Puzzle for Pilgrims Read online

  She tried, God knows. When she saw our marriage sliding, she threw up her movie career. I should have been grateful, but perversely I felt she was playing the martyr. Her very patience with me seemed an accusation. Because I was insecure I wanted to hurt her, and because she was human she started hurting me back, and I was vulnerable. Our pointless, poignant antagonism climaxed when she moved into the spare bedroom.

  The psychiatrist a friend recommended laughed at me and said I was one of hundreds of thousands of ex-servicemen suffering from a temporary traumatic neurosis. In six months, he said, I would be my pre-war virile self. I told him I had wife trouble. He laughed again and said I was one of millions of ex-servicemen with wife trouble. The laughter was meant to reassure me, I suppose, and his advice was elementary. I was going through an unattractive phase and taking it out on Iris. It would be better for me and my marriage to sit out the unattractive phase alone.

  I told Iris what he’d said and we squabbled about it, the hostility still between us. Finally, in a sort of mental and physical exhaustion, we agreed that she would go away. We were both frightened then, frightened we were destroying something we couldn’t afford to destroy.

  When she left, she kissed me. It was one of the few physical contacts we’d had recently. She clung to me, and the bitterness went with the feel of her in my arms.

  “It’ll be all right, won’t it, Peter?” she said.

  “Yes, it’ll be all right.”

  And I believed it.

  She drove to Mexico, partly because it was far away from anything we’d known together, partly because a friend had offered her a house in Taxco.

  Maybe the psychiatrist had something. Without Iris, I felt better. All my old tenderness for her returned. I could write to her without self-consciousness. She wrote back—long, cheerful letters at first and then shorter letters, farther apart. I found nothing ominous in that. Iris had never been a letter-writer. I ran into a play script I liked and embarked upon producing it with high enthusiasm. The show was a smash success. Immediately my self-assurance came back and with it a sharp desire to see Iris. When the show no longer needed me, I wired her lightheartedly and took the next plane to Mexico City. Way up in the air over North America, I thought excitedly of our reunion and kindly of the psychiatrist. When I arrived at Mexico City airport, my dreams made a crash landing.

  Because—in the meantime—Iris had met Martin Haven.

  She told me about it that first night in the apartment she had taken in the Calle Londres. She was stricken, but keyed up to it. I had to be told at once, she said. It wasn’t a thing we could side-step. I was too stunned to understand then. It all meant nothing except a cold, flat feeling in the stomach and my old sense of inadequacy, creeping over me like ivy creeping over a ruin.

  Next morning I met Martin. He came to see me, grotesquely formal as a suitor presenting himself for the approval of his fiancée’s family. I realized the full extent of the competition then. Martin was very young and fair and he had charm—charm as irresistible as any I had known. It had to be irresistible to affect me.

  It wasn’t a charm you could pin down, and there was nothing professional about it. He was English—probably even with some kind of title—and small, light as a boy with a boy’s wheat-blond hair and a boy’s blue eyes. He was too gentlemanly to broach the delicate situation. He treated me like a rather nice father, talking politenesses in his grave English voice and looking at Iris with blind worship.

  If I’d followed the manual, I’d have knocked him down and thrown him out of the house. I didn’t. Once I rose, formal too, to offer him a cigarette, and I caught a glimpse of our two faces close together in a wall mirror. His was young, golden, and sublimely sure of getting what he wanted; mine was tired, war-gaunt, thirty-fivish. That’s really when I lost the battle. Because I thought, “Why shouldn’t she prefer this? What in God’s name have I got to offer?”

  After he had left, Iris stood at the window, watching him walk away across the dappled shade and sun of the Calle Londres.

  “It’s something I couldn’t help, Peter.”

  I wanted to hurt her. “I guess he’s more fun than the spare bedroom.”

  She turned, looking at me. She was thinner, miserably unhappy. “It crept up on me, Peter. I read the novel, the only book he’s written. He wrote it after he’d come from England, before he married Sally—when he was living with Marietta.”

