Ordinary People by Judith Guest
“Whenever you say.”
Audrey gets up, too. “I’ll put some hamburgers on for the boys. Keep an eye on them, will you?”
Beth nods, and they are left alone on the patio, as Charlie and Kerry splash and shout under the diving board at the opposite end of the pool.
“Having fun?” he asks her.
She smiles. “Yes. Are you?”
“Sure.”
“I’m sorry you didn’t win.”
“Me too.”
“But third place is good, Cal.”
“Third place,” he says, sipping his drink, “is third place.”
“I’ve been thinking,” she says, “that we should play more golf together. Maybe our next vacation should be strictly golf. We could go to Pinehurst, or Myrtle Beach.”
“Sounds great,” Cal says. “I bet he’d like that, too.”
A short silence. Then, “Do you do that deliberately? Or is it a reflex action? I’m curious.”
“Do what?”
“Insert him into the conversation. Whenever I mention you and I doing something together.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “You said vacation. I guess I assumed that you meant him, too.”
“I’m surprised that you haven’t felt the need to call him since we’ve been here.”
“I was going to do it tonight.”
She laughs. “It must be hard to grow up when your father is breathing down your neck all the time. I think I would hate it.”
He gets up; goes to stand near the edge of the pool, watching Charlie tip himself off the end of the board, backward, arms outstretched, screaming; the drowning-man bit. He gazes then at the magnolia tree, those pink knots of petals glowing eerily in the dusk. Behind him he hears the patio door slide open. Ward says, “Everything all set. Nine-thirty. We’ve got time for one more round, folks.”
“I don’t think I’ll have another,” Beth says. “I’m going to dress.”
“Nothing fancy, Sissie. You look fine just the way you are.”
The best time of year to be here. Everything fresh and green. Later on, Audrey told him, the sun, the heat bakes everything, people and plants, to a hard, nut-brown, and you have to stay in out of it; you live the air-conditioned life. Pure and perfect and artificial.
He turns and hands his glass to Ward, who has come up beside him. “I’ll have one. Light on the vermouth, okay?”
“Always, always.”
And again, he lets himself drink too much, not out of boredom this time. Out of anger at her, maybe. Out of fear. Out of whatever it is that is happening to them, that he does not want to see, and doesn’t see when he is high and feeling good.
“One more!” Ward is gay, when they arrive home, clinking bottles at the bar, he and Audrey giggling together as if they didn’t know how they had been used tonight. Intermediaries. She would not look at him all night. They skirted the edges of conversations, shielding themselves from each other, letting Ward and Audrey do the work. Without speaking now, without looking at each other, they sit on opposite sides of the small, cosy living room, the silence between them far from empty. It is hostile. Full of unspoken words. From tonight, from before tonight, from who knows how far back? He doesn’t. He is sure she doesn’t, either. But he is sick of the brooding, sick of dwelling, nothing gets spoken, nothing resolved, circles and more circles.
“There’s a bottle in the garage,” Ward is saying. “Honey, would I let us run out of Tía Maria, knowing how you love it?”
“Yes, you would!”
“I wouldn’t! I bought it, I swear, this afternoon, only I set it on the workbench—”
“Well, get itl”
“You come on with me.”
“No.”
“Come on, I’ve got something else to show you—”
“Ward, you’re rotten!”
But she goes with him and they are left with the silence. Beth picks up a magazine and leafs through it, and his anger ignites.
“Why don’t we finish it?” he asks.
She looks up. “Finish what?”
“What you started out there tonight.”
“I started? How did I start it? By suggesting we go away together on a vacation? And I didn’t stop it, either, you did. You were the one who walked away from me, remember?”
“What the hell was I supposed to say to that? The old song and dance, I overprotect, I breathe down his neck.”
“You do.”
“It’s a matter of opinion.”
“Right. So there’s no point in discussing it further. We never agree.”
“I think there’s a point.”
