Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (23 page)

Meanwhile the silence was growing. She felt Mar’s eyes on her face. She would have to say something.

“How much money was there in your wallet?”

“About thirty dollars. All I had. It doesn’t matter.”

Mar was standing, lowering, waiting like an animal who expects a blow. It came to her then in a flash that he had needed to tell her because he wanted the blow, wanted to be punished, wanted
that
way out of confusion, and she did not say what she had gotten up to utter, something about money, that it did matter, and he had jolly well better learn that it did. She swallowed her anger, standing there beside him and said, slowly, painfully, measuring each word before she uttered it, “Mar, your Hell and mine are different. I had somehow imagined they were the same.

“That was childish of me. But I do know this: people who have angels have devils, and in this we are alike, … we’ll always be at war with a devil, always to the very end.”

“What makes you think I have an angel?”

“Poetry,” she said crossly, “of course.”

“Don’t brush your angels off on me!” For the first time he smiled; the hostility had gone. “Besides, what has lust to do with poetry?”

“Maybe quite a lot. More than we know. More than most of us are willing to admit.”

“Why did you say then that our Hells are different?” Mar asked warily. “I don’t get it!”

The wind was cold, and she shivered. But she didn’t care, now the electric current between them was set up again. Now she could speak out. “Different because you’re a man and I’m a woman, I suppose. I wouldn’t get any kick out of a prostitute. But I do know something of the excitement of discovering the unknown, how one feels driven to explore the unknown person, to break down barriers, to understand, to be enlarged, to discover, the tremendous excitement of that kind of conquest. Of course sex is mixed up with it. That’s sure. But if it were only sex, it wouldn’t be worth the candle. When I get stirred up, it’s the whole of me that gets stirred. I can’t separate soul and body, don’t you see?”

“I want the separation,” he shouted. “I want to be sexy without all the devastating conflict and
feeling
. I want sex without love! I’ve waited six months for one word from Rufus!”

“And you can’t take it?” she shouted back. “You quail before the conflict. You find a way out, a cheap quick way!” It was a single clap of thunder. After it she asked gently, because she really wanted to know, because he was the strange world for her, and she needed to understand, “Does it work?”

“How do I know?” He pushed both fists into his eyes as if he were blinding himself.

She felt compelled to motion. She led the way this time, down the narrow path, thinking hard. She stopped at the same big rock where she had rested her back on the way up. “I can’t see that it works, because you don’t really escape feeling. You just get a big slap in the face from it. You settle for shame instead of self-conquest, in other words.”

“I’m not ashamed. I’m angry. I told you.”

“You were angry when you told me about Rufus. Frustration makes one angry, and that’s that. But then you towered in your anger. You were all shining with it. You were ready to battle the universe! I saw you! Oh Mar, this isn’t the man-woman difference or even the difference between the deviating person and the so-called normal one. It’s life itself. True feeling justifies, whatever it may cost.”

“Justifies
what?
A lot of mooning around, dissipation? Rufus and all I have felt for him has held me back,” Mar said quietly. “That’s what’s been so hard all along, being held
back!
”

“Back from what?”

“From college for one thing.”

“Oh well,” Hilary sighed, “if we’re talking about the world!”

“You’re safe. You’ve made it. You don’t understand.”

“No poet is safe, and no poet ever makes it!” The answer shot back. “If you find it devastating to absorb
one
short episode, consider what it has meant for me these days to try to absorb my whole life, piece together all the encounters—I wouldn’t dare count how many!—and try to make some sense of it all!”

“You thrive on it! You’re a factory of feeling!”

“Is that how it looks to you?” Hilary pulled herself up from the sheltering rock and walked on. She was furious. She hated the barrier between them which was not really youth against age, nor even masculine against feminine, but quite simply that Mar had not begun to face all she had faced, spoke out of raw suffering, undigested. She had counted, she realized, on essence. It was not enough.

