“Sure,” McCord said. “Let’s eat.” They unloaded the car and carried the things in and started a fire in the stove, then while Charlotte cooked breakfast Wilbourne and McCord carried the bottle down to the water and squatted. They drank from the bottle, saluting one another. Then there was one drink left. “Charlotte’s,” McCord said. “She can drink to the Wagon, the long drouth.”
“I’m happy now,” Wilbourne said. “I know exactly where I am going. It’s perfectly straight, between two rows of cans and sacks, fifty dollars’ worth to a side. Not street, that’s houses and people. This is a solitude. Then the water, the solitude wavering slow while you lie and look up at it.” Squatting and still holding the almost empty bottle he put his other hand into the water, the still, dawn-breathing liquid with the temperature of the synthetic ice water in hotel rooms, the ripples fanning slowly from his wrist. McCord stared at him. “And then fall will come, the first cold, the first red and yellow leaves drifting down, the double leaves, the reflection rising to meet the falling one until they touch and rock a little, not quite closing. And then you could open your eyes for a minute if you wanted to, remembered to, and watch the shadow of the rocking leaves on the breast beside you.”
“For sweet Jesus Schopenhauer,” McCord said. “What the bloody hell kind of ninth-rate Teasdale is this? You haven’t near done your share of starving yet. You haven’t near served your apprenticeship to destitution. If you’re not careful, you’ll talk that stuff to some guy who will believe it and’ll hand you the pistol and see you use it. Stop thinking about yourself and think about Charlotte for a while.”
“That’s who I’m talking about. But I wouldn’t use the pistol, anyway. Because I started this too late. I still believe in love.” Then he told McCord about the cashier’s check. “If I didn’t believe in it, I’d give you the check and send her back with you tonight.”
“And if you believed in it as much as you say you do, you would have torn that check up a long time ago.”
“If I tore it up, nobody would ever get the money. He couldn’t even get it back from the bank.”
“Damn him. You dont owe him anything. Didn’t you take his wife off his hands for him? Yah, you’re a hell of a guy. You haven’t even got the courage of your fornications, have you?” McCord rose. “Come on. I smell coffee.”
Wilbourne didn’t move, his hand still in the water. “I haven’t hurt her.” Then he said, “Yes I have. If I hadn’t marked her by now, I would.……”
“What?”
“Refuse to believe it.”
For a full minute McCord stood looking down at the other as he squatted, the bottle in one hand and the other wrist-deep in the water. “Shit!” he said. Then Charlotte called them from the door. Wilbourne rose.
“I wouldn’t use the pistol,” he said. “I’ll still take this.”
Charlotte did not take the drink. Instead she set the bottle on the mantel. “To remind us of our lost civilization when our hair begins to spread,” she said. They ate. There were two iron cots in each of the two bedrooms, two more on the screened porch. While Wilbourne washed the dishes Charlotte and McCord made up the cots on the porch with bedding from the locker; when Wilbourne came out McCord already lay on one cot, his shoes off, smoking. “Go on,” he said. “Take it. Charlotte says she dont want to sleep anymore.” She came out at that moment, carrying a pad of paper, a tin cup, a new japanned color box.
“We had a dollar and a half left over, even after we bought the whiskey,” she said. “Maybe that deer will come back.”
“Take some salt to put on his tail,” McCord said. “Maybe he will stand still and pose for you.”
“I dont want him to pose. That’s just what I dont want. I dont want to copy a deer. Anybody can do that.” She went on, the screen door slapped behind her. Wilbourne did not look after her. He lay smoking too, his hands beneath his head.
“Listen,” McCord said. “You’ve got a lot of food, there’s plenty of wood here and cover when it turns cold, and when things begin to open up in town maybe I can sell some of that junk she made, get orders—”
“I’m not worrying. I told you I am happy. Nothing can take what I have already had away from me.”
