Experiment in Springtime

Chapter 20

He made love to her though neither of them intended it to happen. In fact, Martha said, “Don’t touch me, don’t come near me,” as if he were a wild beast that had to be kept at bay.

“Don’t worry,” he said wearily. “I won’t.”

“I just meant that I...”

“Whatever you meant, it’s okay with me. Shall I take you to the front door?”

“No, thanks.”

“Well, good night, then.”

The pebbles of the driveway were moist and slippery with dew. He reached down and scooped up a handful.

“When I was a kid I used to like throwing rocks,” he said. “Usually at windows. But sometimes I’d throw them at the moon. If I didn’t hear them fall some place, I figured they must be on their way to the moon. It made me feel pretty powerful. Once, though, I imagined that one of my rocks hit the king of the moon square in the eye. He was pretty mad, naturally, and came over to get me. But he got lost in space or else he’s still on his way.”

He laughed softly. “Maybe that’s the reason I don’t like to go to bed alone. It’s not that I like women. It’s because I’m afraid the king of the moon is still after me, and a woman is a magic charm for my protection.”

“Any woman, any time?”

“No, you. Now.”

He tossed the pebbles and they fell in a spray on the lawn.

“I heard them fall,” she said.

“No, you didn’t. I’m sure you didn’t.”

She was staring at the grass, trying to discern the pebbles. He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around to face him.

“You mustn’t look for them, that’s not fair. You must take certain things on trust.”

Her eyes were black and somber in the faint light.

“Must I?” she said.

“Certain things, for a certain length of time. When I tell you the pebbles are on their way to the moon, you must believe me, if only for a minute. Tomorrow morning when the sun is up, you can crawl around on your hands and knees and gather them all up and throw them in the garbage. You can do it now if you want to. I have a box of matches.”

She stirred in his arms. She had heard the pebbles fall, and what difference did it make anyway?

“Martha,” he said, “if you asked me tonight if I would die for you, I would say, yes, gladly. But tomorrow morning, when the firing squad comes in, I’d say to hell with it. The important thing is that right now, this minute, I love you enough to die for you.”

“Words,” she said.

“Certainly, words. I can love you two ways, by actions and words. You don’t want me to touch you, so I’m telling you.”

“Well, I’d rather...” She stopped and bit her underlip.

He was regarding her dryly. “So would I rather. Will you come into my parlor?”

“No!” She stepped back out of his reach. “It wouldn’t seem right, not now.”

“It used to.”

“Well, it doesn’t now, not tonight.”

“When did it suddenly stop ‘seeming right’? When you saw Charles this morning?”

“That was the beginning.”

“And then when your mother told you what she thought of me? And again when I took you to all those nasty, nasty bars and tried to pick up a girl behind your back?”

“Did you?”

“What?”

“Try to pick her up.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I suppose you never tried to make love to Beatrice, either?”

“That’s right. I kissed her once in a rather uncousinly fashion. She liked it all right, but I didn’t. That’s all.”

“It isn’t all. She’s crazy about you. You only have to look at her face to see that.”

“Well, you only have to look at my face to see I don’t give a damn about her. What in hell started you worrying about Beatrice?”

“I’m not worried about Beatrice. She’s just a symptom, like Laura. There must be dozens of women whose names I don’t know who are crazy about you.”

“Thousands,” he said quickly.

“I don’t know what line you hand them all, probably the same one you handed me. ‘You are my beloved, my wife.’ Your wife, my foot!”

Her viciousness caught him off guard. He felt a little sick, as if she’d suddenly hit him in the stomach when he was expecting a kiss.

He conjured up the ghost of a smile. “Did I say that? I must have been — must have been plastered.”

“Well, I never believed any of it, thank Heaven! Not even for a minute.” She mimicked his tone. ‘You must take certain things on trust, Martha, for a certain length of time.’ You and your damned talk!”

Denial was useless, but he couldn’t stop himself saying, in an incredulous voice, “You must have believed me. I meant it.”

She didn’t hear him. “You and your two-bedroom apartment! It’d be all right for you, certainly. You’d never come near the place unless you were hard up. Imagine anyone trying to domesticate you... you... you stallion!”

She stopped with her mouth open, as if she had shocked herself into silence.

“Stallions,” he said in a flat voice, “are so domesticated that they can no longer have sex relations with a mare without the aid of people. Jackrabbit would be a better name. Or stoat. There’s only one name for you, though. You’re a bitch.”

She began to cry, holding her face tight against the sleeve of his coat.

“Now you’re a crocodile,” he said, quite gently.

“I don’t know — why I said those things — I...”

“You said them because you thought them.”

