Her lips parted, she stared at him.
Something on her mind? How would Carlos know? How could he have found out? Her frightened eyes searched his face. She sank back against her pillow. Carlos didn’t know. Carlos didn’t care. He was just telling her he didn’t give a damn about her woes, whatever they were.
“Please come back!” she pleaded.
“I told you. I’m going to bed.”
“Come here, Carlos.”
“I’m going to bed.”
“Sleep with me. Hold me.”
“You couldn’t stand it.” He stared at her seared body, the ointment glinting in the light, the outline where her bathing suit had been looking Easter-lily white against the fiery red of her legs and shoulders.
“I could stand it.” Her febrile eyes clashed against his. “I can’t stand it not having you.”
She twisted on the bed and he watched her. Something happened to his face. She saw his eyes narrow, his mouth pull into a hard line. He started toward her on the bed. She knew he wanted to hurt her. Wanting to hurt her made him more passionate than he’d ever been, made his eyes as feverish as hers.
“It’s going to hurt you,” he told her. “It’s going to hurt you.” Only his voice didn’t care. It rasped across his lips. He wanted to hurt her.
He fell against her. His arms went under her shoulders and she screamed with agony. It didn’t stop him. The sound of her screaming drove him wilder. She felt as if the flesh were being raked from her back on the ridges of the rumpled sheets.
She heard something crash from the side of the bed. She was sobbing in pain and agony and delirium. And then she didn’t care any more and he wasn’t hurting her. He wasn’t hurting her enough and the frantic chains of her arms tried to shackle him to her. But she wasn’t strong enough, even in her fever and her need. He fought himself free.
She watched him stagger up to his feet and stand staring down at her, his eyes hating her.
“Carlos!” she cried. “My back, my shoulders! They’re killing me. The ointment. Please. Rub it on me! It’s here. I had it on the bed.”
He looked down at the floor. “It’s broke,” he said. “It fell off the bed and broke.”
“Use it anyway!”
“You can’t. It’s just a mess of salve and glass.”
“I can’t stand it. I’m burning up. It’s killing me. I can’t stand it.”
She was on fire. It had never been so painful before. She couldn’t even bear to lie on the rumpled sheet, and knowing there was no ointment made it worse.
“Looks like you’ll have to stand it,” Carlos said.
He snapped off the light as he stumbled back into the front room and left her moaning in the darkness, praying for morning.
Eleven
Her body was still afire at daylight and she hadn’t slept.
She lay on her stomach, praying Carlos would come in and smooth some of the lotion on her. Glass particles, anything, she didn’t care any more. She wriggled to the edge of the bed and peered over the side. The lotion jar was smashed. It was a mess of glass and cream on the floor. She stretched out her fingers, hoping to get just a smear of it. She wanted just enough of it to cover the back of her neck where it felt as if somebody were pressing a smoldering coal against her bare skin. Her fingers trembled as she raked them across the top of the cream. She felt the sharp jab of a glass sliver and blood started to spread over the top of the white cream. She drew her hand away and sank back on the bed.
The doctor. Why in hell didn’t Carlos get the doctor? How long did he think she could stand this?
She pushed up on her elbows and started to call him. She heard him moving around in the bathroom, and, puzzled, she lay there with her mouth agape, listening. She sank back to the sheet. Carlos had been high last night. It wasn’t like him to be up at this hour, even when he wasn’t hung over.
Carlos came out of the bathroom. Bernice watched him from beneath lowered lids. Why was he up so early? He was shaved and dressed except for his shirt. He took one from the dresser drawer and slid his arms into it. He turned and looked at her. She let her lids close, feigning sleep.
He stuffed his shirt into his trousers. Her purse was on top of the dresser. She saw him glance at it. He selected a tie and knotted it about his throat and got a clean handkerchief. Where was he going? Where could anyone go on the beach at this hour?
She watched him start from the room. He hesitated and returned to the dresser. Holding his breath, he opened her purse. His fingers closed over the flat fold of bills inside it. He let the purse close, snapped it, and turned around.
