Desperate Asylum

Section 1

Awakening very early in the morning, she knew at once that it was going to be a bad day. Bad days were in her life nothing unusual, of course, but some days were bad even in comparison with other days that were bad, and it had been that kind of day when she had taken the barbiturates quite a while ago, and it had been that kind of day when she had gone to the park and met Bella, and every time a day like that came along she knew that she would be far better off if she didn’t have to live it. She lay quietly in bed with the still house around her and the bad day ahead of her, and pretty soon she realized that it was Saturday, the day of the party at the country club, and that, however bad the day might be, the night would certainly be worse. Lying there with her eyes closed and not moving a muscle, she tried to think of a way to avoid the bad day and the worse night, but she couldn’t think of a way for the simple reason that there wasn’t any, and then she thought that she would continue to lie quietly in the darkness behind her lids until she went to sleep again, thereby at least-shortening the day if not the night, but she couldn’t do that, either. She opened her eyes and began waiting for whatever was going to happen to start happening.

In due time, she heard Mrs. Lamb, the housekeeper and cook, who slept out and came in early, clump across the back porch below and let herself in the back door with her own key. Later she heard the yardman working in the yard beside the house, though God knew what work there was for him to do with the grass and all the flowers seared and sapped by the relentless sun, and later still Avery came out of his room and down the hall and stopped outside her door. When he knocked softly, she twisted her head on her pillow and looked at the door but did not speak nor move in excess of the twisting of her head. She kept her eyes on the knob, waiting to see if it began to turn, and when it did begin she immediately closed her eyes and kept them closed. He came into the room and stopped a few feet from the bed and was silent for a minute before he spoke her name. She could hear him breathing and smell his shaving lotion, and she could see him in the dark and private little world behind her lids as he leaned forward slightly from the hips and peered at her to try to determine if she was waking or not. She did not answer, and he spoke again, and she still did not answer, and he went out and closed the door. Hearing his footsteps descending the stairs, she opened her eyes again and began to wonder what made some bad days so much worse than other bad days.

It is not, she thought, anything in the days themselves. Looking back on them, it is impossible to find any reason at all why these were the days when one particularly wanted to die, or to have others die, or felt that it was absolutely essential to do something to change the intolerable procession of degrading days, while at the same time one was irrationally terrified of any change whatever. No, it is not in the day but in oneself that the badness begins and grows with no discernible logic in its beginning and growing today rather than yesterday or tomorrow, and it is not a result of overt misfortune but of intangible oppression that builds and builds to the absolute certainty of proximate destruction. Therefore, since it is in oneself that it begins and grows, and since there is no logic in the beginning and growing, it follows that there is nothing to be done about it, except to bear it and get through it, and if one is lucky this is something that can be done.

She heard the yardman start the power mower and wondered why on earth he was starting the mower when there was no grass to cut. She heard Avery’s Caddy go past the house in the drive and wondered if Avery would be back before evening and hoped that he wouldn’t. She heard Mrs. Lamb’s heavy tread on the stairs and in the hall and waited for Mrs. Lamb’s heavy rapping to sound on the door. It did, and she took her time deciding whether to tell Mrs. Lamb to come in or go away or simply to ignore the rapping altogether, as she had done with Avery’s. After a while she decided that it would be just as well on the whole to get Mrs. Lamb in and out and finished with as quickly as possible.

“Come in,” she said.

Mrs. Lamb opened the door and stepped inside the room, leaving the door open behind her. She was a strong, blocky woman with a massive chests so tightly bound that it gave the appearance of being undivided, and Lisa had once, seeing the remarkable chest, had a joke pop into her head about it, a kind of humorous analogy with one part to be supplied, and the analogy was, what is to a woman as a dromedary is to a camel? The answer was, of course, Mrs. Lamb. There were several things wrong with the analogy, however, and as a joke it really had something wrong with it too, which was that it wasn’t, after all, a very funny joke. It was impossible, anyhow, to imagine Mrs. Lamb being amused by it.

“Good-morning, Mrs. Lawes,” Mrs. Lamb said.

“Good-morning, Mrs. Lamb.”

“Will you have breakfast this morning?”

“No, thank you.”

“You didn’t have breakfast yesterday morning.”

“I seldom eat breakfast.”

“Nor day before yesterday morning.”

“I know.”

“You ought to eat breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day. When you start having children, you will wish you had eaten your breakfast.”