  She watched me whitely, at sea, as if she wanted me to explain something she couldn’t understand herself.

  “Marietta?” I asked noncommittally.

  “His sister.”

  “His sister.”

  “Friends lent me the book. Peter, it’s wonderful. Perhaps there’s genius in it. Then I met them—Martin and Sally.”

  “In Taxco?”

  “In Taxco. Sally has a house. She’s stinking rich.”

  Malice rose. “And you decided she didn’t understand him?”

  “Peter, please, please, don’t make me sound that unattractive. She only married him because people said he was a genius and she couldn’t bear not to have the genius belong to her. She has to live on someone else’s vitality. He’s not a very strong character. He’s not been a match for her. He’s almost lost.”

  “He didn’t seem lost to me. He looked like a prefect in an English public school with half the rugger team mad for love of him.”

  The awful thing was that I don’t think she was listening to anything I said.

  “He was in a trap,” she said, almost to herself. “Such a clever trap. Sally’s clever. Marietta’s the only person he ever really loved, but Sally managed it so that they quarreled. They don’t even speak any more. And he didn’t see through her enough to know what was happening. He thought he’d lost his talent, that he never had talent anyway. He started drinking, behaving impossibly. Sally didn’t stop him. Oh, I don’t know—I suppose if she couldn’t be his inspiration, she preferred it that way, preferred having a wreck of a man so long as he was still tied to her—like a female spider with the shell of the male she’s eaten.”

  “Love’s made you very Curiosities-of-Animal-Life-conscious,” I said. “Spiders.”

  “It’s made a mess of me.” She dropped into a chair, her dark hair dropping forward, hiding her profile. “I don’t know anything any more. It’s not like any of those Hollywood men. I don’t even know if it’s love. I don’t know what it is. At first I was just sorry for him, and I despised Sally. I talked to him. I told him how good I thought the book was. We made a date to walk in the mountains. Sally didn’t catch on. For some reason she didn’t think I was dangerous. Martin and I saw each other more and more…”

  “Do we need the sordid details?”

  She heard that and looked up, not angry, just wilted and suffering. “I’ve got to make you understand. I was something strong, I suppose. At least he thought I was. And, almost before I knew it, he was relying on me. I felt the whole weight of him. He was clinging to me as something to balance Sally. I was frightened. It was like the Old Man of the Sea.” Her shoulders seemed to shrink. “Then, suddenly, it wasn’t the Old Man of the Sea any more.”

  “And he stopped drinking? And he started writing again? And what he started writing was good? All that?”

  “Yes.” She stared at me defiantly. “Corny, but yes.”

  “And you alone can make something of him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he’s very beautiful?”

  “If you like—yes.”

  “And if I said it was all hooey, that you loved me, that this was just—glamour?”

  “Peter, don’t say it. Please don’t say it. It’s too late.” She jumped up, ran to me, and clutched my arms as if they were the only firm thing in a toppling building. “How can I say it? How can I say that I loved you, that I left New York loving you in spite of all those ghastly times? We were wrong. What we did was horribly wrong. We should have stayed together, stuck it out somehow. I came here, alone, exposed. W
ithout you, there wasn’t any armor.”

  She wasn’t crying. Her body was dry and hot in my arms. It was the same body I had known and loved for five years. Part of me wanted to fight for a cause that was obviously lost. Another part remembered Martin’s face and my own face in the mirror. Something shriveled inside me and I knew I wasn’t going to fight.

  I looked at a bowl of lush pink roses. I wondered if Martin had bought them for her before I came. I could see him with the roses clutched in his hand, sober, rather awkward.

  I said quietly, “Okay. What are you going to do?”

  Her face was buried against my shoulder, her soft hair brushed my cheek. “He’s—he’s going to leave Sally. He has friends in Pie de la Cuesta, near Acapulco. He’s going there.”

  “And you?”

  Her voice was muffled against the tweed of my jacket.

  “I’m going to Pie de la Cuesta too.”

  “In sin?”

