Lie Down in Darkness (13 page)

I need a drink.
…

Down in the locker room he fished up a pint of Hiram Walker from his golf bag, had a drink, and was returning to the ballroom when he met Dolly on the upstairs landing.

“Why, Milton honey, I’ve been looking all around for you.”

“How’s it going, baby?”

“Why, Milton, what’s wrong? You look like you just saw a ghost.”

“It’s Helen,” he said. “She said she was going to take Peyton home.”

“How silly!”

“Yes,” he said.

“But why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I gave her a sip of whisky for a joke——”

“Oh, really. How silly!”

“Yeah.” He sighed. “I shouldn’t have given her——”

“No,” Dolly said. “I mean how silly for her——” She halted, assuming an air of haughty indifference. “Well,” she said with a little icy laugh, “you know it’s really none of my business.”

“No,” he said. “I mean that’s all right. It was silly. Silly of me, silly of her. But,” he added after a thoughtful pause, “she’s not going to take Peyton home.”

“When did all this happen?”

“Just before it started to rain,” he replied, “just a few minutes ago, I reckon. I reckon she suspected something.”

“Yes,” Dolly said with faint sarcasm, “I imagine so.”

Loftis leaned wearily against the banister. “I made one over par for nine and par for eighteen this morning. It near about wore me out.” He paused, and she came near him; he smelled her perfume, a sweet pungent odor, intimately coquettish, as evocative and compelling as the scents in those suave perfume advertisements—a fine, secular odor, suggesting undulance and flesh. It was always the same; he had come to identify this scent as peculiarly hers, just as, standing in vague, uneasy and often—later to his foolish surprise—unaccountable anticipation at a party, he would identify the abruptly thrown-open front door, the gay greeting, sometimes too noisy, but always enthusiastic and jolly and warm, with her alone; he sometimes felt that he knew she was nearby even before she entered a room.

He looked at her. She turned and leaned up against the banister, too. The sound of the party was distant, muffled by the walls. “Goddam,” he said suddenly. “What kind of bluenosed moral …
crap
is that anyhow? Why do you suppose I’ve got to put up with that sort of thing? Why do you think——” He stopped in confusion. Never before, with Dolly, had he allowed himself to be so outspoken—outspoken, that is, in regard to Helen. Now he felt that for propriety’s sake, or for the sake of some obscure sense of decency which prescribes that one doesn’t reproach one’s wife in this manner, he must repair the damage. He said, “Well, hell—” he gave the banister a sharp smack with the flat of his hand—“maybe I
don’t
know how to bring up children!”

“Oh, Milton,” Dolly put in sharply, “don’t be silly now. Really, it’s none of my business but I think it’s the craziest thing I ever heard of, her wanting to do such a thing. If I were you—of course as I say it’s none of my affair—I’
d
just tell her what I thought. The idea!”

The moment seemed suddenly to Loftis to have assumed gigantic troubled proportions, of dilemma, of schism and heresy, and of moral strictures so subtle that it was beyond him, a poor lawyer, to plan a safe course of action. The music, from a distance, sent reedy and sentimental vibrations through the walls. The rain had ceased, a faint, tepid light seeped through the windows here, and far off he could hear the last remnants of the storm rumbling eastward, like a multitude of barrels tumbling off over the brink of night. Soon it would be dark.

“Dolly,” he began (much too drunk for logic, he felt a curious exhilaration in succumbing to easy sentiment), “you’re the only person who understands me, I think.”

Her eyes swam up to the edge of her lowered lids, gazed at him tenderly and with what he knew to be understanding.

“I’ve been in Port Warwick for twenty years. I had great hopes when I arrived. I was going to be one hell of a politician. I was going to burn up the town, the state, everything. At the very least I thought by now I’d be Commonwealth’s attorney. Look at me now—a goddam rotten failure, a bloodsucker using my wife’s money to get just a little bit ahead, by which I mean to keep as well stocked with bourbon as the next hot shot in town, and by which I mean——” He paused. Confession was not his specialty, and although he enjoyed the mildly tragic sensation it gave him, it also left him a bit breathless.

“You’re not,” Dolly said passionately. She clutched his arm. “You’re not! You’re not! You’ll become something great. You’re fine and wonderful. You’ve got a terrific quality about you that makes everybody want to be your friend. They want to talk to you. You’re positively—why you’re …
radiant!
”

“Let me finish that for you,” he said with a wink, reaching for hei glass. Starry-eyed still, she yielded it up like a chalice, and he polished it off in one big gulp. In the little hallway it was getting warm, and he walked over and opened the window. He sat delicately on the edge of the sill, careful that he should get no rain on his pants. Dolly trailed him, skirts rustling. She stood beside him and let her hand rest lightly on his shoulder.

