A Garden of Earthly Delights

  She wept bitterly. “I never needed to grow up,” she said. “I never needed to be gone after with a knife.”

  “I'm sorry.”

  “What the hell made you do it?”

  He laughed a little. He seemed to be asking her permission to laugh, by the sound of it. “I thought you loved me,” he said.

  Clara sat up and smoothed her hair back from her face. She took hold of it and twisted it up and back, away from her neck. The perspiration on the back of her neck made her shiver. She looked down at Lowry, who was lying now with his arms behind his head. He smiled at her, then his smile broadened. Clara's face remained rigid. “If I said I loved you, could be I didn't know what I was talking about,” she said.

  “Could be you don't yet.”

  She bent her head back again suddenly to look at the sky, but did not see it. In spite of the pain she felt a sensation of joy, something unexpected she didn't want Lowry to see yet. “So, after two years,” she said. “You wouldn't ever do it when I was ready, or when I wanted you to or thought I wanted you to. That would have been too easy.”

  “I didn't want to do it, honey.”

  “If you find yourself not wanting to do it again, let me know,” she said. There was a twist to her mouth she'd copied from Sonya. “I can get something else to do that day.”

  He smiled at her toughness. “It doesn't mean anything, honey.”

  “I know that.”

  “I'm serious. It doesn't mean anything except what it is.”

  “I knew you would go on to say something like that.”

  She tried to get up but froze. A sigh escaped her that was a sound of regret for everything, but not serious regret. The only thing that was serious was the pain and she knew now that it would not last long.

  Lowry put his arms around her waist. From behind, he embraced her and pressed his forehead against her back; she could feel him there, and she turned a little as if she were listening to his thought with her body. “You are such a bastard,” she said. “Do you know that?” His fingers locked together. He lay still. Clara looked down at her bare feet and blinked when she remembered how it had all happened—and there was the spot between her toes, pink from where the blood had been but now smeared around, a tiny dot of blood that was all that was left from the bloodsucker.

  Lowry said, “I'm not going to marry you. You know that.”

  “All right.”

  “I can't think of you that way. Don't you think of me that way either.”

  “All right.”

  “I'm ten, eleven years older than you, sweetheart.…” His words sounded sad. Clara glanced down at his fingers, which were making wrinkles in the cloth of her dress; but it was probably ruined anyhow. Her eyes ran along down her thighs to her legs and feet and back up again. She smiled slightly. She would have drawn in a great exultant breath, except Lowry's embrace kept her back. “How do you feel?” Lowry said.

  “You must have made me bleed.”

  “Does it hurt bad?”

  “No, it's all right.”

  “No, really, does it hurt?”

  He straightened up and turned her head to him. He kissed her and Clara made a slight gesture of impatience, mock disgust, then he held her head in his hands and kissed her again. She felt his tongue against her lips and smiled while she kissed him. She said, drawing away, “You never kissed me like that before. You're going to love me if you don't watch out.”

  “That might be,” Lowry said.

  It was late when they drove back to Tintern, between ten and eleven. Clara's hair was tangled and her face drawn with exhaustion; she lay with her head against Lowry's shoulder. She thought he was holding the steering wheel in a strange way, with a precise, almost drunken attention he had never showed before. Lowry said, when they were parked outside her place, “Are you going to go in or what? You want to say goodbye?”

  “No,” said Clara.

  “Or would you like to take a few days off and come with me?”

  “Yes, Lowry,” she said. It surprised her to see where they were, even though a moment before she had watched them drive up and stop. The stores on the main street were darkened; only the drugstore was open. Someone sat in the doorway on a folding chair, and another figure was behind him. “Where would we go?” Clara said.

  “Thought I'd take a drive to the ocean.”

  “The what?”

  “The ocean. You'd like it too.”

  “All that way? Drive all that way?”

  “I can do it.”

  “Without sleeping?”

  “We could maybe sleep first.”

  “Yes,” she said gently. She tried to open the door but could not pull the handle down hard enough. On her second try she succeeded. Lowry slid over behind her and put his arms around her, his hands over her breasts, and buried his face in her hair. Then he pushed her out and followed her upstairs.

