The Followed Man

by Thomas Williams

  "Nineteen, then."

  "Too late, Buster," she said, and blushed, he was certain, be­neath her careful tan. Some idea or possibility had come to her and made her cautious, or embarrassed, as though she questioned the propriety of coming to see him all by herself. "Ham says we're going to drive up here one of these days and see how you're get­ting along, so I thought I'd scout on ahead, find out just where you were," she said. "I've got to get on home."

  Her embarrassment excited him. Without her knowing looks and sarcasm, or whatever it was she coated all her remarks with, she became the stunning blond golden girl he had desired, at least once in his life, before Helen had imprinted her own characteris­tics upon him. He look Jane's glass, which was not empty, chipped more ice from the twenty-five pound block and made her another drink.

  "God! Easy!" she said. "I've got a long drive ahead. It's six o'clock already!"

  "You're welcome to stay over," he said, watching her, feeling a little reckless and even cruel. She became very nervous, her long metallic fingernails clicking on her glass, which she held in one hand and played upon with the other. She was trying to find something to say, and finally looked at him resentfully, then away.

  "Ham had a thing for Helen. Did you know that?" she said. "But of course nothing ever came of it except he used to tell me about it all the time."

  "He told you about it?"

  "Sure. Maybe it's our California ways or something. We confess a lot."

  "I don't," he said. "We didn't."

  "I know. I used to envy your uptight whatever-it-was. Christ, Ham treats me sometimes like I'm his kindergarten teacher. Ev­ery little kinkydink in his psyche and Big Jane knows all about it. But then I'm just as bad, I guess. There's just no goddam dignity. I mean I like to look good and feel good, so I go on the wagon and watch the calories, but then I ask myself what do I want to look good for? Because there's no dignity and I just want men to drool over me a little? Why should I ask you this, anyway? I never thought of anything like that before your . . . before the . . . tragedy. I don't want to remind you of it. I'm sorry. What I mean is, I didn't come up here to jump in bed with you. I'm on my way back from a lousy doubles tournament. I can't stand my partner—for one thing, she never comes to the net—so we drive in separate cars; we always do. So I came up here to see you as a person. I did see your whole person, more or less, in the brook. Joke. I'm seri­ous, though, or I want to be, and you're serious. I mean you really are serious, maybe because you have to be now, after what happened. No, you always were serious. Maybe all I mean is that you were in love with your wife. Anybody could see it, and it was amazing, fabulous! Like you read in those women's books, so I just naturally respected you and that's why we had all the argu­ments, not because you never asked to make love to me. Anyway, I never asked you, right?"

  "Right," he said.

  "When you said to take a swim over there I didn't, right?"

  "Right."

  "Are you laughing at me, you shit?"

  "No, Jane."

  "There's no dignity," she said, crying, her lids suddenly red and overflowing. "Christ, I feel like a fool in front of that goddam dog! Why does he keep looking at me? And it wasn't my fault I was for Nixon, either. He came from my mother's hometown!"

  She put her glass, clasped in both hands, in front of her face. She was sitting on a kitchen chair, her athletic bottom filling the hard seat, her cute, too pretty, lace-decorated tennis dress une­qual to her emotion. The top seam of her ball pocket was tinted red from clay dust, where she had stuffed the yellow extra ball when she had served. Her tears and ragged breaths seemed im­portant because out of character, or out of whatever character he'd thought she had. He went to her, removed her spilling glass from her hands and put it on the ground, knelt beside her chair and put his arms around her. Sympathy threatened to undo him, as though one soft thought might release from him groans and wails that would frighten them both.

  She hiccuped, and said, "I stink. I couldn't stand hanging around long enough after the match to take a shower and change."

  She did stink, of a prodigious, an Olympic sweat. He thought of her hairy ancestors—Celtic, Saxon, Mycenaean—fierce warrior-women of interminable seiges, survivals, battles and massacres. It rose like heat from her as she sobbed over some vague civilized unhappiness she probably couldn't define. Now he would not dis­solve into mush, at least; but he wondered as she leaned into him, needing his arms, to whom his real thoughts might be expressed, and if they were not in violation of the tenderness and sympathy he really felt toward her. As a comforter he had always felt not so much a fraud as an inadequate vessel.

