Contrary Pleasure by John D. MacDonald

afraid you would go and
I ran.”
    “I shouldn’t have been here. I shouldn’t have waited so long.”
    “How long would you have waited?”
    “I don’t know, Bonny. I don’t know.”
    “Drive someplace, Mr. Delevan. Please. I don’t want to stay here. It
keeps making me feel like crying.”
    He drove slowly out of the city. She wore a perfume that was too heavy
for her. It did not suit her. He drove on back roads he had never seen before.
And after a long time he began to talk to her, not looking at her, just talking
as though he were alone in the car and he had to tell himself what he was and
what he had been. All of it, all the continuing knowledge, never before
admitted even to himself, that he was dead weight in the firm, that a large
area of him was dead. And there were the dreams of things you would do, and
found you had waited too long, and there were the sterling resolutions that
always seemed to degenerate into a sort of mild and meaningless futility. The
words went on and on, draining thinly out of him. He talked to the night and to
the girl’s silence, his voice growing hoarse as the words exhausted him. And
with a complete despair he realized that even here honesty was denied him, that
as he tried to explain himself and what he was, a sly censor kept coloring the
facts and dreams, adding dramatic highlights, spicing the hopelessness, so that
the dusty plots became drama, and drama became a tool of seduction. He was the
adolescent lover who combats his girl’s indifference by inventing a unique and fatal
disease for himself, selling himself so heartily that, in self-pity, his tears
become genuine.
    He stopped at a crossroads and trained his spotlight on the road signs
and found an arrow that pointed to Stockton sixteen miles away. He felt weary
and disgusted with himself. Ashamed of contrived emotions. What had all this
meant to the silence beside him? An embittered complaining bore, whining about
his life. She could tell her girl friends about it. It would be a fine story,
particularly if she had any gift for mimicry. They could all giggle.
    “I’ll take you back,” he said, his tone dulled.
    “Please stop a minute,” she said.
    He pulled over in the darkness and turned the car lights off. “Dandy
evening for you, Bonny. Maudlin. A cheap movie.”
    In the darkness she moved to him almost harshly and her cold hands went
flat against his cheeks and she put her lips hard against his and turned her
head back and forth as she did so, so that her mouth was ground warmly against
his and his hands found the long fine line of her back. Then she pulled his
head down a bit and kissed his eyes, her lips releasing the tears of self-pity,
and she murmured, “Quinn—oh, Quinn darling—oh, Quinn honey.” And lips and
murmurings and the giving warmth of her tuned the drama of self just a bit
higher so that the harshness of his first sob was almost completely genuine to
him, and even as he tried to believe in it, something inside him was cool and
sneeringly disdainful of this method which won her so easily and so completely.
    When it was over, he assumed a gruffness, a colonial manner of
understatement, saying, “Dreadfully sorry. Didn’t mean to crack up like this.”
    “I’m glad you did. I’m glad I understand you now.”
    And now the promise of ultimate victory could be neatly countersigned, so
he said, “I hope you’ll let me see you again.”
    “Of course… Quinn.”
    “Even though we both know it’s wrong and we shouldn’t.”
    “It’s too late… for shouldn’t, I think. When, Quinn? When?”
    “Not tomorrow night. I have to go to a dinner party. The next night?
Eight thirty.”
    “Yes,” she said. “Yes, Quinn. I like saying your name. I like to hear you
say my name.”
    “Bonny.”
    “I never liked it before. Now I like to hear you say it.”
    He drove her back. This time she looked back from the lighted porch, made
a small gesture of parting, a furtive wave before she was gone