Dusk and Other Stories (3 page)

The streets of Sitges have changed. An hour has struck which announces evening, and everywhere there are strolling crowds. It’s difficult to stay together. Malcolm has an arm around each of them. They drift to his touch like horses. Inge smiles. People will think the three of them do it together, she says.

They stop at a café. It isn’t a good one, Inge complains.

“It’s the best,” Nico says simply. It is one of her qualities that she can tell at a glance, wherever she goes, which is the right place, the right restaurant, hotel.

“No,” Inge insists.

Nico seems not to care. They wander on separated now, and Malcolm whispers, “What is she looking for?”

“Don’t you know?” Nico says.

“You see these boys?” Inge says. They are seated in another place, a bar. All around them, tanned limbs, hair faded from the long, baking afternoons, young men sit with the sweet stare of indolence.

“They have no money,” she says. “None of them could take you to dinner. Not one of them. They have nothing. This is Spain,” she says.

Nico chooses the place for dinner. She has become a lesser person during the day. The presence of this friend, this girl she casually shared a life with during the days they both were struggling to find themselves in the city, before she knew anybody or even the names of streets, when she was so sick that they wrote out a cable to her father together—they had no telephone—this sudden revelation of Inge seems to have deprived the past of decency. All at once she is pierced by a certainty that Malcolm feels contempt for her. Her confidence, without which she is nothing, has gone. The tablecloth seems white and dazzling. It seems to be illuminating the three of them with remorseless light. The knives and forks are laid out as if for surgery. The plates lie cold. She is not hungry but she doesn’t dare refuse to eat. Inge is talking about her boyfriend.

“He is terrible,” she says, “he is heartless. But I understand him. I know what he wants. Anyway, a woman can’t hope to be everything to a man. It isn’t natural. A man needs a number of women.”

“You’re crazy,” Nico says flatly.

“It’s true.”

The statement is all that was needed to demoralize her. Malcolm is inspecting the strap of his watch. It seems to Nico he is permitting all this. He is stupid, she thinks. This girl is from a low background and he finds that interesting. She thinks because they go to bed with her they will marry her. Of course not. Never. Nothing, Nico thinks, could be farther from the truth, though even as she thinks she knows she may be wrong.

They go to Chez Swann for a coffee. Nico sits apart. She is tired,
she says. She curls up on one of the couches and goes to sleep. She is exhausted. The evening has become quite cool.

A voice awakens her, music, a marvelous voice amid occasional phrases of the guitar. Nico hears it in her sleep and sits up. Malcolm and Inge are talking. The song is like something long-awaited, something she has been searching for. She reaches over and touches his arm.

“Listen,” she says.

“What?”

“Listen,” she says, “it’s Maria Pradera.”

“Maria Pradera?”

“The words are beautiful,” Nico says.

Simple phrases. She repeats them, as if they were litany. Mysterious repetitions: dark-haired mother … dark-haired child. The eloquence of the poor, worn smooth and pure as a stone.

Malcolm listens patiently but he hears nothing. She can see it: he has changed, he has been poisoned while she slept with stories of a hideous Spain fed bit by bit until now they are drifting through his veins, a Spain devised by a woman who knows she can never be more than part of what a man needs. Inge is calm. She believes in herself. She believes in her right to exist, to command.

The road is dark. They have opened the roof to the night, a night so dense with stars that they seem to be pouring into the car. Nico, in the back, feels frightened. Inge is talking. She reaches over to blow the horn at cars which are going too slow. Malcolm laughs at it. There are private rooms in Barcelona where, with her lover, Inge spent winter afternoons before a warm, crackling fire. There are houses where they made love on blankets of fur. Of course, he was nice then. She had visions of the Polo Club, of dinner parties in the best houses.

The streets of the city are almost deserted. It is nearly midnight, Sunday midnight. The day in the sun has wearied them, the sea has drained them of strength. They drive to General Mitre and say
good night through the windows of the car. The elevator rises very slowly. They are hung with silence. They look at the floor like gamblers who have lost.

