Stolen Pleasures. Gina Berriault
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wife among them, thought that he was faking a fit to comically demonstrate the effect of the hostess’s bosomy proximity or her words in his ear, although that sort of fakery was utterly foreign to his shy, gracious, reflective person. Then, because it was foreign, they realized it was an act beyond his control. Those who were sitting near him got out of his way and stood back with the others, who had also risen, and his wife fell to her knees at his side.
For several seconds he lay rigid, eyes up, a froth along the lower edge of his neat, blond mustache, while his wife stroked his face and fondled his hands. The others walked around in a state of shock, conversing with mourners’ voices. Someone asked her if he had ever done that before, and she said, “No, never” and repeated it to the first question asked by the young doctor who, summoned by the hostess from an apartment upstairs, knelt down at the other side of the now limp man.
Claudia, the wife, stood away while the doctor with encouraging hands and Ah ups assisted her husband to the couch and laid him out, long and weak. She refused a chair, feeling called upon to stand in deference to unpredictable blows. The hostess embraced her waist, but she offered no yielding to this comfort and was left alone. She watched the shocked face of her husband watching abjectly the doctor’s face above his, and watched the stethoscope move over the exposed broad chest. The young doctor glanced up to ask her which arm had jerked, which leg, and replying that she had been too alarmed to notice, she saw his fleeting response to her person, the same response in the eyes of men and women seeing her for the first time—a struggle to conceal from her the emotion that a woman’s beauty aroused, whatever that emotion was, whether envy or desire or even fear. It lasted half a second, this consciousness of her effect, and was followed by devotion, which came over her with such force that she was again the girl she had been for him at the beginning of their nine years together.
When he stood up, shakily, joking weakly with dry lips, someone said the pickled mushrooms were hallucinatory and someone else laughed loudly and caved in. The hostess helped him on with his overcoat, and Claudia, her arm across his back, with the host on his other side, took him down the five slow flights in the elevator and along the street.
As she drove homeward she remembered with remorse their quarrel early in the evening. She hadn’t wanted to go to the party. “So they don’t know who the hell Camus is,” he had said, tugging the words up from his throat as he tugged unnecessarily at his socks. “Why don’t you get down to the human level?” They both had got down to the human level tonight, and now he was deeply asleep, his chin sunk into his muffler, his long legs falling away from each other, his hands in his overcoat pockets where, in one, he had slipped the doctor’s note with the name of a neurosurgeon. The doctor had given him no sedative, but his sleep was as heavy as doped sleep.
On the bridge they were almost alone, behind them the headlights of two cars and far ahead of them, with the distance widening, the red taillights of one, and her fear of his sleep as a prelude to death changed the scene of the dark bay and the jeweled, misty cities ringing the bay, changed the familiar scene into the very strange, as if, were he to open his eyes, that would be his last sight of it. She felt, then, almost ashamedly, that affinity with Camus again, and although Camus was dead, the adoration that had taken her to Paris seven years ago was revived in her memory. She had gone there alone and lived there for three months, the sojourn made possible by a small inheritance from an aunt, but the money had run out before the destined meeting could take place. It was true she hadn’t made much of an effort to meet people who knew him. How was she to do that? She had hoped that just by wandering the street where he might wander, a chance meeting would come about and he would see at first glance how far she had come to be with him. Yet in that time she had felt her pursuit was as embarrassingly obvious as that of a friend of hers who, enamored of Koestler, had managed a front seat at a lecture, and with her transfixed gaze had caused him to stumble a time or two over his words, and, later, had accosted him in the hall and proved how deep into his work she was by criticizing some points of his lecture in which he had seemed untrue to his own self. Nothing had come of her own obsessive time in Paris, and in despair—what was her life to be?—she had returned to New York. But she had refused to board the plane to San Francisco. In the waiting lounge a terrible prophetic sense had come over her: all the persons waiting to board that plane—the chic, elderly woman in black, the young mother with her small son in his navy coat and cap, the rest, all were to die that day. She had not yet left the lounge, she was still on the bench, unable to rise, unable to return to Camus and unable to return to her husband, when the plane crashed as it was taking off. She had gone back to the hotel and cried all day in her room, shaking with fear of her prophetic sense that, if she were to heed it again, would show her in old age, all beauty gone, all curiosity for life gone, all hope for a great passion gone.
On the long curving road down through the hills and into the town, only the low white fence between the car and the dropoff into space, her sleeping husband beside her, she felt again on the verge of something more. If she had found another existence, those seven years ago, her husband would have found another wife and gone on living; now, another existence for her would be the result of his dying. The sense of crisis was followed by guilt that came on as an awful weariness, and when she roused him and was helping him from the car, she felt in her body the same weight that was in his.
She pulled off his shoes and his socks while he sat on the bed, and he was asleep on his back a moment after she had covered him to his chin. His sleep dragged on her body as she undressed and slipped her nightgown on. It forced her down beside him punitively, and she lay toward him, her hand on his bare chest, persuading him with her hand, with her heart, to stay alive. Dear Gerald, sweet Gerald, stay alive.
All Sunday Gerald slept, wakened every few hours by Claudia, who was afraid he had lapsed into a coma, and she brought him milk and toast and fruit as an excuse for waking him. After poking around a bit that Sunday evening, trying to recall the sensations, the thoughts preceding the seizure, reading the papers, showering, he returned to bed at ten o’clock and slept until noon of the next day, when she wakened him by stroking the smooth, veined underside of his arm that was bent on the pillow, a half-frame for his pale, unshaven face. She told him that the neurosurgeon could give him an appointment no sooner than Friday of that week, and this information liberated his eyes from the startled frown. If the specialist was in no hurry to see him, then nothing much could be wrong. He flung off the covers, his legs kicking and pushing out into air, and sat up. “I’ll get up, I’ll get up,” he said.
Always he was already up and about at this hour, carving his fine wood sculptures or roaming the forest trails or the beaches, doing what he liked to do before he walked down the hill and caught the bus to the city and worked at his desk until midnight on the next day’s paper. Up he got, and the moment he was on his feet again she felt again the inertia that came of her acceptance of the way her life was. The fact that he was up again, ready to return to work without having missed a day, deprived her of this crisis in her life, this crucial point of change, and, alarmed by her reaction, she embraced him from behind, pressing her face against his back, kissing him so many times over his back that he had to bend forward with the pleasure of conforming to her love.
Claudia was in the tub when he left, and she imagined how he looked going down the hill, under the arcade of trees, a bareheaded, strong-bodied man of thirty-six, going to work at the hour when most men were about to return home. At that moment, imagining him disappearing, she felt the emptiness of the house, and in that empty house felt her own potential for life. She was aware of herself as another person might become aware of her as so much more than was supposed. And, the next moment, afraid that a prowler was in the house, she climbed from the tub, shot the bolt on the bathroom door, and toweled herself in a fumbling hurry. After listening for a long minute for footsteps in the empty house, she unlocked the door and, holding her kimono closed, went barefoot through the rooms, knowing as she searched that there was no one in the house but herself.
Some nights she ate supper at home, alone, reading at the table, and some nights she went down into the town to one of the restaurants along the water’s edge, went down with the ease of a resident in a tourists’ mecca and was gazed at with curiosity—an attractive young woman dining alone. And some nights she went out later in the evening, tired of reading, restless, to the bookstore that stayed open until midnight, to sit at a little