The Deceivers (6 page)

“Sometimes it gets to be too easy not to do any of the hard stuff. My God, I’m not after information, stowing away definitive little facts like a squirrel in September. I just want to use some of these muscles up here that God gave me before they wither away entirely. I want to read some of the boys who make me have to strain to stay up with them.”

“I know what you mean.”

She looked down and drew a fingertip through the wet ring her glass had left. “About what I said before.”

“I didn’t understand what you meant.”

“I know you didn’t. I shouldn’t talk about it. I don’t want
advice or guidance or anything. I don’t want you to think I’m putting you in the position of being a marriage clinic. But, dammit, there isn’t anybody else to talk to. And you can always get things in more perspective in your mind if you talk to somebody. You and I … we sort of think alike. I guess I have a masculine turn of mind. That’s what they told me in school. It made me nervous at the time, I remember.” She kept looking down at the table.

“Troubles?” he said.

“Now try to tell me you didn’t know,” she said, defiantly.

“Just a little suspicion here and there. A sort of strain between the two of you. But, believe me, nothing very apparent. At least nothing so apparent that Joan has noticed anything. If she had, she would have spoken to me about it.”

“I’m glad we’ve hidden it that well. It’s the main reason I had to get the kids out of here this summer. To do some heavy thinking, Carl. To make up my mind once and for all whether to accept the situation and make the best of it, or get out while the kids are young enough so it won’t mark them too badly.”

“I’m very sorry, Cindy.”

“I know you mean that sincerely, and I thank you. It’s no grand tragedy. I guess it happens all the time. But I didn’t expect it to happen to me. I’ve fallen out of love with Bucky, if I ever was in love with him. Believe me, I know how sappy that sounds. I have a certain amount of tolerant affection for him. I didn’t expect marriage to be magical forever, but I did expect to stay in love. Damn it, I wish it didn’t make me feel so creepy and disloyal to be spouting off about my marriage to a third party.”

“Sometimes you have to talk. I’m glad you picked me.”

“I was terribly sophisticated when I met Bucky, I’d just terminated my only affair. It was very intense and very dramatic and it had lasted nearly a year. I was a woman of twenty-one, by gad, and I’d lived, lived, lived. I had the sense to get out when the pink clouds parted and I found out I’d given my all to a very selfish and talented and neurotic man who didn’t give a ghost of a damn about me, just so long as I kept playing my part of Camille. After that somewhat humiliating revelation, our Bucky was as refreshing as an April sun. That good All-American grin of his and those lovely bulgy shoulder muscles and that restful conversation that didn’t require much of me but a nod in the right places.”

She paused and poured beer into her glass. “I didn’t realize that it was a rebound situation. The affair had made me emotionally sick, and Bucky was my rest camp. Now I know full well that I am not the wife for him. I’m not what he wants. He wants blind and utter adoration and respect, and he needs to be told quite often how wonderful he is and how well he’s doing. I recognize that need, and I try to give him what he wants, but I can’t keep the act consistent. Every once in a while I come out with a tart little wise-guy comment that cuts him down to size. He resents the fact, and won’t admit it completely to himself, that I am more intelligent and more mature than he is. He would be happy with a ball of fluff who could keep his house, take care of his clothes, feed him well, grace his bed and bear all his kids. He wants six kids. We have had some mighty hassles about my reluctance to start the next one. I could have cheated him without his knowing it, but I thought it best to be frank.

“You read about a man going up the ladder and the poor little woman unable to grow with him. This is the other side of the coin. I’m learning more as I grow older. Bucky is in complete mental stasis. What he believes now, he’ll believe when he’s sixty.

“I’m not the right wife for him, and he’s not the right husband for me. God knows what I do want for a husband, but I don’t want someone who … is so oppressively stagnant. When he’s home I want to stick pins in him to see if he’ll jump. I keep thinking that if he says the same trite things over and over one more time, I’ll go screaming mad. And I can see his future all too clearly. Just as I can see the beginnings of what will be an impressive paunch. He’ll be sales manager of the firm some day. With a whisky voice and a bloated red face and a clap on the back and a locker room personality. And I am not going to be the little woman to another Al Washburn, I swear. But you can’t change him. The mold is set. He’s sublimely confident that he, by God, has his feet on the ground, and I am being neurotic and petulant and dreamy and impossible. I am being practically un-American, or something.”