  “It isn’t that way, Peter. He’s terribly English about me. He wants to marry me.”

  “And divorce Sally?”

  “She’ll raise a howl that they’ll hear in Guatemala. But yes. He’s going to ask her for a divorce.”

  I was still looking at the roses over her shining head. They wobbled slightly. “And how about me? They say Mexico’s a good place for a divorce, short and cheap. Shall I start proceedings today?”

  She pulled away from me and stared as if that was her death knell instead of her release.

  “Peter…”

  My pride, what there was of it, came out as anger. “For God’s sake, what do you expect me to do? Crawl on my hands and knees to you and whine about a broken heart? You’ve found a man you want more than you want me. Do you imagine it’s the first time it’s happened since Krafft-Ebing? Do you imagine I’d want to cling to a wife with a head in someone else’s gas oven? What’s done is done. Take your little genius and mother him and wallow in it.”

  “Peter…”

  “And if the wife makes trouble, shoot her over to me.” I felt taut and hard, but the way ice is taut and hard over water. “I’ll help you get your man if he’s too feeble to help himself. God knows, I hope it’s heartbreaking when you get him. But if she acts up, I’ll fix Sally Haven for you. And I’m not being noble. It’s just plain, ornery vindictiveness.”

  That was too much for her. She stood in front of me, quite still, crying. Large, bright tears wet her lashes and slid down her cheeks.

  The futile unhappiness of it all—for me, for her—moved me. I put my arm around her and stroked her hair. I felt then that maybe I was the one with the strength, after all.

  “Don’t worry, baby,” I said softly. “It’ll all pan out. And, believe it or not, I’ll probably live.”

  Martin left Sally. She let him go with a quietness which should have aroused their suspicions. Iris left too. I helped her pack and drove her to the airport. When she boarded it, she asked me in a tight voice not to start divorce proceedings until she gave me the word. We didn’t kiss. We shook hands stiffly. I caught a glimpse of her white, obsessed face in the window as the plane roared away.

  After that, life had been smooth for them for a few days in Acapulco. That, of course, was just because Sally had been preparing her attack. Then the attack came. I heard about it from Iris. One evening her voice came through thinly on the long-distance wire from the coast.

  “Peter, please don’t be angry. I’ve got to talk. There’s nobody but you.”

  Sally had arrived that afternoon and thrown a scene. First she had attacked Iris, calling her every gutter name outside of the dictionary. Then she had turned on Martin. She told Iris that he was wanted by the English police for embezzlement and could never go back there. She said he had consorted with the lowest types in Taxco and that he was a drunk. But those had only been preliminaries, getting her tongue in. She came to the point in her own good time. She was never going to give a divorce; she would die before she gave him a divorce. And not only that. For the three years of the marriage, Martin had been penniless; she had given him large sums of money and on each occasion she had made him sign an IOU. If he didn’t go back to her, she would sue him for the return of every cent.

  “She means it, Peter. It’s all lies about Martin. I know. But she can twist things.” Iris added forlornly, “Peter, what are we going to do?”

  That was what showed me the real extent of my defeat. The thing between us was so dead for her that she was asking my advice as if I were a godfather or an old friend of the family. I wasn’t comforting. I growled something about her taking the rough with the smooth and hung up.

  Then I went out and got drunk. That’s really all Mexico City had to offer me. I couldn’t leave, because I had to wait for word from Iris to start divorce proceedings. I had nothing to do. Occasionally, I’d make a halfhearted tourist trip, but Aztec pyramids and Catholic churches aren’t much balm. Mostly I hung around bars—not the chromium bars where American businessmen borrow Mexican hats from the orchestra while their wives kick their shoes off under the bars and let their make-up run, but Mexican bars where they play dominoes and shoot dice and sometimes, because it’s sissy not to, hit their best friends in the face.

  Two weeks before the bullfight I was in a bar, a few days after Iris called, when I met Marietta Haven. In New York it would have been a wild coincidence, my meeting Martin’s sister, but in Mexico everyone runs into everyone sooner or later. She was sitting at the bar of La Cucaracha in front of a Martini. We started to talk, not knowing each other. I thought she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.

