Sleepers, Awake!

Beach, lake and sky rich with deep late colors, with Indian Summer prosperity and only a few crisp leaves blown out onto the sands, which were white, tended, raked and heated by a long season -- he thought it must mean good luck. Why not believe in ease and health? Why not believe in reviving ways? He sat up, feeling the hot September sun on the sunburnt bridge of his nose, and decided that they had won their risk of a week's vacation after Labor Day, when on another year a thin September rain might have Kept them quarreling in the hotel off the lake. It was a good omen. An optimist still, he piously took good hope from good omens although not bad hope from bad ones.

"This sand looks clean," his wife remarked, turning fitfully at his side, "but it's really just crawling." She lay stretched out, eyes closed, wide awake, trying to court sleep by pretending. It would be a nice surprise if she found it. Her thigh twitched and Burr Fullers brushed away a sandfly.

"Maybe you put on too much lotion," he said. "They don't seem to be attracted to me."

She sat bolt upright. "Do I look greasy to you, Burr?"

"No," he said very precisely, "no, you do not look greasy to me, Laura."

She fell back into the little trough formed between her two thin wings of shoulder blades: she closed her eyes, working hard at getting a tan, one of her several anxious enterprises. Just when you have a good one, it begins to fade, and where are you then? Merely yellow. She covered her eyes with the little pads of cotton she kept for that purpose. Now that she could not see him, he felt emboldened to look at his wile, this angry, dieting, sun-bathing and distant creature with whose life he had been joined since their college days. Yes, the oil on her thin flanks probably did draw flies. Her skin twitched under them and she scratched idly. He saw on her thighs the punishment of her mistrust of flesh: a stringy looseness replacing the firm health of first youth. Of course, it was still true that she wore clothes well. She dieted for that, and got what she dieted for. But in a bathing suit (or undressed for the great dance -- he thought with an ache of anger and of love) her bones were as sharp as her discontentment. In winter she had a resenting gray face, masked by the sunlamp which reddened it; now there was the bronzing of a long summer over what was gray within, needing seconal to sleep.

And yet they had rolled and wept with pleasure sometimes, and line sleep afterward -- or perhaps with desire of pleasure, with planning and plotting of pleasure.

It was why they were here. They had arranged this vacation alone in one more effort to bring back their good times and make good days to come. The peace of the after-season resort, a few children, beach balls and driftwood, the slow movements near the lake, lazy, easy, a bit tired, much sleeping -- this gave them hope of focus on each other. The attendants at the hotel were grinning and indifferent, ready to quit for the winter after tips and a good summer. To be alone like this was to be on a wedding trip. They had wished to make it together again.

Laura was really sleeping now. Her narrow girlish breast rose and fell regularly. Good. If she slept in the afternoon, she would be relaxed and able to sleep later. And thus no seconal. And she would be pleased about the almost effortless sunburn she had acquired during the hour of oblivion. And no guilt about seconal.

He got up carefully, straightening his boxer trunks, watching to see if Laura stirred to notice while he left her side, and began to walk down the long beach. There were a few children running about, and parents studious of the children, and fond fat grandparents. It was not the time of the year for frolicking young people like Laura and him. He grinned wryly at the word "frolicking" and glanced back to where she dozed on the sand, her bottles and tubes piled by her side on a towel, her glasses and watch in a slipper. She needed to lie flat, to become irritable under the sun, flesh quivering when a fly pricked, anxious and compelled by her ideals to get deeply tanned, even at the cost of trivial discomfort and boredom and the yellow which inevitably followed her few days of brown success. He went to the edge of the water where the stiffened, wavelapped sand made a springy path for him.

"Lucille!" a voice cried out.

