Everything Will Be All Right (19 page)

—Because she can draw, said Dud. Even though they aren't naturalistic forms, it's there, the truth in the pencil.

Joyce envied Mary, for those minutes, desolatingly.

—But would you want to go to bed with her? she laughed.

She couldn't believe, the moment she'd said it, that she was capable of anything so stupid. She and Ray stared at each other; she imagined that their pupils were dilated like cats', gaping blackness.

—I would, said Ray. She's mysterious.

—Mysterious? What's mysterious? You didn't use to think that. That just means ugly. You're just impressed because she's somebody now.

—Yes, I suppose I am. It's something, that she's somebody.

—You men! she exclaimed, flinging her arm in a grand gesture of disgust, knocking over a glass. Although after all it was she who had said the stupid thing, who had lowered everything to the personal, sexual question.

*   *   *

Eventually the reverend underwood came thundering at the front door knocker in his pajamas and dressing gown. He and Ray engaged in a shouted argument while the guests, half relieved at being shaken out of the evening's dark tangle, hurriedly got their things together and made subdued farewells.

—Thanks for a lovely time, whispered Penny, snugly rounded, blinking from her innocent sleep. I'm sorry I've missed all the fun. Dudley loves coming here.

Usually after their dinner parties Joyce and Ray cleared up in fatigued companionable silence, moving coordinatedly around each other under her command, piling up plates and emptying ashtrays. Tonight Joyce gave one shuddering look at the mess; her bones ached and her head swam and she was nauseated. She was incapable of restoring order. She didn't even want to. While the front door was still open and Ray was saying goodbye to John and Minkie, she clambered out of her clothes in the half-dark bedroom, leaving them in a heap on the floor, and lay down on her back in the bed in her baby-doll short nightdress, keeping still as a statue, staring at the ceiling, listening to Ray padding round the rooms, turning the lights off, checking at the children's door.

She knew that when he came to bed he would want to make love to her; his heart would be pounding from his furious quarrel with the Reverend Underwood and he would want calming down. She waited for him like a stone, promising herself to endure it as unforgivingly as if she were having an examination at the doctor's. It seemed to her that if she could just keep her mouth closed on this silence she would be punishing him, holding on to what he didn't know she knew, even though it lay huge and heavy in her head. She was quite sure he hadn't an idea that she had guessed. He would have to wait for Minkie to tell him (women were so much better at these things), and she imagined that even then, even when he came to her with big dog eyes full of contrition, wanting to explain, she would refuse to speak about it to him.

—Should I put the leftovers in the fridge? he asked, standing in the doorway, aggrieved at having to do her chores; he thought she'd flaked out on him because she was tipsy.

—Put them wherever you want.

For another few minutes she heard him banging things ill-temperedly around in the kitchen; then he came and climbed into bed and, after a bit, reached out and touched her breast, which was their sign. Obediently she got up and put in her cap in the bathroom.

—Only if you'd like to, he said.

—I don't mind.

She lay as if she were an effigy on a tomb. He labored on top of her, and she pressed her nails into her palm because it was disgusting and thought the words “his hairy rump,” although that wasn't fair, he wasn't particularly hairy. Toward the end she pretended, and stirred about a bit, just to get it over. She thought she only wanted him to fall asleep and leave her alone to think. At the same time she felt so sad, and even ashamed, that the thing that had been so transforming and incandescent between them could have become as diminished and miserable as this.

His climax, though, groaning and collapsing on top of her, affected her as unpredictably if he'd released a spring: not of sexuality but of rage. As he rolled off her she pushed away from him and leaped out of the bed.

—I'm off, she said. I'm going.

He propped himself up on his elbows, startled out of postcoital relaxation.

—What do you mean? What's the matter?

—I'm going. How could you?

—How could I what? You said you didn't mind.

