Wives & Lovers Read online

  “I’m thirsty,” she said behind him.

  “Coming up.” His voice caught. The word up had come out in a falsetto. She laughed softly, lazily; she reveled in her effect on people.

  They each took another pill and sipped the whiskey, and for a time everything seemed calm enough. They sat on the bed and waited, and she talked about her stepmother’s friend, who had abandoned her family and hadn’t even left a note. “I know her daughter,” she said. “Her name is Maizie.” She laughed softly. “I worked with her and we got to be friends. That’s not exactly the truth. Since she got pregnant, I haven’t seen much of her at all. And I haven’t even talked to her about her mother. Actually, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Maizie used to talk me out of suicide, you know? Jesus—I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “Pamela,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking about you.” He had decided that he should tell her now, before the drug took over. “I’m in love with you, and I want us to stop all this and settle down together.”

  She shrugged, not looking at him. It seemed as if she might even yawn. “Everybody says that. That’s movie talk.”

  “It’s true. I’m speaking the absolute truth as I know it.”

  “You watch too many movies,” she said.

  He was ready to swear off ever seeing another movie again in his life. “I know, but listen to me,” he said. “I want to marry you and start a family.” The words sounded oddly foolish on his lips. “I love you,” he said. “No matter what else is true.”

  She laughed. “Stop it.” Then: “Feel anything yet?”

  “I feel that I love you,” he said.

  “Stop it.”

  “I do. I honestly do, Pamela.”

  “Here.” She gave him another pill. He had begun to experience sharp pains in his left side. Shooting pains. He put the glass down with the whiskey in it, and tried to kiss her again. “Wait,” she said. “Jesus.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, wait. Feel that? Jesus. Tell me how it feels, come on. You must feel something by now.”

  He had experienced the pains, and now he noticed a strange tunneling of his vision; all the edges were beginning to blur and dissolve. He felt as though his eyes were bulging. He couldn’t believe she would not react, his eyes bugging out of his head. “God,” he said.

  “Whoa,” she said, opening her mouth. Her expression was that of someone flying down the steepest turn on a roller coaster, though she kept watching him, too. “Whoa,” she said. “Jeee-sus. Feel that?”

  He swallowed the rest of the whiskey, and the room grew liquid. She was sitting on the bed with her legs crossed, and he did not remember when she had arranged herself like that. He lay face down, arms dangling over the edge, head lolling, tongue out. He moved it, licked something—her knee. He had turned and was licking her knee.

  “Okay,” she said, lying back. “Ohhhh-kay.”

  He got to his knees on the bed, and then he was pulling at her shorts, the flimsy pink panties underneath. “Stop it,” she said. “Tell me what it’s doing to you.”

  Her hand pushed his away. Everything wavered and went up in waves of air. He lay down at her side, and his hands wouldn’t work. He was tossing in a boat, riding an ocean, and she was murmuring in his ear, moving her tongue at his ear.

  “Okay, lover,” she said.

  He couldn’t raise himself up. He reached for her, felt the weight of her, and heard the laugh. They lay in a tangle of clothes. She was trying to unbutton his shirt. “I love you,” he said. And then he was crying.

  “Jeee-sus. What’re you crying about?”

  “I can’t stop.”

  She pulled away and stood. “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “Pamela.”

  But she had stumbled away. He heard her in there, coughing. “Ridley,” she said. “I have to be alone for a few minutes. That goddam whiskey.”

  “I’m in love with you,” he said, still crying. Everything seemed so hopeless for a moment. He gathered himself, tried to clear his mind.

  “Get out of here, Ridley.”

  “I’ll be downstairs,” he told her.

  “Just get.”

  So he came unsteadily down the shaky wooden stairway, realizing that he had reached this level of intimacy with her; he had been in bed with her and she had called him lover. He knocked on the Masons’ door. The world was suffused in a yellow glow, and he felt completely immutable and clean. The hopelessness had dissipated like a cloud. He was solid as a piece of marble inside. He thought of the curves of rock under his skin.

  The Masons let him in, offered him a glass of water for the parched sound of his voice (he hadn’t noticed the parched sound of his voice, but he took them at their word), and quickly enough after they brought him his glass of ice water, he began to feel everything shift toward fright.

