by Sol Stein
Barbara seemed to sense his momentary discomfort and removed her hand. She lay back, her head resting against the leaves, her right hip slightly raised, her right leg slightly over the left one. And then she stretched, a languorous action, and as she did so, Peter noticed she was stretching all four limbs, bringing her mound of Venus in conspicuous view beneath the dress.
First Paul and Susan, now what? Life in suburbia was supposed to be full of exotic arrangements, but here in the country? Was the whole world going kinky? Was Square Peter still lingering in the age of one-to-one relationships lasting a lifetime? Of course not. He had just left Rose for Elizabeth, hadn’t he? But what was this? Was he imagining more than was actually happening?
“If the weather were nicer,” she said, “I’d invite you for a moonlight dip.”
“Where?” he said foolishly.
“There’s a stream just there,” she pointed. “It’s like a shower under the waterfall.”
“It’s a great view,” he said. “I think we ought to be getting back.”
“Do I bore you?” she asked. “I hope not.”
“No, no,” he assured her, “it’s just—”
He stopped his sentence because he had no alternative. Barbara was rubbing her hand across his middle, slowly, firmly, and her hand was slipping lower. Yank her hand away, you fool, he thought, but didn’t, and wondered if it was good sense that was keeping him from acting precipitously, or whether he liked it.
In a moment, there was no mistake about what she was doing. It had happened to him once before. A whore at a bar had made her approach that way, but this was Barbara, Elizabeth’s best friend at school; they were houseguests, they had just met…
He raised himself from the ground, not without difficulty, not without excitement, and with a thick voice suggested again that they should be going down.
Barbara raised herself to her knees and said simply, “I am down,” and at once there were no secrets or ambiguities.
“Look,” he explained to her, “I’m not a prude.”
She laughed nervously. “I didn’t think you were.”
“You’re an attractive girl,” he said, not wanting her to be hurt by his unwillingness.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I’m just not much for this sort of casual thing.”
“I like you,” she said. She seemed desperate.
“Elizabeth and I are just finding our way together. I don’t want to complicate things.” He was trying to say the least that would stop her.
“Please sit down again,” she said.
He did, not wanting to be rude.
“You’ll enjoy Elizabeth more afterward. It’s always that way.”
“Always?”
She was moving closer to him again. “It was Fernando’s condition that we could each have sex with someone else once in a while as long as there was no involvement. To sustain interest in the marriage.”
“Just like that.”
“With friends we don’t see too often. With people we meet. We come together after each episode stronger than before. It will be like that for you, too.”
Not on your life, he thought.
She was undressing. He rose to his feet unsteadily.
“Oh, please don’t go,” she said. The pleading in her voice threw the alarm switch. Fernando and Elizabeth were down there. Would Fernando dare? It was their custom. Would Elizabeth let him? It seemed inconceivable. Anything was conceivable.
He ran down the hill, hearing Barbara calling after him. He was running too fast for the terrain; he was in danger of stumbling. He slipped, skidded, grasped branches for support, but kept on going until he arrived, his chest heaving for air, at the house.
Fernando, his face a snarl, was slouched with a full glass and said only, “She’s up there.”
Peter ran up the stairs two at a time, but the door of the guest room was locked. “It’s me, Peter,” he said, and she immediately let him in. She locked the door behind him and threw her arms around him. She was sobbing.
“I had no idea,” she said. “I had no idea.”
He pulled her face away just enough to look at her and ask, “What happened?”
“Like a nightmare. I was dozing from the drink—it was more than I’m used to, you know that—and suddenly he was standing at the side of the bed. No overtures, nothing. Just, oh, Peter, he wouldn’t listen to anything I said, he wouldn’t stop. I hit at him and scratched, and it did no good till I—Peter, I had to kick him in the balls.”
He didn’t know if she was laughing now or still crying.
“They’re sick,” she said.
