I Come as a Theif (12 page)

"Oh, Norry, I love it!" she whispered hoarsely. "Norry, I adore it!"

In the atmosphere of general constraint Norry turned with relief to the white-coated figure of the butler appearing in the doorway. "Oh, is lunch ready, Len? Good, I think we can all use some."

***

The dining room walls were painted green and blue to create undersea atmosphere, and the only paintings, brilliantly lit, were three Odile Redons, of strange, jewel-like marine monsters. Tony was seated on Joan's right, but she had placed her diamond before her, and she would not talk. But as he sat there silently, sipping his white wine, he experienced something that put conversation out of the question.

At first, he had a sense of the sky darkening outside as if the sun had been clouded over. Yet he was facing the long, curved bay window that looked on the sea, and it was perfectly apparent that no clouds had diminished the brilliant sunlight that fell on the sparkling water. The darkness, which made him think of a scrim over a stage set, must have been a thing of his imagination, yet even when he closed his eyes and shook his head, he could not rid himself of this impression of darkness, right there, all over the room, permeating the harsh light, so that black and white seemed to coexist in a queer blend of blindness and vision.

After some minutes, as the vision continued, he began to peer cautiously about the room at the objects and people. The Redon paintings, which he had always before admired, now seemed unaccountably dreary. They might have been executed by a commercial artist on the order of a department store. The beautiful Lowestoft that covered the table, blue and white, struck him as showy and pretentious, and the friends, all chatting about themselves, however lively and well-dressed, seemed the most ordinary of mortals. And yet even here his old sense of observation had not wholly deserted him, for he still could see that the Lowestoft was of a rare quality and he recognized that at least one of the guests was a near great poet. What was the meaning of the two levels of observation? What was
he?

He! Maybe that was it. As he saw himself, there were not—this was suddenly clear—two levels. He was sure of one thing only. He was the man to whom the room
looked
the new way. He was the man to whom the universe was now surpassingly dull. It would be his punishment to live in this dull universe. Punishment for what? His crime? Was he experiencing the old horror of solitary guilt in the presence of persons not guilty? Was he being swept with the despair of a damned soul who sees the elect in Paradise and knows that he can never join them, a despair intensified by the very failure of the elect to realize his excluded status and the cruel mockery of their continuing to regard him as one of themselves? But no, it wasn't this. It was something much worse. They were not in Paradise and never would be. Paradise had disappeared. He had hurled himself out of it and had fallen into a strange limbo where he existed alone. The people who surrounded him—even Lee, yes even Lee—were not really people any longer. They were the ghosts of the people he had known in Paradise and, like all ghosts, they existed without pleasure or taste. Without companionship. And there was no seeming end to it.

And finally, as if these realizations were only the whistling, stiffening breezes that immediately precede a storm, came the sudden inundation, through his mind and body simultaneously, of a misery, the intensity of which he had never even conceived. He held himself rigidly still, in the horrid apprehension that the least movement might make the pain worse, might make it unbearable so that he would scream and rush from the table.

"What's wrong with you? Are you sick?"

Tony turned to look at Joan. Her face seemed strange and white. She might have been a visitor, in a hospital, looking down on him in a bed.

"I suddenly realized I'm damned."

She continued to stare. "You look absolutely green. Would you like to go and lie down?"

"No, no, it's mental."

"You mean, like a depression?"

"I guess so. A fit of depression. Except I wonder if it will pass."

"Tony! You're acting so strange."

"I'm feeling so strange. I've done a wicked, criminal thing, and I disgust myself."

Joan looked down at her diamond for a moment and then covered it over with her hand. "What kind of a criminal thing?"

"It doesn't matter. It's done."

"Will there be consequences?"

"There have been. That's what I'm telling you."

"No. I mean real consequences. Like the police or something."

"What does it matter?" He was suddenly impatient with her silly questions. "If I told you I were going to suffer some horrible, old-fashioned punishment, like being broken on the wheel, I wouldn't care."

