I reached out slowly and put my right hand on her throat. She did not try to evade me. I squeezed gently, felt the muscles in my arm and shoulder knot. I wanted to clamp my fingers and thumb shut on her throat with all my strength. She still watched me, unmoving. I could feel the pulse beat against the base of my palm. I increased the pressure slowly and her breathing stopped. There was contempt in her eyes then. She did not move. The chalky face began to take on color and a tiny vein at her temple stood out.
It gave me the feeling that she would force herself to stand there, without resistance, until consciousness left her, just to prove that she was the stronger of the two.
I released her. She breathed deeply, rapidly, breasts lifting sharp and hard against white nylon. The color faded slowly, the vein receded.
“You wanted to kill me,” she said, her voice raspy from the pressure on her throat.
“Yes.”
She gave the door a little push. It swung slowly shut and the latch clicked loud in the silence. She looked at me with something lowering, feral, in her expression. Chalk face framed with black. Lips like a wound.
The nyloned arms flashed up and her fingers caught folds of the corduroy shirt above my belt on either side. She thrust her hips against me and leaned backward from the waist, as though she were trying to hold herself aloof and apart from the body, which had now taken over volition, had now begun its unthinking act. She ground herself against me, and as she did so, she whimpered softly.
“Emily, I …”
“Don’t talk,” she said, without unclenching her teeth. “Don’t spend time talking.”
She was the agressor, sweeping both of us up into an incredible and brutal climax that was, for both of us, like being at last broken on a great wheel.
Her breathing took a long time to quiet, and then she left me. I watched her walk quickly by the lamp, her shoulders drooping, head lowered, body impossibly white, breasts sharply conical silhouetted against the lamplight, and I saw that in profile, the line from the nape of her neck to her ankle was one long flowing curve.
I dressed. I felt a long way away from myself. I picked her clothes from the floor, stood stupidly with them for a moment, put them carefully on a chair. Then I stretched out on the day bed, lit a cigarette.
She came out after a time, wearing a dark robe with wide lapels and heavily padded shoulders. She came to the couch and I moved my knees over to give her a place to sit. She took a cigarette from my pack. I saw her hand tremble as she lit it, but her face had regained its impassivity.
“That’s what they sense about me,” she said tonelessly. “Now you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t they write books about physical love? A nice dreamy floating. Tender stuff. Drifting on big woolly clouds. I wonder how that kind would be. You know what my kind is. Like a kind of dueling I read about. Where two men stand, each with the corner of the same handkerchief in their teeth, and a knife in each hand. Then they turn out the lights.”
“Maybe your way is better.”
“This wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t going to let it happen.”
“What did I do that made it happen?”
She gave me a quick look. “I won’t tell you that.”
“Because I’ll use it again.”
“Yes.”
I reached down and caught her wrist. I twisted it slowly. I watched her face, saw her mouth begin to change. I released her.
“Damn you,” she said. “Damn you for learning how!”
“It was pretty obvious, wasn’t it?”
“You know what you’ve done. Now I’m going to have to leave. Leave the apartment, and the bank and the city.”
“Because I can’t buy cars and clothes and diamonds and all the rest of it.”
“And that’s what I want, Kyle.”
“A matter of money,” I said contemptuously.
She turned her head slowly and looked at me. She kept her eyes on mine for a long, long time. This was a new kind of tension.
When she whispered, I could barely hear her. “You handle money all day, Kyle.”
My mouth slowly turned dry. Lying there, I could hear the big drum that was my heart. “You don’t mean that.”
She turned away, “No, I guess I don’t mean it.”
What was left in the shaker was warm. She took it out and put ice cubes in it. She brought it back, swirling it, filled the glasses again. She didn’t speak.
I said, too loudly, “That’s for damn fools. They never stop hunting for you. How can you live? What good is that kind of money?”
“I didn’t mean it. It’s easier for me to go away, Kyle.”
“I won’t let you go. Not now. Not after this.”
“There’s no way to stop me from leaving, Kyle.”
I dug my fingers into her shoulder. “No way but one. Is that it? Is that the way you’re putting it up to me?”
She pulled away. “Why try to give me the responsibility?”
“I asked you your price. Now you’ve let me know what it is.”
“If that’s the way you want to say it.”
“And that’s the choice you’re giving me. Be a thief and be with you, if I’m lucky, for thirty days before they catch us.”
She moved up along the couch, put her hands on my shoulder, and forced me back. She looked intently down into my face. A long strand of the dark hair swung below her cheek. “Suppose it were a year, Kyle. A full year. Just for us. Would that be worth it?”
“Where do we hide for a year?”
“Would it be worth it? Answer me!”
I traced the line of her swollen mouth with my fingertips. “If it were just thirty days, it would be worth it. You know that.”
“We’ll be careful, Kyle. Terribly careful. I learned things from my husband. I remembered a name. I’ve remembered it for a long time. A man in Mexico City. Manuel Antonio Flores. He’s expensive. But he can sell Argentine citizenship, the kind where they can’t extradite you.”
“Very simple. I just pick up a couple hundred thousand and we got to Mexico City and become Argentinians.”
