The Goddess Abides: A Novel (13 page)

No, it could not be done. Perhaps, if she could be sure that he would not wake? But how could that be sure? And suppose his eyes opened, how could she know what she would see there? She did not know him well enough. She could not risk the possible rejection. She was too proud. Of course there were women who could cast away all pride, women who would count on physical response whatever the cost, but she knew herself. She could not escape herself, shamed. She would walk in shame, thereafter, and then whom would she have? She had only herself.

She lay rigid with desire, refusing to move, refusing to rise, refusing to walk across the floor, refusing the very imagination of what it would be to open the door and see him lying there, even sleeping. She forbade it to herself, until at last the throbbing of her body subsided and she slept.

…In the morning when she woke the memory of the night remained vividly with her, nevertheless. She lay remembering, and she listened. He was already up. Through the thin wooden door she could hear him moving about, and she listened for a moment and then got out of her bed and turned on the shower and dressed, putting on another suit than the one she had worn yesterday with her sable jacket. She wanted to be beautiful today, really beautiful, and aware that she was changeful in her looks, sometimes looking almost plain, she took pains with every detail. Ah, but she had not cared until now! Amelia was disgustingly right. Though she had no lover, yet the possibility of love produced a new vitality, stemming from the enlivened heart, the quickened bloodstream. Life became worth living again. The experience of the night had changed him for her, and she knew now she could love him. Yet she would not let herself say, even in the silence of her heart, that already she loved him. She was too sophisticated for that. She did not know him well enough, and might never know him well enough, for the completeness and the complexity of the true meaning of love, a word she never allowed herself to use as she daily heard it used, carelessly, and in regard to a multiplicity of objects and persons, expressing mere fondness or exaggerated liking.

No, she recognized the longing of last night for what it was, a yearning in her loneliness for a companionship most easily and simply expressed through a shared physical experience. She was grateful that she had forbidden herself. Nothing could be less gratifying to her than such an experience, prematurely expressed, so that afterward their relationship would have come to an abrupt end.

Their relationship—what was it? She asked herself the question and her only answer was another question. What could their relationship be, accepting as they must the difference in their ages? Let her crucify herself upon that fact! Yet had she not been even younger than some of Edwin’s children? Ah, but he was a venerable man, a philosopher, dreaming of love as a philosophy, the shadow of himself as he lay beside her, a white ghost in the night. She had loved him for his beauty but her love had not been impelled by longing. She gave it gladly because he deserved every gift she could give, and this for no other reason except that he was worthy. Nor had she now any regret whatsoever.

Arnold of course would never have understood, nor, she guessed, could Jared, if he ever knew. For that matter, she herself did not understand. Probably her nature being human and no less selfish than that of other persons, she needed the comfort of Edwin’s adoration. Perhaps that was all it was, an inglorious need, just as for years she had accepted Arnold’s faithful love as her husband, returning what she could of her own love as his wife, which was, nevertheless, as she very well knew, much less in measure than his.

It occurred to her later, as she sat facing Jared at the breakfast table, that she was in grave danger of loving him as she had never before loved anyone. The morning sun shone full on him, she having chosen to sit with her back to the window, and thus she saw all too delightfully well his clear dark eyes, the firm line of his brow, his straight nose and beautifully sculptured mouth, all details of a totally unnecessary beauty. He was lit with a morning joy, ready to laugh, hungry for food and eager for pleasure—and innocent, she thought, touchingly innocent, at least so far as she was concerned. She rubbed salt relentlessly into the wound of this conviction.

“Tell me,” she said, “how it is that you are not with that pretty girl of yours?”

He was eating scrambled eggs assiduously.

“She is pretty,” he said, “but she has a handicap—a huge noisy father. He’s divorced and married again. I wouldn’t mind his noise, if it were occasionally a little more than that, but it isn’t. Just noise—noise—noise.”

“Come now,” she said laughing. “Define this noise.”

“Well, hail-fellow-well-met, back-slapping, h’are ya, Jared, old boy stuff!”

“How did she come to have such a father?”

“She’s not like that, at all, herself.”

“No? What is she like?”