"Or like dying of cancer?" Joan had finally remembered herself.

"That's right. I envy you, Joan."

The fact that he did not care enough about convincing her to put the least conviction in his tone did the job better than any emphasis. "I believe you do," she murmured in awe. "But then you're very brave. That's why I envy
you.
Why I've always envied you."

"Brave?" He snorted. "What's bravery?"

"Not being afraid of pain. Or dying."

"It depends what the pain is. I'm afraid of what's inside me now. If I could run away from it, you'd see how brave I was." He clenched his fists in a sudden spasm of misery. "I'd put on a skirt and fight my way into a lifeboat ahead of any number of women and children."

Joan abandoned her diamond and reached under the table to touch his hand. But when she felt the tremor of his clenched fist, she withdrew. "You poor darling, I believe you would. What
has
happened? Is it bad conscience?"

"How do labels help?"

"Maybe you could pray."

"Do you?"

"Oh, yes. Constantly. When I'm not abusing God, I pray to him."

"You think this is a religious experience I'm having?"

"Couldn't it be?"

"You and your chalice. It could be anything. Except I don't feel repentant. I only feel damned. Can you be damned if there's no God and no heaven? It's a paradox, but I can believe it."

"Couldn't you make some kind of restitution? They say you can't buy back innocence, but I wonder if that's true. If you've hurt somebody, you can pay damages. If you've embezzled, you can put the money back. There's not much you can do about murder, but I suppose you haven't gone
that
far."

"Where would I get the money?"

"From me, of course. What do I need money for?"

"You know I can't touch your money."

"Is that sensible? If you're damned and I'm dying?"

"It isn't sensible. But there's very little that's happening to me that makes any sense." Again he shivered with impatience. "All I know is that I wish I were dead."

Joan almost smiled. It was the nearest thing to a smile anyway in their curious interchange. "It would be cozy if you went with me. I'd mind everything much less. But whatever it is, you'll get over it. You're so strong, lover. You're the strongest man I've ever known. And I wish I'd married you. I think we'd have got on."

"You'd have hated being poor."

When he had said this, he did not want to go on with the conversation. Joan would never understand what had happened to him, and what good could it do him if she did? Tactfully, she turned to her other neighbor, and he was left to silence as the woman on his right had given him up as hopeless. He had a fierce urge to leave the dining room, to go down to the rocks and to run by the sea, run as hard as he could. He was just about to excuse himself when Joan rose, and the terrible meal was over.

On the long drive home he answered Lee in abrupt monosyllables. Her questions about the party irritated him furiously. Never could he recall having been so unreasonably angry. But the pain was actually growing. He had to concentrate on the road to keep the car from swerving.

"You seemed to have had plenty to say to Joan at lunch," Lee observed tartly. "Is that why you're all talked out?"

"Yes."

"Well, you don't have to bite my head off."

"Lee, will you try to understand something? I think I'm starting a nervous crack-up. I have the most terrible sunk feeling. Like a migraine."

"You mean you have a headache?"

"Much worse. Much!"

"Oh, Tony, what
is
it?"

The tense anxiety in her tone only infuriated him. "Oh, leave me be, will you? I'll come out of it. Just leave me be."

"Well, it makes a girl feel just great to be told to shut up by a husband who's been shooting his mouth off all day to another woman."

"Joan's different. She's dying."

"Is that the only way to your wounded heart? Rather a stiff price to pay, don't you think? Do you mind if I wait until the children are a little older?"

"What a handy thing jealousy is!" Tony almost shouted "It exempts you from the least chore of sympathy. All you have to do is imagine that I'm paying attention to another woman, and I can suffer the tortures of hell for all you care!"

Lee was silent, and for some minutes he drove on without even glancing at her. Then he heard her stifled sobbing and knew that he had really hurt her. For Lee was no easy weeper. Always in the past her tears had been a terror to him, and few indeed had been the concessions that he would not allow to make them cease. But now everything was different. Her resentment seemed to him unreal, egocentric, not really concerned with him. He would not apologize or attempt to console her. Grimly he gripped the top of the wheel and stared down the middle of the road. When he stopped at their apartment house Lee got out, dry-eyed, without a word. As he drove about to look for a parking space, he knew that their breach was grave.