“No, no. I...”

“And you’re confused, darling. We’re both confused.” His mouth touched her hair. “We’re caught in a trap and we can’t get out without hurting ourselves. But it doesn’t matter, don’t cry, it doesn’t matter. We’ll get out. Don’t worry. We’ll go away together.” He stroked her hair. “We’ll go away before Charles comes back. You don’t have to have an apartment. We could get a house. Would you like that, darling?”

She rubbed her face up and down his coat sleeve in agreement. “A house...”

“Charles will give you a divorce. He won’t try to keep you if he knows you love somebody else. As you do, don’t you?”

She nodded again.

“A house in the country, maybe, where you could have a garden. You like gardens, don’t you? And look, you don’t have to have a kid if you don’t want to, if you’re afraid it would grow up like me.” He smiled, feeling the sting of tears in his eyes. “Don’t cry, darling, everything’s going to be swell. We’ll have a wonderful life.”

They both believed it for a whole minute.

“She’ll be surprised,” Charles said. “Don’t you think she’ll be surprised, Forbes?”

“Yeah, I do.” Forbes kept his eyes on the road ahead. His hands were gentle on the steering wheel. It was the last time he would drive the little car, and he was saying goodbye to it as if it were his dog, reassuring it by petting, and wondering if the new owners would be kind to it and feed it properly. The car had been as real a factor in his life as if it had had blood instead of oil running through its veins. He had treated it right; it was healthy and full of beans, and though its heart was mechanical and could be stopped at will, it couldn’t always be started at will. It beat for some people and not for others. Pearson, for instance, couldn’t handle the car any better than he could his wife. His manner toward them both was too timid and half-hearted, as if he expected them to meet him halfway.

“Maybe you should have phoned her,” Forbes said. “Women don’t like to be surprised.”

“Don’t they?” Charles murmured.

“Not that I know anything about it, but I read once, women don’t like to be surprised.”

Charles was amused. Whenever Forbes talked of women, he herded them all together, threw a rope around them and retreated to a safe distance to observe. At that distance they lost their distinctions and became as mysteriously active and alike as a box of ants. Forbes had once read or been told that women didn’t like to be surprised, and he accepted it as a fact because it made as much sense as anything else about a group of people as completely incomprehensible to him as women.

“Some of them do,” Charles said absently.

They had reached the outskirts of the city. The billboards and gas stations and hot dog stands and cocktail lounges and steak houses were multiplying in heterogeneous profusion like a mixture of small animals that had been bred artificially in a lab to produce hybrids. Hot-dog stands that looked like schoolhouses turned out to be cocktail lounges. Gas stations sold road maps and chocolate bars, fresh flowers and contraceptives, provided pinball machines, clean rest rooms, free literature on Christian Science, and information on all subjects from food to hair tonic.

Here and there a church spire rose in contemptuous dignity above all this squalid mismating.

They passed one now. The bells were ringing and some people were standing on the lawn outside, stiff as statues, as if the rigidity of mind and purpose that was required once a week by their religion had extended to their bodies. Every Sunday morning they climbed into their iron suits and clanged away to church with righteous noise, looking narrowly through their visors at the ungodly and the other-godly.

“What time is it?” Charles said.

“Nine.”

Nine o’clock Sunday morning on a summer day. It seemed good to Charles, a good time to start all over, to begin a new life.

“It’d be kind of nice to be religious,” Forbes said. “You wouldn’t feel so much responsibility for yourself, you know. It’s like passing the buck to Jesus. But me, I’m not built for it. I’m a moral man. I don’t have to have any morals read to me out of a book by some little squirt with his collar on backwards, who couldn’t make a living any other way than by shooting off his mouth.”

Charles thought, the ungodly, too, peer through visors.

“An uncle of mine got religion,” Forbes said. “He went out to California and became a monk in one of those new religious places. They milked him of all his money and he died in an asylum. They have a lot of places like that in California. Maybe the sun goes to their heads out there.”

“As someone has already said, it’s the last point west for the desperate. After California, comes the Pacific Ocean.”

Perhaps he would take Martha there some day for a holiday. She had always said she didn’t care to travel, but he realized now that it was because she never had traveled. She was a little afraid, just as she used to be afraid of eating in restaurants because she wasn’t accustomed to it.

He must be careful how he approached her though. There was no use asking, “Would you like to go to California?” She would instinctively refuse. He must be more definite about it and decisive. “Come on, we’re going to California.” She was, in many respects, like a child. Children function better within clean-cut boundaries and rules; given their choice about everything, they lose the ability to make a choice at all. The possible and the impossible become equally possible, and in this confusion they must be guided.

