Desperate Asylum

Section 1

Spring ran into summer, and summer ran into August, and August was hot. It was reported to be the hottest August on record, and in the heat of its still, white days the aberrant hunger survived and grew and became a malignant torment, and what gave it strength and made it worse was that it had ceased to be diffuse and unattached and had become directed and dedicated. During the ascent of the year and now in the early decline, Lisa continued to tell herself, as she had told herself immediately in the car returning from the restaurant, that she would have to run, that the peril involved in fidelity for the promised year was far too great, and that flight, if not the attainment of security, was at least the postponement of disaster. But she did not run. She stayed. She stayed on into the still, hot month in the precarious fulfillment of the promised year, and where she stayed precisely for a great part of the time was in Emerson Page’s bar.

She was in the bar now, and it was cool and shadowy, and there were at hand the ingredients of the lift that had become more essential to existence and more difficult to gauge and sustain than ever before. She came here for a part of almost every afternoon, and this was something that she had promised herself to stop. Once she did stop for nearly a week, but then she resumed her visits and later her promises, and this running, losing fight between resolution and weakness only added to her burden of guilt and the magnitude of her despair. The real reason she came, and continued to come in spite of her promises, was not, of course, merely to gel a few drinks, which could have been had at home or elsewhere, nor to sit out of the heat in a cool and pleasant place, for there were other available places both cool and pleasant. She came to see Emerson Page, who had been blessed by contact and had become a symbol. Through him there was vicarious release, a transient abatement of hunger and pain. He was, in effect, a secondary stimulus to which she responded partially, though not fully, as to the primary.

At this time, however, he was not present, and she wanted him to be, and she was very annoyed that he was not. It seemed to her that his absence might very well be calculated to deny her deliberately her vicarious contact, and this was certainly sufficient to justify annoyance, or even anger. It was quite likely, moreover, that he had been counseled in his perversity by a shrewder and more vindictive head, and it was her conviction, after considering it, that this head was surely the bald one moving around behind the bar at this very moment. She was well aware that Roscoe did not like her and wished that she would not come here any more. Though it was antipathy unstated, it was perfectly apparent in the shades of gesture and expression, and it was all right with her, as far as that went, because she did not like him any better than he liked her, which was not at all, and as a matter of fact she considered him a repulsive oil man absolutely. She had already drunk too much and passed the stage of compatibility, and she watched him with cold distrust as he filled her glass from a shaker.

“Where’s Emerson?” she said.

She had started using the Christian name quite a long time ago, right after she had begun coming in alone, and this was a mild excitement in her secret intimacy with the substance through the shadow. There was also a secondary pleasure in the use of the name in that it disturbed Roscoe, who unperceptively thought that Emerson himself was the object of her interest, and this was such a screamingly funny joke as the old fool would never understand.

“He isn’t here,” the old fool said.

“I can see that, of course. I can see perfectly well where he isn’t. What I want to know is where he is.”

“He’s upstairs.”

“In the apartment?”

“That’s right.”

“Isn’t that unusual?”

“What’s unusual about a man’s being upstairs in his own apartment?”

“Why do you persist in asking questions of your own instead of answering mine? If you want to know what I think, I think it is no way to treat a customer.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Lawes.”

“To me it seems very strange that he should be upstairs in his apartment at this particular time. It seems very strange indeed.”

“All right, Mrs. Lawes. It’s strange.”

“Yes, it is. It’s certainly strange. What I would like to know is, what is he doing up there?”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about that.”

“Are you sure? Are you quite sure that you wouldn’t know about that?”

“Look, Mrs. Lawes. A man goes upstairs to his apartment. Why he goes or what he does there is something I don’t know anything about, and it’s something I don’t want to know anything about. If you want to know the truth of it, it’s something I don’t figure is any of my business.”

“Are you being impertinent, Roscoe?”

“I hope not, Mrs. Lawes.”

“Why do you continually call me Mrs. Lawes? I wish you would not continually call me Mrs. Lawes.”

“What would you like me to call you?”

“Oh, never mind. I can see that it is quite futile to talk about it. Perhaps you can at least tell me when he will come downstairs.”

“I’d tell you if I knew, Mrs. Lawes, but I don’t.”

“Doesn’t he usually come down about the same time?”

“You never can tell. Sometimes he comes down one time, sometimes another. There’s no way to tell.”

