Fletcher waited several long seconds. He knew how it was meant. He fought his anger and finally turned and said, “Okay. Thanks, Hud.”
“Want me to depart?”
“Stick around, you lecherous, unprincipled old bastard.”
“Now I know you love me again. What’s the score?”
“Jane and Bill Graves have taken four straight games.”
They watched the match. Jane and Bill lost the fifth game and the sixth and then came back and took two straight to end the set, six two. Jane came over. She was flushed and breathing hard. Fletcher saw her recognize Hud, and saw the sudden shyness. He had a sudden realization of what it meant to her in terms of self-respect to know that Martha and Hud knew about it, and probably Ellis and Laura, and quite probably Midge and Harry. It was something they wouldn’t forget, and it was something that would inevitably be known in more or less exaggerated versions throughout their set, and it was something to have to live with.
Jane stretched out on the grass, face down. “I’m fair pooped, gentlemen,” she said. “Either old age or dissipation.”
Bill Graves sat cross-legged. “Lady, you weren’t sagging as bad as I was. Nancy wants to take you on alone.”
“Give me a five-minute break first.”
Hud got up. “I think I hear somebody rattling my dish. Strive on, silly athletes. See you anon and about.”
Jane gave Fletcher a quick, inquisitive glance and then looked away. After a time she got up and cut the air with her bat. “Okay, Nance.”
During the set with Nancy, when Jane was leading, three games to one, Fletcher wandered back toward the pool. He signed for a rum Collins at the pool bar, and carried it over and watched the golfers holing out on the eighteenth green for a while. He sat on the stone steps that led up to the terrace. He saw a girl in white walking toward him. No one in the world except Laura Corban walked that way. He stood up as she came up to him, unsmiling. “You haven’t phoned,” she said.
“No, I haven’t.”
She sat down on the steps and he sat on one above her. “By the way, congratulations, my dear.”
“Thanks.”
“It doesn’t make you nervous to have me sitting here talking to you?”
He looked down at the curve of her throat, at the dusky separation of her breasts where the round neckline of the white dress fell away from her. The memory of her was in his hands and on his lips and he felt his throat thicken. “It doesn’t make me nervous.”
“Such tremendous enthusiasm, Fletcher! Don’t strain yourself.”
“Why are you in such a filthy mood?”
“Ellis, I guess. He’s unbearable after any promotion. This is the worst one yet. He keeps looking in mirrors and twitching his mustache. He’s even harder than ever for me to bear … after our red barn.”
“Is he?”
“Like the sleeping princess, Fletcher. And the kiss awakened her. Princess isn’t too apt, is it? Sleeping what?”
“Houri? Odalesque? Daemon?”
“Those will do. But now she’s awake, and she is waiting.”
“What if she waits in vain?”
Laura looked sharply up at him and for a moment her mouth was quite ugly before it smoothed out. “I hardly think so.”
“Maybe it was enough.”
“I know you. You’re not going to go Christer on me, Fletcher. I’m not too rich for your blood. Only it might make it interesting for you to fight a little. To try to wiggle off the hook, maybe. We’re both hooked, you know.”
“Hud said you were going to explode in my face.”
She looked at him calmly. “How shrewd of Hud.”
“I have the funny feeling that it will improve my immortal soul to have none of you, Laura.”
“How do you go about taking the cure?”
“Maybe sometimes you go at it the same way those flagellantes work. Punish yourself.”
“Oh, dear. Cold showers and lots of exercise?”
“Pure bitch.”
She stood up slowly and arched her back just a bit. “Of course! And exactly what you want. What do you industrialists say? Machined for the job?”
“And doesn’t that make me an interchangeable part?”
She turned a bit white. “That’s a little too shrewd too. Think about it. Wait too long and you might find yourself obsolescent.” She walked away from him, swinging her round hips just a bit more than necessary, turning back when she was twenty feet away to give him one small quick evil confident smile. His hands were sweaty and he took out his handkerchief and dried them.
He saw Jane and Nancy heading for the locker rooms. Jane seemed to be just a little too engrossed in conversation, and he wondered if she had seen Laura sitting with him. Jane glanced his way and her smile was a little too gay. When she was out of sight he wandered over to the pool again and Jane found him there after she had showered and changed. “Let’s round up the kids and get a sandwich,” she said. “It will be a long time until dinner.”
They sat at one of the picnic tables out in the small grove. Midge and Harry Van Wirt moved in and ate with them, Ellis Corban stopped by to chat, and Jane congratulated him gravely and with beautiful sincerity. The kids were told how long they had to wait before going back into the pool.
Fletcher stopped drinking during the long afternoon. He wandered around, feeling strangely apart from the laughing holiday people. Jane got into a bridge game on the terrace and for a time he sat near her, watching her play of the hands until he realized that he was making her nervous.
As the day began to fade, as the children grew noisier, as the drunks began to laugh louder at their own wit, Fletcher felt the slow increase within him of morose depression. It was depression without anger, without resentment. A vast grey dullness inside of him. Yet he made himself smile at the right moments and say the right things.
The traditional Fourth of July buffet dinner was served. The long buffet was set up in the main lounge. People were eating in the dining room, on the big porch, on the terrace, out by the pool, over in the grove. Talk and lights and laughter, as the day faded. By the time the Wyant family had finished eating, people were already going out with blankets and car robes to pick vantage spots on the long slope of the eighteenth fairway where they would get a good view of the fireworks. The children had raced through their meal and they were itching to be off. To keep them busy, Fletcher gave Judge the car keys and sent them to get the robe out of the back end of the car.