Since Elizabeth had hardly unpacked, it took only a minute to fix their suitcases. Peter led the way down the stairs. Barbara had returned. Her back was against the front door. Whatever Fernando was saying, he stopped the minute he heard footsteps down the stairs.
“Please excuse me,” Peter said to Barbara, his voice firm, Barbara looked at Fernando for instructions.
“They’re not even married,” said Fernando. “You’d think they were an old married couple.” He gulped at his glass. “Your friends,” he said, underlining his contempt.
Peter didn’t want to touch Barbara. He motioned her out of the way.
“They’re useless,” said Fernando. “Let them go.”
Out the door, Peter and Elizabeth warily descended the stone steps into the darkness.
“You’d better give me your bag,” he said.
“It’s okay,” she answered.
They didn’t say another word until they were in the car. Peter locked all four doors, sealing off the outside world. The engine started instantly. He backed up carefully, then swung down the dirt road, following his low beams. The woods were full of limbs and eyes.
“How often do you think this happens?” Elizabeth asked.
“I don’t know,” said Peter. Thinking of the reported orgies of the ancient world, of the gossip of monasteries, of what he had heard in the Army—even if only a hundredth were true—he said, “I guess oftener than either of us thought.”
Peter noticed with alarm how low the gas gauge was, and not a station in sight. He hoped, he prayed they wouldn’t run out of gas. Not here. He wanted to be a long way away before he stopped driving.
Chapter Seventeen
The only car they passed on the treacherous road was a green Mustang driven by a blond boy of eighteen or nineteen, laughing away with his girl friend beside him and not paying enough attention to the road, Peter thought. How much attention had he paid to the road when he was that age? He hadn’t had a car. Now all the kids have cars. Adolescents will inherit the earth.
“There’s a gas station,” said Elizabeth.
The two pumps stood like mechanical men, each with a hose arm raised in rigid salute, each lit by a large bare bulb under a metal overhang. An old gas station with old pumps; didn’t see many of them along the roads anymore. Any pumps that pumped gas were welcome.
Behind the pumps was a clapboard house. The instant they stopped, a light went on inside, and an elderly woman came to the screen door.
Peter stepped out of the car so he wouldn’t have to shout. “Tell the boss we want a tankful of high test, please.”
“I’m the boss,” said the woman, wrinkling her crow’s- foot face and wiping her hands on her apron.
“Hope we’re not too late for you,” said Peter.
“When them lights are on, I serve gas. When they’re off, I’m asleep.”
She filled the tank but not brim full. It could easily have held another gallon or more, gas she could sell to him this time only. Most of her customers must be transients. How many gallons did she miss selling by not filling to the brim? Enough gallons in a year to give the house the paint job it badly needed?
“Oil and water okay?” she asked.
“Okay,” he said, not knowing whether they were okay or not, but not wanting a woman that old to lift the hood, check the stick; man’s work. Bad enough
she had to pump gas. The rental agency probably checked the oil and water before the car went out. Head stuffed with trivialities. Better than thinking about what had happened back on Kinky Mountain.
He paid the woman.
“How far to Keene?” he asked.
“Not far,” she said.
Helpful. He slid in beside Elizabeth and was happy to see the needle on the gas gauge swing over to the right when he turned the ignition on.
As he turned onto the road, he wondered why he hadn’t seen the green Mustang pass. They’d been at the station five minutes surely. The kids probably pulled off to the side of the road to neck. They didn’t call it necking anymore, did they?
Elizabeth said after a while, “That’s a lonely place for a widow.”
“How do you know she’s a widow?”
“Oh, a woman can tell.”
“Be specific.”
“I just can tell.”
“The way you can tell if a woman sitting in a bus is married or not?”
“Yes.”
“Very unscientific.”
Elizabeth said nothing.
“Maybe she has children in the house with her.”
“No children,” said Elizabeth. “Maybe once, but not now.”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “Anyway, it’s too far East for Bonnie and Clyde.”
