Experiment in Springtime

Chapter 17

When he was dressed again, they sat side by side on the porch, talking.

“Why did you come?” he said. “Because you wanted to see me?”

“Why, of course. But...”

“I’m fine. Don’t I look fine?” He smiled at her, his lips, still blue with the cold.

She nodded. He didn’t look fine at all, but he seemed a great deal stronger than he had been.

“I eat a lot,” he said. “Raw things. You know, like carrots.”

“Forbes told me.”

“Forbes thinks it’s silly, even though it saves him a lot of work cooking.”

As if in response to his name, Forbes came silently out of the house carrying a steamer rug.

Charles waved him away. “Stop treating me like an old man. I don’t need a rug over my knees.”

Forbes snorted, very faintly, and went inside again.

“Would you like a cigarette or anything, Martha?”

“No, thanks.”

“Will you stay for lunch then?”

“I’d like to, but I’ve got a cab waiting.”

“Let it wait, won’t you? I have so many things to say to you. I can’t even get started.”

“I have something very important to discuss with you, too.”

“Then you’ll have to stay. What I’m going to say may require two hours, perhaps the whole rest of my life. Look, Martha.” From the inside breast pocket of his jacket he brought out a battered envelope with his own name written across the front. “Remember this?”

“Yes.”

“I carry it around with me all the time. It’s the only letter you ever wrote me.”

“Throw it away,” she said sharply.

He stared at her. “Why?”

“Because it’s a silly letter.”

“Extremely silly. That’s why it’s so important. Do you remember what you wrote?”

“Vaguely.”

“You told me you were afraid and you wanted me to come back home.”

She wet her lips. “Did I?”

“Afraid. Can you imagine? It bowled me over because I never dreamed you were capable of fear. I thought you were a rather hard woman.”

“I am. Don’t let a letter change your mind.”

“It didn’t. It merely made me start wondering whether I hadn’t been the big failure in our marriage. You had so many good qualities, but I never seemed to be able to bring them out. I knew you didn’t love me, of course, and I used to get crazy jealous wondering if you’d ever loved anyone else, and what his name was and how he looked.”

He leaned back in the chair, smiling.

“Crazy jealous,” he said. “Wasn’t I a fool?”

Her hand moved to her throat as if to loosen the invisible chains that were growing around her again, choking off the words she would have said.

“But I’ve changed, Martha. I know how ridiculous it is to get up suddenly and announce you’ve changed, but I have. I’ll prove it to you. You will let me, won’t you? You want me to come home, don’t you, as you said in the letter?”

She rose violently. The chair teetered, the floor vibrated.

“I’d better go and tell the cab driver to have lunch in the village,” she said.

“But you didn’t answer me. You do want me to come home... Don’t you?”

“Of course,” she said in a flat, thin voice. “Of course I do.”

“When? Soon?”

“Any time.”

“You’re not just saying that because you feel sorry for me, or anything? I know you’ll tell me the truth, and you’re always so honest.”

“Stop dreaming,” she said. “Stop making me up out of your imagination. I’m not honest. I doubt if any woman is.”

Her words didn’t disturb him, he was beyond their reach, up in the clouds again. Later, in an hour, a week, a year, he would fall hard and noisily down to earth, and the dreams he carried in his pockets would explode like grenades. She was incapable of softening the fall for him, or even trying, because she was so contemptuous of the original ascent.

“Lunch,” said Forbes from the doorway, “is ready.”

Charles got up, eager and excited. “Come on, Martha.” He took her arm. “It’s like old times, isn’t it, Forbes, having Mrs. Pearson here? Just like old times.”

Forbes’s satiric little eyes rested briefly on her face. There was dislike in them, but understanding, too, as if he realized quite as well as she did that Charles was up in the stratosphere again, detached completely from reality. “Old times” had become jolly evenings, sweet with love and gay with music. He had forgotten they were dull and interminable nights, shared with a woman who wanted to see him dead.

“Yes, you have changed, Charles,” she said with a grim little laugh. “You’ve no idea how much. Do you remember the last time I saw you?”

He reached across the table and put his hand over hers. “Yes. I was a brute.”

“No, no, you weren’t. Considering how you felt about me, you acted perfectly natural. But we’ve had so many ugly scenes.” She repeated the word, “Ugly.”