  HE’S ASHAMED, AND HE understands that lately whatever he’s feeling seems somehow beside the point. Even so, he keeps finding in himself this little tremor of well-being, like a secret nerve discharging at the synapse. In those moments, it’s almost as if, at the core of himself, he were a man standing on a boulder amidst a fast-flowing river. It convinces him, each time it happens, that things might soon take a turn for the better.

  He’s looking for that feeling as Mr. Mason comes back into the room.

  “Well,” Mr. Mason says, setting down a plate of crackers and cheese. “I myself always believed in discipline.”

  “Yes.” Ridley looks straight at him, focusing. “And it’s gone. Nobody even thinks about it.” He remembers that this is the subject. And then he hopes it is.

  Mrs. Mason says, “Civilizations are like arrows in flight. They arc and then fall to earth.”

  On occasion, Ridley thinks of her conversation as a series of captions for the pictures her husband paints. The old man has described himself as a history buff. Everybody, according to Mr. Mason, is a buff of this or a buff of that. There are computer buffs and movie buffs and radio buffs and song buffs. Ridley is a medicine buff, though it has been some time since he dropped out of college. He told Mr. Mason that he was a pre-med student when he quit. All this means is that he took one biology and one chemistry course. He failed them both, but this makes no difference to Mr. Mason. “Young Ridley here,” Mr. Mason will say to visitors, “is a medicine buff.” To Ridley’s friends, Mr. Mason says, “Are you medicine buffs like Ridley?”

  “Entropy is in God’s plan,” he says now. “As is our struggle with it.”

  Mr. Mason’s views are all informed by his religious feeling. He’s nondenominational, he says, with Catholic leanings. Ridley has privately described him to friends as a God buff, since all his talk leads inexorably back to God. Having read the works of Thomas Aquinas, and having once almost decided to attend the seminary, Ridley can talk the talk. Even now, with panic roiling in his heart. “When was the last time anybody asked for sacrifice?” he says. “Even the word sounds strange, doesn’t it?”

  “Never sounded strange to me,” says Mr. Mason.

  Ridley is always unnerved when something he has said that is a lie, and that he has thought would be picked up by someone and agreed with, is turned back in disagreement. It’s always as though he’s been caught out, the falsehood showing on his face somehow. For a second, he can’t say anything else. The two people sit on their couch, their faces pleasant and empty. He feels them begin to slide out of solidness, feels the beginning of hallucination, and tries to talk again. “It’s a great world,” he says. He had meant to say word. Sacrifice is a great word. The old people simply stare back at him. “My eyes feel funny,” he says. “I’ve got allergies to certain kinds of things in the air. And I hate war. I hate all different kinds of war. Guerrilla war and holy war and—and wars of liberation. Did you know that the albumen in eggs is full of strontium 90 from practicing for the war we didn’t get around to fighting?”

  They stare at him.

  “Sometimes I think wars are l
ike God’s forest fire for people, you know?” This seems perfectly clear to him, but he can see the doubt in their faces. “My eyes sting,” he says. “It’s really something.”

  “Pollution,” Mrs. Mason says, smiling to encourage him. She seems to think there’s more. Out the window, behind her almost too bright bluish-gray hair, trees wave in the wind. There’s a storm coming. The sky on the other side of the trees is black.

  “I think suffering really comes from people realizing they’re not doing what’s right for their spiritual development,” Ridley says. He’s almost certain he got it out clearly, but the two of them look worried and nervous. “Really,” he goes on. “Don’t you think so? People have—they could have everything. Beautiful—you know. And they—they throw it away on nothing, a lot of empty shit like drugs and alcohol and running around like there’s no tomorrow and talking about suicide that way, like it’s a thing you flirt with, for Christ’s sake. When a person would swear to love them forever in a minute and work to stop every bad habit just for the chance—you know. I mean if you love someone, I mean isn’t that what we’re all supposed to be doing?”

  “Pardon me,” Mr. Mason says, rising. He walks into the next room. Ridley hears the windows closing there.

  “Rain,” Ridley says to Mrs. Mason. “I didn’t think it was supposed to.” His voice shakes, as if someone has punched him. The sentence has come out all wrong. He thinks he must’ve said it wrong, because she’s giving him a troubled look. “Rain is nice, isn’t it?” he says.

