Nothing That Meets the Eye (50 page)

Then for another few seconds Robert felt that he couldn't realize what he had done. That was almost comforting, like a pill he might have taken. He did realize that his life and his work, whatever he had wanted to do in life, was over, finished. He might as well be dead now, like Lee. But they weren't going to kill him, just sentence him and imprison him. That was worse. Think about that later. He was pushing his tongue against his left eyetooth, which was nicked from a football game, way back, when Robert had been fourteen or fifteen. A vision of little white houses, blue sea behind them, came into his eyes. Greece. Robert had been to Greece when he was twenty, pack on his back, sleeping on beaches and in pine woods, getting to know the land and the people. He had hoped to have enough money one day to buy a house on a Greek island, and to live there with Lee at least half of the year, the other half in America. He had never forgotten Greece or his dream of a house there. He and Lee had used to talk about it, now and then. Greek music.

Lee's music. Lee hadn't always played pop, either on the radio or on the record player. She had liked Mahler, oddly. Depressing sometimes to Robert, fear-making, unfathomable sometimes to him. Yet now the memory of the Mahler Sixth steadied him. He had come to a big decision about Lee while Mahler's Sixth Symphony played one afternoon. He had been working on a clay model of what he called A Dreaming Woman, the woman not reclining but on her knees with arms raised as if half ambulant in her dream. He had gone to speak with Lee about his idea.

And what had she been doing? Putting adhesive paper down on some kitchen shelves, standing on a low formica stool. Robert proposed that she divorce him and marry Tony, the bachelor architect-carpenter who lived about eight miles away, the same fellow who had hung the shelf Lee was now busy with.

“Tony?”

Robert could still hear her voice and the astonishment in it. “He's in love with you,” Robert had said. “Just too polite to do anything about it. You must know it yourself.”

“Are you out of your mind, Bob?”

Robert remembered her eyes then, the same straight clear gaze at him, but what a different mind or brain behind those eyes!

The difference in her was affecting his work, at least affecting his sketches of Lee. He could not see her the same way as before, because she wasn't the same. His nearly life-size nudes of her, a couple of years old by then, thumbtacked to the walls of his workroom, had seemed to mock him: you can't do it again, they seemed to say. The drawings had spirit, enthusiasm, even genius. Whose genius, his or Lee's? Robert wasn't vain, it could be his or hers, and he preferred to think it both his and hers.

So Robert had turned himself to other themes, other women's figures, if he needed them, abstracts, nature forms. Lee had become “any woman,” ordinary, pretty, but uninspired and uninspiring. Robert had managed a teaching job for three mornings a week in Chicago. They could have afforded a baby-sitter, a woman to do the housecleaning once or twice a week, but Lee seemed to enjoy these chores, and she said she didn't want anyone else in the house.

If Lee began to be the cliché, the woman-next-door, Tony Wagener was the archetype of the man-next-door (formerly the nice-boy-next-door) whom the average girl would be lucky to marry. He was healthy, attractive, good-natured, age twenty-five, and he couldn't take his eyes off Lee. Was it any wonder that a happy idea had crossed Robert's mind? Robert had thought it might work. He still loved Lee, even in a physical way, in fact, but the letdown—of his dream? No, because Lee had been the way he remembered her when he met her and when they had married, for a while. Witness his drawings! Witness his three statues of her, two small and one life-size! They were good, really good!

Therefore, Tony.

“Don't you like Tony?” Robert had asked on another occasion.

“Like him? I never think about him. Why should I? He brings us wood for the fireplace—because he doesn't need it.” She had shrugged.

“It might be better. You might be happier. Tony would.” Robert remembered he had laughed here.

Lee had still been puzzled. “I don't want Tony!” And what else had she said? Had she asked him if he was miserable with her, if he didn't love her any longer?

What would he have answered in that case?

It had crossed Robert's mind to run away, simply abandon Lee and the baby. He loved the baby, was rather in awe of it as his and Lee's creation, but he had still been able to envisage disappearing rather than—something worse. The something worse hadn't been definite in Robert's mind then, he had merely feared it.

