Puzzle for Pilgrims (2 page)

The
aficionados
liked it, but not enthusiastically. I guess it had just been a run-of-the-mill kill.

People stood up and stretched and smoked cigarettes and shouted greetings to each other. Sally sat on, very still. Her face was pale. The skin around her mouth was tight. Something terrifically important and secret seemed to be going on inside her.

She turned to me as if my presence were a sudden discovery. “You don’t have a drink with you, do you?”

“I’m sorry.”

She laughed, and the laugh was more extreme than it had been before. “Then you haven’t taken to drink in your sorrows. In Taxco, they all say I have. They say Sally’s lost her husband to a floozy from—”

“Shut up,” I said. It had come too quickly. I had no control.

The pale eyes, wide and unblinking, stared. “My dear, do we have to be social—you and I? Just because Iris is your wife, do we have to choose our words daintily? She’s acting like a floozy. And if you can’t call a floozy a floozy—”

I got up. “I was dumb to let you sit here.”

“My dear, why? Can’t you face it? Are you hugging a lost love with a hurt behind the eyes?”

“We’re people who’re not going to like each other. We might as well get this over with as soon as possible. Goodbye.”

I started away. She jumped up, after me. Her hand came on my arm, drawing me back. People were watching, grinning. I turned. Her face had quite changed. Her eyes seemed darker and hollow as if something had been opened onto a bottomless void.

“You can’t leave me,” she said. “Please, please, you can’t leave me.”

It amused me that she, who had behaved as badly as any of the four of us, should decide to be forlorn.

“I imagine I can leave you,” I said.

“But I came from Taxco to see you. Can’t you understand? They’re destroying me between them, Martin and Iris. They’re trying to kill me. I’ve got to have someone. There isn’t anyone. Not anyone.”

The spray of tuberoses had broken. The heavy blooms were flopped foolishly forward on her lapel.

I patted her arm. “Stay here, little girl, with your bulls.”

“But you’re on my side.” Her small heel was stamping against the cement floor. “You’ve got to be on my side. They’re making you suffer too. I can see it in your face. Don’t go.”

“Sorry,” I said. “But I’ve got a whim to go. You have whims, I guess, when you’re very unhappy. It’s like being pregnant.”

I walked away. When I reached the steps going down to the exit, I could see her yellow coat. She was still standing there, her shoulders hunched. Slowly she moved back to her seat and sat down.

The trumpets sounded high up.

As I left, the second bull was frisking hopefully into the ring.

This time it was a gray one with a white stripe over its eyes. Gray bulls show the blood more.

I was glad Sally had given me an excuse to go.

I had parked the car a couple of blocks from the bull ring. When she left me three weeks before, Iris had bequeathed me her car and her apartment. Not that a car and an apartment were much of a substitute for a wife I happened to be in love with.

On the sidewalks, Indians were milling around brightly colored stalls stocked with pyramids of fruit, pitchers of juices, dough frizzling in skillets over charcoal, and cheap socks. The pavement was cracked and filthy. An old woman followed me, waving a strip of lottery tickets and whining. A small boy whose brown-sugar skin showed through ripped denims claimed to have watched my car. I gave him twenty centavos, backed out past a flower barrow, and started home through the hard mountain sunlight.

Some of the bullfight atmosphere still lingered. None of those bustling people seemed real, just marionettes allowed to wiggle a while before they were shut up in wooden boxes.

I had stopped thinking about Sally Haven. She meant so much to the others. She had become to them the bogeyman of the whole setup. But you have to get adjusted to unhappiness before you look around for someone else to blame. I was still trying to get used to the fact that Iris was gone.

Things had begun to go sour between us in New York. I’d come back from three years in the Pacific war, touchy, restless, and impossible to please. To make it worse, during my absence, Iris had become a famous movie star. I returned to find her with the world at her feet. I had nothing at my feet, just a bunch of ribbons on my chest. I tried to get back into theatrical producing, but things didn’t pan out. I had terrific, impractical plans for the indefinite future which mostly dissolved into mooning around the house, smoking, drinking. I hated everyone who hadn’t gone through what I’d gone through. I hated anyone who was more successful. I guess I almost hated Iris.

