With Shuddering Fall

  Karen turned off the light and lay down again. There were footsteps out in the hall but they went nowhere. She listened to them, her heart pounding in excitement; but nothing happened. The sky outside the window had not lightened. On the bureau there were pills, sleeping pills Max’s doctor had given her. But she would not take them. She despised pills. She wanted no help. If there was pain, she would feel it. If the pain belonged to her, she would feel it; it was hers. Then, abruptly, she was dreaming. A child had died. It had been growing inside a closet, on the dusty floor, a clothes closet with bright summer dresses in it: tubes ran in and out of the child’s body, plastic veins, queer bright colors of red and blue and yellow, a transparent chest so that one could see the damp red heart. A plastic heart. But she would not cry for that, she thought angrily, it was a trick to make her pity herself, or pity someone, when pity was disgusting! Pity withered one’s heart, bore into one’s stomach. Pity ruined love. “God!” she said, grinding her teeth. Her heart was hardened: she could feel it turn to stone. She would pity no one. Certainly she would not pity herself. She thought of the fragmentary stories of men and women in the Bible, people who must have been in another world and yet who seemed to her, had always seemed to her, bizarre, wild-eyed contemporaries of her own. No pity. No mercy. Nothing. Had she been born for this, come into the world for this, that she should pity herself? On the contrary, someone was telling her, it was herself she must forget. Did she not know that the universe had contrived her life, her father had planned her birth, so that she might be here tonight in this dirty hotel room, alone, waiting? Of course the mind jerked away from such thoughts, but that was only because such thoughts terrified. Better to look into an empty drawer, stare into an empty hole, than to discover oneself looking into a darkness filled with shape! She began to twist her body as if someone were struggling with her. How much easier to look into a darkness that meant nothing than into a darkness that was really an open, straining mouth, a vast waiting hole that claimed her! It was as if God were struggling to appear to her, not in sunlight but in darkness. If she had ever expected to see God (and she had expected to see Him, as a child) she would have supposed Him to come in light, in fire. Not in darkness. But now she ground her teeth together savagely, twisting on the damp bed, and just at the moment when it seemed to her she would suffocate, her dream snapped clear and it was Shar who struggled with her. He lay above her, hard arms and legs, his hard wet body so familiar that she did not at first recognize him as someone apart from herself.

  She forced herself awake. She was frightened, damp with perspiration. Someone was crying out, somewhere—far away. She listened: nothing. An automobile’s brakes screeching. Now her heart began to pound with fear, for it was true that Shar was with another woman. He lay somewhere now, drunk, asleep, peaceful, safe from her. The realization that he had truly betrayed her seemed to clear her mind. She would be all right. She could deal calmly with the truth. And, as if her failure with him endeared him to her, made him seem much more a man, she lay back again and thought of how they had first met: of Shar’s strangeness, his look of having come from another country. Then her father, and that trip to town—yes. Yes, she thought, how well it had all worked; she might have planned it herself. Shar jerking and straining to escape, but Shar trapped by her all the same! The fields, the barn, the back room of that country store, and after that, as if by magic, another room in the city—and Max’s ritualistic behavior, his grave gentlemanly concern for her that she had distrusted for so long until she realized he was somehow seeing Shar in her, and that she was valuable to him because of this. She had been in bed then, attended by Max’s doctor. Perhaps they had expected her to die and were waiting calmly. Perhaps everything had been arranged: a coffin, a grave. But she had not died. She had waited as they had waited, day after day, more patient than they. Max had brought her newspapers and magazines and a radio, then some books. Karen had turned the pages of the books idly, too weak to read. When she saw that the books had been charged out of a library in the city she was struck by a sense of disorder, of wonder, as if it were somehow absurd to have to see her bed and this anonymous room in relationship to a larger city, a coherent world of governmental design that in turn related itself to the world of her family. Max would talk to Shar about Karen, fondly, in her presence; he admitted himself quite fascinated with her. “She suffers without knowing it,” he said often. “A strange thing. That endears the sufferer to us, but also makes us fearful of him—sometimes contemptuous!” And he had winked at her, as if they shared a joke Shar would never understand.

  Shar watched her but seldom spoke to her. If he spoke, it was usually to Max, with Karen as a third party who might or might not be listening. Now and then he would glance at her as if he expected her, in those moments, not to notice him. He said things like, “It’s warmer out today.” “It’s raining out this morning.” “I had some stuff to do downtown.” Always his words were accompanied by queer silent pleas, questions. He would stare at Karen secretly, indulge himself in long heavy-lidded examinations masked by clouds of smoke about his face. His legs, seemingly so idle, were really tensed to keep him on guard, protect him, get him out of the room if necessary, if the preposterous situation in which he discovered himself were suddenly too painful, too dangerous. Karen, dizzy with her own pain and with a despair so overwhelming she knew it must approach sin, absorbed his senseless, unanswered remarks and his looks as if she were older than he, stronger and wiser.

