End of the Tiger (12 page)

“Jean Anne,” he said, “we have to …”

“I know, darling,” she said. “But not here. Not like this. Where I can see you. Driving along, it’s like talking on the phone, sort of.”

“How did it start? Can we talk about that part while riding?”

“The day you had the headache, Joe. That’s when it started making bad jokes, all trying to make you feel better, and we all got laughing. And when the job was done, there wasn’t anything else scheduled and we did that crazy ad.”

“Forlorn little match girl selling matches outside the Zippo factory.”

“Was it then for you?”

“Sooner. Two weeks earlier. On that eye thing.”

“I wondered about that. I wasn’t right for it. Joe … was it very specific that early?”

“No. I just wanted you there. The jobs I used you on, they seemed more fun for everybody. I told myself that’s all there was to it.”

“Like I did. That’s what people tell themselves, I guess. It’s just this much and nothing more. When they know it can’t be anything more. I didn’t want it to be more.”

“Do you think I did?”

“Now we’re getting into the what-do-we-do part of it, darling, and I have to look at you when we talk about that.”

“Did you know we would talk today?”

“I knew we had to. Soon. I knew you knew it. I knew one of us would … make it possible.”

He took the Cross County over to the Thruway. Traffic was light. He had fifty dollars on him, blank checks, credit cards. She did not ask him where he was going. She had all that quality of trust, of gentle compliance. He wondered how it would be to just keep going. He knew he could not. But he wondered.

He exited at Suffern and drove to the motel road that went up the mountain, turned up that road and, out of some obscure impulse of cruelty, said no word of explanation. He glanced at her. She sat with that blind acceptance of all of it, and there were no tears. But her face was set for tears.

Atop the mountain, he drove past the motel office and on to the restaurant. The parking attendant was not on duty. He drove into the lot, parked, started to open the door to get out. She put her hand on his arm. He looked back at her, and she said his name with her mouth without making a whisper of sound.

As he took her in his arms to kiss her he realized this was the third kiss for them. Such a weight of guilt. Three kisses. In his despair, he made it too rough a kiss. When he realized it was too rough, he made it more cruel, hurting her mouth. The kiss said, at first, this is a man. Not some game. It was pride, and then it shamed him and he released her, got out of the car, and walked around to let her out.

They went to the big restaurant. Quarter to four. The lounge was empty.

“Drink?” he said.

“I don’t think so. Tea, maybe.”

So they went to the restaurant part. It was big and nearly empty. They took a table for two by the windows where they could look far into the gray misty distance, down at a half-seen cloverleaf, a few cars crawling. The waiter brought tea and cakes. She looked at him and then looked down, her face pale.

He made a professional measurement of the quality of the light against the left side of her face and thought, I would use the Nikon with the 105 mm lens, a Plus-X load, go back six feet about, and take this angle, probably a thirtieth at f/2. Portrait of a girl who thinks her heart is breaking, taken by a man who knows his is.

“Mostly it’s how much you are,” he said.

Her eyes lifted. “I think I know what I am.”

“Do you?”

“I’m not fluff, Joe. I’m of consequence. I have value. I take pride. I’m twenty-three.”

“A very old party.”

She took a little cake, bit a corner off of it, then put it down. “Not a pretty baby, or a pretty child, or a pretty little girl. So that they always said, ‘Ah, darling.’ Nobody started saying ‘Ah’ until I was nineteen. Now a pretty woman. Yes, indeed. Pictures to prove it. But it came along late enough so I know what it is. So I don’t give
it the wrong value. Do you understand that?”

“I think so.”

“Strong, too.”

“Are you strong, Jean Anne?”

“There was the polio. I told you about that, didn’t I? But not how it was those years of bringing those nerves and muscles back. A lot of hurting, Joe. And pride. But strong for loving, too. I’m sure of that about me. A lot to give. But is there enough strength for us? That’s what I don’t know.”

He rubbed his palm slowly across his forehead. “It’s how much you are. Like I said. And funny to have it focused on me. I mean what the hell. I’m Joe Kardell. Going bald. Thick in the middle. Two teen-age kids. Young Joe is teen-age. The girl is only twelve.”

“But why me?” he demanded.

