Cliffs of Fall Page 3

  After dinner, they went back to the fire. The living room was furnished, as rooms in summer houses often are, with the mistakes and discards of a town apartment. Unabashed, these had assumed a certain style of their own. The rug was a deep cocoa color, worn pale and thin near the door and by the sofa. The chairs, with one or two defections, tended toward dark green. There was a mosaic coffee table, made by a relative, and two ash trays that had seemed a good idea one hot afternoon in Cuernavaca. The same rash expedition to Mexico was responsible for a black and brown painting in which a man and woman stared at each other with unmistakable resentment.

  When the telephone rang, Clem put his coffee cup and saucer down on the uneven mosaic, where they rocked a little, and went into the hall. They heard him speaking loudly, as people do on a long-distance call even when the connection is good.

  “He doesn’t sound alarmed,” said Nettie.

  Sarah said: “One never knows. With these things.”

  Clem’s voice went on, with long pauses. Instinctively they watched the doorway, but it was Marion, not Clem, who first appeared there, startling in a coat and hat. She gave a polite but meaning glance at Nettie, who with a little gasp of recollection sprang up from her chair and left the room.

  In the drawer of the hall table there was an envelope that May had marked “Marion,” and this Nettie now passed on stealthily. “I hope it’s right,” she said, having no reason to doubt it.

  Marion, infinitely more assured than Nettie, put the envelope in an immense black handbag. “I’ll be over tomorrow,” she said. “And I hope Matt’s all right.”

  “Yes. Thank you. Good night,” said Nettie. She closed the front door. Clem, sitting on the stairs with the telephone receiver in his hand, was still talking, but with a terminal inflection. As she passed him, he reached out and touched her dress. Matt must be better, she thought.

  When she came back into the living room, Vernon was leaning forward as if he had been speaking earnestly. Sarah, Nettie noted, look confused. Nettie did not sit down, but started to assemble the empty cups on a tray.

  “Let me help,” Sarah said, taking up the coffeepot.

  “Don’t bother, really. I’ll just leave them in the kitchen.” Nettie was halfway to the door.

  “Matt is better,” said Clem, appearing in the doorway. “It’s a throat infection, apparently.”

  “I knew it,” Sarah said.

  “His temperature is down.”

  “I’m so glad.” The coffeepot waggled slightly. “Perhaps I should have spoken to May. What is she planning to do?”

  “She’s going to call me in the morning. It depends how he is—she may stay there a day or two.”

  Nettie took a firmer grip on the tray and walked on down the corridor. “Be careful,” she said over her shoulder to Sarah, who at once followed her with the coffeepot. “There’s a step.” She pushed open the kitchen door with her elbow. “Can you find the light? On the left. Thanks.” The light fell, dazzling, on aluminum saucepans and a huge white refrigerator. “Just put it anywhere. I’m not going to wash them tonight.”

  Sarah kept the coffeepot in her hands, but came across the room. “Nettie,” she began, with as much solemnity as haste would allow. “We would be so pleased if you would come home with us.”

  Nettie put the tray down carefully by the sink. Taking up the sugar bowl, she walked past Sarah and put it away in a cupboard. “Because of the ants,” she remarked apologetically. She returned to the sink and started to pour away the dregs from the cups. “I don’t understand,” she said. Blankly, she felt this to be true. It was her own stillness she did not understand.

  Sarah came and stood at the sink, so that it was impossible not to look at her. She had a flushed, uncomfortable expression and Nettie noticed that her eyes were not only pretty, but even kind. “No, of course. But Vernon feels—People around here gossip so. Unprincipled, really. You shouldn’t be exposed to that.” Sarah grew impatient before Nettie’s empty look. “And, of course, we’d love to have you.” Her voice ran down.

  It is really quite easy to have the advantage over people, Nettie thought—if you can be bothered. You just have to keep quiet and look at them. “I’ll have to see what Clem thinks,” she said at last. She finished stacking the rinsed dishes and dried her hands. She exchanged a hopeless little smile with Sarah. “You go ahead,” she said. “I’ll put the light out. Watch the step.”

