The Deceivers (5 page)

He went to a drive-in and had a hamburger and a milkshake and listened on the car radio to the Yankees scoring heavily against the Red Sox. He felt restlessly alone in the world. He had gone away many times. He had gone to a war and he had gone on business trips, and once he had gone on a hunting trip to Canada as a guest of the Treasurer of Ballinger. But she had never gone away before. Not in seventeen years of marriage. She had never been in hospital since they were married with the two exceptions of the births of Kip and Nancy. And this time was not like those times. He had been scared then, but not in this way.

The car next to him was full of teen-age boys. They were kidding the car hop in a noisy and unfunny way, and she was not taking it well. When he blinked his lights she came and got the tray and the tip and said good night, mister.

He drove home, knowing how empty the house would be, and how empty her bed would be. Sunday evenings had always been a quiet and pleasant time for them. Perhaps the television set would fill the emptiness, or at least mask it.

When he turned off the turnpike he looked west and saw the nightglow of the city against the overcast. There was summer lightning in the hills a dozen miles beyond the Silver River. It would be hot down in the city tonight, and they
would sleep on the roofs and fire escapes and in the parks and they would hope for rain. The neighborhood bars would stay full until late because it would be too hot to think of leaving the hum and frosty breath of the air-conditioner to go back to hall bedrooms. The young girls would walk arm in arm, giggling over their delicious mysteries, arching their backs slightly and whispering together when they passed the young men who stood outside the sundries store. And the young men would make casual appraisal of the young swaying abundance of hip, and the tilt of the nyloned breast, and spit toward the gunmetal trunk of the light post and, quite often, two of them would leave the others and saunter after the girls with enormous casualness.

And, he thought, down in the city tonight there will be episodes of an ugly and savage violence. The sweating cops who make the arrests will be irritable and brutal. In small stale rooms the sweet coppery stench of blood will float on the motionless air.

There were a lot of words for Hillton. Industrial complex. Lunch-bucket town. A forward-looking American city making a wise and valiant effort to solve its problems of traffic congestion, slum clearance, high taxes and high crime rate. Or, a vital clog in the industrial might of America. Or, a rather inviting target for an atomic warhead. Or, a foul and grubby place to live and try to bring up kids, for God’s sake, and keep them from running wild.

It was, he suspected, like all of the other cities in the heartland of America. Or maybe all of the cities of all time. Dedication mated to venality. Energy and progress linked to idleness and sin. But in this time, louder than ever before, rang out the plea that was more than half command—AMUSE ME. Fill these sour hours of this, my own and only life, with the gut-buster joke, the rancid ranch-hand laments about love, the talcumed armpits and shaven crotch of commercial love, the flounderings and hootings and vomitings of the big bender. By God, I want the girlie shows and the sex books, and a big cigar is a sign of masculinity and success. I want to be slim without dieting, smart without half trying, rich without working. And I want to read all about it, read all about hell for the other guy—with pics of him strewn on the highway, or cleaved with an axe, or being carried out of the mine. So I can hug old precious, invaluable, unique and irreplaceable me. Amuse me. That keeps me rolling along,
boy. So I can live without dying, and right at the end of my world, die without thinking. Then all the rest of you can go to hell because I won’t be here, and by God, when I was here, I had it good. I had it sweet and hot and often.

After he had parked the wagon next to the little Hillman, known in the Garrett family as Lucinda May, he went into the house and hung up the gray sports jacket, took off his tie, rolled his sleeves up, pried holes in a can of beer. He turned lights on all over the house, opened windows to let a frail west breeze through, and turned on television. He checked the five available channels and found nothing that he felt like watching. He looked through his records and could find nothing he wanted to play. He leafed through the current copy of
Life
, glancing at the pictures, skipping the text. He threw the magazine aside and went into the kitchen and opened another can of beer. It was a little after ten, and he knew he could get a good night’s sleep, and it would be a sensible thing to do, and there were some pills that would push him over the edge into sleep in a gentle but convincing way, but he did not feel like sleep.

