The Followed Man (35 page)

A motion at the bank—animal.
It was Jake, who, having had to follow, gingerly looked for a place
to be. He settled down in a mossy depression between roots, curled
and tried to lick himself, but gave it up as too painful. After a few
tentative moves, he found a way to prop his head on a root, his large
eyes on Luke.

At first even Jake didn't hear,
over the rushing of the water, the approach of someone else. Luke was
soaping himself and his eyes were closed. He heard Jake's hoarse,
short bark of warning, bent down to rinse the soap from his face and
came up to see, fuzzily, a woman he didn't recognize immediately
because he didn't expect to see her here. His first reaction to her
being a woman was to wade toward the stone where his towel was. He
wiped his face just as she spoke, and knew who she was.

"I've seen you naked
before, Luke Carr, so you don't have to put on your sarong!" It
was Jane Jones, in white tennis costume, her tanned skin dark as an
underexposure against the white of her tennis dress and shoes. She
took a long-legged step and a jump to a nearer boulder and sat on it
with one knee up. "Go on with your bath," she said. "I'll
wait."

He had been startled, and being
startled was not, here and now, exactly pleasant; there was a trail
of disappearing fear. Jake made some other threatening sounds and
subsided to watch Jane care­fully. Luke said hello cheerfully
enough, he thought, then went under to rinse himself and wash away
the bitter memory of fear, thinking as he pushed through the cold
water that Jane Jones was about the last person he had expected to
see, and what did she want with him?

He surfaced and stood waist
deep, wondering if it was modesty or some other sort of fear to have
the water cover him, though she could see through the refracting
water and did look there, with an amused look. He resented this
somewhat, and said, "Come on in. The water's fine."

Involuntarily she glanced at
Jake, as if he were a third party to this immodest proposal, and then
she saw that she had lost the advantage, and frowned, again
involuntarily, just long enough to realize that she had given herself
away. So she had missed that part of a second in which she might have
maintained her cool. Luke climbed out, wrapped the towel around his
waist and invited her to his camp. Jake followed them slowly across
the field and waited patiently, standing while Luke made drinks,
entering the painful process of lying down only when Luke sat down.

Jane explained that she had been
in a doubles tournament in North Conway, that she and her partner had
lost, and she had de­cided to stop by on her way home. The
directions Luke had sent to Ham were bare but adequate, and so she
had found him skin­ny-dipping in the brook. She had the TR-7,
which didn't have much clearance, so she'd left it out at the main
road and walked in, following the electric wire.

"You're beginning to look
like one of those weight lifters," she said. "A stunning
body you've got, Luke Carr."

"Yours is pretty stunning,
too, Jane."

"I know. I don't look a day
over twenty-nine."

"Nineteen, then."

"Too late, Buster,"
she said, and blushed, he was certain, be­neath her careful tan.
Some idea or possibility had come to her and made her cautious, or
embarrassed, as though she questioned the propriety of coming to see
him all by herself. "Ham says we're going to drive up here one
of these days and see how you're get­ting along, so I thought I'd
scout on ahead, find out just where you were," she said. "I've
got to get on home."

Her embarrassment excited him.
Without her knowing looks and sarcasm, or whatever it was she coated
all her remarks with, she became the stunning blond golden girl he
had desired, at least once in his life, before Helen had imprinted
her own characteris­tics upon him. He look Jane's glass, which
was not empty, chipped more ice from the twenty-five pound block and
made her another drink.

"God! Easy!" she said.
"I've got a long drive ahead. It's six o'clock already!"

"You're welcome to stay
over," he said, watching her, feeling a little reckless and even
cruel. She became very nervous, her long metallic fingernails
clicking on her glass, which she held in one hand and played upon
with the other. She was trying to find something to say, and finally
looked at him resentfully, then away.

"Ham had a thing for Helen.
Did you know that?" she said. "But of course nothing ever
came of it except he used to tell me about it all the time."

"He told you about it?"

"Sure. Maybe it's our
California ways or something. We confess a lot."

"I don't," he said.
"We didn't."

