“It’s only the fortune he’s after,” she said in her characteristically caustic tone. The afternoon sun dappled the table through the tree, thus casting the endless struggle of light and darkness across the white metal space between them and into their laps. While the sun warmed the April air and the tree’s still bare limbs spread their shadows over their shoulders, they sipped their wine and talked.
“I believe the lady will do anything to get a husband,” he said.
“I think she would marry anything that resembled a man, though it were no more than what a waiter could pinch out of a napkin,” and she raised the one from under her glass and waved it in front of his face, whereupon they both laughed.
A breeze stirred the limbs causing the pattern of light and shade to dance over them. A certain bitterness crossed her face as she paused to sip the dark wine, and, noticing, he glanced away to passers-by walking hand in hand, a young couple strolling in easy conversation.
“Frailty!” she exclaimed. “We must all come to it if we live to be old and feel the craving of a false appetite when the true is decayed.”
“An old woman’s appetite is depraved—the green sickness of a second childhood.” He was playing her game, afraid not to, or she might turn her wit on him—the “old lady” they were talking about was an acquaintance who didn’t deserve to be used as an object of her venom. “What blooms in spring serves to usher in the fall, but the latter spring must have about it an odor of corruption.”
“But a girl’s appetite is no spring bloom. It’s the whirlwind that ruins us. . . . Appetite is a windmill,” she continued after a pause, coming up with yet another simile, “that moves to face whatever direction the wind comes from. It’s not having mastered those ways by her time of life that makes her such a fool.”
And he called up an image of the doleful widow, the time he worked with her at the booth in the park selling ice cream for the local art museum. She was a combination of endless gratefulness and sophisticated seducer, depending on who came to spend his dollar, for she always maneuvered to serve the men and left the women and children to him. In spite of that, he liked her and enjoyed the afternoon, being much too young to be a target of her stratagems himself.
“How she talks about this latest gold-digger—‘My joy! My jewel! My pleasure!’ and all that nauseating cant!”
Enough, enough, he thought, such memories coming to him whenever he thought of her. He could still hear her remark, “Here comes Mrs. Millamant!” speaking of the widow, who was always pathetically unaware of the atmosphere of ridicule that surrounded her, enlisting her services in any community event that would place her next to men.
He closed his eyes again, resting back into the comfortable old chair, and sipped his scotch. He came to his study to sit and think whenever sleep evaded him, finding comfort in the silent volumes filling the bookcases on the walls. Had he the nerve he would have murdered her. How many men he might have saved!
As he dozed, images of shades, men and women, floated round him, like black spots in his vision rushing chaotically round the peripheries, making low moaning sounds, as of people suffering, or, more nearly, people yearning, the shades reaching out to each other but being buffeted by some power of the air that could not be overcome. The voices cried in despair and hopelessness, and he woke from the dream, feeling saddened. He sipped again from the glass of scotch he was still holding and rose to get a cigarette and ashtray.
Interrupted sleep. More often than ever these last years, he would wake at two or three in the morning and lie on his back, staring at the ceiling. Finding sleep unlikely to come again and impatient with the long hours yet to endure, he would rise, put on his robe, go to his study, pour himself a double scotch, and pick something off the shelf he might not otherwise have turned to again. He would read, sometimes aloud, if it was good reading, and after an hour or so and a second, sometimes third, scotch, he would feel ready again for sleep. Usually, this method of getting through the night worked for him, but it deprived him of energy the following day, leaving him lethargic and willess.
Tonight he had plucked a volume of Restoration plays off the top shelf of the bookcase beside the window, a book he hadn’t opened in twenty years. He began to read at random, out loud, and found the text familiar. He remembered the dialogue so clearly that he put the book down and began to improvise.
But he soon grew bored with his game, though he was quickened with powerful animosities and angers that he thought he had buried a long time ago. He shut the book thinking of her. She came back to him now in all her splendor—her auburn hair, her fine complexion, her green eyes, her Grecian nose. She was beautiful. And oh, how he detested her!
Her name was Vivian. She came as a young graduate to the college where he taught to take her first job as an assistant professor. She taught the department’s courses in neo-classical and Victorian literature. She stayed for five years, and when she moved on, she left him disillusioned and smarter for the wear—cynical when it came to women and appreciative of his bachelorhood. It was all a long time ago. He left teaching and made a very different kind of life for himself, but it remained a life of separation and celibacy.