  In the hall, she stopped to straighten a mirror. She felt that she had unlimited time at her disposal. She could hear voices raised in the living room, and for a moment stood still with a child’s pleasurable horror in listening to a grown-up quarrel. She stared into the mirror, exasperated —as Sarah had been—by her own unresponsiveness; to see her feelings reflected in her face would have made them clearer to her. But here was, simply, a strained, alarmed expression made the more unfamiliar by the care with which it had that evening been powdered and embellished.

  As he entered the room, she heard Clem’s voice, cold and angry. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “But don’t you think …” Sarah’s voice wavered anxiously. It was her fate that evening not to be understood.

  Clem broke in. “Good Lord, she’s like a daughter in this house. What an extraordinary idea. Perfectly extraordinary. In fact,” his voice rose on a short, humorless laugh, “if we didn’t know each other so well, I would say it was—downright insulting.”

  “Oh dear,” Sarah said. Vernon had not said a word.

  Nettie came further into the room and glanced at Clem. She saw that he had managed to be genuinely angry—angry in some way with her, too. She felt chilly, and walked past him to the fire.

  There was an arduous silence. The fire flared and crumbled, and flared again. Resting her arm on the mantelpiece, Nettie stayed with her back to the room, in an attitude of unintended pathos.

  “Oh, hell,” said Clem, concedingly. He laughed, more encouragingly, and reached into his pocket for cigarettes.

  “Why are things so complicated?” Sarah asked generally. Nettie looked round at her with compassion.

  “Let’s all sit down and have a brandy,” Vernon suggested.

  “That’s a rather better idea,” Clem said. “Sarah—never mind. No harm done.”

  She gave a nervous, relieved little laugh. “Oh, Clem. I can’t tell you how sorry—No, Vernon, of course we can’t. It’s so late. Clem, we must be going.” Suddenly active, she discovered her handbag beneath a cushion on the sofa. “Here it is.”

  “Are you really leaving?” asked Clem. He took her arm. They went into the hall. Vernon followed them, but stood back at the door to let Nettie pass. They did not look at one another.

  Clem was bringing coats, and Vernon’s hat, from the closet. Sarah kissed Nettie again and drew on her gloves. “Be sure to let me know how Matt is.” She let Clem kiss her cheek. “I do hope it isn’t anything serious,” she said. “Clem, dear, do forgive—”

  “No harm done,” he repeated. He smiled with complete good will; he almost looked pleased.

  Vernon took Nettie’s hand briefly and released it. He followed Sarah into the garden, and Nettie stood where he had left her, behind the open door. Clem, holding the door handle, watched them go to their car. He called good night, and waved once or twice with his free hand. Sarah called out that the grass was wet. A car door, improperly closed, was banged several times before Vernon started the engine.

  When the sound of the car receded, Clem closed the front door and switched off the outside lights. He linked across the lock a small gilt chain in which May had complete confidence. Now, thought Nettie, he will hesitate and smile. Instead, he turned at once with a grave, concerned face, and took her into his arms.

  They stayed this way, in silence, until Nettie drew back and leaned against the door. Clem moved forward slightly, holding her with his left arm and supporting his right on the panel above her head. “Don’t shake,” he said at last, speaking against her hair. “It isn’t compli
mentary.” His left arm tightened. She felt him smile. “In fact, if we didn’t know each other so well, I would say it was—downright insulting.”

  “What a summer for roses,” said May. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” She laid her sewing on her knee, and took off her glasses, and sighed. As if to make her last remark irrefutable, she closed her eyes.

  Clem, in a garden chair, glanced up from the Sunday paper. “Are you tired?” Without waiting for her reply, he folded the pages in his hand and dropped them on the grass beside him. “I don’t know why we read this—nothing but advertisements, and it makes one’s hands black.”

  “I am tired, yes,” May pursued. “I was gardening all afternoon.”

