A Covenant with Death (16 page)

The railroad had one virtue: trains ran fast over a hundred miles of flat, almost waterless plain. We joined the Rio Grande at San Marcial and from there on the view was more various; by then the evening sun lay low, and just the aspect of the river diminished the heat. By Belen, where assorted revelers clambered aboard, destination the big city, I was no longer sweating, and when I swung off the train into the twinkling lights of Albuquerque at dusk I was almost cool. I hired a taxi and checked into the Bench Club, thinking that Bryan Talbot's jury was out, and telephoned Rosemary. She had not dined. Politely, she invited me to chicken salad and iced tea. Her roommate was away for the weekend. I accepted with reserved delight and solemn protestations of continuing respect. It was an ignominious conversation; I was reduced to a Reverend Mr. Collins, gravely informing his Elizabeth, “And now nothing remains for me but to assure you in the most animated language of the violence of my affection.” But I slicked back my hair and adjusted my cravat and stepped nervously into the moonless purple night. I walked—it was a mile or so—searching for a florist's, but none was open. I was suddenly very tired. This would be a weary, stale, flat and unprofitable evening, and as I walked a couplet—from what? I never knew—circled endlessly through my mind:

If a man be so spent

That his wife keepeth Lent …

If a man be so spent

That his wife keepeth Lent …

If a man be so spent

That his wife keepeth Lent …

Rosemary was born on a farm, not even a small ranch, not far from Athens, Texas. The Bergquists were hard-working, God-fearing sons of the soil, et cetera, pious Lutherans whose existence was simply bleak. The family had originated, as far as they knew, near a place called Umeå in northern Sweden, not quite Lapland though I had my little joke about that too, which annoyed Rosemary. They did not dance or play cards and refrained from laughter on Sunday. God knows what they did: they worked, they set their lips to keep from pestering Jehovah, they procreated, they read the Bible. The farm barely kept them alive, though they were never in deep debt. Hearing Rosemary talk about it, I congealed, turned away sick and rebellious from the aridity, the grubbing toil, the dry sweat that defined the silent, aching, gloomy Bergquists, whose salvation had never come in this world. Rosemary was born in 1900 and survived, the family's one triumph over a grudging, almost savage, Nature. But the old man wore himself out and ground to a halt in 1905; Mrs. Bergquist found work with the church in Athens and survived ten years more. It was the church that took care of Rosemary from then on, seeing her through high school and into a denominational college, where she took care of small children, waited on table, and made beds in return for her education. A bachelor of arts in 1921, she noted opportunities in Albuquerque—found a squib in a teachers' magazine—and came west to make her fortune. She was highly moral and untouched by human hands.

I met her in 1922, eight or nine months before the beginning of this story. Her eyes were large, brown and direct under brows slightly darker than her hair. Her nose was not neat and Grecian but a trifle too big. Her lips were full and her teeth regular and white. When she moved I saw that liquefaction of her clothes. What a foolish catalogue! I noticed none of that at the time, and knew only that some unformed lust for utter perfection lurking within me as within every man needed no longer be blind and shapeless; here was its object and its fulfillment.

All right: drivel. A purplish way of saying that I saw a woman I wanted immediately, and that in ten seconds I had stripped her and bedded her and taken ten thousand meals with her and grown old happily. What the hell: better that than marrying for money or to win a competition or to make an advantageous alliance. Men marry for hundreds of reasons and I did not know then and do not know now any better reason than to make of life a fruitful orgy. The day I met her I asked her to dinner and she blushed and did nervous things with her hands and said, “Well, I don't know,” and at first I thought she was making fun of me with her voice, imitating one of her eight-year-old charges. When I realized that she was not, that she was a natural chirper, I just grinned. I would not have cared if she had bellowed like a bull. In the end I took her to dinner and then to see
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
with Rudolph Valentino. I kissed her goodnight; that was easy because it was unthinkable, and she had no notion of what I was about to do until my lips were touching hers. She pulled away horrified and squeaked “Judge!” and ran inside. For all I knew she would lie awake all night waiting for labor pains. I was very happy and sang a bit on my way to the hotel, no words, just that mandolin serenade from
Don Giovanni
. I had seen it in Paris, only once, and loved it. My French friends told me it was a wretched performance, and I felt sorry for them. That night in Albuquerque I pitied them even more: I had found my Elvira and no one else had, ever. If I had asked her to marry me in those first weeks—but I did not, and then I discovered that she was not perfect, and neither was I. I was so desperately in love with that unformed image of utter perfection that I became petulant, and a pompous masculine surliness cankered my heart. I see all that now. Now I am over seventy. You will not understand why I bundled my mother into an automobile a month later for a two-week visit to Ignacio's. Nor did I at the time. The answer was there, but it wanted finding.

