Moral Disorder Read online

  “I get that part,” said Bill. Form wasn’t difficult for him, because it involved counting. A sonnet, a sestina, an abab rhyme-scheme ballad – identifying these caused him no problems.

  I finished my ice cream and tucked the end of the cone in between the stone wall and the funeral parlour’s flower bed, in which a neat row of red tulips was arranged. I felt lazy, I wasn’t really in an instructive mood, but Bill was leaning forward, he was actually listening. “So, it’s the Duke of Ferrara speaking,” I said. “The whole poem is told from his point of view – that’s important, because they always ask about point of view. We know it’s Ferrara because it says Ferrara right under the title of the poem. Ferrara was a noted centre for the arts in Italy, so it makes sense for the Duke to have a picture collection. The time is the Renaissance. There was a lot of murdering going on then. Okay so far?”

  “Yeah, but …”

  “Okay, so the Duke is talking to an envoy from the Count. We know it’s the Count because it says that, right there at the end. He’s dickering for the Count’s daughter, he wants to get hold of her for his next Duchess. It doesn’t say which Count. They’re upstairs – the Duke and the envoy. We know that because they come downstairs at the end, where it says, ‘Nay, we’ll go together down, sir.’ ”

  “Why put that in?” said Bill.

  “Put what in?”

  “Who cares whether they’re upstairs or downstairs?” Bill was already getting exasperated.

  “They have to be upstairs because there are other people downstairs – see, look, it’s right here – and the Duke wants a private conversation. Anyway, the portrait of the Duchess is upstairs. That’s what the Duke is taking the envoy to see. The Duke pulls a curtain. There’s the picture of his last Duchess behind it. His last Duchess, get it? The picture has verisimilitude.”

  “What?”

  “Verisimilitude. It means lifelike. Put that word into your answer on the exam. I bet it’s worth a whole mark.”

  “Cripes,” said Bill, giving a rueful little grin. “Sure. If you say so. Okay. Write it down for me.”

  “Okay. So they stand looking at this Duchess picture. Then basically the Duke tells the envoy about her, and what was wrong with her, and why he bumped her off.”

  “Or shut her up in a convent,” said Bill hopefully. Miss Bessie had proposed this as an alternative, saying that Browning himself had done so. The boys in the class preferred this milder version, oddly enough. They could see wanting to dump your wife because she was boring or ugly or a nag, or unsatisfactory in some other way; they could understand the desire for a better model; but killing the first wife seemed extreme to them. They were nice boys, they intended to be doctors and so forth. Only pervs like the Duke would have to go all the way. “She would have been out of his hair, in a convent,” said Bill. “She’d be happier in there anyway. The guy was a pain in the neck.”

  “I don’t buy that,” I said. “He definitely killed her. ‘All smiles stopped together’ – that’s really sudden. It’s pretty definite. But on the exam, you need to say there’s the two choices. Anyway, he got rid of her. Why, is what the poem’s about. What the Duke says is that she smiled too much.”

  “That’s what I don’t get,” said Bill. “It’s a really dumb reason. And there’s another thing I don’t get. If he’s so smooth” – Miss Bessie had dwelt for some time on the Duke’s smoothness, though she hadn’t called it that, she’d called it cultivated and sophisticated – “if he’s so smooth, why is he dumb enough to tell all this to the envoy? The envoy’s just going to run back to the Count and say, ‘Cancel the marriage – the guy’s a dangerous creep!’ ”

  I got up from the funeral-home wall, straightened down my skirt front and back, picked up my books. “We’ll go through it again on Saturday,” I told him. “I’ll copy out my notes for you.”

  “I’m not going to pass it,” said Bill.

  At home, I lived in the cellar. I’d moved down there in order to study for my exams. The cellar was cooler than the rest of the house; also it was farther away from everyone else. These days I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, or at least not to my parents. They didn’t understand the gruesomeness of the ordeal before me, they thought I still had time to mow the lawn.

  I slipped in through the back door and crept down the cellar stairs, unseen by my mother, and opened the freezer and took out the jar of Noxzema I kept in there. It was my theory that covering my face with frozen mentholated skin cream would stimulate the blood flow to my brain and make it more possible for me to study.

