Some Came Running (46 page)

The fire was beautiful. Hands resting on the mantel, all her weight on one leg, she leaned at arm’s length in the immemorial position of the inveterate fire watcher, her body bent just a little so that she could see beneath the lintel. All of her was pervaded with that sense of sheer physical gratitude open fires always made her feel. They always kept the heat lower than normal in the house, so the fire would be more enticing. Besides, she thought, it was healthier.

She did not bother to fix the fire as she had promised Dave. In the first place, the fire didn’t need it. Any wood put on it now as hot as it was would not last over an hour. He obviously didn’t know anything at all about open fires.

In all the years—and that must be at least seventeen?—that she had been lying to people about her many lovers so that no one would suspect she was still a virgin, this was the first time she could ever remember having played her part so well that someone took her for a nymphomaniac.

Gwen laughed. That was one possibility she had not even remotely contemplated. She still did not know whether to feel complimented or insulted. But her tendency was all to feel insulted, and that was silly wasn’t it? Because this was only the ultimate of the very effect she had been striving so hard to achieve. She had worried so long about people not believing her that she had never considered the opposite, that of being believed too well.

Well, it was certainly a compliment to her acting ability, anyway. She really ought to get at those papers.

She stared into the red, tinkling incandescence of the fire as if sucking physical nourishment from it. It had burned down just enough from the last new wood to make a thick bed of coals, glowing and irradiant, from which little violet flames flickered. The big back log split off little cherry-red pieces of itself that dropped into the gold-red of the coals with thin metallic sounds, as if somewhere within the cycle of chemical change from wood to ash there was a space where the wood was transmuted first directly into metal. Fire. No wonder the alchemists called it one of the four basic elements.

A virgin. A virgin at thirty-five! What would he say, if she told him. Hoot in her face with disbelief. And run like a scared rabbit, probably, if she ever did convince him.

Raptly, she studied the pictures in the coals. They shifted and shimmered, formed and dissolved. Right now on the left, she could see a gargoyle face from Notre Dame Cathedral. And to the right of it an old English castle on a hill. The gargoyle face slowly changed into a dog’s face for her. The castle became a treaded tank with a long gun on its turret. It was alive—that was the only word for it, alive. The whole thing pulsed with life.

Sometimes, she imagined a fire was a window into the fourth dimension. Through which one might pass, and travel far, and then return. Sometimes, staring into a fire it was as if she herself came up out of herself, passing out through her eyes, and on through the fire into that other space. At other times, it was as if the fire was healing, its glows and rays passing through her eyes to circulate around her body healing whatever ailed. How frightening a house on fire was; the enemy. And how opposite; how much a friend; when under control and contained within a fireplace. Abruptly, she turned away and sat down on one of the divans by the coffee table. Okay, sure there was curiosity; she wouldn’t be normal if there wasn’t curiosity would she? The coffeecup he had used still sat there, a remaining bit of personality, enforcing remembrance. The mixer glass still sat on the other table. She felt like breaking both of them.

How many other times, when she had been telling people with the open frankness of a sophisticate about having had lovers, had they immediately jumped to the conclusion that she was a nympho? My God! She blushed deeply and a terrible wave of embarrassment passed over her. She shut her eyes wanting to crouch and hide somewhere. Momentarily, she was helpless, completely crippled. Wave of it followed wave, hitting her like heavy seas crashing into a cliff in a high wind. Gradually, it passed, though.

Gwen rose and picked up the cup and mixer and carried them down to the sink and ran them full of water to soak so they would be easier to wash. She felt as though a sudden gust of wind had blown her skirt around her ears, exposing her completely, and revealing she had no panties on—a thing she was wont to do sometimes because it was more comfortable.

She turned back to the room. The thought of exposure had been enough to send another crushing, sick wave of embarrassment through her. The theme papers still lay in a pile beside the one of the two reading chairs she used. She didn’t feel like doing anything; there wasn’t anything she felt was important enough to do. And yet she wanted to be doing something badly. Anything.

