Hangsaman (17 page)

I wish I knew why I am so excited all the time. I keep thinking something is going to happen. I keep thinking I am right on the point of telling someone all about myself.

I wonder what I would say to a psychoanalyst. I wonder where people find words for all the funny things inside their heads. I keep turning around in circles and finding how well things fit together, but nothing is ever complete. I think if I could tell someone everything, every single thing, inside my head, then
I
would be gone, and not existing any more, and I would sink away into that lovely nothing-space where you don't have to worry any more and no one ever hears you or cares and you can say anything but of course you wouldn't
be
any more at all and you couldn't really
do
anything so it wouldn't
matter
what you did.

Of course I realize that the first thing to do if you wanted someone to tell you everything would be to make your minds go along together, so that if for instance a psychoanalyst wanted me to tell him everything in my head, he would have to be very close to me so that our minds were running exactly together, coinciding, and what I told him would not be told, really, but only an echo of the way both our minds were going, and would sort of cancel out. And there, you see, is what I mean by superior, because after all this he would have to have enough left over after he had taken all my mind, so that he could keep on thinking by himself, after I was nothing. But of course I don't believe anybody really exists like that and that all these people like Elizabeth who talk about going to psychoanalyst don't want this at all, or perhaps their minds are so little and move on such a small amount of energy or space that a psychoanalyst could use just a little bit of himself to capture them and have plenty of mind left over, so as not to be absorbed in them at all particularly. And that, I suppose is why these people find it so easy to get along with the idea of having their minds taken away from them, because their minds were never very useful to them in the first place. Although I do not have to worry about being modest here, it is certainly not necessary to point out to
you
that Elizabeth is not as wise as I am.

I want somebody who will fight about it, too. Suppose there is a person, somewhere very near me, right now, who is thinking about me and who watches me and knows everything I think about and who is just waiting for me to recognize

Odd things, these days, came back into Natalie's mind. For instance, she remembered a scene that happened when she was about six years old; it recurred to her often, and mostly during classes when her mind relaxed and she drew strange little patterns in her notebook, and, with her eyes fixed earnestly upon the front of the room, wandered away by herself. The scene she remembered so clearly was of herself, small vague Natalie in a pair of shorts and sneakers, looking honestly and with the eyes of pure truth up at her mother, who bent down over her and listened with concern. “I found a wishing stone,” little Natalie was telling her mother. “I knew it was a wishing stone because when I dug it up it
looked
like a wishing stone, so I held it tight in my hand and closed my eyes and wished for a bicycle, and then nothing happened at all and so I threw the stone away.” Natalie could still, this many years later, see her mother's stricken eyes. She remembered that her father had laughed, and that her mother had begged for the bicycle for Natalie; these cynical later days, Natalie suspected that her mother had been right. It was less important, Natalie thought, to allow her father's humor to be transmitted to his children than to keep alive her mother's faith in magic. Too, Natalie saw now that if she had kept the wishing stone until the right time came, she could have used it to wish for a bicycle on that Christmas Eve when a bicycle was so obviously awaiting her under the Christmas tree. Then, magic would have been sustained, and cause and effect not violated for that first, irrecoverable time.

Behind Natalie a girl said aloud, puzzled, “Well,
I
think that if Romeo wanted her so much all he had to do was
take
her. I mean, why all that bother with secret marriages and stuff when they could just walk off together?”

Mustn't violate the sacred rules of magic, Natalie thought sleepily. Never wish for anything until it's ready for you. Never try to make anything happen until it's on its way. The formal way is best, after all; no short cuts allowed in this passage.

“Seems to
me
,” said someone on the far side of the room, “that if the ending was happier it would be a better play.”

