The Tight White Collar (16 page)

David shook with rage and insult and he took Mark's jacket and flung it at him.

“Get out!” he shouted.

Mark was calm and white faced. “David,” he said, “why fight it? It's all right. I understand. I understand everything. You needn't keep up a front with me. Believe me, Davy, I can sympathize with the bad times you've had and I can understand the squelching of your desires and the frustration that follows. I went through the same ordeal myself before I developed enough honesty to admit what the matter was with me.”

“You queer!” David screamed and tears began to pour down his face. “You fairy! You perverted sonofabitch! Get out of here and leave me alone!”

Mark's face had a carved look as he stood and looked at David.

“
You
calling
me
names, David?” he asked at last. “
You
calling
me
those horrible names? Who are you trying to fool, David? You're a homosexual and everyone in town knows it. Even the peasants who don't know the proper word for you realize that you're different. Even Jess Cameron trying to get you to admit it to yourself in the mistaken hope that he could help you. I realized that Jess knew as soon as you began telling me that he wouldn't treat your silly, nonexistent ulcers.”

“Shut up!” cried David. “Shut up and get out!”

“You should hear the way people talk about you, David,” Mark went on in his cool, relentless voice. “Did you know that every parent with a son who studies with you tells him to be careful, to run right home and tell if you ever try to put a hand on one boy? Did you know that, David? And did you know that Nathaniel Cooper and Jim Sheppard know all about you and that the only reason your contract is ever renewed at all is that Doris Palmer is on your side? No wonder you signed her silly petition.”

“If you don't get out, I'll throw you out,” said David quietly.

“Oh, I'll go, David,” said Mark and picked up his jacket. “But when you finally wake up and realize what you are, don't you dare come crawling back to me, begging me to take you. I'll spit in your face.”

David stood for a long time in the center of his studio after Mark had gone, then he went to the piano and began to play softly.

He's mad, of course, thought David. Absolutely stark, raving mad. I'm not like that. I've never been like that. How could anyone possibly think such an evil thing of me?

But every note he struck echoed the same sound. Martin Mallory, said the music. Martin Mallory. Martin Mallory.

David's hands came down on the keys with a discordant crash.

“The long, hot summer,” said Anthony and stretched his naked body lazily against the rumpled sheets. “Your belly is damp, my love.”

“So is your hand,” murmured Lisa and moved languidly under his touch.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Time for me to get up and go home,” she replied.

They had taken to using Anthony's house for their days of talk and lovemaking not only because Lisa enjoyed the Cooper house more than her own but because now that it was summer there was an element of danger to the gardener's cottage. Chris had taken a job as a supervisor of summer activities at the state school but sometimes, when the weather turned unfavorable, he came home early or the children, who attended a day camp run by the town, returned at unexpected times. Then Lisa, hearing Chris's car or the day camp bus, would stand up and go to one of the windows in Anthony's bedroom. She would stand behind the curtain and watch her family.

“Why don't I feel rotten and dirty?” she asked Anthony. “I should, you know. I'm being unfaithful to my husband and a bad mother to my children. I should feel like a tramp but I don't. I wonder why.”

Anthony came to stand in back of her and his hands caressed her naked behind.

“Because I've taught you not to,” he told her.

Anthony had taught her well. In the beginning, after the first time, he had refused to rush things. He had wooed her slowly, building up a sensuality and a need in her as great as his own. During the first three weeks of their relationship, he did nothing but touch her and caress her, arousing her to unbelievable heights of passion and then releasing her with his mouth and his hands until Lisa whimpered and screamed. He taught her, too, to be proud rather than ashamed of her body. He made her stand in front of the full-length mirror in his bedroom and then he stood behind her.

“You're beautiful,” he said. “And you should enjoy the fact.”

Lisa stood in front of the mirror and watched his hands on her body and later she could not remember whether it had been the sight or the way he touched her but she was overwhelmed with a sudden need for him. She turned and pressed against him.

“Do it to me,” she said. “Now.”

But even then, Anthony went slowly and carefully, waiting until she hovered at the edge of the chasm of ecstasy before he took her.

When it was over he held her and caressed her gently.

“You have the makings of a fine little animal,” he said.

In the weeks that followed, he used and abused her body. He taught her everything that his years and his worldliness had taught him. And Lisa, of course, did the unfortunate thing. She fell in love with him.

“I love you,” she said. She said it against his mouth and against his body and she said it when he touched her.

