You Live Once

by John D. MacDonald

  “Want to walk some more?”

  “It was so wonderful. We had our kind of friends. Everywhere we went. Not like these people. They act like his job stinks. Like it’s a … a hobby. These aren’t my kind of people. You know what? He won’t let me tell anybody here. It was okay to tell it other places where we lived. Big joke. We could laugh. Here he hasn’t got any sense of humor. Know how I met him? Want to bust laughing? I cleaned his teeth. Dental hygienist. Kept coming back to get his teeth cleaned. Had the cleanest teeth in the country. Had to marry him before I wore ’em right down to the gums. Other places we could tell that. Not here. Here it would be like dirt. Like I’m something to be ashamed of. Gee, it isn’t something you can just do. You have to study for it. I studied hard. I was good. What’s wrong with that?”

  She sounded so lost I wanted to take her in my arms. I wanted to anyway—even drunk she was a desirable woman. And I wanted to smack Dodd Raymond right in the nose. There wasn’t a damn thing I could say to her.

  She stood up suddenly and said in an awed voice, “I’m going to be sick.”

  We went over to some bushes. I held her and held her head as she was wrenchingly ill. Then I went up to the men’s room at the club and got a wet towel and a dry towel and took them back down to her. She bathed her face and then used the towels on the spattered front of her dress. As she bent over, working on her dress, she said, “How awful, Clint. How perfectly awful.”

  “It happens to the carefullest.”

  “I wasn’t very careful. You’re sweet, Clint.”

  “Friend of the family.”

  “Would you do me one more thing?”

  “Sure.”

  “Drive me home. Don’t tell Dodd you’re doing it. Tell him when you get back. If you tell him now he’ll insist on taking me home. He won’t say anything later but he’ll have that damn patient look that will mean I spoiled the party. Added to everything else, of course. Do you mind?”

  “No. Want to leave now?”

  “Please.”

  I drove her to the Raymond home. It was a high-shouldered job, mansard roof, iron fence, in a neighborhood that was decaying in slow genteel fashion, preparing its soul for the inevitable invasion of funeral parlor, supermarket and masseuse. The big house was dark.

  “We moved Mother Raymond up to the place at the lake early this afternoon,” she explained. “I wouldn’t dare come home alone if she was here. She said it was earlier than usual for her. Then she sighed and she said it would be nice for us two young people to be alone. And she sighed again and said she hoped it wouldn’t be so damp at the lake this time of year, and so cold that it would hurt her arthritis. Sigh, sigh, sigh. Damn it all!”

  I walked her up to the door and she handed me the key. I opened the big door and it creaked as it swung back. She reached inside and found a switch that turned on the light in the big narrow gloomy hallway.

  “Clint, I talked too much. I talked an awful lot too much.”

  “I can’t remember a darn word, somehow.”

  “Can I tell you you’re a nice guy?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re a nice guy. What I said is between us. I’m unhappy here and I drank too much and I’m ashamed of myself. This isn’t my house and it doesn’t seem like my husband any more and I became a fool tonight. I won’t do it again. That isn’t the way to fight this thing. That’s the way to hand him to her on a platter, with an apple and cloves. I’ll do better.”

  “I know you will, Nancy. Temporary lapse. Maybe overdue.”

  She smiled. “If I wasn’t so messy, I’d like to be kissed.”

  I put my hands on her shoulders and kissed her forehead. “That do?”

  “It does fine, Clint. Goodnight … and thanks.”

  I drove back to the club. The dancing had started. The five piece orchestra sounded like an awkward fusion of Meyer Davis and Bobby Hackett. Every other number was mechanical Latin, gourds and all. Dodd wasn’t on the floor. I tracked him down over in the men’s bar. He was talking down at a man who looked like a bald Pekingese. When I caught his eye he wound up the conversation and came over to me, glass in hand.

  “Where’s Nancy?”

  “She didn’t feel good. She had me take her home.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have taken her home.”

  “She wanted it that way.”

  “I’ve never seen her do that before. I can’t understand what got into her.” He glanced at me sideways, suspicion shining in his eyes.