  Anyone would think gardening was a penance, Nettie observed to herself. She was sitting on the lawn, a book open in her lap. She thought that May contrived with her exhaustion to dispirit them all. The warm afternoon, the garden, the tray of empty glasses on the grass, succeeded in conveying foreboding and dissatisfaction; even the roses seemed to threaten violence, brimming over their plots of earth or arrested, scarlet, on the white wall of the house. Love, she thought, lowering her head over her book, is supposed to be enriching; instead I am poisoned (she exaggerated to hurt herself) with antagonism. Here she caught herself up—I am being an Incurable Romantic, she thought, and smiled. And yet, when I can be with him, just see him, I am happy. And I care more for him than for myself—I suppose that is enriching. I would literally die for him—only, no one wants that; they would rather you went on living and behaved reasonably. It has all happened too quickly. I keep thinking there will be a pause, I will find the place again, get back to being as I was, but that never comes. And yet the surprising part, too, is that it doesn’t make more difference. I would have thought such things made one wordly; instead, one becomes more vulnerable than ever.

  Lifting her eyes from the unturned page, she could see at her right Clem’s legs and the side of his chair. His clothes, the wicker chair, the very newspaper he had flung down seemed involved in his personality. He is not vulnerable, she reflected. One can even see that from the way he sits, or moves, or reads the paper. He does not need my good opinion, as I need his. If he loves me, it is as a kind of indulgence to both of us. I cannot trust him completely —but, after all, one would not trust anyone completely; it would hardly be fair to them. It is the discrepancy that hurts—that I should be so aware of him, order my life, think, speak, clothe myself for him.

  “Nettie, that color doesn’t suit you,” May remarked lazily. “If you’ll forgive my saying so.”

  “Oh, really?” said Nettie, in an unforgiving voice.

  “You should wear more blue, with your eyes. Don’t you think, Clem?”

  Clem looked down at the back of Nettie’s head. “What color are her eyes?” he asked.

  Only Nettie laughed.

  “What a tiring day,” May said with a certain determination. “Let’s hope there won’t be a storm before you get back to town.”

  Clem looked at his watch. “We should leave soon, if we want to arrive before dark.”

  “And be sure to give Nettie dinner somewhere, or she won’t eat anything.”

  She speaks, Nettie thought, as though I were not here.

  “I generally do,” Clem said. “We have dinner and then I take her home.”

  We have dinner, Nettie repeated to herself, and then he takes me home. Every Sunday evening of this spring and summer. Occasionally they went to Nettie’s small, cluttered apartment, but more often to Clem’s large and empty one. Saturday’s unopened mail and newspapers lay on a little table outside the front door of the apartment, and, inside, the hallway echoed as it would not have done in winter, and smelled of floor polish. Most of the windows were closed and all the blinds were drawn. There were so many doors that two people must feel slightly unsafe until they had entered one room, closed one door behind them.

  “That’s all right then,” May said. She yawned, but resumed her sewing. “Nettie,” she began again, “why don’t you bring a friend next weekend? Someone your own age. Some nice young man.”

  “Thank you, no,” replied Nettie, turning a page at last.

  “You must know some.”

  “Well, they are stupid.”

  “If you are so critical,” May observed comfortably, “no one will ever love you.”

  “And if you’re so tired,” said Clem, conveying disbelief, “why do you go on sewing?”

  “Darling, it has to be done, and I’d rather get on with it. I don’t dam your socks for amusement, after all.”

  I would love to darn his socks, Nettie thought. She could not tell whether this marriage was worse than other people’s, although it would have gratified her to think it was. Why do men ever marry, she wondered. I can understand that women must have something of the sort—it is our nature, she thought vaguely—but why men? (She had forgotten about the socks.) Because nothing better has been worked out? But they don’t even expect anything better; the limitations are flagrantly justified, like restrictions in a war, in the interests of national security. She told herself reprovingly, It is an institution—but this produced a mental picture of a large brick building not unlike a nineteenth-century prison. If he and I had been married, she wondered, would it have had to deteriorate into this? May and Sarah discussed their husbands as though they were precocious children—“Clem is very handy in the house,” as one might say “He hardly ever cries” or “He sleeps right through the night.” Let me go on believing, she asked, looking at his canvas shoe, that love isn’t merely getting along with someone. She thought that once she accepted such a compromised version of love she would never reach back again to this. (She had excessive confidence in the instructive power of experience.)

