“I don’t think so.”
She turned away. She had to control her voice. She looked over the stone ledges. She asked: “Do you find it very hard to work here?”
“Yes. Terribly.”
“Do you get tired?”
“Inhumanly.”
“How does that feel?”
“I can hardly walk when the day’s ended. I can’t move my arms at night. When I lie in bed, I can count every muscle in my body to the number of separate, different pains.”
She knew suddenly that he was not telling her about himself; he was speaking of her, he was saying the things she wanted to hear and telling her that he knew why she wanted to hear these particular sentences.
She felt anger, a satisfying anger because it was cold and certain. She felt also a desire to let her skin touch his; to let the length of her bare arm press against the length of his; just that; the desire went no further.,
She was asking calmly:
“You don’t belong here, do you? You don’t talk like a worker. What were you before?”
“An electrician. A plumber. A plasterer. Many things.”
“Why are you working here?”
“For the money you’re paying me, Miss Francon.”
She shrugged. She turned and walked away from him up the path. She knew that he was looking after her. She did not glance back. She continued on her way through the quarry, and she left it as soon as she could, but she did not go back down the path where she would have to see him again.
2.
DOMINIQUE awakened each morning to the prospect of a day made significant by the existence of a goal to be reached: the goal of making it a day on which she would not go to the quarry.
She had lost the freedom she loved. She knew that a continuous struggle against the compulsion of a single desire was compulsion also, but it was the form she preferred to accept. It was the only manner in which she could let him motivate her life. She found a dark satisfaction in pain–because that pain came from him.
She went to call on he distant neighbors, a wealthy, gracious family who had bored her in New York; she had visited no one all summer. They were astonished and delighted to see her. She sat among a group of distinguished people at the edge of a swimming pool. She watched the air of fastidious elegance around her. She watched the deference of these people’s manner when they spoke to her. She glanced at her own reflection in the pool: she looked more delicately austere than any among them.
And she thought, with a vicious thrill, of what these people would do if they read her mind in this moment; if they knew that she was thinking of a man in a quarry, thinking of his body with a sharp intimacy as one does not think of another’s body but only of one’s own. She smiled; the cold purity of her face prevented them from seeing the nature of that smile. She came back again to visit these people–for the same of such thoughts in the presence of their respect for her.
One evening, a guest offered to drive her back to her house. He was an eminent young poet. He was pale and slender; he had a soft, sensitive mouth, and eyes hurt by the whole universe. She had not noticed the wistful attention with which he had watched her for a long time. As they drove through the twilight she saw him leaning hesitantly closer to her. She heard his voice whispering the pleading, incoherent things she had heard from many men. He stopped the car. She felt his lips pressed to her shoulder.
She jerked away from him. She sat still for an instant, because she would have to brush against him if she moved and she could not bear to touch him. Then she flung the door open, she leaped out, she slammed the door behind her as if the crash of sound could wipe him out of existence, and she ran blindly. She stopped running after a while, and she walked on shivering, walked down the dark road until she saw the roof line of her own house.
She stopped, looking about her with her first coherent thought of astonishment. Such incidents had happened to her often in the past; only then she had been amused; she had felt no revulsion; she had felt nothing.
She walked slowly across the lawn, to the house. On the stairs to her room she stopped. She thought of the man in the quarry. She thought, in clear, formed words, that the man in the quarry wanted her. She had known it before; she had known it with his first glance at her. But she had never stated the knowledge to herself.
She laughed. She looked about her, at the silent splendor of her house. The house made the words preposterous. She knew that would never happen to her. And she knew the kind of suffering she could impose on him.
For days she walked with satisfaction through the rooms of her house. It was her defense. She heard the explosions of blasting from the quarry and smiled.
But she felt too certain and the house was too safe. She felt a desire to underscore the safety by challenging it.
She chose the marble slab in front of the fireplace in her bedroom. She wanted it broken. She knelt, hammer in hand, and tried to smash the marble. She pounded it, her thin arm sweeping high over her head, crashing down with ferocious helplessness. She felt the pain in the bones of her arms, in her shoulder sockets. She succeeded in making a long scratch across the marble.
She went to the quarry. She saw him from a distance and walked straight to him.
“Hello,” she said casually.
He stopped the drill. He leaned against a stone shelf. He answered:
“Hello.”
“I have been thinking of you,” she said softly, and stopped, then added, her voice flowing on in the same tone of compelling invitation, “because there’s a bit of a dirty job to be done at my house. Would you like to make some extra money?”
“Certainly, Miss Francon.”
“Will you come to my house tonight? The way to the servants’ entrance is off Ridgewood Road. There’s a marble piece at a fireplace that’s broken and has to be replaced. I want you to take it out and order a new one made for me.”
She expected anger and refusal. He asked:
“What time shall I come?”
“At seven o’clock. What are you paid here?”
“Sixty-two cents an hour.”
“I’m sure you’re worth that. I’m quite willing to pay you at the same rate. Do you know how to find my house?”
“No, Miss Francon.”
“Just ask anyone in the village to direct you.”
“Yes, Miss Francon.”
She walked away, disappointed. She felt that their secret understanding was lost; he had spoken as if it were a simple job which she could have offered to any other workman. Then she felt the sinking gasp inside, that feeling of shame and pleasure which he always gave her: she realized that their understanding had been more intimate and flagrant than ever–in his natural acceptance of an unnatural offer; he had shown her how much he knew–by his lack of astonishment.
She asked her old caretaker and his wife to remain in the house that evening. Their diffident presence completed the picture of a feudal mansion. She heard the bell of the servants’ entrance at seven o’clock. The old woman escorted him to the great front hall where Dominique stood on the landing of a broad stairway.
She watched him approaching, looking up at her. She held the pose long enough to let him suspect that it was a deliberate pose deliberately planned; she broke it at the exact moment before he could become certain of it. She said: “Good evening.” Her voice was austerely quiet.
He did not answer, but inclined his head and walked on up the stairs toward her. He wore his work clothes and he carried a bag of tools. His movements had a swift, relaxed kind of energy that did not belong here, in her house, on the polished steps, between the delicate, rigid banisters. She had expected him to seem incongruous in her house; but it was the house that seemed incongruous around him.
She moved one hand, indicating the door of her bedroom. He followed obediently. He did not seem to notice the room when he entered. He entered it as if it were a workshop. He walked straight to the fireplace.
“There it is,” she said, one finger pointing to the marble slab.
He said nothing. He knelt, took a thin metal wedge from his bag, held its point against the scratch on the slab, took a hammer and struck one blow. The marble split in a long, deep cut.