Collected Stories of Carson McCullers (8 page)

Light as shadows her hands fondled his head and then came placidly to rest; the tips of her fingers hovered on his temples, throbbed to the warm slow beat inside his body, and her palms cupped his hard skull.

"Re
ver
berating va-cuity," he mumbled so that the syllables lolloped ponderously into each other.

She looked down at his lax, sound body that stretched the length of the couch. One foot—the sock wrinkled around the ankle—hung limp over the edge. And as she watched his sensitive hand left his side and crept up drunkenly to his mouth—to touch his lips that had remained pursed out and loose after his words. "Immense hollowness—" he mouthed behind his feeling fingers.

"Enough out of you tonight—my darling," she said. "The show's over and the monkey's dead."

They had turned off the heat an hour before and the apartment was beginning to chill. She looked at the clock, the hands of which pointed to one. Not much heat anyway at that hour, she thought. No draughts, though; opalescent ribbons of smoke lay motionless close to the ceiling. Speculatively her glance shifted to the whiskey bottle and the confused chessmen on the card table. To a book that lay face downward on the floor—and a lettuce leaf lying forlornly in the corner since Marshall had lost it while waving his sandwich. To the dead little butts of cigarettes and the charred matches scattered.

"Here cover up," she said absently, unfolding a blanket at the foot of the couch. "You're so susceptible to draughts."

His eyes opened and stared stolidly up at her—blue-green, the color of the sweater he wore. One of them was shot through at the corner with fragile fibers of pink, giving him somehow the guileless expression of an Easter bunny. So much younger than twenty, he always looked—With his head thrown back on her knees so that his neck was arched above his rolled collar and tender seeming with the soft outline of the cords and cartilages. With his dark hair springing from the pallor of his face.

"Vacant majesty—"

As he spoke his eyelids drooped until the eyes beneath had been narrowed to a slit that seemed to sneer at her. And she knew with a sudden start that he was not as drunk as he pretended to be.

"You needn't hold forth any longer," she said. "Phillip's gone home and there's just me."

"It's in the na-a-ature of things—that such a viewpoint—view—"

"He's gone home," she repeated. "You talked him out." She had a fleet picture of Phillip bending to pick up the cigarette butts—his agile, blond little body and his calm eyes—"He washed up the dishes we messed and even wanted to sweep the floor, but I made him leave it."

"He's a—" started Marshall.

"Seeing
you
—and how tired I was—he even offered to pull out the couch and get you to bed."

"A cute procedure—" he mouthed.

"I made him run along." She remembered for a moment his face as she shut the door between them, the sound of his footsteps going down stairs, and the feeling—half of pity for loneliness, half of warmth—that she always felt when she listened to the sounds of others going out into the night away from them.

"To listen to him—one would think his reading were rigidly narrowed to—to G. K. Chesterton and George Moore," he said, giving a drunken lilt to the words. "Who won at chess—me or him?"

"You," she said. "But you did your best work before you got so drunk."

"Drunk—" he murmured, moving his long body laxly, changing the position of his head. "God! your knees are bony. Bo-ony!"

"But I thought sure you'd give him the game when you made that idiotic move with your queen's pawn." She thought of their fingers hovering over the carved precision of their pieces, brows frowned, the glow of the light on the bottle beside them.

His eyes were closed again and his hand had crumpled down on his chest. "Lousy simile—" he mumbled. "Granted about the mountain. Joyce climbed laboriously—O-O-OK—but when he reached the top—top reached—"

"You can't stand this drinking, darling—" Her hands moved over the soft angle of his chin and rested there.

"He wouldn't say the world was
fla-at.
All along that's what they said. Besides the villagers could walk around—around with their jackasses and see that for themselves. With their asses."

"Hush," she said. "You've talked about that long enough. You get on one subject and go on and on ad infinitum. And don't land anywhere."

"A crater—" he breathed huskily. "And at least after the immensity of his climb he could have expected—some lovely leaps of Hell fire—some—"

Her hand clenched on his chin and shook it. "Shut up," she said. "1 heard you when you improvised on that so brilliantly before Phillip left. You were obscene. And I'd almost forgotten."

