Cancel All Our Vows

by John D. MacDonald

  “Sam, I …”

  “Hush up. Not about me. About your guy. Because who else can you talk to?”

  She could not look at him any longer. She looked away. The words came, slow, awkward, then faster, more fluently … all of it. The whole mess. The party, the sheet, the coffeepot, all of it right up until the moment of meeting him.

  He put his hand on her shoulder. “I don’t mind your being sore at me. I told you that before, Janey.”

  She let the can drop. It rolled off the end of the blanket, leaving a trail of wetness where the beer spilled. She hitched closer to him, turning her face against his chest, and it was a painful sort of crying. No gentleness in the tears. They burned. And the sobs hurt her throat. Through tears, as he held her with one big arm, she saw the brown hand close slowly on his empty beer can, flattening it, before he tossed it away to clink against a stone.

  “I’m glad I stopped, Janey,” he said. “That’s no way to do. No way to get even with the guy.”

  She used a paper napkin from the lunch to dry her tears. She moved away from him, rolling onto her stomach, supporting herself on her elbows. What was left of the sobs made little holes in her sentences.

  “Why can’t I get even that way? Why not, Sam?”

  “As I said before. You’re not a pig. There has to be love. Emancipated womanhood is a farce, baby. We’re still working on a double standard.”

  “He can and I can’t?”

  “If you can, it means you’ve stopped loving him. With him it doesn’t mean that at all. That’s where the double stuff comes in.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Try to reason it out, Janey. Evidently he took a quick hack at that Corban dish, and dish she must be, out of some idea of getting even with you. So you come roaring up here to get even with him for getting even with you. Offhand, it doesn’t sound like there’d be much future in that sort of thing.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You’re using the fidelity pitch to nibble holes in each other. Maybe fidelity is just some kind of symbol.”

  “Oh, it’s a lot more than that. Sam. A lot more.”

  “You and this Fletch of yours are regally fouled up, no?”

  She felt the tears starting to come back. “And there’s no way out of it. That’s the trouble. No way out at all.”

  “Hell, you’re both too tense. Look. Let him have his little roll in the hay, or six. He’ll think he’s gotten even with you. It may make him a little ashamed. You say you gave him the straight story on our little fiasco. He’ll start thinking about that, and because he’s ashamed, he’ll start making excuses for you. Maybe, he’ll say, I was too hasty. Good Lord, fifteen years of learning to live with each other. A nice wife who doesn’t leave hair in the sink, and who does the coffee right and cleans up after the brats. He isn’t going to toss all that over when he gets over his mad.”

  “But just living together, Sam. That isn’t enough. It never could be enough. It would be like … cellmates. You have to have magic, Sam.”

  “Are you saying that for your own self, you want all or nothing?”

  “No. I want him. I want to live with him. I want him around. Where I can look at him. I don’t care how. Just to have him there.”

  “Easy, easy. See, if you and I had gone through with this today, it wouldn’t have been any use to you unless you could let him know. Maybe he’d get over that fiasco. Would he get over a deal like this?”

  She lowered her head so that her forehead was braced against her fists. “No, Sam. He wouldn’t. But the thought of him and … Laura. It makes me …”

  “Okay, it makes you feel bad. Little penalty for shedding your suit the other night. Look at it that way.”

  “But if he does come back to me, every time I’ll think of …”

  “Why? God, she isn’t going to mark him. A night’s sleep and a hot shower.”

  “Don’t be so damn casual!”

  “Hell, unwrap the sandwiches. I’m fixing to starve.”

  They ate and they finished the beer, and as they ate he talked to her gently, casually, encouragingly. She found herself liking him. She couldn’t help liking him. After he tossed the last can of beer away, he lay back and fell asleep with the astonishing quickness of any husky young animal. She watched the slowly changing patterns of the afternoon sun in the pine boughs. He breathed with the slowness of a trained athlete. Oddly, he looked older when he was asleep. A golden dollar of sunlight moved toward his eyes. When it touched his closed lids he grunted and turned away from it.

  She watched him. She sat hugging her knees, watching him sleep, and slowly she forced herself to accept the horror of the realization that he was, after all, a nice person. And accepting that, she knew that she was far more to blame for what had happened between them than he. She relived that first moment he had touched her, after they had fallen from the skis. Perhaps that was the moment of decision, unknown to her at that time. Other men had tried that sort of thing and she had chilled them immediately and effectively. Yet somehow she had failed to do that with Sam.

  Hating him, she saw, had been just a defense. The easiest way to keep from taking a slow calm look at herself. A way to keep from admitting that she had, in some obscure way, become restive, become curious.

  She thought for a long time, and she began to realize what she must do, what she had to do to cleanse herself. It was nearly three by her watch. She stretched out gingerly beside him, moved her head into the angle of his neck and shoulder, and put one arm across his broad chest.

  He awoke at once and said, “Well, hello!”

  “Sam. Sam, I’ve been hideous to you. And you’ve been pretty wonderful.”

  “Wonderful Sam. They all call me that.”

  “Sam, it isn’t love, but it’s almost love. And it wouldn’t be just to get even or anything. It wouldn’t be … something I’d ever save up to taunt him with, or anything childish like that.”