“Now, aint that just sweet. Listen. Why dont you give me that damn check and send her back with me and you can eat through your hundred bucks and then move into the woods and eat ants and play Saint Anthony in a tree and on Christmas you can take a mussel shell and make yourself a present of your own oysters. I’m going to sleep.” He turned over and seemed to go to sleep at once, and soon Wilbourne slept too. He waked once and knew by the sun that it was past noon and that she was not in the house. But he was not concerned; lying awake for a moment it was not the twenty-seven barren years he looked at, and she would not be far, the path straight and empty and quiet between the two fifty-dollar rows of cans and sacks, she would wait for him. If that is to be, she will wait he thought. If we are to lie so, it will be together in the wavering solitude in spite of Mac and his ninth-rate Teasdale who seems to remember a hell of a lot of what people read, beneath the red and yellow drift of the waning year, the myriad kissing of the repeated leaves.
The sun was just above the trees when she returned. The top sheet of the pad was still blank, though the paints had been used. “Were they that bad?” McCord said. He was busy at the stove with beans and rice and dried apricots—one of those secret cooking or eating specialties such as every bachelor seems to have and which some can actually produce though, you would have said at first glance, not McCord.
“Maybe a little bird told her what you were doing with fifty cents’ worth of our grub so she had to run,” Wilbourne said. The concoction was ready at last. It was not so bad, Wilbourne admitted. “Only I dont know whether it actually is not foul, or if it’s something protective—that what I taste is not this at all but the forty or fifty cents it represents, if maybe I dont have a gland for cowardice in my palate or stomach too.” He and Charlotte washed the dishes, McCord went out and returned with an armful of wood and laid a fire. “We wont need that tonight,” Wilbourne said.
“It wont cost you anything but the wood,” McCord said. “And you’ve got from here to the Canadian line to get more from. You can run all northern Wisconsin up this chimney if you want to.” Then they sat before the fire, smoking and not talking a great deal, until time for McCord to leave. He would not stay, holiday tomorrow or not. Wilbourne went out to the car with him and he got into it, looking back at Charlotte in silhouette against the fire, in the door. “Yah,” he said. “You dont need to worry, no more than an old lady being led across the street by a policeman or an eagle scout. Because when the damned bloody wild drunken car comes along it wont be the old lady, it will be the cop or the scout it busts the hell out of. Watch yourself.”
“Watch myself?”
“Yah. You cant be even afraid all the time without taking some pains.”
Wilbourne returned to the house. It was late, yet she had not begun to undress; again he mused, not on the adaptability of women to circumstance but on the ability of women to adapt the illicit, even the criminal, to a bourgeois standard of respectability as he watched her, barefoot, moving about the room, making those subtle alterations in the fixtures of this temporary abode as they even do in hotel rooms rented for but one night, producing from one of the boxes which he had believed to contain only food objects from their apartment in Chicago which he not only did not know she still had but had forgotten they ever owned—the books they had acquired, a copper bowl, even the chintz cover from the ex-work bench, then from a cigarette carton which she had converted into a small receptacle resembling a coffin, the tiny figure of the old man, the Bad Smell; he watched her set it on the mantel and stand looking at it for a time, musing too, then take up the bottle with the drink they had saved her and, with the ritualistic sobriety of a child playing, pour the whiskey onto the hearth. “The lares and penates,” she said. “I dont know Latin, but They will know what
I mean.”
They slept in the two cots on the porch, then, it turning cold just before dawn, in one cot, her bare feet fast on the boards, the hard plunge of elbow and hip waking him as she came into the blankets smelling of bacon and balsam. There was a gray light on the lake and when he heard the loon he knew exactly what it was, he even knew what it would look like, listening to the raucous idiot voice, thinking how man alone of all creatures deliberately atrophies his natural senses and that only at the expense of others; how the four-legged animal gains all its information through smelling and seeing and hearing and distrusts all else while the two-legged one believes only what it reads.