“Rather tall, but not very. Quiet. I think perhaps she’s stubborn, or perhaps only pertinacious. Or again, maybe she’s not quiet except when she’s with me and she thinks that’s the way I like her to be.”

“Why not just encourage her to be herself?”

“Well, you see, as I said, I don’t know what that is. Did I ever tell you that I love your hands?”

“No. What makes you think of them at this instant?”

“I’m looking at them—that’s why. They’re
telling
hands.”

She gazed down at her ringless hands. “What does that mean?”

“They tell me what you are.”

She resisted the impulse to ask what that was. Instead she pressed the crown of thorns upon her head.

“If you know hands so well, why can’t you tell what your girl is like?”

“Oh,
her
hands!” He laughed shortly and then was suddenly grave. “I wish you wouldn’t call her my girl. She’s—well, not
that,
anyway.”

“But?”

“I don’t know. It’s a problem.”

“She is?”

“No. I am. Perhaps I shouldn’t marry. I’m too involved in this work I’ve chosen. Even now, sitting here opposite you on this glorious morning, with a whole glorious day ahead of us, I am thinking about something I’m trying to do—to create, that is. It’s an artificial hand, a great improvement over anything we have now. Perhaps I was looking at your hands without knowing why I did, exactly. A man such as I am—I’m always at my work. It’s in me, the inventing, the planning. Take the hand, for instance—”

He held up his own right hand, spare and shapely. “The saddest thing about someone’s losing a hand is that the feeling power is gone. A hand is not only an implement, it’s a sense organ. It’s the eye of a blind man, it’s the tongue of those who cannot speak. I am working on an artificial hand which is so articulated that it can almost feel. Surgeons tell amputees that artificial hands can work for them but they can’t feel. Well, I’m about to make one that
does
feel—at least it feels shapes and maybe even textures. There’ll be feeling fingers instead of a hook or a claw. Think of touching a woman’s cheek with a hook or a claw—or think of never being able to feel a woman’s cheek at all!”

“You are an artist,” she said. “But then all scientists are artists, my father used to say. You think like an artist, at any rate, and I can see that you want what you create to be a work of art.”

He put down his knife and fork, and beckoned the waiter.

“Coffee again, please, and get the check ready. And you’re very intuitive, Edith! I want to see something that I can see only half blindly, as a musician goes about creating a symphony. He hasn’t any idea of how to do it, but he blunders along, inventing as he goes. That’s me, too. It’s only the artist in a human being that makes him creative. Without it he’s no more than a technician. God, but it’s fun to talk to you! I hope you don’t mind my calling you Edith? It’s a beautiful name and it suits you perfectly.”

“If you like it, use it,” she said.

“I am Jared, of course.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“I should have thought of it before, but we’ve been close even without names. I often wonder why I am so close to you—I’ve never had this feeling before, not with anyone. But the minute I saw you—remember that snowy night? You opened the door of your Vermont house to me and I was startled because I felt I’d found someone I’d been looking for, though I hadn’t been conscious of looking for anyone. At that moment I knew that somehow—I didn’t know how and I still don’t know—my life would be linked with yours as long as we live.”

She heard these grave words with dread and exultation. For he spoke them gravely, his voice earnest, his eyes gazing steadfastly into hers, and she received them as gravely. This was not the light speech of a playful young man to an older woman. He was not such a young man. Lighthearted and whimsical as he could be at times, he was profoundly serious as she had already perceived, weighted she sometimes felt by the very magnitude of his talents. She had never known so talented a human being, she herself talented enough to recognize the effect of overburdening talent. Some of her own loneliness through the years, she had suspected, came from her recognition that neither of her children had inherited the brilliance of her father’s gifts. Accustomed as she had become to his special affection throughout her childhood and youth, she sometimes felt, half guiltily, that this had made Arnold and the children she had had by him dull by comparison. For this guilt she had tried to atone by meticulous attention to what she had considered duty. Now there was no longer need to think of duty and in the delight of this new relationship she recaptured, too, some of the joy of her youth. Concepts, ideas, words that she had not used except with her father flowed now from the storage of her memory, waiting to be spoken when needed.

