Nightlight (13 page)

Mary would give in to Phil, understanding his needs, and realizing that although he was an insect compared with her father, he was, in the eyes of the world, a desirable husband. The eyes of the world had always mattered to Mary. To appear cheerful and sophisticated was to earn envy, and envy was power. Power to do what? she asked herself sometimes, because she was not smug, and she was not stupid.

Simple power was enough, its own end. She was a jewel, and her husband and her son were the fine setting. Except that night after night she hungered for the touch of her father, his manly laugh, his rough-gentle hands, the way he had tossed a football to her, so that the ripe leather of it had seemed to breathe under her fingertips as he laughed. “Throw it back! And let's see a spiral.”

And she had thrown it back with a spiral, while her mother, that pale spoonful of spit, would watch from the steps, disapproving her daughter's masculine ways, disapproving her father's attention, her father's fondness, the way her father would caress his daughter after a day of riding, his intelligent, strong hands soothing her back as if she were a filly as he told her she was the best horsewoman who had ever lived, and he was proud to have her as his daughter.

The night came when her husband was again drunk, the bottle of twelve-year-old single malt on the floor beside him, his snoring mouth like the mouth of a salmon exhaling the sour stink of a man who does not know how to live his life.

“You are disgusting,” she told the rattling carcass. “Weak. Empty. Worthless.” The words were weak. She could not enunciate her contempt.

Like an answer, his breath caught and he coughed.

She waited for him to wake, but he did not. She hungered for him to rise for a moment so she could tell him what she thought, but he was beyond that, a man who had transformed himself into a heap of garbage.

She wept, furious that she had to live with such a wasted man. Her father could drink all night, and never waver. He could laugh as heartily at dawn, smoking yet another cigar, as he had laughed the evening before. His card companions would reel apologetically, and he would saunter, in control of every movement, assisting them into their coats.

And then she awoke to the understanding that her father was alive that moment, waiting in that house, to show his contempt for Phil in the best way a man could show contempt for another. Not that her father had ever expressed contempt; such a feeling was too base. But you could see in the glint of his eye that he knew that he was superior to a man who complained too much, or couldn't hold his drink.

She slipped through the house like a wraith, called to where he lay, a proud man in the body of a youth, but calling to her, willing her to him, up the carpeted stairs, the unheard signal of his will drawing her in like a trout on the long, transparent line.

She was in his room, and his eyes were alight. “Father,” she whispered. “Take me away from this.”

And his eyes glittered, and she understood that her father had felt more than a father's love for his daughter. “I can't,” she groaned, kneeling beside the bed. “I can't stand it any more.”

She gripped the hand, her father's hand, her son's hand, and held it. She gripped it, squeezed it until it must be agony, but of course there was no cry, and she knelt there beside the bed imagining the walls dissolving as the room soared into the air, the bay, the hills and the distant lights of faraway cities scattering around them, like playthings.

18

Mary asked Mark in, but of course the tone of her asking was deeply asexual, and he thanked her the way a man will when he is about to decline, but he said yes.

To her regret, he wanted Scotch. “I thought you preferred bourbon.”

“Usually. But I feel like Scotch tonight.”

Sandy, the Filipino slip-of-a-thing, brought them drinks, and vanished in the way that made Mary prize her. “I do prefer a full-length ballet to one of those mix-and-match shows they put together.”

Mark seemed to mull this, or savor the Scotch, but it turned out to be neither. “I might as well be straightforward,” he said.

Mary drooped inwardly. Men were always tedious when they resolved to be straightforward or honest. But whatever could he have to say? He seemed to be waiting for a nod from her, and when men need permission to speak they are about to say something they are afraid no one wants to hear. She smiled quickly and tilted her head quickly, and then resumed an expression she could wear like a mask, that of bored benevolence.

“I have been considering our future.”

“Ah!” Was she surprised? A little? No, not at all. And yet, one is always a little surprised to have one's scantest suspicions leap into fruit.

