The Deer Park (16 page)

She came into his bungalow quietly, she kissed him absent-mindedly, she was sweet and a little distant. “I met an old friend of mine today,” she said after a while, “somebody who knows you, too.” When he did not answer, his heart beginning to pound, Elena said, “It was Marion Faye.”

“Marion Faye. How do you know him?”

“Oh, I knew him years ago.”

“He’s an old friend of yours?” Until now, Eitel had managed to hide his jealousy, but the effort was going to be too much. “Tell me,” he said, “were you shopping for prices?”

Her eyes were wary. “What are you talking about?”

“Marion Faye is a pimp.”

“I didn’t know that. Honest I didn’t.” Elena’s face became expressionless. “Oh, my God. He’s just an old boy friend.”

“And now he’s a new boy friend?”

“No.”

“You just talked to him?”

“Well, a little more than that.”

“You mean a lot more than that?”

“Yes.”

Eitel felt gleeful. If his knees were numb, his tongue was sharp. “Obviously, I haven’t been enough for you.”

“How you talk.”

“Still, you had something left in reserve.”

“No. I wouldn’t say that.”

“Just threw a party for Auld Lang Syne?”

“You’re enjoying this,” Elena said, “you’re making fun of me.”

“Forgive me for hurting you.” He restrained a desire to clap his hand to his forehead. “Elena!” he exclaimed, “why did you do it?”

Her face took on defiance. “I felt like it. I was curious.”

“You’re always curious, aren’t you?”

“I wanted to see …” She stopped.

“I know. You don’t have to tell me. I’m an expert on female psychology.”

“You must be an expert on everything,” Elena said. She stopped and began again. “I didn’t know, and I wanted to find out if …”

“If this blossoming of the flesh was something you could cultivate only with me, or whether any old lad would do. Is that it?” From far away, Eitel was offended by the way he was speaking.

“Something like that.”

“Something like that! I’ll kill you,” he roared hopelessly.

“I had to find out,” Elena muttered.

“What did you find out?”

“That’s what I wanted to tell you. I felt like a statue with him.”

“Only you didn’t act like a statue with him.”

“Well … I thought of you all the time.”

“You’re a pig,” he said to her.

“I’ll go if you want me to go,” she said stiffly.

“Stay here!”

“I think we’d better quit now, you and me,” Elena said. “I’ll pay you for my hotel room … I’ll owe it to you.”

“And where will you get the money? From Faye?”

“Well, I didn’t think of asking him,” she said, “but now that you mention it …”

To his surprise, Eitel began to shake her. Elena started to cry, and he released her and walked away. His body ached.

“You don’t care about me,” she said. “You don’t really care. Just your pride is hurt.”

He tried to calm himself. “Elena, why did you do it?”

“You think I’m stupid. Well, maybe I am stupid. There’s nothing interesting I can tell you. I’m just a game for you.” Her weeping increased. “You’re too intelligent for me. All right.”

“What has this got to do with it? I think you’re smart. I’ve told you.”

Again she was defiant. Her little heart-shaped face tried to show indifference. “When a woman’s unfaithful, she’s more attractive to a man.”

“Stop reciting your lessons,” Eitel shouted. In a kind of frenzy, he caught her to him. “You idiot!”

“It’s true. It is true. It’s not lessons. I know.” The pain in her face was momentarily real to him. She was right. If her flesh were tainted, she had never seemed more pure to him, nor ever so attractive. “You idiot,” he repeated, “don’t you understand? I think I love you.” From the paralyzed center of his mind came the thought, “You’re in the soup now, friend.”

“You don’t love me,” she said.

“I love you,” he amended.

Elena began to weep again. “I worship you,” she sobbed. “Nobody ever treated me the way you do.” She was kissing his hands. “I love you more than I ever loved anyone,” she said with final abandon.

So their affair really began, and Elena consented to live with him.

