Stars (The Butterfly Trilogy) (46 page)

     Hannah hid her disappointment. She couldn't permit Ardeth to crush her twice in one lifetime. "He did? Where did he go?"

     "He joined some accounting firm. He got his CPA and suddenly we weren't good enough for him anymore," Ardeth said, implying that a lot of people were walking around thinking Halliwell and Katz wasn't good enough for them anymore.

     Hannah went back to her office at McMasters bewildered and disappointed. She had put it off too long, and now she had lost him! How on earth was she going to find him? What if he'd left the Valley? Or California, even?

     She looked at her watch and felt a stab of panic. She had two hours to go before lunch, two long impossible hours in which Alan's trail could go cold before she had a chance even to start searching for him. Attacking her work with vigor to make the time pass quickly, Hannah mentally sketched out her plan of action. She was simply going to sit down with the Valley telephone directory and call every accounting firm listed. If that didn't produce Alan Scadudo, then she'd try the Los Angeles directory and all the other Southern California phone books she could lay her hands on. As a matter of fact, she decided as she glanced into her boss's office and saw that he hadn't come to work yet, why wait for lunch?

     Pulling out the directory she kept beneath her desk, she flipped it open to the yellow pages and was looking for the accountants' section when the phone at her desk rang.

     "Damn," she muttered, then answered it as cheerfully as she could, "Good morning, Mr. McMaster's office."

     "Hi," came a voice that would have knocked her out of her chair if she hadn't been weighted down by the phone book. "Remember me? This is Alan Scadudo."

     It wasn't possible. This was another dream, although it wasn't very erotic. She pinched herself. "Hello, Mr. Scadudo."

     He explained how he had just telephoned his broker at Halliwell and Katz—Hannah could have smacked herself; of course, he had an account there, Mr. Driscoll would have known where to find him!—and that Driscoll had mentioned seeing her there at the cage just a while ago, talking to Ardeth. "So I thought, well, I wondered what you were up to these days so I called Ardeth and she said you'd been asking for me. I remembered that you had moved to McMasters."

     Hannah mumbled something, for the rest of her life she would never remember what, and couldn't believe her ears when Alan asked her if she'd like to go out sometime, "You know, a movie, or dinner, or something. Are you free?"

     Whenever Charmie lead a Starlite group, she left her little boy, Nathan, with Mrs. Muncie down the street, who also had two small children. As she was driving down Avenida Hacienda, felling particularly uplifted by tonight's group—six more new members, and someone from the local paper doing an article—she did not at first notice, as she drove past her own house, the car in the driveway. But she stopped a few yards away, backed up, and saw that her husband was home.

     Ron was supposed to be in Santa Barbara for two more days.

     She suddenly had a bad feeling. When he had pulled her out of the meeting last Saturday night, Charmie had feared all through the silent drive home that she was going to be punished. But Ron had only said a few lousy things to her, gotten drunk, and fallen into bed. The next morning, he was gone and so was his sample case. The note on the kitchen table said, "Sorry about last night, honey. Didn't know what I was thinking. Will be back Friday."

     But his car, parked in the dark driveway, seemed suddenly threatening. Deciding to leave Nathan with the Muncies for a little while longer, she parked and went into the house.

     He was in the kitchen, picking at the cold chicken carcass he had found in the fridge, drumstick in one hand, can of beer in the other. Charmie could tell by his posture that this was not his first beer.

     "Hi," she said as breezily as she could, afraid to give herself away. Although he hadn't punished her on Saturday night, he had shouted at her that she was to stay away from that "fat freak show," and so she had promised not to go back to Starlite again. But he
never
returned early from a trip. "What happened? How come you're home?"

     He lifted bleary eyes. "Where've you bin? How come the kid's not here?"

