Marijuana Girl (7 page)

Oh, well. You couldn't make yourself look ridiculous and stand when the only empty seat was the one next to her. Frank sat down. "Good morning, Mr. Burdette."

"Not mister--remember?"

"Frank!"

"Lunch with me today?"

7 ~ Conflict

Tony swung the car around the corner and braked to a stop on Randolph Road in front of Burdette's house. He turned to Joyce on the seat beside him. She was leaning forward, adjusting her hair against wind-damage with the aid of the rear-view mirror.

"I don't see what you want to come here for," he said. "And I don't see any reason for dragging me along. Why should the city editor of the paper invite a copy girl to his house? After all, they're older people."

"If you don't want to come," Joyce said between clenched teeth that held a bobby-pin, "nobody's twisting your arm."

That caught Tony enough off base so that he lied. "Of course I want to," he said. "I want to spend a little time with you now and then. After all, I've hardly seen you this week."

His real purpose in coming had been to dissuade her. But now he allowed her to urge him out of the car.

Joyce said, "How do I look?"

She was a little worried about this. Frank had asked her to come tonight specifically to meet his wife, and it was not exactly the kind of thing she could approach easily. It brought to mind, somehow, one of those rare times when her parents had been at home. Her mother and father had planned to take her to New York. Mr. Taylor had driven downtown alone in the morning, and had then come home to pick them up. Joyce came out to meet the car and said--for some reason she had, by now, forgotten--"Daddy, Mother's not coming. She said for us to go ahead." And they drove off together.

She could not understand why this recollection kept to mind as they approached the front door. Unless it was because Frank had invited her to go to New York with him--although it might be better if she didn't mention it tonight. Since then, she had only had that one lunch with him during the week.

As they mounted the steps, Tony suddenly took fright. "Look, why don't you just go in alone. I'll only be bored with old people like them. I'm going. You go ahead and stay here." He released her arm and turned to go back down.

Tony!" Joyce hissed. "Don't you dare. You come right back here."

She seized his elbow and pulled him along with her. Janice Burdette opened the door to the bell. She stood slender and blonde, with an alert look about her blue eyes, and a set of features to which animation and intelligence lent a beauty beyond features themselves. She said, "Hello, Joyce. You are Joyce, aren't you? Of course. Frank said you would be here this evening, and I'm afraid it's my fault that Junior isn't in bed yet Come on in, and I'll whisk him off to dreamland."

In the middle of the living room floor a small boy, a very small boy with his little finger deeply intruded into his mouth, eyed the newcomers with a critical expression. He was standing a little straddle-legged, and the trap door of his pajama dangled open. Janice caught him up in her arms.

"You just sit down here, and Frank'll be right in. Frank! Frank! Company! Would you like a drink? Of course you would. I'll have Frank make you one while I stuff the by-product into his bed." She fled from the room trailing a wake of friendliness just as Frank came in.

Frank studied Tony Thrine as he performed the ritual of drink-making and strove, simultaneously, to keep up a flow of light, meaningless conversation. This was, of course, the cure that he needed. Once it was done--once this evening was over--he would see Joyce in her true perspective and she would see him. That was why he had insisted she bring Tony. Generation would belong to generation. Age to Age. And this would clearly point up the difference.

He counted on Janice to fall in with his plan--perhaps not knowingly but still to fall in with it. Her maturity would fit together with his, like matched parts of a whole, while Tony and Joyce would naturally go together. And then he would be rid of his obsessive interest in this--this kid.

Tony was a good-looking boy. You had to give him that. His dark hair was unruly, but not untidy. And at first, what seemed an entirely disjointed array of arms and legs and trunk on the divan became, on closer observation, a figure of graceful, feline ease--of total relaxation that could, catlike, instantly spring to action.

Then the most appalling thought struck Frank. He wondered if Tony had--that is, had known Joyce intimately, as a lover. After all, they were the right age for it. Nineteen, Joyce was. How old was Tony? Frank asked him.

"Eighteen," Tony said. "I'm just a year older than Joyce. We have the same birthday."

