Area of Suspicion (17 page)

The room was almost dark. She had created a special mood wherein I could find myself wanting to believe that somehow we could make the four lost years seem like an absurd mistake, and be together again.

I turned and looked at her. Her face was inches from mine. “I remember you very well,” I said.

“And I remember you, Gevan. You are the man who had all the drive and all the energy, and one day you just … came to a stop.”

“Because there wasn’t anything worth working for.”

“Do you feel guilty about that?”

“Why should I?”

“I had to ask. It’s easier to ask things in the dark. Important things, darling. I don’t want you all steamed up to get back into the rat race.”

“What has that got …”

“Hush!” she said and touched my lips. “I have a crazy plan for us. It’s no good here for us. Too much happened here. We’d have to live in a new way to catch up on all we’ve lost. We lost so much, darling. Let’s go away together just as soon as we can. There’s all the money we can ever use. We could get a boat, a motor-sailor we could crew ourselves, and … make a life out of following the sun.”

She turned suddenly to put her head in my lap. She looked up at me. “Let’s do that, Gevan. Let’s really and truly do it, you and me. The hell with all of them.”

She made it sound so good and so easy.

“And leave all this? Mottling says you’ve been taking a big interest in the company.”

“Poo! He’s been trying to bring me into the discussions. It’s therapy, I guess. I can’t contribute anything. He can run the company with my help or yours, dear. We wouldn’t ever have to come back.”

Yes indeedy, off we would sail and in a couple of years we’d be able to speak fondly and tolerantly of good old Ken, and we’d be grateful to good old Stanley for keeping our dividends nice and fat. We’d just rove the blue seas and tie up at the fun places at the fashionable times, and make love, and drink too much, but always with adorable and enchanting people. And when the sex and sensation bit started to go a little dead, we could always give it a booster shot by taking exactly the right sort of couple on a little cruise, some adorable, enchanting pair too vulnerable to tell tales, and with some trading around and with some of the practices of the voyeur, we could put our romance right back on the up-beat, yes indeedy, and we would push the
good old machine until finally the parts wore out, at which time the medics could gut her like a trout and carve away portions of me, and we would then want a larger and more comfortable boat and somebody to run it for us while we sat in adjoining deck chairs astern, soft, fat, brown as saddles, and without one bloody word left to say to each other or one itching thing to do to each other, yes indeedy. Bliss without end.

She must have anticipated what I was going to say, because she got up suddenly and said. “I’m restless, darling. Let’s go for a walk.”

We walked in darkness on the soft fresh grass. She found my hand in what seemed a most natural way. An airways beacon swept the south horizon. We walked past the garages and servant quarters, and down a tidied slope of lawn toward a pale caligraphy of young birches at the edge of the woodland. The first stars were out.

We stopped near the woods. “I’m ashamed,” I said.

“So am I, darling! So am I! But we’re the only ones who know about it, aren’t we? Who have we hurt? A dead man? You see, we’re not really ashamed of what we did. We broke a convention, dearest. We violated the code. We jumped the gun. We’re ashamed because we didn’t let what they call a decent interval elapse, that’s all. The act wasn’t shameful. Such a great need can’t be shameful. It was just the timing, darling. Don’t you see? We’re going to be together anyway. Nothing can stop that, and we both know it. I’ve never stopped loving you and needing you, Gevan. So we have no reason to be ashamed.”

“You make it sound reasonable, Niki. You’ve got that wonderful talent for making anything you want to do sound reasonable.”

“You didn’t use to be like this. Gevan. Why do you have to pick at things? Just enjoy, enjoy. You don’t have to think so goddamn much, do you?”

I made a sound like a laugh. “Somebody else told me the same thing a little while ago.”

“Who?”

“It doesn’t matter. You don’t know her.”

She shrugged and turned away from me and looked up at the night sky. “I love the quiet out here. We’re the only two people left in the world, darling.”

“How dandy.”

She spun back and put her hands on my shoulders. “You’re still hostile toward me, darling. God knows I can’t blame you, after the fool thing I did, and the way I almost lost you forever. But don’t I deserve a chance to make it up to you? Isn’t it worth it to you to give me a chance? Try to feel a little bit of kindness, dearest. This hostility is like a sickness, you know. It even carries over to Stanley.”

