Another sound broke the night then. Walter. Walter was crying. He sank to the driveway like a child whose tired legs will not support him any longer, and sat on the asphalt and put his face into his hands and cried. He cried great wrenching, silent sobs. He was saying something, but it was a long moment before I could understand what it was, and then I could.
“I would have killed you,” he sobbed. “I would have killed you both. My God, I don’t understand what has happened.”
I was crying too, and went to him and crouched down beside him and held him in my arms.
“I didn’t mean it,” I wept hopelessly. “Darling, Walter, baby, what you saw—I didn’t mean that! I don’t know why—I don’t understand—”
He shook his head back and forth in his hands, tears running through his tanned fingers.
“I would have killed you, Colquitt, and then I couldn’t have lived!”
Kim said nothing, looking at us. His face was dead. His voice, when he spoke, was formal and precise.
“I know what happened,” he said. “I know about all of it. I understand it now. Colquitt, help me get him back to your house. I can help you both. Please come now.”
I got up obediently. Kim and I raised Walter to his feet. He walked with us, quietly, back through the rhododendron hedge and across our driveway and into the den. We sat down on the sofa, and Kim brought the brandy bottle from the pantry and took a long pull of it and passed it to us. We drank in turn from the bottle and looked at him expectantly and blankly, like children waiting to have something enormous, incredible, made credible. I remember feeling almost peaceful, ebbed and emptied, waiting. Walter said later that he did too.
“First,” he said, looking at Walter, “do you really think there’s anything going on between me and Colquitt? Forget what you saw over there. Do you really think we’ve been having an affair, shacking up, running around behind your back? Do you really think she would ever do that to you, with me or any other guy?”
Walter looked at him, and then at me. “No,” he said. “I don’t think that. I know what I saw, but I don’t believe that.”
Kim looked at me. “Why were you kissing me?” he said. “Do you remember what you felt? Do you know why?”
I shook my head. I felt nothing but a gentle, vague confusion mingled with a faraway, sleepy, simple relief and the dreaming sense that things were not, perhaps, broken between Walter and me. None of it seemed real or seemed to matter a great deal.
Kim said, “I can’t ask you to believe this if you don’t, Walter, but I am not in love with Colquitt, I do not lust after her, I had no intention of touching her when we went over there tonight, and I don’t remember why I did it. I don’t even remember how I felt.”
Walter shook his head slowly. “I don’t remember picking up that knife either,” he said. “I don’t remember thinking that I would kill you both, but I know that I would have. I would have done that. If I hadn’t left there I would have done it.”
Kim’s face wore the rapt, luminous sheen I had seen earlier that night when we’d first talked on the patio. “It’s that damned house,” he said. “It is damned, that house. It’s a greedy house. It takes. You said once, Col, that it would bring out the best in whoever lived there. You were wrong. It takes the best. It took that miserable Pie’s kid, and her marriage, and her daddy. It took that poor sonofabitch Buddy’s whole future. It took that Abbott guy’s future. It’s taking Anita Sheehan’s sanity—I know damned well there was more to her little ‘setback’ than you told me, Col—and it took my talent. And tonight it almost took you and Walter away from each other for good. Don’t you see that? Don’t either of you see that?”
I felt normalcy flood back into me like a freezing current, and watched it fill the husk that was Walter. Pain and shame and self-loathing at the dreadful scene in the Sheehans’ living room came roiling over me too, but the queer, flattened, childlike suspension was gone. Kim’s obsession had slid over into something approaching madness, and the fright and sickness of that restored me.
