A Dangerous Woman

by Mary McGarry Morris

  “I don’t know,” she said, grinning in disbelief. “Maybe.”

  “Do you like to dance? That’s another thing. If you go with someone, then you’ve got your own dance partner all night long.”

  She shrugged and he kept looking at her. “Do you know how to dance?”

  “No.”

  He laughed and held out his arms. “Okay, here we go. Colin Mackey’s one easy lesson in fake dancing.” He set her left hand on his wet shoulder, and he held her right hand as well as his beer. “Look at me, look me right in the eyes, and when I take a step back you take a step forward. That’s right. Now, two back, and two the other way. That’s right. Follow your feet, but don’t look down. Just look at me.”

  Staring at him, she tried to follow, but she got confused every time he brought her hand to his mouth so he could sip his beer. She grew stiffer with each step, until her knees had almost locked. She kept stepping on his toes, so he stopped and told her to take off her shoes. He opened another beer.

  “That’s it. You’re getting it,” he said, when he had set her hands in place and started to move again. “Here, let’s loosen up a little. Don’t be afraid of touching.” He pulled her closer. “Perfect strangers touch when they dance, and nobody gets the wrong idea. That’s right. That’s it. One, two, three, one, two, three,” he hummed. “One, two, three.”

  Her eyes blurred with his closeness.

  He was smiling. “I see you’re ready for the hard part. Now close your eyes and keep moving. That’s it. Just go where I take you. Trust your partner,” he murmured, turning in tight circles. Each time he took a drink, her hand brushed his mouth. Her pants grew damp against his wet bathing suit. “You never danced with anyone before?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m honored to be your first partner.”

  Was he feeling this same way, thinking the same thing? Was that his heart pounding against hers?

  “I was thinking, you should call that fellow who was here, that big guy, Mount, and invite him to the party.”

  “No!” She started to pull away.

  “Martha!” he said, not letting her go. “I just meant he’d be somebody to … to be with. And besides, he likes you. Can’t you tell?”

  “I want to be with you. I love you!”

  “Don’t say that!” His hands tightened on her arms, his face darkening. “Don’t even think it. Do you understand?”

  Understand? What was there to understand, with strange children chasing her, and her own father so seldom acknowledging her that, when they did speak, she would dig her nails into her palms, then race to a light to study the pattern of blue runes in her flesh before they were gone. “I can’t help it. That’s all I want,” she gasped, holding on to him.

  His face drew close, his breath ravenous, as if for some vital element she exhaled. “I know what you want,” he said hoarsely. “Same thing I want. Same fuckin’ thing we all want.”

  His room was hot and dark. They sat fully clothed, legs outstretched on the bed. The bottle clinked against the glass, and she heard his long swallow. She felt feverish. Without her glasses, her eyes burned, and for a moment she couldn’t tell if they were open or closed. The ceiling fan turned with a slow rubbing sound, and somewhere by the bed a cricket chirped weakly. He put his arm around her with a dismal laugh, then sat there a moment, the two of them staring across the room. He turned and kissed her temple, her ear. “Does that feel good?” he whispered.

  “Yes,” she whispered back.

  “Do I make you feel good?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Well, if Dr. Feelgood can bring a little happiness into this world, what the hell’s wrong with that?” He touched her face, one cheek, then the other.

  “Nothing,” she whispered back, reaching for his hand.

  “It’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it. Okay,” he said, standing up suddenly. “Time for therapy. Take off your clothes.” He went into the kitchen and took a can of beer from the refrigerator. She pulled her shirt over her head, and the hair on her arms bristled in the fan’s breeze. She wiggled out of her pants. When he returned, he stood with his back to her, staring out the window while he drank his beer. Waiting in her underwear, she fiddled with the bedspread fringe, finding it peculiar that love could feel this lonely.

  “I’ll be ready in a minute,” he said, lingering by the window, as if he were watching for someone, someone to save him. When he had finished the beer, he turned, crunching the can in one hand, then dropping it. It bounced on the floor. “You ready?” he asked, stepping out of his bathing suit.