She tried, God knows. When she saw our marriage sliding, she threw up her movie career. I should have been grateful, but perversely I felt she was playing the martyr. Her very patience with me seemed an accusation. Because I was insecure I wanted to hurt her, and because she was human she started hurting me back, and I was vulnerable. Our pointless, poignant antagonism climaxed when she moved into the spare bedroom.

The psychiatrist a friend recommended laughed at me and said I was one of hundreds of thousands of ex-servicemen suffering from a temporary traumatic neurosis. In six months, he said, I would be my pre-war virile self. I told him I had wife trouble. He laughed again and said I was one of millions of ex-servicemen with wife trouble. The laughter was meant to reassure me, I suppose, and his advice was elementary. I was going through an unattractive phase and taking it out on Iris. It would be better for me and my marriage to sit out the unattractive phase alone.

I told Iris what he’d said and we squabbled about it, the hostility still between us. Finally, in a sort of mental and physical exhaustion, we agreed that she would go away. We were both frightened then, frightened we were destroying something we couldn’t afford to destroy.

When she left, she kissed me. It was one of the few physical contacts we’d had recently. She clung to me, and the bitterness went with the feel of her in my arms.

“It’ll be all right, won’t it, Peter?” she said.

“Yes, it’ll be all right.”

And I believed it.

She drove to Mexico, partly because it was far away from anything we’d known together, partly because a friend had offered her a house in Taxco.

Maybe the psychiatrist had something. Without Iris, I felt better. All my old tenderness for her returned. I could write to her without self-consciousness. She wrote back—long, cheerful letters at first and then shorter letters, farther apart. I found nothing ominous in that. Iris had never been a letter-writer. I ran into a play script I liked and embarked upon producing it with high enthusiasm. The show was a smash success. Immediately my self-assurance came back and with it a sharp desire to see Iris. When the show no longer needed me, I wired her lightheartedly and took the next plane to Mexico City. Way up in the air over North America, I thought excitedly of our reunion and kindly of the psychiatrist. When I arrived at Mexico City airport, my dreams made a crash landing.

Because—in the meantime—Iris had met Martin Haven.

She told me about it that first night in the apartment she had taken in the Calle Londres. She was stricken, but keyed up to it. I had to be told at once, she said. It wasn’t a thing we could side-step. I was too stunned to understand then. It all meant nothing except a cold, flat feeling in the stomach and my old sense of inadequacy, creeping over me like ivy creeping over a ruin.

Next morning I met Martin. He came to see me, grotesquely formal as a suitor presenting himself for the approval of his fiancée’s family. I realized the full extent of the competition then. Martin was very young and fair and he had charm—charm as irresistible as any I had known. It had to be irresistible to affect me.

It wasn’t a charm you could pin down, and there was nothing professional about it. He was English—probably even with some kind of title—and small, light as a boy with a boy’s wheat-blond hair and a boy’s blue eyes. He was too gentlemanly to broach the delicate situation. He treated me like a rather nice father, talking politenesses in his grave English voice and looking at Iris with blind worship.

If I’d followed the manual, I’d have knocked him down and thrown him out of the house. I didn’t. Once I rose, formal too, to offer him a cigarette, and I caught a glimpse of our two faces close together in a wall mirror. His was young, golden, and sublimely sure of getting what he wanted; mine was tired, war-gaunt, thirty-fivish. That’s really when I lost the battle. Because I thought, “Why shouldn’t she prefer this? What in God’s name have I got to offer?”

After he had left, Iris stood at the window, watching him walk away across the dappled shade and sun of the Calle Londres.

“It’s something I couldn’t help, Peter.”

I wanted to hurt her. “I guess he’s more fun than the spare bedroom.”

She turned, looking at me. She was thinner, miserably unhappy. “It crept up on me, Peter. I read the novel, the only book he’s written. He wrote it after he’d come from England, before he married Sally—when he was living with Marietta.”

She watched me whitely, at sea, as if she wanted me to explain something she couldn’t understand herself.

“Marietta?” I asked noncommittally.

“His sister.”

“His sister.”

“Friends lent me the book. Peter, it’s wonderful. Perhaps there’s genius in it. Then I met them—Martin and Sally.”

“In Taxco?”

“In Taxco. Sally has a house. She’s stinking rich.”

Malice rose. “And you decided she didn’t understand him?”

