Contrary Pleasure Read Online Free Page B

the middle of the family. That’s the
way they’d have to be here or at my house. Besides, she’s got Mrs. Bailey to
help and the cleaning girl that comes three days a week. You heard her
say she’d be glad to. And the twins are away.”
    Ben knew Wilma enough to sense the relief behind her hesitant words. “All
right. I mean, I guess it’s all right. But let’s not let Alice do any
entertaining for them. That’s our job, Bess. She’s doing enough just having
them there.”
    Bess stood up and stretched and yawned. She put her hand on Quinn’s
shoulder. “Come on, honey. These people want to eat.” Quinn unfolded his lazy
length out of the chair and set his empty glass on the tray. They said good
night and walked away through the late dusk toward their house.
    Wilma banged glasses on the tray and said in a low voice, “I wish that
once, just once, she’d at least carry stuff into the house after one of these
parties that just happen. I want the chance of at least telling her not to
bother. I even wish I had the gall to not offer when we have a drink over
there. I do, though. Every time. And she says sure. Honestly, Ben, sometimes it
makes me so damn mad.”
    “She just doesn’t think about it, I guess.”
    “At her age she ought to start thinking about it. I guess it’s a good
thing Robbie and Susan won’t be staying with her. Susan would be working her
head off.”
    “David might make it difficult.”
    “I guess he would make it difficult.” He picked up the pitcher and shaker
and followed her into the house. She turned on the white amphitheater glare of
the kitchen lights. She turned to him as she put the tray down. “You better do
something about those cushions. The dew has been heavy these nights.”
    He walked out and collected the canvas cushions off the wrought-iron
chairs and put them on the shelf in the pump house. He bent over, grunting a
bit, and touched the grass with his fingertips. It was a bit damp already. He
was far enough behind his own house so that he could see through the trees the
lights in Quinn’s house and in George’s. There was a dim trace of color in the
west, a dull orange, low to the horizon. He lit a cigarette. Day is done and
the Delevans are in their nests and all of us have
gotten through this one. Fifty is a time when you think too much of all the
things that can happen. Twenty is a time when nothing can happen.
    Turning, he could see through the kitchen windows, see Wilma walking back
and forth. She was a stranger in a tricky stage setting. Suburban matron. The
billowing breasts and the rigorously girdled waist and hips, so that she seemed
balanced in a rather topheavy way on the legs which
for some reason had remained as slim and smooth and unblemished as when she had
been young. She used some sort of blue tint in her white hair, and it was
carefully sculptured, looking in that light as cold and rigid and planned as
marble. There were two deep lines between her eyebrows. And a compressed look
about her lips. He had heard her described, quite often lately, as a handsome
woman. Perhaps it was the way her features were cut. A certain bold clarity.
    And he suddenly felt ashamed because he had looked at her so coldly. What
right had he to indulge himself in a critique. Both of them had changed in the
same slow way, the same terrifying day-by-day way, so that the faces in old
photographs became the faces of strangers. A strange girl in a muddy print,
looking out with shyness, and the young man beside her—that fast walker, that
fast talker, that one who bounded up stairs and sang and knew a thousand things
and told of them well, and perhaps too often. There had been a thousand things
in the world and a thousand risks to take gladly.
    It was, he thought, like a network of tunnels. A thousand choices. And
the next year five hundred choices. And each year the choices were fewer and
finally one day there were featureless walls on either side of you and nothing
to do but keep