The Deceivers (16 page)

“Jill?”

“Jill Watson, silly. At least she used to be. Now she’s Jill Pritchard.”

“Oh, the little dark one who got the messy divorce.”

“I’ve heard she’s very happy now.”

The minutes seemed to crawl by. The visiting hour would never end. At last it did. He kissed her and, from the hallway, smiled back at her and waved, and walked to the elevators, and went down and turned in his visiting card and went out into the twilight.

The Cable family sedan, a blue two-year-old Buick, was parked at the corner. He touched the horn ring once as he drove slowly by. He caught a quick glimpse of her behind the wheel. When he looked back he saw the car pull out to follow him. He went back onto the turnpike. The evening traffic was heavy, and soon it was so dark he could not tell if the headlights behind him were hers.

He could not establish his usual driving rhythm. He seemed to be going either too slow or too fast. And it seemed a very long time before he came to the sign that announced the next exit one mile ahead, and he saw the bright clutter of the neon along the commercial strip. When he moved right into the exit lane, the headlights behind him followed him. He drove down the long curve and pulled into the gas station. It was brightly floodlighted and, at that moment, very busy. Cindy pulled up on his right and he leaned across the seat and said, “Back it onto the grass beside that Chevy.”

He got out as she backed it into place. He opened the door for her. She took a small suitcase from the seat and handed it to him.

“Should I lock it?”

“Give me your keys. I’ll do it. You get in my car.”

He locked her car, carried her small suitcase to his car and got behind the wheel. She sat far over by the door. She was wearing something dark. Her long hair was fashioned into a flat bun at the back of her head, and there was a drifting scent of musky perfume in the car.

“Hello, Cindy,” he said softly as he started up.

“Hello.” Her voice was small and tense.

“That’s it, just up the road. The Traveler.”

“Carl … could we just drive for a little while? And come back?”

“If you’d like.”

“It’s just sort of too quick.”

“I know what you mean.” He went back to the turnpike
and headed east through the night in the fast even flow of traffic. She stayed over on her side of the seat. He glanced at her when oncoming headlights shone into the car. Her face was grave and still.

“It’s very odd,” she said.

“What is odd?”

“The name of the place. The Traveler. This is a journey, I guess. A trip to a far place. And when you come back, you aren’t the same again, ever.”

“I suppose.”

“We went to Mexico City on our honeymoon, you know. We had a suite at the del Prado. And we found a place to eat that we loved. El Parador. We ate there many times. Do you know what that name means?”

“No.”

“The Traveler. They made their martinis with Amontillado sherry. They had hors d’oeuvres that were little hot biscuits with a surprise in the middle. A shrimp or a little cube of steak. It was a wonderful honeymoon, Carl. We were going to be happy forever. I’m telling you this because I don’t want you to get the wrong idea from what I said the other night, about the bedroom part being all wrong lately. In the beginning it was so very right. We would be in some public place and then we would look at each other, and all of a sudden the plans we’d made for the day were unimportant and the only important thing was to get back to the hotel, quickly. I know that the … physical part of marriage is more important to me than it is to most women. And in the beginning Bucky was thinking of me, too, instead of just thinking of himself, the way he does now. He tumbles into sleep and I lie there with my fists clenched, all tight as violin strings, despising him. But it was good, Carl, very good. And you should know that. And if it was still good, in spite of all the other things, I wouldn’t be here.”

“I know that’s true.”

She suddenly slid over and sat close beside him, so that he felt the warmth of her hip. “Now,” she said, “there isn’t going to be any Bucky and any Joan. You’re not Carl and I’m not Cindy. No labels. We’re just a couple. And we’re in a car, and we’re going to be together soon.”

“Shall we go back now?”

“We can turn at the next exit. From the sign back there it ought to be another four miles.” He dropped his right
hand to her lap. She held his hand tightly in both of hers. Her fingers were chill.

After he had turned around, using the clover leaf and the underpass, she said, “Is it terribly silly of me to feel like a bride? Is it stupid or coarse or anything?”

“No.”

“I’ve got the most horrible case of stage fright. I suppose, rationally, it’s because I’m doing something I never thought I would do. I knew I’d never cheapen myself by getting into one of these grim little clandestine adulteries. Cheap and sneaky.”