He was old enough, and calculating enough, to seem calm. But she knew he was nervous. She would make a man nervous, because she struck men as capable of breaking them like sticks. Her next words had to be chosen with care, but could not seem to be the result of much thought. Such words required high craft.

“The future is imaginary,” she began, and she knew he would have to feel disappointed. “It is an invention. Not even worth thinking about.”

He smiled, an attractive man.

“You knew my husband?”

Calling Phil “her husband” was a signal. But Mark took it well. “Yes. Not well, but we saw each other from time to time and said hello. I always admired him.”

“He was a remarkable man. All these books—” The books shifted in the firelight, and a sudden gust spattered rain against the window. “He was a clever man. And he asked me, in the weeks before his death, not to remarry too soon. Not that I was impetuous, or at that time young.”

He made a grimace of protest, as she had expected him to. “But it has been years, now,” she added. “I can do whatever I want to.”

Mark leaned forward, seeing nothing but her, and she wanted to scream, because she would marry him in an instant except for Len. If not for Len anything would be possible, but Len, whose life she had made monstrous, needed her.

“Have you met my son?”

“Yes, at the reception at the Legion of Honor several years ago. A bright young man. Won awards in photography, I understand.”

“Yes,” she said sadly. She phrased the next words with her highest skill. “But he is a very sick young man. Emotionally disturbed. I think drugs had something to do with it. He has been a burden to me, but I must accept it. Still, I couldn't ask you, Mark, to share in this burden.”

“How sick is he?”

“Quite.”

“Mary, I am an experienced person. I know what the world is like. I'm willing to take on the shared responsibility for your son.”

Of course, Len was sick. Sicker than she wanted to tell Mark, sicker than she wanted even cousin Paul to know. But most of all she didn't want anyone to know what role she had played in twisting Len into what he was. All she wanted was to have Len safe. Alive. Somewhere.

Mark sensed indecision. He stepped to her side, for the first time that evening, perhaps for the first time in years, wooden and unsure of himself. He kissed her cheek, and she scented Scotch and the starch of his collar. “I'd be good for you,” he whispered.

She believed him.

“I suppose we don't really know each other that well,” he said.

“I think I know you, and certainly trust you, as a very dear friend.”

He smiled again, that acknowledgment of disappointment accepted with grace. “I would like to know you better. Much better. Because every moment I've spent with you has made me hungry for more.”

She turned away from such talk. It pleased her, of course. But if he knew her at all well—if he really knew—he would be disgusted.

“I have what you would have to call a contented life,” he was saying. “I lend my name to a successful practice. I travel. I listen to music. But at the very center I have sometimes felt my life to be … a little bit empty.”

She wondered just how experienced he was. Well-seasoned, perhaps. And sure of himself. But had he any idea how evil the world could be? “I don't believe any part of you is empty.”

“I am very happy. Make no mistake about that. Emptiness has never bothered me. I enjoy going for walks and listening to Vivaldi. I seem to have the gift of simply avoiding anxiety.” He smiled, as if ashamed of himself. “But when I'm with you, I know I am with a human being whose life is full. Much richer, and more exciting than mine. A person who has a center.”

“Good heavens.”

“I'm sorry. I am being foolish. But why not? I admire you, Mary, a good deal.”

It hurt her to hear it. It meant that she should not see him after tonight. It meant that he would be shocked if he knew the truth. “I heard someone say that you have a fine legal mind.”

“People say things without thinking.”

“No one with a fine legal mind can be altogether empty, can they?”

“You're arguing with me about the state of my soul.” He put down his drink. He took her hand and held it in his hands for a moment, and then turned away. “And I can see that I have not said the right things tonight.”

She hungered to reassure him, but it was better that he leave, and gradually fade from her life. “I would not dream of arguing about the state of anyone's soul. Souls in general are far out of my field of knowledge.” Although this was not, she thought, quite true.

