He mounted Anna blindly. But it was Betty he entered, whose receptive body waited for him. It was on Betty’s body he consummated his marriage and from Betty Anna’s blood flowed.
“Jesus God,” he said aloud. “Jesus God.”
WHEN THE image of Betty had faded, and the small circle of blood soaked into the padded sheet, he rolled off her body, and reached, without thinking, for a cigarette. (There were some right by the bed. How did Anna know that about him?) He lay on his back, watching the smoke rise and lose itself in the pink shadows. He was trying to think of something to say, something that wouldn’t sound foolish. Something tender. Something profound.
By the time he finished the cigarette and snubbed it out in the pink leaf-shaped ashtray, he found that she had turned slightly on her side, slightly away from him, and fallen asleep.
IN THE morning, even before he opened his eyes, he knew that she was awake. He could feel her steady stare begin to pry him open.
“Hi,” he said vaguely and was surprised at the weariness in his voice. One little time and he felt like he’d been grinding all night.
Her brown eyes were almost round this morning. There were shadows under them, blue shadows, but the eyes glowed as if lights burned behind them. “Robert,” she said, “we are going to be the happiest couple that there ever was in the world.”
He frowned, blinked, and found the brown glow still there. Only a cat looked like that, that gleaming look, when it located the prey it was going to eat.
“Robert,” she said, “I love you so very much, and I will love you all my life.”
“You know I love you,” he said. He had an earache. He hadn’t had one of those since he was a child.
She didn’t even seem to be listening. “I like to think of us getting old together, and having grandchildren.”
“You do?”
“Two loves put together, the way God intended them to be. I wouldn’t want to live without you.”
Before her blazing certainty, he felt himself shrivel and die.
ANNA SLIPPED out of bed. He noticed that her long white gown was spotted with blood. Would she fold that away to keep, he wondered, like a certificate, a testimonial?
For a moment he thought she’d come back to bed. He felt a faint stir of desire, a twitch, a familiar burning. (Either that, he thought bitterly, or he had to piss.) But she walked silently out the door, and in a few minutes the smell of coffee reached him.
At noon they left New Orleans. At ten o’clock they drove through Collinsville’s Main Street; at eleven o’clock they passed the single grocery-and-post-office that was Port Bella. They missed the turn on the unmarked road and didn’t find their hotel until shortly after midnight.
There was no moon, but they saw clearly by starlight. The Gulf, a couple of hundred yards away, white, sand-fringed, reflected the night dully, like a sheet of unpolished metal. The lawns, treeless and smooth, rose from the beach to the hotel itself, gables and turrets and high peaked roofs, a wooden castle guarding the crab-filled waters.
At the front door Anna said: “There’s got to be a bell.”
Robert struck a match. “No bell, no pull, no knocker.” Overhead, disturbed by the faint yellow light, a couple of birds fluttered. Farther off an owl gave its soft descending cry.
Anna laughed: “Wouldn’t it be silly if we drove all that way and couldn’t get past the front door?”
Robert pounded the wood with his fist. It gave a kind of muted thump, stifled and faint.
“That’s the littlest sound I ever heard.”
“That’s oak,” Robert said, “and the door must be a foot thick.”
“We could camp on the lawn. Or down on the beach. That might be fun.”
“Well, not for me.” In annoyance he leaned against the door, hip pushing against the brass latch. The latch clicked; the hinges moved smoothly in well-oiled silence. The door opened.
“It wasn’t locked.” Anna giggled. “We never thought of that.”
The hall was wood-paneled and very dark, its high ceiling invisible. At the foot of a wide stairway, a life-sized turbaned Negro figure held a feeble torch.
Under the arch of the stairs hung a small discreet sign. Robert pointed. “Let’s see if that’s the office.”
They found a small desk placed across the alcove, and behind that the vague outlines of a room. There was no light at all.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Robert shouted: “Anybody here? Anybody here?”
