The Dark Descends (7 page)

"Costing who?" Del asked.

"Eliot, mainly. He was doing television publicity, which he loathed. He went into it originally as a temporary thing, to get a stake to see him through his doctorate. But you know how it is, temporary has a way of becoming permanent when the money's good, especially if you've taken on obligations and—But I was paying, too. Being cozy and comfortable inside a cocoon can be soul-destroying, and I had seven years of it."

"Sounds boring as hell," Kitty said, with a laugh.

"Unless you have kids," Rebecca said. "But you don't have kids, do you?"

"No. We decided—" Joyce broke off. Damned if she'd go into that. "I wasn't bored, though. You see, I discovered I had a real flair for home mechanics. I practically rebuilt the house from top to bottom, and that took—"

"Seven years?" Veronica asked. "Seven years of home mechanics? And you didn't go off your nut?"

"Working with your hands can be satisfying," Del said, before Joyce could answer. "It gives you a sense of accomplishment, even when you know you're not accomplishing anything much. I used to be into making pottery, so I know. The thing is, you can get so far into the handicraft scene that you shut out everything else. Which isn't good."

"You're right," Joyce said. "That's exactly what I was doing, shutting things out, and it wasn't good. But then I woke up, and I was able to—"

"Woke up to what?"

"Why, to Eliot's needs, of course. Somebody who starts out with the ambition to scale intellectual heights isn't going to be satisfied doing something that doesn't provide a real mental challenge. If it hadn't been for me, he would have resumed work on his dissertation long ago. Once I faced the fact that providing a cozy existence for me was costing Eliot too much, I realized that things couldn't go on the way they were, that I'd have to stand on my own two—"

"Bullshit."

"Del," Kitty said reprovingly.

"It
is
bullshit. She sounds too good to be true. Who gives up the cutesy-pooh paradise where she's been nesting for seven years without a struggle? It's not human. It's not—"

"I'm not saying it was that easy. It wasn't easy at all. But when honor demands—"

"Honor? Who the hell thinks about honor when her lifeline's being cut?"

"When one is civilized—'

"Nobody's ever that civilized, baby! You know what I think? I think Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm here has more self-awareness than you. I think you come on like this because you've never confronted your problems in a gut way. I think—"

"That's quite enough!" Joyce was astounded at the intensity of the anger in her voice. Not warranted. Not warranted at all. Speaking bitterness was the name of the game: there was nothing personal in it. "Frankly, my dear," she began, exerting self-control, and was pleased that her tone sounded light and casual, "I don't give a damn
what
you think."

Del opened her mouth for a rejoinder, but apparently thought better of it. Slowly her tense face relaxed in a grin, though the red-rimmed eyes remained passionate. "Spoken like a gentleman," she said, echoing the casual note. "But remember, baby, even gentlemen lose their cool sometimes."

"Do they?"

"Do they ever!" Veronica said with gusto, and at once launched into an anecdote concerning the most gentlemanly man she had ever set eyes on, a Baptist minister in Houston, who had invited her to his private box in the Astrodome and tried to make her while a ball game was in progress. Pithy, graphic, and thoroughly irreverent, the story reduced everybody, even sorrowing Rebecca, to fits of laughter.

Anecdotes, outbursts, sporadic infighting—that was the way things usually went. Often some very real problems were introduced, but they never seemed to get explored very far; somehow the sessions, when they didn't lack direction, lacked follow-through. It was too bad, it was really too bad, that more couldn't be accomplished. Joyce had once said as much to Kitty, who had explained that the whole conception of women banding together to discuss matters other than clothes, the kids' schooling, and hubby's food preferences was totally new, so it was hardly surprising that progress was slow.

Well, perhaps. Joyce was not convinced. Not that it mattered. What if it was sometimes hard to tell the difference between a consciousness-raising session and an old-fashioned hen party? One evening a week was taken care of, and that had to be counted a plus. A great big plus. It wasn't so easy to find things to do away from home. Tried and trusty distractions like the theater, movies, concerts, and sightseeing jaunts were okay once in a while, but no use kidding herself, the absence of the post-mortems she and Eliot used to hold after every outing caused fresh pangs of nostalgia. Even if this had not been the case, it was a truism that distraction gone at full tilt soon loses its power to distract, so, for the most part, it was necessary to cope with the noise, and cope she did, with the aid of wax earplugs (plugs of rubber and earmuffs had been tried and found wanting). The wax hurt her ears when she kept it in for too long, and it didn't shut out the noise entirely, but, resorted to late at night, it enabled her to sleep.

