He sat up and rubbed his hands over his face. He groaned and looked at her. “Kathryn! How the hell…” He groaned again and lay back.
“Would you like some coffee?”
“I can try some. I don’t know if I can keep it down. I feel awful. I can remember walking in the rain. I went from bar to bar. How did I get here?”
“You walked. I let you in and then you… passed out.”
“Brother! What a mess! I never did anything like this in my life before. What time is it?”
“Four in the morning.” She went over and felt of his clothing. “Your clothes are dry, but they’re pretty wrinkled.”
“What a mess! Kathryn, I’m so damned ashamed of myself.”
“Don’t be.”
“I’ve got to get out of here.”
“It’s still raining.”
“I can’t help that. I’ve got to get out of here.” He sat up again, rubbing his face. She heard the rasp of his fingertips on his beard.
She looked at him sitting there and then she went quickly over and sat down on the daybed beside him. He looked at her with surprise. She pushed gently at his chest. “Lie down, Walter.”
“But…”
“Will your wife be worried about you?”
“I don’t think so. I come and go. She doesn’t pay a hell of a lot of attention.” He lay flat again, frowning up at her.
“You know why you came here, don’t you?”
“I don’t even remember coming here!”
“But you know why you had to come here, sooner or later.”
After a long silence he said, “I guess so, Kathryn. But it’s nonsense. It isn’t any good. It’s… cheapness. And dangerous for both of us.”
“You’re going to stay.”
He sat up again. “No. There’s no…”
“I know what I’m saying and I know what I’m doing, Walter.”
He looked at her for a long time and closed his eyes. Her hand found his and they held hands tightly in the quiet room, much as though they were strangers who had both miraculously survived some unusual disaster.
After that beginning for them the office hours were strange. They knew the mutual danger of the furtive caress. The efficiency of both of them suffered for a time and then grew greater than before as they learned to live within this new dimension of closeness. He spent two, sometimes three evenings a week at the apartment. One drawer of the bureau became his, and one shelf of the medicine cabinet. She learned to cook the things he liked best. They did not risk going out together. He bought things for the apartment, a high fidelity music system, comfortable chairs, a dishwasher and disposal.
For over three years their physical need of each other was a continual hunger. At times in the office she would happen to catch a glimpse of the angle of his jaw, or see his broad back as he turned away, or look at his powerful hand as it rested on the edge of the desk. And then, without warning—there in the muted electrical chatter of office accounting, in that arid place of pale green routing slips, executive conferences and payroll deductions—she would feel a spreading softening warmth in her loins. Her head would grow too heavy for the slenderness of her throat, and her knees would begin a lax rebellion against supporting the ripe weight of her hips. Even the tenderest of fabrics would then chafe the tautened buds of her breasts. It showed then, in the way she looked at him and the way she stood. When he saw her in those moments, saw her with quick and eager recognition, she knew that on that night he would climb the outside stairway toward all the wanting that was there for him, waiting and throbbing.
In that first year he turned her, slowly at first, and then with a rush of momentum, into an acceptance of the flesh without shyness, without the cool reserve that had always been hers, turned her into eagerness and boldness and delight.
He was a powerful man physically, as masculine as a fist. His need was strong and rough. Sometimes on those days when, in the office, the great waves swept over her so strongly that she was afraid all could see, she would be so nearly ready for him that she could rise at once to his first quick need, sharing then an implosion that was more like combat than love, more fierce than fond.
But more often she would assuage his early need and later, on a wide plateau of passion sustained, they would, by trick and artifice, move close to the high place, and then deny themselves completion, playing this drugged game ever more dangerously until denial was overcome by their deep, compelling need.
During those first years there was ever a conflict in her—the problem of adjusting her reserved self to the great and frightening resources of sensuality he had tapped within her. Approaching any mirror she would expect to see the ravages of the life she was leading. She would expect to see a broadening and softening of lips, breasts and hips. She would expect to see in her eyes a dazed, provocative languor, see in her very stance an exaggeration of the movements of love.
But the mirror image would be the fresh, cool vision of Kathryn Aller, breasts still a bit bleakly virginal, hips leaner than she cared to have them, mouth hinting of things prim. She could not visualize that mirror image in bed, writhingly tormented by its own devices, prim mouth torn by words without shape or form. And so the mirror image looked out at her and accused her.
Yet all accusations, all conflict was forgotten when his strong hands were here and here, when muscles bunched his back, when the sledge came down from the sky and struck the anvil and, with spark shower, burst it asunder.
Their need was a hunger that seemed as if it could never be satisfied, and then it was. After their first three years physical love became more offhand, more commonplace, became merely one facet of their existence. They often talked of the office. Sometimes they worked at the apartment on files he would bring there.
She sensed that she was more nearly married to him than was his wife. She cared for him—professionally, physically, emotionally—learning all of him. It seemed that life would go on that way. What could stop it? Though he had many outside interests, he was her only interest. Life began when she went into the office and opened her desk in the morning. And began again when she heard his footsteps climbing toward the apartment he had found for her.
