Three Short Novels (31 page)

Her first time out with him he had explained that his wife was away for a couple of weeks and he needed to hear a woman laughing and to help her put on her coat, and she laughed at the comedy they saw and gracefully moved her shoulders for the coat. The evening was his way of telling her he missed his wife. The following night he parked his car in the Marina, and while the masts of the sailboats swayed across the windshield, he spent two hours caressing her. She prepared for the third evening by dropping scented balls of oil, like somber-colored jewels, into her bath water, by changing earrings three times and lipstick twice, by drawing mascara lines around her eyes, fascinated by the effect of each artifice.

“You are stunning!” Janine clapped her hands, muttering something in French, like a prayer. “Who is he? Who is the man? Is he a movie star?”

Dolores sat at the kitchen table and, over a cup of black coffee, told Janine about him while the woman muttered prayers in French and allowed her pongee kimono to fall open at her breasts.

“Oh, he is a man of distinction,” Janine said. “That is the kind of man you deserve. You have an
expenseef
look,” laughing with an excess of pleasure that proved the laughter false.

The flattery was demanding something of Dolores. She couldn't reject it because she needed even flattery's imitation of praise. It demanded that she confirm the truth of it and surprise this woman with the truth. Toying with her teaspoon, her voice low, she said, “There was a man back home, he was an attorney, he was running for Congress. I mean he was very intelligent and everybody liked him, and he killed himself over me. I mean he was in love with me. He had a wife and child.”

Janine lifted her dark eyes to stare, and a tangle of noises came into her throat, a seductive laugh entangled with a moan. “Ah, no, that is
terrible
! Poor man! Poor man! I could tell when I saw you. Whenever you see a beautiful girl who is sad, you can say to yourself, ‘Some man has wounded her, he is tied to his wife's apron strings and he did not have the courage to untie himself.' That is the way it is. But with you I saw something more, something tragic. I said to myself, ‘There was violence. The man shot his wife.' And then it came to me, ‘No, he shot himself. That girl has that look of losing what she can
nevair
get back.' ”

“You knew about me?”

“I looked and I knew.”

“You mean I didn't even have to tell you?”

“That is
why
you told me. Because I knew already. You could see in my face that I knew. All my life I have this intuition. It has
nevair
disappointed me.
Nevair
. Have you also felt intuition?
They
do not have it, men do not have it. Only women. It is mysterious, who knows where it comes from? That is why they look up to us. When a man takes a woman out, as tonight this man will take you out, he will be in awe of you. Because you have the intuition. They envy us for it. We have this gift while
they,
” and she clapped a hand to her head, “they
think
and they
think
how to figure out somebody, who to trust and who not to trust, but the woman,
she
has the answer just like that,” snapping her fingers. “You have intuition about this man?”

“George, you mean?”

“That is his name? You have intuition there will be trouble?”

“He's married, if that's what you mean.”

“Married or not! Sometime there is no trouble at all with the married ones. I am talking about how you
feel
. . .”

“You mean am I in love with him?”

“No, no, no! I am asking—do you feel trouble is coming?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, good then. That is good. You have a nice time and do not worry.” Janine's eyes were luminous—she had revealed herself. She was a seeress, she knew about Dolores's past and future, and her thin mouth smiled a false apology for her intrusion into another person's life.

Dolores's heels, clicking sharply on the sidewalk from the Corvette to the door of his apartment building, were silenced by the thick carpet of the foyer. Silence now, like the unspeaking moment before the embrace. They hurried in silence up the stairs and past the doors of other tenants, doors he must have entered with his wife for an evening's visit, and came at last to his door.

A lamp was on in the small entry. He went before her into the living room, switching on another lamp. “Come on, come in, don't stand there like a country cousin,” he called back to her. He did not help her take off her coat, as he had done in restaurants and theaters, and she dropped it on the long beige couch. “Want some coffee?” he asked, drawing curtains together across the expanse of glass, closing out the reflection of the large white lamp he had lit. The moment's reflection of the lamp had intrigued her—the lamp itself was his, but the reflection of it, like a lamp out in the night, was hers. “Come on, let's have some coffee. Something else, see what we can find. Usually some fish eggs around, put 'em on crackers.”

