Shadows 4

by Charles L. Grant (Ed. )

  She knew it was true but she also knew her mother was jealous of her, resented her easy passage into the society that her mother had never really been accepted in. The only one of them her mother had ever cared for was Jay, who was forgiven his outrageously snotty accent and cherished for what Beth's mother had referred to as his "antics." He could say the boldest things to her and be laughed at. Perhaps Beth's mother had also seen Beth's growing away from the country life as an intrusion on Jay's uniqueness. Only one of them could belong to both worlds successfully. And only one of them did, for Beth never went home now.

  She had not seen or heard of Jay since her wedding thirteen years ago. He had not even made her father's funeral, though the two had been as close as father and son, closer than Jay had been to his own father. By the time of Beth's father's death Jay had become a rumor, an item of family gossip, said either to be dealing dope in the Far East or living as a monk in some Italian monastery. She had not known what to believe of him, for he was capable of anything, and with the stress of mourning and the disintegration of her marriage, Jay had become a dead-end concern.

  She threw her wrapper over the blue chair and slipped into a softly cut white sundress. Assembling the necessities into a little evening bag, she dropped her lipstick and eye pencil. The thin gold tubes rolled as if under their own power beneath the chair. Abandoning all dignity, she crawled around on the floor after them, giggling with nervous irritation. When she trapped them against one of the chair's legs, she felt a prick on the bare skin of her back and drag along it as she backed out hastily. A quick peek in the mirror confirmed that the thin line of heat on her back was a long red scratch. A loose upholstery tack or exposed staple under the chair must have caught her. Her evening shawl and then the low lighting in the night club would have to cover it.

  She fled the blue chair, the glass table littered with working papers, the trolley going rancid outside her door, into the suffocating summer night with an almost euphoric sense of relief.

  Jay was lounging at the entrance to the restaurant; she saw his red head a block away. She stepped from her taxi into his joyous embrace. They babbled at each other. She was struck by how good he smelled. Some discreet and sensuous European scent, worn with the kind of Ivy League clothing he'd worn in college. Not flashy enough for a dope dealer, but definitely unmonkish.

  It was enough, for a time, merely to look at each other. They were seated at a tiny table and had ordered drinks before they could speak anything other than a kind of verbal confetti.

  It was a jolt to see that he hadn't changed very much at all. A few threads of white in his hair, promising a distinguished middle age. It was scary how very much he was still the boy who had infatuated her as an adolescent. It wasn't until Jay had introduced her to his best friend from prep school that he lost his place in her heart. Ken had seemed, then and for a long time after, to be everything that Jay was and more. It was natural that Jay should be their best man; he had surrendered her formally and gone away. And taken the luck of their marriage with him.

  "What are you thinking about?" he asked her.

  She drank in his voice, which was like a dry, silky wine.

  "How little you've changed," she smiled, "and how glad I am you left Ken and me to our miserable devices. I'm so glad you weren't there. I would have been terribly embarrassed."

  He laughed, just a little cruelly. "I won't say I saw it coming." He paused. His gaze passed over her again, like an approving caress.

  "You've changed. You're not just prettier, you're beautiful. I always knew you would be."

  She twirled the swizzle stick in her glass lightly. "So kind of you to say so," she said. "Now tell me what you're doing here, and what you've done with the last decade."

  "I live here." He sipped his drink. "I work for the State Department. I speak five languages." He raised his eyebrows elaborately. "That makes me invaluable."

  "I should think so. Did it take you all those years to learn them?"

  "Almost." He waved a bowl of pretzels under her nose as if it were roses. "I'm married."

  Beth sat up straight and seized his left hand.

  "Wonderful!"

  "My wife is Vietnamese. We have three children. My father bought us a house in Alexandria, much nicer than we could have afforded on my salary."

  "Why aren't you working for someone who would pay you what you're worth?" Beth demanded.