But he did not see who had called, because instead he saw Lucille herself wave to someone back on shore, climbing and jumping into the feathered waves, a flashing happy girl with droplets of water glistening on her shoulders in the sun. An instantaneous physical recollection of joy flooded his body -- she was lovely. In the next moment Fuller was running and hurling himself into the lake, bathing luxuriously in the warm late summer water, in the same lake in which the girl named Lucille happily swam. He swam toward her, thinking the old song: "Those girls, those girls, Those lovely seaside girls ..." Of course she did not notice him. He did not try to speak, but for the time was satisfied simply by taking these pleasures with her -- sand bottom, then backstroke, then crawl, hissing foam against bared teeth in a last rapid spurt before coming out blowing and breathing deeply onto the beach. She did not see that he had imitated her frolicking maneuvers. She was a sleek girl in a finely fitted black swimsuit, shaking her long reddish hair loose out of her bathing cap as she ran up the beach, laughing and dancing on one foot with water in her ear, and then he lost her among the little crowd at the hotdog stand. He even wanted to lose her and averted his eyes as from the sun. He did not dare to lose her.

But moving toward his wife, who was sitting up and watching him, he went on imagining Lucille: she was a college girl on a dutiful weekend outing with her parents before returning to her senior year at Oberlin. All right, back now, enought, he thought, and waved and grinned at Laura.

She hugged her knees and said, "Why didn't you tell me you were going in?"

"I thought you were sleeping. I didn't think you'd want to."

"Well, no," she said, "but I wondered where you were, that's all. Not that it made much difference, since there aren't many places to go. Is the water nice?"

"Marvelous!"

"It looks all right, but it's probably brackish. I'd rather just admire from a distance."

"Did you really sleep?"

"Dreamed, Burr," -- and all at once miraculously she smiled and showed her small fine buds of teeth (the sun!) and he remembered her abandoned gaiety at parties, her dancing fling and laughter on the excuse of one drink: and then how they held and clutched and plucked at each other's flesh afterward. She stood up, stretched, took his arm. She yawned. They lurched through the sands toward the Breakers Hotel a few steps from the beach. "Let's have a big dinner and a big time doing nothing tonight," she said. She brushed her hand across the hairs on his arm. The contrary touch of her fingers on his skin made it rise and tingle. There was that warm, marvelous, and secret detonation between them.

His heart seemed to leap toward her. As they passed Lucille, licking the mustard from her finger after the hotdog, he looked away. He wanted to see no one but Laura. She wanted him, too. He wanted nothing but their good marriage.

• • •

By the time they showered and dressed for dinner, the rapidly shortening September afternoon was over and there were blue shadows on the gravel walk outside their window. They were hungry, but not with the alert pang of appetite; they suffered under a dull, starved, cocktail-needing boredom. His bored exasperation with assigning too much duty to love had always been the weak side of his feeling for her; her passive refusal to be assured was the other side of her clutching, clinging passion for him. Their unstable good spirits passed while he threaded new laces into his shoes and Laura put on her girdle.

"Why wear a girdle here?" he asked her.

And she answered: "I'm not a college girl any more, and anyway, it's only a light summer thing. Just a little elastic to hold up my stockings ----"

They walked toward the bar through the echoing, almost empty corridors of this ramshackle resort hotel, all of sagging wood and peeling paint, splendor turned economical. The smart people traveled further. The Breakers at Cedar Point on Lake Erie had once been a watering place to which carriages came from Sandusky and Toledo and special trains from Cleveland. Now the carpets on long slanting corridors had been sanded into threads; the halls echoed with the slapslapping of slippers below jellylike or stringy bodies; children ran shrieking; dark faces, blotched by age and sun, ignored the signs about Proper dress is suggested going and coming from the beach. Into this quiet of offseason brooding, economy, and last hope of summer in the week after Labor Day, Burr and Laura Fuller emerged to walk toward the bar. Grandfathers and widows turned to look at them: Such a nice young couple!

"Make sure you have matches," Laura was saying to her husband.

"Don't worry, they'll have them at the bar," he answered.

"Yes, but what if I'm caught without?"