“You know—” he looked upward—“you know, I believe this is the first time I’ve ever talked to you alone. Beyond nosey ears and eyes, I mean. We’ve always been so circumspect.”

“What does circumspect mean?”

“Careful, cautious, coy.”

“Why, Milton,” she laughed, “don’t you remember one time a long time ago at your place? We were alone then.” She squeezed his shoulder, sending a pleasant nervous tremor down through his arm. “The first time you called me sweet kitten. I remember. Don’t you remember, Milton honey?”

“Yes.” He remembered. That was all a long time ago. A drunken and disastrous afternoon that lay chilled in his memory. He put it out of his mind and thought of Helen. Right now she would be gathering up her things, umbrellas, rubbers, and he would have to go out and face her—with an apprehension that approached terror.

I’m afraid of Helen,
he thought.

He put his arm around Dolly’s waist and drew her next to him. Her waist was most agreeably soft and through a little hole or gusset in her dress he intruded, before he knew what he was doing, his forefinger, and felt there, beneath the silk, a band of flesh, quite yielding and very warm. Dolly didn’t seem to mind so he left his finger there and stroked at the silk while Dolly, silent, softly and a bit timidly at first, began to caress the back of his head.

“But by God,” he said suddenly, embarrassed by the silence and feeling the need for some kind of assertion, “it’s not that I haven’t wanted to be with you.”

“Or me either,” Dolly said gravely.

It was dark outside, full of mist. A blaze of light illumined the swimming pool; in the woods beyond, a thousand frogs and katydids set up a shrill chaotic chirping. The stars appeared, and the edge of a summer moon, while the lawn tables, the shining Buicks and Olds-mobiles on the drive, all seemed engulfed by a ghostly, placid light through which the music, echoing from a distance, floated innocently out over the terrace and up to the stars. He groped idly, yet with a cunning sort of deliberation, toward the elastic of Dolly’s pants; he thought
young, youth,
and “Milton,” Dolly was saying, “I’ve wanted——” She stroked his cheek.

He arose and pulled her toward him. “Dolly,” he said, “sweet kitten, I think I love you.”

His arms surrounded her. He pressed upon her lips a long and despairing kiss.

Japanese lanterns bloomed over the terrace like swollen, pastel moons, painting the flagstones with an exotic light—orchid, lilac, phantom wings of midnight blue. On the tables crepe banners and paper hats lay strewn amid souvenirs, discarded favors and bricks of vanilla ice cream oozing messily away. The boys and girls had gone swimming. Loftis and Dolly and Mr. and Mrs. La Farge lingered over whisky and soda—at least Dolly and Loftis did, for Mr. and Mrs. La Farge, both of whom had originated in Durham, North Carolina, were teetotalers. The party had been a success; there had been the appropriate noise and disorder, and now three Negro girls went about, past the tables where other mothers and fathers sat drinking, and poked desultorily at the wreckage.

Mr. La Farge was saying, “You’re Sclater Bonner’s wife, aren’t you? How’s old Pookie? I haven’t seen him in a coon’s age.” He was a runty, repetitious man with thinning hair and large, stained teeth. He owned a local wholesale grocery, played golf in the high eighties, and was completely overshadowed by his wife, who outweighed him by forty pounds and who was forever chiding him for his grammatical lapses.

Dolly nodded. “Pookie’s in Richmond this week on a ‘deal,’ he calls it. Everybody’s all worked up in real estate.”

“The war——” Mr. La Farge began.

“Yes, the war, it’s so awful,” Mrs. La Farge broke in. “Everybody says it’s bound to come almost any minute. Poor little Poland!”

“Poor us, you mean,” Mr. La Farge said. He leaned back and swallowed part of his ginger ale, revealing in the process a row of stained and horselike incisors. “Poor us,” he repeated.

There was a noncommittal silence, modulated by the distant sound of frogs and katydids, and faint shouts and screams from the swimming pool.