  He smiled at her a little wearily. "You presume I'm underpaid. That, maybe. But I'm doing what I should be doing. Don't worry about me, Beth. Why do you think my father, and our grandfather, and our greatgrandfathers piled up all that long green, if it wasn't to return it to the Republic in a suitably artistic form? I'm just doing my dooty, as a gent."

  "Can't dump on that, can I?"

  "Nope. Want another drink?"

  "Oh, yes. Why didn't you bring your wife? I would have liked to meet her."

  That was true enough. Even if the news had produced a small seismic shift in her heart, she couldn't help being both intensely curious about Jay's wife, and somehow pleased that he had married.

  "Rachel—that's her anglicized name—doesn't go out. She hates to leave our girls. So she says. She doesn't really like this country very much. It's a little awkward, this town being what it is, and all."

  Beth took both his hands in hers again. "Jay," she began.

  Loosening her grasp on him, he reversed the gesture, and was holding her hands, raising them to his lips to brush them, almost too lightly to feel.

  "I want out," he said slowly. "I don't have the courage just yet. We muddle along."

  "Oh, Jay," Beth repeated helplessly.

  He looked straight at her and grinned. "Not too good at being married, are we?"

  It made her laugh, to see him being jaunty, like a small boy shadowboxing some cosmic comic-book enemy.

  "You like your job?" he asked.

  "Love it. I'm going to be a partner come New Year's, I think."

  He raised his glass to her. "I'm not surprised."

  "Oh, you never are," she laughed at him. "Nothing ever surprises you."

  "Not true," he protested. "Something does."

  "What? I have to hear this. The thing that surprises Jay," she challenged him.

  "Every time I look at my little girls," he paused to stare into his drink as if he could see them there, "I'm surprised. I don't believe I'm really the father of three small females."

  "It's hard for me to feature that, too," she admitted, giggling.

  "I have a secret," he announced. "I talk to your mother."

  Beth put her glass down with a thump. "What?"

  "Yes, I do," he insisted. "Four times a year—Christmas, Mother's Day, Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving. You really didn't know?"

  "No. I don't, you know. Talk to her."

  "Yes," he said. He studied his hands. "I know."

  "You know everything."

  "I saw Ken last year, at a cocktail party in New York. He looked good, a little heavier than he used to be. Had a new wife with him, biiig boobs." Jay drew enormous bazooms in the air.

  Beth laughed. "I saw him too, only it was a class reunion. His wife went to school with me, did you know that? Anyway, the shocking thing was I didn't recognize him. I had to look at him for ten straight minutes to summon up his name. How's that for selective recall?"

  Jay whooped. In the well-oiled, noisy crowd around them it went unnoticed.

  "That's great. I'm pleased to hear it doesn't hurt anymore."

  "Sometimes it surprises me," Beth mused. "I wonder if I'm heartless, or something. But there's no resentment, no anger, no nothing. That's the worst of it—no nothing."

  "You knew his wife in school? Did you like her?"

  "When we were in school? No." Beth made a face. "Veddy goddamn artistic. What did you think of her?"

  "They'll drift apart eventually. Giving each other space until they forget each other's telephone numbers."

  Beth fell silent, playing with
her swizzle stick. Jay munched a pretzel lazily and watched her. She looked up and slapped one of his hands playfully.

  "Don't look at me like that. I keep thinking one of my straps is broken and I've fallen out."

  "You're blushing," he teased, delighted.

  "Do you really call my mother?"

  He nodded, now solemn.

  "Why?"

  He shrugged. "I miss your dad. We talk about him, mostly."

  Beth covered her surprise by reaching for a pretzel. It was not so much a shock to know that Jay wanted to talk to someone about her father as that her mother did.

  "And me?"

  "Sometimes. I get the biannual bulletins. She talks more about Tory."

  "Oh." Beth snapped the pretzel in two, tasted it, set it aside. She picked up her glass and began to push remnants of ice around the bottom of the glass.

  "How is he?" she asked evenly.

  "Handsome, strong, and bright, she says."

  "That calls for another drink."

