He was never certain afterward if she had made a solicitation or laid down an ultimatum. It didn’t really matter.
They both knew, now that her father was dead, that she was offering him a kind of contract in which the terms were, in practically every way, more favorable to him than to her.
Although he was reluctant to qualify his freedom, he had been considering the advantages of marriage, and it didn’t take a college professor to see which side of his bread the butter was on in this instance.
They were married in June after a proper and passionless engagement, and only rarely thereafter, during their honeymoon that summer in Bermuda, did their relationship achieve brief flashes of carnal heat and intensity.
These episodes were really rather embarrassing to Madelaine, and so it was a relief that they occurred as rarely as they did in the beginning, and that they occurred hardly ever as time went on. She was capable of giving perfect fealty to such a relationship, and she did. But Brad could not and did not, and that was the trouble.
Yes, she thought, that was the trouble.
But it was getting late, trouble or none, and dinner was to be early.
She stopped brushing her hair and dressed and went downstairs.
6
He had been in the hotel cocktail lounge almost an hour when Cornelia came, and it was indicative of his changing attitude toward her that he was annoyed because she was late, although he really was in no hurry to meet her and would actually have preferred it if she had failed to come at all. Seeing her enter in the mirror behind the bar, he slipped off his stool and moved toward a small table in a shadowy corner. They met there and sat down.
“Have you been waiting long, darling?” she said.
“Almost an hour, I think.”
“I’m sorry. Would you like to go right up?”
“No. I’d like another drink or two first. Will you have a Martini? That’s what I’m having.”
“A Martini will be fine.”
He ordered the Martinis, and they drank them slowly. The truth was, he was reluctant to go upstairs at all, having a fear of failure, and he was merely delaying as long as possible what he knew he could not agreeably prevent. It was quickly apparent, however, that she did not share his reluctance, quite the contrary, and after two more Martinis had been slowly consumed in the better part of another hour, she arose abruptly and spoke urgently.
“Darling, let’s go up.”
“All right. You go ahead. I’ll follow.”
“Hurry, darling. Come right away.”
“You knew very well that we have to practice some sort of discretion. We can’t afford to be obvious.”
“I know. Come soon, though. Don’t wait too long.”
“I’ll be there soon. What room are you in?”
“607. I’ll be ready, darling.”
He did not watch her as she left the lounge. Feeling now a kind of negative urgency himself, the desire to get finished with what he couldn’t avoid, he waited only a few minutes longer, and then went upstairs to his own room on the fifth floor. He stayed there only long enough to remove a robe from his bag, which was still unpacked and then he walked upstairs with the robe folded compactly under his coat and knocked on the door displaying the number 607 in chrome. He did not wait for an answer to his knock, but opened the door and entered, snapping the lock behind him, and Cornelia was lying on the bed in the light of a bedlamp. She was, as she had promised, ready.
“Darling,” she said, “I’ve been waiting and waiting.”
“Not long,” he said. “Only a few minutes.”
“It seemed like forever. Come quickly, darling.”
Driven now by his negative urgency, he undressed with a rush and went to the bed, where he was drawn downward at once into the hot heart of her importunate hunger, and was even incited by it, after a while to an importunate response.
He was quicker than she and sooner done, spent and ready to quit while she was still importunate and insatiate, a demanding redundancy that had become almost an imposition, and he wondered how in God’s name he had ever found her exciting and challenging, and why the excitement and the challenge must always be reduced to the exhausting repetition of this stale act.
Compelled to a kind of frenetic exertion by a fear of failure, he felt tricked and trapped by adhesive flesh that would never release him except in shame, and it was with an exorbitant sense of escape that he achieved at last, just when he thought with despair and anger that he never would, her final carnal fury.
He lay for a minute gathering strength, and then he stood up abruptly, breaking with brutal impatience the embrace of arms. She stirred and sighed, turning her head on her pillow. He stood for another minute looking down at her in the soft light of the bedlamp, observing with clinical and contemptuous detachment, now that he had survived again the ordeal of her importunacy, the bald display of her satisfied flesh — the large firm breasts and heavy thighs above and below the soft swell of belly. He would have preferred darkness in the end, in the submission that was necessarily his as well as hers, but she always wanted light and demanded it and always had it.
“Darling,” she said, “come back.”
“In a minute,” he said, wondering with instant annoyance why she always told him to come back in that imperious way, when he had in fact hardly left, as if he could return at once as he had been before to do what he had just done, although she knew perfectly well it was impossible.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“In here,” he said, cursing silently the foolish answer to a foolish question that did not need asking or answering. He resisted with an effort the temptation to say instead that he was going anywhere at all that was away from her, and he wished for God’s sake that she would put up her hair and put on her clothes and go away somewhere too.
“Don’t be long,” she said.
He put on a robe that he had brought from his own room in the hotel and went into the bathroom and sat down, pretty soon, on the edge of the tub. There were cigarettes and matches in the pocket of the robe, and he lit one of the cigarettes with one of the matches. Then he began to think about the problem of Cornelia on the bed, or Cornelia anywhere, and how he could bring to an end without recriminations or any ugly display of emotions a relationship that was no longer worth sustaining, and was threatening, besides, to get out of control.
He had been betrayed originally into false assumptions by Cornelia’s practiced air of sophistication. Now he was forced to accept the unfortunate truth that the sophistication was more apparent than real and did not rise to a casual evaluation of all it invited. There would certainly be, in brief, a nasty fuss when he broke things off. But the time for breaking was surely due, or overdue, and tonight, when he was determined, would be better than tomorrow or next week, when he might not be.
Discarding his cigarette in the commode, he went back into the bedroom and sat down on the side of the bed and lit another.
Cornelia was still lying as he had left her, and this made things doubly difficult, if not impossible, for a woman is not inclined to be reasonable in absolutely nothing.
“There’s something we need to talk about, Cornelia,” he said.
“No, don’t talk.” She spoke with her eyes closed, and her voice had a thick, drugged sound. “Lie down beside me,”
“Damn it, Cornelia, I want to talk without distractions. Are you listening?”
“I’m listening, but I’m getting very sleepy. Darling, I feel so good and so sleepy. Couldn’t we talk later? In the morning?”
“I’ll be gone in the morning before you’re awake. You know that.”