The Deceivers (20 page)

But understanding her motivations perhaps better than she understood them herself did not produce any solution to the problem.

He finished mowing the lawn at two o’clock, took a quick shower and went to the hospital. The curtains were drawn around the other bed. Joan, in a hushed voice, told him that it was a Mrs. Mincher, a seventy-four-year-old woman who had tumbled down her own cellar stairs, breaking her thigh and wrist, cracking her pelvis and fracturing her skull. Miss Calhoun had gotten the information on her, and her condition was listed as serious. It was not yet known whether she would live. She was under heavy sedation, and the most severe fracture had not yet been set because she had been in deep shock when brought in.

Joan said, “The poor old thing moans so.”

“Will she disturb you?”

“Oh, no. It isn’t very loud. You’ve been in the sun.”

“Just for a little while. I just finished mowing the lawn.”

“Did you sleep late this morning, darling? You look more rested than you did last night.”

“I got up about ten-thirty, I think it was.” (And she was taking a shower when I woke up, and later she came out with a towel wrapped around her wet hair, turban-fashion, and came smiling toward me, and when she is naked and knows I am watching her, it changes her walk so that she appears to place her feet more delicately and precisely, stepping a little higher, like a sleek and spirited horse in a show ring.)

“Why don’t you play golf this afternoon? It looks like a lovely day.”

“It’s getting pretty hot.”

“What time do you have to be at Molly and Ted’s?”

“Around six. We’ll probably all troop over here and see you and then go back and eat.” (And I haven’t told her yet.)

“This morning, dear, I walked down to the elevators and back. I felt as if I’d walked around the world. I was utterly pooped.”

He smiled at her. He could think of nothing to say to
her. He felt like an impostor, a man carefully trained to make Joan Garrett believe that he was her husband, but who now had run out of all the lines and comments they had taught him, and dared not say more for fear of saying the wrong thing. This Joan Garrett seemed to be a very nice woman. Carl Garrett must have been a lucky man. Too bad that it had been felt necessary to eliminate him and send, in his place, this articulated robot with its taped voice reel and its chromium heart and its frozen plastiform grin. And it seemed quite sad that this warm and merry Joan Garrett should have to be the most recent member of that vast group of wives on whom this plausible deception has been worked, condemned to spend the rest of her years with a clever mechanical device equipped with electronic relays which permits it to make all the expected responses, but which because of the limitations of manufacturing technique could not be equipped with a heart or a soul.

“Do you feel all right, dear? You look kind of … somber.”

“I guess I’m lonesome.”

“When they send me home Monday you’ll wish the house was empty again. It’s going to make me very irritable to have to stay in bed most of the day.”

“I won’t mind that.”

   When he drove back to the house, he checked next door and found the car was not back yet. He knew he would have to tell Cindy about going to the Raedeks for dinner. She had said nothing about when she would drive back home, or even whether she would come back at all. He realized that she had seemed curiously evasive about her plans—almost coy, in fact. And he suddenly realized that she expected him to drive back out to the motel in the afternoon. He wondered at his own dulled perceptions.

The motel pool was empty. He knocked at the door of the room. He had the feeling that the room was empty, and was slightly shocked at the extent of his own feeling of relief. He knocked more loudly and waited. The lock clicked and the door opened and she looked out at him through the six-inch gap, her face thickened and dulled by sleep.

She gave him a blurred smile and looked cautiously beyond him, then swung the door open for him and turned and padded back to the bed, the tan of her long flat back in vivid contrast to the white flexing of her buttocks. She
sprawled on her back and pulled a corner of the sheet across her middle, yawned vastly and said, “I hope you didn’t stand out there knocking too long. I was so dead I couldn’t figure out where I was, even.”

He had closed the door and he sat on the other bed, lighted two cigarettes and gave her one. She yawned again, and indulged herself in a long lithe and tawny stretch that ended in a shudder.

“I’m glad you woke me up. I was having a foul dream. What time is it, darling?”

“Twenty to five. What was the dream?”

