End of the Tiger (13 page)

She recovered and was shy. Her eyes looked torn, and she took small nibbles of her drink.

“Self-pity in the third degree,” she said. “Another of my noble traits.”

“There’s more in the inventory. Pride, spirit, decency, sensitivity.”

She smiled at him. “I’ll do what has to be done, sir. You don’t have to buy me with flattery. But it’s the mechanics of it I don’t quite see. Isn’t it going to look sort of strange and hollow to her, no matter how I do it?”

“It makes me feel sick, Tina, to even ask you to do it. But you have to know more about the marriage. You’ve got the right to know more. The kind of a job I have, there has to be trust. So many trips, so many late nights. A woman should feel loved and secure. Maybe Fran needs that security more than most. I don’t know. Maybe because of her folks splitting up when she was small. God knows I haven’t been a rovin’ man. I don’t need that kind of trouble. You and I, we’ve been as close as I want to come. And you see, Tina, I haven’t reacted the way I should because I
have
been conscious of this being a
kind
of infidelity. Do you understand?”

“Of course.”

“We’d been at the club, and in the middle of the evening she turned all strange and remote, and I didn’t know what was up. But I did feel guilt—on account of you—even though I knew we were going to stay, what would you call it, pristine. We went home early. She’d danced with Hal Ward. He was tight. He was trying to
make a pass. So he figured, I guess, to smooth the way by giving her the old get-even-with-Johnny motivation.”

“Hal doesn’t know a damned thing about us!”

“That’s what I would have said, but apparently he saw us somewhere and he couldn’t figure any other reason for us being there, and maybe we looked furtive or something. We didn’t see him, but he saw us.”

“He’s a wretched man!”

“At least he didn’t hand her your name. Maybe he was showing restraint. Or maybe he didn’t recognize you—just saw me with a female who wasn’t Fran.”

“With a friend like Hal, who needs enemies?”

“I know. And when we got home early from the club, it could have been settled very quickly and easily. But as soon as I found out what it was all about, I became full of indignation and outrage. They say you get the biggest reaction from an unjust accusation. I’d say the reaction is bigger when there is just a tiny germ of truth in the accusation, just a little stink of guilt. So instead of trying to help her, I got proud as all hell. I wouldn’t even discuss it. I wouldn’t deny it or confess it, so naturally she took my attitude as a confession. The best thing I could have done would have been laugh. But that’s the sort of thing you remember too late. After a week, when I finally woke up and saw what I was doing to her because I happened to feel abused, I made the complete denial I should have made in the first place.”

“A little too late.”

“Yes, indeed. And I could hear myself hitting false notes—because of the guilt and because it was a little too late. My God, I even sounded as if I were the chicken husband making the usual trite lie. She pretended to accept it. Maybe she believes me with ninety percent of her, but the other ten is dubious, and it’s a little wedge sticking into a sort of dangerous potential fracture-line in our marriage. Every trip, every night I have to stay in the city is like giving that wedge a little tap. Staying in town tonight is another little tap. No matter what you think of her, she’s never really had enough confidence.”

“But … what if I sound as hollow as you did? I’ve got this guilt-for-no-good-reason, too, you know. And won’t
I just be sort of a … solid fact instead of a vague suspicion?”

“With a sixth sense or something she’s narrowed it down to you anyway.”

“What? How do you know?”

“The name came up during the last quarrel. When you were assigned to the account, I used to mention you. I’ve always talked shop at home. She’s always been interested. For the last couple of months I’ve still talked shop, but I never mentioned your name. That was pretty stupid, I know. But again it was the product of guilt, I guess, and it was subconscious.”

“Oh boy.”

“Oh boy, indeed.”

“There’s that scene in the movies where the other woman calls on the wife and begs her to let him go. And then there’s the scene where the wife calls on the other woman and tells her to get out of Walter’s life. But how do you do this scene? I’ve never seen it played.”

“I don’t know how you can do it. But, you see, I know both of you. I know you both well enough to know you’ll like each other.”

“She’ll adore me!”