They were back before Jane had finished her coffee. They went out and it was grey dusk. It was not yet dark enough to begin, and down on the flats the fireworks scaffolding had been erected, the wood pale yellow and raw in the dusk. Men moved about down there on mysterious errands. The children picked a spot and Judge spread the robe with much advice from Dink. Jane and Fletcher sat down side by side, the children in front of them.
Slowly it grew darker while the children complained about were they never going to start, for gosh sakes? “When do they start, Dad?”
He saw the Corbans come and find a place a little way down the slope from them. He was barely able to make them out in the gathering darkness, and he saw that Ellis was spreading a blanket, and he wondered if it was the same one, if it held the odor of musty hay, of barn dampness.
Jane had turned a bit, hugging her knees, and her arm touched his, and he felt her move quickly away from the contact.
There was rhythmic clapping which stopped suddenly as a high wild red rocket whooshed high, and banged and dropped a wide silver spray. There was a long slow Aah! of pleasure, and sudden applause.
There were more rockets and Fletcher ceased watching them, watched instead the reflected glow on upturned faces. He felt himself a stranger in this place, among all the people he had known most of his life. A stranger sitting with the small family of some person named Fletcher Wyant. He moved back a bit and turned almost furtively to see the explosive reflections against Jane’s face, as though by looking at her he would s
ee an answer to this feeling of apartness. Her lips were parted. There was a small moist highlight on her underlip. He could see the sheen of her eyes.
And she was a stranger beside him. A living, breathing creature of tissue and muscle and nerves and bone. A creature taut in its firm brown skin, with the tendons cleverly sheated, muscles awaiting the messages of the clever little white threads of the nerves. Bride of a stranger. Person forever unknowable. And maybe that was it. You knew so little of yourself. And so any other person was but a deeper mystery. This stranger beside him had been born in pain, and had conceived, and would die and rot and be forgotten. Even as he.
He felt that he was close to an answer, close to something rare and good. He closed his hand hard on her arm, felt rather than heard her small gasp of surprise. She turned toward him with eyes he did not know. A rounded wetness of membrane. Eyes of a stranger and they were aware of him.
The children were oblivious. He stood up and tugged her arm and she rose silently and obediently. She had been looking at the fireworks and they had blinded her. He guided her between the groups of people, took her across the wide yard to the pool, still holding her arm tightly.
On the apron of the pool, near the slim steel of the diving platform, he turned her, roughly, released her. There was no one near them.
“I’ve got to have help,” he said thickly.
“Help?” Her voice was faint.
“I don’t know if I can do it. I got to have help to try to do it. It’s like … being tied up. Knowing how thick the ropes are. You are filth. I’ve got to stop thinking that. I can’t keep on thinking that.”
She made no sound. He saw that she had started to cry. She had her arms folded across her stomach and she was bent forward slightly from the waist, standing there in an ugly, stricken way.
“I’ve got to stop judging you,” he said, with no inflection on any word. “I’m not fit to judge. There were two of them overseas. And that one in Chicago. And Laura. And I still want Laura, but not in any way I’ve ever wanted you.”
She made a small sound. Rocket light was against her face. She had bent further forward. He took her shoulders roughly, straightened her up, backing her against one of the steel uprights.
“Did you hear what I said? Four of them since I married you.”
“Oh yes. I heard you. I heard you.”
“How does it make you feel? What does it do to you?”
“Stop, Fletcher. Please stop. Oh, please.”
He held her shoulders and pulled her forward and banged her back against the upright. “How does it make you feel?”
“Dirty. For … for both of us. Dirty, Fletcher. But … but I want us to … keep anything we can.”
“In spite of it?”
“In spite of it.” She had stopped crying. Her chin was high but her voice was dead. “I’m … not proud any more. I can crawl. I want you back.”
He let go of her. She stood, leaning against the upright. There was a silver waterfall at the foot of the fairway. It made her face silver, and her dress, and made his shadow black across her.
“There’s only one way, only one thing I can do, Jane,” he said, and the words sounded slurred. “Never again anyone but you. Only on that basis. And … you see I can’t promise that, even.”
“Do you want to try to promise?”
He turned and looked at the dark pool. A rocket burst and he saw the reflection in the still surface of the pool.
“I guess I do,” he said quietly.
“Let’s have all we can,” she said.
“It could be everything, the way it was before, if I wasn’t such a … a very little person on the inside, Jane.”
She moved shyly, her hands touching his coat, sliding up, her fingers suddenly chill against the back of his neck, pulling him forward, down.
He took her wrists and pulled her hands away from him, thrust them down at her sides. He said, “It doesn’t go that way.” He had the feeling that he was explaining something very difficult. “It isn’t a fade-out with soft music. We can’t do it that way. I can’t do it that way. I’ve got to do it my way, and all I want is help, but I don’t know exactly what kind of help.”
She made no sound. He walked away from her and walked to the middle of the lawn. He turned and looked back. It was hard to see her in the shadows of the diving platform. He waited and after a little while he could see her. She was walking toward him. She was walking very slowly in her light dress, and now they were setting the bombs off. The ones you could feel in your belly.
About the Author
John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.
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