Ray Bradbury Stories, Volume 1 (116 page)

‘I’m going back to the room,’ he said. ‘I’m tired.’

‘We only drove a hundred miles from Pátzcuaro.’

‘My throat is a little raw again. Come on.’

They moved away from the music and the walking, whispering, laughing people. The band played the ‘Toreador Song.’ The drums thumped like great dull hearts in the summery night. There was a smell of papaya in the air, and green thicknesses of jungle and hidden waters.

‘I’ll walk you back to the room and come back myself,’ she said. ‘I want to hear the music.’

‘Don’t be naïve.’

‘I like it, damn it, I like it, it’s good music. It’s not fake, it’s real, or as real as anything ever gets in this world, that’s why I like it.’

‘When I don’t feel well, I don’t expect to have you out running around the town alone. It isn’t fair you see things I don’t.’

They turned in at the hotel and the music was still fairly loud. ‘If you want to walk by yourself, go off on a trip by yourself and go back to the United States by yourself,’ he said. ‘Where’s the key?’

‘Maybe I lost it.’

They let themselves into the room and undressed. He sat on the edge of the bed looking into the night patio. At last he shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and sighed. ‘I’m tired. I’ve been terrible today.’ He looked at her where she sat, next to him, and he put out his hand to take her arm. ‘I’m sorry. I get all riled up, driving, and then us not talking the language too well. By evening I’m a mess of nerves.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

Quite suddenly he moved over beside her. He took hold of her and held her tightly, his head over her shoulder, eyes shut, talking into her ear with a quiet, whispering fervency. ‘You know, we
must
stay together. There’s only us, really, no matter what happens, no matter what trouble we have. I do love you so much, you know that. Forgive me if I’m difficult. We’ve got to make it go.’

She stared over his shoulder at the blank wall and the wall was like her life in this moment, a wide expanse of nothingness with hardly a bump, a contour, or a feeling to it. She didn’t know what to say or do. Another time, she would have melted. But there was such a thing as firing metal too often, bringing it to a glow, shaping it. At last the metal refuses to glow or shape; it is nothing but a weight. She was a weight now, moving mechanically in his arms, hearing but not hearing, understanding but not understanding, replying but not replying. ‘Yes, we’ll stay together.’ She felt her lips move. ‘We love each other.’ The lips said what they must say, while her mind was in her eyes and her eyes bored deep into the vacuum of the wall. ‘Yes.’ Holding but not holding him. ‘Yes.’

The room was dim. Outside, someone walked in a corridor, perhaps glancing at this locked door, perhaps hearing their vital whispering as no more than something falling drop by drop from a loose faucet, a running
drain perhaps, or a turned book-leaf under a solitary bulb. Let the doors whisper, the people of the world walked down tile corridors and did not hear.

‘Only you and I know the things.’ His breath was fresh. She felt very sorry for him and herself and the world, suddenly. Everyone was infernally alone. He was like a man clawing at a statue. She did not feel herself move. Only her mind, which was a lightless, dim fluorescent vapor, shifted. ‘Only you and I remember,’ he said, ‘and if one of us should leave, then half the memories are gone. So we must stay together because if one forgets the other remembers.’

Remembers what? she asked herself. But she remembered instantly, in a linked series, those parts of incidents in their life together that perhaps he might not recall: the night at the beach, five years ago, one of the first fine nights beneath the canvas with the secret touchings, the days at Sunland sprawled together, taking the sun until twilight. Wandering in an abandoned silver mine, oh, a million things, one touched on and revealed another in an instant!

He held her tight back against the bed now. ‘Do you know how lonely I am? Do you know how lonely I make myself with these arguments and fights and all of it, when I’m tired?’ He waited for her to answer, but she said nothing. She felt his eyelid flutter on her neck. Faintly, she remembered when he had first flicked his eyelid near her ear. ‘Spider-eye,’ she had said, laughing, then. ‘It feels like a small spider in my ear.’ And now this small lost spider climbed with insane humor upon her neck. There was something in his voice which made her feel she was a woman on a train going away and he was standing in the station saying, ‘Don’t go.’ And her appalled voice silently cried, ‘But
you’re
the one on a train!
I’m
not going
anywhere
!’

She lay back, bewildered. It was the first time in two weeks he had touched her. And the touching had such an immediacy that she knew the wrong word would send him very far away again.

She lay and said nothing.

