Джон Макдональд - S*E*V*E*N

I knew I could throw it all away. The bad thing was that I wanted somehow to throw it all away. I wanted the sickness and the evil, and I wanted to take her by force. It was a feeling that was stronger than my religion and my self-respect.

I fought it as best I could. I remember at one point striking myself with my fist on the top of my thigh a dozen times, using pain to make the wanting go away. I hit so hard I had big ugly bruises for a long time, and I had to keep remembering not to limp in front of Mabel.

I had stared at the child’s naked body on the seventh day of May. The next day was overcast and windy, and the wind had an edge to it. I was grateful to God for giving me time to become strong again. The ninth of May was cloudless and cool, but there was no wind. I kept telling myself all morning that I had no reason to believe she had any set pattern of going into the pool near the middle of the day on warm days. I told myself I had the strength to stay away from there and never find out. But all that morning little electrical quivers would come out of nowhere and run up and down my body, and there would be an empty fluttering feeling in my belly. The little things I happened to see around the place would remind me of her. One smooth pale stone in Mabel’s rock garden turned into a small breast and then back into a stone. The curve of the scythe handle hanging on the peg in the shed was the same as the curve of her waist the way it went into the line of her hip. Apple branches made girl shapes in my eyes.

I told myself I would not go near the pool, and at the same time I was telling myself I had the right to go anywhere I wanted to on my own place. But at least I held off long enough, because when I looked down over the little crest into the valley I saw her in the same robe walking toward the cabin, not ten feet from the steps I built after I got it set on the fieldstone foundation.

It was like some kind of great victory to be late, to have missed staring at her flesh. But the victory feeling went away as I realized I had learned that it was her habit on the warm days to bathe in the pool. It would have been better if I had not seen her at all.

A hard wind blew all day of the tenth, so there was no victory to be won. I had to spend most of the eleventh in Ithaca with Mabel, so that did not count either. The twelfth was a hot still day, and I did not go near the valley. I started toward the valley, and I stopped and put my arms around a young apple tree as if it were a woman and I ground my forehead against the bark and sobbed and felt the tear-tickle on my cheeks. So it was a victory, and the cost of winning it was high. I felt drained and sick and old for the rest of that day.

I won again, day after day, but each time, each hot day, the margin was narrower. I had cruel dreams. I was not eating well. Mabel got on my nerves. And I finally lost my battle on the sixteenth day of May. I knew when I woke up that I was going to sneak into the valley early so as not to take any chance of missing her again. I did not care that I had become a sick, foolish, and dangerous old man. It was a necessity for me. I could not go on living otherwise.

I found the right place and moved into it at eleven fifteen. It was a nest in much deeper grass on a backslope beyond the pool. A half hour later she came from the cabin toward the pool. She was wearing the same robe. There was a boy with her, sixteen I would guess, trying without success to grow a beard. His hair was long. He wore khaki shorts. He was a slender boy, but with good shoulders and a deep chest. They were laughing and talking together. They had soap and towels.

She dropped her robe in the sunny place in the grass. He stepped out of his shorts, and they came naked into the willow pool together, yelping with the shock of the cold water. They splashed and played there, leaving soap on the icy water. They were innocent and unashamed. There was no hint of lovemaking. They were like young otters. They were part of nature, both handsome and healthy young animals. And I was a saddened and smutty old man, seeing myself as they would see me had they known I was hidden and waiting just to look upon the girl’s body again. In the time they were in the pool, perhaps ten minutes, I was cured of my dangerous illness. They hurried out, chattering and shuddering into the sunlight, snatched up their towels, and hopped about, drying themselves. He put his shorts on and they lay on the girl’s robe in the sun, she with a towel across her loins. I could not hear what they were saying to each other. I heard them giggle. He got up and trotted to the cabin and came back with two opened cans of some soft drink. I wormed my way back out of their sight. That was the last of it for me.

Though there had been no caresses, I had the feeling that they had been intimate, that the boy was staying there with her. I thought of telling Mabel, but I knew what a disaster that would be. Mabel has been a good wife to me, but there is a kind of harsh virtue about her. It is intolerance. She can be cruel and will never admit she enjoys being cruel. She works herself up to it by saying it is her Christian duty. I knew that had I told her she would have marched down there and said all manner of dirty things to them in the name of God.

I could never have made her see that if those two made their love together, it would be the way young creatures are in the springtime, simple and natural, not smeared and sinful and evil. From the way they acted together they liked each other. There was joy in them, not guilt.

Then, as I walked slowly back toward our house, across our land, I realized for the first time that the sick fever which had attacked me and had so suddenly been cured was something that all the years of marriage to Mabel had helped create. She had made sex a dark and shameful act, something done swiftly in darkness and never admitted or acknowledged in daylight. She had hidden her pregnancies as long as she could and in the last months had not gone out among friends or strangers. And so it had twisted me too, bolting an iron lid down on my human needs and instincts so that the pressures had warped something inside me.

A waste of something that could have been a good part of marriage, a good part of our lives. Now that we were old I was a sick and dangerous old man, and she was an old woman full of righteousness, with a venomous mouth and a permanent expression on her once-sweet face of suspicion and disapproval.

I was surprised and relieved when I found out the girl had had to leave earlier than she had planned. Even though I had stopped my mind from touching her body while I was awake, she was still a torment in my dreams, and the sooner she left, the sooner the dreams would return to old safe patterns.

I would say it was almost three months ago that a man named Paul Warcroft telephoned me long distance and asked if he and his wife could have the cabin for the month of May. He sounded like a pleasant young man over the phone. I asked him how he knew about the cabin, and he said a good friend of his had stayed in the cabin for a time and had liked it. I made sure he knew that it does not have all the extras that city people expect.

A lot of summer people had rented it during the two summers since Norrie Ames had stayed there. I told him he could have it if he would send me a deposit. I got the deposit in the mail the next day.

When they arrived in their shiny new car I recognized the bride right away. There was no mistaking their being on their honeymoon. She was very friendly. She did the introducing, all smiling and lively.

Of course, at that time I didn’t know why Mabel was so upset at finding out that Mrs. Paul Warcroft was Norrie Ames. I could hear Mabel all over the house, setting her feet down harder than usual, muttering to herself the way she does when she is working herself up to something. I think she came close to telling me a couple of times. If she had, maybe I could have stopped her. I don’t know. I know I would have tried.