Anthony Cooper finished his fourth Martini and looked gloomily at his Aunt Margery when she stood up and announced that it was time to eat.
“Roast beef, Anthony,” she said, “and spring peas. The first of the season and right out of your Uncle Nate’s garden fresh this afternoon.”
God, but she’s turned into a pain in the ass, thought Anthony sourly. When they had the kid around there was a certain fine-drawn look about Margery, an aura of tragedy that suited her. But now she’s turned into a regular bucolic hausfrau, roast beef, new peas, ruffled apron and all. Christ.
“Must we?” asked Anthony rudely. “Personally, I could stand another of Nate’s Martinis even if he does eff them up with all that lousy vermouth.”
“You’ve had enough, Anthony,” said Nathaniel and stood up next to Margery. “You’ll ruin your stomach with all that crap. Come on, you’ve got to eat.”
“My dear uncle,” said Anthony, who was not tight from a mere four Martinis but from the several quarts of beer he had sipped on all afternoon, “the only thing I have to do in this life is die.” He almost managed to swallow a rather large belch. “And I have no intention of doing that right at the moment. I shall take a long time about it. A long, long time. And the path will be paved with nothing but Martinis, beer and good Scotch. Oh yes. And girls. Beautiful, blonde, busty girls who dance in nightclubs and never go to bed before daylight.”
“Well, sit there and get plastered if that’s what you want,” said Nate impatiently. “We’re going in to eat.”
“Go with God,” replied Anthony with a magnanimous wave of his hand.
“Anthony,” said Margery, “you shouldn’t drink any more tonight. You have that long drive facing you tomorrow and you don’t want to start out with a hangover.”
“Anthony, you shouldn’t,” mimicked Anthony. “Anthony you don’t want. My dear aunt, the things I want and the things I should do are far beyond your ken. In fact, I might go so far as to say you’d be shocked by the things I should do and the things I want.”
Margery smiled. “I may be a contented hick well on my way to getting fat to your way of thinking,” she said. “But don’t count on shocking me, Anthony.”
“Then go eat your spring peas and leave me to my silly notions,” said Anthony.
“We shall,” said Nate. “And when we finish, we’re going over to the Stricklands to play bridge, which should also hand you a laugh.”
“It should and it does,” replied Anthony. “As for me, I shall go home and put my feet up and drink a lot of Scotch.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to put your feet up here,” said Margery. “Marie and I finished closing up your house this afternoon. Everything is covered with dust sheets and your refrigerator is empty. So make yourself comfortable right here.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Anthony. “That’s what I call real Southern hospitality.”
“You know which room is yours if you want to lie down,” said Margery.
“Indeed, I do,” said Anthony and bowed a little. “But I’ve no intention of lying down. I shall sit here and get drunk and ponder on my sins.”
Margery and Nathaniel walked into the dining room and as they went, Anthony studied Margery’s figure.
She’s got it, he thought as he opened a bottle of Scotch. The walk. All women who are good in bed have it. Toward the end, Lisa had it.
Anthony poured whiskey over a couple of ice cubes and sat down with his drink.
In the beginning, she didn’t have it. Lord, no. In the beginning Lisa walked like a frustrated small-town librarian, but not in the end. Not by any means. In the end, she rolled when she walked. She swayed. Her hips were alive. They had promise and meaning. Like Margery’s now. Guess there’s more to old Nate than a nephew would suspect. But I wonder if Margery’s like Lisa. Like metal under his hands and his body, Lisa said. And I was the magnet.
Anthony glared down into his drink before he took a heavy swallow.
God, she was a dumb little thing, he thought. A magnet indeed! But dumb in an interesting way. She could learn fast when she wanted to, and she was fun to teach. Well, that’s all over with and tomorrow I’ll go back to civilization. No dumb girls in New York. Nobody to teach there. Might even learn a few things myself.
When Anthony Cooper drank Scotch, he did so without any appearance of speed, but he drank continually and methodically so that by the time he heard the front door slam shut behind Margery and Nathaniel, more than a third of the bottle he had opened was gone. He went to the window and watched them drive away in the spring evening. It was twilight and there was a smell of new grass on the air.
