Weep for Me (14 page)

She did not speak. When oncoming lights shone briefly into the car, I saw her out of the corner of my eye, pale thighs apart, hands slack, palms, up, on the seat on either side of her. She looked frail, beaten.

The route bypassed Cortland. Below Cortland the thunder grew louder, and pale flashes lit the southwestern sky. Just as we came into Ithaca, fat drops began
to splat on the windshield, and in the reflected lights the trees swayed, showed the undersides of their leaves. On the steep hill leading down into the center of town the water began to drop in sheets out of the heart of the sky, bounding high on the road, streaming down the windshield faster than the wipers could handle it. I went down into town in low gear. Traffic was light.

As we left town the air that came through the vents was cool, washed, clean. Emily sat up straighter, pulled her skirt down. She no longer rested her head against the seat back.

“Cigarette,” she said.

I gave her one, pushed the dash lighter in for her.

As the car gathered speed, she moved closer to me. Her thin fingers clamped hard on my leg, just above the knee. “Kyle! We did it, Kyle!” Her voice was low, but held the quality of a shout of triumph.

“Yes, we did it.”

“You’re my luck.”

“Yes, Emily.”

She stayed close to me. I saw the whole thing. The complete picture. I saw myself, Kyle Cameron, a decent, unassuming guy. A quiet guy. I saw him driving through the rain-washed night with this dark girl beside him, and all of a sudden I didn’t know how he’d got into that position. A quarter of a million. A woman as moral as an otter.

Every Sunday, when I was a kid, I went to church. Behind the pulpit was a huge stained-glass window depicting the Last Supper. Sometimes the sun would shine through it so strongly that you had to squint to see the minister silhouetted against the light. When the sun was that way, it did funny things to the eyes of one of the disciples. They gleamed, and they were strange, terrible, accusing. Not like the others. Those eyes always looked straight at me. Once I tried sitting on the other side of the church. It didn’t make any difference. Somehow he had turned so that he still watched me. He knew about everything. About how I let the air out of Mr. Kipten’s tires.

About handing in Sonya’s lesson as though it were my own.

I hadn’t thought of those eyes in a long time. And now they were watching me again. They knew that the loins of this dark girl beside me were a trap that had closed on my soul.

Thief, libertine, coward.

My world was behind me. My world was Thrace, with its scrubby little parks, and the soft hills folded around it, and the look of Cleveland Avenue on a rainy night. The arched windows of the bank. Jo Anne laughing as we skated together. The warm washed scent of her blonde hair, and the freshness of her lips.

When you leave your world, never to go back, you die a little.

“Did you say good-by to your little girl?” she asked me. It was as though she had read my thoughts.

“No.”

“Are you sorry you didn’t?”

“No. There was nothing to say.”

“I left the Thrace Bulletin in my apartment. I bought it on the way from work. Her mother died.”

The car swayed and I steadied the wheel. “When?” My voice sounded seventy years old.

“Just before noon, today.”

“Why did you bother to tell me?”

“I thought it was something you would like to know.”

“At least she died before we made the headlines.”

“That girl will read the headlines. It will make her a little tin celebrity. They’ll interview her, and put her picture in the paper. Jilted girl. Boy friend absconds with quarter of million and other woman.”

“Damn you, Emily.”

She laughed. It was the second time I had ever heard her laugh. It sounded like bells again. “Tell me what you’d do if you had it do over again, Kyle.”

I didn’t answer her. I stared ahead at the headlight pattern, at the road running toward us, sliding under the wheels.

She quickly knelt on the seat, facing me. She slid
her left hand under the collar of my open shirt, at the nape of my neck, slid it along my shoulder, nails tingling against my flesh. She pressed herself hard against my right arm.

“Say it, Kyle. Say it!”

“I’d do it again.”

“All of it.”

“Yes, all of it.”

She moved away, sat with her back against her door, her legs drawn up. “Where do we stop, Kyle?”

“Harrisburg.”

“Will it be long?”

“We’ll get there before three, I think.”

“Can we get an air-conditioned room?”

“If we go to a hotel. I was thinking of a tourist court.”