Through the long sunlit morning such thoughts came and went through her mind but she did not speak them. Indeed as the miles sped by neither of them spoke. He drove expertly, but he was far away in some distant space of his own, and she, recognizing such absence, for her father had habitually slipped away into similar abstraction, sat in silence and relaxed happiness. The landscape was mild and without snow, the rounded hills and shallow valleys were still tinged with green, the people were amiable and unhurried. There was little sign even of Christmas. So quiet was the day that the quietude invaded her own being until she wondered if she had dreamed her passion of the night before.

…“I don’t understand the nature of love,” he said.

It was such a Christmas Day as she had never had. They stopped at noon near a small town, a mere village whose name she did not know, and took their Christmas dinner in a restaurant that was the only one open. The proprietor was an old man, without family, he told them, else he would have been in his own home.

“Buried my wife ten years ago,” he said cheerfully.

Now, the meal over, they walked along the beach and Jared, out of unusual lightheartedness and chaffing, had suddenly become serious and declared that he did not understand the nature of love. She leaned against the twisted weather-beaten trunk of a dead pine and waited for further communication. He stood beside her, looking out to sea. The day was quiet and the sea was still, but the first ripples of the incoming tide fringed the shore with white. He continued.

“What I really mean to say is that I don’t understand my own state of mind.”

She waited, having learned that though he was articulate enough when he spoke of his work, he was not at all articulate about himself, not because he was shy, she perceived, but because he was not accustomed to thinking about himself.

“For example,” he went on, “when I am with you I am in the most curious contentment. I can’t call it anything else—contentment. I feel I am somehow in my element. You make no demands on me. Do you realize, I wonder, how unusual it is for a woman to make no demands on a man? I don’t have to charm you!”

She laughed. “I find you charming exactly as you are!”

He did not laugh in reply. Instead he continued to speak in the same half-musing mood. “No, I’ve never felt like this toward any woman. I have a sense of homecoming, of there being no need for secrets between us.”

“Have you secrets?”

“Of course! A man of my age with no secrets? Impossible—in this day, anyway! I’ve played the fool as much as any man. My uncle—bless his reticences—could never bring himself to give me any advice and I stumbled along on my own, always too old for myself, always ahead of my own years. Yet I don’t understand the nature of love.” He turned to face her. “Mind you, I’m no innocent. I’m precocious in everything. A woman initiated me when I was thirteen…Well, I let myself be initiated!”

“Don’t tell me about it,” she said quickly.

“I
will
tell you,” he insisted. “I was in school—prep school—and one of the masters had an ardent wife. He was a chilly sort of fellow and she was a redhead, with all that goes with the temperament. She—well, it was a rape, I suppose, except that I was infatuated and big for my age—and once the final moment began, I couldn’t stop. There’s a point which, if a man lets it get that far, there is simply no stopping, and physically I was a man. It happened in her own house, too, on a rainy afternoon. I’d gone over to ask my professor a question in physics. I was doing advanced work and so I was a sort of favorite of his. I know now, of course, that he had a homosexual bent, which explained her, I suppose. But after she initiated me into the way of the flesh, so to speak, I simply became obsessed, to put it bluntly. I thought about nothing but sex. Are you shocked?”

“No,” she said quietly, “only terribly sorry for that boy.”

He did not reply to this, but continued his story, almost coldly, she thought. “It didn’t matter how many experiences I had or with whom. They all ended the same way—in a sort of disgust with the woman and with myself. I couldn’t understand why. She—whichever she happened to be—was always irresistibly attractive until I’d slept with her—maybe not at once but inevitably, and then it would be over. I’d stop seeing her then. I suppose I knew subconsciously that there was no real relationship there—a blind demand of the body, meaningless so far as communication went, like eating when you’re hungry. Anyway, slowly, I grew beyond the meaningless stage. I simply stopped. I saw that I was destroying something in myself. I was destroying the capacity to communicate on any other level than sex. As soon as I’d got to like a girl—or a woman—and that might happen instantaneously, I thought of her physically. What confuses me more is that I think of you in the same way except it is entirely different with you—it’s on every level at once.”