Clemmie (26 page)

It wasn’t until Irene phoned that he remembered that
this was the twenty-third, the day of Anita’s funeral. It was at two thirty at the Congreve Funeral Home. He told Betty where he would be and said he doubted whether it would be worthwhile trying to get back to the office.

He arrived at Clemmie’s at a quarter after four, after going home to change again. The somber aftermath of funeral faded as he climbed the steel stairs. The door was locked. After he called to her through the door, she unlocked it for him and flung herself, laughing and naked into his arms, chiding him for being early so that she’d had no chance to take a beauty nap and dress so very carefully for him. She’d gotten back a little while ago so the sparkling burgundy wouldn’t really be cold enough yet, but it should be cold soon. Never, never had there been enough, but this time there was enough to bathe in, should the fancy strike them. And they would eat late, because it had to be dark enough for the candles. Clams in aspic and a shameful number of the most enchanting little squab. And if we move the couch away from the window, we can put the table there.

During the morning, in the office, when he thought of how she had acted the night before, he had wondered uneasily if it hadn’t all been just another of her games. He thought of it again later in the evening and across the table and told himself it couldn’t have been a game. No. By then they were gay and blurred by burgundy, and wearied by lovemaking, but the mood of celebration was still upon them.

And later, after they’d put the couch back, he sat on the couch with a half-empty bottle of burgundy between his bare heels. She sat on the floor facing him, so close he could look down into her upturned face. Her bottle was beside her, and she sat in one of the positions of Yoga, legs interlocked, the soiled soles of her bare feet upward. She wore nothing but a pair of vivid orange shorts, harsh as sailcloth, and he could not remember when she had put them on. She was talking and smiling up at him and he realized he had lost track somewhere and made a heavy effort to concentrate on what she was telling him.

“… was perfectly, perfectly crazy. Because, and this is the thing Marvin didn’t know, it was the ski instructor all the time. Hans or something like that. Eyes like a great sad cow. Well, he would take Delia off for these very expensive lessons, individual instruction. Marvin was paying him
fifty dollars a day for those lessons for Delia. Then Delia and Hans would spend the
entire
day up in one of those rescue cabin things halfway around the mountain. And this is the funniest part. Hans, or whatever his name was, was a very nervous type. And so he
insisted
that when he’d bring Delia back to the lodge, she’d have to look as though she’d spent the day on the trails instead of in a bunk full of pine boughs. She told me the last hour was absolute hell, every day. Hans would make her charge up and down the slopes, and he’d knock her into drifts and rub her face with snow and then make her schuss down into the flats and run all the way back to the lodge. She’d come back utterly exhausted, and once with a wrenched ankle which made it look better, of course. She said that nobody, but nobody, ever had a more athletic affair. Between the bunk and the skiing, she lost eight pounds in the three weeks we were there. Toward the end it was all she could do to drag herself out of bed and crawl up the mountain in the morning. She said that if it had lasted another week, they would have found her in May when the snow melted. Of course, she was absolutely no use to Marvin, but what she didn’t know and I didn’t tell her was that Marvin and I were having such a mad time every afternoon when we were supposed to be taking naps, so I imagine they were equally exhausted. I even thought I was in love with him and I used to have the most delicious quivers waiting for him to come tippy-toe down the hall. But he got very demanding and very dull indeed, and when I tried to brush him off he kept hanging around, whimpering and tearing his hanky and threatening to kill me and then himself, Somebody has been drinking out of my bottle, said the little bear. You ready, darling?”

“Not just yet,” he mumbled.

She wavered away and he heard the cork pop in the kitchen. Who the hell was Marvin? How many Marvins had there been? Sounds like a hell of an unwholesome three weeks.

When she came back and sat in front of him as before, he said, leering at her. “How was old Marvin? Good as Raoul?”

Her mouth changed. “Don’t start getting dull. What possible difference could it make to you?”

“Hey, now!” he said, hurt by her quick viciousness.

Her face slowly softened again. “Didn’t mean a thing,” she said. “Not a thing. And you’re drinking too slow, Fitzbaby. Lean way over now and you can kiss burgundy lips for free. On the house.”

