The Deceivers (11 page)

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you see? It’s so damn cheap. That’s the thing about it. It’s such a horrid and typical little suburban game.”

“So,” he said heavily, “maybe we can leave it that way. A little experiment on a summer night in suburbia. And forget it.”

“Can we really do that?” she asked in such a subdued way he could barely hear her.

“Now who’s helping?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I mean, Carl. One of the things I’ve been cursed with all my life is a passion for complete honesty and frankness. Plus an unhealthy amount of
curiosity. Maybe, if we’re frank with each other, we can open up this little infection and let it drain. Or maybe, God knows, we can talk it to death.”

“It started last New Year’s Eve, Cindy.”

“I know it did. When you were drunk. I wanted you to be too drunk to remember.”

“And ever since then I’ve been telling myself I feel one way about you, and hiding the other way so that even I couldn’t see it.”

“You hid it so well I couldn’t see it either.”

“But it was there. And here’s another thing I’d like to believe about myself. That hidden … response to you started to come out in the open last night and tonight. But it’s as though we’d been tricked some way. I mean that when Joan and I planned the time she’d be in the hospital, I had no way of knowing you would be alone here.”

“I can play that game. When Bucky had the sprinkler system put in he had no way of knowing I would trip and fall at such a terribly strategic time. But maybe I’m wrong there. Maybe my subconscious mind was aware of the location of the sprinkler head and steered me into it so that I would get special attention from you.”

“I don’t think so. It’s just the timing. It’s a sort of trap that was set for us, Cindy.”

“What I want you to know and believe, Carl, is that I am a good person. By that I mean I’m not mischievous, or flirtatious or experimental. And by that I mean that I’m not trying to turn this into a dramatic game because I’ve seen too many movies. Or because I’m bored, or restless or discontented. I am restless and discontented, but I think I’m honest enough with myself to keep from using you as a temporary remedy.”

“You don’t have to explain that to me.”

She snapped the cigarette out into the dark yard. “We’re not getting anywhere with this. I’ll be clinical. I happen to be physically very darn vulnerable right now. Not only because the physical side of my marriage has been … personally inadequate for quite a long time. So all this is a big fat rationalization. It’s just an animal need, so I’m cloaking it with a lot of fancy words.”

“Do you believe any part of that?”

“Now who’s not helping?”

“All right. I’m sorry.”

They were silent for several minutes. He heard the insect sounds in the night. His heart had slowed. He felt tired.

“Carl?”

“Yes, Cindy.”

“If we’re going to be honest, you must know something. A kiss is not supposed to be a shattering affair. I had never known I could be so thoroughly shook up by a kiss. I couldn’t have imagined that any kiss could make me so … damnably and almost obscenely … ready.”

“I sensed that. The readiness. And I keep wondering if maybe in trying to be honest or talk it to death or whatever you want to call it, maybe on another level we’re merely trying to maintain … all that awareness.”

“That’s a stinking thing to say!”

“If we’re going to be honest, let’s be completely honest. I’m sitting here perfectly aware of the fact that this little talk has its inevitable ending. That’s the scene where we tell each other it can go no further, that we are both people of character, that we are too fine to get involved in any sticky little infidelity, and we can’t hurt Joan this way and we have responsibilities to our families and ourselves and so on. And we shake hands on it, or something. Hell, I’m aware of that and so are you. It’s the only way the conversation can conceivably end. But that does not deny the fact that I can sit here and try in desperation to think of some way I can take you to bed and still manage to save my face and yours, that I think there is some glittering rationalization just out of my mental reach, and if I can grasp it and explain it to you, then we might feel that it was our God given right to pile into the sack and have at it.”

“Don’t. Please don’t.”

“What good is honesty if it only goes so far? Then it’s as bad as the thoroughgoing lie. Maybe worse. Let’s not, for God’s sake, dwell on the fine textures and subtle flavors of our souls. We’re a man and a woman and we were stupid enough, or I was, to lift the lid on the box and let the monsters out. And we aren’t going to be able to do a damn thing about it. And that won’t be the result of character, it will be the result of emotional logic.”

