Cancel All Our Vows (9 page)

“But you’re going to find out, aren’t you?”

“Oh for Christ’ sake, Jane! You talk like a crazy person.”

“
I’m
not crazy. But you better watch yourself, bud. You’re getting to that age. You’ve got to prove you’re a man or something. Like that time in Chicago.”

“Let’s stay on the subject.”

“You find the subject pretty attractive. You
want
to talk about her. You’re getting some kind of filthy pleasure out of talking about her, aren’t you?”

He held his teeth tight shut for the space of three breaths. Then he said slowly, “We don’t get anywhere bickering, Jane. She’s an odd woman. Not like others we know. I’m perfectly willing to admit that. I don’t envy Ellis. It looks as though he’s got himself a hell of a problem. I don’t know what makes the woman tick.”

“But you’d like …”

“Please let me finish this. I’m trying to be as objective as possible. If I seemed to pay too much attention to her, I’m sorry. Maybe I did. But it wasn’t an attempt to make passes. It was an honest, though perhaps misguided, attempt to find out what motivates her. It interests me, because I want to be able to depend more and more on Ellis as time goes by. I want to know if she is going to cut loose and give him so much personal hell that he won’t be of any use to us down at the shop. I do not think we ought to see too much of them. You know I don’t like to be too close to anybody who is working for me. I seriously doubt, and I believe you do too, that there’s going to be any whispering due to my actions tonight.”

“You don’t know …”

“Please, honey. Just let me finish and then you can give me some more hell. I want to talk about how I feel about women. I like them, dammit. I enjoy looking at them. I inspect every pretty girl who passes me on the street. I like to look at the eighteen year olds. But God forbid that I should ever get involved with one. You can’t spend all of your time in bed, and I would have absolutely nothing else in common with a young girl except that. Now, how about women? How about Mrs. Corban? I think she is an attractive woman. You know she is. In her own way, she’s witty. Now, let us suppose that I suddenly had to go to New York, and I met her on the street there. Assume, further, that she was anxious to have me take her back to my hotel room. This is getting a bit fantastic. I don’t think I would, dear.”

“I’ll say it’s getting fantastic.”

“Not in the way you mean. I’m getting older and I’m getting smarter. I knew some girls before I met you. I’ve learned something. The first time is no good. You aren’t adjusted to each other. You know absolutely nothing about the other person’s wants or needs or tempo or anything else. It takes a lot of times of being together before you’re—damn it, I hate to sound so clinical—proficient. And that means just from the physical angle, without thinking of any emotional or spiritual aspects.

“We’ve been together a long time, Jane. I love you and I don’t want to lose you. Both of us have a strong streak of the voluptuary. So with us it’s good. I’m not a kid. I’m not looking for illicit thrills. I’m not trying to prove anything to myself, or to anybody else. To make any deal with Laura worth while, assuming that I
could
seduce her, or, as you might say, vice versa—a long long time would have to pass before we could do each other any good. And frankly, I’m too old and too weary and too lazy and too damn set in my ways to embark on any campaign like that, believe me.”

There was a long silence. He decided he did not want to plead any longer. He stared glumly ahead, sucking hard on the cigarette, seeing, against the slant of the windshield, the reflection of the glowing red end of his cigarette. It
was the dead still part of the morning. The time when old people died. The time when hospital corridors were empty echoing places, smelling of pain.

He felt Jane move close to him, the long warm length of her thigh against his, her hand light on his knee.

“God, I’m silly,” she said in a small voice.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Yes you would. I rattle on and on and you listen to me half the time and I hardly blame you for that. I guess I’ve got everything in the world I want. I forget that. I let the little darn things pile up on me—things that aren’t important. And then I give you a bad time because I get stupid jealous of you. But you
did
spend an awful long time down there with her, and I guess the old gabby-noses will find somebody to talk about Mostly I didn’t like being left with that Ellis creature. He’s so ponderous. And we’ve got to bear with them on Sunday, bless us.”

“Let’s not make them a habit, hey?”

