Clemmie (11 page)

“Nice guy. Great friend.”

“Don’t be a fool. If I hadn’t, we’d both have spent the night in there.”

“I guess you’re right. Thank God Ruthie wasn’t there to see me when I got home. Christ!”

“Did Al tell you Connie’s isn’t there any more?”

“Yeah. Great big deal. Steak. Champagne. You know, I never expected to see you in the office.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Al said you sounded funny over the phone. I told him about the overload of Martinis. I phoned your house when I got home. No answer. I got worried about you. I called you again Saturday at least a dozen times. Then I went over there late Saturday afternoon. Your car was there, but you weren’t. I waited around. I phoned in the evening. I phoned all day yesterday and I stopped around again. What the hell, Craig?”

“I was all right.”

“I thought maybe you’d phone me, to find out how things came out. You haven’t even asked.”

“Okay. I’m asking.”

“I’m out on a thousand-dollar bail. Al is getting it set back until after my vacation. He thinks he can soften it up a little, get it cut to D. and D. without that resisting-arrest rap. Then it should be just twenty or forty bucks and costs.”

“He’s got connections.”

Chernek stared at him. “Just where the hell were you?”

“Staying with a friend.”

“What kind of a friend? You got a nice color on you. Like putty. Shack job?”

“Why don’t you just drop it, Bill?”

Chernek stood up. “The hell with you, Fitz. You make a dandy buddy on a binge.”

“What are you sore about?”

“If you can’t figure it out, skip it.”

Craig stared at him for a moment, shrugged, and said, “As long as you’re here, what luck are you having on that aluminum alloy on 770 F?”

“Write me a memo and I’ll look it up, you stuffy son of a bitch.” Bill left and slammed the door heartily behind him.

Betty came in immediately. “What’s the matter with Mr. Chernek?”

“I don’t think I know, and I don’t think I care. Will it foul up any of your plans if I go to lunch first?”

“Why, no!”

He drove far enough to find a restaurant where no
plant people would be. He drove east, away from the river, and picked a roadhouse at random. He had two Bloody Marys at the bar, and then a sirloin-steak sandwich at the bar. He looked in the back bar mirror. He decided he didn’t look at all gray. Bill had been fishing.

But there seemed to be plenty of reasons why he should look gray. On the way back to her place he had found a delicatessen and had loaded up, carried a great heavy bag up her steel-tread steps.

There was no coherency about the thirty-six hours. They had started drinking and had drunk too heavily. There were curious distorted images in his mind. A playful, boisterous sharing of the huge shower stall. A time when she had him doing fiendish exercises of her own devising. He had strained and groaned and the sweat had poured from him, while she stood like a drill major, counting sharply, tolerating no deviation. He was still sore around the middle, and in his thighs and his biceps. He remembered that they had talked about going off in the car, going out into the country for a long, long walk. But when that was nearly arranged, the big thunderstorms had hit, in sequence, flashing and banging, and it suddenly became essential to her to make love at the very peak of the storm, there under the vast window. Sleeping, eating, showering, love-making, they were all jumbled and mixed in his mind, like a film from which entire sequences had been cut. She was tirelessly inventive, incorrigibly experimental, and when he remembered bits and pieces of the week end, he had that same hot-cheeked feeling of incredulity that the party guest feels when he awakens the following morning and remembers that, with drinks and persuasion, he was trapped into playing games that destroyed every last device of personal dignity. The very last straw would have been a venal boy friend behind a peephole with a splendid camera.

That thought made him choke over the last bite of his sandwich and look with wide-eyed consternation at his own reflection in the mirror. No. That wouldn’t be her style. The week end was over. He had had it. When he thought of her there was not the faintest suscitation of desire. It had been a damn fool thing to do, and now it was over and it would not happen again. The problem was to get his clothes back. She had driven him to his house
and let him off in front at eight that morning. Clemmie wouldn’t miss him. She led a busy life. He remembered the hooting and hammering on the big metal door. She had said it was the kids, and giggled against his chest. And one time the phone had rung twenty-seven times before the caller gave up.

He would return her to the kids, gratefully. He felt a thousand years old. When the endless day finally ended, he drove home. He was too tired to eat. He showered, tumbled into an unmade bed and fell endlessly down black velvet cellar stairs.

