Tales for a Stormy Night (26 page)

“Damn it,” Mike kept saying, “this never happens to me.”

“It’s all right,” Amy said over and over again, although well aware he had used the present tense.

Later, watching him stoop to see himself in her dressing-table mirror while he knotted his tie, she said, “Bed isn’t everything.”

“That’s right.”

“But it’s a lot,” she said and threw off the blankets.

By the time she finished in the bathroom, he had gone back to the living room where he stood before the fire and stared into it. A fresh log was catching on, the flames like little tongues darting up the sides. He had not brought the martini pitcher from the kitchen.

“You can’t go home again,” she said.

“I guess not.” He could at least have said that it was fun trying. But what he said was, “Amy, let’s not spoil a beautiful memory.”

“Oh, boy. I don’t believe you said it. Not Mike Trilling.”

“All right. ‘You can’t go home again’ wasn’t exactly original either. We aren’t going to make it, Amy, so why don’t I just take off before we start bickering again? No recriminations, no goodbyes, no tears.”

Her throat tight as a corked bottle, she went up the stairs and got his coat and overnight bag.

On the porch they did not even shake hands—a turn and a quickly averted glance lest their eyes get caught, and a little wave before he opened the car door. When he was gone, she remembered the wine. It was as well she had forgotten it. A “thank you” for anything would have humiliated them both.

Returning to the house she felt as sober as the moon and as lonely. There was a whispery sound to the fire, and her aunt’s Seth Thomas floor clock ticked with the slow heavy rhythm of a tired heart. Most things break: the phrase from somewhere she could not remember kept running through her mind. The old clock rasped and struck once. Hard though it was to believe, the hour was only half-past eight.

She called Virginia.

Her friend took her time picking up the phone. “I wasn’t going to answer. I thought it might be Allan. Did he call me there?”

“Not so far, dear. Ginny, you could make the nine-thirty bus and come on out. The story isn’t ready yet. I always start too soon. I’m botching it terribly.”

“Thank you, but I don’t think I will, Amy. I want to stay home by myself now where I can think things out comfortably. I’m a mess, but since I know it, I ought to be able to do something about it.”

“You sound awfully down. Do come and see me.”

“Actually, I’m up. Have a nice weekend, Amy.”

Have a nice weekend: that was the
coup de grace
. Amy went to the kitchen and got out the martini jug. She closed the refrigerator door on an eight-dollar steak. The cat, her paws tucked out of sight where she sat on the table, opened her eyes and then closed them again at once.

Amy returned to the living room by way of the dining-room door. As she entered, she discovered a man also coming into the room, he by the door to the vestibule. She had not locked up after Mike’s departure.

“Hello. I did knock,” he said, “but not very loudly. I thought I’d surprise you.”

“You have, and now that I’m surprised, get the hell out of here before I call my husband.”

“Funny. Ginny didn’t tell me about him. In fact, she said you didn’t want one.”

“You’re Allan.”

He had stopped. They both had, in their tracks, on seeing one another. They now moved tentatively forward. He was handsome in an odd way: his quick smile and his eyes did not seem to go together. The eyes, she would have sworn, took in everything in the room while not seeming to look directly at anything, even at her when they came face to face.

“Yes, I’m Allan. So Ginny’s told you about me? I’m surprised, though come to think of it, I shouldn’t be. She’s told me a lot about you, too. Where is she?”

Damn Ginny. “She’s gone for a walk.” She regretted at once having said that. Now it was reasonable for him to expect to wait for her return. “Don’t you think, Mr.—” She stopped and waited.

“Just Allan,” he said, which she did not like either, the familiarity of it. No. The anonymity: it was more like that.

“Mr. Allan, don’t you think if Ginny wanted to see you, she would have arranged it?”

“It takes two to make an arrangement, Amy.” His eyes, not really on hers anyway, slipped away to the glass where Mike had left it. Her glass was on the side table near which she stood, the martini pitcher in her hand. He might well have arrived in time to have seen Mike leave.

