Cancel All Our Vows (34 page)

The thunder was almost constant, and the city power flickered, went off. Each dip in a street became a lake. Water streamed into the Glass River and slowly the level began to rise. He walked and felt the good coldness of the rain trickling down his body under his sodden clothing. He had cashed a check and he had nearly a hundred dollars in his billfold. The city lights came back on, suddenly, just as he was passing a bus terminal. Sell me a ticket to anywhere. Give me forty dollars’ worth of distance, please.

He stood for a moment, looking in through the wide pane of glass. A fat tired woman with two children sat waiting, surrounded by bundles. To go would be an escape. An escape from Laura, from the pattern of little silver hooks she had imbedded in his flesh. An escape from Jane, who had taken away all that was good.

But they always found you.

He walked on. The rain slowed for a time and he could hear the distant thunder above the diminished roar of water. Then it came on again, twisted and whipped by the wind. The wind flapped his soaked trouser legs. He walked slowly with his shoulders hunched, hands shoved deep in his jacket pockets, looking ahead at the sidewalk a dozen feet in front of his slow footsteps.

Laura would answer any phone. Answer his call. Make some excuse. Pick him up and they would drive out to a cabin somewhere. Drive out and sink again into the little death that was a temporary end of all memory. Shining body of flax and wine. Open the inner doors and let the blackness come out, the black things, the dark knowledge.

He stopped at a corner and looked around, realizing, suddenly that ancient habit patterns had guided his steps back to a familiar area of small frame houses on quiet
streets. This was the neighborhood in which he had grown up. Jane had lived down there, a block and a half further. They had walked these same streets long ago, walked back from the winter movies, her hand in his coat pocket, warm in his. Walked with a slow singing, and walked as slightly different people—as though the mannerisms of those on the screen had rubbed off on them for a bit.

Gable and Ginger, walking home. Oh, we’d rather walk, of course. The chauffeur will bring the car along later. Where shall we go, my darling? The Bahamas? It’s quite pleasant there this time of year.

He walked slowly by the house where he had been born. It looked small, shabby. He wondered how his room looked. He saw a young girl and a child on the couch in the living room, turning the pages of a magazine.

He remembered the strange feeling of coming back from honeymoon with his bride, taking Jane up to his room that night, taking her into that bed where he had spent the long restless times thinking of her.

He walked on, slowly, remembering how he had been unaware of her for many years. She’d been a kid on the next street, a slat-thin blonde kid, scabbed knees, wild, loud. A considerable local reputation as the only girl in the area who could put a respectable curve on a hard ball and chin herself twenty times.

He felt himself grinning as he remembered the heap he had in high school and how she hung around all one Saturday while he was working on it, imploring him to teach her how to drive. Damn gadfly. But he’d given in and she’d learned with spectacular quickness, and then she was a sort of a mascot. A mascot until one day in his last year of high school he’d looked at her and suddenly became aware of what she would be, of what she could be.

There was a walk they used to take that last June he was in high school. A good walk because his friends were not likely to see him with her, and that was good because she was too young. A high-school sophomore, for God’s sake, and he was at a period when he yearned for worldly women. He followed that walk they used to take. The rain had stopped. The air smelled washed and clean and his clothing had begun to dry.

Past her house, and he didn’t want to look at it. Up Collins Street to the park. Through the park and by the tennis courts and up the long wide curving path to the small hill where there were picnic tables. The hill made his ankle hurt again, and he walked more slowly, favoring it.

He came to the tables and stopped there. Rain dripped from the elm leaves overhead. Up on the drive a few cars were parked. Dark and silent. He sat on one of the tables, his feet on the attached bench, and wondered if it was the same table. He took out his cigarettes. The rain had gotten to them and he threw away several, dug back into the pack and found a dry one, lit it.

A hell of a long time ago. Nineteen years. Damn near twenty. Fletcher Wyant sitting on a table in the warm June night with Jane Tibault beside him. Dream talk. Things to do with a life.