He would be firmer, much firmer about everything. Money, for instance. She wasn’t extravagant by nature, but she had been spending money recklessly the past year and they had lived beyond his income. It was entirely his fault, he admitted. He wanted her to have everything and he had set her no limits. Consequently, she had spent the money without thought and probably without pleasure. Her checkbooks were always in a mess, and she never knew within a thousand dollars how much money she had in her account because she never bothered to open her bank statements. She piled them all up, neatly and in order of date, in a corner of her desk. He smiled, thinking of how orderly she was even about bank statements that she had no intention of reading.

Perhaps he would give her an allowance every month, or they would have a simple discussion of the facts. My income is... My assets are... My liabilities are...

He hadn’t the faintest doubt that she would be reasonable. She might even enjoy saving money. He’d frequently suspected her of being a little stingy.

A trip to California; a firm hand; an allowance — small pegs to hang a future on, but he was confident, and sure, not of her, but of himself. He had one fact in his favor: his profound conviction that his marriage was the core of his existence. It was necessary to preserve it, no matter how many personal sacrifices he had to make or how many petty spites and triumphs he had to forego.

He was aware that the most difficult part would be to stop himself from worrying about whether she loved him, or cease carrying around inside his head the little scales on which he weighed her feeling for him down to the last ounce. He must destroy the scales, accept it as a reality that she didn’t, and couldn’t love him as much as he loved her; and then go on from there to have as good a life as possible.

The really important thing was that she didn’t love anyone else. On that small negation he based his hopes.

“I still think,” Forbes said, “that the sun has something to do with it.”

Charles blinked. “With what?”

“Making people buggy in California.”

“All right.”

“Could be rays. Cosmic rays, maybe.”

“It could.”

Charles opened the window to let the sun in. Charged with cosmic rays and hope, it shot through the dust of the city.

Nine-thirty, but the house was quiet, and the blinds drawn like lids over sleeping eyes.

“You can take the luggage around to the back,” Charles said. “I want to go in alone.”

He got out, and the car slid away from behind him with anxious haste.

Perhaps Martha wasn’t awake yet, he thought. Mrs. Putnam and Lily would be at church, of course. Mrs. Putnam was a Presbyterian and Lily was a Lutheran, but they went together to church, one Sunday to the Lutheran Church and the next Sunday to the Presbyterian. During the week they argued, sometimes quite bitterly, and once Charles was called in to arbitrate. “Religion,” he told them, “is a matter of the heart.” He hadn’t any idea what he meant, if anything, but it sounded good to Lily and Mrs. Putnam and they used it whenever they were at a loss for a rebuttal.

A matter of the heart. One of those simple phrases that could, with the proper inflection, sound convincing and profound. Suitable for any occasion. Everything, my dear Martha, is a matter of the heart.

He went up the steps of the porch, feeling that he had been away a long time and that no one expected him ever to come back.

The door was unlocked. For that he felt pathetically grateful. It was a welcome, and he would have liked to believe that every night Martha left the door unlocked in case he should come home unexpectedly. Of course he didn’t believe it. Brown had merely forgotten to lock up, or else Mrs. Putnam had unlocked the door before she left for church.

He went inside the house quietly. There was a faint odor of flowers in the hall and the door into the drawing room was shut. It reminded him of a funeral, with the corpse lying in state behind the closed door, smothered in the ominous sweetness of flowers.

“Martha,” he shouted suddenly. “Martha, it’s me!”

The house sprang into action, as if he’d shouted, “Fire!”

Brown came out of the kitchen, grinning from ear to ear, and Laura flew down the stairs, crying, “Charley! Hey, Mother, Martha! Charley’s home!”

She hugged him and told him all in one breath that he looked wonderful, having a tan suited him, she herself, though, was not going to have a tan this year, it was passé, for a woman she meant, not for a man.

“Where’s Martha?”

“I don’t think she’s up yet,” Laura said.

He mounted the steps, two at a time. His body felt feather-light, he could easily run up and down steps all day if he had a reason.

But he hesitated outside her door, not knowing whether he should pursue his new policy of being firm, walking in as if he had as much right to enter this room as she had; or whether to act natural and rap on the door first.

She settled it by saying in a weak and incredulous voice, “Charles? Is that you, Charles?”

He went in. She was brushing her hair with nervous, faltering strokes as if she had just picked up the brush for something better to do. Everything in the room was the way he remembered it, except that the mirror was broken.

He walked toward her with a slowness that indicated not reluctance but a deliberate postponement of pleasure.

“Are you glad to see me?”

“Yes, I...”

“Well, say it then.”