He then said, “Should I confess something to you, Miss Amy—I guess that’s what you’d like me to call you, but it certainly rings strange against the picture Ginny gave me of you—let me tell you the reason I crashed this party. I wanted to see the cottage, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever get an invitation, leaving it to Ginny. It’s pre-Revolutionary, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you need an architect?”

That disarmed her—he was a man with humor at least. “Will you have a drink?” She swirled the contents of the pitcher. “A martini?”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll get a glass.”

A few steps took him to the table where Mike’s glass sat “If this was Ginny’s glass, I don’t mind using it.”

No more lies. She hardly knew now which were hers and which were Ginny’s. “It wasn’t Ginny’s glass,” she said.

He brought it to her anyway. “Whose ever it was, it won’t poison me.”

All the same, those eyes that just missed hers saw everything that passed through her mind. She wanted to escape them, however briefly, in the time it would take to get a glass from the other room. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “Sit down, Allan. That chair is better for your long legs than this one.”

His movements were such that she thought him about to take the far chair as she had suggested, but she had no more than stepped into the dining room than he was behind her.

“What a marvelous old room!”

Of all six rooms this was the plainest, with nothing to recommend it except the view of the garden and that was not available at night. One end of it had been chopped off in the nineteen-twenties to provide space for a bathroom. She took a glass from the cupboard.

“May I see the kitchen?” he asked, throwing her a quick, persuasive smile.

“Why not?” This time she stepped aside and let him go on by himself. The kitchen was straight ahead, not to be missed. He had an athlete’s build as well as one’s lightness of step, she observed as he passed her.

“Puss, puss, puss,” he said, seeing the cat. She came wide-awake, stood up, and preened herself for him.

Amy kept trying to tell herself that it was she who was behaving oddly, letting her imagination run wild. She tried to think what he and Ginny would be like together. They were similar in a way she could not put her finger on. Then she had it: Ginny never seemed quite able to hit the nail on the head. God knows, he was direct enough, but his eyes slipped past what he was presumably looking at.

Well, he had made it to the kitchen and if there was something there he wanted—a knife or a hammer—there was no preventing his getting it. She turned into the vestibule, that entrance to it opposite the bathroom, with the purpose of making sure the shotgun was in its place alongside the porch door, more or less concealed by her old Burberry coat and the umbrella stand. She could not see it where she stood, but that did not mean it was not there. For just an instant she thought of making a dash to the front door.

“Amy?”

They very nearly collided, him coming in as she turned back.

“Is the kitchen fireplace a replica of the old one?”

“Probably.”

“Afterwards I’ll show you where I think the old one was.” He caught her hand as though he were an old friend and led her back to the living room. When she tried to remove her hand he gave it a little squeeze before letting go.

She poured the drinks shakily. “I should have got more ice.”

“Are you afraid of me?”

“Certainly not,” she said.

“I’m harmless enough. You’d have to know that for a fact from Ginny’s having anything to do with me.”

She laughed, thinking how obviously so that was. If she knew Ginny. Sometimes she felt that she knew Ginny so well she could not possibly know her at all. Maybe there were two Ginnies. “Cheers.”

The drink was strong enough, but it was going tepid.

“Would you allow me to get more ice and give these another stir?” he asked.

“I would allow it.” She poked up the embers under the half-burned log. The sparks exploded and vanished. Ginny ought to have come even if she didn’t believe the story about the story. It was funny how sure she had been that Allan was imaginary. Nor could she remember anything Ginny had ever told her about him. Had she told her anything? Or had Amy simply turned it off, doubting that there was a real live Allan?

He returned with the pitcher and the glasses, having taken them also to the kitchen. They now were white with frost. He poured the drinks, touched her glass with his, and said, “What else would you allow?”

Harmless? She said, trying to strike a pose of propriety without overdoing it: “I’d allow as how—I wouldn’t allow much.”

He shrugged. “No offense.”

“None taken.”

He started to shuffle across to the chair she had appointed his, then turned back. “What’s much?” Having again amused her, he bent down and kissed her as she was reasonably sure he had never kissed Ginny. “Perfectly harmless,” he said and trotted over to the chair while neatly balancing the glass so that he did not spill a drop. “Does she often take long walks at this time of night?”

“As a matter of fact she does.”

