All the King's Men (50 page)

On the side of the road toward the bay, just opposite the Stanton house, there was a big thicket of myrtle. When we got there, going hand in hand on our way back to the house, I stopped there in the protection of the shadow, drew her to me a little clumsily and abruptly, I guess, for I had had to key myself up to the act, plotting it all the way up the slip–and kissed her. She didn’t put up any protest when I did it, just letting her arms hang limp, but she didn’t return the kiss, just taking it submissively like a good little girl doing what she’s told. I looked her in the face, after the kiss, and its smoothness was shaded by a reflective, inward expression, the kind of expression you see sometimes on a child’s face when it is trying to decide whether or not it likes a new food it has just tasted. And I thought, my God, she probably hadn’t been kissed before, even if she was seventeen, or almost, and I almost burst out laughing, the expression on her face was so funny and I was so happy. So I kissed her again. This time she returned the kiss, timidly and tentatively, but she returned it. “Anne,” I said, with my heart bursting and my head reeling, “Anne, I love you, I’m crazy about you.”

She was clutching my coat, a hand on each side of my chest, just under the shoulder, crumpling up the seersucker and hanging on, with her head, a little to one side and down, pressed weakly against me, as though she were asking pardon for a piece of misbehavior. She didn’t answer what I said, and when I tried to lift her face up, she pressed it harder against me and clutched the seersucker tighter. So I stood there and ran my hand over her hair and breathed in the clean odor it had.

Then, after a while which may have been long or short, she disengaged herself from me, and stepped back. “Adam–” she said, “he’s waiting–we’ve got to go.”

I followed her across the road and into the gateway of the Stanton drive. A few paces up the drive she hesitated for me to come abreast of her. Then she took my hand, and that way, hand in hand, we proceeded toward the gallery where back in the shadow Adam would be sitting.

Yes, he was sitting there, for I caught the glow of a cigarette, the sudden intensification as the smoker took a deep pull, and then the fading.

Still holding my hand, tighter now as though executing a decision, she mounted the steps of the gallery, opened the screen with her free hand, and entered, drawing me behind her. We stood there for a moment, hand in hand. Then she said, “Hello, Adam,” and I said, “Hello, Adam.”

“Hello,” he said.

We continued to stand there, as though waiting for something. Then she released my hand. “I’m going upstairs,” se announced. “Good night, you all.” And she was gone with the quick, muted patter of her rubber soles across the boards of the gallery floor and down the hall inside.

I still stood there.

Till Adam said, “Why the hell don’t you sit down?”

So I sat down at the other end of the swing from Adam. He tossed a pack of cigarettes my way. I took one, and fumbled in my pockets for a match, but didn’t find one. He leaned toward me, struck a match, and held it for my cigarette. As the flame flared there in front of my face while the cigarette caught, I had the feeling that he had put the light there for a purpose, to spy on my face while his own was back out of the direct rays. I had the crazy impulse to jerk back and wipe my hand across my mouth to see if there was any lipstick there.

But the cigarette caught, and I drew my head back from the light and said, “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” he replied, and that about wound up the conversation for the evening. There was something for us to say. He could ask me the question which I knew was in his mind. Or I could answer it without his asking it. But neither of us said what was to say. I was afraid he would ask me, for with all my saying to myself that he could go to hell, that it wasn’t his business, I had the feeling of guilt as though I had robbed him of something. But at the same time I sat there keyed up and wanting him to ask me, for I wanted to tell somebody that Anne Stanton was wonderful and that I was in love. It was as though the condition of being in love were not completed until I could say to somebody, “Look here,, I’m in love, be damned if I’m not.” At the moment it seemed to require the telling for its fulfillment just as much as it would later require the hot, moist contact of bodies. So I sat there in the swing, in the dark, absorbed with the fact that I was in love, wanting to say it to complete it, and not, for the moment, missing Anne, the object of my love, who had gone upstairs to her room. I was so absorbed at the time with the fact of what had happened to me that I did not even wonder why she had gone upstairs. Later I decided that she had gone because, having serve notice to Adam by standing there before him holding my hand, she wanted to leave him alone with that fact, to let him accustom himself to the new structure of our little crystal, our little world.

