With Shuddering Fall
“Do you love me?” Karen said.
Shar sat up and lit a cigarette. The smoke would clear his head; he had to think. Immediately his mind filled with the race, the grandstands full of people, the relentless dirt track. He felt something—a queer little force—drawing at him, luring him into the center, to death, but he did not understand what it was. Death for auto racers came not through surrender to the center, but through surrender to the outside—to centrifugal force, a sudden careening off the track. Green infield, dotted grandstand, blue sky: these would reel before him, narrowing to the white retaining wall and then to the flash of impact. Shar had awakened out of various nightmares upon the moment of impact, drenched with sweat, his fists clenched on an invisible wheel, his legs and feet straining to keep him in, keep him in. . . .
He turned to Karen as if he had not heard her. She looked serene, complete; she gazed at him with satisfaction. Little he said or left unsaid seemed to have any effect on her. “You scare me sometimes,” Shar had said once nervously; he felt Karen oddly like himself, for she reflected his surface calm with her entire being, while Shar’s mask did little more than mock his feelings. It was as if she had designed herself so: a woman imagining what would attract him, entrap him, and creating herself in that image, hair and eyes and mouth and body, and the hints of a soul that Karen revealed.
Shar remembered that she had not always been like this. She had emerged out of a week of pain and hysteria, attended by Max’s doctor, to claim him. When Max had demanded what Shar wanted to do with the girl, what point there had been in abducting her, ruining her health, almost ruining her sanity, Shar had really been unable to reply; he did not know. He had not thought about it. At the back of his mind he felt that she had wanted it, but his common sense rejected that and his expectation of Max’s outrage silenced it. Shar had not had time to think about it, and now the familiar image of Karen’s presence obscured all thought. At times he could not remember ever having been without her.
As if she understood his thought, she moved to take him into her arms. “Come here,” Karen said. Shar let the cigarette fall on the floor with the dirty clothes and empty whisky bottles and came to Karen. He embraced her with his body. Anguish overtook him that he would not be able to make her feel as he did, then frustration, then the beginning of his mute, angry violence: she resisted him at the same time she gave herself to him, he thought; she did not love him, she mocked him, she used his infatuation to degrade him. In the face of such mockery Karen’s gentleness, her silence even to his deliberate coarseness, irritated him until he felt like striking her, forcing her to cry out—as she sometimes did—in sharp, surprised pain. But her body had adapted itself to him now, he could hurt her only from time to time, and as he did it he was tortured by the fact that he wanted to do it; he could not understand. Anger at himself expressed itself in anger at Karen, who accepted it as she accepted everything—not bravely but only silently, innocently, as if everything he did were normal, as if these were the rituals that passed between a man and a woman in love! It was indecent—dirty—Shar thought, his outrage rising, it was dirty, dirty, he had made himself dirty in doing it, yet he enjoyed it, he loved it, he was obsessed by it! Karen, stained by his exertions, exhausted by his energy, was really untouched by him: he could not reach her. In desperation he gave himself up to the hot sucking softness of her body. He could stand it no longer; he cried out, he sobbed helplessly against her tensed face, he felt her small limbs brace him as if to prevent his doing violence against himself.
Some time later when Shar awoke he found that Karen had pulled the sheet over them and held him in her arms. His face had been against her shoulder; her skin was wet with his saliva. Shar drew away. “Christ, it’s hot,” he said. He felt strangely irritated. “What time is it?”
Karen reached for the watch on the night table. “It’s five after twelve,” she said.
He sat up and reached for his cigarettes. He did not look at Karen. “What the hell is that noise down there? It sounds like firecrackers.” A slow uproar was sustained down on the street, punctuated by explosions and horns. Someone on the sidewalk three stories below was laughing hysterically. Listening to the laughter, Shar glanced at Karen: she was watching him steadily. Her face was damp with perspiration, her hair a little darker with it around her forehead. For a moment he sat with a lighted match in his hand, looking at her. He wanted to appeal to her, cringe before her, bury his face in her stomach, hide his eyes. He did not know why. He wanted to beg something of her, but he did not know what it would be—she was little to him, after all, new to his life and temporary to it; he had had other women longer than this. Before her pleased silent gaze he felt helpless. Even his strength was helpless. It occurred to him that if he wanted to be free of her he would have to kill her.
This thought bothered him. “Hell,” he said aloud, lighting his cigarette. He tossed the burned match onto the floor with the rest of the refuse he had accumulated—crumpled candy bar wrappers, soiled underclothes, bottles, opened newspapers. His shoes, white with dust, lay against the baseboard of the wall as if they had been thrown there.
“I’m going out to the track,” Shar said. “I’ll see you after the race.”