She went into the bathroom and washed herself in cold water and then dressed, though not in the gray dress; she felt herself trampling that under her feet as she moved backward and forward in the room, choosing slacks and a striped cotton top from her drawers, pulling a comb through her hair, picking up to take with her in her handbag a change of knickers and her toothbrush and makeup bag and perfume.

Ray by this time was standing uselessly beside the bed; he had put on his pajama bottoms for decorum's sake.

—What's going on here? What's all this about?

—I'm going, she said. Where does John Lenier live?

—Jesus Christ, Joyce, what are you talking about? You're making a terrible mistake.

—I'm talking about M-i-n-k-i-e. Someone who was here tonight. Some nice little cream pancake with cherries on top. But two can play at that game. Don't bother to tell me where he lives. I'll take the address book.

*   *   *

She didn't know how much it was really about john lenier.

There was no doubt that, as she left the house and hurried through the dark windy night to the telephone box (John's address wasn't in the book but his telephone number was), she was full of a sexual excitement focused on him. She wasn't imagining that she would take much time telling him how she felt about Ray and Minkie; all that was needed was a bare explanation of the need to make up for everything that had been spoiled in her bed just now. Her rage was a license: her mind feverishly threw up fragments of scenes with John—his grateful astonishment, his hesitating and at first elaborately courteous advances, that languorous delicate alertness of his applied to her, bent over her, minutely responsive to her pleasures, taking his own with an exquisiteness she intuited in him. More, too: other things flashed in her mind's eye, an accelerating daring, initiations into new things (she wasn't specific as to quite what new things), an open-eyed consent to some definitive crossing into adult territory. It was high time, she thought, that she grew up.

If John had been another man, the night might have had a very different outcome: the things dreamed up in fantasy might have taken on solid form, everything from then on might have turned out differently.

On the other hand, as soon as she knew he wasn't going to play the part she had imagined for him, his importance fell away as if it had never existed, releasing her into a kind of calm and disclosing her real situation in a new perspective. Perhaps she knew she had made a mistake as soon as she spoke to him in the phone box, her whole body shaking so profoundly in time to her heart's thumping that it even distorted her voice; the box meanwhile was being buffeted from outside, gusts of wind rattling twigs against the glass.

—It's Joyce, she said. Something's happened. I need to talk to you. Can I come round?

At least he didn't sound as if she'd woken him from sleep; he was sober and careful.

—Joyce? Oh, dear. Well, of course you can. Where's Ray? Wouldn't you rather that I came to you? I could easily pop my things on.

—Oh, no. It's easy now. I'm already out; I don't want to go back. Just tell me how to get to where you live.

She thought he'd offer to come out and find her; instead, after a moment's thought he gave her precise directions to his address. (It wasn't far, a ten-minute walk, a few streets away.) The real man, of course, was never going to be as obediently pliant to her desires as his simulacrum in her fantasy; it was understandable that he responded guardedly to this casual party flirtation returned upon him, rawly exacting. No wonder, even, that he wanted to know about Ray; husbands begin to count when things get serious. Nonetheless, something in his voice cooled her and warned her off, so that by the time he opened his door to her ten minutes later in the red silk paisley dressing gown that somehow suddenly made everything come clear—he might almost have put it on to help explain—she was all ready for her disillusion. The dressing gown gave it away like a piece of crude stage machinery signaling a point; even to her, who had been so obtuse, so sure of her command of the way things were, so oblivious to essential missing pieces of information. This must have been what Ray was trying to tell her while she was busily planning, first, to have John for Minkie, then for herself.

It was simply never mentioned after that between her and John: the possibility that she had come to him in hopes of something rather more than the clean handkerchief and cocoa he considerately provided, or that he might have ever had to deliver up to her the awkward explanation of why he would not be able to play his part in her revenge. Instead, awareness of all this hovered with an effect of high comedy between them and made them get on rather well, as if they had been together through some danger narrowly skirted. Even though she poured out her story to him, crying copiously into his handkerchief, and told him things she had never spoken of to anyone else about the difficulty of living with Ray, and even though John consoled her so tactfully with his calm estimate of the unimportance of what had happened, nothing that they said to each other seemed completely serious. At some point the conversation even turned to her admiration of the way he'd done his flat, which was all black and white with a spatter of bright colors in the cushions and rugs.