A smile crept out across his face and his blue fringed eyes looked up at her. "Obscene—? Why should you put yourself in place of those symbols—sym—"

"If it were with anyone but Phillip that you talk like that I'd—I'd leave you."

"Immense va-cuity," he said, closing his eyes again. "Dead hollowness. Hollowness, I say. With maybe in the ashes at the bottom a—"

"Shut up."

"A squirming, fatbellied cretin."

It came to her that she must have drunk more than she realized, for the objects in the room seemed to take on a strange look of suffering. The butts of the cigarettes looked overmouthed and limp. The rug, almost brand new, seemed trampled and choked in design by the ashes. Even the last of the whiskey lay pale and quiet in the bottle. "Does it relieve you any?" she asked with slow calm. "I hope that times like this—"

She felt his body stiffen and, like an aggravating child, he interrupted her words with a sudden burst of unmelodic humming.

She eased her thighs from beneath his head and stood up. The room seemed to have grown smaller, messier, ranker with smoke and spilled whiskey. Bright lines of white weaved before her eyes. "Get up," she said dully. "I've got to pull out this darn couch and make it up."

He folded his hands on his stomach and lay solid, unstirring.

"You are detestable," she said, opening the door of the closet and taking down the sheets and blankets that lay folded on the shelves.

When she stood above him once more, waiting for him to rise, she felt a moment of pain for the drained pallor of his face. For the shades of darkness that had crept down halfway to his cheekbones, for the pulse that always fluttered in his neck when he was drunk or fatigued.

"Oh Marshall, it's bestial for us to get all shot like this. Even if you don't have to work tomorrow—there are years—fifty of them maybe—ahead." But the words had a false ring and she could only think of tomorrow.

He struggled to sit up on the edge of the couch and when he had reached that position his head dropped down to rest in his hands. "Yes, Pollyanna," he mumbled. "Yes, my dear croaking Pol—Pol. Twenty is a lovely lovely age Blessed God."

His fingers that weaved through his hair and closed into weak fists filled her with a sudden, sharp love. Roughly she snatched at the corners of the blanket and drew them around his shoulders. "Up now. We can't fool around like this all night."

"Hollowness—" he said wearily, without closing his sagging jaw.

"Has it made you sick?"

Holding the blanket close he pulled himself to his feet and lumbered toward the card table. "Can't a person even
think,
without being called obscene or sick or drunk. No. No understanding of thought. Of deep deep thought in blackness. Of rich morasses. Morrasses. With their asses."

The sheet billowed down through the air and the round swirls collapsed into wrinkles. Quickly she tucked in the corners and smoothed the blankets on top. When she turned around she saw that he sat hunched over the chessmen—ponderously trying to balance a pawn on a turreted castle. The red checked blanket hung from his shoulders and trailed behind the chair.

She thought of something clever. "You look," she said, "like a brooding king in a bad-house." She sat on the couch that had become a bed and laughed.

With an angry gesture he embrangled his hands in the chessmen so that several pieces clattered to the floor. "That's right," he said. "Laugh your silly head off. That's the way it's always been done."

The laughs shook her body as though every fiber of her muscles had lost its resistance. When she had finished the room was very still.

After a moment he pushed the blanket away from him so that it crumpled in a heap behind the chair. "He's blind," he said softly. "Almost blind."

"Watch out, there's probably a draught—Who's blind?"

"Joyce," he said.

She felt weak after her laughter and the room stood out before her with painful smallness and clarity. "That's the trouble with you, Marshall," she said. "When you get like this you go on and on so that you wear a person out."

He looked at her sullenly. "I must say you're pretty when you're drunk," he said.

"1 don't get drunk—couldn't if I wanted to," she said, feeling a pain beginning to bear down behind her eyes.

"How 'bout that night when we—"

"I've told you," she said stiffly between her teeth, "I wasn't drunk. I was ill. And you would make me go out and—"

"It's all the same," he interrupted. "You were a thing of beauty hanging on to that table. It's all the same. A sick woman—a drunk woman—ugh."

