Experiment in Springtime

Chapter 16

She had a confused, endless dream that night, in which she watched a sea monster cruise along the lake shore, holding its head out of the water with contemptuous dignity. It was dusk and she’d broken her glasses; she had to wait and wait until it got close enough for her to see. It was a shock but a relief, too, to see that the monster wore Charles’s head.

“It’s only Charles!” she cried to the people on the shore, with their half-strange, half-familiar faces.

It was getting dark and they all vanished suddenly, burying themselves in the sand and crouching behind rocks.

“Charles, stop a minute! Listen to me! I want a divorce!”

Grey and ponderous as a battleship, the monster moved away into the black water.

She went home. She stepped on some of the people hiding under the sand. She apologized profusely, but they never let on they were there.

Her alarm rang at eight.

She rose hastily, impelled by a sense of urgency whose cause she didn’t recognize. It was as if her muscles knew in advance what her mind would remember later, that there was something difficult to be done and they must be prepared.

She crossed the room with eager steps and pulled open the drapes, as if she could hardly wait to see this new day. The sun was shining like a congratulation. A swarm of bees did a noisy, dizzy dance for her alone, and the dream drowned of its own weight. The people dug themselves out of the sand, shook themselves and stretched and began to make human sounds.

Her mother coughed, Laura was taking a shower. Brown whistled his way down the stairs, Mrs. Putnam brought the milk in.

She phoned the doctor before she went down for breakfast. When she told him she wanted Charles’s address, he gave it to her without asking any questions or showing any surprise. He seemed to have been waiting, in fact, for her to call and to be acting under Charles’s instructions.

Perhaps Charles has found out already, she thought, and he’s waiting for me. Brown might have written to him or told Forbes. She knew Forbes phoned the house now and then and talked to Brown — there were some collect calls from Green Village on the phone bill. Brown didn’t mention them and she didn’t ask. It was somehow annoying to ask Brown anything. He always answered truthfully and the truth was always blameless. Only his face lied. It invited you to believe in intrigue. His eyes had plots in them, spies and secret formulae lurked in their corners. Behind his smile grew vast scandals and his eyebrows twitched with revolutions. Untraceable poisons rolled on his tongue and his hands fondled a homemade bomb. You felt cheated when he opened his heart to you, and you saw it was as fat, pink and innocent as a baby.

No, Brown hadn’t told, and he wouldn’t.

“Have you got that?” Dr. MacNeil asked.

“Yes, thanks.” She read it off to him as she’d written it. “Turn left at the main intersection of the village, drive two miles, turn right, the third cottage.”

“That’s fine. I think you’ll find him in good spirits.”

“I hope so,” she said, wondering why he should suddenly be so friendly, so anxious for her to see Charles.

“Oh, you will. He’s taking a more reasonable attitude now. He’s had an opportunity to think matters over.”

“What matters?”

“The general situation,” MacNeil said blandly.

She thanked him for the address and hung up.

Neither Laura nor her mother had come down for breakfast yet. Brown was in the dining room setting out halves of grapefruit at each place.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Good morning, Mrs. Pearson.” His little eyes slid from her face to the grapefruit and back again, as if they were saying, “Guess what’s in the grapefruit this morning. Give up? Curare! I just had a shipment from the chief of an Amazon tribe.”

She smiled involuntarily, and he smiled in return. They seemed to be sharing some huge, inscrutable joke not meant for other people.

“I’m going out to see Mr. Pearson this morning,” she said. “You can call me a cab right after breakfast.”

“Mr. Ferris would be glad to drive you.”

“I don’t want to impose on him.”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t look at it like that.”

“I prefer a cab.”

“Certainly, ma’am.” He rubbed the side of his jaw pensively. “Any particular color?”

“Pink,” she said, and bit decisively into a piece of grapefruit.

The cab arrived at nine and Brown escorted her out. She was very surprised when she saw that the cab was pink. Brown waited, with childish glee, for her to remark on it.

“It’s pretty,” she said.

“The only pink cab in town.” He nodded his head mysteriously, implying the rest: a couple of friends of mine who happen to be gnomes painted it up for me in a jiffy.

She was almost ready to believe that he’d said it and that it was true. The driver looked like a gnome. He wore an oversize pink and grey checked cap under which his sad, delicate little face crouched in hiding from a world which did not understand him. His voice was high and sweet as a choir boy’s, and his hands touched the gears, thin and elegant as spiders.

“A beautiful day,” he said. “A really beautiful day.”

“Yes, isn’t it?”

“This is my very own cab.”

My very own. I painted it with my own tiny hands with a watercolor brush and I drive it up and down the treble clef.

