The Peter & Charlie Trilogy

by Gordon Merrick

  He came slowly around from behind the chair and stood looking down at her. She forced herself to lift her head with a little smile. His expression made the smile inappropriate and it was quickly effaced. She was more frightened than she had ever been in her life with him. His look of cold pained disgust told her that she risked losing him forever. Disaster confronted her and she talked fast, hoping that something would come out that would deflect the force of what she felt was going to be a punishing end to everything. “If you’d asked me if I’d been to Pavlo’s house, I would have told you. Why all this beating around the bush? It never occurred to me you’d be interested. Besides, we’ve had no chance to talk. You haven’t been here. I’d made friends with him on the rocks. I was hot. I just dropped in to see if I could cool off. Stop staring at me like that, darling. I drop in on people all the time. I don’t always remember to report all my comings and goings to you.”

  He looked at her, watching all her composure crumble. He felt a small sad vindictive satisfaction in knowing that he had her on the run at last. It wasn’t the sort of satisfaction he wanted to live with. “You’ve made a friend of a creature like that? My respect for you has worn pretty thin, but there’s enough left for me not to want to believe that. I prefer the truth. Sex is sex. Before we go on, I’ll offer you an alternative. I’ve decided not to leave. Do you want to? Leave here, leave me, take Kate and go? Jeff doesn’t belong to either of us any more.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, George,” she said, astonished at being given this opportunity to fight back. “Where would I go? You can’t afford for us to leave, even if I wanted to. I don’t, of course. You’re my life. You know that. We’ve made our life here. Neither of us is going anywhere.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure about that. Maybe we’ll be thrown out. I haven’t told you about that possibility.”

  “What are you talking about now?”

  “I won’t go into it at the moment, but it might be best. Perhaps Mike is right. Maybe I should be back in the States, taking part in whatever is going on over there. After seeing Mike, I don’t believe it, but it’s worth thinking about. Keep it in mind. If you stay with me, you may not be living here long.”

  “I’m going to stay with you, George, no matter where we live.”

  The heartfelt simplicity with which she said it made tears spring to his eyes and he turned away from her. She knew how to play on his vulnerability. The temptation to let her off was greater than ever, but he had to resist it. Nothing had been accomplished, nothing had changed. He cleared his throat and turned back to her. “In that case, we’ll have to go back to Pavlo before I can decide whether I want you to stay. Tell me what happened.”

  “What do you think happened?” The respite had given her an opportunity to rally her confidence. Now that she had admitted going to the house, there was no reason why she couldn’t maintain to the end the innocence of the visit. “We talked for a few minutes. As a matter of fact, it was cooler there. It was quite a relief after my walk.”

  “Sarah, you know perfectly well I know why you were there. If you can’t tell me, I definitely don’t want you to stay. If you can—well, truth hasn’t been the most common commodity between us recently. Maybe a little more of it would clear the air. I really don’t know. It’s the risk you have to take.”

  “Why do you talk such nonsense? What risk? This is getting very boring, you know. I don’t like the suggestion that I can’t go visit a man without misbehaving.” A cloak of indifference descended over her, as if she had suddenly passed beyond his reach and achieved total independence. It was undoubtedly play-acting, but it chilled him because it corresponded to something he was beginning to be aware of in himself. Some part of him was free of her. It was boring to go on trying to make her state the obvious. He could almost believe that he wanted to be completely free of her.

  “Christ,” he explained. His voice rose to a shout. “You went there to get fucked. Do you think I’m an idiot? You’re still attractive enough, goddamn you. It’s obvious what he’s thinking about every waking minute. It’s on display for everybody to see. How was it? Is it as big as it looks? Did he really get it in there and make you feel it?”

  “Please, George. Don’t be disgusting.” She sat inviolate in the dignity of her indifference and distaste. “What’s come over you? We don’t talk like that. I’ve never seen you like this.”