“I consider it unlikely that I’ll ever start having children, Mrs. Lamb.”

Which was worse than the repudiation of a sacred function. It was dereliction of duty not to produce a Lawes, specifically a male Lawes, in an apprehensive world that was presently in the precarious position of having only one left. Mrs. Lamb was privately of the opinion that this production should have begun some months ago, and she was totally incapable of understanding how any woman could be reluctant to do the producing. She would have been almost willing to undertake it herself.

“I could bring it up in a tray,” she said.

“I do not want any breakfast, Mrs. Lamb.”

“Very well. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Yes, there is. You can go away and leave me alone.” Mrs. Lamb flushed and left, slamming the door, and Lisa began immediately to wish that she hadn’t said what she had, and then she began to wonder if it would be possible to remember even a fraction of the times she had said something and wished afterward that she hadn’t, and she knew that it would not. Oh, Christ, what a bitch you are, she thought. What a bitch you are, and what a day it has begun to be with your very gracious treatment of this woman who wished for nothing but to be kind and to bring you your breakfast on a tray. It is quite apparent already that this is a day which should be eliminated, that it would be a good thing to skip at once to tomorrow, but it is also quite apparent that the only way to eliminate a day is to live it, so there is nothing to be done, and after the day is the night, and what in Christ’s name is to be done with the night?

She was beginning to feel uncomfortable, and so she got out of bed and went into the bathroom and then returned and lay down on the bed again and began to think of those she had known, of Alison and Bella and others, who were no longer threats in themselves but were symbols of the threat that survived them. This was not good, was part of the bad day getting worse, and she tried thinking of Carl, how remarkably kind he was, and of Avery, how even more remarkably kind he was, and she wished to God they would quit crucifying her with their cursed kindness, and this wish made her feel guilty and debased and contributed more to the bad day getting worse than Alison and Bella and the others. Trying to achieve a kind of neutrality in her thinking, she considered the party at the country club, but this was no help because the party was assuming the proportions of a terrifying ordeal. And that, of course, was the clue to the bad day. When the past is a depressant and the future is a threat, the bad day is a trap between them, and there is no escape unless you can find it in a bottle.

Thinking of a drink, she began to want one badly, but it would never do to drink today because of tonight, which had to be gotten through somehow and would be difficult enough at best and could be survived only by drinking just ahead of time and just enough to establish and secure the lift that was her only protection. There had been other times when she had resolved not to drink, either for some specific reason or just because she was convinced that drinking was bad for her and should be stopped, and she had then tried substituting coffee for alcohol on the grounds that it was easier to do without something if you immediately put something else in its place instead of leaving an emptiness where it had been. Every time she had wanted a drink and was in danger of submitting, she had made or bought a cup of coffee and drunk it, but eventually she had given up this technique simply because it was impossible for anyone to go on drinking that much coffee indefinitely. Now, however, though it had never worked before, she decided that she would try it again, just for this one day, and she got off the bed and put on slippers and a robe and went downstairs to the kitchen.

It was very hot in the kitchen, because it was not air-conditioned like some of the rooms in the house. She found the glass pot of coffee that had been left over from Avery’s breakfast and put it on the stove and switched on the electricity and sat down to wait in a straight chair by the table. She could hear Mrs. Lamb vacuuming in the front part of the house. The power mower started up again outside and ran a little while and died, and she decided that the yardman was adjusting the motor or something, and that was why he was running it even though there was no grass to cut. It was really extremely hot. A still, oppressive heat in which you could hear, if you listened intently, a whisper of menacing movement. Perspiration gathered in her armpits and trickled down over her ribs. Strangely, the perspiration felt icy cold. She listened to the menacing whisper in the still heat and was suddenly aware that she was about to scream. She closed her throat abruptly upon the scream, and it died with a whimper in a spasm of pain. Getting up, she went to the cabinet where the china was kept and got a cup and carried it to the stove. She poured coffee into the cup and returned with it to her chair at the table. Sitting with her elbows on the table and her head supported by her hands, she stared down into the black liquid and knew that it wasn’t going to work this time either, the technique of substitution, and that she was certainly going to have a drink in spite of all tricks and resolutions. Once this truth was accepted, it was only reasonable to believe that the drink had as well come now as later. Leaving the coffee untasted in its cup on the table, she went into the hall and down the hall to the library, where there was a liquor cabinet. She got a bottle and a glass from the cabinet and carried them upstairs to her room.

