by Clark Howard
“Yes—God—yes—” she answered, because as he asked the question he rolled over her leg and entered her in a single slow, delicious stroke. “Oh, sweet Jesus—”
They were splendid together. But they were always splendid in the dark.
Cloud could not bring himself to tell her that he had to take her in the dark because every time he came, he thought the same thought that had come into his head the very first time they had made it together: that Weldon Whitman had once ejaculated into this same woman. No matter how hard he tried, he could not keep that persistent thought out of his mind. And he lived with an awful dread that if he left the lights on, she would be able to see it—see that thought—in his face, in his eyes.
So he kept putting her off about the lights. And finally she stopped asking.
The other thing that bothered her about him was that damned cross and chain. He carried it around with him. In the mornings when he dressed he apparently put the thing in one of his pockets and kept it there all day. Sometimes when they were sprawled close to each other on the couch watching television, she would notice him occasionally move his hand down and touch his trousers pocket, or reach up and touch his shirt pocket, as if to reassure himself that the damned thing was still there and had not somehow mysteriously disappeared. Later, when they would be undressing for bed, he would remove it from whichever pocket he had carried it in all day, and put it on the dresser with his handkerchief and lighter. It was there every morning during the week when she got up to get ready for work; it was there on weekend mornings when they got up together; but always it was gone as soon as Cloud was dressed. He made no effort to conceal the fact that he was carrying it around with him, but neither did he speak of it or offer any reason for what he was doing—and Carol did not ask him. She did not pretend to understand all the psychological implications of why he was doing it, but she was certain of one thing: Robert Cloud’s physical possession of Glory Ann Luza’s cross and chain was the single remining link he had with the Weldon Whitman case—and it was a link he obviously felt compelled to retain.
Toward the end of the second month with her, Cloud began to cultivate a mustache. He had insisted that she use the safety razor to blade cut his hair every eight or ten days to keep it from becoming too shaggy—then he had turned around and grown as bushy and shaggy a mustache as she had ever seen. Not that she didn’t like it; she did; she particularly liked the feel of it when he sucked her nipples: she had never felt such a sensation before. But she did not think it needed to be quite so full and drooping. She was of the opinion—and in her completely open manner told him so—that a neat, decently trimmed mustache would probably be very becoming to him.
One of the primary reasons for Cloud’s growing the mustache was that he knew it made him look different, and consequently it made him feel different. He was trying desperately to exorcise the influence of Weldon Whitman from his mind—particularly that element of it that intruded into his physical love for Carol at the precise instant when the result of that love was going from his body into hers. He simply had to drive away whatever it was. It did not bother him in the least to think of other men who probably had been intimate with her; and he knew there had been others; as a matter of fact, one of her letters that he had read specifically mentioned an incident of intercourse that had taken place on a picnic somewhere. But those thoughts did not bother him; only the persistently intruding thought of Weldon Whitman bothered him.
It was a problem he had to solve. He thought by changing the pattern of their lovemaking that he might also change the pattern of his thoughts. So he began making love to her as soon as she got home from work in the evenings. And not only in bedroom, but in other places: the living room, the floor, the couch; and in places where it was lighter—though still not as light as Carol wanted it to be; and in different ways, in different stages of undress, with varying intensity. He did anything he could think of to make the intrusive thought vanish.
But it did not.
Changing their lovemaking habits of necessity changed all their other habits also. They ate dinner later because they usually dozed for half an hour after their lovemaking, then showered or entwined together in a hot tub. After dinner, they watched television or played Scrabble or Casino, or just lounged on the couch, his head in her lap or her head in his lap, one of them massaging the other’s temple, until eleven o’clock or so when Carol would go sleepily off to bed. Cloud rarely if ever went to bed with her on week-nights; he preferred to stay up by himself, usually until three or so in the morning, watching talk shows or late movies, playing solitaire, reading books he had her pick up for him at the library—Steinbeck and Dos Passos and Faulkner—works he had read in college and earlier, but liked and wanted to read again. Several times, when Carol bought a Cosmopolitan or a McCall’s for herself, she would also pick up a magazine or two for Cloud: a Playboy or True, or Argus, whatever looked interesting. But she noticed that even though he accepted the magazines and thanked her, there was no indication that he ever actually read them. They lay on the end table, their covers as unwrinkled as when she had given them to him; she never saw him touch them again, and a week or so later they would be in the trash. It was the same with the morning newspaper. She would read it while she ate breakfast, then put it neatly back together and leave it at the place she set for him. At night, when she finally got into the kitchen after their lovemaking and bathing, she would see the newspaper in the trash, as neatly as she had left it, as if it had simply been picked up from the table, folded once, and discarded.
It was the same with television. He would watch anything and everything—except news shows. If she turned on the early news while she was preparing dinner, he would busy himself with something in the bedroom. If she left the TV on for the late news after the movie, he would get up and go into the bathroom. He simply refused to watch the news.
For a while, all of his idiosyncrasies seemed separate and distinct; but eventually Carol was able to link them all up: magazines, newspapers, television. Cloud was avoiding all current events, all present news. He had retreated into the word-picture world of Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Faulkner, where the problems were not of his making, and their solutions no obligation upon him.
