Clemmie (15 page)

She complained about how the kids had her so tied down she’d lost her golf game. She complained about how dull the vacation was. She had wanted to go to Las Vegas. She complained about how she would be forty before she could pack the youngest off to boarding school, and what was there left after that? She spoke in an amusing way, in a young and husky and defiant way, but it was a paean of woe.

Finally she asked about his wife and he explained, and she asked what he did for a living and he explained that too, and said Bill Chernek worked there too, and she leaned closer and told him that Chernek was drunk and was looking for a playmate. Then she wanted him to get her a bourbon on the rocks with a dash of soda.

He went and fixed her drink and decided he would make himself a tall Scotch. He poured a reasonable amount in a tall glass with the ice, started to fill it to the top with water and then, on an impulse he did not understand, he put the pitcher down, took the bottle again and slugged the drink so heavily there was little room left for water. He wondered why it should seem such a necessary thing to do, why he should feel such a strong desire for the amnesiastic refuge of a dive into the bottle.

When he went back and sat beside her, he looked at her for the first time directly and intently. She sensed it and turned so the light struck her face more directly. She had changed from her cape and swimsuit to dark slacks and a short-sleeved white cotton knit sweater, an off-the-shoulder sort of sweater. She had brown short hair, a broad brow, high, heavy cheekbones, eyes wide-spaced, a rather rudimentary nose. Her mouth was broad, with lipstick applied in an almost rectangular pattern. She was a big girl with good shoulders, large breasts, and a waist made more trim than it was by the clever tailoring of the slacks. It was a face patterned to current standards of beauty, as glib and mannered as the face on every billboard.

They stared at each other in an utter silence. Her eyes glittered in reflected light. She ran her tongue along her lips and said softly, “Well, now!”

“A sudden awareness,” he said. “Like in the books.” And felt a slow inner turn and coil and stretch of need for her.

“I’m a sucker for the gloomy ones,” she said. “You’re unhappy, aren’t you?”

A tired gambit, he thought. Shallow and silly and pointless. Very like one of Clemmie’s games, but not as honest. This would be full of stock phrases, and perhaps if all cautions and precautions were observed, and if she was certain he would not talk or become a problem to her, she would award him her special favors and expect breathless gratitude. She would insist on a lot of emotional posturing, phony tears, posings and worn romantic devices to surround, obscure, glorify, saccharin-coat, justify and make more memorable some twelve spasmed seconds of revenge against her environment and compensation for her inability to feel love.

“Unhappy. Up to a point. So are you, Floss.”

“I know, I know,” she said, and sighed, and looked away. “In two weeks the long-expected vacation will be over, and ole Floss will be back in a welter of diapers and pablum and Spock, and what has happened, I ask you? Absolutely nothing.”

“What would you like to have happen?”

She looked at him again. “That’s it. I don’t know.” She turned just enough so that her knee rested warm and round against his thigh. He looked at his glass and saw to his surprise that it was empty.

He filled it, as heavily as before, and brought her another. And coldly, purposefully, half amused at himself and half disgusted, he steered the conversation toward marital fidelity. This heavy-breasted discontented wife might be turned into a fine antidote to Clemmie. A double negative. Two infidelities would cancel each other out.

“I think I know what kind of man you are, Craig. Most husbands would get into the most horrid kind of trouble if they were left alone all summer. I shudder to think of how Dave would react. He needs a tight rein. He’s got dandy taste. Greasy little car hops and elevator girls and girls behind counters at the five and dime. It’s
depressing. When I was in the hospital having Margot—she’s the middle one—it got very messy. He’s like a puppy that has to roll in something dirty. That hurts, you know. I told him that if he could do that to me, I could do the same to him. But I haven’t. But he doesn’t know that.”

“Does it have to be dirty?” he asked, seeing his cue as clearly as though she had handed him a script.

“I don’t think so. Not really. It depends on the people involved. I mean if they’re sensitive and so forth.”

“I’m the steady type,” he said.

“Well, really! I’m not exactly round-heeled. Did you think I was?”

“No, Floss. I’d never think that.” And the pressure of her knee became more insistent and she smiled and squinched her eyes a little and arched her back to make the breasts more prominent against the white of the orlon sweater.

