23

“You can’t dance at all,” Everett said to her. “You never could dance worth a damn.”

He said it in a motel room outside Salinas on a spring evening in 1957; they had driven down to look at a stock ranch, 840 acres for $225,000, which was, Everett thought, on the high side for a stock ranch but was $85,000 less than the eventual buyer, a Stockton syndicate, asked one year later for the eight acres of it with cloverleaf access to a proposed freeway south. (In the end, however, the joke was not upon Everett after all, since the route of the freeway was shifted five miles east.) In the motel there had been glass doors to the lighted swimming pool, Muzak piped in through the walls, and wall-to-wall tweed carpeting on which they had tried, after three drinks before dinner, to dance.

“Nobody can dance on a rug,” she said.

“You couldn’t dance at the Palladium.”

Although she had never considered herself even a mediocre dancer, she was hurt; in the haze of three drinks she embroidered bitterly upon past hurts. A month before she had bought a red chiffon dress which he claimed not to like on her, although he knew (in fact because he knew, he said it because he knew) that she had wanted a red chiffon dinner dress from the time she was in school and had seen one on a girl at a dance; before Christmas, the day she came home from two weeks in Carmel, he had not been at home but (by a deliberate effort, she was certain now) in Reno.

“I’m not that bad a dancer,” she said, wondering what had happened to the girl in the red chiffon dress, what brilliant marriage she had made, what adoring husband was even then leading her (leading: there was the key to good dancing) across the polished floor of what fashionable hotel.

“I told you, you can’t dance at all. You don’t listen to the beat. I don’t know what you’re listening to but it isn’t the beat.”

“Then let’s not dance.” She sat down on the bed and began brushing her hair.

He sat down, without speaking, and pretended interest in an advertising leaflet bearing a photograph of a man identified as “The Salinas Valley’s Number One Restaurateur, a Ph.D. of Beef.” There was also a drawing of a steer wearing a crown, with the legend “Where Premium Beef Is King.”

“You’re deliberately starting it again,” she said. “You’re deliberately doing it again.”

Everett said nothing.

“You do it,” she added, “because you’re insecure.”

“Cut it out, Lily.” He stood up and straightened his tie in the mirror. “You ready to go?”

She picked up her sweater, and they did not speak again (if you did not count queries for the benefit of the waiter, and she did not) until halfway through dinner, after Everett had left the table to say hello to a cattleman he had seen in the bar.

“Eat your dinner,” he said when he sat down again. “Or is there something the matter with it.”

“I was waiting for you.”

“You were.”

She did not say anything.

“That’d be the first time.” He picked up his drink. “That’d be the goddamn first time.”

“When did you ever care.”

“That’s right. When did I ever care. When did you.”

“I care right now.”

“That’d be the goddamn first time,” he repeated.

She saw the vein tightened on his forehead and tried to eat a bite of abalone. Everett had not touched his dinner and was on his sixth or seventh martini, she did not know which. That’d be the goddamn first time. What it was not the first time for, at any rate, was this scene: she supposed they said different words each time but it was always the same scene, and although she could not remember when or how it had begun, it seemed now that they were condemned to play it out together all the days of their lives, raking their memories for fresh grievances, cherishing familiar ones, nourishing the already indestructible shoots of their resentment with alcohol and with the inexhaustible adrenalin generated by what she supposed was (at least she did not know any other name for it) love. It did not seem to matter any more who had first resented whom, or for what. It did not seem to matter what either of them did any more: it could begin out of nothing. It could begin when they were trying hardest to keep it away, could tear apart all their tacit promises, could invade even the cunningly achieved anonymity of motel rooms with wall-to-wall tweed carpeting, rooms in which they had thought they might begin again; rooms in which she could feel, in the first glow of the first drink, that Everett was someone she did not know at all, someone to whom she might seem the gifted, graced, charmed woman she had wanted to be.

“Stop it,” she said, putting down her fork.

He beckoned to the waiter. “Stop what.”

By midnight Everett had fallen asleep in his clothes on one of the two double beds. Lily sat rigid in a straight chair on the far side of the room; to have lain on even the other bed would have implied domesticity, a truce. When he woke and told her to go to bed she turned away, turned her face toward the window which looked out on nothing but the Lincoln. She could not sleep, she said, in the same room with him. She had managed to sleep, he said, in the same room with plenty of other people, hadn’t she. No, she had not. And what did it matter if she had. When had he ever cared. He had slapped her then and she twisted away, and he took her in his arms and it was all right again for a while. It’s going to be all right baby, he said, it’s going to be fine now, and she said over and over Please Christ Everett keep us, and he said Lily, baby, we’ll get through the next few months all right and then you take a trip, you take the kids on a trip, go somewhere you want to go and baby when you come home it’ll be all right, you’ll see.

Later she had begged Everett to go with them on the trip that summer but he would not. Knight liked everything, liked Paris and London and Rome and New York, but Julie was homesick and wanted her father, and Lily was homesick too. Although she sent postcards almost every day to Everett and to her mother, neither wrote frequently: her mother twice, once to observe that Duke Snider had been off his game for a week, once to complain that the Wells Fargo Bank would allow her to subordinate not three hundred but only one hundred acres to the Paradise Valley All-Electric Homes people; Everett three times, each letter an exercise in the stiff, impenetrable optimism he reserved for all mailed communications. In Paris she received a cable from Ryder, asking if she could lend him five thousand dollars; she cabled that she could not, and then wondered guiltily where he would get the money.