But maybe, I decided later, much later, years later when it didn’t seem that it would ever matter again, she had gone up because she had to be alone, to sit by the window in the unlighted room, looking out on the night, or lying on the bed watching the dark ceiling, to accustom herself to her new self, to see if she could breathe the new air, or sustain herself in the new element or dive and lounge in the new tide of feeling. Maybe she went up there to be alone, absorbed in herself the way a child is absorbed in watching a cocoon gradually part in the dusk to divulge the beautiful moth–the Luna moth again, with its delicate green and silver damp and crumpled but gradually spreading in the dusk, defining itself, slowly fanning the air to make a breeze so slight that you would not be able to fell it on your eyeball were you to lean that close to peer. So maybe she was up in the room trying to discover what her new self was, for when you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you’s, the one you yourself create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you’s are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on it axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn’t be any difference between the two you’s or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be a perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect adjustment.

Anyway, Anne Stanton, age seventeen, had probably gone upstairs to be alone because she was, all of a sudden, in love. She was in love with a rather tall, somewhat gangly, slightly stooped youth of twenty-one, with a bony horse face, a big almost askew hook of a nose, dark unkempt hair, dark eyes (not burning and deep like the eyes of Cass Mastern, bur frequently vague or veiled, bloodshot in the mornings, brightening only with excitement), big hands that worked and twisted slowly on his lap, plucking at each other, and twisted big feet that were inclined to shamble–a youth not beautiful, not brilliant, not industrious, not good, not kind, not even ambitious, given to excesses and confusions, thrown between melancholy and random violence, between the cold mire and the hot flame, between curiosity and apathy, between humility and self-love, between yesterday and tomorrow. What she has succeeded in creating out of that unpromising lump of clay scooped up from the general earth, nobody was ever to know.

But in any case, in her loving she was also re-creating herself, and she had gone upstairs to be in the dark and try to learn what that new self was. While downstairs Adam and I sat in the swing on the gallery, not saying a word. That was the evening Adam got counted out for all the other evenings, and out you go, you dirty dishrag, you.

Everybody else got counted out, too, for even on those evenings when a crowd would get together on the Stanton gallery, or my mother’s, to play a phonograph and dance (with some of the boys–some of them veterans back from France–slipping off to take a drink from a bottle hidden out there in the crotch of a live oak), Anne and I would count them out. For organdie and seersucker are pretty thin materials, and the only person on the world I ever danced decently with was Anne Stanton and the nights were warm, and I wasn’t so much taller than Anne that I could not inhale the full scent of her hair while our music-locked limbs paced out the pattern of our hypnosis and our breathing kept time together, till, after a while, I would pass from an acute awareness of body to a sense of being damned near disembodied, or floating as light as a feather or as light as a big empty-headed balloon held captive to the ground by a single thread, and waiting for a puff of breeze.