The fire felt good the next morning. While she washed the breakfast dishes he cut more wood for it behind the cabin, removing his sweater now, the sun definitely impacting now though he was not fooled, thinking how in these latitudes Labor Day and not equinox marked the suspiration of summer, the long sigh toward autumn and the cold, when she called him from the house. He entered; in the middle of the room stood a stranger carrying balanced on his shoulder a large cardboard box, a man no older than himself, barefoot, in faded khaki slacks and a sleeveless singlet, sunbrowned, with blue eyes and pale sunburned lashes and symmetrical ridges of straw-colored hair—the perfect reflexive coiffer—who was looking quietly at the effigy on the mantel. Through the open door behind him Wilbourne saw a beached canoe. “This is—” Charlotte said. “What did you say your name was?”
“Bradley,” the stranger said. He looked at Wilbourne, his eyes almost white against his skin like a kodak negative, balancing the box on his shoulder while he extended the other hand.
“Wilbourne,” Charlotte said. “Bradley’s the neighbor. He’s leaving today. He brought us what grub they had left.”
“No use lugging it out again,” Bradley said. “Your wife tells me you folks are going to stay on a while, so I thought—” he gave Wilbourne a brief hard violent bone-crushing meaningless grip—the broker’s front man two years out of an eastern college.
“That’s decent of you. We’ll be glad to have it. Here, let me—” But the other had already swung the box to the floor; it was well filled. Charlotte and Wilbourne carefully did not look at it. “Thanks a lot. The more we have in the house, the harder it will be for the wolf to get in.”
“Or to crowd us out when he does,” Charlotte said. Bradley looked at her. He laughed, that is with his teeth. His eyes did not laugh, the assured, predatory eyes of the still successful prom leader.
“Not bad,” he said. “Do you—”
“Thanks,” Charlotte said. “Will you have some coffee?”
“Thanks, I’ve had breakfast. We were up at dawn. Must be back in town tonight.” Now he looked at the effigy on the mantel again. “May I?” he said. He approached the mantel. “Do I know him? I seem—”
“I hope not,” Charlotte said. Bradley looked at her.
“We hope not yet, she means,” Wilbourne said. But Bradley continued to watch Charlotte, the pale brows courteously interrogatory above the predatory eyes which did not smile when the mouth did.
“It’s the Bad Smell,” Charlotte said.
“Oh. I see.” He looked at the effigy. “You made it. I saw you sketching yesterday. Across the lake.”
“I know you did.”
“Touch,” he said. “Can I apologise? I wasn’t spying.”
“I wasn’t hiding.” Bradley looked at her and now Wilbourne for the first time saw the eyes brows and mouth in accord, quizzical, sardonic, ruthless, the whole man emanating a sort of crass and insolent confidence.
“Sure?” he said.
“Sufficiently,” Charlotte said. She moved to the mantel and took the effigy from it. “It’s too bad you are leaving before we can return your call upon your wife. But perhaps you will accept this as a memento of your perspicuity.”
“No; really, I——”
“Take it,” Charlotte said pleasantly. “You must need it much worse than we do.”
“Well, thanks.” He took the effigy. “Thanks. We’ve got to get back to town tonight. But maybe we could look in on the way out. Mrs Bradley would—”
“Do,” Charlotte said.
“Thanks,” he said. He turned toward the door. “Thanks again.”
“Thanks again too,” Charlotte said. He went out, Wilbourne watched him shove the canoe off and step into it. Then Wilbourne went and stooped over the box.
“What are you going to do?” Charlotte said.
“I’m going to carry it back and throw it in his front door.”
“Oh you bloody ass,” she said. She came to him. “Stand up. We’re going to eat it. Stand up like a man.” He rose, she put her hard arms around him, wrestling him against her with restrained savage impatience. “Why dont you grow up, you damned home-wrecking boy scout? Dont you know yet that we just dont look married thank God, even to brutes?” She held him hard against her, leaning back, her hips against him and moving faintly while she stared at him, the yellow stare inscrutable and derisive and with that quality which he had come to recognise—that ruthless and almost unbearable honesty. “Like a man, I said,” holding him hard and derisive against her moving hips though that was not necessary. She dont need to touch me he thought. Nor the sound of her voice even nor the smell, a slipper will do it, one of those fragile instigations to venery discarded in the floor. “Come on. That’s right. That’s better. That’s fine now.” She freed one hand and began to unfasten his shirt. “Only this is supposed to be bad luck or something in the forenoon, isn’t it? Or isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.” She began to unfasten his belt.