He snuffed out the cigarette and finished the scotch, leaned back into the chair and closed his eyes. Sleep came to him then, and, upright, he gave himself to it. He was wakened by the deep cooing of a dove in the middle branches of the fir tree only a few yards from the window near which he sat. He opened the window and looked into the summer morning. The mood of the night had passed. Another dove had roosted on the cross bar of the telephone pole behind the house. Its little head turning this way and that, it seemed to catch sight of him standing in the window and made skittish movements like it would fly off, but then it settled down, resting into itself, and became a part of the landscape, merging into the stillness of the morning light and air.
It was Sunday morning. For some years now he had taken to going to church on Sunday mornings, usually the earliest mass—at eight o’clock. At first this church-going was motivated by the desire to get out and do something. During his years as a student and then as a professor, belief had never been a part of his life. He was one of those who had seen through to the nothing—after all, he had cut his teeth on the existentialists. Going to church had never become a habit, however; he always had to make up his mind to go, and then do it deliberately--and after several years of going, he still didn’t think of himself as religious. But going to church did begin to feel like a duty, and gradually it became an obligation that he felt a special satisfaction in fulfilling.
The child that was born to him and Vivian had only one eye, the eye in the other socket being malformed and having to be removed not long after birth. In addition to his grotesqueness of appearance, the boy had other problems, among them a heart defect that caused too little blood to flow to the brain in the first hours after birth, and so it was also severely retarded. Its death was finally brought about by a pulmonary disease that caused it to drown in its sleep when it was a year old. Vivian, however, never knew the child and its plight, since she had gone to Cornell to take a position that would propel her into the top ranks of the new literary theorists coming into vogue. She came back in the last weeks to have the child and left it with him, returning to Cornell—on the third day after delivering! At least she had it, that much he always wondered about. She wanted a clean conscience, he supposed, and he made that convenient for her.
A one-eyed creature with a defective heart! How often he thought of that as the perfectly just outcome of their relationship and, ironically, as the perfectly appropriate issue of her womb. But he hated himself for thinking such things, and going to church had the ameliorative effect of helping him get over those feelings—helping him get over, as well, what he felt when he found the boy blue and stiff in his crib when he got up to feed it that morning: pure relief, release. He called emergency and an ambulance was sent. The little white coffin made the ceremony seem so pretty. Vivian didn’t come.
He had informed her, but he never heard from her—neither at the time of the funeral nor afterward. He had gone about his new work with a dullness and heaviness that took some time to wear off. He was surprised to find how many opportunities opened to him when he left the college. He took a job with an insurance company as a supervisor in the claims division and had in a short time worked his way into a vice presidency. He found the work congenial and undemanding compared to his teaching and research, and people in the company respected him, and the company itself rewarded him generously.
For sixteen years now he lived this life. He worked, went to church on Sundays, and vacationed in Florida. His social life was confined to company affairs, and these he always found to be a burden. He was a good speaker, however, and this carry-over from his college life made a difference to the company, which relied on him to give addresses, serve as master of ceremonies for the usual rites and rituals of the organization, and to speak for the company in public forums. Like going to church, he found this duty an obligation he took satisfaction in fulfilling. He kept in touch with his earlier life by writing occasionally for the New York Times Book Review. No one in the company was aware that the man whose name appeared on those substantial article-reviews in that Sunday paper and their vice president were one and the same.
Before he left the window, he noticed the dove in the fir tree wing out from the branches and join the other on the telephone pole. He watched it settle in against the other, dully iridescent in its quiet waiting, and sleepily merge into the calmness of the Sabbath morning.
He knotted his tie, looking at himself in the bedroom mirror. His hair was white and his face pink and his body spare and trim. After coffee and a shower he felt good, in spite of the restless night and the lingering mood of sourness he felt at having thought again about Vivian. He shrugged at his image and left for the church. And afterwards it occurred to him that he would never be free of her, that she had permanently altered him. “It’s all really my fault,” he thought, “for getting involved with her in the first place, and then for not having the courage to end it. She did that, when it was convenient for her.”
After church he went for breakfast at the pancake house, where he sat alone, usually at the same table if he could get it, and read the New York Times, which he brought with him. He read this morning a little news item buried in the first section about a man who had exacted revenge on a manipulating woman and was quoted at the end of the three-paragraph story, saying, “I can get a good night’s sleep now; that’s worth more to me than my liberty.” He put the paper down, feeling he understood this man’s state of mind but thinking he was not ready and probably never would be ready to trade his liberty for satisfaction against Vivian. He stared across the room, however, noticing familiar faces, when the desire came over him in a rush.