“Then how do you react irrationally?”

“I guess I don’t feel cheap. Or maybe that will come later. I just feel all trembly and scared and hollow and excited. Darling, do I talk too terribly much? Wouldn’t you rather have a woman of restraint and mystery and so on? I’m too much the den-mother type to be suitable for intrigue.”

“I love to hear you talk.”

“I have a great talent for talking things to death. I was a horrid-looking child, you know. All strings and knobs, and when the other little girls my age were having dates, I was still trying to scrounge turns on the post rifle range and taking my horse over the highest walls I could find. As a defense, I chattered. Endlessly. I remember, when I began to look a little more human, a boy wanted to kiss me. He was a colonel’s son and his name was Benny something, and that was when Daddy was stationed at Fort Ord, California. I knew he’d maneuvered me into a walk in the woods for the purpose of kissing me. And I very much wanted to be kissed, so that I could sort of join the group, so to speak. We were both horribly nervous. I started talking before we got to the woods and I talked all the way through the woods and out the other side and all the way back to the front porch of our house on officer’s row, and then went plunging in and fell across my bed and cried my eyes out.”

“Poor Benny.”

“Well, he did try again, poor thing, and took advantage of the first ten seconds of silence I gave him. After we got over the nose-bumping problem, we acquired quite a taste for it. I was fourteen at the time, and Benny was fifteen. We managed to get in a great deal of kissing and fumbling, and though I was heartbroken when they were transferred, it was probably a very lucky thing, because in another few weeks we could have gotten into some real trouble. I think
we wrote each other every day for as long as three weeks.”

“I would have liked to have been the first to kiss you, Cindy.”

“Would you now? How old were you when I was fourteen, twelve years ago.”

“Thirty, damn it.”

“They would have been after you with a net. Can you remember your first kiss?”

“Distinctly. Back in Youngstown when I must have been twelve or thirteen. I went to a birthday party and they got around to this game of playing spin the bottle. I had the vague scared feeling that I would like to kiss a little dish named Florence. But the luck of the bottle sent me out into the hall closet among the coats with a monstrous girl named Irene Brechtoller. She was half a head taller and weighed twenty pounds more than I did, and she had the beginnings of what is probably, by now, a handlebar mustache. And no dainty peck for Irene. She took her cue from the movies. I felt like I was being simultaneously smothered and crushed. I was terrified, but dead game. I got into the game again on the off chance of getting to kiss Florence. But I got Irene again. After my second tour of duty in the closet, I said I had to go home. For months afterward, it seems, everytime I looked behind me on the way home from school, there was Irene waddling along wearing a wide hopeful smile.”

“Poor little man!”

“I think we’ve done enough driving for the day. There are some good-looking motels up ahead, Mrs. Garroway, so let us go get us a room.”

“Garroway?”

“That’s what we’re registered as.”

“A good thing to know.”

He drove through the arch. The pool was lighted. A man and woman were swimming side by side, their slow strokes in perfect rhythm. He parked in front of twenty. It was nearly ten, and most of the units were dark. He unlocked the door and found the light switch just inside the door, and a very bright ceiling fixture went on. He put the two suitcases down and went out and carried the cooler in and shut the door and fastened the night chain.

Cindy stood with her back to him. She turned as he walked up to her. The garish light made the room look harsh and ugly. But it could not make her look less desirable.
She wore a tailored black suit, a white blouse with a severe collar, white pumps with high heels, small gold hoop earrings. Her dark blond hair was pulled smoothly back at the temples. Her makeup was careful, her face flawless.

With wry and crooked smile, she said, a strained note in her voice, “Well, here we are! Isn’t that what one says?”

He took her in his arms and kissed her. She was awkward in his arms, and the kiss she returned him was quick and tepid. She moved out of his arms and said, “I had quite a problem. Would I try to look girlish and innocent? Or slinky and seductive? Or maybe all frilly? So I settled for sophistication. Like me?”

“You inspire a certain amount of awe. But yes, I like you.”

