Ariel

NINE

Jeff opened his eyes. He was lying on his back on a king-size bed in a Days Inn motel just off I-26. The air was cool on his bare skin. He raised his head from the pillow and watched Roberta, who was sitting a few yards away in a teak-and-vinyl armchair reading a book. Smoke rose from the cigarette she held in her right hand. One leg was bent sharply, its foot propped on the cushion of the chair, and one shoulder was also held at a sharp angle; he was reminded of a couple of pictures from Picasso’s blue period — the guitar player, the woman ironing. Her body displayed that attitude.

He continued to watch her, enjoying the moment, until she evidently felt his eyes on her nude body and turned to meet them. “Look who’s awake,” she said.

“I guess I was sleeping."”

“No kidding.”

“What time is it? Was I sleeping long?”

“It’s past two. I already had my shower.”

“I never even heard the water running.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have heard World War Three,” she said. “You were really out. I’ll never understand why sex wakes women up and puts men to sleep. Whoever worked out the natural order of things seems to have screwed up there, wouldn’t you say?”

“It’s handy for men who work a night shift. They go home, make love, and the little wifey gets up and starts in on the housework.”

“Trust you to see the bright side. The silver lining. Incidentally, who cares if every cloud has a silver lining? You still can’t get a peek at the goddamned sun through it.”

“I keep forgetting what a literal-minded sort you are. What are you reading?”

“The Bible. What else do you do in a motel room? Just commit adultery and read the Bible.”

“Do you think of this as adultery?”

She turned toward him, crossed one leg over the other. “Well, what else would you call it? I don’t think of it as a sin, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“Well, I don’t. This book would tend to disagree with me, however. The Living Bible. That’s what it seems to call itself. Evidently the good old King James version is the Dead Bible.”

“What is it, modern English?”

“Modern and not terribly grammatical.” She closed the book, put it down on the lamp table. “If you’re going to read a Bible it ought to be full of thees and thous and begats. When it starts to sound like the host of a morning television talk show it loses me completely. The mystery is gone, and then what’s left?”

“Like when they took the Latin out of the Mass.”

“That’s right, you’re Catholic. I tend to forget that.”

“Lapsed Catholic. And I can’t blame it on Vatican Two, either. I was gone before they changed the Mass. We’d better get going, don’t you think?”

“I suppose so. You want to take a shower, don’t you? Or do you want to carry my spoor back to Elaine?”

“Your spoor. Like some jungle beast.”

“That’s the idea.”

He showered thoroughly but quickly, toweled dry, and emerged to find her already dressed. “And now the gentleman puts on his clothes,” she intoned, “and the charming couple will be on their way. The gentleman will return to his office — you are going back to your office?”

“Yes.”

“—while the lady goes back to her haunted house. God.”

“It bothers you, doesn’t it?”

“More than ever. I’m living in a hostile environment. Getting away from it just makes me aware of how unpleasant it is. I spend a couple of hours with you in this room or one like it and it’s neutral, it’s uncomplicated and safe. Then I walk through that door and there’s a presence in that house that hits me like a two-by-four between the eyes. Haven’t you felt it yourself?”

He shook his head. “But I don’t have to live with it,” he said. “And I haven’t really been inside your house except for the first time.”

“And you don’t have to live with her.”

“You mean Ariel.”

“Obviously. Who else?”

In the car, heading back into town, he said, “You hardly ever call her by name, have you noticed that? It’s always she or her or the child.” “I’m aware of it.”

“Any particular reason?”

“I don’t know. It just turned out that way.”

“Since Caleb’s death? Or before it as well?”

“Before it. Since his birth. Maybe even before that. There’s been a gradual change in my attitude toward her.”

“Did you love her originally?”

“Yes. Wait, I’m not sure of that. I thought I loved her because we’d adopted her and therefore I was supposed to love her like my own child and therefore I was determined to feel what I was supposed to feel. Once Caleb was born, well, I certainly couldn’t deny that I felt something for him I had never felt for her.”

“What do you feel toward her now?”

“I don’t know. She spooks me.”

“What does that mean? Are you afraid of her?”

“We talked about it. I can’t get rid of the feeling—”

“That she was responsible for Caleb’s death. I know that, and we both know that all it is is a feeling. But let’s deal with present time. Are you afraid of her now?”