He assured her that this cataclysm would almost certainly not break over them. They had their drink. Since there was still time, they had another. Laura was silent in the crisis of incomplete devotion, although Burr lit her cigarette. Since they did not speak very much, and consequently drank too fast, they had a third. Fuller regretted the last two because they meant that he was still sitting there with his wife in the cool dark bar when the girl, Lucille, came in on her father's arm. Dressed in a light summer frock, her hair pulled tight against her head and her mouth flagrantly lipsticked, she looked older than on the beach. She had a frosted drink, probably a daiquiri, over which she bobbed and ducked her head as if it were a chocolate soda -- and with the delight of the daughter having a drink with her father. The man was ruddy, thick, smiling and triumphant in his daughter's pleasure. Burr wondered how many happy families like this one existed -- what percentage of all families, say -- and if it really did exist or merely looked that way with father and daughter smiling, touching, toasting each other. Lucille put on glasses to look about, and as her eyes behind the slanted frames briefly rested on him, he felt that she was really lovely, really ready for happiness, a really grown-up girl of 20 or 21. She sat alertly without her back touching the chair.

"I guess we'd better be getting along to dinner," Laura said. "What are you thinking about?"

"Nothing. You?"

"I have a little sprain, I think. Not serious -- just from falling asleep on a lump in the sand. It's really nothing, Burr. Don't be concerned."

He resolved not to be, but made a solemn face so that she would not read his thought. She was only a few years older than Lucille, but she had always, even at Lucille's age, worn that fret of unhappy self-love between the eyes, and had never known Lucille's elegance of stance and movement. His wife was slightly stooped at the shoulders, narrow at the back: "petite" was her word for (continued on page 62) Sleepers, Awake! (continued from page 58) it. Now he turned again, hopelessly, thinking that even Lucille's name -- not Lu or Lucy, thank God, but Lucille! -- spoke with a confident grace. Resounded unspoken in his head, Lucille, Lucille.

But despite everything, the years were with Laura, his years and hers. He sat with her in the overlarge dining room, insects thumping against the screens, moths circling the chandeliers high up, in this place once chic and wild, now calmed under the grandparents and blurred by the children. From one corner of the room came a rhythmic cry:

"I want some, I want some. I want some." From another, behind his back, Burr could feel the pressure of Lucille with her sweet, nice, ordinary parents glowing in the presence of their daughter. The waiters brought the food, took away the plates. Dessert was vanilla ice cream, grainy and starchy.

"I want some, I want some, I want some," said the greedy unformed mouth.

Why did they have no children after five years of marriage? He remembered another childless couple's explanation. They had been drawn together at a ski resort in the strange intimacy of bereavement, of lack -- they had played bridge. Their new, passing friends had finally confessed, putting down the cards and staring at them across the table: "We're cousins and we're afraid." Laura and Burr were not cousins, but they were afraid.

They thought, they were being rational. Like all those pseudo-rational, irrational men and women who count overmuch on romantic love, they waited for some impossible perfection between them before they could dare to have children. This romantic perfection had once seemed in their grasp, as they wrestled together on the beach of their first summer together, and then was forever retreating, retreating, called back by a moment, a day, a breath of feeling, then retreating again. Still Burr hoped about this vacation. He had an idea for Laura about giving themselves a child. After their time of marriage the idea was ordinary, although it seemed to him fantastic and needing schemes and plots and preparations: Let's just go on, Laura!

Perhaps he should not have waited: perhaps he should just have said it.

But he had learned to be a cautious romantic. And he had superstitious worries about Laura's knowing how he looked at Lucille, how he looked at fresh and healthy girls, and how this might corrupt the health and desire which he wanted for her -- for the mother-to-be. Tonight, in the sweet dark, if she felt well, if her back had stopped hurting, he would talk with her about it. He would not look at Lucille at all. He would imagine Laura, his delicate and quiet Laura, and only Laura. He would not taste, smell, imagine the skin of Lucille, to whom he had never once spoken. He would think only of Laura. She would sleep very well. She had strong ankles, strong hips: the blood was good to her, despite her back and her insomnia; she could do for him, and he for her, and they would leave the dining room before Lucille could cross before his eyes.

