Juice (17 page)

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” he said. “Stop that. Listen. I went away to college, and one spring vacation—I was about nineteen—I brought my girl home, and we shared my room and had hilarious breakfasts with my folks. That makes even less sense, I suppose. But when my father said nothing about the seventeen bucks, he was committing himself to silence later on when I brought the girl home. He was establishing something—faith in me is one way of expressing it, but it wasn't really that so much, it was faith in a whole way of existence, a whole view of man.”

“He trusted you to marry the girl if you got her pregnant.”

“Not even that,” Joe said. “That's a mechanical kind of trust. He trusted me primarily to do what I did in response to myself and not to others. In response to the way I saw life, and not because it was recommended, or so ordered, or generally approved.”

“Who was the girl?” Helen said roughly, and they both smiled.

“Listen.” Joe hunched toward her. “Remember when Dave was five and became so interested in his body? And at night, in bed, you made obscene jokes to me? Well, you made the jokes because you were embarrassed, I think, but you never said anything to Dave and neither did I. Okay; the same principle was at work.”

“Principles,” she said. “You've used the word twice. But you said once you didn't have any.”

“I don't remember that,” he said slowly. “I probably said I didn't have any absolutes. I say a lot of stupid things. Or maybe I meant it all goes beyond principle. That you can't be one thing one day and another the next. That consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, but the goal of great ones. That by being what you are, always, you establish your own principles, and you stand or fall by them but you don't weasel, because by weaseling you become someone else, and you waste all the years you tried to be what you were.”

“I remember what you told Dave once,” she said, “and how I admired you for it.”

“What?”

“That if you couldn't be honest all the time, you never were.”

Joe grinned shyly. “I don't know if he understood.”

“You're not eating,” Helen said. “And you're not drinking, which is worse. Let's get out of here and have coffee in the living room.”

“Good,” he said. He took plates to the sink. She extinguished the flame under the enameled pot and poured coffee; together, but silently, they walked to the living room. She set the tray on a coffee table. The living room was less dim; book ends glinted, and vases gleamed.

“I suppose you know now what happened,” Joe said.

“No.” Helen's voice was low.

“Davis was letting them throw it out of court,” Joe said. “I had a kind of genteel convulsion and refused it. All the witnesses were lying. Davis told them I was unhinged.”

Helen sighed, set down her coffee, came to him, and kissed him. “That may be the last kiss for a while,” she said. “I feel a brawl coming on.” She left him.

He said nothing, but he was conscious again of a nervous pulse. “I'm sorry,” he said finally. “That's how it was.”

“I want a cigarette,” Helen told him, and when he stood up to find her a cigarette she went on, “So you'll leave us for several years, perform your acts of penance or contrition or whatever they're called—I believe the modern phrase is ‘serve your time'—and then come to your old wife and adolescent children and we'll hop into our carefully preserved station wagon and make a new start. Our honor intact.”

“No,” he said wearily. “You know it isn't that.”

“I'm not so sure,” she said. He held a match for her. She smoked rarely. “You kill yourself working. You can't keep your hands, or your mind, off responsibility. If the office boy spills coffee, it's your fault. If Arthur Rhein has a headache, it's your fault. If Flavia Montrose blows a line, that'll be your fault, too. Why is everything your fault? Why is there no one else in the world who can take a little of that responsibility for you? Unless you want it. Unless you insist on all the trouble, bow your head, beat your breast,
peccavi, mea culpa
—”

“I get fifty-seven thousand five hundred dollars a year plus dividends and bonuses to keep things rolling. It's as simple as that. You take the Queen's shilling, you fight the Queen's wars. Where's the masochism?”

She hid her eyes from him. “What would happen if just once you didn't deliver?”

“That can't happen,” he said stiffly.

She blew smoke at him and said, “Look at me. I know what you are. A puritan.”

“Not that either. A puritan feels pain when he enjoys himself. I feel pain when I don't; but I have to earn the right to my pleasures.”

