Three Short Novels. Gina Berriault

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СКАЧАТЬ to move with his wife to San Francisco and to become a partner in his brother-in-law’s investment firm, for a time their love must await the stabilizing of the other factors in his life. Over supper tables and in his hotel room or her bedroom, he talked a great deal about his factories, about conversion. There were complications in his reports that were unsolvable for her, and yet she felt that he was not really attempting to establish the truth, the reality, for her, because he thought it too much for her to comprehend, that he was not telling her much of anything, only the skimming, only the jokes repeated by the clerical help, only the froth that rose from the turbulence of the business, from the heavy maneuvering. But this was enough, it was all she wanted to know, the rest was his domain.

      With the diminishing of the intensity of their times together, in the second year, some certainty of the future had to compensate for the lessening. When he and his wife moved up to Hillsborough, a few miles from the city, his constant proximity, then, was a substitute for that certainty, was an approach to it. And yet, as the months went by, that proximity of both himself and his wife in a colonial-style home upon several acres of landscaped grounds served to make the certainty grow more distant.

      He was as aware as she of the slow abating, but he was not apprehensive of the end; he did not appear to believe that the end was approaching simply because the zenith was passed. He was now involved with his brother-in-law in plans for investment in Japan and the Philippines, and something of his optimism was transmitted to their affair.

      “Listen, there’s going to be big things in Japan,” he told her. “Got to start their exports going, got to help them rebuild. I’m going over and take a look around. You want to fly over with me?”

      The invitation to go with him to Japan was an intimation of something more, a return to the zenith, even a promise that she was to be his wife; it served for several months as proof of the constancy of their love. Then he left without her, promising to take her along the next time, explaining that this time was to be for a minimum of days.

      She drove him to the airport, and as they stood together in the corridor he said to her, to the crown of her head as she was fingering the buttons of his overcoat, “You know why we’re crazy about each other? It’s because we’re apart so much. If we go on like this, it’ll go down in history, won’t it? With those great passions? If we lived together, some of that crazy wildness might get lost, and I don’t want to lose a fraction of it. We’ve got something I don’t think anybody else ever had.”

      She looked down at him crossing the ground to the plane, ready to wave should he look up at her in the window of the waiting room. He seemed a man designated to bring about a prosperous future for all concerned, and his stride appeared so quick and purposeful she wondered if he might always be worried about missteps. The morning wind was flapping his trouser legs and lifting his white hair in tufts. He bent his head to enter the plane, a habitual bowing in doorways that were high enough.

      When he disappeared into the plane, she was seized by fear, convinced the plane was to fall from the sky, plunging into the ocean. Out in the parking lot, trapped in the roar of planes flying in low and planes rising and vanishing into the high fog, she asked herself if she would want him to die rather than leave her willfully. Then she wondered how much she loved him or if she loved him at all, if such a question could cross her mind. Dismayed by her own mind, she wandered the parking lot, lost, unable to recognize her own car.

       9

      On the way to her room, at midnight, she entered her son’s room. The window was up a few inches and a cold wind was stirring the curtains. Out on the bay the foghorns were sounding, expectantly repetitive, like a deep-spoken word. She sat on the edge of his bed, shivering in her negligee, watching him, his face plump with sleep, his arms flung above his head. If now, at the end of the affair, she doubted that she had loved, if her life was spent in seeking and pleasing some man, if her life was spent in need of his need of her, was love nothing but desperation passing for love? Was the only love that was not a delusion her love for her son?

      The confusion, the terror she had experienced out at the airport returned and she began to weep, wanting to waken him with her weeping, wanting him to come up out of sleep to a consciousness of her. She lay down on his bed, facing him, facing his small, awake, alarmed face. After a time, realizing, perhaps, that her weeping was not caused by him, was not his fault, he began to stroke her hair and her cheek. Her love for him was not a delusion. He was the person in whom reality was posited; he was abiding, he was constant. Since the room was cold and she was lying on top of the blankets, he threw the top quilt over her, smoothing it around her so that it formed a cocoon, and she slept that way for a time.

      Olga had left them, returning to Idaho some months before, and Vivian, rising early in the morning, went down to prepare breakfast for her son. After she had called him several times, he came down, still in his pajamas, and she saw his sullen resistance to her, a stubborn contesting with her, as if too much had been exacted of him the night before. He sat at breakfast with his eyes down, and when she asked him if he were going to school in his pajamas, he told her he was not going that day. When she tried to tug him upstairs to dress, he went limp, and, unable to drag him, she left him there, a small figure in blue and white striped pajamas, lying on the stairs. He remained all day in his room in his pajamas, coming down for his meals and going up again and closing his door.

      The following morning she forced him out of bed by pulling down the covers and dressing him herself. He ate his breakfast and permitted her to slip his yellow raincoat over his back and over his limp arms and jerk the hood of it over his head. In the moment before she thrust him out the front door, she saw his small face, smaller within the yellow hood and paler in the gray light of outdoors, gaze out with a failing of his resistance to her, enthralled for that moment by the mingling of fog and rain, by the change of weather. The first rain of fall made the streets and sidewalks dark and glistening, and the leaves of the slender trees in their wire enclosures by the curb were moved erratically by the drops. She thrust him out, and he sat down on the steps. At ten o’clock, looking out the round glass in the door, she saw him still on the top step, throwing pebbles from the potted plant. The drifting rain, slow and unabating, glistened on his yellow raincoat and hood from a long accumulation. The small, stubborn figure forecast a future of contesting: they were to be alone together, and whatever was to trouble her would be for him only a reason for contesting. She called him in from the neighborhood’s sight and, when the door was closed, turned him to face up the stairs and struck him across the back. With no retaliation, no anger, he went up the stairs, and the paradox of the fragility of his very young body and the power of his will led her to strike him again across his back.

      The next day he got ready for school, ate his breakfast, and left, all with the casualness of a habit that had not been broken. Some time in the days that followed, before Leland’s return from Japan, the conflict that had gone on between herself and her son roused her to an awareness, more than ever before, of the boy’s separateness. He was someone unknown. And she acknowledged the pleasure for her in that unknownness. She took pleasure in his strong will. In those days of her lover’s absence, she grew fascinated with her son’s beauty, with the slender shape of his bare feet, with the thick, dark hair with its cast of amber red, with the hard blue of his eyes, with all the particulars of his face, the pliability of his lips. He had grown shy about his body without her realizing it. When the shyness had begun she could not recall, but her awareness of it now led her to become less concealing of her own self. With only a negligee around her she drank her coffee at the table while he ate his breakfast, the translucent, ruffled garment falling away from her breasts; with the door to her room open, she undressed or drew on her stockings while she sat in her slip; and she returned from her bath to her room with the negligee clinging to her body.

      On the day of her lover’s return from Japan, he telephoned at midnight, speaking to her with a teasing, insinuative voice, and in another twenty minutes he was there, roving his voice, which he seemed to have realized on his trip might be a means of arousing СКАЧАТЬ