Stranger On Lesbos (5 page)

She didn't know until the next day that he had patched up a fight with his real girl after the game, three hours before she changed into the net dress; that he was dancing with Patty Kelly, holding her tighter than the chaperones approved of and whispering into her ear, while she sat on the porch, until morning sun reddened the sky and she went inside and went to bed, but not to sleep. I'll never sleep again, she thought in her proud and hurt young ignorance. The sequins on her dress winked at her from the rough pine floor.

Who cares how a miner's kid feels, a girl from Frisbie, that tangle of wooden cottages and slag heaps on the edge of town?

The grown-up Frances turned restlessly between wrinkled sheets, dry-mouthed and tense, even now, under the memory of that rebuff.

But Bill isn't like that. Bill's good and kind, and he loves me.

Past tense. Used to be kind. Used to love me.

(The small hotel room, small-town hotel at its worst, she knew now, had been blessed by his gentleness and patience. Even though he could not have known, that night of their hasty and ill-considered marriage, why she was afraid. She had started to tell him. "The night my mother died
" and had faltered to a stop, with his eyes questioningly on her face.)

Mixed with remembered shame, now, was the growing, insistent pressure of desire, a dim feeling of need at first, sharpening to a definite, insistent urge. She sat up in bed, hating herself for needing him, hating him for humiliating her this way.

"Bill," she called.

"What's the matter?" His voice was loud and cheerful
a salesman's voice, she thought. She said hesitantly, "I can't sleep."

"Take a phenobarb. Some in the medicine chest."

Her eyes widened. She sat irresolute, waiting. Bill's chair scraped across the floor. "Don't wait up for me. I'll be a little while."

"Oh, to hell with it," Frances said aloud. She pulled the covers up under her chin and lay silent for a long time, staring at nothing.

CHAPTER 4

Bake turned the handle that opened the car door. "You look a little shadowy. Company stay late?"

"Late enough. They were just some people Bill knows." Frances took a deep breath, feeling better. "One of the salesmen and his wife."

"What's your son doing?"

"Spending the day with a friend."

Bake stripped off her leather-palmed gloves and wadded them down behind the seat. "Damn it, I like to get my hands into things." She gave Frances a look at once sharp and concerned. "Relax, baby. We're going to get out of traffic and get a little fresh air."

The highway was a long white ribbon unrolling before them, with a few cars scuttling like insects. "Not much traffic," Bake said. She lit a cigarette. "Sunday will be terrible, but everybody's hung over today."

They rode as they always did, without talking.

They cut over to Aurora, slowing for all the soft little suburban towns where commuters were digesting their Thanksgiving dinners, and took the river road north. The Fox River, studded with little green islands, wound alongside the highway, sometimes only a few feet from the pavement, sometimes lost from sight for a mile or two behind hills and trees. The water was bright blue, sequinned with sunshine. Here and there a group of three or four Negroes in bright holiday clothes were fishing, heedless of passing cars and the cold wind. North Aurora, Batavia, Geneva, Saint Charles
clean tree-shaded towns with identical business districts, brick schools, white frame houses.

A few miles south of Elgin, Bake turned off the highway. They picked their way over a gravel road edged with drying brown weeds. Crows flew up, shrieking, at the car's approach. A woman hanging clothes on a backyard line looked after them curiously. Bake took the car to the end of the road, which dwindled out in a clump of trees. Beyond a sagging barbed wire fence was a thick stand of shagbark hickories, reaching as far as Frances could see in three directions. She turned an inquiring look upon Bake.

"It's like this for miles, all along the riverbank. Virgin timber, the way it was when the Indians lived here."

"It's quiet, isn't it?"

They were still. Far away a dog barked. Single leaves fell slowly, turning in the breeze. "Hungry?" Bake asked.

"Not so very."

"I've got sandwiches and a thermos of coffee and some Scotch. Hal gave me the Scotch
it ought to be good." She stretched luxuriously. "God, this is beautiful. I thought we might cook dinner at my place, if you want to. If we feel like going back and cooking, we will. If we don't, we can eat along the way. There's no hurry."

