Kitten with a whip (9 page)

Temporarily, he was the stronger of the two. She still held the ultimate power over him but for a while she was letting him be the dominant one. Perhaps she was tired or perhaps she had reached a cycle where she wanted to punish herself a certain amount.

He found himself saying, "I'll make a -deal with you. Can I trust you to keep your moutli shut and not try any funny stuff?"

Jody nodded glumly.

"All our mutual troubles aside, maybe this stuffy house is getting on our nerves. If we took our drinks and went out back, sat in the patio, and didn't turn on the lights and kept our voices down, well . . ."

She gazed up at him, blinking tenderly. "You're such a sweet guy, David. I don't know v^^hy, every once in a while, I want to treat you so rotten."

Because, it came to him, you've almost run out of

self-respect and you re scared I'll notice. You re scared I'm laughing at you or looking down on you. Most of which is true. So you hit first, trying to hurt me before I can hurt you. "Come on/' David picked up his drink and the decanter and left her to follow with her drink and the ice bucket. .He headed for the kitchen door.

The night was moonless but bright with stars. The warm fragrant air lay hushed and drowsy against the earth. The shadows beneath the half-grown trees—mock-orange and jacaranda and umbrella—were blacker than ever because they-did not move. The neighbors to the west were still on vacation but in the next patio to the east, Juhan and Daphne Clark were holding a barbecue. Their lot was lower by the height of a ten-foot bank than the Patton lot so they could not see at all into David's backyard. But he could watch the smoke rising through the openwork roof of their shelter and smell the tang of meat sauce and hear the rippling and soft laughter of pleasant conversation.

He put his drink and decanter on a low glasstop table and leaned back in a lounge chair. Jody did the same on the other side of the table. They sat in silence for a while, absorbed in the night sounds.

She said at last, "What's that smell? The flower one."

"Night-blooming jasmine."

"Mmm, smells pretty much like this cologne." She stretched her arms wide and said lazily, "I could even go for this, you know?"

"You must have a home somewhere, Jody."

"If that's what you want to call it." He could see her unsmiling profile and hear the bleakness in her voice. "A couple of rooms with leaky faucets and cockroaches and the landlord always pounding on the door for the rent. Me sleeping in a closet or out on the back steps if it was summer so I wouldn't bother Mom and whoever she happened to be married to at the time. And between marriages, the place would be crawling with uncles. And lying all the time to the welfare people. I went to work at thirteen just so I could crash out of that kind of dump. I mean, a girl ought to like nice things, don't you think?" Sure.

"And I was beginning to fill out my sweaters so I was getting pawed on the sly by Mom's visitors and relatives. You know 1 got my first proposition when I was ten? One of my stepfathers. I couldn't tell you where Mom is riglit tonight if you gave me a milHon dollars. And I wouldn't give odds on who my pop is, either."

It sounded quite pathetic. It was also a little too thick for David to swallow. The "welfare people" generally took children away from unlit mothers and placed them in foster homes. And as for her going to work at thiiteen—that involved the huge difficulties of securing a work permit at that age and at the same time eluding tlie City Schools truant officer. No, Jody was a proven Har and even when there was no reason to he, as now, she still might be flying high on fantasy. It was even likely that she was unaware of her own deceptions, having reached a point where the truth was blurred.

As blurred as his own senses. The liquor and the aspirin were getting to him. When he closed his eyes, he could feel himself floating. He felt divided in two; while he relaxed—and at the same time sat in judgment-he could hear somebody else asking Jody if she didn't think peddling dope was a pretty dirty business to be in.

She said, It beats selling me.'*

Like spreading a disease.

"Nobody's making them make a buy."

Dirty business. Ought to be stamped out. He tried to remember if lie'd noticed any needle marks on her arms. No, he decided.

"Come on, quit all these lousy questions. Here it is a beautiful night, David, and I want so much to do something nice for you because you're the only guy who's ever been halfway nice to me. So what do you do but-"

The somebody else asked her. Where do you go from here, Jody?