He carried his beer out through the screen doors onto the patio. (Item: 1955 project. Removed big picture window with flanking dormer windows from south wall of living room. Enlarged opening. Replaced with folding glass doors and screen doors opening onto the patio that had been 1954’s major project. Managed to conceal all evidences of unskilled labor. Left hand folding door has never worked right. Much experimentation with weather stripping still does not eliminate wintry blast when winter wind is from south.)

He sat on the low wide wall and sipped his beer. At infrequent intervals he could hear a distant grumble of thunder to accompany the summer lightning in the west. The west breeze had turned gusty. He looked into the house, and decided that when Joan was well they should go through the living room and mark some items for disposal. Somehow, without being aware of it, they had acquired too much stuff. The room was looking cluttered. The clean lines of the low furniture were being destroyed.

He got up and stepped over the wall and strolled to the west boundary of his land. The Cables’ house was set about
five feet lower than his. Barrow Lane sloped down from his corner lot at what they had told him was a seven percent grade. He was above the roof level of the houses farther down the street. He walked to the red maple that had replaced the one assassinated by the Rikers and hooked his arm in the crotch of it and looked at Cindy Cable.

The kitchen window was about thirty-five feet away, and five feet below him. The fluorescent lights made the kitchen glaringly bright. She sat in the breakfast booth on the far side of the kitchen, elbows on the table, a book open in front of her. She sat there, dressed as he had seen her in the hospital, with cigarettes, lighter, opened beer bottle and a third of a glass of beer. It made him feel guilty to look in at her. Due to the screen of plantings, you could not look from one house into the other. But from this place on the lot he could see into the kitchen perfectly. She had pulled a strand of her dark blond hair forward and she wound it around a finger. He watched her sip the beer, turn pages, light a cigarette.

There was, for him, an inexplicable quality of tension in the scene. It was as though he looked into a stage set. Girl sits reading. Somebody enters. Or something. He felt an odd compassion for her vulnerability, something that he had previously felt only about Nancy. She was alone on a summer night, and the dark world was full of dark motives. Her slim attractiveness was a provocation to the things of the night. But, of course, nothing happened and nothing would. The night bugs would bang their hypnoid heads into the screening, and she would read her book until she finished it, or felt sleepy and went to bed.

On impulse, and because he was both lonely and restless, he walked cautiously down the abrupt slope and then across the flatness of their rear yard to the kitchen door. He stamped on the two concrete steps noisily and said, “You sell beer, lady?”

“Come on in, Carl,” she called. She got up from the booth as he walked into the kitchen. “Hey, you’ve already got a beer.”

“One tenth of an inch left in the can. And, to be perfectly truthful, a full six pack in the refrigerator. If you’re short I can …”

“Got scads,” she said. She took a bottle out of the icebox and jacked it open on the wall opener in the corner. The cap came off but the magnet failed to catch it and it fell behind
the waste basket. “Damn!” she said. “Last week I would have dived after it. Now it can stay right where it is.”

“No glass. I’m a bottle man.”

They sat in the booth, facing each other. “What are you reading?”

She turned it so he could see the jacket. “A modrun novel. All full of hangovers, remorses and fornication. It’s supposed to be a tragedy, sort of, and see it says here that it ranks right up there with
Appointment in Samarra
. But I find it faintly queasy and mostly dull. I’m a classicist, I guess, when it comes to tragedy.”

“How do you mean?”

“I haven’t tried to put it into words before. I mean that if you take a lot of mealy little people who have already sort of sold their souls down the river before the book even starts, then you can’t really give a very large damn about what happens to them. The author can put them into perfectly frightful situations, and the poor little things can run back and forth, bleating like anything, but you sort of say so what.”

“But isn’t it a tragedy to them?”

“Hell’s bells, boy! Isn’t life itself a sort of experiment in tragedy? That sounds a little too good to be me. I must have read it some place. I’ve got a ragbag mind, full of snipped ends and bits. Tonight Mr. Walter Upshot and his wife Delicious Upshot and their three little Upshots are killed when their Super Rapier tries to uproot a hundred year old elm tree in West Armpit, Wisconsin. And that’s too damn bad, and I can feel empathy and a sort of remote grief for the Upshots. But it isn’t my kind of tragedy.”

“What’s your kind?”