     A shiver ran up her spine. In the old days, back in New York when he hadn't been drinking so much and they were dating, Ron had sent shivers up Charmie's spine—but shivers of a different sort. She had thought he was wildly exciting, being crass and outspoken and flicking the world away like lint off his sleeve. He had just gotten out of the army and was having a major blow-off to celebrate his freedom—the uniform and the saluting had definitely chaffed. They had laughed and made love and done crazy things in those first weeks, crawling into each other as a refuge against
parental rejection: Ron's father had no more time for his son than Charmie's mother had for her daughter. They were each other's balm. For a while. But then Charmie had gotten pregnant and Ron had changed. He'd had to get a job and had been quick to display his resentment. He didn't want the kid, and they'd had many fights revolving around the subject of abortion. How Charmie had managed to keep the baby she would never know, but a spark of hope had kept her going—hope that the baby would change Ron and make him see that not all families were as abusive as his.

     The first time he had hit her was the day she came home from the hospital with the baby.

     "Well?" he said, rising from the kitchen table, slamming beer and drumstick down. "I asked you a question. Where've you bin?"

     "Ron, you're drunk—"

     He slapped her hard across the face. "You've bin with those fat cows again, haven't you?
Haven't you!
"

     "Please, don't—"

     Even though Charmie outweighed him, he was stronger. Grabbing her painfully by the arm, he said, "It's time you were taught a lesson."

     "Ron, you're—"

     "Go on!" he bellowed. "Move!" And he shoved her through the door.

     He pushed her down the hall, shouting, "Get in there! I'm going to show you who's boss in this house! Christ, how I ever came to be married to a sow like you!"

     She started to cry. He pushed her again and she fell against the wall, gouging her shoulder on a bare picture hook. "Please!" she cried. "I'm sorry."

     "Get in there!" he said, delivering a kick into her thigh that made her stumble into the bedroom, terrified of what was going to happen next. He had done this to her once before, in a motel on Route 66, when they had driven across the country. She hadn't given the doctor in the nearby town her real name.

     "Come on," he growled, tugging at her pink and lavender muumuu. "Get this rag off."

     "Please," she said, "can't we just—"

     Another slap across the face silenced her.

     She tried to undress slowly, to buy time, to see if the alcohol would finally hit some sensitive part of his brain and knock him unconscious. She had been saved before that way. But he just stood there swaying, glaring at her with red, hate-filled eyes.

     When she had all her clothes off, she tried to cover herself. They had been naked together many times; in the early days they had showered together. But now, as she stood there shivering and he made no move to undress, she felt shame burn through her until she thought she could die of it.

     "On the bed," he said.

     "No, Ron,
please.
I promise I won't—"

     He knocked her down, sending her sprawling on the bedspread. "God, you're fat!" he shouted as he started to unbuckle his belt.

     "Ron! No!" She tried to scramble away from him, but he strode around to the head of the bed, grabbed her wrists and pulled them up over head. As she sobbed and begged him to stop, he strapped them together with the belt, then tied the belt over the rail of the brass headboard.

     She was crying so hard that tears were running down the back of her throat, making her cough. She didn't see what Ron did next, but she heard the sound of his zipper and felt the bed dip as he got between her legs.

     Screwing her eyes shut tight and curling her hands into fists, she waited for the painful assault. And when it came, with brute force, she clenched her teeth to keep from crying out. As he slammed into her, covering her with beer breath and grunts, Charmie felt such an intense wave of nausea that she was suddenly afraid she was going to be sick. She turned her head to the side.

     It didn't last as long this time as it had on Route 66. When he finally stopped and pulled away from her, she prayed that this was it, that he would go back to his beer and leave her alone.

     But he was far from finished. In terror she watch as he untied her wrists; there was a look on his face that she had never seen before. She thought, This time he's going to kill me.

     Taking her by the hair, he dragged her off the bed and wordlessly pulled her out of the bedroom and down the hall. Yanking open a closet, he threw
her in, sending her sprawling among old boots and junk. When she fell against a broken tennis racket, she felt a sharp pain in her ribs and heard a faint crack.

     "Wait—" she said as the door closed. "No, please, don't leave me here!"

     But the door slammed shut and she heard the key turn in the lock.

     "Ron!" she screamed. "Don't leave me here!"

     The light bulb in the closet had burned out long ago, but even if it had worked, she couldn't have reached it. He had crammed her in with so much clutter that there was no room to move. And there was the alarming stab of pain in her chest each time she took a breath. But it wasn't worse than the pain between her legs. Down there, it wasn't so much a physical pain as a laceration of the soul.