  I made a noncommittal sound. It was no time for a brand new friend of the family to tell husband he knew what was wrong with wife.

  “Did she tell you what was eating on her?”

  “No. Is something?”

  “There must be, for her to act like this. My God, she knows how this town is. They’ll clack for a week. I suppose I ought to get on home. Wait a minute, we all came in your car. Well, I can get a taxi.”

  “She sounded as if she’d like it better if you stayed, Dodd. She said she didn’t want to spoil your evening.”

  “Any more than she already has.” He finished his drink, reached over and set the empty glass on the bar. “I might as well hang around, I guess. Buy you a drink, Clint?”

  “Not right now, thanks.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder, gave me a couple of squeezes. I was born with a catlike aversion to such stray gestures. I merely endure them, hoping my expression doesn’t give away my distaste. Besides, there was something forced about the way he did it. He looked at me intently. “Clint, I’ve never had a chance to tell you how damn well much it means to me to come out here and find a guy like you to help carry the ball. I mean that.”

  “Well, thanks, Dodd.”

  “You know what you can get sometimes in this outfit. A politico. An oily switch artist. Hell, I know where you stand.”

  He took his hand off my shoulder, made a fist out of it and punched me lightly in the arm. “We’re both going places in this outfit, boy.”

  I told him I hoped so and watched his broad back as he went off toward the festivities. It was obvious that he had just enough quasi-feminine perception to sense that Nancy had somehow acquired an ally; how much else she might have in me he couldn’t tell. He wanted to pour a little water on the flame. Deciding that wouldn’t do, he had built a back fire. I cannot say that it was ineffective—mellow words from the boss are always welcome. And he was almost a nice guy.

  Between eleven and twelve the party was in overdrive. Every time I saw Mary she was with Dodd. A junior miss who took considerable pride in the gaudy details of the recent escapade that had gotten her tossed out of Sweet Briar on her pretty tail, had taken me over and kept bruising my morale by frequent references to how much “older men” appealed to her.

  She steered me, not too unwillingly, out into the darkness. But when I came to kiss her she sagged softly against me, a boneless, gasping, wide-mouthed horror. I have no idea where and how such a response happened to become fashionable among the younger set. Maybe they think it sets a mood of sweet surrender. You reach for a firm-boned young morsel and she falls into suet. I pushed her away and eased her back into the bright lights.

  After the first cut-in I moved back out into the shrubbery alone. The clouds had thinned and a moon cruised blandly through the ragged edges. Music thudded out across the somber fairways. I fingered an empty cigarette package and remembered the half carton in the glove compartment. I walked across the grass toward the parking lot.

  I was close enough to the car to touch it when I heard Mary Olan’s voice coming from inside the car. Her tone was lazy, taunting. “My dear, you aren’t on the basis where all you have to do is whistle. So I won’t take your key. Any time I go back there—if I ever do go back there—you’ll damn well be there waiting for me, not I for you. This isn’t Back Street, sweets.”

  Dodd’s heavy voice said, “This double-dating is childish.”

  “Is it? I know what you want. You want me waiting
there for you any time you happen to take a notion. You don’t want me to go out at all. I happen to like this arrangement. Clint is sweet. Wasn’t he sweet with your plotzed Nancy?”

  “Are you falling for him? Damn it, if I find out you’ve let him get to you, I’ll get him shipped so far away from here he’ll …”

  “Jealous, darling?” she drawled.

  “Why don’t you just take the key and then …”

  “You want one cake to eat, one to look at and one in the cupboard. No thanks. I might decide never to pay you another visit there.”

  “Mary, listen to me …”

  “You listen to me. You’re boring me. That wasn’t in the agreement. I’ll continue to go out with Clint. You’ll continue to come along too, with Nancy. It’s a cozy arrangement.… And I’m getting sick of sitting here like a college girl on a date.”

  “But tonight Clint took her home and we could …”

  “We could but we won’t, dear. Not tonight. Face it like a brave little man.”

  I had stood there and listened. And learned a great deal. It was a situation that smelled faintly of mental illness.