“I know. We won’t have any more.”

“Why not?”

“I have more control now.”

“Oh, dear.” She laughed again, with an echo of hysteria. “You really are hopeless, Charles. Remember the day I bought you the tie?”

“No.”

“You do, I can tell by your face. You’re such a bad liar. Do you want to know something about that tie?”

He moved uneasily. “No. I...”

“I didn’t pay a dollar for it, I paid eighty-nine cents! It was on sale!” How hilariously funny it was, and how uncomfortable he looked. In a minute he would say it wasn’t the price that mattered, it was the thought.

“It isn’t how much a thing costs that matters...”

“Oh, dear!” She couldn’t stand it, he was too funny, everything was. She brushed the tears from her eyes with the sleeve of her dress. “It’s the thought,” she gasped.

“Is anything the matter, Martha? Do you want some brandy?”

“And I don’t even know whether there was any thought. Isn’t that insane?”

“Here’s a handkerchief, darling. I’m sorry if I’ve done anything to upset you.”

“And the things you called me that day. You said I was sly, stupid. Maybe I am.” She had her face behind the handkerchief. It was a refuge to her from Charles’s bewildered eyes and Forbes’s listening ears. Within this world of damp linen, she could laugh or cry as much as she liked, and when she was through, she could squeeze it into a ball and toss it away.

“So much ugliness,” she said. “Ugly names, ugly thoughts.”

“Don’t keep saying that word. It’s going to be different from now on. Look at me, Martha. Please look at me.”

“Oh, leave me alone.”

“I love you, Martha. I promise you I’ll make you happy if you give me a chance. I won’t call you any more nasty names. If you irritate me sometimes, I won’t say anything, I’ll just go out for a walk around the block or something.” He added, hopefully, “Maybe you could do the same thing?”

She lowered the handkerchief and stared at him. “We’re going to be doing an awful lot of walking.”

She saw the two of them walking simultaneously around the block, Charles in one direction, herself in another, passing each other every five minutes but not saying a word because they both happened to be irritated. Eventually, perhaps, their system would be taken up by other people, and at all hours of the day and night the sidewalks would be jammed with husbands and wives walking their heads off.

She began to laugh again, with genuine amusement this time.

“I didn’t realize I’d become so funny,” Charles said with a stiff little smile. “You never used to laugh at me, not unless I broke an ankle or caught my hand in a lawn mower, that being the only sort of thing that would appeal to your macabre and practically non-existent sense of humor.”

“That’s more like it, Charles. Now you’re talking natural again.”

“Thank you. What is ‘natural’?”

“You know, ironic and rather nasty. I like you better that way. I can’t stand these happy, happy moods of yours when you go around starry-eyed and full of hope.”

“But I am full of hope,” he said quietly. “I can change my dialogue if it will make me seem more natural, but I can’t change the way I feel.” He paused. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. You always act like this when you’re hungry.”

Her mouth opened in amazement. “Act like what?”

“Uncontrolled and shrill.”

“Uncontroll—”

He raised his voice. “Forbes, bring the soup in. Mrs. Pearson is starving.”

Forbes brought the soup in and then scurried back to the kitchen like a cockroach. It was obvious that he had heard every word of the conversation and that he didn’t want his presence to interrupt it.

“Have a cracker,” Charles said.

“I will not.”

“Do you mind if I do?”

“You’re the most impossible man. One minute you’re full of hope, and the next minute you’re calling me names.”

“I didn’t call you any names. I merely pointed out the fact that when you’re hungry you have no control over your emotions. Eat your soup.”

“I don’t want any. I prefer to go on being uncontrolled and shrill.”

“All right, but I’ve only got one more clean handkerchief. The laundry hasn’t come back yet.” He helped himself to another cracker. “Which reminds me of another small point. Do you have any handkerchiefs of your own?”

“Why?”

“Because every time you want to blubber, you blubber into mine.”

She glanced at him doubtfully, wondering why he was lying. She had never before borrowed one of his handkerchiefs and she couldn’t recall that she had ever cried in his presence.

She told him so, but he merely looked at her, smiling, and after a minute she realized that he was lying, haphazardly, saying the first thing that came into his head because she had wanted him to change his dialogue.