And her flat declaration. “Whatever you do, I’m going to be part of it.”

It had shocked him, because it had sounded so fierce and so determined. So he had gagged it. “This is so sudden, Janey.”

“Not so sudden.”

“Well, people drift apart. I’m going away.”

“You’ll be back. Why don’t you kiss me, anyhow? You never have. You act like I was a little kid. I’m not that little.”

There, sitting on the table, he had kissed her, and at first it had been a bit awkward, as she had somehow gotten her nose in the way, but then it was all right. Very all right. And it stopped him thinking about her as a little kid. And it kept him thinking about her after he was away at school. Her kiss had been as fierce and determined as what she had said.

He sat and smoked and he felt his hand tremble each time he lifted the cigarette to his lips. How do you make yourself forget something that happened? A little thing. A little foolish thing. A moment of weakness with a husky college kid. It didn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean enough to wipe all this out. All the memories. All the damn wonderful years.

He dropped the cigarette and shut his fists hard and
lowered his chin onto his chest and fought against himself with all his strength. What is it, after all? A physical thing. Think of the history of different cultures. Think of the goddamn Eskimos. What the hell makes it so wrong? What makes it so rotten and unforgivable? Think of what I’ve done. Jesus! Those two overseas. That Chicago tramp. And now Laura, with her sick mind. Can it be right for me, and wrong for Jane?

Me, I’m a big boy now. The locker room talk gets onto women. Sure, I always hint how I have my innings on the business trips. Something shameful about fidelity. Yet fidelity is what I want. For both of us. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

I can’t live with her, thinking of what she’s done. And I can’t imagine not living with her.

He hit his balled fists together, heard the small choking sound in his own throat. His eyes filled and stung.

Because it was all impossible. It was impossible, he knew, to force himself to accept any standards of morality except those ground into him by his environment Through no process of logic could he make himself discount or ignore the fact that someone else had used her body, that some other maleness had made her, forever, secondhand.

He remembered how he had tortured himself, long ago, thinking that on their wedding night he would discover she was not a virgin, and wondering who it was who could have had her. And he had thought of all the lies she might tell to conceal the fact that she had been … used. But she had been a virgin bride. Almost too emphatically a virgin bride, so that it had all been most difficult, and very shocking, and quite terrible for her. So bad that it had been a long time before things had gotten right for her, and had it not been for his patience, they might never have been right.

Was it possible, he wondered, to just go on. A nice pleasant formal little life together, and when it became unbearable, there was always Laura and a little trip with her into a fascinating darkness. Oddly how, with Laura, or with any of the others, it did not matter that others used them. It mattered only with Jane. It mattered only with
Wife. Church, Home, Wife, Mother. Anything they could make verses about for greeting cards, and you ran into a whole series of emotional blocks.

Thunder banged loudly, startling him. A bright flash of lightning turned the picnic area a vivid green-white and thunder cracked quickly after it, and again the rain came down, torrents of it, barrelsful, tipped over from the tree-tops.

The world was a vast place, full of death and atomics—mud ball swinging around a dying sun, and yet, he thought, I, as Jehovah junior grade, sit in judgment on my wife, and I cannot help it. Let him who is without guilt cast the first stone. I have guilt and she has guilt and I cannot forget hers.

Years, perhaps, will dull it. But I cannot forget it.

He walked slowly home through the rain. The rain stopped before he had covered half the distance. It was much cooler. He shivered in the soaked clothes.

As he walked he tried a new way of rationalizing. Marriage, he told himself, is a breeding pact. A mating for the purpose of having children. A legal and spiritual device which is designed to give the children of that marriage emotional security.

And so, he reasoned, sex without procreation is a barren thing. A thing of no importance. An amusement. A device. Perhaps, a disease. It involves only the body, and not the soul. Jane, in that larger view, is guiltless. She succumbed only to a variant of decadence.