  When Clara woke off and on that night she felt no surprise at all that Lowry was with her. It might have been that in her sleep she had been with him so much, that now the real Lowry was nothing to alarm her. Being so close to him was like swimming: they were like swimmers, their arms and legs in any easy position, blending together, breathing close together. Her toes groped against his. She thought, It's all decided now. I am a different person to him now. When he made love to her the next morning she began just at the point she had left off the night before, and she had already learned to feel past the pain to the kernel in her he was stirring that was like the kernel in himself he loved so well, that inspired him to such joy. She said, “I love you, I love you,” in a kind of delirium, her ears roaring with the flow of her own blood and fit to drown out the silence that had been with her all her life.

  At dawn they drove off in his car to the ocean some hundreds of miles away. She brushed her hair with her blue plastic hairbrush, languid and pleased as any married woman, letting her hair fall down onto the back of the seat. She hummed along with the songs on his radio. On the front of the dime store, for the manager she had left a note: “Have been called home, emergency. Will be back Thursday latest. Clara.” It was with the little dictionary that Lowry had given her one time that she had looked up, by herself, the word “emergency.” This had pleased him. Everything about her pleased him now. She lay back, comfortable in the sun, and thought that now it would be decided between them—what they were to each other, how they had to stay together—and she had only to wait for Lowry to explain it to her.

  6

  “You sure as hell don't want to get pregnant, Clara.”

  It was Lowry's somber mode: calling her Clara. She'd grown to like best those times Lowry called her sweetheart, honey. Even kid.

  There were to be three sun-drenched days in what Lowry called a resort town, that had formerly been a fishing village on the Atlantic Ocean; these days would remain in Clara's memory for the remainder of her life. Then she found herself back in Tintern— Tintern, that had once seemed so exciting to her!—on the Eden River, alone; her brain dazzled by what had happened to her, and what had not happened.

  Lowry was always at the center of her thoughts. Like the sun, you needn't even glance up to see it, let alone feel it. You could even forget it, in a way. So Clara concentrated upon what surrounded her—working at Woolworth's, going out in the evening with whoever was around, gazing dreamily out her second-floor windows, sleeping alone and touching herself gently, in love, as her lover had touched her, though not always gently. Clara. Beautiful Clara.

  Sometimes Lowry's voice was so clear, she woke from a dream of overwhelming happiness. Clara: I don't want to hurt you.

  She wasn't sure what that meant. An apology ahead of time.

  A warning?

  “ ‘Beautiful Clara.' ” It was so: she'd changed. Customers in the store regarded her closely, and smiled. Even the women lingered, friendlier than she remembered. And on the street. In that way that people smile at a good-looking girl or woman, with no thought for why, what logic.

&nb
sp; Now it seemed to Clara that Tintern had grown mysteriously less beautiful. Stricken with the hot-humid air of August, that made you sweat inside your clothes though you'd just had a bath, and had talcum-powdered your body with care. Clara walked on Main Street, and on River Street, and on Bridge Street, and sometimes on the gaunt old nightmare bridge, gripping the railing when vehicles passed, and the structure shuddered. In her old life—she'd come to think of her life before Lowry had made love to her as old, bypassed—she'd have been scared as hell, but now the sensation thrilled her. As if Lowry were close beside her. She knew herself radiant and buoyed by happiness. If men or boys approached her, she laughed and told them that she was engaged, her fiancé was out of town.

  That word: fiancé. Speaking it, with a smile.

  Drifting into a dream open-eyed. Her mind was a thousand miles away, in that seaside town on the Atlantic Ocean.

  Atlantic seaboard Pearl had murmured solemnly.

  “Then it's decided. He has decided.” So Clara had thought on the first day, and on the second day of lying in the sun with him and observing other people live out their lives—parents, children— who were staying at the shore as she and Lowry were doing, though probably for longer. “It must be all decided, he doesn't even need to think about it.” Lowry would lie for a while on his stomach, and if she leaned over to gaze at his face she saw how vulnerable it was, his skin that was a man's skin, coarse, pitlike scars at his hairline from some accident long ago, or fight. At the beach, Lowry soon became restless. He read, or tried to read: paperback books, newspapers, magazines. Sometimes turning the pages so swiftly, Clara supposed he wasn't really reading. If she leaned against his arm, and began to read aloud, haltingly, as a child might, Lowry laughed and caressed the nape of her neck, “Go on, good. Don't stop.” But Clara invariably stumbled over a word, and shoved the book from her.

