finish a lakescape, but it was no good, she had no talent whatever (which was quite true) – ‘And have you ever tried painting, Humbert?’ Charlotte, who was a little jealous of Jean, wanted to know if John was coming.
He was. He was coming home for lunch today. He had dropped her on the way to Parkington and should be picking her up any time now. It was a grand morning. She always felt a traitor to Cavall and Melampus for leaving them roped on such gorgeous days. She sat down on the white sand between Charlotte and me. She wore shorts. Her long brown legs were about as attractive to me as those of a chestnut mare. She showed her gums when she smiled.
‘I almost put both of you into my lake,’ she said. ‘I even noticed something you overlooked. You [addressing Humbert] had your wrist watch on in, yes, sir, you had.’
‘Waterproof,’ said Charlotte softly, making a fish mouth.
Jean took my wrist upon her knee and examined Charlotte’s gift, then put back Humbert’s hand on the sand, palm up.
‘You could see anything that way,’ remarked Charlotte coquettishly.
Jean sighed. ‘I once saw,’ she said, ‘two children, male and female, at sunset, right here, making love. Their shadows were giants. And I told you about Mr. Tomson at daybreak. Next time I expect to see fat old Ivor in the ivory. He is really a freak, that man. Last time he told me a completely indecent story about his nephew. It appears – ’
‘Hullo there,’ said John’s voice.
21
My habit of being silent when displeased, or, more exactly, the cold and scaly quality of my displeased silence, used to frighten Valeria out of her wits. She used to whimper and wail, saying, ‘Ce qui me rend folle, c’est que je ne sais à quoi tu penses quand tu es comme ça.[110]’ I tried being silent with Charlotte – and she just chirped on, or chucked my silence under the chin. An astonishing woman! I would retire to my former room, now a regular ‘studio’, mumbling I had after all a learned opus to write, and cheerfully Charlotte went on beautifying the home, warbling on the telephone and writing letters. From my window, through the lacquered shiver of poplar leaves, I could see her crossing the street and contentedly mailing her letter to Miss Phalen’s sister. The week of scattered showers and shadows which elapsed after our last visit to the motionless sands of Hourglass Lake was one of the gloomiest I can recall. Then came two or three dim rays of hope – before the ultimate sunburst.
It occurred to me that I had a fine brain in beautiful working order and that I might as well use it. If I dared not meddle with my wife’s plans for her daughter (getting warmer and browner every day in the fair weather of hopeless distance), I could surely devise some general means to assert myself in a general way that might be later directed toward a particular occasion. One evening, Charlotte herself provided me with an opening.
‘I have a surprise for you,’ she said looking at me with fond eyes over a spoonful of soup. ‘In the fall we two are going to England.’
I swallowed my spoonful, wiped my lips with pink paper (Oh, the cool rich linens of Mirana Hotel!) and said:
‘I have also a surprise for you, my dear. We two are not going to England.’
‘Why, what’s the matter?’ she said, looking – with more surprise than I had counted upon – at my hands (I was involuntarily folding and tearing and crushing and tearing again the innocent pink napkin). My smiling face set her somewhat at ease, however.
‘The matter is quite simple,’ I replied. ‘Even in the most harmonious of households, as ours is, not all decisions are taken by the female partner. There are certain things that the husband is there to decide. I can well imagine the thrill that you, a healthy American gal, must experience at crossing the Atlantic on the same ocean liner with Lady Bumble – or Sam Bumble, the Frozen Meat King, or a Hollywood harlot. And I doubt not that you and I would make a pretty ad for the Travelling Agency when portrayed looking – you, frankly starry-eyed, I, controlling my envious admiration – at the Palace Sentries, or Scarlet Guards, or Beaver Eaters, or whatever they are called. But I happen to be allergic to Europe, including merry old England. As you well know, I have nothing but very sad associations with the Old and rotting World. No coloured ads in your magazines will change the situation.’
‘My darling,’ said Charlotte. ‘I really – ’
‘No, wait a minute. The present matter is only incidental. I am concerned with a general trend. When you wanted me to spend my afternoons sunbathing on the Lake instead of doing my work, I gladly gave in and became a bronzed glamour boy for your sake, instead of remaining a scholar and, well, an educator. When you lead me to bridge and bourbon with the charming Farlows, I meekly follow. No, please, wait. When you decorate your home, I do not interfere with your schemes. When you decide – when you decide all kinds of matters, I may be in complete, or in partial, let us say, disagreement – but I say nothing. I ignore the particular. I cannot ignore the general. I love being bossed by you, but every game has its rules. I am not cross. I am not cross at all. Don’t do that. But I am one half of this household, and have a small but distinct voice.’
She had come to my side and had fallen on her knees and was slowly, but very vehemently, shaking her head and clawing at my trousers. She said she had never realized. She said I was her ruler and her god. She said Louise had gone, and let us make love right away. She said I must forgive her or she would die.
This little incident filled me with considerable elation. I told her quietly that it was a matter not of asking forgiveness, but of changing one’s ways; and I resolved to press my advantage and spend a good deal of time, aloof and moody, working at my book – or at least pretending to work.
The ‘studio bed’ in my former room had long been converted into the sofa it had always been at heart, and Charlotte had warned me since the very beginning of our cohabitation that gradually the room would be turned into a regular ‘writer’s den’. A couple of days after the British Incident, I was sitting in a new and very comfortable easy chair, with a large volume in my lap, when Charlotte rapped with her ring finger and sauntered in. How different were her movements from those of my Lolita, when she used to visit me in her dear dirty blue jeans, smelling of orchards in nymphetland; awkward and fey, and dimly depraved, the lower buttons of her shirt unfastened. Let me tell you, however, something. Behind the brashness of little Haze, and the poise of big Haze, a trickle of shy life ran that tasted the same, that murmured the same. A great French doctor once told my father that in near relatives the faintest gastric gurgle has the same ‘voice’.
So Charlotte sauntered in. She felt all was not well between us.
I had pretended to fall asleep the night before, and the night before that, as soon as we had gone to bed, and risen at dawn.
Tenderly, she inquired if she were not ‘interrupting’.
‘Not at the moment,’ I said, turning volume G of the Girls’ Encyclopaedia around to examine a picture printed ‘bottom-edge’ as printers say.
Charlotte went up to a little table of imitation mahogany with a drawer. She put her hand upon it. The little table was ugly, no doubt, but it had done nothing to her.
‘I have always wanted to ask you,’ she said (business-like, not coquettish), ‘why is this thing locked up? Do you want it in this room? It’s so abominably uncouth.’
‘Leave it alone,’ I said. I was camping in Scandinavia.
‘Is there a key?’
‘Hidden.’
‘Oh, Hum.’
‘Locked up love letters.’
She gave me one of those wounded-doe looks that irritated me so much, and then, not quite knowing if I was serious, or how to keep up the conversation, stood for several slow pages (Campus, Canada, Candid Camera, Candy) peering at the window-pane rather than through it, drumming upon it with sharp almond-and-rose fingernails.
Presently (at Canoeing or Canvasback) she strolled up to my chair and sank down, tweedily, weightily, on