The Deceivers (31 page)

   On Saturday they drove to the camp and saw the kids.

He slept very little on Saturday night. Eldon had made it so easy. Just don’t phone. And Cindy would be moving away. He could put it all out of his mind. Bobby and Bitsy would have a good home with Bucky’s people. And, if Cindy was in any danger of losing her mind, did that indicate she
would be a reliable mother? Think of the stink that could occur. Lover of adulterous wife appears as character witness for her in child custody case. Husband thrashes lover and wife and is killed in plane crash. Deluxe motel scene of infidelities. Wife of executive who today gave testimony was in hospital at time of four-night affair. Unfaithful wife beaten with putter by husky sales executive.

But there might not be a stink at all. It might not be peddled in the streets to give a nation a knowing smirk.

But wouldn’t a man be a fool to risk everything in order to satisfy what most men would consider to be a quaint sense of honor?

And hadn’t Bob Eldon maneuvered him most cleverly!

Joan sighed in her sleep and turned over. He went silently out and sat in the dark living room, smoking. Somewhere a puppy was yapping dolefully to be let in. There was a faraway hum of a high airliner. A quick wind rattled the maple leaves and died away.

My house, my wife, my kingdom.

And Cindy sleeps approximately sixty feet away from me, and she would not permit Eldon to call on me for help.

I can’t even be sure it would be of any help,

It might be a stupid and unnecessary sacrifice.

   By Sunday afternoon he had not been able to decide. He suspected the quixotic impulse. He did not know what he would do.

“I would like to be taken for a ride,” Joan said. “It’s a lovely day, honey.”

“Okay, where would you like to go?”

“Anywhere. I’m just tired of watching you pace around here like a bear with a sore tail.”

“How soon?”

“Right now. Why don’t you take me out and show me where it was that you fell and hurt yourself?”

He stood frozen for a moment and then said, “Sure. My favorite little bridge.”

He did not want to talk on the way out. He did not know what to say to her. He could not imagine ever having anything in particular to say to her. He found a ball game on the car radio. She seemed content to sit and look at the countryside.

He drove through Aldermon and found the turn to the right and found the little park, turned in and turned off the
motor. A family with three small children had apparently just finished a picnic and were getting ready to leave. They were burning papers and loading equipment back into an elderly sedan. They smiled in casual friendliness at Carl and Joan.

“Over this way,” he said.

She walked down the path beside him and he stopped when they reached the bridge.

Joan stared at it and said, indignantly, “Why, it’s criminal practically to have a thing like that around. They ought to fix it or tear it down.”

“I most heartily agree.”

She moved closer to it. “Where did you fall, exactly?”

This would do it, he knew. This would make it all visual to her, and he would be forever safe.

“I walked out to where …” And he stopped.

“What, darling? How far?” She turned and looked up at him. “You look so strange! Are you sick?”

“No.”

“How far did you walk out?”

“Joan. Joan, I can’t. God help me, I can’t.”

“You’re as pale as death! And I don’t understand.”

“Come back where we can sit down.”

The elderly sedan was gone. They were alone in the raggedy little park with its three defeated picnic tables, the smoking fireplace with rusted grill. They sat at one table, on the attached benches facing each other. He held her hands and looked at her and did not realize how tightly he was holding until he saw the pain change the shape of her mouth. He loosened his hold. He saw a changed expression in her eyes, a look of awareness.

“It’s about time, isn’t it?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t think things the way you do. I can only feel them. I don’t know what you want to tell me. But I think it’s going to hurt, and I think it’s about time. I’m tired of … being alone.”

“It will hurt. I hope I can keep from begging.”

“I might not mind begging.”

“I love you. I hope that’s a good way to start. Try to keep hanging onto that, if it will do any good.”

“You’re really talking to me, aren’t you? To me. To Joan.”

“There’s something I have to do. Something difficult and unpleasant and … possibly disastrous. I didn’t know I had to do it, that there was no way to get out of it, until I tried
to follow through on the lie about the bridge, and I couldn’t. The words stuck. I have to go away for a day and do this bad thing that I brought on myself, and then come back if you want me. But before I go away I have to tell you how it all was, and try to explain what can’t be explained.”

“The lie about the bridge?”

“And a hundred other cheap, stupid, insulting lies.”

And he began to tell her, starting at the beginning, restraining her when she tried to pull her hands away from his. And it was not long before she had lowered her head so that he was talking directly at the top of her brown hair, and he hoped she would keep her head that way because it made it just a little bit easier. His voice was quiet in the park, and a sun-made coin crept across the weathered wood. He saw her first tear fall and soak into the silvery gray of the wood, next to a carved heart that encircled two sets of initials. He stopped for a moment when the tear fell and then went on, and saw the others fall and did not pause.

And after an endless time it was over, and he had told her everything, and why he had to go away. “I love you,” he said, and then listened to the long silence.

He knew that soon she would raise her head and look at him. And he did not know what he would read in her eyes. He knew it could be complete rejection. Or he might see something that could give him cause to hope. Though he knew that it was one of the most important moments of his life, he waited without tension. He felt almost at peace with himself. And very soon he would know.

Carl Garrett sat in the little unkempt park and held his wife’s two hands in his.

And after a little while she raised her head slowly and looked into his eyes.

John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel
The Executioners
, which was adapted into the film
Cape Fear
. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.