Tony had met both Joan and Lee in the winter of 1954. He always looked back on that year as the dividing point of his life, a period of brief but heady independence between his final resolution to give up fussing about his parents and siblings and his acquisition of new and more permanent subjects for emotional untidiness.

He was twenty-seven. He had the Korean War behind him and a silver star for bravery as a rocket ship skipper in the Inchon landings. He had almost forgotten the religious flutterings of adolescence. He had learned to leave his prickly relatives to their chosen injustices and to live for Tony Lowder.

He found his lawyer's duties in Hale & Cartwright congenial to his post-combat nature. He loved being able to throw all his force into a given case, without having to fret unduly over the equities. He had been allowed to cut his legal teeth on a cluster of small law suits, the kind that big firms have to take on as accommodations: divorces of relatives of partners, claims by discharged domestics, nuisance suits amounting to petty blackmail. The clients were pleased by his vigorous representation, and Tony received good raises. It struck him that the typical customer of Hale & Cartwright wanted his lawyer to be a bulldog that licked his hand and snarled at everyone else.

Tony did not kid himself, when he defended a rich woman, notoriously forgetful, against the claim of a small milliners' shop which she swore she had never patronized, or contested the suit for alimony of a penniless wife against a husband who was currently bankrupt but the heir to future millions, that he was serving any great cause or promoting any public good. But people had to have lawyers, didn't they? And Tony Lowder had to make a living.

Max Leonard was the self-appointed politician among the clerks of Hale & Cartwright, the man who studied the backgrounds and habits of the partners to try to determine what sort of associate they were most likely to promote, the man who was always gossiping with other associates about their chances, the man who considered every possible way of "making the grade" but the obvious one of hard work. Yet he had a charm to cover his buzzing activity and an ingenuity to conceal his basic superficiality. Tony saw through Max, but he found him pleasant, largely because Max so much admired him. The latter was already probing the possibilities of their setting up on their own, and Tony suspected that Max, if on the light side for Hale & Cartwright, might still be the perfect front man for a smaller organization.

It was at the Leonards' apartment that he first met Joan. Elaine Leonard, whose blonde prettiness already augured a ‹ plump figure and who was already expressing public doubts that she and Max were the perfect young American couple they had seemed at their wedding, was torn between her jealousy of Max's constant fussing over his handsome friend and her own pleasure at having Tony around.

"Who is that stunning girl in the corner?" Tony asked her. "She lookeds like the heroine of a Joan Crawford film. You know the type: cool, possessed, ambitious."

Elaine did not need to turn around. "It's Joan Lane, not Joan Crawford. But at the end of the movie you'll find she's just the same. She won't, like a Crawford heroine, have given up everything for love."

"Let me be the judge of that."

"You want to meet her? Don't get too thick. Max has other plans for you. He wants you to marry an heiress."

"Must we do everything Max says?"

"You'll find it's easier. It saves you from being manipulated with hidden wires."

"Why didn't
he
make a rich marriage?"

"He should have. But never fear. He'll live again in you. Perhaps he and I both will."

"What kind of talk is that?"

Elaine's eyes rested on him, mocking, irked, even rather desperately hopeful. "Does it embarrass you, Tony, to have made a hit with both the Leonards?"

But Tony had grown too accustomed to Elaine to be embarrassed by her. "Do me a favor, will you? Introduce me to Joan."

When he had taken the other man's place in the corner with the tall, pale girl with the long black hair, he felt at first that she might not have noticed the substitution. She had been talking about decorating, which was evidently her trade, and she continued to discuss a sample of new material which Elaine had pinned to the curtain behind them.

"But then I suppose the room's such a medley it doesn't matter," she concluded.