The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [197]
Their lovemaking is fantastic for a time:
He must subdue her, absorb her, rip her apart and consume her.
This motif is concealed for a month or two, clouded over by their mutual inexperience, by the strangeness, the unfamiliarity, but it must come out eventually. And for a half year, almost a year, they have love passages of intense fury, enraged and powerful, which leave him sobbing from exhaustion and frustration on her breast.
Do you love me, are you mine, love me.
Yes yes.
I'll take you apart, I'll eat you, oh, I'll make you mine, I'll make you mine, you bitch.
And surprising profanity, words he is startled to hear himself speak.
Margaret is kindled by it, exalted for a time, sees it as passion, glows and becomes rounded, but only for a time. After a year it is completely naked, apparent to her, that he is alone, that he fights out battles with himself upon her body, and something withers in her. There is all the authority she has left, the family and the Boston streets and the history hanging upon them, and she has left it, to be caught in a more terrifying authority, a greater demand.
This is all of course beneath words, would be unbearable if it were ever said, but their marriage re-forms, assumes a light and hypocritical companionship with a void at the center, and very little love-making now, painfully isolated when it occurs. He retreats from her, licks his wounds, and twists in the circle beyond which he cannot break. Their social life becomes far more important.
She busies herself with running her house, keeping a list of the delicate debits and credits of entertainment and visiting. It always takes them two hours to figure out the list for their monthly party.
Once they spend a week wondering if they can invite the General to their house, discuss the elaborate arguments on either side. They conclude it would be in bad taste, might hurt them even if he came, but a few nights later Captain Cummings wrestles with the problem again, wakes up at dawn and knows it is a chance he must take.
They plan it very carefully, picking a weekend when the General has no obligations and it seems as if none will develop. From the General's house orderly, Margaret finds out which foods he likes; at a post dance she talks to the General's wife for twenty minutes, discovers an acquaintance of her father's whom the General knows.
They send out the invitations and the General accepts. There is the nervous preceding week, the tension at the party. The General walks in, stands about at the buffet table, picking not without zeal at the smoked turkey, the shrimp for which she has sent to Boston.
It is finally a success and the General smiles at Cummings mistily, pleased with his eighth Scotch, the puffed and tufted furniture (he had been expecting maple), the sharp sweet bite of the shrimp sauce through the fur of drinking. When he says good-bye he pats Cummings on the shoulder, pinches Margaret's cheek. The tension collapses, the junior officers and their wives begin to sing. But they are too exhausted and the party ends early.
That night when they congratulate each other Cummings is satisfied.
But Margaret ruins it; she has a facility for ruining things now. You know, honestly, Edward, I wonder what the point to it all was, you can't get promoted any faster, and the old fart (she has taken to swearing mildly) will be dead by the time it's a question of recommending you for general's rank.
You have to start your reputation early, he says quickly. He has accepted all these mores, forced himself dutifully into them, but he does not like them to be questioned.
Oh, what a perfectly vague thing to say. You know I'm feeling now as if we were silly to have invited him. It would have been much more fun without him.
Fun? (This hits at the core of him, leaves him actually weak with anger.) There are more important things than fun. He feels as if he has closed a door behind him.
You're in danger of becoming a bore.
Let it go, he almost shouts, and she subsides before his rage. But there it is between them, stated again.
I don't know what gets into you, he mutters.