The Deceivers (12 page)

But she was completely and compulsively sexual, inventive, demanding and experimental, shameless and greedy and aggressive, insatiable and bold. When he was away from her he would feel shame when he thought of the sweaty tableaus he had endured, but at the end of the day he would find himself waiting at the end of the corridor in headquarters where they met, and feel the sick thumping of his pulse when she would come teetering and clicking down the corridor on the high heels she loved, hips swaying in an absurd parody of a ladylike walk, her welcoming smile eager and knowing and anticipatory.

It was a sickness in him, and the most evident symptom of his disease was the continuing ability to meet all of her demands on him.

The affair lasted over eight months. During that time, when the news came announcing the birth of Nancy, he felt as though it were something that had happened on a remote planet, a birth to a woman he did not know, but had heard of somewhere, a long time ago.

The affair ended on a Sunday afternoon. There had been gin, too much gin, and a turbulent and meaningless quarrel, and then they had made love, and then he had slept. He had awakened first, with dried mouth and fast pulse and sweat cold on his body. She was beside him, facing him, still asleep. Her mouth was open and she breathed at him the stale spices of the foods she had eaten, and that scent was mingled with the distinctive acid tartness of her perspiration. He looked at the black tangle of hair and the sallowness of her
and the large dark brown nipples and felt so suddenly, so strongly repelled that his stomach twisted and he thought he would be ill. He dressed quietly and collected the things in the apartment that were his, and crammed them in the musette bag he had once left there and put it by the front door. Then he shook her awake. While she was still dazed by sleep he told her he was leaving for good. She jumped up and followed him, naked, to the door, screaming at him, calling him foul names, beating at his back with her small hard fists, but he would not give her the pleasure of walking more quickly. When he reached the street entrance he could still hear her voice.

He had not anticipated how difficult it would be not to go back to her. He had not known the spell of evil was so strong, or that he was so vulnerable to it. During the next week he exhausted himself with hard exercise, and tried resolutely to keep her out of his mind, but she kept creeping back in, and in each pose there was more provocation than the last. But he fought it successfully and, ten days later, when he was transferred to General Dora’s headquarters in Kunming, he was grateful that it had been taken out of his control.

In Kunming he was given staff work that was more immediate and practical and made more sense to him. He began, once again, to write to Joan with greater regularity and in greater length. He felt as though he had gone to the edge of the world and teetered over the blackness below and had, with the greatest luck, started to find his way back to the center of things.

And it was in Kunming that he worked for a time on a special assignment under a Colonel Gregory Dean who, in peacetime, was a top executive with the Ballinger Corporation. They took an immediate liking to each other. It was Colonel Dean who made possible Carl’s promotion to captain and who, over several long evenings of conversation, convinced Carl that he would do well to come with Ballinger after the war. Dean guaranteed him a position at an increase over what he had been making at Carrier.

He saw Sandara Lahl Hotchkiss once more, and for the last time. He was sent down to New Delhi as a courier officer. He found out she no longer worked at Theatre Headquarters, that she had been discharged for some infraction of the disciplinary rules. That evening he loitered outside her apartment for forty-five minutes. She came out with a Navy lieutenant
commander, a bulky young man with a red face. Though Carl moved away quickly, there was no need to. She was clinging to the Navy’s arm in a possessive way he well remembered, and she was talking up at him, and he saw from the look of her eyes and the shape of her mouth that she was giving him her special variety of virulent hell. The Navy’s mouth was clamped shut and his face was perhaps not as red under other circumstances. He stood behind them and looked at the sway and flaunt of her little hips, and the teetering heels and the sinuous waist, and felt nothing. No desire, no regret, no lingering shame, but only a great swelling relief that he had gotten out of it so little impaired.

