The Deceivers (13 page)

At twenty minutes after twelve, Dr. Bernie Madden came down the hall. Carl hurried toward him, and when he saw how sick and gray the usually vital face looked, he felt as if he could not catch his breath. Madden looked at Carl as though he were a stranger. Then he nodded and said, “Hello.”

“How’s Joan?”

“Joan? Oh, Joan is fine. No problems.” He leaned against the door frame and took out his cigarettes. “I just lost a kid in there. Eleven years old.”

“When will I be able to see Joan, Bernie?”

Bernie did not seem to hear the question. “See her? Wait here a minute.” Bernie came back in five minutes. “She’s doing fine. They’ll take her back to her room at about two o’clock. You can go get some lunch and come back.”

“What did you have to do to her?”

“Took out those fibroid tumors and one ovary. Those
tumors were good sized, but I’d say there’s nothing to worry about on the lab reports. We’ll have the reports day after tomorrow. There’s a flock of tiny tumors on the uterus, too small to get all of them. Took a biopsy, but I didn’t perform any hysterectomy. I thought about it, as long as I was in there, but I’ve never been as damn anxious as some of my colleagues to perform a hysterectomy. When they aren’t in menopause it’s a hell of a shock. If the little ones are as slow growing as the ones we had to take out, and I’m pretty damn sure they are, it’ll be fifteen years before anything would have to be done. And maybe never. She’s fine, Carl. Go have some lunch and come back at two. They’ll let you see her, but she’ll be pretty groggy. I’ll order special nurses around the clock for a couple of days, and we’ll keep her on demerol until she’s more comfortable.”

“Thanks, Bernie. Thanks a lot.”

He nodded absently. Carl knew he was thinking of the child again. When Bernie walked slowly down the corridor, he looked small and stocky and defeated.

He had lunch near the hospital and discovered he was ravenous. He felt in a holiday mood. He felt as though great weights had been taken from him, and he caught himself grinning at nothing at all. He had not realized the full extent of his fear and worry until it had been taken from him.

At two o’clock they let him see her. One of the special nurses, a Miss Calhoun, was on duty. She looked up at Carl and smiled and got up from the chair beside the bed. The curtain between Joan’s and Rosa’s bed was drawn. “Mr. Garrett?” she said. “I’m Miss Calhoun.” Her voice was polite and hushed, and she was a small-boned, pretty woman. “She’s doing wonderfully.”

Joan lay flat. When she smiled at him, her eyes were oddly wide and staring and her smile didn’t seem to fit. “Hello, darling,” she said in a faraway voice.

He kissed her forehead and said, “How did the other guy look?”

“Gosh, I could feel them sort of cutting and tugging and talking to each other, but it didn’t hurt and it wasn’t even scary.” She tried to shift in the bed and grimaced with pain.

“Hey!” he said.

“I’m supposed to move. But it feels as if … everything would fall out.”

“I talked to Bernie. He says you’re fine.”

“Did they … do anything else to me?” She had a worried expression.

“Just the tumors, honey. That’s all they did. That’s all they had to do.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive.”

“They try to kid you. I know that. Everybody tries to kid you along.”

“I wouldn’t kid you, honey. You know that.” She shifted again and grimaced, her lips whitening. She looked gray and sweaty.

Miss Calhoun stood beside him and looked at her. “Time for another shot, I think. You hurt, don’t you?”

“Not very much.”

“Your wife is a very stubborn patient, Mr. Garrett. She’s supposed to tell me when she hurts, but she won’t.”

“You tell the nurse whenever you feel uncomfortable. That’s an order.”

“Yes, darling,” she said.

He kissed her again and said, “I’ll be back in a little while.”

He went out into the corridor with Miss Calhoun. “Have I stayed long enough this time?”

“She’ll go to sleep as soon as I give her the next shot.”

“When can I come back?”

She looked at her watch. “She should sleep pretty heavily. Why don’t you wait until about seven?”

“Will she be allowed other visitors?”

“Oh, no! Probably not until tomorrow evening.”

When Miss Calhoun went to get the shot, he went back into the room. She found his hand and held it tightly. Her hand felt damp and very warm. “Gee, I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad I can stop thinking about it.”

“After you get your shot, you’ll have a good sleep.”