"I'd like to see your apartment."

"No hurry," Bake said again. "Let's see what it's like in the wilderness."

Frances climbed through the barbed wire fence, wishing she had worn slacks. Bake stood beside her, neatly trousered and sweatered, the wind ruffling her short dark hair. They looked at each other. Then a red squirrel ran up a tree, jabbering and scolding, and Bake laughed.

"Come on. I bet there's bittersweet in some of these old fence corners, and you hardly ever find it growing wild any more."

The brown leaves crackled under their shoes.

It was almost evening when they climbed through the fence again, holding the rusted strands apart for each other. Frances was tired, but exhilarated. She laid her armful of scarlet sumac, bittersweet and late maple leaves on the back seat while Bake turned the hickory nuts out of her jacket pockets. They sat down in the car, side by side, breathless and smiling. Frances was conscious for the first time that her shoes were wet and muddy, her hands stained with hickory hulls and barbed wire rust. She laughed.

Bake sat with her hands on the steering wheel, not making any move to start the car. "Do you realize that we haven't eaten all day? I'm starving."

"I could use coffee."

"Here, let me." Bake got the top off the thermos, slopping coffee over the edge of the plastic cup. "Put a little whiskey in it. It'll warm you up."

"I'm not cold."

"Let's go up to my place and cook a real meal. Let's not take the edge off our appetites with sandwiches."

"All right."

Frances sipped the coffee and Scotch, feeling dreamily agreeable to anything Bake might suggest. By closing her eyes she could see etched bare branches wind-tossed above the leafy forest floor, and one red maple leaf slowly falling. As long as she lived, she felt, she would have the imprint of that leaf on her retina. "Lovely," she murmured.

"Hey, you're falling asleep.”

Frances pried her eyes open. "I am not."

"Lean your head against my shoulder if you want to. We'll be home in an hour."

"You won't get sleepy?"

"No." Bake said smiling. "I won't get sleepy.”

Frances could feel the car start. Her knees braced automatically against the jar as they lurched back onto the gravel road. Then she laid her head against Bake's soft wool sweater, feeling the good solidity of bone and the warmth of living flesh beneath. The western sky was darkly pink against a bank of curly gray cloud. It was too much for one time. She sank down into a half-sleep, unwilling to relinquish consciousness but unable to stay fully awake.

"Your hair smells nice." Bake said. She shifted to lay an arm across Frances' shoulders, whether for support or reassurance was not clear. She's driving with her left hand. Frances thought foggily, but she felt no alarm. She had utter confidence in Bake's ability to do anything she set out to do.

Then without any apparent passage of time they were stopping in front of a brick apartment building. Frances struggled upright and sat looking owlishly at the street lights, the passing cars and the close-set buildings.

"Here we are." Bake said. "Pull yourself together and see if you can get out."

Electric light beat down on the lobby floor, set with black-and-white tile squares meant to look like marble. Bake unlocked the mailbox under her name card, found nothing, unlocked the inner door. They climbed a flight of stairs, their wet shoes squishing on the thin carpeting, and walked down a long hall past a double row of closed doors.

"It's not very chic," Bake said, "but it's in easy commuting distance of most of my clients
and anyway I'd rather spend my money on books." It was not an apology. She laid her double armful of leaves and berries on the hall floor and fished in a pocket for her door key.

"Oh, you carried my stuff up too."

"That's all right."

"What a nice room!" Frances said as they entered.

The living room looked larger than it was because it was sparsely furnished and almost bare of decoration. A chair of woven leather strips and one of steel mesh flanked a nondescript studio couch with a Mexican blanket laid across it. The walls were lined with brick-and-plank bookshelves.

"You can look at the books as soon as you get your wet shoes off," Bake said, smiling.

A Navajo rug punctuated the flat black of the floor, and the windows were covered with inside blinds painted dark green. Best of all, there was a working fireplace, the brick hearth dusted lightly with ashes. Bake crumpled a sheet of newspaper, knelt to arrange it with three sticks, and lit it with one of the kitchen matches she carried in her shirt pocket. A tiny blaze leaped up, primitive in its beauty.