“I have no great respect for the law,” he remembered he had said to Peter Wriggs in Metcalf two years ago. Why should he have respect for a statute that called him and Miriam man and wife? “I have no great respect for the church,” he had said sophomorishly to Peter at fifteen. Then, of course, he had meant the Metcalf Baptists. At seventeen, he had discovered God by himself. He had discovered God through his own awakening talents, and through a sense of unity of all the arts, and then of nature, finally of science—of all the creating and ordering forces in the world. He believed he could not have done his work without a belief in God. And where had his belief been when he murdered? He had forsaken God, not God him. It seemed to him that no human being had ever borne, or had needed to bear, so much guilt as he, and that he could not have borne it and lived unless his spirit was dead already, and what existed of himself now only a husk.
Awkwardly, he turned and faced his work table. A gasp hissed between his teeth, and nervously, impatiently, he passed his hand hard across his mouth. And yet, he felt, there was something still to come, still to be grasped, some severer punishment, some bitterer realization.
“I don’t suffer enough!” burst from him suddenly in a whisper. But why had he whispered? Was he ashamed? “I don’t suffer enough,” he said in a normal voice, glancing about him as if he expected some ear to hear him. And he would have shouted it, if he had not felt some element of pleading in it, and considered himself unworthy of pleading for anything, from anyone.
His new books, for instance, the beautiful new books he had bought today—he could still think about them, love them. Yet he felt he had left them there long ago on his work table, like his own youth. He must go immediately and work, he thought. He had been commissioned to plan a hospital. He frowned at the little stack of notes he had already taken, spotlighted under his gooseneck lamp. Somehow it did not seem real that he had been commissioned. He would awaken soon and find that all these weeks had been a fantasy, a wishful dream. A hospital. Wasn’t a hospital more fitting than even a prison? He frowned puzzledly, knowing his mind had strayed wildly, that two weeks ago when he had begun the hospital interior he had not thought once of death, that the positive requisites of health and healing alone had occupied him. He hadn’t told Anne about the hospital, he remembered suddenly, that was why it seemed unreal. She was his glass of reality, not his work. But on the other hand, why hadn’t he told her?
He must go immediately and work, but he could feel in his legs now that frenzied energy that came every evening, that sent him out in the streets finally in a vain effort to spend it. The energy frightened him because he could find no task that would absorb it, and because he felt at times that the task might be his suicide. Yet very deep inside him, and very much against his own will, his roots still clung to life, and he sensed that suicide was a coward’s escape, a ruthless act against those who loved him.
He thought of his mother, and felt he could never let her embrace him again. He remembered her telling him that all men were equally good, because all men had souls and the soul was entirely good. Evil, she said, always came from externals. And so he had believed even months after Miriam, when he had wanted to murder her lover Steve. So he had believed even on the train, reading his Plato. In himself, the second horse of the charioteer had always been obedient as the first. But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative. The splitting of the atom was the only true destruction, the breaking of the universal law of oneness. Nothing could be without its opposite that was bound up with it. Could space exist in a building without objects that stopped it? Could energy exist without matter, or matter without energy? Matter and energy, the inert and the active, once considered opposites, were now known to be one.
And Bruno, he and Bruno. Each was what the other had not chosen to be, the cast-off self, what he thought he hated but perhaps in reality loved.
For a moment, he felt as if he might be mad. He thought, madness and genius often overlapped, too. But what mediocre lives most people lived! In middle waters, like most fish!
No, there was that duality permeating nature down to the tiny proton and electron within the tiniest atom. Science was now at work trying to split the electron, and perhaps it couldn’t because perhaps only an idea was behind it: the one and only truth, that the opposite is always present. Who knew whether an electron was matter or energy? Perhaps God and the Devil danced hand in hand around every single electron!
He threw his cigarette at the wastebasket and missed.
When he put out the stub in the basket, he saw a crumpled page on which he had written last night one of his guilt-crazed confessions. It dragged him up sickeningly to a present that assaulted him from all sides—Bruno, Anne, this room, this night, the conference with the Department of Hospitals tomorrow.
Toward midnight, when he felt drowsy, he left his work table and lay down carefully on his bed, not daring to undress lest he awaken himself again.
He dreamed that he woke up in the night to the sound of the slow, watchful breathing that he heard every night in his room as he tried to fall asleep. It came from outside his window now. Someone was climbing the house. A tall figure in a great cape like a bat’s wings sprang suddenly into the room.
“I’m here,” said the figure matter-of-factly.
Guy jumped from his bed to fight him. “Who are you?” He saw it was Bruno.
Bruno resisted him rather than fought back. If Guy used his utmost strength, he could just pin Bruno’s shoulders to the floor, and always in the recurrent dream, Guy had to use his utmost strength. Guy held Bruno to the floor with his knees and strangled him, but Bruno kept grinning up at him as if he felt nothing.
“You,” Bruno answered finally.