The sounds didn’t echo, they flattened and died under the arch of the stair.
“I’m coming,” a quiet voice said. “I’ve been waiting for you. I’m coming.”
The desk clerk appeared from somewhere close behind the desk. He wiped the sleep from his eyes with one hand. With the other he pushed the registration form toward Robert.
He’s naked, Robert thought. And then: I’m seeing things.
The clerk switched on a small lamp bent almost double on its thin gooseneck. Robert filled in the form, hardly knowing what he wrote, staring intently at the man’s navel and the hair that radiated from it.
“Thank you,” the clerk said, slipping the forms into his drawer. “I’ll find the boy to take your bags. These niggers are never around when you want them.”
He turned and marched through the door, lamplight sliding off the thin planes of his buttocks. His bare feet slapped the floor briefly, then a screen door slammed.
Anna held the counter and shook with silent laughter. “It’s a hot night and I suppose he wanted to be comfortable.”
Robert said: “I want to see what this place is like in the morning.”
BY DAYLIGHT it was just a large gray old-fashioned hotel. There were four elderly couples—printed voile dresses and white linen suits. One fat widow who carried her canary with her. Two spinster sisters who sat in rocking chairs on the porch and did crossword puzzles all day long, never speaking a word to each other, never looking at the sky or the water, only now and then consulting a large dictionary on the table between them. There was also a redheaded man who left every morning at four to fish and was brought back, staggering drunk, in midafternoon by the charter-boat captain.
No one ever seemed to use them, but there was a croquet lawn on the east side of the hotel and a shuffleboard court on the west. There was a tennis court splotchy with Johnson grass. There was also a long pier out into the Gulf, at its end a square platform roofed with palm thatch.
That first afternoon Anna and Robert stood in the shade of the dry leaves. “Nothing here,” Robert said. “Let’s go back to bed.”
Anna smiled her sleepy contented smile. “What would people think?”
“They’ll think we’re madly in love.”
Their windows opened on the Gulf, flat and waveless and heat-smeared at its horizon. Starched white curtains hung straight down, motionless in the air. Glare poured through them, hot as sunlight.
Later he said: “It’s blazing hot.”
Lines of sweat glistened over her eyebrows and across her upper lip. His chest hair matted and clung in streaks to his skin.
“Just feel the bed,” she said, “it’s like a stove.”
“I’ll pull the shade.” He stood at the window for a moment, looking down the slope of brown grass. Two children, wearing identical blue sunsuits and wide straw hats, walked down the beach. Had they just arrived? Or were there other houses around the point? They had a toy boat, shiny white, and they squatted down to float it in the shallows.
He watched the bit of white wood riding on its string. Maybe the hotel had a skiff, and tonight, when it got cool, he could take Anna for a row. Not far. Just enough to feel the lift of the water. Floating apart from shore, they could look back to where they had been and where they would be again.
He’d always liked that. Even when he was very little, he’d liked to take a pirogue or an old skiff and paddle out into the bayou, just to float there. He was doing that when the Bozo, a big shrimp lugger that the five Cheramie brot
hers owned, came plowing up the bayou. He was daydreaming and hadn’t noticed in time, though you could hear that engine—one piston missing, everybody knew it—for half a mile. He couldn’t get clear. He knew enough to put the pirogue’s bow directly into the wake and hold it there. He was too young, and the pirogue too sluggish. She swung broadside, flipped over, and he found himself swimming for the first time. The water felt heavy and thick; he was so terrified that he saw colored sparkles in front of his eyes. His legs began running frantically, his fingers clamped around the paddle, and he whimpered through tight-shut lips. He stepped on something and slowly realized what it was—the pirogue had not completely lost its buoyancy. It was hovering slightly under the surface. Like a little island, he stood on it. The Bozo had gone on; the waves were subsiding and he had no trouble balancing, the water reaching only to his shoulders. He screamed until somebody pulled him out. He got beaten with a razor strop the moment they dragged him ashore, but his cousins did not bother going after the old pirogue. It was a Saturday evening, they had boiled shrimp and beer, and they were tired. In the currentless bayou the pirogue would wait for them. The next morning they had a few more beers while thinking what had to be done. Then the Bozo, going down to trawl on Sunday because the weather was good, smashed into the pirogue, hidden in the muddy water. There was a lot of shouting and cursing but no harm done beyond the loss of a few hours’ fishing. After that, when the welts from his beating healed, Robert taught himself to swim. He’d gotten sick several times from the filthy bayou water, but he managed to learn.