If he disappeared, Robert remembered thinking, mightn't things be better? Lee would land on her feet, if she fell at all. Tony would dance attendance and step in as soon as Lee let him, and why shouldn't she? Tony was serious about his architecture, had a degree from somewhere, and was going to climb in his profession. Robert could not imagine a more ardent suitor than Tony, if Tony were only given a chance. Tony had had a girlfriend when Lee and Robert had moved into their house, but after three months or so (Tony had been doing some carpentry work for them, and had brought the girl once or twice), Tony had dropped her. Tony had fallen in love with Lee, that had been plain. Robert remembered mentioning it, early on, to Lee, and Lee had shrugged, uninterested.

Robert had been doing portraits, heads as he called them, for two people or clients in Bloomington, and for one in Chicago. They brought in money. Only middle-aged and well-to-do people could afford the luxury of having themselves or their wives cast in bronze at three thousand dollars each. Robert had had to work in rather conventional style to get a likeness that pleased the client. He tried to be as free as he could in his style, but still it bored him.

Lee had begun to bore him. Incredible realization! One day he had driven back from a sitting in Chicago, nervous, unhappy, and he had said to Lee, “What if I just disappeared?”

She had turned from the stove where she was cooking something. “What do you mean?” Her smile was almost her former smile, amused, cool, showing rather pointed white teeth between her rouged lips. She wore white sneakers, a pair of girls' maroon corduroy jeans. She couldn't wear boys' trousers, because she had a waistline and hips, though she was not plump.

What had he replied? Robert tried to remember now, because it was important, because he had really been trying to make the right suggestion. “I don't see that you need me anymore.” Robert was sure he had said that. What else could he have said? “If I went away, I'd send you money to live on, you can be sure of that.” Then he had blurted out the truth: “You're not the same girl as before. It's not your fault, I think. It's my fault. I should never have asked you to marry me. Somehow I'm destroying you. And this situation or whatever it is is bothering my work. It depresses me.”

“But I am the same person. Sure I have to spend a lot of time now with Melinda, but I don't mind that. It's normal.” And at that moment hadn't she run across the kitchen to stop Melinda from poking a finger into an electric outlet? Melinda crawled around a lot, because Lee was against confining her too much in her crib. “When she's really tired, she'll sleep better,” Lee often said. What else had she said? Maybe, “I thought you were working rather well. Aren't you?”

And her dressing table, its top covered with little boxes of pins, lipsticks, perfume bottles, lotions, cologne. Robert had used to look at all that with a smile—mystifying objects, but Lee knew what to do with them. She made herself prettier, different. She amused herself, she amused other people. Boys and men looked at her when they went to restaurants. But Lee didn't invite attention, never had, didn't need to. Maybe men took as flirting one glance from her, but Lee could hardly go around with her eyes shut all the time. No, she hadn't flirted, and once she had decided she liked him, Robert had been the only man for her, he knew that.

One Friday morning, one of the mornings when he had to get up at seven at the latest for the Chicago art school, Robert had quit the house. He had left Lee a note saying that he was going to telephone Tony. Try it, Robert had written. See if you can't love Tony as much as he loves you. You know where to reach me, at the art school. Try it for maybe a month, please? You might find yourself happier. Robert had taken a furnished room not far from the school. If Tony didn't work out, Robert had thought of acquiring a ­second-hand car for himself and giving Lee the car he had taken, their car. She was able to drive. Robert envisaged a divorce, of course. He felt a divorce would be better for both of them. Some other Tony would come along. Meanwhile he missed his workroom at home, his clay, a couple of works in progress.

Tony had said on the telephone, “But what happened, Bob? A big quarrel? You sound serious.”

“Just look after her. We didn't quarrel, no. It's like a trial. I want to try it.” Shocked silence at Tony's end. “She may like you better.”

“Oh, no.” Tony defensive now. “You've got me wrong, Bob.”

“Try it. I invite you.” Robert had hung up.

The following Sunday evening around eight, Robert got a telegram from Lee: cannot understand you. please come home. i am so unhappy. lee.