  Even now, when I know her as well as the lines on my own palm, I find it difficult to describe Marietta. She was tall and dark as her brother was slight and fair. She was slender, too, like a spray of pussy willow, and there was a quality of spring about her, fresh, with clean, dark hair and the sort of flawless country skin which made the French pedant write that God, when he created the perfect woman, gave her an English complexion. But that wasn’t the essence of Marietta Haven. The real Marietta was always elusive. If she was spring, it was spring with a late frost and a sad backward glance at winter. You felt that, deep inside her, something secret was locked. There’s a street in Mexico City called the street of the Niños Perdidos—the lost children. Sometimes I thought of Marietta like that—a lost child. And sometimes, when her cool green eyes forgot me for her own incalculable reflections, I thought of her as Ixtacihuatl, the Sleeping Woman, the snowbound, brooding volcano that watches over Mexico City.

  I never knew why she talked to me that first night, or why, having come into my life, she stayed. But then I never could tell what she was thinking or feeling or even if she was thinking or feeling anything. She hardly ever talked about Martin, Iris, or Sally, either—only an occasional phrase that dropped into the conversation when it was least expected.

  We saw each other every day, but there had never been talk of a romance or even of an affair between us. And yet she must have known dozens of other men in Mexico City, although she never spoke of them and I never saw them. Sometimes I wondered if she was a very good person who knew what a raw deal her brother had given me and was trying to make compensation. Sometimes I wondered if she was just a bum after free drinks—because I always paid.

  She went everywhere with me, except to the bullfights. She didn’t like the bulls. That’s why I’d been alone that afternoon when I met Sally.

  The drive home from the bull ring ended in the quiet, tree-lined block of the Calle Londres where my apartment was. I left the car on the street and walked to the door leading to my patio. Someone had left a large, shiny rooster, with its feet tied together, pegged into the brown strip of grass outside the door. It watched me with a baleful eye.

  Near it, but detached from it, an Indian squatted on the sidewalk behind a cloth on which lay a dozen tiny mounds of peanuts and a plate of cucumbers, fancily cut into slices. He was there all day every day. I had never seen him sell anything.

 
I ducked under the bougainvillea vine and went up the steps to my apartment, which had its own outside entrance on the second floor. I let myself in, thinking how I was going to dislike the emptiness inside.

  But the living room wasn’t empty. Marietta was sitting in a cream brocade chair by the window, drinking tequila. She sat cross-kneed, showing long, thoroughbred legs. She never wore a hat, and her dark hair gleamed in the late sunshine, brown with a touch of gold and seemingly in motion like the gold-splashed water of a trout stream. She was elegant and cool, as always, the way you expected English women to look in The Tatler when you hadn’t actually seen The Tatler for a long time.

  She got up and came to me.

  “The velador let me in, Peter. He’s used to me now. He probably thinks I’m the Mexican equivalent of your little piece of fluff.”

  She had an unopened envelope in her hand. She held it out to me. She wasn’t smiling and something was wrong for her. I could tell that at once.

  “Here’s a letter from your wife,” she said. “It’s just come special delivery. You’d better read it. I have a feeling something nasty is brewing.”

  Three

  I opened the thin air-mail envelope.

  Peter: I’m frightened for Martin. Sally was here yesterday. She threatened him again. And this time it’s real. She says she knows something. I don’t know what it is but something he’s done here, and she says she has proof. She says if he doesn’t go back to her, she’s going to the police. Why are people like that allowed to live? I hate her. I could kill her. Peter, do you remember that you offered to help me with her? I never dreamed I’d take you up on it. But pride doesn’t seem important any more. Martin will never leave me—whatever she does. I know that. Peter, please, someone’s got to stop her. I can’t. There isn’t anyone but you. You might be able to do something. Go to her, talk to her, try and make her see it can’t help her to destroy Martin. God, hasn’t this made me a monster? Peter, I’m so sorry.