Everything and More (54 page)

When the waiter left, Roy said,
“Mucho
impressive. You didn’t
learn
that
at Beverly High.” She beamed at Althea. “This is so fabulous. Gerry—my husband—is painting here. Remember, the last time I saw you, we were living in sin.”

Heat had swollen Althea’s hands, and the chunky jade ring that Gerry had bought her cut into her finger. Roy was so ebulliently certain of herself that it was impossible to believe that Gerry was unwarned of her visit. Why didn’t he tell me? Althea thought, wrenching off the ring. Why the secrecy?

“. . . all go to dinner,” Roy was saying. “I’m dying for you to meet him. Oh, that’s right. You know him. Have you bumped into him?”

“The place simply swarms with Americans.”

The happiness faded from Roy’s face, and she looked down at her glass. “I remember . . .” she said uncertainly. “You and he didn’t get along, did you?”

“Dear heart, that was in my infancy.”

The waiter brought Althea’s beer, and she drank half of it swiftly.

“I love that dress.” Roy had recovered her bounce. “The embroidery’s fabulous. Where did you find it?”

“At one of the stalls in the
mercado
—it’s owned by a cross-eyed Indian woman.” Althea, too, spoke convivially. She sipped the remainder of her beer, describing the shrewd widow who sold junk to American rubes, treasures to the cognoscenti. A bitter skill of hers, this, mining small talk out of her darkest anxieties.

Roy was laughing. “I’m too dumpy for loose things, but I adore that. Lead on, McDuff, to the wall-eyed lady.”

“Where’s your loyalty? I thought you only shopped at Patricia’s.”

Roy was not listening. She was staring over Althea’s shoulder, an expression of rapt adoration transfixing her face. “There he is,” she murmured. “Gerry. In that car.”

Gerry was pulling into one of the slanted parking spaces in front of the Hotel de los Reyes.

“So he is,” Althea said, drawing in a breath.

“Maybe, well . . .” The umbrella shaded them, but Roy’s face was red, as if from heat stroke. “Maybe it would be easiest if you . . . uhh . . . let us be alone for a few minutes. I’m surprising him.”

So Gerry did not know of Roy’s visit!

Althea felt strength flow into her, and a measure of kindness. To preserve Roy from humiliation, she said quietly, “You’re silly to have come.”

“Don’t I know it. Gerry’s not like other people, he’s an artist, he needs his individuality. That’s why he’s here—he’s beginning a new
series of paintings, and he wanted to get away from all the distractions.” Rising, she reached for her big straw purse. “Better get it over with.”

“Wait.” Althea curved a restraining hand on Roy’s wrist. “We need to talk.”

“Later.”

“Before Gerry sees us together.”

The flush had faded from Roy’s face and her makeup base showed like a film over her freckles. “What are you trying to say?”

“I knew Gerry years before he met you,” Althea said rapidly. “He was still in the Army, an outpatient at Birmingham Military Hospital in the Valley—”

“Yes, you told me. You and he were both at the art school.”

“We fell for each other.”

“You what?”

“We had a big thing going.”

“He hated you,” Roy refuted flatly. “He called you Miss Rich Bitch.”

“My parents broke us up, they did it in a rotten way—I didn’t know about it, but he blamed the mess on me. I blamed him. We pretended we hated each other—you can see the logic, can’t you? When we met again this last November—”

“So
you’re
what kept him in New York.”

“Yes. It started all over again, and we arranged to come down here.”

Roy was clasping her straw purse to the bosom of her sundress. A drop of perspiration showed on the side of her cheek. “He’s had other women. You aren’t the first. You won’t be the last.”

“Roy, I’m not trying to harm you.”

“How could you? You’re just another tramp to him!”

“Hardly.”

“I’ve made a home for him, a place where he can work.”

“Roy, will you stop acting like this is the fall of the Holy Roman Empire—”

“You’re such a cold fish!” Roy’s pupils glinted, and in this fleeting instant there was something unfamiliar about her, a gross intensity, a wildness. The ringing of the cathedral’s ancient wooden clock set up a deafening reverberation. “You took Dwight Hunter away from me by sleeping with him.” Despite the tintinabulation Roy’s low voice somehow managed to be clearly audible. “Well, this time it’s different. You aren’t getting Gerry. He’s my husband.”

Gerry slammed the Studebaker door, moving toward the hotel’s shadowy, deep-set entry arch.

“Gerry!” Roy’s cry shrilled over the antiphonal church bells and the clatter of traffic.
“Gerry!”

He turned, raising a hand to shelter his eyes, looking toward the Café Manuela. He froze momentarily in that position; then his hand fell to his side, his shoulders slumped. In this attitude of defeat his stocky body seemed thicker. For a moment Althea was positive he would cross to them. But he wheeled about, barreling into the dark hotel entry.

Roy darted into the street. A peddler’s bicycle laden with tourist machetes swerved to avoid her, the wheels flapping as the rider steered frantically out of the way of a large truck. The bike fell toward the dusty pavement, the noisy bells covering the crash.

Roy had disappeared behind the thick, nail-studded doors of the Hotel de los Reyes.

Althea stared up at the windows of the rooms she shared with Gerry. The shutters had been closed against midday heat. She could see nothing.

  
50
  

Gripped by the violence of her need to confront Gerry, Roy was scarcely aware of demanding that the gray-haired desk clerk give her Señor Horak’s room number. In the creaking elevator she held a hand over her heart. Calm down, calm down, she ordered herself. Calm down.