"I know. I used to envy
your uptight whatever-it-was. Christ, Ham treats me sometimes like
I'm his kindergarten teacher. Ev­ery little kinkydink in his
psyche and Big Jane knows all about it. But then I'm just as bad, I
guess. There's just no goddam dignity. I mean I like to look good and
feel good, so I go on the wagon and watch the calories, but then I
ask myself what do I want to look good
for?
Because there's no
dignity and I just want men to drool over me a little? Why should I
ask you this, anyway? I never thought of anything like that before
your . . . before the . . . tragedy. I don't want to remind you of
it. I'm sorry. What I mean is, I didn't come up here to jump in bed
with you. I'm on my way back from a lousy doubles tournament. I can't
stand my partner—for one thing, she never comes to the net—so
we drive in separate cars; we always do. So I came up here to see you
as a person. I did see your whole person, more or less, in the brook.
Joke. I'm seri­ous, though, or I want to be, and you're serious.
I mean you really
are
serious, maybe because you have to be
now, after what happened. No, you always were serious. Maybe all I
mean is that you were in love with your wife. Anybody could see it,
and it was amazing, fabulous! Like you read in those women's books,
so I just naturally respected you and that's why we had all the
argu­ments, not because you never asked to make love to me.
Anyway, I never asked you, right?"

"Right," he said.

"When you said to take a
swim over there I didn't, right?"

"Right."

"Are you laughing at me,
you shit?"

"No, Jane."

"There's no dignity,"
she said, crying, her lids suddenly red and overflowing. "Christ,
I feel like a fool in front of that goddam dog! Why does he keep
looking at me? And it wasn't my fault I was for Nixon, either. He
came from my mother's hometown!"

She put her glass, clasped in
both hands, in front of her face. She was sitting on a kitchen chair,
her athletic bottom filling the hard seat, her cute, too pretty,
lace-decorated tennis dress une­qual to her emotion. The top seam
of her ball pocket was tinted red from clay dust, where she had
stuffed the yellow extra ball when she had served. Her tears and
ragged breaths seemed im­portant because out of character, or out
of whatever character he'd thought she had. He went to her, removed
her spilling glass from her hands and put it on the ground, knelt
beside her chair and put his arms around her. Sympathy threatened to
undo him, as though one soft thought might release from him groans
and wails that would frighten them both.

She hiccuped, and said, "I
stink. I couldn't stand hanging around long enough after the match to
take a shower and change."

She did stink, of a prodigious,
an Olympic sweat. He thought of her hairy ancestors—Celtic,
Saxon, Mycenaean—fierce warrior-women of interminable seiges,
survivals, battles and massacres. It rose like heat from her as she
sobbed over some vague civilized unhappiness she probably couldn't
define. Now he would not dis­solve into mush, at least; but he
wondered as she leaned into him, needing his arms, to whom his real
thoughts might be expressed, and if they were not in violation of the
tenderness and sympathy he really felt toward her. As a comforter he
had always felt not so much a fraud as an inadequate vessel.

"You stink good," he
said. "It's honest sweat. You should have smelled me before I
dove in the brook."

"I didn't shower because I
didn't want you to think there was any hanky panky," she said.
Her arms went around his waist and his towel fell off. "I didn't
mean to do that!" she said, nearly in a panic. "God damn
it!"

"I know," he said, but
the appendage he had never found an adequate word for, at least in
any complicated situation, had a willful mind of its own and rose
white, pink, veined, a rather shockingly utilitarian instrument. He
didn't know if she would take the recalcitrant organ's behavior for a
betrayal or a compli­ment. As he leaned back to retrieve the
towel, Jane stared at the thing that pointed at her, then at his
eyes. He couldn't read her expression at all.

"I'm not exactly
responsible," he said, covering it. "There are certain
areas in which our best intentions are subverted, at least in part,
by Beelzebub. When I feel tender toward a pretty woman that
son-of-a-bitch goes on automatically, but I reserve the final
decision, as it were."

"If you screwed me,
wouldn't you feel you'd betrayed your friend?"

"You're a friend. You mean
Ham. In that case you're talking about two friends. But do you blame
me for this growth, or not? I don't know."

"You couldn't have
calculated
to say anything more seductive. All you want is a
piece of ass."

He felt his noble ambivalence
betrayed by this simplification. How easy and wonderful was marriage,
in which action was not necessarily the opposite of care.

