With Shuddering Fall

  They walked through the slummy downtown of the city, and idly over toward the great cinder-strewn parking lots of factories, and across railroad tracks, and past fences topped with barbed wire, and through soot-darkened residential neighborhoods, and past schools with windows decorated with flowers, rabbits, and trees. Just as all external details disappeared in Shar’s presence, so did Karen’s vision of what they saw disappear. Shar walked impatiently through a vacuum composed of store-window reflections of himself and the silent girl beside him, and when there were no store windows to give him these reflections he must have contrived them himself. He smoked constantly, waited perfunctorily at deserted street corners before crossing, glanced with a dull, angry gaze to notice little corner stores that sold pretzel sticks and candy and popsicles of various flavors—orange, raspberry, root beer, cherry. If it was warm, they would stand on the steps of these stores while Shar, frowning in thought, sucked at a dripping popsicle and children straddling bicycles a few yards away ate the same thing. Karen never asked herself the question, “What is he? What kind of life does he lead?” Of course he had no life, he had nothing, he was simply himself. Other men hurried out of factories in the late afternoon, or were to be seen on errands, going somewhere, having come from somewhere, but Shar came from nowhere and went nowhere. He seemed also to notice nothing. Beside his muscular propriety the ordinary world paled and fell away. He was a sojourner here, and never confused the intricacies of this surface world with the reality of his own world, which consisted of himself. His simplicity, Karen thought, made him dangerous, for to him the world of man was not valued for its uniqueness, nor was human experience judged to be good or evil, nor was sin possible: there was only Shar’s will, the deadly whimsical range of his desire. He was as perplexed as she by his strange refusal to dismiss her. He wanted her gone yet he did not want her gone, not so simply. Once he had turned to her—they were near a mud-splattered excavation site—and said, as if he were only now thinking of this, “When are you going home?” Karen stared at their feet and pretended to be thinking. Shar had hard, big feet, dirty shoes with frayed shoelaces. After a while he said, “Max can fix it up for you. Buy the tickets or drive you right up there himself.” Karen’s silence forced upon them both the realization that there was for them in these roles no common language. Daily he was being drawn to her, his initial failure to escape her had decided everything; it was only Shar’s simplicity that blinded him. “I can’t leave you,” Karen said, still staring at their feet.

  His affinity was with machines, though none they saw were so finely geared and meshed as he. He loved to watch excavating machines and great straining trailer trucks maneuvered with astonishing skill; he even watched men repairing streets, enjoying the vibrations and the roar of the air drill. In the smelly bars they wandered in and out of he played machines—gaudily-colored pinball machines that seemed to Shar to be challenging him personally. When he was not with her, over at the garage, Karen believed he was trying to blot out his confusion over her with the blunt, exhilarating performance of machines. But he reappeared to her always, and something in the repetition of their days—they began to eat together, they had periods of real silence that were more intimate than anything Karen had ever experienced—seemed to satisfy him. One morning they went out walking, again in silence, but Shar was humming to himself and Karen had the numb feeling that something had been decided. They walked in a park bordering a cemetery. The air was fresh with spring, the grass vividly green. Karen touched her hair, her cool face, feeling herself unrevived by spring, pale and lifeless, unattractive, while the man at her side had to hold back his energy and could not stop his eyes from staring at the tops of trees and beyond them into the blue sky. Something had been decided, Karen thought. She had won. They wandered through to the cemetery, where the spongy ground and the cheap gravestones looked oddly healthy. Karen felt in the warming air that she had no right to be here, that she had really died; she had escaped illness and insanity, perhaps, but she had really died somewhere in the past. She could not help but stare at Shar’s back with a kind of fond contempt—clumsy, ignorant man, to suppose he could understand her! She saw him looking about with a precision not ordinarily his. He said nothing, there was nothing hurried about him, and though later she would be able to sense, by the sudden rigidity of his jaw, exactly when the bitter pressure of his obsession overtook him, she did not understand until he finally touched her what his intention was—it must have been, up until that moment, ceremonial and plotted, an act his mind and not his body had prescribed for him. “I’m not well,” Karen said. “I’m not—I might bleed—” She had begun to tremble convulsively. Shar urged her down and knelt beside her. He gripped her shoulders as if listening to her heartbeat. “It won’t hurt,” he said. But he waited. Karen felt her eyes harden; she looked behind him at the bare tree limbs stretched out so absurdly against the sky. As her strength ebbed out of her, the trembling lessened; she might have been fleeing her body, plotting to leave it behind with Shar in order to please him and cheat him at the same time. Shar touched her hands, her arms, her shoulders; very gently and seriously he stroked her body as if trying to bring her to life, while Karen closed her eyes and felt her soul contract itself into a tiny pebble-like thing safe in her brain. Her hand reached out and groped against his chest. She slid her fingers inside his shirt and touched his skin, and in that instant she felt her trembling pass over into him. Still he crouched over her and stroked her limbs and her body, so gently and lovingly that, so long as her eyes were closed, she felt no shame. It might have been night, she might have been asleep, and this lover come to her made innocent by his being only a dream, something over which she need have no control. Suddenly he was like Jack and the other young men she had known who had tried to make her love them, tried to make her feel something for them—though they had never dared to do what Shar did to her. She wanted to take hold of his wrist, but she knew she did not have the right. She pitied him for trying to evoke in her a feeling she would never give him, just as she had pitied Jack and the others, though contemptuously, and with her eyes still closed she reached up to touch the nape of his neck. Then she heard something overhead—an airplane—and opened her eyes suddenly. She squinted and stared up at nothing. Then she looked at Shar’s face and what she saw there made her lips jerk up in an angry, disgusted grin. Shar stared at her. He was breathing through his mouth and she could see his teeth. Then he straightened and brought his hand around and slapped her face. “Look at me like that, you little bitch!” he said. His face was white. Karen was frightened, but she could not change her expression. Her lips seemed frozen in their grimace. Shar slapped her again. She shut her eyes, her face turned away, while he raged above her. This was something real, something she could understand, the selfish little pebble in her brain rejoiced in it because it could make her hate this man so much more clearly. The memory of his patience was dissipated now by the violence of the pain she felt. They grunted together, Karen squirming backward in the damp earth, Shar grinding himself against her. Karen felt her hair tangle in the wet grass. “You little bitch! Little bitch!” Shar sobbed. Karen heard cloth being ripped. She pushed against him, her forearm against his face, but he ducked under it and brought his face down hard against hers, blindly, his teeth wet, the hard deadly pressure of his skull holding her still. “I’d like to set you on fire like I did to him,” he said, “take a match and set you on fire—burn everything—your clothes catching on and burning—you screaming for help, you little bitch! And all burning up, hair and insides, so you could see inside and see the things burning there, melting away, burning—” He was enlivened with rage as with charges of electricity, grinding and lunging against her, as if his murderous spite were trying to bore its way out of him and into her.