  “It’s high time you did. You grab a young twerp who’s after your son. Aren’t we supposed to mention that? You go panting after a beach boy with a big cock. What a dreadful word. Christ. You’re no more or less sluttish than any other woman. If you’re not getting it at home you go out and find it. Can’t we say it?” Rage was boiling in him. He was freeing himself with every word he said. He had only to revive the earthy crudeness that had once been in her to reduce them both to the half-tamed animals they both essentially were. He had been born and bred a sham, sham gentleness, sham consideration of others, sham cultivation of his mind and senses. If her betrayal helped him to break through the layers of sham, at least he would be more nearly a man.

  “I won’t listen to this,” she said in infuriatingly superior tones. “You must be mad. What about all the decency and happiness we’ve created together? You’re throwing it all away.”

  “You’re damn right I am. Decency is incompatible with the human condition. People can’t endure happiness. You haven’t had sex for a year, but what about before? Weren’t you happy when you met Ronnie? Who cares? You had to be sure you weren’t missing something. Shit on decency.” He sprang forward and swung his open hand hard across her face. She cried out and rocked in her chair. “Go on. I want you to say it. I want you to hear yourself say it. Pavlo fucked me. Get it out loud and clear. Then maybe we can talk about decency and happiness.”

  Tears were rolling silently down her cheeks. “You don’t hit people,” she protested incredulously.

  “Don’t I, though.” He swung his other hand and hit her harder. He could scarcely believe that it was he who was doing and saying these things, but he was filled with a wild exhilaration. Let the animal take over; civilized man had had his day. “You’re going to say it, do you understand?” he shouted. “I’m going to hit you till you do.”

  She had lifted her hands in front of her in fragile self-defense. She shook her head as sobs began to shake her. “You can’t make me,” she asserted in a choked voice.

  “That’s what you think.” He swung both hands, one after the other, and hit her twice again.

  She cried out with pain and bowed her head and held it in her hands. Her body swayed and twisted as if she were wrestling with some inner demon. “All right, damn you.” Her voice rose suddenly, hard and coarse and almost exultant. “Pavlo fucked me. He fucked me. I wanted him to fuck——”

  He was on her, his arms flailing, beating her on the head and back and shoulders. He seized her hair and shook her until he heard her teeth clattering. He released her and struck her again so that she almost toppled from the chair. She managed to twist out of it and dart up from under his arm. He turned and seized her and sent her hurtling against the bed. She fell back on it, her skirt up around her thighs. She tried to struggle upright, her hair falling in a tangle across her face. He had stripped her of all pretense to dignity at last. She pushed her hair back and their eyes met, hers brimming with tears and an unmistakable message. This wretched, sobbing, battered creature wanted him. He lifted a hand to his forehead. His mouth stretched wide to emit an animal howl of outrage. No sound came. He covered his mouth with his hand to contain his revulsion. His mind once again posed the question: Why not? If this was the way back to her, take it. So much for tenderness and solicitude and understanding. They could wallow in the gutter together. He was on the bed in a bound. He grabbed her arm and dragged her up to him. He seized the top of her dress and gave a great yank. It ripped down the middle.

  “You disgusting——” she panted. “Don’t touch me. I won’t ever——” Her eyes contradict
ed her words. They were full of astonished, wounded desire.

  “What about yesterday? Did you go let him fuck you again?”

  “No. I did it so I would stop wanting him. It worked.”

  “You bitch. How many more men are you going to have so you’ll stop wanting them?” He tore the remnants of the dress from her. She was wearing nothing under it but brief underpants. Her body had no need of being trussed. He yanked at cloth again. Elastic held, but enough came away in his hands. Shreds of the garment circled her waist but the center of her was exposed. The effect satisfied the brutality he had found in himself. She looked like the victim of rape. Her arms were lifted instinctively to shield her breasts. He tore them away and held them out while he looked at her and flung her back onto the bed.

  “You’re vile. Filthy,” she cried. “If you go on I’ll never speak to you again.”

