by Jane Gentry
Chapter Seven
The rector, an exhausted father of newborn twin daughters, had spoken of fortitude as the most important of the cardinal virtues.
“A lot he knows about fortitude,” declared Steve, as he and Elizabeth watched the busload of eighth-graders pull away from the church. “Wait till those infants are thirteen. Then we’ll see what he has to say.”
“Grumpy,” said Elizabeth, amused.
“Dealing with Melody,” Steve pronounced, “is exactly like riding a half-trained horse. People think you’re doing all right, but you know you’re not in control, and so does the horse.”
“Having a little trouble today, are we?” asked Elizabeth sympathetically.
He treated her to a recital of the morning’s conversation.
“She’ll outgrow it,” Elizabeth said, although she had no proof of that. Her own experience led her to believe it would last forever.
“Before she drives me crazy?” asked Steve. It wasn’t only Melody driving him crazy. There were Cara and Joe Salvini and Robert Fairchild and loneliness and longing and jealousy all waiting their turn to discomfit him. The restive knot which had nudged at him all morning swelled blackly over his future.
“She’s not going to drive you crazy,” said Elizabeth, slipping her hand into his.
No, but wanting you and not having you will, he thought to himself. Aloud he said, “I have to go home and let Sammy out. If you want to come with me, I’ll buy you a sandwich.” He knew he snarled when he said it. He was in a terrible mood—nothing in his life was going right, and he didn’t seem to be able to do anything about it.
“Why are you so irritable?” asked Elizabeth, suddenly cross herself. Very surprising she wasn’t terribly cross all the time, she thought. Irritability was the inevitable result of worrying about Cara during her waking hours and dreaming about Steve during her sleeping hours and trying to sandwich productive labor into the tiny spaces that were left.
“The pot calling the kettle black,” returned Steve. “Are you coming?”
She tugged at her hand; he elected to keep it.
“Let go,” she said, with emphasis.
“I refuse.” He opened the passenger door of his car and tucked her into the seat.
“Now I’ll let go,” he told her. “But I want it back as soon as I start the engine.” He fastened her seat belt for her, then he got Sammy’s blanket out of the back seat and tucked it around her legs and feet. “There,” he said. “You can relax and enjoy the ride.”
“You act like you’re trying to get me back to the asylum without upsetting me,” she said, after he’d started the engine.
He reached across the seat to take her hand. “You know how sensitive animals are to emotion.”
She scowled. “You ought to be worried about me, not Sammy.”
“I was talking about me,” he said. “There was an earthquake once, when we lived in California, and Sammy didn’t even wake up. If he had a clowder of cats doing a cancan in front of him, he’d pant and try to learn the steps. He’s a doof. I’ve had a bad morning. You ought to be nice to me.”
Her scowl lessened, and she produced a throaty humph that was almost a chuckle.
“What I like about Sammy,” she said, “is that he’s never out of sorts, he’s always glad to see me, and he doesn’t want anything but a little petting now and then.”
“That’s all I want,” said Steve, wondering if he were ever likely to get it. “Just a little petting. And I am always glad to see you, despite the increasingly unlikely circumstances.”
“Sammy has other charms,” she said. “He has a vocabulary bigger than mine. Armph and oomphf and rauff and mrowrrmp. He’s a scholar and a gentleman.”
“Try to remember that no matter how many times you kiss him,” said Steve, “he will never turn into a prince.”
“He doesn’t need to turn into a prince,” said Elizabeth. “He already is one. Have you noticed how attached he and Cara have become?”
“Yes. I wish I could say that it’s progress.” He sighed. “She shows no sign of becoming attached to me.” He pulled to a stop in his driveway. “Or Melody.”
That was true enough. Cara remained obdurate, despite the wiles of Sammy and Johnny and the considerable Vorkland charm. She regarded Steve and Melody as an affliction on the unfortunate Vorklands and pitied their circumstances.