  They had surveyed each other carefully at this time. Shar’s first impact upon her had been physical: he had appeared as a body, a presence. Smears of color—lines of movement, a peculiar awkward grace—certain gestures with his fingers, which had struck her as nervous, nervously appealing. Beneath his contemptuous control there had always been distrust—he had learned that distrust as a child. Now, sitting with her in Max’s presence, forced to sit still, to meditate, to stare in disbelief—and, in spite of her condition, with lust—he emerged in a sense from his body and created for her an image of himself that she had learned to cherish as time passed, since it was only at such times, in perfect stillness or in sleep, that he appeared to her so. It was strange that even then, even when she could not have known clearly what he was going to do with her (whether she would be sent back home on a bus or abandoned somewhere in the city or passed around to the innumerable men who, it seemed, stomped about on the periphery of Shar’s life), she thought of the various shades and complexities of his person as possessions of hers. It was almost as if he were offering himself to her, shielded as he was behind nervous clouds of smoke and by the rigidity of his being. “Remember, I am a stranger,” he seemed to say. But he was already familiar: she might have known him for years, watched him secretly for years. The man who had, in a final vicious exasperation, made love to her that morning was not lost and did not belong to a painful nightmare, but sat with her often, gazed upon her with bewilderment and calculation, and identified himself always as the same man. He sometimes seemed to sweat with inertia; he could not move. The fat man who pampered them both seemed to sustain, witnessing Shar, a mild and delighted astonishment, as if he too were recognizing something: but what was happening? When Shar was gone Karen had the idea other people were watching her, spying on her drugged composure. Time passed. Reality slipped from her, she could not even soothe herself with tears for the life she had given up—she knew in her heart that she had not given it up—but the center of this new world, the force that controlled it, Shar, sat firmly and familiarly at her bedside, offered himself in mute impatience to her examination.

  He was to her lean and hard: his physical presence blocked the light from the window, scattered and diffused its rays, so that his body, even in relaxation, had a precarious and threatening solidity that did not belong to other objects—the chipped bed railing or the shade at the window. On Shar clothes lost all identity, became at once colorless and non descript. Karen could never, in her imagination, see clearly what Shar wore—he wor
e wrinkled clothes, soiled clothes, perhaps; what was important was that she could not recognize any detail about him that was not inescapably himself. His leanness was expressed especially in movement, and in the taut look that suggested hunger and dissatisfaction, the uneasiness of the predatory beast that suspects he can never achieve satiation. His hardness came from other sources—from within, behind his eyes. He was to her a strangely beautiful machine, a creation shaped by hand, perhaps carved out of stone: the hardness had been set in him too, placed deep in his brain like a tiny pebble or seed. It inspired all his movements, all his words. Whatever he might say to her—and everything he said to her was abrupt and self-conscious—resulted from the angry agitation of this secret hardness, its friction against other oiled and clicking parts of his being, the parts that had run him for years, had initiated him to a pattern of reacting and understanding that was now being violated. She had not been too delirious to sense the irony here: upon whom had that violation been performed? It was true that her body was changed, but this change was not really within her experience—it was abstract and theoretical, like tiny points in a catechism lesson (to daydream during so many minutes of Mass was a venial sin, so many more minutes a mortal sin); certainly it was to this bitter forlorn man that the violation was real, and all his minutes with her in that gloomy room must have grated upon his brain and body, mocking his strength, establishing for him that personal dislike for her beyond his impersonal infatuation that he still showed now, months later. He had spoken as if always astonished by the fact that he was speaking at all, that he was recognizing her as a reality in his life, and as if astonished by the stupidity of whatever he said. “They got some stuff on the road, some junk, black tar that gets all over everything,” he had said once. It was an effort for him to speak to her. He had the air of a man apprehensive of being fooled. “I went out to the garage to look at the car,” he would say, his words getting harder and tighter instead of relaxing, “and had a talk with this friend of Max’s, the one in the downtown precinct, and he says nothing—no news, nothing. Like nothing ever happened.” He might have wanted to add, “Why aren’t they looking for you?” but he did not. At such moments he would stare at her and their eyes would meet helplessly. Karen thought they might have been two people condemned to an eternity in each other’s presence, lovers or criminals who had sinned together on earth but who could not understand precisely what they had done, or why, or in what way it was a sin demanding damnation. “But what are you doing here? What do you want with me?” Shar asked with his silent, baffled, murderous eyes, and his fingers would pick nervously at one another as the hard, diamond-sharp little pebble in his brain pressed and maddened him. It was not that Karen obscured the rest of the world from him that alarmed him, but rather that—she could only guess at this—he had come to feel that in some way she exemplified the rest of the world, or somehow invalidated it, so that it became irrelevant. Karen took his hatred for her as a token of their growing familiarity, something he revealed to her constantly while she revealed nothing to him. She would smile faintly and murmur, “Yes . . . yes . . . I think so . . . That man told me . . .” and allow her words to disintegrate, pushing at him the burden of carrying on this performance. She took courage from the simple knowledge that she had not abandoned anything of herself and so was in a way protected; she understood too that the looks they exchanged, the brief meaningless words they exchanged, were blind moves in a game of some sort, like the elaborate and cunning games of chess her father and brothers sometimes played at holiday reunions—and that Shar did not know the rules of the game.