  At other times, after making love, Clara sat beneath Lowry's gaze and brushed her hair that fell now to nearly her hips, staring out at the ocean. That slow dreamy time Clara wanted to last forever but knew would not. Lowry became gigantic to her: a presence more than the sun, that could cut the sun off from her. He'd grown to fill her mind most of the day, and at night he was a presence she slept curled against and would have clung to if he'd allowed it. “He must not be thinking of it, even,” she told herself, waiting to ask him what plans he had and whether he was keeping in mind that note she'd left for the dime-store manager about Thursday. Would that day come, and Clara would be back in the damned store? She could not believe it.

  Yet a part of her mind must have accepted it, because she felt no great surprise, only a faint, wan disappointment, when she was back in Tintern on Thursday, just as Lowry had said.

  The days at the shore were a flashing, blurred interruption of the summer, and all that Clara retained of it, to hold in her hand, were two snapshots: Lowry and Clara snuggling together like teenaged lovers in an automatic photo stand, smiling into the camera's blank eye. Clara had been sunburnt, her hair windblown and tangled, and Lowry hadn't shaved for a day or more, grinning with mean-looking wires pushing from his jaws. The edges of both photographs were clouded. One of the snapshots was for Clara, and one was for Lowry, but Clara discovered both snapshots among her things.

  And she had also this tanned sensuous body, and certain memories, and Lowry's promise of returning again in two Sundays—it was the earliest he could make it, and he kissed her goodbye with genuine regret—and a vague suspicion that her awkwardness about taking care of herself in the way that Lowry wanted might have consequences.

  Still, Clara had no way of knowing yet.

  And even if her period came late, that might not mean anything. For her period sometimes came late, and sometimes early. Clara was so stricken with self-consciousness, she could not bear to speak of such things to another person, let alone a man. When Lowry had said, “You sure as hell don't want to get pregnant, Clara,” she'd heard the word clearly, but turned aside, blushing. She knew: Lowry did what a man did, sometimes: slid things onto himself, thin-rubber ugly things that she, Clara, did not acknowledge, could not bring herself to acknowledge except in repugnance, afterward. Pregnant was not so uneasy a word, or an idea; you heard pregnant often, though not as often as going to have a baby, which was somehow easier to utter. Clara had a vague idea—hadn't Rosalie said so?— poor Rosalie, who'd gotten pregnant, so young!—that you couldn't get pregnant so fast. Or maybe it was Sonya who said so. Based upon her sister who'd tried so damn hard to get pregnant, and it had taken years. Sonya's attitude caught on with Clara, who could imagine her lumbering sardonic friend sneering at other people's advice. (Sonya was involved with a married man, a gypsum mine worker twelve years older than she was.) Trouble was, Sonya seemed always angry these days, and Clara avoided her afraid she might hear something she didn't want to hear. The serenity of Clara's face might annoy Sonya, for with Sonya love made things jagged and troublesome and brought out blemishes on her face. Clara had softened. If her face looked empty it was because her mind was occupied, sorting out and arranging memories. In four days there had been less of them than she would have thought, because moments blended into one another and were almost the same moment. But she had certain images to love: Lowry doing this, Lowry looking at her in such a way. One day a man had said something over his shoulder to Clara, and Lowry had grabbed him and pulled him around, and the man had jerked away and told Lowry to let him alone, and Lowry had waited a second and then gone after him again, pushing him along with one hand and showing by the stiffness of his bare back that he was furious. When he came back to Clara she had been ashamed, not because he had been so angry on her account but because he had been angry just for something to do. That was one of her memories. And all the times when she had said aloud to him, “I love you,” the words tortured out of her by a force that was like a devil squirming inside her, lashing out in his frenzy. Sunlight in at the window—they stayed in a boardinghouse that was clean but a little noisy—and certain water marks on the ceiling, and the eating stands and taverns, one after another, and Lowry squeezing her shoulders or swimming in loose circles around her: she had these things to think about.