“Let’s do something about the horrible lighting effects, at least.” She turned on the gooseneck lamps between the beds and he turned off the ceiling light. It was immediately a much more attractive and intimate room.

She sat rather stiffly on the side of a bed and said, “This isn’t what I expected. I didn’t think about it too much, but I sort of had the idea of a sort of grim cabin effect, with one naked light bulb and a lot of trucks growling by just outside the door. This is … almost too formal. I don’t even feel like taking off my jacket. But I have to because you have to see this sneaky blouse.”

She got up and took off her black jacket. The blouse consisted of the severe collar and a front and a small area around her waist. It left her smooth and honey-tan shoulders and back bare. She pirouetted slowly and said, “Sneaky, hmm?”

“Delightfully.” She went to the closet and hung up her jacket, then noticed the cooler.

“What do we have here?”

“Maybe it’s a little on the corny side, Cindy. It’s champagne.”

She came to him and kissed him lightly, and moved away before he could take her in his arms. “You’re a darling,” she said. “I think champagne is going to be practically essential, the way I feel right now.”

He took out a bottle, stripped the cellophane from the two glasses, twisted the wire loose and thumped the cork out. It popped off the ceiling and struck her on the shoulder as it fell.

“I think that’s supposed to be lucky,” she said.

She took her glass and they clinked glasses. They sipped, and then she began to stroll restlessly. He sat on the bed and watched her. The skirt of the suit was high waisted and superbly fitted to the narrow waist, the roundness of hips.

“I just wish I could stop feeling so damnably awkward and strange,” she said.

“Come here and be thoroughly kissed.”

“Not just yet, please, darling. I have the ghastly feeling that I want to run like a big rabbit. I feel so dang … immature.”

“You’re lovely, Cindy.”

“Thank you kindly.” She went and refilled her glass, drank it down thirstily, refilled it again.

“Hey!” he said.

“I’m seeking a little moral anesthesia, pal. I’ve got a painful abscess of the conscience. Joan and Bucky are riding my back.”

“We weren’t going to mention them.”

She sat on the other bed, facing him, and crossed long legs in the narrow skirt and looked at him somberly, and said, “You’re being very patient with me, and I do appreciate it, my darling.”

“I don’t think it was supposed to be exactly like this.”

“We’re both awkward, aren’t we? Poor stuffy fools. Lost lambs, or something. I think it’s because it’s all so planned. It wasn’t at all planned the other two times. I’m completely unaware of the protocol, Carl. I’m facing the awkward problems of just how we go about getting undressed. If I hadn’t worn such silly complicated clothes with girdle and all, you could undress me and maybe that would be all right. Look, would you care to start giving some orders around here?”

“All right. We have one more drink, and then I shall go out and look at the starry night. And then I will come back in say fifteen minutes.”

“All right,” she whispered. She blushed then and looked down at her glass and said, “Might as well get all the embarrassing little matters out of the way. You won’t have to worry about …”

“I understand.” He poured another drink for them and took her glass to her. They touched glasses again. They drank in silence, and when the glasses were empty, he left.

He walked slowly out to the pool. It was empty. He sat on a lawn chair damp with dew and smoked a cigarette
and looked at the high and sterile stars. They were there ten thousand years ago and they’ll be there ten thousand years after the last memory and trace of me is gone. Under their pale light, anything I do is meaningless, of too little significance to be considered good or evil, right or wrong.

When he went in and locked the door behind him, she was in bed. She had twisted the neck of one half of the double lamp so that it threw its cone of radiance down toward the floor, and in the reflected glow he could see her shadowy face, her hair spread and tousled on the pillow. He undressed in the shadowy corner near the closet, and went to the bed and slipped in beside her.

“Leave the light, dearest,” she whispered.

He reached for her between the crispness of sheets and laid his hand on the tender concavity of her waist, felt the warmth and softness and electric aliveness of her, felt the deep lift of her breathing. And all at once she came into his arms, all the trembling, gasping, silken length of her, throbbingly warm, vivid, so stirring in her eagerness that any lingering restraints were swept away, and he was involved and lost in her textures and customs and pliancy, involved in all the secret places of her, wracked and pulsed by her thirsts and her needs.