“She could get robbed,” said Elizabeth. “She could get raped. Eighty-year-old women get raped.”
The thought seemed suddenly very funny to them both. They were laughing when Peter saw the police car on the side road. Instinctively he checked his speedometer. They weren’t going too fast; they were okay.
“If they’re trying to catch speeders, they ought to pull off the road a bit more,” said Peter.
He had hardly finished the words when he heard the unmistakable sound of metal on metal somewhere behind, a squealing of tires, a thump, a prolonged crumpling sound, the scrunching of broken glass, and a final silence.
Peter’s foot had come off the accelerator instantly. He braked hard. The tires screeched. Making the U-turn took four tries on the narrow road. A side glance at Elizabeth’s face: it was white.
You could have driven on, a voice said in his head. You could not have driven on, the same voice said.
The sounds, carried on the night air, had seemed to come from just behind them, but it was at least two hundred yards before his high beams caught the tangled scene of the accident which blocked the road. The front bumper of the police car was locked into the back bumper of the Mustang, and the front of the Mustang had smashed into—or been pushed into—a tree. Had the police car accelerated too fast just as the Mustang’s driver, spotting the police, had slowed down? The Mustang had swerved and smashed. Its windshield had vanished. The front and vent windows on the driver’s side were shattered. The girl sitting next to the driver was screaming.
Peter thought to keep his lights on the scene of the accident. He and Elizabeth were out of their car and running even before the policemen got out of their car. Peter reached the Mustang first. He could see the boy’s neck, a vast length from open collar to chin, his face straight up at the roof of the car. Unnatural angle, he thought, remembering the war and how in picking the wounded you skipped the ones with unnatural angles: broken neck, broken spine. The boy’s hands gripped a broken-off piece of the steering wheel. The steering column with the rest of the wheel was hard up against his chest. Peter wished Elizabeth wouldn’t see; she was at the other side with the girl.
The girl didn’t stop screaming. Elizabeth didn’t know whether to slap her face or not. How could you slap a face covered with blood, blood running from the hair, over the eyes, and from gashes in the cheeks and chin?
Both policemen were out of the car now, obviously shocked. One of them was bleeding at the side of the head. The other limped.
“She must have hit the windshield,” said Peter. The seat belts flapped uselessly. How do you stop bleeding in the head? You can’t put a tourniquet around her neck. She was bleeding from so many places in her face and head. Elizabeth put her hand to the girl’s face and withdrew a large sliver of glass.
The policeman who was bleeding at the side of his head said, “Get her to a hospital.”
Peter came around to the other side of the car. He and the policeman tried to get the girl out. If only she’d stop screaming. Maybe broken bones. Don’t move if she has broken bones. Have to move. Have to get to a hospital, she’s bleeding to death.
“Hospital six miles ahead in Keene,” said the policeman. The policeman with the limp said to the other, “You pulled out too fast. You hooked his back bumper.”
“Shut up,” said the other policeman as he and Peter managed to get the girl out. They carried her, a writhing sack, to the police car.
“Use your car,” said the limping policeman. “We’ll never get the bumpers untangled in time.”
They put her in the front seat, where Elizabeth had been sitting. Blood all over the car. Peter couldn’t help thinking: it’s a rented car.
“He’s breathing, I can hear him breathing,” shouted the other policeman bending over the boy. “I’ll radio.”
The limping policeman radioed for help. The radio worked. “Get going,” he said to the others.
Elizabeth got into the back seat of their car with the policeman whose head was bleeding. He couldn’t be too badly hurt. He seemed all right, except for the head wound, though his face was chalk. “I’d drive, but I might conk out. I’ll just give directions.”
