Contrary Pleasure (22 page)

“Mrs.
Franchard
phoned here. You better tell
the truth.”

Ellen put the case and the racket on the kitchen table. She spoke
quickly. “They had this idea—about the four of us going up and staying in
Bobby’s family’s camp overnight. A dumb idea, I guess, and we were—the girls,
that is—to make out like we were staying at each other’s house. I was the last
one to phone and Mom said I could and then… well, walking back to where they
were, I thought it would not be the right thing to do and I guess to be
perfectly honest I was scared and so I told them Mom said no instead of yes
like she said, and then we drove up there just to leave Norma and Bobby up
there and we were going to go pick them up in the morning, but as far as I’m
concerned, Clyde can go pick them up by himself. As far as I’m concerned, Clyde
can take himself a big running leap and drop dead.”

“What happened to your face?”

“I fell.”

“Call your mother, Brock, and tell her Ellen is home and she’s okay.”

“Where’s Mom?”

“Over staying with Mrs.
Franchard
while Mr.
Franchard
and Mr. Rawls are making a trip up to that camp.”

As Brock hurried to the phone he heard his sister say, in an awed voice,
“Oh, brother!”

He got hold of Mrs.
Franchard
first and then
his mother. He gave her the message. She started to ask questions he couldn’t
answer, and then said she’d be right home. As he had been talking he had heard
the low voices of his father and Ellen in the kitchen. When he went back out he
saw Ellen smiling and he knew that things were all right. She’d always been
able to get around the old man. And never got away with anything with Mom. It
worked just the other way with him. The books said it was supposed to be that
way. But it seemed funny sometimes.

Ellen, still smiling, moved gingerly onto the offensive. “I guess I ought
to be kind of mad about you thinking I’d do that, Dad, stay up there all
night.”

“And I could have a few things to say about you running around with a
couple who will stay up there—would have stayed up there.”

Ellen took the new advantage. “I’m through with them. They’re sickening.
So is Clyde.” Her face began to break up. “Oh, why can’t we all go away from
here? I just hate it here. I hate it!” And she fled. They heard the door of her
room bang. A few minutes later his mother drove in, came hurrying into the
house, asked where Ellen was, and went off toward Ellen’s room. His father
asked him to please put the car away. When Brock got back into the kitchen, his
father was pouring two glasses of milk.

He gave Brock a twisted smile. “Confusing evening. Milk?”

“Thanks.” Brock took it and sat on the counter near the sink. His father
leaned against the refrigerator.

“You were right about Ellen, Brock.”

“She’s okay. She’s a little mixed up.”

“What about that Clyde?”

“I don’t much like him. I never have. He goes around bulging his muscles.
I guess he’s okay, though.”

“But if Ellen had agreed to stay up there, he would have liked that?”

“Why not? I don’t like him, but he isn’t crazy.”

His father frowned. “Is that the attitude you all have? About nice
girls?”

“If they won’t, they won’t. If they will, they will.”

“That’s pretty damn cynical, son.”

“Is it? I never thought about it. Look, Dad, suppose I look around for
something to do this summer.”

“I hoped you would. But I wasn’t going to mention it.”

“Then enlist in the fall. They’re going to come after me sooner or later.
I can get that over with and then be squared away to try to get in school
someplace when I get out. What do you think?”

“I want you to finish college. I don’t care when or how, but I want you
to finish.”

“I want to. I thought I knew what I wanted to do. Now I’m not so sure. So
maybe with a break in the middle, I’ll be smarter about what courses I want
later on.”

“Your mother isn’t going to like it.”

“I figured that.”

“Let’s sleep on it.”

“Sure. Night now.”

“Good night, Brock.” And there was a tentative touch on his shoulder in
parting, the first shy gesture of affection since Fiasco. Brock went to his
room. He heard the muted feminine voices of sister and mother. The affectionate
gesture had pleased him. But, as he prepared for bed, the pleasure faded. He
realized that for a brief time in the dark living room he had talked directly
and honestly, as himself. But in the bright kitchen he had slipped into a new
role. The staunch penitent. The noble prodigal. Good God! A job that would
louse up the summer completely. And then basic training to top it off. All that
had been spur of the moment, like a toddler holding up a newly found green leaf
in hopes of a pat on the head.

