William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (12 page)

But she was worried now. This air of preoccupation and mystery she had taken particular notice of in the past few months. It always worried her. It meant that shortly he would be rude to her, at least impatient, and she would be unhappy. She was determined to cheer him up. She took a sip of the martini; it burned clear down to the pit of her stomach—she had never decided whether she liked martinis or not, and only drank them because he did—but looking up past the flower centerpiece she took note of his brooding face and thought: Trouble trouble boil and bubble.

“Trouble, trouble, dear. What’s the matter, dear?” she said lightly. “You can tell me.”

“Nothing.”

“You can tell me,” she said. “Tell Dolly,” she said, teasing.

“Nothing, dammit,” he said.

She ignored this surliness, hoping by coy persuasion to make him be nice. “Now, honey,” she murmured, “be nice.” Just then, at a table near by, a woman with red hair and plump, exposed arms suddenly leaned back in her chair and uttered a high-pitched, massive series of laughs. Detonating upon this casually genteel atmosphere, it had all the effect of a flock of geese set loose in church, and caused everyone on the terrace to turn with knives and forks hovering in mid-air, looking for the source. Then, recognizing the woman as a familiar character, given to such outbursts, they turned back to their tables with knowledgeable nods of their heads and patronizing smiles.

“Who’s that woman, dear?” Dolly asked. Although their affair had been going on for years, it had only been lately that they had taken to venturing so easily together at the country club, and there were many people in the new, exclusive and beautifully exciting circle whom Dolly didn’t know. Defined by Port Warwick protocol, Dolly had been “social,” but never “country clubby.” She had often come here as a guest, but poor Pookie had never been able to make the grade.

Loftis had looked, too. He was smiling a little, “Sylvia Mason,” he said. He waved, “ ’Lo, Syl.” “
Milton Loftis.
How you?” A gentle, trivial greeting.

A waiter descended upon them with a happy grin and a metal tray, piled high with dishes, as big as the lid from a garbage can, impossibly balanced on four fingers. “Order, Cap’n Milton?”

Loftis looked up. “Hello, Luther. How you tonight? Clam cocktails. Steak dinner.” The waiter left.

Suddenly he said, “I was thinking about Peyton.” He drank the rest of his martini.

“Oh dear,” she said. “Is she all right?” Actually she didn’t care. Peyton, whom Milton dwelt on constantly, bored her stiff. And often when he spoke of her—although she strove to be understanding—she felt an emotion that, try as she might to call it something else, was nothing but wretched jealousy. To be known as “his mistress” by the children of the man you love is likely to cause worry and fretfulness and maybe broodings at night, and Dolly, who preferred things to be worked out simply, detested Peyton for her own sense of sin. She had avoided Peyton as well as she could during the past years—it was the only right thing to do—but even from afar she felt that the girl cast forbidding shadows across her tenderly hopeful destiny.
Milton and I.

In the twilight he looked very handsome; the provoking streak of gray hair, the color of old pewter: a vulgar handsome man could never wear it with such grace. And soberly talking now; she loved him so much when he was sober, which was fairly infrequent: then his very spirit, so uncompromisingly aware of life, of the poignancy of their dilemma, so richly conscious of the fine things soon in store for them—this sober, gentle spirit promised to envelop her like a flame, a tender flame radiating decent contentment just as the soft, temperate voice seemed to promise: “I will take care of you. You need have no worries now. I will show you what love is, and truth.”

But he was talking about Peyton.

“There’s something wrong with the girl. Ever since they broke up, she’s been at loose ends. I get these letters, you see, and they worry the hell out of me. The poor kid’s had a rough time. You see, what I advise her … take it easy. God knows I know that a marriage can be difficult. It’s a shame. Poor kid … I think I’ll run up to New York next week … talk to her.…”