“You're a nut,” he told her gently. “You're in love with sex and that kind of love isn't the right kind. Comes September and I'll be going back to the city and you'll go back to being a dutiful wife who is in love with her husband. This is fun. It's wonderful and exciting but it isn't love.”

“You're a beast,” said Lisa and felt like crying. “Don't you love me just a little?”

“That is a question that a woman should never ask a man,” said Anthony. “Come here.”

“Sometimes I absolutely hate you,” she said.

“Good,” replied Anthony, reaching for her. “That's the way it should be.”

“But haven't you ever been in love?” she asked.

“I've been too busy,” he said. “Besides, I don't believe in love. It makes slaves of people and I love freedom.”

“But aren't you ever going to get married and have a family?”

“Now you sound exactly like my Aunt Margery and my Uncle Nathaniel,” he said. “No, I'm not going to marry. I'll go to my grave as the last of the Coopers and a good thing it will be.”

“That's a dreadful way to talk about your own family,” objected Lisa.

“Maybe, but I mean every word of it. Now will you please shut up and let me kiss you?”

The summer wore on, green and heavy with heat and moisture, and Doris Palmer had the names of twenty-five percent of the voting population of Cooper Station on her petition.

“A tempest in a teapot,” Anthony told Lisa. “And much ado about nothing and every other cliché in the world. This thing is a farce.”

“Don't you care about anything?” demanded Lisa.

“Not particularly,” replied Anthony.

“What in the world ever made you this way?” she asked.

“I was born this way,” he said.

But it wasn't true. Anthony could remember well the jagged edges of too much feeling, of too much caring.

Anthony Cooper had been a bright child but a puzzling one to his family. Certainly neither his father nor his grandfather had ever understood him and if, sometimes, the child thought that he recognized a kinship of feeling with his uncle Nathaniel, there had never been the time nor the opportunity to turn this feeling into friendship.

When Anthony had been taken to the mills as a child, he had not turned ill and feverish as Nathaniel had done. Anthony had looked and watched and been overcome with rage and pity. It had been hot that day, he remembered, and the windows of the factories were shut tight against the breeze that might snap the precious yarn or blow lint on the finished goods. The machinery thundered and over everything was the smell of oil. The men and women stood in front of their machines, drenched with sweat, and even as Anthony watched a woman staggered on her feet and fell fainting to the floor.

“Get her a drink of water,” said Benjamin. “She'll snap right out of it.”

Anthony looked up at his father. “Aren't you going to take her home?” he asked.

“Don't be silly,” snapped Benjamin. “We can't afford to stop one spinning machine. She'll be all right in a minute.”

Someone fetched a drink of water for the woman and in a few minutes someone else stood her on her feet and then she began to work again. She was pale and her hands shook, but she was working.

It's as if she were part of the machine, thought Anthony. As if she had been doing her job for such a long time that she had become part of the machine.

“Good girl, Annie,” said Benjamin.

Her eyes had a sunken look and she smiled tiredly.

“You know me, Mr. Cooper,” she said. “I'm tougher than I look.”

“Tough girls are the only kind we can use here,” said Benjamin and led his son on to watch the next operation.

Anthony watched and for no reason at all he thought of his new bicycle and of the big, airy bedroom in his father's house in Cooper Station.

As they were driving away from the factories, Benjamin looked back at the brick building.

“Someday you'll be running things here,” he told his son. “The sooner you learn how the better.”

“I don't want the mills,” replied Anthony.

“What the hell do you mean?” demanded Benjamin. “What kind of way is that to talk?”

“If the mills were mine,” said the child, “I'd close them all up and set everybody free.”

“And I'd come back from wherever I was and give you a good swift kick in the ass,” said Benjamin. “We've worked too hard at building up a business here for you to talk like that.”

Anthony kept still but then and there he made up his mind that he would never have anything to do with the factories at Cooper's Mills.

When Anthony was fifteen years old and living with his grandfather, a union organizer had come to Cooper's Mills. Ferguson Cooper yelled and stamped around the house for one whole day, and the next day he went to the factories and called his workers together.

“I hear tell,” said the old man, “that there's been talk of making the mills into what's called a union shop. Well, that's up to you. Who am I to say that you can't gather to bargain collectively or whatever the hell it is? But I can tell you one thing. If I hear any more union talk in any of my mills, I'll close everything up and damn quick, too. Anybody who doesn't want to work here on my terms can pick up his pay at the office right now. That's all I've got to say.”

The workers went back to their machines and as far as Anthony knew, there had never been any more union talk in his grandfather's factories.

“Grandpa,” said Anthony. “They may be millhands but they have certain rights as human beings.”