She leaned back and closed her eyes, forcing silence on the gnome and blotting out the beautiful day. Each turn of the wheels brought her closer to Charles, but she could not even conjure up a picture of him or plan a single sentence to say to him. The most she could do was censure herself, and that only in a trite and rather absent way: This is a bad situation and you are a bad woman. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. There will be a terrible scandal, innocent people will suffer, not just you...

But I won’t suffer, she thought with amazement, and I don’t think I’m a bad woman. I’m not ashamed of anything except marrying Charles and making a mess of it.

She could view their marriage with detachment now that it would soon be ended. The fault had been mainly hers. She had had something to conceal from Charles, and the very act of concealment had aggravated her sin, the way layers of face powder cover up acne but make it spread and itch. She had married Charles at a time when she was filled with resentment against all men because one man had seduced her (rather easily, she admitted), and then left her.

It was not the loss of her virginity that bothered her so much as the fact that she had lost it for nothing, and in such a sordid, ordinary way. She remembered the squeaking couch in the parlor at home, the careful shifting to avoid the broken spring, and the darkness torn now and then by her father’s gargantuan snores, or her mother calling, “Martha, you better come to bed now. It’s late.”

Her mother always called in the same kind of voice, kindly, but a bit absent-minded. Almost as if she knew what was going on downstairs, Martha thought, but felt she had neither the right nor the strength to interfere. Her parents were similar in their attitudes. They were not morally loose, their lives were blameless and dull; but they had a certain laxity of purpose. There was nothing clean-cut or definite about their thoughts or their plans. They never wanted one thing consistently or badly enough to go after it. Their weak acceptance of whatever came along had puzzled Martha when she was a child and enraged her when she became older. By the time she was fifteen, her life was already in sharp contrast to theirs. She was relentlessly ambitious and puritanical. She moved like a steamroller, in a straight line, crushing everything that was in her way. She harried her mother about her housekeeping and her father about his occasional and harmless drinking bouts. She looked after Laura, she washed and ironed her dresses, and brushed her hair and sent her off to school starched, prim and respectable.

She worked hard and late, without amusement and almost without reward. Though she was branded a bluestocking at school, her marks were invariably mediocre. She was not popular. Some of the boys admired her from a distance and sent her mash notes, but she rejected them with scorn. She had some of the usual, wild schoolgirl crushes on her male teachers and assorted movie actors and orchestra leaders, dark and romantic men that passed her on the street and dark and romantic men who stared at her from the windows of cars or buses. Just one long deep look and the crush was born and was lifted tenderly from her heart into her diary: “I feel so wonderful today, diary, because I finally saw Him. I don’t even know his name, but in my secret heart I call him Mr. X. Names are not important anyway. When two people just look at each other, they should both know.”

The parade of Mr. X.s marched briskly into oblivion, their scent lost in the musty odor of ink, while the silverfish slithered across their tracks.

Before she married Charles, she cremated them all in the furnace. She left the furnace door open and watched the record of the years turn to dust, the forgotten men and giggling girls, the tears that had long since dried and the triumphs that no longer mattered. She clanged the iron door shut on her dead secrets, she washed the smoke grime carefully off her hands, and began her life with Charles.

The gnome stirred, he was restless, he wanted to talk. He did think it was a crying shame she wouldn’t talk, he was so terribly bored.

“We should be in Green Village in five minutes,” he said. “You can feel the lake breeze already if you put the window down more.”

She didn’t answer, wasn’t even polite enough to open her eyes. Vulgar, she was. Insensitive. He could tell it to look at her. Cow of a woman. Cow breasts.

He glared at her, but his viciousness was once-removed, in a mirror, and besides, she wasn’t looking.

Charles had been very much in love with her at first. He could not do enough for her. He built the house exactly as she wanted it, and it was he who suggested that her family come to live with them, in case she might be lonely. When they did come, he put himself out to make them feel at home. He charmed her mother with his wit, and bought Laura’s heart with an adroit mixture of almond nougats and Saturday matinees. He entertained them, he played the piano and sang and told them stories. It was only when they were alone together that Martha couldn’t endure him. He changed abruptly, as soon as a closed door separated them from other people. He became humble, almost embarrassed. He followed her around, begging for attention like a dog, smiling at her in a radiant, incredulous way as if he were just that minute on the point of convincing himself that she was really his wife. She could not read a book without feeling his eyes watching her, or his hand touching her shoulder or stroking her hair. She would read on, grimly, while he forged invisible chains around her with quiet, gentle skill.

“Come to bed, Martha.”

“Do you mind if I finish this chapter?”

“Of course not. Can I get you anything? A drink? Cigarette?”

“No, thanks.”

“Is it a long chapter?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t looked.”

“If it is, I’ll put another log on the fire for you.”

He put the log on, he mixed her a drink, he placed a lighted cigarette between her lips. Then he sat at her feet, his head resting against her knees and his fingers spanning her ankle.