After his light was out, he lay in darkness and wondered if he were truly
totally lacking in that something called sincerity. Play a moody part for a
time and then slide from that into temporary honesty and then into a new part.
Now he would have to be bluff and cheery and brave for a long time. What in
hell was it that he really wanted? What were you supposed to want? Approval? He
had placed a big mortgage on the future to obtain a tiny morsel of that. Maybe
the best thing to want was no trouble. Smooth and easy. Food and a sack and
some records to play and some thoughts to think and a girl to chase.

After the boy
had gone to bed, Ben sat in the silent kitchen, the empty glass, milk-streaked,
in front of him. He thought of his daughter. He had wanted to go with the other
two men but had not quite dared. For fear of what they would find. Fear of
himself and how he would react if they found it. For it was more than
protection of the sweet young daughter. There was, and perhaps there had to be
in these years of their father-daughter lives, a faint yet not unhealthy tinge
of the incestuous. Both he and she becoming aware, almost simultaneously, of
her as woman. And so in the rage which he feared, there would be the murderous
intent of the betrayed, as well as the fever of the protective parent. He well
knew that one day she would marry. And the wedding night would be, to him, a
form of peculiar torture. A physical jealousy that could not be admitted.

And so he had not dared go up there. And had been reprieved.

But the true oddness of the evening was in the boy. The way Brock had
talked had given Ben a strange nostalgia for his own youth, for those years
when you thought often about the why of things, when philosophical discussions
lasted until dawn. I think, therefore I am. What is God? All those old thoughts
had slept uneasily in his mind.

Brock’s words had brought them awake again, to stand on awkward legs,
blinking at the light. What Brock had been saying was basically the old
discussion of good and evil. It hid behind new words. Purpose and lack of
purpose. Creation and destruction. Meaningfulness and lack of meaning. Once
upon a time it had been the most important problem in all the world, in all of
life.

But you grew up. And grew into acceptance, not of good and evil, but of a
world in which they were so curiously intermixed, so mutually interdependent,
that it became far easier to accept the inevitability of all compromise. Or was
it because it just became so much more comfortable
not
to think.

You could not go into the men’s bar at the club and start talking about
the meaningfulness of existence. Not sober, at least. You would embarrass them
and, perhaps, alarm them. An old friend would take you aside and suggest a
physical checkup. Or start the same discussion with your wife and she would
interpret it as a general dissatisfaction with life, and she would put it in
her personal frame of reference and see an implied criticism of her.

There wasn’t anybody to talk to anymore. Even when your own son opened
the subject, you could not talk to him without attempting to instruct or
command.

So the thoughts went to sleep. You kept them quiet. You made them sleep.
If they started to stir in their sleep, they could be safely
Miltowned
or
martinied
. Or
eclipsed by the excitement of the new flesh of a stranger.

These are the things that put the doubts to sleep, but there are other
ways to weaken them if they stir into wakefulness. Repetition, endlessly, that
life
has
to be good. Because the white walls are pristine, because the
dishwasher kills germs as well as washes the dishes, because the lawns are free
of crabgrass this year, because there was enough left after taxes to buy some
more Hudson Fund, because the doctor stood—grave, smiling,
bakelite
of the stethoscope hanging against starchy white—saying you were healthy as a
horse [why is it always a horse?], because the joke you were dubious about, the
joke that kicked off the speech [the tightrope walker and the four-dollar beer]
convulsed them all, because the newsletter reports that dealers’ stocks are
moving rapidly, that retail sales are up 2.7 percent over the same month last
year, that rails and motors are leading a market resurgence, because the
twenty-pay-life is at last paid up, yes, yes, because of all these things it is
good and it has to be good, and nobody has it any better, and no generation in
any time of history ever had it any better, it has to be good, and pray leave
us have no juvenile, adolescent, sophomoric maunderings about truth and beauty,
good and evil, and man’s destiny. Merely be the little engine that could, that
has, and is, and will continue to be.