“I don’t want to hold out any hope,” Elizabeth said soberly, as she got out of the car. “When I talk to her about us, I still get that shuttered look, and she turns around and goes into another room.”
Sammy heard them coming and barked madly. Steve opened the door and pushed past him. Sammy capered, leapt and whirled, rearing like a colt. He dashed around the room, looking for something to play with, and snatched one of Melody’s socks off the coffee table.
“Gimme that,” said Steve, grabbing at him.
Sammy feinted and ran. Steve hooked the end of the sock and tugged. Sammy gave the sock a shake to show that he still claimed possession and dropped it on the floor.
“Mwrorp,” he said, nosing at Steve’s ankles.
“That means out,” translated Steve.
“What happens if you ignore him?” Elizabeth wanted to know.
“I’m afraid to find out,” said Steve, opening the door. “He always sniffs my ankles first.”
Sammy trotted disdainfully into the small yard, lifted his leg, and galloped back to the comfort of the house.
He presented himself to Elizabeth with an elephantine wriggle.
“Him’s a big precious boofums baby dog,” she crooned, rubbing her knuckles on the top of his big nose.
“Him’s a shameless, opportunistic, conniving hound,” said Steve, amused by this sudden rupture of Elizabeth’s syntax. “Don’t let Cara hear you talk like that.”
“I’m in love,” said Elizabeth. She dropped to her knees and ignored any possible damage to her stockings and her pink dress.
“Good,” said Steve. “Marry me.”
“And spend my declining years as a referee?” she said, refusing to look at him. “No, thanks. I think I’ll just take up with Sammy, instead, and go live on the Busted Flush. You think he’d like a boat better than he likes your backyard?”
Every muscle tightened, from his ankle to his ear. A warning cramp nibbled at his neck. “I somehow think Travis McGee would object to the five of us.”
“Yeah?” she said. “Maybe we should move in with Meyer.”
“Maybe we should move in together.” His tone was hard and flat.
She canted her eyes upward. He was smiling, but there was a certain ominous rigidity about his mouth. She quit petting Sammy and stood, to find herself literally and figuratively backed against a wall.
“How about the sandwich?” she said, trying to defuse a dangerous situation.
His eyes glittered. “How about answering me?”
“That can’t have been a serious suggestion.” She tried to move away. He put one large hand flat against the wall and kept her where she was.
“Why the hell not?” he snapped. “It’s time for you to start thinking about loving me, Elizabeth. Past time for you to think about getting married again. And far past time for you to resolve the conflict that keeps you single and celibate in that ancient sexless brick house of yours.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she told him, battered by her emotions. “What if we’re never able to bring the girls to reason? It’s a real possibility—I don’t know why you won’t face it. It’s not fair of you to demand that I love you.”
“Not fair? What’s not fair about it?” The cramp bit at his neck again.
“I have too many other problems. I can’t think about either romance or marriage now.” She would look at the ceiling, she thought, the floor, anything but Steve’s face. “I don’t seem to be able to think coherently about anything. It’s stress.”
He stepped across the dog and took her by the shoulders. “You have to think about rom
ance and marriage.” He pulled her, almost roughly, into his arms.
He made her look at him, look into gray eyes as hard and cold as flint. Overlying the passion and desire was anger and purpose and uncompromising resolution.
“We are falling in love,” he said. “Surely you’ve noticed. We’ve been dancing politely around it, trying to ignore it, for months, and we have to do something about it. Either give it up or continue with it. It’s time for you to decide what you want to do.”
“Why just my decision?” she said. “What about you?”
“I made my decision the first time I kissed you. I want you, now and forever. In my heart, in my life. In my bed.”
She turned her head. “I have to think about Cara.”
“I’m tired of thinking about Cara and Melody,” he said. “I want to think about you and me. It’s time we gave ourselves a break.”
Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “Oh, do try to be sensible,” she said.
“You think I’m not sensible?” he said. The words rumbled menacingly in his chest and emerged as a subsonic roar. “Would you like to try to explain to me why it’s sensible of you to let Cara control what you’ll do and whom you’ll love?”