When he looked around he saw Karen trying to hide a small yawn. The movement of her arm, the sleepy luxury of her expression, touched him; he smiled at her. But his smile stopped when he felt with alarm his body preparing itself for her. He looked away. He got up. What did he want to beg of her? It might have been freedom—freedom to rid himself of her, clean himself of his intoxication for her, so that he could approach her as a man. Never had he made any choice about her: she had happened to him as accidents happened to him, immediate and complete. He had talked to Max about it. In the past Max had helped him with everything. Max listened to him, asked him questions, shared in his life; sometimes Shar felt that Max wanted too much, crowded Shar a little, but Shar had grown almost as dependent upon Max as Max was on him. He did not understand the relationship, he was not interested in understanding it. Shar’s experience in racing, his experience with violence, with women, certain events in his past—these Max had shared, had drawn out of Shar so they really did not belong to Shar any more. But of Karen Shar had been able to tell Max little. He could not talk about her with anyone. She belonged to him, she seemed to have no life except with him. The thought of this maddened him, made his brain buzz and flinch—he had tried to explain it to Max but had grown so angry that he had been incoherent. And sick with desire for her. He could not escape her. He felt that she was nothing apart from him, she had nothing of herself but what she gave him, she was nothing in herself but what he touched—unlike the other women whom he could not even remember now—she did not turn away in secret, she did not avert her eyes, did not think of other men when she was with him. She gave herself to him at once, and constantly; even the expression of pleasure she revealed from time to time was no more than a part of Shar, of what he created in her.
Shar chewed on a piece of chocolate candy left on the bureau and went into the bathroom, leaving Karen to herself. He was angry with her and he knew she understood, though neither of them could have explained. Under the shower he thought of sweat running off his body, dirt licked free, the intense heat of the bedroom exorcized by the water. He would be free of that; he would be ready for the race. Systematically he began emptying his mind of all things irrelevant to the race. First there was Karen: there was always Karen. On the verge of sleep at night he confused her in his mind with other women, with all women up to the first girl he had had, years ago; she blended with them, distorted their faces to hers, usurped their roles. A baby of three running fatly in her polka-dot clothes, blond curls, plump soft legs, busy fists! That had been Karen too. Remembering her thus strained Shar’s sanity; he could not believe she was the same person. He had tried to explain it to Max: “I picked her up and handed her to her father that day. I was about sixteen—I don’t know. She was two or three. She couldn’t
talk sense yet. Can you believe it’s the same person?” Max thought it delightful; he had wanted to hear more. For the first time Shar resisted his questioning. Gladly, zestfully, had he reviewed his experiences with other women—Max had listened impassively—but something dulled his energy when he started to betray Karen. Max had asked his usual question: “Did you make her happy?” Instead of saying, as he usually did, “You’re goddamned right I did,” he had fallen silent; he did not know what to say. “Not like with the others,” he had told Max finally. At the start he had been able to say, when Max asked him how it was with Karen, that it was wonderful, beautiful, that he “couldn’t last five minutes with her”—Shar’s tribute to a beautiful woman—but after a while he had shrugged his shoulders, he had not wanted to answer. For the first time he felt that Max wanted to know too much. “The fat old son of a bitch!” Shar growled into the shower—inexplicably, for he really liked Max.
There were other things he must cleanse himself of: his hatred for the people who crowded the street and who would be watching him this afternoon. A grandstand filled with hungry faces, murmuring lips. What delicious pleasure it would give them to watch him die! He knew them; he understood them. But he must not think of them, for anything beyond the pure experience of the speed alone was degrading. It was a private ritual—Shar shared it with no one, with none of the other drivers, certainly with no one in the crowd; he shared it, perhaps, with Max, but only partially. Max, who sat propped up with pillows in a chair, fingering pages in his innumerable books, fearful of his heart, of heat stroke, of cancer, of anything—Max could feel the beauty of Shar’s experience only in his imagination, while Shar felt it in his very body. At a certain point the speed became his body: he was one with it. Those who sat sweating and chewing popcorn and drinking beer in the stadium watched the drivers tear around the track, but what they saw had little relationship to what really happened—to the private experiences of the drivers, who moved in a world apart. “Safe from those goddam bastards!” Shar said with immense satisfaction. And on the track he would be safe from entanglements with anyone—with himself, even, his usual self, the mortality in him that linked him to other men. He would be safe from time, lifted above time, he would be free of human bondage, of hatred, of jealousy, of anger, of lust, most of all, of love!—free of love! For him there would be dust and the smell of oil and the terrific reality of that dirt track and the speed at which he moved above it. When the race was over, when he came back, he would feel cleansed, exorcized of fragments in him that were not really himself, that cluttered and obscured his vision. It was good to work up the speed, good to give it up, to return to the normal world of time: it was good to see the sun perfectly still in the sky.
If he could return from a race and meet Karen for the first time, then it would be possible for him to love her; he felt that strongly, angrily. If he could approach her without lust, without fear, he could love her. He did not know if he wanted to love her, if he was strong enough for it. He realized now that he had never loved anyone before. But he did know that his bondage to her was driving him insane, splitting him from what had always been essential in his life—a simplicity of vision, and simplicity of emotion—and that he had to free himself from it. Again the thought came to him that his freedom would be the same as Karen’s death. But he shook his head in disgust; he did not believe it, he did not want to hear about it.
