Stolen Pleasures (6 page)

Claudia, the wife, stood away while the doctor with encouraging hands and
Ah ups
assisted her husband to the couch and laid him out, long and weak. She refused a chair, feeling called upon to stand in deference to unpredictable blows. The hostess embraced her waist, but she offered no yielding to this comfort and was left alone. She watched the shocked face of her husband watching abjectly the doctor's face above his, and watched the stethoscope move over the exposed broad chest. The young doctor glanced up to ask her which arm had jerked, which leg, and replying that she had been too alarmed to notice, she saw his fleeting response to her person, the same response in the eyes of men and women seeing her for the first time—a struggle to conceal from her the emotion that a woman's beauty aroused, whatever that emotion was, whether envy or desire or even fear. It lasted half a second, this consciousness of her effect, and was followed by devotion, which came over her with such force that she was again the girl she had been for him at the beginning of their nine years together.

When he stood up, shakily, joking weakly with dry lips, someone said the pickled mushrooms were hallucinatory and someone else laughed loudly and caved in. The hostess helped him on with his overcoat, and Claudia, her arm across his back, with the host on his other side, took him down the five slow flights in the elevator and along the street.

As she drove homeward she remembered with remorse their quarrel early in the evening. She hadn't wanted to go to the party. “So they don't know who the hell Camus is,” he had said, tugging the words up from his throat as he tugged unnecessarily at his socks. “Why don't you get down to the human level?” They both had got down to the human level tonight, and now he was deeply asleep, his chin sunk into his muffler, his long legs falling away from each other, his hands in his overcoat pockets where, in one, he had slipped the doctor's note with the name of a neurosurgeon. The doctor had given him no sedative, but his sleep was as heavy as doped sleep.

On the bridge they were almost alone, behind them the headlights of two cars and far ahead of them, with the distance widening, the red taillights of one, and her fear of his sleep as a prelude to death changed the scene of the dark bay and the jeweled, misty cities ringing the bay, changed the familiar scene into the very strange, as if, were he to open his eyes, that would be his last sight of it. She felt, then, almost ashamedly, that affinity with Camus again, and although Camus was dead, the adoration that had taken her to Paris seven years ago was revived in her memory. She had gone there alone and lived there for three months, the sojourn made possible by a small inheritance from an aunt, but the money had run out before the destined meeting could take place. It was true she hadn't made much of an effort to meet people who knew him. How was she to do that? She had hoped that just by wandering the street where he might wander, a chance meeting would come about and he would see at first glance how far she had come to be with him. Yet in that
time she had felt her pursuit was as embarrassingly obvious as that of a friend of hers who, enamored of Koestler, had managed a front seat at a lecture, and with her transfixed gaze had caused him to stumble a time or two over his words, and, later, had accosted him in the hall and proved how deep into his work she was by criticizing some points of his lecture in which he had seemed untrue to his own self. Nothing had come of her own obsessive time in Paris, and in despair—what was her life to be?—she had returned to New York. But she had refused to board the plane to San Francisco. In the waiting lounge a terrible prophetic sense had come over her: all the persons waiting to board that plane—the chic, elderly woman in black, the young mother with her small son in his navy coat and cap, the rest, all were to die that day. She had not yet left the lounge, she was still on the bench, unable to rise, unable to return to Camus and unable to return to her husband, when the plane crashed as it was taking off. She had gone back to the hotel and cried all day in her room, shaking with fear of her prophetic sense that, if she were to heed it again, would show her in old age, all beauty gone, all curiosity for life gone, all hope for a great passion gone.

On the long curving road down through the hills and into the town, only the low white fence between the car and the dropoff into space, her sleeping husband beside her, she felt again on the verge of something more. If she had found another existence, those seven years ago, her husband would have found another wife and gone on living; now, another existence for her would be the result of his dying. The sense of crisis was followed by guilt that came on as an awful weariness, and when she roused him and was helping him from the car, she felt in her body the same weight that was in his.