Nor did that reasoning work for him.

He went to the back door of the house. Jane heard him and came quickly and opened the inner door and stared at him. “I was worried about you,” she said. “You’re soaked!”

“I was walking,” he said casually, but his teeth chattered.

“Walking in the rain on that ankle? Really, Fletch! Here, I’ll spread papers. Get your things off. I’ll bring your robe and you take a hot shower.”

She hurried off. He emptied his pockets of their soaked contents onto the shelf in the back hallway. She came back with a big towel and his robe and slippers. She said,
“Leave your things right there. I’ll take care of them.” She turned away quickly. He stripped and rubbed himself dry and belted the robe. The shivering was not as violent now. He went into the kitchen, found a fresh pack of cigarettes, lit one over the gas stove.

Jane came in from the hallway. “I hung your things in the utility room. I think they’ll dry there. That suit might shrink some, but the dry cleaners ought to be able to stretch it. You go take your shower.”

“I’m feeling warmer now. The kids okay?”

“Sound asleep.”

“They have a good time?”

“They seemed to. You better make yourself a stiff drink.”

“Good idea.” He started for the liquor cupboard, then said, “How about hot coffee laced with brandy? Too much trouble?”

“Of course not. Sit down. It won’t take long. I’ll use Instant.”

He sat at the table and she brought him an ash tray. He realized that she had not looked directly at him, except fleetingly.

“The job go all right today?”

“Fair. I had words with Ellis. I think he’ll stay in line.”

“It must be odd to be telling him off when you …”

“When I what?”

“Never mind. I was thinking out loud. Did you stay late at the office?”

“I left at five.”

She gave him a quick oblique look. “Oh.”

“There was a lot to do, but I didn’t feel like it,” he said, a shade too harshly.

She brought him the coffee and the brandy bottle. “Here, you better fix your own.”

“You having some?”

“I wouldn’t mind. Yes, I guess I will.”

By the time the coffee was cool enough to sip, she had brought her own cup and she sat across from him. He sneezed suddenly.

“I’ll lay out the antihistamine.”

“It never seems to help me.”

“You can’t tell how bad the cold might have been if you didn’t take them, you know.”

“I suppose.”

She sipped her coffee. “Why were you walking?”

“No special reason.”

“Where did you go?”

“I walked through the old neighborhood. Haven’t been over there in years. God, it looked small and shabby. The houses were all smaller.”

“I know.”

“You been over there lately?”

“I drove through there the other day.”

They were silent for a long time. He finished his coffee. “Want more?” she asked.

“No thanks. I can’t sleep if I have two cups.”

“Funny how we both went over there.”

“Is, isn’t it. I walked up Collins and through the park up to the picnic tables. Sat on one of the tables for a while.”

“The … same one?”

“I don’t know. They’ve moved them around, and they looked sort of new. Maybe the old ones gave out on them.”

The house was cool for the first time since the heat wave had started. Jane wore a pale blue cardigan and a grey flannel skirt. She glanced at him and frowned and reached over suddenly and put the back of her hand against his forehead. Her eyes widened a bit and she took her hand away quickly. “I’m … sorry, I thought you looked flushed. You … don’t feel hot.”

“I was wondering over there tonight how it would be if we could jump in our time machine and start it all over again.”

“Maybe someday people can do that. Or maybe they do it now on some other planet. I couldn’t go back that far. I’d just go back … a little way.”

He had the strange feeling that they were like a pair of doctors called in on consultation, and now stood over the corpse making learned comment about what had been the exact cause of death.

She looked at him suddenly and her eyes were wide and wet. “Fletch. I …”

He stood up. “I better get to bed before this cold gets ahold of me. ’Night, Jane.”

“Good night. I put an extra blanket in there.”

“Thanks.” And later, long after he would normally have been asleep he lay awake, thinking of how precarious even the most orderly life could be. Luck was all on your side, and one bright day it kicks everything out from under you.