Her voice sank to the dream level of the distant music still playing inside the house, to the muted companionship of the Clai-k barbecue next door. "Oh, I got plans. Soon as 1 lose this town, I'll do all right. Maybe I'll take up modeling." In reverie, she stroked her hands over her body and stuck out her chest Hke a

pouter pigeon. "Everybody says I got a good figure and all you have to do is stand around and wear stylish clothes. Or maybe I'll go into TV. You know those women that push Hpsticks and refrigerators and stuff? I read in a Sunday paper once how much money they make and Tm stacked a lot better than they are. Or, there's no reason I can't be . . ."

As she rambled on about a futvire painted with gold, David struggled to recall his own ambitions at her age. He couldn't very well. He summoned up a vague old desire to be a hero of some sort, have people admire his courage, but he couldn't pin down his adolescent wishings to any specific impossible careers. At her age, he beheved, he had already learned pretty much what the world was like, and without being shoved around particularly. Sure, who wouldn't like exotic adventures, but . . .

With a shock, he came face to face with his own self-righteousness. Wasn't he the one who every now and then mooned after an existence more exciting than his own? The phantom yearning he could never describe to Virginia. Exactly how much did that differ from Jody's childish fantasies? Sure, his was hidden away and seldom glanced at whereas hers were honestly trotted forth and advertised in all their silly gaudy glory, but . . . He didn't care much for the idea that he was still carrying on with seductive wraiths from his years of puberty. That didn't make him too far removed from Jody's shoddy immaturity.

"Are you asleep, David?*

"No." He roused himself fiercely and made it to his feet.

"Where you going?"

;;To bed."

"But it's early. Can't we go in and dance or something?"

"Too tired," he mumbled.

"Then let's just talk some more. What do you and your wife talk about? Oh, come on, David."

"Usual things. What she's done, what Katie's done, my job, something one of us has read—"

"I read a lot," Jody cut in eagerly. "Just last week

. . r He stood there, swaying slightly, in the dark patio while she chattered on about a story she'd read in a confession magazine, some dizzying brew about a girl who'd married a rich man who was a beast at first but it was only because of some misunderstanding so it came out all right. What do you and your wife talk about? It gave him a clammy feeling to imagine what it would be hke if, by some mad jumbling of their Hves, he were married to Jody. He shuddered. Her reading level couldn't possibly be much better than sixth grade. He had never thought of himself as a snob—but imagine spending a lifetime at Jody's intellectual plane.

"I'm going to bed," he said thickly. He reached for the decanter to carry it into the house. He miscalculated, the crash startled him, and he found himself holding only the cut-glass stopper in his hand. He stared down stupidly at the gleaming fragments at his feet, the puddle of whisky as if the glass had bled. A present from Virginia. He wanted to cry. He flung down the stopper so it would be broken, too. He was conscious of Jody's staring eyes, of the hush that had fallen over the party next door.

He thought, brimming with self-pity. Well, it isnt the first thing ive shattered around here.

He shambled through the house and into his bedroom. He sat down heavily on the edge of the double bed and fumbled his wallet out of his pocket. He gazed at Virginia's picture a long time and sai4 finally, deep in his throat and barely articulate, "I'm sorry, hon." Head spinning, he focused laboriously in turn on her blessedly familiar features, her dark neat hair, her thoughtful eyes, tiny earlobes hke soft pearls, the quiet amusement of her Ups. At last, he found himself dozing off so he stood up and began undressing, nearly toppung over a couple of times.

He couldn't find his pajamas and finally gave up the search. He crawled naked between the sheets of the unmade bed. "Goodnight," he mumbled to nobody. Yet he knew he wasn't alone and it was comforting. He heard the record player shut off and the television turned on by some mysterious hand. Through the walls he couldn't distinguisn the words being spoken out in

the living room but the muffled speech patterns of a late movie lulled him toward the brink of unconsciousness.

The dreams began, at first a weird melange of swollen horrors that threatened him and his spinning world with suffocation, then the peaceful sensation that Virginia had come home and everything was all right. He was safe in the cloud of her jasmine-scented cologne, waim and close in the smooth circle of her arms, free of an unremembered fear. Her hands wandered up and down his body and her mouth moved over his face. She whispered, "1 cleaned up the broken glass and I washed my feet before I came to bed."