“Do you know what it seems like to me? It seems like he may be deliberately avoiding me.”

“That isn’t true, Mrs. Lawes. You know better than that. Why should he avoid you?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? Perhaps you could answer that one yourself.”

“I told you he isn’t trying to avoid you at all.”

“It seems very strange, that’s all.” She lifted her glass and looked at him over the edge of it. “Shall I tell you something, Roscoe?”

“If you like.”

“You don’t like me, Roscoe.”

“I wouldn’t say that, Mrs. Lawes.”

“I know you wouldn’t say it. You wouldn’t say it because you are a gentleman, and a gentleman doesn’t tell a lady he doesn’t like her, and besides, it would be bad for business. I would judge that I give this bar about as much business as any other person in town. Isn’t that so?”

“You’re a good customer, Mrs. Lawes.”

She thought this was very funny, one of these classic, understatement kinds of joke, and she lowered her glass, and looked down into it and laughed for a while silently with a slight shaking of her shoulders.

“Yes. A good customer. I am quite a good customer indeed. Shall I tell you something else, Roscoe? Would you be shocked if I were quite honest with you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“The truth is, I don’t like you, either, Roscoe. I don’t like you a damn bit more than you like me. Does that disturb you?”

“It’s always better if people like you, but sometimes it can’t be helped if they don’t.”

“You’re a philosopher, Roscoe. You are a philosophical bartender. Emerson told me once that you used to read poetry to him. Is that true?”

“Em talks too much.”

“It’s true, then. It’s true, and it embarrasses you. Why are people who read poetry so often embarrassed by the fact that they read poetry?”

“I’m not embarrassed, Mrs. Lawes.”

“Oh, well, deny it if it is any comfort to you. It’s beside the point, anyhow. The point is, you and I don’t like each other. There may be more in this than lies on the surface, Roscoe, but whatever lies below the surface, we will leave there. Is that agreed? If so, I will tell you the obvious reasons why we don’t like each other. To begin, you don’t like me because you are a kind of self-appointed guardian of Emerson Page and Ed Page, who are your own precious pair, and it is your opinion that I am a predatory female on the prowl, and that Emerson is the one I am currently on the prowl for, and that he is the kind of guy who, in favorable circumstances, could definitely be had. This is the reason you don’t like me, Roscoe, and the reason I don’t like you is that you are a fool, and just why you are a fool, and just how big a fool you are, I will not say, because this is my secret and amuses me very much. What do you say to all this? Am I right?”

“I don’t think we ought to be talking this way, Mrs. Lawes.”

“Don’t you? Do you think it’s improper? Do you think I am an improper woman?”

“I didn’t suggest that, Mrs. Lawes.”

“On the contrary, you did suggest it. You very definitely suggested it. However, I am not at all offended, so we had just as well drop it. I will only repeat that what you think is very amusing. It would be even more amusing if you were capable of seeing just how amusing it is.”

“I’m glad I amuse you, Mrs. Lawes. I guess it’s part of my job. Now you will have to excuse me. I have a customer.”

“Certainly, Roscoe. You are certainly excused.”

He went off to his customer, and she was no longer amused. She was depressed and frightened, and she told herself that she would finish her drink and go away and not return to this place again, ever again, but she knew quite well that she would return nevertheless, just as she always did, because here was the secondary source of desire, and here, in truth, was the primary source also, but the primary source was strictly forbidden and heavy with peril and was susceptible only to vicarious attainment through the secondary.

I will go away, she thought, I will go away, and knew that she would not.

And so she continued to sit, and eventually had another drink, and in time Emerson Page came in behind the bar and stood across from her in the borrowed significance of which he did not dream.

“Hello, Mrs. Lawes,” he said.

I will be quite casual, she thought. I will be merely a lady who has stopped in for a drink in the most natural way.

And she looked at him and felt the stirring of her early hatred and subsequent concession, a reaction of conflict that resulted from his being in her mind both an interloper and a medium, and she was not casual in the least.

“Where have you been?” she said.

“Upstairs in the apartment, taking a break. I was out earlier, and it pooped me. Hot. I’ve never seen it so hot around here. Hundred and ten at three o’clock, I understand.”

“Was Ed with you?”

“Ed? Not much. You couldn’t drag her out of that air-conditioned apartment on a day like this.”

“I didn’t mean was she out with you earlier. I meant in the apartment.”

“Oh. Yes. She was with me. Still there. Did you want to see her, Mrs. Lawes?”

