Three Short Novels. Gina Berriault
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8
On the night when the lights of the city came on again, she walked several miles before she hailed a taxi, elated by the glitter and glow of the signs, by the suffusion of colors, by the colors pulsing through the tubes, crackling and humming; by the animation of the signs whose borders ran in a demented pursuit of themselves, or each letter of the letter before it; and by the lights reflected on dark windows and gliding along the windows of passing cars. She saw the change of colors upon her white coat and upon her legs as she walked and knew that her face was tinted with the colors that she walked through as were the faces of other strollers, and this coming on again of every light was like an absolving of everyone in the city and like a mindless promise of further experiences that might call for further absolving.
The Manufacturer—she called him that, amusing herself with the anonymity of it—appeared again in the lounge. He brought no friends with him and he spoke to no other patrons. Their first night, when everyone had left her alone with him, she had gone up to his room and she had been delightedly aroused. Yet, after, she had wanted to seem uncaring if he were not to return, she had wanted to seem as elusive as she expected him to be, and with that she had brought him back to her. When they lay together again, his hands caressing her seemed to be discovering her for the first time, not having truly known her that other time.
He stayed four days in the city and promised to return in two weeks. Now that the war was over, he said, he would be in the city more often, conferring with his brother-in-law who was an investment banker. She no longer called him, jokingly, the Manufacturer. His name was Leland Talley, and she bought him six fine handkerchiefs with his initials in blue silk thread, and read her intimate knowledge of him in those fancy letters that could be felt under her thumb.
When he returned in two weeks and telephoned her from the hotel, she asked him to come to the house. It was early afternoon and David was home from school. He stood up from the floor, where a number of his toys were set about in some inviolable scheme, and shook hands with the visitor. Talley’s manner with the boy was brusque and affable, his eyes veering away, distracted by other things; he seemed to resist being charmed by the boy’s beauty, as though to be charmed by it was a sign of weakness on his part and the boy’s also. David engaged in a fervent telling of an involved and unfollowable tale, his voice high and nervous and monotonous, his face without expression as he talked on and on intrusively, as if he had gone deaf and could not hear her and her visitor talking between themselves, as if he saw their mouths moving without voices.
Up in her room she dressed to go out to supper with her lover, who sat on the bed, his drink in his hand, watching her every move—the lifting of her arms for the slip to slide down, her hips within the slip as she walked to the chair, and the extending of her leg as she drew on the stocking with a graceful working of her fingers. Whenever she glanced at him as she talked, he narrowed his eyes, as if caught at some speculation that she was not a party to. Was he thinking that a serious affair with her might break up his marriage? She resented his hardheaded thinking about it, and yet was pleased that his resistance to her was falling away in her presence.
While she was brushing her hair and he sat watching her lifted arms and the pale curls springing back from the brush, David slipped in through the half-open door and, speaking at once, bowing his head over a toy he carried, he walked directly to the man on the bed. Something was wrong with the toy, he said, some wheel, some part was lost or stolen. “Right here, right here,” he said, his voice high and hypnotized, “here, here. It’s a clock. The lost wheel pushed the blue wheel. It was a red wheel but it got lost. The hands don’t go. The big one—it was yellow—fell off and this one is loose, the little one, the green one. The wheel is gone on the other side. Right here, you see? The red wheel is gone.” His complaining voice was a high, driving chant that, possibly, could endure to the end of the night. She called to him, but he failed to hear her. She called his name again, but he would not look at her or come to her. Instead, he sat down on the floor, his head still bowed over the clock. “Right here, right here, it used to be a big yellow hand. It used to go around when you wound it here. You could make it any time you wanted, you could make it any time of day.” He went with them down the stairs and to the front door, the clock left behind on her rug, warning them about the dog next door, instructing them as to what they were to do if the dog attacked them.
After that day, the appearance of her lover, every few weeks, did not result in her son’s acceptance of the man. Instead, David avoided him, apparently ashamed of his behavior that first time, or not ashamed but brooding over some other way of appeal. He kept apart from them and was not inquired after by her lover, who brought a gift for him occasionally but left it lying on the sofa or on a table. And in the early months of her desperate love for the man, she could not, she knew, be tolerant of her son’s intrusion if he were driven to intrude. In the time between her lover’s visits she was consumed by her longing for the man. She thought of him incessantly, and on his visits underwent a complete abandon at the first touch of his hand. She lay in his hotel room for hours while he went out into the city to attend to his appointments, waiting for him to return to the bed and to her body.
She no longer sang in the hotel lounge because the time there sometimes interfered with his visits. The months—almost without her consciousness of them, because the present was a combining of longing and fulfillment—ran on through the first year, and each last day and last night of his visits were always for her the peak of that combining. It was understood, at the beginning, that his wife was ailing and that he could not, now, approach her about a divorce, and that, since his factories were in a state of upheaval with the end of the war and his plans were to move with his wife to San Francisco and to become a partner in his brother-in-law’s investment firm, for a time their love must await the stabilizing of the other factors in his life. Over supper tables and in his hotel room or her bedroom, he talked a great deal about his factories, about conversion. There were complications in his reports that were unsolvable for her, and yet she felt that he was not really attempting to establish the truth, the reality, for her, because he thought it too much for her to comprehend, that he was not telling her much of anything, only the skimming, only the jokes repeated by the clerical help, only the froth that rose from the turbulence of the business, from the heavy maneuvering. But this was enough, it was all she wanted to know, the rest was his domain.
With the diminishing of the intensity of their times together, in the second year, some certainty of the future had to compensate for the lessening. When he and his wife moved up to Hillsborough, a few miles from the city, his constant proximity, then, was a substitute for that certainty, was an approach to it. And yet, as the months went by, that proximity of both himself and his wife in a colonial-style home upon several acres of landscaped grounds served to make the certainty grow more distant.
He was as aware as she of the slow abating, but he was not apprehensive of the end; he did not appear to believe that the end was approaching simply because the zenith was passed. He was now involved with his brother-in-law in plans for investment in Japan and the Philippines, and something of his optimism was transmitted to their affair.
“Listen, there’s going to be big things in Japan,” he told her. “Got to start their exports going, got to help them rebuild. I’m going over and take a look around. You want to fly over with me?”
The invitation to go with him to Japan was an intimation of something more, a return to the zenith, even a promise that she was to be his wife; it served for several months as proof of the constancy of their love. Then he left without her, promising to take her along the next time, explaining that this time was to be for a minimum of days.
She drove him to the airport, and as they stood together in the corridor he said to her, to the crown of her head as she was fingering the buttons of his overcoat, “You know why we’re crazy about each other? It’s because we’re apart so much. If we go on like this, it’ll go down in history, won’t it? With those great passions? If we lived together, some of that crazy wildness might get lost, and I don’t want to lose a fraction of it. We’ve got something I don’t think anybody else ever had.”
She looked down at him crossing the ground to the plane, ready to wave should he look up at her in the window of the waiting room. He seemed a man designated to bring