The Followed Man (39 page)

Luke didn't see how he could not
go, if they had come all the way from Boston, where Robin's
assignment had been, just to see him. He must, just this one last
time; they would both have to go back to New York and their wrenched
lives. He shook Jake's pill bottle and Jake, resigned and sad over
the inevitable, came slowly over to him and sat down. He broke a pill
in half, opened Jake's wet, toothy mouth and stuck the pill down into
Jake's throat as far as his finger would reach, shut the mouth and
rubbed Jake's throat to force him to swallow. Jake didn't object to
all this, but could be clever in holding the pill in clew or gum
somewhere and later spitting it out. Luke opened a can of dog food
and put it in Jake's blue pie plate, formerly Shem's. Jake was mildly
pleased by this, though he preferred human food.

"A watchdog to keep the
wolves at a distance, huh?" Robin said.

"Oh, he's small but
fierce," Luke said.

He washed up at the hose, which
had warmed in the sun, rinsed in the cold water that came after and
put a kettle on his Coleman stove to heat for shaving. Robin looked
into the tent and saw the pistol hanging there. "Is that for
real? Jesus!" he said. Luke took out the clip, unloaded the
chamber and handed it to him. Robin quickly handed it back. "What
do you shoot with it?"

"Nothing yet, but you never
can tell."

"That thing scares me more
than the Sasquatch," Robin said. "I mean, do you really
need it around here?"

"To me it's just a friend."

"Weirder and weirder,"
Robin said. "Let's hurry up and get the hell out of here."
He was even more puzzled when, before they left, Luke reloaded the
pistol and put it back in the truck.

He followed Robin down the
mountain, through the village and out along the lakeshore road to the
Lake Cascom Motel and Din­ing Room, an old wooden inn that had
grown outward into long, one-story motel units, nearly every one,
now, in the summer sea­son, with a car nosing its parent cubicle.
Across the broad blue lake the hills rose up toward Cascom Mountain,
which did look impressively steep and rocky from here.

Marjorie had just come back from
the beach across the road. She wore a filmy light blue dressing gown
open upon a bright or­chid bathing suit, a two-piece semi-bikini
that revealed smooth reaches of white skin now tinted pink, a near
sunburn, on those curves that by their amplitude had been offered
directly to the sun.

"Hi, Marge," Luke
said. She was shy, yet prepared, as though she had thought a lot
about this meeting and was as ready as any­one could be. She
smiled and said hello, but was terribly embarrassed. She seemed bound
by it, kept back a certain distance from them toward the far wall of
the room. She was larger than he re­membered her to be, a tender
giant in the clashing feminine col­ors. She looked directly at
him once, as if to say, "Look what's hap­pened to me, of all
people," with some of the wry humor of the fallen. They talked
about the lake, the clear cold water, the green­ness of the
hills, her first time way up here in New Hampshire, the difference
from the city. Robin made gin and tonics for them, plain tonic for
himself.

Marjorie was grave, impressed by
the ceremony of all of this. It was as if her body were the immensely
important but somehow shameful offering that had caused it all. She
was excited, pre­pared to be shamed or praised, knew she was in a
foreign land in a compromising room with two men who were strange,
attractive, rich, glamorous and judgmental, and who had nothing to do
with her real life. Yet she was here, and they all knew she had lain
naked with one of them. At least that was the way Luke had to read
her high emotion. She, Marjorie Burns Rutherford, her life, soul,
worth, morals, her freaky licentious behavior, her cheap­ened but
still sinfully magnetic sexual attractiveness, was at the center of
this moment.

Luke suddenly thought that if
Robin had any meanness in him now was the time he would show it.

And then, another thought that
frightened him: by requesting his presence she had given away her
right to treat her liaison with Robin as a lark, a whimsical thing
she had decided to do, and giv­en him a license to ask her any
question at all. In fact demanded those questions, and he didn't want
the responsibility. No. But if he were imperviously polite and
casual, and went away having dealt with nothing of high seriousness,
then she would be aban­doned and truly hurt. He didn't want to be
anyone's confessor, not even his own, and they were after him as they
were always af­ter him.

