“Not much of a spring, I guess.” She had slipped off her shoes, twisting one long foot behind the other. “I hope you don’t mind, my shoes are damp.”
The depression Levin felt, hung in him like a dead animal. Where’s my love gone? He wanted to warn her something was wrong; instead he hid it.
She asked, then, why he had stopped seeing her.
Levin, after long silence, spoke. “At first to help you. After a while I felt you no longer wanted to see me. I got used to it.”
“It’s true,” she said. “I didn’t.”
“I figured that, I tried to help you.”
“If you had written once at least.”
“I hoped you would, it had to be by your choice. What could
I do under the circumstances? You didn’t let me know how you had got into the house—or if you had got in though you knew I’d be sweating it out. Not hearing from you I felt you wanted to call it quits.”
“I didn’t call purposely. I did it for
you,
not to involve you further in my confusions. I ate myself about you but I was terribly unhappy about Gerald and the children. I had got into the house without the least trouble. He wasn’t there, he had left at four to go fishing with George. He thought I had come in and gone to sleep in Erik’s room, and didn’t want to wake me—I’d been sleeping so badly. The kids were alone in the house from four till almost eight. There were signs Mary had waked and cried herself back to sleep. Erik had gone looking for me and then began to play with his toys. When I got back, he cried as though he had found out for all time what a bitch I was. That I wasn’t his mother and never would be. What if there had been a fire? I would have killed myself. That was my state of mind for most of a week and I decided I must give you up—my love for you. I imagined you would know, when you saw Gerald, that I had got in safely.”
He said he had known.
“I swore to myself I’d be a better mother, and wife. I did everything I could to suit myself to him, to be less critical, to enjoy life with him. I did everything, short of cutting my throat, to forget you.”
“Ah—” said Levin.
“The more I tried—I hope you don’t mind hearing this—the less I could. There were days when I almost didn’t think of you, when I felt I had killed you in me, but the very thought renewed my feeling of loss so profoundly that sometimes I felt I had left drops of blood where I was standing when I had thought of you last. But I kept trying to end you in me, and I was, bit by bit, until I saw you at Orville’s funeral. When I saw you then, your face so lonely without the beard you had cut off to protect me, what was left of my heart beat itself silly trying to get to you. I realized then how much beyond recall
I was in love with you. If you had come over to me and said I was to go with you, I would have gone. Afterwards I fought against myself for your sake—to save your plans—until I no longer could. Then I thought, I must go to him, and that’s what I did.”
Levin sat like a broken statue. The destruction of love she could not commit he had accomplished.
The landlady brought in two cups of coffee on a silver tray. Pauline had her handkerchief to her eyes.
“I’m sorry for your trouble,” Mrs. Beaty said.
“And I to trouble you.”
“There’s none at all. The children are playing with my pots and pans.”
“We’ll be leaving soon—”
The landlady set the coffee cups on the small tables near each chair and returned to the kitchen.
Pauline held her cup in her palms.
Levin did not touch his. He grew desperate to leave.
“When we got home from the funeral,” she was saying, looking at the cup in her hands, “I went upstairs and tried to sleep. But I thought about Gerald, about all the kind things he had done for me. I found myself thinking that my character had deteriorated with his. I overlook too much in both of us that I oughtn’t to. I try to be honest and I’m not when I want most to be. He knows I no longer love him but he can stand it so long as I keep my mouth shut and we go on living together. He gives me little, I give him less. I try but fail with him, we fail together. I don’t want to any more. I want a better life. I want it with you.”
He listened in petrification.
“Lev, I love you. Be my love again.”
He muttered what of her husband.
“I’ve made up my mind to ask for a divorce. I feel I’m entitled to my love for you. I’ve worn out the obligation—if it is that—of living half a life. I want to be your wife.”
He rose hastily, upsetting the cup on the table. Levin
watched the stain spreading on the rug. He ran to the kitchen for something to mop it with.
Why don’t I keep on running?
But he returned with a cloth and dabbed at the rug. She wanted to do it but he wouldn’t let her.
When he came back from the kitchen again she was standing barefoot at the window, watching the rain. She turned to him with eyes like sad flowers.