Then in the past year he had come to her less often, spent less time with her when he did. He spoke half-apologetically about the many other things he had to do. She felt that he was drifting away. She tried to hold him. She spent a great deal more time over her appearance, shopping carefully, trying new make-up. She wanted the hours he spent in the apartment to be perfection. Yet the drift continued. He was absent-minded with her. And gruff. And seldom affectionate. Their relationship in the office grew colder.
One night he came to the apartment for the first time in three weeks and they quarreled bitterly over an unimportant matter. He left, slamming the door. She faced then the certain knowledge that, somehow, she had lost him. She did not know how. She did not know where she was at fault.
The final scene occurred in the office. It was nasty and vicious and unforgettable. She said he had become boorish, casual, cruel, selfish. He said she seemed to have acquired the strange idea that she owned him. He said he resented being smothered. He said she hovered over him in a most irritating way.
After the scene they both knew that it would be impossible to continue even in any form of limited relationship—as limited as a purely business relationship.
And so it ended for them.
Now, as she headed east, there was no one left to say I told you so. She had flown back five years before to attend the funeral of her aunt, dispose of her aunt’s meager property.
I am twenty-eight, she thought. A competent secretary, an adequate cook, a practiced mistress. I have an air of coolness that repels people, discourages friendly advances. I have a good healthy body that will last a long time. Life is, perhaps, a third of the way finished. But everything that was to have happened has happened. All the other chapters are written. I shall inhabit an office, stiff and correct and unyieldingly efficient. In the slo
w wheeling of the years the memories will grow dim until at last it will seem as if all those nights belonged to someone else. Someone else held close the male flesh and made the small, soft cry of love. I shall sit sterile and erect and terrorize the young girls in the office and, behind my back, they will say the usual guessable things. I return now from whence I came, used up by the years, too dry to cry, too cold to be warmed again, assured of my own inadequacy, cleanly, solvent, clad—and quite, quite dead.
She glanced at the temperature gauge and then at the speedometer. The dealer had said to keep an eye on the speedometer. A new car might overheat. She was traveling at a steady fifty-five, five miles under the legal limit. It was the first car she had ever owned. With proper care, it would last many years. She drove in the center lane. She passed the trucks on her right and the faster traffic passed her on the left. Traffic was heavier than she had imagined it would be. She felt a great deal more confidence in her driving than when she had started out. It might be nice, once she was settled in an apartment in Philadelphia, to take a trip. During this trip she had been in tight places twice and each time her reaction time and decision had gratified her. She liked doing things well.
She heard a car coming up behind her quite fast. She looked in her side mirror and saw that it was a brown
Chrysler, going very fast indeed. She wished she could move over into the far right lane to give him a lot of room, but there were trucks in the right lane. She looked straight ahead, holding the wheel more tightly.
The Chrysler passed her. She caught a glimpse of a blond man hunched forward over the wheel, a woman beside him. When the rear bumper of the Chrysler was about sixty feet ahead of her he jammed on the brakes suddenly. The car lost speed, tires shrieking. At first she thought he planned to make a left turn. Then she saw the improbable blue car, out of context, out of reason, like a picture pasted crookedly against the scenery, the way a child might place it.
Her foot was on the brake and she had pulled even with the brown Chrysler. The Chrysler swerved into her, hard, with a clash and grating of metal, with an impact that thrust the back end of the Ford around, out of control. All the bright colors of the traffic swung by her windshield as the car spun, and she thought, sitting there, holding the wheel, that it was very like one of those Hollywood chase scenes where the camera is mounted in the fast car.
chapter 4
AN hour before a huge young state trooper left the scene of the accident to be profoundly sick in the roadside ditch, Paul and Joyce Conklin, over an early lunch in the town of Blanchard, began another bitter quarrel.
As with most of their quarrels during the past two years, it began over a trivial thing. But this time the quarrel was more significant because of the environment.
Five years ago, lacking one month, they had eaten a later lunch in this same restaurant. It had been the second day of marriage, the second day of honeymoon. Joyce remembered that other meal vividly. She could even remember the face of the portly waitress who had served them, and the way Paul had made the waitress laugh. Five years ago, and she thought of it as the golden time, the time when they were favored above all other couples on earth. No other couple had been so blessed, so happy, faced such a world of promise and faith.
This was the second day of the trip which to Joyce was a trek into their past, a calculated risk, a chance to recover what had been lost. She did not know how it had been lost, or where. As with the losing of any other shining thing, it made sense to retrace old steps, looking for the glitter of it.
Joyce Conklin was twenty-six. She had a thin face, a face like that of a sensitive boy of seventeen, with its fineness and clarity of bone structure. Her hair was dark, thick of texture. Her brows were heavy, unplucked. Perhaps her outstanding quality was her look of aliveness, as obvious as the pulse that beat in her throat. Her body was thin and firm. Her gestures were quick, angular, over-emphasized. There was about her a look and aura of excitement. In rare moments of repose she seemed a plain girl. Yet in animation, in motion, in excitement she became lovely. All photographs of her were dreadful because they were static.