“This is a celebration, Kyle. Go to a hotel.”

“It might not be smart.”

“Just this time, Kyle.”

“And if they remember us?”

“I’m no good in the heat, Kyle. No good at all. We’ll sleep till noon. Please, Kyle.”

“All right. Sit closer to me.”

“I can’t. You understand. I can’t.”

Below Elmira, inside the Pennsylvania border, the night was clear, traffic light. I increased the speed. The car moved faster. Life moved faster. I wondered how much life was left. For me. For her. At a quarter of three we crossed the bridge into Harrisburg and pulled up in front of the hotel.

I
nside the room I tipped the bellhop and he went away. I closed the door and fastened the chain. I leaned my forehead against the cool wood of the door for a moment. Behind me the window air-conditioner buzzed.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” But I did know. Two months of cumulative strain. It had piled up. Until I locked the door I hadn’t realized the extent of my nervous exhaution. It was more than fear of being caught that had been working on me. It was a terrible conflict within me. I had forced myself to do what I knew was wrong and was unforgivable. And the internal combat had taken its toll.

The scarred brown suitcase stood near one bed. She sat on the bed and watched me and swung her foot against the side of the suitcase. The bellhop had grunted under the weight of it.

“How much money have you got left?” she asked.

“Thirty dollars or so.”

“We better take some out. Tomorrow you’ll have to buy me a ring. It would look better if I were wearing a ring. I hate rings.”

No one could see in our windows. I put the suitcase on the bed and unfastened the straps. She moved close to me.

“What sort of ring?”

“A plain band. Not gold, unless it’s white.”

I swung the lid open. You can look at two or three packs of hundred-dollar bills and they are impressive because your mind can translate them into terms of goods and services. Fifteen or twenty packs of bills become overpowering. A whole suitcase, jammed tightly full, becomes meaningless. There is just too much of it. There is so much that it is almost comical.

Her quick hands darted into the mass of currency and she took out wrapped sheaves of fifties and twenties,

“It will be enough,” she said. “Close it.”

I closed it. She divided the bills into even halves, gave me one pile. I wedged them into my wallet. She folded her half, tucked them into her purse. When I had first begun to bring the money to her, she had seemed to take an almost sensuous pleasure from handling it, counting it. Her attitude had changed abruptly. Now she could be cold about it, almost casual.

I sat heavily in a chair, and I did not see how I was going to force myself to make ready for bed. When I had closed the door, a dam had broken in my brain. All the energy stored behind it had run through the gap, dissipated into nothingness.

She was vibrant. She walked to the windows and looked out. She hummed softly as she unpacked her bag. I heard her taking her shower. When she came out, nude, I was still sitting there.

She stopped and stared at me. “What’s wrong, Kyle?”

I made myself stand up. I looked at her. Previously I had found her complete lack of personal modesty exciting. Now I wished she’d cover herself up. I didn’t want to look at her, or think about her body.

She stretched out on one bed. I undressed with tired lethargy, yawning deeply. I showered, put on pajamas, turned out the bathroom light.

When I opened the door she said, from the darkness, “Leave the bathroom light on.” I fumbled for the switch, turned it back on.

I went to the empty bed. The bathroom light was strong. As I pulled the sheet and thin blanket back to get in, she came quickly across the narrow space between the two beds and she was a bundle of warm ivory fury, a moving smoothness that struck hard against my chest, driving me back and down. And I knew at once that it was no good.

Minutes later in the light from the open bathroom door, I saw her as she knelt, black hair across her eyes, body rigid. Her voice was a keening whisper. “Do something, do something,
do something
!”

“I … I can’t.”

She hammered down on my chest with both clenched
fists, driving the wind out of me. Her bare feet thudded against the rug and the bathroom door slammed behind her as she pulled it shut with all her strength.

When she came out, a long time later, she turned the light off. I pretended to be asleep. It didn’t make any difference. She paid absolutely no attention to me. I fell into a deep sleep as though I fell from some high place.

She woke me up at eight. She was dressed.

“Hurry up, Kyle.”

“You said we’d sleep till noon.”