Craig found it easier not to think. He began to spend every possible moment with Clemmie. He went to his house to get his mail, to pick up changes of clothing. When he went there he spent as little time inside the house as possible. Day by day the job became merely hours that had to be endured. He worked mechanically, doing what had to be done, impatient for five o’clock when he could leave. He found he was able to turn off any thought of the future, the way a light can be turned off. He fended off Betty’s attempts to speak seriously to him about his future in the company. When Al called him at the office to ask him if he should set up the appointment with Johnny Maleska, Craig said he hadn’t made up his mind yet. He’d let Al know.

Jeanie Tribbler phoned him at the office to invite him to a party. She said, with a teasing edge in her voice, that it seemed impossible to catch him at home. He made up an excuse which he knew was clumsy and would probably hurt her feelings, but it didn’t seem worthwhile to devise either a better excuse, or to go to the party. He let Bud Upson corner him as infrequently as possible.

Clemmie filled the nights and the days and the week ends. He knew they were both drinking too heavily, but that was something he didn’t care to think about too directly. He made a habit of going to the roadhouse for lunch, and soon it was no longer necessary for him to place his order for vodka on the rocks. The bartender placed it in front of him when he sat down. Three of them were generally enough to steady him and get him through the afternoon.

She had stopped her exercises at the bar. A new softness came around her middle, and when she got tired she became
querulous. When her eyes were closed the lids were darkly shadowed. When she was gay it was a hectic manic gaiety. They played her games often, and many of the roles were highly inventive. Yet sometimes she would break off in the middle and turn sullen.

They did strange things at strange times on impulse. Roller skating at a pavilion at a lake eighty miles away. Once, at her insistence, and with her money, they flew to New York. They arrived late on a Saturday afternoon. When he awakened on Sunday morning, he could not remember registering at the hotel, nor could he remember buying the cheap suitcase in a drugstore as they had come without luggage. They flew back on Sunday night and she had slept the whole way.

He was often very drunk, and he was never entirely sober. He knew that he was showing the effects of continual dissipation. His weight was dropping and his face was gaunted. Betty James spoke to him very formally, and with an undercurrent of disappointment and contempt. There were fewer and fewer conferences in which he was asked to take a part. He was listless in his approach to work. The only brightness was Clemmie. The only times of feeling alive was with her. His sexual energies were undiminished. She seemed able to arouse him as completely as in the very beginning, and was herself as easily, as thoroughly aroused. They spent most of the time in her studio apartment. Twice they went out together, on invitation. Once to a very odd party at the converted barn where Hildy and Rick Kelly lived, and once to Jake Romney’s hotel apartment. He turned down all invitations from his former circle of friends, with just sufficient rudeness so they would not be likely to ask him again.

Once, because Clemmie was too scantily dressed and too obviously intoxicated, there was a particularly nasty brawl in a bar, and he got her out moments before the police arrived. Another time, coming home from a curious picnic, driving through thunderstorms, he fell asleep and smashed the front end of the Speedster into an elm tree. She got a bruised lip and a cut on her knee, and it was a great joke to walk through the drenching rain, singing. She had it towed in and traded it on a new car the next day, a pale green Austin-Healey.

She never stopped demanding that he write to Maura.
She said that if he didn’t, she would find the address and write to her herself. He could not quite bring himself to do it. Once he told her he had mailed the letter. Later, when he confessed the lie, she had been more angry than he had ever seen her, yelling and stomping her feet and striking at him, and finally flinging herself on the floor and drumming her heels and screaming a flat endless shriek that scared him.

He moved through a misted world, and he moved aimlessly, indifferent to direction. The only clear light in the world was Clemmie. And yet there were moments of a curious vividness. There seemed to be no continuity in them. Quick flashes, as though a bright light went on for a few moments in a dark room.

Once, while dictating to Betty, he had looked down at his hands on the desk top. He saw the grimy knuckles, black-rimmed nails, two inexplicable scabs on the backs of his hands. And he grew suddenly aware of his own body odor, a smell of perspiration, soiled underclothing. He put his hands out of sight.