“You’ll have to say you’re doing it without my knowledge. You’ll have to say that I made some bitter and cryptic remark to you and you pried the rest of the story out of me. You’ll have to tell her that you’ve been attracted to me.”

“That’s no lie, darling.”

“But I ignored all the openings, and you finally decided I was that rarity in our business, the faithful husband. In fact, you can let her know I have a considerable reputation for same.”

“It wouldn’t have been a serious thing with me otherwise, Johnny.”

“And you can say I’m not exactly hitting the ball squarely around the shop lately.”

“But you are.”

“Sure, but how well will I scramble if the marriage keeps getting a little more sour? I love her, Tina. And for the first time I can’t seem to really communicate with her. Suspicion is a sick, terrible thing.”

“So I tell her that because I
do
sort of love you, even though it’s a dead-end street for me, I had to bury my pride and come talk to her.”

“I can’t tell you how much it will mean to me. To both of us. But it’s … such a ghastly thing to ask of you, Tina.”

She touched his hand quickly. “Idiot! I’d roll from here to Canarsie for you through broken bottles. And it’ll make me feel better about myself. Create a little self-respect for a change.”

“The man who does get you is going to be very very lucky, Tina.”

“Put that in writing so I can show it to him—if I ever find him. Did you say next Sunday?”

“It would be a good time. I’ll be in Chicago all next week. You might phone her on Saturday and set it up.”

“I can borrow Meg’s little car and drive up there. I’ve wondered what your house is like. I have a crazy feeling, you know? I have the feeling she and I are going to become friends.”

“I hope it can happen. You’ll like her.”

“I sense that, damn it. Johnny, I better stagger out into a cab. I’ve had it—completely.”

“I’ll take you back.”

She looked rueful. “Just put me into a cab, dear. It would be bad timing right now to get the game to go along with the name, wouldn’t it? Tonight I’d be too tired to even drag my feet. Don’t look so alarmed, dear. It’s just a lousy joke.”

When he opened the taxi door for her, she turned and touched her lips to his cheek. “Good night, Johnny. You’re the nice one who got away.”

The misty rain had stopped, and the city night was humid. He walked seven blocks uptown and two and a half blocks east.

While he walked he managed to keep his mind emptied of all inward things, staring attentively at the objects and persons in his line of vision, identifying them the way a child finds goats and kings in a puzzle maze. But as the miniature elevator carried him slowly aloft, he could hear the bump of his heart amid a drone of silence, and fancied himself in a magical machine that
dwindled him as it lifted him upward. Feeling dwarfed and vile, he looked at himself in an oval mirror and grinned like a yawning dog.

Sometimes he imagined the key would not fit, and measured his relief against his terror, marveling at how precisely they cancelled each other. But it fit, and the same light was on, and in another room a pink shade backlighted the pillowed tangle of blonde. She looked at him, and he turned away and went to make a drink. He heard her behind him, a scented whisper, turned into her look of drowse, then fed on the lips’ sweetness until the drink, unheeded, tilted icy onto the back of his hand—saw a single eye then, close, wide, vast, focused beyond him.

She rolled her forehead against his jaw and said, “It went well?”

“She’ll go see Fran on Sunday.”

“We’ll cheer them on from Chicago. Poor little cat’s paw.”

“Who is the cat’s paw?”

She backed away, exaggerating demureness. “It’s such a dear role. Maybe we all take turns.”

She moved from shadow through the light and back into shadow toward the doorway. He braced himself with schoolyard defiance and said, “I don’t like you, Jemmy. You know that. I don’t like you.”

She turned in the pink doorway glow. “What has that got to do with anything?” There was a mild patience in her tone, as if he had violated a protocol understood by everyone. And then she was gone into the pink light.

He turned and looked out the window. The glass was a cylinder of stone in his hand, too heavy to bring to his lips. He wondered if the window faced north.

He wished, by an effort of will, he could turn himself to stone and remain there, facing in an uncalculated direction so that when the city ended, he would fall into the rubble, an archeological curiosity.

But then it began once again for him, that force beyond shame, beyond guilt, beyond the small coins of appraisal—that timeless, merciless engine of his anticipation.