“I don’t know.”

“And I don’t know what you mean by that.”

She turned to him, unhooking her seat belt so she could face him, tucking her right foot under her left thigh. “I don’t know means I don’t know,” she said levelly. “You know the cliché about adoption, don’t you? You never know what you’re getting.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“My mother used to say don’t put money in your mouth because you never know where it’s been.”

“Everybody’s mother used to say that.”

“Well, I don’t know where the child’s been. I got her and I don’t know what I’ve got. She’s strange, dammit, and it’s not a familiar strangeness, it’s not my strangeness or David’s strangeness, it’s something uniquely hers and I don’t know what it adds up to. Am I afraid of her? God, I don’t know. I don’t know if I should be or not. Maybe she’ll murder me in my sleep. Maybe she’ll poison my food. Maybe she just gives off an evil presence, the same as that godforsaken house.” She fumbled in her bag, found a cigarette. “And maybe I’m just overreacting to Caleb’s death, and the child’s normal and innocent, and I ought to take David’s advice and lie down on Gintzler’s couch and tell him all my nice Freudian dreams.”

“Is that what you want to do?”

“No.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to keep on keeping on, I guess.” She plugged in the dashboard lighter, lit her cigarette when it popped out. “I want to spend as much time as possible with you in nice clean sterile anonymous motel rooms. Incidentally, I want to start paying half.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

”But I want to.” She reached into her purse again, counted out some money. He shook his head impatiently. “Then I pay for the room next time,” she said. “Agreed?”

“If you insist.”

“I insist.”

“Fair enough. Who picked out the name?”

“Huh?”

“Who decided to name her Ariel?”

“I did. I picked both names. Why?”

“They’re unusual.”

“I’m partial to unusual names. I was then, anyway. Odd names and old houses.”

“Ariel and Caleb,” he said, and frowned in thought. “Ariel and Caliban,” he said. “How’s that?”

“From The Tempest. You know the play?”

“I must have read it. I took a Shakespeare course in college. Ariel and what?”

“Caliban. Ariel was the airy spirit who served Prospero. Caliban was a primitive type, lived in a cave, something like that.”

“I wasn’t thinking of the play when I named them. Unless I made some unconscious connection while I was pregnant with Caleb, thinking that it was a name that went with Ariel. Except I didn’t, really. I found it in a long list of biblical names in a book on what to name the baby, and most of them were about as appetizing as Ahab and Nebuchadnezzar and Onan. Can you imagine calling a child Onan?”

“Somebody named a canary Onan. I think it was Dorothy Parker. Because he spilled his seed on the ground.”

“I’ll bet it was Dorothy Parker. Shadrach, Meshach and What’s-his-name. They were all like that, or else they were very ordinary, and then I saw Caleb and I was struck by it. What did you say Caliban was? A primitive type? Sort of a noble savage?”

“Hardly that. He tended to lurk and howl. I think he symbolized the evil of man’s basic nature.”

She laughed shortly. “Then I got them backwards,” she said. “Didn’t I?”

That night Jeff and his wife played bridge with a couple who lived a block away. Jeff was an aggressive player, his chief fault a slight tendency to overbid, a natural outgrowth of his enthusiasm for the game. One of the things he liked about it, he had often thought, was that it was one of the few things he and Elaine did well together.

But this night the game had lost its savor for him. He played well because he could do so automatically, but a part of his attention was focused inward. He would look at Elaine, seated across the table from him, and he would think of Roberta, and his mind would find it difficult, and a little pointless, to concentrate on jump overcalls and cue bids.

How long could they go on this way? Hurrying off to motels, shutting out the world for an hour or two, rolling together in fitful passion, then washing each other off beneath the shower and slipping back into their separate lives. Sex had always had an electric intensity for the two of them, and now it seemed to possess a special urgency, as if they were calling upon the flesh to solve problems of the spirit. They could shut out the world by locking themselves in a room at the Days Inn or the Ramada; they could shut out their own thoughts by locking themselves into one another.

But they couldn’t have sex all the time, nor could they spend eternity behind closed doors. Most of the time they were apart. And most of the time Jeff had his thoughts for company.

