On Green Dolphin Street (20 page)

She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him. He lay on his back with his arms loosely folded across his chest, like the figure on a crusader tomb. The breath was hauled up slow and deep from his lungs and blown out almost soundlessly through his nose. Where the robe was open she could see the light covering of hair on his chest; there was a place where it did not grow, as though it had been worn away by the friction of some heavy object.

She reached out a hand and touched the pale freckles beneath his eyes, then ran the back of her hand down his cheek, which was shadowed and rough from the time change and the late night. She touched the soft membrane of the lips with the tip of her finger.

While he was unconscious, he lay within her power. She looked at each indentation of his features, thinking she might reduce them to so many pores and lines, might banish the power which, when animate, they held over her. It did not work: the more she looked, the more forlornly she loved him. If she could not profit from his sleep to break the spell, she thought, perhaps she could use it in a different way.

She went back into the lounge to fetch her purse, from which she took a powder compact. She climbed onto Frank’s bed, pulled the skirt up her thighs and straddled him; he stirred but did not wake as she settled lightly on his hips. With gentle strokes she covered the dark rings of fatigue beneath his eyes, and made pale the growing shadows on his jaw. She could not bear the thought of all the years she had not known him, how much of what was rightly hers had been withheld. By covering the marks of the years, she might recapture them: she might make time run differently.

She felt herself aching with the furtive control she had taken over him. If she were to take some pleasure of him while he slept, he need never know; and somehow, then, it would not count. After all, could they be
lovers if one of them did not know it? She pulled the tight skirt higher, so it bunched above her hips, rose up on her knees, gently untied the cord of Frank’s robe and parted it. She closed her eyes and let her left hand slide down over the fabric of the skirt, then inside, where it felt her own flesh.

She heard her breath coming harder when his voice interrupted her, “Keep your eyes closed.” She felt her face flare and burn as his hand pushed aside her clothes. He had one hand on himself and one hand on her hip as he carefully guided her downward. She sighed as she sank and fell.

Chapter 9  

C
harlie woke up, but did not know where he was. He looked into his memory, pressed the usual buttons of recall, but nothing came. He dragged his eyes around the room and saw it as a savage might see his first interior. It appeared to be a hotel: his unopened case was on the folding baggage holder; on the glass top of the chest of drawers were keys and coins. His jacket, the sleeves bunched inside out, was lying on the carpet and next to it was a lassoed necktie. He lifted the bedcovers and looked down: he was dressed in his shirt and underwear.

Carefully, distrusting the impact on his eyes of light and air, he made his way to the net curtain and pulled it back. In front of him was a city park: a big open area of green with sparse trees crossed by paths on which a few figures walked. He went to the desk and found some writing paper in a leather-bound folder. The hotel was in Boston. He looked again out of the window. The Common. Boston … Beacon Hill … Tea Party … Back Bay … Irish Catholics. Kennedy. Patches of the previous day began to take shape in his memory like disconnected areas of a photographic print emerging in solution. Charlie remembered the senator making a
speech to a lumber company in Eugene, Oregon. But from where had he then flown to Boston? Portland? Seattle? And who had told him where to go? Presumably he had undressed himself, as a kindly helper would have hung up his jacket. From the back pocket of the suitcase, he pulled out a fifth of Wild Turkey, his emergency supply, went to the bathroom for a glass and drank it half-and-half with lukewarm water from the faucet. Then he pulled off his clothes and stood beneath the shower, from whose retractable head two dozen needles pierced his hunched shoulders.

A few minutes later, he picked up the telephone and asked for breakfast to be sent to the room.

“We could send up some coffee right away, sir,” said a male Bostonian voice. “And maybe a sandwich. But we can’t do breakfast. It’s two-forty in the afternoon.”

Charlie sat on the edge of the bed. He wanted Mary to be with him. From her sprang strength and clarity of purpose. She had made all the decisions about the children, the house, how they lived, whom they invited over. Even the Kaiser Manhattan had been her idea, and that was what he loved about her best: you could leave it all to her, but she would make interesting choices. All Charlie had been supposed to do was keep his own career on course, to choose between jobs, perform them diligently and not offend his superiors.

He lowered his head into his hands. He felt tired with the exhaustion of all the failed centuries. He was not exactly hungover; he barely had hangovers anymore, just days of gastric terror and mental absence. He sometimes pictured the workings of his mind as the jeweled movement of a Swiss watch, trembling with expensive fibrillation, into which he had poured sand. Yet what had he or the world lost by this wantonness? There was no sign that a careful husbanding of the machinery would have produced anything that would have helped to give value or meaning to his or any other existence. There was nothing he could do that could not be done by other overeducated people in the State Department, the World Bank or the Diplomatic Service. As for power … Those who sought and won it had a talent for self-abasement and sycophancy, an indifference to
shame, an ability to believe the fatuous and the untrue. And all of this was in the service of … Of what? Of seeing their hand on a lever, their name on a box.

It was not possible by art or politics to transcend the self-renewing strictures of the daily world: of that Charlie felt sure. He noticed—bore witness to the fact—that people could nevertheless perform with antic gaiety within those confines, could plan and act and laugh as though nothing were wrong, as though the design were not irremediably flawed. The more he lived, the more certain he became that the key to being able to act in such a way (for what that way was worth) lay not in analysis of the problem, not in intellectual effort, not even in experience or good fortune, but merely in the chemical inheritance that people called temperament. He saw it a little in Katy Renshaw and sometimes in Benton, his stern secretary; it was in women more often, it seemed, than in men (though in himself it could be chemically induced); but mostly he saw it in his wife.

