“Shut up!” she said. “You shut up! Suppose I had a drink. You stole it. You stole that money right out of my purse. You thief! Shut up. You fool. You didn’t even have to. You could have had anything just by asking. But you stole it. Oh, you fool. You stole it!”
That was a long and tiring speech. She sagged backward on the bed.
She felt Carlos’ hands on her and she shook them away.
She struggled to speak again. “Oh, no, you stole it. You stole it and you didn’t have to. And now you can’t ever have anything. Because I’m free of you. All I got to do is drink enough and I’m free of you. Oh, no.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I never meant anything more.”
His hands were moving over her. She tried to twist away, out of his reach, but suddenly she couldn’t force herself to go away from him. She reached up, pulling him down on her. Her heart thudded under his. And she thought. What a fool I am. How helpless I am against him.
The last thing she remembered before she fell asleep was the look on Carlos’ face. A look of contempt.
He knows, too. He knows I haven’t a defense in the world against him.
She woke up with a splitting headache at eleven A.M.
She staggered into the bathroom, took a cold shower, and dressed. When she came out into the front room, Carlos was there.
She looked at him, astonished. Her voice was bitter. “What’s the matter, is it raining outside?”
“Why?”
“You wouldn’t be in here if it weren’t.”
She knew how bitter her voice was but she couldn’t help it. She looked at Carlos. He had never looked handsomer or fresher or younger. Oh, God, how she loved him! How she needed him!
“I’m sorry about the money, Bernice. I didn’t mean to steal it. I thought you were asleep. I was going out to eat. I was broke. I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“I didn’t mind, until I saw you get on the bus for Clearwater.”
I don’t care what you do, only don’t leave me, Carlos. Don’t leave me.
“I was just running into town.”
“No.”
“What the hell you think?”
“You were leaving me.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you were. You took that money. And you were leaving me. Why?”
“I only rode into Clearwater. Why would I want to leave you?”
“Why don’t you tell me?” Oh, God, tell me you love me. But she couldn’t stop that shrewish voice. “I knew. You were running away.”
He shrugged. “All right. We can’t get along. I thought I might as well.”
“So now at least you’re telling the truth. Maybe you’ll tell me why you came back!”
“I tried to leave. And I couldn’t. I decided, Bernice. Things will be better. I swear it.”
“You’re lying again.”
“I’m back, aren’t I?”
“Yes. But why?”
He got up and put his arms around her. He smiled, pulling her close so her body fitted against his. Perfect, Bernice thought. As though we were really made for each other. But she knew Carlos wasn’t thinking that at all. He knew every trick there was to know, and this was one of them. “Forgive me, baby. I’ll be a good boy,” he said.
She tried to twist away, but she couldn’t.
“You won’t be good. You’re a liar and I know that now.”
“I’m what you want.”
She struggled, again. “You won’t be. I won’t let you.”
“Doesn’t it feel good like this, Bernice?”
“No. Let me alone.”
“See, Bernice, so nice. So nice. You want me back, don’t you, Bernice?”
“Yes. All right. I do. My God, I can’t help that. I love you. That’s why I’m here.”
A smile twisted his face and he stepped away from her. For a moment she wavered and almost fell.
“O.K., Bernice. Maybe you’re right. We don’t get along. I’ll clear out. This time I’ll really go.”
But Bernice was thinking about the feel of his body against hers, the need of her body for his. The awful need. The sick need.
“No, Carlos.”
“Sure. You don’t want me. Isn’t that what you said? I’m a liar. I stole from you. Why’d you want me around?”
“Carlos, stop. You’re torturing me.”
“O.K. So if I get out I won’t torture you.”
“All right. You’ve twisted it around until I’m begging you. I’m begging you, Carlos. What do you want? What do you want?”
He took a step forward. His crafty eyes went over her face. “You want me back, eh?”
“Please don’t leave me.”
“I couldn’t stay here unless I was happy, could I?”
“All right, Carlos. What do you want?”
“I’m tired of having to tell Dugan you’ll pay him. That hurts a guy, having people look at you the way Dugan does. You can either shell out a hundred a day or I’m not staying. Good God, Bernice, the way you treat me, it makes a man sick.”
“All right, Carlos.”
“If I had a car I could get around. I wouldn’t have to go in that bar. The dogs are running in Sarasota. I could get over there.”
“But look, Carlos, you’re just wasting money on the dogs. You don’t ever win. You can’t win.”
“O.K. I’ll get out. I told you I would. I won’t be treated like some goddamn lap dog. I ain’t no goddamn lap dog, Bernice. I can’t sit around doing nothing. I got to be doing what I want to do, or I go nuts.”
“Will you love me, Carlos?”
“Sure. I told you I would, didn’t I? You’d like to go to bed right now, wouldn’t you? That makes it swell. Only we do it my way. From now on, everything is my way.”
And she knew it all had changed. Once the intensity of her passion had been enough. She had been able to get Carlos when she wanted him. But Carlos had changed that. It was on a different basis now. His basis. Cash and carry.