  He stood over her and tore off his shirt. The feel of her skin against his hands, her obscene nakedness exposed to him after all the months of averting his eyes from it were sending commanding orders tingling through his body. He wasn’t impotent now. He stripped and straightened and thrust his hips toward her. He caught a strong whiff of body smell. Ordinarily, he would have been fastidiously offended by himself, but now it contributed to his intoxication. He was glad to stink of humanity. “I’m not a body boy, but I’m the only man you’ll have as long as I’m around,” he raged. He lunged for her hair and pulled her face up close to his lifted sex. “There. All I needed was to see you for what you are. An available body. If it’s going for free. I’ll have some too. Go on. Take it. I’ll bet you were panting to suck Pavlo’s. It must’ve been quite a mouthful. I’m easy for you.”

  “Why do you want to make it hideous?” she sobbed. “I loathe you. I never want you to touch me again. It’s all over.”

  “You’re damned right it is. It was all over day before yesterday. What’s hideous about sucking my cock? You sucked his, didn’t you? I’m sure he didn’t have to insist. Tell me. I want you to say it.”

  “Yes, I sucked his cock.” Her voice was once more hard and coarse.

  His sex strained upward. He yanked her head closer. “Then do it, goddamn you. Open your mouth and do it.”

  She did as she was told and in an instant all inhibitions vanished from her obedience. He felt no pleasure in it. There was a great wrenching within him and his spirit seemed flooded with tears. All that was left to him was the harsh sordid satisfaction of making her grovel before him at last. He steeled himself to accept this shameful obeisance and swarmed up onto the bed over her, gripping her frail shoulders roughly to keep his sex in her mouth.

  When he had exploited his command of her to the limit of his endurance, he pulled away from her. “That’s enough of that,” he said harshly. “We know you like it. Now I’m going to fuck you. I’m sorry you like that too. I’m not going to do it to give you pleasure.”

  His hands were rough on her, handling her beauty with cold authority, while he placed her as he wanted her and dropped down onto her and drove cruelly into her. She cried out, but he could feel her body offer itself to him. He closed his heart to its appeal. He was determined to reestablish his possession of her without yielding his newfound freedom. He forced himself to take her selfishly, forced his nature to retreat before the liberation of his basest urges, resisted the love that flowed out of the very act of their lying together again after their long privation.

  Orgasm became a hope of final freedom. He drove hard to achieve it, knowing that it must come quickly if he was to save himself from being ensnared by her again. He had recovered the power to accomplish a mechanical act on her body, nothing more. It was dehumanized, depersonalized, independent of the desire he felt charging her body with electrifying responses.

  He burst into her with a shout before she could impinge on the cold solitary enactment of his triumph over her. He lay on her with his eyes closed, blessedly drained of thought or feeling. When he opened them again, the room was afire with the copper rays of the setting sun. The glory of it transfigured what had just taken place between them. He withdrew from her hastily and sat up on the edge of the bed, fighting back tears.

  “That’s fucking for you. It has all the emotional impact of brushing your teeth.” After the violence he had unleashed in himself, words sounded peculiarly sterile and superfluous. Using them was a habit he had yet to overcome. “Is that all you wanted from your body boy and your pretty fairy?”

  There was a silence and then she spoke in a constricted voice. “You’ve punished me more horribly than I thought possible. You had the right. I didn’t know you had such cruelty in you.”

  “I didn’t either. We still have things to discover in each other.” His voice caught and he bowed his head and rested it in his hands. “Oh, Christ, Sal, why did we have to do this to each other? Were we so wrong for so long? It’s never going to be the same again, you know.”

  “No. never.”

  “Maybe we’ll discover that’s a good thing. I wonder.”

  “How can ugliness be good?”

  “Ugliness can be true. I’ve tried never to shut my eyes to ugliness or truth. The truth you had to tell me was ugly enough. Don’t you forget it. I’m glad I made you tell me. It was stupid to pretend there was less ugliness in us than there is in most people. Things were going our way for so long that I guess we forgot. Loving each other so much right from the start maybe wasn’t an unmixed blessing. We’ve always been sort of above the battle. My goddamn success. Living here has been part of it too, I suppose. Our island idyll. We’re not above the battle any more.”