  “Yes,” she said faintly, rolling her bra and panties into a ball. He lay on top of her, at first unmoving, his mouth at her ear. She could feel his chest pumping in and out against hers.

  “Is this what you want?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think this is it, don’t you?” he whispered. “You think of me and you burn inside. I remember feeling the same way after my first time. Christ, I followed her around for weeks. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t talk straight. It’s all I wanted to do. The minute she came near me, the minute I heard her or smelled her, it’s all I could think of. You know what I mean?” he asked, and she tried to tell him yes, she knew exactly what he meant, but it came out sounding like a long wet moan.

  He rose up on his elbows, all the while talking, crooning, to the rhythm of his hips against hers. She was acutely conscious of the heat in the room and the dwindling light and the anger in his voice, the mounting disgust, and yet she didn’t care. It felt too good. She felt too good.

  “It’s like being on fire, isn’t it? Burning. Burning inside. Gets up in your eyes and you’re blind. Just like booze. You think, Well, just one more time.… But each fire’s worse and worse.… Isn’t it, baby? No way to put it out. Jesus, I remember.…”

  Her head tossed and turned. Sweat ran down her throat, between her breasts, and made sucking sounds against his heaving chest.

  “I was only fourteen,” he grunted with a movement so wrenching that her eyes opened wide on the fan, its wreath of blades turning around his head. “But this … this is pathetic. You don’t want me. This is what you want. It’s all you need … all anyone needs! Just this … Here! Here! Oh my God! Here!” he moaned, then collapsed, his hairy legs sprawled over hers, his arms pinning her shoulders.

  She gazed at the whirring blades with an amniotic half-blindness. Her chest ached as she held her breath under his dead weight. After a while, he rolled off and lay with his back to her, facing the wall. She waited for him to say something. Finally she sat up and gathered her clothes from the floor.

  “Mack?” she called softly when she came out of the bathroom.

  “Don’t say anything,” he warned from the dark bed. “Just go.”

  Steve seemed to be driving slower and slower. Frances laid her head back and closed her eyes. The play had been so bad that she had fallen asleep during the first act. Embarrassed, Steve kept nudging her awake. “You’re snoring,” he whispered. “People keep looking back.”

  Later, when he thought he had caught her dozing again, he squeezed her wrist. Irritated, she almost said something; instead, to make light of it, she pinched his leg, and his look of disgust shocked her.

  He had been fidgety and distracted all through dinner, barely touching his food, then finally admitting he had already eaten. Patsy had barbecued lamb chops for the three of them. She had listened with a fixed smile while he described the skewered vegetables Patsy had grilled with a lemon-and-mint marinade.

  “I had no idea she could cook like that,” he said with a ridiculous note of wonder in his voice.

  She had poured more wine, buttered a roll, and with deliberation cut off another piece of swordfish, pleased, as she chewed, that not one negative word had passed her lips.

  Now, as they came down Route 4 past Killington, he hunched forward, as vigilant over the wheel as if he were navigating through a blizzard. Sh
e laid her hand on his thigh, patting it. Poor Steve, being put through this charade now, after all those loveless, painful years. She squeezed the back of his neck, saddened by the hair bristling from his neck. She would remind him to get a haircut Friday. He reached back for her hand and held it while he drove, squeezing it until it hurt.

  “Frannie, I don’t know how to tell you this. Remember how I said the girls were planning a trip for me and … their mother. It’s the sixteenth through the twenty-third. It’ll do her …”

  “But that’s your birthday. You can’t go then. Not on your birthday, Steve. You can’t, damn it!”

  There was nothing he could do, he insisted. In a way, it was out of his hands.

  “The girls wanted to surprise us,” he said. “Their mother and me,” he added quickly, she knew, to blunt his use of the word “us.”

