William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (58 page)

no,
closing my eyes to the water. “You can’t kid me, baby,” he said, “I worked in Cleveland before the war. Shaker Heights is outside of Cleveland.” “I know,” I said, “he is
in
Cleveland now, he was
from
Philadelphia.” “Aw, baby,” he said, “come on, what’re you tryin’ to cover up? Come on, let Mickey in on it. Now tell me, if this Harry works in Cleveland just what building does he work at?” I turned away thinking, from the black gums, the sawed-off teeth; I was very confused: “Now you lie about it, persistently, and outlandishly, Peyton, why did you say Greenwich now when I know damn well it was Darien”—and I turned back to the soldier. I don’t know why, I wanted to cry again, but I thought
no
. “He works at home, he doesn’t work in a building, and besides——” I paused. “Besides what, kid?” “Besides, it’s hardly any of your business.” The soldier leaned back and laughed, smacking his leg: I watched the orifice glinting with stubs of ivory, shredded black gums, quivering, upraised tongue: “You kill me, kid. You’re a real storyteller!” “Yes,” I said, and I swallowed the rest of my martini whole and burning, “and now I must be off to meet Harry.” He was still laughing. “Harry! That kills me, baby. I’ll tell Tony Cecchino you’re two-timin’ him.” I opened my mouth: “You’d better not”—but I didn’t say it, and I remembered I had forgotten Tony. Guilt is the thing with feathers, they came back with a secret rustle, preening their flightless wings and I didn’t want to think. “Tonight, baby.” He had hair on his shoulders like wires. Harry, I did it because we loved each other, once we lay awake all night and he said blessed Beatrice, he said Lady I saw a garland borne by you, lovely as fairest flower. “Now why are you crying?” the soldier said. “Turn ’em off. I won’t tell on ya.” I stopped right away, looking up through the water. “You’d better not, Mickey,” I said, “please don’t.” Then I thought: Well, it’s all right, when Harry comes back it’ll be all right about Tony. Only. Only we’d have to move away, because Harry and Tony wouldn’t get along, living next door. And Mrs. Marsicano: Harry would pay the rent, and I was glad the place was so pretty and clean. Only. “Yes, tell Tony,” I said, “if you want to. Only——” “Only what, kid?” “Only wait until tomorrow.” “O.K., kid.” I got up to go, holding my bag and clock close against my breast: this always gave me a certain peace. I thought I could hear it ticking there, a clean, ordered multitude of jewels and springs, above my heart. Globed from the atoms, I hadn’t heard: such destruction, the radio said, has never before been seen on earth. “What you standin’ there for, kid?” said the soldier. “I’m listening to the radio,” I said. “I’m communing with the spirits of the dead.” “You’re nuts, I think,” he said. “Good-by, Mickey,” I said. “So long, Mary,” he said. I went out the door, it was like walking into a kitchen where the oven is on and all the burners: colossal and suffocating, and thick with smells—of a bakery somewhere, caramel popcorn from the theater, gasoline and factory smoke and drains. I tried to think: here it became very odd, for it took me a long time, half a minute maybe even a minute, to decide on going left or right. A thousand times at least we’d walked up to see Lennie there; I knew it was somehow north, yet I felt that the bar had been in another country: had I not already walked too far north? I had to ask a girl. She had her tongue wrapped around an ice-cream cone, black insects on top, sprinkling off: “That way—” pointing north—“second corner.” “Are you sure?” “Sure, I’m sure.” “Thank you then,” I said. So I started walking again, looking down at the concrete and scuffling along. Surrounded by water it was hard this way, but the pain had retreated far down inside me and out of sight: it was lucky this month with small nausea and no headache. Then I thought: Even if I begin to drown completely and the day comes down on me like all the oceans as it did last time, then still Harry will keep my head up above: that was my pride and joy and just to hell with Tony anyway. Past the drugstore it smelled of Coca-Cola and medicine, cool, but I went on: in the window, hung amid soot-coated blue and white crepe streamers, a sign said LAXATEEN—Conquer Irregularity Forever. Albert Berger had piles. But then I stopped, moved in under the awning, and thought. Oh Harry. I thought. Oh. No. Because he had said just that. Oh Harry. “You’re asking the completely impossible. Something you inherited from your mother, only in reverse. You’re a Helen with her obsessions directed in a different way. Talk about my irregularly oriented mind, how about yours: you want to lay anything in pants, that’s all——” Only I said then (it was two months ago, couldn’t he see how close I was to drowning?) I said, “Oh, Harry darling.” I said to Lennie, “Make him come back, Lennie. I promise. I’m drowning.” Only they couldn’t see, they just couldn’t see—“Go on back to your Italian friend,” Harry said—I just couldn’t make them understand: that with Tony it was different, that the heat and the gin and the drowning. We dumped some trash in the incinerator and then I could see the Christopher nestling in his hair: it was gold or something, and I had drunk all the gin, then he pressed up against me and made me—— That sober part of me shrieked in dread, yet the shrieks—oh Christ!—they wouldn’t go through the water, and then he had his hand inside: couldn’t Harry understand? “There was no defection so small,” he said; “there’s a big difference between a pat on the tail and a quick roll in the hay with the milkman.” Couldn’t he see? “I’ll never do it again!” I hollered, “I’m drowning! I need you!” Couldn’t he see? But he said, “You’re just drunk. I’ve given you every chance in the world. You said the same thing when you came back from Greenwich or Cos Cob or Darien or wherever you went with that writer slob and so to hell with you.” My poor Harry, couldn’t he understand?
