Clemmie (23 page)

“I didn’t do much. I admit that.”

“It’s just the last few weeks. As if you don’t give a damn any more, Craig. I’ve got something at stake too. I couldn’t stomach being sent back to the steno pool. I want to protect both of us.”

“So what do I do? Got any suggestions?”

She hitched the wicker chair closer to his. “You make fourteen five. I’m not supposed to know that, but I do. You’ll be forty soon. If you’re bounced out, and stay unemployed for sixty days, you’d be glad to get back in somewhere, anywhere, for eight five. Personally, I don’t think you can salvage anything at Quality. It’s gone too
far. But if you handle it right, I think you can ease right out from under the ax. If you move fast. You’ve got contacts. Your present title has a nice ring to it. You’ve got a good excuse for looking for a new position. You’re in a dead end job. Ooze confidence. You’re loyal, of course, but there comes a time when a man has to think of himself. You would consider seventeen five provided the job has some challenge.”

“For God’s sake!”

“I’m not dreaming this up, Craig. You
must
take it seriously. You’re going stale in that job. It’s a crucial time for you. You’ve got to beat Ober to the draw.”

“Are you trying to terrify me?”

“Don’t you dare smile. This is important. If you move now, you can have twenty years of increasing pay and better jobs. If you don’t move now, this will be the farthest you’ll ever go. All the rest of the way will be downhill.”

“To the inevitable bread line.”

“I could kick you. You make me so mad I could spit.”

“How do I look for a job and work too?”

“Cover the local firms first. National Lighting, Federated Tool and Forge, Alsco Industries, Donner Plastics, Hallohan Wheel Works. Any one of those could pick up the tab. Use your contacts. You make a good impression when you
care
. When you
try
. Set up lunch dates.”

“Are you absolutely positive it isn’t your imagination when you say I’m on the way out?”

“Oh, heavens! Just the little things. I used to have standing. Now I’ve got to fight to get an office requisition filled. I have to raise hell to get the mail as early as they used to bring it. We don’t get the major policy memos any more. They leave you off the routing list. It makes me mad as hell. When I bring those things up to you, and you’ll remember that I have, you just don’t seem to hear me. Darn it all, Craig, you seem to think that damn jungle is some kind of a pea patch.” Tears suddenly came to her eyes. “What’s taking the guts out of you?”

She jumped up and went by him hastily and awkwardly, bumping into his knees. The screen door slammed shut behind her. He opened up another beer. She was being dramatic. It couldn’t be that bad. Yet there was a feeling of stiffness in the back of his neck. They would give his thirteen and a half years with the company some consideration.
Then he remembered how they got rid of Rollins, five years ago. And then he remembered that his last raise had come two years ago last month. He tried to compute what he had in the pension fund.

Say five thousand there. And maybe another nine in cash value of insurance policies. Fifteen hundred in bonds. Nothing in the savings account. Eight or nine hundred in the checking account. Gar was free and clear and the house nearly so. Healthy enough situation unless.…

Quite suddenly he wanted to hurl the beer can through the screening, and kick the chairs over and yell. Why couldn’t they leave him alone? Why couldn’t all of them just leave him alone?

After a while he walked down onto the beach. Betty was sitting on her heels, helping the kids dig their hole. She looked up at him with eyes slightly red and a shamefaced smile. “Sorry, boss.”

“Maybe you’ve got something.”

“Will you think about it?”

“Yes, Betty.”

“Don’t take too long.”

“Mommie, it’s
my
turn with the shovel,” Dickie said.

“Don’t bend it this time,” she said, giving it to him, standing up, dusting the sand from her hands. Sally peered down into the hole as her brother dug. Soiled water was seeping into the bottom of the hole. They went up to the camp and Craig helped her set out the lunch. Gold fried chicken, potato salad, pickles, cold ham and tongue, rye bread, and a thermos jug of lemonade. Craig had to pretend to be hungry. When he was finished the food was leaden in his stomach. After the lunch Betty put the kids to bed for a nap.

