Bunny Hollis had driven the Mercedes-Benz with the casual co-ordinated grace with which he performed all physical movement. She sat in the seat beside his, and she would look at his hands resting lightly on the wheel and she would say, over and over to herself—Betty Hollis Betty Hollis BettyHollisBettyHollis.
Not Betty Oldbern any longer. Never Betty Oldbern again.
His hands were square and brown with pronounced cords on the backs of them, with long fingers splayed at the tips, with heavy ridged nails that he kept closely clipped. On his left hand was the gold ring, heavily ribbed, a masculine variation of the daintier band on her finger.
Just the way he would open a door, climb stairs, reach to pick up something. It was controlled grace, taut and completely masculine. Finely and perfectly balanced. Not like that one who had been Stella’s friend. That ballet one. His grace had been muscular, but of a different breed. There had been a simper in it.
All the days of her childhood and her young girlhood seemed to be compressed into one unending scene—where she walked alone down a street while all the others watched from steps and porches. She walked in painful consciousness of too soft hips, her knees brushing awkwardly together, her head too heavy for her throat, her arms refusing to swing in any rhythm to her walk. There goes that Oldbern girl.
Almost from the very beginning she had known that she was not what Daddy had wanted. Not at all the sort of girl he had hoped for. He had wanted a brown sunny laughing girl. A girl like Stella or Janie or Sue or Cindy. A girl who could
do
things, and talk to anybody in that bright pert way that she had never been able to manage. When she had tried to talk that way people had looked at her in an odd way.
That was why Daddy had sent her away, of course. To all those schools so far away. It was something you had to accept. You weren’t what was wanted, what had been expected, and so you had to go away. And she had sent back the very best marks she could get. And the medals given for those marks. It was a small gift, but the only one she had to give.
Eating so much was part of it too. But she had never clearly understood how that was so much a part of it until lately. Eating had been just about the only fun. And in a sense it had been scary fun. Gobbling all those heavy pastries and thinking that each new pound put you a little bit further from any possibility of being ever wanted by any man. And that was a relief, because it was a problem you’d never have to face if you were too fat. And she had really been terribly fat that day she had first seen Bunny Hollis. About a hundred and sixty-five. And for a small-boned girl only five foot four, that was really gross. Mirrors had always been the enemy, and being that heavy had been sort of a way of getting back at the mirrors.
She knew she would never forget that day. She had been bored and restless and she had driven over to Oswando Club, a place she usually avoided. She had sat alone at a table under an umbrella and ordered a sundae and ate it there and wondered about ordering another and watched the man who was teaching tennis to two brown towheaded boys of about thirteen. The day was still and hot and she could hear his instructions clearly. “Billy, the reason he keeps passing you is because you wait to see where your ball is going. As soon as the ball leaves the racket, you should be on your way back to position. And you’re trying too hard to hit ’em where he ain’t. Just concentrate on getting it back smoothly and moving back to center court. Let’s try again.” She decided he was quite a nice man. He seemed so patient and so anxious to have the kids do well. He stood by the net post and watched the kids. She was aware of him, but not specifically aware. Then, as she watched casually, he put both the boys in one court and he took the other side of the net and began to volley with them. She watched him. She saw the shape of his shoulders, the long straight line of his back, the way he moved with style and precision, the way his head was set on the round strong column of the neck.
She watched him and she felt a rising of warmth within her, a slow stirring that brought a hot flush to her cheeks. For the first time in her life she felt strong, specific, physical desire—desire that had an immediate target. She had had crushes, but they were not like this. It was as though for the first time her femininity had a focus and a purpose. She had thought of men and of physical love and wondered often how it would be. Her anatomical knowledge was sound and specific. But her wonderings had always made her feel faintly queasy. The actual act seemed to be so ludicrous, so animal, so intimately degrading. And suddenly she had seen a perfect stranger and the act, which had been so appalling, seemed all at once to be logical and necessary. Yet even as she drew mental pictures that shamed her, she realized the absurdity of her position. Fat girl in the umbrella shade going all sticky over the tennis instructor at the club. He was so old. He must be nearly thirty.
She could not get him out of her mind. She learned that he was Bunny Hollis and he was well liked at the club. The next week she made an appointment with him and showed up with tennis equipment to take lessons. It was by far the bravest and boldest thing she had ever done. He had been polite and distant. They had played a few games so that he could find out how well she played. Then he had called her up to the net and she had come up close to him, ashamed of the way she was panting and sweating and trembling from the unaccustomed exertion.
“How old are you, Miss Oldbern?”
“Nineteen.”
“I think I can help your game, but you have to cooperate. I’ll be frank with you. If it offends you, I’m sorry. You’re much too heavy. The first exercise you better practice is pushing yourself away from the table.” He grinned to take the sting out of the words.
A week later when she fainted during a lesson it was because she was weakened by hunger. She came out of it after he had carried her into the shade. She opened her eyes. He was rubbing her wrist and looking down at her with a strange intentness.
“How much have you been eating, Betty?”
“Practically… nothing.”
“Do you want that badly to be good at tennis?”
“No… I mean I guess I do.”
After that she sensed the change in his attitude. He seemed thoughtful, and quite aware of her. Lots of times they would talk instead of practice. She told him about the schools, about how she had lived for nineteen years. And he told her how he had lived for thirty-three years. Fourteen years’ difference in age didn’t seem so much if you said it quickly. And when she was fifty, he’d only be sixty-four.
When it turned cold they moved the lessons to the indoor courts. That was all there was in her days. The lessons. There was nothing else worth thinking about. There was a lesson on a gray day in November. When it was done he turned out the court lights. Gray light came down through high windows. They walked toward the doorway. She clumsily dropped her racket and it clattered on the floor. They both bent to pick it up. They straightened up, close together. She had the racket. He looked at her and put his hands gently on her shoulders and pulled her closer to him and then put his mouth on hers and kissed her hard. She had been kissed before. But it had never done anything like this to her. From far away she heard the racket fall again. He kissed her twice and then held her close. She was down to a hundred and forty-four by then.