She was a minute or two late and was trying to phrase apologies in her mind when she knocked softly on the door of the Langdon's house. It was a perfectly legitimate delay, but it was difficult to tell Elizabeth Langdon that one was late for tea with her because her husband had stood in the center of the path, refusing to recognize any hints about appointments, asking endless questions, making well-turned compliments . . . she knocked again, a little more emphatically. The door was not latched, and slipped back and open under her hand. For a minute she stood there and then, thinking that she was expected and telling herself she would do the same anywhere, she pushed the door a little farther and stepped in. For a minute she saw nothing and then, all at once, she saw Elizabeth Langdon asleep with her head on the arm of the couch, and the thick line of smoke rising from the upholstery near her head. Moving quickly and crying out, “Elizabeth,” before she thought to say, “Mrs. Langdon,” Natalie went to the couch and pushed Elizabeth's head aside, and began to slap at the burning couch.

“Oh my God,” said Elizabeth from somewhere behind Natalie. She too began to slap at the chair, hitting Natalie's hand, and then she said, “Wait, wait,” and ran down the hall and into the kitchen. The cigarette that had fallen from Elizabeth's hand had burned itself out of sight in the couch, and the smoke coming from some horrible secret inner part choked Natalie as she leaned over it. Elizabeth came back behind her with a shakerful of cocktails and said with a giggle, “Couldn't wait to fill a pitcher with water. Got to remember to save two drinks.” Natalie knocked her arm away so that the cocktails poured on the floor, and said, “That stuff burns! Get
water!
” Elizabeth stared vacantly, and Natalie, thinking, I am acting in an emergency, ran into the kitchen and filled a saucepan with water and hurried back, spilling water on the hall floor as she ran, and poured the water carefully and accurately into the burning hole on the couch.

As the smoke died away Natalie realized that Elizabeth was laughing, and she began to laugh too. The hole became a sodden ugly spot, the smoke stopped, and the room suddenly smelled most violently of gin. Elizabeth lifted the shaker and peered into it. “Terrible waste,” she said.

“I'll never be able to drink it,” Natalie protested, laughing because it was over and she felt that she had been perhaps a little impulsively heroic. “I thought
you
were on fire,” she explained with embarrassment.

“I nearly
was
,” Elizabeth said, wide-eyed. “Thanks,” she said.

“I'm sorry I shouted at you,” Natalie said. They stared at one another uncomfortably for a minute. Then Elizabeth said, “Saved some cocktails, anyway.”

“Spilled water on the hall floor,” Natalie said.

“
That's
all right,” Elizabeth said largely. “That's the third time I've done it, you know. Fires, I mean.”

“The
third
time?” Natalie said, unbelieving.

Elizabeth nodded. “Third time this year,” she said. “Once the fat in the frying pan caught fire because I wasn't watching it, and before I could put it out the kitchen curtains caught, and then if Arthur hadn't been there my dress would have caught but he pulled me out of the way and put the fire out. He was so frightened he couldn't talk. I could have been killed.”

“That's terrible,” said Natalie earnestly.

“And the second time was when I accidentally dropped a lighted match into the wastebasket in Arthur's study, and the wastebasket flamed right up and that time my skirt
did
catch fire, but I picked up the wastebasket and ran into the bathroom and turned on the shower and threw the wastebasket under it and got under myself. So
that
time was all right.”

“I'll bet he was frightened then,” Natalie said.

“He was when I told him. He wanted me to stop smoking. He said—” Elizabeth looked at Natalie queerly “—he said I was trying to kill myself.”

“Are you?” Natalie asked in spite of herself.

Elizabeth shook her head. “I don't know,” she said mournfully. “I really don't know. Sometimes, though, I think I have cause.” She stopped, thinking, and there was a silence. Natalie stirred uneasily, and Elizabeth said, “Serve him right, too.”

“That's no way to die, though,” Natalie said.

“It certainly is
not
,” said Elizabeth, and shuddered. “My God, I was scared,” she said.

“Me, too.”

“Well,” Elizabeth said, as though done with the subject. “How about we finish off the cocktails?” she asked.

Natalie made a face. “I don't know if I can stand it,” she said, and gestured at the room at large. “Seems like it's into everything.”

