All the King's Men (51 page)

She had seen right through me, like a piece of glass, and there wasn’t anything to answer except to say that she was very wrong, that I was indeed going to study law, and what was wrong with studying law, please?

“You just made it up,” she repeated stubbornly.

“Hell,” I said, “I won’t let you starve, I’ll give you everything you’ve got. If you’ve got to have a big house and a lot of dresses and parties, well, I’ll–”

But I didn’t get to finish that.

“You know perfectly well, Jack Burden,” she interrupted, “I don’t have to have anything like that. You’re just being mean. You’re trying to put me in the wrong. I don’t want anything like that. You know I don’t. You know I love you and I’ll live in a shack and eat red beans if you’ve got to live that way because what you want to do doesn’t make any money. But if you don’t want to do anything–even if you do just sort of get a job and have plenty of money–oh, you know what I mean–you know the way some people are.” She sat up very straight on the seat of the roadster and her eyes, even in nothing but starlight, flashed that fine seventeen-year-old scorn. Then she fixed the gleam on me very steadily and said in a serious way that made her a funny mixture of a really grownup woman and a little girl plat-acting, probably with mother’s loose clip-clopping high-heeled shoes and a feather boa, a serious way that made her both older and younger that she was–she said, “You know I love you, Jack Burden, and I believe in you, Jack Burden, and you are not going to be like those people, Jack Burden.”

I laughed, it was so funny, and tried to kiss her, but she wouldn’t let me and became suddenly all sharp elbows and knees working like a mowing machine and in dead earnest and I was the hay crop. I couldn’t soothe her. I couldn’t even lay a finger on her. She made me take her home, and wouldn’t even kiss me good night.

That was the last I heard of it, except for one sentence. The next day, when she and I were lying out on the diving float, she said, all of a sudden, after a long sun-baked silence, “You remember last night?”

I said I did.

“Well,” she said, “I meant it. I really did.” Then she took her hand out of mine, slipped off the float, and swam away to keep me from making any answer.

I didn’t hear any more about that business. And didn’t think anything more about it. Anne was just like before, and I fell back into the full flood of the summer, into the full tide of feeling in which we drifted in a kind of breathless ease, like a strong, massive, deep current which didn’t hurry but which had an irresistible weight of water behind it, and over which the days and night passed like flickers of light and shade. It was drifting, all right, but not drifting in any nasty pejorative sense, like a waterlogged old skiff drifting in a horsepond or a cake of soap in the gray water before you pull the plug in the bathtub. No, it was a fine, conscious surrender which was a participation in and a willing of the flood itself, and not a surrender at all but an affirmation and all that, like the surrender of the mystic to God, which isn’t a surrendering to God any more than it is also a creating of God, for if he loves God he has willed the being of God. Well, in my very surrender I willed and mastered that great current in which I drifted, and over which the days and night flickered, and in which I didn’t have to lif a hand to hurry myself, for the current knew its own pace and own time, and would take me with it.

