It was a bedroom for two people who loved each other. I thought of the tragic euphemism for what Niki and I had just done. It was called making love. Whatever it was we had made, it was not love. When she had ripped my back and bellowed her pain and completion, it was not love. Love has tenderness. What we had done was more suitable for the fetid cave of the Neanderthal after gorging on the steaming meat of one of the great carnivores.
Fluorescence turned the big bathroom into a brightness adequate for brain operations. The air was faintly steamy and elusively fragrant. The top corners of the mirrors were coated with a dwindling mist. She had laid out a big coral towel for me, precisely folded. Resting on the towel was one of those little kits luxury hotels provide the guest who stays over unexpectedly; aseptically packaged in a plastic bubble, shaving things, comb, toothbrush, nailfile, deodorant. The service was, I thought sourly, very complete in every shade of meaning of the word.
The shower, once I had learned the procedure on all the chrome dials and knobs, was superb. Such a shower inevitably makes some improvement in the morale. I was as low as I had ever been in my life. Improvement was the only possibility. I stayed in the shower a long time.
When I walked back into the bedroom with the coral towel knotted around my waist, she was curled in a deep chair by the window, her legs pulled up, a glass in her hand. She wore a pleated tailored white blouse, a narrow navy skirt. Her shining hair was pulled back tightly, and she had been very sparing with makeup. On a squat table beside her chair was a silver tray, a silver shaker frosted with moisture, a plump fragile cocktail glass like hers.
I realized the cleverness behind the effect she made, and had to appreciate it even though I knew it was contrived. This not only suggested her office costumes of long ago, reminding me of better times than these, but it had a clean and impersonal look that made things a little easier. Had she chosen a sensuous outfit, a revealing housecoat for example, and combed her hair long for me, she could possible have turned my stomach.
“Daiquiri here, if you want one, dear,” she said. “Help yourself.” She smiled at me in a shy, tentative way.
I went near her and poured the drink. It had a tart clean taste. “Good,” I said.
“Your clothes were messy with that sun lotion.” “I’m a mad, impulsive creature.”
“You wouldn’t want to take them to the hotel. I’ve bundled them up. I know where I can drop them off myself and pick them up and keep them here until you can collect them. I … laid some things out on the bed.”
I went over and looked. The things from my pockets were spread out. There were shorts, socks, a white shirt still in its retail cellophane, slacks that would look well enough with my jacket.
“You don’t mind?” she asked in a meek voice.
“Somehow I can’t get worked up about taking over his clothes. I’ve moved in on something more private than that.”
“He wore those slacks twice. They’re just back from their first trip to the cleaners. Everything else is brand new.”
She had laid out my belt, tie and shoes. “I told you it isn’t important. How could it be, now?”
“But you had me first!” she said with such despair I turned and looked across the room at her. Dusk had come into the room. Her face was a paleness against shadows, just a little duskier than her blouse. “Long before him! You had me first!”
“That gives me special rights?” I said. I dropped the towel. She turned and looked out the window and sipped her drink. I dressed in my brother’s clothing. The slacks were too big in the waist and too short, but not ludicrously so. The shirt sleeves were short. I dressed and put my jacket on and refilled my glass and sat on the couch, facing her.
“Gevan.” she said softly, “we both knew it would happen sooner or …”
“You were saying that he had fallen asleep and you had covered him with a blanket.”
“Gevan! Darling!”
“What happened after you covered him with the blanket?”
“But this is cruel! I want to talk about us.”
“Baby, I thank you sincerely for the shower, the clothes, the rum and the roll in the hay, but don’t make the mistake of thinking I am going to let you milk it for kicks by talking circles around it. You were telling me you covered him with a blanket.”
She looked down into her drink for a long time. At last she shivered and straightened and lifted her chin and looked at me without expression. “I read until I finished my book. It was midnight. I went in and shook Ken awake and told him the time and told him I was going to bed. He said he had a headache and he was going to go out and see if the night air would help. I told him less liquor was the only thing that could help him. He didn’t answer me. That was the last thing I ever said to him. It’s a very loving farewell, isn’t it?”
“You never know about such things in advance. How could you?”
“Thanks, darling. I came in here and went to bed. The bed on the right is mine. I left his bedlamp and the bathroom lights on. I was drifting off so quickly that when I heard the shot I thought it was part of a dream that had just begun. I began to wonder if he had fallen, or knocked something over. It’s unbelievably quiet up here at night. I tried to go back to sleep, but I kept wondering what I had heard. I put on my robe and slippers and went through the house, calling him, but there wasn’t any answer. I went outside and called. I knew I could be heard a long distance in the stillness. I walked around the whole house, and finally I was yelling so loudly I got hoarse the next day.
“I got a flashlight and went down the drive toward the gate. He was on the grass just inside the gate, near the lilacs. It isn’t a gate really, just two posts with lights on top that you drive between. You saw it when you came here. The lights were out.
“When I found him I didn’t think it was him. He looked so shrunken and little and flat against the ground, and his clothes looked too big for him. His face was bulging and horrible, and they say that happens because of the pressure of the bullet on the brain and …” She lost control for a few moments. She sat very still with her eyes shut, but when she opened them she continued in the same level voice.