Her eyes glowed. “This is luck, Kyle! Can’t you see it? Can’t you taste it? Luck! The best thing in the world. Everything fits.”
I pushed her away and drained the drink and stood up. I began to pace back and forth. She sat and watched me. When I glanced at her, I knew where I’d seen that expression before. Mona Lisa. Now I knew why that old gal had smiled that way. A little victory smile. Suddenly I hated the black-headed tart on the day bed. Hated her for both her violence and her greed.
I stood heavily in front of her. “I’m a fool, Emily. But not a damn fool. I’ve never stolen a dime in my life.”
“Bully for you,” she said softly.
There was a certain kind of revenge I could take. I reached for her.
She said quietly, “If you touch me, I’ll scream as loud as I can. I’ll scream before I have a chance to … respond to being hurt.”
I knew she would. It was on her face, in her eyes. I picked up the shaker, went into the hall, pulled her door shut, and went down to my own place. I showered, changed, went out, and ate a steak that was more expensive than I could afford. When I first went down into my apartment, it shocked me to find that it was still daylight. It gave me that same subtle sense of disorientation as when you come out of an afternoon movie.
I went to bed, telling myself that I was cured of her.
Chapter Six
Friday, in the bank, I tried to keep my mind off it. But the bank money I handled had a new feel in my hands, a new texture.
I don’t think the bank teller ever lived who didn’t play the mental game of how to beat the system. It’s a dangerous game to play. You do it as a sort of mental exercise. You are led to do it because in the books, in the news, there are always stories about those who tried and failed. Being egocentric, you tell yourself that if you ever really wanted to jump the fence, you could do a smarter j
ob than the slob who just got himself caught.
You think and think and think. The checks on you are pretty intricate. A teller can’t really take out enough to make it worth while between auditings. You never get into the main vault without people watching you.
Years before I had decided, playing my mental game, that the only possible way to make a decent haul is to have an accomplice upstairs. Once I had arrived at that decision, I had given no more thought to the mechanics of it. Now I had the accomplice upstairs, ready made. I knew I wasn’t going to let her angle me into turning thief. So I told myself there was no harm in giving a little thought to the mechanics.
All day Friday I was slow, and kept catching myself up in one error after another.
At the end of the day I had a double error somewhere in the checkup, and couldn’t clear it until quarter of six, much to the disgust of all concerned. But while I was fumbling through my job, something cold and sharp and accurate in the back of my mind was ticking over like the timing mechanism on a bomb.
Saturday morning at ten-thirty, Jo Anne, her eyes dancing, met me in town and we took a bus out to Hilson Gardens. She chattered all the way out, seeming not to notice the depression that I was trying, unsuccessfully, to hide.
There was quite a crowd there. It was a privately owned housing development. The propaganda sheet they handed out had a lot to say about utilization of space, dynamic design, functional living. The apartments in the first unit to be completed were certainly unlike anything else in Thrace. Panel heat, living rooms designed for television, sliding-door closets, glass shower stalls, pass-throughs from kitchen to dining nook, kitchens complete with garbage disposals and dishwashers.
We found ourselves alone in one, the bare rooms echoing to our footsteps.
“Kyle, I love this one!” she said. She trotted around opening closets and shutting them again, looking in cupboards. “Hey! Look! Magnetic things on the cupboards to keep them shut. And did you see the size of that shower?”
We went into the bedroom, the bigger one. “This will be ours, Kyle. With the children’s room across the hall.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Don’t you just love it?”
“Certainly is attractive.”
“Gee, you sound kind of flat about it, darling.” She took my arm. “We’ve always dreamed of a place like this. Remember all the times we’ve talked? Of course, it’s just for a few years. We’ll have to have a house of our own eventually.”
“Yeah. I guess we will.”
“Shall we tell Mr. Anderson all right? The only deposit they want is two months’ rent. And we’ll be in that second unit over there, the one they’re still working on. Come here and you can see it from this window, darling. We can have the same floor plan as this, with the same big windows and all. And see, there’s where they’re putting up the swings and teeter-totters. There’s even going to be a sort of nursery-school thing where you can leave little children while you go shopping or anything. We’ll be happy here, Kyle. So terribly, terribly happy.”
She spun around and faced me, her face pink and glowing. “Let’s go give Mr. Anderson the money. I withdrew it from our account and had a check made out.”
I looked at my knuckles. “Maybe we could look around some more.”
“Why? Gosh, it’s perfect! There couldn’t be anything better. And if we don’t decide today, it will be too late. Mr. Anderson told me that he could hold it for us for August first if we let him know today. They’re going like hot cakes. And mostly all young people, Kyle. I think …”
“Is there any law against looking around some more?” I asked her.
She took hold of my arms. Her face crumpled like a child’s. Her eyes filled with tears. “Kyle, do you want to marry me?”
I delayed a fatal fraction of a second too long. “Of course!”
She stamped her foot. “You don’t, you don’t!”
Another couple wandered in, stopped, backed hurriedly out. “What gives you that strange idea?”