“I don’t recall asking you for any advice,” said Elizabeth icily. “I’ll let you know when I want anything from you.”
“You don’t know what you want,” he said disdainfully. “You’re too busy trying to figure out what Cara wants.”
She stared at him for a minute, then her green eyes flashed.
“Yes, I know what I want. I have a child to raise. I want to do it right. And if that means doing without you, then that’s the way it will have to be.”
The pressure in Steve’s chest spread to his head and his hands. He fought himself to keep from holding her too tightly.
“That’s not all you want,” he said, through a pounding anger.
He wrapped his big hand around her jaw and forced her mouth to his. At first she was paralyzed by the sudden aggressiveness of the kiss, then she opened her mouth fully to his demanding invasion. His tongue plunged phallically, deeply and strongly, until she was violent with wanting him. She clung to him, seeking and wild, he slid his hands over the soft pink dress, cupped her warm, rounded buttocks, and pulled her solidly against him. He hungered, he burned, he desired. He wanted her to feel that desire hard against her, and he wanted her to hunger for it, too.
He wanted her to remember it at night, in the desert wasteland of her bed. He wanted her to covet him, dream of him, lust for him until she was savage with need and aching for him to come to her.
“If you think you’re going to let Cara decide for you, Elizabeth,” he said, between his teeth, “and sleep in that big, cold bed all by yourself for the rest of your life, you’re wrong. I’m going to have you, and nothing Cara or Melody can ever do will keep you from me.”
She pulled away from him with her heart pounding. When she looked at him, he was breathing hard, and his mouth was tight and bloodless at the corners.
He walked away from her and jerked open the door. “Stay, Sammy,” he said.
Sammy slunk to his chair, looking sideways at Steve from eyes wide with alarm.
“He thinks you’re mad at him,” said Elizabeth, full of reproof and glad of diversion. “Poor baby.”
“He was born with a guilty conscience,” Steve told her.
Her heart still thudded dangerously in her breast...and intensified when she let her body remember the hot touch of his hands.
“He should split it with you,” she said. “You need a conscience worse than he does.”
He snorted at that. “I’m ridden with conscience, God help me,” he said. “Are you coming? I want to eat.”
She gave Sammy a last comforting pat before she put on her coat. “Where are we going?”
“To a steak house. For good, red meat, so rare it’s barely warm to the touch.” He got behind the wheel. “A virile, hearty, manly meal, to sustain me through weeks of trial by combat.” Irony surfaced, gained strength and treaded water. But his sense of humor, he thought, was permanently gone.
“Appeals to the caveman in you, does it?” she asked acidly.
He considered Robert and Joe Salvini.
I’ll take them to the zoo, he thought. And feed them to the tigers.
“Yes,” he said, with satisfaction. “It does. How long are those two brats going to be at the movies?”
“We’re supposed to retrieve them at three.” She looked out the window at the elegant facade of the restaurant Steve had chosen. “We can’t eat here. This place is terribly expensive. Besides, for food like this, I should be in a better mood.”
“You don’t have to be in a good mood to eat,” said Steve.
“I do if I want to enjoy it.”
“Bah,” said Steve, whose appetite had never been affected by his emotions.
“We need reservations.” She put one foot on the ground, but didn’t get out of the car. Steve extended a hand to pull her up.
He shrugged. “So I’ll bribe the headwaiter for a table.”
“Bribe him?” said Elizabeth, in a voice which shuttled between amazement and rebuke. “Do you do that sort of thing?”
“Bah!” Steve repeated irritably, and Elizabeth watched as money did, indeed, change hands.
Outside the window by their table, a vigorous little stream rushed past a willow copse. Glaze ice tipped the branches. They moved and glittered, the water leapt and glittered, as Steve watched. The muscles around his mouth began to relax. A skein of geese beat into the wind, headed southeast, and their wild cries echoed like a homing call in the cold November air.