“Through pain,” she smiled.

“Not through pain. Just through work. I like my work.”

“Because it's a necessary evil. You've adapted. This is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil. Who said that?”

“I don't know,” Joe said. “He was wrong.”

They were silent while Helen thought of her house and her grounds, her clothes, her two children, her husband; thought that they were all part of an indivisible whole called her life, and that if a part were altered the whole would alter, and no one could say how.

“I feel as though I know myself,” Joe went on patiently. “And if I let anything happen that was a denial of myself, then I would become something else, or someone else; and maybe someone or something loathsome that I wouldn't want to recognize and you wouldn't be able to love. I can't allow that.”

An indivisible whole, Helen thought; and if a part is altered …

“You've been loathsome before,” she offered weakly.

“All right. A couple of times.” Joe smiled at her. “But you accepted that. You knew it was a part of me. You knew I wouldn't lie about it or apologize for it. You knew it made no difference to the marriage. You were a little loathsome yourself once, with that—sculptor? Is that what he was? I saw his work once, but I could never be sure.” Helen had blushed and now she could not help laughing aloud. “But that was you, part of you, and I was sore as hell but I accepted it; I never married you because I thought you were perfect—this is no time for the gallantry of idiots,” he said as she looked up, hurt. “I married you because I loved you and I was pretty sure I always would whatever imperfections you had and whatever form they took. I married all of you and not just the virtuous you, and when your depravity and villainy showed up I had to accept that, too.” They were smiling. “And you did the same with me, or we'd have been divorced long ago, like the others, the people who marry an ideal and break down when it breaks down.”

There was a long pause then; they sat, momentarily depleted, and Joe was conscious of his arms, strong, thick-haired, pale below the rolled sleeves, and he wondered when he would notice the first flabbiness, the sagging of flesh, the beginning of wrinkles and hollows, and how long would it be before the sagging was general? How long before the buttocks fell and bunched in withered dewlaps at the thighs? How long before the neck thinned in stringy grooves? And Helen: What would she feel? What chemistry of the brain would take place when her breasts sagged and her belly thickened and the wrinkles appeared behind her knees? What was left then would be important. They would need a sense of rightness then, the knowledge that none of life had been wasted; that what they had been, they still were; that the accidents of the flesh were the least of their love.

“I don't think you know how hard it is for me,” Helen said. “You're asking me to lay my whole life on the block and take my chances with the headsman.”

“You did that with the sculptor,” Joe said.

“That's unfair,” she said calmly.

“Yes.”

“This is something else. This is the chance of losing you for a long time—losing the home, the friends, having your children grow up without you. And then what? No job, no reputation, no rights. You can't start all over again, and I can't live in a frame shack and watch myself die slowly.”

“It won't happen,” he said.

“You think it won't. But how do you know? You with your sainted father and your abstractions that you can't even explain to yourself.” Her voice was stronger; he watched her almost warily. “You put on your metaphysical armor and you go up in front of a judge who only knows the law and a jury full of—”

“No jury,” he said.

“All right then, a judge, one man, and you've got to depend on him, and suppose he's a Republican like your father and he thinks you're a Democrat, some accident, he had a bad breakfast—”

Joe cut her off. “You're being silly. There's no judge in the world who wouldn't know, maybe dimly, maybe just barely, but he'd know what I was talking about. And that's not the point. You can't be yourself, your charming, handsome, honest, seductive self only when the stakes are low, and then turn coat when they double. I don't want to be that way. We're surrounded by that, and I don't want it for you and me. Look at them. God damn it, look at them! We've talked about them for years, the pseudoreligious and the lip-servicers and the back-stairs adulterers and the patriots, the ones who never in their lives stood up and said, Yes, I did it, or Yes, that's what I believe, because to do that would have cost them a buck, or patronage, or a friend, or that most valuable of all moral acquisitions, the good opinion of their neighbors. The hell with that. Okay? Okay? The hell with it!”

