by Oakley Hall
“What the hell are you doing here?” he said. It was a comment, he expected no answer, and she gave none, arranging her skirt over her knees. There was a run in her stocking. He pulled the gear lever into low and the car moved forward. When he looked at her again she leaned toward him and put her hand on his leg.
Night came while they were in the cabin in the auto court. From yellow, the shaded west window had gradually merged with the darkness of the room, and Jack sat on the edge of the bed beside V, staring down at her. He could see the thin, glinting lines of her open eyes.
He put out his hand. Carefully, almost shyly, he touched her arm. Her arms were outstretched above her head, the wrists crossed, and he moved his fingers down over her arm. He touched her breast. He touched the nipple. He felt the sudden hard hollow between and below her breasts. He moved his hand to touch her stomach and her thigh and when he could reach no further down her leg without moving, he withdrew his hand. She was perfect, all of her was perfect, and dumbly he felt that it was her perfection that hurt him, for he had never been so shaken, and shaken he had soared and fallen achingly beyond the limits of his understanding.
But the perfection was not only of her, it was of the both of them. This feeling that, when he lay with her, was emotion powered and expanded a thousand times beyond itself, was almost too big for him to be capable of feeling, and was enormously too big for him to express; it left him tottering on the lip of a valley filled with the musically screamed answers to all the questions he had never been able to ask, or had only vaguely felt, or had never known he had felt until he heard the answers. It tore at him with a torment of seeking, and in an excruciating light had almost let him see. But somehow it had all destroyed itself and he feared it now as though some hideous, perverted evil had tricked him and trapped him.
V was speaking to him but he did not hear her. His mind had been wrenched and now he felt drained and weak and afraid. He felt completely absorbed into her, as though she were the two of them, and he, as an individual, had been destroyed. He heard her say, “Jack, it’s all over now.”
“What?” he said.
“I said it’s all over now. We can live without hurting each other.” He felt the soft touch of her hand on his slumped back, but he did not answer. The words did not connect. He tried to put them together with a mind that was groping elsewhere. “What?” he said again.
“Don’t you understand, Jack?” V said patiently. He heard her move. She said, “All that’s over. We can’t hurt each other anymore. Do you love me, Jack?” Her voice was vibrant, and it seemed to fill the room.
“Yes,” he said, and he thought of Gene.
“I love you,” V said.
“If we’d only known a long time ago.”
Again he felt the touch of her hand on his bare back. He shivered, and he reached around behind him and took the hand in his. He felt it carefully, the fingernails, fingers, knuckles, the crotch between the thumb and first fingers, the hard bone of the wrist, the soft hairs of the forearm. The arm was connected to V but he could not see the rest of her in the dark. “I love you now,” he said.
He was trying to think clearly. He wanted to know himself, to understand this, he wanted to be truthful to himself and to V. It was more than the fact that he had made a bargain, more than the fact that he wanted to hurt V, but he did not know what all it was and he could only say when he knew.
“I love you now,” he repeated. “But I love you too much and I don’t love you enough. There’s too much…I don’t love you enough, V,” he said.
She gasped and her hand was gone.
“Wait,” he said. “I know what I did to you. I know that. But you’ve done too much to me too. There’s just too much…”
“It was the only way I knew to keep you!” V cried. “Oh, please see my side! There’s never been anybody but you. Those were all lies about…”
“It was Red that made it too much, I guess,” he interrupted. “That happened because of us, and now…”
“Jack!” she cried again. “It’s only one more reason why this has to stop now!”
“Yeah,” he said.
“No! No! I don’t mean that. Why we have to stop hurting each other. It can be all right if we stop that.”
His shoulders ached as he slumped forward. He shook his head doggedly. He was trying, too, to shake off the instinct that now he should hurt her, for he could hurt her cruelly for those letters, for Bakersfield, for all of it. He could stab her and twist the knife and make her beg and watch her writhe. He hated this feeling of wanting to hurt her, because the feeling hurt him. He hated this way she made him feel. But it was too strong and it burst from his lips like vomit. “How do I know you love me?” he said.