“You don’t. And it’s that girl. I know it is. Oh, don’t look so injured. Peggy Reese told me about her, and enjoyed telling it, too. It’s all over the bank, she says, that you waited for her after work and now she has an apartment right in the same building with you. She might just as well have moved in with you. And Peggy says she’s cheap. Peggy says she looks hard.”
“Shut up!”
“Now you want to defend her. You don’t want to hear the truth about her, do you? You’d rather carry on some cheap, cheap, cheap …” Her voice broke completely and she went into the bathroom and closed the door.
I shoved my hands in my pockets and looked blindly out the window. After a long time she came out.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“How about the deposit?”
She looked around the room as though saying good-by to something dear. “I don’t think I’d like to live here now. Maybe we can find another place.”
“I thought there wasn’t any other place like this.”
She left me standing there. I followed her out. There was a long wait for a bus. She’d made the crazy accusations. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of trying to explain anything. The next step was up to her. We got off downtown and she turned, quite calmly. “I have some shopping to do, Kyle.”
“In other words, run along.”
Her mouth tightened. “If that’s the way it sounded.”
“That’s exactly how it sounded. Shall I come over tomorrow?”
“You’re under no obligation, you know.” I had never realized her blue eyes could be so cool.
“In other words, don’t come.”
“You seem to be making the interpretations.”
“If you want me to come, invite me.”
She turned quickly and went off into the crowd. She carried her shoulders straight and her head high.
I had lunch in a drugstore and went to a double feature. It was full of screaming kids. I sat with my eyes shut and that cold mechanism in the back of my mind was still clicking over, grinding out data.
I sat through it nearly twice, and came out a little after six. At a liquor store I bought a bottle of cheap rye and took it home. I pushed open the street door. Jo Anne was standing by the mailboxes. She had the look of someone who had been standing there for a long time.
She looked at the center of my chest rather than at my face. “I came to extend that invitation,” she said. Her lips barely moved as she spoke.
I kissed her forehead. “I’m sorry about today.”
“Can I come up?”
“Of course.”
We went into my apartment. She acted very strange. She had only been there twice before, and that had been when we were with other couples. She sat on the couch.
“Drink?” I said.
“A stiff one, Kyle. Strong as strong.”
“Depth bomb coming up for the lady.” Her answering smile was meager.
I made two drinks of rye and water. I made them both stiff. I handed one to her. She lifted it to her lips. Higher and higher, her throat working.
“Hey!” I said.
When the glass was empty she lowered it. She made a face and held the glass out. “Make me another, Kyle.”
“I won’t be responsible,” I said.
She looked me directly in the eye and said, “I don’t want you to be.”
I made her second drink weaker than the first. She didn’t seem to notice. But at least she didn’t drink it in the same manner. She only drank half of it in the first attempt.
I saw the drinks hit her, saw her blue eyes grow a bit vacant, saw her mouth slacken. She lifted the glass and drained it.
“Feel floaty,” she said.
“How could you help it? Not being used to it.”
“Had to have a drink. Have to say something. Walking and thinking and crying and walking some more. People staring at me. Crazy girl.”
I was standing, looking down at her. “What
do you want to say?”
“Came to tell you to take me, if you want me. Been a sissy. Sissy for years. Scared of it. More scared of it than anything in the world. Girls told me it hurts bad. Terrible. The first time. First time for me, Kyle, Twenty-eight. Firs’ time.”
I sat beside her. “Not like this, Jo Anne. Not this way. This isn’t what you want.”
She looked at me with tipsy shrewdness. “Want you, Kyle. For keeps. If this is the way, Jo Anne does it this way. Now. Sorry about … drinking. Scared.”
“Jo Anne, I …”
“Insist. Where’s your chiv’lry? Maiden humiliating herself.” She shut her eyes tight, then opened them wide, held her arms out. “Oh, Kyle! Please, Kyle.”
I took her in my arms. Her lips were cold, compressed, frightened. She trembled violently. I moved her over so that she lay beside me, her back to the wall. This was one way out of it. One sure way out. After this, there would be no chance for me to continue the crazy tangent that I had started on.
I was holding her, caressing her, murmuring to her, trying to make her fears smaller and her wants greater, when I heard a slow familiar step on the stairs. Involuntarily I stiffened. I heard Emily come up the stairs to my floor, walk by my door with her soft tread, and go on up to the floor above. Then I heard her footsteps over us.
“That’s her, isn’t it?” Jo Anne whispered.
“No, I just thought somebody might be coming to …”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“Jo Anne. Baby. Just …”
“Don’t put your hands on me.” Suddenly she began to push frantically against me. “Sick,” she gasped. “Sick!”
In the bathroom I had to support her with my arm around her waist, or she would have fallen. She had taken the liquor too fast. Her system couldn’t handle it.
She straightened up, wavering, her face grayish green, her blue eyes dead. “Better get me home, Kyle.”
“Honey, you take a nap. Then you’ll feel all right.”
“Don’t want me here. Not with her here.”
I shook her until her head wobbled loosely on her shoulders. “Take a nap. It’s an order.”
She started to cry. “Everything goes wrong. Everything.”
Weep for Me Page 6