  She says something he doesn’t quite catch, about her garden. During the summer, before things started running out of control, he helped her put the garden in. He worked all day for three days, bare back cooking in the sun, clean and pleasurably thirsty, so that water tasted better than anything, and at night he slept deep. He had not met Pamela Brill yet. He had flunked out of college and been disowned by his father for the failure, and he was unable to decide what he should do in the way of work, a career. The whole idea of a career made his stomach hurt and filled him with the dread of death.

  He remembers digging in Mrs. Mason’s garden, thinking about the cool water in the tin ladle from the well.

  “It’s terrible now,” he hears, and realizes he has spoken aloud.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Mason says, agreeing.

  “Pardon me,” he says to her. “I lost my train of thought.”

  She smiles, staring.

  “Did you hear me?” he says.

  “Yes,” she says in that agreeable way. When her husband isn’t there, she becomes quite vague, Ridley has noticed.

  “Do you remember what I said?” Ridley asks her.

  “Discipline,” she says, making a fist. She’s watching him carefully. She’s wary. “It started because we were talking about why a woman with a nice family and a husband and a lot of nice things would lock herself up in a motel room and do away with herself.”

  “Who?” Ridley says, more confused all the time.

  “The woman. That person they found in the motel room down the street.”

  “Oh, my God,” he says. He can’t remember. He thinks of Pamela. He was talking to Pamela about this. Did they bring this up? “Did you bring this up?” he says.

  “We were talking about her. She took a bottle of pills.”

  “We only took four apiece,” Ridley almost shouts. “It just gets worse.”

  “Pardon?” she says.

  He says, “Everything’s coming apart at the seams.”

  “Are you all right?”

  He nods, sees Mrs. Mason’s features shrink. Is she frowning? She’s leaned forward slightly to look at him.

  “Are you sure you’re all right, young man?”

  “Oh,” he says, “I’m just fine.”

  The rain hits the window with an insistence, as if it wants in now, and Mr. Mason comes back into the room carrying the box of crackers. “These are all I could find,” he says. “I’m afraid the cupboard’s bare.”

  This is a hint, and Ridley knows it. He can’t put the words together in his head. “I’ve got a job interview,” he says. But they don’t seem to have heard him.

  “All this makes me very nervous,” Mrs. Mason says.

  “She’s never liked storms,” her husband says. “That one yesterday really frightened us both for the lightning.”

  “I’ve never seen it so bad,” she says.

  “Well, I shouldn’t’ve mentioned it,” says Mr. Mason. “I can see it also upsets our young tenant here.”

  “Such an awe-inspiring thing,” says Mrs. Mason.

  “You mean the—that—the woman that—the suicide,” Ridley gets out. It’s as if he’s solved a puzzle they’ve given him. “Her. I know about that.”

  They stare at him.

  “I was talking about the lightning.”

  “It’s a disgrace these days to tell a girl you want to get married and have a family. It’s a fucking joke.”

  Mr. Mason draws a breath. It’s clear that he’s overcoming some resistance in himself.

  “Excuse me,” Ridley says.

  “You’re upset,” says Mrs. Mason.

  There’s more talk, but Ridley can’t quite follow it. Then he can.

  Mr. Mason says, “I heard that she was lying in the bed with the covers pulled up, like someone lying down to sleep, you know.”

  “Right,” says Ridley. “No note.”

  “A note?”

  He waits. The next thing they say will give him something to latch on to.

  “Poor woman,” Mrs. Mason says.

  Ridley realizes that his hands are gripping his knees. He tries to look calm. The Masons are changing before his eyes, drifting out of their own shapes. He almost leaps at them. “Hey,” he says, too loud, and they sit forward. They have recomposed themselves. Their color is odd in the light.

  “Yes?” says Mr. Mason with a faintly suspicious tilting of his head.

  “Where were we?”

  “There’s no knowing what a person goes through,” Mrs. Mason says. “We should talk about something else.”

  “No one can ever really know another person,” says her husband.

  It thunders. The sound seems to move across the sky, like a heavy ball rolling on a table, and then everything is still again. The rain comes down. Ridley has a moment of believing he can hear it splattering against the leaves of the farthest tree, and then he sees that on the branches of that tree there are two large black hulking birds. The sound now seems to rise from those shapes, and it comes at him through the small opening at the bottom of the window. He can almost see the air tremble with it. His heart shakes; he breathes the odor of wet wood and ozone, and thinks of outer space. Everything makes too much noise.

