The Cannibal Heart

7

Mrs. Wakefield turned from the piano, rubbing her hands as if to restore their warmth and flexibility. “I’m badly out of practice. I haven’t touched a piano for over a year.”

“I don’t play at all,” Mark said. “It sounds wonderful to me.”

Mrs. Wakefield got up, making a funny little grimace of protest. “I could never play very well, just enough to be able to read notes if I looked at them long and hard enough. I didn’t start to learn, actually, until after my son was born and we came here to live. My son was very fond of music.”

“Jessie isn’t. She can’t sing two notes.”

“Oh, Billy didn’t sing. He liked to listen though, he would listen for hours while I played — I hope I’m not keeping you up? Am I?”

“Of course not.” Mark was faintly annoyed at Evelyn, curled up on the davenport and looking so uncompromisingly sleepy.

“I shouldn’t have said Billy didn’t sing,” Mrs. Wakefield corrected. “Actually he did, only they were his own songs. Some of them were very unusual.” She added with a laugh, “I’m talking my head off tonight, I haven’t talked so much for a long time.”

It was true that she had talked a lot but it seemed to Mark that she had deliberately said nothing. The trivialities, the vague references to Billy and her husband slipped off the surface of her mind leaving the rest undisturbed. Mark did not share Evelyn’s unreserved curiosity — with perfect guilelessness Evelyn bartered secrets with the elevator boy, the butcher, the news vendor — but he was intrigued by Mrs. Wakefield’s intentional deviousness. He felt that it was not natural to her, that she was, in fact, a rather candid woman who was afraid of indulging her candor.

She was his own age, but he felt awkward and inexperienced in her presence. Even when she gazed directly at him, her eyes were disinterested, as if they had seen a little of everything in this world and had already looked across a dreary space into the next.

“It’s been a year now since I’ve really talked to anyone,” she said. “Billy and I were traveling, you know. We went here and there, all over, but we never met anyone we knew, so all the talking we did was to each other.”

Traveling, Mark thought, where and how? Train, plane, rocket ship? Argentina, Trinidad, Manila, Siberia, Little America? And why take an eight- or nine-year-old boy out of school for a year to go traveling? Mark thought of the noisy nerve-racking trip across the country with Jessie tearing through the train like a tornado, picking up and laying down an endless debris of people, discarded magazines and newspapers, Pepsi-Cola treasure tops, and small nomadic and anonymous children over whom she assumed a position of benevolent tyranny.

“It must have been hard traveling with a child,” he said.

“Sometimes. But Billy was usually very patient. And we had things to do, like lessons. I used to teach school.”

“Luisa told me.”

“Luisa loves to give out information,” she said wryly. “Sometimes, I warn you, it isn’t accurate. She has all kinds of fancies, superstitions, like her mother. Carmelita is one of these half-Catholics, you know. She was brought up very strictly but she no longer goes to church except on Easter. It is terrible around here at Eastertime with Carmelita teetering on the brink of hell. I’m often tempted to push her over, but no, I can’t. She is a good woman—” She broke off suddenly as if she realized she had stepped over the invisible line she’d drawn for herself. When her foot touched the line a bell rang a warning. “I mustn’t keep you up any longer.”

“I’m not a bit tired,” Evelyn said, suddenly opening her eyes very wide as proof. “Let me make some more martinis.”

“No, thanks. No, really. You’ve been awfully kind to bother about me at all. I’d almost forgotten I’m supposed to be here on business. I’ve never taken an inventory before, but I bought a notebook at the dime store and a pencil. I guess that’s all the equipment I need.” She turned to Mark with a frank smile. “The object of it, I suppose, is to make sure you don’t walk out with something when you leave.”

“I assure you we won’t.”

“It’s all very silly. I have nothing of value, here or anywhere.”

She shook hands with them both. Her touch was firm, the skin of her hand cold and dry.

When she had left the room Mark experienced a vague let-down. He looked at Evelyn, straightening the cushions on the davenport and gathering up the ashtrays, and she seemed quite commonplace, an ordinary pretty little housewife performing her ordinary duties after the departure of a guest.

“Don’t fuss around,” he said. “Carmelita can do that in the morning.”

“I’m not fussing. I always do this.”

“That’s the point. Let’s vary it a little.”

“All right.” She put down the ashtray she had just picked up, jarring some of the ashes out on the coffee table. “I seem to have annoyed you in some way. God knows I’m getting to be quite an expert at it.”

“You didn’t have to droop around all evening like a dying violet.”

“Mrs. Wakefield doesn’t have the same adrenalin effect on me that she has on you.”

“What does that mean, exactly?”

“Nothing,” Evelyn said. “It’s just a reply to the dying violet theme.”

“If you’re hinting that I paid too much attention to her, kindly remember that you were the one who wanted to have her around. I like her,” he said, as if surprised at himself. “I think she’s had some tough breaks.”

“But you wouldn’t feel quite so sorry for her if she had three eyes.”

“So you’re jealous again, are you?”

“Observant, not jealous. Obviously she’s an attractive woman, even if she is old enough to be your mother.”

