Stolen Pleasures. Gina Berriault
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had removed his shirt, and the lamp shone on the smooth flesh of his long chest, on flesh made slack by the downward pull of age. He stood in the doorway, silent, awkward, as if preoccupied with more important matters than this muddled seduction.
“We ought at least to say good night,” he said, and when she complied he remained where he was, and she knew that he wanted her to glance up again at his naked chest to see how young it appeared and how yearning. “My door remains open,” he said, and left hers open.
She closed the door, undressed, and lay down, and in the dark the call within herself to respond to him flared up. She imagined herself leaving her bed and lying down beside him. But, lying alone, observing through the narrow panes the clusters of lights atop the dark mountains across the channel, she knew that the longing was not for him but for a life of love and wisdom. There was another way to prove that she was a loving woman, that there was no fatal flaw, and the other way was to give herself over to expectation, as to a passion.
RISING EARLY, SHE found a note under her door. His handwriting was of many peaks, the aspiring style of a century ago. He likened her behavior to that of his first wife, way back before they were married, when she had tantalized him so frequently and always fled. It was a humorous, forgiving note, changing her into that other girl of sixty years ago. The weather was fair, he wrote, and he was off by early bus to his mountain across the bay, there to climb his trails, staff in hand and knapsack on his back. And I still love you.
That evening he was jovial again. He drank his blackberry wine at supper; sat with her on the sofa and read aloud from his collected essays, Religion and Science in the Light of Psychoanalysis, often closing the small, red leather book to repudiate the theories of his youth; gave her, as gifts, Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart and three novels of Conrad in leather bindings; and appeared again, briefly, at her door, his chest bare.
She went out again, a few nights later, to visit a friend, and he escorted her graciously to the door. “Come back any time you need to see me,” he called after her. Puzzled, she turned on the path. The light from within the house shone around his dark figure in the rectangle of the open door. “But I live here for now,” she called back, flapping her coat out on both sides to make herself more evident to him. “Of course! Of course! I forgot!” he laughed, stamping his foot, dismayed with himself. And she knew that her presence was not so intense a presence as they thought. It would not matter to him as the days went by, as the years left to him went by, that she had not come into his bed.
On the last night, before they went upstairs and after switching off the lamps, he stood at a distance from her, gazing down. “I am senile now, I think,” he said. “I see signs of it. Landslides go on in there.” The declaration in the dark, the shifting feet, the gazing down, all were disclosures of his fear that she might, on this last night, come to him at last.
The girl left the house early, before the woman and her son appeared. She looked for him through the house and found him at a window downstairs, almost obscured at first sight by the swath of morning light in which he stood. With shaving brush in hand and a white linen hand towel around his neck, he was watching a flock of birds in branches close to the pane, birds so tiny she mistook them for fluttering leaves. He told her their name, speaking in a whisper toward the birds, his profile entranced as if by his whole life.
The girl never entered the house again, and she did not see him for a year. In that year she got along by remembering his words of wisdom, lifting her head again and again above deep waters to hear his voice. When she could not hear him anymore, she phoned him and they arranged to meet on the beach below his house. The only difference she could see, watching him from below, was that he descended the long stairs with more care, as if time were now underfoot. Other than that, he seemed the same. But as they talked, seated side by side on a rock, she saw that he had drawn back unto himself his life’s expectations. They were way inside, and they required, now, no other person for their fulfillment.
Nights in the Gardens of Spain
THE BOY BESIDE him was full of gin and beer and wine and the pleasant memory of himself at the party, the great guitarist at seventeen, and he had no idea where he was until he was told to get out. His profile with that heavy chin that he liked to remind everybody was Hapsburg hung openmouthed against the blowing fog and the cold jet-black ocean of night.
Berger had no intention of forcing him out, but to command him to get out was the next best way of impressing his disgust on his passenger. “I asked you when you got in, friend, if you had money for the bridge toll and you haven’t answered me yet. You want to get over this bridge tonight and into your little trundle bed, you look for that two bits because I’m sick of paying your way wherever we go and getting kicked in the fact for a thank-you. What the hell did I hear you say to Van Grundy? That you got bored by musicians because all they could talk about was music?” His breath smelled of cheese and garlic from all the mounds of crackers and spread he had eaten, not the kind of breath to accuse anybody with. “And that meant me, of course, because I’m what’s known as your constant companion, that meant old ignoramus Berger. For a guy who’s got all the famous relatives you’re always bragging about—big dam builders, big mummy diggers, big marine commandants—you ought to be able to come up with a miserable nickel once in a while.” He held out his hand for the coins that David was searching for and found.
“What the hell.” David gripped his guitar between his knees again, settling back uncomfortably. “You sore because they wanted me to play?”
He shifted into low to start the car again. “You don’t know what anybody wants, you’re too busy playing all night.”
The boy waited a minute, then sprang the big psychological question with a rare timidity in his voice: “You sore because it’s me that’s going to play for Torres tomorrow?”
“Jaysus Christ, I’m sittin’ next to Freud here!” he cried, disgusted.
They went on in silence over the long bridge. The deputy at the toll gate reached out his hand to take the coins that Berger pressed into it with his gray-gloved fingers, suede driving gloves to keep his hands warm so that he could commence to play soon after entering a room, but David wore no gloves, came with cold, thin hands into a room and played slickly, charmingly, his first number and afterward blew on his fingers to impress upon the audience how cold they were still and how much they had accomplished even so.
Along under the neons of the motels, assured by the rainbow lights and the traffic signals that the time had passed for his abandonment on the bridge, the boy spoke again, “Listen yourself, I’m not the one who’s destroying himself, you worry about yourself. Some day you’re going to explode, a hundred different colors and a sonic boom. Big little David, folks will say for miles around, got too big for himself. God, you slaughtered that Purcell. If you play that for old Torres he’ll ask for a change of rooms after you’re gone.” He unloaded now all the complaints accumulated against the boy—criticism of his teacher-companion that David made to friends: “Berger could be the best, good as Tomas Torres, but he doesn’t look the part, hasn’t got the urbanity, short you know, big shoulders, like a wrestler’s that don’t fit him, big face, and the way he telegraphs his mistakes to you before he makes them, like ‘this hurts me worse than you, dear audience.’ But the best, really the best, could have been the best, but came to it too late, a jazz musician until he was thirty, still got the mannerisms of a jazzman in a nightclub, smiling at the audience, smiling at himself. You can’t do that with a classic guitar. He’s good all right but he should have come to it at eighteen, twenty, then he would have been great.”
“Things come back to me!” Berger was shouting. “For a man of few friends, like you say I am, they come back to me!”
He drew the car to the curb, leaned across the boy to open the door. “Get out here, man. From here it’s just a mile to your mother’s place. I’d take you there but it’s a mile out of my way.”
“Under