“My father was the steady type too,” she said. “It’s funny what happened. You take Dave. With him it’s like a little kid stealing cookies. But my father wanted to be a good man and he was. He was a thousand per cent loyal to my mother. And when it ended, it was horrible for both of them. I was eighteen. Mother and I went through hell and so did he. He took it so seriously. He divorced my mother and married her, and she’s made his life hell ever since. He’s pathetic now, honestly. He’s trying so hard to be a Princeton boy. I see him when he comes to visit our kids. He bounds around, very springy, wearing hairy sports jackets and suede shoes. He has a Jag and a Cad convertible and a heart murmur and a bitch-cat wife three years older than I am.”

“So you think that will happen to me?”

“My God, don’t get mad.”

“I’m not mad. It was an interesting analysis, Floss.” He checked on his degree of intoxication. His mouth felt numb, but his mind felt cool and still and competent.

“Like we said,” she whispered, leaning toward him, “it depends on the people involved. And—what they want. I wouldn’t want anything cheap. Without any meaning. Would you?”

“Never,” he said gravely.

“We’re not cheap, are we, darling?” she whispered.

“But there won’t be any chance, will there?”

“Remember the saying. Where there’s a will.” The knee had been away and it swung back, blunt and warm and confident, and it went with the arched back, and with the four-color reproduction of the same smile that sells orange juice, motor parts, retirement policies and Tampax. “Don’t go ‘way,” she said and got up easily and smiled down at him and touched his cheek with the back of her hand and went away then, long round legs swinging in the dark slacks.

Irene Jardine came over and sat on her heels beside him and said, “People were beginning to talk, Craig dear.”

“Let them talk. This is bigger than both of us.”

“You are a little bit tight, my boy.” She smiled at him. “Be careful of these out-of-town gals.”

“Very careful,” he agreed solemnly. Irene went away. I am merely setting up an antidote, he thought. Get bitten by a snake and they give you a shot made from snake venom. They grind up polio germs to make a polio shot. So I take her like medicine. Cures Clemmie-itis.

He got up and he felt adrift in a world where the lights made the leaves too green. Old Goodman band music came over Al’s outdoor speakers. He saw Floss taking Dave a drink. Dave was wobbly. The drink looked very dark. He felt smug and very sophisticated and very wise about being able to prescribe for himself, and pleased that he was able to line up a suburban roll in the hay with all the ease of a man who made a habit of it.

At eleven o’clock Anita Osborne, who had been drinking with an almost hysterical compulsion, fell down in one of the bathrooms and hit her face on the edge of the sink, cutting her mouth badly and knocking out her two front teeth. Craig met her inside the house before anyone else had seen her, and the look of her sobered him slightly. Ralph Bench took her away to see a doctor. He led her to his car. She leaned on him, sobbing into the bloody towel she held to her mouth.

The party continued.

He had a very deep and very confusing talk with Irene Jardine about ethics and civilization. The party shrunk abruptly to thirteen when Bill Chernek stretched out on the chaise longue under the partial roof of the terrace and passed out peacefully, moving not a muscle when Alice Burney and Jeanie Tribbler filled his every accessible
pocket with potato chips. Craig was glad to see Bill fold. He had been growing uglier by the moment.

Craig had eased off on his drinking, trying to maintain a certain level of intoxication. Vince and Bobby Hellgren organized a drunken and disorderly session of The Game. Craig played, though usually he was more than content to pass it up. He found himself on the same team as Floss Westerling. Dave Westerling was on the other team. When Craig’s team held their strategy conference over in the shadows, Floss took every furtive opportunity to rub against him.

When it was Floss’s turn to act out something for her team to guess, they never found out what it was she was trying to do. She laced her fingers behind her neck and began to do a slow series of bumps and grinds, after indicating that it was a book title.

David, her husband, came charging across the grass and grabbed at her so awkwardly and roughly that he knocked her down. He was very drunk. He swayed over her, looking down at her and said, in the sudden silence, “Don’t wantya doin’ that stuff, ya hear?”

“Dave, for God’s sake,” she said, starting to pick herself up.

“Showoff bitch,” he mumbled, and kicked her heartily in the ham and sent her sprawling. The scene held everyone avid and motionless.

