly tenderhearted. If you had to cut off a puppy’s tail, you’d take it off a bit at a time. Can’t you see, darling, that the quick, clean blow is the kindest?”

“You don’t understand. You don’t know what I’m trying to say. I’d rather have her than you. I want to stay with her.”

The line was silent. “Clemmie?” he said.

“I’m still here. It’s just a little too late for what
you
happen to think you want. I know what’s best for you. I’m holding you to this. I’m going to write her and tell her we’ve been living together and you want a divorce but you’re too chicken to ask for one.”

“You’d better not do that, Clemmie.”

“Are you warning me?”

“Just don’t do it.”

“There’s no way in the world you can stop me from doing anything I want to do.”

“Clemmie?”

The line hummed. He hadn’t heard the click. He hung up. He looked at his watch. Ten thirty. He called Al Jardine.

“This is Craig, Al.”

“What can I do for you?” The tone was curt.

“I want to talk to you. Can I come to the office?”

“I’m pretty busy these days.”

“What’s wrong?”

“You apparently don’t need friends, Craig. You don’t want friends. You should know what I’m talking about. I don’t like the way you talked to Irene on the phone.”

“Try to believe this, Al. I don’t have any recollection of talking to her. I’ve been—drinking more than enough.”

“She’s pretty damn sore about it. Why haven’t you been writing Maura? She’s frantic.”

“Al, I’ve got to see you.”

“All right. I’ll see you when you get here. Make it by eleven?”

“I’ll try.”

He took a quick shower and dressed. The car battery was dead. He had no idea how long it had been since he had used it. Yet it wasn’t likely Clemmie would have been driving him to work. The taxi took a long time. He was fifteen minutes late getting to the old brick office near the County Court House where Al had a corner office on the third floor front.

Al’s girl was not at her desk, and Al called to him to come in. He walked in.

Al stared at him over the tops of the heavy glasses. “My God, you look like hell!”

Craig sat down, tried to smile. “I feel worse.”

“Are you sick?”

“This was the result of some plain and fancy dissipation. Now—I’m really jammed up.”

Al got up and closed the door, came back and laced his fingers across his stomach. “You better tell me about it.”

It was past twelve thirty by the time Craig finished. It was a painful story to tell. He found it hard to look toward Al as he told it. It sounded a good deal more crude than it had seemed while it was going on.

“Questions. Are you cured of her?”

“God yes. I think of how she was when I woke up yesterday and I feel physically ill. But after what I’ve done, it isn’t fair to Maura to …”

“Don’t bleed on the floor, Fitz. What’s good for Maura is to keep the marriage going. There’s no way to keep her from learning a lot of what you’ve told me, and filling in
the rest. I don’t know how good the marriage is going to be after this, but it’s going to be better than being apart, maybe. In this, my friend, I’m on Maura’s side. I don’t dig you. You’re not too God-damned noble to go take a quick hack at Floss who was practically saying pretty please. There was no special harm done. Then, with all your morality, you get yourself all fouled up with a very dangerous trollop, take her into your house, into your own bed. In this deal, I’m working for Maura.”

“I’m trying to.”

“You’ve acted like it. All right. You’re cured of her. But she’s going to write Maura. You want me to stop her.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t. Some shopgirl, yes. That would be easy. I’ve got cop friends who could pick up that kind of a girl for soliciting, take her in, scare hell out of her. If she was stubborn, I could make sure she got the roust, right out of town. But you, my friend, are dealing with Miss Clementina Bennet. She’s named after her grandmother, you know. The old lady met the robber barons on their own terms and beat hell out of them. Any little push I try to give Miss Clementina, she can push back twice as hard. If you’ve been factual, and I don’t think any man would make up stuff that makes him look this silly, I don’t think you can stop her. She’ll write. Let her write. Tell Maura some psycho girl is trying to foul you up and she may hear from her. Then do an awful lot of rehearsal on the story you’ll tell Maura when she gets back.”