The statement was so ridiculous that Mark smiled in spite of himself. “Aren’t you exaggerating a little?”

“Maybe.”

“Come here a minute.”

“No.” She shook her head obstinately. “I don’t want any of your conciliatory pecks on the forehead. The hell with it.”

“I hadn’t the slightest intention—”

“Yes, you had. We’re always having these pat little kiss-and-make-up scenes. I’m tired of them, they don’t settle anything.”

“What does?”

“I don’t know. A heart-to-heart talk maybe.”

“If all the heart-to-heart talks we’ve had were laid end to end—”

“Oh, I know.” She frowned and then smoothed away the frown with the tips of her fingers. “Well,” she said finally, “you don’t mind if I stagger upstairs now like a dying violet?”

“For God’s sake, stop repeating that.”

“Why? I like it. It suits me. I feel like one, sort of shriveled and limp and curled in at the toes.”

“I’m sorry I had to pick the one phrase in the English language that got your goat.”

“You can have my goat,” Evelyn said. “Keep it. There’s plenty more where that came from.”

Mark looked at her in surprise. “Why all this sudden cynicism?”

“You started it. You said, stop fussing around.”

“There’s nothing so awful about that.”

“I know, but it’s a sign.”

“Certainly it’s a sign. It’s a sign that I didn’t want you fussing around.”

“No,” she said. “It’s more than that. You’re bored with me. Maybe you always have been, but it didn’t show so much until we came here. I’ve gotten the feeling lately that you expect me to be a lot of things I’m not — you know, very clever and sharp and terribly, terribly amusing.”

“I didn’t marry you for laughs.”

She said quietly, “We can’t discuss the problem if you won’t even admit there is one.”

“I’ll be damned if I’ll admit something that isn’t so.” His denial sounded convincing though he knew that she was at least partly right. “You seem to think the problem is that I’ve lost interest in you and you consequently get jealous when I show an interest in any other woman. Is that it?”

“That’s close enough.”

“Since you have it all figured out, tell me why I’ve suddenly lost interest in you.”

“I’m beginning to think you never had any. Maybe that’s why I’ve always been jealous of you. No, don’t interrupt. I don’t blame you. I suppose the real trouble is that I’m not very interesting. Nothing much has ever happened to me. I can’t go around being dark and mysterious and fascinating like her.” She raised her voice, in a crude imitation of Mrs. Wakefield’s. “My dear, I haven’t touched a piano since the time I played ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ for those headhunters in Borneo, yackity, yackity, yackity.” She turned away, abruptly. “Sorry. I guess I’ve been hitting the catnip too hard lately.”

“Evelyn...”

“I’m going to bed.”

“Wait just a minute. You’re not actually jealous of her anymore, now that we’ve talked the matter over. Are you?”

“Oh, Lord. You and your simple faith in words. It’s touching. Why shouldn’t I be jealous of her?”

“Because I’ve told you you have no reason to be.”

“All right then. I’m not jealous. Does that ease your mind any?”

“Not a damn bit, thanks.”

“You know, I’m such a simple-minded creature that things look simple to me. Like this, for instance. I love you and you don’t love me, and Jessie is caught in the middle, somewhere in the middle where she hasn’t anything to hang on to. We’re not a family — you know what I mean? — and sometimes I think, I can’t help thinking, that Jessie knows that, and that she hates us both.” She rubbed her eyes. They were a little pink, a little too bright. “Good night, Mark. You might think it over.”

“I’ll try. Good night.”

While he was getting ready for bed he thought about Evelyn and Jessie for a little while but he couldn’t keep his mind on them. Mrs. Wakefield’s image kept looming up, and he found himself remembering, and puzzling over, some of her odd, half- restrained gestures — like those of an actress, he thought, whose freedom of movement and expression was being constantly controlled by an unseen director.

Yet he realized that it was unfair to judge her by normal standards. She had recently lost a child, and to make it worse, the child had been her only son. My son was very fond of music... Billy and I were traveling here and there... Billy was usually very patient... He was drowned.

In fact, Mark thought, she talked quite freely about Billy, but the more she said the more elusive he became, like an old photograph, faded and faceless.

He switched off the light and groped his way to the bed.

It was nearly morning when he was awakened by the sharp yelping of a sea lion. The sound was like one of Jessie’s wild cries of excitement, but there was a note of hysteria in it, a wild regret.

After a minute the sea lion stopped abruptly and Mark went back to sleep. But the noise crept into his dreams, changing identity — it was Jessie shouting, a dog howling, a woman sobbing; it was a faceless little boy barking from a rock in the sea, half-hidden in the slimy eel grass.

Later in the morning, after breakfast, Mark remembered the sea lion and asked Mr. Roma if he had heard it.

“Sea lion?” Mr. Roma said. “Oh, no, we don’t have sea lions along here. Over at the island, yes, there are hundreds of them.”

“I heard one.”

Mr. Roma shrugged. “If you heard one, then that is very unusual.”

He went off down the path, lurching slightly under the weight of the pails of chicken mash.