“I’m glad to see you, Charles.”

“Sorry to bother you,” Forbes said. “I just want to pick up a couple of things I left.”

“That’s all right,” Steve said. “Make yourself at home.”

“Thanks.” Forbes noticed that the bed wasn’t made and two empty suitcases were lying open on top of it. “Going somewhere?”

“Maybe.”

“Holiday?”

“Not exactly. I’m waiting to hear from somebody.”

“A dame, I bet,” Forbes said slyly.

“As you say, a dame. I think, though, I’m wasting my time.”

“She doesn’t want to go along, eh?”

“She wants to, but she won’t. She’s got a husband.”

“That’s bad. Did you come across a calabash pipe anywhere?”

“It’s in the kitchen.”

Forbes went and got the pipe. When he returned Steve said, “I see Mr. Pearson’s home.”

“That’s right.”

“He’s okay again, then?”

“He’s as okay as he’ll ever be, I guess. He’s got bad nerves.”

“Oh.”

“Did you by any chance come across a couple of books?”

“They’re in the case.”

“Thanks.”

He picked the books out of the bookcase and went to the door.

“Well, I hope she turns up.”

“So do I.”

“Must be a tricky thing for a woman to decide.”

“Very tricky, yes.”

They shook hands as if they were drinking a toast to all tricky decisions.

“But are you really glad?”

“Of course I am, Charles.”

“It’s nice to be home.”

His eyes swept the room again. There was another change besides the broken mirror. She had put new spreads on the beds.

“Aren’t the spreads new?”

“Yes. Do you like them?”

“They’re beautiful,” he said, but he preferred the old ones. He wanted everything to be exactly the same as he’d left it, to have himself as the only change.

“That’s a new robe, too, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I bought a few things this spring.”

He wasn’t much interested in women’s clothes, but he wanted suddenly to see exactly what she had bought because it would be part of knowing exactly what she had done while he was away.

He opened the wardrobe closet. Half the dresses in it he had never seen before.

“Well,” he said smiling, “you certainly splurged.”

She returned the smile. “Yes, didn’t I?”

“They’re quite different, too. Some of them might even be called gaudy.”

“I got tired of wearing black all the time.”

“Why the sudden change?”

“Everyone’s wearing color this spring.”

“You never cared before what everyone else did,” Charles said in a reasonable tone. “Why do you care now?”

“I don’t care. I just wanted some new dresses.”

“But why?”

“I gave you my reason.”

“But it doesn’t seem to me to be a good enough reason.” This was fine, he was really being firm now just as he had sworn he would. The thing was to figure everything out neatly, then to formulate a policy and pursue it. It worked, too. Look how rattled she was getting, even frightened. While he remained perfectly calm and in control of the situation, and above all, logical.

“You buy dresses because you want them, certainly, but why did you want them?”

“Charles, for heaven’s sake, be sensible. Don’t start acting in the same old way as soon as you get home.”

The same old way. Only the most obtuse of women could fail to notice the change in him. But he wouldn’t lose his temper, he would merely continue to pursue his policy of cold, firm reasoning.

“I simply desire to get to the bottom of things,” he said. “Why did you want the dresses?”

“For heaven’s sake...”

“Did you buy them for somebody? For me, perhaps? That’s it, isn’t it, Martha? You bought them for me, to please me.” He began walking toward her while she stared at him with the most comical expression of fear. “That was frightfully nice of you, to buy the dresses to please me. I’m terribly pleased. I knew there must be a reason, a real reason, and I’m so terribly pleased that that turns out to be the reason.”

He touched her shoulders. Under the silk robe her flesh was soft and boneless as apple pulp. Eventually, if he pressed his fingers down hard enough, he would feel the core. But the fact was he had no control over his fingers. They went down, down, they couldn’t help themselves, they were caught in quicksand. Down, down, on a little elevator. The core was there, plainly. Not an apple, a peach with a peachstone. The elevator crashed to the bottom of the shaft. It was dark, bloody dark, noisy dark, because people were screaming for help. They all got out except him. He was left alone in the dark shaft. The machinery of the elevator was smashed to pieces, but it wouldn’t stop whirring and whirring around him.

He had to scream to make himself heard: “Don’t go away, Martha, come back! We could be quite happy in an elevator shaft if you only realized it, and I’ll give you an allowance.”

By and by he saw her running across the lawn.

Later, when the whirring noise stopped making him dizzy, he would go after her. No matter how far, how fast she ran, he would find her and bring her home. He would be ill, and neither of them would ever leave his room again. Soon he must start running after her, but right now... right now...

I simply desire to get to the bottom of things.