"That was a lot of sun today," he said. "Let's turn in early, OK?"

"I'm willing," Laura said. "That's what we came for -- the rest."

She took his arm, and like a solemn, satiated pair of pensioners they retreated from dinner. Fuller felt a muscle twitching in his leg because he was still young and willing to run, swim, work and make love.

• • •

When Laura said that she wanted to bathe again before bed, he recognized her acknowledgment that they would make love tonight. She said "bath" casually, and with a dark, sideways, challenging glance from her very dark, smudged eyes. She was signaling willingness and preparation. She would spend a long time in the tub, scrubbing, relentlessly cleaning herself in water almost too hot to stand, and emerge wan and soaked and her fingertips spongy. The thought of so much foaming effort, so much ferocity spent on cleanliness, inexplicably isolated him and he could not wait for her in their little room. He wanted to fold her in his arms just as she was, warm afte1r the sun-soaked day, only partly undressed, and he would help her the rest of the way, carrying her to bed, warming her, warming himself to her; but she slipped away, saying, "Wait!"

"But you had a bath before dinner, darling."

"Wait, wait!"

He was alone in a hotel room. Warped pine and lake dampness. He went out to walk in the corridors of the hotel, feeling for his pack of cigarettes, cramming it unnecessarily back into his pocket so that he could go to buy another and talk with someone. Did he need excuses? He felt ashamed of his loneliness. He was not looking for Lucille. He was just looking for someone. He was just waiting until his wife would be ready to receive him. Then why the deep drawing pain of anxiety and anticipation in his belly? It was the pain of excess and indulgence -- it was lower than his belly. No, it was for his wife, not Lucille, and it was not pain. His wife too had those marvelously abandoned, beautifully irresponsible moments that he read into the girl's slim, unhurried, smiling ease. (Charm means to be certain-sure of yourself. To be sure of yourself means to be able to let go, to cut loose, to hold on.) And he did not find Lucille either at the tobacco stand or at the desk, where he went to ask if there were any messages for him. He expected none. He was just asking. He needed a human voice to answer him.

The desk clerk was used to loafers, gossipers, men afraid of their four walls. He was a narrow-chested old bobo in a blue nylon cord suit and a red paper flower in his lapel from some celebration to which he had been invited. He believed himself skilled in "handling people," sizing them up with his eyes, measuring them down, and he wore his eyes frowning and smiling at the same time, crumpled and with the labor of telling all: I know, I know, I see through you! It takes head! -- and he tapped his skull. What didn't just come to him by innate knowledge he filled in by questions. He figured it that Laura was abed, that Burr had the wandering insomnias. "The little wife sleeping? They sure like to get their rest, don't they?" He didn't need answers, not him. His own questions gave him all the information required. "Those pretty little mothers now, they come to the lake for a vacation from the kids."

We don't have any yet -- but he did not say it.

"It's hard on the grandparents, but you need some fun once in a while, too, don't you? I see lots like you. It's swell. Don't worry, you'll hear from them if the kids are lonesome. It's really swell to have a little peace and quiet."

Burr returned to his room. By this time Laura would surely be ready, scrubbed, oiled and bedwarm in the shortie nightgown he had given her the day they left Cleveland. But when he opened the door, the bottle of pills was out on the dresser and she was ostentatiously, challengingly sipping water. "Laura, no!" he cried out. "Did you take them tonight?"

"Shush, I have a fright of a headache, Burr. Too much sun -- you were right." She must have waited until she heard him at the door. "I knew I wouldn't sleep without them."

"But you wanted to break the habit, and you thought that if you could just relax, have a relaxing week ----"

"I know, I thought so, but I knew I couldn't."

