T. Boyle - Riven Rock

He did. And he hung his head and pulled mournfully at his cuffs and offered Josephine his handkerchief, but he was soaring, absolutely, no dogs in the mirror now. Katherine loved him. Incredibly. Improbably. Beyond all doubt or reason. He mooned at her across the table through the soup and fish courses and kept on mooning and beaming and winking till the dessert was in crumbs and the coffee cups drained, and after she’d pecked a goodnight kiss to the hollow of his right cheek, he phoned up an old friend from Princeton and went out to drink champagne into the small hours of the morning.

The next afternoon he was back at Katherine’s door, pale and shaking, his head stuffed full of gauze and his eyes aching in their sockets. No one was home and the maid wouldn’t let him in, so he sat on the stoop in a daze and watched a skin of ice thicken over a puddle in the street until Katherine came home and found him there. “I can’t let you do this,” he said, rising from the cold stone in a delirium of shame and self-abnegation.

She was in her furs and a scarf, the brim of her hat faintly rustling in a wind that came up the street from the Bay. “Do what?” she said. “What are you talking about? Her smile faded. ”And what are you doing out here in this weather — do you want to catch your death?“

Slouching, miserable, crapulous, chilled to the bone, his veins plugged with suet and his fingertips dead to all sensation, he could only croak out the words: “Marry me.”

She puzzled a minute, her bag and books clutched tight in her arms, her eyes working, her hat brim fluttering, and then she decided he was joking. “Marry you?” she echoed, talking through a grin. “Are you asking me again? Or is that the imperative form of the verb?”

“No, I… I didn’t mean that. I mean, I can’t let you do this to yourself, throw your life away, on, on someone like me.”

She tried to make light of it, tried to slip her arm through his and lead him up the stairs, but he broke away, his face working. “Stanley?” she said. And then: “It’s all right now. Calm down. Come on, let’s discuss it inside where it’s warm.”

“No.” He stood there shivering, fitfully clenching and unclenching his hands. There was ice in his mustache where his breath had condensed and frozen. “I don’t deserve you. I’m no good. I’ve never — I won’t ever… Didn’t you read my letters?”

The wind picked up. Two men in overcoats with bowlers clamped manually to their heads went by on the opposite side of the street. Katherine looked uncertain all of a sudden. “I have a confession to make,” she said, ducking her head and pulling at the fingers of her gloves. “I’m afraid I didn’t read them, not all of them. They were beautifully written, I don’t mean that… it’s just that they were so, I don’t know, depressing. Can you forgive me?”

Stanley was thunderstruck. He forgot everything, forgot where he was and what he was doing and why he’d come. “You didn’t read them?”

In the smallest voice: “No.”

A long moment passed, both of them shivering, a couple in a silver-gray victoria giving them a queer look as they trundled past in a clatter of wheels, hoofs and bells. From down the street came the voices of children at play, shrill with excitement. “Well, you should read them,” Stanley said, his face drawn and white. “Maybe then you’d… you’d change your mind.”

She was firm, Katherine, unshakable and tough, and now she did loop her arm through his. “I’ll never change my mind,” she said. “Here”—all business now—“help me with my things, will you, please?” She handed him her books before he could protest and tugged him toward the door.

He tucked the books firmly under his arm and allowed himself to be led up the steps, where Katherine let her handbag dangle from her wrist and rang the bell rather than fumble for her key. “The letters,” he said, and they weren’t finished with the subject yet. “They — they’re nothing, they barely scratch the surface. You don’t know. You can’t know. You see, I‘m”—he turned his head sharply away from her—“I’m a sexual degenerate.”

“Stanley, really,” she said, and the maid’s footsteps were audible now, echoing down the hallway like gunshots. “You have to calm yourself — it can’t be as bad as all that.”

He tried to pull away, but she held fast to him. “It is,” he cried in a kind of whinny, his frozen breath spilling from him like some vital essence. “And I have to tell you this, I have to,” the maid at the door now, the tumbler clicking in the lock. “In all honesty, I can‘t — what I mean is, Katherine, you don’t understand. I’m, I‘m”—and he dropped his voice to a ragged chuffing whisper—“I’m a masturbator.”

“Good afternoon, madame,” the maid said, pulling back the door. “And sir.”

Katherine’s face showed nothing. “Good afternoon, Bridget,” she said, ducking out from under the woolen scarf with a graceful flick of her neck and reaching up to unpin her hat in the vestibule with its mahogany-framed mirror, Tiffany lamp and Nottingham curtains. Stanley was staring down at the rug. “Bring us some tea in the parlor, would you?” she said, addressing the maid. “And some biscuits.”

“Oh, I can‘t—” Stanley said, still studying the pattern of the rug, “I really, I have to go, I—”

“We need to talk, Stanley.” There was no arguing with the the tone of Katherine’s voice. She made an impatient gesture. “Come, give Bridget your coat and we’ll sit by the fire — you must be chilled through.”

Again he let himself be led, slumped over and shuffling, a man of sixty, eighty, a hundred, his face transfigured with pain and mortification. She helped him to the couch and sat beside him. They listened in silence as the clock chimed the half hour — four-thirty, and starting to get dark. Stanley shifted uneasily in his seat. “I’m so dirty,” he groaned.

“You’re not. Not at all.”

“I’m not suited for marriage. I’ve done filthy things.”

She seized his hand, and she was as wrought-up as he was, but it wasn’t his revelation that disturbed her — certainly masturbation wasn’t a nice habit, not the sort of thing you’d discuss over dinner or cards, but she was a biologist, after all, and she took it in stride — no, it was the idea of it that got to her, the mechanics of the act itself. She kept picturing Stanley, alone in his room and touching himself and maybe even thinking of her while he was doing it, and that sent a thrill through her. She could see him, stripped to his socks, his long strong legs, the pale hair of his thighs and chest and abdomen, Stanley, her fiance, her man. She loved him. She wanted him. She wanted to be there in that bedroom with him.

He was inexperienced, like her, she was sure of it. And that was the beauty of the whole thing. Here he was, a big towering physical specimen of a male, and yet so docile and sweet, hers to lead and shape and build into something extraordinary, a father like her father. And there was no chance of that with Butler Ames and the rest — they were smirking and wise, overgrown fraternity boys who tried women on for size, like hats, and went to prostitutes with no more thought or concern than they went to the barber or the tailor. But Stanley, Stanley was malleable, unformed, innocent still — and that was why everything depended on getting him away from his mother, that crippling combative stultifying monster of a woman who’d made him into a pet and all but emasculated him in the process. He needed to get free, that was all, and then he could grow.

Katherine squeezed his hand as the maid clattered into the room with the tea things. “It’s nothing to worry about,” she said. “Really. It’s your nerves, that’s all.”