Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (28 page)

“No.”

“They have no talent of their own. They have to steal it from others. They don’t deserve their success, and they know it. They’re always frightened someone is about to catch on to them. Six months ago some of them were pumping gasoline in Peoria.”

“I don’t understand you. You’re so wise, yet you seem so unhappy.”

She felt his fingers spread across her back, his breath like a feather on the side of her face. “I think I used up all my luck in the South Pacific. I don’t worry about it, though. We’re born and we live and we die. What we do along the way isn’t that important.”

“You shouldn’t say that.”

He released her hand and held her with both arms, his cheek against hers. Her temples were pounding.

“I’m not a philanderer,” he said. “I take care of my wife, but I don’t love her. By the same token, I try not to cause grief in the lives of others. I haven’t always done the right thing.”

“You’re not causing grief,” she said. “Not to me.”

She felt his arm tighten around her back. “I wish we’d met earlier.”

“What are you saying? I’m confused. What do you mean? Are you here to tell me you shouldn’t be here?”

He stepped back from her and removed the needle from the record and replaced the record in its jacket. He picked up the champagne bottle from the coffee table. “Drink a glass with me.”

“Whatever you want.”

“Do you like Weldon?” he asked.

“Sometimes I do. I don’t think he likes me.”

“He’s going to get hurt. When that happens, he’ll need his friends.”

“You’re saying I’m not one of them? You’re here about Weldon Holland?”

“I’m telling you that you’re swimming among a school of piranhas. I don’t want to add to your burden.”

He popped the cork on the champagne bottle and filled two glasses. The door to her bedroom was open, and through it she could see the mix of pinks and blues that resembled a child’s playroom.

“Call me again if you have trouble with Valentine or anyone else,” he said.

“You’re going?”

He touched her hair and cheek in a way that reminded her of how she had touched the sleeve of the policeman who drove her home in Los Angeles. “You’re a beautiful woman,” he said. “Keep being who you are, Linda Gail. Be true to thine own self.” He set down his glass and opened the front door, then looked back at her. “I can’t wait to see your first film.”

He eased the door shut, letting the lock click quietly into place, as though not wanting to disturb the solemnity normally associated with a church. She could not remember when she had felt so foolish.

N
OW HE WAS
at her house again, this time without invitation or a phone call. When she opened the door, she couldn’t believe what she was looking at. He was carrying his clothes and wearing only boxing trunks and a jersey that was dark and soggy with sweat. “Do you have room for a wayfaring stranger?” he asked.

“You look like you were hit by a manure truck. Is that blood on you?”

“I went a round or two with a fellow at a gym. It’s nothing. Is Hershel home?”

“He’s out of town.”

“Do you mind if I use the hose in your backyard?”

“No, you cannot. What happened?”

“This fellow was rude and things got a bit out of hand. I’m sorry to be a bother.”

“What fellow?”

“He was in prison. I thought I’d go a few rounds with him. Weldon was there. I could have gone to his house, but I didn’t want to upset his wife.”

“I hate to ask this question, but why don’t you go to your own house?”

“Because I have a problem and I need to talk to somebody about it. I don’t trust many people. You’re the exception.”

“Where are you trying to take us, Roy? What are you trying to do to me?”

“If you want me to leave, I will. Let me be honest. I saw your husband’s pickup was gone. It was also gone yesterday. So I came here and knocked on your door.”

“You’ve been spying on my house?”

“I’ll see you another time.”

“No, you won’t. Get in the shower,” she said. “Give me your clothes. All of them.”

When he hesitated, she grabbed him by the jersey and pulled him inside.

While the shower water pounded inside the bathroom, she sat in a chair and tried to think. In three days Hershel would be home. She had already resolved that she would make a clean breast of her bad behavior with Jack Valentine. Again and again, she had gone over the words she would use. She was drunk when she went to bed with him. She might even admit that she had been drawn to Roy Wiseheart when Hershel was away, and had danced with him in the living room. Nothing really bad had happened, but she was sick with fear and guilt just the same. She would promise never to be unfaithful again, not even in thought. She would be a good wife and go with Hershel wherever he went, even if she had to give up her career.