“Why do you call me Mrs. Lawes? Why don’t you call me Lisa?”

“Lisa, I mean.”

“I’ve told you and told you to call me Lisa. Perhaps it’s significant that you always call me Mrs. Lawes. Maybe it’s a kind of unconscious sign that you don’t like me.”

“Oh, come off it, Lisa. Of course I like you.”

“I’m not so sure. Roscoe doesn’t like me, and Ed doesn’t like me, and it’s quite possible that you don’t like me, either.”

“Whatever gave you the idea that Ed doesn’t like you?”

“I have a feeling about such things. It’s practically infallible. I can always tell.”

“Well, this is one time your practically infallible feeling is all wrong. Ed likes you very much.”

“Really?”

“Certainly.”

“You’re not just telling me that?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why doesn’t she ever come to see me? Why doesn’t she ever invite me to come to see her? The only time we ever meet is when we happen to be here at the same time, or accidentally somewhere.”

“Well, to be frank about it, Lisa, the Laweses and the Pages have just never moved in the same social circle. I guess Ed would naturally be pretty shy about trying to move in. She’d be afraid someone would get the wrong idea about it.”

“That’s silly. That’s perfectly silly. Avery likes you. He likes you better than anyone else.”

“I don’t know about that, but, anyhow, it isn’t the point.”

“No? Can you tell me just what is the point?”

“I’m afraid not. It’s pretty confusing to a simple guy like me. I don’t know exactly what the point is, but I know what it isn’t, and it sure as hell isn’t just whether or not you happen to like a guy.”

“You know what I think? I think you’re only rationalizing. You have a feeling of inferiority and are trying to convince yourself that it’s something else.”

He laughed. “All right. Maybe that’s it.”

“Not that it matters, because you are obviously not telling me the truth, anyhow. The truth is, both you and Ed dislike me and don’t want to have any more to do with me than is necessary.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“Do you think I am lying?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Lisa! Listen to me. Ed and I both like you. We like you very much, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Well, in your case I may be open to conviction, but in Ed’s, I’m certain I am right.”

“No, you’re not. You’re absolutely wrong.”

She picked up her glass and saw that it was empty and set it down and pushed it toward him.

“Then we had better have a drink together.”

“Are you sure you want another?”

“Quite sure. You needn’t worry about it. I’m used to drinking a great deal.”

“I know.”

“What do you mean, you know?”

“Nothing, Lisa. It was just a remark.”

“To me it had an unpleasant sound. As if it meant something.”

“Wrong again. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

He fixed drinks for them. He would have made hers light, but he knew very well that she would have realized it immediately and made an issue of it, so he stuck to the prescribed ratio. She tasted it and was satisfied.

“She’s very lovely,” she said.

“What?”

“Ed. She’s very lovely.”

“Oh. Yes, she is, isn’t she?”

“How long have you been married?”

“Ten years. A little longer.”

“Ten years is a long time.”

“Not with Ed. Not nearly long enough.”

She thought of the things that had happened to her in the last decade, and it seemed like a very long time indeed. A long, bitter time. She wondered what kind of life it would be that could make ten years seem short. “A lot can happen in ten years,” she said.

“That’s right. In ten years Ed and I have come from a cheap short-order place to this. I don’t mean it’s so much, after all, but it has made money for us, and it has made us happy. It’s what we wanted, and it’s what we got.”

“Some people are lucky to get what they want.”

“Sure they are. And you’re one of them. It seems to me that you’ve been a hell of a lot luckier than most.”

“Does it? Well, it would be quite futile to try to convince you otherwise, I can see that. Besides, it makes absolutely no difference what you believe, so it is unnecessary to try. Do you still love her?”

Emerson looked at her for a moment with a stricken look in his face, as if the sudden, brutal inference that he might not love Ed left him mute and isolated in a terrible emptiness. After a moment he laughed at the incredible idea.

“Excuse me for laughing, Lisa. It’s just that I find the idea of not loving Ed completely unbelievable.”

“Why are you so sure? I don’t mean love her the way they say it gets after you’ve been married for a long time. You know the way I don’t mean. A dull kind of business of mutual respect and devotion to servitude with an occasional tepid concession to love. I mean, do you still want her and hunger for her with passion?”