“Why are you so obsessed?” she snaps. “God, I am sick of talking, talking, talking about him! He controls you, even when he’s not around, even when he’s two thousand miles away.”
“Oh, stop it. We haven’t exchanged a dozen words about him in months—that isn’t the problem. He isn’t the problem.”
“Isn’t he?”
“No! So let’s talk about what’s really bothering you.”
“Oh, no, let’s talk about what’s bothering you! That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s why you go around moping and depressed—just the way you used to! As if it helped, being half-alive, dragging everybody else down with you!”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about last year! Last spring, when you couldn’t answer the phone, couldn’t open your mail without wondering if it would be the hospital with more bad news.”
“Goddammit, sure I was depressed! But I wasn’t too depressed to go to Europe, was I? I wasn’t too depressed to take you to Spain and Portugal—”
“Goddamn Spain. And goddamn Portugal. If you’re going to quote him, then quote him!”
“I am not quoting him! I am quoting myself! I am ...” He struggles for control, his senses blurred. Important. This is important, don’t screw it up, don’t get off on old songs, old dances. “I am asking you to tell me,” he says slowly, “what I’ve done that’s made you so angry with me.”
“It’s not what you’ve done,” she says. “It’s what you think I’ve done.”
“What you’ve done.” He lets the words sink in, trying to get the message. There is no message, nothing coming through. “I don’t know what you mean, I don’t think you’ve done anything.”
“Oh, you liar,” she says bitterly. “You do, and you know it. You blame me for the whole thing.”
“For what whole thing?”
“That whole vicious thing! He made it as vicious, as sickening as he could! The blood—all that blood! Oh, I will never forgive him for it! He wanted it to kill me, too!”
And suddenly she is crying. Painful, desperate sobs that shake her shoulders. Her hands are over her face, her head bent to her knees. Bewildered and frightened, he goes to her, kneeling beside the chair, trying to put his arm around her, but she will not permit it.
“Leave me alone! You got what you wanted, leave me alone, I don’t want any of your goddamn false sympathy!”
“I got—I didn’t—Beth, I love you, honey, please, let me help.” He fumbles stupidly at her side, and her head jerks up. She looks at him stiffly, her eyes hard.
“Help? What do you mean, help? I don’t need it. Not your kind of help. I can help myself.”
Carefully she wipes her eyes. Ward and Audrey are standing in the doorway.
“Hey,” Ward says softly, “I’m sorry about this. We don’t want to butt in.”
“You’re not butting in!” Beth says. She starts to cry again, and Cal stands up, turning away from her, close to tears, himself. He goes to the window, looking out at the pool, at the shadows of trees and bushes on the cement.
“Don’t you understand what he was saying?” she asks. “He was saying, ‘Look! Look what you made me do!’”
“Why?” he asks. “Why was he saying that?”
“I don’t know! I wish I knew!” She sobs, and then her voice is calm, more subdued, and she s
“Oh God, Beth, I don’t believe that! I don’t believe he went all that way to try to manipulate us! What happened—what he did—he did it to himself! Can’t you see anything except in terms of how it affects you?”
“No! Neither can you! Neither does anybody else! Only, maybe I’m more honest than the rest of you, maybe I’m more willing to recognize that I do it. You’re right,” she says, her voice low and strained, “he didn’t do it to you. He only did it to me. I don’t know what he wants from me, and I’ve never known! Does he want me to throw my arms around him when he passes a chemistry exam? I can’t do it! I can’t respond, when someone says, ‘Here, I just did this great thing, so love me for it!’ I can’t!”
“I don’t think he wants that,” Cal says. “I think he just wants to know that you don’t hate him.”
“Hate him? How could I hate him? Mothers don’t hate their sons! I don’t hate him! But he makes demands on me! He tries to blackmail me!” She looks up at him. “Where did you get that? About my hating him? Did he tell you that about me? Is that what he told you up in his room?”