“All right, all right,” she said, and her voice was tired. “I should have slapped your face and marched into the house. And now I think I better go in. Maybe if we expose this to some daylight it won’t seem so enormous and dramatic. Maybe in the daylight, Carl, it will look small and cheap and beery and … manageable. But it certainly doesn’t look manageable right now, does it?”

“No.”

“But it’s got to be.”

“Yes, I know that. Good night, Cindy.”

He stood up and stepped back, aware that he should not get too close to her. She went in without word or gesture, her shoulders at a weary angle.

He paused at his back door and went to the red maple. The kitchen lights were on and he saw her go from the yard into the kitchen with the bottles and glass she had dropped. He watched her sit in the booth, and then he saw her lower her head to her outstretched arms. He could not tell if she was crying.

His own house had an odd look to him. He could not identify the strange feeling he had about it. And then he remembered a time in his childhood. He had been about eight and Marian had been about four, and the family had gone on a long motor trip one summer, to far away places. They had returned on a Sunday afternoon. And when they had gone into the house it had a dusty locked-up smell, and everything had looked strange to him—slightly out of proportion and of a different hue than he remembered. Even his own room and his toys had been distorted by an alien magic. It was as though, while they were gone, the house had been completely destroyed, and then rebuilt by people who had been able to get it almost right.

As he prepared for bed, he saw the mark of her lipstick on the corner of his mouth. He rubbed it off carefully and looked at the smear on the piece of Kleenex. It seemed a symbol of all deceits, a painful clue to all infidelities, an index of the faithless.

In seventeen years of marriage, he had committed but one infidelity, and that affair had been of an intensity which, he believed, had cured him for all time. He had learned that he could not survive in the emotional climate of infidelity.

And he remembered Sandy …

Carl Garrett had been drafted into the army in March of 1942. The Carrier Corporation had attempted to have him deferred as essential to the war production effort, but it had been denied. Carl, himself, had asked for deferment on the basis of Joan’s pregnancy, but it had been a half-hearted request, made out of a feeling of obligation to Joan. He had wanted to serve in the armed forces, and had the feeling that if he did not, he would forever feel as though he were not quite a legitimate member of his own generation.

Kip was born in August of 1942 on the first day of Carl’s compassionate leave from OCS. After he was commissioned in October of 1942, he was assigned to the Signal Corps and ordered to report to Washington. After a frantic search he found a small and shabby apartment in Alexandria, and Joan closed the Syracuse apartment and joined him. He was in Washington eight months, and, in June of 1943, as a first lieutenant, was given fourteen days’ leave before reporting to Camp Anza near Riverside, California, for overseas shipment to the CBI theatre. The leave they granted him gave him time to get Joan settled with his parents in Youngstown.

He went out to Anza by train, and had six days in the harsh dryness of the yellow sun and in the cold purple shade before embarking on the
Brazil
for Bombay. He shared a small cabin with seventeen other first lieutenants, and the forty-one day voyage with stops at Hawaii, Wellington, Melbourne and Perth made all the accustomed things of his life seem very far away indeed. He felt not only an almost uncomfortable freedom and lack of responsibility, but like a most impartial observer who could watch everything about him, and also observe his own behavior with remote interest.

From Bombay he was flown by ATC to New Delhi, billeted in a room for four in the Victoria Hotel, and assigned to the staff of the Theatre Signal Officer.

India gave him the impression of being a vast circus grounds a week after the circus had left. Dust and smells
and debris and the sun-parched grasses. He could never get used to the poverty—the bloat and the stick-limbs of the starving, the fly-clotted pus around the eyes of a baby in arms, the fungoid sores of the beggars, the great sour reek of the market places. The Indians had an insinuating and disturbing servility about them.

Here, amid the filth and turmoil of New Delhi, were the great arid buildings of British H.Q. and United States Theatre Headquarters. There seemed to be to him no purpose or reality in the staff work he was asked to do. They were forever making out lengthy requisitions for Signal Corps supplies for mysterious Chinese forces termed Xray, Yoke and Zebra. The estimated manpower of these proposed forces fluctuated wildly from week to week, as did the estimates of what tonnage could be airlifted over the Hump into China.