  As the days passed she began to think more and more of Lowry's baby. Her mind broke through to the surface of the day, shattered by the sunlight, and she was positive that she was pregnant—she knew it must be. But she waited. She fell into the habit of dreaming about Lowry and the baby together, as if the two of them were somehow one, and what had begun as a thought that frightened her turned into a daydream she looked forward to. If she had a baby it would be his and it would be something only he had given her, something he had left her with. After the first several times he had never again said to her, “Are you taking care of yourself, Clara?” because it embarrassed her. Sometimes they would fall asleep and he must have known she was doing nothing, but forgetfulness came down upon them like the lazy heat of the beach and told them that all was well. Clara thought that all was well forever and that the future would stretch out before them the way the ocean and the beach did, stretching out of sight but always the same, monotonous and predictable. She supposed it would be that way with Lowry once he settled down. She supposed that in his mind everything had been decided—that he was going to keep her with him from now on—but, back in Tintern a while later, she had had to give up that idea and start working on this new one.

  On the surface of her mind was this worry, was she going to have a baby? Or could it be that her body was thrown off by Lowry? It was only on the surface of her mind, however. What she really felt came out when she said to Sonya one day, “It would be nice to have a baby,” and then stopped to think what she had said. Sonya made a contemptuous noise that was like something ugly kicked out before you, for a joke. This did not bother Clara. She felt like a plant of some kind, like a flower on a stalk that only looked slender but was really tough, tough as steel, like the flowers in fields that could be blown down flat by the wind but yet rose again slowly, co
ming back to life. Her first thought was, “Lowry will be mad at me for not taking care of myself ”; then she thought, “It's his more than mine because he's older,” and remembered the many times he had been gentle with her, drawing her close with a casual gesture that meant more to her than anything else. They came together at moments like that. On the beach his dreaminess had been a dreaminess that drifted out for miles, while hers was a dreaminess of motion content to remain still for a lifetime; but still they had come together at certain moments.

  Ginny's children, especially the baby, drew out Clara's love. On Sunday she went to a charity picnic with them, just to have something to do while waiting for Lowry to come (he had said not before eight), and she kept asking to hold the baby even when Ginny said she didn't mind carrying it herself. Ginny was pregnant again. Her husband Bob had not found work yet and he and Ginny were living with her mother.

  They walked slowly about together, a little group. Clara thought that everyone at the picnic looked different, special. The old women wore hats, round black straw hats with bunches of artificial flowers, usually violets. Many of the men wore suits, though they looked awkward and hot in them. Ginny wore a filmy long-sleeved dress that was already stained with the baby's milk, an accident they had in the car, but her face was freshened by the music and the excitement of the picnic and she did not seem to mind the way Bob walked a few steps ahead of them. Clara returned looks she got with a slow, dreamy smile, not surprised that people should think her worth staring at but rewarding them for it. She saw Sonya and her boyfriend standing at the Volunteer Firemen's Beer Tent, the biggest tent of all, but she did not go over to say hello. Ginny nudged Clara and said, “Don't they have a nerve?” but Clara just shrugged her shoulders. She was in a warm, pleasant daze, trying to balance the secret she was now certain of about herself with the color and noise of the picnic, dazed by what she knew that no one else, not even Ginny, could know.

  They stopped at the bingo tent and the two girls played a few games, while the baby whined and tugged at Clara's skirt and the boy tried to swallow the dried-up corn kernels they pushed around on the dirty old bingo cards. A fat lady, the wife of the man who owned the drugstore, stood by them and chattered at the baby. She wore an apron with special pockets sewn in it to hold change. “Too bad you don't have better luck, you two,” she said to Clara and Ginny. On the last game Clara had no luck either, and sat toying with the kernels of corn and staring down at the card with a small fixed smile, her mind already fallen beyond the noisy tent of bingo players and the shaking of the numbered balls and the recorded music to those days by the ocean with Lowry. But those days seemed already far away.… Then someone yelled “Bingo!” and, as always, she wasn't ready just yet to hear it. Ginny said, “Crap,” and pushed her card away. Clara swung herself around on the bench and let her legs fall hard. She thought, “Six or seven months and I won't be able to do that.” This thought, which came out of nowhere to her, was more real than all the memories she had been reliving.