He shuddered with revulsion at himself. He could hear her breath whispering through her lips. When she spoke her voice shook. She said, “It’s always been that. Why do you need to ask that? Why do you think I came down here? Why…” Her voice broke off again and again he could hear her breath whispering through her lips. He wondered if she were crying.
It amazed him that he could do this. Too much hurting had been done already and he knew this was just something else stacked before him that he must pay for. “I’m getting married,” he said quickly. “Next week.”
Her breathing came faster, then not so fast, and then she seemed not to breathe at all. “Who?” she whispered.
“A girl,” he said. “A girl from the office.”
There was a movement beside him and V was sitting up. Her hands grasped his arms, her face was thrust close to his, frighteningly white, the eyes closed as though she didn’t want to see him, her closed eyes two dark, shadowed holes in the white face. Her fingernails dug into his arms. “You’re lying!” she said.
“No, I’m not.”
“You’re lying!” she whispered. “You’re lying!” she repeated, shaking her head. “You love me!” she said fiercely.
He didn’t speak. Her fingernails cut into the flesh of his arms. Her eyes opened and seemed to touch his face like fingers. “Why?” she cried. “Oh, God, don’t! Don’t! We’ve got to stop this!”
“I’m going to marry her.”
The hands let go his arms and she was gone. He could feel the pressure on his leg where she had rested, but he couldn’t see her anymore. Then he heard her whisper, “Is she pretty?”
“She’s all right.”
“Jack! You just told me you loved me!”
“Okay. That wasn’t all I said.”
“Why don’t you hit me if you want to hurt me so? Why don’t you hit me like you hit Red?”
He felt absolved; he said tiredly, “See?”
She was crying, a painful, hopeless sound. “Oh, damn you, Jack,” she whispered.
“I tried to tell you.”
“You lied! You wanted to hurt me. All right, you’re going to. This’ll be the worst. You’ll win. But you’re going to hurt yourself. And this girl, too. Don’t you see what you’re going to do to this girl?”
“I’m going to marry her.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “You will, you fool. Oh, you fool, Jack.” She sounded as though she were lost somewhere, crying fretfully where no one could hear her, sobbing bitterly; he heard her say, half to herself, “You never understood what we had.”
“I understood what you damn well had,” he said fiercely. “Yes, but you’re never going to get me again! You’d break me right down to the ground. You take the man out of me. Do you want to know? I’m scared of you, damn you! And I’m ashamed. Do you understand? You’ve ruined it. You have! You…” He stopped, panting, shaking, straining his eyes to see her. He was terrified that he might never be rid of her. She was a cancer in him. By sending her away he was hurting her, yes—but hurting himself, too, for he could never be through with her.
He felt her hand on his arm. It tightened, pulling him down beside her. Her leg pressed against his. “That’s all over,” she whispered. “Listen, we can get married tonight. We can dr
ive…”
“No,” he said through his teeth. “I meant it.”
“We can drive over to Arizona,” V went on. “Tonight. We can never let each other go, Jack.”
He pulled away from her roughly. “It’s all over,” he said, and he stood up and took his shirt from the chair. She did not speak while he dressed, but when he walked toward the light-outlined rectangle of the door, she said, “Jack!”
He turned, his hand holding the knob.
“It’s not over,” she said. “It will never be over.” She had stopped crying.
He didn’t reply, standing staring toward her. He couldn’t see her but he wanted to remember her like this, this the last time. He could still feel the place on his leg where her leg had touched, and he pitied her.
He turned and went out the door. Something inside him was raw and tender, and bitter in his throat.
8
He was not surprised when he received her telegram. He had accepted the fact that this had not been the last blow, that she would hit him in return. It came the day of the wedding, and Arch Huber was with him in his room, waiting while he dressed. Arch was sitting on the bed, knocking ashes from his cigarette into a peanut can balanced on his knee, and Jack was tying his tie in front of the mirror over the dresser, when there was a knock on the door. It was Mrs. Ostermann, the landlady, her dyed hair done up in curlers, a broom in her hand. “Telegram,” she said. “I gave the kid a dime.”