Summer’s coming, thought Anthony and sat down, rubbing his glass between his palms. The long, hot summer, thought Anthony and the smell of Scotch was very heavy in his nostrils. Heavy and smoky, like summer. The long, hot summer. Your belly is damp, my love. Anthony took a deep swallow of his drink and clenched his jaw against a pain that he had not been able to get used to after almost a year of trying.
It was worse when he drank, for the drunker he became the sharper grew his images.
Hurt me, darling, Lisa said. Her teeth were tight together and she half smiled. Hurt me with your hands.
My dear child, said Anthony, do you know why you want to be hurt? It’s to expiate your guilt feelings about cheating on your husband.
Am I sleeping with Sigmund Freud or with Anthony Cooper? asked Lisa and rolled over so that he could bite her shoulders.
Who’s sleeping? demanded Anthony and began to handle her.
Sometimes you make me feel like a whore, said Lisa. And I love it. A very good, expensive French whore from whom you’re going to get your money’s worth.
Anthony flicked his cigarette toward the empty fireplace in Nathaniel’s living room.
Dumb, he thought. Lisa was as dumb as they come. Goddamn her. And I never could abide stupidity in a woman.
He fixed a fresh drink and as he sat down again he reflected that the whole thing was a damned good joke on him. Dumb or not, hopelessly naive and unschooled as she had been, it was still Lisa who came to plague his dreams at night and who appeared in the bottom of his glass when he drank. And for quite a while after she had gone he had not realized that it was going to be like that. He had thought, Good riddance. Her and her schoolteacher husband and her two obnoxious children and her belly that will soon be distended and ugly and her breasts that will begin to sag like overripe pears. I’m well rid of that one and damned lucky not to have had any more trouble about it than I did.
It was dark in Nathaniel’s living room and Anthony thought vaguely of getting up to put some lights on.
I must be getting drunk, he thought. Shouldn’t get drunk, Anthony. Don’t want to have a hangover in the morning, Anthony. Balls, Anthony. You’re nothing but a phony and a coward, Anthony. Ought to take a walk, Anthony. Good for an overactive libido, walks. Like cold baths and basketball.
He got to his feet with an effort and picked up a fresh, unopened bottle of Nathaniel’s Scotch.
Got to take a little walk, he thought. A little constitutional before retiring to my dear Aunt Margery’s little pink-ruffled guest room.
He went out the front door and walked carefully across the street. He went past his own house that already had a closed, veiled look even though he had left it only a few hours before, and made his way down the path that led to the gardener’s cottage. It took him long, fumbling minutes to find the proper key on his ring, but at last he managed to open the door and walked into the house.
A darling little place, he thought. Just like something out of Hansel and Gretel. How goddamned cute can you get. Hansel and Gretel. God, she was dumb. Clichés rolled off her tongue with every breath she drew. A magnet, huh? Christ.
Anthony sat down in an armchair and he drank directly from the bottle now, not bothering to get up and find a glass in the little kitchen.
Man, he told himself, that’s when you’ve had it. That’s when you’re really a drunk, when you start drinking it right out of the bottle. Funny. But with Lisa around beer had tasted good. Just beer and nothing else.
Liquor is a weakness, said Lisa. It doesn’t solve anything to get drunk, Anthony. Not a single thing.
But my dear child, I’m essentially a very weak man, said Anthony. All the Cooper men are weaklings. Take my Uncle Nathaniel, for instance—
I don’t want to take your Uncle Nathaniel, for instance or any other way. I want to take you.
How do you want to take me?
Like this, said Lisa and began to touch him the way he had taught her.
Poor Uncle Nathaniel, said Anthony. Doesn’t know what he’s missing.
Shut up, said Lisa as she rolled over on top of him. Just shut up and lie still. Who do you belong to?
And then lower and more savagely as she moved faster and faster on top of him.
Who, Anthony? Who do you belong to?