"But Laura!" And he flushed deep red, felt it like a jilted swain, murmuring, "I wanted to talk to you. I wanted ..."

As if this meant that he didn't care (concluded on page 82) Sleepers, Awake! (continued from page 62) about her headache, she shrugged angrily, her tan and white and pink nakedness of breasts winking at him under her flimsy gown. "You can grab me quick before I fall asleep," she said, and brutally she stared at him.

Many times before they had fought at this moment in their lives, but they had resolved to make it good. He had put forward -- hot, cold, frightened, determined -- the news that seconal was more than a symptom: it was at moments like this an active agent in their trouble. It changed their life together. Could he hold in his arms a woman blunted and blurred and worrying only about her sleep?

"Why not? Seconal isn't all that effective," she had argued.

About what it means, then, he had said, and pleaded with her: "Why don't you at least wait to see if you can fall asleep?"

A pretty creature, too thin and frowning, but still shapely, fresh and pink in her new nightgown, she stood there waiting for him to make up his mind. It would be decided within the next few seconds -- everything, or the trip to the beach, which was now everything in their lives. He looked at the bottle on the dresser. He looked into her narrowed eyes above the feverish, painfully sunburned cheeks. "OK," he said, "let's go to sleep. I'll be with you in a moment."

"I really had an awful headache, Burr," she said, softening abruptly. She took a step toward him, and with a rising rush of relenting feeling, of desire and regret that almost swept him weeping against her, she moved forward and put her arms about him: "From the sun. But it was a mistake. Kiss me, Burr. You were right. You were right, but kiss me anyway."

But he turned his back and her hands fell away and he went into the bathroom. He ran the water for a while and sat on the edge of the tub, holding his head in his hands. When he felt that he had his control back, he got into pajamas (a gift from Laura -- they had the same ideas) and went stealthily to bed, stealthily because she had turned off the lights and was asleep, her face turned away, composed whitely, judging him by her white, still, angry sleep, or pretending to be asleep, no difference; and then he really was. It was as if he shared his wife's drugged retreat from the truth of their life together. He fell off into it with a great weight tied to his head.

In the dream that came to him almost at once he did whatever he wanted to do, she did whatever she wanted, and they wanted the same things. Her name was Lucille in the dream. He awoke with the top of his head hurting where it pressed against the headboard of the hotel bed. He looked at his wife and wondered whom she dreamt of and did not care anymore. He wondered if he were fated now to stop dreaming of Laura, to dream henceforth of Lucille.

Quickly he dressed and went out onto the beach. It was barely midnight, and a warm, starlit September evening, with only the few rustling leaves on the beach to suggest that this was no longer midsummer. He imagined meeting Lucille, also alone and walking on the beach -- just like a boy he imagined it. He saw her asking him for a cigarette, telling him of her loneliness, and then finally he began to weep, for he remembered that this is the way a boy imagines finding miraculous perfect love. The tears swelled and burned like blisters in his eyes because he was unused to crying, and they said that it is bad to be nearly 30 years old and still have need of looking for love as the boy does. The boy never finds anything except, if he is lucky, the courage to go beyond himself, and then he abolishes this fantastic ideal love. The Lucilles can sleep undisturbed, patiently awaiting their chances for good and bad times, because a man has his own wife, his own children. He walked the beach, sinking deeper and deeper, secured by the heavy, thick, enveloping cold sands.

And stopped. He stood blinking, shocked awake on the beach with his ankles wet and the night breeze fluttering at him. Some sad creatures, unhappily wived, committed for better and for worse, for worse and for worse, sleep away their age, fearing their heart's secret lament: Those girls, those lovely seaside girls. But there is a better option than sleepwalking on the beach when a man's misery is complete. Poor Laura! At last Burr was ready to move the lesson of dream into the practical day. He would search out the girl whom he wanted in life, in flesh, the girl who wanted him.

All he need do next time is speak to Lucille. Why not wake her, wake himself entirely?