Just one, she thought. Just one small drink will be quite sufficient, and there will be no need for another until tonight, when drinking will be expected and acceptable.

She poured the drink and drank it and lay down again on the bed and began to think about the party at the country club that night. It was going to be only a small party with a few people there to whom Avery thought he was obligated for one thing or another, and she had safely gotten through several more formidable affairs since she had come to Corinth, and there was actually no reason at all why it should be dreaded so excessively. She lay there and told herself this, but it did no good, and no matter how she diagnosed the situation or tried to see it for the small matter that it should have been, she understood that the party was somehow established in a pattern of peril, the consummation of the bad day that had started with waking, and that it should., if possible, be avoided at any cost. This was at first a feeling, but it was soon a conviction, and avoidance of the party was essential to survival. She started scheming how this could best be accomplished, and she came to the conclusion after quite a while that she would simply say that she was too ill to go. This would not be, anyhow, an absolute lie, for she was really not feeling at all well. She had slept poorly in the night, and there was a terrible pressure inside her skull. What she needed, she thought, was to go back to sleep, and if she had another small drink she might possibly be able to do it.

She had it and began to think about Ed Page, who had been there waiting to be thought about all the time but had been resisted up to this point. Now she thought about Ed deliberately in all the ways she had thought about her over and over again, and this was a mistake, as she very well knew, for Ed was the siren of a shining, deadly island, the symbol of a particular ruin. In the torment of thinking, however, there was at least a kind of release from depression, the insubstantial peace of submission. Inviting Eel and Emerson to the party at the club had been a suicidal thing to do, exceeding even her usual proclivity for doing suicidal things, and she had alternated afterward between excitement and dread, and finally had refused to think about it at all. But now it was different. Now there was nothing to be lost in thinking about it, because she was herself not going to the party, and it no longer mattered. She lay and thought, and in the uneasy peace thus established, because she was exhausted, she eventually went back to sleep.

She awoke in the middle of the afternoon with the feeling that she had been on the brink of disaster and had awakened just in time, not to avoid it, but to delay it. Her heart was beating hard and fast, and she lay and listened to its beating, feeling the force of it against her ribs. Danger had slipped with her from the sleeping to the waking world and was hovering with infinite patience in the silent room. She got up abruptly and the room, with the motion, became violently alive, its parts merging and spinning and absorbing in an instant all the light of the world. She sat down on the edge of the bed in darkness until the dizziness passed, and she remembered that she had eaten nothing all day and would certainly have to take something into her stomach soon, even though the thought of it made her feel faintly nauseated. Mrs. Lamb was surely gone, because she worked only a half day on Saturdays, but perhaps she had prepared a cold lunch of some kind before she left. If so, it would be in the refrigerator, and she decided that she would go down and see, but first she would have a shower and get dressed.

She removed her robe and gown and stood looking at herself in the full length mirror of her dressing table. It was very strange how she felt about her own body, fiercely possessive with a kind of wild and terrible sadness, as if it were something apart that had been assigned to her custody for the care and protection she could not provide. It was like a child, her own child, and she had somehow failed it. Sometimes, looking at it, she would stroke it and croon to it and feel like crying because it was not stronger and lovelier and more like other bodies she had known. But now she saw it and felt only despair and wished never to see it again. Going into the bathroom, she had the shower and then returned a few minutes later to the bedroom and covered the body with clothing without looking at it again, except partially and quickly as was necessary in dressing.

In the hall below, she stood at the foot of the stairs and wondered what it was she had come down for. She had come for a specific reason, she remembered, but she could not remember what it was, and now that the dizziness had passed and she had been a little revived by the shower, she had completely forgotten about not having eaten and the necessity for food. She was only aware that whatever had followed her from sleeping to waking had also followed her from the bedroom to here and would follow her wherever she went in the house, and that it was therefore necessary to get out of the house at once. She went out the front door and around the house into the back yard and down all the way to the swing near the edge of the bluff overlooking the river valley. A few nights ago, she recalled, she had sat here and told Avery the truth about herself. There had been a kind of satisfaction in it at the time, but it had not come to anything, apparently, and in fact nothing had been said about it since, and she suspected that this was another example of his God-damn depressing kindness that was always placing her under some sort of moral obligation. The yardman, she noticed, was no place to be seen or heard. No doubt he had found it too hot to work, and it was indeed excessively hot. It was dry and blistering heat, destructive heat, the kind that could easily kill you if you weren’t careful. It was, as a matter of fact, far too hot to be sitting in the swing, it was already getting unbearable, and the only thing to do was to go back into the house in spite of whatever was waiting there. In the house she could probably find some gin and soda and lemon juice and make a tall Tom Collins and drink it slowly in the living room, which was air-conditioned. In this way, it would be possible to wear out the time until Avery came home to take her to the party she wasn’t going to, and maybe tomorrow would be a better day, but this was hardly likely.