One can, over a period of time, build up a tolerance for noise, just as one can build up a tolerance for pain. It is largely a question of exerting the will, of forcing oneself to keep busy with things that require full attention. Joyce kept busy. She made herself some summer clothes. She knitted a sweater for Eliot in a complicated Aran pattern. She worked a succession of difficult, tedious jigsaw puzzles of abstract paintings until the thought of Mondrian or Jackson Pollock was enough to make her flinch. She wielded a razor blade on Ivory soap to carve the whimsical animals that had delighted the children of friends in Moccasin until she had produced a supply to outlast the dispensing of Christmas gifts for the next decade.

The siege was bound to end. It was bound to. Nobody could keep it up forever. Charlotte Bancroft would see reason eventually. There were limits to vindictiveness, after all. In the meantime, cope and go on coping. Joyce went on coping. Coping well. How well was brought home to her one day when she was walking past a midtown construction site, unruffled by the noise of the drill and by the vibrations underfoot and evidently showing it, for a deaf-mute rushed over to her and happily began addressing her in sign language. A triumph for mind over matter.

...

"You could get a tall stepladder, put the speaker of your hi-fi up against the ceiling, and blast back with a different station," Sheila said.

"Not such a hot idea," Dick objected. "All the horrible hag has to do is switch her dial to that station, too, and she's getting enhanced amplification."

Sheila was not fazed. "Well, how about records? The same record over and over until she screams for mercy."

"That's more like it," Dick said. "And I know just the record for you, Joyce. Respighi's
Feste Romane
. Somebody gave it to us for Christmas, and I swear the damn thing would wake the dead."

"Let's keep our eye on the ball, huh?" Sheila said. "Applying the kiss of life isn't exactly the idea, is it? How about
Death and Transfiguration
?"

Joyce laughed. "Sounds absolutely brilliant, but I'm afraid it might backfire on me. Mine isn't a repeating turntable, so I can't just start it and go away and leave it, and if I should happen to be more suggestible than she is—Still, I could always invest in a new turntable, couldn't I?"

"Don't do anything rash," Dick said. "You might be getting into deep waters. If the power of suggestion does its stuff, they'll book you as an accessory after the fact. Or before it."

"Well, perhaps I could choose something more subtle in the way of program music. How about The Rite of Spring? I can just see our sainted Charlotte dancing out into the street, straight into the arms of the men in the white coats."

"Hide all her clothes before you start the music," Dick said. "It should make for a better spectacle."

All three of them laughed, Joyce harder than the others. How marvelous to be able to laugh about it. Here, removed from the battlefield, in an atmosphere generated by straight, wholesome people without arty kinks, one recovered one's sense of humor, if only temporarily. Bless Sheila, who radiated health from her burnished gold ponytail to her pedicured bare feet. She had done really well for herself in latching on to Dick. He had never been much to look at, and he was pared down to skin and bones and not much else now, with signs of the hard drinking he was prone to etched on his face, but he had in full measure the qualities that wore well. Lucky Sheila.

Lucky in another respect as well. For she had grown up in this vast barn of an apartment, had had it passed on to her when her parents moved to Florida, and, like most New Yorkers in possession of large, rent-controlled apartments where the rent was lower than what other people paid for one room or two, had burrowed in till the millennium. (Neighborhood changing for the worse? Take a taxi after dark. Bugs? Call the exterminator.) The bliss of having all this space! Lucky Sheila. Lucky, lucky, lucky—

"You know, Joyce," Dick said, "that spare room of ours is pretty much going to waste. Why don't you stay here till the ear gets better? We'd love to have you."

"Oh, I couldn't. It's wonderful of you, really it is, but my ear doesn't hurt anymore. It's as good as new after a couple of days' rest. I think I must have jammed the wax in too hard. Anyway, I've imposed on you too much already, calling you up in the middle of the night and practically inviting myself over."

"Don't be such a dope," Sheila said. "What are friends for? If it gets so bad you can't stand it, remember you're always welcome here. At any hour of the night or day. I really mean that."