  It was Karen’s icy reserve that controlled the game, precisely the secret in her that commanded her degradation and did not even require hysteria to narcoticize it—her knowing that if some morning Shar or the strange fat man were to see her crying, pleading for help, pleading not to be abandoned, not to be returned to a world that would never forgive her shame, pleading, above all, for Shar himself—then the game would be finished, the pieces swept off onto the floor with a slash of Shar’s victorious hand. But they never found her this way. Even alone, awake for hours, she never gave in. Despair tempted her but it was a dry, hollow despair, the anguish that must lure people on the brink of death when tears and frenzy would change nothing, the despair one might experience upon seeing his heart snatched from him, slit and opened and turned neatly inside out, empty as an old soiled change purse. But Shar never detected that despair in her. If he hid a sharp, glinting knife in his insides, waiting to be turned upon her, she hid her knife also and did not even grimace—as he often did—when its brilliant edges cut her. The question in everyone’s mind (so clamorous as to be almost vocal) was what Shar would do with her, and if Karen herself posed this question she did not offer it to him but thrust it upon him—not as a question but as a taunt, since she knew that nothing less than this could touch him. He was a man of violence, a stranger to her life, a man who could not even sit comfortably but must always be dreaming of air and space and speed—yet she was so arrogant as to suppose herself a match for him. She was so shameless as to show him that she knew his feeling for her, exactly what he wanted from her. There was nothing secret about this; it showed in the sweat on Shar’s forehead, in the hot icy gleam of his eyes that held her rigid while his voice went on to speak of other things—“No news today either. Max has five papers down there and reads them through.” He would sometimes squirm in his chair, and if Max was in the room he would look around at him with a gesture that made Karen understand that his eyes showed anguish as soon as they were turned from her. The game continued for days, weeks. She did not know how long she was drugged; she took as a familiarity the equally drugged look of Shar’s contemptuous, disbelieving face, turned upon her with a strange baffled urgency, as if they were conspirators and had no one but each other. One day Shar abandoned the game. Karen was not quite sure of how she knew this, but it was true. He abandoned it and admitted defeat, as if with a sudden uplifting of his hands toward heaven. Karen, by then accustomed to a life that began nowhere and headed nowhere, geographically or morally, understood that she must not abandon the game herself but must continue to play it in secret, plotting and calculating her moves until victory was hers.

  When Karen felt well she and Shar went out for long, aimless, yawning walks. It was an effort for Shar to walk slowly enough for her; he was always straining ahead, peering enviously down alleys, up at the tops of buildings. They did not touch, and to a passer-by it might have seemed that the two of them—a man of about thirty with tiny perpetual lines of disapproval on his forehead and a girl of uncertain age, under twenty, who blinked at the sunlight as if unaccustomed to it—were not really aware of each other but simply happened to be going in the same direction at the same time. Shar expressed in his gestures and in his walk the brittle, impatient nervousness of the man who is frightened at his loss of self-control and cannot understand it. He was happy only when in control of some sort: driving his machines, drinking himself into a stupor, seeing the tabulation of his threatened violence on another’s face. He never touched her, as if her skin might be poison to him, but she understood his slanted looks and felt victory approaching—he would not be able to resist for much longer the generous acquiescence she promised, could not help but promise, and the rich anarchy of the control he would then achieve over her. If he did finally surrender to her it was no more than himself he was surrendering to—already he must have thought of her as an appendage of his, an extension of his own body that he craved if he was to exist for other things. So in her presence he was alone; he contemplated her as they walked, puzzling and accusing the image of her that he carried with him, glancing over now and then in surprise at the actual young woman beside him. Karen caught these moments of surprise. “How do you feel?” Shar would say. His fingers would rub at his cheek, at his nose. “Are you tired yet?” Hopelessly they fell into silence. Shar would buy newspapers and sit in cheap diners reading them, frowning seriously, while Ka
ren sat with a cup of coffee untouched and cooling before her. Shar leafed through the newspapers impatiently, reading only headlines and looking at pictures. When he was finished he threw the papers down and sat, smoking, looking out the grease-specked windows to the street. It did not occur to him to offer the papers to Karen; he might not have known she could read. In her role she could not ask him. She had no idea what was happening in the world, if anything was happening. She had withdrawn from history and had no interest in it, just as Shar, though he glanced at photographs of diplomats and African leaders and automobile accidents, had no interest in it, having created his own pastoral history out of the strength of his own body. What he looked for were items concerning Karen—GIRL REPORTED MISSING, GIRL SUSPECTED KIDNAPED—that he never found, and all other events baffled and angered him, as if their space in the paper had usurped the place of the other ghostly story.