Three Short Novels. Gina BerriaultЧитать онлайн книгу.
she did with this prosperity brought words of praise, whether it was the accumulation of exquisite clothes or of oil paintings from the Museum of Art exhibits, the selection of silver and crystal and antiques, or the artistry of her suppers for a few guests. After two years in the house near Twin Peaks, they moved to a modern house surrounded by a Japanese garden, and the combining of her antiques with the modern architecture, all the harmonious combining was like a confirmation of the happiness of the family. It was further confirmed by color photographs in a magazine of interior decoration and by the article written by one of the editors who stressed the wonderful compatibility of antique and modern that had, as its source, the compatibility of the family with everything beautiful. No member of the family, however, appeared in the pictures—only Vivian at a far distance, her back turned, a very small figure in lemon-yellow slacks way out among the etching-like trees of the garden, glimpsed through the open glass doors of the living room. It was in bad taste to show the family, she understood; they would appear to be like the nouveaux riches, wanting to be seen among their possessions. Not to show the family gave more seclusion to the home and a touch of the sacred to the family.
In the second spring after their move to the new house, it was included in a tour of several beautiful homes in the city, the tour a charitable endeavor by the young matrons’ league to which she belonged. While the woman who came once a week to the house was cleaning it the day before the tour, Vivian locked up in cabinets and closets small valuables that could be pocketed, although there was to be a leaguer in almost every room to act as hostess. It was customary for the owners of the houses in the tour to be away all day, and she had planned to spend the day with her mother, shopping for summer clothes. But the night before, carefully wiping out with a tissue the ashtrays she and Russell had been using and rinsing their liquor glasses, she knew she would remain in the house—not to hear words of praise and not to prevent any thefts, but to stand anonymously by and watch the flow of strangers who had paid their tour-ticket price in order to enter into the privacy of her home.
With the other women who were acting as hostesses, she awaited the invasion. Wearing a pink spring suit and white gloves, a white purse under her arm, she was, she felt, sure to be mistaken by the crowd for one of them. The early ones, at ten o’clock, entered with a reverent step because it was their first house of the day; but the later ones entered with less reverence, commenting loudly on plants and garden lamps as they came up the front path, taking in the living room with gazes already somewhat jaded by their acquaintance with other homes of secluded beauty. She watched them as she sat on the arm of a chair, chatting with a hostess, or wandered with them through the house. They were chic women, young and old, and they were impeccably dressed men with oblique faces as if seen in attendance upon her in a mirror of a beauty salon and never in direct confrontation; they were eccentrics, one a young woman in a garishly green outfit, with a pheasant feather a foot long attached to her beret and switching the space behind her as she stopped frequently, her feet in a dancer’s pose, to glance around with large, transfixed eyes and a saintly smile; and there were two seedy brothers, shuffling and gray, who had the look of small-time realtors from the Mission district. For brief moments Vivian met eyes with the invaders, their roundly open eyes, their shifting eyes, their eyes ashamed of their curiosity, their envious eyes, and their eyes desiring ruin. She caught sight of a hole in the sock of one of the seedy brothers and of their run-down, polished shoes. She mingled with them up and down the hallways, on the flight of stairs between the two floors, and in and out of rooms, following a group into the serenity of the bedroom of herself and her husband and observing with them the wide, high-swelling bed, the ornately carved bedstead and the plum silk spread, the highboy with its shining brass hardware; the lamps, one on each side of the bed, a yard high with cylindrical shades of white silk; the black marble ashtrays; and the sand-color, thick carpeting that hushed everyone’s step. They were fascinated by the small photos of Russell and David in pewter frames on her dressing table, and by a snapshot of the three of them in ski clothes. They bent to see the three faces closer, and after the others had done this, she, too, leaned closer to see for herself.
13
In the summer of the third year of their marriage they bought an old, large house near Clearlake on four acres planted with fruit trees. They invited two and three couples for weekends and spent the time in boats on the lake, over elaborate breakfasts and buffet suppers, drinking at the bars to survey the patrons and reclining at home in the sun or under the trees if the sun was too hot.
David was off on his own all day. He was twelve, that year, and although she knew that his distance from them all was due, in part, to a dislike of their friends, it was also, she felt, a sullen and almost violent resistance to any tracing of him, either the tracing of him in his roaming during the day or of his present self into the past, as the eyes of their friends traced him into childhood, and as hers did, and Russell’s. They saw him cruising around on the lake with another boy in somebody else’s motorboat, or laughing with another boy as the two bailed out a dinghy, or they did not see him for an entire day. Sometimes he did not come in for meals and ate leftovers up in his room, wanting more privacy than was given him in the kitchen where the guests went in and out and tried to talk with him.
One night, however, he came to watch them dance in their bare feet in the parlor. He sat on a kitchen chair near the door, his arms crossed over his chest and his legs stretched out toward the dancers. The women tugged at his shirt to persuade him to dance with them, and one drew up another chair by his and stroked his hair and called him shy. When at last he danced with the woman, he danced without the hesitation and clumsiness and deafness to the beat of the music that were signs of shyness. He danced with the woman almost instructively, a glide of insinuation in his hips and a contempt and an urging of her in his gaze that he kept on her belly and legs.
The night was warm, the house warmer than the night, containing in all its rooms the heat from the day. The women wore no more than they had worn during the day, cotton shorts and halters. The woman he was dancing with, the wife of the bank manager, had loosened her high pile of red hair so that it fell in strands along each side of her face. That she was short and stocky, that her long hair and bare feet made her almost comically squat, she was apparently not aware. They danced a foot apart, each flattering the other, seductively, with every move. The days of his avoiding them, of crossing to the other side of the road, of eating alone in his room at night—all were cast off in an eruption of melancholy desire. His eyes appeared almost black, they were open wider, and there was a firmness in his hands on the woman like that of a man experienced in arousing, and the vigor in his slender body ridiculed the men in the room who were slumped earthward, who were debilitated by the sun of the day rather than enlivened by it, as he appeared to be. Vivian recalled the comic dance he had performed as a child, the uncontrolled dancing, the stomping with no grace or rhythm, the prancing that was nothing more than self-tripping. The woman cupped her breast with one hand, a gesture that she did not appear conscious of. It must be, Vivian thought, a habitual caress, probably one that she gave herself when alone. The woman was smiling at David, and since he was watching her belly and legs, it appeared that she was watching herself with his eyes. When the music was over, she collapsed onto the couch, falling into her husband’s lap.
“You ought to get him in the movies,” said the bank manager. His hands had gone up to protect himself from his wife’s falling body; in the next moment he had removed his hands from her, jerking his leg away also. He was a tall thin man whose high, complaining voice Vivian would often hear when she stood in the marble rotunda of the bank, and once she had watched him stride from his carpeted enclosure, slam the gate that only swung noiselessly, and run up the stairs, too impatient and full too of complaints to wait for the slow elevator.
“You remember that kid? You remember that thirteen-year-old kid?” Duggan, an attorney, a small, blond man who wore sports clothes that seemed with their expensiveness to dwarf him. Even when his lips were not moving in speech, they moved with anticipation of speech. “You remember he ran away with that woman? I attended the hearing. She had six kids and was thirty-eight and I forgot to mention she had a husband too. They took her 1941 Plymouth to Tucson and shacked up there in a motel—Big Indian or Little Indian Motel—stayed for four days, I think it was, before they were apprehended. She said she loved him, she said she loved him more than her husband, she said he was the greatest lover of the century. One of her boys was two and a