  KAREN WOKE TO HEAR SOMEONE knocking at the door. She could not think for a moment where she was. She was alone, and she could not remember being alone. The knocking was soft and discreet. “Yes,” she said vaguely
. She did not move. Sunlight streamed in the grimy windows. After a moment the knocking began again. Karen pulled the sheets up to her chin and said nothing. Her heart had begun to thud. Then she heard the sound of a key in the lock. Knowing it was not Shar made her feel reckless; she did not even look around.

  “My dear Karen!” Max closed the door behind him. He was fat and apologetic. “I was waiting for you downstairs—I thought you might come downstairs.”

  Karen said nothing.

  “But my dear child,” Max said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, “you must look at me. Here. Yes, like that. How pretty you are, even after last night! I’m sorry to tell you this—it’s hard for me, very hard for me, a strain on my heart—Are you listening? Shar is gone—I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, terribly sorry—He’s gone, he said for me to tell you. He—”

  “He isn’t gone!” said Karen.

  “It’s difficult enough for me to tell you this,” Max said, though his pert, benevolent expression seemed to suggest he was enjoying himself, “I could hardly eat breakfast, thinking of it; my appetite is gone. I thought of you up here, my poor forlorn Karen, and it made me think of the other women, the young women that Shar—It made me think of you all together, and made me think of how old I am—I told him he should be the one to tell you himself, but—”

  “He isn’t gone,” Karen said. She stared angrily at Max. “I don’t believe you. He can’t be gone.”

  “But he is gone,” Max said, lifting his palms in a gesture of defeat, gently, smiling gently, “he is gone—and you will never see him again. For your own good and his. Do you understand that?”

  13

  Max had been sitting in the sunny corner of the hotel lobby for about half an hour, awaiting Karen. He had arranged himself in the creaking chair with much effort and tenderness, hesitating many seconds before he let his legs slide out from under him. He wore a suit of light, faint blue, buttoned across his chest and stomach. His face was newly shaven and looked a little raw, as if he were being seen in too exposing a light. He crossed his short, thick legs with an effort, sighed unhappily, and opened a book. In a minute his reading so engrossed him that he chuckled out loud and took a pencil out of his pocket to mark something in the text.

  A few people walked past but he did not look up. Jerry came downstairs and sat heavily in a cracked leather chair not far from Max, but said nothing. Max did not look up. The sunlight brightened, pouring warmly on his head. His fair, thinning hair had been dampened, and now the sunlight played minutely about it. Jerry, gazing blankly at his employer’s head, put his arms behind his own head and yawned. Outside, automobile horns blared angrily.

  As soon as the sound of sharp clicking heels came to Max’s ears, he looked up. Karen passed by, heading for the street. He called to her; she turned quickly, showing her desperation. But in the next instant Max felt he had misunderstood her—she stood staring coldly at him, her lips firm, her neck very tense. She wore white: a hard, dazzling white. As if to mock him, the silver necklace he had given her gleamed proudly back at him!