“I can’t really remember running to the house. The police came quickly. I had put a blanket over him. I knew he wouldn’t want people looking at him the way he was. It was the same blanket I’d used to cover him after his drinks knocked him out. A lot of police came, and Lester and Stanley came. There were a lot of questions. I started to go to pieces. My doctor came and gave me a shot, and a nurse stayed here with me. I didn’t wake up until late Saturday morning. I phoned you then but … I couldn’t get you. You know the rest.” She carefully refilled her glass.
“Yes,” I said. “I know all the rest, including your mourning methods.”
She stared at me. I wanted to smash her with my own guilt. But I had pushed it too far. She laughed at me, with derision and amusement. “My mourning methods! Oh, you are so blameless, Gevan Dean!” I knew, even in the dusk light, how the blue of her eyes had deepened. I saw the arched lines of her mouth, arrogant and sensuous. “Are you going to convince yourself you were raped, darling? It was a good trick, if you were, you know. My back was turned, wasn’t it? Were you just trying to do the best job of oiling a lady’s back that had ever been done? For God’s sake, let’s both try to be honest. It might be the only virtue we have left, you know. We’ll call it our mourning procedure—for husband and brother. You see, darling, I have less to regret than you. I’m the one who didn’t love him.”
She rose to her feet and took two slow steps to stand tall over me, tall and mocking, sleek and resilient in her skin, smug in the aftermath of satisfactions. Long before, when we had known we would be married, we had found in each other an endless hunger for physical love. She had been marvelous to be with. She had demanded her pleasures with a boldness and a joy which had been a constant source of re-excitement to me. But the Niki I had known then was but an inquisitive emotional girl compared to the woman of riper body
who stood before me, laughing at me. This one was in a full torrent of her maturity, aware of her strengths and their uses, her driving needs and just what would be most assuasive to them.
I lowered my face into my hands and felt her sit quickly beside me. She wrapped gentle fingers around my right wrist. “Let’s not try to hurt each other,” she whispered.
“You make it sound easy.”
“Maybe we can do incredible things, darling. Like turning the calendar back a long way. It was all so good once upon a time. If we look for it, maybe we can find it again. Remember me? My name is Niki. I’m your girl.”
The room was almost dark. She had created a special mood wherein I could find myself wanting to believe that somehow we could make the four lost years seem like an absurd mistake, and be together again.
I turned and looked at her. Her face was inches from mine. “I remember you very well,” I said.
“And I remember you, Gevan. You are the man who had all the drive and all the energy, and one day you just … came to a stop.”
“Because there wasn’t anything worth working for.”
“Do you feel guilty about that?”
“Why should I?”
“I had to ask. It’s easier to ask things in the dark. Important things, darling. I don’t want you all steamed up to get back into the rat race.”
“What has that got …”
“Hush!” she said and touched my lips. “I have a crazy plan for us. It’s no good here for us. Too much happened here. We’d have to live in a new way to catch up on all we’ve lost. We lost so much, darling. Let’s go away together just as soon as we can. There’s all the money we can ever use. We could get a boat, a motor-sailor we could crew ourselves, and … make a life out of following the sun.”
She turned suddenly to put her head in my lap. She looked up at me. “Let’s do that, Gevan. Let’s really and truly do it, you and me. The hell with all of them.”
She made it sound so good and so easy.
“And leave all this? Mottling says you’ve been taking a big interest in the company.”
“Poo! He’s been trying to bring me into the discussions. It’s therapy, I guess. I can’t contribute anything. He can run the company with my help or yours, dear. We wouldn’t ever have to come back.”
Yes indeedy, off we would sail and in a couple of years we’d be able to speak fondly and tolerantly of good old Ken, and we’d be grateful to good old Stanley for keeping our dividends nice and fat. We’d just rove the blue seas and tie up at the fun places at the fashionable times, and make love, and drink too much, but always with adorable and enchanting people. And when the sex and sensation bit started to go a little dead, we could always give it a booster shot by taking exactly the right sort of couple on a little cruise, some adorable, enchanting pair too vulnerable to tell tales, and with some trading around and with some of the practices of the voyeur, we could put our romance right back on the up-beat, yes indeedy, and we would push the good old machine until finally the parts wore out, at which time the medics could gut her like a trout and carve away portions of me, and we would then want a larger and more comfortable boat and somebody to run it for us while we sat in adjoining deck chairs astern, soft, fat, brown as saddles, and without one bloody word left to say to each other or one itching thing to do to each other, yes indeedy. Bliss without end.
She must have anticipated what I was going to say, because she got up suddenly and said. “I’m restless, darling. Let’s go for a walk.”
We walked in darkness on the soft fresh grass. She found my hand in what seemed a most natural way. An airways beacon swept the south horizon. We walked past the garages and servant quarters, and down a tidied slope of lawn toward a pale caligraphy of young birches at the edge of the woodland. The first stars were out.
We stopped near the woods. “I’m ashamed,” I said.