Peter backed up and swung around, leaving the accident scene in darkness. He drove seventy miles an hour, thinking, that’s dangerous on a road like this. He realized the girl had stopped screaming. Turning to look, he heard the policeman say, “Keep your eyes on the road. She’s passed out.” Elizabeth held a handkerchief tight up against the girl’s forehead, where the bleeding was worst. The handkerchief was quickly soaked in blood and useless. Peter handed over his own handkerchief. “God,” Elizabeth whispered, “let her live.”
When they reached the populated area, the policeman instructed him, in the absence of a siren, to keep honking his horn. The first red light, Peter started to brake.
“Keep going,” said the policeman.
Peter looked right and left and accelerated again. “Next light, turn right.”
It seemed an eternity; too long, too long.
The light was a red blinker. Another car was approaching the intersection from the opposite direction.
“Flash your lights,” said the policeman. “Flash them again. Turn right.”
Peter felt like an automaton.
“Just a bit more,” said the policeman. “Okay, turn left up the hill.”
Peter saw the hospital sign and, almost immediately, the hospital itself. He followed the red emergency signs around to the rear. They carried the limp girl into the emergency room just past the wide doors.
“I’m okay,” the policeman said to the hurrying nurse. “The girl’s lost a lot of blood.”
“Put her on the table,” the nurse instructed and pressed a buzzer. Within a minute, it seemed, the plasma stand was alongside, the bottle upside down, leading into the tube, the tube to a needle, a quick swab of the girl’s arm, the needle inserted.
A second nurse—where had she come from?—was damping up the blood from the girl’s head so she could see where the blood was coming from. The resident doctor appeared. He seemed to Peter no older than the boy who had been driving the car.
“Lot of stitches,” said the doctor to himself. “Call Surgery,” he told the nurse and busied himself about the girl’s head as Peter, feeling he could do no more, stepped backward, took Elizabeth’s arm and led her, trembling, to the other side of the room.
“Why can’t they work faster?” he said to Elizabeth.
The second nurse was filling out forms. Ridiculous!
A stretcher on wheels was put alongside the table. The girl was gently transferred, the apparatus still in her arm, the e
mpty plasma bottle replaced with a full one.
“Pretty girl,” said the nurse with the forms. That nurse had never been pretty. She asked Peter, “Car crash?”
“Yes,” interjected the policeman.
Just then several policemen, including the limping one, came in, carrying the boy on a stretcher. Peter felt curiously outnumbered. The form nurse put her clipboard down and looked at the boy. Dispassionately, Peter thought.
The nurse put her head down on the boy’s chest. She felt his pulse. The limping policeman looked at her questioningly. “DOA,” said the nurse.
Elizabeth was crying. One of the policemen led her into the waiting room. Peter followed. The policemen asked them both questions, filling out a questionnaire. Peter told them everything he had seen and heard.
“Anything else?” The policeman directed the question to Elizabeth.
She shook her head.
The policeman took their addresses, checked Peter’s against his license, phone numbers where they could be reached if necessary, asked him to sign his statement. Then, “You can go if you want to.”
“What about the girl?” asked Elizabeth.
“I’ll check.”
The policeman went out and didn’t return for a full ten minutes, while Peter and Elizabeth thumbed sightlessly through the magazines in the waiting room.
“She’ll live,” he reported, “probably. We’ve reached her parents. They said the boy is her steady. Since first term high school.”
“The boy’s dead?” asked Peter fruitlessly.
“I guess so.”
Fifty thousand people a year die this way, thought Peter as they wandered out. A lot of blood to mop up in the rented car. He took Elizabeth by the arm back through the wide doors and asked a passing nurse if there was a coffee shop in the hospital. She directed them. He’d mop up later. Too late to count on a motel on the road, but ought to be plenty of tourist homes in Keene. They’d find a place to sleep. Ha, thought Peter, sleep.
The coffee was very hot. They had Danish with the coffee. The waitress didn’t seem to mind that they were both a mess. All she said was, “Accident?” They nodded. End of conversation.
After a while, Peter said, “If only the police car had come out two seconds later.”