I’ve got to be honest with her, Levin thought. That may be all I have left to give.
“Pauline,” he said heavily, “I’m sorry for the way I am now—”
“Don’t you feel well?”
“I’m not myself—”
“Have I upset you?”
“To tell the truth, I wasn’t expecting this—”
“That I would come back?”
“Yes—” She went to him, put her arms around him. “Hold me, please hold me.”
He held her.
“Hold me tightly.”
Levin tightened his arms. She gazed at him as though he had just returned from a long voyage and she was trying to remember what he was like in a former time.
“Don’t you love me any more?”
“Love—” he said with a heavy heart. “Who knows what I’ve mangled—”
She seemed to shrink, then held him harder. “I love you, say you love me. Say it the way you used to.”
Holding her, he strove to say it, groping from one obscure thought to another for an explanation, the secret of what afflicted him, anything that might free him to love her. At last Levin said, “Why didn’t you tell me you and Leo Duffy were lovers?”
She pushed him away. “Oh God, is that what’s bothering you?”
“I don’t know—”
“I thought you knew, that Avis or someone had told you but you never mentioned it to be kind to me. If I loved him what difference would it make?”
“I want to know the truth—”
“The truth is we were lovers, sexually, once. I slept with him the day he was publicly fired. If you want to know where, it was in his car that night. I’ve had that experience too—”
“Did you love him?”
“Not then, but I fell in love with him after he had gone. Now you know what I’m like—”
“Are you sure you still don’t love him?”
She smiled sadly. “Leo’s dead.”
Levin shuddered. “Dead?”
“He died last year. His mother wrote in the spring that he had killed himself in January. I don’t know the circumstances and couldn’t bring myself to ask—”
“I’m sorry—”
“He left a note: ‘The time is out of joint. I’m leaving the joint.’”
Levin sprang to her and they desperately embraced.
He packed both bags and drove off along a lonely road lined with black cypresses, past a railroad crossing, full granary, and deserted farmhouse. He was making good time when the car gave out with a clunk. Abandoning suitcase and valise, he took off on foot, the dust of the road settling on him. He had run through the day and was on night’s tail when an obscure figure appeared on the road, coming at him from a mirror, the opposing self or its spitting image.
QUO VADIS, LEVIN?
Towards freedom.
Loud laughter in the wings.
He awoke clammy, and spent half the night wandering amid the crosses row by row in a graveyard of mangled hopes, purposes, schemes. Hadn’t he planned—it said in his notebook —to be a college professor? To Straighten Out His Life?
Come To Something? He hadn’t planned to be entangled with a married woman. To be anyone’s second husband before he was somebody’s first. To be this unsettled, confused, tormented, at this time of his life. He suffered from Unfinished Business. He wanted to win the election. Now that classes were over, he was moved by an oppressive desire to rush to Humanities Hall and teach all who would listen, the mysteries of the infinitive.
Flight flew in him. He wasn’t fleeing yet fled, unable to determine whom he was running from, himself or her. He blamed the flight, paradoxically a pursuit of feeling, on the fact that too much had happened in too short a time. He couldn’t cram it all in, experience leaked out, confusing subjectivity. He had, since their separation, harbored a secret belief that they had through love marked each other for future use; he hadn’t expected the future to explode in his face, shattering all he had to think, decide, do. The responsibility was terrifying —taking away another man’s wife, the miserable mess of divorce, having to fit himself to her, all her habituations and impedimenta, to suit to her clutter his quiet bachelor’s life, needs, aspirations, plans, which though more than once destroyed and replaced, remained essentially what they had been, except that their fulfillment was farther in front of the nose with every step he took. He was distended by the fast thrust of events, of too many revived possibilities—where would he put them all? He feared his destiny had been decided apart from him, by chance, her, not him. She called the signals and he awoke running in the play. He had grave doubts, if he took her on again, that he could be master of his fate to any significant degree; he had already lost—the terrible thing—his freedom to feel free.