  Jay flagged a waitress.

  Beth sucked at the melting ice noisily. She had known they would talk about Ken, about her parents, about her son Tory, because those people were part of the past she shared with Jay. But it was a shock to discover that Jay retained ties to her mother that were more elaborate than her own twice-yearly letter. She had not expected him to know that she had given Tory up to her mother.

  She found him watching her again.

  "Are you happy?" he asked her matter-of-factly.

  She thought about it. His tone was intellectually curious, nonjudgmental, dry as the gin she sipped gratefully.

  She nodded.

  "Good," he said, and launched into the kind of gross yarn that had once captivated her. She resisted mightily, setting her face in the mask of constipated sobriety that her mother had worn years ago when subjected to what she had called "Jay's foolishness." It was just a game, an old, familiar tease and surrender, and at the proper moment, midway through the third story, she howled with horrified delight.

  They came back to her hotel a little sloshed, holding hands. Heads turned as they passed through the lobby; Beth's color, already high with excitement and drinking, increased. From within the glass elevator, they presented sober, mock-American Gothic faces to the curious, and when the door closed on them they burst into giggles.

  Beth had to close her eyes against the queasiness induced not only by the normal effect of the rush against gravity as the elevator rose, but also by the sudden dissolution of the outside world. Which was not, she reminded herself, exactly outside, but only the cylindrical multistoried inside of a fancy hotel.

  She fumbled the key at the door. The suite seemed smaller and closer than she remembered. A normal side effect of gin, she thought, and no doubt that also explained her sensations in the elevator. She went immediately to the air-conditioner. At once the room was filled with the sound of its light respiration, and was cooler.

  Turning, she found Jay looking around the living room, touching everything lightly, intently, as if he were blind and had to map the location of her papers, her portable typewriter, her address book, her briefcase, internally.

  "I took you away from work," he commented.

  "Oh, yes," she said.

  "Good."

  "Look over the rest of my home. Cloned all over this hotel, and in thirty dozen other hotels in the U.S. and the Free World. I can draw a map locating the can, the closet, and the drapery drawstrings before I sign the register."

  "I know the sensation," Jay said.

  He sauntered through, peeking at the kitchenette, and the bath, pausing in the bedroom. He touched her cotton wrapper on the blue chair affectionately.

  "That chair," Beth said. "I wake up at night and it's watching me. The revenge of the decorator."

  Jay smiled. "I didn't notice it until you said that. What does it eat?"

  "Bits and pieces of me, when I get too close," she answered, and showed him her back.

  He traced his finger lightly along the scratch.

  "Poor baby," he murmured.

  She tapped the bedroom door; it swung closed, and she could see herself in the mirror. And then Jay, behind her. It was amazing how much they looked alike.

  Jay saw it too; he always had.

  "We could be twins," he said.

  She remembered the first time he had said it, when they were, what—eleven? She hadn't thought so then.

  She giggled. He slipped one arm comfortably around her waist. She looked back at him, over her shoulder.

  "Do you think the people downstairs thought so?"

  He nodded yes. They looked into the mirror together.

  "Little did they guess—not incestuous twins; merely cousins. The children of twins," he said.

  "Still, incestuous," Beth said, smiling at him in the mirror. "Unzip me, will you?"

  He smiled back at her, his fingers already doing her bidding. Then she turned to him, just as she had always wanted to, and it was so easy, they had done it so many times in their heads.

  She brushed his mouth lightly with hers, and he moved suddenly against her, pushing the bony basket of his pelvis into her soft belly. Jay was already huge and hard, and he held it like a weapon against her.

  In a quick light rush of words, she told him that this was what she wanted, and had always wanted. She talked all through it, talked about being fifteen and wanting to and not doing it, and later, how the possibility was always there between them. And how now the fact of it would always be there. This would close the circle, finally. This was where they were meant to come.

  Without a man for many months, she prolonged the lovemaking until she was glazed with sweat and dazed with fatigue. Jay said very little, only to urge her on; it was apparent her talking was as effective for him as the easy practiced sexual gymnastics.