“Anna,” he said, “do you know how to swim?”
She didn’t hear. She was lying, naked, face down, her long smooth back and buttocks gleaming with sweat.
Funny, he thought, all the things I don’t know about her. He touched her shoulder. “Can you swim?”
She opened one eye. “Are we having a flood?”
“Go back to sleep,” he said. Under his hand he could feel her muscles relax, her flesh turn soft and heavy.
He put one hand on the bed. All the heat of the long afternoon seemed concentrated there. When Anna got up, there’d be a sweat shadow left on the sheet, a dark clear imprint. The perfect outline. The shadow without the flesh.
He tossed a pillow to the floor directly under the window, off the rug, and stretched out.
The boards were slick and cool and comfortable. He put his hands under his head and stretched slowly. He’d spent all his childhood sleeping on the floor. On the porch in summer, if the mosquitoes weren’t too bad: sun-bleached boards, with the grain standing out high and hard, like a washboard. When the mosquito plagues came—when the air was thick with them and people plastered their milk cows with a thick layer of mud twice a day to protect them—he had to sleep in the house, again on the floor, but inside the mosquito barre. He hated the nights spent huddling within the dust-laden net folds, listening to the insects buzzing outside, to the creaking of the bed ropes, to the deep heavy breathing of the other children. Their breaths ruffled his hair, stifled him so that he pulled up a tiny corner of the net and stuck his nose outside. … But winters were worst, when a cold gray rain fell steadily and all the children slept wrapped in their pallets, jammed body against body around the dying warmth of the stove, eyes squeezed shut to keep out the creeping cold.
He did not like people sleeping close to him. He could not stand being touched; he always woke up with a jolt of alarm in his stomach. That was the hardest thing about being married—the double bed. Every time he jerked awake, it was hours before he fell asleep. But how could he tell Anna that? She hadn’t even asked him about the double bed. She’d asked about everything else: the color of the living-room rug; of the outside shutters. Did he like a garden or did he want the tiny yard bricked over, patio-fashion? Did he think Queen Anne would look silly with a Sheraton sideboard? … But not the bed.
There was nothing to do. If his flesh cringed every night and shrank from contact when he was asleep, well, he would just have to get over it. Right now it looked like he was going to lose quite a lot of sleep.
He rubbed the bare boards with his finger tips and smiled grimly at the ceiling. Nice. Nothing close by. Not even a wall. When he was little, he’d never put his pallet against a wall, the way he was supposed to. He slept in the middle of the floor, so that people getting up to use the outhouse or to urinate from the edge of the porch, scattering the chickens roosting there, those people would stumble over him, and stagger cursing through the room. He always managed to be in his proper place, pretending sleep, before they lit the lamp. They saw only a line of children, him no different from the rest. Soon as they were back in bed, he’d sneak again into the center of the floor. It was the only way he could sleep.
Robert yawned. … Even if Anna should ask him about the bed, he thought, his mind refusing to leave that problem, he would never tell her. You weren’t a man unless you slept in the same bed with your wife. You were something else. A stud, or a lover. But you weren’t a husband, not a proper husband. Anna expected a husband. And he was going to be one.
He woke, Anna kneeling next to him. The light was different, yellower. It was getting toward evening.
“I couldn’t imagine where you’d gone.”
“It really is cooler here.” He was apologizing. Like he’d been caught doing something wrong.
“Doesn’t your back hurt?”