She got up and went back into the house and found the ingredients for the Tom Collins and made it. In the living room, she sat in a large chair and looked out through a window into the bright still day and sipped the cold drink slowly, and by sitting quietly and thinking as little as possible she was able to induce a kind of semi-trance through which the remainder of the afternoon slipped silently in an illusion of peace. The only time she moved from the chair was when she became aware that her glass was empty and got up to fill it. She returned at once and was still there when the light outside had lost its brightness and Avery came home.

He came into the living room and said, “Hello, Lisa.”

“Hello,” she said.

“How was your day?”

“Rotten. My day was rotten.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Please don’t be sorry. I’m sick of people being sorry about things.”

“Perhaps the party will cheer you up. You need to get out more.”

“Do I? Is that what I need? It’s very comforting to know that there is someone around who knows immediately just exactly what it is that I need.”

“I don’t want to quarrel with you, Lisa. Are you drinking a Tom Collins?”

“Yes. That’s what it is. It’s my second one, and earlier I had two straight whiskeys, or maybe three.”

“I wouldn’t drink too much before the party if I were you.”

“I know you wouldn’t. That’s because you are a stronger character than I. You are not I, however, which is your good luck, and it doesn’t matter about the party, anyhow, because I have decided not to go.”

“Not go to the party? Why?”

“Must I have a reason? Very well. I’ll give you several and you can take your pick. I hate the club. I hate your sickening friends. I hate dull parties. I just prefer to stay at home. Is any of those satisfactory?”

“I think you are being unreasonable.”

“Do you? No doubt I am.”

“It would be different if you were ill.”

“Is that what you want me to say? All right, I’m ill. I’m ill and can’t go to the party. That’s what I had planned to tell you, anyhow, and it would have been simpler if I had done it to begin with.”

He was silent for so long a time that she turned her head and looked at him, and she was surprised to see that his face was deathly white with the mouth so distorted that it looked like an ugly, ragged wound. She realized that he was very angry and was controlling himself by a monstrous exertion of will. She had never seen him angry before, and she felt suddenly a stirring of excitement, almost a sense of exhilaration. After a moment, he stepped forward deliberately and slapped her across the face. It was a strong blow that knocked her head around and would have sent her sprawling from the chair if the arm had not prevented it. Her glass dropped from her hand and rolled across the carpet, leaving a trail of wetness and spread slowly through the pile.

“I will tell you something,” he said. “You will go to the party tonight.”

The blow struck, the excitement was gone. In its place was utter acceptance of the inevitable in the belief that nothing could ever have been different from what it had been and nothing could be changed from what it was bound to be. She was a fool ever to have thought otherwise. The bad day was going and the worse night was coming, and she had survived the one in order to fulfill her commitment to the other. So much was quite simple and quite true. She leaned her head back against the chair and closed her eyes.

“All right,” she said. “If you want me to go, I will go.”

Section 2

The Corinth Country Club hired a live orchestra every Saturday night. Once in a while, for something special, it was an orchestra from Midland City, and sometimes it was even one of the name bands you had probably heard on radio or had at home on platters, but usually it was the Corinth High Flyers, which it was tonight. Besides the piano, there were six instruments in the orchestra, seven if you counted both the saxophone and the clarinet, which were played at different times by the same Flyer, and people were always saying that it didn’t make much sense to lay out all that money for an outside organization when you had something just as good or better right at home. The girl vocalist was good too, a damn sight better than most of the girls up in big time, and it was just one of those things that she wasn’t up there herself, but of course everyone knew that the breaks made all the difference in that sort of success, and for each one who made it there were at least a dozen just as good who didn’t. The vocalist was billed as Flame Farrell, a platinum blonde whose name alluded to temperament and not pigmentation. According to Merlin Collins, who claimed to have learned from experience, her temperament could be incited to fever heat by the sight of a twenty-dollar bill.

