Three Short Novels (32 page)

When his wife returned, three days later, he came to Dolores's room for the first time. All was quiet at midnight, the other girls asleep. She switched on the light in her room before she dropped the Venetian blinds, and anyone glancing out a window across the street or up from the sidewalk could have seen him there in her room, and that possibility annoyed him. The girls had men of their own sometimes: the cocktail waitress had opened her door for a departing lover at five in the morning at the same moment Dolores had opened hers to go to the bathroom, and Janine on Saturday nights had her slight, sad-faced American lover. But the stories she had told him of the other girls and their lovers must have contributed to his discomfort. He said the place had a “transient atmosphere.” He made love to her quickly, smoked half a cigarette, and left. She did not see him for a week, and then one day as she was climbing the stairs after work she heard the phone ringing on the table in the hallway.

Within an hour he came by, and drove for another hour to Sonoma, over the bridge and north. They ate supper in a flashy restaurant that she knew was not the best in the town, and two blocks away they found a motel. Its green neon sign blinked on and off around the edges of the blind in the small dark room. He was more curious, more experimental than he had been in his own bed, and she felt that he was living a lascivious dream, materialized for him by
the cheap motel and the girl who complied with his dream. But on the long ride home through the stretch of darkness, he seemed not to remember or to be grateful for his dream come true. He talked about city politics, labor racketeers. She was afraid that they meant nothing to each other, after all. His talk, now, about events in which she did not figure, told her clearly that he did not require her in his life. The night she had gone up to his apartment, she had felt that she was entering some opulent state—his mistress, more beloved than his wife, set up in an apartment of her own and adorned by couturier dresses, by real jewels. The fact that the motel was not high class, that the room smelled of disinfectant, that silverfish raced over the bathroom tile, and that he talked to her now of things that cut all threads with the intimacy in the motel—these facts, she told herself, had no bearing on their future. She lifted his right hand from the steering wheel and kissed the back of it and between the fingers.

But three more weeks went by, and he did not suggest that she look for an apartment of her own, and he brought no gifts. Instead, he drove her habitually to a motel on the beach, south of the city. Up a short dirt road off the highway, a small white frame motel and a row of cabins stood isolated by the rocky cliffs and the sea and sky. They returned each time to the same cabin and plugged in the electric heater for warmth. The orange glow of the wires in the battered cylindrical heater filled the room with a dim, coppery light, and the sound of the sea struck a great echo, far out. Across the highway, a seed company's acres of flowers were blooming, and their fragrance was blown in through the cracks, permeating the cabin when the wind was still, and in those times of being with him there, she longed to be in love with him. Her resentment of him for bringing no gifts had to be banked down because if he suspected that she wanted more of him than himself making love to her, he might drop her. The loving was enough. All she needed she had in these nights in the sand-shifted shack.

Some nights the music from the jukebox in the motel bar blew down
past the row of cabins. A man's voice singing took her by surprise, and she lay afraid of intrusion, convinced the singer himself was coming down the path. Or the muted notes of a saxophone, heard above the subsiding sound of the waves, was the voice of a lover in another cabin, amplified by a mystical trick. The music was a reminder to her of the closeness of others at the bar who knew by the red car parked behind the cabin that a couple was inside. When a man and woman came along the row one night, the woman muffling a high laugh, it seemed to Dolores, lying on the rented bed in the dim, wire-lit room, that at last the curious were stealing down the path to peer in under the curtains.

“What you scared of?” he asked in her ear. “You close up like a little ol' morning glory when it isn't time yet.”

But the couple on the path had intruded, bringing with them her complaints against him. If she asked for gifts, it was only because she wanted them as evidence that she was more than a pretty waitress taken out to a shack on the beach. But if she asked, he might turn cold and cruel instantly, take his face from her face, his body from her body, and leave her alone and ashamed of her need for anything more than the few hours, the few nights with him.

“Come on, what you scared of? They don't rent the same cabin to two couples. They went in already.”

She closed her eyes against his impatient eyes that could not take a moment to wonder. She lifted her mouth to his as a way of asking him to stay with her, and she asked his forgiveness for her complaints by drawing from his mouth all his anger, every cruel word that he might say, and by being as he wanted her to be for the rest of the time; and when they lay apart, what she was asking for changed back again. If she brought him pleasure, wasn't it natural that he tell her so with gifts? It must be natural, so many women were given gifts by the men who loved them for the pleasure they gave. If she never complained, then she was cheap. She was nothing but a dumb waitress who went to bed with him for nothing.

“I guess you think I'm a fool,” she said.

“A fool?” He was already sitting with his back to her, rubbing the sole of his foot before he pulled on his sock.

“Because I come here for nothing.”

“What do you mean for nothing?” so swiftly she suspected his answer had been ready for weeks. “Don't you like it? You act like you like it.”

How would other women say,
that's not enough
? With what words, in what way? “That's not enough,” she said.

“I'm not man enough for you? What you want, some nature boy? Jack Biceps?”

“That's not what I mean.” Was he trying to cuff her away from her real meaning by pretending to be hurt by what she didn't mean? “What I mean is, you never bring me anything.” But, spoken at last, it wasn't what she meant, either.

“Like what? Like what?”

Her fear of being discarded by this man who was more to her now than any man had ever been, even more than Hal, took away her wishes, leaving her only a trace of a complaint. “Like little things.”

“What little things?”

“Like big things.”

“What then? Big things or little things? Make up your mind.” Though he continued with his dressing, his clothes appeared not to be his own. With distaste he examined his shirt as if suspecting someone of borrowing it and returning it unclean.