Carlos paced up and down in the Tampa Cadillac agency office. There was a light in his face that Bernice had never seen before. He was like a kid at Christmas. He was getting just what he wanted. She looked at him. Maybe he’ll be grateful. He’ll know I love him. Things will be different.
She paid four thousand dollars cash for the blue convertible. Carlos insisted on waiting in the showrooms until the car was delivered. She wanted to see a movie while they serviced the new car. Carlos didn’t even hear her. “We’ll just wait right here. They promised me they could hurry it up.”
He went through all the Cadillac display books. He was sweating and nervous. The more excited he became, the less aware he was of her.
It was nearly dark when they got back to the Rockledge Motel on the beach. Carlos said almost nothing on the drive back across Campbell Parkway from Tampa.
The lights in the green community center were bright.
“I’m hungry, Carlos. Why don’t we eat dinner now?”
He pulled in to the curb before the restaurant. “Why don’t you go ahead and eat, Bernice? I’ll just drive up the road a little. I’m not hungry. God, how I love the way this thing runs!”
Bernice didn’t want to get out of the car. She didn’t want to leave Carlos. Didn’t he understand that she tried to please him only because she wanted to keep him with her? Didn’t he know that was why she had bought him the Cadillac?
She knew she couldn’t let him see how frightened she was, how dependent she was. She forced her mouth to move into an acid smile. She was the old Bernice now, talking sharp to keep from showing the hurt and the fear inside. She slid out of the car and slammed the door behind her.
“Be careful. Don’t get any dust on it.”
“If I do, I’ll lick it off.”
She watched him pull away from the curb and swing in a wide arc on the road. The pebbles flew from beneath the rear wheels. How perfect he looked in the smart new car! How they were made for each other!
/> She was no longer hungry. She looked at the bar and decided against it. She couldn’t go on blanking out every night. After a while it wouldn’t work any more. Then what?
She entered the restaurant. There were only a few people eating and Bernice crossed to the booth she and Carlos always used. It wasn’t going to please her to have to eat under the cynical eyes of Carlos’ little blonde waitress.
She looked up. The waitress was a dark-haired girl who didn’t usually serve the booths.
The girl smiled. “Bet you were expecting Cookie.”
“Who?”
“Cookie Dawson. The blonde kid. She usually waits on you. You and your husband.”
“Oh? Yes. She isn’t here?”
“No. She ain’t. Tonight’s her night off.”
Bernice tried to eat. She ordered fried shrimp with cole slaw, tartar sauce, and French-fried potatoes. The shrimp were golden, standing up and pointing at her from the plate. It was the specialty of this restaurant. But for Bernice they were tasteless. She paid her check and left the restaurant.
On the sidewalk she realized she had nowhere to go. Carlos was still gone in the car. God knew when Carlos would return. She thought of the cottage, lonely and dark, the dreams waiting for her in the darkness of her bedroom. Lloyd would be falling and the splintering of the railings would scream in her ears.
She stood taut, her shoulders stiff and straight. She began to hear the juke-box music from Dugan’s bar.
Suddenly she laughed, pleased with herself.
Dugan’s was crowded at this hour. Women in brief beach-wear and men in sandals, shorts, and gaudy sport shirts sat at the tables and lined the bar. There were only two empty stools. Bernice sat on one of them.
Dugan smiled at her. “Again? So soon?”
“Yes.”
He polished the bar before her. “Maybe you’d like a table?”
“No. I like it here. I’m lonely. I want somebody to talk to. If I sit at a table, I’ll talk to myself.”
“That’d never do. Probably a state law prohibiting it. What’ll it be?”
“Where’d I leave off last night?”
“You want to start there?”
“I haven’t been happier in years.”
He fixed her a whisky sour. “That’s the trouble with people,” he told her as she drank. “They’re always looking for happiness. Or something they think’ll bring ‘em happiness. That’s why people are so miserable. If they’d just quit trying to be happy and relax and admit things are gone to hell, they wouldn’t have to drink my liquor. I could close up, sit on the beach all day, and develop a pot gut.”
“Another drink,” Bernice said.
“There are a lot of things quicker,” Dugan said. He shoved another drink at her. “This is the slow way, lady. It may take you years this way.”
“The quick ways, they’re against the law.”
She looked at him. His eyes were on hers. She shivered. It was as though they were alone in the room.
Dugan’s voice was very soft. “But sometimes it gets pretty rugged, eh? Looks like it’s going to get worse, and looks like you can’t stand it, eh?”
“Yes. Yes. That’s it.”
He polished the bar again, swiftly, putting a lot of pressure behind it.
“There are quicker ways than that stuff.”
Bernice tried to laugh with him. She couldn’t. What was there to laugh about? Carlos and her in their bed? Carlos and his new car? The splintering sound of ripping stair rails? The nightmares? The loneliness?
Dugan swiped at the bar again. “You know the right people,” he said, “you can get anything you want.”
Someone called Dugan and he moved away down the bar. Bernice watched him. In a moment he returned, held out a glass to her. It was brimming. She smiled eagerly, reaching for it.
Dugan held the drink just beyond the tips of her trembling fingers. “Sometimes you latch onto something that’s too big for you,” he said. “You got a rat in the house, you got to have rat poison, don’t you? You got to know where to get it.”
