William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (16 page)

He wanted to comfort her a little, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. If it weren’t for that kiss, he thought, I’d be in the clear, in the right. Guiltless I could comfort her. She was so wrong. She was so wrong, yet right too. Their paths, diverging in the wood, had gone limitlessly astray, and nothing could bring them together again. Both of them had lost the way. She stood weeping alone. He couldn’t approach her. The kiss he had sealed upon Dolly’s lips had sealed up for him, also, the knowledge of guilt, and there didn’t seem to be any way of going back at all.

He followed her outside. She walked over to the couch and helped Maudie to her feet. Peyton, bending over, tried to help Maudie, too, but only seemed to get in the way, for Helen, shoving Peyton briskly aside, muttered, “Now don’t you bother. Don’t bother.” She began to lead Maudie toward the door. Peyton stood stiffly by the couch, her cheeks flushed, saying nothing.

Maudie turned at the door and waved back at them. “Good-by, Peyton dear. Good-by, Pappadaddy.”

Peyton waved and he, too, lifted his hand and watched them disappear, thinking: If only, if only … Thinking: If she knew what was true, if I knew what truth was too, we could love each other.

“Bunny, she wouldn’t even let me help Maudie.”

“She’s pretty upset, baby.”

She took his hand. “She didn’t say anything about taking me home. She just left.”

He smiled. “Yeah, baby. I talked her out of it.”

She straightened his tie. “Buy me a car,” she said, “for Sweet Briar.”

“You’re too young.”

“Come on, honey, buy me a car.” She pressed a big smear of lipstick on his neck.

“Gold digger,” he said. “What kind?”

“A Packard,” she said. “A big old sinful Packard convertible. Red-colored.”

“O.K.,” he replied. He turned toward the door, thinking that a breath of fresh air would clear his head. Outside, beyond the driveway, rain dripped desolately from the trees. “I’ll think it over,” he said. “Run along and dance.”

Now, as he listened to Chester La Farge’s gloomy discourse on war and the fate of the grocery business, it occurred to him simply and with the heady glow of discovery that in this world there was no way of telling right from wrong and, anyway, the hell with it. What had happened had happened and what might happen
would
happen and so he took a drink and let his knee rest against Dolly’s, safe in the all-inclusive logic of determinism. The feeling of shame had vanished and the business with Helen seemed not nearly so awful anymore.

My son, most people, whether they know it or not,
his father had said,
get on through life by a sophomoric fatalism. Only poets and thieves can exercise free will, and most of them die young.

The hell with that, too. He had suffered, he felt. He took a drink. Beneath La Farge’s unfaltering monologue came Dolly’s whisper, “How are you, darling?” and he again pressed his leg against hers and looked into her eyes with a wide gaze of bright humor and longing, as if to indicate the sudden entrance into his life of love and contentment, in place of that huge void which had served in the absence of both these things.

“You might like the President,” La Farge was saying, “but, by God, you don’t have to like his fambly.”

Loftis leaned back in his chair and laughed loudly. So did Dolly and Mrs. La Farge, all three of them in one hilarious accord, laughing, rocking against the flagstones like a trio of hobbyhorses.

La Farge exposed his teeth appreciatively and casually shot his cuffs. “Heh-heh, well——” he began, but far down the river a shipyard whistle made a long and soulless hooting.

“My heavens!” Mrs. La Farge arose. “It’s eleven o’clock. Chet, we’ve got to go!”

“All right, doll.”

“Charlie’s still swimming, I guess,” Mrs. La Farge said. “Would you be kind enough to see he gets a ride home, Milton?”

Loftis had got up. “Why, Alice,” he said expansively, “I’d be glad to.”

“Good night … night … night.”

All the parents went home, some with their children, some merely with light-hearted entreaties that Loftis not allow Jimmy or Betty to come home too late, and he and Dolly were alone. The Japanese lanterns flickered and died. Violet shadows covered the terrace, his bottle was empty; the moon, big as a gold doubloon, clipped off at one edge behind a wandering cloud, dropped an insouciant light over the river, the lawn and through the strands, airy as spider webs, of Dolly’s hair. They were silent. A whippoorwill called from the woods; they both slapped at mosquitoes.

“Well,” Loftis said finally, “you just never can tell, can you?”