“Or is this just the way you assuage insults to me? Or are you going to bed with me just because somebody happened to remind you I divide at the belly?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
Later in the forenoon they heard Bradley’s car depart. Face down and half lying across him (she had been asleep, her weight heavy and relaxed, her head beneath his chin, her breath slow and full) she raised up, one elbow in his stomach and the blanket slipping away from her shoulders, while the sound of the car died away. “Well, Adam,” she said. But they had always been alone, he told her.
“Ever since that first night. That picture. We couldn’t be any more alone, no matter who went away.”
“I know it. I mean, I can go swimming now.” She slid out from beneath the blanket. He watched her, the grave simple body a little broader, a little solider than the Hollywood-magazine cod liver oil advertisements, the bare feet padding across the rough boards, toward the screen door.
“There are bathing suits in the locker,” he said. She didn’t answer. The screen door slapped. Then he could not see her anymore, or he would have had to raise his head.
She swam each morning, the three bathing suits still undisturbed in the locker. He would rise from breakfast and return to the porch and lie on the cot and hear presently her bare feet cross the room and then the porch; perhaps he would watch the steadily and smoothly browning body cross the porch. Then he would sleep again (this scarcely an hour after he had waked from slumber, a habit which he formed within the first six days) to wake later and look out and see her lying on the pier on stomach or back, her arms folded across or beneath her face; sometimes he would still be there, not sleeping now and not even thinking but merely existing in a drowsy and foetuslike state, passive and almost unsentient in the womb of solitude and peace, when she returned, moving then only enough to touch his lips to the sun-impacted flank as she stopped beside the cot, tasting the impacted sun. Then one day something happened to him.
September had gone, the nights and mornings were definitely chilly; she had changed her swim from after breakfast to after lunch and they were talking about when they would have to move the bedding in from the porch to the room with the fireplace. But the days themselves were unchanged—the same stationary recapitulation of golden interval between dawn and sunset, the long quiet identical days, the immaculate monotonou
s hierarchy of noons filled with the sun’s hot honey, through which the waning year drifted in red-and-yellow retrograde of hardwood leaves sourceless and going nowhere. Each day she departed directly after her swim and sunbath, with the pad and color box, leaving him to move about the house empty yet at the same time thunderous with the hard impact of her presence—the few garments she owned, the whisper of her bare feet on the boards—while he believed that he was worrying, not about the inevitable day on which their food would run out, but at the fact that he did not seem to worry about it: a curious state which he had experienced once before when his sister’s husband had taken him to task one summer because he refused to exercise his vote. He remembered the exasperation just about to become rage in which he had tried to present his reasons to his brother-in-law, realising at last that he was talking faster and faster not to convince the brother-in-law but to justify his own rage as in a mild nightmare he might be grasping for his falling trousers; that it was not even to the brother-in-law he was talking but to himself.
It became an obsession with him; he realised quite calmly that he had become secretly quietly and decently a little mad; he now thought constantly of the diminishing row of cans and sacks against which he was matching in inverse ratio the accumulating days, yet he would not go to the closet and look at them, count them. He would tell himself how it used to be he would have to steal away to a park bench and take out the wallet and produce the scrap of paper and subtract numbers from one another, while now all he would have to do would be to glance at the row of cans on a shelf; he could count the cans and know exactly how many days more they would have left, he could take a pencil and mark the shelf itself off into days and he would not even have to count cans, he could glance at the shelf and read the position at once, like on a thermometer. But he would not even look into the closet.