     "Ron," she whimpered, "please. I'm sick. I'm dying. Don't leave me here..."

     And then she heard the front door slam and the sound of a car motor start up and go off down the street.

     Alan took Hannah to Pacific Ocean Park, an amusement park built out on a pier, where they mingled with the crowd enjoying the sultry evening bright lights, salty sea air, and wild, uninhibited fun. Their date started out shyly; they didn't touch as they walked along the midway, listening to the spiels of the barkers, watching boyfriends go by lugging the enormous stuffed animals they had won for adoring girlfriends. Romance surrounded them like a sweet, throbbing fog. They talked a little about themselves.

     "You know, Hannah, I've always liked you," Alan confessed as they ate corn dogs on sticks, smothered in mustard. "But I could never get up the courage to talk to you. When Mrs. Faulkner told me you had been asking for me, I was flabbergasted. It gave me the confidence to call you. Otherwise, I never would have." He gave her hand a promising squeeze and then let it go.

     Hannah had always known that Alan Scadudo was short, but she hadn't realized until now that he was actually shorter than she. But she didn't care; beneath the tight madras shirt and equally tight chinos, there were insinuations of a great physique.

     They sucked on their corn dog sticks, then bought snow cones, one cherry, one lime. When those got too sloppy to eat and the paper cones collapsed, they tossed them away and bought cotton candy. Neither was really
hungry; their appetite was for something else. But both were too shy to make the first move, so food was the substitute.

     They decided to take the Skyway ride from one end of the pier to the other, but as they rode in the little bucket suspended high over the ocean on a cable wire, Hannah got tense, Alan put his arm around her. She let him leave it there. They went next on the roller coaster, and as their car plunged straight down toward the black, churning Pacific, Hannah screamed and held on to Alan, and he let his hand slip to her breast, where it remained for the rest of the ride. On the Octopus he got a little braver with his exploration as the buckets swung perilously up into the air and then down again. When Hannah didn't protest, he ventured a foray up under her sweater, fingers probing at the elastic of her bra. But it was on the Tilt-A-Whirl that he managed to slide his hand all the way under her bra, cupping a large, firm breast. As their car spun and went up and down, the rapidly changing centrifugal force pressed them together first this way and then that. With Hannah holding on tight to Alan, and he holding on tight to her breast, they got busy kissing. When she reached down and squeezed his erection, he thought he was going to explode right there in the Tilt-A-Whirl.

     When the ride came to a halt, they stumbled off, dizzy more with sexual skyrockets than from having been thrown around. Alan kept his arm tightly around Hannah's waist as they walked numbly through the crowd, oblivious to the lights, the calliope music, the smell of hot dogs and generator fumes. They reached the seal compound, where people were tossing fish into foul-smelling water, and Hannah managed to peel herself away from Alan with a murmured, "I'll be right back."

     He watched her disappear into a gray stone bunker with a little LADIES light over the door. When she emerged a moment later, he saw at once that she had removed her bra, and when he saw how those luscious breasts moved beneath the sweater, he thought the top of his head was going to blow off.

     "Oh God," he said thickly, taking her hand. "Come on!"

     The entrance to the fun house was sexually inviting, a great gaping red curtained doorway with a dark hole in the center. Alan managed to find a dollar bill for their tickets, and then he and Hannah slipped inside, still
hanging onto each other as they had on the Tilt-A-Whirl, like twins who had been joined at birth.

     They paused for a moment to adjust their eyes to the darkness. The noise inside was almost deafening; it was hard to tell if they were hearing a recording of music, laughter, or gunfire. As they followed the green luminous footsteps painted on the floor, they passed a couple entwined in the shadows, madly making out.

     There were silly things in the fun house, more laughable than scary, but Hannah clung to Alan all the same, and he valiantly protected her from swing skeletons, disembodied heads, and a floor made slippery from dropped soft drinks. They came to the trick mirrors and laughed at how funny they looked, all wobbled out of shape, changing as they moved. But when Alan saw how tall one of the mirrors made him seem, taller even than Hannah, he couldn't stand it any longer.