“Cut it out,” said Frank.
“All right,” I said. “But I find it odd to think that you have room in your judgment for those pictures and mine. What’s the connection?”
“I’d like to know why you’re so disturbed by them,” he said, turning on me. “That says a lot about you.”
“Good point. I was disturbed.”
“Hah!” He stood up. “See, that’s the real problem, isn’t it? It’s you!”
“And how! But they’re your pictures.”
“They don’t worry me a bit.”
“Amazing,”
He said, “There are worse. Scenes you wouldn’t believe.”
“What are they for, for heaven’s sake?”
He was silent, standing like a crane.
I said, “Tell me how you knew I’d seen them.”
“Leave me alone.”
“I’ll stop razzing you if you tell me.”
He looked at the wall, making his jaw mournful. He said, “Because you messed them up.”
“I did no such thing.”
“Yes — you mixed them up, scrambled them out of order.”
“Oh, my God.”
“That’s how I knew. The sequence was wrong.”
“The sequence!” I started to laugh.
He had gone to the door. “And it better not happen again,” he said. “There’s a word for not minding your own business, for invading people’s privacy and sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”
He swung open the door, but he pushed his white face at me. “Treachery, that’s what it is!”
Treachery? I said, “I’ve heard that one before,” and then, “Yes, that’s it! You’re absolutely right! That’s just what I wanted to hear!”
But he was out of the door and down the stairs before I could thank him for his appropriate intrusion.
15. Treachery
IN MY VERY ROOM, in those very words, demanding explanations and apologies, but not satisfied with my innocence and using the occasion to be rude and hurtful. People say they want apologies but what they really want is to bite your head off and spit it into your face.
She burst in late one night, a few days after I had seen Orlando at Harvard. She was out of breath and sort of whimpering at me. My memory was of thumps in the hallway and the door to my room suddenly pushed open and her looking as if she were going to fling herself on me. She said, “You — you — you!” and carried each word a step closer to where I sat with my peepstones and a stack of pictures.
Her jump into the room, the way she swung herself at me, had lifted her hair and given her dress an updraft of coarse folds and made her coat sleeves look like beating wings. I caught her pouncing as one explosive instant, an action shot framed by the doorjamb. She seemed in that moment of agile fury — her fists near her bright slanted eyes, her knee raised, all this force balanced on one toe — as if she were about to streak forward and stamp on me. It was the picture Frank, in his indignation, had suggested. I had not wanted to remember this episode.
She had the fearsome nimbleness of the deeply wounded. In my terror I tried to freeze her. I did not see her moving continuously at me, but rather caught her in a series of still leaps, each more exalted than the last, and mounting toward me intimidatingly to howl.
I said, “Blanche, wait—”
I felt a seismic thrill, as if a picture I had been taking had swallowed me in its undertow and made me a subject, too.
“You bitch!” she said.
Profanity from someone who had never used it before, anger in someone who had always been solemn: it was truly thunder to me. And angry, she looked physically different, all sinews, teeth, and hair, like a person animated by an electric current.
“Now, now,” I said, wishing to calm her.
“So help me,” she said, and stepped back, not withdrawing but threatening me the more by giving me a glimpse of the whole voltage of her anger.
“Not so loud,” I said, as reasonably as I could, and moved past her to shut the door. “Phoebe’s asleep.”
“I could kill you, Maude Pratt.” She showed me her hands, which she had crooked into a strangler’s claws.
I said, “Now that wouldn’t do a darn bit of good, would it? Just simmer down and we’ll have a nice long talk and you’ll feel a whole lot better.” I went on in this way, talking gently, plumping a cushion, pulling up an armchair, and easing her into it. Sort of taking the initiative.
I thought I had succeeded, but when I brushed past her to sit down myself she sucked in her breath and stiffened and said, “How could you?”
“Not sure I get your drift,” I said.
“There’s something wrong with you,” she said. “I never would have believed it. I always thought you were so good — a little dull, but good deep down. I was glad when I heard you’d been successful with your photos and making a name for yourself. Now this!”
“Thanks very much,” I said, “but I don’t have the slightest idea of what’s at the seat of your—”
“Don’t give me that, Maude Pratt,” she said, repeating my full name again in that judging way, as if to make it sound unpleasant, like that of a prisoner being sentenced. “I’ve heard the stories you’re spreading about me.”
“Stories?”
“About me and Sandy.”
“Oh, that,” I said. “Honestly, you wouldn’t understand.”
“You admit it! You’re shameless.”
“I’ve had my reasons,” I said. “It wasn’t supposed to get back to you, obviously. But no harm done. Drink?”
“How can you be so horrible? What have I ever done to you?”
“Why, nothing, Blanche. I think the world of you. But I’m afraid I had to make up that cock-and-bull story. It would be better all around if you just forgot it, though if you understood why I did it you’d be glad for me, you really would.”
“But it’s a lie,” she said. “And it’s filthy. How would you like it if I said that about you and Ollie?”
I laughed out loud. “Wouldn’t bother me a bit!”
She sat forward on her chair and began to cry. I felt sorry for her, hunched there with her fingertips on her face and that lonesome shudder in her spine, and her toes together making a pathetic angle of her feet, and dampness on the back of her neck making her short hairs into moist spikes and foretelling a lifetime of this. She had come down with grief like an everlasting cold and was practicing a comfortable posture for her sorrow.
I touched her. She reacted as if I had left a sting in her. She straightened, smarting, and stopped weeping and said, “You have no business talking about me like that.”
And I started to wonder if perhaps what I had invented about her was the plain truth and she was taking it badly because of that. Certainly, she and Sandy were capable of those feelings, and I had always suspected that it might be true; but it was my boogie-man, Teets, who had furnished the details. Blanche seemed shocked, as if she’d been found out: I had discovered her secret.
So I said, “You shouldn’t take it so hard. Lots of brothers and sisters have been passionately in love with each other. It doesn’t happen every day, but then great passion is a rare thing at the best of times. Only a lucky few are chosen — for all I know, you might be one of them.”
“It’s an insult,” she said.
This annoyed me. By objecting, she was demeaning my love for Orlando and finding something weird or irregular in it, and in her stubborn way perhaps denying her own love for Sandy.
“You’re confused,” I said. “There are all kinds of love. Simply because you haven’t felt it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Someday—”
“You’ve spoiled everything,” she said. “Why are you so cruel?”