The apartment is dark. Nico turns on a light and then vanishes. Malcolm washes his hands. He dries them. The rooms seem very still. He begins to walk through them slowly and finds her, as if she had fallen, on her knees in the doorway to the terrace.

Malcolm looks at the cage. Kalil has fallen to the floor.

“Give him a little brandy on the corner of a handkerchief,” he says.

She has opened the cage door.

“He’s dead,” she says.

“Let me see.”

He is stiff. The small feet are curled and dry as twigs. He seems lighter somehow. The breath has left his feathers. A heart no bigger than an orange seed has ceased to beat. The cage sits empty in the cold doorway. There seems nothing to say. Malcolm closes the door.

Later, in bed, he listens to her sobs. He tries to comfort her but he cannot. Her back is turned to him. She will not answer.

She has small breasts and large nipples. Also, as she herself says, a rather large behind. Her father has three secretaries. Hamburg is close to the sea.

T
WENTY
M
INUTES

This happened near Carbondale to a woman named Jane Vare. I met her once at a party. She was sitting on a couch with her arms stretched out on either side and a drink in one hand. We talked about dogs.

She had an old greyhound. She’d bought him to save his life, she said. At the tracks they put them down rather than feed them when they stopped winning, sometimes three or four together, threw them in the back of a truck and drove to the dump. This dog was named Phil. He was stiff and nearly blind, but she admired his dignity. He sometimes lifted his leg against the wall, almost as high as the door handle, but he had a fine face.

Tack on the kitchen table, mud on the wide-board floor. In she strode like a young groom in a worn jacket and boots. She had what they called a good seat and ribbons layered like feathers on the wall. Her father had lived in Ireland where they rode into the dining
room on Sunday morning and the host died fallen on the bed in full attire. Her own life had become like that. Money and dents in the side of her nearly new Swedish car. Her husband had been gone for a year.

Around Carbondale the river drops down and widens. There’s a spidery trestle bridge, many times repainted, and they used to mine coal.

It was late in the afternoon and a shower had passed. The light was silvery and strange. Cars emerging from the rain drove with their headlights on and the windshield wipers going. The yellow road machinery parked along the shoulder seemed unnaturally bright.

It was the hour after work when irrigation water glistens high in the air, the hills have begun to darken and the meadows are like ponds.

She was riding alone up along the ridge. She was on a horse named Fiume, big, well formed, but not very smart. He didn’t hear things and sometimes stumbled when he walked. They had gone as far as the reservoir and then come back, riding to the west where the sun was going down. He could run, this horse. His hooves were pounding. The back of her shirt was filled with wind, the saddle was creaking, his huge neck was dark with sweat. They came along the ditch and toward a gate—they jumped it all the time.

At the last moment something happened. It took just an instant. He may have crossed his legs or hit a hole but he suddenly gave way. She went over his head and as if in slow motion he came after. He was upside down—she lay there watching him float toward her. He landed on her open lap.

It was as if she’d been hit by a car. She was stunned but felt unhurt. For a minute she imagined she might stand up and brush herself off.

The horse had gotten up. His legs were dirty and there was dirt on his back. In the silence she could hear the clink of the bridle and
even the water flowing in the ditch. All around her were meadows and stillness. She felt sick to her stomach. It was all broken down there—she knew it although she could feel nothing. She knew she had some time. Twenty minutes, they always said.

The horse was pulling at some grass. She rose to her elbows and was immediately dizzy. “God damn you!” she called. She was nearly crying. “Git! Go home!” Someone might see the empty saddle. She closed her eyes and tried to think. Somehow she could not believe it—nothing that had happened was true.

It was that way the morning they came and told her Privet had been hurt. The foreman was waiting in the pasture. “Her leg’s broken,” he said.

“How did it happen?”

He didn’t know. “It looks like she got kicked,” he guessed.

The horse was lying under a tree. She knelt and stroked its boardlike nose. The large eyes seemed to be looking elsewhere. The vet would be driving up from Catherine Store trailing a plume of dust, but it turned out to be a long time before he came. He parked a little way off and walked over. Afterward he said what she had known he would say, they were going to have to put her down.

