Stolen Pleasures (12 page)

She released his hand the moment they were in the open and took his elbow, instead, and swung along beside him with a movement in her hips more pronounced than she had tried for in a long time, yet wondering why her responses to the boy must be so extravagant. They crossed the bricks she had watched him cross and stepped out into the garden where other guests were walking the brick paths or sitting around the white, fancy ironwork tables. The flowers were so large and perfect that the garden seemed a greenhouse, and this illusion was intensified by the humid air.

“It reminds me of Mazatlán, this weather,” she said. “The weeks before the rains came. Hot, hot, everybody out along the beaches, the esplanade, 'till way past midnight, children and everybody. I remember the night the storm came, the first storm. The little trees by the window were bent over horizontal and the lightning continuous, sheets of lightning, and the rain and the wind, and the coolness coming into the windows, but the air still warm. I remember I went out into it, wrapped my raincoat over me and went out, but someone looking out a window told me to get back in, it was dangerous—the lightning, and the rain all over the ground in a flood.” She glanced away. “The sand there is pink and gold, and weird birds—I guess they're vultures of some sort—hover over the beach. At night you can see the lights of La Paz across the water, or think you can. Your father was there at the time. He was there, too. In Mazatlán.”

“Did you meet him there?” he asked.

“We knew each other before,” she said, and was impatient to reveal to him a woman from out of his father's life, a woman he had not known existed, impatient to compel him to see her as he would imagine his father had seen her and to experience for a time, for the rest of the day, what she had meant to his father. Impatient to recreate the father and herself, the lovers. With her head bowed over a yellow leaf she had picked up, she strolled down the path a step ahead of him to contend with her urge to reveal to him that which ought to be left in the father's past and in her own.

“I remember he went to Mexico when I was six,” he said. “He wrote me a letter. I was just learning to write and I answered him. He kept my letter. My mother has it. God, the spelling!”

“He went there with me,” she said. “Or I went with him. We were lovers.”

She had told him in order to experience again, as she was doing now as he followed her, the delight of being both desired and desirous as she had known it then. She had told him in order to experience again that greater awareness of herself, of the shifting and floating of the weightless silk around her thighs, of the threads of her hair that, glimpsed from the corner of her eye, were like flying spider silk in the sun, seen and not seen. She had told him in order to experience again that woman she had been years ago, followed by the man, the father. When he came alongside her she glanced at him to see her effect upon him, and saw the face of a sick child.

They stood in the shade of trees; and all things, the fragrance of the flowers, the tang of the limes from the drinks on a table close by, the voices in conversation among the trees and flowers, the heat of the day, some dust in the air from somewhere on the other side of the high, wrought-iron fence, everything served to make his face that of a boy taken sick at a picnic. “I remember you,” he said, pressing at the leaves on the path with his heel. “I don't mean that I met you. I just mean that I remember you.”

“How?” she asked.

“The time, I mean,” he said. “I remember the time.”

“The time?” She felt the loss of herself, as if she no longer existed even in anyone's memory, her features, her voice, all forgotten. Only the time remained as a frame empty of its picture of a woman.

“My mother used to cry,” he explained. “She seemed to be crying all the time. And they would quarrel when he came home. The mascara would run down her cheeks and make black tears.”

“But they weren't getting along even before he met me.”

“Yes, I suppose,” he said. “But she cried anyway about you.”

He lifted his eyes in the silence he had enforced, and they were a child's accusing eyes, the eyes of a boy troubled by his mother's troubles, seeing his mother's face streaked by the mascara, hearing the quarreling through a wall, through a door left open.

“You shouldn't have told me,” he said.

“Or committed the crime ten years ago?”

“No, no, I just know more about people now,” he said, defending his store of wisdom. “I just said you shouldn't have said it,” trying to tell her that he was ashamed for reacting as a child, thrusting his mother between them, and that she should not have forced him back into the past, into the child loyal to the mother, when he was enjoying her company, the company of a strange woman who was giving him her time and gracefulness and wit, gifts that implied his maturity.

The shame he felt for reacting as a child and the love aroused for his mother struggled together, denying him any further ease with her. They walked side by side past guests who fell silent as they went silently by, much like lovers who have had their concluding quarrel. They made a circle of the garden, and at the table nearest the porch she stopped to chat with a friend. The boy went on before she could introduce him, and, glancing after him, she saw him striding down the driveway and out the wide-open gate.

The woman she was chatting with drew out from behind her a round, yellow cushion and tossed it into the empty chair. She sat down and continued the chatting, smoking and smiling, and seeing the face of his mother weeping black, bitter tears. She sat with her
bare arms on the table, observing how the circle of trees and the soft, pointillistic light through the leaves all gave the group around the table the intimacy of a group in a painting, but seeing, all the time, the face of the weeping woman. There was unhappiness and tears for that woman long before she, the mistress, appeared in their lives; there was nothing that could have been done even if this feeling for the other woman had been experienced at that time, but her indifference, then, struck her now as a failing. She felt that she was a hundred years old, at last discovering that the person in her memory who affected her the most was not the one she had loved the most but the one she had understood the least.

She turned partly away and, reaching over the back of her chair, picked a leaf from a small tree blossoming with purple flowers, and with this activity concealed her face from the woman with whom she'd been talking.