  “But Mary …”

  “And, darling, I didn’t like that phrase ‘get to me.’ People don’t ‘get to me.’ I get to people. Now if you’d take that slightly clumsy hand off my breast …”

  I moved back fast as the door latch clicked. She got out of the car quickly. She’d have seen me if she’d turned my way, but she headed off, heels punching the gravel, toward the front door of the club. I was back in better cover when Dodd got out and lighted a cigarette. I watched him take three long draws, then snap it away toward the wet grass. He followed her slowly. When I got my cigarettes the interior of the car was heavy with the perfume she used, a musky, offbeat scent.

  When I drove them home I dropped Dodd off first. Mary Olan didn’t move over next to the door after he got out. She stayed pleasantly and encouragingly close to me, the side of her leg touching mine. I took her out to the Pryor place where I had picked her up. Though a lot of the old line families have stayed down in the shady quiet streets of town, a few, such as Willy Pryor, have built out in the country. It has a stone wall, a bronze sign, a quarter mile of curving drive before you get to it. Probably the outmoded term for it would be a machine for living. You know the type—all dramatics. Dramatic window walls, dramatic bare walls, dramatic vistas. Two floodlighted pieces of statuary—one all sheet aluminum and the other a grey stone woman with spider limbs and great holes right through her where breasts should have been. The architects do fine, they can really set up a place. The only trouble is that no one has been similarly occupied redesigning people. Such machines cannot sit in sterile functional perfection. We people have to move in—bringing, of course, our unmodified belch, our unreconstructed dandruff, our enlarged pores and our sweaty love.

  I parked and Mary made no move toward the door handle, so I gathered her in and kissed her. She hesitated for a stilted second and then baked the enamel on my teeth. She was no pulpy junior miss. She brought to the task at hand a nice interplay of musculature, a crowding enthusiasm, and the durability and implacability of a Marciano. She stopped all clocks except the one in the blood, so that on terminus, I was dimly startled to find myself merely sitting in my own automobile.

  “You’re an agreeable monster, Sewell,” she said softly.

  “Likewise.”

  “You should get a bonus for overtime.”

  “A truly obscure remark,” I said, pretending young innocence.

  “Would, Sewell, that I were a touch more charitable and I would make of myself a suitable bonus, because I suspect you are a nice guy who deserves a better deal than you are getting.”

  “Tonight is my night to be told I’m a nice guy. How do I go about arousing your charitable instincts, lady?”

  She permitted a second flanking operation. During same I investigated traditionally, hopefully, a breast warm and classic. She rebanked her fires and extricated lips and breast, putting a cold foot of distance betwixt us.

  “No sale, Sewell.”

  “Anything my best friends have neglected to tell me?”

  “Nope. You are a fine crew-cut, long-limbed specimen of young American manhood, my dear.”

  “They why?”

  “Don’t ask it with a pout. I guess it is because you are what you are. For a man to intrigue me he must have a wide streak of son-of-a-bitch.”

  “I can work on that.”

  “Hardly.”

  “Could you force yourself?”

  She reached a quick hand and knuckled the top of my head. “That would be pure charity, sweets, and you have too much pride for that, don’t you?”

  “And the next line is let us be good friends.”

  “Seriously, I’d like that, Clint. I need a good friend.”

  I sighed with resignation. “Okay, what do you want to do with your good friend on the morrow.”

  “Wouldst go to church with me, sir?”

  It was quite the last thing I expected. “Yes. Of course.”

  “Pick me up here at twenty of eleven then.”

  I walked her to her door. She smiled up at me. “You are sweet.”

  “Then pat me on the head, damn it.”

  “Temper, temper! Kiss goodnight.”

  As that kiss ended I took revenge with my long right arm. She yelped and took a cut at me and missed. As I drove home I knew that if she had a full-length mirror and looked back down over her shoulder within the next ten minutes, she could admire a nice distinct hand print.