“Beth—”
“And you let him say that to you?” Her voice is trembling. “You see? How you accept his feelings without question? But you can’t do the same for me, can you?”
Ward moves toward her. “Honey.”
“I don’t know what you want from me any more, Cal. I don’t know what anybody wants from me!”
“Honey, nobody wants anything from you,” Ward says. “We all just want—Cal and Con and everybody, we all just want you to be happy.”
“Happy!” She looks at him. “Oh, Ward! You give us all the definition, will you? But first you’d better check on those kids. Every day, to make sure they’re good and safe, that nobody’s fallen off a horse, or gotten hit by a car, or drowned in that swimming pool you’re so proud of!”
“Beth!” Audrey says, turning her back, her hands to her face.
“And then you come and tell me how to be happy.”
He closes his eyes, not listening any more, letting blackness surround him, blackness into last year, when he stood outside the bathroom door, begging to be let in. No sound, the silence was screaming at him. He didn’t want to know, didn’t want to believe it was happening Con, open the door! Let me in! His shoulder bouncing, crashing against the door, the jamb splintering, giving way to the nightmare of blood, the towels soaked with it, leaking their overflow onto the rug, the floor. His arm curved, hiding his face. A sea-fan of dried blood on the wall behind his head.
And in the hospital. Let me die. His eyes bright with the drugs they had given him, strapped down in the high, criblike bed, his face pale against the green emergency-room sheets. I want to die.
In shock, watching the bottle, upside down in its rack as it drained healing liquid into that arm. In shock, unable to think, already broken by the note they had found on his desk: I wish I knew why but I just don’t.
After the accident, after they had towed the boat in, on the way from the dock to the hospital, he had moaned over and over, “Mama, I’m sorry! Dad, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
That second time. There had been no apology. A bloody, vicious thing. She is right. It hasn’t killed her, but it has done something to her; something terrible. Circles and more circles, where does it end? How can it end?
29
The moon scuds from behind a cloud, a flat, pale slice of light. The air smells of darkness, of endless space, as he stands on the porch, an extension of it, and Beth, inside reading, Conrad upstairs doing his homework, all, all extensions of it. Space. And time. These dimensions that embrace him, control him.
This afternoon on the plane, Beth sat, fragile and untouchable beside him, and he had left her alone at last, knowing that if he tried to approach her, she would simply move her seat. Let her move her seat, let her believe what she believes, you cannot change her anyway, you are not God, you do not know and you are not in control, so let go.
He has finished the work he promised Ray he would have done by tomorrow.
Conrad teased him when he saw him seated in the den, his books and papers piled around him. “The indispensable man, huh?”
It had made him flinch. Another illusion hits the dirt. This feeling that he has existed in order to understand, to control, to predict. This idea that he was necessary. To organizations, to his family, to his wife. To life. All these things, including himself—they exist all right, but not because of anything.
Then, are no decisions required? Is there nothing to be done? No action to be taken?
Right. Sit tight. Never confuse movement with action, says Hemingway. She had been reading him one day. She told him that, declaring her agreement with his statement. Maybe she won’t then. Confuse movement with action. Lie back. Don’t be hasty. Haste makes waste. He is inundated with Howardisms suddenly; all true, those old and wrinkled maxims, proverbs, clichés. A rolling stone gathers no moss. Well, who needs moss anyway? Oh, hell. He is abruptly disgusted with himself. Do not clutch so at things, it is useless, useless. And do not be paralyzed. It is better to move than to be unable to move, because you fear loss so much: loss of order, loss of security, loss of predictability.
Better sometimes not to know what to expect. Like tonight at dinner. She was perfect. The perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect hostess. Conrad picked the restaurant—Naroffs—the small Italian place in Highwdod. And Conrad did all the talking, while she and Cal listened, quietly attentive. Once she reached out to pull the collar of his shirt from under the neck of Conrad’s black pullover, and he sat, not moving under her touch, but drinking in every ounce of her attention, knowing that, mysteriously, he had done something right tonight, maybe just walking in the door and being glad to see them, or maybe it was his description of the impromptu picnic on the school lawn in thirty-degree weather, to celebrate the coming of spring.
