Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

He tried once more to find a suitable tone for his reply. He put his elbows on the desk and began rubbing his forehead with a sort of painful violence which was somehow a great relief to him. He was tempted to be bitter, to be unbridled, but a kind of sporting instinct forbade that; there was so much else that he wanted to say; in fact, he wanted, in a sense, to write her a loveletter, a loveletter which also would tell her in horribly brutal sentences what he really thought of her. But the whole thing was too complicated. How could you sum up in one letter all your feelings about ten years of married life? All the tendernesses, the secret symbols, the extraordinary elaborate and profound and—yes— vascular dual consciousness which their conjoined experience had given them? All the regrets, the anguishes, the ecstasies, the memories, the precious emblems of shared pleasure—no, it was impossible. It would all have to be left out. There was no kind of shorthand which could express it. It was as if the moss, torn from the wall, should try to tell you, with the raw surface, what the wall had been like .…

He could say that , of course; and the idea pleasing him, he took up his pen and drew a sheet of typewriter paper toward him and wrote on it “My darling.” But the impulse ran out, died—or, more precisely, withered in the presence of his anger. It was no good. He would have to take refuge in a merely formal letter, a glazed official style, something inhuman and abstract. Polite, uncircumstantial, with perhaps just a suggestion of bitterness and more than a suggestion of affection, affection curbed. And just the same, it was ridiculous that at such a crisis of one’s life one couldn’t, simply couldn’t, say what one really meant, and say it richly. If only Barbara had understood all this! If only she had seen—underneath his helplessness and his indifference to the conventional—his desperate loyalty and essential gentleness!… How absurd. This was tantamount to asking destiny, implacable destiny, to be one’s mother; it was like trying to pillow one’s head on a meteor.

He was still struggling with the problem, still remembering this and that and the other—their visit to Jackson Falls, the time when Betty had fallen into the river, the winter when Paul had taken to calling on Barbara every afternoon, Paul’s habit of kissing her hand, her curious indifference to cleanliness in the house, the odd trace of exhibitionism which always showed in her in Paul’s presence—when the door opened and Ulrich came in. He remembered, then, with a start, that the whistle had already blown; he had half noticed it at the time. He jumped up, crumpling the sheet of paper.

“Five o’clock, eh?” he said.

“My wife’s waiting in the car,” said Ulrich, tapping the edge of the desk with a rolled-up newspaper. He always carried a rolled-up newspaper. “And she says Miss Houston will meet us over there in Wellington.”

II.

It was to be a fish supper, in a little secret restaurant which Ulrich had discovered: a place where they gave you very good fish, and also very good beer, smuggled across the lake from Canada. Ulrich prided himself on possessing little secrets of this sort. It was as if he felt some queer kind of inferiority, and sought to make up for it by knowing all sorts of out-of-the-way odds and ends. He always knew, for example, just which of the standard brands of cigarette contained, at the moment, the purest and best tobacco, and which of them were capitalizing their success by recourse to cheaper materials. He knew a buyer of tweeds in Buffalo, and could get his suits for a third of what it cost anyone else. And it went without saying that if there was a new place at which you could get something to drink he would know about it. Faulkner really disliked the man; he felt sure that Ulrich wanted to get something out of him. Was it merely a sort of social thing? a desire to be on friendly, not to say intimate, terms with the manager, whom he perhaps also suspected of being “superior”? His manner was always uneasily ingratiating; he smiled too much.

And his wife bore out this impression, as Faulkner immediately discovered when they joined her in the car. All the way to Wellington, while Ulrich drove, Mrs. Ulrich, a plump fair-haired little woman, who shut up her blue eyes when she laughed, did her best to captivate him and impress him. She was playing the “great lady,” evidently under the impression that Faulkner moved in some social sphere of impossible grandeur—the world of marble halls and terraces with urns, which, in America, at any rate, exists only in the movies. She had cultivated a broad “a,” and used it with devastating effect; except when, now and then, she used it where she shouldn’t.

Faulkner was patient with her, replied to her lofty inanities, gave her a cigarette, and prayed that this Miss Houston (whoever she was) would be more interesting, more honest, and less on the make.

“Who is this Miss Houston?” he asked.

Mrs. Ulrich arched her eyebrows, and then immediately afterwards, for no discoverable reason, narrowed her eyes at him enigmatically.

“Ah,” she said, “she’s a woman of mystery.”

Faulkner felt that he was expected to smile in reply to this challenge, and obediently did so, but without much conviction; at the same time, suddenly, feeling extraordinarily angry with this fool of a female. He saw the whole thing—all the months of scheming that had gone to this party, in order that she might let it be known in local society that she was an intimate friend of the manager, Mr. Luke Faulkner. Revolting. All the more revolting, and also pathetic, not to say tragic, when one knew—as he did—how silly and unfounded was this legend of his social splendor.

The conversation lagged. Mrs. Ulrich could think of nothing further to say, at the moment, and sat back, ladylike, holding her cigarette between two stiff fingers; and Faulkner watched the flight of wet trees past the car, and the fence-rails from which raindrops still hung, bright with the evening light. A sense of unreality came over him; he realized how little he knew these two people, and how little he liked them; he hated the back of Ulrich’s head, and the little dark point of hair which hung over his collar; he disliked the silver vase beside the window, with its artificial bachelor’s-buttons; he loathed Ulrich’s habit of humming popular airs. And to be riding in a closed car, an expensive car, a car more expensive than he himself had ever had or wanted to have—to be riding in this, with two such commonplace people, and at a time when he particularly wanted to be alone … the thing was so incredible as to seem ludicrous. It was, in fact, so fantastic that the thought crossed his mind that the adventure might be amusing. Why not simply throw oneself into it, sink to this queer level, bathe in this strangeness? Might it not be in a way refreshing, invigorating? Suppose, for example, he were to make love to this pudgy and overscented female absurdity who sat beside him, bumping against him when the car bumped; what would happen? It might, at any rate, end this little campaign for social conquest.

III.

The “secret” restaurant turned out to be a kind of little yacht club, or boathouse, mounted on stilts over the lake. It looked like the sort of place that would sell you bait and rent you a dirty fishy-smelling boat. The dining room, however, was rather charming: a long, low-ceilinged room, windowed on three sides, with an uneven floor. They found a table at the far end, overlooking the lake, and sat down; and Faulkner remarked to Miss Houston that it was very like being on a ship. He could feel the whole thing moving.

“Wait till you’ve had two or three of their dry Martinis,” said Ulrich, “and you’ll think it’s moving, all right!”