Dolly looked downward. “What do you mean, Milton?” she said softly.

He took her hand. “Funny,” he said, “where you end up in this world.”

She looked up at him. “How?”

“Oh, nothing,” he chuckled softly, finishing his drink. “Sometimes I just wonder what we’re here for. Sometimes——” He said something about “the deep,” he said something about “the endless night,” and Dolly, sleepy, restless, wishing he would kiss her again, reflected that Pookie would never talk of the deep or the endless night. She knew he would kiss her again. Night enfolded them with the odor of pine and grass, the smell of sea, a vast low tide beyond the forest, where shells, rocks and sea things, sad as the universe, lay drowsing beneath the summer moon. They walked together through the empty ballroom to an electric water fountain where each of them had a drink. He bent over and kissed her brow, swaying. In the dark golf museum, shoving her down on a couch, he managed—it was odd, for she was saying, “Oh, sweet baby”—to remember “the deep … the endless night,” while the door again, easing to, cut off all light from the room, and from his faltering, only half-willing hands.

Charlie La Farge was just sixteen. He was of medium height, nice-looking, with the close-cropped hair that was the fashion among high-school boys that year. Through some happy accident of heredity he had escaped his father’s tediousness, while retaining a little of his mother’s jolly high spirits and humor. This did not make him anything special, but at least he was good-natured. It was his somewhat hybrid ambition at this stage of his life to be a lieutenant commander in charge of a submarine and to become a bandleader, combining the two so that the easy frivolity of bandleading would not contradict the other, austere side of his nature, which brooded often upon crash dives and the heroic terrors of depth bombs. He also gave women a great deal of thought, frequently to the exclusion of his ambitions, and sometimes his thoughts about women reached such a pitch that he knew his real and only desire was to lose his virginity. Breasts, legs, thighs and other things filled his mind with constant fleshy images, indistinct and maddening, the more so because he had no precise idea of what a girl felt like—although a fourteen-year-old first cousin named Isabel, from Durham, once let him rest one hand, lightly and on the outside of her dress, upon her disappointing little breast. On summer mornings he would awake in an ecstatic heat, half-frantic with the obscure and swollen dreams that lingered in tatters at the margin of his consciousness, and with a groan he would succumb to that private sin his father had vainly walloped him for at the age of twelve, watching the sycamores shake ever so gently, the sparrows that swerved in raucous, terrible haste against the sky.

A year ago he had fallen in love with Peyton. She alone among the pretty girls he knew remained unscathed in his morning despoilments; because he loved her, she alone stayed undefiled, unattainable. In a fashion he had fostered her remoteness, made of her something far apart from lustful considerations, and adored. He had had dozens of dates with Peyton, but he had never kissed her: he was afraid. He would leave her at night at her doorstep and drive slowly around the house—unkissed, balked and frustrated, peering up desolately at her lighted window in hopes of catching sight of her, she who, minutes before, standing at the door, had shown no emotion whatever at his aloofness and his self-control, but had merely said, “Good night, Charlie,” touched his hand lightly and vanished into the house. At such times, toying with the idea of self-destruction, he would drive home and go to bed where, crucified, shaken, miserable with unfamiliar insomnia, he would listen to his sister’s baby squalling in another room, and attend this solitary vision: He and Peyton had been happily married for some years now, but a trivial argument had come up; her back was to him; she was weeping. She was gazing from their penthouse window at the Manhattan spires and towers which lay below, as if drowning, in the movielike glow of autumn dusk. This light seemed to send tiny golden thorns through her hair. The radio, from distant hidden recesses in the room, played “Maria Elena,” a recording his band had made before he went off to war with the submarine service. She wept, he couldn’t see her face, and the climax was all simplicity and wonder: approaching her, he laid his hands on her shoulders and turned her about: “Peyton darling, you mustn’t cry.”

“Go away, you brute.”

“Darling, I love you.”

“Oh, no, Charlie, I mustn’t cry,” she murmured while, crumpled and acquiescent—realizing, as if by some transcendental power of autumn, of his strength, music, the power of love—she yielded herself up with a little cry, forgiving and forgiven, into his enfolding arms.