Whom, corrected Anthony, to make her angry and stronger, and then at last, just before the end, To you, my darling. I belong to you.
But he hadn’t, thought Anthony and tried to make his smile triumphant as he sat in the dark in the little house where Lisa had lived. He hadn’t belonged to her any more than he had ever belonged to anyone. He was his own man, always had been, and he hadn’t changed. Anthony leaned his head against the back of the chair and grinned drunkenly in the dark.
No, my dear girl, not to anyone. The only person I’ve ever belonged to is me, and I’m never going to be any different. Thank whatever Gods there be, or something. I am the master of my soul.
But then, why were there the moments of aching? The moments of impotent rage toward people who didn’t matter? Like Polly Sheppard, for instance.
It hadn’t taken Polly long to forget that Lisa Pappas had ever existed, reflected Anthony. Within a matter of days after Chris and Lisa had left Cooper Station, Polly was back to normal. Good old civic-minded, community-spirited, busybody Polly who, as Lisa had confided to Anthony, had been Lisa’s best, true, good friend.
Friends like that you can live without, Anthony had warned. Polly Sheppard is nobody’s friend but her own.
Don’t you dare say a thing like that, insisted Lisa angrily. Polly and I have been friends for years. You don’t know what she’s had to put up with, Anthony. Did you know that Jim Sheppard used to run around on her all the time?
Anthony smiled and kissed her neck. That was his Lisa all right. Here she was in his bed, doing what all Cooper Station would have considered as “running around” and her voice was full of outrage at the defections of Jim Sheppard.
No, I didn’t know, he said.
Well, he did and it was just awful for Polly. She thought she was going to die from it.
My dear child, people don’t die from the effects of infidelity.
How would you know, Anthony. Honestly, I think you’re the most cynical person I’ve ever known.
Seeing someone like Polly Sheppard in a true light does not constitute being a cynic, said Anthony.
Well, you can be wrong, can’t you? And you’re wrong about Polly.
But Anthony hadn’t been so far wrong. The night of the town meeting he had questioned Lisa.
And what did your good true friend Polly have to say about all this? he asked.
What could she say? demanded Lisa. It wasn’t her place to speak up.
I thought it was an open meeting, said Anthony. At an open meeting everyone has the right to say whatever he wishes. What did Jim have to say?
Nothing, admitted Lisa. But it was too late to say anything anyway. They offered the money and before anyone could say anything, Chris jumped at it.
I thought he would, said Anthony.
What do you mean by that? asked Lisa.
He supposed that he could have told her. If she’d known about the money then perhaps she would have hated him instead of believing herself in love with him, and then everything would have been easier for her. But Anthony could not tell her and he didn’t even know why. What difference did it make? He was through with her anyway, so why not make a clean break of it? Now what did he mean by that? He’d already told her it was finished and she’d accepted that, so why worry about what she might think? But still Anthony did not speak and he would not admit that it was because he wanted Lisa to think well of him in the future. As the years passed, he wanted her to remember him as the great love of her life, as the sophisticated older man who had been everything to her. He did not want her to think of him as the man who had paid off her husband in order to get rid of her. It all smacked too much of a bad novel or a second-rate movie.
At least she left with a few illusions, thought Anthony. She left thinking that I was really sorry to see her go and that Polly Sheppard was still her friend.
He ought to get up and go back to the house. Margery and Nathaniel would be home shortly and they’d start wondering what had happened to him. If he knew his Aunt Margery, with her goddamned cloying maternal instinct, she’d peek into his room to see if he were properly covered and find him gone. Well, let her. Anthony took another drink from his bottle of Scotch, then he went into the bedroom that opened off the living room. He sat down on the edge of the bed and against all the strength of what little will he had left, he remembered the day he had been with Lisa for the first time on this same bed. He remembered her nakedness and the goldness of her legs and shoulders where her summer tan had already started, and he remembered the way she had fought to try to keep from feeling when he had touched her and the way she had finally given in to him as he had known she would.