Finally, after a long while, she heard him get up, sighing, and move off. He got into his own bed and drew the covers up, silently. She moved at last, arranged herself on her bed, and lay listening to her watch tick in the small hot darkness. ‘My God,’ she whispered, finally, ‘it’s only eightthirty.’

‘Go to sleep,’ he said.

She lay in the dark, perspiring, naked, on her own bed, and in the distance, sweetly, faintly, so that it made her soul and heart ache to hear it, she heard the band thumping and brassing out its melodies. She wanted to walk among the dark moving people and sing with them and smell the soft charcoal air of October in a small summery town deep in the tropics
of Mexico, a million miles lost from civilization, listening to the good music, tapping her foot and humming. But now she lay with her eyes wide, in bed. In the next hour, the band played ‘La Golondrina,’ ‘Marimba.’ ‘Los Viejitos,’ ‘Michoacán la Verde,’ ‘Barcarolle,’ and ‘Luna Lunera.’

At three in the morning she awoke for no reason and lay, her sleep done and finished with, feeling the coolness that came with deep night. She listened to his breathing and she felt away and separate from the world. She thought of the long trip from Los Angeles to Laredo, Texas, like a silver-white boiling nightmare. And then the green technicolor, red and yellow and blue and purple, dream of Mexico arising like a flood about them to engulf their car with color and smell of rain forest and deserted town. She thought of all the small towns, the shops, the walking people, the burros, and all the arguments and near-fights. She thought of the five years she had been married. A long, long time. There had been no day in all that time that they had not seen each other; there had been no day when she had seen friends, separately;
he
was always there to see and criticize. There had been no day when she was allowed to be gone for more than an hour or so without a full explanation. Sometimes, feeling infinitely evil, she would sneak to a midnight show, telling no one, and sit, feeling free, breathing deeply of the air of freedom, watching the people, far realer than she, upon the screen, motioning and moving.

And now here they were, after five years. She looked over at his sleeping form. One thousand eight hundred and twenty-five days with you, she thought, my husband. A few hours each day at my typewriter, and then all the rest of each day and night with you. I feel quite like that man walled up in a vault in ‘The Cask of Amontillado.’ I scream but no one hears.

There was a shift of footsteps outside, a knock on their door. ‘
Señora
,’ called a soft voice, in Spanish. ‘It is three o’clock.’

Oh, my God, thought the wife. ‘Sh!’ she hissed, leaping up to the door. But her husband was awake. ‘What
is
it?’ he cried.

She opened the door the slightest crack. ‘You’ve come at the wrong time,’ she said to the man in the darkness.

‘Three o’clock,
señora
.’

‘No, no,’ she hissed, her face wrenching with the agony of the moment. ‘I meant tomorrow afternoon.’

‘What is it?’ demanded her husband, switching on a light. ‘Christ, it’s only three in the morning. What does the fool want?’

She turned, shutting her eyes. ‘He’s here to take us to Parícutin.’

‘My God, you can’t speak Spanish at all!’

‘Go away,’ she said to the guide.

‘But I arose for this hour,’ said the guide.

The husband swore and got up. ‘I won’t be able to sleep now, anyway.
Tell the idiot we’ll be dressed in ten minutes and go with him and get it over, my God!’

She did this and the guide slipped away into the darkness and out into the street where the cool moon burnished the fenders of his taxi.

‘You
are
incompetent,’ snapped the husband, pulling on two pairs of pants, two T-shirts, a sport shirt, and a wool shirt over that. ‘Jesus, this’ll fix my throat, all right. If I come down with another strep infection—’

‘Get back into bed, damn you.’

‘I couldn’t sleep now, anyway.’

‘Well, we’ve had six hours’ sleep already, and you had at least three hours’ this afternoon; that should be enough.’

‘Spoiling our trip,’ he said, putting on two sweaters and two pairs of socks. ‘It’s cold up there on the mountain; dress warm, hurry up.’ He put on a jacket and a muffler and looked enormous in the heap of clothing he wore. ‘Get me my pills. Where’s some water?’

‘Get back to bed,’ she said. ‘I won’t have you sick and whining.’ She found his medicine and poured some water.

‘The least thing you could do was get the hour right.’

‘Shut up!’ She held the glass.

‘Just another of your thick-headed blunders.’

She threw the water in his face. ‘Let me alone, damn you, let me alone. I didn’t mean to do that!’

