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ESSAY |
In a jonquil yellow dress his sister Enid materialized in the room, pale face flushed, eyes huge from pleasure, hair still full of rain. . . . Her return had gone unnoticed, a fact unusual in itself since the whole point to Enid was that she was always noticed, with no effort on her part. She glided to the bar and poured herself a whiskey, again unusual: Enid seldom drank. Peter looked toward the hall to see who it was she had been with. But the man with the garters had either gone home or would reappear later, to avoid suspicion. Fiercely, Peter tried to recall who had been at dinner. He shut his eyes, the better to concentrate. Enid twirled his hair against the central cowlick, causing sudden tears of pain. "Stop it!" He struck away the hand. Each was experienced in the torturing of the other. Although she had the advantage of being older than he by three years, his biological age had now made him physically stronger than she but to no purpose, since in the process he was now no more able to touch her physically than he could hold fire in his hand. It was too dangerous, as they both knew well. "Where have you been?" "At the poolhouse." He was startled by her condor, and then by the swift serenity with which she lied. "I took a walk after dinner and got caught in the storm. My hair's still wet. Listen to that thunder." But Peter could hear nothing but the dull rapid thud of his own pulse beat. ----- "Listen," she said, taking the glass. "I don't want a divorce. Do you?" "No. I never did." He had to say this; and yet, in a way, he meant it. "Then why did you move out?" "How could I stay? Besides, you wanted me to." "I did not! Why do you say things like that?" She stared at him reproachfully. "You moved out just to spite me. Father put you up to it, and don't say he didn't. He's getting back at me for having married you. Oh, he's sly as they come, and never forget it and never start thinking you can manage him like that Senator of yours, because you can't. Not Daddy. He's managing you, to hurt me. Why don't you come with me to Harold's tonight. It ought to be fun." Clay had never got used to her sudden changes of mood, not to mention her dazzling dialectic. Starting with a false premise, she could build such a logical case that by the end she had almost made the premise itself seem true. Even more virtuoso were her sudden revelations, always egocentric, usually false, and yet often perceptive. On the face of it nothing was more absurd than that her father should take up with him to get back at her. But Blaise was mysterious and passionate. Enid had deeply offended him by marrying Clay (or so it had seemed), and now by taking Clay's side against Enid he could at last get back at her. For want of a better theory, Clay accepted Enid's; otherwise there was no understanding Blaise, who supported him while believing Enid to be the injured party . . . Clay had told no one the truth about the adultery on the excellent ground that it is not the aggressor but the victim the world despises and fears. The more Enid told her story of Clay's adultery "in my own bed with the baby in the next room," the less sympathy she was able to evoke even from those strangers whom, after three martinis, she took into her confidence. ------ "The leisurely pace of prewar Washington was now replaced by a positively New York surge of people coming and going, particularly women hurrying to do manly jobs: their short skirts revealed knees, whole mountainous hair fell to padded shoulders, despite urgent warnings that long hair, by getting into machinery, not only slowed down production thereby delaying America's inevitable victory over tyranny, but scalped its owner. The hair, however, was necessary to maintain a femininity compromised by so many hundreds of thousands of women fitting altogether too easily into the jobs of absent husbands and lovers." ----- They made love as if they had been married a long time yet still desired each other. But then, they had known each other a lifetime and their lovemaking could be considered simply a progression in a friendly relationship. Lately Peter found himself, to his disgust, using jargon words like "relationship," picked up from Aeneas and his friends who, to a man, were addicted to the opulent vocabulary of psychiatry, a pseudoscience now in vogue, even more than phrenology had been during the previous century. . . . The first victim in these storm quarrels had been the English language. Eager to illuminate interpersonal activity, words were made up exactly as if this elaborate game were a science in which new things heretofore unknown must be named. One of the great discoveries, the Vinland of the bold voyagers, was "relationship," a word Peter personally found less appealing than the as yet uncoined "connectionship" or "loveship." "Now what are you smiling at?" She pulled herself up on one arm. "Erotic pleasure. Normal reflex of the aroused male." "No, it's not. They scowl." ----- "Dilettante!" Harold had the popular writer's unerring ability to select the one word which vulgarizes even as it characterizes, sacrificing accuracy to mere vividness. |