“Kim,” I said. “Kim, listen. I cannot forgive myself for what happened tonight. I never will. I will spend the rest of my life making it up to Walter, if he will let me, and to you too. I don’t know how or why it happened, and I am ashamed and sick about it, but it’s not your fault, and it’s nothing in that house. Things like that don’t happen. It was something in me, something…sick and awful that I didn’t know I had. I will accept the responsibility for it. But I will not listen to you talking like this anymore. You’ve let this—this dry spell you’re having make you sick. You need to get some help from somewhere, you need to go away for a while, go home, go to a doctor—”
Walter broke in. “Col’s right, Kim. Christ, I owe you both an apology; it must have looked like something out of a Ken Russell film there for a minute. Look, I’ve smooched up a neighbor lady in the kitchen myself, and felt like an ass about it for the next month, and it hasn’t changed things between me and Colquitt. Neither will this. You’ve been under a godawful strain lately, and you’ve gone off the deep end about the house, and I agree—I think you do need to get away from here for a while. Maybe a session or two with a shrink wouldn’t be a bad idea, and it’s certainly nothing you need to be ashamed of. And Col’s been under a strain, with Anita and all, and I have—hell, the whole street has, for that matter. I think we can all three forget this…this thing tonight. Just not speak of it again. It’s not going to change things between the three of us.”
Kim looked silently from me to Walter, and then rose. He came to me and hugged me, and then went to Walter and gave him a brief, hard hug around the shoulders.
“I love you both,” he said. “I really do. I’m sorry.”
And he was gone.
Walter and I looked at each other, and then we went upstairs and got into bed and held each other, long and hard and quietly, and we did not speak of the evening. It was a long time before we did again.
Kim went away three days after that, away to Europe. He left us no forwarding address.
When Walter and I got up the morning after that hideous night, the day was overcast and freighted with a heavy ordinariness that reminded me of a mild hangover. We were both tired, and moved slowly and quietly, and were gentle with each other. There was no constraint between us, and no flinching, hurtful shying away from the previous night in either of our minds. I am sure of that. Both of us had, sometime during the dreamless night, locked the thing away and sealed it and walked away from it.
The following Monday there was a note from Kim in the mailbox when I drove in from work. It sounded like Kim, like Kim a year ago, bantering and dry and flippant.
“To Europe,” it read in part. “Starting with Paris and going on from there. With a backpack and the whole thing. I can just hear you now, Col, fussing about how I’m going to live. Don’t worry. I’ve got enough money for half a year if I’m careful, and my old man’s got a million contacts all over Europe, so I’ll get a good dinner and a fancy bed and introductions to whoever in every city from Norway to Spain, if I want them. I may even end up in the jet set. You’ll read about me lolling around on some fat old Greek’s yacht in Antibes, or water-skiing with Jackie Onassis. I’ll be the toast of the Continent. I’ll write you later and let you know what’s happening. Please take very good care of yourselves.”
He signed it, “Love, Kim.”
I cried a little when I showed it to Walter that night, but not much. They were the foolish, simple tears of missing someone you’re fond of. We had been, both of us, very fond of Kim Dougherty.
The next Sunday evening the Sheehans returned from the island, and Buck called to thank us and to say that the trip had done Anita a lot of good and that he really thought she was much better.
“We’ll drop over tomorrow night and bring the key and tell you about it,” he said. “Things okay here while we were gone?”
“I’m so glad it helped,” I said. “Do come on over tomorrow night; we’d love t
o hear. Yes. Things here were fine.”
14
BUCK SHEEHAN did come over the next evening to return the key to the beach house, but he was alone. He was deeply tanned and peeling across the bridge of his nose and looked rested, but there was a faint abstraction to his voice and in his eyes. He looked frequently across at his house, its lights glowing once again in the dusk.
“Anita asked me to make her excuses,” he said. “She’s sleeping. She slept for twelve straight hours last night and took a long nap this afternoon and dropped off again after dinner on the sofa. I think it’s probably good for her. She slept like there was no tomorrow the whole time we were on the island.”
“It does that to you,” Walter said.