I
N THE FIRST WEEKS
of living together, Elena’s eyes never left Eitel’s face; her mood was the clue to his temper; if she was gay it meant he was happy; if Eitel was moody, it left her morose. No one else existed for her. I do not like to put things so strongly, but I believe it is the truth.

From what Eitel had been able to learn of Elena’s life—she was always vague about the details—he found out that her parents owned a candy store in the center of the capital, and their marriage had been miserable, her father an ex-jockey with a broken leg, a vain little man, a bully; the mother a petty shrew, a calculator, another bully. She had coddled Elena and scolded her, made much of her and ignored her, given her ambitions and chased them away. The father, cheated of his horses, ridden with five children, had disliked her—she was the youngest and she had come much too late. There were brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins, grandparents, family parties where they all got together and fist fights started. The father was good-looking, he was a dandy, he could not be alone with a woman without trying to make love to her, but he was also moral, he told others how to live. Her mother was a flirt, she was greedy, she was jealous; she was sick that life had left her in a candy store.

“You see, she was so funny to me,” Elena would tell him, “she would take me when I was a kid and say, ‘If you don’t do nothing else, get off this goddamn street.’ But then, five minutes later, she’d slap me so hard I’d almost fall down.
And sometimes when I wouldn’t do what they said, they would tell me that I wasn’t really their daughter, but that they had bought me from somebody, and they were going to send me back. Oh, it was bad, Charley.” As a child, Elena would cry silently while the mother and father yelled insults at one another. Her childhood had been spent listening to their jealous quarrels.

Elena had had the courage to leave home before she was twenty, and she had moved into a furnished room, and from there, through the friends she had, girls who worked at Supreme, young unemployed actors, aging college boys who went to night school, Elena had learned to go bohemian, that was the word she used. So she had taken night courses, and studied dancing, and worked as a model in art schools and as a hat-check girl in restaurants with colored plastic tables and imitation wood-paneled walls. Then had come Collie, and a furnished apartment near the studio.

Eitel would grow tender when he would think of her life. She had opened his sympathy in a way nobody had for years. She had come out of nothing, and with such pain, such waste, such backward looks. Even now, though she had not seen her family ten times in the last six years, she was always thinking about them. She had an aunt who sent her all the news. That was the only tie, and Elena always answered with long letters, eager to hear that this relative was married, that cousin was sick, her brother was trying to get on the police force, her sister was studying to be a nurse; Elena told him these items about people he would never see. She could not go back to her family—that was the short of it. They would take her, but she did not want to pay the price. The last time she had visited her parents, they had found nothing to say to one another and had sat down to dinner. In the middle of the meal her parents had started to yell at her for the way she lived, and Elena fled the house.

Now, she was Eitel’s responsibility, without family and
without friends. Collie had taken care to wean her from everybody she knew, and for that matter Elena made friends poorly. If she could chat easily with Eitel, often going on like a child from one subject to the next, she was stiff in company the few times they went out. But Eitel hardly cared these days what people were saying about him, and they were not invited out that much. Three days after Elena moved in, the gossip column of the weekly sheet in the resort had an item:

Whether it was coincidence or not, he was asked about this time not to come to the Yacht Club any more, and I could measure the meaning of that by the way Lulu would go into a fury every time I visited them. Eitel only laughed when I told him. “Deep-down, Lulu’s admiring you,” he said with a grin. “Tell her she’s welcome to come over.”

That was the night he told me his theory, and although I do not want to go into theory, maybe it is a part of character. I could write it today as he said it, and I think in all modesty I could even add a complexity or two, but this is partly a novel of how I felt at the time, and so I paraphrase as I heard it then, for it would take too long the other way. Eitel made references to famous people and famous books I never heard about until that evening although I have gotten around to reading them since, but the core of Eitel’s theory was that people had a buried nature—“the noble savage” he called it—which was changed and whipped and trained by everything in life until it was almost dead. Yet if people were lucky and if they were brave, sometimes they would find a mate with the same buried nature and that could make them happy and strong. At least relatively so. There were so many things in the way, and if everybody had a buried nature, well everybody also had a snob, and the snob
was usually stronger. The snob could be a tyrant to buried nature.