“Poor us,” Mr. La Farge went on. He spoke in the flat, inflectionless tones of a Piedmont Carolinian, and Loftis, eying him sleepily—he had eaten and drunk too much and yearned to stretch out somewhere—felt that if he and Dolly didn’t escape these people at once, he would perish of nervousness. Why was it his lot to be eternally hemmed around by inferior minds, by dentists and real-estate operators and expensive undertakers? To get off more often to New York and take in a musical, meet some interesting people, go to the Alumni Club—that would be nice. Dolly nudged him with her knee. Take Dolly? But Chester La Farge was saying, “We should keep out of foreign entanglements. It’s Zionist Wall Street leading us into war. International raspcallions.”

Mrs. La Farge giggled. “Rapscallions, honey,” she said.

La Farge made a vast, declaiming motion with his hand. “Rapscallions, raspcallions, it’s all the same. The international Jewish bankers are conspiring to send my son Charlie into war, that’s all I know.”

Dolly and Mrs. La Farge responded in unison with a small interested hum of approval, while Loftis, bored, distracted, looked away. The swimming pool, infinitely far off, it seemed, trembled across his eyes with a filmy distortion, violently green, a cold and uncanny light into which young half-naked bodies seemed to be diving and tumbling with frightening abandon. “Yaaa-y,
Peyton,”
a boy’s voice called, rising up over the dark slope along with a muffled splash, and without apparent reason touching him for a moment with a mild and uncertain sadness. He glanced at Dolly out of the corner of his eye: now this was an uneasy position, he thought; here he was sitting here with her, like this. Here he was, in full view of God and God knew who else: Millie Armstrong over there, for instance, who was one of Helen’s dearest friends. Involuntarily, he thrust his neck down into his shoulders, as if to feel that they might imagine he was Pookie maybe, or Dolly’s old uncle from Emporia—but just then Mrs. La Farge said with maddening directness, “What in heaven’s name happened to Helen, Milton?”

“She had to take Maudie home,” he replied easily, a bit startled at the simplicity of his lie. “You know——” He made a wan smile, turned the palms of his hands outward, and looked down solemnly at the table—all as if to say, “You know how these things are. This affliction, this burden. At least I know.”

“Poor thing,” Mrs. La Farge said, “poor child. She tires easily, doesn’t she? Maudie, I mean.”

“Yes,” he said simply. He finished his drink, poured more from a bottle underneath the table, out of deference to a state law which prohibited public display of liquor. Dolly’s shoulder brushed his as he bent over and just as this happened it seemed to him, with a vague sense of shame, that the long kiss still burned wickedly upon his lips. His mind drifted backward through the hours and he remembered: How quickly they had parted! It had excited him, that kiss, but it had startled and frightened him, too. Parted not because he had wanted to; feverishly, with all sorts of fumbling and satiny caresses, there as night fell completely, they had clung together: breaking apart for a moment, he felt his heart thumping, her hands on his, all over him—his cheeks, his hair—and gluey lipstick on his mouth. They had agreed in a concerted whisper: We’ve got to watch out.

“I’ll see you later, my darling,” she had murmured, and rushed upstairs.

Then the awful business with Helen. Perfectly awful. He had composed himself, thrown a stained red handkerchief down the stairwell and walked out, still unnerved, into the lobby where just at that instant, as he had imagined, she came flouncing out of the ballroom with Maudie and Peyton in tow.

“Hello, my dear,” he said quietly.

All nerves, all agony, she was dressed in a black cape, arms full of paraphernalia meant for rain (as he had pictured it uneasily before)—umbrellas, two of them, Maudie’s raincoat and overshoes and—the final sad touch—a bottle of aspirin clutched in her hand.

“Somebody sick?”

She pressed Maudie down onto a couch and leaned over, buckling the overshoes on.

“Maudie’s catching cold,” she muttered.

Peyton came toward him solemnly and wound an arm in his.

“Hello, Papadaddy,” said Maudie, looking up with a smile.

“Hello, honey. Listen,” he said, bending down and tapping Helen’s shoulder; “Listen,” he repeated softly, while the blood began to pound and pound at his temples, “let’s get this straight, my dear. Peyton’s staying right here.”

She arose and turned with a wry and forbidding smile, while in a flash he saw her breasts heaving—this and, out of the corner of his eye, the assistant manager of the club behind the desk, a pale overfed man counting stacks of coins, eying the scene slyly through his bifocals, vacant discs of reflected fluorescent light.

She smiled, saying, “Right here with you so you can feed her whisky. Well,” she went on smiling as she bent down above the overshoes, lifting, with accustomed tenderness, Maudie’s braced leg and adjusting a leather thong, “you’ve got the wrong idea.” A moment’s silence. “The wrong idea.”