It was like a stick of dynamite going off in his brain, and Frank almost spilled the brace of highballs he was carrying over to the pair on the couch. Seventeen! Holy cow! And here he had almost ... No. Hadn't thought of it for a second. Not a second. He rattled away furiously to conceal his shock. "You know, you two can get passes to anything you like. Movies. Even the major league ball games. After all, Joy--ce is a full-fledged newspaperwoman now." And then, "Where are you going to college, Tony?" Then, "I wanted to go to Harvard, too, when I was a kid." When I was a kid! Holy jumping Jesus! Look, Ma, I'm spinning.

The pressure had eased a little when Janice came back downstairs. She led the talk into feminine channels: clothes, travel, her trip to Maine on which she would leave tomorrow, how very easy was knitting once you got down to it, the latest rumor from Hollywood. It was amazing how easily Joyce and Janice got together. And yet, Frank thought he detected a certain tightness, as in the feeling-out thrusts of fencers, or the cautious sniffing of two suspicious dogs. But Janice was good. Really good. She could get along with anybody.

Like with Jerry. He remembered the first time Janice had met Jerry. He had always known Jerry--before high school, even. But Janice had never met a Negro socially before, and he could imagine her New England background really getting in the way the first time. But she had fallen right in the groove. Not a word about the tea, even. You expected these upcountry girls from Maine and places like that to be real prudish. But once he and Jerry had explained about it, she'd fallen right in. Once she got it straight that it wasn't even as bad for you as liquor--well, now she was a regular old viper, like anybody else. That was the difference between Janice and other girls ...

Other girls? Hadn't Joyce taken it the same way. But Joyce was only a kid and he was thirty-one--and what the hell was he thinking about!

Janice said, "How do you feel about working on newspapers? Frank says you worked for the Courier last summer too, so I guess you must have made up your mind by now. Do you think you want to make a career of it?"

"I've been thinking about it," she said. "I guess I'm still a little young to get steamed up about it, but I'd like to work on newspapers for a while and then somehow get on a big magazine like Seventeen or Harper's Bazaar."

"I used to work for the Bazaar," Janice said. "I was an editorial assistant there. That's how I met Frank. We were both assigned to cover some demonstration of a new laundry machine. They always serve drinks at these press previews, and we both got a little tight and then he insisted on dragging me to some place in Harlem where he knew all the jazz musicians ..."

Good old Janice, Frank thought. Consciously or unconsciously. She knew what she had to do, and was doing it.

He tried to get some kind of conversation going with Tony, but soon gave up. There was such an undercurrent of hostility, at least on Tony's part, that nothing could get started.

Then he heard Janice beginning something else, and a sensation of apprehension threaded up into his mind.

"Frank has covered some pretty big stories. Once he even made a hero of himself. The firemen--this was in Brooklyn--had been working on a tenement blaze and all the reporters--they get fire-line cards so they can get close enough to see and take pictures--the reporters were pretty close up to the building. A wall was about to come down, and everyone was being ordered to stand back, when Frank saw this child standing in the doorway of the wall that was going to crash. He yelled, 'C'mere, kid,' and started to run toward the child, but the kid was too frightened to do anything, and he had to go all the way up under that dangerous wall and grab the kid out of the doorway and start running back. He had just gotten out of the danger zone when the wall crashed down. He wouldn't write the story about himself--but the other reporters did, and it was in all the papers. But let me tell you something--That was the phoniest false modesty I ever saw, because he bragged to me about it for a week afterward ..."

"I did not," Frank said. And everybody laughed. There was a sudden easing of the tension. Then Janice said, "Frank, why don't you show Joyce some of those stories. You've got them all in the scrapbooks upstairs, and I'll take Tony out in the garden. It's just beginning to be nice, Tony. I made Frank put the furniture out there while I was away, and you'll find it lovely and cool. I never saw a June like this. Why there are already fireflies in the yard, but no mosquitoes yet ..."

This was the apprehension. This was what Frank had been fearing. He said, "No, Janice. She doesn't want to see those scrapbooks."

"Oh, but I do, Fra--M--Frank."

