Trust (81 page)

"Oh God.
Stef,
" William's son groaned. "Cut it out, will you?"

"She's mad because I once asked her how rich she was. Well I know your father's always telling me I have this tendency to assess money-value, not that it's so bad if I do. If you ask me so does he. The only difference is I do it out loud."

The pods of Mrs. Purse's eyelids split wide. "Obviously no one
here's
ever been in want of a fat purse," and punched the jolly flesh of her padded jowl "I'd say three thousand, thirty-five-hundred for that little job?" she guessed, gliding her tongue toward the gold-brown of the cabin. "Though no one can match Mr. T. for generosity—" Did she hope someone would make her a gift of the boat then and there? She had a humorous afterthought: "A terrible lot of fathers in this conversation—I wish I had a penny in my purse for every one of 'em! Including," she added, "your stepfather. I didn't know you had a stepfather, what with your mother passed away—"

"
Her
mother?" Stefanie said.

"She's dead."

"
Her
mother's not dead."

"Hm," said Mrs. Purse, unfazed by resurrection. "I'm glad to hear it."

I burnt my ships. (Ships, not boats.) "And Tilbeck lives off her," I told her for no reason other than danger.

She did not grasp this.

"He doesn't have any money of his own. It's all hers. If he gets Harriet Beecher a new dress,
she's
the one who's bought it."

"Who's this Tilbeck?" William's son asked finally.

"The caretaker," I offered, presenting Mrs. Purse with Vindication Number Three.

But it was less welcome than the others. She said heavily, "That makes sense. Someone employs him to live here? Your mother employs him? That makes sense." She sighed like a falling tree. "
We
were never taken in. Though it'll be a shock to poor Purse. Promises made and so forth. He had hopes. Well, I have to see to my hungover baby," and made a little distance between us.

"Hopes!" Stefanie said, uncomprehending but only briefly bitter. "Everybody has hopes some time or other. We had hopes until we got here." She turned up a pleading palm to William's son. "Come on, pussyhead, sit with me. Right here. The sand's so nice and warm under my fanny. Quit looking mean,
you
couldn't know the Marines'd landed."

But he did not respond. His legs spread with deliberation. I saw the bluish globes of sweat on the breast of his shirt, extending meridians down from his armpits and up from his navel and groin. "Exactly what're you doing here?" he put it to me.

"Vacationing."

"Cut it out. You gave up Europe."

"That's right," Stefanie accused. "She gave up Europe."

He persisted: "Last time we met you swore you didn't know this place existed. You didn't give up Europe just to come
here.
"

"Why not?" Mrs. Purse intervened, showing a glint of vengeful little tooth below a fatness of gums. "Could be she's here for the same reason you are."

"Oh, not her! Nobody even dates her! She never looks at anybody! Ovum and Virgin—dead Latins, that's all
she
likes," Stefanie blew out; her nape yielded to flatness and she spread her hair among seashells, laughing.

"You haven't seen her look at the caretaker," Mrs. Purse called back—she had begun to climb away from us. Her words dissolved: "Wait'll you've seen"—the gossamer tail of the dirigible came sailing out, and it might have been "Mr. Implausibility" that she smeared across the sky; or might not Perhaps it was only "Nicholas T.," with the orphan Gustave unthreaded in air.

"Mr. Generosity!" I yelled up the hill to Circe, spitting malice for malice. "He gives himself, like so few of us!" She thought me her dark rival in covetousness, not of cash but flesh. Ponderously she gained the earlobe of the slope, then its mound. The sun spattered her out of sight; little by little she faded off.

"Horrible thing, talks like a garage," Stefanie said. "What were all those horrible kids before? Bunch of ghosts."

"Tilbeck salvaged them out of the Automat."

She tittered. "What happens if you put a nickel in that woman?"

"She brings forth," I said, "a child, a machine, or a pun on pocketbooks. They're practising Urdu for digging fossils in Pakistan. I've only known them"—this was melancholy—■ "one day."

"What a day!" But she had already given up thinking of my acquaintance with Purses, or its length; she was rejoicing in life and weather. A sudden mood sat her up. "Did she mean you're in love?" she asked in awe. "With that what's-his-name—"

"Nick," I said. "Nick's his name. The source," I told William's son, "of Mrs. Vand's miscellaneous expenditures."