  She ran out of words and separated from him. He closed his eyes and was very still. The air conditioning breathed a draft over them; she drew up the sheet and covered them. She lay quiet, listening to his breathing as it quickly became deep and even.

  She was still intoxicated from alcohol, from sex, from Jay and their reunion that had abruptly fulfilled so many old daydreams. The unease that had plagued her for weeks was gone, cleanly exorcised. She was on the mountaintop, she told herself. It was too easy to forget the benefits of getting one's ashes hauled.

  She closed her eyes but sleep eluded her. Her body was sticky, her mind busy. Moving slowly, so as not to shatter the wonderful langour of her flesh, she opened her eyes and sat up. The blue chair was the first thing she saw. It made a nice composition—the rainbow colors of the wrapper draped in horizontal stripes, cradled in the arms of the chair, so vaguely and monstrously human, such a deep, unmarkable night-sky blue.

  The shower was just right; she stopped it only because she was afraid she might awaken Jay if it went on too long. She passed by the bed; he had shifted and covered his face with one protective arm. His lips curved upward a little, as if he were having a very pleasant dream. The hair in his armpit was reddish gold, as hers would be if she didn't shave it; his pubic thatch was the same color and as full as her own. She did not pause very long to observe him; it was too sweet, promising complications. Picking up the wrapper from the blue chair, she went into the living room and closed the door, gently and not quite completely, behind her.

  She had just gotten into the work when the door opened. Hearing it, she did not bother to look up.

  "I'm sorry," she said, "I didn't mean to wake you. I couldn't sleep."

  When he failed to answer, she looked up to see him leaning against the doorframe. The look in his eyes was one she had seen before, sometimes in the faces of her Japanese clients when they looked at Americans. The what-are-you look, she called it. She smiled at him warmly.

  "Go back to sleep. Don't mind me."

  "Don't your clients resent it?"

  She frowned, puzzled. "What?"

  "Don't your clients resent your jumping out of bed
to get back to the paperwork. Or is it just part of the job?"

  Her anger fell on her good feelings for him like a typhoon upon a lovely dune. She wanted to punch him. How could a man as intelligent as she knew Jay to be fail to understand that no serious woman could afford casual sex with business associates? Precisely because she would always, with or without evidence, be suspected of screwing her way to the top.

  "I don't sleep with my clients," she said shortly.

  "Oh," he said. "Who do you sleep with?"

  "My cousin, for one," she said easily, meeting his gaze directly.

  Jay grinned. "You aren't telling me the company has been having your best all these years?"

  Beth leaned back in her chair and stretched. This was really incredibly tiresome. And unfunny, if there was an element of joking in it. He seemed to want to spoil their wonderful time with some kind of obscure male tantrum. Perhaps it was necessary to defuse, once and for all, the implication that she whored, literally or metaphorically, for the company.

  "I had a very pleasant relationship with a surgeon in Chicago, up until seven months ago. It lasted three years. Will that satisfy the Inquisition?"

  "And?" he persisted.

  "And what?" she exclaimed. "And nothing. And none of your goddamn business, Jay. What are you trying to do?"

  He smiled again, this time rather sweetly. "Come back to bed with me?"

  She stared at him incredulously. "Jesus. Some bedside manner."

  He shrugged and left. She heard the bedsprings give as he dropped to the mattress.

  She sighed and followed him, leaving the papers where they lay.

  It was her turn to stand in the doorway, while he spread himself possessively over the narrow bed. He grinned at her, and opened his arms.

  "I am a true descendant of capitalists. I want it all, all the time."

  "I don't understand you," she protested. "You were riding me. I never would have expected sexual jealousy from you, Jay."

  He punched the pillow playfully. "I hate women who get out of bed to shuffle papers. This frigging town is full of them. It's too much like balling the Secretary of State."

  "Oh, you've been screwing the Secretary of State, have you?" Beth teased.