Three Short Novels by Gina Berriault Page B

undressed, smoking a cigarette. Though he was not yet in bed, he had already turned off the lamp, or not turned it on, apparently wanting to reject her with darkness, and she felt that she had come from the presence of a man who was more than he. It seemed to her that Russell and the others in the house and herself were all to be left behind by her son, their lives nothing compared to what his life was to be, that this man, castigating her with darkness, sat in a cul-de-sac of a life. She felt that all of them except her son were trapped in the summer night in that house with the unwashed glasses and ashtrays on floors and couches and windowsills, with intimate, used garments on floors and chairs—everything testifying to wasted lives.
    â€œGolden vipers,” she said, low, pacing the floor in her bare feet, making no noise on the floorboards, as if she were weightless. “Always some little surprise or other, always some concoction nobody ever heard of before and that’s deadly familiar. How do you manage to accomplish both at the same time?”
    â€œEnough, enough. Every little thing. Enough . . . ,” he said, breathing out the words as if someone were testing him physically to see how much pain he was able to bear.
    â€œThey all add up to the big thing.”
    â€œWhat’s the big thing?” he asked, challengingly, unafraid.
    â€œYou. They all add up to you.” She was unable to move, struck by her own cruelty.
    â€œYou don’t see me right, Vivian,” he said. “You’ve got a crazy wayof looking at me. You put together things nobody notices because they’re nothing to notice. You watch for everything and call it a fault.”
    She pressed her temples to destroy the cruelty in her head, but it was not cornered by a posture or a wish. “It’s you I see,” she insisted.
    â€œMe? Me?” He kept his voice low. “You act like I misrepresented myself. I never misrepresented myself, Vivian. Besides, you’re smart, Vivian. You’re smart enough to know if a man’s lying to you. That’s not saying I’m satisfied with myself. You don’t know what’s plaguing me. You think I think everything’s great. You think I think my life’s just great. What I gripe about—this guy and that guy, some deals—you think there’s nothing else that gripes me. I see the way you see me and I don’t look so good, sometimes, but you can’t see what I feel . I’d like to tell you what I feel. Or maybe I wouldn’t like to. If I could tell you, you still wouldn’t know.” He paused. “I’ll tell you,” and paused again. He was rubbing his knees, trying to rub away his confusion over himself, straining to engage his being in whatever was the aspiration he could not find words for.
    It was so amorphous a thing for him to tell—the thing which he hoped would make him more in her eyes—that the attempt to reveal it was almost like an attempt to confess a crime instead of to reveal a virtue.
    She went over to him. There was no one else to lie down beside if she wanted an embrace against her own cruelty. He leaned forward to clasp her around her legs, drawing her down with him.
    â€œVivian, listen. When I first saw you, the way you ran down that hill like a kid, I said there’s a woman with a heart as big as the world. So if I blow up, you’re supposed to know I don’t mean it. Lie still, lie still,” he urged.

14
    M aria came to visit more frequently at Vivian’s invitation until she was with them almost ritually every weekend. Along with the diffidence, there was now in her manner almost the slyness of a spy in the enemy camp. At twelve she was ineffectually pretty in Vivian’s eyes; there was no quickness, no grace, no wiles, no artifice to make persuasive the large, smoky blue eyes and fair skin; and this lack of conscious femininity, which was, to Vivian, the very