The Followed Man

by Thomas Williams

  Luke suddenly thought that if Robin had any meanness in him now was the time he would show it.

  And then, another thought that frightened him: by requesting his presence she had given away her right to treat her liaison with Robin as a lark, a whimsical thing she had decided to do, and giv­en him a license to ask her any question at all. In fact demanded those questions, and he didn't want the responsibility. No. But if he were imperviously polite and casual, and went away having dealt with nothing of high seriousness, then she would be aban­doned and truly hurt. He didn't want to be anyone's confessor, not even his own, and they were after him as they were always af­ter him.

  Maybe he would have to get drunk in order to take her confes­sion and dispense his paternal indulgences, as he had been at the Joneses' when their repetitive marital cataclysm demanded his goddam mediation.

  And now Marjorie, this twenty-nine-year-old woman, so awed by the strange turns her life had taken; big Marjorie, Marjorie in all her voluptuous warm flesh chilled by the cold lake and warmed again by the afternoon sun, now indoors with men, drinking gin, still in the diaphanous blue of her gown, her sinful places struck by scant and violent orchid. They must be so important to her, these next hours, but did he need them? Demeaning thought. Poor Marjorie.

  "I ought to change out of my bathing suit," she said, but sat in one of the shiny motel easy chairs, next to the door that led to the inner hallway. Sunlight striped her. With one hand she pushed and carded her hair that was damp at the ends. "And wash off all the Coppertone, though I got burned a little anyway. I burn so easy I guess I ought to stay in the shade and look like a white worm."

  "Some worm," Robin said.

  "Now, Robin," she said with a touch of sternness, or dismay, then changed the subject. "How are you doing now, Luke?"

  "I'm building myself a cabin in the woods," he said.

  "He's going to be a hermit," Robin said.

  "A hermit?"

  "I just want to live alone for a while," Luke said.

  "But it's awful living alone. Why do you want to live alone?"

  "I don't know," Luke said, though the unformulated answer loomed in his mind, anxiety around that gray shape like a nimbus. "What are you going to do, Marge?" he said.

  "Be a receptionist-secretary at the clinic again. The girl they got now's leaving the first of September, her husband's going to col­lege in Indiana."

  "So you've got a vacation till then."

  "I got to go back and take care of Mickey and Marcia, so this part's nearly over. Sheila's mad at me, anyway. I said we only live once and I'm a widow now, so why not? Do you disapprove, Luke?"

  "Why should I disapprove?"

  "It's like, well, I mean, I never did anything like this before."

  Robin said, "I'm going to take a shower, so you two Wasps can discuss the finer points of sin." He went off cheerfully to the bath­room, and the shower started.

  "You do disapprove. You disapproved on the phone when I called you," Marjorie said.

  "Well, I got the impression that you kind of disapproved of the whole thing yourself."

  "I did at first, but I liked it too much. You only live once. That's what I told Sheila. She's Catholic, you know."

  "It's just a matter of what's good for you, that's all," Luke said, sinking, doing his duty.

  "Robin's so good in bed. I need a man in bed," she said, a little breathless at this confession.

  "Just so you know how temporary it is."

  "I don't know about that," she said.

  "He's married and has a kid. Do you think he'll leave them?"

  "She left him!"

  "I doubt it. She'll be back when he gets home."

  "He loves me!"

  "Not to marry you, Marge, for Christ's sake. I was hoping you knew what you were doing. Treat it as an outing or something. You only live once. Robin's a nice enough fellow, it's just that he's a little sick in certain areas. He wants to go to bed with every wom­an in the world. I'm sorry, and I shouldn't get exasperated, but if you think anything's permanent, you're a fool."

  "Why did Mickey have to die?" she said, crying. Fluids came to her nose and eyes, and she reached for the Kleenex. When she'd wiped and blown, her eyes glossy, she said, "I wish I could live with you, Luke. Not to sleep with. No, that too. I don't care how old you are. Maybe you don't even do it anymore, how should I know? I've just been so alone!"

  "You're an attractive young woman who likes men and you won't be alone for long, believe me. Go back to work in your clinic. I wish my prognosis was as good. Meanwhile, have fun on your vacation."