Guy awakened heavy-headed and perspiring. He sat up higher, vigilantly guarding his empty room. There were slimily wet sounds in the room now, as of a snake crawling through the cement court below, slapping its moist coils against the walls. Then suddenly he recognized the sound as that of rain, a gentle, silvery summer rain, and sank back again on his pillow. He began to cry softly. He thought of the rain, rushing at a slant to the earth. It seemed to say: Where are the spring plants to water? Where is the new life that depends on me? Where is the green vine, Anne, as we saw love in our youth? he had written last night on the crumpled paper. The rain would find the new life awaiting it, depending on it. What fell in his court was only its excess. Where is the green vine, Anne . . .
He lay with his eyes open until the dawn eased its fingertips onto the sill, like the stranger who had sprung in. Like Bruno. Then he got up and turned on his lights, drew the shades, and went back to his work.
twenty-nine
Guy slammed his foot on the brake pedal, but the car leapt, screaming, toward the child. There was a tinny clatter of the bicycle falling. Guy got out and ran around the car, banged his knee excruciatingly on the front bumper, and dragged the child up by his shoulders.
“I’m okay,” the little boy said.
“Is he all right, Guy?” Anne ran up, white as the child.
“I think so.” Guy gripped the bicycle’s front wheel with his knees and straightened the handlebars, feeling the child’s curious eyes on his own violently trembling hands.
“Thanks,” said the boy.
Guy watched him mount the bicycle and pedal off as if he watched a miracle. He looked at Anne and said quietly, with a shuddering sigh, “I can’t drive anymore today.”
“All right,” she replied, as quietly as he, but there was a suspicion in her eyes, Guy knew, as she turned to go around to the driver’s seat.
Guy apologized to the Faulkners as he got back int
o the car, and they murmured something about such things happening to every driver now and then. But Guy felt their real silence behind him, a silence of shock and horror. He had seen the boy coming down the side road. The boy had stopped for him, but Guy had swerved the car toward him as if he had intended to hit him. Had he? Tremulously, he lighted a cigarette. Nothing but bad coordination, he told himself, he had seen it a hundred times in the past two weeks—collisions with revolving doors, his inability even to hold a pen against a ruler, and so often the feeling he wasn’t here, doing what he was doing. Grimly he re-established what he was doing now, driving in Anne’s car up to Alton to see the new house. The house was done. Anne and her mother had put the drapes up last week. It was Sunday, nearly noon. Anne had told him she had gotten a nice letter from his mother yesterday, and that his mother had sent her three crocheted aprons and a lot of homemade preserves to start their kitchen shelves. Could he remember all that? All he seemed to remember was the sketch of the Bronx hospital in his pocket, that he hadn’t told Anne about yet. He wished he could go away somewhere and do nothing but work, see no one, not even Anne. He stole a glance at her, at her coolly lifted face with the faint arch in the bridge of the nose. Her thin strong hands swung the wheel expertly into a curve and out. Suddenly he was sure she loved her car more than she loved him.
“If anybody’s hungry, speak up now,” Anne said. “This little store’s the last place for miles.”
But no one was hungry.
“I expect to be asked for dinner at least once a year, Anne,” her father said. “Maybe a brace of ducks or some quail. I hear there’s some good hunting around here. Any good with a gun, Guy?”
Anne turned the car into the road that led to the house.
“Fair, sir,” Guy said finally, stammering twice. His heart was flogging him to run, he could still it only by running, he was sure.
“Guy!” Anne smiled at him. Stopping the car, she whispered to him, “Have a nip when you get in the house. There’s a bottle of brandy in the kitchen.” She touched his wrist, and Guy jerked his hand back, involuntarily.
He must, he thought, have a brandy or something. But he knew also that he would not take anything.
Mrs. Faulkner walked beside him across the new lawn. “It’s simply beautiful, Guy. I hope you’re proud of it.”
Guy nodded. It was finished, he didn’t have to imagine it anymore as he had in the brown bureau of the hotel room in Mexico. Anne had wanted Mexican tiles in the kitchen. So many things she wore from time to time were Mexican. A belt, a handbag, huarachas. The long embroidered skirt that showed now below her tweed coat was Mexican. He felt he must have chosen the Hotel Montecarlo so that dismal pink-and-brown room and Bruno’s face in the brown bureau would haunt him the rest of his life.
It was only a month until their marriage now. Four more Friday nights, and Anne would sit in the big square green chair by the fireplace, her voice would call to him from the Mexican kitchen, they would work together in the studio upstairs. What right had he to imprison her with himself? He stood staring at their bedroom, vaguely aware that it seemed cluttered, because Anne had said she wanted their bedroom “not modern.”
“Don’t forget to thank Mother for the furniture, will you?” she whispered to him. “Mother gave it to us, you know.”
The cherry bedroom set, of course. He remembered her telling him that morning at breakfast, remembered his bandaged hand, and Anne in the black dress she had worn to Helen’s party. But when he should have said something about the furniture, he didn’t, and then it seemed too late. They must know something is the matter, he felt. Everyone in the world must know. He was only somehow being reprieved, being saved for some weight to fall upon him and annihilate him.