Emptied of the past, he prepared himself carefully for the future.
10
At one time the several acres of land north of Synderdale that were set aside for county use had been the site of the annual county fair, but now everything but the racing track and its stadium was abandoned. The track had originally been used for horse racing—farmers and their sons had showed off their horses with great pride; but for the last several years the track had been used for auto racing and, more often, for stock car racing—spectacles that attracted great crowds even on the hottest summer days.
On this day the dirt parking lot was filling up early with cars and pick-up trucks. Children rode bicycles and parked them in the grass. Old buses, of the sort usually seen transporting migrant farm workers from place to place, showed up filled with strangers from cities to the north. Hot-dog stands were crowded, cotton candy was sold, beer, soft drinks, souvenir flags and whistles, racing caps and goggles for children, straw hats, noisemakers—all were for sale. It was impossible not to feel the intense excitement in the air.
The impending communion in such a spectacle, well worshiped by most of the people, gave them a sense of brotherhood. Gangs of boys sought each other out, young girls drifted about in slow loose clusters, smiling at everyone. Many of the older people, still dressed in their fine uniforms and flushed by the joy and success of the firemen’s parade, argued and shouted and slapped one another on the back with great gusto. They eyed with suspicion and admiration the big, well-dressed, rich-looking man who walked in conversation with the beautiful young girl—no doubt his daughter. These two were strolling slowly through the old fair grounds, waiting for the beginning of the race to near. The man kept looking at his watch. He wore a very light gray suit of a rich material, unfortunately a little too tight for his big, almost fat body; his shirt was cream colored and his necktie a modest blue. For all his bulk he walked delicately, as if he were not used to it or as if he feared it might somehow injure him. From a distance his face looked merely blank, and of a bloodless, stony color; at closer range his face was heavy and burdened with many tiny lines about his eyes and cheeks. Wrinkles of delight and of anger had imprinted themselves into him, running from his massive jaw and mouth up to his nose, out from his eyes in a fan-shaped spread, and across his forehead in irregular precision. One of his pockets was stretched almost to bursting by a small blue book that he had stuffed into it.
The girl wore blue linen, a dress that did not belong exactly to summer or to the race track, and about her neck a necklace of silver hung catching the sunlight. Her pale hair hung straight to her shoulders. Her face was small, childlike, yet at the same time elegant—so people thought who stared at her. Sunglasses hid her eyes, and the careful vacuity of her expression, the deliberate set of her reddened lips, hid any feeling she might have had.
Automobiles were beginning to fill up the lot in which they strolled, so they turned away. Flies and mosquitoes buzzed in the air. They passed old buildings: the biggest, with most of its grimy windows broken, declared itself in a long weather-stained sign before its entrance: DAIRY CENTER. Now the doors were open and led into nothing but sunlight and buzzing flies. The man, who fondly called himself Max, spoke confidentially to Karen with a forefinger raised, as if he were delivering a lecture.
“You are thinking you have fooled me!” he said merrily. “You think to yourself—a fat man on a hot day, what a fool he turns out to be! Sweats himself away in little dribbles. Ah, that’s true,” he said, wiping his forehead, taking off his sunglasses either to wipe his eyes or to peer at Karen. “Heat, this heat disintegrates me—given a high temperature, a man caught in it—what happens to God at such times? So far away—Impossible—Just like no man with a toothache can be a believer.”
Karen smiled to show she appreciated his humor but did not believe in it. Max’s eyes, intent upon her, were startlingly small, small within the harsh pasty expanse of his face, and like the eyes of an animal, without much thought or perception: a deceit Karen knew he did not contrive. “But you are fooling me!” he cried, taking her arm. They passed through parked cars now, heading back to the stadium. “Who was it that took care of you in your hysteria? Was it Shar? Shar was drunk! It was I, and I understood you then, and I thought—a clever girl, a very intelligent girl, he is drunk and sick to death because he doesn’t know what to do with her! I thought—she is a strange girl, but she will come around to me, she will see I am her friend; she will see that we are kin. Our minds are kin. I am positive of that.”
Small boys ran shouting about them, intent on a game. Max stared a
t them for an instant in terror; but they did not notice and ran away behind the cars. Karen noticed his fear with a slight impulse of pity, but she said nothing. She had been trying not to surrender to pity for herself and, more immediately, to block Max’s subtle probing into her mind, his groping for her secret. The effort to resist him had weakened her. “But when I say you are fooling me it is not just about this—you realize. No, it is about yourself—your very being. Your very being is a puzzle to me, a most delightful puzzle!” And he smiled to show he found her delightful. “You are the second to come down out of those mountains and to me—the first was Shar, a very young man then, no more than a boy. And you—You are a delight to me, you have made us very happy.”