The Sheltering Sky - Bowles, Paul [22]
He looked mystified. “What’s all this? Say it again slowly. Friends?”
“That’s right. Some English woman and her son. They’ve asked him.”
Little by little his face began to beam. This was not false now, she noted. He was just incredibly slow in reacting.
“Well, well!” he said again, grinning.
“What a dolt he is,” she thought, observing the utter lack of inhibition in his behavior. (The blatantly normal always infuriated her.) “His emotional maneuvers all take place out in the open. Not a tree or a rock to hide behind.”
Aloud she said: “The train leaves at six and gets there at some God-forsaken hour of the morning. But they say it’s always late, and that’s good, for once.”
“So we’ll just go together, the two of us.”
“Port’ll be there long before, so he can get rooms for us. I’ve got to go now and find a beauty parlor, God forbid.”
“What do you need of that?” protested Tunner. “Let well enough alone. You can’t improve on nature.”
She had no patience with gallantry; nevertheless she smiled at him as she went out. “Because I’m a coward,” she thought. She was quite conscious of a desire to pit Tunner’s magic against Port’s, since Port had put a curse on the trip. And as she smiled she said, as if to nobody: “I think we can avoid the wreck.”
“Huh?Ó “Oh, nothing, I’ll see you for lunch in the dining room at two. “
Tunner was the sort of person to whom it would occur only with difficulty that he might be being used. Because he was accustomed to imposing his will without meeting opposition, he had a highly developed and very male vanity which endeared him, strangely enough, to almost everyone. Doubtless the principal reason why he had been so eager to accompany Port and Kit on this trip was that with them as with no one else he felt a definite resistance to his unceasing attempts at moral domination, at which he was forced, when with them, to work much harder; thus unconsciously he was giving his personality the exercise it required. Kit and Port, on the other hand, both resented even the reduced degree to which they responded to his somewhat obvious charm, which was why neither one would admit to having encouraged him to come along with them. There was no small amount of shame involved where they were concerned, since both of them were conscious of all the acting and formula-following in his behavior, and yet to a certain degree both were willingly ensnared by it. Tunner himself was an essentially simple individual irresistibly attracted by whatever remained just beyond his intellectual grasp. Contenting himself with not quite being able to seize an idea was a habit he had acquired in adolescence, and it operated in him now with still greater force. If he could get on all sides of a thought, he concluded that it was an inferior one; there had to be an inaccessible part of it for his interest to be aroused. His attention, however, did not spur him to additional thought. On the contrary, it merely provided him with an emotional satisfaction vis-a-vis the idea, making it possible for him to relax and admire it at a distance. At the beginning of his friendship with Port and Kit he had been inclined to treat them with the careful deference he felt was due them, not as individuals, but as beings who dealt almost exclusively with ideas, sacred things. Their discouraging of this tactic had been so categorical that he had been obliged to adopt a new one, in using which he felt even less sure of himself. This consisted of gentle prods, ridicule so faint and unfocused that it always could be given a flattering turn if necessary, and the adoption of an attitude of amused, if slightly pained resignation, that made him feel like the father of a pair of impossibly spoiled prodigies.
Light-hearted now, he moved about the room whistling at the prospect of being alone with Kit; he had decided she needed him. He