The Victoria Hotel was a concrete structure with huge barren rooms, plagued by mice, by petty thievery and by drunken officer personnel. Their room bearer was named, inevitably, Ali—and he made a specialty of being unavailable whenever there was any legitimate use for his services. On too many nights Carl would lie in the lumpy bed under the mosquito bar and listen to the slow creak of the ceiling fans and the distant hootings and laughter from other rooms. Sometimes at night the jackals would invade the city and run in gibbering packs.

When he arrived there was a thick packet of letters from Joan. He sorted them chronologically, and the third one he opened informed him, a little too bravely and blithely that she was again pregnant, with a tentative date of January of 1944. Her letters were chatty and warm and loving and amusing.

He tried to fit himself into the routine of New Delhi. He managed to acquire a ponderous khaki-colored bicycle on which he braved the curious traffic problems of the New Delhi streets. He wrote long descriptive letters to Joan, and he tried to make sense of the staff work he was asked to do. He made friends and played bridge and volley ball. He drank gimlets and a strange British concoction called a Suffering Bastard. He made trips to the station hospital for treatment of athlete’s foot and prickly heat. He ate butter that tasted of goat. He went to the coffee shops and walked through the market places and procured a guide book and dutifully visited places of historical interest.

But he felt oddly unreal, as though he were a two dimensional man, a purposeless figure in a mythological place.

   Her name was Sandara Lahl Hotchkiss and she was called Sandy. She was an Anglo-Indian girl, or, as the American officers termed that racial mixture, a chi-chi. She was from Calcutta, and she was employed in CBI Headquarters in the Special Services Section as a civilian. She was five feet five, twenty-four years old, with coarse and shiny black hair, a sharp-featured, handsome but rather sallow face, very dark eyes, a cute, fragile-looking figure, a confidence and self-possession that amounted almost to arrogance, and a very very British accent that was faintly contaminated by the curious singsong cadence of the Anglo-Indian.

He had noticed her around headquarters, but the first time he had talked to her was at a dance at the hotel when, on impulse, he had cut in when he saw her dancing with another officer he knew rather well. She had looked very pretty in a pale blue gown, her black hair in an intricate styling, her bright eyes shadowed, her smile quick. There was an intense, quivering aliveness about her that intrigued and stimulated him.

The officer she had come with passed out, and Carl, after considerable delicate maneuverings, managed to be the one to take her home. She lived but four blocks from Theatre Headquarters, in an upstairs apartment in a building on the south side of Conneaut Circus. She was very argumentative and opinionated, and on that evening they sat in the front room of the apartment and argued bitterly in hushed voices to keep from disturbing her roommate.

The next day was Sunday. He met her by prearrangement and they took a tonga ride through the more pleasant suburban part of the city and returned to her place in the late afternoon. Her roommate was out. A half hour after they had entered the apartment, he possessed her on the shabby settee in the tiny front room of the apartment, and again, an hour later, in the more spacious bedroom of the apartment.

During the next week the first building to house junior officers was completed, and Carl was moved out of the hotel. At about the same time Sandy’s roommate disappeared. “She had to go back to her people in Agra because of sickness,” Sandy explained. She wanted to look for another roommate. She did not make enough money to carry the apartment
alone. Carl persuaded her to let him pay fifty rupees a month toward the upkeep of the apartment.

After the affair had gone on a month, Carl knew her very well and knew that she was very unsuitable. She was arrogant and selfish and lazy. She was quarrelsome and demanding. She was half-educated, and coarse, and she treated the Indian servants with a vicious contempt that continually embarrassed him. She was such an inveterate, incurable liar that it was impossible for him to piece together any coherent personal history. She demanded dozens of small, intimate attentions, and became furious when he was not as obedient as any servant. Their quarrels were violent and exhausting, and it was a rare week when he did not plunge out of the apartment, vowing never to return. She had a fishwife temper and her tantrums were like those of a small child, rolling and drumming her heels and screaming.