  "You stink good," he said. "It's honest sweat. You should have smelled me before I dove in the brook."

  "I didn't shower because I didn't want you to think there was any hanky panky," she said. Her arms went around his waist and his towel fell off. "I didn't mean to do that!" she said, nearly in a panic. "God damn it!"

  "I know," he said, but the appendage he had never found an adequate word for, at least in any complicated situation, had a willful mind of its own and rose white, pink, veined, a rather shockingly utilitarian instrument. He didn't know if she would take the recalcitrant organ's behavior for a betrayal or a compli­ment. As he leaned back to retrieve the towel, Jane stared at the thing that pointed at her, then at his eyes. He couldn't read her expression at all.

  "I'm not exactly responsible," he said, covering it. "There are certain areas in which our best intentions are subverted, at least in part, by Beelzebub. When I feel tender toward a pretty woman that son-of-a-bitch goes on automatically, but I reserve the final decision, as it were."

  "If you screwed me, wouldn't you feel you'd betrayed your friend?"

  "You're a friend. You mean Ham. In that case you're talking about two friends. But do you blame me for this growth, or not? I don't know."

  "You couldn't have calculated to say anything more seductive. All you want is a piece of ass."

  He felt his noble ambivalence betrayed by this simplification. How easy and wonderful was marriage, in which action was not necessarily the opposite of care.

  He could say to her that, after all, she had come here, where he had been peacefully, ascetically, eremitically performing his inno­cent ablutions.

  Ah, no. She was unhappy and she was not evil. She would never know, this stunning golden girl, whether anyone, except maybe her kindergarten pupil, loved her for herself or her bod—to use a word of her generation. But how much of herself was the great bod she exerted and starved for beauty? This new and near-hys­terical flippancy of thought was tawdry, trashy, unworthy, self-protective. He didn't want to have to weep over her unhappiness or his own. If his erection was now licked by flame, now by ice, maybe that was the fire and ice of hell. Maybe she had cheated on Ham a hundred times, but that wasn't his information, and didn't matter anyway.

  "I do care for you, Jane," he said with surprising emotion and difficulty, as though the words proved the truth of it. "I'll listen and treat you as a person, okay?" He handed her her drink and went into the tent to put on some clothes. When he came out, a minute later, her tennis costume was draped over the chairback, her tennis shoes and ankleless socks with their little white pom­poms were neatly lined up, and his towel and soap were gone.

  The sun was approaching the mountain when she came back across the field, the towel wrapped tightly around her. She walked carefully over stubble and grass, and her hair was a dark rope, now, over one shoulder. Cool air had moved down from the hills, and he had made a fire in his rocked fireplace in front of the tent. Dead limbs, mostly applewood, burned yellow and orange, the small new fire at least visually the warm center of the pasture and surrounding trees and hills.

  "Cold!" she said as she came up to the fire. "That brook is beyond cold. It's super-cold. You can't even feel it, it's so cold." She knelt next to the fire and spread the heavy, damp strands of her hair over her hands. "God, this is a beautiful place," she said, holding her h
air over her head. "It's so green. It's almost too green."

  He got her another towel and offered her dry clothes. She ac­cepted the towel and tossed her hair in it as if her hair were wheat and the moisture were chaff that must be gently shaken away, nev­er rubbed. Women were always doing expert things like that, things that rarely made much sense to him, but were part of their common mystery, such as why men caused in them so much ten­sion and emotion all the time. Jane had come here out of something like love, something utterly impractical and compelling. She knelt by the fire, tossing her hair, naked except for the towel that compressed her breasts and covered her to her strong thighs. She was forty, but he had trouble imagining her as a younger woman, as if any smoothing out or firming of the live body that was now almost a cliché of the proper proportions could only make a mani­kin—thinner, hard, with an airbrushed surface. From certain an­gles, when she was dressed up and fixed up, she did look like a manikin sometimes, her face simplified and a soft sheen across cheek or forehead that was inhumanly geometrical. Then from this model, as visual an entity as a statue, would come all sorts of ragged, sometimes destructive emotion.