  “We are and always will be. You’re still you. Nobody sees the beauty in life the way you do.” She said it with conviction while she thought what a relief it would be not to be so in awe of him anymore. He wasn’t perfect. He had been unfaithful to her now. He had dismissed it as if it had no importance, but it would surely count in the way they dealt with each other in the future.

  “We’re right back where we started, with all of it to be done all over again,” he said, reminding her of the harsh facts as he saw them. “Do you think we can make it?”

  “I didn’t mean any of the things I said. You were terrifying but——” She dropped her voice almost to a whisper. “It was horrible but exciting.”

  He suppressed a pang of revulsion. She was right to say it. A fuck was a fuck and the hell with their otherworldly sensibilities. “Don’t expect me to be that exciting often,” he said. “It’s there, but I have to dig for it. A lot of it was pretty forced.” He lifted his head. The light had lost its piercing clarity. He looked out the window at the swirls of gold and green and rose and purple that were spilling out across the western sky. This prodigal display to mark the ending of a day spoke to him of time. They had time. That was one reason he had to be here. Time was running out everywhere else in the world. Where else could he have disappeared for two days to allow himself to fall apart so thoroughly that he had had no choice but to pull himself together? At home, there would have been engagements and commitments, all the things Mike had offered him as salvation, so that he would have been too busy to be aware of a need for salvation. A scene such as they had just had would have been inconceivable to his old self. He could see that all the years here had been a preparation for it, had in a sense been leading up to it. Their total freedom coupled with the obligation of creating their own rules out of their real needs had made it possible finally for him to reveal himself to her.

  He had found an answer to one of Jeff’s questions. Not much, if he was supposed to tell people what life was all about. He might have something to say to a few backward souls. Mike, for one. If Mike had constituted a threat, a test, a challenge to his beliefs, he had been soundly routed. Jeff had told him that. Mike hadn’t the courage of his own vicious convictions.

  He sighed with an almost peaceful exhaustion. After all the shouting and obscenity and violence, what had he achieved? He had staked out some new little area of free
dom in himself; he would never again hide anything of himself from her. There was a new inconsequential element of fatigue in his feeling for her; he couldn’t imagine expending quite so much passionate attention on her in the future. Otherwise, love was intact. Everything was pretty much the same. That was the miracle. They would go on, as he had known they must despite his brief rebellion, adapting, yes, growing. Knowledge was growth.

  He turned and looked at Sarah. There was a puffiness in her cheeks and along her jaw. One eye was bloodshot. The skin along her shoulders was beginning to show marks of discoloration. His bruised love. He reached out to her and pulled her up and drew her in beside him on the edge of the bed. She folded herself against him in the way he had longed for her to do, had been terrified that she might do, for so many months.

  He held her close with one arm and smoothed her hair. “Poor darling. Did I hurt you badly?”

  “Yes, you did,” she said with spirit.

  “No more than you hurt me. I’ll never get over Ronnie, but I do understand finally. I guess we were in a rut. A rut of contentment. That’s what people can’t endure. They long for the heights and don’t worry about the depths they’ll fall into if they fail to reach them. It keeps things moving. Gain and loss.”

  “I thought it was going to be all loss from now on. Thank God you’ve taken charge again.”

  He turned her face to him and gently kissed her swollen lips. He dropped a hand to her sweet breasts and bent down and kissed each nipple. He straightened and looked into her eyes. “Such a pretty girl. I really don’t want anybody else to have you.”

  “Nobody ever has—nobody ever could the way you do.”

  He parted his legs and allowed his freshly erect sex to lift from its confinement. He laughed and put her hand on it. “That’s in charge again. Poor Jeff. He’ll never know how awful and fascinating women are. And yet, my God. How magnificent it might be. I hope it will be for him. Two hard bodies and two hard minds butting up against each other, wringing love from an impossible clash. There’s a sort of mad valor about it. None of us can have everything. Gain and loss. It’s a rule of life.”