Sort of aimlessly, she wandered back down the room and sat down at the big table. She rested her elbows on it and propped the sides of her long face between her hands and stared back cat-eyed at the fire.

A virgin. A virgin, at thirty-five. Oh, how people would howl with laughter.

Her face resting between her supporting palms, Gwen turned her head to look around the cleaned-up table. The extinguished dinner candles still on it caught her eye and she looked at them, and at their drippings congealed into dead-white droplets down their rounded sides. You could see sex symbols in just about everything, if you looked for them.

The other thing was still there, back down there in the bottom of her mind. She tried to put it aside and think about Dave Hirsh instead.

Dave was one of the good ones, and she knew it. There was just something about them. You could tell. A sort of dumb innocence and a basic inherent sweetness of soul, combined with a ridiculously great vanity, and the meanness of a fiend which cropped out every so often especially if they were drinking. Wally Dennis had the same quality. So did Mac Price, who had gone off to Chicago—and not been heard from since. Mac had been in love with her, too. She suspected Wally Dennis was, too, although he had never mentioned it since that one time he had asked her to sleep with him. It was a little hard to tell about Wally, his reactions were somewhat hampered by the fact that he felt she was too old for him. They all fell in love, and out, and then back in, with such a confusing rapidity that it was hard to keep up with it. And they all had that other thing—that same quality so pronounced in Stendhal and Tolstoy—of desperately needing to indulge in self-exposure.

That didn’t mean they had made the grade. But it did mean they had the qualities that could make it. But the more of those qualities they had, the more it seemed they would never make it. Look at Mac Price, running off to Chicago, to be an artist. Life beckons, he had said. I need love, he said. I need to live. He had had a good novel well on the way, when he had left here. He was probably drinking and sexing himself into a stupor in Chicago.

They were all like runners, Gwen thought, runners with enormous feet. They were dependent upon their feet to run. But those same feet were always tangling them up and tripping them. And if they ever did win a race, it was both because of their feet and in spite of them.

But none of them knew this. All they knew was that they loved their big feet, for making them different, while they hated them bitterly for making them conspicuous. Such children.

Nobody knew what drove them. Probably it was a need for love. But then everybody had a need for more love. What made the difference with the Macs and Daves and Wallys? She didn’t know. But she knew she could always pick them. She could always recognize them by the fact that they were such absolute fools, she thought smiling, if for nothing else.

Gwen got up from the table and strode on down to the fireplace again, but this time she avoided looking into the coals for pictures.

That Dave. He was probably still convinced the only reason he had stayed in Parkman and was embarking on this book was because he was in love with her and wanted to seduce her. He was really very sweet. She had noted how he carefully kept himself from getting physically close to her all evening. That was thoughtfulness. There was a quality of great gentleness about him, she thought, which belied all the harsh bitter things he liked to say. He was astute, too. He had known there was something odd going on all evening. But he couldn’t tell what, so he had gone ahead and made his deduction. Yet he had had legitimate reason to think that: He ingenuously accepted her as honest. Nobody but a writer would ever do that, with a woman. He was such an ass, she thought almost lovingly, and so gullible. God, what a sucker he would be for any little flip who came along. The only reason he wasn’t married right now was because no female ever had considered him a worthwhile enough prospect. She really did like him a lot. Nobody but a writer would ever sit, and in a tone of elated discovery tell a woman to her face she was a nymphomaniac.

Gwen blushed again, and felt again the terrible embarrassment wash over her. It welled up blackly from the bottom of her mind like a flock of slave laborers released from a dungeon into the light. She remembered another time in New York when she had felt like this; one of the rare ones.

She had been dating a boy, one of the bright young Yale men from Time & Life, a genuine wit and a comic. They had had a number of dates. This time—they were going somewhere on the subway—the Eighth Ave, it was—and in the station waiting for the train he had maneuvered her before an ad panel where some child had scrawled the word
fuck
in huge letters across the face of the advertisement, and then he had talked her around, until she was staring right at it, and as the surprised recognition crossed her face, had laughed delightedly. He had not said a thing, but he knew: The point was, there were other people standing around, and her first thought had been whether any of them had seen her looking. She had felt this same sick embarrassment then and wanted blindly to hide, followed by a fierce anger that was not at him, the fellow—or rather not only at him, but at everything. Everything that could make such a stupidly embarrassing situation even possible.