“What tiny ankles you have... Your legs feel cold, do you want a blanket?”

“No, thanks.”

Her ankle twitched, trying to escape its chains.

“I’ll bring you one. I don’t want you to catch cold.”

“Can’t you leave me alone, Charles?”

There. She had kicked the dog. He was hurt but he didn’t cringe. He was a thoroughbred, and retreated with dignity.

“I’m sorry, darling. I guess I’m a nuisance.”

“No, you’re not. It’s just that I want to finish this chapter.”

She finished a great many chapters that way, but she couldn’t remember any of them. She remembered only the drinks, the logs, the cigarettes, the blankets, and how they gradually ceased.

Laura outgrew Saturday matinees, and almond nougats gave her acne. Her mother retired to her room to relive her life without mistakes.

Green Village.

“It’s not a bad little town,” said the gnome. “I wouldn’t mind living here myself.”

Of course he would mind, really. In a small town people got to know you too well and too quickly. You couldn’t turn around without someone getting suspicious. A couple of the boys had taken a cottage here once and they didn’t last a week. The neighbors complained that the boys went around naked with the blinds up and spanked each other quite hard. They said they could hear the spanking sounds at all hours of the night, and it kept them awake.

Dirty minds, thought the gnome.

The pink cab skimmed like a butterfly beneath the dowager bosoms of maple trees and the scrawny spinster-arms of pines.

It stopped where she directed, just out of sight of the cottage. She walked down the path alone. The sun was still shining but the wind was damp and chilly.

The cottage was like a thousand others around the lake, square and ugly and insubstantial, as if the builder knew that some day the lake would destroy it anyway, and not too much money must be spent on it. A pair of bathing trunks that she recognized as Charles’s was hung over the railing of the back porch. From an open window came a faint smell of cooking, but she could see no one in the kitchen.

She walked around to the front of the cottage. The ground, spongy with pine needles and moss, muffled her steps. No one heard her, no one knew she was there. She could retreat now, she didn’t have to stay...

She turned the corner and saw Forbes.

He was sitting on the porch in a rocking chair, smoking a pipe and watching the water. The rocking chair groaned rhythmically like a broken sax.

He removed the pipe from his mouth and tapped it against the porch railing.

“Forbes?” she said.

He moved his head toward her, slowly.

“I thought there must be someone coming,” he said. “I heard a car.” His eyes shifted back to the lake. “Mr. Pearson’s in swimming.”

She followed his gaze and saw Charles’s head bobbing like a ball on the waves.

“The water looks cold.”

“It is.” He made no attempt to rise or be polite. “He shouldn’t be in swimming, he’s not strong enough. Somebody should stop him. I can’t.”

His voice was cold, condemning. It pointed at her like a finger.

“Do you mean I should?” she said.

“You could try. You’re the one he’s doing it for.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“All these daffy new antics of his, the raw carrots, and cold baths, and swimming in water like this. I guess they’re for you. I don’t know who else.” He tapped the pipe again. “Or else he’s trying to kill himself. It’ll probably amount to the same thing in the long run.”

“Aren’t you being a little insolent?”

“Well, frankly, I don’t think so. I’m just talking natural, for a change. I can afford to. I don’t work for you anymore. I don’t work for anybody. I’m not staying here for pleasure, either. That bloody lake makes me sick and the mosquitoes are eating me up.” He pulled up one of his pant legs and scratched a bite with savage satisfaction. “I’m sticking around because I hate to leave any guy in the lurch. Especially one who hasn’t anybody he can trust.”

She wheeled away from him and called in a sudden piercing scream, “Charles! Charles!”

“He can’t hear you,” Forbes said dryly. “He’s wearing earplugs.”

She ran down to the edge of the lake, staggering under the added weight of sand in her shoes. He must have seen her, for he began to swim toward shore with short, feeble strokes of his arms.

When he reached the shallow water he stood up and took out his earplugs and shook the water out of his hair. He appeared not to notice her, to be giving himself time to adjust his manner.

“Hello, Charles,” she said, thinking how surprising it was that she’d forgotten the way he looked when his face was as familiar to her as her own.

He came shivering out of the water. When at last he looked directly at her, she saw that he was smiling in a shy, sweet, hopeful manner.

“Martha. Well, Martha.”

“You’re chilled. It’s too cold for swimming.”

“Is it?” He laughed. “I don’t care.”

“Put my coat over your shoulders,” she said brusquely. “Here.”

“No. No, it’ll get wet.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“All right then.”

She draped her coat over his shoulders. It reminded her of the times she had covered him when he’d gone to sleep naked on her bed, and she never knew whether she did it to hide him from her sight or to keep him warm.

They started to walk, rather solemnly in step, back to the cottage.

“You look wonderful, Martha,” he said. “What have you been doing?”