  She let him talk. Anita was doing so well. The girls were happier than he had ever seen them. Patsy had moved into the house, and she and her mother were redoing her old room. Anita had gained nine pounds. “She sleeps through the night now.…”

  “Tell me one thing, Steve,” she interrupted, unable to stand this ridiculous account that sounded more like a baby’s birth than a grown woman’s recovery from alcoholism. “Are you going or not?”

  He started to say something, but she stopped him. “Just answer that one question. Because, if you go … if you dare go, then we’re through. Do you understand? Do you?”

  He nodded.

  “Well?”

  “I won’t go,” he said.

  “What will you tell Patsy and Jan?” she asked.

  “That it’s not a good time,” he said. “I don’t know … Something. I’ll tell them there’s a big case I’m working on.…”

  “Why don’t you just tell them the truth?” she said.

  The tires squealed as he pulled off the road. In the moonlight, he looked old and pale and defeated; like Anita, she thought with alarm.

  He smiled wanly. “I find myself in the impossible position of having two families, neither of which I can please.”

  “I’m not your family.”

  “You are. You’ve always been. You know that!” he said, so fiercely she fell silent; and in the silence heard something rattle inside him. Sighing, he rested his forehead on the steering wheel. “They talk and they talk and they talk and it’s always about guilt and responsibility and honesty.” He looked up, and his voice broke. “And it tears me apart.”

  “Steve,” she sighed. “Oh, Steve.”

  “It’s getting worse. I can’t sleep nights. I have this dream. I’m locked in this closet, this dark, narrow closet, and little by little water seeps in under the door and it gets higher and higher, up to my chin and then my mouth and then my nose. And I’m holding my breath and my eyes are wide open. And I can’t even scream. I …”

  “Damn it, Steve, why are you letting them do this to you?”

  “I’m not just talking about them. But us too. And all this pain … all this … this agitation,” he said, watching her.

  Her mouth fell open, her insides seized now with a danger she only faintly remembered. He had always been weak. How had she ignored it all these years? How had she loved him?

  “I owe her something,” he said.

  “What about me? Damn it, Steve, what do you owe me?”

  “Gone? What do you mean, he’s gone?” Frances asked.

  Martha sat up in bed, her eyes swollen as if she had been crying all night. This morning Frances had realized that Mack’s car wasn’t in the driveway or the garage. The apartment was empty, save for a balled-up dirty sock in the bathroom and, on the kitchen table, a book, The Art of Fiction.

  The Art of Fiction, she kept thinking. Damn him for walking out on her like this at the worst possible time. The Art of Fiction. All his talk about finally being able to write. Everything the man said was fiction. That was his only art. And she had fallen for it! When she knew better! When she knew exactly the type he was, exactly what he had in mind, her—that’s what he’d had in mind, and in her desperation she had been willing to overlook that.

  “Why are you crying?” she asked, coming closer to the bed.

  “I’m not crying,” Martha answered dully, sinking into the blanket.

  “What happened? Something happened! I can tell by your face. You did something, didn’t you?” She yanked away the blanket. “Oh God, what did you do?” she groaned. “What in God’s name did you say to him?”

  “Nothing!” Martha screamed, springing up from the bed.

  “Stop it,” she panted, trying to block Martha’s flailing hands.

  Grunting, Martha grabbed her hair and yanked her head back with such force that she staggered and fell against the side of the bed. Stunned, she sat there, staring up at Martha, who stood by the door, pounding her chest and pleading in a thick voice, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.…”

  In the bathroom, Frances leaned close to the mirror and examined the scratch at the corner of her eye. Thank God, it wasn’t turning black and blue.

  “I’m sorry!” Martha kept calling from the hallway. She banged on the door. “I didn’t mean to do that. I’m sorry!”

  She splashed her face with cold water, dried it, then dabbed the cut with makeup. So it had come to this, she thought, and for the rest of the night and the next day it began to seem as natural there as a birthmark.