He awakened at seven, after thirteen hours’ sleep. The muscles which had been sore from the ballet exercises she had made him do had stiffened. He got out of bed like an elderly man. He remembered the exercises she had told him would limber him up. He grunted his way through them and then took a very long and hot shower. They seemed to help. He went to a better place than usual and ate a monstrous breakfast. The previous day’s work was like a dream remembered.

On Tuesday he worked with a drive and intensity he had not been able to manage for weeks. Though numerous problems required his attention, he was able to handle those and also dig deeply into the back work that had piled up. He drove all of his people and drove Betty James particularly hard. Though she claimed to thrive on pressure, she was looking particularly harassed at the end of the day. At five-fifteen, when the others had gone and the only shop noise was on the double shift over in C Building, Betty leaned limply against the door frame and said, “Is that all, I hope? Uncle.”

“That’s all, Betty. And thanks.”

“If you aren’t a madman tomorrow too, Craig, I ought to be able to finish the typing by late afternoon, if both of us work on it.”

“No latrine-o-grams today?”

“Gosh, no!”

“When does your vacation come up? I’ve forgotten.”

“The last two weeks in August.”

“Where are you going?”

“Staying in town, I guess. We’ve got a nice backyard. It’s easier to take care of kids at home than on a trip. And Mother doesn’t like to travel. Well, good night now. Don’t you stay too long.”

“ ’Night, Betty.”

He sat at his desk for another fifteen minutes, with blank paper in front of him, and he devoted those fifteen minutes to Ober’s curious request to “Think wild. Think big.” He made aimless doodles. He crumpled the paper in disgust. The chair creaked as he leaned back. All through the long demanding day he had held image and memory of Clemmie Bennet back in a neatly sealed compartment of his mind. Now, with caution, he let her out. She stepped out of the compartment, smiling, vivid and nimble. He felt a hollowness in his stomach, a sudden heavy pressure in his loins, a weightiness. And he breathed lightly and quickly, using the shallow tops of his lungs. His heart raced. He could not have responded more quickly or violently had she suddenly slipped onto his lap. It frightened him. It was actual fright. The thrust of desire was as tangible as her hard, smooth legs.

He went out to Betty’s typewriter, rolled paper into it, and typed a letter to Maura. He made it quite a long letter. He knew he was saying very little, but at least it was long. He felt as though he were writing to a stranger. When he slipped it into an envelope, he knew the whole letter was a lie. But he sealed it, and when he left, he took it with him to mail.

As he was on a party line at his house, he phoned Clemmie from a drugstore booth.

“Yes?”

“Clemmie?”

“Oh, darling! You didn’t call yesterday.”

“I just barely got through the day.”

“Poor dear. Poor old beast.”

“What have you been doing?”

“I don’t know. I’ve gone all helter-skelter. I tried to paint, but you got completely in the way. Then I drove. I went out to the pike and I had the top down and I went just as fast as the bug would go.”

“Hey!”

“I’m a wonderful driver. I sang at the wind, and then I cried a little and had to go slower because it blurred the road. I cried a little while ago, too. First time in years. I’m so terribly happy.”

“Now wait a minute.”

“Can’t I be happy without permission? You have a nice voice on the phone, darling. What will we do tonight?”

“That wasn’t the agreement, was it?”

“Did we have an agreement? I forgot to take minutes of the meeting.”

“Clemmie, listen. I just want to get my stuff and—”

“Poor baffled beast. I know what you mean of course, darling. But I have an idea. Nothing like last time. There’s no harm in it. Nothing bawdy and decadent. Just boy and girl. I saw a fair. A county fair, forty miles away, with midway and cotton candy and rides, harness racing and square dancing. There’s no harm in that, is there? Is there?”

“But—”

“I hope you have a ratty work shirt and a corny hat. Because I have a beautifully faded cotton dress, dearest, and we can go sort of in costume and play my game, Fitzlovely. Please don’t disappoint me. I’ll pick you up at the corner of Federal and Butternut in one half of an hour.” She hung up. He could hear her voice, like a distant echo … “There’s no harm in it. There’s no harm in it.”