"I know you do," Joyce said. And she did know. She felt at home here. She always felt at home here. The room itself, large and rambling, squared off at one end and rounded to an arc of windows at the other, seemed to welcome everything. It welcomed the paintings on the walls, donations from clients whose work had, at one time or another, passed through the flourishing artists' agency Dick and Sheila had built up from nothing, ranging from realistic (a beauty parlor scene depicting electrolysis) to way-out futuristic (disembodied, weightless forms copulating—appearing to copulate—on some lunar landscape). It welcomed the furniture, representative of every era from prehistoric times (the slab of rock forming the base of the coffee table) to the present (Dick's black leather contour chair).

Suddenly, embarrassingly, Joyce burst into tears.

Tears, tears, tears. They came frequently; they came unbidden. The ear gave trouble again, and the specialist Joyce consulted told her she had an inflammation and wax was out for the duration. So she was at the mercy of the din. If a million cacodemons had been loosed upon the earth and instructed to do their worst, they could have come up with no torment more barbarous than Charlotte Bancroft's radio. Had Dante anywhere described a bombardment of noise as a punishment for the damned? A great oversight if he hadn't. Some of his punishments were tame in comparison with the horrendousness of having one's ears pounded and pounded and pounded until the inside of one's head seemed to be held together with wires, all red hot, all throbbing excruciatingly. On and on and on and on it went. Hour after hour after hour. Night after night after night. And so she cried. And despised her weakness.

But tears were not the worst of it. There was a considerable to-do at the office over a missing page of copy for which she was responsible. The article, one about Lewis and Clark, had already subjected her to the ordeal of going through channels to get a wrong date corrected, and the loss seemed like the last straw. The most likely possibility was that the page had strayed over to the desk of Ann Berger, where many missing papers came to roost as though by magic—apparently even to Ann, who took a tongue-lashing without a murmur and docilely instituted a search through the jumble on her desk. But the page failed to turn up, and Joyce was well into a passionate oration on the subject of other people's carelessness when one of the type-setters came in to tell her there was a paper imprisoned between her desk and the glass wall of the office.

There was a frightful scene with Irene McCarthy in a coffeehouse. It culminated an evening that was a series of disasters, beginning with the discovery that the smorgasbord restaurant Joyce had been fond of years ago had been swallowed up by the earth and her acceptance of Irene's choice of a Spanish restaurant, only to be reminded too late—how unreliable Irene's palate had always been. Then, at the theater, the English actor who was, by all critical assessments, carrying the play of a compatriot on his back was indisposed, and the ranting of his understudy proved how badly the play needed carrying. Or so Joyce thought. Irene disagreed, and what began as a dispute over aesthetics changed in a twinkling into a real cat-fight, in the course of which Irene's grievances erupted ("Must you be so god-damned smug? All you're good for is to pronounce superior judgments. Who do you think you are anyway? From where I sit, you come on like one of the lilies of the field. Maybe a little toiling and spinning over the years would have improved your character"), and Joyce was not slow to retaliate ("Maybe you ought to worry about your own character. From where I sit, you come on like a cantankerous, embittered spinster so eaten up with envy of married women she can't see straight").

Worst of all, there was the dream. Joyce was a little girl again, dressing her doll in the familiar room under the sloping roof. How clearly and sharply she could see everything—as though she had left only yesterday. The high four-poster bed. The cherry-wood bureau. The dressing table with the pink organdy skirt and the heart-shaped mirror. The big bookcase completely filled with books, because, Mommy always said, you couldn't acquire a good habit early enough. Joyce was taking great pains with her doll, who had a new dress (pink organdy, to match the skirt of the dressing table). It was an important day. Mommy and Daddy were coming home from Washington this afternoon. How excited she was[ Downstairs, Mrs. Swenson was humming "Long Ago and Far Away" and clattering dishes in the sink. All of a sudden, the humming and the clattering stopped, and footsteps came up the stairs. Brisk, no-nonsense footsteps. Not Mrs. Swenson—she always came up slowly and heavily, groaning all the way. It was Aunt Blanche. Boring Aunt Blanche, whose frozen face always seemed to crack when she smiled, whose kisses tasted of Sen-Sen. Today she wasn't smiling and she didn't offer a kiss; she just stood in the doorway with a dull, dead look in her eyes, like somebody who wasn't really there at all. And Joyce was frightened. So very, very, very frightened...