  Though the shower still ran, she looked conspiratorily toward the bathroom. "He's so good, you know, in bed. He goes on and on. We do awful things, too, that I never did before. I mean, I heard the words for the things we do, but I never knew people ever really did them. Now I'm embarrassed, telling you that." She pulled her gown over her long pink and white legs. "I just need a man's arms around me at night. I thought there for a while I was a mother, so I'd be a mother and that was it, the rest was all over. But the rest wasn't over. I'm still too young, I guess, and too hot-blooded. I'm on the pill now, even. I mean, I'm a good mother, too, but I get wild for a man. I'm unnatural that way. I just got to have a man."

  "You'll get a man, Marge. Don't worry."

  Robin came out of the bathroom in flowered blue shorts, towel­ing his hair. "Next," he said. Marjorie glanced once at his hairy, gleaming body and the bulge caused by his randy little apparatus, blushed and looked away as she rose to take her bath.

  Robin retrieved his leisure suit from the bathroom and Marjo­rie went in. Then he, too, looked conspiratorily at the bathroom's closed door. "Pardon my crudeness, or whatever you'd call it, but if you want to try her, old buddy, I'll take a walk."

  "For Christ's sake, Robin."

  At dinner Marjorie looked purged, absolved. She was gay and laughing, Robin going on about the dangerous animals he'd come across on the way to Luke's mountain home. They ate in the din­ing room of the old hotel, Marjorie a little worried about silver­ware and how one should hold a wine glass. Occasionally she gave Luke quick, serious glances he thought grateful, this somewhat formal dinner and his older presence making it all more legiti­mate. Just having another person know must institutionalize it somewhat, make it a social rather than an aberrant act. Well, he knew, and having known would say good-bye to them soon.

  Robin asked about the article. "Gentleman doesn't pay that well—notorious tightwads—but I wouldn't mind the credits, if you ever do the thing."

  "I wouldn't know how to tell the truth about it," Luke said.

  "I called Mike Rizzo, you know," Robin said. "He told me once I could come and photograph his apartment, but on the phone he was scared or embarrassed or something. He's a big talker. He said he was afraid some nut would come and get him and his family. 'They get your address, Robin, you follow me? They find out where you live, you follow me? Some nut's going to come and kill you.' Our brave paratrooper."

  "What about Jimmo McLeod, the crane guy?"

  "Jimmo's gone to Alaska, his family and all," Marjorie said. "Maura, his wife, called me up to say good-bye. She said they were going to get rich in Alaska."

  "A crane operator makes good money," Robin said, "but a crane operator does not get rich."

  "Or a photographer," Luke said.

  "But films, films," Robin said. "Who knows?"

  When Marjorie went to the ladies' room, her fawn colored slacks drawing glances as she walked between the white-clothed tables, Robin said, "You could take her, you know. Don't get mad, now, but she's ripe. The two of us turn her on, I can tell. She's hot as a pistol, if you're up for that sort of thing."

  "Robin."

  "Don't go all fucking moral on me. I'm thinking what she'd like. I'm not being a shit. She'd like to get gang-shagged, is what she'd really like."

  "I'm not a member of the gang."

  "You mean you couldn't get it up for poor Marge? Listen, she l
ikes you so much that when you act sort of dignified and moral and like that she acts that way too, but I'll bet anything—I'll bet you a hundred bucks, right now, we can take her back to the room and have her clothes off in five minutes."

  "Maybe you're right, but I don't want it to happen. I deeply don't want it to happen, Robin. I want to say good-bye to Marge without making her unhappy now or in the future. I want out with a good conscience, if that's possible."

  "Back to your hermitage, huh?"

  "Right. No guilt, no more tears, no orgasmic convulsions, no voyeuristic amusements whatsoever."

  "Oh, well. It would have been funsies for all. Whatever else she is, Marjorie is one fucknutty cunt. I was just trying to do my old buddy a favor, but forget it, forget it. Maybe I'm a pimp at heart. What do you think?"

  "Maybe."

  "And I guess you're never going to do the article, huh?"