In Merlin Collins’ opinion, virility was an obligation. His own was uncertain, as a matter of fact, and he was therefore constantly trying to prove that it wasn’t by attempting to seduce as many women as possible, preferably the wives of his friends in order to give them an idea of what they were missing in their routine engagements. It was part of his technique to call all women baby. Take the average woman at the right time, he always said, you could do almost anything with her if you called her baby. They all liked it, every damn one of them, even the ones who pretended they didn’t, and the ones who liked it most were the ones who were getting a little older than they liked to admit. Like the one old Avery Lawes had picked up in Miami, for instance. Chances were she was pushing thirty, and she tried to act like she was in cold storage or something, but, by God, she was a damn attractive woman in a snotty kind of way, and that was the kind that surprised you. The reserved ones, that was. It was really something to see the way the reserved ones fell apart in the end, all of a sudden with a God-damn bang, and there was always a fire inside. That was why they always acted so cold and snotty, of course, because they knew the fire was there and had to be watched all the time to keep it from getting out of control.

The night had been bad from the beginning, just as Lisa had known it would be, and it kept getting worse as the party progressed, which was true only because it was part of the pattern of degeneration and not because of any particular pressure the party itself imposed. Actually, it was a very casual party, and Lisa’s obligations as hostess were practically nil. Three tables had been pushed together to accommodate the guests in a group and to serve as a base of operations, and once the guests had been greeted and orientated, it was mostly no more than a matter of letting them alone to operate, and of picking up the tab afterward, which was Avery’s concern and not hers. Emerson and Ed Page had not yet come, however, late as it was, and this disturbed her and aroused in her an unreasonable fury, because it was perfectly apparent that they were delaying their arrival in order to deprive her as long as possible of the only pleasure she might have in the party, which was at best a masochistic pleasure, and it was even possible that Emerson had lied to hurt her, had promised that he would come and bring Ed when he really had no intention of doing so at all. She began to curse them silently, calling them in her mind the vilest names she could think of, and when at last she saw them enter the room and come toward the tables, all the strength that had been shored by anger ran out of her like so much water, leaving her drained and depleted and a little ill.

Avery had also seen Emerson and Ed enter, and he went to meet them and escort them to the table, and she understood that he had been watching for them and was anxious to make them feel welcome and at ease in company that was new to them. He started introducing them to the people who were present at that moment, and Lisa watched and waited as they approached her place, and as she waited she listened with accustomed ears to the thin, despairing cry of her desire in the wasteland of her heart. In Ed tonight there was more than loveliness. There was awareness of loveliness, and a pride in it, a conscious assumption of pride made essential by shyness and the necessity to assure herself that she had nothing to fear or to feel ashamed of. And above all, though she didn’t know it, she was the siren of the shining, deadly island, a high, sweet voice in lotus-laden air.

They reached Lisa finally, and Avery said, “Here are Ed and Em, Lisa.”

She looked up at them and hated them because they had caused her anguish and were causing her anguish now and weren’t even sensitive enough to know it, and she thought that it would be much better and easier to bear if only they knew or were capable of knowing.

“I had given up,” she said coldly. “I thought you weren’t coming.”

Emerson looked apologetic. “Because we’re late? We’re sorry about that. We had trouble getting away at the last moment.”

“It doesn’t matter. It was inconsiderate of me to invite you in the first place. You will probably find it a very dull party and wish that you had stayed away.”

“I’m sure we won’t. I’m sure we’ll enjoy ourselves.”

“Are you, really? I must say I doubt that very much. I find it impossible to believe that anyone could enjoy one of our parties. However, now that you are here, you might as well try. Why don’t you have a drink the very first thing? I find that it helps if you start drinking immediately. And you mustn’t stop. Whatever you do, you mustn’t stop.”

Avery laughed. “That’s what I call good advice. I think we could make almost anything out of the stuff on the table here. What will you have?”

“A martini?” Ed said.

“Certainly. How about you, Em?”

“That’s good for me too, but couldn’t we make them ourselves?”

“Not the first one. After this, you’re on your own.”

He made the martinis and poured them and handed them to Ed and Emerson.

“As you can see, this is pretty casual,” he said. “People just wander off and wander back. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course not.” Emerson tasted the martini and found it below Roscoe’s average. He turned to Ed. “Would you like to dance, honey?”

“I’ll finish this first. Perhaps Lisa will dance with you.”

Lisa shook her head and said coldly, “No, thank you. I don’t think I care to dance.”

At the other end of the room the High Flyers quit playing one tune and began playing another.