“Thinking about a new job, Guy?” Mr. Faulkner asked, offering him a cigarette.
Guy had not seen his figure there when he stepped onto the side porch. With a sense of justifying himself, he pulled the folded paper from his pocket and showed it to him, explained it to him. Mr. Faulkner’s bushy, gray and brown eyebrows came down thoughtfully. But he’s not listening to me at all, Guy thought. He’s bending closer only to see my guilt that is like a circle of darkness about me.
“Funny Anne didn’t say anything to me about it,” Mr. Faulkner said.
“I’m saving it.”
“Oh,” Mr. Faulkner chuckled. “A wedding present?”
Later, the Faulkners took the car and went back for sandwiches from the little store. Guy was tired of the house. He wanted Anne to walk with him up the rock hill.
“In a minute,” she said. “Come here.” She stood in front of the tall stone fireplace. She put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his face, a little apprehensive, but still glowing with her pride in their new house. “Those are getting deeper, you know,” she told him, drawing her fingertip down the hollow in his cheek. “I’m going to make you eat.”
“Maybe need a little sleep,” he murmured. He had told her that lately his work demanded long hours. He had told her, of all things, that he was doing some agency jobs, hack jobs, as Myers did, in order to earn some money.
“Darling, we’re—we’re well off. What on earth’s troubling you?”
And she had asked him half a dozen times if it was the wedding, if he wanted not to marry her. If she asked him again, he might say yes, but he knew she would not ask it now, in front of their fireplace. “Nothing’s troubling me,” he said quickly.
“Then will you please not work so hard?” she begged him, then spontaneously, out of her own joy and anticipation, hugged him to her.
Automatically—as if it were nothing at all, he thought—he kissed her, because he knew she expected him to. She will notice, he thought, she always notices the slightest difference in a kiss, and it had been so long since he had kissed her. When she said nothing, it seemed to him only that the change in him was simply too enormous to mention.
thirty
Guy crossed the kitchen and turned at the back door. “Awfully thoughtless of me to invite myself on the cook’s night out.”
“What’s thoughtless about it? You’ll just fare as we do on Thursday nights, that’s all.” Mrs. Faulkner brought him a piece of the celery she was washing at the sink. “But Hazel’s going to be disappointed she wasn’t here to make the shortcake herself. You’ll have to do with Anne’s tonight.”
Guy went out. The afternoon was still bright with sun, though the picket fence cast long oblique bars of shadow over the crocus and iris beds. He could just see Annie’s tied-back hair and the pale green of her sweater beyond a crest in the rolling sea of lawn. Many times he had gathered mint and watercress there with Anne, from the stream that flowed out of the woods where he had fought Bruno. Bruno is past, he reminded himself, gone, vanished. Whatever method Gerard had used, he had made Bruno afraid to contact him.
He watched Mr. Faulkner’s neat black car enter the driveway and roll slowly into the open garage. What was he doing here, he asked himself suddenly, where he deceived everyone, even the colored cook who liked to make shortcake for him because, once perhaps, he had praised her dessert? He moved into the shelter of the pear tree, where neither Anne nor her father would easily see him. If he should step out of Anne’s life, he thought, what difference would it make to her? She had not given up all her old friends, hers and Teddy’s set, the eligible young men, the handsome young men who played at polo and, rather harmlessly, at the night clubs before they entered their father’s business and married one of the beautiful young girls who decorated their country clubs. Anne was different, of course, or she wouldn’t have been attracted to him in the first place. She was not one of the beautiful young girls who worked at a career for a couple of years just to say they had done it, before they married one of the eligible young men. But wouldn’t she have been just the same, herself, without him? She had often told him he was her inspiration, he and his own ambition, but she had had the same talent, the same drive the day he met her, and wouldn’t she have gon
e on? And wouldn’t another man, like himself but worthy of her, have found her? He began to walk toward her.
“I’m almost done,” she called to him. “Why didn’t you come sooner?”
“I hurried,” he said awkwardly.
“You’ve been leaning against the house ten minutes.”
A sprig of watercress was floating away on the stream, and he sprang to rescue it. He felt like a possum, scooping it up. “I think I’ll take a job soon, Anne.”
She looked up, astoundedly. “A job? You mean with a firm?”
It was a phrase to be used about other architects, “a job with a firm.” He nodded, not looking at her. “I feel like it. Something steady with a good salary.”
“Steady?” She laughed a little. “With a year’s work ahead of you at the hospital?”
“I won’t need to be in the drafting room all the time.”
She stood up. “Is it because of money? Because you’re not taking the hospital money?”
He turned away from her and took a big step up the moist bank. “Not exactly,” he said through his teeth. “Maybe partly.” He had decided weeks ago to give his fee back to the Department of Hospitals after he paid his staff.
“But you said it wouldn’t matter, Guy. We both agreed we—you could afford it.”
The world seemed silent all at once, listening. He watched her push a strand of her hair back and leave a smudge of wet earth on her forehead. “It won’t be for long. Maybe six months, maybe a lot less.”