“Would it make a difference? Would I sleep better? Or sleep less from guilt?” It occurred to him that he would have to take revenge in a way that she would know he did it, and it would have to be something that made her suffer, and, most importantly, that left him untouchable afterward, unlike the man in the newspaper, or there would be no gain. For a moment after the desire struck, he remained blank; but then a hollowness opened in him, and he felt an absence, a loss, and was shaken, for he never felt like that before. Reflexively, he sought who to blame, but there was only himself. Then he felt an ache in his chest which was the pain of guilt, he knew, and he actually appealed to God, but it did no good; he felt odd about thinking it.
He recalled a photograph he and Vivian had taken one afternoon on a visit to Jamestown. They had gone to a dusty souvenir shop where the proprietor had an array of old eighteenth-century costumes for customers to don for photos that could be mounted in antique-seeming frames. She had put on a splendid gown with a low cut bodice that displayed a generous part of her bosom and had placed a wig of long brown curls on her head; he had put on a white full-sleeved shirt, a buff jerkin, a pair of tight navy-blue trousers with a heavy leather belt, and a three-cornered hat with a gold-embroidered rim. But just before the photo was taken, Vivian had switched the hat and wig, so that she was wearing the three-cornered hat in the photo and he the long curls.
It seemed a fun thing to do at the time, but afterward he saw in the photo a kind of premonitory moment he was too infatuated to recognize for what it meant. And now, as he picked at his pancakes and eggs, the three-cornered hat fairly shouted at him. He knew what he was going to do.
* * *
He snuffed out the cigarette and finished the scotch, leaned back into the chair and closed his eyes. Sleep came to him then, and, upright, he gave himself to it. He was wakened by the book falling from his lap, for he had turned in his sleep, trying to rest on his side, and seeing that it was dawn, he opened the window. It was damp and misty outside, and he felt the coolness with a chill. He pulled his robe tight across his chest and raised its collar up against his neck. But he didn’t close the window, for he could hear the birds already busy about their day, chirping to one another in the trees. He stood listening as though he understood.
She was big with child, and in the hospital everyone had that abstracted air of busyness which made him feel like he was in the way. He recalled the look in her face when they took her out of the labor room. She was moaning and wet from perspiration; the labor was hard. The last look she flashed at him was that of a dying woman, and when they gave her the spinal, she fell back into the pillow and closed her eyes, like she had given herself to darkness. It was terrible. And he had paced the room and waited and sat and stood up again and paced.
When the baby came, there were hushed consultations, for it was not thriving, and by mid-morning the doctors wanted to do surgery. She lay still, like a corpse, white and incommunicative, and he had to make the decisions. She said to him that she didn’t care, it was his child not hers, he would have to live with the decisions, he should do what he wanted. Never had he hated her more than then. She refused to look at it and told the doctor she was going to leave the morning after next. She spent the time getting ready, taking numerous walks, sitting up for her meals, making phone calls, and when the morning came, the taxi arrived and took her to the airport. The doctor was annoyed at her flying so soon after the delivery and made her sign a release, which she did with her usual air of efficiency.
He never saw her again. Which is as well, for he could not imagine what kind of conversation they might have had and what he might feel if they were to meet again. Later, when they removed the baby’s eye, he wrote her a letter, but she never responded. And when it died, even then she did not respond.
He returned to his chair, the damp morning air filling his study, and closed his eyes. He had gone for breakfast the morning of the delivery, leaving the hospital and her. He found a café and had ham and eggs and read the morning paper. When the waitress brought him his order, he thanked her, and she replied, “Yep, everybody’s in a good mood this time of day!” He looked at her for a sign of crabbiness or other detail that might explain the remark, but she had a look of calm indifference in her matronly face and a manner of efficiency. That waitress became fixed in his memory as a telling marker of the meaning of the day and her words became in a muted, strange way an assessment not only of his life with Vivian, but of his life without her.
His eyes burned from sleeplessness, and looking out the window from his chair, he could see a slight reddening of the clouds. Already, the sky was a light gray. He got up and poured himself a scotch and sat down again. He took a sip and closed his eyes. He entered a tangled wood. There was no sign of a path or road. It seemed like he had walked out of a reddened cloud into a dark place that was a wood, but nothing was green, or had living vegetation on it or around it. All was dingey black, a tangle of entwined and gnarled branches with no leaves. But there were thorns, and over them, in the cruxes of the branches, were huge objects made of the same unbroken branches that writhed contortedly into the shapes of nests. All about on these nests and on the tangled limbs beside them were creatures with the large wings and legs and lower breasts of carrion birds and the heads and shoulders and naked upper breasts of women. They sat and stared into the darknesses of the tangled wood and every once in a while one would shriek, to be answered by the returning shriek of another from some unseen place. Hideous were these shapes sitting in the branches, and they filled him with dread so that he hid behind the thick trunk of a tree. Afraid of being attacked, he reached for a branch and tried to break it off to use as a club; but the branch writhed out of his hand, and he heard a voice moan and swear at him. And then he saw that he was covered with blood, which was pouring from the limb he tried to break, and he screamed and woke, only to find the morning far advanced, the mist gone, and himself still dreary with burning eyes.