He was a guy with practically no false modesty, and he was rarely embarrassed, but now he was, and he wished that she would quit talking this way. He wondered how the hell it turned out that he was always having a Lawes get intimate with him. She was looking down into her glass with fierce intensity, and he had the strange, stripped feeling that she was seeing in the pale liquid a kind of mental picture of him and Ed in bed. This he considered an invasion of privacy, and it made him angry as well as embarrassed, and he had a hard time containing his anger. He managed it only by reminding himself that she was a woman with normal needs who was married to a personable dud and that her needs must be unfulfilled. She was starving, he thought, and he was truly sorry for her.

“I love her the same as I always have,” he said.

She shook her head, still staring intently into the glass.

“That’s an equivocation. That is obviously an equivocation.”

“Look, Lisa. I don’t think you want me to give you a clinical description of Ed and me making love.”

She looked up at him across the bar then, and he was shocked by what he saw in her eyes, and what he saw was hate and pain. He realized at once that she had been torturing herself deliberately by speaking as she had, and there was almost, but not quite, a flash of insight into the reason she had done this.

“What I think,” she said, “is that you are a man and are incapable of loving her properly for that reason for no other. Men are by nature dull and coarse and are neither sensitive nor tender enough to love properly.”

“Don’t talk like that, Lisa.”

“And now you are angry with me.”

“No, I’m not angry. I just don’t want you to talk like that about Ed and me.”

She slipped off the stool and stood beside it erect and quite steady in spite of the amount she had drunk.

“Despite your denial, it is quite apparent that you are angry, and it is also quite apparent, as I said before, that you dislike me very much.”

“Damn it, Lisa, do we have to go over that again?”

“If you didn’t dislike me, you would come to our party. You and Ed.”

“What party?”

“The one Avery is having at the country club Saturday night. It is only a small party for a few people.”

“No one has asked us to come.”

“I’m asking you now.”

“Well, I don’t know. Saturday night is a pretty busy time around here.”

“You see? You just don’t want to come. Already you are making excuses.”

“Does Avery know you are inviting us?”

“What Avery knows or does not know is not pertinent. I have the right to invite someone to the party if I choose. The point is this: Will you come or will you not come?”

“All right, Lisa. We’ll come. Thanks for asking us.”

“Not at all. Eight would be a good time. Sometime around eight.”

She turned and walked steadily across the room and outside into the street, and Roscoe walked down to Emerson behind the bar.

“That’s a crazy woman,” he said.

“She’s just had too much to drink, Roscoe.”

“Sure. She’s always just had too much to drink. People don’t drink that way for fun, Em. There’s something crazy in them that makes them do it.”

“She’s hungry, Roscoe. She’s married to a dud.”

“Avery?”

“That’s right. He’s a dud.”

“So that’s why she’s after you!”

“Don’t be silly, Roscoe. She isn’t after me.”

“The hell she isn’t! You just be sure she never gets you cornered, that’s all.”

“Don’t make me laugh, Roscoe. I feel sorry for her.”

“In my opinion, it’s wasted sympathy. She’s the most quarrelsome damn woman I ever saw.”

“I told you, Roscoe. She’s frustrated. Frustrated people get that way.”

“Okay. I’m just a damn dumb bartender, and I don’t know anything about frustrated people or the way they’re supposed to get, but I know a woman on the make when I see one, and this is a woman on the make. She’s a bad one, Em. I’ve got a feeling about her. You take an old man’s advice and keep hands off.”

“You shouldn’t have said that, Roscoe. You know how it is with Ed and me.”

“Sure, Em, I know. I guess I talk too much.”

“It’s all right.”

Roscoe went back to work, and Emerson kept remembering Lisa’s eyes, the hate and pain in them.

It was for me, he thought. The hate was for me.

This was something he could not understand, and it disturbed him very much. He had not intended to have a second drink so early, but he poured it and stood there drinking it.

Section 2

In the street, the dry and searing heat came up around Lisa from the pavement. She went directly home, but when she was there she did not go immediately into the house, but went instead around the house into the back yard and down past the old summerhouse to the edge of the bluff overlooking the river and the wide bottom land. The river below was a gray and withered vein in the blistered body of earth. Beyond the river, marking the far boundary of the bottoms, the ridge was an ugly protrusion of bone with its quondam green flesh darkened and shrunken away. She stood staring out across the river and the bottoms to the ridge, remembering her recent insanity in the bar, frightened and impaired by her perverse penchant for self-destruction, and pretty soon she lowered her eyes to the rocks and tangled brush at the foot of the bluff that fell away almost perpendicularly before her. She began to wonder what it would be like to throw herself down, and she could see quite vividly for a moment her broken body in the brush, all that was left of the hunger and hope and perversity that she had been, and she felt for herself in death a great pity. It would be a great relief to be dead, she thought, but the prospect of dying was a terrifying prospect, because dying was not a part of death but the last part of living, and if she were to throw herself down upon the rocks among the brush there would be to endure the eons of seconds in descent and final pain.