It had taken him several years of marriage to appreciate that this was what had drawn him to Mary; that this was his chance of survival, the blind genetic cunning that found him his mate and simultaneously tricked him into thinking it was something else—her dark eyes, her forthright emotions or the modesty of her touch.

In the bathroom he went through his washbag, looking for aspirin, then returned to the telephone and dialed the number of his house in Washington. His head was filled with the logic of despair.

Give me something against reason, he thought. Give me hope. Give me a voice that, however unreasonably, likes living.

Mary lay beside Frank in his bed, kept awake by the thunder of the air-conditioning. She had one thought only through the small hours: I am not the kind of person who does this.

There were people who “had affairs,” as the phrase went; there were people who were what they called “unfaithful”; but all their deceptions seemed banal to her. They were all failures of the imagination because the
constant reinvention of her married love was more romantic than any furtive double cross could be. She was not the kind of person who did that. She was the kind of person who had a sense of value, who loved her husband fully, organically, in a way that easily encompassed his shortcomings. She was the kind of person who did not see the constraints of marriage as a sacrifice of freedom but as a necessary discipline that intensified the rewards of love, both in her husband and her children: marriage was moral and it was indefatigably interesting.

She was wearing a cotton shirt of Frank’s and it was uncomfortable when she turned on the mattress; even though it was an old one, there was a stiffness in the seams, and periodically she had to heave it out from beneath her hip.

Mary could not bring herself to think about what they had done. Once the taboo had been broken, there had seemed no reason to hold back; if they were convinced that the purity of their feelings justified their actions, then the candor of the actions might as well do justice to the fierceness of the emotion. Not that she had thought it through so clearly, on the floor of the lounge, standing against the kitchen counter, in the shower, or kneeling on the bathroom floor. She felt herself blushing in the darkness.

She wanted to return to safety, but home no longer represented a refuge. She had infected Number 1064, and she acutely regretted it; she doubted that she could ever recapture that glad innocence and a squeeze of panic went through her. The hotel room was the best place she could think of: hers, yet neutral; and there she could sleep, reorganize her thoughts and decide what she was to do. In the course of the long night there were no thoughts too radical: leaving Charlie, moving to New York, arranging visits to the children, forsaking both men to be alone. In the morning she was certain of two things: that she remained devoted to her life at home and would not change any aspect of it; and that more than anything at that moment she needed Frank’s reassurance that what had passed between them meant as much to him as it did to her.

She looked at his sleeping face for a long while, then got up and crossed to the window, where she looked east, over Little Italy, hoping for the sun to rise.

—

Frank was dreaming he was back in the Solomon Islands, where he had spent three days in a foxhole with a man from Jamestown, North Dakota, named Aaron Godley. The platoon had been cut off by a Japanese counteroffensive and, with stragglers from various other units, was stranded in the jaws of an unpleasantly intense two-pronged attack, waiting for the reinforcements promised on the surviving field telephone.

Godley had always been the runt of the platoon, the one who would first be picked off by predators, and even within his own unit was the object of bullying derision. He was forgiven for the fact that he could not read a compass and that his gear was always deficient in some crucial respect; his colleagues were grateful that Godley’s obvious failings distracted the drill sergeant’s attention from their own. His problem was that he was inauthentic; his jokes were not funny, his attempts at comradeship were transparently self-interested. He fastened too quickly onto the slang, the nicknames and the running gags that others had in twos or threes, promiscuously switching from one subgroup to another, looking for any sign of welcome; his desire to be accepted was too palpable, and nothing he did seemed natural. He could not even march properly, sometimes making his right arm swing with the right leg, the left with the left, so that he jerked along like a man with tin legs.

Frank felt sorry for Godley because he knew what it was like to be lonely, poor, not there, where the warmth of life was. Yet he felt that he had figured something out for himself: like the other men in the platoon, like Billy Foy, for instance, he had discovered there was a road to friendship and acceptance and that it lay not in caring what others thought, but in finding your own dignity. While he did pity Godley, it was impossible not to dislike him; like the others, he recoiled from him because he embarrassed them: he vulgarly displayed the cravings and the weaknesses that they had learned to hide.

In their foxhole, Frank saw Godley unravel as the intensity of the Japanese fire increased; he learned the smell of his body, of its skin and its excretions.
He saw that there was a void in him where the affections and the self-respect belonged; it was not just that he had been driven frantic by the bullying: it seemed to Frank that he could never have been valued by anyone. He jabbered at the sound of gunfire, clasped hold of Frank’s arm, and it was clear that the emptiness in him was total, that any arm about the shoulder, any reassurance would be the first occupant of that vacant space of unlove.

They received orders to advance to a new position. It was a day of awful heat and Frank welcomed the idea of any movement that might help them refill their water bottles and escape from their inadequately buried waste. They climbed over a ridge of sand and ran for cover in some dense tropical vegetation at the top of the hill. There was rifle and machine-gun fire from the left, where the temporary Japanese positions had been alerted by American ground support aircraft that movement was imminent.

As Frank pulled Godley down beside him, they had a clear view of a Japanese machine-gun post, dug in about fifty yards below, toward the beach. Frank shot the gunner through the cheek; Godley hit the man feeding the gun, also in the face, causing a spill of brain and blood over his shoulder, and turned to Frank with a delighted expression that implored him to concede that now, surely, he was acceptable.