It was hard to concentrate; her eyes wandered to the other tables, to the Mason woman—on whose fat arms there were a dozen silver bracelets, jangling noisily as she ate—to tablecloths, silver, gay flowers, all imparting a splendid, important air of luxury and comfort. Inside, beyond the French doors, boys and girls in twos and fours strolled aimlessly about, waiting for the dance to start—the boys gawky and grave, wearing their new tuxedoes with grown-up unconcern, while the girls laughed and tugged at the boys’ hands or, lifting their skirts off the floor, practiced a dance step or two. The band was tuning up. She lifted her gaze to a second-story window, where, screened a bit by a virile growth of ivy, was his room—the place where he lived, now that he had no home. His room. Inside there, drowned in shadows, she saw familiar things, faintly defined by the dying sun: a corner of his desk, the lampshade, the back of a chair where, sloppily draped over one wooden slat, was a white shirt he had worn, no doubt, that afternoon while golfing: something tugged tenderly at her heart. His shirt unwashed. And looking back at him now, at the grave, wide, honest, yet soberly comprehending face, she thought: He’s so sweet.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get her back to Port Warwick,” he was saying. “After her wedding she said she’d never come back here. Not that she should. She and Helen never got along and anyway I think she belongs up there. Poor kid. She’s got a lot of talent, at least I guess she does. …” He was talking rapidly, with sudden, disheartening animation. She didn’t like to see him like this; as images, thoughts of Peyton swam forth, a troubled glow inflamed his forehead; against the sun the lobe of one ear was transparent and a tiny pool of blood was gathered there, very red. When we’re married, she thought, I’ll have to make him stop drinking so much. … She had heard all this before. She was bored. She wished he’d talk about going to the Skyline Drive. From a glass dish she took a piece of celery, put it on her plate and began to nibble on a ripe olive. A bit giddy from the martinis, she tried to listen to him, but her thoughts, like dandelion seeds, strayed airily away: love, a marriage, maybe, in New Orleans, the Skyline Drive.

“She’s had a rough time. …”

Oh, talk about someone else. Talk about us.

“Now she and Harry. Harry’s a nice guy, but I think they resented each other somehow, almost from the very beginning. She should have taken more time! You go North—you become expatriated, exiled. You reach out for the first symbol that completes your apostasy—you become a Communist or a social worker or you marry a Jew. In all good faith, too, yearning to repudiate the wrong you’ve grown up with, only to find that embracing these things you become doubly exiled. Two losts don’t make a found. Marry a Jew or a Chinaman or a Swede, it’s all fine if you’re prompted by any motive, including money, save that of guilt. My father told me when I went barreling off to the University, ‘Son,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to be a camp-follower of reaction but always remember where you came from, the ground is bloody and full of guilt where you were born and you must tread a long narrow path toward your destiny. If the crazy sideroads start to beguile you, son, take at least a backward glance at Monticello.’ You see …”

She nodded, smiling vacantly. She had caught the word “Jew.” It sent her mind astray again. Why doesn’t he talk about us? Jews, How true. Like Milton she felt herself to be a liberal Democrat; about six years ago—soon after they had first made love, but before Loftis’ political hopes had completely withered—he had mentioned something about her becoming National Committeewoman, if and when they were married. This had excited her terribly—even though she somehow felt the remark was meant lightly—during the mid-hours of one hot, sweet night at the Hotel Patrick Henry in Richmond. How lovely that had been. Their best, really their best. There had been an exquisite secrecy; untried as she was—for, though she had entertained many alluring fantasies, this had been her first out-of-town adultery—the knowledge of misdoing added enchantment to the night. The old Virginia drawl. “Miz Roosevelt, ah’m Dolly Loftis. How you? National Committeewoman from Virginia. Mah husband’s tol’ me so much about you and Pres’dent Roosevelt. Or shall ah say Franklin?” A neon sign winks shamelessly; red sinful splashes fill the room. She gets up, pulls down the shade, hiding her guilt beneath the darkness. Should I? Should I still? He’s married. Stern pentecostal watchwords out of the gray November small-town past, making her sweat: Forswear adultery and other such iniquities. It passes. She crawls back into bed beside him, strokes his face, exalted, thinking: I don’t care. He needs me. … “Milton,” she says, “wake up, sweetheart.”

He was still talking about Peyton, and now the evening started to get horrid. In filmy yellow waves, a bilious sort of despondency took possession of her; from the last martini, somehow swallowed wrong, a vaporous gas rose up in her nose, smelling faintly of juniper, and, looking out of the corner of her eye, she felt that two people, at least, were staring at her. She wished she might see a familiar face, for these, all strange to her, seemed suddenly to damn and accuse. A tawny light spilled over the grass below; through this light a motorized lawnmower, towing a sleepy Negro, moved like a boat across the green, showering a billow of bright grass before it. A man wandered out to the green and removed the flag; in the sunset the little red pennant had been so pretty, she was sad to see it go. The band began to play, and the sound of music, too, filled her with vague, remote sadness, and a fidgety yearning; hungrily, her mind sought old places, old events …

His room.

