All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [187]
Then came the final phase, the phase of the Great Sleep. Immediately after dinner every evening, I went to bed and slept soundly, with the sweet feeling of ever falling toward the center of delicious blackness, until the last possible moment the next morning. Sometimes I did not even wait for dinner and the pleasure of observing Lois. I would just go to bed. I remember that this became almost a habit in the late spring. I would come in from my afternoon’s occupation and draw the shade in the bedroom and go to bed, with the mild light oozing in from around the shade and birds twittering and caroling in the trees of the little park next the apartment building and children calling musically from the playground in the park. Going to bed in the late spring afternoon or just at the beginning of twilight, with those sounds in your ears, gives you a wonderful sense of peace, a peace which must resemble the peace of old age after a well-spent life.
But of course there was Lois. Sometimes she would come into my bedroom–by this time I had moved into the guest room for my serious sleeping–and sit on the edge of the bed and give me long descriptions of myself, rather monotonous descriptions, as a matter of fact, for Lois had little gift of phrase and had to fall back on the three or four classic terms. Sometimes she would beat me with her clenched fists. She had a feeble, female way of using her little white fists. I could sleep through the descriptions, and almost through the beating of the clenched fists on my side or back. Sometimes she would cry and give vent to a great deal of self-pity. Once or twice she even snuggled into bed with me. Sometimes she would open the door to my room and turn up the phonograph in the living room until the joint shook. But no soap. I could sleep through anything, or just about.
Then the morning came when I open my eyes and felt the finger of Fate upon me; I knew the time had come. I got up and packed my suitcase and walked out the door and didn’t come back. To the slick apartment and to Lois who was beautiful and to whom I was so perfectly adjusted.
I never saw her again, but I know what she looks like now when cocktails, bonbons, late hours, and nearly forty years have done their work on the peach bloom of cheeks, the pearly, ripe but vigorous bosom, the supple midriff, the brooding, black, velvety-liquid eyes, the bee-stung lips, the luxurious thighs. She sit on a divan somewhere, held more or less in shape by the vigor of a masseuse and the bands of lastex which secretly sheathe her like a mummy, but bloated with the entire universe she has ingurgitated with a long delicious sigh. An now with a hand on which the pointed nails are as red as though she had just used them to rip greedily the guts from a yet living sacrificial fowl, she reaches out to a silver dish to pick up a chocolate. And while the chocolate is yet in mid-air, the lower lip drops open and beyond the purplish tint of the microscopically scaling veneer of lipstick, one sees the damp, paler red, expectant membranes of the mouth, and the faint glitter of a gold filling in the dark, hot orifice.
Good-bye, Lois, and I forgive you everything I did to you.
As for the way Anne Stanton went meanwhile, the story is short. After two years at the refined female college in Virginia, she came home. Adam by this time was in medical school up East. Anne spent a year going to parties in the city, and got engaged. But nothing came of it. He was a decent, intelligent, prosperous fellow, too. After a while there was another engagement, but something happened again. By this time Governor Stanton was nearly an invalid, and Adam was studying abroad. Anne quit going to parties, except an occasional party at the Landing in the summer. She stayed at home with her father, giving him his medicine, patting his pillow, assisting the nurse, reading to him hour by hour, holding his hand in the summer twilights or in the winter evening when the house shook to the blasts off the sea. It took him seven years to die. After the Governor had died in the big tester bed with a lot of expensive medical talent leaning over him, Anne Stanton lived in the house fronting the sea, with only the company of Aunt Sophonisba, a feeble, grumbling, garrulous, and incompetent old colored woman, who combined benevolence and a vengeful tyranny in the ambiguous way known only to old colored women who have spent their lives in affectionate service, in prying, wheedling, and chicanery, in short-lived rebelliousness and long irony, and in secondhand clothes. Then Aunt Sophonisba died, too, and Adam came back from abroad, loaded with academic distinctions and fanatically devoted to his work. Shortly after his return, Anne moved to the city to be near him. By this time she was pushing thirty.