Dumb little thing, thought Anthony drunkenly. So she’d been a good lay. What the hell did he care that she was gone? He had a full third of his new novel finished and Kent Purdom, his agent, had sent him a wildly enthusiastic telegram.
“Come home, my boy” the wire had read. “You’re as good as new and we’ll have another bestseller on our hands.”
Well, Anthony was going tomorrow and damned glad he was of it, too.
Back to the penthouses and the air-conditioned bars and the sleek, smooth, smart girls who didn’t fall in love with you, or look at you with enormous eyes while you talked or hang on to you when it was over with stories about being pregnant. And when the sleek ones got to be too much for you, you could always go to a whorehouse or get a fancy call girl who knew all the perversions and loved the extra money that practicing them brought in. Those girls didn’t scream and pant and moan and faint. They practiced their art coolly, with precision, while you watched and reluctantly admired them for the master craftsmen they were. Even if they didn’t excite you particularly, you still had to admire them. After all, what was sex anyway but just another appetite to be appeased, like hunger. So you might as well be a gourmet about it and get the best money could buy.
But the sleek, smooth girls did not have hair that smelled of the sun and the whores did not sob your name against your shoulder. The sleek girls, when they wanted it at all, wanted it coldly and neatly with a good strong condom between you and them and you certainly didn’t spend time discussing philosophy with a whore. The sleek ones laughed at sophisticated comedies and the whores laughed at vulgarisms and whoever heard of a girl who laughed over nothing anyway.
God, but it’d be good to get back to the city, Anthony told himself. He’d had enough of the country to last him a lifetime. He was going to be all right once he got back to civilization. Lisa was all right already. All she’d needed was to get away from him and her world had straightened itself out in a hurry.
He took another drink from the bottle and leaned back on the bed.
Oh, yes, Lisa’d gotten over him just fine. He didn’t like to remember the night the ache had gotten the better of him and he’d picked up the telephone.
Hello, my love, he’d said to her.
Anthony?
My dear child, have you already found someone else who calls you my love?
Anthony, it’s one o’clock in the morning. What do you want.
I want you to come live with me and be my love. That’s Sheridan or somebody. I forget.
Anthony, are you drunk?
Only a little, my love.
Oh, for heaven’s sake, Anthony. Go back to bed and sleep it off. You’re going to kill yourself if you go on like this.
Will you come?
Anthony, go back to bed.
But my bed is too big and too cold.
I’ve got to hang up, Anthony. Chris has to be at school early in the morning and I don’t want to disturb his sleep. Good night, Anthony.
Goodbye, my love, said Anthony after he had hung up.
Well if Lisa was so goddamned well-adjusted these days, he would be, too. It wouldn’t take long, once he was back in the city. He’d sober up and finish the damned novel and become a human being again.
Anthony turned his face against the uncovered pillow on the bed and even after all this time it seemed to him that it still smelled of Lisa.
What a horse’s ass I’ve turned out to be, he thought angrily. But still, he buried his face in the pillow.
Goodbye, my love, he said silently. Goodbye to summer and your little round belly. Your silly laughs at nothing and the soft places between your thighs. Your frowns at the Russian novelists and your wondering how the hell to spell Nietzsche and your nervous fingers ripping at the wet labels on beer bottles and the way you looked in a hot, perfumed bath and your little lame brain that it was exciting to put new creases in, your big eyes and your silly Tell me a story, Anthony.
It was almost one o’clock in the morning when Margery and Nathaniel found him. They had searched their own house and Anthony’s before thinking of the cottage. He was snoring and the bottle of Scotch was empty on the floor next to the bed. Margery had turned on a lamp and she stood still and looked down at Anthony.
“Why, Nate, honey,” she said. “He must have had a bad dream or something. His face is all wet.”
Nathaniel picked up his nephew and swung him over his shoulder. He started toward the door with him while Margery picked up his coat, a half-empty package of cigarettes and a lighter.
“Nate, honey, he must’ve been crying in his sleep,” said Margery.
“Don’t worry about Anthony,” said Nate, panting a little. “He’s never shed a tear in his life.”