More and more, lately, they troubled him.

How could the whole thing resolve itself? Could he leave Elaine for Roberta? He looked at his wife and doubted it. She was as attractive as Roberta, and as bright. She was also rather easy to live with, and it had struck him more than once that Roberta would be hell to live with. Roberta was exciting, but the quality that excited him was bearable only in small doses. He couldn’t take her twenty-four hours a day.

Another thing that had struck him was that Roberta wasn’t all that tightly wrapped. From what she’d said, he gathered that David wanted her to resume visits to her psychiatrist. Jeff had a fundamental bias against psychiatrists, thought they were rarely much more than witch doctors, but he wasn’t sure in this case that David was very far off the mark. Because there was something a bit more than slightly crazy about Roberta, and it often bothered him to face this fact.

Was it also this quality that excited him? He didn’t like to think so, and ”crazy” might be too strong a term for Roberta’s emotional eccentricity, but he couldn’t deny that something deep within him responded to that quality in her. Perhaps he wasn’t all that tightly wrapped himself, and perhaps her nuttiness touched off a sympathetic vibration in his own psyche. Wasn’t there a French phrase for that kind of shared lunacy? Folie à deux? Something like that?

On the other hand, just how crazy was Roberta? It might help to know where reality left off and her imagination took over. There was no way he could tell what she had or hadn’t seen lurking in the corner of her bedroom the three nights before Caleb died. But what about Ariel? Was she some sort of twisted child, some kind of evil creature? Or was she just an ordinary little girl hovering on the brink of puberty, and no doubt being driven slightly whacky by her mother’s attitude toward her?

Maybe it would help if he could answer some of those questions. He’d seen Ariel several times lately, but always from a distance and never for any length of time. Once, after he dropped Roberta, he caught a passing glimpse of the child at the street corner. Another time, on an afternoon when he and Roberta had not been together, he’d left the office and walked over to Ariel’s school. He sat on a bench at a bus stop, a newspaper on his lap, and watched the children leaving school and heading homeward, trying not to be obvious about it lest the police pick him up as a potential child molestor. And he’d seen Ariel then, walking briskly down the street with a boy considerably shorter than herself. Probably the odd-looking little fellow Roberta had mentioned, the one who appeared to be Ariel’s only friend.

A third time he’d deliberately parked his car on the route Ariel took to get to school in the morning. He sat behind the wheel, waiting, and felt quite foolish about what he was doing. All the same, something compelled him to wait until the child appeared, wearing a loden jacket over corduroy pants, her bookbag over one shoulder. She walked right past the car and never glanced in his direction, while he studied her and tried to read something in the shape of her face and the way she walked.

Her appearance was unusual, certainly, with her long pale face. But he by no means disliked the way she looked. While no one would be likely to call her pretty, he sensed a quality about her which might well ripen into beauty. He would have liked a longer look at her, but in a matter of seconds she was past him and on her way.

How could she have killed Caleb?

A few days later he and Roberta were in another room at the same Days Inn. This time their coupling, though intense and almost desperate, seemed somehow perfunctory, as though it was something they had to get out of the way, some essential prelude to conversation. Although his climax was as powerful as it had ever been, it left him vaguely unsatisfied, like an orgasm reached by masturbation.

This time sex didn’t make him sleepy. He sat up in bed and kept changing position, trying to get comfortable. Roberta once again sat on a chair, her body arranged in a collection of acute angles, smoking one cigarette after the other and displaying her collection of minor irritations.

The pilot lights on the stove kept going out. He told her, as he’d told her often enough already, to call yet another repairman and have it seen to. She insisted that was pointless. He suggested she get another stove, an electric range, for example. But she liked to cook on a gas flame, she told him, and it was a fine stove, a wonderful stove, and the only thing wrong with it was that the pilot lights kept going out.

And something new to whine about — she was convinced someone was going into Cale’s room and moving things around. In the first place, he couldn’t understand why this bothered her. While he wasn’t prepared to say as much to her, there was something unhealthily morbid in her whole attitude toward the baby’s room. And suppose Ariel did go there, or David, just out of a desire to feel close to Caleb? What was wrong with that?

“But I don’t want them in there,” she explained, without troubling to say why.