  The blue-and-tan cruiser was parked in the driveway. Sheriff Sonny Stoner stood in the kitchen in his frayed blue uniform, describing the accident to Frances. Mack had fallen asleep at the wheel of his car and careened through the Gere family’s back yard, uprooting their maple saplings. She had no idea who the Geres were, but Sonny’s tone suggested that months of this admirable family’s labor had just been obliterated. She was immediately defensive. Sonny had better not be looking to her for any kind of charitable indemnity here.

  “I picked him up after his stitches and I figured I’d just stop by and double-check,” Sonny said, his weary solicitude as grating as ever. She had read an article once that quoted Sonny as saying that he believed in justice and the law, but that one did not always guarantee the other. It certainly didn’t in his personal life. No matter whom he had slept with or how many times he had looked the other way, everyone’s opinion of Sonny Stoner was unwavering: he was a good man. As far as she was concerned, the real bottom line with Sonny, as with Julia Prine, was self-enhancement. How much more pleasing their own images probably seemed to them in a mirror of fools.

  “He’s telling the truth. It’s done,” she said, gesturing back at the deck.

  “The more he didn’t want me to bring him here, the more I figured he owed you something,” Sonny said.

  “I’d advanced him a hundred dollars,” she said.

  “That’s what I figured,” Sonny mused, looking toward the door. “Asked me to let him get his stuff out of his car, then leave him up on the highway. You know, those poor Geres, they don’t have any insurance either.”

  “What are you getting at, Sonny? This has nothing to do with me. This isn’t the same as the windshield.”

  “Hell, I know that. It’s a shame, that’s all. Guy like that you keep throwing the rope to, and he can’t ever seem to hold on.”

  “All I ever expected was a day’s work,” she said, so there would be no mistake about her motives. Sonny better not think she was running some halfway house here.

  “I don’t know how you’re doing it without Floyd.” He stood in the doorway and looked out. If an annual deer-hunting trip together constituted a friendship, then Sonny and her brother had been friends. She wondered if Sonny knew that those three days in the woods were the only times Floyd ever went anywhere. Of course he knew, she thought, looking at the back of his snow-white crew cut, and probably only went because he knew nobody else would go with Floyd Horgan. She thought of that night, years ago, when Martha had burst into the house half dressed and reeking of beer she claimed the boys had sprayed on
her. Sonny had taken care of everything. She shouldn’t be too hard on Sonny.

  She followed him outside. He tapped on the cruiser window before opening the door on Mack, who had been dozing. His right cheek was bandaged with gauze, and over his right ear a matchbook-sized patch of scalp had been shaved and stitched.

  “Would you mind telling me what happened?” she asked, instinctively touching the scab by her eye.

  “I fell asleep.”

  “I mean why you left.”

  “Impulse … It was time.”

  “Time? You couldn’t have picked a worse time!”

  “I’m sorry. I really am.” His head hung, and she thought she heard him laugh. “You still owe me work!” she said angrily.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll get your hundred bucks.”

  “Well, it comes to a lot more than that now,” Sonny interrupted. “There’s the stockade fence and two brand-new bicycles, plus your hospital charges and the towing and repair on your own car. And don’t forget those maples,” he added.

  “God no,” Mack said through a rueful grin. “How could I forget those maples.”

  Rubbing his chin, Sonny looked down at him. “You know what I think?” he said, leaning his forearms in the window. “Frances needs work done here and you need money. The way I see it, you got two choices. Here or my place. Here, you come and go. My place, I gotta use these.” He reached back and jiggled the keys hanging from the same brass ring as his handcuffs.

  Sonny wasn’t tossing any ropes now. With just a few words, he had tied Mack up in knots. It startled her to realize how much she enjoyed watching him squirm.

  Mack looked stunned, almost frightened. “But I told you, as soon as I get to Boston I can send money back. I thought we agreed,” he said, peering up desperately at Sonny.

  “Well, the thing here is that poor Gere family.” Sonny hissed in his breath. “It just doesn’t seem right, the way they work night and day, the two of them, just to have somebody come plow it all down and then take off leaving nothing behind but a promise.”