“It’s all sort of mixed up, but it was awful. I got a present in a long white box, the sort of box cut flowers come in. It arrived while I was having a party, a rather big party, and whenever anybody arrived, I kept hoping it was you. Then somebody gave me that box and said it had been delivered to the door and they gathered around to watch me open it. I didn’t know if it was from you or from Bucky, and it was terribly important that I know, because if it was from Bucky I could open it in front of them, and if it was from you, it was going to be some kind of a message, a sort of symbol, that I wouldn’t want them to see. It was as light as a, feather, as though nothing was in the box, and I knew that if nothing was in the box, then it was from Bucky. My God, I’m beginning to realize just how Freudian this is. I better not tell the rest.”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, I had to open it. There was tissue paper and when I folded that back, I saw a horrible thing. I stood so the others couldn’t see into the box, and I knew I had to pretend that it wasn’t horrible. It was your arm, darling, severed at the elbow but not bleeding, and your fist was clenched. I knew that if I could pick it up and wave it around as if it was light as a feather, then they would all believe it was from Bucky and everything would be all right. But when I tried to pick it out of the box it was hard and cold and very heavy—made of bronze or something. I had on a long white dress like a wedding dress, sort of, but very tightly fitted, and I had made it myself, and I hadn’t had time to do more than baste the seams. I wasn’t wearing anything under it. Each time I strained in desperation to pick the arm up, I felt seams in the dress split, and they had all begun to laugh at me, and I knew the dress was falling off me. I was half crying and trying to pick it up, but each time it
would slip out of my hands and thump back into the box, and then the noise it was making turned out to be your knocking on the door, thank God.”

“That’s a damned strange dream.”

She looked at him, and then pulled more of the sheet across her so as to cover her breasts. “Is it?”

“Don’t you think so?”

Though the daylight in the shuttered room was dim, he saw her face darken. “The symbolism is so damn obvious. And so physical. You know what the arm represents. And the virginal wedding dress. My God, I must have a mind like a sewer.”

“Not necessarily.”

“The interesting thing, Carl dearest, is my frantic efforts to keep the others from knowing about you. And how I couldn’t keep them from knowing about you. It will be wonderful not to have to hide what’s happened to us, darling.”

“The dream says you want to hide it. Maybe the dream says you should hide it.”

“The dream says we can’t hide it.”

“Cindy … we have to talk about this.”

“I said we could talk later, darling. Not in this place.”

“Maybe this is the place where we should talk. We have to talk sometime. I’ve been thinking about how to say things. But when I frame the sentences in my mind, they sound tired and trite—like lines from all the bad plays in the world.”

“What do you want to say?”

“That … I don’t want to change anything. I want to keep the marriage I’ve got. I couldn’t explain just how we happened to get into this situation, but it was going to be just a case of … of grabbing all we could and then … forgetting it.”

She threw the sheet aside and went to the closet and slipped into her robe and belted it. She adjusted the slats of the blinds so that the room became brighter. She sat on the bed, facing him, and pushed hair back from her forehead with the back of her hand and smiled in a slightly serf-conscious way and said, “I couldn’t lie there and talk. Give me another cigarette, darling.”

“It all makes me feel as if somehow I had been put in a bad light, Cindy, by not wanting to go along with … this marriage thing. But that wasn’t the arrangement in the beginning. I mean I didn’t count on it starting to turn into something else.”

She leaned forward for the light and then leaned back again, huffed a gray column of smoke toward his chest. “Be more explicit, dear,” she said in a cool voice. “We both wanted to get laid. And we had a perfect opportunity. No regrets, no recriminations, no sticky emotional mess. So we did, and now we forget it.”

“That’s pretty blunt … but … yes. All right.”

“And then all it is, all it ever will be, is a tired, tawdry, sneaky little spot of adultery—à la motel?”

“Isn’t it more than that, somehow?”

“Is it?”

“You keep asking questions.”

“Give me time and I’ll make a statement,” she said. She got up quickly and paced back and forth by the foot of the bed, elbow cupped in her palm, upright hand with cigarette angled back, frowning at the floor six feet ahead of her slow pacing. At last she whirled toward him so quickly that the wide skirt of the robe swung out from her bare ankles.