“Get the hell out of my sight,” roared Ferguson. “Go sit in the woods and look at something. That's all you're good for anyway.”

Anthony began to write that year. He wrote stories which he was sure were filled with great social significance and in which the hero was always an underprivileged, overworked millhand.

As he grew older, he watched the slow, inexorable pressure that was put on his uncle, Nathaniel, and he knew that Nathaniel hadn't a prayer against the old man. His uncle would go into the mills, like it or not, and because Nathaniel was cast in what Anthony called the true Cooper mold, he would not resist.

Freedom, thought Anthony. They'll never make a slave out of me.

By the time he was twenty, Anthony was selling short stories to the better magazines and by the time he was twenty-five he had written a novel which became an immediate bestseller. He had a penthouse apartment in New York and a different girl to amuse him every evening. Some of them fell in love with him and as soon as this happened, Anthony dropped them from his list of friends.

“Freedom,” he told them, “is the greatest gift given to man. I never intend to give mine up.”

Marriage, to Anthony, meant Nathaniel and Margery Cooper. It meant the mills and, worst of all, it meant a child.

“Not for me,” he said often and decisively. “I'll be the last of the Coopers and I'll go out in a blaze of glory.”

Nine years and three novels later, Anthony Cooper was in a private sanitarium in a town ninety miles from New York.

He had felt the breakdown coming but he had refused to give in to what he was sure was only weakness. He had known it first when he could no longer work. The typewriter seemed to be a huge, open-mouthed monster that would gobble up his very soul unless he kept away from it.

Let me alone! screamed Anthony silently. Let go of me!

For the first time in his life he began to drink heavily. He took drugs to make him sleep and others to wake him up. He could not eat and he began to feel as if the world were made of slime and he knew he was ill. But still he fought.

If I give in, he told himself, they'll put me in a hospital somewhere and I won't be able to get out.

He had terrible nightmares in which he dreamed that he was enclosed in a small space and that the people who surrounded him had never heard of the word freedom. He would wake up with the bedsheets wrapped around his body in soggy imprisonment and it would take every bit of self-control he had to keep from screaming.

He remembered very little of his first weeks in the hospital and, as he said to his agent, Kent Purdom, it was a shame because he imagined that it would have made one hell of a good story.

“Don't try to be wise, Anthony,” advised Purdom. “You're sick and you might as well face it.”

“Nonsense,” replied Anthony. “What I had was one hell of a good, smashing hangover. I'll be out of here by the end of the week.”

But Anthony was no better at fooling himself than he was at fooling Kent Purdom or his doctor.

“You need a good rest,” said the doctor. “You've spent so much of your life running that you're all worn out.”

“Nonsense,” said Anthony again, but when a nurse came to give him an injection he admitted to himself how he had been counting the time until she would arrive with the medicine that enabled him to shut off his head for a little while.

Anthony spent almost a whole year in the hospital and when he left it was with a number of ultimatums. No drinking, no late nights, as few women as possible and no work.

“You've got a few years left,” said the doctor, “if you behave yourself.”

“Why don't you just hand me a knife,” said Anthony, “and I could finish myself off properly.”

“If you don't do as we say,” replied the doctor, “that's probably exactly the way you'll wind up and much sooner than need be. Good luck and don't come back to see us again.”

“I won't,” said Anthony. “I'm going home. Not that Cooper Station is any great utopia, but at least it's dull there. No women, no liquor and no material. After a few months at home I'll be so goddamned tranquil that I'll have to come back to the city to keep from going to the bughouse all over again.”

And Cooper Station had been good for Anthony, he reflected. There was no pressure on him here. The days stretched ahead quiet and long and he even began to work on a novel that he had outlined a few years before. There was Lisa to amuse and excite him and as for drinking, a few bottles of beer were good for him. They relaxed his mind and sharpened his appetite. The summer that had seemed to be eternal and never ending pressed on into August and, as Anthony said later, something had to happen to bitch it up.

Anthony stood very still in the middle of his living room, and he listened very carefully as Lisa spoke and when she had finished, every nerve in his body went toward making his voice cool and casual.

“I'll say this much for you, darling,” he said as he opened another can of beer. “You may be a headache at times, but you're never a bore.”

He was trying very hard to keep from trembling and not doing a very good job of it and he turned his back to her so that she could see nothing of his face.

“Well, I must say, this is what is known as a pretty kettle of fish.”

Lisa did not answer but sat still and watched him. It was the middle of August and only a few moments before she had told Anthony what she had been rehearsing in her mind all the previous night.