“So am I, darling! So am I! But we’re the only ones who know about it, aren’t we? Who have we hurt? A dead man? You see, we’re not really ashamed of what we did. We broke a convention, dearest. We violated the code. We jumped the gun. We’re ashamed because we didn’t let what they call a decent interval elapse, that’s all. The act wasn’t shameful. Such a great need can’t be shameful. It was just the timing, darling. Don’t you see? We’re going to be together anyway. Nothing can stop that, and we both know it. I’ve never stopped loving you and needing you, Gevan. So we have no reason to be ashamed.”
“You make it sound reasonable, Niki. You’ve got that wonderful talent for making anything you want to do sound reasonable.”
“You didn’t use to be like this. Gevan. Why do you have to pick at things? Just enjoy, enjoy. You don’t have to think so goddamn much, do you?”
I made a sound like a laugh. “Somebody else told me the same thing a little while ago.”
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter. You don’t know her.”
She shrugged and turned away from me and looked up at the night sky. “I love the quiet out here. We’re the only two people left in the world, darling.”
“How dandy.”
She spun back and put her hands on my shoulders. “You’re still hostile toward me, darling. God knows I can’t blame you, after the fool thing I did, and the way I almost lost you forever. But don’t I deserve a chance to make it up to you? Isn’t it worth it to you to give me a chance? Try to feel a little bit of kindness, dearest. This hostility is like a sickness, you know. It even carries over to Stanley.”
“Mottling! What the hell has he got to do with this?”
“I’m trying to make you see your own confusion, Gevan,” she said, sliding her hands down to my wrists. I sensed your immediate antagonism toward Stanley, and until I figured it out, it worried me. You see, you know I like and trust him. So now I believe that in some emotional irrational way, you have a compulsion to fight him just in order to spite me.”
“For God’s sake, Niki!”
“I’m trying to get you to be honest with yourself. That’s the only way we can start off right, darling. A second chance is such a rare thing, it’s worth every effort. I hurt you terribly. Yes. But I hurt myself too! Can’t you see that? The four years were just as horrid for me as they were for you. You don’t have to keep on trying to punish me now by … by doing hostile things like working against Stanley, who is really so terribly capable. You really have no real objection to him.”
“He seems too damn plausible. He’s driven too many good men away. I’m dubious about his management policies. What’s that got to do with us?”
“Everything, because those are rationalizations to make your emotional hostility seem based on logic.”
At my slight tug she released my wrists. I lit cigarettes. In the quick glow of flame I looked at the oval flatness and good high bones of her cheeks, and the shadowed eyes. It was getting cooler. We began to walk slowly back up the slope toward the home my brother had built for his bride.
“You’ll have to give me a second reading on this,” I told her. “We talk about us, and we get over into this Mottling running the company. Where is the connection? What the hell difference does it make to you whether Mottling or Granby or Joe Sandwich runs the outfit?”
She walked with her head bowed, scuffing the grass with her sandals. “I want to say it exactly right, because everything I say, you take the wrong way, you know.”
“Take your time.”
After a long silence she sighed, stopped and faced me. “Maybe it’s all too involved and too female to explain. Reasons sort of overlap. In the first place, Ken wanted Stanley to be in charge. And, you can sneer at me if you want to, but I do feel obligation and loyalty toward your brother. It didn’t work, and that wasn’t entirely his fault, and he tried desperately hard to make it work. We both did. He was a good man. We both know that.”
“I’m not sneering.”
“Thank you for that, Gevan. Secondly, it’s … it’s like a test for us. You haven’t been here long enoug
h to learn anything pertinent about Stanley. So if you fight him, it’s because you’re fighting me. And what can we build on that kind of feeling? If you keep on trying to fight me, what will our life together be like? And there’s the last thing, and maybe the most important, Gevan. I do know, more than most people, that grave sense of responsibility you have. So suppose you got Stanley out. You know Granby couldn’t handle it. So you wouldn’t go away with me. You’d stay here and back him up and help him and get more and more enmeshed. And I would have to stay here, because you would be here. But, Oh God, how I want to get away from here forever, with you. This is where I bitched up my life, Gevan. I don’t think we can be happy here. And we need happiness. We need it so terribly.”
I looked toward the dark house. Nothing in the world seemed safe and tangible. I thought of what Uncle Al had said about her motivations. The Lime Ridge house looked like a big, brooding trap. Ken had built it and it had caught him. Something had broken him in a shadowy merciless way, and something else had killed him too cleverly. Everything was shifting, implausible. This woman was someone I had never known and never would know.
“I don’t know,” I said, my voice loud and harsh and weary in the silence. “I have to sort things out. I’ve got to get back to town.”
I expected protestations, pleadings, demands that we talk it all out here and now. But in a voice bright, casual and kindly, she said, as she patted my arm. “Too much is happening too fast, I know. Almost too much to take. And we have all the time there is, darling.”
We walked toward my car. I opened the car door and turned toward her. She was closer than I had expected, and she swayed into me, parted my jacket, hooked the fingers of both hands around my belt and pulled and held us tightly together, her face in the hollow of my throat, her back arched in a way that laid the insistent firmness of her breasts against my chest. I could not stand like a fool with my arms at my sides. I put them around her, my hands light and meaningless on her back.
Area of Suspicion Page 13
