Outside the window leaves stirred and cried soundlessly. Noon was past. And under the bowled pale sky, trees and grass, bills and valleys, somewhere the sea, regretted him, with relief.
No, no, he thought, with awakened despair, don’t spoil it.
But she had moved and her hair brushed his face. Hair. Everyone, anyone, has hair. (To hold it, to hold it.) But it was hair and here was a body in his arms, fragile and delicate it might be, but still a body, a woman: something to answer the call of his flesh, to retreat pausing, touching him tentatively, teasing and retreating, yet still answering the call of his flesh. Impalpable and dominating. He removed his arm.
‘You little fool, don’t you know you had me?’
Her position had not changed. The divan embraced her in its impersonal clasp. Light like the thumbed rim of a coin about her indistinct face, her long legs crushed to her dress. Her hand, relaxed, lay slim and lax between them. But he ignored it.
‘Tell me what you heard,’ she said.
He rose. ‘Good-bye,’ he said. ‘Thanks for lunch, or dinner, or whatever you call it.’
‘Dinner,’ she told him. ‘We are common people.’ She rose also and studiedly leaned her hip against the arm of a chair. His yellow eyes washed over her warm and clear as urine, and he said, ‘God damn you.’ She sat down again leaning back into the corner of the divan and as he sat beside her, seemingly without moving, she came to him.
‘Tell me what you heard.’
He embraced her, silent and morose. She moved slightly and he knew she was offering her mouth.
‘How do you prefer a proposal?’ he asked.
‘How?’
‘Yes. What form do you like it in? You have had two or three in the last few days, haven’t you?’
‘Are you proposing?’
‘That was my humble intention. Sorry I’m dull. That was why I asked for information.’
‘So when you can’t get your women any other way, you marry them, then?’
‘Dammit, do you think all a man wants of you is your body?’ She was silent and he continued: ‘I am not going to tell on you, you know.’ Her tense body, her silence, was a question. ‘What I heard, I mean.’
‘Do you think I care? You have told me yourself that women say one thing and mean another. So I don’t have to worry about what you heard. You said so yourself.’ Her body became a direct challenge, yet she had not moved. ‘Didn’t you?’
‘Don’t do that,’ he said sharply. ‘What makes you so beautiful and disturbing and so goddammed dull?’
‘What do you mean? I am not used—’
‘Oh, I give up. I can’t explain to you. And you wouldn’t understand, anyway. I know I am temporarily a fool, so if you tell me I am, I’ll kill you.’
‘Who knows? I may like that.’ Her soft, coarse voice was quiet.
Light in her hair, her mouth speaking, and the vague, crushed shape of her body. ‘Atthis,’ he said.
‘What did you call me?’
He told her. ‘ ”For a moment, an aeon, I pause plunging above the narrow precipice of thy breast” and on and on and on. Do you know how falcons make love? They embrace at an enormous height and fall locked, beak to beak, plunging: an unbearable ecstasy.
While we have got to assume all sorts of ludicrous postures, knowing our own sweat. The falcon breaks his clasp and swoops away swift and proud and lonely, while a man must rise and take his hat and walk out.’
She was not listening, hadn’t heard him. ‘Tell me what you heard,’ she repeated. Where she touched him was a cool fire; he moved but she followed like water. ‘Tell me what you heard.’
‘What difference does it make, what I heard? I don’t care anything about your jelly-beans.
You can have all the Georges and Donalds you want. Take them all for lovers if you like. I don’t want your body. If you can just get that through your beautiful thick head, if you will just let me alone, I will never want it again.’
‘But you have proposed to me. What do you want of me?’
‘You wouldn’t understand, if I tried to tell you.’
‘Then if I did marry you, how would I know how to act towards you? I think you are crazy.’
‘That’s what I have been trying to tell you,’ Jones answered in a calm fury. ‘You won’t have to act anyway towards me. I will do that. Act with your Donalds and Georges, I tell you.’
She was like a light globe from which the current has been shut. ‘I think you’re crazy,’ she repeated.
‘I know I am.’ He rose abruptly. ‘Good-bye. Shall I see your mother, or will you thank her for lunch for me?’