Maybe he would have to get drunk
in order to take her confes­sion and dispense his paternal
indulgences, as he had been at the Joneses' when their repetitive
marital cataclysm demanded his goddam mediation.

And now Marjorie, this
twenty-nine-year-old woman, so awed by the strange turns her life had
taken; big Marjorie, Marjorie in all her voluptuous warm flesh
chilled by the cold lake and warmed again by the afternoon sun, now
indoors with men, drinking gin, still in the diaphanous blue of her
gown, her sinful places struck by scant and violent orchid. They must
be so important to her, these next hours, but did he need them?
Demeaning thought. Poor Marjorie.

"I ought to change out of
my bathing suit," she said, but sat in one of the shiny motel
easy chairs, next to the door that led to the inner hallway. Sunlight
striped her. With one hand she pushed and carded her hair that was
damp at the ends. "And wash off all the Coppertone, though I got
burned a little anyway. I burn so easy I guess I ought to stay in the
shade and look like a white worm."

"Some worm," Robin
said.

"Now, Robin," she said
with a touch of sternness, or dismay, then changed the subject. "How
are you doing now, Luke?"

"I'm building myself a
cabin in the woods," he said.

"He's going to be a
hermit," Robin said.

"A hermit?"

"I just want to live alone
for a while," Luke said.

"But it's awful living
alone. Why do you want to live alone?"

"I don't know," Luke
said, though the unformulated answer loomed in his mind, anxiety
around that gray shape like a nimbus. "What are you going to do,
Marge?" he said.

"Be a
receptionist-secretary at the clinic again. The girl they got now's
leaving the first of September, her husband's going to col­lege
in Indiana."

"So you've got a vacation
till then."

"I got to go back and take
care of Mickey and Marcia, so this part's nearly over. Sheila's mad
at me, anyway. I said we only live once and I'm a widow now, so why
not? Do you disapprove, Luke?"

"Why should I disapprove?"

"It's like, well, I mean, I
never did anything like this before."

Robin said, "I'm going to
take a shower, so you two Wasps can discuss the finer points of sin."
He went off cheerfully to the bath­room, and the shower started.

"You do disapprove. You
disapproved on the phone when I called you," Marjorie said.

"Well, I got the impression
that you kind of disapproved of the whole thing yourself."

"I did at first, but I
liked it too much. You only live once. That's what I told Sheila.
She's Catholic, you know."

"It's just a matter of
what's good for you, that's all," Luke said, sinking, doing his
duty.

"Robin's so good in bed. I
need a man in bed," she said, a little breathless at this
confession.

"Just so you know how
temporary it is."

"I don't know about that,"
she said.

"He's married and has a
kid. Do you think he'll leave them?"

"She left him!"

"I doubt it. She'll be back
when he gets home."

"He loves me!"

"Not to marry you, Marge,
for Christ's sake. I was hoping you knew what you were doing. Treat
it as an outing or something. You only live once. Robin's a nice
enough fellow, it's just that he's a little sick in certain areas. He
wants to go to bed with every wom­an in the world. I'm sorry, and
I shouldn't get exasperated, but if you think anything's permanent,
you're a fool."

"Why did Mickey have to
die?" she said, crying. Fluids came to her nose and eyes, and
she reached for the Kleenex. When she'd wiped and blown, her eyes
glossy, she said, "I wish I could live with you, Luke. Not to
sleep with. No, that too. I don't care how old you are. Maybe you
don't even do it anymore, how should I know? I've just been so
alone!"

"You're an attractive young
woman who likes men and you won't be alone for long, believe me.
Go back to work in your clinic. I wish my prognosis was as good.
Meanwhile, have fun on your vacation."

Though the shower still ran, she
looked conspiratorily toward the bathroom. "He's so good, you
know, in bed. He goes on and on. We do awful things, too, that I
never did before. I mean, I heard the words for the things we do, but
I never knew people ever really did them. Now I'm embarrassed,
telling you that." She pulled her gown over her long pink and
white legs. "I just need a man's arms around me at night. I
thought there for a while I was a mother, so I'd be a mother and that
was it, the rest was all over. But the rest wasn't over. I'm still
too young, I guess, and too hot-blooded. I'm on the pill now, even. I
mean, I'm a good mother, too, but I get wild for a man. I'm unnatural
that way. I just got to have a man."