Nervelessly she watched his eyelids droop down until they had hidden all the goodness in his eyes.

"And a pregnant woman," he said. "Yeah. It'll be some sweet hour like this when you come to simper your sweet sneakret into my ear. Another cute little Marshall. Ain't we fine—look what we can do. Oh, God, what dreariness."

"I loathe you," she said, watching her hands (that were surely not a part of her?) begin to tremble. "This drunk brawling in the middle of the night—"

As he smiled his mouth seemed to her to take on the same pink, slittcd look that his eyes had. "You love it," he whispered soberly. "What would you do if once a week I didn't get soused. So that—glutinously—you can paw over me. And Marshall darling this and Marshall that. So you can run your greedy little fingers all over my face—Oh yes. You love me best when I suffer. You—you—"

As he lurched across the room she thought she saw that his shoulders were shaking.

"Here Mama," he taunted. "Why don't you offer to come help me point." As he slammed the door to the bathroom some vacant coat-hangers that had been hung on the doorknob clashed at each otner with tinny sibilance.

"I'm leaving you—" she called hollowly when the noise from the coathangers had died down. But the words had no meaning to her. Limp, she sat on the bed and looked at the wilted lettuce leaf across the room. The lampshade had been knocked atilt so that it clung dangerously to the bulb—so that it made a hurtful passage of brightness across the grey disordered room.

"Leaving you," she repeated to herself—still thinking about the late-at-night squalor around them.

She remembered the sound of Phillip's footsteps as he had descended. Nightlike and hollow. She thought of the dark outside and the cold naked trees of early spring. She wanted to picture herself leaving the apartment at that hour. With Phillip maybe. But as she tried to see his face, his small calm little body, the oudines were vague and there was no expression there. She could only recall the way his hands had poked at the sugar-grained bottom of a glass with the dishcloth—as they had done when he helped her with the dishes that night. And as she thought of following the empty sounds of the footsteps they grew softer, softer—until there was only black silence left.

With a shiver she got up from the couch and moved toward the whiskey bottle on the table. The parts of her body felt like tiresome appendages; only the pain behind her eyes seemed her own. She hesitated, holding the neck of the bottle. That—or one of the Alka-Seltzers in the top bureau drawer. But the thought of the pale tablet writhing to the top of the glass, consumed by its own effervescence—seemed sharply depressing. Besides, there was just enough for one more drink. Hastily she poured, noting again how the glittering convexity of the bottle always cheated her.

It made a sharp little path of warmness down into her stomach but the rest of her body remained chill. "Oh damn," she whispered—thinking of picking up that lettuce leaf in the morning, of the cold outside, listening for any sound from Marshall in the bathroom. "Oh damn. I can never get drunk like that."

And as she stared at the empty bottle she had one of those grotesque little imaginings that were apt to come to her at that hour. She saw herself and Marshall—in the whiskey bottle. Revolting in their smallness and perfection. Skeetering angrily up and down the cold blank glass like minute monkeys. For a moment with noses flattened and stares of longing. And then after their frenzies she saw them lying in the bottom—white and exhausted—looking like fleshy specimens in a laboratory. With nothing said between them.

She was sick with the sound of the bottle as it crashed through the orange peels and paper wads in the waste basket and clanked against the tin at the bottom.

"Ah—" said Marshall, opening the door and carefully placing his foot across the threshold. "Ah—the purest enjoyment left to man. At the last sweet point—pissing."

She leaned against the frame of the closet door—pressing her cheek against the cold angle of the wood. "Sec if you can get undressed."

"Ah—" he repeated, sitting down on the couch that she had made. His hands left his trouscr flaps and began to fumble with his belt. "All but the belt—Can't sleep with a belt buckle. Like your knees. Bo-ony."

She thought that he would lose his balance trying to jerk out the belt all at once—(once before, she remembered, that had happened). Instead he slid the leather out slowly, strap by strap, and when he was through he placed it neatly under the bed. Then he looked up at her. The lines around his mouth were drawn down—making grey threads in the pallor of his face. His eyes looked widely up at her and for a moment she thought that he would cry. "Listen—" he said slowly, clearly.