Or we would get into the roadster and drive out of the Landing and pull the cutout and tear along, hell-for-leather, or as much hell-for-leather as was possible on the road and with the mechanism of those days, out beyond the houses between the pines and the tidelands, with her head leaned against my shoulder and her hair puffed with the wind and tendrils whipping against my cheek. She would lean there and laugh out and say, “Oh, Jackie, Jackie, it’s a wonderful night, it’s a wonderful night, it’s a wonderful night, say it’s a wonderful night, Jackie-boy, say it, say it!” Till I have to say it after her, like a lesson I was learning. Or she would hum or sing a song, one of those off the phonograph–God, what were they then? I don’t remember. And maybe let the humming die off, and be perfectly still, with her eyes closed, until I stopped the car at some place where the breeze off the Gulf was enough to blow the mosquitoes away (On nights when there wasn’t any breeze, you simply didn’t do any stopping.) Sometimes then, when I stopped the car she wouldn’t even open her eyes till I had leaned over to kiss her, and I might have to kiss her enough to stop her breath. Or again, she would wait till just the instant before the kiss, then open her eyes wide, all at once, and say, “Boo!” and laugh.. Then she’d be all knees and sharp elbows and little short laughs and giggles and serpentine evasions and strategy worthy of a jujitsu expert when I tried to capture her for a kiss. It was remarkable then how that little seat of the roadster gave as much room for deployment and maneuver as the classic plains of Flanders and how a creature who could lie in your clutch as lissome as willow and soft as silk and cuddly as a kitten could suddenly develop that appalling number of cunning, needle-point elbows and astute knees. While beyond the elbows and knees and sharp fingers, the eyes gleamed in the moonlight, or starlight, through the hair that had worked down loose, and the parted lips emitted the little bursts of breathless laughter, between the chanted words–”I don’t–love–Jackie-Boy–nobody loves Jackie-Bird–I don’t–love–Jackie-Boy–nobody loves–Jackie-Bird–” Till she would collapse laughing and exhausted into my arms and take her kiss and sigh and whisper, “I love Jackie-Boy,” and rub a finger lightly over my face, and repeat, “I love Jackie-Boy–even with his ugly nose!” Then she would give the nose a sound tweak. And I would fondle that hooked, askew, cartilaginous monstrosity, pretending great pain but proud as Punch of the thing simply because she had put her fingers on it.

You never could tell whether it was going to be the long kiss or the furious swirl of elbows and giggles. And it didn’t matter much, for it always came to the same thing in the end, for she would lean back with her head on my shoulder and look up at the sky. Between kisses we might not talk at all, or I might quote her poetry–for in those days I used to read some of it and thought I liked it–or we would talk about what we would do after we were married. I had never proposed to her. We simply assumed that we were going to be married and be together always in a world composed of sunlit beaches and moonlit pines by the sea and trips to Europe (where neither of us had ever been) and a house in an oak grove and the leather cushions of a roadster and somewhere a handful of delightful children who remained very vague in my imagination though very vivid in hers, and whose names, in moments when other topics of conversation failed, we would decide on with great debate and solemnity. All of them would have to have Stanton for a middle name. And one of the boys would be named Joel Stanton for the Governor. Of course, the oldest would be named Jack, for me. “Because you are the oldest thing in the world, Jackie-Boy,” Anne would say. “The oldest will be named Jackie for you, because you are the oldest thing in the world, you are older than the ocean, you are older than the sky, you are older than the ground, you are older than the trees, and I always loved you and I always pulled your nose because you are an old, old mess, Jackie-Boy, Jackie-Bird, and I love you.” So she would pull my nose.

Only once, toward the end of the summer, did she ask me what I was going to do for a living. Lying quietly on my arm, after a long silence, she suddenly said, “Jack, what are you going to do?”

I didn’t know what the hell she was taking about. So I said, “What am I going to do? I am going to blow in your ear.” And did it.

“What are you going to do? Do for a living? she asked, again.

“Going to blow in your ear for a living,” I said.

She didn’t smile. “I mean it,” she said.

I didn’t answer for a minute. Then I said, “I’ve been thinking I might study law.”

She was quiet for a little, then said, “You just thought of that this minute. You just said it.”

I had just said it. The subject of my future, as a matter of fact, was one on which I had never cared to dwell. I simply didn’t care. I would think that I’d get a job, any kind of a job, and do it and collect my pay and spend the pay and go back to the job on Monday morning, and that would be all. I had no ambitions. But I couldn’t sit there and say to Anne, “Oh, I’ll just get some kind of job.” I had to give the impression of being farsighted and purposeful and competent.

I had played hell giving that impression.