She shook her head. “Your word is wrong. Why us? I love you. I can’t tell you why I was vulnerable. I can tell you about you. You are a good man. You are kind and wise and sensitive and funny. But I don’t love you because. I just love you.”

He stared at his fist. “All the choices are lousy.”

“I know, darling.”

He did not dare look into her eyes. “Take Ruthie. Fifteen years married. She’s a good woman. My God, that sounds patronizing. Some of my best friends are good women. It’s more than that. I love Ruthie. We’ve got a good thing going. We always have had.” He looked cautiously at the girl.

“I accept that,” she said.

“But I keep thinking I could do it a lousy way. I could just sort of … turn myself off. You know? Stop all communication. And she would get frantic. Her nerves would go bad. Then I could turn it into fights. And I could turn it into a big enough fight after four or five months so that I could give a very plausible imitation of a guy walking out on a shrew. Now wouldn’t that be nice?”

“To even hear you say it makes me feel sick. If I turned you into that kind of a man, Joe, then neither of us would be very much.”

“I know. What do we want? We want an affair? Just like that?”

“If … if you …”

“Shut up! Don’t you know what you’d be doing to yourself?”

She tried to smile. “Run along, girlie, and find some nice young man. I don’t want some nice young man. I want Joe Kardell.”

“Do me the honor of allowing that maybe I do love you, Jean Anne. I mean maybe I’ve been caught in what you could call an occupational hazard, but you did come along, and neither of us were trying to start anything. Right?”

“Right, darling.”

“So I love you, and I don’t want Jean Anne in an emotional mess with an older man, even if it’s me. In a deal like that I get one of the loveliest girls in the world on a very selfish basis, and you get a bruised heart.”

Still trying to smile, she said, “Falling in love is supposed to be such fun.” But the tears came and ran out of blue eyes, one tracking down to the corner of her mouth where her tongue nipped quickly out and licked it away—a very young and very childish and brutally touching gesture.

“So what we talk about,” he said, “what we have to talk about is knocking it off before it gets a fair start.”

“A fair start,” she said, her eyes going around. “What would a fair start be? I think of you every waking moment, and I’ve never been so wretched in my whole life. How could there be any more of a start than this?”

“You’ll get over it quick.”

She raised a cool eyebrow. “And you too?”

“Real quick. In eighty-eight more years I won’t remember a thing.”

“I wish we had …”

“Don’t start sentences that way. Please, girl. I’ve got sixty of them I can start that way and none of them do any good, because the wishing doesn’t do any good. There’s just one thing clear. We get out now or we get in deeper. There’s no such thing as holding it right where it is. You know that.”

“Of course I know that.”

The tea was gone, the cakes untouched except for one. He sat in silence for a little while and then said, “We better head on back to town.” The lounge was beginning to fill up. Some people had come into the dining room.

“You run along,” she said.

He stared at her. “I can’t just leave you way the hell and gone out here.”

“You have to, Joe. I have only so much strength, and I’m right at the end of it. You just have to walk out right now, and never never ask for me again, because if you do, it will be more than I can take. I have money in my purse and I am used to finding my way from here to there, so just stand up and walk out. Now!”

He stood up slowly. “You’ll be all right?”

She turned her head and stared fixedly out at the gray light of the gathering dusk. They had turned the inside lights on. Her fist rested on the edge of the table, her knuckles white with the strength of her clasp. It was a small wrist and hand, as vulnerable-looking as the hand of his daughter. He picked up the check for the tea and walked away.

When he was out by his car, as he opened the door he looked down toward the motel office. It was a cheap and plausible solution, and, of course, no solution at all. But he thought of all the people he knew who seemed to thrive on such deadening compromises. The irony and impossibility of it bit into him deeply. The deadened people were never loved by such a one as Jean Anne. He gave the roof of his car a mighty smack with his fist, got in, and drove away from there.

He drove back into the city and parked on the street and unlocked the studio and went in. He pawed around in the office and found the test Polaroids of the candy job. They looked all right. He sat at the desk and checked the scheduled jobs. He breathed a deep sigh of mingled regret and relief when he saw that there was nothing within the next week on which he could conceivably use Lya Shawnessy.

She had made it totally clear. Phone me and I come running. But he was safe for a week. And, maybe, at the end of the week, he could endure another week. And then another.