“I know,” said Buck Sheehan. “I never slept so much or ate so much or turned into such a bone-lazy slob in my life, and Anita just soaked it up. I couldn’t keep her out of the water when she wasn’t in the hammock or in bed. And ate enough fresh shrimp to sink the Sixth Fleet. We really loved it; it was everything you said it was. It’s the funniest, greatest little old island I ever saw. I don’t know how we’re ever going to thank you. I really don’t.”
“If it helped Anita, that’s all the thanks I need,” I said.
“It did. There’s no doubt of that. She was…almost the way she was before, down there. You know, I was wondering if, later on, after things are more settled at the office, you might tell us where to start looking for a piece of property down there, or maybe an old house like yours. I wouldn’t even know where to start. But it would make a great place to…retreat to.”
I looked at him; the choice of words was, somehow, unsettling.
“There are probably some around,” I said. “Most everybody wants to buy or build over on Sea Island or one of the fancier islands down there. There’s not all that much demand for houses on St. Agnes. If you looked around, you could probably find something pretty cheap, if you wouldn’t mind a lot of fix-up work.”
“That’s right up Anita’s alley,” he said. “It might be just the thing. Speaking of fixing up, I meant to ask you. I found some broken glass on the front deck, and I wondered if either of you might have noticed anything…”
We were silent for a moment, and then I said, “I have to confess. I—we—went over to water your plants the other night and I couldn’t find the light switch in the living room and blundered into that pane and broke it. We got it fixed of course, and I hoped you wouldn’t notice. It was hardly a neighborly thing to do.”
“God, don’t give it another thought. You weren’t hurt, were you?”
“No.”
“Well, don’t even think about paying for it. Send me the bill. I should have told you where that rheostat is; you’d never find it unless you knew exactly where it was. It’s a small price to pay for the two weeks you gave us.”
“It’s paid, and that’s that. You are not going to reimburse me for my consummate clumsiness. End of subject. Now. Why don’t you two come over and have some supper with us one night this week? Just us, after Anita’s good and rested. I want to hear what she thought about it.”
He hesitated, and looked again toward his house. “She’s…maybe not quite so strong as I thought she was when we were at the beach. Can I call and let you know when?”
“Of course,” I said. “Let her rest.”
I saw Anita the next morning hosing off the shrubbery around her front door. Her dark hair was pulled back under a red bandanna and her eyes were shielded by outsized sunglasses. She wore white slacks and a checked shirt knotted across her tanned, polished midriff and looked like a fashion sketch in W, attenuated and careless and elegant. I smiled and waved, and she laid the hose down and came to the edge of the driveway, smiling in return.
“Welcome home,” I said. “We missed you.”
“Missed you too, and thank you four million times,” she said. “I love your cottage and I love your island and I love you both for letting us have those two weeks. They were…something I’ll never forget.”
She took off her sunglasses. The fine lines were back around her eyes, and there was a look of immense distance in them, but a peaceful sort of distance. I knew the feeling; part of her was still lost in the depths of the sea she had just left behind her. I’m the same way when I come back from the island. She didn’t look as taut-skinned and vivid and glowing as she had when I’d first seen her on our return from vacation, but neither was she the same frail, tight-pulled, half-mad woman we’d first met. Well, I thought, two steps back, one forward. Maybe Walter’s right and this is the way she’ll come out of it. Slowly.
“I want to have you and Walter over for dinner sometime soon,” she said. “I’d planned to do it this week, but I just can’t seem to get my act together. I sleep all the time; are there tsetse flies on your island? But I want you to know that I’m not planning to turn into a recluse.”
“Don’t even think of it,” I said. “You’re supposed to be resting this summer. Let us feed you all for a while. We’ll make you feed us fifty times over this fall and winter when you’re up to it.”