Rosemary lived on the ground floor of a three-story building. Two more teachers occupied the second floor and the landlady, a widow, the third. Rosemary and her roommate had two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen with a gas range and an icebox. The furniture was all horsehair-and-maple but the draperies were bright, yellow and red, and the living-room floor was covered by a scattering of pretty Navajo rugs. The girls did not keep liquor or cigarettes, but a large and misshapen fired-clay ashtray announced their emancipation. There were some Audubon prints on the walls, some Navajo knickknacks, a clipper ship under full sail.

I stood outside the building for a moment, warring with an odd reluctance to see her. I was safe on the sidewalk, and perhaps if I did not enter I would never learn the worst. But native optimism, and even a point of dry curiosity, carried me forward. I rang the bell, and she came immediately to let me in. She was smiling. “Hello,” she said.

“Hello.” I closed the door. “Why the grin? I expected cold silence. Rosemary all in black, buttoned up to the chin.” She wore an Indian skirt, imitation buckskin, and a light green blouse. On her feet were moccasins, deerhide, soft soles.

“Now don't be intense,” she said. “Please?”

“All right.” I smiled. “I tried to find flowers for you but the stores were closed.”

“That's better. You're forgiven.”

“Will you kiss me?”

“Of course,” but it was only a meeting of lips; it asserted nothing. I sat neutrally on the sofa and looked down at magazines:
Scribner's, McClure's, Vanity Fair, The Delineator
.

Rosemary sat in an armchair, smiling, politely, faintly; head high, eyes cool.

Soon I said, “Let's eat. I'm hungry. It's a long, dull trip.”

“It's a long, dull trip the other way too,” she said, and I grew even more neutral. Would she have preferred that I come here each weekend? To pace the streets of Albuquerque? To watch Tom Mix and take ceremonious leave at her doorstep? She was unreasonable.

I followed her to the kitchen. The table was set. She served chicken salad, went back to chip ice, poured tea. The kitchen walls were white and the light bulb overhead was naked. In the flat brightness flaws sprang out: a tiny mole on her neck, a dry upper lip, a faint wrinkle beneath each eye. But delights too: shadows on the pale green blouse. She wore scent; weak, trailing, it called in whispers. “Now you eat,” she said, and smiled again. “You just have to let me be a woman.”

“I ask nothing more.” Louise Talbot crossed my mind.

“But we don't mean the same thing. Your idea of somebody being a woman is that she flutters her eyes when you walk in, and breathes hard.”

“I don't care about ‘somebody' being a woman. I only care about you. And you know that isn't what I want.”

“I don't know what else you want, if anything. Oh, it's fun.” She grimaced daintily at her own weakness. “But it's all you seem to think about.”

Silence seemed best. First, because she was right, but in a way she did not yet understand—did I?; second, because she was flagrantly wrong. Sitting before her, munching, calm and tired, not so nervous now, I thought how wrong she might be: forgetting the hours of talk, the books and music and cowboy movies, the long rambles beside the river, the meals and chaffing with my mother, Rosemary now remembered only the moments of what she obviously thought of as assault, which could as easily have been called invitation or fulfillment or just plain love. Right now it was all
she
seemed to think about. She need not worry tonight. We both sensed that, and after a quiet minute or two we smiled again, almost shyly. And then we made small talk for a time, but over dessert I set down the fork and hunched forward. I wanted to touch her hand but did not. “Are you really unhappy? I don't want you to be.”