He looked out the window. Across the street a man and woman were leaving their house dressed in their Sunday clothes, loading their kids into the car on the driveway. The woman was strapping her infant into the car seat while her husband waited for her holding the hands of two older children, both boys, neatly dressed in jackets and ties. He, too, felt the urge to go to church, but this morning was a bad one for him, unrested and nervous as he was.
During the week he had sent two letters to Vivian. In the first, he told her he was publishing a book, a memoir, about their relationship and that a colleague of hers at Cornell, seeing an advanced copy, had avidly agreed to write a review. In the second, he told her their child was still alive living in a home for the mentally disabled in Southern California and that he could no longer face his conscience for abandoning it. He began now to write the third letter. He wrote that he was leaving the country and taking a position with his company in a European capital which he left unnamed, all expenses for the upkeep of their son now falling to her. He told her he would be incommunicado for the foreseeable future and that she needed to visit their son and speak with his caregivers to make arrangements for her assuming responsibility. He sent her a Southern California address. He knew Vivian well enough to know that these letters would induce in her a state of near paranoia, for it was unlikely that the Vivian he remembered would have undergone a character change. Who does that?
He addressed and stamped the envelope, smiling at the thought of it, handling it gently. Suspicions! Exposure! He showered and dressed and went out for breakfast. He carried the New York Times with him and ordered his usual pancakes and eggs. As he waited for his order he found a story buried in the first section about a prosperous business woman on the fast track to becoming the C.E.O. of her company who killed herself over the betrayal of someone whom she had considered a loyal assistant. The note this desperate woman left behind was quoted in full, perhaps, he thought, as an object lesson:
So faithful was I to my tasks that I sacrificed
my sleep and all my strength. That double-crosser, common bane and vice of people in power, who never took his eyes from the head office, did so inflame the minds of all against me, and they in turn did so inflame the president of the board, that all the successes I had gained were turned into bitterness. Hoping in death to escape undeserved ignominy, I, the just, do myself this injustice.
A strange loamy scent, as of wood’s earth, came to him as he pondered the note. “Fool,” he thought, looking around for the source of the smell. “Fool. Better to live, keep to yourself, do your work, and not worry. Life has its simple pleasures. One needs to fasten to that.” When his order came, he poured more than the usual amount of syrup on his cakes, and then, on impulse, he added a second flavor. He ate slowly, concentrating on the taste, successfully keeping Vivian out of his mind. He had flown to San Diego and rented a house. It was the address of this house he had sent her. He would keep the place for six months. If he couldn’t bring his plan to fruition in that time, he would abandon it as impractical. But he knew he would be successful.
* * *
He closed his eyes again, resting back into the
comfortable old chair and sipped his scotch. “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” he intoned the old poem audibly, fingering the large manila envelope on his lap. He had had too much scotch. The night was swimming in his head along with his bookcases and the books he had piled one on another upon the lamptable next to him. The window was open and the air was warm; crickets under the bushes next to the house sang out loud.
He knew instantly the baby was dead. It was wired so that its breathing could be heard through a speaker in his own room, and an alarm was supposed to alert him to labored or stopped breathing. He had checked on the baby two hours earlier. The routine now called for him to change the baby’s diapers, prepare its formula, bottle-feed it for a while, then add some pabulum to the formula and spoon-feed it just a bit, and by the time he was done the day nurse would have arrived and taken over.
The baby was on its back. Its arms were rigid and raised out from its side, its face was ashen blue, and its one eye was open and dully glazed. He took it up and turned it on its stomach and lightly pounded its back, raising its head so he could see its face. But the baby’s whole body was rigid, like a plastic doll’s, and he knew it was gone. He put it down as it was when he came in, sat in the chair beside its crib, and felt that overpowering sense of release that haunted him ever afterward.