She elicited love because of what she was. She made friends as automatically as most people breathe because she was inevitably, deeply interested and concerned. Grocer, dentist, bus driver, meter reader—they liked seeing her and felt better that day for having seen her.
She had grown up in a home where there was love and faith and warmth and discipline. Her energy was without bounds, her optimism contagious. In five years of marriage she had given birth to two children, a boy and a girl. The first birth was dangerous and difficult because of her narrow pelvic structure. The second child, the boy, had been delivered by Caesarian section.
The last two years had marked her. Gestures which had been expansive were now merely nervous. Dark shadows under her eyes gave her a more delicate look. She was more often grave and quiet.
Paul Conklin was a far more complicated human being than Joyce, his wife. He was twenty-eight, dark, lean, two inches taller than she. His childhood had been served, as a sentence is served, in that emotional wasteland of a home which should have been broken and was not—a home where hate is a voice beyond a closed door, where contempt is a long intercepted look, where violence is a palpable thing in the silent rooms.
After reaching in every direction for security he had reached within himself and found it in the exercise of a brilliant though erratic mind. Only through intellectual arrogance could his mind—that place of safety—be made known to others.
At fifteen, after two blinded years of absorption and study, with all the world shut out, he defeated the almost-great in the chess world. The truly great defeated him because he lacked the patience to accept the discipline of the static game against equals. A year later he gave it up. When he was eighteen small experimental groups were playing his music. It was brilliant music, atonal, polychromatic, edged and daring. Yet to hear it was like handling shards of ice. It told of nothing but its own brilliancy.
At twenty he published an antisyllogistic approach to symbolic logic which created a flurry in the field of mathematics. At twenty-two, after eight months of psychoanalysis, he joined a Trappist Monastery. He fled after two months and found employment in the actuarial department of a major insurance company.
Wherever he had gone, he had taken arrogance with him. In any group he was a silent face on the fringe, reflecting contemptuous amusement. Either that, or the group was an obedient frame for his own unequivocal pronouncements. Thin, bitter, brilliant, acid, contemptuous. And as lonely as the last man left on earth.
At the insurance company he was used and knew it. He worked alone, and did valuable work. He was translating experience data into forms which could be used by electronic computing equipment to give a more detailed and flexible analysis of rate structure than any method hitherto used. It was creative mathematics, uncomplicated by human factors. It was merely a multidimensional expansion of the chess board on which a thirteen-year-old had once, with awe and excitement, learned the moves of the pieces.
Joyce MacAllen was the new girl who brought data up to him from the floor below. He flicked her with the corrosive edge of his mind. She laughed, and was warmly, personally curious as to why he should be so strange. He thought it was some sort of defensive gambit on her part. And then realized that her warmth was genuine, her interest genuine. She was fire and comfort and he came forth, reluctantly at first, from the blue icy caverns of his mind and found himself warmed, and then loved. He had not been loved before. Something came cautiously to life inside him, wary of the expected rebuff.
They were married. He told her it was a pagan rite, with a masochistic ceremony, but he smiled when he said it. He approached her mind and her body with awe carefully concealed. He was a savage who finds and worships the fire goddess. He had believed only in the intricacy of the convolutions of his own mortal brain. Now he came to believe in her, and she was destructive of his own nihilism. For three years Paul Conklin,
warmed by her spirit, was a whole man.
Two years ago it had started to come back. All of it. The black moodiness. The compulsion toward rejection. The walls of ice. Step by step he had moved back from her into the inner comfortless caves so that her warmth had diminished to a pale seldom light against his face. He knew what he did. He saw what it was doing to her. He loved her. He could not help himself. He could look upon himself with objectivity and see the withdrawal and try to halt it and know that there was no lever, no brace, no handle.
This quarrel was like too many others. Because of the new highway it had been difficult to locate the restaurant.
The look of the town had changed. Joyce had been uncertain at first, but quite sure as soon as they had walked in.
They took a table for two by a side window. She smiled across the table at him. “Even the same table, Paul.”
“I’m not that clear about it.”
She refused to be depressed by the flatness of his tone. “I’m sure it’s the same one,” she said.
He unfolded his napkin. “Just think,” he said, “this might even be the same spoon, dear.”
“Paul, don’t say it like that.”
“How should I say it? I’m accepting your fetish. I’m carrying it just as far as I can. Wouldn’t you like it to be the same spoon?”
“You call it my fetish, but you agreed that we should try it too.”
“Certainly. I’m willing to take a trip. But you’re the one who wants all the same ritual all over again. As much of it as you can get. If we do all the same things, it’s like saying abracadabra. It’s mathematically possible that this is the same spoon. They must last five years or better. This spoon looks at least five years old. Of course there is the normal process of attrition. People carry them away. They get thrown out with the garbage. But so long as we are emphasizing similarities, this could be the same spoon. To find the mathematical probability of this being also the same fork, you have to multiply the total number of spoons by the total number of forks to give you—”
Cry Hard, Cry Fast Page 4