Ordinary People (25 page)

Guilt. Is not punishment, Berger said. Guilt is simply guilt. A run-in he and Buck had years ago, with a clerk in a drugstore. He said they had not paid for two comic books, wouldn’t believe them. He had threatened to call their father and expose them to the world as liars and thieves. Go ahead Buck said with scorn
My dad knows we don’t lie and he knows we don’t take things. What do I care what you think?
But he, Conrad, had cared desperately, and had felt, even as he knew he was innocent, guilty and shamed by it. Why?

Because it has always been easier to believe himself capable of evil than to accept evil in others. But that doesn’t make sense. The clerk in the drugstore wasn’t evil, just mistaken. Bad judgment doesn’t make you evil —can he only see these two opposites—good and evil? Innocence and guilt? Is it necessary to believe others guilty in order for himself to be proved innocent? There is a way through this, an opening, if only he can find it. He stands very still, letting water sluice over his shoulders and river into the creases of his stomach to his crotch.

For some inexplicable reason he was left out of this. Passed over. His shame and guilt ignored. It must have been too monstrous to mention. His crime, his part in it, and so he had to suffer alone. But what for? There is no evil there, after all. Just a boy’s game, dangerous maybe, but not evil, and not Buck’s fault, not his either. Nobody’s fault. It happened, that’s all. Not so frightening, is it? To believe them both innocent
Oh God.
His sinuses are packed with a spongy material. Tears leak out from beneath his eyelids. Resigned, he lets them come as he soaps himself carefully: his arms, his shoulders, and his back; his legs, between his legs. He stands and lets the water run over his head, washing his hair. When he is finished, he gets out, towels himself dry. Slowly and carefully he turns his arms up to look at the insides of his wrists.

In grade school a girl named Sally Willet sat next to him. She had taken his hand in hers one day, those strong, brown fingers tracing the creases in his palm, showing him his lifeline, curving beside the heel of his hand almost to his wrist: a deep and definite mark. He draws a ragged breath, wondering about Karen, about her lifeline. Was it a long one, too?

Tears of grief this time
Not fair not fair!
no, but life is not fair always, or sane, or good, or anything. It just
is.

He hangs up the towels in the bathroom and turns off the light. He puts on clean underwear, picking up his dirty clothes, throwing them down the clothes chute. All the while the hot oily liquid seeps out from beneath his eyelids. He continues to blink it back, to wipe it away.

Reduction of feeling. At least he is not guilty of that today. He sets the alarm on his clock-radio, stripping back the covers on his bed. He climbs in and cleanliness surrounds him, its smell cool and seductive. He rolls to his face and, without a sound, without a thought, he sleeps.

The air is balmy and fresh as they sit on the patio, watching the boys swim. It is too cool this evening for the adults, and, besides, Cal is content to sip his martini, savoring the sharp, juniper smell of it as it mixes with the heavier perfume of the surrounding air. Magnolia. Around the pool the stiff, strawlike grass gives off a mossy odor.

Ward raises his glass. “To your low total the first day.”

“No,” Audrey says. “To that thirty-foot putt on the fifteenth hole. I was poking everybody around me. ‘Hey, that’s my brother-in-lawl’ ”

“You did look good, Cal,” Beth says.

He grins. “At isolated moments.”

“Well, you didn’t really expect to win,” Ward says.

“Hell, no!”

But that is the funny part, or maybe not so funny. After Saturday, when he saw that he could do it, that he had a good chance of doing it, he had tightened up. Those three double bogeys on easy holes. If he could have dropped a few more lucky putts like the one on the fifteenth.
You didn’t expect to win.
Maybe that’s it. You get what you expect.

“Why don’t we go out and celebrate anyway?” Ward asks. “How about it, you both like Mexican food? Or we could go to the Captain’s Table, whatever you want.”

“That’d be nice,” Audrey says. “Let’s go there.”

“I’ll check to see if we need reservations. What time? Nine? Ten?”

“Whenever you say.”

Audrey gets up, too. “I’ll put some hamburgers on for the boys. Keep an eye on them, will you?”

Beth nods, and they are left alone on the patio, as Charlie and Kerry splash and shout under the diving board at the opposite end of the pool.

“Having fun?” he asks her.

She smiles. “Yes. Are you?”

“Sure.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t win.”

“Me too.”

“But third place is good, Cal.”

“Third place,” he says, sipping his drink, “is third place.”

“I’ve been thinking,” she says, “that we should play more golf together. Maybe our next vacation should be strictly golf. We could go to Pinehurst, or Myrtle Beach.”

“Sounds great,” Cal says. “I bet he’d like that, too.”

A short silence. Then, “Do you do that deliberately? Or is it a reflex action? I’m curious.”

“Do what?”

“Insert him into the conversation. Whenever I mention you and I doing something together.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “You said vacation. I guess I assumed that you meant him, too.”

“I’m surprised that you haven’t felt the need to call him since we’ve been here.”

“I was going to do it tonight.”

She laughs. “It must be hard to grow up when your father is breathing down your neck all the time. I think I would hate it.”

He gets up; goes to stand near the edge of the pool, watching Charlie tip himself off the end of the board, backward, arms outstretched, screaming; the drowning-man bit. He gazes then at the magnolia tree, those pink knots of petals glowing eerily in the dusk. Behind him he hears the patio door slide open. Ward says, “Everything all set. Nine-thirty. We’ve got time for one more round, folks.”