She swung the little car up to the curb and clambered over into the other bucket seat so that he could get behind the wheel. The black top was down. He felt extraordinarily conspicuous. He knew it would not be wise to be seen too often with this girl. Though Stoddard had a half-million inhabitants, if he was careless he would be seen by someone who knew Maura was away for the summer, someone who would make the correct inference and delight in passing the information along. He hesitated, but felt it would be awkward to try to put the top up. He grinned at her. She had a look of clean glowing youth, of virginal eagerness. She looked so young it touched his heart.

Her thin cotton dress was a blue and white print, quite faded, with a small edge of lace around the bodice. She had made a kerchief of a blue and white bandanna and it was knotted under her chin. He felt relieved to see that she had confined the sharp impudence of her breasts in a bra that rounded them.

“You don’t shift very well yet. Miss me?”

“Like being hit on the head with a hammer.”

“Get on the pike. The hat is perfect, ole Fitz. Look, I bought this because it suits.”

He glanced at the purse she held up. It was a confection
of a purse, a shiny blue embellished thing, in the worst possible taste.

“Now drive fast, Craigman. Pour it to her. Goose this bucket.”

The wind sound was too loud to make conversation easy. It was not long before he found the driving rhythm of the little car. The steering was quick, and it sat deep and stable on the road.

He remembered a movie he had seen long ago. A horror movie, full of trick camera work. The villain had stood, and an alter ego had sort of slid out and away from him, stepped away and become another person, a younger person, smiling and plausible. Craig had the sensation that he had remained back in the house, with the news magazines, the television programs, the dusty silence of the house, the gargle and hum of the refrigerator. This other person had left him back there, this younger man. This was being twenty-four, with a scented date, money in hand, a place to go.

That other Craig Fitz, alone in the house on Federal Street, would never put on a work shirt with patched elbows and a billed khaki cap that smelled faintly of fish and take a young girl to a county fair. But this Craig Fitz could, and would.

Suddenly he felt very good, very strong and young and alive, and he laughed aloud. Anything that could make you feel this good and this alive could not be harmful.

“What’s funny?” she shouted against the wind roar.

“A man I used to know.”

“What about him?”

“Nothing about him. He’s just a silly bastard. Very self-important.”

He drove into the dusty, lumpy lot, and when he turned the motor off they could hear the sad nostalgia of the merry-go-round. They put the top up and locked the car. She took his arm and they walked toward the main gates. She took small steps, prim and shy, and he sensed she was fitting herself into a character.

“Pa wants you to find out if he deeds us that forty acres on the mill road, your father will give you the rest of the piece down to Thompson’s line.”

“Said he would, honey. Now hush and let’s have us some fun here.”

“Where do you figure on putting the house?”

“On the little rise near the southwest corner. Best place,” he said firmly.

“Maybe it’s better by the crick,” she said dubiously.

He paid their way at the main gate. The midway was crowded. He could hear the talkers, the music, the mumbling of the crowd, the ratchety slam of the rides and yelp of the women. They played her game as they toured the fair grounds. They built new identities, staying within the rules. He took her around the corner of a tent and kissed her, and somehow she made her lips dainty and fresh and shy for him.

The summer dusk came and the lights went on. They saw the exhibits, rode on the crack-the-whip and the caterpillar, and banged into each other enthusiastically on the dodge-em cars. There was a group of young and husky boys, sleeves rolled high and tight over bulging bronze biceps. They dominated the dodge-em car rink, ganging up on the prettiest girls. Clemmie had almost no competition. They drove into her grimly, riding her off into corners, swinging around and coming back to thump her again just as she was getting clear of the boards. Clemmie squealed in a manner that Craig guessed, sourly, was most satisfactory to them. Craig could not duplicate their dexterity with the little electric cars. When he tried to get near Clemmie, he was thumped away expertly. He was glad when that ride was over. As they left, one of the boys who had been most diligent about whacking into Clemmie strolled along a little behind them, thumbs tucked in the belt of his jeans, arm muscles tensed for display, hair and brows burned to the color and texture of straw. He knew Clemmie was aware of her new admirer. Her voice became more clear and high, she giggled more frequently, and twitched her hips as she walked. It annoyed him. He maintained the pretense of the game, but his responses were glum and uninspired. He thought she was acting like a damn filly with a frail fence between her and the stallion.