She could feel that same anger coming over her now, hot and searing, not anger at Dave so much, but at people, at life, and the stupidities of life, at—at all the people who might ever have thought she was a nymphomaniac. There, in New York, she had covered it up as best she could and had laughed embarrassedly and turned away; there wasn’t much else she could do. Here, as she felt it raging up in her, she felt like sweeping the mantel. The brass candlesticks, the three steins, the ashtrays, everything, into a smashed welter on the floor.

Damn them all, and damn their primitive superstitions about sanctity and chastity. In Africa, if a man marries a girl and finds out she is not a virgin, he kills her; or, if he be more business-minded, makes her father add five more cows to the dowry. We were at least as primitive. For that matter, who was to say who was primitive?

In our country, we took the females at an early age and began inculcating them with the mystical admonition that they had above all one priceless possession, their chastity, and that this must never be relinquished until legally and in the eyes of God they were united with one particular male, whose sole property this chastity became, and who would cherish it forever. This union thus acquired a deep religious bliss, and a powerful legal and social approval, and engendered a revered state known as The Family, in which the united male and female and their offspring continued to exist with an utter mysterious happiness the rest of their entire lives, serving God, Country, society, and self with equal joy and spiritual greatness.

You didn’t have much choice not to believe it. If you by some miraculous chance managed to survive the incantations of your
very
early childhood, as you emerged from the emotional hazards of puberty you were brought up against such a powerful force of propaganda that you scarcely could avoid succumbing. Your undiscriminating eyes were bombarded with such an array of movies and books full of love-ardor and the religious-worship of the empedestaled female vulva, such a collection of popular music crying the same—all just as you were discovering that your life was going to be full of loneliness—that if your vanity did not cause you to acquiesce willingly, your fear would. Who wouldn’t want all that adoration?

Gwen swung around, suddenly dangerous in her outrage, and glared around the room as if looking for enemies, or something inexpensive to break.

The bald truth was, she was a very unhappy woman. She was unhappy because she was a woman. Because she was a woman and had no talent nor desire for self-exposure, like Dave and Wally and Mac Price had. Or, if she did, she was afraid to use it. Because she was a woman, and had been taught by a woman that women never never exposed themselves. It had taken her a long time to realize her mother was an ignorant woman; she was still ashamed of it. How was she to have known? She was well educated, she was universally admired, she practically ran her church, she was considered a fine wife and mother, was thought to be beautiful. How was she, a gangling knob-boned girl, to know these judgments and opinions were all wrong, were superficial, and were not even most of the time believed by the ones who said them; were merely part of the network of lies necessary to maintain the great human conspiracy of importance. By the time she found out, it was too late. Her mind and opinions could be changed, yes, but you could never change the emotions that had been built into her brick upon mortared brick from the time she was old enough to have one. They were still there. And would stay there.

Men want to degrade you. That was the upshot of it. About as unoriginal a refrain as you could find anywhere in these twentieth-century United States. But not to a frightened girl, who was already too proud for her own good anyway. Men want to dominate you, and then laugh at you. Men want to take the most precious thing you have, and destroy it, for their own selfish demands, and then throw you away like an old sack. Men want to make you big and ugly and fat with a baby. Men want to degrade you.

Before she even knew what it was all about she was hearing it.
That
was why she was still a virgin. A virgin, Gwen thought sourly. At thirty-five. It was one thing to understand yourself intellectually, and why you felt what you felt. It was quite another to change the feeling. She had never talked about it with her father. She couldn’t. She was too ashamed; and she would feel too foolish. But she was sure he knew and understood it all. His own life must have been a veritable hell on earth, with her.