T
HE ROOM ON Vernal Street in Los Angeles was the last room my father rented for us. In that old green three-storied house with pigeons and gables and fire escape, he went over the line and his decline wasn't anymore a matter between father and son. For he assaulted a woman in that house, the woman he had liked the most and spent some nights with. It was a Saturday twilight and I had been reading on the bed up in our room and had thought the noise nothing unusual. Outbursts of voices came at any hour from the rooms below us, and along the hallways, after two in the morning, the homing tenants bungled and cursed. But someone leaped up the stairs and threw open the door and shouted at me to grab a blanket or a coat or
something for crissakes
and wrap your old man up. He had run out of the house with nothing on but the soap from the bath he'd been taking in the woman's rooms.

Under a date palm in the yellow dirt and yellow grass of the steep front yard of another rooming house half a block away, he stood shouting threats at the woman he'd left lying on the floor; and
roomers watched from porches and from windows, and across the street men and women from the bar stood under the red neon goblet, laughing. He was marble white in the twilight, and the sour bar smell of his breath mingled with the fragrance of the soap. When I tried to cover him, he struck me away with his elbow, sharp in my ribs as a crowbar, but when the police came, when he heard the siren, he allowed me to throw the blanket around him.

 

THE WARD WAS located in the old hospital, as it was called, a rambling place of red brick curtained by ivy, and a block west of the new many-storied structure of concrete. I brought his suitcase, as the young man social worker had told me in some huge loft of hundreds of desks and social workers in an agency building somewhere else in the city. It contained his suit of navy blue; his one white shirt and striped tie; his gray work shirt and white work socks, and his dry, bumpy, carpenter's work shoes. And over my arm I carried his raincoat and in my pocket his wallet, containing, under celluloid, a snapshot of my mother taken the year before she died—a dark-haired girl in a short, flowered dress—and a snapshot of myself at the age of five, standing high in the bowl of a drinking fountain.

The bald fellow in shirtsleeves in an office on the first floor told me, as he accepted the personal property across the counter, that my father had shown enough improvement in the past week to permit him among the more tractable patients on the second floor and that yesterday he had been moved up from the basement quarters. He told me, also, that my father had been examined by staff psychiatrists and the institution they'd chosen for him was Camarillo,
in the coastal hills near Ventura. I was leaning my elbow on the counter, smoking a cigarette, demonstrating with that pose my reasonable nature. If the father was unreasonable it did not follow that the son was, also; the son might profit in wisdom from the father's breakdown in a six weeks' ordeal in hotel and housekeeping rooms. Though it did not matter to this clerk whether I approved or disapproved of their taking my father off my hands. In this old brick building of ramps and ivy and barred windows, the personal element was extraneous; it was a place run by public taxation and the public was protecting itself. The thousands of the city who had never heard of him and never would hear of him were afraid of him, and his confinement and classification was a matter between him and them.

 

CLIMBING THE RUBBER-CARPETED ramp to the second floor and crossing the hallway, I pressed the bell to the side of double doors.

“Lewis Lisle,” I said to the orderly unlocking the doors.

The room I entered was long and furnished as a living room with many wicker chairs and three wicker sofas with flat and faded cretonne cushions. The patients here were males, dressed in pajama-like gray cotton trousers and shirts, and on their feet were gray canvas slippers. Some sat with relatives and some sat by themselves, and one lay on a sofa with his back outward. A group of them were conversing at the wide door to the sleeping room, and he was among them, his hands clasped behind him, his head tilted by a smug, lonely amusement with the peculiar reasoning of the others. The impact of his presence in this alien place made my throat swell, and I went up to him quickly and laid my hand on his back.

At first I thought my hand was unfelt, he responded so slowly to it, but then I saw in the slow, annoyed turn of his eyes that he mistook me for a fellow inmate, bothering him with some crazy kind of confidence. He said my name, “Arty,” and the smell of oranges was on his breath. That was good, I thought; if he had eaten an orange then he was comparatively content.

“Did you have an orange?” I asked him.

“A visitor brought them to one of the boys,” he said, and these were the first words exchanged between us in five days, the calmness of our voices recalling the shouting.

We sat down together on a wicker sofa, and the stun of exile was in his eyes and in his joints. He had lost more weight and his hair had grown longer and seemed grayer, an iron gray that was the heavy color of an ending; in spite of the orange, his lips were dry, rimmed by a white dust in the cracks. He sat with legs crossed, his troubled hands clasped on the upper knee.

“What you been doing with yourself, Arty?” he asked.

“Oh, I had a cold for a couple of days,” I said.

“What did you do for it?”

“I did what you always said, I sweated it out.”

But he was embarrassed by the absence of one front tooth, lost a few weeks before, one night he got in a brawl in a café. His tongue hissed a little in the gap.

Beyond the door to the sleeping room were two rows of cots, several of them occupied. The men lay fully clothed atop the blankets, each enwrapped in his delusions as in a mummy winding, and one turned over with a great lethargic wrench, pushing with his elbows. At a table by a window in the sleeping room two patients
were playing cards, one of the players a black man, and his wife sat by him, feeding him pink ice cream from a pint carton with a little wooden spoon. In the room with us a young patient was playing the upright piano with meticulous discordancy, and among the relatives and patients and piano notes wandered an elderly man who recalled Caesar, anciently Roman, and yet would not have come to his prototype's shoulder. With warning flashes of his small black eyes he struck into being everyone he glanced at. A woman's bathrobe was tied smartly about his stocky body, a dark robe patterned with flowers.