And what has this got to do with that so cold and so functional Thomas
Marin Griffin, he who walks his jungle paths alone with never the click of
claws or gnawing sound of teeth, and who now in all fairness and honesty and
remorseless logic is waiting to chew you up and spit out something that is no
longer you—is instead a man in a bright shirt and beaked, straw cap and fat
legs sunburned, fishing from a tidal bridge, and boring his neighboring catcher
of
sheepshead
, and grunting stories of ancient glory,
of
ivoried
splendor of work sheets which now mellow
and yellow in the green file, of warrior methods of forgotten sales meetings,
of bold jousting with obsolescence. Saying it just right. To convey shrewdness
without self-glorification. To hint of this and that, dropping names that land
solidly. And one of the names would be, of course, Thomas Marin Griffin.

He looked around the kitchen with the sudden impression, close to alarm,
that he was in a strange place, in a room he did not know. And his heart
hastened with an excitement he did not understand. Then he got up and rinsed
the glass and set it on porcelain with a tiny click and turned out the lights,
the mercury switches soundless, and went to bed, hearing wife and daughter
still talking in low voices, wondering what they still found to say to each
other, wondering if he would sleep well and hoping that he would because this
had been a bad day, all in all, and Friday would not be any easier.

After her mother had gone, and
after the lights were out, Ellen sat up and flounced her pillow and turned onto
her side, palms flat together and under her cheek, knees hiked high, feeling
the warmth of herself in bed and trying to think only of coziness and warmth
and curled up and warm and soft and each slow breath like falling softly off
something into deeper warmth and softness.

Then she grunted and rolled over onto her back, flapping one arm down in
exasperation, lying spread and rigid and wondering. What would it have been
like?

The boys had brought their trunks and took a swim in the dusk-cold lake,
the frigid, spring-fed lake, while she and Norma had made the sandwiches,
feeling very house-
wifey
in the old camp kitchen,
giggling at the barbarisms of the camp equipment, and then the boys had come
howling and blue up into the camp, into the kitchen, jumping and flapping in an
agony of coldness, and the sun-golden hair of arms and legs pasted flat, but
springing and curling and standing out again when towel-rubbed. Clyde had built
the big fire in the fireplace and then they had dressed and Bobby had poked
around, muttering and slamming cupboard doors until at last with cry of triumph
had held aloft the bottle, almost full, saying that now they could get warm on
the inside too.

So the boys had drunk a lot of it and Norma almost as much and she just
enough so she felt far away from herself, numb-lipped, making faraway laughter
at everything and nothing. So that the sandwiches were things eaten in a
half-remembered state. And somehow time got mixed up so that a second was a
long, long time. Or an hour was nearly nothing. So that she was on the floor,
curled, facing the fire, Clyde behind her, knees against the backs of her
knees, arm around her, so that the fire coals were steady warmth against the
front of her, and Clyde warming close the back of her, and she kept drifting
off and coming back with a start when his hands would move on her and she would
push them away, not wanting to be touched, but just held like this.

Then pushing his hands away became too much trouble and she let him touch
her, and the touch made things seem to slowly shift and melt inside her, made
her feel as if she were enormously heavy, a sweet-swollen, dreamy, helpless
thing there,
unprotesting
when he turned her around
so gently, and his lips were stone against the soft membrane of her own lips.
And then it began to turn into a fumbling, into an awkwardness of fumbling that
broke the mood, so that she frowned against his lips. Then heard, in the camp
stillness, in the night-lake silence, an odd sound, an odd regular sound. It
could not be translated and then, in a moment of shock and horror she realized
that it was the dogged, insensate, blinded creak of springs of one of the old
camp beds in the nearby bedroom, and she began to fight Clyde silently and with
all her strength. He fought to take her. They grunted and gasped, rolling
dangerously near the fire, and she wrested one arm free and hammered twice at
his stone face with her fist, holding it as though she were stabbing with a
knife. Then, wiggling free and pulling her leg out from under him and half
rising to run as he caught her ankle, she fell but pulled free and rolled and
jumped up and backed away.