Though Gerry’s other flings had driven her wild, she had recognized them as casual alliances, no proper threat to her marriage. But this—whatever denials she had hurled at Althea—she accepted as catastrophe. Pure catastrophe. For her mind had sped back through the years to when she had first mentioned Althea’s name to Gerry: he had reacted as if to live electricity.

The elevator decelerated, stopping a foot or so above the third floor; then the young operator jerked them down a few inches too far. Roy stumbled over the rise. Fleeing the boy’s rapid Spanish apologies, she searched through the dim, cool corridor for the door affixed with the brass number 334.

She dabbed Kleenex at her brow and upper lip before rapping tentatively.

“Yeah?” Gerry asked. “What is it?”

At his voice, a mawkishly grateful relief swept through Roy. She felt as if she had been rescued from oblivion.

The door was unlocked, and she let herself in. The exterior shutters of the high-ceilinged sitting room had been closed, and her first impression was of a dim cave where animals hibernated—animals that immediately became massive, old-fashioned pieces of upholstery.

Silhouetted in the archway to the bedroom stood Gerry. It was not light enough to see his expression, but his sandaled feet were apart and his arms bent at the elbows, a defensive stance. She had to fight that old painful need to figuratively kneel in humbleness and plead with him to love her.

“Okay, so you’ve discovered I’m not baching it in Oaxaca.” His truculence sounded forced. “No law says I have to eat shit about it.”

“I didn’t come here to spy.”

“Then what the fuck are you doing down here?”

“I wanted to surprise you,” she said quietly. “But I’m the one who got the surprise.”

His head cocked as if her dignity astonished him. Did she usually rant like a fishwife when faced with his infidelities? Yes, she thought, oh God, yes.

“It’s a shame you had to find out this way,” he said in a less surly voice.

“Althea explained,” Roy said in the same calm tone. “She’s always been the one for you, hasn’t she?”

Her eyes had adjusted and she could see that trapped misery on his broad face. Nodding, he said, “That’s about the size of it.”

For a moment a pain, sharp and physical, stabbed her chest. “And what about me? Didn’t you ever feel the least little something for
me?”
There it was, that involuntary, degrading shrillness.

He grew wary again. “You wanted in, baby. If you recall, marriage was
your
idea.”

“Gerry, can’t you see you’re killing me?” She began to cry. Why must she forever hunger for what he (or anyone else) was incapable of bestowing on her? Love.

Gerry’s expression remained stony. “Right on cue, the waterworks.”

“I can’t help it,” she wept. “. . . the way I feel about you is worse than having Parkinson’s or diabetes or . . . some other incurable disease. . . .”

Her gasped-back sobs sounded over the shutter-muted clamor of the Zócalo.

“Ahh, what’s the use? It always ends up the same. You the bawling, wronged, saintly wife, and me the bastard.” Gerry stamped through the darkened bedroom.

She heard a door close, a shower running. She sat on the couch, whose prickly blood-colored plush gave off a faint peppery aroma. After a minute her tears lessened. Gripping her wadded Kleenex, she went to the other room. Far smaller than the sitting room, it was dominated by the high bed with ornately carved head- and footboards.

As she stared at the bed where her husband made love to another woman, Roy’s mind worked with sudden incongruous lucidity. She had heard vets say that in the heart of fray there comes a moment when the fear and the battle hype both recede and you comprehend without emotion whether or not you’re going to make it. So it was with her.

I’ve lost him, she thought with a clarity unconnected to her passionate grief. Lost him. . . .

She stood for a long time in the doorway.

The shower ceased. Gerry emerged from the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist, his wet hair hanging in his eyes.

“Wasn’t the message clear enough?” he said. “I’ve had it up to here.”

“We have to talk,” she said.

“Talk? Talk means first you pry everything out of me, then you shriek and wail about it!”

“Gerry, I promise to behave.”

He gave her a wary glance, then padded over to the bureau, leaving wet footmarks on the polished floor, scattering socks as he fished out Jockey shorts. Facing away from her, he stepped into them.

“You and Althea are having an affair. See, I said it quite rationally.”

He moved to a big wardrobe for a clean shirt and clean Levi’s.

Roy said, “It’s not a fly-by-night thing, you and Althea, not a one-night stand. I accept that.”

He tilted his head at her. “You’re really on the level, aren’t you? You really do want to hash it out reasonably?”

“We have to.”

He did up a shirt button, not looking at her. “The truth is, Roy, it’s never worked, you and me. It’s my fault. I’ve felt trapped, so I’ve made life shitty for you. The best thing for both of us is to split up. Get a divorce.”

A divorce.

The word echoed and reechoed through Roy’s head, and she saw the dimness of the room as black.
Divorce.
Stifling an impulse to throw herself screaming on the flowered carpeting at his feet, she gripped the doorjamb.

Gerry was watching her with a peculiar begging expression.

All at once she understood that just as her soul and body were being stretched on the rack of love, so were Gerry’s. For years he had been crazy in love with Althea, just as she, Roy, had been in love with him.

This fellowship with Gerry’s torment elicited from Roy a bewildering flood of emotions: barren hopelessness, a vindictive jealousy toward her rival, and—most heavily—an inanely adoring loyalty that made her yearn to help Gerry, to be his ally in winning a victory. Win a victory even though she was his unhappy opponent.

“A divorce . . .” she said weakly. “Gerry, I just don’t know . . . I don’t think I’ll ever get over how I feel about you.”

“You can’t be enjoying this fouled-up marriage any more than I am.”

She sighed miserably. “Not now. . . .”

Gerry asked, “Then at least you’ll think about splitting?”

“I care so much, darling.”