She picked up her spoon and began to eat, feeling defeated. Though the issue was small, a mere matter of words, Charles had outwitted her. She was doing and had done, in fact, exactly what he wanted her to: she had agreed that he was to come home, she was sitting here having lunch with him, and she was making a fool of herself. Charles was too profound and intricate for her. She could not erect a barricade against him because she never knew what road he would take. He had all kinds of devious little detours and he would pop up one and down another and be waiting for her at their destination, fresh, composed and somewhat amused at her laborious plodding in a straight line.

He reacted to everything — a gesture, a look, a silence that lasted too long or a word too quickly spoken — and his reactions were always complex. When Charles became displeased, it was not a simple matter, as it was with Steve, of losing his temper and swearing, and then apologizing. Steve was direct and comprehensible — somebody said or did the wrong thing and made him mad. But Charles’s anger seemed to come from inside himself. It germinated independently of exterior circumstances or other people; it was born without any reason except that the period of gestation was up; it died suddenly, without cause, and it was buried stealthily, without a name.

They finished their lunch in silence. She felt Charles’s eyes on her as she ate, but what emotion lay in wait behind them she couldn’t tell. He may have been contemplating her with pleasure or enjoying her appetite, condemning her foolishness or merely attempting to understand her, with a perplexity that equaled her own.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked abruptly.

“Aspirin tablets.”

Her mouth went tight. “I see.”

“I don’t believe you do.”

“Oh, I knew we’d have to go into it sometime...”

“We’re not going to go into it the way you mean. Look, Martha.”

“I won’t. I’m going home. I’m sorry I came.”

“All I want you to do is to see what I have in my hand.”

She turned. He was holding half a tablet between his thumb and forefinger.

“It’s aspirin,” he said. “I’m going to take it.”

“It will only make you sick. Stop trying to show off.”

“I’m not showing off. I want to prove something.”

“Prove what?” Doubts and suspicions gathered in her mind like an angry mob and burst suddenly into violence. She knocked the tablet out of his hand. It bounced into a glass of water, dissolving as it sank to the bottom. She shouted, “Forbes! Forbes!”

He was at the door in an instant.

“I want you to hear this, Forbes. He was going to take an aspirin while I was alone in the room with him, so he’d have more evidence against me.” She turned back to Charles, breathing hard. “Isn’t that right, Charles? Isn’t that what you wanted? All this business about loving me and wanting to come home again, it was all a pretence, a trap for me, wasn’t it?”

The two men were silent.

“Well, why don’t you admit it?” she cried. “The two of you probably cooked it up between you, maybe the doctor was in it, too! I was to be here alone with you when you became ill, I was to be caught in the act this time!”

“He takes aspirin every three or four hours,” Forbes said in a rather bored voice. “He practically lives on the damn things.”

“Martha,” Charles said.

She sat down, bowing her head. The mob dispersed, wandering aimlessly in all directions. Its anger had been spent, leaving no substitute.

“If you distrust me so deeply,” he said, “I must deserve it somehow. I wish I could change that, make you regard me as a friend.”

“You’re no friend of mine.”

“Do I go now and wash the dishes,” Forbes said, “or do I stick around and act as referee?”

“I don’t like the way he talks,” Martha said.

Forbes raised his eyebrows at Charles. “She doesn’t like the way I talk, so I’ll go and do the dishes.”

He went, muttering under his breath.

“How can you allow him...”

“Wait a minute, Martha. Before you say anything about Forbes, you may as well know he’s not working for me anymore, and he’s not coming home with me when I go. He’s only staying here with me now for some obscure reason of his own.”

“Because you have no one else you can trust. That’s his reason. He told me so himself.”

“Nonsense, there are a great many people I can trust implicitly — you and Laura and...”

“Forbes doesn’t think so. He hates me, that’s the real reason he’s not coming back.”

“He doesn’t hate you,” Charles said patiently. “He likes to make you believe he hates you. You don’t understand Forbes. He’s a lonely man. He has no family and no friends, and none of the excitements and delights and calamities that go with them. He lives off other people, a kind of emotional parasitism. For instance, you should see him when I take my aspirin every four hours. He stands there quite prepared to have me drop dead on the spot.” He smiled. “He wouldn’t exactly like it if I did, but the possibility of it flavors his existence.”