It had been his only infidelity, yet it had been a most serious one. He knew that he had drifted into it because of his loneliness and a feeling of unreality and futility. And from it he had learned that, under the right provocation, he was a more sensuous man than he had imagined. By the time he was flown back to the States, flown back for discharge at Camp Dix, he had so completely recovered from the impact of Sandy that her face was blurred in his mind. He had phoned Joan from the West Coast, and she had come down to New York and taken a hotel room for them. They spent a wonderful week in New York, and got over their initial shyness with each other. He checked in with Mr. Gregory Dean at Ballinger and was told to report to the Camden plant on November 15th. Then he went back with Joan to Youngstown to see his family and to meet the daughter, over a year and a half old, whom he had never seen. And who managed to adore him on sight.

   Now, in the bathroom, the smudge of Cindy’s lipstick on the ball of Kleenex seemed to be a symbol of the eight months during which Joan had been, for the only time in their mutual lives, of almost no importance or interest to him.

After he was in bed he tried to dispose of the Cindy problem with great coldness and logic. After all, it was no problem. A kiss was not a problem. A special awareness was not necessarily a problem. They were both adults, and so nothing beyond what had already happened would be permitted.

But, even as he struggled to be adult and reasonable, his mouth remembered the taste of hers, his hands remembered the sinewy planes and softnesses of her back, his chest
remembered vividly the high strong thrusting of her breasts. And the fragrance of her was suddenly in the room. Desire moved through him, a dark oiled shifting in his belly and loins, a sudden shallowness of breathing, sweaty palms and staccato heart and a prickling of the skin on the backs of his hands and the nape of his neck.

At three-thirty he got up and took a pill, and when the alarm went off he did not hear it, and when he awakened abruptly it was twenty-five after nine, and Joan would be operated on in thirty-five minutes.

He arrived at the hospital, at ten minutes of ten. The pill he had taken made his head feel as if it were full of vast metallic echoes that smelled of machine oil. There had been no time for breakfast. Yes, Mrs. Garrett has been taken to the operating room. No, it will not be possible to see her. I cannot tell you when it will be possible for you to see her. From the operating room she will be taken to the recovery rooms for post-operative care. She will probably be brought down to her room some time this afternoon. No, Dr. Madden has other operations scheduled this morning, and he won’t be free until noon.

“I wonder if I could see the other patient in 314. Miss Rosa Myers. For just a minute.”

He was given reluctant permission. Rosa was in a wheel chair by the windows.

“Well, good morning!” she said. “And I might say you look like you had a rugged night on the town.”

“I couldn’t sleep and I took a pill and then I didn’t hear the damn alarm, so I didn’t get here in time to see her. How is she?”

“Much as I’d like to have you keep your guilty conscience, Carl … I may call you Carl?… they started needling her at eight-thirty. By nine-thirty, she was loaded. High. She was so gay and drunky, it didn’t fret her a bit that you didn’t show. I don’t even think she remembered you were supposed to.”

“That makes me feel better, Rosa.”

“Now the big trick is to find out what goes on up there. They seem to like to keep it a state secret. There’s a small waiting room on the fifth floor, and when the surgeons leave the operating room they pass by it. You can tell them by the green outfits they wear. They look like oversized elves.”

“Thanks, Rosa.”

“Ask me anything. I feel like I’ve been in this place for years.”

He did not check in again downstairs but went on up to the fifth floor. He found the waiting room. It was quarter after ten. He felt very alone.

Suppose it was not as routine as Bernie had indicated. Suppose when they opened her up they found …

“Carl, sit down. I hate to have to tell you this.”

“Do you mean …”

The fantasy assumed the vividness of reality in his mind. He could see just how it would be, how their friends and neighbors would react, how the people at the shop would react. Suddenly they would be tragic figures, the woman doomed, the man stern and heartbroken and brave, determined to make the little time left to her as happy as possible, but always aware of the great emptiness he would face after she was gone. Telling the kids would be horrible. Kip’s only acquaintance with death had been when Joan’s father had died in ’43 when Carl had been overseas. But he had been so tiny then it had been meaningless. This would strike dreadfully close. Joan would not be told. She would think that she was getting better. But then, one day, she would read it in his face, perhaps see the gleam of tears in his eyes in an unguarded moment …

And quite suddenly he was sickened by the selfish bathos of his fantasy, realizing that he was getting a certain amount of curious satisfaction out of thinking of himself as a tragic figure. He wondered what kind of a man he was, what unsuspected streak of coldness could make it possible for him to indulge himself in this shallow game at Joan’s expense.