After she was home, all she could remember of the trip at all was the fat Italian on the flight from New York to San Francisco, the Italian not from Italy but from New Jersey; she remembered him with a clarity she would have preferred to forego. He lived in New Jersey, was married to a woman who weighed 234 pounds, and had business in San Francisco: those were the only three facts she ever knew about him.

Idlewild that night had been hot and swept by fitful warm rains, everything smelling of the same sweet mildew that had always meant New York to her. The plane was delayed, and Lily sat (alone, because Knight and Julie were staying over a week to visit Sarah in Bryn Mawr) in the surgically lighted litter of the waiting room reading the real-estate advertisements in a Town and Country someone had left behind. She had on a white silk suit she had bought on sale the day before at Hattie Carnegie, and thought she presented rather a pleasant contrast to the other passengers, one of whom, an aging blonde, had on Capri pants; another of whom, an extraordinarily seedy minister, had stripped down to his pants, an undershirt, and a clerical bib. He was fanning himself with the New York Daily Mirror, and Lily hoped that he would not sit next to her on the plane, because she was quite certain that before they reached San Francisco she would be telling him, in a helpless drive to win his approval, what faith and works meant to her.

She smiled distantly at a man who had smiled at her. Apparently Italian, about her age, the man wore a suit of such deliberately obscure cut and color that it appeared to be a parody on a Brooks Brothers suit. The suit was complemented by—and such would be the phrase—a narrow black string tie with a heavy gold tie clasp, an absurdly small hat, and a candy-striped shirt with French cuffs, which he shot several times as he repeatedly opened and closed the attaché case in which he had for some reason secured his ticket. It was not until after he had settled himself next to her on the plane that she noticed the cuff links, which were representations of two of the Caesars, and it was not until he accidently brushed his hand against her knee and then drew it away that she noticed the ring, which was large, diamond, and on his little finger.

It was about then that she noticed, as well, that he had been and was still drinking. You’re skinny but you’re good-looking, he announced thickly, his first words to her. Although she was taken back she smiled, lowered her head and looked up at him and smiled. She always smiled that way at men she did not know, unable to think of anything else to do and wanting them to want her, recognize her as the princess in the tower. In this particular case, however, she smiled also because the stewardess had looked with disapproval upon the man, who was making little effort to conceal his intention to stay drunk for the next three thousand miles. The disapproval of the stewardess suggested a kind of pact between Lily and her seat mate, and she sealed it by accepting a swallow of what seemed to be very good Scotch, although she did not like Scotch, from his flask.

Perhaps ten minutes after they had left Idlewild, when the lights had been turned off and the engines had settled to a low roar, the incredible thing happened, only it did not seem incredible until later, on the ground, in the light: the man began a low, loving, brutally obscene monologue. Did she know what he wanted to do to her. Did she know what he was going to do to her as soon as they reached San Francisco. How would she like that. He guessed she’d like that all right. Be quiet, she whispered from time to time, lulled almost unconscious by the dark, the moan of the engines, the slight vibration of the cold window next to her cheek, the void beyond the window; don’t talk that way. There was, however, something about being at 25,000 feet in the dark that drained her voice of urgency. Occasionally she would even drop into sleep, waking each time to the quiet, unthinkable monotone; he never touched her and stopped talking only once, for about an hour, between the lights of Denver and the lights of Salt Lake, when he fell into deep sleep. She rather missed the sound of his voice. He woke not only with his imaginative powers still intact but with, for the first time, a definite program: You’re going to love it, baby, you’re just going to give me three hours and you’re going to love it and then you’ll walk out that door and never see me again. He saw this tryst as taking place in the airport hotel in San Francisco. It seemed he did not have to be into town until two o’clock in the afternoon. Just three hours, baby. I can’t, she heard herself saying again and again, and when he demanded to know why not she heard herself, absurdly, making up reasons: she had to be here, there, her time was committed. Three hours wouldn’t matter, he declared, if she wanted it: Do you want it or don’t you. I don’t want it, she said finally, almost inaudibly, trying to cover herself entirely with the blanket the stewardess had given her.

You want it all right baby, you want it. Three hours of it.

She said nothing. What held her in trance was his total lack of interest in anything else about her, his promise of being what she had looked for over and over: the point beyond which she could not go, the unambiguous undiluted article, the place where the battle would be on her terms. There could be no question of whether he liked her or disliked her, no question of approval or disapproval, no rôles at all: three hours he said and three hours he meant.

And if he had not passed out shortly before the plane landed in San Francisco, and if Everett had not driven down unexpectedly to meet her (given the second, she could thank God for the first), three hours it would probably, she knew with a blend of distaste and interest, have been. A few days later the incident had seemed so improbable as to be of obsessive interest, and she mentioned, tentatively, that she had sat next to a drunk on the plane. She had, Everett supposed, moved. Yes, she said. Of course I moved. She could not see then why she had not, and was moved, a few weeks later, to describe the flight in relentless detail to Ryder. Clearly impatient with her unresponsiveness to the details of a venture he had recently conceived (a chain of espresso shops, see Lily, it’s a natural), Ryder said only that it could have happened to anyone. (“I’m not sure a chain of espresso shops would go, Ryder”: that was all she said, but it occurred to her that Ryder found her as tiresome as she sometimes found him, and she reflected admiringly upon people in movies—and it was not only people in movies—who when they could not talk to each other said goodbye, had renunciations, made decisions: started fresh, apparently lobotomized. If there was one thing that she and Everett and Ryder all had in common, it was that none of their decisions ever came to much; they seemed afflicted with memory.)