He asked how she knew they went in there. Because the position of certain objects seemed to change from one day to the next. But how come she noticed this? How did she happen to visit the room so frequently herself?

“I’m drawn there,” she told him. “The other night — I couldn’t sleep, I got up to go to the bathroom, and on my way back I just found myself in Caleb’s room. I wasn’t even aware of it until I was suddenly standing there with my hand on the light switch. I suppose I was half asleep at the time.”

“Do you go there during the day?”

“Of course. I have to dust.”

“How often?”

She ignored the question. “I go there sometimes. Why shouldn’t I? I’m his mother.”

And Ariel was upsetting her. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the child was sneaking around the house, skulking on the staircase, spying on her. “The only time I can relax is when she’s playing her flute,” she said, ”because then I know where she is. But how can I relax with that damned music going on?”

“Maybe it’s the flute.”

“You don’t mean that it’s enchanted, I hope?”

“You described it as some sort of semi-toy. Maybe the sound of a regular orchestral flute would be less likely to give you chills.”

“I think it’s what she plays more than the instrument. But I suppose it’s possible.”

“Suppose she took lessons.”

“I’ve suggested it. Maybe I could suggest it again.”

But nothing he suggested seemed to have much effect on her, and he came to realize she didn’t want to hear his suggestions. She merely wanted to voice her discontent. He felt himself growing increasingly irritated with her, and in a sort of desperation he wound up dragging her back to bed. He was fiercely potent, thrusting at her as if to hurt her, to punish her, to pierce her with his angry penis. But there was no pleasure in the thrusting, and he could neither reach a climax nor lose his erection, and when at last she pushed him away he felt angry with her and with himself.

They had met at the motel, arriving in separate cars, and this time she had paid for their room. Her car was the first to leave the motel parking lot, and he pulled out after her, followed her part way back to the city, then let her get ahead of him. His sexual desire was long gone now, but the tension that had been a part of it had merely taken a different form. He wanted to scream, to beat on the steering wheel with his fists, to swing the wheel hard left and plow across the median strip and take an oncoming car head-on.

He did none of these things. Instead he drove slowly and steadily into town, went to his office, left after a few minutes and had a cup of coffee at the Athenian on Meeting Street. He got back in his car and drove past Roberta’s house. Her car was parked in front and there were lights on.

It was mid-afternoon, and there were children walking around the neighborhood, singly and in groups, on their way home from school. He drove up one street and down the next, slowing down periodically to scan the faces of the children he passed.

Then, when they were more than a block away, he spotted them. Ariel and her little friend with the glasses.

He pulled the car to a stop alongside the curb, pressed a button to lower the window, kept the motor running. The two of them were deep in conversation, unlikely to notice him, and he felt driven to stay where he was and get as good a look at the girl as he could.

The two drew nearer. When they were almost abreast of his car, Ariel turned to look directly at Jeff. Something went through him when their eyes made contact, something cold. She stopped in her tracks. Her mouth was slightly open, her face ghostly pale. Beside her, the boy had stopped when she did and looked now to see what had attracted her attention.

Images flashed on the screen of Jeff’s mind. His car, animated, with eyes for headlights, leaping the curb to bear down on the two children. Ariel, nude, her breasts tipped with staring eyes, beckoning seductively to him. The boy, dancing goat-footed like Pan. Images, amorphous ones, of blood, of lust, of death.

Only a few yards separated them. He and Ariel stared deeply into each other’s eyes for an immeasurable moment. Then, with an effort, he put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb.

A block away, he had to pull over and stop again. His heart was pounding, his palms too slippery with sweat to grip the steering wheel. He dug out a handkerchief, dried his hands, mopped perspiration from his forehead.

Now what, he wondered, was that all about? One look into a child’s eyes and he’d been thrown so far off his good reasonable center? But something had happened, he had to admit, and he couldn’t begin to say what it was. It was as if those damned bottomless eyes of her had functioned as a mirror, showing him aspects of himself he had no desire to see.

Bobbie was overreacting to Ariel, he was still certain of that much, but he no longer felt her perceptions were so entirely out of whack. There was something about the child, something very damned unsettling.

Maybe he should tell Bobbie as much. But he knew, suddenly and certainly, that he would not. He would not tell anyone what had just happened.