Her contrition was sincere, her words from the heart. Except for the last part. Her breath came short when she thought about turning down a costarring role that had been offered to her. There was another consideration, one she pushed away from the edges of her conscious mind: She had never loved Hershel Pine.

She had met him at a dance when she was sixteen and he was about to be shipped overseas in advance of the invasion of Italy. He was handsome in his uniform and the center of attention among all the local boys who had never been farther than two parishes from their birthplace. The following night Hershel took her to a movie and an ice cream parlor in Bogalusa and kissed her under a magnolia tree in the park. In the moonlight he became a French legionnaire, a Roman centurion, a British officer in a pith helmet firing his pistol at the Fuzzy Wuzzies attacking the walls of a desert fortress. Hershel Pine was her deliverance from the small-town world of cotton gins and five-and-dime stores and wood-frame heat-soaked churches that groaned with organ music and warnings of eternal perdition.

Roy Wiseheart was dressed in slacks and a golf shirt when he came out of the bathroom, one eye almost shut, the lumps on his face as big as bumblebee bites, the cuts clean of blood. “Sit down,” she said.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

She took bottles of iodine and peroxide out of the medicine cabinet and went to work on the damage done to him in the ring, boiling out each cut with the disinfectant, painting it with iodine. “Ouch,” he said, squinting.

“Does that sting?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“You have a rough side to you,” he said.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“I tried to kill that kid,” he said.

“He doesn’t sound like a kid to me.”

“I not only tried to kill him, I enjoyed it.”

“Stop talking about it. It’s over.”

“I’ve done it before.”

“Fight someone?”

“Gone after someone with a purpose. Done serious injury.”

“Is that what you came here to tell me?”

“No. I came here to tell you something else. I abandoned my squadron leader when he was limping home. I did it so I could get another kill and be an ace. Two Zeros lit him up. He was trapped in his cockpit. He burned all the way down.”

She placed her hand on the back of his neck. It was as warm as a woodstove. “Maybe you were trying to protect your friend. That would be anybody’s first instinct.”

“My brother was an ace. I wanted to be one, too. I sacrificed another man’s life to satisfy my ambition.”

“I don’t know about military things, but I don’t think you should blame yourself. Wouldn’t your friend tell you that if he were here now? He must have been a good man or you wouldn’t feel remorse. A good man would forgive you. Are you saying he’s not a good man?”

He looked up at her. “Run that by me again?”

She repeated her words. She could see the shine in his eyes. She stroked the back of his head. He stood from the chair, and took the bottle of iodine and the towel from her hands, and set them on the chair. He put his arms around her and kissed her on the mouth. Then he buried his face in her hair, squeezing her body into his, running his hands down her back and sides, kissing her neck. She could feel his manhood swell against her.

“Roy—” she began.

“I love you,” he said. He pushed her arms around his neck and spread his fingers on her rump and lifted her against him. “You have the loveliest figure on earth. Your skin feels like silk. I’m sorry for the way I’m behaving. I think about you all the time.”

“It’s all right,” she heard herself say.

He unbuttoned the top of her dress and bit her shoulder. “Can we go in your bedroom?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not expecting anyone?”

“No. I want to be with you. I want to help you leave behind all those bad memories from the war.”

“You’re sure this is what you want?”

“Yes, it is. It’s the way it’s meant to be, or it wouldn’t be happening,” she said.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve done this,” he said. “But it was different. It was selfish. That’s not the way I feel about you.”

She took him by the arm and led him into the bedroom. “Get undressed. It’ll be all right. Don’t worry anymore.”

He hesitated, and she realized he was looking at a framed photograph of her and Hershel on the dresser. “You don’t have to feel guilty,” she said. “Anything that happens here is my responsibility, not yours. You don’t know the whole history.”

“History of what?”

“It doesn’t matter at this point,” she said.