She pulled off his shoes and his socks while he sat on the bed, and he was asleep on his back a moment after she had covered him to his chin. His sleep dragged on her body as she undressed and slipped her nightgown on. It forced her down beside him punitively, and she lay toward him, her hand on his bare chest, persuading him with her hand, with her heart, to stay alive. Dear Gerald, sweet Gerald, stay alive.

All Sunday Gerald slept, wakened every few hours by Claudia, who was afraid he had lapsed into a coma, and she brought him milk and toast and fruit as an excuse for waking him. After poking around a bit that Sunday evening, trying to recall the sensations, the thoughts preceding the seizure, reading the papers, showering, he returned to bed at ten o'clock and slept until noon of the next day, when she wakened him by stroking the smooth, veined underside of his arm that was bent on the pillow, a half-frame for his pale, unshaven face. She told him that the neurosurgeon could give him an appointment no sooner than Friday of that week, and this information liberated his eyes from the startled frown. If the specialist was in no hurry to see him, then nothing much could be wrong. He flung off the covers, his legs kicking and pushing out into air, and sat up. “I'll get up, I'll get up,” he said.

Always he was already up and about at this hour, carving his fine wood sculptures or roaming the forest trails or the beaches, doing what he liked to do before he walked down the hill and caught the bus to the city and worked at his desk until midnight on the next day's paper. Up he got, and the moment he was on his feet again she felt again the inertia that came of her acceptance of the way her life was. The fact that he was up again, ready to return to
work without having missed a day, deprived her of this crisis in her life, this crucial point of change, and, alarmed by her reaction, she embraced him from behind, pressing her face against his back, kissing him so many times over his back that he had to bend forward with the pleasure of conforming to her love.

Claudia was in the tub when he left, and she imagined how he looked going down the hill, under the arcade of trees, a bareheaded, strong-bodied man of thirty-six, going to work at the hour when most men were about to return home. At that moment, imagining him disappearing, she felt the emptiness of the house, and in that empty house felt her own potential for life. She was aware of herself as another person might become aware of her as so much more than was supposed. And, the next moment, afraid that a prowler was in the house, she climbed from the tub, shot the bolt on the bathroom door, and toweled herself in a fumbling hurry. After listening for a long minute for footsteps in the empty house, she unlocked the door and, holding her kimono closed, went barefoot through the rooms, knowing as she searched that there was no one in the house but herself.

Some nights she ate supper at home, alone, reading at the table, and some nights she went down into the town to one of the restaurants along the water's edge, went down with the ease of a resident in a tourists' mecca and was gazed at with curiosity—an attractive young woman dining alone. And some nights she went out later in the evening, tired of reading, restless, to the bookstore that stayed open until midnight, to sit at a little round table and drink coffee and read some more, the literary periodicals from England and France. The years her husband had worked days, she had held
a few jobs. She had been a receptionist in a theatrical agency, a salesgirl in the high fashion section of a department store. But the artificiality, the anxiety of everyone, along with the obviousness of her own person when she was by nature seclusive, brought on desperate nights, and she had quit; yet she had chosen not to work in lackluster places. She wanted only to read. The only persons besides Gerald whom she could converse with were the celebrated writers and some obscure ones whose work she came upon unguided. It was always like a marvelous telepathy going on, both ways. While she read
their
thoughts, they seemed to be reading
hers.

This night she took less care than usual with her clothes. Wherever she went she always took extreme care with her appearance, afraid of critical eyes. And always her head was bare, because the blondness of her hair was a loving gift from Scandinavian ancestors. The mauve silk blouse she put on was stained from wine and near the hem of the gray wool skirt was a small spot. To wear these clothes without embarrassment was, she felt, an acceptance of the stain on the soul of the woman who allowed herself to dream of another existence.

