Puzzle for Pilgrims Read Free Page A

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.