“I’ll take opium first. Now kiss me and let’s go to bed.”

He smiled in the night and kissed her and she made her arms tight around his neck, and then whispered in his ear that she was sorry for saying so many nasty things. She sat close to him on the way home.

He was in his bed and she was in the bathroom and he fought to keep awake for her. Weariness ran like molten lead through his veins. She came into the bedroom, silhouetted for a moment against the bathroom light before she reached back to turn it off. And then she was heavy and sweet-smelling against him. The night was warm, and he channeled his thoughts to maintain his awareness of her.

Long after she had gone to sleep and he could hear her breathing deeply in her own bed, he thought of Laura Corban, thought of the thin, clear, delicate articulation of her, the clever intricacies of knee and ankle and oiled socket of hip. She moved lightly across the backs of his eyes, and, on the very edge of sleep, he thought that she was a symbol of some subtle depravity, that there was something about her which was unclean, and yet something that he had to learn. With Jane he had gone through the accustomed rites of their love, and all the time it had been happening, he had seen the watchful face of Laura
Corban. She had watched them with remote, indifferent interest. With a faint trace of amusement. As one might watch the antics of the clumsier beasts at a zoo, filled with self-awareness of her own more motile deftness, more astringent delights, and degenerate devices.

He slept and his dreams were full of unnamed fears, of running—but never fast enough; of hiding—but never cleverly enough; of fighting—with awareness of defeat. Ellis Corban romped woodenly through his dreams, and in one memorable sequence he held a tiny doll so tightly in his fist that only the thin white feet showed.

Laura rode home beside Ellis from the club, sitting silently and remembering. Remembering the look of him, the awareness of his heavy muscular body beside her slimness. The deep slow tones of his voice. And she remembered that first feeling of awe when she sensed his vulnerability—sensed that he by some other path, alien to her, had come at last to stand at the same place where she had stood since the first warm days of spring. It would be good to run, she thought. Safer and better. But a thought as forlorn as that of the child on a mountaintop thinking how good it would be to fly.

She squirmed a bit in the car seat as she remembered the cheapness and obviousness of the way she had maneuvered him into kissing her. And she knew that up until the instant of contact of their lips, she had half believed and half hoped that it would be as meaningless as other kisses on other nights at other clubs.

Yet, in contact, his lips had been hard as oak roots, his arms strong enough to break her body. Her tongue returned to the small raw place on the inside of her upper lip where it had been bruised against a tooth. Her lips still felt swollen.

And the driving, punishing kiss had weakened her oddly, had driven her back to that afternoon time of lying white and naked on the stubbled rug in the bath of music. Then they had swayed, awkward as adolescents, bumping against the slot machine.

And then she had put the last quarter in, knowing as she pulled the lever that it was jackpot, knowing it was
and wishing it wouldn’t be, and holding the yellow skirt ready for the coins that streamed down the scoop and overflowed to chink together in the yellow fabric.

For the rest of the evening he had been near her. Even when he was across the room, he had been near her, and she knew that he felt as she did, that they were the only two living things, moving among automatons in a strange game of charades.

She sat and remembered while Ellis talked cheerfully and endlessly about the success of the evening, complimenting her on her excellent behavior after a bad start.

“Fletch seems quite taken with you, dear,” he said complacently. It jolted her out of a pleasant reverie.

“What? What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing in particular. He just told me he thinks you’re charming and quite unusual. You seem to have gotten off on the right foot here. I’m really pleased.”

“Jane doesn’t seem to be quite so enthusiastic.”

“Well, you never have gotten on too well with women. Just so long as you don’t make an enemy out of her, that’s enough. And I think if Jane tries to criticize you, it will just put Fletch further on your side. It will even help your relationship.”

“Relationship! What are you talking about?”

Ellis laughed comfortably. “Don’t be so naïve, darling. It doesn’t hurt a man at all to have his pretty wife flirt a little with the boss.”

“I’m supposed to dangle? Like a carrot in front of a mule, or whatever they put carrots in front of?”