Steve followed them until they were out of sight, then he sighed and leaned back in his chair.
Elizabeth sighed, too, and beckoned for the waiter.
* * *
Cara returned from the movies tight-lipped. Elizabeth didn’t have to wonder why: Geordie bounced off the church bus behind Melody and melted under the warming power of her thousand-watt smile.
They watched the disaster from the front seat of Steve’s car. It unfolded in front of them like a grade-B movie melodrama.
“God help me,” said Steve, shaking his head. “Melody’s too young for this and I’m too old for it.”
“For what?”
“Geordie. Puppy love. I can’t even handle my own romance, let alone hers,” he growled. “Why does she have to bother me with this now? I’ve got enough on my mind. Why can’t she just wait until she’s older?”
“How old?” asked Elizabeth.
Across the parking lot, Melody and Geordie, charmed with each other, postured and flirted.
“Till she’s twenty-five,” said Steve. “That’s a good, safe age. Mature. Sensible.”
“Are you sure that’s sufficiently distant?”
“It isn’t kind of you to laugh at me.”
“I’m not laughing at you,” she said.
“I know. You’re laughing near me. You know what Lin says?”
“What?”
“She says, ‘This, too, will pass, and something worse will come to take its place.’”
Elizabeth shuddered. “Thanks for sharing,” she told him. “I’ll dream about that at night.
“It’s not situation specific,” said Steve. “She uses it about any trouble with her kids.”
“Wonderful. Is she justified by subsequent events?”
“Sorry to tell you. Yes.”
“Terrific,” said Elizabeth, who was certain Lin was right.
Cara marched towards Elizabeth’s car. Her back was ramrod straight, her head was high, her jaw was firm and her eyes were miserable.
“There’s the ‘something worse,’” said Steve. “Bless her heart.”
“Bless all our hearts,” said Elizabeth, opening her door. “I’d better go.”
Steve bent and kissed her quickly.
“I love you,” he said. “Think about that, every time you get a chance.”
&n
bsp; She turned away from him and left; her back was straight, and her head was high. He couldn’t see her eyes.
* * *
“I hate Melody,” said Cara the following Wednesday, as she got in the car. She had stood outside in the rain, waiting for Elizabeth. Her hair was wet, and water puddled on the floor under her shoes.
No big surprise there, thought Elizabeth. The wipers beat frantically at the windshield; water sluiced away and the rain fell even harder.
“You know what she said?” Cara asked, wrathful both in tone and form.
More adolescent outrage. Elizabeth couldn’t stand it.
“She said her dad said I was a slow learner,” Cara told her mother. “He said that was the reason I’ve gone to church all my life and never learned anything, because I’m stupid.”
Gray shadows glanced off the rain slick streets. Cara’s wool coat, which had been crumpled in the bottom of her locker for nine hours, stank like a wet dog.
Cara and Melody and their endless sniping were very tiresome. Elizabeth looked at Cara, irritated.
“Don’t pay any attention to what Melody says her father says. If you want to know what he really said, go ask him yourself.”
“Because she’s such a liar all the time, right?” said Cara hopefully.
“No, Cara,” Elizabeth said with impatience. “Because messages get garbled in translation. Get your word from the horse’s mouth. Mr. Riker wouldn’t say such a thing. He likes you very much. If you want to know the truth of something, go to the source instead of depending on hearsay.”
“And you know what else?” Cara said. “She knows I like Geordie, because she saw me talking to him on the train.”
Now, there was an idea common in every preschool: if you want something, it belongs to you. A dynamic idea, which had caused endless wars and hatreds. A seductive and ruinous idea—ask anybody in any one of a thousand contested world trouble spots just how destructive it could be.
Not, of course, that Cara could understand that now. Early adolescence, with its raging irrationality, wasn’t exactly the best time to try to teach anyone to view personal disaster with philosophical detachment. Elizabeth certainly wasn’t about to try.