“Need, need,”
he’d said, “I refuse to be needed unless I’m loved too and so to hell with you.” Beneath the awning it was cooler. Two fat nuns in summer white fluttered past, mumbling secretly in French:
Monseigneur O’Toole
…
la la
…
gras comme un moine—
they were sweating, they vanished around the corner, white-pleated butter churns. Chimes in my drowning soul: oh, no, God, I thought, he’ll come back with me. And I thought, lifting the handbag to my ear, the clock ticking inside precise and steady as before: here all our guilt will disappear among the ordered levers and wheels, in the aqueous ruby-glinting sun. Then I said, “Please help me,” and the druggist, sunning his sallow face in the light beside me, said, “What’s the matter, young lady, you got an earache?” He was an old man, a tiny one with hair sprouting from his nose. “Yes,” I said. It was hard to
orient
now, as Harry would say: the man wanted to help me because I’d asked. “Yes,” I said again, “it’s in this ear.” I pressed the bag against my head. “Right here.” “You’d better see a doctor,” the druggist said, “that’s dangerous. It can get in your brain and kill you dead.” “Yes,” I said, “it hurts terribly.” “You just wait here,” he said, “and I’ll get you a couple of aspirins.” He went off into the store. I stood there in the heat, the bag against my head, listening to the tick and whir of the wheels: oh, he’d come, I knew, and I tried to think of anything, music or poems or the clock—music and poems
within
the clock—anything but Tony and lying down in Darien with Earl Sanders and all the bad things I’d done. He’s soft and tender, I thought, is my Harry, and how does it go: bind him with cowslips and bring him home. But it’s decreed. It’s decreed that I shall never find him. When I was a little girl I had the earache and Bunny held my legs and Mr. Lewis up the street held my arms and Dr. Holcomb stuck a thing in my ear to puncture it; I’d scream out loud it hurt so, and she said poor Peyton poor little Peyton, but did it really hurt so much, did you have to scream: then she and Bunny got in an argument: I went to sleep then with a fever and I dreamed of a fat woman sitting down on me and then of a little boy in a field picking a violet. “Here you are, young lady. You just take these and then go straight to a doctor. Hear me?” “Yes,” I said. I took the pills with water in a cup which he brought. “You go straight to a doctor, understand? Let that infection spread and you’ll get mastoiditis. A doctor’ll take care of you.” “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you very much. Which way
is
Cornelia Street?” “Two blocks up, you just go straight to a doctor.” His nose quivered like a rabbit’s. “Thank you,” I said, “good-by.” “Good-by, young lady.” I walked on up the avenue, holding my clock and bag. I was sweating, and that I knew wouldn’t be so nice for Harry, I wish I had remembered to use the O-dor-o-no: saves your clothes from stains, does not rot dress. But my dress was pretty—silk, cream and blue in stripes—clinging nicely: wouldn’t Harry be glad? From the corner, waiting for the light to change, I could almost see the end of Cornelia Street and Lennie’s place, but Jeanette MacDonald, famous star of stage, screen and radio, held up a cigarette on a stripped and peeling billboard: boys played baseball in the shade beneath, one of her arms was amputated: it lay on the grass below and the boys sat on it when they rested. I leaned outward so I could see past the billboard, but only one window was showing three flights above, the green curtain hanging limply: I couldn’t see Harry there. And then I thought: what would I say? The clock would come last, a sort of surprise gift. Perhaps he’d be alone. First the buzzer, then the long climb upward; I’d hear his voice from above: “Who is it … is it?” I wouldn’t answer, but wait. Then panting some, I’d knock at the door, and he’d open it:
Hello,
I’d say.
Hello. I’ll bet you’re surprised to see me.
And he’d say,
No, I knew you’d come.