  "Too much new data keeps creeping in. I want to creep out."

  "Maybe you're a creep at heart."

  "Maybe. Just don't turn over my stone and I'll be satisfied."

  Marjorie came back across the room, her eyes glittering with in­terest and shyness as she looked at Luke and Robin.

  With their coffee, Robin ordered brandy for Luke and Marjo­rie. "Live it up," he said, "for tomorrow we head back to Logan and the shuttle to the real world."

  "You can have it," Marjorie said.

  "Would you like to stay up here with all the trees and creepies and crawlies?" Robin asked her.

  "I don't know," she said sadly. "I guess I got to do what I got to do, the same as everybody."

  They walked Luke back around to his truck to say good-bye. Marjorie suddenly stepped up to him, put her arms around him and kissed him on the mouth. He'd never touched her before, and hadn't realized that she was just his height, which seemed strange—strange that he hadn't known it. His arms went around her broad ribcage, her large breasts squashed alarmingly against his chest. "It helped so much talking with you, Luke," she said. "You make me feel I'm worth something, you know that? I'm so grateful." She squeezed him hard, forcing some breath out of him. She seemed a continent, and he thought of her oversized sexual parts, female parts, which in his mind were muscular and tough, meant for hard and constant use, yet her mind and emo­tions were so delicate and fragile they might break. He was prob­ably, hopefully, wrong.

  She held him until he wanted very much for her to let him go, and finally she did. Good-bye, good-bye, they called to each other as she and Robin went back to their cubicle.

  He got up into the cab, feeling free, and had the key in the igni­tion when a small woman in a white dress came running across the dimly lit parking lot toward him. At first it might have been a child, but then it was Louise Sturgis.

  "Can I get in?" she asked in her husky voice. He opened the passenger door and she climbed up. "Well, what did you do for that statuesque broad?" she said.

  "Not much," he said. "I thought you were in California."

  "I changed my mind. Will you give me a ride home? I'm with a jerk I don't want to be with, savvy? One of the cripples I told you about. Not that all of you bastards aren't cripples in one way or another."

  "Okay," he said.

  She didn't speak until they stopped in her driveway. "I'm too old for this dating crap," she said. "Second-hand goods. The bas­tards are always peeking at the book, like second-hand car deal­ers. Come in and have a drink."

  In spite of everything that had happened to him, that might happen to him, his pulse rose at her offer and he wanted to be in­side her, to slip into her darkness. It seemed an absurd activity, all that soft wrestling, the changing of positions, the goatish jerking and plunging. He would have thought he had outgrown it. He didn't want a woman with all of her sudden resentments, who didn't want what she wanted, or hated what she wanted. A crazy lady, he had said to himself once in another, safer mood.

  He thought briefly, as if the time had been years instead of weeks ago, of the young woman and child he had seen bathing at the brook pool. Now that young woman had Helen's face, but it had been so long ago the memory had turned grainy and bluish, like an old color photograph exposed to too much light. There had been sweetness in that scene, now changed to loss.

  Louise led him into the house, past the unfinished carpentry of the front hall. Coleman was out, she said, on some no doubt doomed venture of the heart, some lost cause, some romantic expedition into the devouring jungle. Poor Coleman.

  "You did go away, though," he said as she made the drinks.

  "My ex-husband, the con man, is in the money again and I wanted some back alimony. Sordid story. I went to Fire Island with him for a week. He's really a pitiful slob. But now he has some nefarious relationship with a conglomerate called R.I.C. I know it's nefarious or he wouldn't be involved."

  The Gentleman conglomerate, he thought, also into comic books, heavy metals, tennis court surfaces, razor blades, imported booze and oil. All this, presumably, for money, power, the world. Right now they could have it, because he wanted another kind of oil and slippage, the power of touch, nerves connecting to this woman through more than the epithelium, liveness to unsheathed liveness—all the nerves that now wove themselves into his leash.

  She sat down next to him on the couch, her thin shoulder be­neath the silky white, her hair a black wash. The pale flat paint­ings glowed around the dark walls. He had asked himself before how it might be possible to make a woman happy, if it were at all possible. He wanted her because he wanted to love her.