Another time while walking through one of the production areas in mid-morning, he had a sudden attack of weakness and nausea. He had moved to one side and leaned heavily on the bed of a lathe, hands flat on the bed, head bowed. Within a few moments he felt all right again. He had straightened and looked around and, near an assembly operation, he had seen L. T. Rowdy standing and watching it. He was making notes. There were high windows. Light reflected from the lenses of his glasses, from the gold pencil. Craig could not tell if he had been watched.

And there was a moment in a bar. He could not remember which bar, where it was, what day it had been. But it was night and they sat at a turn of the bar near a piano being played very loudly. Clemmie was at his left. The back bar mirror was tinted blue. He had tilted his head back and drained a Scotch old-fashioned, the ice clicking against his teeth, and then had lowered it and looked at the blue image of himself, at collar that looked too big for his lean throat, at necktie shoved over to one side, at loosened mouth and sunken eyes. He could see Clemmie in the mirror, beside him. She wore a strapless dress. Her face was turned away from him, turned up and talking animatedly to the man who stood half behind her, a large
man. The piano covered the words she was saying. Then he had turned and looked down at her bare right shoulder, so close to his. The man had his hand on her shoulder. The hand was very vivid, very memorable. A big, coarse, tanned, thick-fingered hand cupping the ivory shoulder. There was a seal ring with a ruby in it on the little finger. Flesh bulged around the ring. There was coarse reddish hair on the back of the hand, and in patches on the backs of the fingers. The nails were heavy and ridged, but immaculate and freshly polished. The hand was six inches from his eyes. He could see the flexion of it, the rhythmic change of muscle tension as he squeezed the unprotesting shoulder. He had looked for a time, and then knocked the hand off her shoulder. He could not remember what had happened after that. There had been some sort of trouble, some waiters who came around.

And he could remember when it was raining very heavily and he sat on the floor in his own front hall, sorting a big accumulation of mail. At least a week of mail.

And a glimpse of Clemmie’s hands, her small, square, thick, short-fingered hands. She held a stack of blue chips in the palm of her left hand, fingers curled up around them. With her right hand she slowly picked up the stack and let it clatter down again into the palm of her left hand. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the flickering spin of the wheel, the marked squares on green felt.

That had been at that place upstate she knew about. She had won a great deal of money, but it didn’t seem important to her. What had happened to it? Oh, later they had been in the big kitchen of the place with the owner, who was a friend of hers, and he remembered watching her imitation of a punchy fighter he had once managed and they had both known. There were men there who laughed loudly at her. And he had fallen asleep with his head on a table and when he woke up it was gray daylight and his neck was stiff and she sat playing gin with the owner, their faces grave, speaking in a low tone only when necessary. Slap of cards, and gray light over the stainless steel of the kitchen equipment. Down for three. That’s where most of the money had gone back, but enough left over to buy him the wristwatch, a Swiss thing, incredibly thin, actually the size and thickness of a silver dollar.

Clemmie naked by moonlight, wading into a lake somewhere, wincing over the sharp stones, then diving forward, slow arm lifting in moonlight in the perfection of an effortless crawl, going so far out that he could no longer see her and then the fear came and he looked at the black emptiness of the lake and finally went back to the car for the bottle. She drank from the bottle, dripping in the warm moonlight, head tilted, throat working as it had at the barn dance.

The men were always there. They always drifted over to her with an animal casualness, a knowingness, and they created violence in him, so they stayed in the apartment more than they would have otherwise.

Clemmie, standing in the big shower stall, hands braced against the wall, saying, while he scrubbed her back with the brush with the blue nylon bristles, “Harder, damn you! Harder!”

An evening of marvelous half-drunk strength and miraculous co-ordination when she had sat behind him at the driving range, and he had hammered out bucket after bucket of balls, sending them soaring far out, arcing, winking white in the floodlights while she said Aaah at the longest ones, like a kid watching fireworks. Finally blisters had broken on his soft hands and the grip of the club became greased with blood.