Floss scrambled up quickly, her face contorted and her voice shrill. “You don’t know just what that cost you, you silly clown! You don’t know what that cost you!”

Dave ignored her and turned with stately dignity toward the others. “Teller this. Teller her husb’n went home and she can damn well come home when she’s ready or damn well never come home. Teller.”

He stalked across the yard, stumbled over a small bush and walked into the darkness, headed for the home of Steve and Lolly Chews. Steve Chews said, in the silence, “Looks like cuz has had it.”

The scene broke up the game. When Craig went in the house a little later, he found Irene Jardine crying, sitting alone. He tried to find out what the trouble was and at last he understood that she was weeping because she had wanted it to be a nice party and it was turning into the worst party she had ever had. It was turning out as messy
as one of Chet and Alice Burner’s parties. Unfortunately Alice Burney came in just in time to hear the comment. The Burneys left, Alice rigid with indignation, Chet bewildered and apologetic.

Party down to ten. He suspected he was losing the splendid edge he had acquired, and he made himself a tall strong drink. Floss Westerling came up beside him as he was fixing it, and made a rueful face at him and held out her empty glass.

“Indignant type husband,” he said.

She rubbed her bruised hip. “He’s a clod. He’s going to pay and pay and pay.”

“Are you going to follow him home?”

“Not bloody likely. Walk me to the end of the garden, darling, but let’s not be too conspicuous about it, hey?”

They walked to the end of Al’s yard. He looked back. They did not seem to be missed. There was a small tool shed, dimly lit by the reflected glow of the spots and floods. She took his glass out of his hand and put it down on the grass beside hers. She looked at him demurely and said, “Now I would be kissed.”

The kiss started in a demure manner. Almost a shy manner. And after that concession to convention and to her ideas of herself, she kissed him with enthusiastic and muscular abandon; she became a panting wilderness of rocking, thrusting hips, press of breasts, avid mouth agape, arms tugging, nails biting. It was like being eaten in the shadows by hungry animals. They lost balance and swayed and thumped against the side of the tool house. She giggled and said, “Where can we go, darling? Where can we go? Your house?”

“No. Not there.”

“Where then, darling?”

“Motel?”

“That’s so … grubby. And isn’t it too late? Well, I suppose we can try. Look, my honey, let’s go back. Here’s your drink, dear. And I’ll say good-by and go home. Give me fifteen minutes and then you leave and drive down to the bend at the end of the street where the playground is. Will you do that?”

“Will do. Roger.”

“Don’t be too drunk, baby.”

He finished the drink and had another and then he
left. The world was a crazy tilting place. Awareness came in short grotesque flashes, with meaningless blackness in between. He was in his Ford wagon, but she was driving, and it was hard to remember her name. Then there was red neon that said “vacancy” and he walked, very carefully erect, across gravel and pushed a door open and gave a fat woman with pouched eyes and stringy gray hair a ten dollar bill and signed, in a cheap ruled notebook, Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Johnson, and was given a key fastened to a piece of soiled shiny wood six inches long.

Then there was the rancid cabin that smelled of linoleum and a harsh disinfectant, and the small lamp was on the floor beside the bed with a towel over it, and she was gasping and slippery with her efforts, and very cross and abusive because he couldn’t. Then he was able to be better, and for an eternity endured the rubbery bucking and tossing until he heard, with relief, her contrived and theatrical cry of completion and felt her body clench totally, like a doughy fist, and he was glad because then he could stop trying and slide away into welcome blackness.

He awoke to a great thirst and a blinding, battering pain that hammered at the backs of his eyes and the inside of his forehead. He was on his back and he opened his eyes cautiously and looked up at no ceiling he had ever seen before. It was a peaked wooden ceiling with two-by-fours as cross beams, all painted a pale, poisonous green. Nausea rolled up toward his throat and receded. He closed his eyes. The room was bright. The light source was on his left. The room was hot. His body was sweaty.

He became aware of something soft and warm and heavy that rested across his left leg, just below the knee. A faint alarm stirred within him. He turned his head slowly and painfully to the left. It moved irregularly, in tempo with the hard thudding of his heart, moved like a rusty ratchet. He opened his eyes.