Shrinking away from the thought and the edge of the bluff, she went back a few yards to the garden swing and sat down. It was getting quite late. Sunlight had ascended the ridge beyond the river and would soon slip upward off the crest to leave the last of the visible world in a long summer’s dusk, but there would be little relief in the dusk from the sun’s heat, for that was held in the earth itself and its appurtenances. Even the swing on which she sat was quite hot. She could feel the narrow slats like brands across her body. The oppressive air seemed to swell and contract with the undulating sound of unseen cicadas, and she could hear behind her, approaching on the dry grass, someone moving with slow and heavy footsteps.

It was Avery. He sat down beside her and sighed and let his head rest against the back of the swing.

“It’s so hot,” he said. “It takes the strength out of you.”

“Yes.”

“Wouldn’t it be more comfortable in the house?”

“I suppose it would.”

“What are you doing down here?”

“As you see, I am sitting in the swing and looking across the river to the ridge.”

“I used to sit here a lot when I was a kid. I would sit and watch the river and try to imagine what it was like when this was the frontier and the wagon trains were going west.”

“I know. You’ve told me about it.”

“Have I? I’m sorry if I’m repetitious. What have you been thinking about while you’ve been here?”

“Just before you came I was trying not to think at all, and before that I was standing at the edge of the bluff and wishing that I had the nerve to throw myself down.”

“You don’t mean that, Lisa.”

“Don’t I? All right, have it your own way. I don’t mean it.”

“I’ve tried very hard to make you satisfied.”

“Oh, it isn’t your fault that you’ve become involved in an impossible situation. I am well aware of that. It’s my fault, and I am perfectly willing to acknowledge it.”

“It’s not your fault. So far as I can see, there is no blame attached to either of us. I wish you would stop being so ready to condemn yourself.”

“It must be very annoying to you.”

“No. I only wish I knew why you get so depressed. Have you had a bad day?”

“Not particularly. It was neither better nor worse than most other days, which is bad enough, God knows.”

“Perhaps you need more to do. Something to keep you occupied and interested.”

She laughed. “You mean like occupational therapy? Thank you for being so concerned.”

“You’ve been drinking. Have you been to Em Page’s bar again?”

“Yes. I was there for quite a long time and had quite a few drinks.”

“I thought you had decided not to go there alone any more.”

“I did decide that. I promised myself that I wouldn’t go, but now I’ve started going again. I’m very good at breaking promises. It’s one of the things I’m best at.”

“You say that as if you were proud of it.”

“I’m not proud of it. It’s the truth that I can’t think of anything I’ve ever done in my life that I’m proud of. Not a single thing. It is only that I am very tired and worn out with pretending. There is a certain relief in facing things squarely. It’s called catharsis, I think. I went to a psychiatrist once, and that is what he called it.”

“There is also a certain relief for some people in assuming guilt that is not properly theirs. I didn’t know you had gone to a psychiatrist. When was it?”

“I was in college at the time.”

“Why did you go?”

“My parents sent me because I tried to kill myself, and it frightened them. I was very cowardly about it, of course. I might have done it in a way that would have been certain if I’d had the nerve, but I didn’t. I only took some sleeping tablets, and it was not successful.”

“It is not always unsuccessful. My mother did that, and it worked very well. She took the tablets at night and was dead in the morning.”

“I was under the impression that your mother died of a heart condition.”

“That’s the impression that practically everyone is under, thanks to the code of the Laweses. In the code of the Laweses, unpleasant things are carefully disguised as something else. But that is irrelevant and hardly worth talking about. Why did you try to kill yourself?”

“For the same reason your mother actually did kill herself, I suppose. Because I felt that I didn’t want to live any longer.”

“That’s hardly an answer.”

“Yes, it is. It is the answer to the question you asked.”

“All right. Why did you feel that you didn’t want to live any longer?”