  “Let me catch up. Go slower.”

  She turned so that she could speak in a barely audible tone, directly into his ear. “If you’d be … very gentle … and patient with me, Sam, I think that I could … that maybe it would be … I mean, I’ve been so damned unfair to you in every way. And if you still want me …”

  He reached over and laid his hand against her cheek. “You are a nice guy, Janey. But don’t spoil my act. I’m full of virtue and manly restraint. The offer is … understood and appreciated. But you’d regret it, and you know it. Now let’s get the hell out of here before it’s too late.”

  He stood up lithely and held out his hand and pulled her to her feet. He folded the blanket. They walked to the car with his arm around her waist.

  As he turned the key in the ignition she saw that his hand was trembling. She understood. When she let him off he walked away with his tall quick stride, not looking back.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Fletcher drove up into the steepness of the dirt-road hills, knowing that he would find the red barn. Her vivid skirt was spread wide across her drawn-up legs. She seemed to sit beside him in some strange trance, her body responding slackly to the sudden lurches of the car over the potholed roads.

  He took quick little glances toward her, seeing the small golden hand resting on her ankles, fingers against the gold thongs. The high world shimmered in heat and the insects sang like a million tiny electric motors, keening endlessly. The leaves beside the road were motionless, caked thick with the white dust. And behind them the dust rolled high and white.

  “Not last night, Fletcher, my darling,” she said softly.

  “Eh? I know.”

  “Not that way. Not dulled and messy and habitual. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  “It has to be like … a little death. Does that sound strange?”

  “A little, I guess.”

  “Maybe I can teach you what I mean. A little death, and the cowards would go to it blindfolded, or drunk, or both. Have you ever fasted? I me
an really.”

  “I guess not.”

  “We’ll have to try that, Fletcher. After the first few days you aren’t hungry any more. But everything gets brighter and sharper. Colors, taste, smell, touch. That’s the way you ought to go to a little death. Go in such a way that everything is stamped deep and bright on your mind. Do I frighten you?”

  “That’s a funny thing to ask, isn’t it?”

  “I want you to be frightened. Because everything … so much of everything has been locked up so long. So damn endlessly long, Fletcher. And you’re going to let it all out. All out at once.”

  “Isn’t that what I want?”

  “I don’t know what you want. I don’t know what you expect. I’m just grateful that … you’ve come to me, in spite of the reason. Because reasons don’t matter any more. Not to us. Not after today.”

  There was an odd flat quality to her voice. As though she had stated some new immutable equation. Apparently, he thought, she was giving this a lot more weight and meaning that he had imagined she would.

  “Sounds mystic,” he said, with an attempt at lightness.

  “Perhaps it is. You see, there’s going to be no love, Fletcher. None.”

  He lifted his foot from the gas pedal involuntarily. “What?”

  “Don’t look so alarmed, darling. What we are going to have isn’t going to be love. No vows about eternity. Nothing sweet and sticky, full of gasping sighs and odes to eyebrows. I’ve outlived love, Fletcher.”

  “What shall we call it?”

  “A nice plain word, Fletcher. Very simple. Begins with the same letter and has the same number of letters. Lust. And the fulfillment of lust. And nothing less than that. A little death through lust, Fletcher. And the beginning of a lot of little deaths for us. We want it to be just as evil and animal and contrived as we can possibly make it. So we aren’t people any more. That’s what I want. To stop being anything but a she-thing. And you are the he-thing. I want you with cloven hooves, Fletcher. And we’ll do everything we can think of to close ourselves off from a pretty little world of manners and customs and tenderness. We’ll be in our own world, Fletcher. A world that we’ll make for ourselves, where there’s just color and sound and smell and feel. Things we can stamp deep. Pleasure and pain all twisted up together in crazy ways, and nothing at all we won’t do, because there won’t be any rightness and wrongness any more.”

  Her voice had a strange singsong quality and when he glanced at her it seemed to him that in spite of the glare of sun on white dust, the pupils of her eyes were enormous. The look of her made his throat thick and he reached one hand for her.

  She pushed his hand away. “No, Fletcher. Nothing as traditional. Because this has to be new. Where we make our own customs. This time, this first time, it will be my turn to make our customs and make our rules and guide our actions, and next time it will be yours. Agreed?”

  “Yes.”

  “A little death, Fletcher. And we’ll come back from our little death and hate what we have to go back to. Because this will be our reality. And there won’t be anything else.”

  “Yes.”

  “An endless experiment in evil, Fletcher. Because that’s the only thing left in the world.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know what I am, I think. What would I have been ten thousand years ago, Fletcher?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “After today you’ll know.”

  He paused at a crossroads to get his bearings. He turned up a steeper rockier hill than any they had been over. The car labored and stones slid under the back wheels. A hundred yards beyond the crest of the hill he saw the barn. There had been a house once, but nothing was left but the tall naked stone chimney, a trace of where a wall had been, a rusty pump. He turned in and the tall grass scraped the underside of the car. He turned off the motor. The cooling engine made clicking sounds and it was so still that he could hear the sighing sound the grass made as it stood up again where the wheels had matted it down.