I never tried to hurry anything all summer. Not in the porch swing, or in the pine woods, or on the float at night when we swam out, or in the roadster. Everything that happened came to happen as simply and as naturally and as a gradually as a season coming on or a plant unrolling a leaf or a kitten waking up. And there was a kind of luxuriousness in not rushing things, in not driving toward the hot grip and awkward tussle and the leer for the boys back in the dormitory when you got in, a new sensuality in waiting for the massive current to take you where you belonged and would go in the end. She was young–she seemed younger to me then than she did later on looking back, for that summer I was so sure that I was old and jaded–and she was timid and sensitive and shy, but it wasn’t any squealing, squeaking, pullet-squawking, teasing, twitching, oh-that’s-not-nice-and-I-never-let-anybody-do-that-before-oh kind of shyness. Perhaps shyness is the wrong word for it, after all. Certainly it is wrong if back behind that word there is any implication or color of shame or fear or desire to be “nice.” For in one way, she seemed to be detached from her very slender, compactly made, tight-muscled, soft-fleshed, golden-shouldered body, as though it were an elaborate and cunning mechanism in which she and I shared ownership, which had suddenly dropped to us out of the blue, and which, in our ignorance, we had to study with the greatest patience and most reverent attention lest we miss some minute, scholarly detail without knowledge would be wasted. So it was a period of the most delicate discrimination and subtle investigations, with her seriousness mixed with a graceful gaiety (“Oh, Jackie-Boy, oh, Jackie-Bird, it’s a wonderful night, a wonderful night, his eyes are not bad but his nose is a fright”), a gaiety to which the word didn’t mean much but the tune meant everything, a tune which seemed to come from the very air as though it were full of invisible strings and she simply reached out at random in the dark to pluck them with an idle familiar finger. And beyond the serious investigations was a kind of level-eyed affection, as natural and simple as the air you breathe, which sometimes didn’t seem to belong with our hot-lipped and shallow-breathed occupations, which seemed to be something I had always had and not something connected with the new, mysterious body which now fascinated both her and me. She would sit and cup my head in both her hands and press it against her breast and sing, with the words just a whisper, the rhymes she made up as she went along (“Poor Jackie-Bird, he is a pest, but I’ll rock him to sleep in a soft warm nest, and I’ll sing a song to Jackie-Bird, the sweetest song he ever heard, poor Jackie-Bird, poor Jackie-Bird”), and after a while the words would just die away until there was only the little crooning sound, with the whisper now and then, “Poor Jackie-Bird, I’ll never let anything hurt poor Jackie-Bird.” Then after a while I would turn my face a little, toward her body, and kiss it through the light summer cloth and breathe through the cloth, upon it.

We went quite a long way, that summer, and there were times when I was perfectly sure I could have gone farther. When I could have gone the limit. For that fine, slender, compactly made, tight-muscled, soft-fleshed, golden-shouldered mechanism which fascinated Anne Stanton and me, which had dropped to us out of the blue, was a very sensitive and beautifully tuned-up contraption. But maybe I was wrong in that surmise, and maybe I could not have hurried the massive deliberation of that current in which we were caught and suspended, or hurried Anne Stanton’s pensive and scholarly assimilation of each minute variation which had to be slowly absorbed into the body of our experience before another could be permitted. It was as though she was aware of a rhythm, a tune, a compulsion, outside of herself, and devoutly followed it in its subtle and winding progression. But wrong or not, I did not put my surmise to the test, for if I myself was not truly aware of that rhythm and compulsion which bemused her, I was aware of her devotion to it, and could find every moment with her full enough. Paradoxically enough, it was when I was away from her, when I was withdrawn from her context, back in my room at night or in the hot early afternoon, after lunch, that I was savagely impatient of the delays and discriminations. This would be especially true at those times when she wouldn’t see me for a day, the times which seemed to mark, I came to understand, some stage, some milepost, we had passed. She would simply withdraw herself from me, as she had done that night after we first kissed, and leave me, at first, confused and guilty, but later, as I came to grasp the pattern of things, merely impatient for the next day when she would appear at the court, swinging her racket, her face so smooth, young, healthy and apparently disinterested, though comradely, that I could not equate it with the face I remembered with the eyelids drooping and the damp, starlight-or-moonlight-glistening lips parted for the quick, shallow breath or the unashamed sigh.

But once, late in the summer, I didn’t see her for two days. The night before, which was windless, with a full moon and an atmosphere that scarcely cooled or stirred with the coming on of evening, Anne and I had swum down to the hotel diving tower, late enough for everybody else to be out of the water. We lay on the big float for a while, not doing any talking, not touching each other, just lying on our backs and looking up at the sky. After a while she got up and began to climb the tower. I rolled over on my side to watch her. She went up to the twenty-foot board, poised a moment, and did a swan dive, a nice one. Then she went up to the next board. I don’t know how many dives she made, but it was a lot. I drowsily watched them, watched her climb up, very slow, rung by rung, the moonlight on the wet fabric of the dark bathing suit making it look like metal, or lacquer, watched her poise at the verge, lift her arms out to the tingling extreme, rise on her toes, leave the board, and seem to hang there an instant, a dully gleaming form so slender and high up it blotted out only a star or two, just an instant before the heady swoop and the clean swishing rip into the water as though she had dived through a great circus hoop covered with black silk spangled with silver.