She sat out on the porch with him and then said she was sleepy and went into the living room to nap on the couch. The couch was against the wall just under the two open windows that opened onto the small screened porch. He heard the rippling clatter of cheap Venetian blinds as she darkened the room, heard the creak of springs a few feet from him, heard her sleepy sigh. He sat and looked out at the lake. He sensed that she had told him true things, and that he should be disturbed. It made him uneasy, but it was much simpler to try not to think of the implications of what she had said. It was simpler
to sit and feel remote from all of it, unconcerned and unaffected.

“Craig?” Her voice was low.

“Yes?”

“I shouldn’t talk to you the way I did.”

“Don’t let it worry you.”

Then, after a long pause, “Craig?”

“Yes, Betty.”

“Could you come inside a minute?”

He went inside, walked over and stood beside the couch looking down at her. She turned her head away and said, “I talk too much.”

“No, you don’t,” he said, feeling awkward with her.

“It’s all I’ve got. You can’t build a life around kids. Mother whines every waking moment. Do you understand?”

As he started to speak she reached out and caught his wrist and tugged strongly, pulling him off balance. He managed to turn and sit rather heavily on the edge of the couch, his hip near her waist. The dim light had softened her face. She looked almost pretty. She was flushed and breathing rapidly. She kept hold of his wrist, and her fingers were cold with her nervousness.

“I’ve got so damn little,” she whispered. “The kids won’t stir for another hour.”

He had a sudden strong feeling of empathy for her. He sensed all the strong and unrequited needs of the sturdy body, the endless hours in a lonely bed, the imaginings and the torments that had grown so strong that she could take this unthinking gamble.

“It—it wouldn’t solve anything,” he said.

“I know that. I don’t want to help anything, or solve anything. I just want— Oh God, I don’t know what I want.” She turned her face away from him again and released his wrist and began to cry almost without a sound.

“I’m such a damn fool,” she said.

“No, you’re not.”

“Just stop being so damn reasonable, please. Stop being so charitable and so patient and kindly go the hell out of here and leave me alone! Just go away. I’m a spectacle. I buy a new bathing suit and offer my all to my employer. How cheap and trite can you get? I just want somebody to look at me the way—a man looks at a
woman. I never thought I’d get this—hard up. So get out. Go walk on the beach. Go look at the pretty little things on their water skis.”

He left without a word, and as he left the porch he heard her begin to sob. He walked on the nearly empty beach. He woke her at three. She was subdued, still-faced. She woke the children. They had another swim. He finished the last can of beer. They left at five-thirty, turned in the key and he bought them a meal at a Howard Johnson’s just outside Stoddard. He dropped them off at her house at seven thirty. Betty thanked him a little too politely, never quite looking directly at him.

As he drove home he sensed that her overt invitation had destroyed any future chance of working together in harmony. She would remember it as rejection and humiliation. Yet had he taken her there on the battered couch, twenty feet from her sleeping children, their future relationship would have been just as impossible. He wished she had not created such an insoluble situation. He could think of no action he could have taken, of nothing he could have said which could have repaired it after that initial frantic tug at his wrist that had pulled him down to her. It was forever impossible from that moment on.

The city was heavy with a sick heat. He went home. He stripped and showered and stretched out on top of the bed. When he awakened it was ten o’clock and he had a dull headache and his mouth was sour. He had the feeling that he had dreamed of horrors, but he could remember no fragment of a dream. He was sticky with sweat, so he showered again and thought of trying to go back to sleep. Instead he dressed and wandered through the empty house for a time, and then went out and began to drive aimlessly.

And, after a time, he found himself driving up the winding roads of River Wood. He had the feeling that he was searching for something without quite knowing what it was. There were lights in the Jardine house, and so he turned into the drive and went up to the door.

Irene came to the door and opened the screen and said, “Come in, Craig. Al should be back soon. Isn’t it horrible?”

He walked in. She looked as though she had been crying. “What’s horrible?”

“Haven’t you heard about Anita Osborne?”

“What happened?”

“You know where everything is, Craig. Fix yourself a drink and bring it out on the terrace and I’ll tell you about it. Oh, and would you make me a gin and tonic, please. A tall one.”