And Carol Carter knew why Robert Cloud had chosen that refuge for himself. It was the only certain way he had of avoiding any and all word of the Weldon Whitman matter and its progress. Just as the Luza girl’s cross and chain was the security link he needed to keep him from being completely severed from that same matter, that same progress.
So Robert Cloud, in effect, had gone into limbo. He had run away—through not completely away—from the Whitman case. He refused to speak of it, read of it, hear of it—yet he carried Glory Ann’s lost cross and chain as if it were his lifeline back to the world outside the little apartment in which he hid. He lived and ate and slept with and made love to Weldon Whitman’s ex-wife—yet he could not reach sexual climax with a free mind. He grew to hate the days, when Carol was gone and he was alone; so he forced himself to stay awake through the night and far into the morning while she was there with him; then he slept away as much of the empty day as he could. He watched television for endless hours, always careful never to let a newscast slip into his schedule. Special bulletins drove him instantly from his chair to turn off the set. In the mornings he would not look directly at the newspaper Carol left for him; he approached it obliquely, folded it upside down, discarded it quickly. He wanted to be, tried to be, a different Robert Cloud, one whose past went back no farther than the night he returned to Carol’s doorstep.
He altered his appearance: wearing the exotic underwear Carol bought him, growing a mustache, letting his hair grow full but keeping it from being long by having Carol razor-cut it.
All these things he did in the blind expectation that they would somehow make a difference in his future, his fate. In the belief that what was to come for him was not already ordained, that he himself was not already predestined. Hoping
, secretly against hope, that perhaps the things he did would matter.
Then Carol came home one night, bringing the outside world with her, and destroyed that hope.
It was the middle of his sixth month with her. Carol opened the door on her return from work and Cloud was waiting there for her as usual. It was raining out; she had on a loose rain cape and was dripping wet. Cloud kissed her briefly and took the cape and hung it in the bathroom. Then he returned to kiss her less briefly and to do other things that he had been thinking about all the rainy, thundering afternoon; but when he approached her, he saw that under the rain cape she had been holding a late edition of the Ledger.
“This is one you’re going to have to read, Rob,” she said simply.
He turned away from her and went to fix himself a drink. To hell with the sex. She followed him across the room.
“You’ve been hibernating long enough, Rob. Now it’s time to stop. I want you to look at this paper.”
“I don’t want to look at the paper.” He poured gin over two ice cubes, ignoring the vermouth.
“I want you to read this, Rob.”
“I’m not interested.” He lifted the glass.
“I want you to—”
Cloud slammed the glass down. “I’m not reading the fucking paper, so leave me alone!” He looked at the gin all over his hand and sleeve, amazed that the glass had not broken.
Carol glared at him. “All right then,” she said in cold defiance, “if you won’t read it, I’ll read it to you. And if you don’t want to listen, you’ll have to turn around and get your ass the hell out of this apartment.” She unfolded the damp newspaper and slammed it down on the breakfast bar. “Headline ‘Whitman Appeal Denied.’”
“Carol, I don’t want to hear about it—”
“Sub-headline: ‘Death Penalty Legal, Says Supreme Court.’”
“Save your breath, I’m not listening—”
“Sub-sub-headline: ‘Whitman to Die in Three Days.’”
Cloud’s head snapped around. “What?”
“That’s right,” Carol confirmed. “Three days.”
Cloud snatched up the paper and quickly scanned the story. In an instant he knew it was true. The California Supreme Court, in a four-to-one decision, had ruled that the death sentence, as it had been applied in the Weldon Whitman conviction, did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Whitman’s appeal was denied, the conviction in his case affirmed, and the matter returned to the Superior Court of Los Angeles County for imposition of sentence. That court, which under the criminal statues could set the date of execution no earlier than seventy-two hours or later than ninety days, set it for ten o’clock the morning of the third day following its receipt of the Supreme Court ruling. The time set was exactly seventy-three hours later. A death warrant was immediately issued by the court to the warden at San Quentin.
Cloud left his glass and went over to the couch. He sat down heavily, holding the newspaper on his knees. The heavy odor of damp newsprint reached his nostrils. Outside, in the pouring rain, a crack of lightning split the dark sky. Carol came and sat in the club chair opposite him.
“Is that fair, what they’re doing?” she asked.
“It’s legal,” Cloud said quietly.
“That’s not what I asked.”
Cloud sighed. “If he deserves to be executed, then it’s fair.”
Carol stared at him for a long, thoughtful moment. She had already decided to make him admit his feelings, to force him to take a stand on Weldon Whitman once and for all; but now that the moment had arrived, she was less certain of her decision than of any she had previously made regarding him. Her love for him was now dominant in her emotional structure, and consequently was causing her to be more cautious than she had been earlier in their relationship. As deeply as she cared for him now, she would not have needlessly hurt him for anything in the world. But at the same time, she was determined to make him help himself.
“Does he deserve to be executed?” she asked flatly. The quickness of Cloud’s response surprised her.