Without moving she said: ‘Come here.’
In the hall, he could hear Mrs Saunders’s chair as it creaked to her rocking, through the front door he saw trees, the lawn, and the street. She said Come here again. Her body was a vague white shape as he entered the room again and light was the thumbed rim of a coin about her head. He said:
‘If I come back, you know what it means.’
‘But I can’t marry you. I am engaged.’
‘I wasn’t talking about that.’
‘Then what do you mean?’
‘Good-bye,’ he repeated. At the front door he could hear Mr and Mrs Saunders talking but from the room he had left came a soft movement, louder than any other sound. He thought she was following him, but the door remained empty and when he looked into the room again she sat as he had left her. He could not even tell if she were looking at him.
‘I thought you had gone,’ she remarked.
After a time he said: ‘Men have lied to you a lot, haven’t they?’
‘What makes you say that?’
He looked at her a long moment. Then he turned to the door again. ‘Come here,’ she repeated quickly.
She made no movement, save to slightly avert her face as he embraced her. ‘I’m not going to kiss you,’ he told her.
‘I’m not so sure of that.’ Yet his clasp was impersonal.
‘Listen. You are a shallow fool, but at least you can do as you are told. And that is, let me alone about what I heard. Do you understand? You’ve got that much sense, haven’t you? I’m not going to hurt you: I don’t even want to see you again. So just let me alone about it. If I heard anything I have already forgotten it — and it’s damn seldom I do anything this decent. Do you hear?’
She was cool and pliant as a young tree in his arms and against his jaw she said: ‘Tell me what you heard.’
‘All right then,’ he said savagely. His hand cupped her shoulder, holding her powerless and his other hand ruthlessly brought her face around. She resisted, twisting her face against his fat palm.
‘No, no; tell me first.’
He dragged her face up brutally and she said in a smothered whisper: ‘You are hurting me!’
‘I don’t give a damn. That might go with George, but not with me.’
He saw her eyes go dark, saw the red print of his fingers on her cheek and chin. He held her face where the light could fall on it, examining it with sybaritish anticipation. She exclaimed quickly, staring at him: ‘Here comes daddy! Stop!’
But it was Mrs Saunders in the door, and Jones was calm, circumspect, lazy, and remote as an idol.
‘Why, it’s quite cool in here, isn’t it? But so dark. How do you keep awake?’ said Mrs Saunders, entering. ‘I nearly went to sleep several times on the porch. But the glare is so bad on the porch. Robert went off to school without his hat: I don’t know what he will do.’
‘Perhaps they haven’t a porch at the school house,’ murmured Jones.
‘Why, I don’t recall. But our school is quite modern. It was built in — when was it built, Cecily?’
‘I don’t know, mamma.’
‘Yes. But it is quite new. Was it last year or the year before, darling?’
‘I don’t know, mamma.’
‘I told him to wear his hat because of the glare, but of course, he didn’t. Boys are so hard to manage. Were you hard to manage when you were a child, Mr Jones?’
‘No, ma’am,’ answered Jones, who had no mother that he could name and who might have claimed any number of possible fathers, ‘I never gave my parents much trouble. I am of a quiet nature, you see. In fact, until I reached my eleventh year, the only time I ever knew passion was one day when I discovered beneath the imminent shadow of our annual picnic that my Sunday school card was missing.
At our church they gave prizes for attendance and knowing the lesson, and my card bore forty-one stars, when it disappeared.’ Jones grew up in a Catholic orphanage, but like Henry James, he attained verisimilitude by means of tediousness.
‘How dreadful. And did you find it again?’
‘Oh, yes. I found it in time for the picnic. My father had used it to enter a one-dollar bet on a race-horse. When I went to my father’s place of business to prevail on him to return home, as was my custom, just as I passed through the swinging doors, one of his business associates there was saying. “Whose card is this?” I recognized my forty-one stars immediately, and claimed it, collecting twenty-two dollars, by the way. Since then I have been a firm believer in Christianity.’
‘How interesting,’ Mrs Saunders commented, without having heard him. ‘I wish Robert
