by Tabitha King
She lay down next to him.
He drew her close. “God, you look good.”
There was a dot of white powder on his right nostril.
She laid her head on his chest and bit her lip. His heartbeat under her ear was thudding like the footsteps of a heavy man running up a flight of stairs.
He tucked his hand under her chin and tilted her head to him. She shuddered against him, and he hugged her very tightly to him.
The act was quick, and elementally violent, as it often was for them after periods of abstinence or separation. She climaxed twice and could have gone on, but when he asked if it was all right with her if he came, she consented, relieved to think he, too, was horny enough not to be able to sustain a longer act. It meant, she hoped, he had done without the past few weeks.
Almost as quickly as it was done, Liv slipped from the bed and went into the bathroom. She turned on the shower.
Pat stood in the bathroom door.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. She reached into the shower to test the water temperature.
“It was okay for you, then?” Pat asked, leaning against the doorframe.
“Sure. How was it for you?” Liv asked. “I know you were in a hot hurry to get laid. Wanted to find out how it was to fuck your wife on a rush of coke?”
Pat froze. “What?”
“Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions,” Liv said. “Maybe it was the first time you ever fucked anybody on blow.”
Pat reached out and grabbed her arm. “I don’t believe what I’m hearing.”
“Look in the mirror,” Liv said softly.
Pat looked over her shoulder, peering into the bathroom mirror. He touched his nostril, and reddened.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, still extravagantly injured. “Bayard laid a little coke on me before I left. Christ, it’s nothing. Two lines. It was in my shaving gear, and it spilled, that’s all. I didn’t want Mrs. Parks to find it.”
“Pardon me,” Liv said coldly and stepped into the shower. She pulled the shower door tightly shut behind her and thrust her head under the shower.
When she turned her back to the spray of water, Pat’s shadow on the glass door was gone. She laid her head against the tiled wall and wept under the screen of the water. She was not sure why she was crying. She was angry, not afraid. This was only a fight, not the end of the world. But she was overwhelmed with a rush of black inexplicable grief.
Pat was sitting in their bed smoking a cigarette with the sheets pulled up to his waist when she came out of the bathroom. He shot an angry, guilty glance at her.
“There hasn’t been anybody else, with coke or without,” he said. “Let’s make that clear. I resent that nasty little implication. I really do. I don’t deserve it.” He sucked at the cigarette. “Because it hasn’t been easy.”
Liv picked up her nightdress. “I’ll accept that, for the moment. I apologize if I accused you wrongly.”
“Accepted,” Pat said, and reached for his ashtray. “I feel like I’ve been hit with a hammer right between the eyes, Liv. You were the girl that wrote the letter to the college paper advocating the legalization of pot. When did you go straight on me?”
“I’ve always been straight,” she said. She turned back the sheets on her side of the bed and climbed in. “I never smoked the stuff. I just didn’t think it was any worse than alcohol and I still don’t. In a rational society, people would be encouraged to substitute pot for alcohol. But it’s intellectual principle with me, not self-interest. When have you ever known me not straight?”
Pat smiled. “Never, I admit it. Except for booze. I’ve seen you tie one on now and then.”
“ ‘A little wine for thy stomach’s sake,’” she said.
“But the Bible doesn’t mention coke, right?” Pat said. “Anyway, you haven’t been to church in years.”
“ ‘Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,’” Liv said.
“I’m not worried about your mind,” Pat said. “I’m worried about your increasingly tight ass.”
She arranged her pillow and turned on her side, away from him.
“The shit’s illegal, Pat,” she said wearily. “You’d better know right now if you get caught, it’s your ass. I won’t bail you out, and I won’t defend you to your kids.”
“Thanks a lot, babe,” Pat said. She heard the hard clunk of the ashtray as he set it down on the nightstand. “I love the feeling that you’re behind me all the way.”
“Don’t ever make love to me again after you’ve used that shit. I’m not just another cheap thrill,” Liv said. “I’ll leave you if you do.”
“Jesus Christ,” Pat said. He threw back the sheets. “Since you seem determined to piss me off, I’m going to have another beer and call Bayard. We’re both too tired to make sense right now.”
He stood by the bed a few seconds, waiting for her to respond.
“All right,” he said. “This has been a bitch of a summer. On me, too, babe. But it worries the hell out of me that suddenly we’re so far apart on this.”
She curled up on herself and waited for sleep. She heard Pat leave the room and pick up the phone in the study next to the bedroom. The tick of dialing carried through the bedroom extension a few feet away from her, the muffled conversation and laughter between him and Bayard was audible through the wall, which on her side was the closet and on his side was floor to ceiling bookcases. She rolled onto her back and stretched, then composed herself in what she thought of as her corpse position: flat on her back, body straight, hands folded just below her breasts. Eyes closed, she breathed evenly, simulating sleep, hoping to fake her way into it.