“Before something can fall in a dramatic and glorious way, it has to be way the hell up in the air. There has to be a greatness and grandeur about it. And then it falls, and it’s a long time falling, and it makes a glorious and tragic noise when it hits bottom. Hamlet. Richard the Third. You see, life never let the little worms in this book get off the ground. Or the author didn’t.”

“I don’t know.”

“You look pretty dubious, old antagonist. Let’s cook up an argument here.”

“Well, Cindy, it’s just that you sound pretty damn arrogant. As if you’re looking down on all us poor little worms. Suppose, and this is a hell of a poor example to use, I guess, but just suppose that Bernie should find that Joan has got something
 … malignant and incurable. Your way of thinking makes it impossible for me, under those circumstances, to experience legitimate tragedy. You leave me with just a sort of sniveling grief. Because I’m one of the little guys. Whoever authored me never let me get off the ground.”

“Well, that
does
require an answer, lad. I better take it in segments. First off, I am not being arrogant and patronizing. I don’t think my soul is so grand and its texture so fine that I can participate in any grand tragedy.”

“And I can’t either, then.”

“Don’t jump so fast. Give a girl breathing room. I have been talking about classic literature. Not about life.”

“Shouldn’t they be the same?”

“Not in the dramatic sense. Look, you are a good man, Carl. There aren’t too many around who have that quality of gentleness and goodness that you have. Take your mind and add selfishness and arrogance and a quality of greed and you could have been a very powerful man. But that doesn’t alter the fact that there are a lot of good men in the world and a lot of good women who have had to hear the kind of sorry news that you used as an example. Illness is a condition of living. You can’t make dramatic material for the novelist out of a statistic.”

He drank from the bottle and put it down. “Okay. Statistic. I guess a lot of ambitious young men have killed young women who stood in their way. Rather ordinary young men. Selfish and greedy. So a guy like Dreiser makes a novel of it that not only stands up, but I would consider a legitimate tragedy, even though the fallen could not be considered grand and mighty.”

“Hmmm,” she said. “That rocks my little boat, but I don’t quite founder. Take good old Crescent Ridge, this sterling experiment in planned community living. Make me a tragedy in this locale, sir. I mean a dramatic tragedy. Take that Crosby thing over on Shattuck Road last year. She was sleeping around and he was the traditional last to know, and when he found out, he cut his wrists but they found him in time and now they’re divorced. But you know and I know that her pseudo-nymphomania was based on alcohol, and she drank too much because living sober with that petty little self-important tyrant was too much to take. And we both know that the wrist cutting was so superficial he could have been found twenty-four hours later without any special damage done.”

“No, Cindy. We’re just too close to Crescent Ridge. And we
both despise certain aspects of it for too many of the same reasons. If we could be objective, we could see legitimate tragedy, maybe not in the case of the Crosbys, but certainly in some other episode.”

“Dear Carl, I didn’t mean to imply that your example would make you something weak and sniveling. It won’t happen, of course, but were it to happen, you would take it in a gutsy way. But the guy who wrote this book wasn’t dealing in that area. He is in an area where I seem to be currently functioning.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Forget it. I shouldn’t have said it. Refill?”

“If you’re having one.”

“I certainly am. A true slob goes all the way. I am going to put on pounds of suet.” She brought the beers back to the booth and slid in and sat with her cheekbone propped against her fist in a way that tilted her left eye up. “But I am not going to stick with books of this ilk. I wonder what language ilk comes from? No, I am moving from this into the hard stuff. Stuff I’ve neglected too long. I want to flex some of the sagging muscles between my ears. You should too, Carl. It will give us some fertile new areas for argumentation.”

“I know I should. I used to read a lot. I’d program my reading to pick up the stuff other kids learned in liberal arts colleges while I was taking banking and insurance and accounting in the Wharton School at Pennsylvania. Big programs. Anthropology one winter. Then geology. Then archeology. I started to goof when we moved out here. There didn’t seem to be any time. Too much do-it-yourself. And then the Crescent Ridge Association and so on. Now my reading is pretty superficial stuff. Escape, I guess. No work involved. Who killed whom, and who rose to the rescue of the beleaguered wagon train. I should start again, I guess.”