“I don’t think I’ll have another,” Beth says. “I’m going to dress.”

“Nothing fancy, Sissie. You look fine just the way you are.”

The best time of year to be here. Everything fresh and green. Later on, Audrey told him, the sun, the heat bakes everything, people and plants, to a hard, nut-brown, and you have to stay in out of it; you live the air-conditioned life. Pure and perfect and artificial.

He turns and hands his glass to Ward, who has come up beside him. “I’ll have one. Light on the vermouth, okay?”

“Always, always.”

 

 

And again, he lets himself drink too much, not out of boredom this time. Out of anger at her, maybe. Out of fear. Out of whatever it is that is happening to them, that he does not want to see, and doesn’t see when he is high and feeling good.

“One more!” Ward is gay, when they arrive home, clinking bottles at the bar, he and Audrey giggling together as if they didn’t know how they had been used tonight. Intermediaries. She would not look at him all night. They skirted the edges of conversations, shielding themselves from each other, letting Ward and Audrey do the work. Without speaking now, without looking at each other, they sit on opposite sides of the small, cosy living room, the silence between them far from empty. It is hostile. Full of unspoken words. From tonight, from before tonight, from who knows how far back? He doesn’t. He is sure she doesn’t, either. But he is sick of the brooding, sick of
dwelling,
nothing gets spoken, nothing resolved, circles and more circles.

“There’s a bottle in the garage,” Ward is saying. “Honey, would I let us run out of Tía Maria, knowing how you love it?”

“Yes, you would!”

“I wouldn’t! I bought it, I swear, this afternoon, only I set it on the workbench—”

“Well, get itl”

“You come on with me.”

“No.”

“Come on, I’ve got something else to show you—”

“Ward, you’re rotten!”

But she goes with him and they are left with the silence. Beth picks up a magazine and leafs through it, and his anger ignites.

“Why don’t we finish it?” he asks.

She looks up. “Finish what?”

“What you started out there tonight.”

“I started? How did I start it? By suggesting we go away together on a vacation? And I didn’t stop it, either, you did. You were the one who walked away from me, remember?”

“What the hell was I supposed to say to that? The old song and dance, I overprotect, I breathe down his neck.”

“You do.”

“It’s a matter of opinion.”

“Right. So there’s no point in discussing it further. We never agree.”

“I think there’s a point.”

“Why are you so obsessed?” she snaps. “God, I am sick of talking, talking, talking about
him
! He controls you, even when he’s not around, even when he’s two thousand miles away.”

“Oh, stop it. We haven’t exchanged a dozen words about him in months—that isn’t the problem.
He
isn’t the problem.”

“Isn’t he?”

“No! So let’s talk about what’s really bothering you.”

“Oh, no, let’s talk about what’s bothering
you!
That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s why you go around moping and depressed—just the way you used to! As if it helped, being half-alive, dragging everybody else down with you!”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about last year! Last spring, when you couldn’t answer the phone, couldn’t open your mail without wondering if it would be the hospital with more bad news.”

“Goddammit, sure I was depressed! But I wasn’t too depressed to go to Europe, was I? I wasn’t too depressed to take you to Spain and Portugal—”

“Goddamn
Spain. And
goddamn
Portugal. If you’re going to quote him, then quote him!”

“I am not quoting him! I am quoting myself! I am ...” He struggles for control, his senses blurred. Important. This is important, don’t screw it up, don’t get off on old songs, old dances. “I am asking you to tell me,” he says slowly, “what I’ve done that’s made you so angry with me.”

“It’s not what you’ve done,” she says. “It’s what you think I’ve done.”

“What you’ve done.” He lets the words sink in, trying to get the message. There is no message, nothing coming through. “I don’t know what you mean, I don’t think you’ve done anything.”

“Oh, you liar,” she says bitterly. “You do, and you know it. You blame me for the whole thing.”

“For what whole thing?”

“That whole vicious thing! He made it as vicious, as sickening as he could! The blood—all that blood! Oh, I will never forgive him for it! He wanted it to kill me, too!”

And suddenly she is crying. Painful, desperate sobs that shake her shoulders. Her hands are over her face, her head bent to her knees. Bewildered and frightened, he goes to her, kneeling beside the chair, trying to put his arm around her, but she will not permit it.

“Leave me alone! You got what you wanted, leave me alone, I don’t want any of your
goddamn
false sympathy!”

“I got—I didn’t—Beth, I love you, honey, please, let me help.” He fumbles stupidly at her side, and her head jerks up. She looks at him stiffly, her eyes hard.

“Help? What do you mean, help? I don’t need it. Not your kind of help. I can help myself.”

Carefully she wipes her eyes. Ward and Audrey are standing in the doorway.

“Hey,” Ward says softly, “I’m sorry about this. We don’t want to butt in.”

“You’re not butting in!” Beth says. She starts to cry again, and Cal stands up, turning away from her, close to tears, himself. He goes to the window, looking out at the pool, at the shadows of trees and bushes on the cement.

“Don’t you understand what he was saying?” she asks. “He was saying, ‘Look! Look what you made me do!’”

“Why?” he asks. “Why was he saying that?”