“And if I’m not mistaken, we’re at the full moon.” He helped make the lie more credible. Knowingly? “Has Ginny talked about me?”

“Well now,” Amy said, avoiding a direct answer, “I almost suggested that she bring you out for the weekend.”

“How intuitive of me then to be here.”

“I suppose Ginny has given you a complete dossier on me?”

“We do talk a lot,” he said in a sly, wistful, almost hopeless way that again amused her. “Have you anything to suggest I do about it?”

She knew exactly what he meant. “A marriage proposal?”

“That’s a bit drastic.”

“It sounds archaic when you set it off and listen to it by itself—a marriage proposal.”

“Or the title to a poem by Amy Lowell,” he said. “You weren’t by any chance named after her?”

“Good God, no.”

“She did like a good cigar, didn’t she?” he said, deadpan.

Amy sipped her drink and gave a fleeting thought to Mike, to the steak in the refrigerator, to the Haut Brion ’61. And to the rumpled bed in the room back of the fireplace.

He put his glass on the table and got up with a sudden show of exuberance. “Shall I bring in more wood? I saw the pile of it outside.”

“Not yet.” Amy put the one log left in the basket onto the fire. While she swept in the bits of bark and ash, he came and stood beside her, bent, studying the fire, but stealing glimpses of her face. He touched his fingers lightly to a wisp of hair that had escaped one of the braids she wore in a circle round her head. “Your hair must be very long and beautiful.”

“I’ve been told so.”

“Ginny said it was.”

“I wasn’t thinking of Ginny.”

“I wasn’t either. Except in the way you hang onto somebody in the dark.”

When they had both straightened up, he waited for her to face him, and then he lifted her chin, touching it only with the backs of his fingers as though to take hold of it might seem too bold. He kissed her. It was a long kiss which, nonetheless, didn’t seem to be going anywhere until she herself thrust meaning into it. She had not intended to, but then the situation was not one open to precise calculations. He tasted of licorice as well as gin.

He drew back and looked at her. At that proximity his eyes did not seem to have the disconcerting vagary. He was, despite these little overtures, agonizingly shy: the realization came in a flash. Someone had prescribed—possibly a psychiatrist—certain boldnesses by which he might overcome the affliction.
Miss
Amy: that was closer to his true self.

He said, averting his eyes once more, “Ginny said we’d like one another…even though you don’t like men.”

“What?”

“She thinks you don’t care much for men.”

“What kind of woman does she think I am then? The kind who gets paid?”

Color rushed to his face. He backed off and turned, starting back to his chair in that shuffling way—a clown’s way, really, the “don’t look at me but at what I’m doing” routine which reinforced her belief in his shyness.

“I don’t want another drink,” she said, “but if you do, help yourself. I say what’s on my mind, Allan. People who know me get used to it. By the sound of things, Ginny speaks hers too on occasion. I’d never got that picture of her.”

“I shouldn’t have blabbed that.”

“No, you shouldn’t.” She started from the room, thinking: God save me from middle-aged adolescents.

“Where are you going?”

“To the bathroom for now. Then I’ll decide where else.”

She had not reached the door when he caught her from behind and lifted her from her feet, holding her close against him, her arms pinned to her sides. He kissed the back of her neck and then with his teeth he removed, one by one, her plastic hairpins and let them drop to the floor. “Please don’t be so fierce,” he said, his mouth at her ear. She felt the dart of his tongue there, but so tentative, as though he were following a book of instructions.

“Put me down. Your belt buckle’s hurting me.”

Her feet on the floor, she faced him. “I don’t have to be fierce at all,” she said and loosened the braids, after which she shook out that abundance of rich brown hair.

He ran his tongue round his lips. “It’s just too bad that Ginny’s going to be walking in.”

“She’s not.”

“She’s not?” he repeated. Something changed in his face, which was certainly natural with that bit of news. “I don’t believe you,” he said, the smile coming and going.

She motioned to him with one finger as much as to say, wait, and going to the phone, she dialed Virginia’s number. With each ring Amy felt less sure of herself, less sure of Ginny. Then, after the fourth ring, came the gentle slow-voiced, “Hello.”