How can I talk about, tell anyone of this tender rapture? Loving a man so for all these years. Now untied from the tie that binds, poor Pookie gone to Knoxville, Tennessee, and Melvin at college, my tie is to him alone. Together we can never die. A farm girl from Emporia: what would Papa say now? I sophisticated and fancypants, vice-chairman of the Red Cross and member in good standing of the Tidewater Garden Club too. Sweet and ruinous, Milton says, with a soft sweet corruption about the mouth. I love him so.

Wanting him for so long, holding off, having to, sitting back on these hips he says drive him frantic, like a saint yearning for perfect communion. Holding off. Having to because he says we’re both upcaught in the tragedy of a middle-class morality.

Still the gossip runs, but we go to his room, up there, now because he says he’s free of that succubus which has so long held him in bondage, free now, legally and without error, and the hell with the paltry petty ruck of envious people who can’t get shut of a virago or a jackass who holds them helpless, too. That’s what he says. So we go to his room now, up there. I know it well. There is something dear and sweet about it. It encloses you with the scent or maybe just the feeling of him: a male smell like heather or tweed, his shirts unwashed and hanging over things, shirts I take home to the apartment to carefully wash and iron myself. I love him so. Knowing he wants me, that’s what’s so good. …

He says I’m the dearest thing and age has made the fiber sweeter. And we are upcaught in the tragedy of a middle-class morality. We do not care, Milton and I, for that will all be over October twenty-first.

Sometimes I wish he’d get that faraway look out of his eyes. I worry. What is he thinking about? Sometimes I don’t know what he’s thinking about.

He says I’m the dearest thing. I think he loves me more than Peyton. Peyton is a bitch, although it’s not his fault, but the fault of that succubus who treated her so badly. It’s somehow Freudian, he says.

His room. We go there now and he pays the nigger a dollar to keep the hall door locked and because of this I can awake on Sunday morning before he spirits me out as he says and feel the sunlight on my face and think well Dolly Loftis you’ve come a long way for a farm girl and think too as he says in the soft morning sunlight that there are miles to go before we sleep and miles more to go before we sleep. …

A waiter appeared at Loftis’ side, mumbled something about New York on the phone.

“Thanks, Joe.” He arose still talking, terribly feverish, Dolly thought, reluctant to be unchanneled from his singing flow of words. “Well, I’ve forgotten about becoming a statesman. Content with working on bond issues. Content with everything.” A strand of celery had become caught in the back of her throat, dangled there itching against her palate. “Hell,” he said expansively, “I might even start back to church. I might …” But he didn’t finish the sentence for—perhaps because of the placid fading light, softening her face so that now, even more, she looked like a little girl—he seemed to understand that she had not been listening to him. Her wandering eyes, she sensed with sudden fright, had betrayed her, and he gazed down at her with an odd sad smile.

He must know. He must know.

“Milton——” she tried to say, but “What do you see in me anyway?” he had said, then turned, walked across the terrace and through the ballroom; she watched him until he disappeared behind a potted palm, and she lapsed back into her chair with a little groan, thinking: Oh something’s happening.

A wisp of music unspooled from the ballroom, saxophone, drums; and thunderheads like Christmas snow rose in disordered piles high above: they would go over, she thought, over the city. People around her talked softly together, laughed in low, gentle tones; all of them, she felt, were watching her, but the band, the moaning saxophone, made her think of a dance right here, long ago. Peyton’s birthday. The first time, after all the waiting, they had ever made love.

She waited. Then he came back and his face, gray as water, was full of agony and horror. He started toward her, but without a word he paused, turned and walked over to Sylvia Mason. The woman got up with a little cry, bracelets jangling, and put her great maternal arms around him. “Ahhh, Milton,” Dolly heard her say. “Ahhh, Milton.” People shuffled, turned about in their chairs; there was great confusion. “Ahhh, Milton,” said Sylvia, “I’m so sorry for you,” but Loftis said nothing, or if he did Dolly could neither see nor hear him, for his back, looming toward her, seemed to be slumped in pure despair against the whole vast evening sky.