Jack got two nickels from his pocket, gave them to her and closed the door. He tore open the yellow envelope, unfolded the flimsy and read the pasted-on message. Holding his face tight and sucking at his front teeth he looked again at the name on the bottom: V Denton. He rubbed his thumbnail over it.
Coolly he tried to recall where he had heard that name. Then he told himself it didn’t matter. He smiled wryly at his instinctive jealousy of this Denton, whoever he was. He should have known V would strike back like this. But this was what he had wanted; V married to someone else, himself married to Gene.
Still holding the telegram he returned to the dresser. He laid it on the scarf, face up, and looking at his reflection in the mirror, pushed the end of the tie through the loop and pulled it down. The knot came out lopsided and he took it apart again. When he read the telegram once more he heard the bed springs creak, and Arch said, “Bad news?”
“No,” Jack said. Then he said in explanation, “Friend of mine just got married.”
Arch laughed. “That’s a coincidence.”
Jack studied his face in the mirror. The muscles of his cheeks were bunched like tiny fingers and a hard grin pushed out his lower lip. Abruptly he covered the telegram with his right hand. He braced the other on the edge of the dresser and leaned forward, half-supporting himself on his hands. His face was pressed close to the mirror, distorting his image, and he felt the shoulder muscles bunch under his shirt.
The telegram tore under his weight and letting himself down he crumpled it into a ball and batted it off the dresser. He retied the tie quickly and pulled the knot tight against his throat.
“About ready?” Arch asked.
Jack took his comb from his hip pocket and ran it through his hair, staring fixedly at the hard face, wooden now, that looked back at him from the mirror. Behind him he could see Arch sitting on the edge of the bed with his legs crossed, watching him curiously.
“Yeah, let’s go,” he said.
9
The thought of V, married, tortured him. Waking in the night with Gene asleep beside him, he would wonder about V, imagining, playing scenes between her and her husband in his mind. He hated to think of her being as happy with her husband as she had been, for a time, with him in Bakersfield; he hated to think of her expressing her feelings and emotions to her husband as she had expressed them to him, for that had been first with him, and so, he felt, should always remain his.
He had finally placed Denton as the rancher V had talked about when he had first known her. He remembered V saying he was an old man. He tried to comfort himself with this, but somehow, at times, it made him furious. He told himself she could not be happy in bed with this old man, but thinking of that, he wanted her, and when he wanted her he would wonder if he were happy now with Gene. And he hated to wonder about his life with Gene, because he had told himself over and over again that it was right, that he was happy, and that this was the way it should be.
He tried to tell himself calmly that everything was over between V and himself, that all there was left of V was a lot of memories, and the good memories would soon be disposed of by the bad ones. He told himself that he loved Gene and that he was coming to love her more every day. He wanted his marriage to be good. It was a bargain he had made; he would stick to it and do the best he could by it. Gene was the anchor he had needed badly. She was the fixed point for him now, for gone completely was the feeling that he wanted to be free of any ties, gone with the loneliness of Tarawa and Guam and Maui.
Yet there were times when the aching need for V came back as overpoweringly strong as ever. He cursed it. He tried to shout it down, to shout down with it the dread that Gene did not, could not, satisfy. He cursed the longing and the knowledge and himself as stupid, unclean, despicable, but it was more and more with him. And it was as though V had felt it in him two hundred and fifty miles away, for she came back. She phoned him on the job one day and he went to her, coldly, and alone and defeated, and making no excuses to himself.
He stopped her when she started to tell him about her husband. Denton was in the hospital and would not bother them; that was all he needed to know. He didn’t want to know anything else about Denton, he didn’t want to have to think about him. So they never spoke of Denton or of Gene, and for a while, together, there were just two of them, and for a while he thought V had been right when she had said it could have been good.
But the disease was there. There was guiltiness in them both now. Even if it could have been good, it was cursed by what he was doing to Gene, by what V was doing to Denton. Anything they did, any time they were together, they were hurting someone. It did not matter that they hurt themselves; that was only of and between themselves and perhaps could pass. But there was always someone else they betrayed, or damaged, or destroyed.
