Джон Макдональд - All These Condemned

When I woke up in the morning with a barbiturate taste, it took the usual chill shower and the usual Dexedrine before my motor started to turn over smoothly. This would be, I suspected, muscle day. Wilma likes to exhaust her guests. If she can send them back to the city with aching bodies, she thinks they remember it as a good gay time. It was warm and breakfast on the terrace was fine in the sunlight, and finer still when I was able to sit at a table with Noel. I had given the gambit some careful thought. I had to make her curious about me as a person, and it had to contain a strong hint that I was not like the others.

After a few banalities, I found the silence I wanted and said, “With a few thousand years of selective breeding, Noel, I could really make an improvement in the race. I was thinking about it last night.”

“An improvement?”

“We ought to have a setup like the lizards do. After you grow a little older and wiser, then you shuck off your skin and become somebody else. You become a better image of yourself. The way it is now, if you change, the way people inevitably do, you’re still trapped in your old life, in the way you’ve always looked. It hardly seems fair.”

I saw the awakening of interest in her eyes and saw at the same time that her eyes were a good shade of brown, a very dark brown that perhaps you could see only in sunlight, with some very tiny flakings of gold around the pupils.

“What do you want to change to, Steve?”

“Undecided. Just something different. I’m sort of a bright young man emeritus at this point. Can’t afford to look tired. Got to keep running fast. Sort of maintaining an impersonation. How about you?”

“I guess this is just female, Steve, but I’d like to be big and golden and shiny instead of a sort of... brown mouse. I sit in too many corners and watch too much and think too much. Maybe I just want to be part of the act.”

I allowed myself a look of contempt. “This act?”

“No, not this act. This one is worn out. I want a better act. New and fresh, with trumpets and drums.”

“I’ll book that. I’ll plant releases. We’ll pack the house.”

And I looked into her eyes very seriously and intently and saw her eyes widen just a bit before they moved away, saw the faint color of pinkness on her throat, and knew that I had created in her an awareness of me and a curiosity. It’s smart tactics to stick pretty close to what you really believe, because that way you can achieve a feeling of sincerity and reality that you can’t get if you pick too fictionalized an approach. She wouldn’t be difficult. She was too mixed up and tired of her life and Randy and Wilma and herself. It didn’t take a trick shot. You could nearly fire blind and knock her off the shelf. For a little while I thought I’d better not, because it was too easy. But a man has to save himself in any way he can.

Later, during the morning swim, after I spilled Hayes off his skis, I had a chance to stretch out on the dock and talk to her some more. Sermon on the emptiness and artificialities of our special segment of civilization. The need to get back to something clean and honest. No honesty any more. All angles. And she gave me all the little clues of a growing recklessness. Even in the way she walked, conscious of herself and of me. She began to glow from the inside, and it softened her mouth and made her laugh more often. And made her tip up the drinks. And Randy was a great help to me, in the feverish way he took care of the little errands Wilma gave him. And she gave him a great many.

The croquet game was a special shambles. Paul Dockerty had got almost alarmingly drunk. And it was evidently the Mavis-Hayes Mutual Admiration Society that had set him off. Noel and I exchanged glances of commiseration, wry smiles, and, with increasing frequency, the reassurance of a light touching of hands. Lunch was late and very liquid and people were folding up gently to gain strength for the coming evening. I had José find me a thermos and I made up a batch of stingers and told Noel there was a place on the lake I wanted to show her. It was the critical move. She agreed readily, almost hastily, and we went down and I took out one of the runabouts and dizzied her with the speed and the curves and the roar of the water along the hull. I took her to the small island and I went over the side and towed the boat ashore and helped her out and up to the grassy bank near the familiar clump of sumac.

She was full of areas of resistance. Some were soothed with words and others were eased with caresses. And a few were melted by the thermos. We were utterly alone, the boat out of sight of the house, the water and mountains in front of us. Capitulation, though delayed, was inevitable. And I found her full of unexpected frenzies, far too many tears, far too many of the broken words denoting a permanence that I had not expected or wanted her to feel. It gave me the troubled, confused, nervous feeling of having taken on far too much. She had never been unfaithful to Randy before. And she was convinced that now we were together forever and ever. I knew it was a rationalization. She could not excuse what she had permitted, and so she had to label it a great love. I knew that I could not keep on being evasive about this forever-and-ever deal. I could see the beginning of suspicion in her eyes. So I had to go along with it. I told her that unfortunately, my fortunes were temporarily tied up with Randy and Wilma and the others, so we would have to be very careful, make good plans, avoid impatience.

“But it has really happened, my darling,” she said, smiling at me.

“Really.”

“I never expected to find you here. I’ve waited for you so long. So very, very long, Steve.”

“It has surprised me too,” I said in momentary honesty.

“But we’ll be together.”

“As soon as we can make the arrangements without knocking my business in the head.”

“She can have him. Gladly. I give him up. He’s a useless thing, Steve. He has been, for a long time. He blundered into the web and she wrapped him up, and when he couldn’t move, she sucked him dry. You’re a man, Steve. He hasn’t been a man for a long time. Oh, I’m so glad we found each other. Hold me close, Steve. Remember what you said this morning? I’ve shed my skin, you know. I’m all golden and shiny. I’m not a brown mouse any more.”

“The new skin is fine. I like it. It’s an improvement. Extra-soft. Extra-fine texture. Guaranteed imperishable.”

“Stop staring. You’re making me blush.”

“Hummm, when you blush it seems to start about here.”

“Steve!”

We stayed there until the summer dusk and the end of the sun. And the end of the thermos, our bodies growing heavy and slow-moving with the dragging sweetness of outdoor love. I felt uneasy about entering into an implied contractual relationship for all eternity. But it was fruit on the bough that had happened to grow within reach. And I could create delay after delay, with excuses that at first would be very reasonable, and would slowly grow less reasonable, and eventually it would be a pose that we maintained as a rationalization, the idea of “someday.” And it would eventually end, as such things have ended before for me, and as they will end again, because pleasure without purpose feeds on itself until it is finally consumed and the thing is dead.

We went back, her face so luminous with fulfillment that I was glad it was near dark when I came into the dock and saw Randy standing there, frail and still.

“Where have you been?” he asked in a quiet voice.

Noel laughed in the silence, in the dusk. She gave a rough and unmistakable imitation of Wilma’s voice. “Why, we seem to have been on a picnic or something, dahling. Miss me?”