  “Without discipline and sacrifice,” Mr. Mason is saying, “I think some people learn to start expecting perfection. And when they don’t get it”—he shrugs—“why, they jump out of the boat. That’s the only explanation I’ve ever had for it.”

  “Maybe it’s because they think life won’t change,” Mrs. Mason says, emphasizing the last word. “Or else they’re too afraid it will change.”

  “I would like to know,” Ridley says suddenly, “what the hell we’re talking about.” It’s as if he has barked at them. Then, softly: “It’s getting dark.”

  They wait. There’s a greenish light at the windows. Ridley is floating loose inside, anchorless, guilty, while the Masons sit regarding him. His vision is clouding over. The wavering light changes and appears to flare up, and it seems to him that a ball of flame rolls out of the fireplace and licks across the carpet to the television set, where it flashes and makes a bright shower of sparks. It’s like the Fourth of July. He sees flames climb the wall, crackling, bending and fanning out at the ceiling. It’s a hallucination, the worst thing, and he grips himself, trying to smile at the Masons, who are huddled together, their faces calm as facts. He tries to think what he has said, tries to recover everything that led up to the moment, and the fierce heat on h
is face makes him fear that the fire is real, that he has not imagined it. The Masons are still huddled on the couch, apparently waiting to die. Their faces are blank.

  “Come on,” he says to them. “Jesus. I took something.” He stands, reaches for them. “Get up,” he says. “Jesus, it’s real.”

  Mr. Mason tries to cover his wife’s face. They do not move. Ridley pulls at the old man’s arm, then bends down and puts his arms around him, lifting.

  “What are you doing?” Mr. Mason says.

  Mrs. Mason has flopped over on her side and is shouting for help.

  “Here,” Ridley says. “Lift her.” But he can’t get either of them to move. The air is burning his lungs. He can’t see.

  “Don’t hurt us,” Mr. Mason is shouting. “Please. Help. Help.”

  Every movement Ridley makes is doubled in his own perception, and finally, somehow, he finds himself on the stairs, tumbling down onto the lawn, with the Masons shouting at him from the stairs.

  “—call the police,” Mr. Mason is saying. “If you come near us again—”

  Ridley moves off from the house into the rain, and lightning shudders nearby. When he turns, he falls, ends up lying on his back, arms spread, the black sky moving over him. The house is plainly not lightning-struck, and there’s no fire. “Excuse me,” he says. “I’m sorry.” Then he tries to yell to them. “I thought it was a fire. I’m absolutely sick with love.”

  “Crazy,” Mr. Mason shouts. “I won’t have it.”

  Mrs. Mason says something he can’t hear. Ridley lifts his head in the rain and there they are, holding on to each other, looking troubled and afraid, and above them, on her own part of the stairs, is Pamela Brill. He has a moment of brilliant clarity, remembering himself. She looks at him with a terrifyingly cold curiosity. “Oh, God,” he says. “I want you. I don’t have anything else. I don’t want another thing in the world.”

  She says nothing, steps into his doorway out of the rain, still giving him that chilly, evaluative look. When the Masons begin shouting at him, she joins them, screams at him, the perfect teeth lining the red mouth. “It wasn’t what you think,” she says. “You with your stupid imagination. You’re drunk, and that’s about all you are, too. Plain old drunk.” It’s clear that she’s enjoying this—that for her, it’s all part of the same fun. For an instant they are all contending with one another and the storm, trying to be heard, saying words he can’t distinguish for the anger and the shouting and the thunder. He lies back. It’s as though the pure force of their displeasure has leveled him. Except that, as the rain washes over him and lightning flashes in the sky, he feels an unexpected peace. It comes to him that his love makes him good, and for this one wordless instant he can believe it. Out of everything else, this true thing shines forth, perfectly clear. And he is reasonably certain that it’s not coming from any drug. His love has elevated him. His wishes for honorable actions and faith have made him excellent, even in this disaster. Through the relative brightness of these intimations, he sees the others still shouting, still gesturing, and in his strangely exalted state, it’s as though they are calling to him from a distant shoreline, long-lost friends, dear friends, loved ones, urging him on, cheering him, happy for him as he sets sail in search of his unimaginable future.