“The big difference between us, Mar, is that you have hardly begun to write the poems. You have been shocked, badly shocked—taking the money was a form of rape, of course. I quite see that. But you seem to be a coward about conflict. You run back to me, whatever I am to you, for a reaction, for punishment, I suppose. Write it out, man! Write the poems!”

“There won’t be any poems. Poems come out of self-respect.”

“I wonder.…” Going down now they walked fast. After a time Hilary turned to call back, “The night before the interview I made myself quite ill, digging out the past, looking at what had fed the poems. Self-disgust! Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn’t there.”

“What is then?” he shouted back. “What is there?”

There was no answer. The wind took the question and blew it away. And it was only when they found themselves back at the quarry side that Hilary, unconscious apparently that it might have been called an answer, totally absorbed in the impression of the moment, said, “Odd, isn’t it? How these quarries, blasted open by dynamite, the scene of so much violence, so much lifting and carrying too, after they are abandoned, become magic places, deep ponds.” She paused, probing the image which had been spoken before she really saw what she had been given. “Rich and peaceful,” she said. “As far as I can see, it’s not a question of fidelity, of the violent encounter with no possible future as against some unimaginable lasting fugue. No, what is important is depth. Hell is very deep, as well as Heaven, so we can almost never quarrel with Hell.” She looked out over the tranquil deep water, a dark green, opaque, she noticed today, under the overcast sky. How to speak to a wound?

“I wonder whether it is not just possible that you will find that what is not material for poetry is not material for life, … too shallow, don’t you know?”

“Very pretty, your image.”

“A dry quarry is not a
pretty
image, damn it! Bound to be dry, if you separate sex and feeling,” she added, glad of her anger now.

“Oh, shut
up!
”

Being angry, it was much more comfortable if other people were, P lary decided: it freed you.

“I won’t shut up! I’ve got hold of something, and I must say it.” She was half laughing now. “You don’t have to listen. For years I’ve been wondering what it is about Europe that nourishes, what it is about
us
on the other hand that feels barren, as if the loam underfoot were shallow, as if the quarries were dry. Look at the faces! Haunted maybe, but haunted by what? Tension, fear, emptiness, self-disgust. Shallow tension, … getting there before the light changes! Shallow fear, the fear of being exposed, the fear of emotion, the terrible fear that if you give a fraction of yourself away you are
diminished!
”

“Stop shouting at me,” Mar rubbed his forehead in a compulsive way which she hated. “Leave me alone!”

But she was not to be stopped now. “So we all feel in America. Leave me alone, we say, to be
myself
, unique, untouchable, set apart in my own peculiar constellation of sailors or whatever, of lust and humiliation, repeating the same self-imposed pattern over and over!”

“It’s not a pattern for me. It’s happened once, for Christ’s sake!” Mar was on his feet facing her.

“I haven’t finished!”

For a second he looked as if he would run away. Then something in her fierceness, like a small belligerent hawk, its feathers ruffled, touched him. And she caught his look, that fatherly look which she had glimpsed when he first came to ask for the dock. Suddenly they both laughed. The anger collapsed like a house of cards.

“Why am I so angry?” she asked him. “Whatever happened?”

“You seemed about to take on the entire United States, not only me. Here, have a cigarette. Calm down.”

“I’m just boiling,” she said, “with ideas and things. I’m on the verge of gripping a solid truth.” Then she laughed her light laugh, “Idiotic, isn’t it, to get so het up?”

But Mar was thinking things over. “I guess you’re right. I am afraid of suffering.”

She lifted her chin. “I’m not afraid.”

“It’s all grist to your mill. Even the Hell gets to be useful.”

“Yes.” She questioned his face, no longer open nor smiling. “If you find that disgusting, you’re not a writer.”

“It seems like rather an easy way out.”

“
Easy?
” She turned on him sharply. “Easy?” she repeated. “It’s not a way out at all; it’s a way
in—
excruciating self-discipline, the ability to deal with anxiety, the need to transpose from one plane of reality to another, the fighting through each time to the
means
toward this transposition. Easy?” She flashed out again. “A way out? That’s not fair. It’s rather more costly than
your
way out two nights ago, I can tell you!”

