The Deer Park (43 page)

After she came to live with him, he found himself riding quickly in directions he could not see, until to his horror and to his pride he came to understand himself at a moment his body was curled next to hers, seeking warmth on the chill of his limbs. A thought came into his brain, a frequent thought, “She’ll kill herself one of these days,” and before he had even done considering this, his mind like an iron monarch inflicting an alien will added cruelly, “You have to make her do it.” Faye protested as he had protested against his decision to leave the door unlocked; he had pleaded with himself, he had begged, “No, that’s too much,” only to hear the taunt with which he had always been lashed another step, “If you can’t do this, you’ll never be able to do the other things,” and he had shuddered in the dark. His command seemed more awful and more valuable than if he had ordered himself to murder Elena. Murder was nothing. Men murdered one another by the million, and found it easier than love. To make Elena kill herself, however, would be truly murder and so he shuddered at his fascination and knew he was bound to it.

But how to succeed? He doubted himself, disbelieved that he was serious, while for all this time his mind ticked forward like the clock of a bomb, set beyond his control. Faye had the feeling so deep in himself that this was finally the situation where he could push beyond anything he had ever done, push to the end as he had promised me so many nights ago, and come out—he did not know where, but there was experience beyond experience, there was something. Of that, he was certain.

Therefore, Elena had been in his house not even an hour when he asked her to marry him, not knowing at the moment why he did this. “We might as well,” he said. “You want to, and it’s all the same to me.”

Even though she was drunk, she laughed carefully. “Life is screwy,” she said.

“Sure it is.”

“I went with Collie three years and he never took me to a party.”

“And Eitel never asked you to marry him.”

When she did not answer, only swallowing her drink, he continued to stare at her, and murmured, “What do you say, Elena, many me.”

“Marion, I feel funny being here.”

He laughed then. “I’ll ask you tomorrow.”

They began the few weeks of their life together in that way. Elena and he passed days when they were never sober, never completely, and yet they were not drunk either, at least not Faye. He would watch Elena with disgust for she had no capacity to drink, and so she passed from gaiety to high excitement to illness to depression and back to the liquor again. Most of the time she talked a lot and laughed with his friends and told Faye how she felt free with him and how with Eitel she always felt ignored.

But occasionally she would be in panic, and several afternoons and evenings when he left her alone and went out to arrange
some date, she seemed to have a terror of being alone. “Do you have to go out?” she would ask.

“That business won’t run by itself.”

Elena would sulk. “I might as well be one of your call-girls. I’d see more of you.”

“Maybe you would at that.”

“Marion, I want to be a call-girl,” she would say out of her drunkenness.

“Not yet.”

Her eyes would narrow in an effort to give dramatic effect. “Just what do you mean by that?” she would say. “Are you calling me a whore?”

“What’s in a word?” he would say to her.

Before he would be out the door, Elena would be clinging to him. “Marion, come back soon,” she would beg. When he would return several hours later, she would announce as if she had thought the thing for the first time, “You think I love you?” She would laugh a little. “I want to be a call-girl.”

“You’re drunk, baby.”

“Get wise to yourself, Marion,” Elena would shout. “Why do you think I’m living with you? It’s cause I’m too lazy to live alone. What do you think of that?”

“Everybody’s scared,” he would say.

“Except you. You’re so high and mighty. Well, I don’t think you’re anything.”

These spells would pass and she would weep, ask him to forgive her, tell him she had not meant what she said, and perhaps she did love him, she didn’t know, and he would say, “Let’s stop knocking ourselves out and get married.”

Elena would shake her head. “I want to be a call-girl,” she would say.

“You’re not the kind who could make it,” he would tell her. “Let’s get married first and then we’ll see.”

He had no idea of how he felt about her. He thought he
hated her, he considered Elena as no more than a test for his nerves, and in their bed he loathed her; indeed if it were not for the pleasure of studying this loathing, of noticing how he was incapable of losing himself for even an instant, and how she was determined to lose herself, it would have been difficult for him, cheated of loathing, to go near her at all. He was urged to lead her through a series of parties, at Don Beda’s, at his own home, with some of his girls, with strange men, with Jay-Jay, with anyone who was ready to meet him.