Avery excused himself and went off to see about something.

Emerson and Ed finished their martinis and went off to dance.

Almost everyone finished something and went off to start something.

Except Lisa. Lisa sat in a posture of primness and listened to the crying of her desire.

And at the time that must have been established for it, Merlin came and sat down in the chair beside her.

She looked at him with a feeling of contempt and revulsion, and she would certainly have got up and walked away if she had known that he was the catalyst that would change despair to ruin, but this was something she did not know nor even suspect. In fact, she was achieving gradually a precarious remission of emotional tension and was beginning to regret her rudeness to Avery and to Emerson and Ed, and she was thinking that surely she could wear out the rest of the terrible party with superficial friendliness at least.

And so she smiled and said, “Avery’s gone off to see about something. Everyone else is dancing, I think.”

“Except you and me, baby.”

He used the two personal pronouns with a nuance of intimacy that made her flesh crawl, as if he had created an improper understanding between them merely by speaking the words in conjunction, but she only smiled again, feeling inordinately proud of her ability to do it, and lifted the glass she had been holding with the fingers of one hand.

“That’s right, of course,” she said. “Except you and me.

“You like to dance with old Merlin?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. Do you mind?”

“No. Rather not dance myself, to tell the truth. Don’t care much for dancing. Consider it a waste of time.”

He laughed windily and wetly, blowing a fine spray. Some of the spittle struck her cheek, and she jerked her free hand up automatically to wipe it away. He was quite drunk, however, and did not notice either his offense or her reaction. His face was flaccid, the skin loose and ugly under his eyes, the muscles sagging at the corners of his mouth. Fumbling a case out of his pocket, he offered her a cigarette. She took the cigarette and put it between her lips, and he found his lighter after a short search and provided flame. She pulled smoke through the tobacco and into her lungs in an acrid and soothing cloud, creating on the cigarette a bright red head.

“How about a little air?” he said. “Hot in here, don’t you think?”

“It’s hotter outside.”

“Oh. Guess so, at that. No air-conditioning outside. Have to think of a better excuse. Let me see, let me see. Got it. Darker outside. How’s that? Tempted? Does its being darker outside suggest any advantages over being inside?”

“None that I can think of.”

“Really? Old Avery must be neglecting your training. Suspected as much, to tell you the truth. If you don’t mind my saying so, you’ve got a frustrated look. Damn shame. Beautiful women shouldn’t be frustrated. Come on, baby. Let old Merlin unfrustrate you. Greatest little unfrustrater around.”

He leaned forward abruptly, and she felt the minor trespassing of his hand under the table, and then there was a shrill scream of pain, like a woman’s scream, and he was standing on his feet with his chair turned over behind him and one hand clapped to his cheek and tears running out of his eyes, and in the eyes were fear and a kind of foolish incredulity, and he kept saying over and over with a bubbling sound, “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” and she understood after a moment, though she could never remember the action specifically, that she had thrust the red coal of her cigarette into his face.

Everyone was looking at them, naturally, everyone arrested and fixed in a terrible tableau, and even the High Flyers trailed raggedly to silence in the realization that something had happened and was terribly wrong. Then Merlin turned and ran out of the room with an awkward, loping gait, still holding his seared cheek and whimpering with pain and saying Jesus, Jesus over and over, and someone who turned out to be Avery detached himself from the fixed members of the tableau, and right away the tableau began to break and move in its many parts, and the High Flyers began to play again, and everyone started pretending that nothing had happened. And Avery approached Lisa in the desolate ruins of the worse night that had become worst.

“For Christ’s sake, what have you done?” he said.

“It seems that I have burned the cheek of Merlin Collins with a cigarette.”

“Why? Can you possibly tell me why?”

“Because he is a fool and deserved it.”

“Are you in a position to condemn fools? Anyhow, that is no reason for doing a thing like that.”

“Isn’t it? Then I did it for no reason.”

“I insist on knowing why you did it, Lisa.”

“I have told you the reason. If you don’t believe me, you had better ask Merlin.”

“I shall. I shall also ask him to forgive you for what you have done, though God knows why he should.”

“You may do as you wish. First, however, I would like to go home.”

“It’s impossible. I have guests. I can’t take you home now.”

“I will not stay here any longer. I didn’t want to come, and you compelled me, and now I will not stay any longer.”