“I keep thinking of a little house,” she said.

“Oh. And a little car.”

She nodded. “And little kids, and large jars of mayonnaise. And you scare me. You're wild and dark and you have black hair on your back and it scares me. Why is that?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I only want you to be happy.”

“Then you shouldn't have come here tonight.” She sounded sorrowful but her eyes were warm.

“Can you tell me why?”

“After,” she said. “Finish your dinner.”

Which I did.

We washed the dishes together. Compendia of aphrodisiacs never include domestic chores; but have you noticed that women warm to a man who will put the silver away and take the garbage out? The intimacy of the kitchen sink. That was taught me during the war by an educated private named Sheers from a place in New York State called Tonawanda. His family manufactured bottle caps, and Sheers spent most of the war cleaning out grease traps in the army's more elaborate kitchens. (The alternative, I gathered, was one court-martial after another.) The time, he assured me, was not wasted, and the sacrifice—of dignity and the olfactory sensibilities—not in vain. “Seduction begins in the kitchen,” he said. “It is true. The professors say that food and sex are similar satisfactions, but that is not it. A man who does things around the house, when it is not his house, is like a man who smokes a pipe. He is reliable and comfortable. He may be a perfect scoundrel, but to a woman he is reliable and comfortable and when she learns the truth it is too late. Her instinctive approval goes back to January of the Cro-Magnon era. She smiles in her heart because the man who keeps the cave clean is a tender fellow. As the book says, the experience I have acquired during this here war will lead to a fruitful career in time of peace. Hand me that steel wool.”

Rosemary smiled. My sleeves were rolled and my tie was flapped in between two shirt buttons. I stacked the dry plates. The silent music of domesticity billowed through the apartment. When the kitchen was clear Rosemary took my hand and led me to the living room; she turned the lights low, propelled me gently toward the easy chair, and settled herself on the sofa. “That was more like it,” she said. “I'm not even nervous now.”

“I am,” I said. “I feel like a defendant. You wouldn't have any of the real prewar stuff in the house, would you?”

“No,” she said firmly. “I want you to be a gentleman tonight.”

It was an inauspicious remark, and evoked neither anger nor chill, but impatience. Or wry weariness. If I was a gentleman, then how could I not be one tonight? If I was not, then how could she hope for the transformation?

“Very well,” I said. “No profanity. No grabbing.” And for God's sake be quick about it, I wanted to add.

“Now,” she said. “I've been thinking, and I don't think you love me. Not really.”

“Oh.” I shook my head. “That can't be answered. If I say I do, you'll just say No, you don't, and we'll be like two kids arguing. If I say I don't, I'm lying.”

“I think you
think
you do,” she said.

“Oh, for the love of God,” I said. “Not that, please. Anything a man feels, you can say he just thinks he feels it. That's unanswerable too.”

“You said you wouldn't swear,” she said. “But I mean it, about what you think. You have love and sex all mixed up.”

“As they should be. Inextricably mixed up.”

“Well, not mixed up. I really don't think you know what love is.”

I blew out a great, tired, puffing sigh. “Stop. Stop right there. You may not know it, but you've begun a classic, hackneyed speech. Any red-blooded American boy has heard it a dozen times. I don't want to hear it again. I don't have to hear it again. You mean that I want your body, and that I use you for my own pleasure, but I have no true affection for the real you, for the real Rosemary, for your soul, for your mind. That way down deep I consider you a piece of ass and nothing else.”

“You Said you'd be a gentleman.” Her lips were tight; she was blushing.

“Ah, come on,” I groaned. “Do you want truth or poetry?”

“All right, truth.”

“Then the truth is that I love making love to you. Also talking to you, eating with you, listening to your troubles, and showing you off. But not arguing with you. Not on this level. And all you remember is that we sleep together. You forget all the rest.”

“That's not true! And you know it isn't. But you never stop to think how I feel. How every time I turn around you have your hand on me. How I have to sit with your mother and wonder how much she knows. How you make me do things I know are immoral, and even against the law! How—”