  If he made love to her she would, sooner or later, confess to Ham or bludgeon Ham with it, depending upon the needs of that future moment, he knew. Then a connection would be made to all that complicated love and hatred and he would have a line on him like a leash, one that could be jerked taut at any unexpected time. If only he knew exactly what she wanted from him, something she probably didn't know either, he could veto the decision of his inflamed member.

  Also he wanted to be alone; that was not an immediate priority because it was now overridden by the persistent itch of lust, each small hair on his body containing a charge, seeming to wave like cilia toward the woman who had come here because of him. But the need for singleness and isolation waited patiently, he knew, and would return with force.

  She moved her long arms and basked in the fire as the air cooled and darkened. He felt the alcohol's dangerous evasions of the future. Because she didn't speak he knew what she wanted him to do. He went to her and for the first time since he had known her touched her with that intention. She knew before he had taken his second step, of course, and was so immediately will­ing and calmly naked she seemed to have lost all of her quirks and hard edges and become a smooth part of him. The mutual exped­iting, the unity of intent, function, opinion—like the slow tropisms of the green life all around them, nothing could ever be so remorseless and easy. There was the urgent recess for the spreading of the blanket and the removal of his clothes. Warning only came back to him just as he entered her, a moment he would re­member later, when her eyes in the firelight widened fiercely, or as if with great surprise.

  He awoke from a dream sometime in the night, not having re­cent memories except for the dream, which was invaded, or sur­rounded, by actual times and events, so that dream and memory were mixed. Helen had just returned to teaching. No, she had taught for six months or so and had changed in little ways he'd thought not necessarily strange, since one would naturally change with a change of occupation. The children were old enough, now, so that they didn't need constant transporting or supervision, and she went to Moorham only two days each week for her two fresh­man English sections and student conferences. Was that history, or part of the dream? She grew more outwardly affectionate; she touched him more, with a kind of bawdy, hail-fellow, ribald jokishness that was unlike her usually passionate solemnity about sex. One time she came home with a package (dream?) which she opened late at night on their bed. He watched her take from its box a strange set of black leather belts and buckles, a truss-like contraption the like of which he'd never seen. "I just wanted to show you this weird thing they actually use," she said. It seemed reasonable, even when she took off her robe and was nakedly, pa­tiently, trying on the straps, belting them across her familiar thighs and belly, her brown pubic hair a warm, friendly muff he knew so well. Finally she'd figured out how the thick straps went, and then there was the plastic or horn part that belted over her mons and was a dildo, a huge rigid prick and balls, oversized, molded in precise male detail and yet the color of old ivory, an­tique as scrimshaw. That had to be dream. Then the dream's memory faded into vague alternatives, one of which was that she told him to get on his hands and knees, which he did, since in their loving there were no limits or inhibitions whatsoever, and she placed her warm, loved hands on his back just before that al­ternative faded. Another, so quickly fading from the dream now it might have been his own waking imagination, was Helen's round, heart-shaped, beautiful woman's ass, straps cutting waist and thigh, humping and thrusting down between a woman's long tanned legs.

  Jane Jones's legs? "Oh, God," he said out loud, remembering more recent events. The dream's details didn't bother him at all, but seemed wonderfully legitimate and interesting, the gift of having seen and touched Helen the dispensation of benevolent gods. But the real events of this night had happened; this was real life with all of its uncontrollable ensuing disasters.