“I’ve changed my mind. I’ve been down and had breakfast. We can get something for you on the road. I’ve told the bellhop to come up in ten minutes, and told the desk we’re checking out. They’re having the car brought around.”

“Emily, last night I …”

“Forget it. It wasn’t important.”

I studied her expression. Impotence leaves an odd guilt. It hits at the very foundation of male pride. I did not know whether the contempt I saw in her eyes was real or imagined. I did know that I could not wait a whole day while I tortured myself with wondering whether the impotence had been just the temporary result of emotional exhaustion, or a new phase in our relationship. If it was a new phase, and a permanent thing, I knew that she would not be long with me. She would go where her climactic need could be satisfied. In that functioning she was so highly specialized that I doubted whether, once she left me, she would even remember me.

I reached to the phone between the beds, got the desk, said to cancel that call for a bellhop, that we would phone when we were ready to check out.

He told me the car was on the way over from the garage. She tried to get the phone and I pushed her away, roughly. I told the desk to park the car outside the hotel rather than send it back.

“What’s the idea of that?” she demanded.

“I want to find out something.”

She struck at my face and I caught her small clenched
fist in my hand. I enclosed it in my fingers and squeezed. After a few seconds the pain began to twist at her mouth. I watched her eyes, watched the slow birth of the insensate blindness, watched the telltale change in the way she stood, watched the peaked breasts sharpen against the sleazy crimson blouse she had purchased in her role as Mrs. Marshall.

When I knew that she had gone beyond the point of returning, I released her fist, caught her harshly as she flung herself against me, her throat throbbing.

After the spate of quick brutality, after this thing that was like the expression of a mutual hate, she lay spent beside me.

“Well?” I said.

“This should have happened last night, Kyle,” she said in a far-off voice.

“Why?”

“It was more important to me last night.”

“Last night won’t happen again.”

She didn’t answer. Then she looked at me with the shift of mockery in her eyes. “But don’t you see? From now on I’ll be expecting it to happen. Every time.”

“But it won’t.”

“But even expecting it changes things. Changes a lot of things.”

“That sounds like some sort of threat.”

“Get dressed, Kyle. We have to hurry. We haven’t gone far enough.”

Heat slammed against the highway and rebounded. Heat made silvery sweat tracks down the insides of her pale slim calves. Heat made the highway, a half mile ahead, disappear into a pulsating, wavering, headache-making tangle of illusion. Sun pressed golden needles into my eyes. She sat limp beside me, as before. Seventy-two miles to Hagerstown and another state line. The roads were clogged with Saturday-morning local traffic, and with summer vacationers. Another forty-two miles to Winchester. Ninety-three to Staunton. Lunch in a drive-in outside Lexington, thirty-six miles farther. Then fifty-two miles to Roanoke and nearly three times as far
again to Bristol. The red numbers moved by on the speedometer. The heat gauge ran well over normal. I had stopped thinking that I was running from anything, or toward anything. I was on a treadmill. Each time we had to stop for gas, it looked like the same station as on the previous stop. Each town we went through had the same stores, and the same slack, heat-beaten faces. The cars that whipped toward us, snapped off behind with a swirled blanket of heat, were all identical. This was a special hell that had been devised just for me. The day would never end. I rode with a pallid corpse that never spoke, and nothing could ease the cramp in my legs.

In the 121-mile stretch between Bristol and Knoxville, we crossed a time line and found that it was back to six o’clock again in Knoxville.

The inside of the car heated up even more than before as we moved through Knoxville traffic. “Can you take much more?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“It’s a hundred and fourteen to Chattanooga. That will make about six-eighty for the day. Far enough.”

“All right.”

“Want to eat here?”

“I couldn’t eat.”

We got gas and soft drinks, and kept on. It was dark when we got to Chattanooga. We had a good break. We found an air-conditioned motel with a vacancy. There was a double bed in the room. She didn’t object to sharing it. Each time I shut my eyes I could see the road coming at me. In the bed I seemed to feel the vibration of the speeding car. Trucks groaned by. She made a soft sound in her sleep, a tiny protest.