His calls to Vivian went unanswered as did his letters. She was probably away at a convention delivering a paper, or on sabbatical, or God knows where. She had to have received the news eventually, because his letters weren’t returned. She just didn’t care to acknowledge her connection either to him or the child.
All his emotions at that time were unhealthy. The feeling of release was, he knew, because of its spontaneity, a sign of a genuine deficiency, awareness of which he tried to repress; but guilt rose in him and kept him awake at nights and made him numb during the day. More destructive was the anger and hatred he felt toward Vivian. These feelings he could not repress, and they consumed him. Sometimes he gave vent to them by raging at his subordinates or being deliberately cruel to someone—and on these occasions the guilt would hound him relentlessly. In time he adapted and learned to control these feelings, and later, when he started going to church, he found he could live with them.
He sipped the scotch and opened his eyes, only to see the books on the shelves across the room begin to swirl. She had come into the bedroom in a white peignoir with a pale blue lace sash. Standing in front of the mirror, the lights on dim, she unfastened the sash and let it drop to the carpet. The robe opened and revealed beneath a short nightgown under which her body showed clearly. Her hair was shoulder length and brushed, glowing like satin in the dim light. He came behind her and removed the robe, letting it drop. He gathered her hair to one side, revealing her neck and shoulder, and kissed her. She let her head fall back so they were cheek to cheek and then turned into him.
Dawn was lifting the darkness and he still had not slept. He could not finish the scotch he had last poured. Setting it down on top of the pile of books, he tried to get up. He wanted to stand by the window and feel the outside air against his face. Instead, he closed his eyes and rested back into the chair. He felt ice under his feet and when he tried to see why, it was so dark he could not tell. He walked on the ice for a long time, curling his toes up, balling his feet, sometimes sitting to give his feet relief from the cold. But he was soon driven by some compulsion to rise and walk again. A yellow streak in the sky, at first dim, but gradually brightening, lighted the air around, and he saw that he was walking on a frozen lake. The lake was very clear and he could see people caught in the ice beneath the surface. These were horribly contorted and seemed to be locked in tortuous embraces, each trying to bite at the ears or faces of those with whom they were entwined.
As he walked, he saw that his feet were beginning to sink into the ice, so that he moved through it, paradoxically, at a depth above his shins. He could hear a child crying, and its voice was familiar, the cry being, he was sure, that of his own son. He was waist deep and approaching her, her neck and shoulders bared for him. The ice now covered him up to his chin, and he felt such a rage that he grabbed her from behind to tear her to pieces, but the ice held him, and all he could do was gnaw at her shoulder and neck. He gnawed and she screamed, she screamed in terror. The more he gnawed, the more terrible her screaming and the greater her terror. The feeling of terror filled him as well, but his hatred was greater, and so he gnawed, his mouth filled with her blood and his ears filled with her screams and with the cries of another, the mournful, sick, and pitiable cries of the baby.
He woke, his head still swimming from the scotch, his legs and arms feeling numb. He was breathless with terror. The big envelope had fallen from his lap, and as he reached for it, he saw that it was bright morning. He felt a gratefulness that he had never felt before. He rose and went to the window and looked out into the Sunday quiet. It was a middle summer morning and standing at this window at such a time was one of his simple pleasures. But he could not feel it now, for he was still drunk and was nauseous from the fears of the dream.
He sat at his desk, lifted the flap of the big envelope, and withdrew three unopened letters. These were his letters to Vivian. They came with a note, which he had read many times yesterday and which he still could not believe:
I am sorry to inform you that Vivian Hellman has
died on the fifth of June, this year, after a long fight against cancer, leaving many grieved colleagues and
friends to care for her memory. If you wish to make a gift
in her name, please send your contribution to the Vivian
Hellman memorial fund, c/o this department. All gifts will
be acknowledged.
He rested his head on his folded arms on the desk. He felt the weight of time pressing on his back and the weight, as well, of all the books in the room. Not the weight of the physical mass of the books, but the weight of their familiar textual strategies, their allusions, allegories, and arguments; their visions and revisions; the lives they imagined, the sins they punished, the joys they exulted in. The voices of their authors echoed in his drunken mind as he imagined the books tumbling down on him, their sheer numbers burying and smothering him, and then the walls of the house itself. He felt himself falling through the floor into the kitchen downstairs, and through the kitchen into the basement, and the roof crumbling down over him, achieving in the totality of the collapse a definitive burial.
He slept soundly at last and dreamlessly. When he woke, the bright Sunday morning had become a dim, cloudy Sunday afternoon. As he looked out the window, it started to rain, and the sound of the rain was bitter.
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