"Oh, come off it, now," Janice said. "Don't be such a phoney. Everybody knows you're dying to show them."

"I'd like to see them, too." Tony said--for obvious reasons.

"No you don't, young man," Janice said. "Who's going to keep me company in the yard? Besides, they wouldn't mean anything to non-newspaper people. You come along with me."

It was clear, Frank thought, how Janice's mind was working. She had sensed the trouble, taken steps to treat it, and now wanted them to be together so that the last vestiges could be swept away. But she was hurrying things too much. He didn't want to be alone with Joyce. Just didn't want to be alone with her yet. But what could he do now?

"All right. Joyce, come upstairs with me so I can show you what a big shot I am."

Tony and Janice carried their drinks out through the dining room and kitchen into the back yard. Frank watched Joyce climbing the stairs ahead of him. She caught the full skirt of her light dress high on one thigh so that it would not interfere with her feet. The gesture charmingly shaped her figure under the light fabric.

"The books are in the bedroom--to the left." he said. His throat felt tight and dry. His voice came almost as a whisper. "Careful. Don't wake Junior."

In the bedroom she sat down on the spread, leaning back on her arms. Her skirt spread out fanwise on the tufted chenille. Her attitude emphasized the freshness of her youth.

He thought: Cut it out, Frank! Stop it! Get control of yourself, man.

Through the open, screened window overlooking the yard and the garden came the murmur of voices, Janice's and Tony's, blended with the tinkle of the little concrete fountain full of goldfish that Frank had, himself, installed last fall.

There was a vanity, on one side of the room, cluttered with the miscellaneous appurtenances of feminine charm: bottles of cream, ointments, nail polish; a jar full of bobby-pins; brushes, combs, a silver-backed mirror engraved with the initials JB; there were nail-buffers, emery boards, scissors, a single fastener from a garter belt, eye-shadow boxes, tweezers, a compact and hosts of other items.

Facing the vanity, but across the room, stood a bureau, with the male equivalents of these beauty aids--lotions, hair tonic, after-shave talc--the array perhaps a little neater because Janice was committed to restoring order to whatever chaos Frank might create, but felt no such responsibility toward her own things.

And against the wall, between the two windows that looked out on the back yard, hunched a desk--a very wreck of a desk, teetering on spindling legs of oak which supported a bookshelf before reaching up to maintain the inclined face of the drop-leaf and the frame. The shelf was loaded down with scrapbooks.

Tensely, insistently, Frank bent down and picked up three, bringing them back to where Joyce was seated on the bed. He seated himself next to her and opened one book across their two laps.

His voice trembling, his grip on himself slipping, he tried to tell her the story behind each yellowed clipping.

Suddenly Joyce turned to him, looking up at him with her great somber eyes. "Frank," she whispered, the faint sound of her voice merging with those from the window. "Frank, do you love me?"

He bent, quickly, and kissed her lightly on the forehead, feeling his whole body trembling. But he said, "Of course I do, honey. Now, this story began when ..."

"No, Frank. I mean, really."

His mind cast about frantically, but all control was gone now. There was nothing to seize upon which could protect him from his own burning hunger. The books fell to the floor as he caught her to him and felt the response of her warm, excited lips. She trembled against him, and her fingers dug deep into the flesh of his back.

Something, very like fire, seemed to be consuming them ...

8 ~ Substitution

For Joyce the romance with Frank had always the added poignancy of impending tragedy.

The first blow fell that same night--the night she shared ecstasy with Frank, while Frank's wife and Tony talked together in the garden below.

The rest of the evening had gone off, somehow, in a state of continuing tension. Tony was hurt and angry because Joyce had deserted him. Frank was tormented by his own guilt--faced with the horrifying realization that he had against his will succumbed to a girl only a little more than half his age. Janice, her plans all made to depart for Maine with the baby the following morning, was openly bewildered at the tensions of the others, and still more bewildered by a psychic unease, that told her something had gone dreadfully wrong.

But the real blow came later, when Tony and Joyce had muttered "good nights" and "thank yous" to Frank and Janice in the doorway of the little house on Randolph Road, and had gone out to the parked car at the curb.