“No. I mean it, Colquitt. I’m starting with this new man down here tomorrow, and if he says the word, I’m going to start pulling my weight around this neighborhood. You all mustn’t worry about me, Colquitt, any more than you can help worrying when I go around throwing fits as regularly as clockwork. I was tired from getting ready for the big party; that was a mistake, so soon. And I had a rotten dream, or hallucination, or something, and I wigged out again for a little while, and I’m sorry for the hell it put you all through, but my doctor back home told Buck that it was probably just the way it was going to be for a while—and if so, so be it. It was a momentary wigout, not a permanent one. I’m going to get myself straightened out eventually. I took it too hard and fast is all.”
Buck had not told her about Virginia Guthrie’s terrible moment in front of their television set, then. Or about Charles and Virginia’s checking of the TV Guide and the television stations. Of course, he wouldn’t have.
“Well, whenever you’re up to it, then, but not one moment before,” I said, starting for my car.
“Soon,” she said. As I got into the car she was coiling up the hose and yawning, a vast, deep, stretching yawn, and when I drove away she had gone into her house and closed the door.
We did not hear from the Sheehans during that week, and except for a couple of times when Claire Swanson saw Buck drive up to the house during the day and pick up Anita and bring her home an hour or so later, nobody saw her at all. I supposed, when Claire told me about seeing them, that he was taking her to the therapist the New Jersey doctor had recommended, and that the man had, perhaps, advised her to curtail any sort of social activity. I was rather grateful for the moratorium. We were in the middle of a new business presentation at the office, and I had been working late all week. I hadn’t really liked the idea of an evening with the Sheehans so soon after their two weeks at the beach. I didn’t want to talk about their problems for a while or have them feel they must thank us over and over. I did not want to hear any more hopeful allusions to recovery and wholeness and eventual health. I simply wanted it to happen, quietly and without incident. I was tired of pain and fear and strangeness. Anita’s and Buck’s. Kim’s. Walter’s and mine.
Midway during the next week I ran into Virginia Guthrie on the street downtown outside my office building just as I was coming back from a hasty trip to soothe a client whose press kits had arrived forty-five minutes after the press had departed. She was trundling along toward the multilevel parking garage at the end of the street, department-store boxes piled chin-high in her arms.
“You look like you’re ready to spit nails,” she said.
“I am. And you look like you’re about to collapse in the street. Let’s go blow two hours on lunch at Rinaldi’s. With Bloody Marys. I’ll treat. If I go back to the office right now I’ll probably bash my dimwitted secretary’s head in with a zip-code directory. Or ruin her manicure, w
hich would be an even greater disaster.”
She seemed reluctant for a moment, and then she said, “Oh, why not? I don’t have to be anywhere until four. And I’ll take you up on that Bloody Mary. I may even have three.”
“Bad day on the barricades?” I said. Virginia does not like to shop.
“Bad week, sort of. I guess. I don’t really know. It will be good to talk to somebody about it.”
“Anita,” I said, looking at her closely in the white noon light.
“Anita,” she said.
We walked across the street and went into Rinaldi’s, and Vito, the maître d’ who had professed a courtly and florid letch for me for all the years I’d been at the agency, found us a quiet table in a sunny bay overlooking the milling human traffic on the street outside. The contrast between the teeming street and the subdued noon restaurant bustle was soothing. We ordered the Bloody Marys and they came immediately, rich and thick and sprinkled with snips of fresh dillweed, in outsized frosted goblets.
“What’s happened?” I said when the silence had spun out between us. “Has there been anything else about the boy?”
“Well, not directly. I’m not really sure anything has happened. It’s just that she isn’t snapping back like Buck seems to think she should; she sleeps an awful lot. Late in the mornings, and long naps in the afternoon, and at night, in front of the television set. Of course she’s on some kind of medication this man down here is giving her, and that could account for the drowsiness.”
“I’m sure it could,” I said. “Didn’t her other doctor, the one in New Jersey, say she would sleep a lot?”
“Yes, but it’s not just that. She watches television from the time she gets up to the time Buck puts her to bed. That’s where she naps in the afternoons, in front of the set.”
House Next Door Page 15