This, his most exciting vision, he turned over and over in his mind and ornamented and examined until it melted away and he fell asleep. The other dreams, fairly routine, concerned endless dancing, separate bedrooms in a Miami chateau and a good deal of problematical kissing.

Peyton looked slick in a bathing suit. It was made of tight red Lastex which glistened like a lobster shell under the arc lamps of the swimming pool. Dripping water, suntanned, she stood at the side of the pool, removed her bathing cap, and fluffed her hair out properly. A boy named Eddie Collins, standing with Charlie in the shallow end of the pool, was trying to persuade him to sneak off into the woods, where he had a pint of whisky hidden, but he shook his head absently, watching Peyton. There was a great splashing, a shout; some boy rose up like a seal at the side of the pool and heaved a rubber ball at Peyton’s head. It bounced off. She laughed, threw the ball back and slid into a woolly robe. “Peyton!” he shouted, but the amplifier—playing music—the shouts, the splashes, drowned out his words, and Peyton, shod in rope-soled clogs, shuffled along the side of the pool and vanished up the slope.

He got out of the pool, dried himself off and put on a terrycloth jacket. He followed her toward the club, hoping to surprise her with a clap on the back or perhaps a horrible and chilling Dracula laugh, for which he had won considerable fame. She walked up the dimly lit front steps and started to go into the lobby but, drawing back suddenly, she paused there for a moment, watching. He halted and hid behind the fender of a car. Then he saw her go into the lobby, softly closing the screen behind her.

He crept up to the door and peeked in. The lobby was deserted, except for Peyton and a fat colored woman who staggered past under a loaded tray. An electric fan whined softly. A bug spanked up against the screen, clung there twitching, beneath his nose. The colored woman disappeared. Very quietly Peyton walked to the door of the golf museum and slowly tried the handle. She pressed downward gently, once, and again without a noise, but the door, it seemed, was locked. For two or three minutes she stood at the door; her head, cocked thoughtfully to one side, made him wince, it was such a lovely thing: he thought of kisses, of love.

She turned away and walked slowly toward him across the lobby. He drew into the shadows, ready to pounce. “Gotcha!” he cried as the screen opened; with a little scream she collapsed deliciously into his arms, then pulled back from him just as quickly, trembling, with a look of horror.

“Charlie!” she said. “Charlie! Oh!”

And fled down the steps and into the darkness.

What had he done?

It worried him enormously; never since he could remember—for he had led a quiet middle-class life, free from emotional extremes—had he seen on a girl’s face, or, for that matter, on anyone’s face, such a look of desolation. Then he knew. Standing at that door, he figured, she must have seen, or known, something frightening and terrible.

Later, when the other boys and girls had gone home, he searched for her, longing to offer his apologies, and finally found her sitting alone by the pool in the dark.

“Peyton,” he said.

A flicker of moonlight crossed her face. She looked up. “Hello, Charlie,” she said.

“What’s wrong, sugar?” he said, sitting down beside her. “Look,” he said painfully, “I’m sorry I scared you. I’m——”

“That’s all right,” she said quietly. “It wasn’t that so much——”

“What’s wrong, honey? Tell Cholly boy. What happened up there?”

“Nothing.”

She lay back in the grass. He stretched out beside her, shivering a little, and put his arms around her, which was the usual thing to do.

“Nice party, honey,” he said.

She was silent for a moment. “No,” she said, “no, it wasn’t a very nice party. It wasn’t a very nice party at all.”

“Come off it, kid. You’re depressing. Get off this gloom kick, will you?” Kissing her, somehow, mainly occupied his mind, but lying there, feeling her hair brushing at his chin, he knew his head was too high, too far up. He edged down.

She was quiet.

“Honey——” he began.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t say anything, please. Just hold me.”

He shivered again. “O.K., honey,” he said, “I can always oblige.”

“Hold me,” she said.

This was it, he knew. Desperate, yearning, bending his face toward hers recklessly, he hazarded, out of a year-long desire, the first kiss, coronation.

She turned her head away.

“No,” she whispered, turning back to him.

With a shock he realized that she had been crying. He drew her close to him.

“Don’t cry,” he said, “I love you, Peyton.”

“Hold me close.”

That was all that happened. She put her arms around him, too, and they lay there like this for a long time silently by the abandoned playground, in the summer night.