“Well, that’s another question and needs another answer. I could say that I was depressed, but then you would want to know why I was depressed, and pretty soon I would have to tell you something you certainly don’t want to hear.”

“If we are going to make a success of our marriage, there are many things, I think, that I should hear.”

“Are you still holding to the hope that we can make a success of our marriage?”

“Aren’t you?”

“No. It is quite hopeless.”

“Then why do you stay?”

“You know why I stay. Because I promised to try for a year, and the year is not up.”

“But you are quite good at breaking promises. It’s one of the things you’re best at. Isn’t that what you said?”

“Nevertheless; this is one that I am trying to keep. I will go away if you want me to, however. You only have to say so.”

“I don’t want you to go, Lisa. Our year is just over half gone. I’m still convinced that we can reach a satisfactory adjustment in time.”

“You think we can learn to love each other? You honestly think that?”

“Perhaps not. Not in a physical way, at least. But there are other values.”

“Spiritual values, you mean? One hears so much about them, but I’m not sure I know just what they are. I am no philosopher, you understand, but it seems to me that thought and emotion do not exist independently. They must surely have at least a physical source, and if the source is no good, if it is distorted or in some way wrong, the thought and emotion are also distorted and wrong, and that is just too bad for the person concerned.”

“Do you deny the possibility of any kind of correction?”

“In my case, I deny it. Last December in Miami I honestly thought that it might be possible, and I have tried to go on thinking it, but now I am sure that it is not so.”

“Have you never loved anyone at all, Lisa?”

“Are you sure you want me to answer that? I told you that I am very tired and worn out with pretending. If I answer, I will tell you the truth.”

“I wish you would.”

She had not looked at him since he had sat down beside her. She did not look at him now. She continued to start out across the river valley to the ridge on the other side, and the light had now left the crest, and the darkening air swelled and collapsed and swelled again with the persistent rhythm of the unseen cicadas in the listless trees.

“Very well, then,” she said. “I have loved more than once with an ardor that would surprise you. In the beginning there was a girl named Alison, and it was a long time ago. It seems to me, anyhow, like a long time. She was tall and slim and strong and very good at games and things like that, and it was my opinion that she was the most wonderful person who had ever been born or was ever likely to be born. I loved her very much, and for a while she loved me too, but then she didn’t love me any more, and this was because of something that happened. I wrote her a note and lost it, and someone found it, a teacher in the school we went to, and that was the end of it, of course, and it was all my fault. She said that I was careless about the note, which was true, and I didn’t blame her for being angry, and I still don’t blame her. No one understood about it, and we were treated like criminals, and it isn’t right for someone like her to be treated that way. I would have given up everyone else for her sake, the whole world, but she said that I was a fool and that she never wanted to see me again. It wasn’t quite that way, however. I did see her many times afterward, but we were like strangers, and it was far worse than not seeing her at all. Do you want me to go on?”

“I’m not sure that I understand what you are trying to tell me.”

“I think you are. I think you are very sure. Later, one summer at a lake, there was someone else. It didn’t amount to much. It was just something that happened in the summer and was not expected to last or to mean any more than it obviously did. After that there was no one else for quite a long time, but I was often very depressed, and it was then, sometimes during that period, that I took the barbiturates but did not die. I wanted to die, I believe I was sincere in that, but I did not want to do any of the things that would have made dying certain, and after the attempt which failed I did not try again. Eventually I was glad for a while that I hadn’t succeeded in dying, however, for I was in college then, Midland City College, and there was a teacher there who taught French. She was French herself, I believe, or had been born in France at least, and she was very sleek and sophisticated, and all the men in her class were excited about her, which was a great joke on them that they never understood. It was wonderful with her at first, as if I had been lifted to a new, exhilarating life, but it couldn’t last long because of circumstances. Because of her position in the college, I mean. You can see that, of course. The perils were multiplied, and the consequences of exposure were far too severe to be risked indefinitely. I have found that nothing can survive in the shadow of a constant threat. Nothing on earth has the strength for that.”

She stopped and waited and was apparently listening for some sound in the hot dusk, but actually she was only giving him time to say something or strike her or do what he felt impelled to do in the circumstances. She still did not look at him, but she knew that he had not moved and was still sitting with his head back against the swing, and she had a feeling that his eyes were closed and had been closed all the time she had been talking. After a while he repeated his long sigh.

“Is that all?” he said.