  At eight-thirty Jane had begun to worry about Ham, who was in Hartford at some sort of insurance meeting and would be home around midnight. She was more worried than she tried to show, her hands trembling as she put on her soiled, dew-damp panties and tennis clothes. Luke suggested that she have something to eat first, but she had to leave right now. The mountain night was cool, so he put a heavy cotton shirt over her shoulders, and drove her up the hill in his truck, past the somnolent farm foundations, through the deep black of the spruce to the road and her car, his hand at the hip of this woman he had known. That was the feel­ing, not sexual, not yet anxious because it had all seemed so famil­iar and normal, but anatomical, or proprietary, because within the moving center his hand lightly rode were vagina and cervix, ute­rus, ovaries and womb and he had been there, his semen still div­ing in the moist interior, and that could not be divorced from care.

  The TR-7 seemed too low and flat to take her all those miles, but she sat deep in the seat and inserted her long legs toward the engine, then remembered to give him back his shirt.

  "Are you unhappy?" he asked. "Is it all right?"

  "I don't know what I am," she said. "I'll let you know." It seemed almost a threat.

  Then the engine rapped and zoomed, the lights came on and in the form of the red taillights her presence narrowed and disap­peared.

  On the way back to his camp the truck's headlights swathed the road and the trees, leaving black hollows and distances that shift­ed, corridors into the night. Halfway down the hill toward the brook he met Jake, who had limped slowly after him and whose eyes, flashing green in the lights, were bothered by this traipsing off in the dark. Luke got out and helped him up into the truck, then down again at the camp, Jake giving only one short, sur­prised yelp of pain.

  And now Luke lay on his cot in the filmy nostalgia of the dream. Jane, in whatever mood this evening might have caused, would be home by now, in bed with her husband and her secrets. Helen and his children were in their graves. Jake sighed from his chosen bed beneath his master's bed.

  18.

  A few days later he stopped in on his way to Leah to see George, but George wasn't there. Phyllis had him come in, made some in­stant coffee and they sat in her office, which still showed signs of the book stacking George had done for the party, though new gla­ciers had begun.

  "I read so much," she said, "and I sometimes think I remember so little of what I read that it's just like some habit, like biting your fingernails. What's to remember about that? What happens to you, that's what you remember. Yet I have odd memories that come up out of nowhere and I know they never happened to me at all."

  "Like dreams," Luke said.

  "Ayuh, like dreams. I got them, too. I hear Louise went off to California."

  "That's what her brother told me," Luke said.

  "You and her get along pretty well?"

  "I don't know, Phyllis. We went out together, you might say."

  "H
uh! Stayed in together, too, I imagine. You don't have to use no euphemisms with me, Luke Carr."

  "I don't know how much specific information you want. We slept together, but I suppose that's another euphemism."

  "You young people, you think you're the first ones to break the rules. I could tell you. Maybe I will. Anyway, I've come to the con­clusion Louise is a little tetched," Phyllis said, proclaiming her loy­alty to Luke.

  She sat straight and thick-bodied, the white flesh of her arms sagging from the bones, her shiny arthritic knuckles around her coffee mug as if to absorb the warmth of the porcelain, though it was a warm day in July. Her swivel chair was well greased in its joints and made no squeaks or creaks when she moved. George would have seen to that lubrication, something he could handle.

  "Not badly tetched," Phyllis said. "I don't mean that. She's smart and she's talented, too, but I guess men, and a worthless husband, give her a hard time. She's come and talked to me, you know."

  "She said she admired you. She said you were 'real' or some­thing like that. I agreed."

  "That's nice. God knows, I feel real enough." She slowly shifted herself on her swivel chair, with the blank look of familiar pain. "You young people think the old are all set in their ways, all the old sorrows and mistakes forgiven or forgotten. It don't work that way. You got to live with them new every day. Nothing ever gets forgiven or forgotten."

  He remembered the story, not really a story but just an old piece of information, that one of George's and Phyllis's sons had committed suicide when he was young. And there were things he had heard about George's having been a hard man and a violent one, though the information was so old and vague it might not have been George Bateman at all. Something about throwing all the furniture out on the lawn, with darker implications. He could remember nothing more than that.

  "We had our bad times too," Phyllis said. "Some of it was my fault. I made my mistakes. Lord, I once made a terrible mistake."