Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [257]
I cannot imagine it, I say. I do not believe it. Yet I have seen the similar breakdown of one whose breakdown I couldn’t possibly have imagined until it happened, whose temptations I was not even aware of.
So I don’t know what happened. I only know that passion and guilt happened, in some form. In their world, their time, their circumstances, and given their respective characters, there could have been no passion without guilt, no kisses without tears, no embrace without despair. I suppose they clung to one another on the dark veranda in a convulsion of love and woe, their passion no sooner ignited by touch than it was put out by conscience.
And I approve. For all my trying, I can only find Victorian solutions to these Victorian problems. I can’t look upon marriage as anything but serious, or upon sex as casual or comic. I feel contempt for those who do so look upon it. Shelly would say I’ve got a hangup on sex. It seems to me of an almost demoralizing importance; I guess I really think that it is either holy or unholy, and that the assurances of marriage are not unrelated to its holiness. I even respect Victorian rebels and fornicators more than the casual screwers and fornicators of our time, because they risked something, because they understood the seriousness of what they did. Well. Whatever Grandmother did, I take it seriously, because I know she did.
When Frank had gone, already furtive, already thinking how to evade or avoid his returning friend and boss, slipping out back to his tied saddlehorse before the sounds of the buggy should be heard in the lane, I can imagine her walking barefooted and distracted around the sopping lawn and along the border of the rose garden, smelling that heavy night-distilled fragrance and torturing herself with the thought of how Oliver had searched through half of Connecticut for some of those new hybrids, and transported them twenty-five hundred miles, to try to make her feel at home in her exile. She was assaulted alternately by anger at his presumption that she could make her home in this place, and by gusts of pity for him, and love, and the will to heal and comfort, and by exasperation over his trustingness and his lapses of judgment, and by despair over the future, and by misery over what she must write Bessie, and by loathing of her own lack of control–a woman of forty-two, with three children, swept off her feet like a seminary girl. And intruding into all that web of complicated and contradictory feeling, the tense memory of straining kisses only minutes ago, and the hands to which she had lifted and tightened her breast, and guilt, guilt, guilt for just those treacherous kisses, and something like awe at what she had been proved capable of.
But when she heard the creak and rattle of dried-out buggy wheels coming down the lane through the starlit dark, she pressed her palms upward along her cheeks to rub and stretch away the stiffness of tears, and ran soft-footed to the door, and slipped in. She was in bed, with a cloth over her eyes to signify headache, when she heard her door open softly, and then after a listening time close, just as softly. She could hear Nellie’s exaggerated North Country voice croaking, “Coom, children, to bed, to bed!”
The house settled, the noises went behind thick adobe walls. Through the open window she heard the hose cart groan as Oliver dragged it off the grass; he never left it overnight because its wheels would dent the new lawn. Then for a time she heard him walking up and down the veranda, slow and steady on