It happened when she took the highest dive I had ever seen her take, perhaps the highest she was ever to take in her life. I saw her climbing up, slow, then pass the board she had been using, the twenty-foot board, and go on up. I called to her, but she didn’t even look at me. I knew she had heard me. I also knew that she would go on where she was going, no matter what I said now, now that she had started. I didn’t call again.

She made the dive. I knew it was a good one from the very instant she left the board, but I jumped to my feet, just the same, and stood at the edge of the float, holding my breath, my eyes fixed on her flight. Just as she entered the water, clean as a whistle, I plunged in, too, diving deep and drawing down with my stroke. I saw the silvery tangle and trail of bubbles and the glimmer of her legs and arms in the dark water when she turned. She had gone down deep. Now that she had to go down deep, for she could whisk out shallow if she wanted. But that time–and other times–she went in deep, as if to continue the flight as long as possible through the denser medium. I pulled deep and met her as she began to rise. I put my arms around her waist and drew her to me and put our lips together. She let her arms trail down, loose, not making a motion, while I held her body to me and pressed her face back and our legs trailed down together as we rose slowly and waveringly through the blackness of the water and the silver of ascending bubbles. We rose very slowly, or at least it seemed very slowly, and I was holding my breath so long there was a pain in my chest and a whirling dizziness in my head, but the pain and dizziness had passed the line over into a rapture like that I had had in my room the night I had first taken her to a movie and had stopped on the way home. I thought we would never reach the surface, we rose so slowly.

Then we were there, with the moonlight brittle and fractured on the water all about our eyes. We hung there together, still not breathing, for another moment, then I released her and we fell apart to float on our backs and gaspingly draw the air in and stare up at the high, whirling, star-stung sky.

After a little while I realized that she was swimming away. I thought that she would be taking a few strokes to the float. But when I did finally roll over and swim to the float, she was already at the beach. I saw her pick up her robe, wrap it around her, and stoop to put on her sandals. I called to her. She waved back, then shaking her hair loose out of the cap, began to run up the beach toward home. I swam in, but by the time I reached the beach she was near her house. I knew I couldn’t catch her. So I walked on up the beach, taking my time.

I didn’t see her for two days after that. Then she appeared at the tennis court, swinging her racket, friendly and cool, getting ready to beat the hell out of me as soon as Adam had given me his lacing.

We were in September then. In a few days Anne was to leave to go back up East to Miss Pound’s School. Her father was going to take her a few days early and stop with her in Washington and then in New York before sending her on to Boston, where Miss Pound would get her hooks in. Anne hadn’t seemed particularly excited about the trip, or about getting back to Miss Pound. She liked the school fine, she had told me, but I hadn’t been overwhelmed by tales of midnight snacks and memory books and that darling teacher of French, and her vocabulary wasn’t slimed up with offensive bits of esoteric finishing-school slang. Back in August she had mentioned the plan, the date of departure, but without pleasure or displeasure, as though it were something completely irrelevant to us, the way a young person mentions death. When she mentioned it, I had felt a sudden twinge, but I had managed to put the thought aside, for even though the calendar said it was August I had not been able to believe that the summer, and the world, would ever end. But that morning when Anne reappeared at the tennis court, my first thought was that she would be going soon. It really came over me then. I went up to her, not even saying hello, and took her hand, feeling a kind of unformulated desperation and urgency.

She looked at me with an expression of mild surprise.

“Don’t you love me?” I demanded, angrily.

She burst out laughing, and fixed her eyes on me, with the laughter making innocent, mocking crinkles at the outer corners of the absolutely clear eyes. “Sure,” she said, laughing, the idle racket swinging in her free hand, “sure, I love you, Jackie-Boy, Jackie-Bird, who said I didn’t love poor old Jackie-Bird?”

“Don’t be silly,” I said, for the language of all our nights in the roadster and in the porch swing suddenly seemed, in the glare of the morning and with the desperation in me, fatuous and loathsome. “Don’t be silly,” I repeated, “and don’t call me Jackie-Bird.”