She was morose, she was gay, and he led her moods like a circus master tapping his whip; she was a trained animal and he could wipe his fingers in her hair. There seemed endless energy in the thought, and he would swear to himself that he was serious, sensing how each new trick broke the old limit until he would exhaust her energy, her pleasure itself, and she would be left with nothing. So he would separate the soul from the body by teaching the body that it may never attain the soul, and the greatest sin is to believe the two may live together.

She tried to call a halt. One morning after they had spent a night at Beda’s and Marion asked her to marry him, she said, “I’m getting out of here soon.”

“And where are you going?” he asked.

“You think you hate me,” she said to him. “If I really believed that, I wouldn’t stay with you.”

“I love you,” he said, “why do you think I ask you to marry me?”

“Cause you think it’s a big joke.”

He laughed at that. “There’s a lot of contradictions in me,” he said, his face boyish for the instant he smiled.

Yet, one night unable to sleep he got up and walked around the bed, looking at her, mourning her as if she were already dead, and from some unwilling pocket of his mind there came compassion for her; despite himself it had worked free, a pure lump of painful compassion wrenched from him as cruelly as miscarried flesh, alive but not alive, its pain severe.

She had come to live with the idea she could marry him, and he could even grieve for her since she did not realize how much she depended on his promise. He thought it humorous that the only part of their life which was like marriage was the way she spoiled his house. She was always strewing her clothing through his rooms, spilling food in the kitchen, dropping glasses, burning cigarette holes, and then apologizing or breaking into a rage when he would tell her to tidy a room. He had lived in absolute order before she arrived with her two pieces of luggage, but once she was there and spilled the nervous spoil of her belongings over his home, he lived in a state of mortal exasperation. They had a maid, a middle-aged Mexican woman with a stolid face who came in for two hours every morning and put the place together just long enough for Elena to scatter it again. About the maid they had fights. Elena insisted the woman hated her. “I heard her call me a
puta
,” she told him.

“She was probably praying.”

“Marion, I’m going or she’s going.”

“Then get out of here,” he would tell her. More and more often he would say this, confident that Elena could not leave, and he would taunt her with the fact. “Who are you fooling?” he would say. “Where do you think you’ll go?”

Elena surprised him. She began to make friends with the Mexican servant. In the late morning, he could hear the two women chatting, and occasionally one of them would laugh. Elena began to say she had misjudged the woman. “She has a good heart,” Elena told him. He watched with amusement, convinced this was only a passing enthusiasm. She could never be friends, he thought, with a Mexican peasant who would remind her that she too was a peasant. Still, it went too far. The day that the servant brought Elena a wooden napkin ring and Elena hugged her, Faye gave the woman a week’s salary and told Elena to clean the house herself. After that they lived in disorder and had quarrels about Elena’s visits to the Mexican
woman. “Dirt always looks for dirt,” he told her and that was successful. Elena stayed home.

After a time, he would leave her alone for hours. When he would return, she would be helpless with jealousy. He chose one of these occasions to tell Elena that he could not help it, but he found her less exciting. “This is temporary, of course,” he said. “I’m getting too much outside.” Two days later he moved into the other bedroom and all the hours he lay awake he could hear her stirring. Once he listened to her crying, his body moist with the effort to ignore her.

They had one last party. Zenlia had left Don Beda and gone back to the East, and one night Marion invited Beda to come alone. Beda was in a bad mood these days.

“You got a hurt for Zenlia?” Marion asked him.

Beda laughed. “I haven’t had a hurt for a woman in fifteen years. But where I live, you get to suffer from the altitude.”

Elena said in a sullen voice, “I dig Beda. I dig a man who doesn’t hurt.”

“Honey, I dig you,” Beda said. “You’re lovelier than you think.”

Elena looked at Faye. “What do you want?” she asked.

“Leave me out of it tonight,” Faye answered.