Bernice sat up in the bed.
“Ah, my lobster Creole,” he said. He shoved his hand into his trousers pocket and brought it out empty.
“Where are you going?”
“I—I was hungry. Thought I’d go out for something to eat.”
“Where will you find anything to eat this time of the morning?”
His eyes met hers. “Oh, I’ll find some place. You want to go along?”
“No. I don’t feel like it. Not this morning.”
She meant she really wanted him to beg her to go. That would save them. That would make everything all right. Just to be wanted.
He didn’t even argue with her, though.
As he passed her bed, he bent over and touched his lips to her fevered forehead.
“When you come back,” she said, “bring a new bottle of lotion. My whole body is burning up.”
“O.K. You want me to call the doctor for you?”
“Yes. Please.”
He stood in the doorway for a moment looking at her.
Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. The wrong screamed in the room.
“Take it easy, baby” he said. The way he said it frightened her. It was a farewell the way he said it.
She opened her mouth to call after him, and then didn’t. To want was one thing—that was hell. To be wanted—that was all that mattered. Her eyes filled with tears. Without that, you had nothing.
She willed him to turn around and ask her again to go with him. Just to coax her a little. But he didn’t look back. He went out the cottage door and left it ajar. Bernice sank back on the damp sheets of her bed.
She couldn’t stay there. It wasn’t the painful burning of her flesh that brought her off the bed. Carlos was leaving. She pushed herself up on her elbows and tried to find Carlos through the bedroom window. There was no one in the shell roadway between the motel cottages. She got up and went over to the window.
She could see him then. He was standing up on the edge of the highway, tall and handsome as a god. Well, the girls on Olympus had had no picnic if all the handsome gods had been like Carlos. She looked at him, at the wide shoulders, the blond hair glistening in the early-morning sunlight. He appeared godlike. But he was much less than that in bed.
She sighed. That was the trouble between them, her passion annihilated him. She wanted him so terribly that looking at him stirred her. And when she was in his arms, she could never get enough of him. He hated to go to bed with her now. And she knew why. It angered him to know that when he did go to bed with her, he was going to leave her moaning and weeping in the agony of frustrated desire. It made him hate her. She could see it. And worse than that, it made him hate himself.
In a sudden feeling of compassion and tenderness for him, Bernice wanted to call out to him to wait for her. She would make herself over. She would be what he wanted. If only he would let her go with him. That was all she asked. She stood there at the window and silently begged him to come back and get her.
Through her tears, Bernice saw Carlos step out on the highway and flag the Clearwater bus. Her heart lurched. Why? Where was he going? Why to Clearwater? And why hadn’t he told her? Why had his voice sounded so final when he’d said, “Take it easy, baby”?
The bus stopped. The bottomless voices wailed inside Bernice. She began to feel dizzy. He wasn’t ever coming back. He was leaving her and he wasn�
��t ever coming back. She wanted to run screaming out into the court after him.
He got in the bus. There were only a few riders at this hour, mostly domestics and yardmen on their way to work.
The flesh across her shoulders seemed to shrivel. The heat was intense. And under the layer of fire she was cold and she began to shiver. She looked at the broken jar beside the bed. There was no lotion for her burns. Carlos hadn’t even got any lotion for her. He didn’t even give a damn.
When the bus was gone, gray exhaust trailing out behind it, Bernice went back across the room and sat on the bed. Carlos was leaving her. He wasn’t coming back. She knew. Maybe it was the set of his shoulders as he boarded the bus. The way he hadn’t looked toward the cottage again. Everything was so final. He wasn’t coming back.
She lay on the bed and tried to sleep. But she couldn’t. The pain in her blistered skin was intolerable. She had to lie still to stand it at all. Her loneliness made her twist and turn on the rumpled sheets. She needed something that would make her sleep. Something that would make her sleep for a long time. The kind of stuff that would expel every memory of Lloyd Deerman. Because she wanted to sleep to escape the thought that Carlos was leaving her. But she was afraid to sleep. Lloyd Deerman lived in her nightmares.