‘You!’ he shouted, face dripping. He ripped off his jacket. ‘You’ll chill me, I’ll catch cold!’

‘I don’t give a damn, let me alone!’ She raised her hands into fists, and her face was terrible and red, and she looked like some animal in a maze who has steadily sought exit from an impossible chaos and has been constantly fooled, turned back, rerouted, led on, tempted, whispered to, lied to, led further, and at last reached a blank wall.

‘Put your hands down!’ he shouted.

‘I’ll kill you, by God, I’ll kill you!’ she screamed, her face contorted and ugly. ‘Leave me alone! I’ve tried my damnedest—beds, language, time, my God, the mistakes, you think I don’t
know
it? You think I’m not
sorry
?’

‘I’ll catch cold. I’ll catch cold.’ He was staring at the wet floor. He sat down with water on his face.

‘Here. Wipe your face off!’ She flung him a towel.

He began to shake violently. ‘I’m cold!’

‘Get a chill, damn it, and die, but leave me alone!’

‘I’m cold, I’m cold.’ His teeth chattered, he wiped his face with trembling hands. ‘I’ll have another infection.’

‘Take off that coat! It’s wet.’

He stopped shaking after a minute and stood up to take off the soggy coat. She handed him a leather jacket. ‘Come on, he’s waiting for us.’

He began to shiver again. ‘I’m not going anywhere, to hell with you,’ he said, sitting down. ‘You owe me fifty dollars now.’

‘What for?’

‘You remember, you promised.’

And she remembered. They had had a fight about some silly thing, in California, the first day of the trip, yes, by God, the very first day out. And she for the first time in her life had lifted her hand to slap him. Then, appalled, she had dropped her hand, staring at her traitorous fingers. ‘You were going to slap me!’ he had cried. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Well,’ he said quietly, ‘the next time you do a thing like that, you’ll hand over fifty dollars of your money.’ That’s how life was, full of little tributes and ransoms and blackmails. She paid for all her errors, unmotivated or not. A dollar here, a dollar there. If she spoiled an evening, she paid the dinner bill from her clothing money. If she criticized a play they had just seen and he had liked it, he flew into a rage, and, to quiet him, she paid for the theater tickets. On and on it had gone, swifter and swifter over the years. If they bought a book together and she didn’t like it but he did and she dared speak out, there was a fight, sometimes a small thing which grew for days, and ended with her buying the book plus another and perhaps a set of cuff links or some other silly thing to calm the storm. Jesus!

‘Fifty dollars. You promised if you acted up again with these tantrums and slappings.’

‘It was only water. I didn’t hit you. All right, shut up. I’ll pay the money. I’ll pay anything just to be let alone; it’s worth it, and five hundred dollars more, more than worth it. I’ll pay.’

She turned away. When you’re sick for a number of years, when you’re an
only
child, the
only
boy, all of your life, you get the way he is, she thought. Then you find yourself thirty-five years old and still undecided as to what you’re to be—a ceramist, a social worker, a businessman. And your wife has always known what she would be—a writer. And it must be maddening to live with a woman with a single knowledge of herself, so sure of what she would do with her writing. And selling stories, at last, not many, no, but just enough to cause the seams of the marriage to rip. And so how natural that he must convince her that she was wrong and he was right, that she was an uncontrollable child and must forfeit money. Money was to be the weapon he held over her. When she had been a fool she would give up some of the precious gain—the product of her writing.

‘Do you know,’ she said, suddenly, aloud, ‘since I made that big sale to the magazine, you seem to pick more fights and I seem to pay more money?’

‘What do you mean by that?’ he said.

It seemed to her to be true. Since the big sale he had put his special logic to work on situations, a logic of such a sort that she had no way to combat it. Reasoning with him was impossible. You were finally cornered, your explanations exhausted, your alibis depleted, your pride in tatters. So you struck out. You slapped at him or broke something, and then, there you were again, paying off, and he had won. And he was taking your success away from you, your single purpose, or he thought he was, anyway. But strangely enough, though she had never told him, she didn’t care about forfeiting the money. If it made peace, if it made him happy, if it made him think he was causing her to suffer, that was all right. He had exaggerated ideas as to the value of money; it hurt him to lose it or spend it, therefore he thought it would hurt her as much. But I’m feeling no pain, she thought, I’d like to give him all of the money, for that’s not why I write at all, I write to say what I have to say, and he doesn’t understand that.