  Once my face was entirely cold and white, I paced around my cellar room. I needed to get my thoughts in order, but the Duchess was eluding me. Maybe she hadn’t been poisoned after all. Maybe she’d been stabbed with a poignard, or else strangled – not with a nylon stocking, as was habitual in the detective stories, but with a silken cord. Maybe she had been garrotted. This method also involved strangling; I didn’t know what kind exactly, but I liked the sound of it. The poor girl, I thought. Garrotted, and all because she smiled too much.

  But also – said the poem – hers wasn’t any old kind of smiling. Her smile had “depth and passion” and was “earnest.” I could see – now I was considering it at length – that a wife who went around smiling earnestly to left and right could have been annoying. There were girls at school who smiled at everyone in the same earnest, humourless way. In the school yearbook, it usually said about them, “Terrific personality” or “Our Miss Sunshine,” but I’d never liked these girls very much. Their gaze slid over you, smile and all, usually coming to rest on some boy. Still, they were only doing what the women’s magazines said they should do. A smile costs nothing! A smile: the best makeup tip! Get smile appeal! Such girls were too eager to please. They were too cheap. That was it – that was the Duke’s objection: the Duchess was too cheap. That must have been his point of view. The more I thought about the Duchess and about how aggravating she must have been – aggravating, and too obliging, and just plain boring, the very same smile day after day – the more sympathy I felt for the Duke.

  But there was no point in dwelling on the Duke’s grievances: for the purposes of the final exam, he had to be the villain. Miss Bessie had told us to expect questions like, “Compare and contrast the characters of the Duke and the Duchess.” For that, she said, we should prepare a list of opposites, arranged in acceptable pairs. I’d started on my own list:

  Duke: ruthless, stuck-up proud, oily falsely polite, self-centred, shows off his money, greedy experienced, psycho art collector.

  Duchess: innocent, modest, smarmy sincere, earnest, sickly sweet kind to others, humble, stupid inexperienced, art object.

  A list like this would be a help to Bill. He’d be able to understand it, as long as I drew arrows from each of the characteristics on the Duke side to the corresponding characteristics on the Duchess one. My real, confusing thoughts I would keep to myself.

  Bill’s question about the envoy had stayed with me. It troubled me. Why indeed had the Duke spilled the beans in such a witless manner to a complete stranger if he was trying to convince the envoy to clinch the deal? So, I want to marry the Count’s daughter and this is what I did with the last Duchess I got my hands on. There she stands, as if alive. Wink, elbow in the ribs of the envoy, get it? Oh. Right, says the envoy. As if. Good one.

  The Duke wasn’t an idiot. He must have had his reasons.

  What if the arrangement had already been signed and sealed? If it had – if the wedding was a certainty – everything in the poem became clear. The Duke hated to explain things in person because explaining was beneath him, so he was using the envoy as a way of sending a message to the next Duchess, and the message was: This is how I like my Duchesses to behave. And if they don’t behave that way, curtains. Curtains literally, because if this next Duchess got out of line, she too would end up as a picture with its own curtain in front of it. Who knew how many other pictures the Duke was keeping behind curtains, up there o
n the second floor?

  The Duke was merely showing consideration by saying all this to the envoy: he wanted his likes and dislikes to be fully understood ahead of time – only this much smiling, and only at me – to avoid unpleasantness later. “ ‘Just this/Or that in you disgusts me …’ ” he’d said. Disgusts: pretty strong language. He’d found the Last Duchess disgusting, and he didn’t want to be disgusted by the next Duchess.

  This was not the accepted view of the poem. The accepted view was that the envoy was horrified by what the Duke had told him and had tried to rush down the stairs first in order to get away from such a twisted nutbar. When the Duke said, “Nay, we’ll go together down, sir,” he was stopping the envoy from barging in front. But I didn’t think so. I thought it more likely that the envoy had motioned the Duke to go ahead of him – probably he’d made a brown-nosing little bow – and the Duke had courteously set them on an equal footing. “We’ll go together down, sir” – he was acting the pal. Most likely he’d put his arm around the envoy’s shoulder.