And I’d say,
I
’
m sorry, Harry,
and then I’d say,
I love you, Harry,
and then we’d lock the door and pull down the blinds and lie there through the heat and the afternoon darkness, watch dusk come late, lie down and sprawl on the springs and drowse awhile, touch hands across the incessant, ticking wheels; this darkness is as perfect as the center of the earth, only with the glow of rubies and diamonds, shining with a self-luminous light, flawless and divine: blessed Beatrice, man at that light, said Harry, becometh so content that to choose other sight, and this reject, it is impossible that he consent: once he took me upstairs in Richmond, I was home rocking upward in his arms, and then he laid me down on a strange bed, and I called out, “Daddy, Daddy,” for I didn’t call him Bunny then. Yet. I knew I mustn’t think of this: I clutched the clock to my breast, and stepped down off the curb, looking toward the window. Then there was a monstrous and agonized shriek of tires behind me, so close I could almost see them—sparks, tortured asphalt, peeling rubber—and I turned, saw it approaching, the grille of a truck with a metal face smiling, and the onrushing, enlarging, threatening word—halting not two inches from my eyes: CHEVROLET. “You nuts? You wanna get yerself killed!” He stuck his head out of the window, a man with a mashed-in nose like a spoon that’s been stepped on, and bulging outraged eyes. He hadn’t shaved, there were rough red patches beneath. “In plain sight!” he yelled. “You nuts? You seen me comin’, I seen you look up!” “I most certainly did not,” I said. “Please don’t shout.” But he went on talking, and I stood there holding my clock, while cars began to honk behind him: “People like you oughta have theirselves examined. Suppose I’da knocked you down?” “Don’t holler at me,” I said, “I’m not deaf,” but then a policeman came up, and I watched the sweat run purple underneath his shirt. “Now just what goes on here?” “Ah, this nutty dame, she walked against the light and I almost run her down. People like her gimme a pain in the ass.” “Now you mind how you talk,” said the cop: it was a voice of Mayo or Down or Antrim, I thought of green things suddenly and a far, fantastic lawn: “Now tell me, miss, how fast was this fellow going?” “Fast as the wind,” I said, “faster.” “Faster than the wind you say now?” “Yes,” I said. He looked at me shrewdly, perspiring and with suspicion. “Well then, tell me now, miss, just how fast is faster than the wind?” “I don’t know,” I said. I held the clock and bag close against my breast and I wanted to cry again, but I didn’t. “I don’t know,” I said again, “very fast.” “Well now, miss, you know you must be more careful. You can scare the bejesus out of a man doing that.” The horns persisted up and down the street, growing louder, a chorus of chromatic moans. The cop motioned the truck on, and the driver went off with clashing gears, scowling at me, still pale with fright. “You must watch your step, miss.” “I will,” I said, and I held the clock closer to my breast. He looked down at me, sniffing. “Haven’t you been drinking quite a bit, miss?” he said. “Yes,” I said. “I had two martinis at the Napoli Bar.” “You don’t have to be afraid of me,” he said, “I won’t hurt you. Might I ask where you’re going?” “I’m going to see Bunny,” I said. “Bunny?” he said. “I mean—” I answered—“I mean Harry.” “Well now, miss, sure that’s fine, but what I meant was could I help you find your way? You look a bit like you’re lost.” “No,” I said, “I’m going up to Cornelia Street, right up there.” He walked across the street with me, holding my arm. I could see water rising up across the avenue, luminous but clear, my drowning: I felt a cramp coming on. “In this city you must watch your step, miss, they drive like the divil himself.” “Yes, they do,” I said. “They don’t drive like this down in Virginia.” “Ah now, that’s where you’re from?” “Yes,” I said, “Port Warwick. Harry’s my uncle from Port Warwick. He’s visiting with Lennie on Cornelia Street.” “Ah now, so, and who’s Lennie?” “Oh, he’s a cousin of ours.” “And might I ask, miss, what you’re holding so careful in that purse?” I looked up and smiled at him. “Harry and I robbed that bank on Ninth Street last week. They don’t know. This is all money.” We were on the curb, he threw back his head and laughed. “Aw, sure you’re a fine one all right!” He patted me on the back. “Now you take care, miss.” “I will,” I said. “Thank you very much.” “Good-by.” “Good-by.” Then I had the cramp again, walking down the block to Lennie’s: it was all I could do to keep from getting sick, and I leaned up against a light pole, getting rust on my hand; and then I couldn’t think of anything again but becoming immoral, the birds came rustling around me through the silent, luminous water, fluffing up their wings, and a cloud seemed to darken the day and chilled, like a fan, the sweat on my back: I leaned there while the pain worked awhile on my womb. One drop of anything, I thought, would save the life of poor damned Peyton, for it had all been so immoral, and maybe, after all, he would say no: “No,” he’d once said, more filled with grief than myself, “no, I don’t understand it. I’ve heard of men turning queer in a year or two, but never a girl so good and decent and with such fine ideas just to collapse. That’s what I can’t see, Peyton, can you? What’s