“That nurse is nice. I wondered why she was staying with me. I asked her about it and she said she’s a special nurse. Aren’t they terribly expensive?”

“Not to us, dear. The hospitalization takes care of it.”

“Oh, good.”

When Nurse Calhoun came in with the hypo, Carl said good-by to her and left. The two-thirty sunshine looked bright and joyous. A man was weeding the flower beds. Two boys in swimming trunks rode by, dinging their bicycle bells, towels tied to the handle bars. All in all, he decided, it was an excellent Tuesday. The best of Tuesdays.

It was too late to go to the plant. He drove home and went into the quiet house and made the promised phone calls, five of them, Kip and Nancy first, then his parents in Sarasota, then Joan’s brother’s wife, Charlotte, in Falls Church, and finally Marian at the agency in New York.

He was talking to Marian over the living room phone when he heard the rap on the front screen door. He looked over his shoulder and saw Cindy standing, looking through the screen, so he motioned to her to come in.

“… and take good care of her, Carlos,” Marian was saying. “She’s your anchor to windward.”

“And when do you acquire an anchor, Sis?”

“Remember me? I tried that once. I’m a fading grass widow, and sublimely happy, thank you. Thanks for letting me know.”

As he hung up he said, “That was the last call.”

Cindy had collected a stack of ash trays. She was wearing blue ranch jeans and a red canvas halter, and her hair was tied back in a pony tail. “I heard enough to be glad about it, Carl.”

She carried the ash trays into the kitchen and he followed her out and stood watching her wash them out.

“How’s her morale?”

“Good, but she’s pretty dopey right now. She hurts, but they keep giving her stuff.”

“I was worrying about her and I called the hospital at about one, but they gave me the usual double talk. When I looked out a little while ago and saw your car, I came right over. You’ve certainly used every ash tray in the house, my good man.”

“I’m just not neat.”

“You were able to get the kids on the phone?”

“Without any trouble. They’d made some sort of arrangements at the camps. Want a beer?”

“Sure. I’m thirsty. I’ve been baking myself in the sun in the back yard.”

He opened two cans and when he went to the cupboard for a glass, she took one can out of his hand and said, “It’s fine like this. I just don’t like to drink out of bottles.” She smiled at him and looked away, just a little too quickly to achieve the casual manner she was evidently trying to assume. He sensed that she had come over with the intention of being casual and impersonal, of burying the incident of last
night under a new layer of polite and courteous and neighborly conversation.

He knew it was a good idea, and knew he would co-operate with her.

They went into the living room. Cindy redistributed the ash trays. He sat on the couch that was set at right angles to the fireplace wall, with the low coffee table he had made in front of the couch. Cindy hesitated visibly, and came and sat on the other end of the couch and put her beer can on the coffee table. He sensed the strategic reasons for her hesitation. To have sat far from him would have merely underlined the possibility in her mind of a recurrence of the physical attraction of the previous evening. To sit too close might give the impression of inviting a recurrence. She wanted to avoid giving either impression.

“It must be a terrible weight off your mind, Carl,” Cindy said.

“I didn’t know just how much until it was over. Then I felt like jumping in the air and clicking my heels.”

She leaned back and crossed her long blue denim legs and said, “I guess the best way to get into this is to say … about last night.”

“I know. It’s daylight now. And we can be all sane and plausible.”

“A summer night and a few beers and loneliness and proximity and that damn foolish accident of mine. That’s what did it.”

“How’s your ankle?”

“It was a little puffy last night. I soaked it, and it’s gone down. There’s a little twinge when I put my weight on it, but not enough to give me an intriguing limp. Anyway, neighbor, we acquired a guilty little secret, and we’ll keep it as our guilty little secret. And maybe we can even be a little proud of ourselves.”

“For our enormous restraint?”

She frowned. “No, I don’t mean that. I mean for being able to be shook up by a kiss. In this day and age. My God, you’ve been to enough drunken dances at Timberlane to know what I mean. The well-adjusted little housewife lines up a sitter for the kids, and they have a quick knock before they
go to their friends’ house, and have a couple there, and then have some at the bar, and then there is a great likelihood that in a parked car, or out beyond the swimming pool, or off in the shrubbery by the eighteenth fairway, she’ll get herself soundly mauled by the husband of one of her friends and, not too infrequently, screwed by same. Forgive the terminology, but this little routine disgusts me. I refuse to go home all fingerprints. So they get their stolen, shoddy little morsel of hasty sex, and delude themselves into thinking it’s a big torrid affair, like in the books and movies. But actually it’s just a grubby little incident that occurs because their lives are empty and their marriages are empty, and they’ve got such a terrible fear of growing old too fast that they take the quickest and cheapest way to prove they’re still desirable. Four to one love on the rocks with a twist of lemon.”