Meanwhile, the days passed quietly, and the nights followed one another with the lamp on the bed table throwing a golden light. Eitel was making the trip he had begun so many times and quit as often and was now making again. For he thought that Elena was soft, she was tender, she was proud when they made love, and she was more real to him as a woman who had come from a fantasy than as a girl with a history. The act was now quiet to them, it was tender—that was the emotion he felt over and over—their first nights together which he had thought so extraordinary seemed like no more than a good hour in a gymnasium compared to what they had now. And Eitel felt changes in his body race beyond the changes in his mind, as though all those nerves and organs which he had tired almost to death were coming back to life, carrying his mind in their path, as if Elena were not only his woman but his balm. He had the hope that he would keep this knowledge of her, that the old snob would not come back to torture him with her little faults, her ignorance, her inability to be anything but his mate. He would stay with her in his house, he would refresh himself, he would do the work which had to be done, and then he could go out to fight.

Eitel loved these weeks. He felt as if he were in the good days of convalescence when appetite comes back and each day one is stronger. He would spend hours at a time on the patio of their bungalow, thinking, daydreaming, storing strength. And at night, full of the warmth of the sun, they would lie in bed, delighted with each other, caught each time with surprise at how they had forgotten how nice it was, every moment seeming more perfect than the one before. “Poor memory is so indispensable to passionate lovers,” Eitel would think with a smile.

He felt at times that he lived in an opium dream, for nothing was very real to him except to wait for night, when easily, led by each new wish, waiting for the pleasure itself, they would
come together, they would explore a little further, he would come back with more. Over and over he would remind himself that nothing lasted forever, and the tenderness he enjoyed so much might not be equally attractive to her—their first few nights together had been, after all, quite a different kind of thing—but Elena had a spectrum of fancies as complex as his own, and so he had the faith these days that they would continue to change together.

They had their quarrels, of course, they had their troubles, but they enjoyed them. Elena had insisted that he let his cleaning woman go because she could do the housework. Pleased by her offer, knowing he should save money, Eitel had agreed. Only Elena was a poor housekeeper, and the messiness of the house irritated him. Their fights followed a predictable routine—making breakfast could end in a crisis—but for Eitel these fights were new, they were fun; in the past, arguments with his women had ended in chilly silence, and so he could enjoy these quarrels. He would criticize Elena for something, and she would lose her temper. She hated to be criticized.

“You’re tired of me,” she would say, “you don’t love me.”

“You don’t love me,” he would tell her. “The moment I hint you’re not perfect, you could take a butcher knife to me.”

“I know. You think I’m not good enough for you. Remember that thing in the papers? You tell me I don’t love you because you don’t love me. It’s all right. I’ll leave.” And she would make a move to the door.

“For God’s sake, come back,” he would command her, and five minutes later the scene would be forgotten. He understood. He knew that in back of all this, she did not believe in her happiness, she waited for it to end at a sudden blow, and judged the danger not by the quarrel but by the way he made up the quarrel. It was exhausting to him at times, it was annoying, he sometimes felt as if he had asked a subtle animal
to share his house. Her concern for what he thought was so intense that he knew nothing to measure it by.

They had only one jealous quarrel, and it was Eitel who started it. In a bar, they ran into Faye, and he sat at their table, he was pleasant to Elena, and as they were leaving she invited him to come over to their house. Eitel was fairly certain she was indifferent to Faye, but when they were home he accused her of wanting Marion, feeling all the while he talked that it was not true, that with her odd capacity to love, infidelities did not remain with her, not even the picture of them. Such pictures were left for Eitel, and he guarded them like a curator. If he had only one real treasure of his own, there were all the ones he had borrowed from Munshin. So Eitel forced himself to be hurt with the sense that to lose his jealousy was to lose his knowledge of how she could hurt him, blessed woman who could cause him pain after so many dozen who caused him nothing.