He remembered that the first time he had ever
seen Louise’s face it had been bent over a typewriter. She styled
her hair longer then and tied back, and the glasses that she wore
only to read had slipped down to rest on the saddle of her nose,
giving her the appearance of some substantial, ferociously
midwestern schoolmistress.
That had been almost six years ago, the
summer before the first year he had taught at Belmont State. Louise
had just started on her M.A., which was the only advanced degree
offered in English, and was making a little pocket money and
generally ingratiating herself by working part time as one of the
three assistants to the department secretary. Guinness needed a
voucher signed for moving expenses, and Miss Harrison was the only
person in the office. She took the form, smiled one of those
automatic secretarial smiles, and said she would give it to the
chairman when he made it back from lunch.
It was hardly love at first sight. Guinness
simply noticed her existence, filed it away for future reference,
and then went about his business for the next several months.
He got settled into his job and pursued other
passions, and then one day at the beginning of the spring term he
leaned across the vast composition board counter top that separated
off the inner sanctum of the typing pool, into which no member of
the teaching staff was ever supposed to venture, and asked for a
date. It had been as simple as that.
They had dinner at a little German place in
San Mateo and went to a movie at the Palm Theater and then stopped
back at her place, a little walkup apartment over a jewelry store
about three blocks from the campus. They were lovers before eleven
that evening, there having been only a single feature, and she had
moved in with him within a couple of weeks.
Toward the middle of the summer they made a
quick trip to Las Vegas, lost two hundred and thirty-two dollars at
the blackjack tables, and got married. In retrospect, they were
both a little astonished at how casually their relationship had
developed. Anyway, within reasonable limits, it had worked well
enough.
Louise had been twenty-seven at the time,
having returned to school out of boredom with clerking for an
insurance company and making the rounds of balding salesman types
with shiny faces and closets full of checkered sports jackets. Life
seemed to have been leading nowhere, and she had a vague idea that
she might enjoy teaching Jane Austen in some semirural junior
college. So she set about getting the necessary credentials and, at
least in theory, was still a graduate student even up to the time
of her death. In the drawer of her night table the police
discovered the typescript of an unfinished thesis on
Persuasion.
. . . . .
Perhaps that had never been what she really
wanted. Perhaps her spiritual destiny all along had been to find an
agreeable, unattached male who didn’t own any checkered sports
jackets, tie the knot, and honorably retire.
And Ray was agreeable enough. It wasn’t a bad
life. It was steady enough, certainly; he seemed to place a high
value on orderliness and predictability. He liked to be told in the
mornings, before he went to work, what dinner would be; and,
barring an act of God, they went to the movies on Monday
evenings.
By common consent, the race and chase
adventure flicks were the best. Ray said they had moral
clarity.
She had married him—oh God—perhaps only
because he had asked without seeming to assume that the suspense
was killing her. Just a contract between two consenting adults who
happened to strike a few sparks for one another, no big deal. Not
quite a simple tax arrangement; there was more to it than that. But
not Tristram and Isolde, not breathless and ethereal passion
either. And it was something to his credit that he had the decency
to refrain from pretending that it was.
And after all the other men she had known she
was ready to give him a little credit. I’ll be this, baby, or I’ll
give you that—just you wait and see. Promises of excitement or
distinction. The Great Life, oh so very different from this one,
always just perceptibly ahead. A few years, a change of jobs, a
lucky break. Somewhere in the distance. And all the time they knew
and she knew that the future would be precisely like the past, a
reality too insipid even to allow you the privilege of ignoring
it.
But not with Ray. He had a habit, when he
didn’t seem to be thinking about anything, of taking hold of her
little finger and curling it up so that as he held it he could
easily have crushed the joint under the pressure of his thumb. They
would sit together—he would seem a million miles away, in some
private existence of his own—and her heart would pound like a tom
tom.