“Then stay out of it,” she said to him, and Faye sat in the living room while Elena and Beda were in the other end of the house, Faye sipping at his stick of tea while he repeated to himself the thought which he found endlessly humorous, “I got a young face and an old body.”

Beda came out at last, leaving Elena behind, and combed his hair while he talked to Marion. “Your girl is on the edge,” Beda said. He looked pale.

“She’s just a little high.”

“Marion, don’t ride her. She’s a brave girl in her way.”

“Yes,” said Faye, “everybody is brave, they say.”

“You know,” Beda said, “people like you give a bad name to people like me.”

“Lover, I didn’t know you cared,” answered Marion.

“I’ll visit you in prison.”

When Beda was gone Marion walked into the bedroom and looked at Elena. She was lying on her back. “I should have gone home with that man,” she said stonily.

“He would have kept you for a day.”

Elena turned on the bed. “You don’t say anything about marrying me any more,” she said.

“Do you love me?”

“I don’t know.” She looked at the wall. “Who could love you?” she said.

He laughed aloud. “I don’t understand it. So many chicks think I’m the jack.”

Elena let her breath out. “I feel very rotten. I feel sick.”

He was angry suddenly. “You’re like everybody else. Do what you feel like doing, and then you think because you feel rotten that it wasn’t really you who was doing it.”

“So what if you’re right?” she said.

Faye had to explain it to her. He had to explain it to everybody. “Take the bullshit of the whole world,” he said. “That’s love. Bullshit mountain.”

“You’re not so happy,” Elena said.

“That’s my fault. If an idea won’t work for me, that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” He lit another stick and blew tea-smoke down on her. “Elena, you thought you wanted to marry Eitel. You loved him, you say. Do you still love him?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Let’s forget him.”

“The more I think about it, the more I decide that you were in love with him.” Marion laughed. “That’s it. I understand it now. You were really in love with him.” “Stop, Marion.”

“It’s pathetic.” he said. “There you were, with your hard Wop heart, and yet you loved him. Would you say you loved him passionately?”

He was beginning to reach a very private part of her, that he knew, and so he went on.

“It’s a pathetic story,” he said, “because you and Charley missed the real connection. Let me tell you a secret about Charles Francis. He’s a frustrated teacher. Can you begin to understand that type? Deep-down, a John like Eitel is always obsessed with wanting people to trust him.”

“What do you know?” Elena said.

“You couldn’t bring yourself to trust him, could you, Elena?”

“Leave me alone, Marion. Maybe too many people let me down.”

“Just didn’t they? No wonder you never got around to telling Eitel about some of the men and boys you did to get a two-bit booking in a night club.”

“Not as much as you think,” she said. “Believe it or not, I had my pride.”

“Yes,” Marion said, “and maybe you were too proud to see that Eitel was in love with you. He didn’t know it, and you were stupid and didn’t play him right, but he was in love with you. Elena, you just don’t have the brains of a slob to get married and hide under a stone.”

She took every word he said, and then tried to smile back at him.

“Stick with me, Elena,” Marion said. “I don’t care if you trust me. I’m a specialist on stupid girls.”

“I told you to make me a call-girl,” she said in a dull voice.

“Well, I don’t think you can make it as a call-girl,” Marion said.

“Why not? I could be a very good call-girl.”

“No,” Marion said dispassionately, “You’re raw meat. You lack class.”

She winced as if he had struck her. “Then make me a prostitute,” she jeered.

“Let’s get married,” said Marion, sipping at his stick.

“I’d never marry you.”

“Proud, aren’t you? What would you say, dearest, if I told you I’m the one who won’t marry you.”

“I want to be a prostitute,” Elena repeated.

“I don’t handle prostitutes,” Marion said. His chest hurt him. “I could send you to a friend though. He has a job where you could work sort of half in a whorehouse.”

“What does half-in-a-whorehouse mean?”

“It means in a whorehouse,” Marion said. “Like on the Mexican border.”

Elena looked frightened. Fear showed and then lapsed again. “I won’t do that, Marion,” she said.

“Are you a snob, doctor? Think of all the poor creeps down there and how they’re crawling for you.”

“Marion, you can’t make me do that.”