“I’ve slept on floors before.” He saw her face freeze.
“Would you like a drink?” She was changing the subject. She was being kind; she did not want to remind him of anything unpleasant.
Suddenly he was angry. At her. She didn’t understand. He’d been a dirt-poor kid, who didn’t even know his father’s name; his family had too many children, but they all worked, and there was almost always enough to eat. And his mother had been wonderful to him. He remembered her hugging and kissing him, holding his face between her hands. Later he wondered if she wasn’t trying to guess his father’s identity. But then he hadn’t thought like that. Then she’d just been his mother, pretty like all mothers. He didn’t really think much about her, until she died. For weeks then he’d shivered with fear and horror until, just exactly the way he hadn’t thought of his mother when she was alive, he learned not to think of her when she was dead. … His days were dirt and sweat and being tired all the time. But none of that bothered him then.
Anna was wrong. He didn’t want to think back to all those different houses on different bayous, yards full of scrawny chickens, everywhere the smell of outhouse, shrimp, and bait. He didn’t want to remember all that, and he didn’t think about it unless he had to. But he wasn’t ashamed of it.
“I never slept in a real bed until I got to Baton Rouge. And I had a hell of a time getting used to it.”
A shadow flickered across her face. “You told me.”
He insisted. “All sorts of people jammed into one little house. I never did figure out why I didn’t catch consumption from my mother.”
“Robert, you told me all about that. Do you want to tell me again?”
The way she said it. He curled with silent anger. Do you want to confess your sins to me? What the hell did she know?
“What do you know?” he said.
“Just what you’ve told me, Robert.”
Something in the smooth patient contours of her face. Something unchanged, and unchanging. His anger washed up over her insistent love. Crested and retreated. And disappeared. He wondered why he’d ever got angry; it wasn’t her fault. She didn’t have to understand. And he didn’t have to care what she thought.
He got up, his back stiff and aching. So he wasn’t used to sleeping on boards after all. He felt vaguely sad about that. As if he’d lost something of great value.
For two days he was patient. By the third day he was acutely restless. Because he didn’t sleep well at night, he dozed all the long afternoon and woke time-confused and groggy. He was exhausted and bored by the endless progression of empty sunny days.
One look at her face—he sucked in his breath, the fogs of sleep and monotony disappeared.
“What’s the matter, Anna?”
“Papa was hurt.”
The more upset she was, the less showed in her face. Robert wondered if she could also control her feelings that completely. Could she stop her stomach churning and her viscera contracting? Could she quiet fear by will? They’d taught her self-control at the convent, but had they also taught her a deeper control?
“Was there a call?” He spoke carefully: that quiet china face might crack.
“Aunt Cecilia telephoned about an hour ago.” No emphasis, no color; only gray sounds.
“How was he hurt?”
The hands in her lap didn’t move. They lay motionless, palms down. “You can’t be sure Aunt Cecilia gets things right.” She was staring out the window at the white-blue summer sky. “She says there was a holdup at the store.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“I don’t know, Robert.” The hands lifted for an instant, in apology. “Papa wouldn’t let anyone tell us. She had to sneak her call.”
“Anna, do you want to go back?”
She went on staring out the window. He thought again how strong the mark of the convent was. Her head, balanced delicately on its thin neck, seemed to have a coif around it. And if he slanted his eyes slightly he could see her starched wimple and black veil. It was in the way she held herself. Patient and secure—hopelessly arrogant.
Those thoughts left an unpleasant aftertaste. Like an odor, it clung to the curtains and hung in the rug and lingered on.
“We’ll go back, Anna.”
“Not for my sake.”
“No,” he said, “but we’ll go back.”
She packed in half an hour, not even forgetting her collection of sea shells.
The afternoon air was thick and dusty and hot; the thunderheads over the Gulf seemed heavier than usual. Robert could see flickerings of chain lightning in their black bases. It was, he thought, going to be a rough drive.
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