Breavman was furious. He didn’t want to move the bed. He wanted to climb into it, hold her, and go to sleep.
They had driven all day. He didn’t know where they were, probably Virginia, and he didn’t know the name of the tourist house.
The woodwork was brown and perhaps the loose circus wall -paper hid sinister bugs. He was too tired to care. The last hundred miles her head had slept on his shoulder and he vaguely resented her defection from the ordeal of the road.
“What does it matter where the damn bed is? We’ll be out of here by eight in the morning.”
“I’ll move it myself.”
“Don’t be silly, Shell.”
“We’ll be able to see the trees when we wake up.”
“I don’t want to see the trees when we wake up. I want to look at the dirty ceiling and get pieces of dirty plaster grape-vine in my eye.”
The ugly brass bed resisted her. For generations of sleepers it had not changed its position. He imagined a grey froth of dust on the underside. With a sigh he presented himself at the other end.
“I offered to drive,” she said to excuse her energy.
But he couldn’t bear to be conducted through the night, helpless by the side of the speeding driver. If he had to find himself hurtling down a highway, neon motels and hamburgers arresting him absurdly like those uncertain images that were always flashing in his mind, he himself wanted to be in charge of the chaos.
“Besides, there’s something irreverent about moving this stuff around.”
She pushed hard, knuckles white on the brass bars.
It struck Breavman that they were the hands of a nun, bleached, reddened by convent chores; he had always thought them so delicate. Her body was like that. At first she might be mistaken for a Vogue mannequin, tall, small-breasted, angular, and fragile. But then her full thighs and broad shoulders modified the impression and in love he learned that he rode on a great softness. The nostrils of her face over-widened just far enough to destroy the first impression of exquisite harmony and allow for lust.
Her remarkable grace was composed of something very durable, disciplined and athletic, which is often the case with women who do not believe they are beautiful.
Yes, Breavman thought, she would have moved it with or with -out me. She is the Carry Nation of Evil Chintzy Rooms and I am the greasy drunkard smirking over my stack of Niagara Falls souvenirs. She learned to wield her axe three hundred years ago, clearing a New England field for planting.
Now the bed was beneath the window. He sat down and called for her with two open hands. They held each other softly and with a kind of patience as if they were both waiting for the demons developed in the silence of the long trip to evaporate.
At last she stood up, a little too soon, he thought.
“I’ve got to make the bed.”
“Make the bed? The bed is perfectly well made.”
“I mean at the other end. We won’t be able to see anything.”
“Are you doing this deliberately?”
He was surprised at the hatred in his voice. Nothing had evaporated.
She turned her eyes to him, trying to get through. I must read what she wants to say to me, I love them so much, he thought in a flash, but his anger overwhelmed him. He looked at the baggage to threaten her.
“Lawrence, this is where we are. This is our room for tonight. Just give me five minutes.”
She worked quickly, a kind of side-to-side harvest dance, and the sheets flew as if they were part of her own dress. He knew that only she could change the chore into a ritual.
She puffed the pillows where their heads would lie. She removed one of the blankets and draped it over a hideous armchair, reshaping it with a few tucks and folds. Into the closet she lifted a small drum table complete with doilies, vase, and a broken trick box from which a scissor-beaked bird was meant to dispense cigarettes. She opened the wicker basket he had bought her and withdrew their books, which she placed carelessly on the large table beside the door.
“What are you going to do about the sink? There are cracks in the porcelain. Why don’t you pry up a couple of floorboards and hide it under the carpet?”
“If you’ll help me.”
He would have liked to rip it from the wall and cause it to disappear with a magician’s flourish, a white cigarette gone, a gift for Shell. And he would have liked to wrench it from its grimy roots and swing it like a jawbone, completely demolish the room which she had begun to ruin.
Shell put out his shaving kit and her own secret case of cosmetics which smelled of lemon. She opened the window with a little touch of triumph, and Breavman could hear leaves moving in the spring night.
She had changed the room. They could lay their bodies in it. It was theirs, good enough for love and talk. It was not that she had arranged a stage on which they might sleep hand in hand, but she had made the room answer to what she believed their love asked. Breavman knew it was not his answer. He wished he could honour her home-making and hated his will to hurt her for it.
But didn’t she understand that he didn’t want to disturb an ashtray, move a curtain?
One small light was burning. She stood in the shadows and undressed and then slipped quickly under the covers, pulling them up to her chin.
It’s a better room for her, Breavman thought. Anyone else would have thanked her. She deserved a goose-feather bed with the sheets turned down so bravely-O. Which I cannot give her because I do not want the castle to cover it, with my crest carved above the hearth.
“Come.”
“Should I close the light?”
“Yes.”
“Now it’s the same room for the both of us.”
He got into the bed, careful not to avoid touching her. He knew his mood had to be attacked. Like the chronic migraine sufferer who doubtfully submits himself to the masseur who always cures him, he lay stiffly beside her.
She had known his body like this before. Sometimes he would disappear for two or three days and when he came back his body would be like that, armoured, distant.
Sometimes a poem would catapult him away from her, but she learned how to approach him, equipped with what he had taught her about her body and her beauty.
It was a refusal to be where he was, to accept the walls, the clock, the number on the door which he knew, the familiar limited human being in the familiar limited chair.
“You would have preferred it even dirtier,” she said softly. “Maybe even roaches in the sink.”
“You never see them if you keep the light on.”
“And when the light is off you can’t see them anyway.”
“But it’s the time between,” Breavman said with developing interest. “You come home at night and you switch on the kitchen light and the sink is swarming black. They disappear in seconds, you do not follow too closely exactly where they go, and they leave the porcelain brighter than you ever imagined white could be.”
“Like that haiku about strawberries on the white plate.”
“Whiter. And without music.”
“The way you talk you’d think we had fought our way out of the deepest slum.”
“We have, but don’t ask me to explain or it will sound like the cheapest nonsense from an over-privileged bourgeois.”
“I know what you mean and I know that you’re thinking I can’t possibly know.”
She would reach him, he was certain. She would uncover him so he could begin to love her.
“The mansion is as much a part of the slum as your horrible sink. You want to live in a world where the light has just been switched on and everything has just jumped out of the black. That’s all right, Lawrence, and it may even be courageous, but you can’t live there all the time. I want to make the place you come back to and rest in.”
“You do a wonderful job of dignifying a spoiled child.”
It was not that things decay, that the works of men are ephemeral, he believed he saw deeper than that. The things themselves were decay, the works themselves were corruption, the monuments were made of worms. Perhaps she was his comrade in the vision, in the knowledge of strangerhood.
“You didn’t want to touch a thing when we came in here. You just wanted to clear a small corner to sleep in.”
“Love in,” Breavman corrected.
“And you hated me for remaking the bed and putting us where we could see the trees and hiding the ugly old table because all of that meant that we couldn’t simply endure the filth, we had to come to terms with it.”
“Yes.”
He found her hand.
“And you really hated me because I was dragging you into it and you would have been free if you’d been alone, with morning a few hours away and the car parked outside….”
God, he thought as he turned to her and closed her eyes over all he remembered of her, she knows everything.