Of course he never did it. She had never seen
him harm any living thing—probably he never had, never would; but
not perhaps because it had never occurred to him that he could.
Somehow, in his very insistence that his life be uneventful, he
managed to suggest that it might have been different had he
chosen.
Once, to celebrate the publication of one of
his papers, they had gone out to dinner in San Francisco, to a fish
place on the Wharf, where the little square tables at which they
seated couples were so close together that you couldn’t have slid a
book of matches between them. The man at the next table had left
his cigarette untended—apparently he had forgotten about it
completely—in a little tin ashtray, and the smoke was drifting
remorselessly into Ray’s eyes.
He had only just recently given up cigarettes
himself and tended to be a little touchy on the subject, as if
sensitive to the injustice of anyone being allowed what he was not.
Finally he turned to his right and, very politely, asked if the
gentleman would mind putting the damn thing out.
The gentleman was about ten years older, at
least twenty pounds heavier, and none the better for a number of
vodka and tonics consumed while waiting for his lobster claws. And
just to make everything perfect, he was there with a woman quite
obviously not his wife.
One gathered from the expression on his face
that he did mind, but he stubbed out the cigarette anyway. Ray
thanked him and went back to his Manhattan chowder.
The matter seemed closed.
But it wasn’t; a second later, apparently
having thought the thing over, the gentleman at the next table
started to flick Ray noisily on the sleeve of his jacket with the
first two fingers of a pink, fleshy hand. It seemed there was a
point of etiquette that it was imperative to have settled.
“Listen, Mac. When somebody does you a favor
you should smile when you say thank you. That was a favor I just
did you, so why don’t you smile?”
Louise wasn’t perfect, and she knew it. She
shared with most women a morbid curiosity to see how her husband
would behave under fire, what he would do when the bully at the
beach kicked sand in his face. So she sat very quietly, torn
between a certain guilty excitement and her dread over the prospect
of a scene. She tried very hard, however, not to give the
impression that she believed he had anything to live up to.
Her husband did, in fact, smile—a friendly,
open, relaxed sort of smile—but it was directed at her. He covered
her hand lightly with his own and for a moment she thought he was
simply going to ignore the whole stupid incident. But, of course,
it wasn’t something he could ignore. Drunks don’t often allow
themselves to be ignored.
“I think, pal,” he said finally, turning only
very slightly in that direction, “that I’ve already expressed my
gratitude. I’d settle for that if I were you—I really would.”
She didn’t know—there was something in the
very calmness of his voice, something not precisely of menace, that
Louise, at least, found far more intimidating than any implied
threat in the words themselves.
It amounted, almost, to a hope that offense
would be taken, taken and acted upon. It almost seemed as if Ray
wanted the man to pick a fight, as if that prospect somehow
appealed to him. But of course that was impossible.
Fortunately, just at that moment the waitress
came and brought the slob his dinner, and he took it as an excuse
to let the matter drop. Of course the evening was ruined; they were
all miserably uncomfortable together at those two little tables,
silent and humiliated.
Except for Ray—he went on talking and eating
as if he had forgotten the whole thing the moment it ended. Perhaps
he had.
It wasn’t until they got home that the
reaction set in.
He sat up in bed while she brushed out her
hair, staring glumly at the lump his feet made under the blanket.
When she mentioned it, all he said was that he couldn’t be
responsible for every middle aged Lothario who had a little too
much to drink. It seemed to make him angry.
“What would you have done if he’d called you
out, Ray?” It was only a playful question. “Would you have gone out
back in the alley with him and hammered away until one of you said
uncle?”
Ray apparently didn’t think it was funny and
indicated by that impenetrable reticence of his that he wished the
subject dropped.
“He didn’t call me out.”
So that was it. He was simply that way
sometimes. Men were whimsical creatures, Ray no more than most; but
when he did not choose to discuss a subject he did not discuss
it.