“Mottling! What the hell has he got to do with this?”

“I’m trying to make you see your own confusion, Gevan,” she said, sliding her hands down to my wrists. I sensed your immediate antagonism toward Stanley, and until I figured it out, it worried me. You see, you know I like and trust him. So now I believe that in some emotional irrational way, you have a compulsion to fight him just in order to spite me.”

“For God’s sake, Niki!”

“I’m trying to get you to be honest with yourself. That’s the only way we can start off right, darling. A second chance is such a rare thing, it’s worth every effort. I hurt you terribly. Yes. But I hurt myself too! Can’t you see that? The four years were just as horrid for me as they were for you. You don’t have to keep on trying to punish me now by … by doing hostile things like working against Stanley, who is really so terribly capable. You really have no real objection to him.”

“He seems too damn plausible. He’s driven too many good men away. I’m dubious about his management policies. What’s that got to do with us?”

“Everything, because those are rationalizations to make your emotional hostility seem based on logic.”

At my slight tug she released my wrists. I lit cigarettes. In the quick glow of flame I looked at the oval flatness and good high bones of her cheeks, and the shadowed eyes. It
was getting cooler. We began to walk slowly back up the slope toward the home my brother had built for his bride.

“You’ll have to give me a second reading on this,” I told her. “We talk about us, and we get over into this Mottling running the company. Where is the connection? What the hell difference does it make to you whether Mottling or Granby or Joe Sandwich runs the outfit?”

She walked with her head bowed, scuffing the grass with her sandals. “I want to say it exactly right, because everything I say, you take the wrong way, you know.”

“Take your time.”

After a long silence she sighed, stopped and faced me. “Maybe it’s all too involved and too female to explain. Reasons sort of overlap. In the first place, Ken wanted Stanley to be in charge. And, you can sneer at me if you want to, but I do feel obligation and loyalty toward your brother. It didn’t work, and that wasn’t entirely his fault, and he tried desperately hard to make it work. We both did. He was a good man. We both know that.”

“I’m not sneering.”

“Thank you for that, Gevan. Secondly, it’s … it’s like a test for us. You haven’t been here long enough to learn anything pertinent about Stanley. So if you fight him, it’s because you’re fighting me. And what can we build on that kind of feeling? If you keep on trying to fight me, what will our life together be like? And there’s the last thing, and maybe the most important, Gevan. I
do
know, more than most people, that grave sense of responsibility you have. So suppose you got Stanley out. You know Granby couldn’t handle it. So you wouldn’t go away with me. You’d stay here and back him up and help him and get more and more enmeshed. And I would have to stay here, because you would be here. But, Oh God, how I want to get away from here forever, with you. This is where I bitched up my life, Gevan. I don’t think we can be happy here. And we need happiness. We need it so terribly.”

I looked toward the dark house. Nothing in the world seemed safe and tangible. I thought of what Uncle Al had
said about her motivations. The Lime Ridge house looked like a big, brooding trap. Ken had built it and it had caught him. Something had broken him in a shadowy merciless way, and something else had killed him too cleverly. Everything was shifting, implausible. This woman was someone I had never known and never would know.

“I don’t know,” I said, my voice loud and harsh and weary in the silence. “I have to sort things out. I’ve got to get back to town.”

I expected protestations, pleadings, demands that we talk it all out here and now. But in a voice bright, casual and kindly, she said, as she patted my arm. “Too much is happening too fast, I know. Almost too much to take. And we have all the time there is, darling.”

We walked toward my car. I opened the car door and turned toward her. She was closer than I had expected, and she swayed into me, parted my jacket, hooked the fingers of both hands around my belt and pulled and held us tightly together, her face in the hollow of my throat, her back arched in a way that laid the insistent firmness of her breasts against my chest. I could not stand like a fool with my arms at my sides. I put them around her, my hands light and meaningless on her back.