—He doesn't really like her much, said John, thinking back over his impressions from the evening. I'd never have had any idea of anything between them, if you hadn't told me.

—No, he doesn't like her much. He thinks she's silly.

—Well, bless her, she is, rather.

—Don't bless her. I want to tear her hair and scratch her eyes out.

—No, you don't. She's a daft little girl who thinks it's clever to pout and play baby. She isn't even worth wasting your anger on. She's a little shallow pond and you're a lake, a deep still lake, just a little bit ruffled on the surface for the moment.

—Oh, John, you're so nice to me. I only wish I believed that Ray thought that.

—He's not an idiot, is he? Don't you think he knows it? Look, what you need is to get some beauty sleep, go home, forget about making any ugly scenes. He knows you know; you don't need to say anything more. Just be your gorgeous self, make yourself look like the sophisticated glamorous woman you are, cook him one of your wonderful meals, put on the lamps and the music, take the time to sit down and talk with him about painting or whatever, and don't you think he'll put some important questions to himself about why he's been playing around? D'you think he wants to sit down and talk about art with Minkie? Maybe it's been difficult for him, with the children. Maybe things haven't been everything they used to be, between you. Buy yourself some gorgeous new underwear and some perfume and make him fall for you all over again.

—Oh, I know I could do that, she said, frowning.

—Well, of course you could.

—I don't know whether it's what I
want
to do.

Eventually John brought a pillow and sheets and blankets and made up a bed for her on his sofa, where she fell almost instantly asleep, with no idea what time of day or night it was, except that it was still dark.

*   *   *

When she woke she could just make out the shapes of objects in the room in a gray dawn light. Her head felt clear, she was perfectly well, she must have worked right through the terrible hangover that surely had been in store for her in all the excitement of the night before: her escape into the dark, her tears, and her pouring out of all her troubles. These had used up all the poison in her.

She woke thinking about Ray: not about Minkie and all the stuff from last night, but about his work. His latest paintings, for the last eighteen months or so, had been something new. He was putting the paint on more smoothly, and if you drew your attention away from the surface details of the brushwork, you could suddenly see revealed a glimpse of likeness, verisimilitude, as if under the necessary play of the paint he had trapped a shadow of the real presence. Joyce knew that this mixture of an expressionistic style with some of the devices of illusionism was an eccentric and original technique, and she knew what a practiced virtuoso handling of the paint was required to produce such a complex effect. The other thing he had changed was the way he arranged the bodies on the canvas, his new cramped picture space with body parts improbably crowded together. Some of the new nudes had startled and unsettled Joyce when she first saw them: he had asked the model to take a contorted position, legs apart, genitalia brutally exposed and foregrounded, the model perhaps looking out from the picture with her head almost upside down, twisted under her knee. The models could only hold these contortions while he made quick sketches. When he worked the sketches up into paintings, he didn't square the drawings up as he used to do; he copied freehand and exaggerated the distortions and the improbability.

These were beautiful pictures, Joyce was sure of that. She knew she was able to make an objective estimate of his work because she also had an uncanny instinct for when his paintings failed, which came from knowing him so well, recognizing when he was weak or false or trying to cover up something he couldn't do. These new ones frightened her, but they weren't ugly. They looked unflinchingly deep into the layered appearances of flesh, seeing things that were true. She trusted him, not personally but objectively, that he was able to see the truth: not in their daily life, when he was often wrong, but beyond it. She could see it when it worked, the translation of the truth of life into pictures, but she couldn't do it for herself. My love for him rests on that, she thought. Everything rests on that.