  Looking back I can count over twenty dates with her, including the time at the motel and the last one on the night of Saturday, May fifteenth. But not including that last ride we took together, up into the hills. Date from which she would not return.

  chapter 4

  Nancy and I sat on the pine log. She smoked her cigarette and scratched at a punkie bite on her ankle. Ever since the night she had gotten drunk and told me her woes, we had talked frankly with each other, though she had retained an aura of shyness. I had not told her what I had learned that night. There was no point in it. Suspicions could hurt, but the actuality would be worse.

  “I hope … I hope she never comes back,” Nancy said.

  I didn’t say anything for too long and the words hung there between us until Nancy laughed mirthlessly. “I don’t mean I hope anything bad has happened to her. Even to her. I just hope she’s found some other fly to pull the wings off.”

  “She’s impulsive,” I said.

  “Nice polite word. She’s a harpy. She feeds on people. She has a nice built-in excuse—her insane mother. That’s handy for her. No marriage, so she does as she pleases. Including going to bed with my husband.”

  “You aren’t positive of that, though.”

  “Oh, I am, Clint. Entirely certain. I kidded myself for a long time. But you can’t live with a man and not know. All the little false touches. That blandness, with all the guilt underneath. I know, Clint. I’ve known for a long time. It started back in February, a month after we arrived. She didn’t waste any time, did she?”

  “Don’t try to laugh about it.”

  “Aren’t I supposed to be gay about it? Isn’t that sophisticated or something? Last night after we got home we had a real scrap. He wouldn’t admit it, of course. I asked him about the things that are missing. His good robe, some sports shirts, an extra pair of slippers—little things like that. And a book of poems. Poems! My God, can you imagine reading poems to a … a thing like that? I asked him if it would ease his conscience any if I took a lover. You know, continental style. Sauce for the goose. At that he stormed out and didn’t come back until five this morning. Anyway, I wanted to talk to you, Clint. I haven’t told him or anybody else, but I’m going to leave him.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “I have some pride. I don’t have to put up with this. I can earn my own living. It hurts … hurts badly, Clint, when someone tells you in that way
that you aren’t enough for them. Enough woman.”

  “You want to be awfully sure, Nancy.”

  “I am sure. I’ve told you so much of my personal life. Aren’t you sick of it? Don’t you want to know everything? The whole story? I have two small brown moles right here on my left hip. Tomatoes give me a rash. When I get emotionally upset, I get diarrhea. Nervous colon they call it. I lost my virginity when I was sixteen and had a job waiting on table at a summer …”

  “Nancy!” Her voice had gone shrill and her face was tense.

  The tension went out of her. She put her head down on her bare knees and said in a small voice, “I’m sorry, Clint.”

  I touched the silky-fine blonde hair. “You’ve had it rough. I don’t blame you. But promise one thing. Think about it for a week.”

  She sighed. “If you think I ought to.”

  “I do.”

  She sighed again. “Clint?”

  “Yes, honey.”

  “Clint … do you want me?” Her voice was shy, far off.

  I knew why she asked. I knew how careful I had to be. “Yes, of course. Any man would say yes. You’re a special thing, Nancy.”

  “I’m not. But I’ll … be special for you. When, Clint? And where?”

  “I want you, but I don’t think it would be smart. I think you still love the guy. He’s hurt you badly. You want reassurance. You want to be wanted. And you want to hurt him back. I’m your friend, Nancy. I don’t want to be caught in the middle of that sort of thing. Suppose he sees what a fool he’s been, and you get back together. You’d always regret it. You’ve never done anything like that, have you?”

  “No. I … I don’t know what I want to do.”

  “Think for a week. Then we’ll talk again. Okay?”

  She lifted her head and looked at me. Her cheeks were wet. “Well you could anyway kiss me,” she said almost fiercely.

  No boats were near and they couldn’t see us from the patio of the Raymond camp. I stood up, took her hand, pulled her up and kissed her. It lasted a long time. There was none of the quick flame of Mary. Nancy’s lips were soft and warm and very sweet. But there was heat there, a slow burning—enough heat so I wondered how Dodd could be such an utter fool. We stepped apart and smiled at each other.