“It’s a hell of a way to leave both of us,” she murmured. Already there was a muzzy formlessness about her articulation, a roughening of her voice. Her breathing was slowing and deepening and I felt the faint ripening sag of her as her knees drowsed under her tumescent weight.

“Haven’t we said …”

“I don’t mean more talk. Can’t you tell I don’t mean more talk? I mean it could be so much better now the terrible edge is gone. Starving people gobble the food, honey. They don’t take time for tasting. They fill their bellies, fast as they can. Too fast.”

I could feel the heat of her slow exhalations against my throat. “We shouldn’t have let that happen.”

“I know, I know, I know,” she said in a cross blurred voice. “But it did, and it’s done, so what’s wrong with
getting all the good of it? Not starving now. Just a good hunger. Les’ go in an be gourmets, darlin’. A slow slow sweet sweet feast. With all the tastes and flavors. No gobbling. All slow and long and sweet …”

She kept murmuring but the singsong words had become indistinct. It was a fuzzy droning, like a summer-sound of bees, and her body had begun its soft, inadvertent pulsings. In the ultimate second, just before I was forever lost, I pushed her slowly and firmly away from me. When I released her at arm’s length I saw her waver in the starlight and catch her balance. She stood hunched for a time, her fists against her cheeks, and then straightened herself.

“You’re right of course, darling,” she said in the same tone she probably used for social telephoning.

“One guilt at a time.”

“I suppose I should feel spurned and degraded. But somehow I don’t. You
do
have a vast talent for turning me into … some unspeakable, panting
thing
, Gevan. Practically with no warning at all. Doesn’t that stimulate your male ego?”

“Good night, Niki.”

“With a friendship kiss,” she said, and came close. With great wisdom, I kissed her cheek. She laughed at me and called me a coward.

When I was behind the wheel she bent down and looked through the window at me, her expression mischievous in the dashboard lights.

“You
do
realize you cheated us by being so conventional,” she said. “Because next time we’ll have to be all fierce and fast again before we can be the way we want to be. Do come back soon. You could be terribly weak and inconsistent and come back a little later, or get out of the car right now, and I wouldn’t tease you about it, really.”

She laughed at me and backed away. When I turned in the drive the lights swept across her and left her smiling in the darkness; that smile, caught in an instant of light, grooved forever into the brain’s jelly—proud, strong and mocking.

I drove toward the pink glow of the city by night. I held
the wheel stiffly and drove slowly, and tried to keep her out of my mind, tried to keep my mind blank and gray. When I was a boy of ten I spent a summer on a farm my grandfather owned. Ken and I were assigned chores. One sow showed the ingenuity of a demon in escaping the pen. When she was loose, we had to drop what we were doing, and herd her back. She was a savage and knowing animal, and we armed ourselves with stout sticks. It was a game of maneuver. Ideally we would work her slowly back until the nearest one of us could dart in and open the gate and the other would stampede her through it before the rest of them could also escape. But it never worked out that way. If we made the slightest miscalculation, if we left too large a gap to right or to left or between us, she would launch herself through it at a dead run and we would have to begin all over again.

I had the same feeling of trying to herd something that was endlessly alert to break loose.

And suddenly it did. All my desire for Niki came burning and torrenting upon me, spewing into my mind all the erotica of the solid, steady, metronomic surging of her hips while her eyes rolled wild and all of her was supple in her torment and her breasts were burning hardness, and her arms grew awesomely strong, and her broken mouth was lost in a demented babbling, keening and mewling between the whistling gasps that measured, by their frequency, her desperate climb to her peak of urgency. All the bright hotness of her in my mind, coming so strongly and suddenly, brought an icy sweat that soaked my body, and brought a knotted aching tension to my loins, and made me too sick and dizzy with my need to be able to drive. I pulled over onto a wide shoulder, able to despise myself for noting there was enough width for a U turn. I stopped and turned off the motor and had the maniac idea that I should throw the car key out into the darkness. I clenched the top of the steering wheel, my fists close together, my forehead resting on my fists. I rocked my head from side to side. In an abandoned ballroom in my mind, countless naked images of
her danced to forgotten music, improvising obscene parodies I could not quite hear.