  He got out and looked out over the city, miles away. She stood beside him.

  “Did you say,” she asked, “that you could lie on your bed and see this barn?”

  “Yes.”

  “I like that. Look at it tomorrow, darling. Look at it and remember what today was like. Because this isn’t one of those country-club escapades. You know that, don’t you?”

  He looked down at her. Her face was tilted up, strange little face with its look of what he had thought of as a delicate strength. Now the arch of the brows, the set of the mouth, they had another meaning. He groped clumsily for her and she stepped back, laughing a little. “Remember? This is my day, Fletcher. Entirely mine.”

  “Unless I take over.”

  “But I won’t let you. Get the red case and the blanket, darling.”

  He got them out of the back seat of the car. They walked through the tall grass. He held up the top strand of a rusty barbwire fence. She slid through gracefully and took the case from him. He stepped over the top strand.

  The big door that had once rolled back and forth in its channel lay to one side, splintered and rotten. The barn was dim inside. Blue sky showed through the roof holes. Sun dotted the ancient matted debris on the floor. There were holes in the floor, and the boards cracked under his weight. The air smelled of dust and spiders and a lingering winter dampness in the hay.

  Laura said softly, “It smells of decay.”

  “We could go out …”

  “You are a fool, Fletcher. So much to learn about me. This is the right place because it is like this. Don’t you see?”

  And she walked quickly away from him into the barn, avoiding the holes in the floor, the vivid skirt swinging from her small round hips—a varicolored flame in the half-darkness of the barn.

  “Here,” she called. “Back here, Fletcher.”

  He followed her back. She had found a battered box stall with a foot or so of matted hay on the floor. He spread the blanket on the hay.

  “Now sit there, Fletcher. Sit quite still. Lock your hands behind you, Fletcher.”

  He did as she said, feeling faintly ridiculous. She undressed very slowly. She never took her eyes from him. Each move was artifice, each gesture contrived, each posturing slow, provocative. Her body had a luminous, almost phosphorescent look in the gloom. Desire for her was, for a time, inhibited by the artificiality of the situation, the faint flavor of ludicrousness. And he knew that had her body been less than perfection, it would have been at best a banal charade, a coarse midway girl show. Slowly, slowly she became all of reality, moving there in the odd light, and the want of her affected his vision.

  She knelt lightly by the red case and opened it, and a small dot of the golden sunlight touched her bent back, showing the sheen of it, the silk with its suggestion of faint down. There was nothing left in all the world but this woman.

  She took a bottle of red wine from the case and her voice was far-off and strange in his ears, like the voices of people in an automobile as you are falling asleep. “Not much wine now, Fletcher. Just enough for us to taste it.”

  And she held a bit of bread over the matted hay and poured wine onto it, then holding the bread between her teeth, lips pulled back, crawled slowly to him. Her kiss was raw with the taste of wine and great lights pulsed inside him, breaking as his locked hands slipped, as he reached for her.

  It was not love, and she had been right in saying that it would not be love. It was a twisted wrenching agony.

  There was a time when he saw her eyes, and they were sightless, rolling. And her mouth was something broken. The sunlight was yellow metal at her throat. He had in that moment the feeling that he did not exist for her. There was no identity to him. He existed only as a part of her body, in the same way that the male spider even while being eaten, continues to perform its instinctual function. This was, he knew, as she had said, a little death.

  He was in a long corridor, endless, black as womb. He ran as hard and fast as u
ltimate terror. There was no sound but the slapping of his bare feet against the smooth chill floor. The corridor walls were glass. Beyond the glass was a green luminescence. On either side of him a white horse ran, and because of the glass he could not hear the sound of hooves. He knew that he dreamed, and told himself that he dreamed, but he could not escape from the dream. The white horses ran with the absurd gait of a merry-go-round, a slow rocking gait. Laura rode each of the horses. She was on either side of him, riding naked, glazed eyes turned toward him, slim thighs clasping the muscle roll of the horses’ flanks. On his right Laura was white as chalk. The Laura on his left was a deep blue-green, her body shining as if oiled, her hair trailing long behind her in the wind of passage. There was no sound but the hard fast slap of his feet, and the glazed eyes watched him.

  He screamed and his cheek was against the damp smell of the hay. It tickled his upper lip and he moved heavily back onto the blanket. She spoke his name and curled against him, and he felt nothing but a vast sick weariness. But she was at him then, with cleverness of lips and fingers, and he saw that the sun was lower, that the round spot of sunshine was against the box stall wall.

  He felt the slow return of wanting, a reluctant starting. And as he turned he saw the man standing there in the broken doorway of the box stall. A beefy, square-skulled man with nothing alive in his face but his eyes, and he was dressed in work clothes and his hands hung still and curled by his sides. For a time seeing the man there meant nothing to him. The man was a part of the new reality of the day, even a part of the dream of horses.

  He felt Laura tauten and then heard her sound of dismay, felt her thrust away from him, moving toward her clothing. It was only then that Fletcher was able to understand fully that a man stood there, watching them.