  Clem’s foot moved. Nettie looked up. “Here’s Matt,” she said.

  Matt came from beyond the roses, swinging a small black box camera by its strap. He was eleven, lanky and dark, with an earnest face that reflected his mother’s resolute honesty and her total lack of irony. The three on the lawn watched him approach. Unnerved by their attention, he started to speak while still at a distance. “I’m going to take a picture.”

  “Oh God,” said Clem.

  “The camera was your idea,” May remarked.

  “You wanted to give him a guitar.”

  “I don’t want to be in it,” Nettie said, closing her book.

  “Don’t be silly,” said May.

  “Who’d want a picture of her?” Matt snorted foolishly. Nettie, injured, looked away.

  May sighed. “Nettie, what’s wrong now? He’s only teasing. You should be able to ignore that, at your age.”

  Nettie saw no reason to expect that what had been intolerable to her in childhood should be acceptable now.

  “Daddy, smile.”

  “I don’t feel like smiling.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’ve got to smile.”

  “Put the tray out of sight,” May said.

  Immobilized, they stared into the sunshine. The camera clicked. Matt came up to them, twisting the knob to the next number. “It probably won’t come out—there was too much light. And Daddy moved. And Nettie looked as if she was going to cry.”

  “My love,” Clem said, keeping his eyes on the road and slowing to let another car pass. “You mustn’t.”

  Nettie wiped her eyes with a shredding Kleenex. She moved along the seat away from Clem until she was propped in the corner.

  “Make sure that door is closed” was all he said.

  If I could only think of something else, she told herself —something that wouldn’t make me cry. She attempted one or two seemingly arid subjects, but they led her back to tears. It was like trying not to be sick. Unable to stay at such a distance from him, she changed her position slightly, taking her weight off the car door. “It was so awful today,” she said.

  “Didn’t seem any worse than usual.”

  “Well—I suppose it’s worse for me than for you.”
She hoped he would contest this.

  “Yes, I suppose it is,” he agreed.

  “I don’t think I can come for weekends any more.” Until she spoke, she had not considered this possibility.

  “Nettie,” he said, irritated into using her name, “that’s something you must decide for yourself.” After a moment, he added with ill-timed practicality: “What would I tell May?”

  “You could always tell her,” said Nettie, “that I’ve fallen in love. With someone my own age.” Almost immediately, however, she threw away this advantage and laid her hand on his knee. “Oh, Clem, what will happen?”

  “Darling, I don’t know.”

  “But it can’t go on and on like this.” His silence seemed to ask, “Why not?,” and to answer it she made a little explanatory gesture with her free hand. “Without any meaning,” she said. “Anything to hope for.”

  “But it has been like that from the beginning,” he pointed out, genuinely puzzled. His eyes were still on the road. “You knew that. I never promised you anything.”

  She was ashamed of him for this remark. She had not intended to charge him with obligations. It also occurred to her that an obligation was not the less incurred for being unacknowledged. She took her hand from his knee (he shifted his leg slightly, as though liberated from an uncomfortable pressure), and moved back against the door.

  He glanced at her. “You aren’t pleased?”

  “Why should I be pleased? You’re not trying to please me.”

  “I don’t like to see you so upset.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be upset? You want it every way. When shall I be upset if not now?”

  “But, Nettie, what can I say? I am married, I do have two children. May is forty-three—she can’t be asked to begin her life over again.”

  “I know, I know.” The Kleenex had shed some flecks of white on her eyelashes. “I don’t expect—I know we can’t be married.” (Though we might as well be, with this deplorable conversation, she thought.) “It isn’t that.”

  “What’s in God’s name is it, then?”