He took this meditatively. "You really
do
know everything," he said. "You did right along. That's quite an act you've been putting on."

"No act. He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."

"For Pete's sake, if it isn't politics it's got to be poetry. I just can't be bothered with that eth stuff," Stefanie said. "When even somebody like Euphoria Karp puts in an eth, I tell
you
they lose me. I go as far as a wilt, but believe me I draw the line at eths." But she screwed her face to cultural duty, as though all at once reminded that her fiancé's tastes required it of her. "Who wrote that anyway? That eth business you just did?"

"Oh, just some Preacher." To William's son I said: "I got it all from your father."

"What do you mean all?"

I stated: "ALL"

"Knowledge she means," Stefanie said intelligently. "Anyhow it looks as if your sorrow didn't increaseth. What's this Nick like?"

I said abstractedly, "Young—"

But this made her scowl. "I don't like 'em young.
How
young?"

I was reluctant. "I guess around forty."

"Forty! Jesus Christ, I bet you think Methuselah's still in diapers. D'you put yourself to sleep counting wrinkles? I mean aren't men absolutely
dry
by then?"

William's son said, "Let it go, Stef."

"Well why?"—belligerent.

He mused unhappily down at his long feet. "You're in a glass house, that's why."

"Well my goodness!
You're
not old, and not too young, or anything. You're just right" she crooned, and reached up to pull him to her.

"Not that particular glass house."

She was genuinely baffled: "Well what other one is there?"

He addressed not her but me. "I know what you think," he said.

"I think you're brave."

"God, how I hate a satirist. God I hate 'em. Listen, you think I'm not like my father, right? Don't live up to the old family purity. You still think my father's got that old family purity."

"
What
glass house?" Stefanie insisted.

"I told you I wasn't a Christian gentleman. I told you that."

"Congratulations," I said, "on your fall among mortals," and to the girl, "Won't they miss you at home?"

"I'm out camping with old Beverly Reveille. Allegedly. (That's law again.) And pussyhead went and told William and his mama a regular bitch of a story. He's getting really good at stories. He's a
beautiful
liar," she praised.

"I'm getting more like the old man every day," he acknowledged.

It was true. Already he seemed domesticated. Obediently, familiarly, he laid his head on the sleek glissade of her lap. She had tamed the buffalo.

"
I
don't think you're like William at all, whatever anyone else around here says. —I bet your father never went away with your mother before
they
were married. —Oh." She bethought herself. "Is that what you mean by glass house?"

"Drop it, Stef," he begged. "Get your teeth out of it."

"You and me and her and this Nick forty, fifty years old?
I
don't see any resemblance."

"He's
young,
" I said distinctly. (Obscenity—no, constancy, of the past. The hideous threat of constancy!—A boy of seventeen had made me.)

But she was looking wilfully around her. "Don't apologize, pussyhead. You really don't have to. A secret's a secret. As far's the
world's
concerned, we might've come just because we're shell-fanciers or something. Or for the scrap-metal. Or—I know!—because we're crazy about dense populations—" Her nostrils opened to challenge me. "
I
don't care who knows what."

"Me neither," William's son grunted, and threw a narrow brown trouser-leg over her taut linen thighs. "You dared me to it," he told me. "Cohabitation without benefit of the law. It has other benefits."

"It's not as though we weren't
engaged,
" Stefanie said.

—He had lost the imperial mark.

"Look, while I'm on the subject—"

"
I'm
on the subject," William's son interrupted: he pressed his warm weight down, and granules loosened beneath her, sifting, hissing.

"—of engagements I mean, remember that weird man, Governor or somebody,
you
know, the night we got engaged after your bon voyage thing—"

"McGovern? My mother's editor?"

"That's who. That weird man. Him, the one with all the bedtimes. Does she still keep'm around?"

"He defected to California," I said.

"He was a weird one though."—Her program of domestication included a certain playing-off of one bull against another. It was curiously effective. Her fiancé seemed calmed, even comfortable. She had transmuted rage to a coziness. "William thinks California's a slum. Anyhow I adore weird men, don't you?"

"She's made an example of me," William's son said accommodatingly. "Talk about weird. Head of a cat—"

"Oh come on, pussyhead, it's just affection. Besides I don't care what your
head
is like"—she stroked it—" 'slong as your legs and stuff are all right. You have
such
nice legs."