He sat quite still for a little while, a stocky man with dark quick eyes and a blue shadow of beard. He took his hat off and leaned forward onto the desk, his head in his arms. He made a snorting sound that startled him. He sat up, snuffled once, looked at his watch, and phoned Ruthie. He said he was sorry, but he had been too busy to let her know he would be a little late. He told his wife he would be home by twenty past eight.

As he turned out the light he thought it was probably a very ordinary thing. If you could look at it sort of from the outside. And that was the trick from now on. Keep it ordinary. Keep everything very very ordinary.

She looked at him, and for the first time he realized that the second drink was affecting her. There was an owlish intensity in her gaze. She was a small dark girl, eyes large in a small face, eyes earnest under the dark curl of bangs, mouth showing the small erosions of discontent.

“The lousy stupid things I do to myself,” she said, “I play these games, Johnny. The what-if games. So it’s a hypnosis thing. I know she’d never let you go. Even if you wanted out, which would be a fool thing.”

“Don’t blame yourself, Tina.”

She scowled at him. “The thing is, which you know, the hypnosis thing goes only so far, and then I drag my feet. Sometimes I think I’m the most dishonest person I know. Remember the night we couldn’t get a cab?”

“Of course.”

“Any number of cues I could have given you, and you would have taken it from there, right?”

“I guess so.”

“Oh, you know so, Johnny. You know so. I’ve got no international fame for glamor, but I’m suitable. And you’re a human type male type, and we have this kind of awareness that’s been going on with each other for months and months, and who could fault you? Who blames the guy?”

“His wife.”

“Yes indeed, and that’s our little problem, isn’t it?”

“Mine.”

“Anyhow, I guess you could say the game was called on account of rain that night. And after you went trundling on back to hearth and home, I paced my lonely pad telling myself I was a real smart girl. It went like this. He is Johnny Powell and he is one hell of an attractive man, so attractive that if it ever went one inch past where it’s gone already, you’d be hooked for good, and it’s a lousy thing to do with your life, Tina, to become the sad little town mouse, stealing the suburban
husband from time to time. You see, it couldn’t be casual.”

“For either of us.”

“Thank you, dear. It’s a sweet lie, but I appreciate it anyway. Anyhow, after trying to sell myself on how bright I was, I got down to the real truth of the thing. Terror. The fear of sin. You see, I’m really the worst kind of cheat.”

“I don’t think so.”

“The modrun woman! Johnny, I’m up to here Victorian. I guess I’ve got to have all the licenses and permits. But, Johnny, where where did all the men go? Did the girls like Frances get them all?”

“There’s some around.”

The waiter looked into the booth. He signaled for another round.

“But I’m twenty-nine years old, Johnny, and when do I stop playing kid games with grown-up people like you?” Tears grew on the black thickets of lashes and rolled free. She dabbed them away.

“Maybe the next won’t be a game.”

“Comfort me, dearie, with brave words. Sure. But what scares me now is, maybe, despair. You know, I get assigned to some other account and there is another Johnny Powell, and maybe he’s only half what you are, but I have to set up all the trite misery for myself, go the dreary route with him because I have to sell myself at least one dream, because the clock ticks on. Maybe just as trite as what could have happened to us. I work for you. I’m a city girl. And you have that big glowing country wife and those dear darling glowing kiddies. Do you mind if I hate Frances a little?”

“Go ahead.”

“She’s so invulnerable. Why do they always have to look like Doris Day? Ah, that shining meaty smile, and knowing the PTA song. Oh God, Johnny, I sound so cheap and nasty, and it’s all pure envy. I’ve got a kid sister, up to her hips in babies, up to her armpits in suds, and I hate her sometimes, too. I’m Aunt Tina, career girl. You and Frances are good people, and I’m glad I didn’t get any further into your lives. But sometimes I can feel so …”

She covered her face and sat hunched, weeping silently. The drinks came. He saw a man in another booth staring at them. What could it look like? The end of the affair. But what was it when there’d been no affair? He felt tender toward Tina. He sensed it would be best to let her work herself out of tears. Gentle words might make it worse for her. He was aware of the city night around them, murmurous, full of mouths and lights and motors, with dark rooms and dark places in the heart and ten thousand simultaneous scenes, and he wondered how many of the scenes had dialogue interchangeable with this one. If everyone were masked, perhaps all the words would be alike.