“Maybe,” she said, with sudden insight, “it even flavors your own.”

“True. I feel very daring. Like one of these arsenic-eaters, you know.”

“So that’s the idea — you’re building up an immunity.”

He spoke eagerly. “That’s only part of it. The whole business is experimental. You might call it silly.”

“What does Dr. MacNeil call it?”

“Nothing, yet. But he’s very interested. He comes out every other day, and we talk.”

“About what?”

“Sometimes about you, but mostly about me. He asks me questions and I answer them. It’s a little bit like the old type of psychoanalysis, perhaps, except for this difference: MacNeil believes, and I agree, that no one can face the complete truth about himself. No neurotic is cured, he merely substitutes one set of neuroses for another. Like a man who stops biting his fingernails only to start scratching his head. Or like me — when I became able to eat tomatoes, I couldn’t eat pork. Or you might look at it this way: When you start to houseclean and you sweep out one room, unless you keep the door shut, the dust will go into another room. Well, that door can’t be shut, not entirely.”

“You make it sound hopeless,” she said.

“That’s the first step. That was the initial fact I had to grasp, that, no matter how much money I spent or trouble I went to, I would still have more difficulties than the average person, just as I have more benefits. The problem was then to try and guide the difficulties, to sweep the dirt that came out of that room into neat little piles, so that I would have some idea of what was in each pile, the people, experiences, thoughts.”

She stirred, and he said instantly, “If I’m boring you, I’ll stop. I have no right to inflict all this on you.”

“I suppose I’m in one of the piles of dirt.”

“I think so.”

“Do I have one all to myself, or do I have to share it with someone?”

“I am boring you,” Charles said, with an attempt at a smile. “It was foolish of me to try to explain something I don’t understand very well myself.”

“Does MacNeil?”

“No. I told you we were experimenting. He believes that every one of these bouts of allergy poisoning was a form of suicide, that I wanted to die.”

“And did you?”

“I’m beginning to think so, yes. They always occurred when I was having some difficulty, mostly with you.”

“You were having them before you even knew me.” She turned and faced him. “I see. I’m sharing my pile of dirt with your mother.”

“Well...”

“How are we getting along together? Any scratching or hair-pulling?”

“I’m serious,” Charles said. “MacNeil thinks that I was over-spoiled and dominated by my mother and too dependent on her, and that when she died, I looked around for a substitute, someone who resembled her in appearance.”

Her mouth opened in amazement. “Are you telling me that the reason you married me was because I looked like your mother? I’ve seen pictures of...”

“Oh, I didn’t say that. MacNeil did.”

“That old quack...”

“Please listen. The real point is that when we did get married, you weren’t in the least like my mother. You paid very little attention to me, you didn’t try to boss me, and God knows, you didn’t over-spoil me.”

“I’m not the type.”

“That’s it, exactly. You’re not the type, and I can’t change you, so I must change my conception of you and my expectations. I must change myself. I can, too. I already have to a certain extent.”

He waited for her confirmation, but she could think of nothing to say. She felt tired and confused. Following Charles as he scampered up and down his little detours was exercise too strenuous for a cumbersome mind like her own. Perhaps he and the doctor were right, perhaps they had evolved, with a little deft borrowing from Cove, Freud and Mary Baker Eddy, a system whereby Charles could live at peace with himself.

“I’m going to get rid of all the old trappings of dependence,” he went on. “Even Brown and Forbes, because they were with my mother and they both treat me as if I were still a kid. The only person I need is you, Martha.”

He came over to her and put his hand under her chin and raised her face to his. “I’m not asking you if you love me. I’m afraid to.”

She moved away from him with an imperceptible sigh.

“I have to be going now, Charles. Where’s my coat?”

“But it isn’t dry yet. You can’t wear a damp coat all the way home, you might catch cold.”

“I never catch cold.”

“That’s right, I’d forgotten.” He went out to the porch for her coat, walking as if his legs had suddenly become heavy.

When he returned he said again, “It’s still damp,” but he spoke listlessly as if he knew very well she would leave, even if the coat were dripping wet.

As soon as she was out of sight of the cottage she began to run. The pine needles were slippery as ice and the moist earth treacherous as quicksand, but she kept on running, senselessly, knowing that no matter where she ran, how fast or how far, Charles would be waiting for her.