“Leave me out of it. Talk to yourself,” Mar said quietly.

“That’s what I’m doing, you idiot … talking to myself, whistling in the dark.” The words she had uttered spontaneously reverberated. “Talking to myself.…”

It was true. Mar was a buried part of herself. Mar was the young man she had dreamed of being. That was why the episode of the sailor had been so disturbing, had jarred her at some deep level of consciousness, had almost split her off from him into that dangerous anger so much like pain. Turn that troubled, troubling face around and it was her own face.

“Everyone is everyone,” she murmured. “Only you and I are more so.”

Mar had walked away, was standing a little distance away, not throwing pebbles in to trouble the waters this time, just standing there. And she too looked down into the deep still pool, as if he were not there, and she could rest for a moment on nature itself. It was very still, and in the stillness she became excruciatingly aware of what might lie ahead for him, of the danger he was in, of the danger of her way of taking life, of battling through suffering, of taking on suffering almost with joy, of using deprivation as a springboard into poetry. Did he have enough talent? A hard enough core? Would he be drowned in the winds and the tides, tossed up and down, never coming to shore? She was deeply frightened. She saw that she had been saved a great deal by being a woman, been saved by nature itself from some kinds of degradation and shame, and that she had been saved also by being a mystic of sorts. Transcending, sublimating—these would not be his way. His way would have to deal with gritty substance; the quarry as it was, not seen in a special light. He must not be bound to her wheel of boy and woman and the two married within her to make the poems. His poems would be cramped and distorted if he did not live out his life to the full, as a man. And she was afraid because of all she had told him, asked of him, believed could be possible for him, as if he were herself. Here she ground her teeth to keep from swearing aloud, so fierce was her sense of failure in regard to him. He must have a whole life, grow up, marry. So she knew in the very center of her being. How to set him free? How persuade?

“I’m an old woman, Mar. You must grant me that”

“Do I have to?” He came back toward her, smiling. “You talk about it a lot, but you don’t seem exactly old. Or young either. Just yourself,” he said considering her with evident pleasure.

“I’ve
earned
being old,” she said. “Don’t deprive me of what I have earned.”

“Well?”

“First, there are no casual encounters, for you or for me. Every one is a collision, reverberates, and, because it reverberates, is costly.”

“What has our collision cost you?”

“A home truth,” she said quietly. “Never mind that for the moment. The wonderful thing that happened when we collided was poetry. That’s true. You can’t deny it”

“I wouldn’t think of denying it”

“You stirred me up. The old machine got into gear again, don’t you know? You were stirred up anyway, and all I had to do was discover you had a secret weapon, a talent. It has been exciting, Mar, hasn’t it?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Something else happened which I am only beginning to understand.” Catching his amused look, his fatherly look, Hilary was dismayed. It was all going to be harder than she knew quite how to manage. “You’re not going to like it!” she said with an edge in her voice. But oh be gentle, something warned her. Summon your gentleness now. (And from somewhere deep down she heard Margaret’s voice, so long ago, saying about Adrian, “Life with Adrian is going to ask all your tenderness, all your womanliness.”)

Mar was at this moment swinging a birch branch down, feeling his strength against the limber strength of the tree, letting it snap back and take him part way with it.

“Hilary has one more thing to say, and I’m not going to like it. Well?” And he let the branch go, watched it spring back. “What is it, Hilary?” He stood there with his hands in his pockets, daring her. For the first time that morning, the shadow of the sailor was not standing behind him. His eyes looked very blue, and for a second Hilary envied him, envied that masculine power, that youth, the
animal
in him.

“I’m an old woman,” she said heavily, and this time with disgust. “But when I was your age, or a little younger maybe, I wanted to be a boy. Part of me just stayed back there, and you can laugh if you must—it might be appropriate!—but it was (and is) that boy in me who wrote the poems. So I have kept him close to me, for better or worse, and perhaps justified my way of life in the light of his immature eyes.”

Mar was dead serious now. “Do you really think,” he asked, “that the poems are immature?”