He made her drink, and then decided on a Scotch and soda for himself. He looked down at his hand holding the bottle as he poured the Scotch. It was like watching someone else pour. It was like the night of the party, yet different in that the hand did not seem to belong to him. Neither the hand nor the volition. He poured the tall glass half full. After he added ice and soda, it looked much too dark. He wished he had selected an opaque glass. He picked it up quickly and drank a full half of it, drank steadily until his throat closed and he gagged. He added soda again. The drink was sufficiently pale. He carried the two glasses out onto the terrace and handed Irene hers. She was in a chaise longue, ankles crossed. He sat in the safari chair near the foot of the chaise longue.

It was evident that Irene was pleased to find someone who had not known about Anita. Ralph Bench had found her when he stopped by to take her to church. When there was no answer he became worried and forced his way in. She was nude in the tub, and the medical examiner established the time of death at about three in the morning, and established that she had been intoxicated at the time she had made the deep cut across the inside of her arm at the elbow. Her new denture was to have been ready the middle of next week.

Irene told the story well. She was a plain-looking woman with a pleasant expression, an animated face, cropped graying hair and a slim figure. They had all liked Anita. They had all felt sorry for her in her desperation. Craig made the proper sounds of surprise and distress, but he could feel nothing. It was like something you read in a paper about a tragedy that happened a long way away to someone you had never known. He felt as if he had somehow lost his ability to react, to feel deeply about anything or anyone.

“I’ve been sitting out here thinking black thoughts,” she said.

“How so?”

“You were very naughty the other night, Craig. I was very displeased with you. It wasn’t at all like you, not at all.”

He shrugged. “The curse of alcohol.”

The insecticide lamp made a yellow glow against her face. She looked at him somberly. “More than that, I think. Something has gone wrong with all of us, Craig. I’m not trying to excuse you. Something is changing the world. Ten years ago it wasn’t like this. Oh, there would be some free-hand necking in the kitchen and out on the eighteenth fairway, but it was shallow. It was foolish, and there were spats, but it wasn’t destructive, really. Somebody would pass out. We’d have our little scandals to talk about. We knew who was living beyond their means, and we knew whose kids got expelled from school. And we were shocked. We went around deploring things, and it gave us something to talk about.”

“Isn’t it still the same?”

“No, Craig. No, now things are colder and more cruel and more vicious. There isn’t any unity. I mean people aren’t living and hoping for the same things. Now it’s all keyed to one idea. I’ve got to get mine before the roof falls in. People want sensation. They want money only because then they can buy more expensive sensations. I guess we’re upper-middle-class. Before I go any further, I’ve got to give Al a credit line. We’ve talked about this. Al says that if you take a society and hang a cobalt bomb overhead and set up a tax structure that makes it impossible for them to accumulate anything, and then promise them that no matter what happens, they’ll never actually starve or lack shelter or medical care, then you’ve got them in a real box. People seem to have—less dignity as human beings. I used to love to give parties. Now they scare me a little. Marriages go boom in front of your eyes. And maybe Anita started committing suicide right here the other night. And you going off with that Westerling person. It isn’t like it used to be. This is getting too serious, Craig. Get yourself another. Your glass is empty.”

“You ready?”

“Not yet, thanks.”

When he came back she said, “Jeanie was over this afternoon as soon as she heard about Anita.”

“What are the arrangements about Anita?” he said quickly.

“Funeral Tuesday. And Al is terribly afraid Anita never changed the will she made out when she was still married to Tom. So he’ll not only get off the alimony hook, he’ll get the house and everything. He’ll be coming back here with that horrid, mercenary little pig he married, and I could gag when I think of her getting Anita’s lovely emerald. First the little tramp got Tom, and then she got the marriage certificate, and now she gets everything else. It’s too damn bad she can’t take Anita’s head to a taxidermist. She could have it mounted over her dressing table. I must be getting tight. That’s a truly macabre idea. I guess I lose my sense of proportion when I think of all the sexy little harpies of this world lying in wait for good husbands to reach the restless years.”

“The restless years?” he said.