The Stand (Original Edition) (30 page)

“Good,” she said. “You were right. Thank you.”

“Welcome,” he said. “Now look. What I’m going to suggest is this. We go down Fifth to Thirty-ninth and turn west. Cross to New Jersey by the Lincoln Tunnel, then follow 495 and . . . those eggs okay? They’re not spoiled, are they?”

She smiled. “They’re fine.” She forked more into her mouth and followed it with a sip of coffee. “Go on.”

“We might pick up a couple of Yamahas, or something. There’ll be a lot of stalled traffic on the roads. I thought we could head northeast. Maybe end up in Maine. How does an estate on the ocean sound to you, maybe in Boothbay or Camden or Bar Harbor?”

He had been looking out the window, thinking as he spoke, and now he turned back to her. What he saw scared him badly. She was smiling, but the expression was more of a grimace. Sweat stood out on her face.

“Rita? Jesus, Rita, what—”

“—sorry—” She scrambled up, knocking her chair over, and fled across the living room. One foot hooked the hassock she had been sitting on and rolled it on its side like an oversized checker.

"Rita?"

Then she was in the bathroom, and through the closed door he could hear the low, wrenching sounds of her breakfast coming up. He slammed his hand flat on the table in irritation, then got up and went in after her. God, he hated it when people puked. It always made you feel like puking yourself. The smell of American cheese in the bathroom made him want to gag. Rita was sitting on the tile floor, legs folded under her, head hanging weakly over the bowl. She wiped her mouth with a swatch of toilet paper and looked up at him pleadingly, her face paper pale.

“I just couldn’t eat it, Larry. I’m sorry.”

“Well Jesus, Rita, if you knew it was gonna make you do that, why did you try?”

“Because you wanted me to. And I didn’t want you to be angry with me. But you are. You are angry.”

His mind went back to the lovemaking of the night before. She had screwed with such febrile energy that he found himself thinking of her age and feeling a little disgusted. She went at it so hard that it was a little like being caught in one of those exercise machines. He had come quickly, almost in self-defense, and a long while later she had fallen back, panting and unfulfilled. Moments later she had drawn close to him and once again he had been able to smell her sachet, the same sort of scent his mother had worn, and she had murmured the thing that had jerked him back from the edge of sleep and kept him awake for another two hours:
You won’t leave me, will you? You won’t leave me alone?

Before that she had been good in bed, so good he was stunned. Her touch was light and sensual and nearly playful. It had been that way until they found the monster-shouter, and last night. There had been other things before then, things that troubled him, but something like this (so he had rationalized it), if it only makes you a little bit psycho, you’re way ahead.

Two nights ago he had awakened sometime after two and had heard her weeping softly in the bathroom. He knew she was taking sleeping pills, and the big red-and-yellow gel capsules that were known as “yellowjackets” out on the coast. Big downers. He told himself she’d probably been taking them long before the superflu came along. She followed him, too, even standing in the bathroom door and talking to him while he was shaving or showering. He was a private bathroom person, but he told himself that some weren’t. A lot of it depended on your upbringing. He would have a talk with her . . . sometime. But now . . .

Was he going to have to carry her on his back? Christ, he hoped not. She had seemed stronger than that, at least at first. It was the reason she had appealed to him so strongly that day in the park.
There’s no more truth in advertising,
he thought bitterly. How the hell was he qualified to take care of her when he could barely watch out for himself? He’d shown that pretty conclusively after the record had broken for him.

“No, I’m not mad,” he said. “It’s just that. . . you know, I’m not your boss. If you don’t feel like eating, just say so.”

“I told you ... I said I didn’t think I could . .

“The fuck you did.”

She bent her head and looked at her hands and he knew she was struggling to keep from sobbing. For a moment he was angrier than ever, wanting to shout:
I’m not your father! I’m not your bigshot banker husband! I’m not going to take care of you! You got thirty years on me, for God’s sake!
Then he felt the familiar surge of self-contempt and wondered what the hell could be the matter with him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m an insensitive bastard.”