He released her and turned away and said, “I didn’t mean to do that, Betty.”
“I love you,” she said. It was the only thing she could think of to say—the only thing that was indisputable and explanatory.
“You don’t mean that. I shouldn’t have kissed you.”
“You can do anything you want to me, Bunny.” But he wouldn’t take her on that basis. Within the next month they began to talk cautiously of marriage. She was not a fool. She was accustomed to rejection. She was quite aware that the world was full of men who would be delighted to pretend love in order to marry all that money. And she sensed that Bunny was one of those. She was certain that Bunny was one of those. By then she had learned enough about him so that she could not blame him too much for being one of those. He had never had money. She tested him by pleading with him to run away with her when she was twenty. It alarmed him. She could see that. He didn’t want the applecart upset. Nor would he make love to her. She took that as a tribute to her unattractiveness, and as a sample of his caution. She knew what a fool she was making of herself, and yet she decided to go ahead with it, to wait and to marry him, knowing that she was merely buying something important to her, and could never buy the truly precious thing, a return of the love she felt for him. For despite her awareness of his greed and his design, she could not help loving him.
And, of course, it was the only way that the money would ever be of any use to her.
The family—her father and all the elderly relatives—raised absolute bloody hell when she made her plans known. But she was twenty-one and there wasn’t a single thing they could do about it. There was no way they could turn her against Bunny.
She weighed a hundred and thirty-seven on her wedding day. The flesh was stubborn, clinging. The softness was gone and the remaining excess was firm and too durable.
After the ceremony she began to be afraid. She had had two years in which to anticipate climax. Soon she would be taken by him. It was the penalty he would have to pay for his carefulness and his greed. She hoped he wouldn’t be rough. He was so terribly strong. His strength frightened her. It was absolutely no good. He had been gentle, almost tender, but it was no good. It had been strange and awkward and it had hurt, but not badly, and if this was what the world was all about then a lot of people had been kidding a lot of people in a lot of different ways for thousands of years. It was no good at all. And then it was bearable. It became something you could do without it bothering you too much if you didn’t think too much about it. If you made a sort of passive acceptance.
And then, like a light being turned on, like a window being opened, it made sense on that first night in Curacao. It made her feel as though she had been particularly obtuse about getting the point of a very obvious joke. It made her feel stupid that it had taken her so very long to learn what this could be. What had been harsh and alien and alarmingly masculine about him became suddenly dear. It all became simplified, like the logic of the dance. Harshness was meant to be enclosed in softness. Giver and receiver. The very physical configurations of them, the differences between them, became as logical to her as night and day. And in the very midst of this new acceptance, in the sudden certainty that what she was doing was inevitable and good, there came upon her wave upon wave of a pleasure so keen that it was beyond anything she had ever imagined. The pleasure stretched beyond the point where she could bear it without crying out, and just as she did so there was a bursting, a fulfillment, a shuddering torrent that left her feeling boneless, spent, heavy and soft as rich whipped cream.
The next day she went about full of a heavy-lidded wonder, full of a warm sweet stupor. It seemed the most precious and miraculous thing in the world to know that it could happen again and again. She held that knowledge close to her. She could not look at Bunny the same way, ever again. She looked at him with warm, strong, knowing lust, and wanted him when she looked at him.
She tried to tell him all of it, half laughing as she tried to tell him. He laughed too and held her and said, “It appears, Mrs. Hollis, that the honeymoon has begun.”
“You have been very patient, Mr. Hollis.”
“Patience has been richly rewarded, Mrs. Hollis.”
And in the tropic nights, in the lazy mornings, in the afternoons after swimming, she learned that each time could be better than the last. She learned that she was a lusty woman, and, having always been uncertain, shy, rejected, she felt very proud that here was at last an aspect of life which she could seize cleanly, firmly, strongly.
And she also learned that this coming alive had strengthened her desire to look well for him. She knew that the better she looked to him the stronger would be his wanting, and the stronger hers would be. She learned to be constantly aware of him, and to so handle her body that she would look her best. She learned little tricks to entice him, amazed and amused at her own ability to devise such tricks. In her flowering she learned to handle herself more gracefully. There was more confidence in her walk, more fun in her talk.
Little by little, and with the utmost caution, she began to permit herself to believe that she might be loved. She began to believe that if Bunny were acting a part, he was by far the most clever actor in the world. With the new confidence that came from accepting the possibility of being loved, she became Betty Hollis. And the other one, that Betty Oldbern, was long dead, long buried. She could not grieve for Betty Oldbern, not for that fat awkward stupid girl, that wolfer of pastries, that dull talker, that winner of gold medals for excellence in French composition.
“There isn’t so much rain now,” Bunny said. “But that damn wind is getting a lot stronger.”
“I’ve been thinking about something,” she said.
He gave her a quick glance and looked back at the road. “Hmmm. Important?”
“I think I’m going to have an operation.”
The car swerved and came back into line. “What the hell kind?” His voice sounded angry, and she was pleased because she knew it was concern and not anger.
“There was a girl I was in school with in Philadelphia. She had a real grim set of buck teeth and practically no chin at all. Much worse than I. They used to call her the beaver. She had an operation right after school was out and when she came back in the fall she was really lovely. They did something to her jaw. Some sort of bone graft or something. And they fixed her teeth too. The funny thing about it was that her eyes had always looked sort of close together, like mine do. But that was because of her chin going in. I covered up my mouth with a towel this morning and looked and it really does change my eyes. I’m going to find out what she had done and get it done to me.”