She stretched out her arm, closed her fingers around the drink. Their eyes met again.
“Anything you want,” he told her, “I can get it for you.”
Thirteen
Bernice was sick all the next day. This time she had no memory of how she got home. She slept until four in the afternoon. Her sleep was uninterrupted by nightmares, but when she woke she was alone and frightened, and haunted. How had she got home? Had there really been some man sitting on the stool beside her? Some man who laughed too loudly at everything she said? I’ll see you home. Gee, you’re awfully nice. I’m a nice guy. Only with you it’s a pleasure, baby. Yes, I live right here. Maybe we better be quieter, we might wake up your husband. Wake up my husband? You’ll have to yell pretty loud. He’s in the next county. Gee, it was nice of you to see me home like this.
Bernice began to sweat. Wasn’t that just a dream? And the way she hurled her body against his in the darkness? That was what she wanted with Carlos. That was all. Because if it had been real, maybe the man could have satisfied her. But in her dream, it had been just as terrible afterward as it had been with Carlos. Only worse. Because in this dream it hadn’t been Carlos. She twisted, sweating on the bed. She sat up, looking around. There was no sign that anyone had been here with her. The bed was rumpled, but when she was finally asleep she was always restless, and the bed was always rumpled. It proved nothing.
Trembling, she got up and stared at her wan reflection. So that was what could happen to you when you blanked out. That could happen to you, and you’d never know for sure. You might meet a man on the street, and he would smile at you, and know he’d been in your bed. And you wouldn’t know. He was just a stranger. Just a man you passed in the street.
She shuddered. She wasn’t going to drink herself blotto like that any more. She thrust out her coated tongue and regarded it in the mirror. What had Dugan said? This was the slow way. The slow way to what? She felt a chill at the nape of her neck. The slow way to die.
She tried to repair the ravages of sleep in her face. But as she worked with the cosmetics she was thinking about Dugan. The bartender. The talkative bartender. A strange little man. Seeming to know what was inside her mind. He had looked at her and had known she was afraid of trying to live alone but didn’t know how to die quickly. See me, Dugan had said meaningly. Anything you want, I can get it for you.
Well, she would stay away from that bar. Dugan gave her the creeps. Besides, even if she and Carlos weren’t getting along well, it was her business. It didn’t concern a strange little man named Dugan.
She went forlornly about the small cottage. There was no sign to show when Carlos had last been here. She dreaded the hours ahead without Carlos. It was more than the awful need for him. There were only two things that could keep her from thinking about Lloyd and remembering the way he’d died. Carlos was one. When she was with him, she was free of her dreams. The only other thing that could save her was drinking at Dugan’s bar. What a lovely life she’d bought for herself!
When she was with Carlos, she was left tormented and raving with frustrated need. And worse than that, he had twisted their relationship around until he used her desire for him as a way to bleed her of money. It was cash and carry. Carlos knew what she wanted, and he made her pay for it.
That left only the drinks that Dugan prepared for her. And that led to what? The man’s voice, the man’s laughter, the indistinct gray of the man’s face. I’ll see you home. Gee, you’re nice. I’m a nice guy, only with you it’s a pleasure, baby.
She looked at her hands. They were shaking. She clenched her fists.
The doorbell rang. She stood in the center of the room and stared at the closed front door. Maybe it was the man from last night. If there had really been a man last night. She didn’t even know. She only knew she didn’t want to find out. The doorbell rang again, clattering and screeching against her raw nerves.
She pa
dded across the gray rug of the living room. The doorbell rang again before she reached the front window and wailed at her again as she peered through the curtains. The breath sighed out of her.
She had never seen this man before, not even in her nightmares. The man at her front door was heavy-set. He was wearing a brown suit that was somehow gaudy and expensive-looking at the same time. His thick-jowled face was red and moist. Bernice saw that he had small blue eyes. There was anger in them as he punched at the doorbell. His thick mouth was firm. Bernice saw that he had no intention of going away. He intended to keep ringing the bell until someone answered him.
She opened the door. For a moment they looked at each other. The red-faced man took a monogrammed handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his forehead.
“Carlos Brandon live here?”
Bernice felt a tremor about her heart. Was it always to be like this, every time someone came to the door? Expecting the worst, afraid for Carlos, afraid to ask and afraid not to know?
“Yes. I’m his wife.”
“His wife?” This seemed to please the big man. “May I come in, Mrs. Brandon?”
He’d already opened the screen door and was pushing by her into the living room. Purposefully, she waited until he was in the center of the room, then she said, “Yes. Come in. Please do.”
She might as well have forgotten the irony. It was lost on the visitor.
There was a brief silence as the big man peered into the kitchenette, into the disordered bedroom, and through the opened door into the bath.
“Small,” Bernice said. “But adequate.”
“Looks nice, Mrs. Brandon. Looks real nice. Hope you like it down here. Hope you like it a lot.”
“Are you a real-estate man? Or a greeter from the Chamber of Commerce?”
“Not me, Mrs. Brandon. I just came down from New York. Just flew into Tampa this morning. Came all the way to see Carlos. He’s not around, you say?”
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