  When they were naked in her bed he tried to prove to her how sweet and valuable she was. How could she not turn, all of her, not just her flesh, open and equal? She seemed enraptured by what he gently did to her. It was all smooth and mutual, but if to her each new wave of rapture was a theft of power, then he was help­less, no matter how she warbled and turned liquid under him and over him. If he could only reach the center that screamed thief, usurper, alarms and excursions.

  When she did convulse, skim and then glide down to come, he did, grateful to her loved center where he'd left himself. She held him and said nothing. Time had passed in sleep, he knew, when he woke. The night felt deep, climbing toward morning. She had turned on her bedside lamp, propped herself on an elbow and now smoothed him with her squarish hand. When he was wide awake she said, "Luke Carr fucked me. You want to know who fucked me? It was Luke Carr that fucked me." She seemed ten­der, angerless. "He's got a gun, though. Do you have a gun?"

  "A real question?" he asked.

  "Yes. Have you got your gun?"

  "It's in the truck," he said.

  "I'd like to see it. Go get it."

  "We don't need a gun, Louise."

  "I mean it. Go get it. I want to see it," she said. He looked at her closely, for signs. Her olive eyes seemed just curious, as when she'd asked him to do different things to her—to see if he would do them, or to see what they would be like if he did, he was never certain.

  "To hell with the gun," he said.

  "I'll go get it. Tell me where it is," she said, then quickly came over him and took him in her mouth so deeply she gagged and momentarily recoiled. He felt her breath and the naked little points of her teeth, then her tongue.

  "Let's fuck," he said. "Hell with the gun."

  She brought her face over his, her black hair falling around him. "I'm in heat, don't you know? I'm dripping for you. But go get the gun."

  He entered her, but she wrenched away. "I just want to see it," she said.

  He went out through the hallway, wondering, not certain how curious or apprehensive he was, barefoot and naked in the chill darkness. The grass, the trees and the house were drenched and silent, the road empty. Coleman's Toyota was parked next to his truck. He took the pistol from its holster and carried it back through the silent house to the lamplight, where she sat cross-legged on the white sheets, the heavy black weapon wrong near her tender nakedness. He took out the loaded clip and put it on her bureau, then pulled back th
e slide to make sure the chamber was empty, the hard clicks of internal stops and cams loud in the room.

  "God, what a sound," she said. "Is it empty? Let me hold it." Her voice was low, as if in dread. She took the black gun in both hands. "It's cold. It's too heavy. God, it's black and cold! It smells of oil." She put the cold gun flat against her belly and winced at the shock.

  "It's cocked," he said. "Now let me uncock it and put it away."

  "But it's empty? It's empty?" She pressed the gun against her with both hands.

  "It's empty. The hammer would just click against the firing pin," he said, "but it might pinch your finger. Anyway, come on, let's put it away now." He reached for it.

  "Wait! I want to feel it. It's warming now." She turned it around so that the barrel end was against her navel, fitting into that soft depression. "God," she said. "It's death, isn't it? That's all it was made for." She squeezed the gun, her forefingers depressing the grip safety, her thumbs on the trigger, and the hammer fell with a dull, high pink, unreverberant yet powerful as a sledge on an an­vil.

  He took the gun away from her so quickly he twisted and hurt one of her fingers. She looked at him, holding her finger in her other hand. "That hurt," she said.

  He shuddered out of the horror of whatever absolute taboo she'd broken. "I'm sorry I hurt you," he said. "I shouldn't have brought this thing in here."

  "What's the harm if it's empty?" she said.

  "It's the idea."

  "The whole ugly, cold thing is an idea," she said. "You're the one who carries it around with you all the time."

  "I don't point it at myself and pull the trigger."

  "You're too squeamish. You know what I'd like you to do?" Her eyes were bright with an idea, her teeth showing. "I'd like you to cock it, and I'll get on my hands and knees, like this." She got on her hands and knees, her behind toward him, her dark round anus in its condensed, pigmented skin, her vagina wet amber wrinkles in the black silk. "Now," she said. "Now. Put the end of it up my ass. Put it in deep and pull the trigger. I want to feel it."