Three Short Novels. Gina Berriault
undressed, smoking a cigarette. Though he was not yet in bed, he had already turned off the lamp, or not turned it on, apparently wanting to reject her with darkness, and she felt that she had come from the presence of a man who was more than he. It seemed to her that Russell and the others in the house and herself were all to be left behind by her son, their lives nothing compared to what his life was to be, that this man, castigating her with darkness, sat in a cul-de-sac of a life. She felt that all of them except her son were trapped in the summer night in that house with the unwashed glasses and ashtrays on floors and couches and windowsills, with intimate, used garments on floors and chairs—everything testifying to wasted lives.
“Golden vipers,” she said, low, pacing the floor in her bare feet, making no noise on the floorboards, as if she were weightless. “Always some little surprise or other, always some concoction nobody ever heard of before and that’s deadly familiar. How do you manage to accomplish both at the same time?”
“Enough, enough. Every little thing. Enough . . . ,” he said, breathing out the words as if someone were testing him physically to see how much pain he was able to bear.
“They all add up to the big thing.”
“What’s the big thing?” he asked, challengingly, unafraid.
“You. They all add up to you.” She was unable to move, struck by her own cruelty.
“You don’t see me right, Vivian,” he said. “You’ve got a crazy way of looking at me. You put together things nobody notices because they’re nothing to notice. You watch for everything and call it a fault.”
She pressed her temples to destroy the cruelty in her head, but it was not cornered by a posture or a wish. “It’s you I see,” she insisted.
“Me? Me?” He kept his voice low. “You act like I misrepresented myself. I never misrepresented myself, Vivian. Besides, you’re smart, Vivian. You’re smart enough to know if a man’s lying to you. That’s not saying I’m satisfied with myself. You don’t know what’s plaguing me. You think I think everything’s great. You think I think my life’s just great. What I gripe about—this guy and that guy, some deals—you think there’s nothing else that gripes me. I see the way you see me and I don’t look so good, sometimes, but you can’t see what I feel. I’d like to tell you what I feel. Or maybe I wouldn’t like to. If I could tell you, you still wouldn’t know.” He paused. “I’ll tell you,” and paused again. He was rubbing his knees, trying to rub away his confusion over himself, straining to engage his being in whatever was the aspiration he could not find words for.
It was so amorphous a thing for him to tell—the thing which he hoped would make him more in her eyes—that the attempt to reveal it was almost like an attempt to confess a crime instead of to reveal a virtue.
She went over to him. There was no one else to lie down beside if she wanted an embrace against her own cruelty. He leaned forward to clasp her around her legs, drawing her down with him.
“Vivian, listen. When I first saw you, the way you ran down that hill like a kid, I said there’s a woman with a heart as big as the world. So if I blow up, you’re supposed to know I don’t mean it. Lie still, lie still,” he urged.
14
Maria came to visit more frequently at Vivian’s invitation until she was with them almost ritually every weekend. Along with the diffidence, there was now in her manner almost the slyness of a spy in the enemy camp. At twelve she was ineffectually pretty in Vivian’s eyes; there was no quickness, no grace, no wiles, no artifice to make persuasive the large, smoky blue eyes and fair skin; and this lack of conscious femininity, which was, to Vivian, the very soul of a woman, was not, she thought, the girl’s fault, not the dead mother’s fault, not the fault of the grandmother with whom she lived, but Russell’s fault. The girl was evidence to her always that he had not been the man he ought to have been in that other marriage. The girl was like the dead wife’s past consciousness of him as he was; she was like the wife’s dismayed, sorrowing consciousness of him.
With the girl, they drove up to the mountains to ski, and Maria, who could not ski and could not learn, spent the time walking in snowshoes, and Vivian sometimes accompanied her, affected by the sight of the girl alone, her sad face surrounded by a knit cap of exultant red. In the summer, they drove to Monterey, or up into the gold-mining country and gambled on the machines in desolate saloons, or they went to Clearlake or to Tahoe to swim.
Constantly urged by Russell to intrude upon David, to swim as far, to climb as far, Maria, one day at Lake Tahoe, in the midst of Russell’s badgering, stood up from the shallow water where she had been paddling around and struck out after David, who was climbing onto a raft several yards offshore. She was an awkward swimmer, fearful and rigid. Even so, while they watched apprehensively and with shame, the girl, apparently propelled by sheer anger against the man who had taunted her, got as far as midway, and then could neither turn back nor continue on to the raft. Russell ran into the water and swam after her, and, with one arm around her, helped her back to shore. Once on her feet and out of the water, Maria refused to go as far as the blanket where they had congregated before. She sat down on wet sand, facing the water, clasping her knees, not acknowledging her father’s presence or Vivian’s. Vivian laid a sweater over the girl’s back and sat down beside her. Russell lay on his back, several yards away.
“I think he wanted me to drown,” Maria said.
“That’s not true.” Vivian put her arm around the girl.
“It’s true,” the girl said.
“But he rescued you.”
“I wasn’t drowning.”
“Then you see, it’s not true,” Vivian said, hugging the girl to impress upon her their humorous reasoning.
Maria sat alone, after Vivian had left her, until it was time for them to leave the lake, and on the long drive back to the city that evening she did not speak, not even to answer.
Russell returned at two in the morning, after taking Maria home, and, as was his habit, stopping by at the nightclub. He stumbled down onto the bench of Vivian’s dressing table, facing her where she lay in bed. “You terribly awfully fond of her, Vivian?” he asked. “Why?”
“Why?” she repeated, half asleep.
“Why?”
“Why? Because I guess I feel sorry for her.”
“You’re not fond of her and you’re not sorry for her and you’re not fond of me and you’re not sorry for me. You just don’t like me. It’s that simple. That’s the crux of it. You don’t like me and because you don’t like me you fix it up so we see her every week. You use her to remind me of something you think ought to be plaguing me. What do you want to plague me with, Vivian?” He began to weep without covering his face, and his pale eyes, paler because of the deeply flushed face, seemed to have wept out their color before he returned home to weep.
She slept in the guest room after that night, and heard him come home, stumbling, slamming doors, an hour after the nightclub closed. One night he did not come home, and in the morning her father telephoned to tell her that the manager had ordered Russell from the club because he had made a nuisance of himself, complaining to the patrons that his wife refused to sleep with him. He did not come home that day and, at two in the morning, her father telephoned again: Russell had spent the evening in the restaurant next door to the club, buying drinks for a couple, buying supper for them, telling of his ostracism, that his wife forbade him to come home and his partners forbade him to enter the nightclub.
An hour after her father had called, Russell returned. “It’s me, don’t shoot!” he shouted, unlocking the front door. “Vivian, you hear me up there? I’m turning on all the lights so you can see it’s me. You saw that thing in the papers? She shot her husband dead because she thought he was a prowler?” He came up the stairs, stamping, and into their bedroom, shaking his keys above his head with both hands.
As if he felt he required some excuse for being there,