“No. It’s just that ... all of this is starting to catch up with me. It . . . yesterday that poor man in the park ... I thought: No one is ever going to catch whoever did that and put him in jail. Whoever did it will just go on and do it again and again and again. Like an animal in the jungle. Don’t you see?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I can see that.” He had lost his mother and she had lost the man who brought her Mercedes around. But somehow her loss was supposed to be greater. Well, bullshit. It was the pills. They were bumming her out.

“Try not to be angry with me. I’ll do better.”

“You’re fine,” he said, and helped her to her feet. “Come on, now. We’ve got a lot to do. What do you say? Feel up to it?”

“Yes,” she said, but her expression was the same as it had been when he offered her the eggs.

“When we get out of the city you’ll feel better.”

She looked at him nakedly. “Will I?”

“Sure. Sure you will.”

It was a walk that Larry Underwood never forgot. So much had changed, so much was out of joint, that New York now seemed almost a fabled city in a Tolkien story. A man had been hung from the street sign at Fifth and Fifty-third, a placard with the single word LOOTER hung around his neck. There was a cat lying on top of a hexagonal litter basket which still bore advertisements for
A Chorus Line.
The cat was giving suck to a litter of kittens and enjoying the mid morning sun.

They reached the corner of Fifth and Thirty-ninth shortly after noon, and Larry suggested lunch. There was a deli on the corner, but when he pushed the door open the smell of rotten meat made Rita draw back.

“I better not go in there if I want to save what appetite I have,” she said apologetically.

Larry suspected he could have found plenty of good meat—stuff loaded with preservatives—inside, but he didn’t like leaving her alone on the sidewalk. So they found a bench half a block west and ate dehydrated apple slices, bacon bits, and cheese spread on Ritz crackers.

“Everything tastes better when it sits on a Ritz,” Larry said, doing an Andy Griffith drawl, and Rita giggled.

“This time I was really hungry,” she said, and offered him the Thermos of coffee.

“I’ll catch a Pepsi later on,” he said. The thought of drinking coffee her way made him feel a little ill.

Otherwise, he felt good. Just to be on the move, that felt good. He had told her she would feel better when they got out of New York. It had been something to say. Now, consulting the rising barometer of his own spirits, he guessed that it had also been true. Being in New York was like being in a graveyard where all the dead were not yet quiet. The sooner out, the better. North now, and south in September or October. Boothbay Harbor in the summer, Key Biscayne in the winter. It had a nice ring. Occupied with his thoughts, he didn’t see her grimace of pain as he stood up and shouldered the rifle he had insisted on bringing.

They were moving west now, their shadows behind them—at first as squat as frogs, beginning to lengthen out as the afternoon progressed. They passed the Avenue of the Americas, Seventh Avenue, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth. The streets were crammed and silent, frozen rivers of automobiles in every color, predominated by the yellow of the taxicabs. Many of the cars had become hearses, their decaying drivers still leaning behind the wheels, their passengers slumped as if, weary of the traffic jam, they had fallen asleep. At the intersection of Thirty-ninth and Seventh, they saw a young man wearing cutoff denim shorts and nothing else lying atop a Ding-Dong taxi.

“Is he dead?” Rita asked, and at the sound of her voice the young man sat up, looked around, saw them, and waved. They waved back. The young man lay placidly back down.

It was just after two o’clock when they crossed Eleventh Avenue. He heard a muffled cry of pain behind him and realized Rita was no longer walking on his left.

She was down on one knee, holding her foot. With something like horror, Larry noticed for the first time that she was wearing expensive open-toed sandals, probably in the eighty-dollar range, just the thing for a four-block stroll along Fifth Avenue while window-shopping, but for a long walk—a hike, really—like the one they had been making . . .

The ankle-straps had chafed through her skin. Blood was trickling down her ankles.

“Larry, I’m s—”

He jerked her abruptly to her feet. “What were you thinking about?” he shouted into her face. He felt a moment’s shame at the miserable way she recoiled, but also a mean sort of pleasure. “Did you think you could cab back to your apartment if your feet got tired?”

