Читать книгу Three Short Novels - Gina Berriault - Страница 21

14

Maria came to visit more frequently at Vivian’s invitation until she was with them almost ritually every weekend. Along with the diffidence, there was now in her manner almost the slyness of a spy in the enemy camp. At twelve she was ineffectually pretty in Vivian’s eyes; there was no quickness, no grace, no wiles, no artifice to make persuasive the large, smoky blue eyes and fair skin; and this lack of conscious femininity, which was, to Vivian, the very soul of a woman, was not, she thought, the girl’s fault, not the dead mother’s fault, not the fault of the grandmother with whom she lived, but Russell’s fault. The girl was evidence to her always that he had not been the man he ought to have been in that other marriage. The girl was like the dead wife’s past consciousness of him as he was; she was like the wife’s dismayed, sorrowing consciousness of him.

With the girl, they drove up to the mountains to ski, and Maria, who could not ski and could not learn, spent the time walking in snowshoes, and Vivian sometimes accompanied her, affected by the sight of the girl alone, her sad face surrounded by a knit cap of exultant red. In the summer, they drove to Monterey, or up into the gold-mining country and gambled on the machines in desolate saloons, or they went to Clearlake or to Tahoe to swim.

Constantly urged by Russell to intrude upon David, to swim as far, to climb as far, Maria, one day at Lake Tahoe, in the midst of Russell’s badgering, stood up from the shallow water where she had been paddling around and struck out after David, who was climbing onto a raft several yards offshore. She was an awkward swimmer, fearful and rigid. Even so, while they watched apprehensively and with shame, the girl, apparently propelled by sheer anger against the man who had taunted her, got as far as midway, and then could neither turn back nor continue on to the raft. Russell ran into the water and swam after her, and, with one arm around her, helped her back to shore. Once on her feet and out of the water, Maria refused to go as far as the blanket where they had congregated before. She sat down on wet sand, facing the water, clasping her knees, not acknowledging her father’s presence or Vivian’s. Vivian laid a sweater over the girl’s back and sat down beside her. Russell lay on his back, several yards away.

“I think he wanted me to drown,” Maria said.

“That’s not true.” Vivian put her arm around the girl.

“It’s true,” the girl said.

“But he rescued you.”

“I wasn’t drowning.”

“Then you see, it’s not true,” Vivian said, hugging the girl to impress upon her their humorous reasoning.

Maria sat alone, after Vivian had left her, until it was time for them to leave the lake, and on the long drive back to the city that evening she did not speak, not even to answer.

Russell returned at two in the morning, after taking Maria home, and, as was his habit, stopping by at the nightclub. He stumbled down onto the bench of Vivian’s dressing table, facing her where she lay in bed. “You terribly awfully fond of her, Vivian?” he asked. “Why?”

“Why?” she repeated, half asleep.

“Why?”

“Why? Because I guess I feel sorry for her.”

“You’re not fond of her and you’re not sorry for her and you’re not fond of me and you’re not sorry for me. You just don’t like me. It’s that simple. That’s the crux of it. You don’t like me and because you don’t like me you fix it up so we see her every week. You use her to remind me of something you think ought to be plaguing me. What do you want to plague me with, Vivian?” He began to weep without covering his face, and his pale eyes, paler because of the deeply flushed face, seemed to have wept out their color before he returned home to weep.

She slept in the guest room after that night, and heard him come home, stumbling, slamming doors, an hour after the nightclub closed. One night he did not come home, and in the morning her father telephoned to tell her that the manager had ordered Russell from the club because he had made a nuisance of himself, complaining to the patrons that his wife refused to sleep with him. He did not come home that day and, at two in the morning, her father telephoned again: Russell had spent the evening in the restaurant next door to the club, buying drinks for a couple, buying supper for them, telling of his ostracism, that his wife forbade him to come home and his partners forbade him to enter the nightclub.

An hour after her father had called, Russell returned. “It’s me, don’t shoot!” he shouted, unlocking the front door. “Vivian, you hear me up there? I’m turning on all the lights so you can see it’s me. You saw that thing in the papers? She shot her husband dead because she thought he was a prowler?” He came up the stairs, stamping, and into their bedroom, shaking his keys above his head with both hands.

As if he felt he required some excuse for being there, for returning, he began to undress, pulling at his tie, unbuttoning his shirt before he had removed his coat. He took off his coat and seemed surprised to find his tie gone and his shirt already unbuttoned. Then, as if he were afraid that somebody else had unbuttoned him because he was incapable of it, because he was drunk, his face flushed up in humiliation. “What’s this guilt every woman puts on me? What’s this bloody guilt?” he shouted. “What’re you retaliating for, Viv? What’re you retaliating for? You’re always retaliating for something I never know I do to you.”

“I said nothing,” she said.