  If I was right, they were all three of them in cahoots – the Duke, the envoy, and the Count. The marriage was a trade-off: the Count would hand over the dowry and kiss the daughter goodbye, and would get social prestige in return, since Dukes rated higher than Counts. Once the Count’s daughter had reached the Duke’s palace – his palazzo, as Miss Bessie had told us it would have been called – she’d be all on her own. She couldn’t expect help from her father, or from anyone else either. I thought of her sitting in front of her mirror, practising her smiling. Too warm? Too cold? Too much upward curve at the edges? Not enough? In view of the hints from the envoy, she’d be totally certain her life depended on getting that smile down perfectly.

  On Saturday night I made my way over to Bill’s, wearing my studying clothes: jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt, with a loose man’s shirt over top. I went on my bicycle because Bill’s parents were out in their car, or so he’d told me on the phone, so he couldn’t pick me up.

  Bill’s family lived in a small, square, newish yellow-brick two-storey house; rows and rows of identical houses had been built in that area just after the war. The main bedroom was over the garage; there was a tiny vestibule, then a hallway that ran past the doors to the living room and the dining room to the boxy little kitchen. At the back there was a stuffy, cramped room with a La-Z-Boy recliner and a sofa bed that pulled out for guests, and the TV set; that room was where we did our studying when we were at Bill’s. At my house, we did it at the dining table when my parents were home, and in the cellar when they weren’t.

  I rang the doorbell, Bill opened the door right away – he must have been waiting for me – and I stepped into the vestibule and slipped off my running shoes. This was a rule at Bill’s house: shoes left at the door. Bill’s mother had a job – she worked at a hospital, though she wasn’t a nurse – but despite her job she kept the house spotless. It smelled of cleaning products – Javex bleach and lemon-oil furniture polish – with an undertone of mothballs. It was as if the whole house had been soaked in preservatives to keep it from ever changing, because change meant dirt. Bill and I never went into the living room, although I had looked into it. It had mole-coloured wall-to-wall carpeting and was crowded with varnished end tables, which in turn held an array of china figurines and crystal ashtrays, or were they bonbon dishes? The drapes were kept drawn to stop things from fading. There was no such roped-off, hushed, consecrated space in my own house.

  Bill’s mother didn’t altogether approve of me. I’d learned about this kind of disapproval – the age-old disapproval of mothers toward any girl dabbling in their sons – from Chatelaine and Good Housekeeping (Your Mother-in-Law: Best Friend or Worst Enemy?), so I hadn’t been surprised by the chilliness of her smile. On the other hand, whenever I encountered her she’d go out of her way to thank me for helping Bill study what she called “his English.” It was a shame he had to study it – it wouldn’t be any use to him later in life, and he got so discouraged about it; why couldn’t he be allowed to focus on his strengths? – but since he did have to study it, better he should have a clever friend like me – she didn’t say “girlfriend” – to keep his nose to the grindstone.

  We started our studying well enough, going over the possible questions, and the answers to them, in point form. But then Bill said you needed to take a break from the books once in a while, and he went and got us some ginger ale, and soon we were fumbling around on the sofa bed. We didn’t pull it out into a bed, however – only a cheap girl would have connived at such a thing, and also we were aware that Bill’s parents might return unexpectedly, as they had done before. This evening they didn’t return, but after a while we sat up anyway, and smoothed down our hair and did up our buttons, and went back to the studying.

  Bill couldn’t seem to focus. He grasped the list of opposite characteristics – that made sense to him. But then he said it was a shame, what that guy had done to the Duchess. She probably never even saw it coming, and then the smug little pervert had the nerve to brag about it, he’d stuck her picture up on the wall like a pin-up, most likely she was very good-looking as well, what a waste.

  I said all of this was beside the point: the people marking the exam were not going to be interested in Bill’s personal opinions. What they’d want was an objective analysis of the poem, using evidence. The poem would be printed right on the exam paper – they didn’t expect him to have memorized it. All he had to do was read the question twice and make the accepted points – that stuff we’d been going over with Miss Bessie – and then find the lines in the poem that backed up those points, and then copy them down with quote marks around them.

  Bill said yeah, he knew that, it’s just that it was such a useless way of spending time and energy – what was it for in the end, what was it supposed to prove? I said it would prove he was an attentive reader, and that was all they wanted to know.