She could see that he was angry again, as he had been at home in the living room, and she thought that the only reason he did not strike her now, as he had then, was that they were now exposed to the public. His anger did not disturb her. She regretted a little, perhaps, that she was causing him so much trouble, for she felt sincerely that he did not deserve it, but it was quite evident by now that the trouble was inevitable, something to which she was party but over which she had absolutely no control, and so the regret was really futile and not worth expressing.

Standing, she said, “I’ll go outside to the car. If you want to come, you can come. If not, it doesn’t matter.” She walked across the room and outside, and it was quite a long walk with everyone watching her, the kind of situation that would usually make your arms and legs go in all directions at once, but she felt strangely at ease, not in the conviction that the worst of the night had passed, but in the serenity of resignation to progressive: evil, and she walked gracefully with her head back and her slight body erect. She went to the parking area and got into the front seat of Avery’s black Caddy and sat there with her eyes closed, and after quite a while a man came and got in beside her. The man was not Avery, but she knew instantly without opening her eyes just who he was, and she began to laugh quietly with the merest whisper of sound because it was so perfectly part of the pattern that he should be who he was.

“Avery didn’t want to leave his guests,” Emerson said. “He asked me to drive you home. Do you object?”

“It would not matter if I did. You would still drive me home.”

“If you prefer, I’ll tell Avery to ask someone else.”

“No. It was necessary that he ask you and that you should agree.”

“Why do you say that? I don’t understand you.”

“Don’t you? Perhaps it’s just as well.”

He backed the Caddy out of its position between two other cars and drove out of the parking area.

“Didn’t you drive Avery home from your place one night?” she said.

“Yes. A long time back.”

“I know. In November. The night before he left for Miami. I disgraced myself tonight, didn’t I? Everyone will be talking about it. It was a very beautiful public spectacle, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know, Lisa.”

“Of course you know. How ridiculous to say you don’t. You were there and saw it all quite clearly. Do you know why I burned that fool’s cheek with my cigarette?”

“Knowing Merlin, I can imagine.”

“Because he pawed me? He did that, of course, but it wasn’t the real reason. It was just a kind of precipitant. Would you care to know the real reason?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? I’m just in the mood for telling you if you’d like to know.”

“I’m quite sure.”

“Oh, very well. Be as smug as you like. Do you know that you are very smug?”

“I don’t try to be.”

“Of course you don’t try. It just comes naturally. Because you are a nice guy who does things. That’s what you are. A nice, smug guy who does things.”

“I’m sorry you find me so unpleasant.”

“You say that you’re sorry, but you’re not. You don’t care at all. You don’t care because you despise me.”

“I don’t despise you, Lisa.”

“Certainly you despise me. Shall I tell you why? You despise me because I’m despicable. That’s very logical, isn’t it? How can you deny anything as logical as that?” She was very pleased with this. She had reasoned logically and confounded him completely. She began to laugh again quietly to herself, continuing to sit with her head back and her eyes closed, and it wasn’t long before she was aware that the Caddy had stopped, and then she opened her eyes and saw that they were parked in the car port beside the house.

“Here we are,” Emerson said. “I’ll see you to the door.”

She looked at him slyly. “Won’t you come in for a drink?”

“No, thanks, Lisa. I don’t think I’d better.”

“You see? I said you despise me, and you do. You won’t even come in for a drink when I ask you. It would only be common courtesy to come in for a drink.”

“God damn it, I do not despise you. I like you very much. I just think it would not be a good idea to come in for a drink.”

“Why? Are you afraid I would seduce you?”

“Certainly not.”

“Would you be surprised if I tried?”

“I don’t think you are going to.”

“Why? Do you think I am incapable? Is that what you think?”

“I don’t think anything about it at all.”

“Perhaps you don’t trust yourself. Is that it? Are you afraid you could not resist?”

“All right, Lisa. Perhaps that’s it. Anyhow, whatever it is, I am not coming in for either a drink or a seduction, and I will take you to the door and no farther.”

“No. Wait a minute.”

He had started to open the door beside him, and now he paused and turned back toward her in the seat, and she moved suddenly with incredible speed and was upon him in an instant, her mouth over his mouth and her body pressing against his body, but he was of course only the necessary medium, and the mouth and the body she sought were not his nor even present, and in her was the wild, aberrant unleashed hunger, and her harsh whisper in her throat had a strangled, dying sound.

“Here,” she whispered. “Right here, right now.”