Her heels still silenced by carpet, this one the color of sand and that sent up a thick, stuffy feeling into her legs, she followed him toward the kitchen. At the kitchen doorway he turned, impetuously, fitfully, to watch her cross the room, a nervous, embarrassed smile in his eyes. “Come on,” he said, taking in how she looked in his apartment, a girl whose face was excitingly unfamiliar and whose body he was to know in a little while.

She followed him into the small, gleaming kitchen, and sat down at the glass-top table. Through the glass she saw her legs and how
her short black dress slipped up past her knees as she crossed them. He tossed his cigarettes onto the table. Every time, before, he had brought out the pack gracefully, a wordless, confidential, insinuating offer. She did not touch them. She put her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands and watched him opening jars, stooping to look for crackers in a low cupboard, measuring coffee for the tall chromium percolator.

“That thing looks like a rocket,” she said, and he laughed, a quick, eager laugh to make them both feel at home.

“It does, it does,” he agreed, talking so fast as he counted spoonfuls that his teeth caught at the words. He's fifty, she thought, and he talks as fast as a kid. Some coffee grounds scattered over the top of the stove, and he glanced at her sideways to see if she had noticed.

“You nervous?” she asked, laughing.

“Naw, naw, I hate this teaspoon stuff. I hate little bitsy stuff. I'm a mountain mover, like to move big things fast. You know what I've always had in mind to do? Move New York to San Francisco and vice versa. Lots of people I know in New York are never going to get out here, so I could do that little favor for them. No more blizzards in winter, no more steam baths in summer.”

“I like this city where it is,” she said, implying that she was already rooted there, making the entire strange, confusing city her own so that she might feel less homeless now in his apartment, less vulnerable to him.

“What's the matter with you, you don't like to move around?” He was glancing at her derisively. “You come up from Fresno? San Bernardino? and that's the big move in your life? Got no ambition?” He set out a jar of caviar, crackers on a plate, little silver knives, and jerked out the other chair. “Go ahead, eat,” he said, biting a cracker in two. The black caviar slid down his tongue. “I like women with ambition. The only trouble with my wife, it made her kind of shrill, you know what I mean? When I first met her it was fine, she was restless,
she had to be the best in everything and that meant bed, too, and that was fine. But after a while the ambition destroyed the woman in her. What you've got to remember is not to let it destroy you but you've got to have it in you. You just want to be a waitress all your life?”

She had no answer. Why should she drag up wishes enmeshed in her life, unformed wishes that were a part of her being, and give them as answers to his nervous hounding of her? She sensed that he was talking so fast and so compulsively, jamming crackers and caviar into his mouth, because he felt on the spot and wanted her there instead.

“Is that it?” he persisted.

“I don't know what I want,” she said.

“You want to marry a fry cook and get yourself six kids?”

“Maybe,” she said. The caviar was too fishy and black. She had never eaten the stuff before and could not make herself like it while beset by his heckling in this kitchen that belonged to his wife.

“Don't you like it?”

“Not much.”

“You marry a fry cook and eat french fries and fried eggs every meal. You like that better?”

“No.”

The suspense, the desire for him was fading from her face, from her gestures. She saw his face go blank with confusion He laid his fingertips over hers, attempting a delicate approach. “Come on, smile,” he said. “Ah, that's great, the sun is shining again. My wife's in Palm Springs,” supping up his coffee. “She went down to L.A. to push accounts down there and took a little vacation afterwards. I think she got somebody with her, some guy from San Diego. How I can tell, I phoned her tonight and she sounded happy. When she's alone anywhere she sounds like a kid. Cries.”

“She must be awfully smart to run a business. My mother has this cafe, but that's nothing compared to what your wife does. How many people work for your wife?”