“I enjoyed your company tonight,” he said, and it seemed the beginning of a speech of farewell.

More than anything she wanted to beg him not to leave. But she could not involve this decent man. He must go on believing that she was what she seemed to be: a lively, beautiful woman, and nothing more.

“It was a very pleasant evening,” she said, and his smile told her that her words hurt him. To her surprise, she was trembling. “I don't know when I have enjoyed the ballet more.”

When he was gone, the shadows of the furniture were dark, and shifted back and forth, like living things.

She tilted the glass of his Scotch and gazed into it, the amber liquor blazing with reflected firelight. Then she turned and flung the Scotch into the fireplace. The flames burned white for a moment, and she watched until they died down.

“Would you like a toddy, ma'am?”

“No, I think I'll sleep better tonight.”

“I hope so. You need a night's rest.”

Mary smiled wanly. Yes, everyone could see it. The secret was wasting her away, just as living with it had wasted Phil.

Just as it was destroying Len.

She laughed, and Sandy turned, startled. “I'm all right, Sandy. Don't worry. I'm sure I'll sleep well tonight. I can feel it deep inside me. There is no question in my mind. Tonight I sleep.”

“Len never goes anywhere,” Phil had once said. “He never has any friends over. I don't even think he has any friends. Does he?”

She had stopped brushing her hair for a moment. “No. I don't think he does.”

“You like that. You like having him to yourself.”

“You are being spiteful tonight, Phil. Are you tired of your Latin?”

“You like keeping him as a kind of pet.”

“He's not a pet. He's more of a man at seventeen than you'll ever be.”

“That poor little worm! He's a pale, skinny little teenager.”

She slapped him. “He is twice the man you are. He watches you leave in the morning and his eyes are bright with pity for you, because he sees the kind of worthless coward I'm married to.”

Phil held his face where she had struck him, and eyed her. “What both of you need is a kick in the butt.”

“You wouldn't dare touch him. He'd tear you limb from limb.”

“You're crazy. The poor kid's puny. He's pale from staying in his darkroom all day. He has all the vigor of a slug.”

She hit him again before she could think, hard. “He's tougher than anyone you've ever known. Powerful. Capable of taking any kind of punishment without crying out, capable of pleasing me!”

She would never quite decide what lust for brutality had made her tell her lie. The time seemed ripe, and she spoke evenly, slowly, so he would believe her. “He is my lover. He makes love to me while you are asleep, drunk out of your mind. While you are playing with your books he is mounting me, muscular and hard.”

It was not, of course, the truth, and she at once regretted saying it, but then strengthened herself. It was the best way to show her spineless sack of a husband how little respect she had for him. It was the best way to hurt him, and he deserved pain for all the lonely, aching evenings she had endured.

“It's not true!”

“It's true! He's mine, all of him, and you have nothing.”

She had always been stronger than Phil, emotionally, mentally, in all the ways that mattered. He was weak in the very part of him that should be vital, and he broke and sobbed.

He did not drink himself into a stupor that night. He slowly gathered his suitcases, packed some books, and left; for months afterward she was in terror lest he spread the lie.

Then she was sure that he was the one who was most vulnerable. She had hired a detective and spun Phil back, as a spider reels in the husk of an insect while it is still alive, but paralyzed with poison.

In the last months of Phil's life she had both of them, the spirit of a dead man in a teenager's body, and the spiritless body of a man waiting to die.

He spoke to her about it only once. He had withered over the last few years into a pale scrap, and watched television because he was too weak to read. One day as he sat in the study, unopened volume of Hesiod in his lap, he looked up at her and said, simply, “The worst will happen to you.”

“I don't believe in Hell, my dear,” she said lightly.

He actually smiled. It was little more than a twitch. “You will find the secret eating you rotten.”

“Good heavens, Phil. What a ghastly image.”

“And there won't be anything you can do.”