Had that man in the restaurant upset him? Was
he afraid of death, or a black eye, or the prospect of turning
forty? When it suited him he was as silent and as fast as a stone
wall. It did no good to pry.
Perhaps he had painful thoughts. Or perhaps
it was the vagabond in him, she couldn’t tell. She had lived her
whole life within a few hundred miles of the hospital in Yuba City
where she had been born, but Ray had traveled, had lived in England
and had been all over Europe. Perhaps things had happened. Perhaps
it had given him a sense of being a stranger everywhere. Perhaps
that was it.
Sometimes he would talk about such and such a
place in London, or what the train ride was like between Munich and
Amsterdam, but he would only talk about the place or the thing, as
if he were merely a pair of impersonal eyes.
As fast as a stone wall. The past, she had
the feeling, was served up in carefully edited versions.
But if the past did not, the present belonged
to her.
Their life together was to her taste; Ray was
a good man and seemed to love her. She didn’t mind housework,
especially in a small house, and Ray made her feel that he was
pleased with her, that she was to his taste too and that their
relationship was enough for him.
At least he wasn’t clamoring after her to
have babies. Why should he? After all, he had been married already
once and had had a daughter, aged about nine now, whom he never
mentioned or visited but whose picture, she happened to know, he
carried around with him in an inside flap of his wallet. She didn’t
think he owned a picture of Kathleen.
Aside from one brief mention of her existence
once when they were still Living in Sin, he never talked about his
first wife. Things hadn’t worked out, was the way he had phrased
it. She had apparently left him, but nothing was said about what
her motives might have been. It had all happened while he was
abroad.
Did he think about her? Had he loved her with
more of himself than he gave to his poor little Louise? Another
area that wouldn’t bear probing.
Well, let him have his past and his memories
in quiet. She didn’t mind. She had him now and would keep him as
long as there was breath in her. And, after all, everyone was
entitled to his little secrets.
. . . . .
With Peterson still tactfully leading the
way, the two men came out a side door, directly up a little
stairwell from the basement into the parking lot, where the dead
sunlight was bouncing off of cars and the pavement and tier upon
tier of hospital windows. It made you flinch away, as if some great
hand were closing painfully over your eyes.
Guinness hoped she had been happy, that he
had been able to make her happy. He hoped five years could somehow
be counted as an atonement in advance for the way she had died. He
was responsible for her death, just as surely as if he had murdered
her himself. The how and why were still uncertain, but they were
only details. He had killed her—or rather his past had, which came
to the same thing. Something had come up out of that silence he had
imposed on it and her, and had killed her. That much it was
pointless to try evading.
Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.
3
Fifteen years ago there had been no sun. That
day when it all started it had rained all morning long, had rained
in rhythmic sheets that came and went every few seconds like the
crackling of static on a radio. People were hurrying to get out of
it, running with their heads folded forward and their hands in
their pockets as they splashed along over the undulating sidewalks
on their ways to some place dry.
Guinness tried not to notice. Instead he
followed with his eyes the droplets wriggling down one of the front
windows of a tea shop half a block off Bond Street. Between his
hands he was nursing a mug of pale Darjeeling, almost room
temperature by now. Once in a while he would take a birdlike
sip—not too much, because he would have to leave when it was gone
and he didn’t have anywhere else dry he could go. Even his raincoat
was up the spout, pawned the day before for five shillings. Minus
the nine pence for the tea he was supposed to be drinking, it was
all he had left, and he couldn’t think of anyplace he could spend
the night on that kind of money.
He had read once in Orwell, his literary hero
and guide to the morality of poverty, about places where you could
rent a chair by the fire for three and six, but he supposed all
that was dead and gone. Swept up in thirty years of Social
Progress. He couldn’t even sleep on the benches around Trafalgar
Square, not in the middle of February. Not in the pouring rain he
couldn’t. Well, perhaps by then it wouldn’t be raining. But the
bobbies wouldn’t let him sleep there anyway; they hadn’t let
Orwell.