“All right, Carl Garrett. Statement from Cindy. I try, so help me, to be reasonably honest with myself. I said, Cindy, I said, you want to make a big deal out of this so that you can think of it as a many-splendored thing instead of a little extracurricular coupling with a handsome neighbor. And, my girl, all this futz about not being able to endure the thought of living without him is just the window dressing your sick emotional mind is using to obscure the basic fact that you are at this point a pushover. Maybe any man would have done, Cindy. I told myself that. It didn’t work, Carl.”

“I had that same idea,” he confessed.

“I expected you would. So, because it didn’t work, I had to take a longer, colder look at the emotional facts. We’re both miscast, Carl, in life and in marriage. Your Joan is a warm, sweet, lovable, loyal little woman. Neither of us want to hurt her. She lives in a constricted little world of children, cooking, housework and garden club. You get as much intellectual stimulation from her as you would from an amiable airedale.”

“Now wait …”

“Hear me out, and then you can make your objections. Take a look at what your marriage has done to you. You have damn near become a vegetable. You don’t commit yourself to your work. You’ve slid into a t.v. and do-it-yourself existence. You avoid having any ideas, because they are uncomfortable things to have around. You’ve managed to almost
turn yourself into the typical suburban Dagwood, the lovable guy with an itch for complete security. All your opinions have become secondhand stuff you’ve gotten out of the cheap analyses of our environment that you can read in any newspaper. You’re afloat in your little warm puddle of security, Carl, with your eyes closed and a big contented smile on your mouth. You aren’t dead, but all you are doing is marking time until you are. And if I want to give up, that’s the same thing my marriage will do to me. Darling, they only give us one quick turn around the track, and it’s a stinking shame to have to spend the good part of it asleep on your feet. When you love, you want to give something. I want to give you back … your awareness and risks and dangers and … the feeling of being intensely alive.”

She stabbed her cigarette out, knuckled wet eyes in a child’s gesture, and then sat opposite him and half-smiled and said, “Big speech. Now you talk.”

Even as he gauged the depth of his own anger, he knew that it was partially caused by an element of uncomfortable truth in what she said.

“That’s a fine speech, Cindy. And it’s a very young speech. We’re supposed to clutch each other’s hot hands and canter off toward adventure, leaving behind us two adults and four kids who would never know exactly what hit them. We’re supposed to strike brave sparks off each other, and live gallantly and furiously.”

He stood up to pace as she had done, speaking as he walked, glancing at her from time to time where she sat with still face and averted eyes. “It’s young, all right. It’s the kind of thing that fills the quaint little bistros of all the art centers of the world with girls who wear black sweaters and bangs and talk about Colin Wilson. God damn it, Joan is no mental giant, but she is sound in what she believes. I’m no mental wizard either. What the hell do people like you think marriage is? A discussion hour? An ideological argumentation period? Marriage is mostly having somebody on your side, somebody who, throughout your life, gives you the incredible gift of being acutely and specifically concerned with what happens to you—your health and your work and your happiness. Marriage is having somebody near you.

“Maybe you are right about my having slipped into a nice comfortable rut, Cindy. Sure, I feel a sense of being wasted. Who doesn’t? I titillate myself with that precious little sorrow
every now and again. It’s one of the great pleasures of man—to say to himself, boy, what I
could
have done. A bitter-sweet pleasure. But in my more rational moments I think of the cost of a continual complete expenditure of myself. I might have gained a certain fame in small circles. I might be, by now, a rich man. And I might have ulcerous holes in my gut and a stumbling heart muscle too. People like to talk about compromise. That word has a sickly stink to it. It has a dishonorable sound. I’ve arrived at an equation, not a compromise. I have carefully judged my point of diminishing returns. At this point in my life I receive the maximum gratifications and the maximum leisure for the minimum output. I take a deep and, I assure you, very strong pride in my wife, my home and my kids. This is my turn around the track as you call it. One hundred years from now it won’t matter a damn whether I was Chairman of the Board of the Ballinger Corporation, or a stock clerk. So I’m going around the track at a pace I find suitable for me.”