“You say nothing. What makes you think you need to say something? I get the point. And Maria says nothing, but I get the point. She’s like a creditor—I didn’t pay my bill, I didn’t meet my obligations, or the check bounces. What’s this guilt every woman puts on me? What’s this bloody guilt? I been walking around with it all my life. I was sitting next to this guy and I was telling him what a wonderful woman you are and goddamn how I didn’t deserve you, how I wasn’t good enough for you, when he says to me, ‘You got guilt on you, man. What you don’t deserve is your guilt.’ That man, a stranger, knows more about me than any man I call a friend. ‘You got guilt on you,’ he says. ‘That’s the only thing you don’t deserve.’ You hear that? Seems to be a goddamn disease that women got. They give you a dose of guilt like a whore gives you a dose of clap.” He sat down on the bench, bent over to untie his shoe, his face lifted to her at the same moment that his bare back was reflected in the large, round mirror of the dressing table, and it seemed to her that his undressing was an act assuring him his words would not, after all, bring about the end. “If there were trials, if there were trials, if they could accuse you of leading your wife to her end just by being yourself, they’d do it and hang you for it. Isn’t that the truth, over there? That you got me for life and what kind of life is it? You got everything invested in me and who am I? What I’d like to know is why the hell did you get into the bind? And why the hell did Anna? Why did she? What do you want? What do you expect? You think you’re embracing the whole goddamn universe and you wake up the next morning and it’s me there? It’s me there? And what do you do, then? You give me this guilt. You give me this guilt when I’m spitting up my heart to do the job right.”

She threw off the covers and sat on the edge of the bed, trembling. Alerted by her movement, apparently suspecting that she was about to flee across the hall to her son, he lifted his head as if he could, if he tried, hear David listening. The boy could not hear the words, she knew, but the angry pitch could reach him. “You get ’em young enough, you got ’em on your side. You get ’em in the cradle. That’s it. That’s a goddamn political truth, every politician knows that. Give ’em the ideology with their mother’s milk and you got ’em for life. Go on in and throw yourself on him and tell him what you’re suffering, tell him how I make you suffer.” He slammed his hand down hard and flat on the bench. “I never did anything to you!” he shouted. “I never did anything to any woman that I have to feel guilty about. Why do you want to make me guilty?”

“I’m not Anna,” she said. “Don’t talk to me that way,” as if he had shouted that other wife into her grave.

“You’re all Anna,” he cried. “You’re all alike. Sometimes I start to call you Anna.” He stood up to unbuckle his belt but the rage against her forced him to put on his shirt again. His hands shook as they went down the buttons.

She began to walk around the room, frightened by his accusation that she was as his wife Anna had been. She had not thought that the desperation in herself was as much as in that other woman, but this comparing them roused in her the fear that it was as much. “If I’m Anna,” she cried, “then I can tell you how she felt. You want to know how she felt? Everything she said against herself was against you, because she was afraid to say it against you.”

“She wasn’t afraid to say it!” he shouted. “What makes you think she was afraid?”

“Sometimes I say it, but I’m afraid when I say it,” she told him. “Every time I say something against you to your face, it’s like a terrible falling, like I’ve cut the ground out from under my feet.”

“That is the ground under your feet!” he shouted. “That is the ground.”

“No, it’s true,” she said, twining her fingers. “It’s true what I say. That’s the way she felt, I know. She couldn’t bear you anymore, but she couldn’t cut the ground away. That’s a terrible thing, not to be able to bear the ground under your feet. What do you do then but die?”

“You blame me for it?”

She gave him a look of scorn, and was appalled by the slipping away of the ground. He came toward her and she waited, unable to expect that he would strike her. He struck her and she fell to her knees, clinging to him. He grasped her arms and flung her off. When she got to her feet, he followed her. “Go on! Goddamn! Go on! Go on, faster!” he shouted. “You know the way, you know the way. Take off your goddamn nightgown. What’s that on for when you run naked in the hallway? He’ll think you’re dressed to go out, looks like a goddamn dress to go out in.” He grasped the hem of it, but she swung around, striking at him, and, missing him, fell against her son’s door.

Above her, she saw her son strike Russell in the chest. The boy flew at the man, all his taciturnity released into rage, into shouting and striking. Russell flung him away, and when the boy fell against the wall, struck him in the face with the back of his hand and left them. David helped her into his room and locked the door, and they sat together on his bed, trembling, listening to Russell’s sobs and his screams at the sobs to stay down, and they heard the rush of water in the basin. Then he left the house, raced the engine of his car, and roared away.

She ran down the stairs and bolted the door, afraid that he would return, afraid that later in the night, wherever he was, in some hotel room, he would be forced to return. She lay down in her bed. She was not concerned with her son; he could take care of himself and his own wounds. If he was trembling, it was with fear of things beginning, of woundings and conflicts beginning; he was not trembling with the fear of endings.