“Peter, please, please, don’t make me sound that unattractive. She only married him because people said he was a genius and she couldn’t bear not to have the genius belong to her. She has to live on someone else’s vitality. He’s not a very strong character. He’s not been a match for her. He’s almost lost.”

“He didn’t seem lost to me. He looked like a prefect in an English public school with half the rugger team mad for love of him.”

The awful thing was that I don’t think she was listening to anything I said.

“He was in a trap,” she said, almost to herself. “Such a clever trap. Sally’s clever. Marietta’s the only person he ever really loved, but Sally managed it so that they quarreled. They don’t even speak any more. And he didn’t see through her enough to know what was happening. He thought he’d lost his talent, that he never had talent anyway. He started drinking, behaving impossibly. Sally didn’t stop him. Oh, I don’t know—I suppose if she couldn’t be his inspiration, she preferred it that way, preferred having a wreck of a man so long as he was still tied to her—like a female spider with the shell of the male she’s eaten.”

“Love’s made you very Curiosities-of-Animal-Life-conscious,” I said. “Spiders.”

“It’s made a mess of me.” She dropped into a chair, her dark hair dropping forward, hiding her profile. “I don’t know anything any more. It’s not like any of those Hollywood men. I don’t even know if it’s love. I don’t know what it is. At first I was just sorry for him, and I despised Sally. I talked to him. I told him how good I thought the book was. We made a date to walk in the mountains. Sally didn’t catch on. For some reason she didn’t think I was dangerous. Martin and I saw each other more and more…”

“Do we need the sordid details?”

She heard that and looked up, not angry, just wilted and suffering. “I’ve got to make you understand. I was something strong, I suppose. At least he thought I was. And, almost before I knew it, he was relying on me. I felt the whole weight of him. He was clinging to me as something to balance Sally. I was frightened. It was like the Old Man of the Sea.” Her shoulders seemed to shrink. “Then, suddenly, it wasn’t the Old Man of the Sea any more.”

“And he stopped drinking? And he started writing again? And what he started writing was good? All that?”

“Yes.” She stared at me defiantly. “Corny, but yes.”

“And you alone can make something of him?”

“Yes.”

“And he’s very beautiful?”

“If you like—yes.”

“And if I said it was all hooey, that you loved me, that this was just—glamour?”

“Peter, don’t say it. Please don’t say it. It’s too late.” She jumped up, ran to me, and clutched my arms as if they were the only firm thing in a toppling building. “How can I say it? How can I say that I loved you, that I left New York loving you in spite of all those ghastly times? We were wrong. What we did was horribly wrong. We should have stayed together, stuck it out somehow. I came here, alone, exposed. Without you, there wasn’t any armor.”

She wasn’t crying. Her body was dry and hot in my arms. It was the same body I had known and loved for five years. Part of me wanted to fight for a cause that was obviously lost. Another part remembered Martin’s face and my own face in the mirror. Something shriveled inside me and I knew I wasn’t going to fight.

I looked at a bowl of lush pink roses. I wondered if Martin had bought them for her before I came. I could see him with the roses clutched in his hand, sober, rather awkward.

I said quietly, “Okay. What are you going to do?”

Her face was buried against my shoulder, her soft hair brushed my cheek. “He’s—he’s going to leave Sally. He has friends in Pie de la Cuesta, near Acapulco. He’s going there.”

“And you?”

Her voice was muffled against the tweed of my jacket.

“I’m going to Pie de la Cuesta too.”

“In sin?”

“It isn’t that way, Peter. He’s terribly English about me. He wants to marry me.”

“And divorce Sally?”

“She’ll raise a howl that they’ll hear in Guatemala. But yes. He’s going to ask her for a divorce.”

I was still looking at the roses over her shining head. They wobbled slightly. “And how about me? They say Mexico’s a good place for a divorce, short and cheap. Shall I start proceedings today?”

She pulled away from me and stared as if that was her death knell instead of her release.

“Peter…”

My pride, what there was of it, came out as anger. “For God’s sake, what do you expect me to do? Crawl on my hands and knees to you and whine about a broken heart? You’ve found a man you want more than you want me. Do you imagine it’s the first time it’s happened since Krafft-Ebing? Do you imagine I’d want to cling to a wife with a head in someone else’s gas oven? What’s done is done. Take your little genius and mother him and wallow in it.”