“I never thought—”

“Well, Christ!” He ran his hands through his hair. “I guess you didn’t. You’re
bleeding,
Rita. How long has it been hurting?”

Her voice was so low and husky that he had trouble hearing her even in the preternatural silence. “Since . . . well, since about Fifth and Forty-ninth, I guess.”

“Your feet have been hurting you for twenty fucking blocks and you didn’t say anything?”

“I thought ... it might ... go away . . . not hurt anymore . . . I didn’t want to . . .we were making such good time . . . getting out of the city ... I just thought . . .”

“You didn’t think at all,” he said angrily. “How much good time are we going to make with you like this? Your fucking feet look like you got fucking crucified.”

“Don’t swear at me, Larry,” she said, beginning to sob. “Please don’t ... it makes me feel so bad when you . . . please don’t swear at me . . .”

He was in an ecstasy of rage now, and later he would not even be able to understand why the sight of her bleeding feet had blown all his circuits that way. For the moment it didn’t matter. He screamed into her face:
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
The words echoed back from the high-rise apartment buildings, dim and meaningless.

She put her hands over her face and leaned forward, crying. It made him even angrier, and he supposed that part of it was that she really didn’t want to see: she would just as soon put her hands over her face and let him lead her, why not, there had always been someone around to take good care of little Rita. Someone to drive the car, do the marketing, wash out the toilet bowl, do the taxes. So let’s put on some of that gagging-sweet Debussy and put our well-manicured hands over our eyes and leave it all up to Larry. Take care of me, Larry, after seeing what happened to the monster-shouter, I’ve decided I don’t want to see anymore. It’s all rawther sordid for one of my breeding and background.

He yanked her hands away. She cringed and tried to put them over her eyes again.

“Look at me.”

She shook her head.

“Goddammit, you look at me, Rita.”

She finally did in a strange, flinching way, as if thinking he would now go to work on her with his fists as well as his tongue.

“I want to tell you the facts of life because you don’t seem to understand them. The fact is, we may have to walk twenty or thirty miles. The fact is, if you get infected from those scrapes, you could get blood poisoning and die. The fact is, you’ve got to get your thumb out of your ass and start helping me.”

He had been holding her by the upper arms, and he saw that his thumbs had almost disappeared into her flesh. His anger broke when he saw the red marks that appeared there when he let her go. He stepped away, feeling uncertain again, knowing with sick certainty that he had overreacted. Larry Underwood strikes again. If he was so goddam smart, why hadn’t he checked out her footgear before they started out?

Because that’s her problem,
part of him said with surly defensiveness.

No, that wasn’t true. It had been
his
problem. Because she didn’t know. If he was going to take her with him (and it was only today that he had begun to think how much simpler life would be if he hadn’t), he was just going to have to be responsible for her.

Be damned if I will,
the surly voice said.

His mother:
You’re a taker, Larry.

The oral hygienist from Fordham, crying out her window after him:
I thought you were a nice guy! You ain’t no nice guy!

There’s something left out of you, Larry. You’re a taker.

That's a lie! That is a goddamned LIE!

“Rita,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

She sat down on the pavement in her sleeveless blouse and her white deckpants, her hair looking gray and old. She bowed her head and held her hurt feet. She wouldn’t look at him.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I . . . look, I had no right to say those things.” He did, but never mind. If you apologized, things got smoothed over. It was how the world worked.

“Go on, get out of here,” she said. “Don’t let me slow you down.”

“I said I was sorry,” he told her, his voice a trifle petulant. “We’ll get you some new shoes and some white socks. We’ll—”

“We’ll nothing. Go on.”

“Rita, I’m sorry—”

“If you say that one more time, I’ll scream. You’re a shit and your apology is
not
accepted. Now go on.”

“I said I was—”

She threw her head back and shrieked. He took a step backward, looking around to see if anyone had heard her, to see if maybe a policeman was running over to see what kind of awful thing that young fellow was doing to that old lady who was sitting on the sidewalk with her shoes off. Culture lag, he thought distractedly, what fun it all is.

She stopped screaming and looked at him. She made a flicking gesture with her hand, as if he was a bothersome fly.