He swallowed coffee; it was lukewarm, and he drank it down. “Cold,” he said. “I'm damned if I'll do it. Not for Rhein or Davis or anybody. My responsibility is to me and not to them.”

“And to us,” she said. “What about Dave and Sally? What about that responsibility? What about when they go to school and their enchanting playmates sing songs for them? ‘Your Daddy's in the Can,' to the tune of ‘The Farmer in the Dell.' I don't care so much. I really don't.” Her eyes were ferocious; Joe was bewitched. “I can walk down the street and if the old ladies look the other way, all right. That's how old ladies are. And if I can't get credit anywhere I'll pay cash. I'll kill my own chickens. I could do anything because I love you. I love you that much.” He was leaning forward, and she slipped from her chair and came to her knees, near him, beside him, and laid her head on his thigh and went on. “That's how much I love you. It isn't even love any more. It's Pav-love.” Joe groaned softly and stroked her hair. “It's thirteen years of love until love is a reflex. I eat it and sleep it and breathe it, and nothing I do isn't saturated with love, directed by love, done for love and in love and with love. I don't exist apart from that love. But my God, Joe, the children. What happens to them?”

Joe brought his face to her hair and kissed her; her fingers closed on his thigh. “What happens to them if I quit?” he said softly. “Then what have they got? They won't even care for five or ten years, and then one morning they'll wake up and they'll know all about their father, and everything I've told them and shown them and done for them for fifteen or twenty years will be meaningless. I'd rather have been the son of Judas,” he said bitterly, “who did what he thought he had to and then hanged himself for it, than Peter's.”

“I know.” She sighed; he felt her breast against his knee and saw a silver line of afternoon sun on the black piano. “All right.” She sat up, falling away from him, and he saw tears on her face. “What happens now?”

“I don't know,” he said. “And I have only a little time to find out.”

He spent part of the afternoon in a rocking chair. The curtains were drawn, the living room was shadowed. He sat for an hour, an hour and a half; he dozed; he awoke. Birds sang for him, larks called. He went to the window and parted the curtains. Larks crossed the hillside in dizzy swoops, and the green brush flashed pink in the afternoon light. To the south, the sky shimmered. He went back to the chair and rocked. When the telephone rang he blinked stupidly.

Helen returned. He sighed and smiled at her. She said, “It's Davis.”

Harrison rose; the birds were silent, the colors of the day forgotten. “What does he want?”

“He said Rhein was out of his mind. Furious. Took it personally, as a kind of defiance of himself.”

“What's he done?”

“Davis?”

“Rhein.”

“Davis wasn't sure. He thinks they'll run a report that you're temporarily irresponsible. They'll come here, and get you, and talk you into doing what they want. I told him they couldn't; he said they would. He said they'd brainwash you. I laughed. He said to stop laughing. He said if the papers and the television all made the story big enough you'd be in a real jam. Rhein would rather have you in a hospital for two weeks than a jail for longer.”

Joe had been holding his breath. “The son of a bitch,” he said. He went into the hall. “Hello,” he said. “Davis?”

“Yes. Your wife told you?”

“She told me. What the hell does he think he is?”

“Well, he's your boss,” Davis said. “He's a big political dabbler. He owns a television channel, a radio transmitter, a newspaper—”

“All right, all right,” Joe said. “What's he going to do?”

“Probably come over here,” Davis said. “I'd like to be out, if he does.”

“Then go out,” Joe said.

“Take it easy,” Davis said. “You in a mood for company?”

“No. You know what I want.”

“I didn't mean a business chat,” Davis said. “I thought I might bring my girl over.”

“Your girl?” Joe felt stupid; at the same time he felt a sharp curiosity.

“Yes. A social call.”

“Ah, well,” Joe said, “I see. You insist on making it complicated. All right. Come on over. Bring your lady. I'll try to explain it again.”