“No, it is not all, but perhaps it is enough.”

“I want you to tell it all.”

“All right. Just as you wish. Bella was the last. I met her in a park during a particularly bad time, and we met there two or three times afterward, and I went to live with her in her apartment. It was never very good with Bella, not like with the others, but it was better than being alone, and I stayed with her until it was no longer possible. She found out that my family had money and wanted me to help her blackmail them, and it was this that made it impossible to stay. Against my will, she contacted my brother Carl and had him come to the apartment, and he came and paid her five thousand dollars, and this was the night he took me away with him and three or four days later took me to Miami.”

He stirred and sighed again and spoke so softly that she could barely hear him.

“To meet me.”

“Yes. You were in bad luck. You probably won’t believe it, but I’m truly sorry.”

“Why did you marry me?”

“For asylum. Carl thought that marriage would eventually convert me to normalcy, that it was the only way. He had been very kind to me, and I wanted to please him. He wanted me to change, and I honestly wanted to change myself. I even convinced myself that it would be possible in the way you offered, but now I know that it is not possible and can never be accomplished. I’m sorry for the hurt I’ve done you.”

“You needn’t be. I deserve what I’ve received.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“I had no capacity for marriage myself. I was using you as much as you were using me.”

“Oh, that. That’s different.”

“Yes? How?”

“Impotence can be adjusted to. Even compensated for. If only that were between us, we would have no great problem. Anyhow, it will serve no purpose now to weigh the blame. You said that yourself a little while ago, and I agree with you. The only question is, what do you intend to do about it?”

“Do? What’s to be done?”

“I must say you are taking it very calmly. Don’t you find me disgusting? Don’t you want to strike me or curse me or even kill me?”

“No.”

“I don’t understand it.”

“Maybe I am too tired. Do you think you are the only one who has ever been tired or depressed or has wanted to die?”

His voice did not rise with emotion. It was perfectly flat and lifeless. She turned her head and looked at him for the first time since his arrival, and he was sitting as she had thought he was, with his head back and his eyes closed, and his face had in the dusk the stiff, waxen look of a face that had been embalmed.

“I told you I should go away,” she said, “and now I will go.”

“Break your promise?”

“I think you are now willing to relieve me of it.”

“No. I am not.”

“Why? Do you want me to stay so that you can punish me in some way? If you do, I will not blame you.”

“I don’t want to punish you. I am in no position to assume a judicial role, God knows.”

“Then why do you want me to stay?”

“Because I am obligated by the fraud I practiced on you, which was as great, in spite of what you say, as the one you practiced on me. Because I cannot release you without first trying to help you. What does it matter? You have made a promise, and I will hold you to it.”

“You are being kind, and I wish you wouldn’t. No good has come of kindness. Carl was kind, and you can see what it has come to.”

“I will take you somewhere for treatment.”

“I won’t go. No good has come of treatment, either. If you have faith in treatment, why haven’t you sought it for yourself?”

“I don’t know. At any rate, I won’t try to force you to do anything you don’t want to do. Do you intend to stay?”

“If you still want it.”

“I do. I am trying to think why it is that I want it, and I believe it is because I am convinced that this is the last chance for both of us, and if it can’t be the beginning of something better, it should at least be the end of everything bad.”

“All right. If I am going to stay, I had better tell you that I invited Emerson and Ed Page to the party Saturday night.”

For a moment he did not understand what she had said, his mind struggling to adjust to the incredibly quick shift of hers from their personal tragic relationship to such petty business. Actually, the shift was not so abrupt nor the new subject so unassociated as they appeared, but this was something he did not know.

“Party? Oh, yes. Em and Ed? Why did you do that?”

“Because I wanted them to come. They are the only people in Corinth I can tolerate. Do you object?”

“No. Of course not. I’m a little surprised that they accepted.”

“It was he who accepted. I don’t think he wanted to, but I rather tricked him into it.”

“Well, they’re welcome. I like Em. Perhaps he’ll help to make the evening bearable.” He opened his eyes and stood up slowly, as if the action required tremendous effort. “I’m going up to the house now. Are you ready to come?”

“Not yet. I want to sit here a little longer.”

“Will you be all right?”

“Perfectly. If you are afraid I may throw myself off the bluff after all, you needn’t be. I am really too great a coward.”

Turning, he walked away. She listened to his footsteps receding on the dry grass. The valley of the river was filling with darkness.