“It depends on how much you like me. If you like me a lot, they're little things.” She was shameless, forcing him to weigh and measure her value to him.

“Give me an example.”

“Like a place, like an apartment . . .”

“Anything else?”

“You shouldn't ask me to list them.”

“Why not? Don't you like to list them?”

“No.” She had made a mistake. She didn't need anything more from him, not anything more than her numb, kneaded mouth whose lipstick was gone, its color, chosen with care for its promise of love, now a barely present coloring over the rest of her face, not anything more than the clamoring of her body for him, waking her up in the night, back in her own room.

“Go on.”

“No.”

“You sorry you started it?”

She stuffed some ends of her hair into her mouth and began to cry, confused by her contradictory wishes.

“What's the crying for?” patting her stomach.

She twisted a strand of hair around her fingers, close to her face. “There was a man who killed himself over me,” she wept. “You think I'm nobody, but there was a man who fell in love with me.”

“No, hell, I don't think you're nobody,” patting. “What do you mean, he killed himself?”

“Just what I said.”

“All right, all right. But I'm a little deaf. I don't get it.”

“You want me to say it again?”

“If it doesn't hurt too much.”

“I said he killed himself.”

“How did that happen?”

“It happened, it happened.”

“Sure it did, sure it did. Just tell me how.”

“He was married, and he had a little boy,” covering her mouth with her hair.

“Yuh, go on,” patting.

“He knew we were going to be found out but he didn't care.”

“Yuh?”

“He didn't care.”

“Listen, sweetie, listen, doll,” he said. “You must have left something out.”

“What?”

“You tell
me
what. I don't want to hurt your tender feelings, but it doesn't seem like that's enough reason for a man to kill himself over.”

“You don't know the whole story!”

“That's exactly what I'm saying.”

“He was running for Congress,” she explained, with as much insulting, indignant enunciation as she could scare up for her small, broken voice, “and we were found out a few days before election day. What I'm saying is he didn't care about the election, I mean if he had to kill himself. What I'm saying is that he couldn't help it if he was in love with me.”

“Sounds funny to me,” he said. “Oh, you're telling the truth, you're telling the truth as you see it. But a man doesn't do that, I mean go out of his mind for wanting some girl unless he's out of his mind already.” He turned his back on her again to tie his shoes. When he straightened up he consulted his wristwatch. “Quarter to twelve,” he said. “Time to get up.”

She placed a palm over her nipple to hide a spangle of pain that she imagined was detectable by him. He was taking away from her all that she had tried to claim for herself in her story about Hal Costigan, the image of herself as a girl desirable beyond any risk. With his mockery, he was taking that story away just as she was telling it for the first time to any man, and here, under her palm, her nipple's small begging voice was calling him back.

Standing above her, he dropped her underwear and slip over her crossed hands. “Come on, come on. What're you looking like a madonna for? Are you Catholic? You sore at me because I said your story doesn't make sense?” He dropped her dress over her stomach, covering up everything he had wanted uncovered before. Her nylons he dropped on her thighs.

“You're not so great,” she heard herself say, low.

“Hell, I know I'm not so great,” pretending good humor about his deficiencies.

“You could die, too,” she said.

“I know all about it,” shrugging on his coat.

“You could shoot yourself.”

“Yeah, I could if I got cancer or something.”

“You could do it anyway.”

“Who knows?” he said, agreeably.

With angry flicks of her hand, she tossed aside the clothes, sat up, and began to dress. “You're not so great.”

“Nobody ever told you I was, did they?” He went to the window, drew back the curtain, and, with a hand at each temple, peered out through the glass. “I can see the waves,” he said. “The foam, the white part on the breakers. You ever see that old movie where the guy walks out into the ocean? Can't swim, just keeps on walking out into the ocean? Maybe that's the way I'd do it if I was going to do it. If I get to thinking about how not so great I am, like you want me to.” He chuckled. “Unless I get worried about sharks.”

She glanced up as she dressed and saw her reflection in the window he was peering through, the reflection of the half-clad girl imposing itself between him and the darkness. With her dress held to her breasts she gazed at his back, at his gray head bent forward so his brow touched the glass, and at her almost transparent self in the pane, and shame came over her for asking something of this man who was as vulnerable as Hal Costigan to dying. The girl in the glass stood between him and the night, just as she had between Hal and the night.

He turned and stood waiting, hands in his pockets jingling coins and keys, and she knew when she glanced at his face and saw him gazing at nothing that the bitter taste in her mouth was in his, the same.

6

T
oward midnight Cort's wife felt the labor pains come faster. She was walking through the house, and every time the pains came she knelt down. She knelt down by the bed where Cort was lying, and when the pain passed she looked up at him, and he saw the frown, the knot of pain, ease from her face. The contractions had kept her awake the night before and most of the day, and her face was very pale, and he saw in her eyes only a remote need of him. Her fear of the ordeal that was near left him out.

Wrapped in her coat, she leaned against him in the car, and when the cramps came he stroked her thigh. Most of the houses were dark. He had always been disturbed by the presence of so many people asleep, by the blocks and blocks of flimsy houses into which the darkness flowed. Everyone seemed at the mercy of so many things, and again the memory of his brother came to him as it had come so often in the past few weeks. The memory of his brother came to him vividly now as he drove his wife through the streets of the sleeping city. For a moment, a hallucination that his brother was sitting on the other side of his wife caused him to slip his arm around her shoulders and kiss her hair.