She got up and called the doctor. While she waited for him, she found a shoulderless sun dress. Painfully she pulled it on. By the time she was in it, she was sweating. She was tired but she looked at the bed and knew she couldn’t rest. How could she rest? When her mind was quiet, Lloyd stalked into it and stumbled and fell down the steep endless stairs. And she told herself she could even have stood that. She was willing to pay the price if only she got what she wanted. But that was it. She had nothing she wanted!
Oh, she’d got away with murder, and she had Lloyd’s hidden money. But she had walked into hell: the hell of frustration. The kind of frustration that drove you insane. You knew what you wanted, you had it right with you, but it was rotten in the middle. It was no good. It was desire and excitement and sweet agony and it was always frustrated.
The doctor knocked at the door. She told him to come in. She watched the twist of his mouth when he found the broken lotion bottle. His eyes said he knew what had happened, and she saw what he thought of her for letting it happen. To hell with him. There was no time she wouldn’t want Carlos. There was always the thought that sometime it was going to be right for them. Sunstroke wouldn’t matter then. Nothing would matter.
Only when, God? When?
The doctor spread lotion on her burns and went away. She looked at the clock on the table beside her rumpled bed. It wasn’t time for the restaurant to open. She couldn’t have breakfast yet. Not here on the beach. She remembered the dress shop owned by Elhanner. Maybe if she could buy a few dresses, some underthings, it might take her mind off Carlos. It would help her forget for a little while. Her back was cooler now, and she decided it was unreasonable to think Carlos wasn’t coming back. She had to stop being a neurotic wife.
She got more money from her hiding place and went out of the cottage, closing the door after her. When she came back, Carlos would be there. He would raise hell because she had spent more money on herself. Everything would be lovely then. Oh, God, let him be here!
Elhanner’s shop was open. He smiled at her. “My goodness,” he lisped. “You’ll just have to take it easier, dearie. That old sun has simply cooked you.”
Bernice nodded. “Have you any dresses that will set off my new look?”
Where are you, Carlos?
“Goodness, no. I think you’re wrong to buy anything until your skin darkens. You know, you’ll very likely peel. You certainly won’t be very pretty then.”
“Show me some dresses anyhow. What does the well-boiled lobster wear down here this season?”
Without enthusiasm, Elhanner brought out his latest beach creations. Bernice couldn’t get Carlos out of her mind. She looked at the dresses. She tried to concentrate on them. She spent two hours in the shop. When she finally left, she had bought only half a dozen underthings.
The restaurant was open now. She looked at the menu. She wasn’t hungry. She went instead to Dugan’s bar. There were no customers in the small green-tinted room. Dugan was polishing glasses. He looked up as she came in the door.
“Done to a turn,” he said. “You’re done to a turn.”
“Give me a whisky sour.”
“Right.”
“Carlos said I owe you some money.”
“Right.” He consulted a tab beside his register. “Ninety bucks.”
“Ninety dollars! What for?”
“Dog racing, honey. They run dogs down at Sarasota. But they don’t run the right ones for your Carlos.”
“You take bets here?”
“I’m not supposed to. But I do. They know about it. Costs me a kick-in. What the hell? I can afford it. I got Carlos. You and me both got Carlos.” He slid the whisky sour across the bar. “He’s gone, has he?”
She looked up. “Why?”
“Oh, I saw him leave on the bus this morning. Is he coming back?”
She stared at him. “Of course!”
“Is he? Those punks are cut pretty much to a pattern, Bernice. If he comes back this time, he’ll leave you later. Sooner or later. You’d be lucky if it was sooner.”
“He’s not going to leave me. He’ll never leave me.”
She finished the drink and slid off the stool. “I was going to stay in here and drink. But you talk too much.”