He could say to her that, after
all, she had come here, where he had been peacefully, ascetically,
eremitically performing his inno­cent ablutions.

Ah, no. She was unhappy and she
was not evil. She would never know, this stunning golden girl,
whether anyone, except maybe her kindergarten pupil, loved her for
herself or her bod—to use a word of her generation. But how
much of herself was the great bod she exerted and starved for beauty?
This new and near-hys­terical flippancy of thought was tawdry,
trashy, unworthy, self-protective. He didn't want to have to weep
over her unhappiness or his own. If his erection was now licked by
flame, now by ice, maybe that was the fire and ice of hell. Maybe she
had cheated on Ham a hundred times, but that wasn't his information,
and didn't matter anyway.

"I do care for you, Jane,"
he said with surprising emotion and difficulty, as though the words
proved the truth of it. "I'll listen and treat you as a person,
okay?" He handed her her drink and went into the tent to put on
some clothes. When he came out, a minute later, her tennis costume
was draped over the chairback, her tennis shoes and ankleless socks
with their little white pom­poms were neatly lined up, and his
towel and soap were gone.

The sun was approaching the
mountain when she came back across the field, the towel wrapped
tightly around her. She walked carefully over stubble and grass, and
her hair was a dark rope, now, over one shoulder. Cool air had moved
down from the hills, and he had made a fire in his rocked fireplace
in front of the tent. Dead limbs, mostly applewood, burned yellow and
orange, the small new fire at least visually the warm center of the
pasture and surrounding trees and hills.

"Cold!" she said as
she came up to the fire. "That brook is beyond cold. It's
super-cold. You can't even
feel
it, it's so cold." She
knelt next to the fire and spread the heavy, damp strands of her hair
over her hands. "God, this is a beautiful place," she said,
holding her hair over her head. "It's so green. It's almost too
green."

He got her another towel and
offered her dry clothes. She ac­cepted the towel and tossed her
hair in it as if her hair were wheat and the moisture were chaff that
must be gently shaken away, nev­er rubbed. Women were always
doing expert things like that, things that rarely made much sense to
him, but were part of their common mystery, such as why men caused in
them so much ten­sion and emotion all the time. Jane had come
here out of something like love, something utterly impractical and
compelling. She knelt by the fire, tossing her hair, naked except for
the towel that compressed her breasts and covered her to her strong
thighs. She was forty, but he had trouble imagining her as a younger
woman, as if any smoothing out or firming of the live body that was
now almost a cliché of the proper proportions could only make a
mani­kin—thinner, hard, with an airbrushed surface. From
certain an­gles, when she was dressed up and fixed up, she did
look like a manikin sometimes, her face simplified and a soft sheen
across cheek or forehead that was inhumanly geometrical. Then from
this model, as visual an entity as a statue, would come all sorts of
ragged, sometimes destructive emotion.

If he made love to her she
would, sooner or later, confess to Ham or bludgeon Ham with it,
depending upon the needs of that future moment, he knew. Then a
connection would be made to all that complicated love and hatred and
he would have a line on him like a leash, one that could be jerked
taut at any unexpected time. If only he knew exactly what she wanted
from him, something she probably didn't know either, he could veto
the decision of his inflamed member.

Also he wanted to be alone; that
was not an immediate priority because it was now overridden by the
persistent itch of lust, each small hair on his body containing a
charge, seeming to wave like cilia toward the woman who had come here
because of him. But the need for singleness and isolation waited
patiently, he knew, and would return with force.

She moved her long arms and
basked in the fire as the air cooled and darkened. He felt the
alcohol's dangerous evasions of the future. Because she didn't speak
he knew what she wanted him to do. He went to her and for the first
time since he had known her touched her with that intention. She knew
before he had taken his second step, of course, and was so
immediately will­ing and calmly naked she seemed to have lost all
of her quirks and hard edges and become a smooth part of him. The
mutual exped­iting, the unity of intent, function, opinion—like
the slow tropisms of the green life all around them, nothing could
ever be so remorseless and easy. There was the urgent recess for the
spreading of the blanket and the removal of his clothes. Warning only
came back to him just as he entered her, a moment he would re­member
later, when her eyes in the firelight widened fiercely, or as if with
great surprise.