It was a good marriage. It had been and it would continue to be good. The world was a cruel and lonely place, and disasters struck in a disconcertingly casual manner, and if you could find one other human being who was irrevocably committed to you, then you were ahead of the game. They had achieved a rare contentment.

But he was still disturbed that he had been able to project the fantasy so vividly that for several hypnoid minutes he had been reconciled to hopelessness and death. He wondered if it could be merely a protective device, a kind of self-anesthesia which could partially soften the jolt were the news bad. Or was it a basic coldness in him, a remoteness?

Joan had often complained about this remoteness, his spells of keeping himself to himself. Though his parents
were both warm, outgoing people, both he and Marian had been moody children, shy and often depressed, with a need for privacy and solitude, without the knack of making and keeping friends.

As he had grown older he had learned the tricks of friendship, acquired a somewhat spurious degree of that extroversion necessary to be at home in a smiling rotarian world. But he had never felt at ease or at home with most of the trappings of goodfellowship. He envied other men their ability to cope with utmost sincerity with the bawling of sentimental songs at service club meetings, their bluff locker-room manners, their ability to chortle at the bawdy and unfunny joke, their casual and meaningless use of the leggy girls who livened their business conventions.

He had conformed insofar as it was possible for him to conform. He had learned to address a meeting or a group with an ease of manner that masked the weak feeling in his knees, the sweaty palms, the feeling of being a damn fool. He had laughed at all the jokes and had told some of his own, and he played golf and joined the clubs and played his expected part in the nonsense of cocktail parties and cook-outs, but too often he would sense that the smile he wore was pasted there in a grotesque way, that he was actually from some alien world, less hearty, less sweaty and more skeptical.

Joan had grown accustomed to his apartness. His reluctance to give her all the normal, casual gestures and words of affection no longer caused her to feel the need of reassurance of his love for her. She was physically, actively affectionate, with frequent little pats and hugs and words of endearment.

He had convinced himself that despite his surface restraints, he loved her deeply. And that he was capable of love. And had convinced her. And he had adjusted himself to accept, as a condition of his life, those frequent moments when he would feel completely unreal, as though in his secret heart he were an impostor condemned to live out his life as Carl Andrew Garrett.

So, there in the waiting room, he eased his conscience by telling himself that his fantasy had been meaningless, that it was just another evidence of the same offbeat imagination that had prevented him from committing himself to his maximum capacities to the destiny of Ballinger.

And to prove it, he devised another game. This was a hospital
in a world designed on a different basis. He had this day been constructed out of the raw stuff of life, built, clad and equipped with all the memories of a life he had never known. And now he waited until they completed the construction of the female entity who would be his wife. From this day on they would progress backward through time. Each day would be in normal chronological sequence of hours, but the day after each Christmas would be December 24th. So, together, they would move back through all the memories, powerless to change any word or action, back, inevitably, to the day before he met her, back then through school and childhood, back to the misty grasping mind of the infant, and then into the pre-birth blackness. Each man and woman in the world would be in the same trap. There would be all the conventions about growing old, providing for the future, accepting the inevitability of eventual death, but they would all know, but could not say aloud, the truth that they moved forever backward through artificially imposed memories to the first and final day of their lives.

But he tired of that game, and the time moved with a dreadful slowness. He thought of what they might be doing to her, and his mind would slip and veer away from images too vivid.

At eleven-thirty two men in pale green operating costumes came down the hall, talking to each other. He got up quickly, but sat down again when he realized neither of them was Bernie Madden. Nurses went by, walking briskly.