He sat passively under the attack, neither resisting nor responding, thinking that she would soon withdraw, but she continued to press upon him and devour him, and he began to think that he himself would surely strangle and die. Raising his hands to her wrists, he tried to break her grip but couldn’t, and so he took the fingers of her hands and pried them loose and pushed her away from him. Then he opened the door and got out quickly and went around the car and opened the opposite door. She was now sitting quietly in the seat with her hands folded in her lap, and he felt for her a deep, bitter pity that was like nothing he had ever felt before.

“Come on, Lisa. Let me take you to the door.”

She got out and started to walk toward the front of the car, but when he took a step after her, she stopped and whirled around with that incredible and savage speed, her voice a thin projection of venom that shocked him and made him feel suddenly withered and sick.

“Go away! Go away at once before I kill you!”

Turning, she went on alone around the car and up across the porch and into the front hall. She stood just inside the door and listened to the Caddy’s motor start and diminish and die away, and whatever it was that had been waiting in the house all day and had been waiting when she had left the house at the end of the day was still waiting now that she had returned to the house in the middle of the night. She stood there for a few minutes, wondering where she should go and what she should do, and then she walked into the living room and turned on a light and began walking slowly around the room, stopping and looking at things and picking them up and setting them down again. After a while she came to a console radio-phonograph that was hardly ever used by anyone, and she got down on her knees and began to look through the records in the cabinet, and after she had looked at perhaps a dozen she came to one called Death and Transfiguration. She remained on her knees in a posture of prayer, looking at the label on the record and thinking that she had tried in a way to achieve a transfiguration, and it had not worked, it had only gone from bad to worse to worst, and perhaps after all death was the only transfiguration, the only possible real change, and anyhow this would surely be a solacing record to listen to in the ruins of this worst of all nights. Getting up from her knees, she put the record on the machine and sat down to listen to it, and she found in the music a great and cathedral-like gloom that was tremendously satisfying. When the record was finished, she sat still and permitted the mechanism to start it playing again, and she continued to sit still and listen while the machine repeated the record a number of times, and one of the remarkable things about it was that in all this time, which was considerable, she didn’t even seem to want a drink. Not until the Caddy came back into the drive did she get up and stop the machine and go upstairs. In her room, she took off her dress and her shoes and lay down on the bed in darkness and listened to the small sounds involved in the elimination of time and space between her and Avery, his entrance into the house, his ascent of the stairs, his entrance into the room, his sigh as he sat on the edge of her bed.

“Lisa,” he said.

“Yes?”

“How are you feeling?”

“I am feeling quite well, thank you.”

“Are you? I’m glad that one of us is feeling well, at least, because I am not. I am feeling tired and defeated. I feel as if I had come to the end of things.”

“It’s my fault. I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. Once I could have helped it, and I should have done it then, but you can see that now it is much too late.”

“Yes, I can see that. I see it and accept it. Did you mind my asking Em to bring you home?”

“No, I didn’t mind, but it would have been better if you hadn’t. I tried to seduce him and was unsuccessful.”

“Why on earth did you do that? I don’t understand.”

“Because he is a man and I am what I am? The answer is very simple. It wasn’t him at all. It was someone else. Now do you understand?”

“I think that I do. As nearly as it is possible for me to understand.”

“It is certainly devious, isn’t it? Perhaps you think it is unnatural. Do I disgust you?”

“No.”

“Certainly I must disgust you. And you must also certainly hate me. I will feel better about it if you hate me.”

“I told you that I am tired and defeated. I am much too tired to feel disgust or hatred or anything else. I can’t even feel disgust or hatred for myself, which is something that has not been true since I was a small boy.”

He got up slowly from the edge of the bed and went out of the room, and she lay in the silence he left behind and did not move. In time he came back and sat down again on the bed, and something hard lay lightly on the bone above her heart.

“Do you know what this is?” he said.

“It feels like a gun.”

“That’s what it is. A gun. Do you know what I am thinking?”

“You are thinking that you will kill me.”

“Would you mind a great deal if I were to kill you?”

“I don’t think so. I have often wanted to die, and once I tried, and I think I would be grateful if you killed me now.”

“Do you remember what I said when you asked me the last time why I wanted you to stay?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“What did I say?”

“That if our marriage was not the beginning of something good, it should at least be the end of everything bad.”

“That’s right. That’s what I said.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m thinking about it.”

He thought about it, and she lay with the weight above her heart and listened alone to the dry interior weeping, the vestige of impossible tears.