“I think he does,” Cloud said with no hesitation at all.
“Then you don’t intend to do anything to delay it again?”
“There’s nothing I can do.”
“I don’t mean just you,” she said. “I mean by helping the others at the foundation.”
“I don’t think there’s any way I could help them,” he told her. “The only people who can really do anything now are Niebold and Whte, the two lawyers.”
“Will they?”
“I’m sure they will.” Even as he said it, he felt a frown forming on the surface of his face. He did not know why. “They’ll probably file an emergency writ of some kind,” he said, much less positive now.
“Do you want to see Whit again?” she asked. “Before it happens, if it happens?”
Cloud shook his head. “I don’t think so. There’d be no point in it.” He tilted his head slightly and studied her. “You know I love you, don’t you?”
Feeling very warm, she moved over to the couch next to him. “I know it now,” she said, pleased.
Cloud let the newspaper fall to the floor. They sat quietly, close to each other, for several minutes, she thinking about him, he thinking about Weldon Whitman. Until his thoughts moved on to someone else.
“There’s Genevieve, too,” he said nebulously.
“What about her?”
“If this is really the end of the whole thing, she’ll be all alone. You see, she’s really in love with Whit.”
Carol did not say anything to that; she remained silent and left the problem, if there was one, for him to decide.
“Genevieve is the one decent person in the whole fucking mess,” he said after a while.
Again Carol did not reply.
“She’s the only one who’ll be hurt—really hurt, deep down inside—when they gas Whit.”
Still Carol Carter maintained her silence.
“She doesn’t really deserve being left all alone like that,” Cloud said finally.
Carol got up from the couch and went into the bedroom.
Several minutes later Cloud got up and followed her. Carol had his suitcase open on the bed and was already packing for him.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Cloud arrived in Sacramento on the noon commuter the following day. He took a taxi to the foundation and walked in unannounced, suitcase in hand. Genevieve was sitting alone in her cluttered little office, staring vacantly at the wall. The rest of the place was deserted. Cloud stood in the doorway of the office, holding his suitcase, until she looked up and noticed him.
She blinked twice when she saw him, and her lips parted in consternation more than surprise. “Oh, Rob,” she said in an unusually toneless voice. “For a moment I wasn’t sure it was you.”
Only then did it occur to Cloud how different he probably looked to her, with his mustache and several months of amateur haircuts.
“If it weren’t for your eyes, I wouldn’t have recognized you,” Genevieve said. “You look older. Shabbier too, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“I don’t mind,” Cloud told her. He set his bag down and came in. “How are you, Gen?”
“I’m all right.” She swallowed and struggled to hold back the tears. The tremble in her breast escaped and caught in her voice. “I’ve—just—resigned myself—to—”
She surrendered, burying her face in her hands, sobbing convulsively. Cloud went to her, knelt beside her chair, took her tenderly in his arms.
“Okay now,” he said, squeezing her shoulders, patting her head. “Okay now, okay …”
She cried for five minutes, the sobs racking and wrenching her body as if it were being struck by heavy blows. All the while Cloud held her and stroked her head and spoke quietly to her. And when he sensed that it was nearly over, that she had cried herself out, he found her box of tissues in a desk drawer, gave her several of them, and went out in the printshop to the cooler and brough
t her a cup of water. She drank it, sniffing loudly, wiping at eyes that were puffy and red. She managed to half-smile miserably.
“I knew you’d come back, Rob,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t just let them kill Weldon without making some kind of effort to save him.”
Her words made him feel wretched. “Gen, I don’t really know of anything I can do—”
“You can make Morris and Borden do something,” she told him.”
“Aren’t they doing something already?”
“Nothing,” she said bitterly. “At least I don’t know of anything they’re doing. Neither of them will even talk to me on the phone anymore. But I have a friend who clerks for the federal district court of appeals. She’s promised to call me if they file anything at all on Weldon.”
“Wait a minute, I don’t understand what you just said,” Cloud told her, frowning. “What do you mean, Morris and Borden won’t even talk to you on the phone?”
“Just that I haven’t spoken to either of them directly in more than five months. Any word I get from them comes through your friend Carla.”
“Forget that business of ‘your friend Carla,’” he said with a hint of irritation. “She’s not my friend anymore. In fact, I’m not at all sure she ever was.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re finally seeing her in a true light,” Genevieve said with almost maternal relief. “If you knew how she’s been carrying on with that man Terrier who’s been rewriting Weldon’s book—”
Cloud grunted. He might have known. “Let’s get off the subject of Carla,” he said. “She’s not important anymore. Tell me why Morris and Borden won’t talk to you.”
“That’s pretty obvious, Rob. I don’t agree with them on anything; I mean anything. It’s much simpler to ignore me than to argue with me. Besides, the way the foundation is organized now, all I do is supervise the printshop. The professional speakers that Borden hired take care of all the speaking engagements, and that Terrier person does all the writing. Or did all the writing. As you can see, there’s nothing at all going on around here. They stopped giving us printing to do a week ago. I suspect that they had advance information on the ruling.”