She lay remembering that. The day had ended. Lights were appearing in parts of distant houses. The six o’clock news was on. Far below she could see the hayfield of Piñones and much closer, a hundred yards off, a truck. It belonged to someone trying to build a house down there. It was up on blocks, it didn’t run. There were other houses within a mile or so. On the other side of the ridge the metal roof, hidden in trees, of old man Vaughn who had once owned all of this and now could hardly walk. Further west the beautiful tan adobe Bill Millinger built before he went broke or whatever it was. He had wonderful taste. The house had the peeled log ceilings of the Southwest, Navajo rugs, and fireplaces in every room. Wide views of the mountains through windows of tinted glass. Anyone who knew enough to build a house like that knew everything.

She had given the famous dinner for him, unforgettable night. The clouds had been blowing off the top of Sopris all day, then came the snow. They talked in front of the fire. There were wine bottles crowded on the mantel and everyone in good clothes. Outside the snow poured down. She was wearing silk pants and her hair was loose. In the end she stood with him near the doorway to the kitchen. She was filled with warmth and a little drunk, was he?

He was watching her finger on the edge of his jacket lapel. Her heart thudded. “You’re not going to make me spend the night alone?” she asked.

He had blond hair and small ears close to his head. “Oh …” he began.

“What?”

“Don’t you know? I’m the other way.”

Which way, she insisted. It was such a waste. The roads were almost closed, the house lost in snow. She began to plead—she couldn’t help it—and then became angry. The silk pants, the furniture, she hated it all.

In the morning his car was outside. She found him in the kitchen making breakfast. He’d slept on the couch, combed his longish hair with his fingers. On his cheeks was a blond stubble. “Sleep well, darling?” he asked.

Sometimes it was the other way around—in Saratoga in the bar where the idol was the tall Englishman who had made so much money at the sales. Did she live there? he asked. When you were close his eyes looked watery but in that English voice which was so pure, “It’s marvelous to come to a place and see someone like you,” he said.

She hadn’t really decided whether to stay or leave and she had a drink with him. He smoked a cigarette.

“You haven’t heard about those?” she said.

“No, what about them?”

“They’ll give thee cancer.”

“Thee?”

“It’s what the Quakers say.”

“Are you really a Quaker?”

“Oh, back a ways.”

He had her by the elbow. “Do you know what I’d like? I’d like to fuck thee,” he said.

She bent her arm to remove it.

“I mean it,” he said. “Tonight.”

“Some other time,” she told him.

“I don’t have another time. My wife’s coming tomorrow, I only have tonight.”

“That’s too bad. I have every night.”

She hadn’t forgotten him, though she’d forgotten his name. His shirt had elegant blue stripes. “Oh, damn you,” she suddenly cried. It was the horse. He hadn’t gone. He was over by the fence. She began to call him, “Here, boy. Come here,” she begged. He wouldn’t move.

She didn’t know what to do. Five minutes had passed, perhaps longer. Oh, God, she said, oh, Lord, oh God our Father. She could see the long stretch of road that came up from the highway, the unpaved surface very pale. Someone would come up that road and not turn off. The disastrous road. She had been driving it that day with her husband. There was something he had been meaning to tell her, Henry said, his head tilted back at a funny angle. He was making a change in his life. Her heart took a skip. He was breaking off with Mara, he said.

There was a silence.

Finally she said, “With who?”

He realized his mistake. “The girl who … in the architect’s office. She’s the draftsman.”

“What do you mean, breaking it off?” It was hard for her to speak. She was looking at him as one would look at a fugitive.

“You knew about that, didn’t you? I was sure you knew. Anyway it’s over. I wanted to tell you. I wanted to put it all behind us.”

“Stop the car,” she said. “Don’t say any more, stop here.”

He drove alongside her trying to explain but she was picking up the biggest stones she could find and throwing them at the car. Then she cut unsteadily across the fields, the sage bushes scratching her legs.

When she heard him drive up after midnight she jumped from bed and shouted from the window, “No, no! Go away!”

“What I never understood is why no one told me,” she used to say. “They were supposed to be my friends.”