Robert had sent his furnished-room address to Lee on Friday, so she would have got his note Saturday morning. He had not sent the name or telephone number of his landlady, so maybe it had been easier for Lee to send a telegram straight to the address. Robert had found it under his door, when he got back from supper.

And that had been that. After a minute's debate Robert had driven back home. He had not been able to bear the thought of Lee unhappy—either because of being alone, or because of not liking Tony, or of being bored or annoyed by him. Robert had been willing to leave his week's rent with Mrs. Kleber, but she gave it back to him except for a charge of one extra day.

Lee's first words to him had been, “What is the matter, Bob? And Tony! What're you trying to do? I never said I liked Tony.”

Tony had not been there when Robert got home. Tony had been polite, helpful, it seemed, but Lee did not want him.

Robert fell on his cell cot exhausted, and had to be awakened for his early supper. Hours ago they must have poked lunch at him. He couldn't remember, he must have been daydreaming then.

“God, I wish I had a radio,” he murmured to himself. He would have switched on anything just to take his mind off Lee and himself. It grew dark early, because it was December. He walked and walked around his cell, deliberately tiring himself so he could sleep.

The next day at one-thirty
P.M.
his parents came. Robert was allowed to go into a side room with table and chairs and to talk with them. There were no other prisoners in the room, and only two other cells in the place, as far as Robert could see.

His mother was nervous and looked as if she had been weeping. She was blondish, wore a green tweed dress and a sheepskin coat. His father was as tall as Robert, six feet, a man of fifty, a logical man. Robert recognized the downturning of his father's strong mouth. His father was displeased, he didn't understand, was going to be stubborn. Robert remembered that look from his childhood, for his minor misdemeanors. His father now had reason to be grim.

“Bobby, you must tell us what happened,” said his mother.

“What they said happened,” Robert replied. “It's the truth.”

“Who's they?” asked his father.

“The police, I suppose. I called the police,” said Robert.

“We know that,” said his mother. “But what happened at home?”

“Nothing.” He stopped, having been about to say that he must have had a moment of irrationality, of anger. But that wasn't it.

“You had a quarrel? You'd had a few drinks?” asked his father. “You can tell us the truth, Bob. We're in a state of shock, I can tell you that.” His father was making an effort to get his words out; he glanced at Robert's mother, then looked back at Robert. He said quietly and earnestly, “It's not you, Bob. You worshiped Lee, that we know.—Can't you talk to us?”

“Was there another man in the picture?” asked his mother. “We thought of that. This Tony you mentioned in your letters—”

“No, no.” Robert shook his head. “Tony is a very polite fellow.”

“Polite, well,” said his father tolerantly, hoping for a lead here.

“No, it's got nothing to do with Tony,” Robert said.

His mother asked gently, “What did Lee do?”

“Nothing,” Robert answered. “She just changed.”

“Changed how?” asked his father.

“She turned into a different person from the one I married. She ­didn't do anything.—Maybe she was just herself, after all. Why not?” He tried to sound reasonable. What they were talking about was perhaps not susceptible to reason, not to be understood in logical terms. Also Robert had never been intimate with his parents, or tried to talk with either of them about his moods, his crushes and loves in his adolescence. They had been sympathetic about his wanting to go to art school, though Robert knew his father had considered it impractical, somehow “easy,” undemanding and unrewarding. He was an artist, therefore more sensitive, Robert supposed they thought, so what he had done must be all the more unbelievable to them.

“Changed how?” his father repeated. “Neglecting you maybe, paying more attention to the baby. I've heard of that happening, but—”

“It was not that.” Robert was suddenly impatient, wanted to end the useless conversation. “I've been absolutely unreasonable,” Robert said, “and I deserve everything they're going to give me or do to me.”

His mother's hand shook as she reached in her pocketbook for a tissue, but she was not weeping now. She gave her nose a pinch. “Bobby, we've talked to a lawyer by telephone, one who knows the state laws here, and we'll see him this afternoon. He says if there had been a quarrel about anything, if you'd been angry about something, it would help you when—”