We had been driving through country baked hard by summer. At about three in the afternoon I stopped at an isolated gas station. We were tired, and the children had begun a peevish wrangling in the back seat. I thought a gas and Coke stop would freshen us up. Heat shimmered in the desert, and far stone hills looked cooler than they were.

The gas station was a cluttered place, with frayed and faded pennants, a souvenir stall bright with cheap dusty pottery, a fat owner who served us with condescending joviality. Cars thrust by at high speed, whipping up dust circles. I drank half my Coke and looked around for the children. They were sixty feet away, examining something in a cage.

I walked toward them, the sound of my approach lost in an oncoming roar of truck. I saw Janet cautiously extending her fingers toward the cage bars. An old fear came strongly into my mind, vivid and sickening. I pulled her back roughly and without warning. It hurt her a little and startled her a great deal. She began to cry. And so, of course, did Janice, her twin. Buddy, their younger brother, moved back with feigned indifference when I ordered them too harshly not to touch the cage.

The fat proprietor kept two narrow, furtive coyotes in a makeshift cage too small for them. There was a rank smell about them, and their cage needed cleaning. Though even at best they are not prepossessing beasts, there was something baffled and helpless about their tucked-in flanks and evasive pacing that was touching and sad. It was perhaps that flavor of bewilderment that made Janet wish to offer the passing comfort of a touch.

As I took the children back to the car Betty came from the women’s room behind the gas station. I sensed from the way she walked and the expression around her mouth that her fastidiousness had been offended by the facilities. And I knew also that this stopping place,
though at first agreeable to her, would become my fault—hence both reprehensible and punishable.

She looked at the twins and said in an edged way, “
Now
what?”

Janet, amid snufflings, said, “Daddy hurt my arm.” She said it with a faint odor of that special primness that signals a parent at fault.

“Really, Hal!” Betty said.

“I pulled her back before one of those coyotes took her fingers off.”

“Couldn’t you have just spoken to her?”

“Let’s go,” I said. I wanted to be away from there quickly. But I did not leave the memory behind. It came with me, undamaged by the years, vivid. It was a memory I had not examined for a long time. It was a memory that shamed me.

We drove along the burned road through the dry land. There was a quality of rigid silence in the way Betty sat beside me. The twins made damp muted noises. We had over two hundred miles to go.

“I’m sorry I hurt your arm, dear, but I was scared you’d be hurt by the coyote.”

“He wasn’t going to bite,” Janet said. “He didn’t like it in that cage.”

“When I was young,” I said, hunting carefully for the right words, “not much older than you are right now, I had a friend named Judy Hoover. She got too close to a cage where a bear was, and he reached out and hit her and killed her.”

The twins gasped, and Buddy lunged forward and asked with great eagerness, “Was there blood? Was there?”

“Why,” demanded Betty icily, “do you make up such ridiculous things to tell them? What do you expect to gain?”

I glanced at Betty. Her face was angry. “It happened,” I said. “It really happened.” I glanced at her again and saw a questioning uncertainty in her eyes.

“All right. It happened, Hal. That’s no reason for telling the children.”

“I was telling Janet so that she could understand why I was unintentionally rough.”

“You were rough, Hal, because you’re always irritated when we have to stop. Your idea of a trip is to keep traveling until everybody is a ragged ruin. You were rough because you were cross.”

“Was there any blood?” Buddy demanded.

“We are
not
going to talk about that ridiculous bear,” Betty said firmly. Buddy sat back where he belonged. Janice whispered something to Janet and the twins giggled.

I was content not to talk about it. I had never told Betty about it. I had never told anyone all of it.

It had happened when we had lived in West Hudson, the summer before I had gone away to school. We had moved to West Hudson when I was ten and in the fifth grade. Judy Hoover was a year younger and in the fourth grade. I cannot remember how I met her. She was on the fringe of my awareness and she moved gradually and steadily into focus. I remember that she was not a pretty child. She was brown and blond and skinny and active, very fleet of foot. In the dusk games of summer evenings she was very difficult to catch, and even more difficult to evade. She was constantly in motion. I cannot remember her ever being still. I used to help her with arithmetic and, later, plane geometry and algebra. She was bright in everything but math.