“So you want to avoid that classification?”

“I damn well do, Carl. And if I ever cheat, it isn’t going to be that way. It’s going to be all the way. Out in the open. With divorce and remarriage and all the rest of it.”

“Which, of course, lets me out.”

“I know that.”

“You get pretty vehement about it, Cindy.”

She drank deeply from the beer can and put it down. “Oh, I have all my little acts. I come on right after the trained seals. I wish that I could believe in all my little acts, Carl, but whenever I hear myself sounding off, I have the horrible suspicion that I’m impersonating somebody. That, maybe, there is no real Cindy—just a collection of attitudes I strike.”

“I thought that was my private curse.”

She looked at him sharply. “You feel that way sometimes?”

“Too damn often for comfort.”

“Birds of a feather, eh?” she said.

“The undeniable attraction of nonentities.”

She made a face. “Don’t call us that. Anything but that, darl … darling.” And she looked defiant.

He laughed aloud.

“What’s so damn hilarious?” she asked heatedly.

“All these forlorn little mechanisms, Cindy. I was laughing at myself as well as at you. You don’t go around calling people darling. But you started to call me darling. You got halfway into the word, not knowing why you started to say it, and then wished you hadn’t stopped, which made it overly obvious, and then decided that rather than cover up you’d better go through with it, and so you did, and then, to cap it,
you sort of glared at me as if daring me to make anything out of it, daring me to find any significance in it.”

She flushed and said, “We’re so hopelessly complicated, Carl. We get lost in such intricate interpretations. You read me loud and clear, I admit. And I don’t know where the darling came from.” She paused and looked at him wonderingly. “That’s stupid. Of course you know and I know where it came from. To me you are a darling. And in a curious and hopeless way, I’m somewhat in love with you. And I know I’m looking defiant again.”

“You don’t have to look defiant. I guess I’m touched. And I know damn well I’m flattered, Cindy. You are a strikingly handsome gal. And I’m a sedentary office worker, biologically if not socially old enough to be your father. I’m getting thin on top and I’ve got a partial bridge and …”

“Stop it, Carl. Stop that this minute.”

“Okay. So we chalk it off to the summer night, beer, proximity and so on. And we don’t let it happen again.”

“That’s right. We stay sensible about it. We’ve got ethical responsibilities.”

“And right now, Cindy, we’re demonstrating one of the big fat flaws in the logic of the western world. All of us try to attack emotional problems with logic. And logic with emotions. Emotion is more of a physical problem. It’s as though … you see a man drowning and you stand on the bank and explain to him the mechanics of the flutter kick.”

“All right. I might buy that. But what has it got to do with us?”

“I mean that we can stay out of trouble with each other through an exercise of will, but please to God, leave us not try to say we’ve saving ourselves through logic.”

“All right, Carl,” she said in a subdued way. “But don’t you think that …” As she spoke she reached toward her can of beer, but she was looking at him as she did so. She reached beyond it and her wrist hit it, knocking it off the coffee table so that it fell on the floor between them. They reached for it simultaneously, both bending over to rescue it quickly before the beer ran out on the rug. As she grasped it, her hair brushed his cheek, and as she placed it on the coffee table he reached across and cupped his hand on her bare, warm, tan shoulder, her left shoulder, to turn her toward him, to turn her so she would face him.

She sat very still, head lowered, fingertips still touching the beer can. She sat rigidly, resisting the increasing pressure of
his grasp. She made not a sound, but he was aware of the lift of her breasts as she took a deep breath. Then slowly, and reluctantly, she let herself be turned toward him, head still lowered. When she was facing him on the couch she slowly raised her head and looked into his eyes, their faces inches apart. Her gray-blue eyes were wide and they seemed to look beyond him, unfocused. He held her there and watched her face change, watched her lips swell and part, watched her eyelids droop in sexual languor, watched her head waver as though it had become too heavy to be supported by her frail throat.