Levin beat himself into a concrete frenzy to resuscitate his love for her, but try breathing green, purple, rose. He tried every way he could, by every use of the imagination, to recapture love as it had been in fullest flower, as though the mind could recreate what it apparently rejected. Memory was a dark
door leading through dark doors floating in space to Orpheus always descending. Levin a whirlwind of enraged impotence at what had become of him. In love he had unwillingly pulled the stopper, ug glug, no further feeling. This though he told himself he
must
still love her. Love for her was in him as experience, as valued idea, pleasure received, which he wanted to repeat. Except it wasn’t where it had been, or should be. He had had and hadn’t it. What in Christ’s name had he done with the love he had only a month ago felt for her? Had he butchered it in the vize of will, sublimated it beyond repair, or recall, like a magician prestidigitating a girl into a tree, then forgetting the hocus pocus so that when he wanted a woman he embraced wood? Was such a thing even remotely possible? These thoughts drew others equally unhappy into their orbit. Was it love murdered or love imperfect, less than love to begin with? Had he loved her for the lay and not much else, giving it a tainted reciprocity of feeling? Was it a guilty response to experience he should have accepted as one accepts sunlight? Why must he forever insist on paying for being alive?
And with the lay as good as gone—he had believed—had he then, after a show of self-castigation to make himself look decent in the mirror, stopped loving the little he had loved? Or would this, in time, have happened anyway, out of boredom, without the necessity of a sudden decisive surrender of her? Or was his interest in Pauline basically that she belonged to someone else—life’s initial tease—and once he had her as far as she went, when her thing broke down in various motels, best send her back to daddy, the lover’s gut glutted? Who knows the answer? Not Levin. But why scratch sores to see what lies under them? “Thought is a disease of the flesh.” T. Hardy said it, not the diseased Levin. Levin couldn’t stop scratching: if it was none of these things then wasn’t it really as in the past—the thought returned—the suffocating quasi-deadness (alas poor Duffy) of going through more than he could stand, nervously frazzled to the point of immobility?
Can I give out with only three pints of feeling before the well runs dry? Is it nerves, glands, the broken machine itself? What’s to blame: the poor quality of his love, how beat to death, or the imperfections of an imperfect man? Or, please God, that he had simply gone through her, she no longer interested him as a person—perfectly normal and he was making a sickness out of it? Conscience the rotting onion in the mind’s stomach. Whatever the answer or answers, the doubt most in his mind was What to Do: Was it best to stall for time—wait it out and hope to approach her again with a full heart, to which she was entitled; or must he commit himself now, no matter how bad he felt, or couldn’t feel? In her mind she had parted from Gilley and was alone in his house, possibly frightened at all that lay ahead to be done. He felt for her a blunted compassion, not enough to give relief but at least a response.
Everdrowning Levin saw the thirsty world from under the sea. It wasn’t the world, it was more of the sea. He was a lone fish poking its snoot into bursting bubbles. On the bank sat Gilley with hook, line, sinker. The poor fish fled. Levin in watery flight followed confused currents. Every way out was his way in. He fantasied self-destruction, fish hooking self, funny for a fish. (Duffy, proud bird, had blown his coop.) … He woke in terrible thirst and frantically searched for a bottle in the bottom drawer until remembering he had long ago dumped it into the garbage can. He tried drowning thirst in water, drinking glass after glassful until his stomach bloated. He bathed in Mrs. Beaty’s tub, thirstily soaping himself six times over but still was thirsty, thick as toothache, fire in the mouth, boiling lead dripping down his salted gullet. Levin dressed in the dry middle of the night and walked in rain till the rain stopped. He stood on the riverbank watching the thirsty-fingered dawn on the surface of the hidden water. For hours he wandered in downtown streets, his eyes glazed as he gazed through glass, thirsting to dive into a whiskey bottle. What sweet relief to feel the searing stuff go through his tortured throat. To feel the sodden spirit soar. To be in peace not
Levin. To lie pickled thirstless, satisfied. Wandering, he cast love-sick glances at both brown-bottled tavern windows, drunk with emptiness, wrenching himself along in rectangular circles, until broken by weariness be pushed through a door and stood solemnly at a bar.