“Do it right, dear, and you’ll earn yourself the other kind of carats. Pretty good, eh? The other kind of carats. I’ll have to remember that.”

“Please do.”

“You don’t think it’s funny?”

“It’s an absolute howl. But isn’t the whole idea dishonest, darling? I mean dangling like that. To be fair, I better go off on a business trip with him. It would really be business, and if I spent anything, we could deduct it, couldn’t we? If a little flirtation will help you at the office, just think, darling, what a long honest-to-God weekend in the hay could do. You might get to be president.”

“Why do you have to spoil everything?”

“Why would it spoil anything? Aren’t we all sophisticated people? If you think you’re being left out, maybe we could work a four-way deal and include Jane.”

“Get your filthy mouth off her! She’d understand what I mean. I’ve watched her talking to Stanley Forman. She doesn’t think there’s anything degrading about being merely pleasant.”

“Men like you ought to have two wives. One to handle the promotional aspects.”

“What makes you think you’re too damn pure to play the game the way everybody else does?”

“Any game I play, I play for keeps.”

“You’re always saying that. I’ve heard it a hundred times. Frankly, I can’t see as it means anything. It’s just one of those meaningless comments that make you sound as if you were loaded with integrity or something.”

She didn’t answer him. He turned into the drive and she got out while Ellis took the car back and put it in the garage. She hadn’t brought her house key so she waited in the night for him to come back. She had a sudden strong urge to call a truce, to put a temporary end to the pointless bickering. She wished, suddenly, that she could be everything he wanted her to be, even if it would mean a minor death. The night was warm and the stars were out, and she wanted to cry, for no special reason.

She heard the scuff of his foot on cement as he came back along the walk. He came up to her, making no move to unlock the door. They stood close in the night and he said in what she secretly called his “marshmallow fudge” voice, “Kits, we shouldn’t fuss at each other. Things are getting better between us. You know that. You’ve steadied down a lot, believe me, and don’t think I don’t appreciate it and love you for it. And I was really so terribly proud of you tonight.”

Laura wanted to make up to him, and yet when he took the initiative she felt both repulsion and rebellion.

She leaned closer to him and whispered the vilest word she knew. It was as brutal and meaningless as a blow. The moment she said it, she wished with all her heart she could take it back. He unlocked the door with rigid dignity.
They did not speak while preparing for bed. Once the lights were out he turned over on his side, his back to her. She lay in the darkness for a time and then, as penance for her own brutality, she slid close to him and caressed him. She half smiled in the darkness as she sensed his shock at this rare and unusual incident. And then he turned to her with such a bumbling eagerness that she was at once sorry for her impulse. She automatically performed her suitable portion of the joyless act, while her mind roved far from the tangled bed and the labored breathing, far from the broken words of adoration. When she was quite certain that he had slipped into heavy slumber, she got quietly out of bed, took a quick chill bath, dressed in the darkness in slacks, a light sweater, comfortable moccasins.

She locked the door behind her when she left the house. She walked slowly toward the river, her hands shoved deeply into the pockets of the slacks, fingertips against the soft roll of her thigh muscles as she walked. There was a crumpled dollar in the slacks and she bought a Coke from a sleepy counter boy at an all-night drugstore.

A block from the river a group of young drunks came up behind her, promising her unspeakable delights in fuzzed voices. The pack chases a prey that runs, and she turned and faced them and told them off quietly. They went on down the street, looking back, mumbling about “wise bitch” and “goddamn smart-pants dame.” She walked slowly out onto the old Town Street bridge, aware of the darkness under it, the shadow bank where she could have been dragged by them, down there in the rusty litter, by the river smell. Maybe a thing like that would be in part an answer, to be dragged down by a pack, half strangled, used by each one of them, left at last in the broken moaning silence, with all the memories of pain.

The sky was getting light in the east. She climbed up onto the broad concrete railing and sat with her feet dangling over the dark water of the Glass River, her arms braced, a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth.

Half an hour later the police car stopped. The man was heavy, balding. He wore a summer uniform that smelled sharply of sweat, and he clinked and creaked as he came over to her.