  “You must understand that he is gone—he is gone,” Max said. She stood before him now, looking past his head. He was tempted to turn around and see what she was looking at. Jerry, slouched in his chair, watched her with the sort of helpless look Max had noticed in him when Karen was in their company. “You must learn to forgive him,” Max went on, inspired by the pathos of the scene. He had felt it a delicious, dramatic moment—yet Karen, after the first instant of her surprise, showed no emotion, as if she had thrust upon Max the burden of making this difficult. “It has been difficult for him—I saw this coming in him, before he realized it himself. That was one of the reasons I talked to you yesterday—”

  Karen’s young, clever face showed nothing. Max was amazed as always by the clarity of her eyes—faint blue, modest blue, refusing to shift away under the impact of fear or shame. Perhaps he had always misjudged her, and what he thought to be shrewdness in her was simply ignorance—profound ignorance? She did not even relish what suffering came to her; she did not seem to always know it was supposed to be suffering. Max was not sure if this was admirable in her or if it was an indication of her vulgarity.

  “You will allow me to help you,” Max said, getting to his feet. “I will be very happy to help you—to see that you return home safely. And to see that your health is good. Of course it is no business of mine, but—” He saw, to his alarm, that she was about to turn away. “Where are you going? At least let us talk together. Let me help you with your grief.”

  Karen did not appear grieved, but in a daze—a hard, tearless daze. She looked at Max as if she had never seen him before. “Perhaps I can tempt you into coming to breakfast with me,” he said. His appetite now had returned most powerfully. “We can talk there. You surely can’t be in a hurry to go anywhere—why, where would you go?”

  In the murky coffee shop of the hotel they sat in a booth by one of the high, grimy windows. Max’s doctor was already in there, sitting languidly at the counter; he turned and nodded to Max when they entered. He stirred his coffee endlessly. “This looks fine, by the window,” Max had said. He sat across from Karen and Jerry, smiling hospitably at them. “Such brilliant sunlight! It woke me early this morning. I had difficulty with sleep—some trouble with my nerves, trouble as always with something! I’m afraid my health is disintegrating,” he said.

  Karen wanted nothing; Jerry ordered coffee. Max read off an order for breakfast from a fly-specked menu he had been given, then leaned forward, pressing his stomach against the table, to look seriously at Karen. “First of all, my dear,” he said kindly, “you must not think of desperate measures—of violence against yourself. You must accept what has happened. It is for the best—certainly—ultimately for the best; all things are. If you were to have a baby, if you had been pregnant—” He spoke now as if this were a possibility that no longer existed. “If you had been pregnant, Shar’s reaction might have been—violent, or—He is governed by his passion, his emotion; he doesn’t think. Exactly like a child. I have always considered him a child—the young man from the provinces, seeking his fortune. What sense is there in him of his condition? The whole world is shrunk down to fit him—he carries it around in his head! Exactly like a child! He is the child who does nothing, to whom all things are done. Whatever happens to him he hasn’t deserved or earned—good or bad—whatever—these things simply happen, accidents. And that is true for you as well!”

  Max smiled as if he had made a brilliant point. “We others—we who are more worldly, who aren’t, properly speaking, from the ‘provinces’—we realize that life is something else, that we are always responsible for what we do. But you children—you do not!—and that is what I love in you and respect very sincerely; I assure you I do. It is innocence. It is lost to all but children.”

  Jerry, who did not seem to be listening, took out a pack of cigarettes and selected one carefully. He lit the cigarette with a heavy silver lighter that was designed with small intricate hearts. His expression, professional and deaf, would have been the same had he been sitting alone.

  “That is something you cannot understand,” Max said softly. “A lost innocence—you cannot understand it. Those who are protected by innocence are not even aware of it; they know nothing. They know nothing. Yet you are innocent, my dear Karen, in spite of your knowing quite a bit—and you know these things, incredibly, without understanding them, without having been transformed yourself by the knowledge of them!” He wiped his forehead. “That is what is incredible. . . . Nothing either you or Shar will ever do will have anything to do with you; all things are accidents to you. You heard Shar talk of the accident yesterday. Precisely! No one could say what had happened—Shar least of all. He would be the last to understand—He operates from his stomach.”

  “And I do too?” Karen said.

  It was impossible to tell how she meant this. Max believed she was serious. “Perhaps not your stomach,” he said
, making a kind of gracious bow with his head, “that sounds . . . indelicate . . . for such a pretty girl. Your heart, perhaps—You operate from your heart.”

  “That is true,” Karen said queerly.

  The waitress brought their orders. Jerry accepted his coffee without looking up, Max the first part of his breakfast—a grapefruit, cut neatly in half and seeded—with a fond, condescending smile for the waitress. He ate with relish. The grapefruit was sour, even after he had put several spoonfuls of sugar on it; but still it was fresh and good. He understood that fruit was good for a man in his condition. He talked for a while of the grapefruit and of fruit in general, then reverted to his subject. “I sometimes think,” he said philosophically, waving the dripping spoon at Karen, “that children like you understand the world best. You are perhaps most sophisticated, after all. To take life as an accident, and everything in it as an accident—what sophistication! Why should there be any logical pattern of events, any distinction between an earthly order and an . . . oh . . . eternal order? Why, indeed? We religious people—” He noted how Karen’s eyes narrowed as he said this. “We religious people search for meaning, and we are humbled. What brilliance there is in a child, who takes the world as chaos and never thinks about it! There is innocence—it is impossible in anyone else, in anyone who believes.”