  I shouldn’t have said “attentive reader.” It reminded Bill of his most recent run-in with Miss Bessie, and her sarcasm. His face went pink.

  He said it was all pretty useless, because being an attentive reader wouldn’t get him a job. I said it would, because that way he would pass the exam and he’d be able to go on. Anyway, I said, I didn’t make the rules, so why was he mad at me?

  Bill said he wasn’t mad at me, he was mad at the goddamn Duke, for killing the Duchess. He ought to have been locked up or, better, hanged. So why was I defending him?

  We’d had these kinds of stupid arguments before. They came out of nowhere, they went nowhere; during them each one of us would accuse the other of saying things that hadn’t been said.

  “I was not defending him,” I said.

  “Yeah. You were. She was a nice normal girl with a sick jerk for a husband, and you seem to think it was her own fault.”

  I hadn’t said that, but it was partly true. Why did it make me angry to have Bill guess my feelings?

  “She was a dumb bunny,” I said. “She should have been able to figure out that he didn’t like her smiling in that sucky way at every Tom, Dick, and Harry, and sunset, for heaven’s sakes.”

  “She was just being friendly.”

  “She was just being a simp.”

  “She was not a simp. How was she supposed to know what he wanted? She couldn’t read his mind!”

  “That’s what I mean,” I said in a bored voice. “She was dumb.”

  “No, she wasn’t! He was a creep! He never let on about the smile thing. He never said a word to her. It says in the poem. All that about choosing never to stoop.”

  “She was a half-wit.”

  “At least she wasn’t a brainer and a show-off,” said Bill offensively.

  I said the Duke would have preferred a brainer and a show-off to a dumb bunny – a disgusting dumb bunny – because he was cultivated and sophisticated, he appreciated works of art. Anyway, I wasn’t showing off, I was just trying to help him pass the exam.

  “You think you’re so smart,” said
Bill. “Thanks but no thanks. I don’t need any goddamn help, and specially not from you.”

  “Okey-dokey,” I said. “If that’s what you want. Good luck.” I gathered my books up off the floor and strode down the hall, as quickly as I could in my sock feet, and put on my running shoes in the vestibule. Bill didn’t try to stop me. He stayed in the TV room. From the sounds coming out of it I knew he had turned on the TV.

  I bicycled home in the dark. It was later than I’d thought. My parents were in bed with the lights out. I’d forgotten to take my key. I climbed up onto the garbage can beside the back door, twisted myself sideways, and slid into the house through the milk cupboard, a feat I’d performed many times before. Then I tiptoed downstairs and into my cellar room, where I burst into tears. Whatever temporary patching-up might take place, the era of Bill was now at an end. Bye-bye love, as in songs. All alone now. It was so sad. Why did such things have to disintegrate like that? Why did longing and desire, and friendliness and goodwill too, have to shatter into pieces? Why did they have to be so thoroughly over?

  I could make myself cry even more by repeating the key words: love, alone, sad, over. I did it on purpose. After I’d finally finished crying, I put on my pyjamas and brushed my teeth, and covered my face with frozen Noxzema skin cream. Then I got into bed with Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Miss Bessie would be tackling it on Monday. It would be a full gallop for all of us, and I told myself I wanted to get a head start on it. In reality, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep: I needed some distraction from my fight with Bill, which otherwise would have replayed itself over and over while I changed the words we’d spoken into other words that gave me more of an advantage, and tried to figure out what our actual words had meant, and then cried some more.

  It didn’t take me very much reading and skimming to discover that Tess had serious problems – much worse than mine. The most important thing in her life happened to her in the very first part of the book. She got taken advantage of, at night, in the woods, because she’d stupidly accepted a drive home with a jerk, and after that it was all downhill, one awful thing after another, turnips, dead babies, getting dumped by the man she loved, and then her tragic death at the end. (I peeked at the last three chapters.) Tess was evidently another of those unlucky pushovers, like the Last Duchess, and like Ophelia – we’d studied Hamlet earlier. These girls were all similar. They were too trusting, they found themselves in the hands of the wrong men, they weren’t up to things, they let themselves drift. They smiled too much. They were too eager to please. Then they got bumped off, one way or another. Nobody gave them any help.