She took her packages and went out on the green sidewalk. She walked toward the restaurant. Damn Dugan. He had expressed her own thoughts. Carlos was leaving her. Damn him. Dugan had no right to know. Did he have to know everything?
She entered the restaurant. She almost laughed aloud. There was Carlos at a table, eating breakfast. The sickness in her stomach slid out as though it had never been there.
Carlos looked up, cheeks distended with food. The little blonde waitress was standing at his side talking to him. Carlos chewed, watching Bernice come toward him. He swallowed, his face flushing with the effort. He smiled at her.
What a hell of a smile!
“Thought you were sick in bed.”
The waitress turned, smirking at the film of ointment spread all over Bernice’s blistered body. For a moment their eyes clashed.
Bernice looked at Carlos. He was again bolting his food. He hadn’t even asked her to sit down.
She opened her mouth to speak, and then didn’t. She watched his handsome head bent wolfishly over his French toast. Fascinated, she stared. That wasn’t hunger. That was greediness. What she had thought so sweet and dear when she’d first known him she now recognized as gluttony. He ate as though he could never get enough—as though he coveted everything in the world and more.
Bernice turned and retraced her steps across the café.
Dugan looked up when she re-entered his bar. He wasn’t smiling.
“He’s back, eh?”
“He’s back. I want another drink.”
“Sure. What you want this time?”
“How do I know? I don’t know anything about liquor. You fix something.”
He nodded. “My first wife ran off and left me. The guy she lammed with looked like your husband. Like they were twins. She took me for everything I had, and this guy spent it. That was a long time ago. The guy is probably forty by now. Looks like hell. He couldn’t even satisfy her after he got her. He couldn’t spend her money fast enough. Boy, she went through hell. Came back, wanted me to take her back.”
Bernice looked at him. “Did you?”
He nodded. “Sure. But that don’t make me like pretty boys like your husband any better.” He pushed a drink toward her. “Here, try this. A clear alcoholic mind is what you need.”
“That’s what I need.”
“Sure you do.”
He was lining odd-shaped glasses on the bar before her. “Drink these as I mix ‘em. You’ll have it.”
“I thought mixing drinks was dangerous.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“Sure. Why not?”
She picked up the first small glass. She held her breath and drained it off. With the second one she forgot to hold her breath, and the fourth she sipped slowly, and didn’t even feel the burn of it.
Twelve
Vaguely Bernice remembered that Carlos found her in the bar and took her home. It still puzzled her why Carlos had left her this morning and returned as he had. With her clear alcoholic mind she saw surely that Carlos had meant to leave her forever. And yet he was back. He was helping her out of Dugan’s bar, and Dugan was watching them, and Bernice knew the expression that was on Dugan’s face, even without being able to see Dugan at all.
She didn’t speak to Carlos as they passed the stores in the modernistic green building. She was silent and paced with the grave dignity of the exceedingly drunk past the crowded shuffleboard courts.
At their cottage she shrugged free of his arms and walked ahead of him. The step skidded away from her and she would have fallen, but Carlos leaped forward and caught her. She looked at him but didn’t bother to thank him.
Inside the door, she began to undress. She was aware that Carlos was talking. His voice was passionate and insistent and, she felt, disapproving. She slid the strapless dress down over her hips and dropped it on the floor. She stepped out of her shoes, staggered into the bedroom, and fell across her bed.
She sensed that Carlos had sat down on the edge of the bed and that he was undressing.
She was assailed by extreme sadness. It already seemed a hundred years ago since the very sight of Carlos’ bare body had thrilled her, numbed her, and left her speechless with delight. Everything was a hundred years ago. It had been at least that long ago since it had been a thing of beauty to watch Carlos wolf down a meal.
He was still talking. The room spun about her head, and she could hear the cars on the highway, and somebody’s radio was too loud, and she could hear the laughter from the shuffleboard court. But she couldn’t understand what Carlos was saying. Only his tone of disapproval got through to her. How dare he disapprove of her! Her breath came fast and angry. She sat up on the bed with the room spinning around her and stared at him.
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