But her mind was restless, full of her anger with Pat, her anger at herself for letting him screw her when she knew what he was doing. And for fucking him because she wanted fucking that badly. Every act of copulation between them could not proceed entirely from love; there were inevitably elements of compromise, the times when one or the other of them was less than wholehearted, doing it because the other wanted it, the times when selfish desire, the need, was more important than who their partner was. But if it was true that the very habituation to each other’s bodies achieved over years together produced reliably easy good sex, that good fucking they got from each other reminded them how good it could all be, and brought them back together. And it was still good between them. She did not believe, though, they could go on long fucking each other merely because the other was there to be fucked. At least she couldn’t.
Maybe she had been unfair to accuse him of cheating. Either she was being realistic, accepting the worldly wisdom that these things happen, meaning grown people couldn’t keep their pants on, or she was being cynical, refusing the possibility that Pat was keeping the promise to have no other. It was a curse of the times. The old rules had been abolished to no tangible improvement. Love had been reduced to a crap game. Sometimes you got lucky. Mostly the house made money off the suckers.
When she heard the click of the phone being hung up, she realized she had been holding her breath. Her stomach was queasy. She was, she realized, enraged again, as enraged as she had been at Pat for coming to her for the first time in weeks with cocaine up his nose. Having fulfilled his connubial obligation, he had then rushed to phone Bayard—to whom he had talked for half an hour before they left for the party, as well as been with every day of the last six weeks on the set of Firefight.
Pat would tell her she was not to take any of it seriously, yet he lived and breathed it. He had never really left acting behind. Unconsciously, he picked up the voice, phrasing, idiom, gesture of whomever he was with. He had come back to her talking and walking like Bayard Rohrer, reminding her with whom he had filled the last six weeks of his life.
Pat was on the deck, she could smell his cigarette smoke, see the blue of the buglight, hear the zap and sizzle of insects dying fiery deaths in it. He coughed and cleared his throat now and then. She felt disgusted with herself for the rush of
spleen that had overwhelmed her, and was enormously weary. What did it all matter? She closed her eyes and listened for the rending shriek of the loons.
The birds must have gone to bed for the night. She was still awake when Pat came to bed, but she pretended sleep. Sometime later she got up to take aspirin and drink warm milk. Sometimes it helped. She slipped into a doze, waking with a start around three-thirty. Her usual hour. She collected a blanket from the closet and left the bedroom. In the kitchen she made herself a cup of camomile tea, and carried it and the blanket to the deck, where she lay down on a chaise lounge. The lake mirrored the sky, which was clear and white with the false dawn. Only a jagged black line of trees on the opposite shore, the mountains gray ghosts behind them, defined air from water. Overhead, the trees were inky, jagged-edged Oriental brush strokes. The loons began their morning noises, raising goosebumps on her arms. Curled underneath her blanket, she listened to them with her eyes closed. Hours later, just before the sun’s first tentative warmth touched her face, all the other birds went at it at once in a raucous chivaree. Suddenly the world was soft and clean, all new again. Another day.
She went back to her bedroom to put on a bathing suit. As she reached for her beach cover-up in the closet, her knuckles rapped against something hard in the pocket of Pat’s sports coat, the one he had been wearing when he arrived home the day before. Slipping her hand into the pocket, she gingerly passed the tips of her fingers over it. It was a small glass bottle, the size of the ones in a child’s chemistry set. Attached to its ribbed plastic cap by a short chain was a tiny spoon made of a bead and a tube of metal flattened into a spoon at the end. The tiny bottle was half-filled with white powder. She didn’t have to be a weathergirl to know which way to blow that kind of snow. Just a few lines someone had slipped him, no doubt. She dropped it back into the pocket and closed the closet door on it.
The pond was a cold shock, the slipstream of the angelic sword. She felt it from the roots of her teeth. Her skin reddened in protest. But the water was also silky, caressing her as she moved through it. After a few laps, it began to seem actually warm, though really it was only her own body heating itself with exertion.
She came out of it feeling reborn. Stripped of her bathing suit, curled up in her cover-up under the blanket on the chaise, she fell deeply asleep at last.
“What’s left?” Sarah said, wiping her hands on her jeans.
Liv looked around the gingerbread house-studio. “There isn’t much.”
It always looked naked and abandoned at the beginning of the season and at the end, when everything was packed away. She never left anything behind except a few cheap and simple tools and her old-fashioned kick wheel, locked in a cupboard. The kiln, now cold and swept clean, was built in.
Travis sat in the middle of the floor, playing with a lump of clay. His face and hands were very dirty, and the clay stained his white T-shirt. But he was sweaty with happiness. Liv had given him clay as soon as he was old enough to hold it, just as she had given it to Sarah when Sarah had been the baby toddling around her studio. But Sarah had never taken to it the way he had.
Liv indicated the small stack of boxes by the door.
“You weren’t kidding,” Sarah said, for once too genuinely surprised to be cool.
Liv tried not to notice, as her daughter really looked at her for the first time in weeks. It occurred to her then that Sarah’s self-absorption had at least had the effect of preserving Liv’s privacy.
“I’ve had some good ideas,” Liv said. “I’m ready to really work again.”
Sarah picked up the first box and carried it out, her face closed again.
Working on what her mother could have done with the summer, Liv thought. There should have been a dozen cartons to take back, not three.