He had resolved to end it before Gene confronted him. He had made up his mind to take Gene away somewhere where V could never find them again. That way it could be finished. And the fact that now Gene knew, only made him more determined. He and Gene had gone to Oregon.
There, he had felt confident it was over. He was whole at last and the evil had been exorcised. He felt that he could free himself from V by absorbing himself completely in Gene. He did everything he could to make amends to her for what had happened; he had dedicated himself to her and there was no more room for V.
It had been simple and logical that they return to San Diego. When the job at Pendleton was almost over, there was a letter from Smitty offering him more pay than he had ever earned before, and a good chance to go higher. And he was sure of himself now. Six months had passed. But still he felt a twinge of fear when Gene suggested they go to La Jolla for dinner on their anniversary. La Jolla was where V had been staying.
But it had been logical that they go to La Jolla. He had proposed to Gene in the dining room of the Casa del Mar, and they would go there again on their anniversary. And, afterward, he supposed it was perfectly logical too, that V would still be there.
The waiter had just brought them their dessert when she came in. As she passed she looked at him with no surprise, almost with no recognition, and she sat down at the table behind Gene. With her was a skinny little man with dark glasses, whom Jack took to be Denton, and when he could think again he felt angered and cheated that Denton was not old, as he had believed. Then he was angered still more at the realization that this was not Denton.
V sat opposite him, one table removed. He had to look at her when he looked at Gene, with the man’s dark, cropped head between. He had to loo
k at her but she did not meet his eyes, talking animatedly to her escort. Her hair was blonder, drawn back high on her head, and her face was deeply tanned. She looked shiny and expensive in a gold dress that was cut low to show the cleft of her breasts.
Then he could bear seeing her no longer and his fury turned on Gene because he could not get her out of the dining room quickly enough. Waiting in the lobby while Gene went to the powder room, he was sick with anger and impatience and desire. He lit a cigarette and immediately strode to the tall blue-and-white vase that stood by the door, to grind it out in the sand. He turned toward the entrance to the dining room. Helplessly he walked in.
He made his way across to the table where V was sitting. He put his hands on the tabletop, leaning forward and searching her eyes for a look he knew must be there, a flicker, a shadow, something to show she knew she had caught him again. She put her hand to her throat. A ring sparkled on her finger. He heard the man say something.
“Call me in half an hour,” he said steadily, tight-lipped, to V. “Franklin 5852-R.”
“I beg your pardon,” the man said. He put his napkin on the table and moved to get up. He had on a tuxedo and a black tie and his nails had been manicured.
“Never mind it,” Jack said to him. It seemed unfair that V should be attractive to men like this, who wore tuxedos to dinner and had educated accents and manicured fingers, and probably bought a new Cadillac every year. He grimaced and looked back at V and said, “Franklin 5852-R.”
“See here, get out of here!” the man said, and Jack turned and walked away from the table. Gene was waiting in the lobby. She had just had a permanent and her hair was stiff and tightly curled. He came up behind her and took her arm.
Driving home, he wondered what there was in him that V wanted. For he had known she had wanted him tonight; even though she had looked at him with no expression on her face, even though she had not said a word, and he knew she would phone him. But suddenly completely conscious of what he was, he wondered why she wanted him. He saw himself as a big, cheap grade foreman who didn’t know how to speak properly and had no manners, who worked with his hands and wore dirty clothes all day and had dirt permanently imbedded under his fingernails, whom she had seen drunken and despicable and cruel, who had killed a man in an animal fight, who had forced her to leave him once and had left her twice; why did she want him? He did not know, but for the first time he was jealous of her and not of someone else. She had started no better than he, but now she was better. She had money now, expensive clothes, jewelry; she was beautiful and desired by men who would not have spit on him had they even thought of him. He wondered at it, watching the streets and lampposts and houses flash by, and he was afraid to look at Gene, who sat silently beside him, staring up at his face with worried eyes.