She left the old, raffish convertible by the small, dim park and walked along the sidewalk bordering the water that, a yard or so below, lapped the stone wall, and the reflection on the dark water of low-lying fog out near the channel, and the clear, faintly starred sky, and the cluster of seagulls floating where the waters were lit by the restaurant globes, all evoked the promise she had experienced in Paris. Just before she reached the restaurant that stood on pilings over the water, she heard a low whistle at her back, and a man fell into step behind her. She felt his close gaze, she felt his bumbling,
beastly obstinacy, and she wanted to turn and shout at him to get away, a woman had the right to go out into the night alone, and, at the same time, she wanted to run away and escape her accusation that she had enticed him with her long, rippling, moonlit hair, her legs in black nylons, her white silk scarf with its fringed ends. On the restaurant step he spoke to her, some word to halt her or caution her about the step, and she pushed the door wildly open, banging it into a young man leaving. She chose the farthest table from the door, up close to the window over the water. The encounter with the man whose face she was afraid to see marred this night in which she had meant to be released, harmlessly, into an old dreaming of another future. She saw her hands trembling, they couldn't lift the fork without dropping food back to the plate. Able to manage only a few morsels, she waited to leave, waiting until the man must have wandered away, waiting for her heart to calm down.

But after she had gone several steps along the sidewalk, she heard his heels again. This time he did not speak, he followed as if
she
had spoken, as if they had become invitation and answer. Her heart knocking crazily, she climbed into her car, slamming the door. Her heavy skirt and coat lumped under her legs but she was afraid to take a moment to jerk them free. She swung the car around and, long before the time she intended to return, she was returning up the hill. Just before she took the first curve, her rearview mirror flashed headlights, and she took the curve too fast, almost crashing into somebody's quaint iron gate.

She stood in the unlit house, her grip on the curtains causing the brass rings to clink against the rod. If Gerald had experienced a foreboding before his seizure, this sensation must be the same.
The man was standing out under the gate lamp, an obscene clod out of doorways, following a woman whom he could not believe would turn him away, a woman waiting in the dark house to open the door to him and draw him down upon her. Raising his arm to tend off the branches, he came up the path. She heard his step on the stone doorstep and heard his two raps, and heard her voice shouting, “Get away! Get away!” She clung to the curtains until she heard a car's motor start up and saw the red taillights reflected on the foliage in the yard and heard the car go down the hill.

A desolation came over her, then, as she moved through the dark house. The obscene dolt must have stolen away her dream of herself in the future, the dream that was only a memory of herself in the past, that brief time in Paris, alone, desirous of a destiny, desirous of the one with a destiny, the man who would break the hull of her guilt, guide her into the intricacies of his intellect, anoint her with the moisture of his kisses. The intruder must have stolen away the past and the future, and she was nowhere else but in this dark house where she might be forever. Her slender heel was caught by the grille of the floor heater in the hallway, and she left both shoes on the cold, trapping metal.

By the time Gerald came home all the lamps were lit and his late supper was on the stove, plates were set out on the table, and wine was cooling; and facing him across the small table she complained about the number of days they must wait before his appointment.

“Must be lots of people throwing fits,” he said. And later, tossing the covers over himself, “Anyway, the serious things are nothing to worry about. By the time you've got a symptom you're usually too far gone to do much about.” For a minute he lay gazing
up, then he switched off the lamp to conceal his face. She heard him mutter half a word and then he was quiet. With his few words tonight he had expressed more pessimism than in all the years of their marriage. To indulge in pessimism, as to give way to anger or criticism, was to weaken the marriage, and he did not care to weaken it. He had never appeared to be dissatisfied with his life. He had not mapped out his life for a grand endeavor and been diverted. Everything about him gave evidence of his stolidity—his deliberation over small things, his way of absorbing circumstance rather than attacking it, the almost perverse unnecessity to change his existence, to strike, to wrestle, and she had clung to him for that enduring nature. But now, lying beside him, she felt in his being the invasion of futility, she felt his resentment of the specialist for his inaccessibility, and of her, his wife, for belittling him with her other life without him. The seizure and the suspense, the possibility that he might be at the mercy of physicians and of some malady and even of the end itself, all was enough of a belittlement. The husband who had always slept with a trusting face turned up toward the coming morning lay fearfully asleep, and she was afraid to touch him. She fell asleep with her hands tucked in under her heart.