“Bucky is not a complicated human being.”

“I think he was faithful up until a year ago. But I can’t blame him completely for the change. He wasn’t getting the respect from me that he needs. So there has been a succession of cheap little affairs. That hasn’t come out in the open yet. I’m afraid of what I’ll say when it does. But there have
been all the little clues. Too many of them, because Bucky is not really bright enough to be a good conspirator. He’s sort of pathetic in the way he thinks I’m ignorant of his infidelities.

“Maybe it could all be patched up and I could endure it if the … bedroom department had not gone sour. Once I began to doubt the wisdom of this marriage, I found it more difficult to … respond to him. And, with Bucky, any slowing of response is fatal, because his technique is … pretty damn hasty. God, I shouldn’t have brought that up.”

Her face was pink and she avoided his eyes.

“When you talk, it ought to be the whole story.”

“All right. This slowness of response has been turning into an actual physical revulsion. I try to conquer it, but it is getting worse. Carl, I don’t know what to do or where to go from here. He’s talking about our three weeks in August as a ‘second honeymoon.’ And he says I’ll come to my senses. I
have
come to my senses. It is my senses, or my sensibilities, that are being … violated. It’s a sour and sorry mess. I’m sorry to inflict it on you. But you see, it isn’t grand tragedy. It’s just a messy little marriage between people of no particular importance or interest to the reading public at large.”

She said the last part lightly and tried to smile, but her mouth broke and she laid her forehead on her forearm on the top of the table in the booth. A few moments later he realized she was crying silently.

He had an impulse to touch her hair, but he suppressed it. He knew he should say something, but he had no idea what to say to her. He had suspected that all was not well with them, but he had no idea that it was this bad, that it had gone this far. She had showed him the true flavor of their marriage, and he did not see how it could be retrieved, made sound again—if indeed there had ever been any soundness or validity in it.

“Everybody has to make adjustments,” he said, and was immediately ashamed of the stock phrase, empty and inane. He went on quickly: “I’ve made adjustments to Joan, and she has to me. Joan isn’t the most … stimulating mental companion in the world.” He felt the guilt of disloyalty as soon as he said it, but he sensed that the easiest way to soothe her guilt at her own confession was to answer in kind. “I can often feel a sort of impatience with her. There are a lot of little social goals that I think are pretty damn dubious. But Joan accepts all the truisms without question. Sometimes I envy her because it makes life so damn simple. If you accept
everything you read and everything you’re told, then you can be at home in the world and you don’t waste time, as I do, trying to detect how society is kidding you. And trapping you into a lot of empty effort.”

Cindy raised her head. Her eyes were reddened and slightly puffy. “But that isn’t the same, Carl. It isn’t the same.”

“Why isn’t it?”

“Joan accepts you. She’s perfectly content to have you as you are, and when she doesn’t understand you, she just says that Carl is kind of moody sometimes, and lets it go at that. But Bucky doesn’t accept me the way I am. He wants to force me down into … into the shiny little neoprene and plastic world where he lives. He’s so bloody damn sure he’s absolutely right about everything and that I’m the weird one who has to come to her senses. Joan loves you the way you are. Bucky only loves—if he has the capacity to love—his private image of me the way he thinks I should be. It’s as though I’m trying to live with another girl in the house, the one Bucky wishes he had married. That girl looks just like me. But she takes the ironing into the living room so she can watch the soap operas while she works. And the only things she reads are the fashion magazines and the home making magazines. And when he takes her to parties, she wears a pretty little simper and she never, never says anything that could possibly offend anybody.”

“Conversely though, Cindy, I accept Joan. I don’t want to stick pins in her. I don’t resent her because there are certain stretches of back woods and jungle in my mind that she can’t inhabit. I realize that there are a hell of a lot of other areas where we share.”