She squatted down next to Travis. “It’s time to go,” she said.
He sighed. “Good,” he said.
He climbed to his feet, and put the clay in its Tupperware box. When the cap was firmly on and burped, he joined her at the door. She looked around once. The air already smelled stale and empty. She closed the door and locked it.
Pat was putting the last of the perishables in the station wagon.
Liv went into the kitchen and checked to be sure everything was gone. Then she went through the house, locking windows and doors. She stopped on the back porch, trying to commit how it all looked just then to memory. She always did. But her mind was too full of closing up and what she had to do when she was home again, and she felt not the moment of cherishing she wanted but only mechanical emptiness. Like the house itself, a shell in which nothing lived, except small creeping things and insects, until spring came again. All she got was a bad photograph in which everything would be flattened, small, indistinct, and ordinary.
“Pee?” Pat asked, as she came out the back door.
Sarah groaned. “Daddy!”
“Well?” he insisted and was answered with a chorus of yeses.
“Move ‘em out,” he said.
Liv took the wheel of the Pacer, Travis sitting beside her. From the back, The Poor yowled miserably from her cat carrier. The air was already fierce with the stink of cat piss.
Pat leaned in at the window. “See you when we get home,” he said. “Be careful.” He kissed her forehead. Straightening up, he looked around sadly. “It’s all over again, babe.”
Liv watched him get into the station wagon with Sarah. Already rock loud enough to deafen was pouring out of the wagon’s windows. She started the Pacer.
“Summer’s all over,” she said to Travis.
“Good,” he said. He was lining up G.I. Joes in a troop transport truck on the seat between them. “I don’t like this house.”
“Why?” Liv asked.
“Daddy’s never home, and you cry all the time,” Travis answered matter-of-factly.
Shit, she thought. You can’t hide anything from them, no matter how hard you try. They always know. “We’ll come some weekends this fall,” she said. “Gather pinecones like we always do. And when the snow falls, we come skiing, and sliding. That’ll be fun, won’t it?”
Travis was more interested in battling G.I. Joes over the terrain of his ragged blanket than in weekends in Nodd’s Ridge.
Putting it into words, she realized how unlikely it was, unless she and Travis came by themselves. Sarah had games and practices every weekend and no enthusiasm for parting from her friends even for forty-eight hours. Pat would be away most of the fall and would not want to leave Portland when he was home.
Maybe it was just as well. Put the summer behind them. Maybe everything would be better next year. She had to hope.
Chapter 5
FIREFIGHT
Rough Cut #3
Frowning slightly, a woman in a gold-lamé halter and a pair of very short black shorts paints her nails. They are excessively long and luridly red. Teenage girls often affect such nails, part of a natural experimentation with sexual display, but in a grown woman, such nails are either a holdover, an indication of immaturity, or a narcissistic statement that she does not work with her hands, which implies some kind of kept status, of which she is proud. They may also be a lie, as well as poor taste.
She glances up as the man entering the room passes between her and the television screen a few feet in front of her. He drops onto the couch next to her and drapes an arm around her shoulders. She had not taken her eyes off him, though her hands are held rigid to protect the wet glaze. She squeals softly when he hugs her and pulls away, holding her nails in front of him to show him why.
He sits back and pops a can of beer. A small, lithe man with arresting dark eyes and curly black hair, he is not just handsome, he is beautiful. And he knows it. There is a swagger in the way he tosses his head back, in his self-satisfied smile.
"Whatcha watchin'," he asks the girl.
She flicks a wrist at the TV. "Nothin'."
She is taller than he is, bony-thin, but with disproportionately large breasts threatening t
o spill from her gold-lamé halter. Her pale skin is freckled, and fine hair glints on her forearms, as if they had been dusted with gold. Her abundant hair is an artificially whiteblond, and floats loose over her shoulders, occasionally veiling her face when she bends forward over her nails.
The man stares at the TV. The evening news is on. It seems to cast a spell over him, without his showing any interest or reaction to it.
She continues to flick glances at him. It is clear there is a high sexual charge between the two. What is also apparent is that for both these people, most of sex is in the display, the innuendo of glance and stare and grab. They have nothing much to say to each other beyond double entendres. It is what has held them together as long as it has: The best part of their lovemaking is in suggestion. It is how they assure themselves not only of their desirability but their sexuality.
As if a scale were lifted from his eyes, the man changes. Abruptly he comes out of his lounging, his nose going up in the air like a dog pointing, and he is on his feet, facing the door to the apartment. Even from his television trance, over the noise of the telecast, he has heard something.
She follows him with her eyes, puzzled, then hears the footsteps on the stairway. He is moving to one side of the door, positioning himself.
She sighs, inserts the applicator back into her bottle of nail polish, and screws it tightly shut. There is a tentative knock at the door, and she rises to answer it. The black shorts expose more of her bottom than they cover. The man is behind her, ready to peek through the crack of the hinges.
Leaving the door on the chain, she opens it wide enough to see the visitor. Eyebrows raised high in question, she asks, "Yes?"