“—and we damn near froze our asses off!”
And, when he refused dessert, even her correcting his table manners seemed right and proper: “You don’t need to say, ‘I’m full.’ Just ‘No, thanks’ is sufficient.”
“Sure. Okay. Wait, let me write that down, will you?”
“You’ve got a mind, haven’t you? Just retain it.”
“—I’ve told you fifty times!” he teased her.
Now he stands on the stairs, as Cal comes back inside.
“I’m going to bed,” he says. “See you in the morning.”
“All through studying?” Cal asks.
He nods. “It’s just a quiz in trig. Shouldn’t be hard. I’m tired. It was sort of a rough week.”
“What happened?” he asks. “Your grandmother give you a hard time?”
“No. Nothing like that. She was fine. I’m just—I’m glad you’re back, that’s all.”
And he goes to her, then, without any hesitation; it is what he has come downstairs for, obviously. He bends his head, puts an arm around her in a quick, clumsy embrace.
“G’night.” His voice is thick. He exits swiftly, his face turned away.
She sits on the couch, her legs curled under her, the book in her lap, just as he has left her. She is staring off into space. Then, after a moment, her head drops over her book again, her hair spilling over her shoulder. Her face is hidden from Cal, also.
30
“Already I’m thinking about next fall,” Jeannine says. “Isn’t that dumb? I don’t want to go away now.”
They are sitting on the floor in her living room, their backs against the couch, as Conrad picks out chords on Mike’s guitar. Conrad has Mike’s cowboy hat on, pulled low over his eyes.
“I don’t want you to go, either,” he says.
“Don’t you?” She reaches up to snatch the hat from his head, but he grabs her wrist.
“Ah, ah, no you don’t—” He settles the hat more firmly on his head. “Why don’t you hang around here for another year? Wai
“I can’t,” she says.
“You can’t.”
“No. Did you write that, Con? It’s beautiful. Play it again.”
“It’s not anything special. Just note patterns. Fooling around. Here’s a good one.” And he plays her the song he has composed upstairs in his bedroom over the past week. He loves doing this; the mathematics of it, organizing the notes into definite pictures. She sits watching him, elbows on her knees, chin in her hands.
“I love it. Let’s notate it, okay? I’ve got some paper. Here, play it again. It’s so lovely and clean—”
He laughs. “I’ve got some dirty ones, too.”
“No, I mean it’s neat. Pleasant and orderly and neat.”
“Those are horrible adjectives. Rapturous. Passionate. Use those. Pleasant and neat do not make it.”
He fingers the chords, one at a time, and she copies them briskly on staff paper.
“You should write words for this one.”
“I’m not too good at that.”
“You used to write poetry, didn’t you?”
“Who told you that?” he asks. “Lazenby?”
She nods. “Are you mad?”
“No. Surprised, though. How did he happen to tell you?”
She smiles at him. “How do you think? I asked him. I said, ‘Tell me everything you know about Conrad Jarrett.’ So he did.”
He laughs. “The hell you did!”
“The hell I didn’t,” she says calmly. “You were the mysterious figure. I wanted to know about you.”
“Mysterious? I was just scared, that’s all.”
“I saw Suzanne in school today.”
“—Suzanne—”
“—Mosely. She asked me if I was still going out with you. I said yes. Then she asked me if I was ‘serious,’ or was I just having a good time?”
He looks at her from under the hat. “What did you say?”
“I said ‘both.’ She’s crazy about you, Con.”
“I’m sure!”
“She is. She told me she was. She told me that you were the only nice boy in the whole school, and she would be very disappointed in me if I were just fooling around with you.”