26
THE FIRST OF MY AFTERNOONS in that dark little room with Ariane came about by accident—or luck.
I had come by in all innocence, looking for Raskol. I knocked at the back door and waited. I heard someone calling, but I couldn’t tell whether it was Ariane or Mrs. Lodkochnikov, and I couldn’t tell what she was saying. I knocked again, louder. I heard someone calling again, still too faintly for me to understand. I put my hand against the door frame and leaned against the door, with my head against the window, and then I could make out who it was and what she was saying, faintly still, but clearly enough to understand. It was Ariane calling to me, “I’m in here, Peter, in the TV room.”
I let myself in and walked through the house, with no particular expectations, no particular suspicion that she might be alone. I came into the little room, which was dark, as always, and found her curled up on one end of the sofa, like a cat, in the silvery light of the set.
She raised her finger to her lips to keep me silent, and I tiptoed across her field of vision and sat at the far end of the sofa, making an exaggerated business out of being quiet and not disturbing her viewing. When I settled into my place, I watched the movie for a moment or two, but my view of the screen was obstructed by an ironing board, and that got me thinking. Apparently, I reasoned, Ariane had been ironing or intended to start ironing. On the ironing board there was a piece of clothing. I looked it over and determined that it was a dress I had seen her wear often. A fascinating thought arose in my mind, unexpected and unwilled but quite welcome: the dress on the ironing board might be the dress Ariane had been wearing at work. When she got home she had made herself a snack and come into the TV room. She had set up the ironing board, intending to iron her dress, which had horizontal wrinkles across the front because she’d been sitting at the Babbington Clam switchboard all day. She had turned the TV on and found that she was just in time to catch the beginning of the afternoon movie. She had taken the dress off and tossed it onto the ironing board with the intention of ironing it while she watched the movie, but she had settled onto the sofa to eat her snack and gotten interested in the movie and hadn’t bothered ironing the dress. It was a pleasant theory, because if it was correct it meant that Ariane was just a sofa’s length away from me, alone in a darkened room, in her slip. To test the theory, all I would have had to do was take a peek, but I didn’t want to, because I knew that if I did there was a strong likelihood that the assumptions and deductions from which the attractive theory was constructed would turn out to have been nothing more than wishful thinking and would collapse in a heap, like a doghouse suffering from cumulative error or a lighthouse built by kids.
Instead, I tried to verify the theory indirectly while I kept my eyes on the set. Memory wasn’t much help. I’d seen Ariane when I came into the room, but she was curled up in a ball. True, now that I studied the memory of her curled there, she did seem to be wearing white. What I had assumed at the time to be a white dress might have been a slip. I sat at the end of the sofa, absorbing the sensations emanating from Ariane while pretending to pay attention to the television, the perfect mask for the attention I was paying to her. I was watching the images on the set, but all my other senses and all my thoughts were focused on her, only on her. I couldn’t seem to hear the dialogue over the rustle of her stockings when she moved her legs, one stocking sliding against the other. I knew when to laugh only because she laughed. I sat beside her on that sofa for the entire afternoon, and she never got up to do her ironing. At last the phone rang. When Ariane jumped up from the sofa to take the call, I couldn’t help looking at her, whatever embarrassment it might cause us both. She was wearing a white dress. Across the back, in red stitching, it was labeled Babbington Clam.
“Peter,” she called from the hall. “It’s your mother. You have to go home for dinner.”
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 622, Mark Dorset considers Wishful Thinking from this episode.
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