"You too." He shut his eyes easefully. The sunlight beat a tune on their intertwinings. I felt, in their company, always obliged to play the part of
voyeur.
Such a part had I played on the terrace, watching the two of them kiss while the river darkled in ambush below. "Head of a cat, legs of a human. Centaur in reverse, that's me," William's son said.

As usual he compelled me to cheap philosophy. "In the end everything reverses itself," I vapidly announced, thinking how he had declined. Once she had called him halfway human: it was a clairvoyant celebration of her desire and her skill. —He had lost the imperial mark. He mewed. The tragedy of the halfway human: half power, half victim. The boy in the boat, force and gross potency of prow, bland boasting muscle of child. Or Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck crouching on the beach—the terror of the human head, the vital fork and member machined, made mechanistic. This island turned men from what they seemed to what they were. Plumed helmet shadowed little soft snout of a cat. My grandfather knew well how the place, on its own, would breed a museum: he had his will, though not according to the terms of the trust. I remembered how admirably the centurion had spurned his fiancee's arm, shining ochroid arch of horn, as we walked forth to the terrace; and the masterfulness of his "encore un peu" in the roseate circlet of her ear; and then, shutting me and all the universe out, his long peremptory kiss. Now his forehead was in the shade of her chin, and she twiddled in his rough dull hair; it was a weakness, and new in him. Head of a cat. He had abandoned the sneer of the helmeted centurion, keen and glorious, for sensuality. He mewed for her.

"Oh look, never mind reverse, not my pussyhead I hope! I mean I
love
cat's heads, the way they have their ears all velvety, but I could do without the crawly of their legs and their spooky tail and stuff, thank
you,
" Stefanie said stoutly, giving out one of those sprays of laughter, like so many flying florets, that had recalled broken-hearted youth to her father-in-law-to-be.

But something in my statement recalled William's son to himself. "Speaking of reversal—" He flopped lazily erect, pulling torso from torso with exquisite reluctance, as though some fierce sticking plaster, with all their hairs embedded in it, hair of head and leg and puberulent niche and cache of arm, had kept them close and dedicated. "—You know why the Senate moved up the date of those hearings? Very interesting."

"Interesting like a crutch," Stefanie said, left alone with her bosom. "Somebody's crown's loose over there, that's all. Not a real crown," she explained. "It's not as though they had a king or anything. If they had a king I could at least
stand
it. I'm crazy about royalty—"

"The regime needs bolstering," William's son confirmed.

"—especially queen's clothes. Tiaras kill me."

"What's that got to do with the hearings?" I asked.

"Government's suddenly in a terrific hurry to get an Ambassador over. They figure a quick application of pomp and ceremony should do the trick. —That's according to a Senator pal of my father's. You know how my father's always crawling around horses' mouths. Trouble over there, dissident elements—"

"Communists," Stefanie said positively. "Bomb-throwers."

"—so now we want to get someone over as' fast as we can."

I wondered. "Pomp and ceremony?"—and thought how my mother's lust for these would be fulfilled at last.

"Show 'em the power of the U.S. The mighty fist. Show 'em we're right behind the regime. They won't dare anything if we're behind it. That's the theory."

"Pussyhead, come back," Stefanie said.

I had to wait while he let himself be gathered over her impatient glitter. She licked the peak of his nose, upside down, and seized his fingers and made him dabble them in the mysterious crevice of her collarlessness.

"It'll be a shoo-in for Vand," he finished, absorbed in Stefanie's small clever luring fist, indifferent to the mighty one behind the regime.

But all brightly the note of her voice struck: "Who's your father? How come that woman kept saying father? I never knew you had a father."

"She doesn't, stupid," her lover answered.

Up to a point love is plagiarism. If no one had ever remarked a pair of lovers—how they dazewalk through the streets of cities in the shelter of their wound secret arms, how they dawdle interminably in their chairs, how they pick and slap at one another, how they stare and laugh, how they talk incessant trifles, how they stand at stalls studying the five-cent candies—the ritual art of flirtation would be unknown. None of it is instinct; all of it is imitation. Who invented it? Ask who invented the wheeL What spread it? Rumor, the mother of convention.