Something was wrong. He struggled upward from his pit of dreams to a pulsating land of half-awareness. "Virginia?" he mumbled. Yes, she was still there in the darkness with him, tugging him nearer. He embraced her hungrily, entwined with her until there was nothing left to share and he lay back spent and hot and gasping for breath.

Gentle lips brushed against his ear, affectionately. Jody's voice whispered, "Didn't I tell you I'd do something nice for you?" He heard himself moan in his sleep as he drifted away.

Chapter Eight

The heat wave hadn't broken during the night. That was David Patton s first thought the next morning as he opened his sticky eyes to gaze dumbly at the bright rectangles of the closed Venetian blinds.

Memory returned like an enemy, in creeping fragments fouler than the taste in his mouth. He turned his head slowly to look at the mussed whorl of blonde hair on the next pillow. The girl was sleeping face down, making whistling Httle breathing sounds. Like a wilted flower—there was the platinum msarray of her head and then the slim iavmy stalk of her body. The top sheet had shpped to the floor. Two strangers lay side by side on the white dais of the bed, flagrantly exposed to the davHght, as if they were sacrificial victims ready on an altar.

He nearly choked on his disgust. He slid out of bed, blindly caught up his clothes and made it to the bathroom before ne tlirew up, a thin pale brown Hquid that was nearly the color of Jody's flesh.

He leaned on the sink and stared at his face in the medicine cabinet mirror. All he could see was the ugliness, the gummy red comers of his eyes, the sHght wrinkled poudies beneath them, the black whiskers, the slack miserable totahty of a human face.

/ didnt mean to, he told himself, / didn't want to. The mirror-mouth contorted with his. He turned away from himself with a shiver of revulsion.

The shower didn't help much, nor did shaving or brushing his teeth or gargling the mint-flavored mouthwash. No matter how cruelly he towelled his body, he still imagined there was a rotteimess cHnging to him. All the ferocity of his rubbing accompUshed was to reopen the scratch marks on his chest. He dressed in yesterday's clothes as hopelessly as if they were a shroud.

What, for God sakes, went wrong? He tried to figure it out. Sure, he'd had too much liquor and too little food so by the time Jody had come to him in the dark he was devoid of any response but animal instinct. Yet he couldn't honestly believe that that excused him. Nor could he bring himself to blame it all on Jody. Or blame it on the heat. After all, stress was his ousiness, how much will a certain substance take before it gives way. To him it seemed that it had taken damn Httle to break down David Patton. All these years of life and marriage, then to wake up one Sunday morning to meet yourself as a weakling . . . From the other end of the valley, through the still and empty air, he heard the sharp notes of the church chimes.

He unlocked the bathroom door and returned to the bedroom. Something entangled his feet. It was Virginia's white negligee. He picked it up, disengaged a coat hanger from his wife's side of the wardrobe closet and hung it away. He sat down on the cedar chest, his head thick with recriminations and self-disgust, and Ht a cigarette. The smoke hung in the air Hke cobwebs. He thought how appropriate it was that he should have trod on the negligee. He thought of the decanter he had shattered last night. His mind toyed childishly with the possibihty that it could somehow be glued together again. Then he shook his head at such nonsense. Even patched together, the decanter could never be the same. It could never achieve the crystalline perfection of its original self. He had smashed it forever.

He wondered why he was tormenting himself by sitting there and watching the sleeping girl. Forcing himself to do it served no purpose; it didn't make up for anything. Jody lay curled on her side now, her hands tucked between her thighs. Intellectually, he could admit that her bare youthful body was desirable although his own senses responded to nothing about her. Cling to that, he told himself bitterly. You don't desire her. There lies the carcass you romped on last night—hut not from desire, huh? What then? He began wondering if some other married man, Sid Wright, say, would feel as badly in his place. Or would Sid be able to dismiss a night's adultery as a passing pleasure, one of Life's Httle bonuses?

But there was no use trying to transfer Sid or anybody else into this situation personal to David Patton when he couldn't quite pin down his own feelings. Was it really the act of adultery that disturbed him so, the betrayal of Virginia? Or was it more selfish, the hateful discovery of weakness in himself?