"You'll get a man, Marge.
Don't worry."

Robin came out of the bathroom
in flowered blue shorts, towel­ing his hair. "Next," he
said. Marjorie glanced once at his hairy, gleaming body and the bulge
caused by his randy little apparatus, blushed and looked away as she
rose to take her bath.

Robin retrieved his leisure suit
from the bathroom and Marjo­rie went in. Then he, too, looked
conspiratorily at the bathroom's closed door. "Pardon my
crudeness, or whatever you'd call it, but if you want to try her, old
buddy, I'll take a walk."

"For Christ's sake, Robin."

At dinner Marjorie looked
purged, absolved. She was gay and laughing, Robin going on about the
dangerous animals he'd come across on the way to Luke's mountain
home. They ate in the din­ing room of the old hotel, Marjorie a
little worried about silver­ware and how one should hold a wine
glass. Occasionally she gave Luke quick, serious glances he thought
grateful, this somewhat formal dinner and his older presence making
it all more legiti­mate. Just having another person know must
institutionalize it somewhat, make it a social rather than an
aberrant act. Well, he knew, and having known would say good-bye to
them soon.

Robin asked about the article.
"Gentleman
doesn't pay that well—notorious
tightwads—but I wouldn't mind the credits, if you ever do the
thing."

"I wouldn't know how to
tell the truth about it," Luke said.

"I called Mike Rizzo, you
know," Robin said. "He told me once I could come and
photograph his apartment, but on the phone he was scared or
embarrassed or something. He's a big talker. He said he was afraid
some nut would come and get him and his family. 'They get your
address, Robin, you follow me? They find out where you live, you
follow me? Some nut's going to come and kill you.' Our brave
paratrooper."

"What about Jimmo McLeod,
the crane guy?"

"Jimmo's gone to Alaska,
his family and all," Marjorie said. "Maura, his wife,
called me up to say good-bye. She said they were going to get rich in
Alaska."

"A crane operator makes
good money," Robin said, "but a crane operator does not get
rich."

"Or a photographer,"
Luke said.

"But films, films,"
Robin said. "Who knows?"

When Marjorie went to the
ladies' room, her fawn colored slacks drawing glances as she walked
between the white-clothed tables, Robin said, "You could take
her, you know. Don't get mad, now, but she's ripe. The two of us turn
her on, I can tell. She's hot as a pistol, if you're up for that sort
of thing."

"Robin."

"Don't go all fucking moral
on me. I'm thinking what she'd like. I'm not being a shit. She'd like
to get gang-shagged, is what she'd really like."

"I'm not a member of the
gang."

"You mean you couldn't get
it up for poor Marge? Listen, she likes you so much that when you act
sort of dignified and moral and like that she acts that way too, but
I'll bet anything—I'll bet you a hundred bucks, right now, we
can take her back to the room and have her clothes off in five
minutes."

"Maybe you're right, but I
don't want it to happen. I deeply don't want it to happen, Robin. I
want to say good-bye to Marge without making her unhappy now or in
the future. I want out with a good conscience, if that's possible."

"Back to your hermitage,
huh?"

"Right. No guilt, no more
tears, no orgasmic convulsions, no voyeuristic amusements
whatsoever."

"Oh, well. It would have
been funsies for all. Whatever else she is, Marjorie is one fucknutty
cunt. I was just trying to do my old buddy a favor, but forget it,
forget it. Maybe I'm a pimp at heart. What do you think?"

"Maybe."

"And I guess you're never
going to do the article, huh?"

"Too much new data keeps
creeping in. I want to creep out."

"Maybe you're a creep at
heart."

"Maybe. Just don't turn
over my stone and I'll be satisfied."

Marjorie came back across the
room, her eyes glittering with in­terest and shyness as she
looked at Luke and Robin.

With their coffee, Robin ordered
brandy for Luke and Marjo­rie. "Live it up," he said,
"for tomorrow we head back to Logan and the shuttle to the real
world."

"You can have it,"
Marjorie said.

"Would you like to stay up
here with all the trees and creepies and crawlies?" Robin asked
her.