“She runs that business like a man. I set her up with the capital, and in seven years she's made it into a big thing. Galatea, Inc. That's a lousy name, I said. What about Linda Lou? What about Dolores Dee? That's what I said—what about Dolores? But she wanted that Galatea. So the best shops in the country carry Galatea lingerie. She was my secretary but she turned out to be so smart I had to marry her. I guess she's got about fifty people in the factory.” He took off his glasses to wipe them with the yellow linen napkin, holding them down on his stomach, farsightedly. “See? She's got a business, she's got a name, but she's unhappy because she figures she's not woman enough. She'd take one look at you, she'd be envious.”

He wanted her to believe that he
knew
women, she saw that. He wanted her to believe he knew
her,
the girl across the table, and that if there was anything she didn't know about herself she had only to ask him and he'd tell her. He was wiping his glasses on and on, gazing at her with exposed eyes, the exposed face without glasses bringing instantly nearer the time of exploring and exposure.

“She was miserable in Mexico,” he said. “The women there are so voluptuous, Jesus. She's built like a sparrow. She had to do something to attract attention so she went into a beauty shop and had her hair colored pink. Pink. That got her the stares. Someday how'd you like to go down there with me? There's a motel in Hermosillo, got a swimming pool like a harem pool, beautiful tile, outdoors, pillars in the water, and all lit up at night. You swim in there at midnight, warm, feel like you're living. They got a deer that wanders around on the grass, eats out of your hand.” He slipped on his glasses, got up. The time was near. “Come on, you want to hear some music? You like jazz? Stravinsky?”

She got up, holding her small gold leather purse under her breasts, and followed him, puzzled now by his nervous delaying.

“Got a Giuffre record here,” he said, twirling knobs on a long, low, blond wood cabinet, setting down record and needle, all with his
back to her. “You like him? You ever heard him?” The music began to ricochet around the room. “Sit down,” he said. “Listen to this guy on the bass. Listen.” Over his shoulder he was watching her. “What's the matter, you think you're a cat or something, got to think about every chair? Sit on the couch. Listen, they're good, uh?” Leaning back against the cabinet, he watched her sit down. “They're good, uh?” he said, coming to her, at last, sitting down by her, laying his hand on the black silk over her stomach, running his lips around the rim of her ear. “Come on, come on, it's bedtime.”

Awkwardly, because he was holding her against him, she entered the bedroom, a room of pale colors and rich and various textures, a room that, though it was shared by him, was a woman's room. Lustrous chalk-white curtains hung in pure stillness from ceiling to curly beige carpet. The headboard of the bed was a great whorl of gilded plaster with a gilded cherub's head in the center, and gold threads gleamed here and there in the heavy white silk spread. She was afraid of the woman's wrath. She was afraid and felt sympathy, yet found pleasure in her own desirability, herself so coveted that he had brought her here to the bed he shared with his wife. She stepped out of her shoes and came down to his height. At the same moment he embraced her, she felt a trembling begin at the core of him.

“Sit here, sit here,” he said, and sat her down on the bench before the oval mirror in an ornate frame, and, standing behind her, he fumbled the hairclasp out and, when her hair was down, slipped her dress off her shoulders. She could not glance at herself in the mirror because the mirror was not hers and had held the image of his wife, but she could glance up at his reflection as he went about undressing her, his gray head bowed toward the mirror, and in that moment her dislike of him overcame her. Who was he but a blundering, trembling, fast-talking fifty-year-old man whose gray hair was bouncing lifelessly as he bent forward toward the mirror to lift in his hand the breast he had uncovered and watch how it moved in his moving fingers. But her dislike
of him frightened her, she saw him as she did not want to see him. The signs of his weakness laid her down again beside Hal Costigan, now knowing beforehand that he was to take his life. She wanted to see this man as he had been before this night, when his gray hair had a life to it, and the body in its fine suit a strength to it, and his face a cleverness and an assurance of all he had accomplished. With sudden urgency she turned to him and took his face in her hands and kissed him. She heard a moan come into his mouth and stay baffled there because it had no escape.