She turned off the light and pulled back the bedcovers and threw all the pillows except one on the floor. She hung her dress over a chair and removed her underthings with her back to him, then turned around. His face softened, like warm wax changing shape. She pushed him down on the mattress and spread her knees, straddled his thighs, and placed his hands on her breasts. Next door she could hear someone bouncing up and down on a diving board, then springing and flattening on the water. “I just want to ask one thing of you,” she said.

“Anything,” he replied.

“Don’t talk bad about me later. Like men do when they brag to others. Don’t ever do that to me.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“I want you to hold me and kiss me when it’s over. I want to see you in other situations also.”

“Whatever you want, Linda Gail.”

She made a cradle of herself and leaned down and kissed him and put her tongue in his mouth.

“You’re the most wonderful woman I’ve ever been with,” he said.

She reached down and placed him inside her. She shifted her weight back and forth and crunched her stomach and rotated herself until she saw his eyes go out of focus. She had never felt such power in her life. It was like the first time she walked into the waves at Santa Monica, the water sliding above her thighs, the foam wetting the tops of her breasts, the gulls wheeling overhead as though in tribute to her, the suntanned boys on Muscle Beach setting down their iron weights to gaze upon her. Now, when she came with him, she went weak all over, her neck stretched back, a ragged sound bursting from her throat. Then she came again and again, something she had never done, as though an entire race were being conceived inside her, as though at that exact moment she was silhouetted against a molten sun descending into the ocean, the palm trees stiffening into black cutouts against a flaming sky, her nails digging into his arms on a beach where there was not another human being.

Later, they lay side by side, their bodies damp with perspiration. As he fell asleep, she stroked his forehead with the tips of her fingers and idly stared at the ceiling. Then she kissed his shoulder, enjoying the warmth of his skin and the hint of salt on it. A great and restful fatigue seemed to settle upon her and quiet all the turmoil and anger that lived inside her. Just before she nodded off, she thought she heard wind blowing in a seashell and waves sliding back from a precipitous shoal gnarled with crustaceans. Out in the swells, she saw herself mounted on a porpoise that would take her to a coral kingdom beneath the sea. It wasn’t simply a dream. She had earned her place in the Pantheon. Today was just the beginning.

Chapter

18

O
UR DRIVEWAY WAS
unpaved. Maybe that seems a silly observation to make in regard to the place where we lived in the Heights in the year 1947. But it was one detail of many I noticed on that late afternoon when I parked my car next to our screened porch and wondered how I should confront Rosita with the movie reel that sat in a tin box on the seat to me. The grass was a pale green, the chrysanthemums blooming in the flowerbeds, the driveway little more than a pattern of white rocks, like an ancient road protruding from the dirt, the lawn scattered with pecans in their husks.

There was another detail about our neighborhood that I had not given great weight to, and that was the absence of fences between the houses. It was an era of trust, of a boy on a bicycle sailing the evening paper up on the porch, radios in a window blaring with the overture from
William Tell
at six-thirty Monday through Friday evening all over the land. I didn’t want to go inside. I didn’t want to hurt my wife. I didn’t want to discover she was someone other than the truthful person I thought she was.

She was making sandwiches in the kitchen, trimming off bread crusts on a chopping board. She glanced at me and at the can in my right hand, then resumed slicing. “Where have you been?”

“Somebody dropped a movie reel in my car. I took it to a photo shop owned by a friend and watched it.”

“Your friend didn’t have a telephone?”

“I asked my friend to leave the room while I watched it.”

“It must have been interesting material.”

I set the can on the drainboard. “There’s a swastika on it.”

“Get it away from me.”

“Have you seen a film can like this one?”

“Not that I remember.”

“You’re in the film, Rosita.”

“How nice,” she said, the blade of her knife moving along the edges of the bread. “Now take it out of my sight, please.”

“You didn’t have to hide your past from me.”

“No one has any idea what went on in the camps,” she said. “You couldn’t begin to understand what they did to us and what we did to one another.”