“You won't notice it after you've had a drink,” Elizabeth said. The shaker sat on the table where she had put it down, and she picked it up and looked into it again. “There's really
quite
a lot left,” she said, and carried it with her out into the kitchen to get glasses. While she was gone Natalie opened the window and stood looking out onto the college campus. Somehow, inside this room, in the house, she was removed from those girls in their bright sweaters who walked easily across the grass, under the colored trees, ignoring the paths and putting their clean brown-and-white shoes down as though their tuition had bought them a permanent share in this very land. They understood the functioning of the college, these girls outside, talking to one another as they walked, and knowing the places to which they were bound; they were intimate and sympathetic with this college, and never saw it as the spot where Arthur Langdon taught, or where one was held apart from home and kindness by the dubious good intentions of strangers. Inside here, Natalie thought, turning abruptly to look into the room and at the furniture and books and even the burned couch, inside this room is the only place except my own home where everybody knows my name.

“At least two drinks apiece,” Elizabeth said gaily, “and probably more.”

“Hadn't we better save some?” Natalie said prudently.

Elizabeth's face turned sullen. “At least this time,” she said, “he won't be able to say I drank them.
This
time he can't blame
me
.” She looked at the couch. “He can't even be angry at
that
, very well.”

“I don't think it's badly burned,” Natalie said.

Elizabeth shrugged. “Oh, well,” she said, and sat down on the couch; because her favorite corner was burned she was forced to go to the other end, and she sat there uncomfortably, resting on her wrong elbow. “I was reading,” she said, looking irritably at the burned spot. “That's what happened, I was reading.”

“Next time put out your cigarette before you fall asleep.”

“That's what I get for reading,” Elizabeth said. She pointed with her toe to the book on the table. “Psychology,” she said. “
I
can't understand it.”

“Then why do you do it?” Natalie asked, wondering at the vast freedom of one who could learn if she chose and could, if she chose, flatly refuse to understand.

“We
all
do it,” Elizabeth said. “All of us, the faculty wives. Got to do something, you know. And besides, it feels good to sit next to those kids in class and look at them frowning and trying to make something out of it, and you sit there thinking how much more you know than they do, and they have to call you Mrs. Langdon.”

“At least you don't have any trouble passing.”

Elizabeth made a face. “I never finish up the courses,” she said. “Those poor kids, they have to come rain or shine, and answer when they're asked questions—me, I can just say, ‘Go to hell professor,' and walk out if I'm bored.”

“How about your husband's class?” Natalie asked.

“I
took
that class,” Elizabeth said, and laughed. “I got through the whole thing—and I passed, too—before I ever married Arthur. He used to give me back my papers with notes written on them. I'd laugh out loud, sometimes, in class when he gave me my papers back with those notes on them. And he'd read things like speeches from
Antony and Cleopatra
, and some of the kids would be blushing and some of them would be just looking at him like lovesick chickens, and I'd think of how anytime I wanted I could get him to read the same things to me all alone and I'd look around that class and think how pathetic those kids were and I'd want to laugh in their faces.”

A great envious excitement filled Natalie; she promised herself quickly that she would somehow, later, examine how it would feel to sit in class with such special secret knowledge, with such delicious sense of possession.

Elizabeth sighed. “I
liked
that class,” she said. She was smiling reminiscently still as she rose to fill Natalie's glass. “And sometimes,” she said, “I'd meet people like Mr. and Mrs. Watson—he was biology teacher then—and I'd say, ‘How do you do, Mrs. Watson, Mr. Watson,' so politely, and all the time I'd be thinking of how when Arthur and I were married I could call them Carl and Laura. And about sitting with the faculty at trustee dinners or college movies. And running into Arthur's office whenever I pleased, and not caring
who
saw me. And staying out all night if I felt like it, and laughing in anyone's face the next morning. And faculty parties,” she said, “and pouring at teas. And getting the best of everything.” She sighed again, her head on her arm and her long hair falling against her face. “I thought it was all going to be so wonderful,” she said.