“So I should accept Bucky. Is that what you’re saying? I’ll answer that by being terribly trite. A woman, due to her reproductive obligations and her responsibilities before and after the birth of a child, has a very primitive yen for total security. So that means that love—and by love I mean all aspects of the marital relationship—must occupy a much greater area of importance in her mind than in the mind of a man. The emotional-sexual relationship is just one area of interest in the male. He has many other areas. For a woman it is damn near everything. So do me the courtesy of reversing your own situation. Be Carla, the wife. And Joan can be John, the man who holds down your job. Then maybe you can better see the dimensions of my own special trap.”

Carl thought it over. “I can see just what you mean.”

“Anyway,” she said, “we’re making a silly damn parallel of this. You and Joan have a good marriage. And I have a rotten one, and I’ve got six weeks to come to a decision. It’s up to me. I can make this marriage work, but I can make it work on such a limited basis that it means I’ll spend a zombie life from here on in. I have to decide if it’s worth it. Maybe I’m just a damn neurotic, and Bucky is right. Maybe I romanticized marriage too much. Maybe this is what all marriage is. But somehow, I doubt it. I doubt it very much. And because I’ve spilled all my soiled laundry out of the hamper and picked it over in front of you, I feel a silly resentment toward you, and I know I shouldn’t.”

“I suspect that’s a very normal reaction.”

“Thank God there’s something normal about me. I keep thinking that you’ve got enough to think about without serving as an emergency wailing wall.” She looked at her watch. “Do you happen to know it’s damn near one o’clock in the morning? And Joanie told me to see that you get your sleep.”

She walked with him out into the warm night. The thunder was closer.

“It’s raining in Hillton,” she said.

“It’ll be here in another fifteen minutes.”

“You are a patient man, Carl Garrett.”

“One of my more noticeable virtues, I guess.”

She held her hand out in the white light that slanted out into the yard. He took it. The pads of her long hand had a velvety warmth. “Thanks, Carl. I think it helped.”

He released her hand. “Just don’t resent me for listening. And I will listen some more, if you want.”

He walked back to his house, climbing the abrupt slope, then pausing and, on an impulse that was not, he suspected, entirely without a strange flavor of guilt, went back to the red maple where he had stood before. He watched her in the kitchen. She took the bottles away, put her book on a counter top, wiped off the booth top. She moved in her slow and leggy way, but without waste motion. Her face, when he could see it, was quite still and thoughtful, her rather heavy lips set in a level and contemplative line. She stood quite still in the middle of the kitchen, elbows in her palms, head bent at an angle as though she were listening, standing hipshot and quiet. Then she so evidently sighed that he imagined he could hear her.

Thunder had eaten half the sky. Lightning stabbed into the black earth a mile away, and the thunder cracked and then rolled around the hills. She picked up the book and moved out of sight and the kitchen lights went out. He saw another light come on and shine pallidly through the windows of the room that he knew was their bedroom. Just as he reached his back door the first swollen drops began to fall, and one struck the back of his left arm, just above the wrist.

He turned out the lights and closed the windows against the rain. He took a long shower, and when he was in his bed the brief heavy rain had stopped, but the lightning continued, so that in its flashes he could see the sterile flatness of Joan’s bed.

He thought of how it would be at night in the hospital, the hushed steps hurrying down the corridors, the starchy rustlings, the sighs and the moanings. He did not want to think of Cindy and her problems, but only of Joan.

And he remembered …

He had graduated at twenty-two in the class of ’37 from the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. His kid sister, Marian, had just graduated from the same high school he had attended, back home in Youngstown, with grades almost as good as the ones he had made there.

The four years had been rough, financially, and would have been impossible had it not been for the partial scholarship he had won when he graduated from high school. He remembered that his father and mother and Marian had driven to Philadelphia in the old gray ’31 Packard to attend the graduation ceremonies.

And after the ceremonies, when he had changed out of the cap and gown, he had the showdown with his father in the room at the Ben Franklin Hotel. Bill Garrett was a construction contractor. He had learned his trade working for other men, and in 1924 he had gone into business for himself. He was honest and energetic and likable, and he had built up a good business. Bill Garrett liked to live well, and he was about as provident as any grasshopper. In the fall of 1933, a month after Carl had entered Pennsylvania, Bill went bankrupt, and went back to working for other men. They lost their home and moved to a flat no better than the one where Carl had been born in 1915.