A Beauty (6 page)

“I feel I do not know you well,” she murmured.

He laughed. That was involuntary, too.

When he didn’t move away, she said, “I am quite serious.”

“Elena,” he said.

She gave a little, foreign-sounding half-laugh.

“What’s so funny? Eh?”

“Men.”

“Men? What do you know about men? Come on, I’d like to know. And then I’ll tell you what I know about women. Especially women that are cockteasers, eh? Lead a fellow on and then turn prim. I ain’t used to that, baby.” He stretched back against the meagre pillow with his hands behind his head. There were occasions when a guy had to lay it on the line. He gazed up at the dark ceiling and recalled her asking if he ever thought about the stars. He was pleased he’d answered, “All the time.” It seemed a strangely sophisticated exchange to have with a country girl. He remembered asking if he could take her home, and her turning right away to the door.

“Hey, Elena!” He tugged on her shoulder. But she was asleep. He couldn’t believe it. Fast asleep, in the old meaning of fast, like a locked-up vault. He shook her and she didn’t wake up. He needed another belt from the flask after that. In fact, he drained it, and then he lay down beside her and made retributive plans to dump her in the morning.

Being deeply suspicious of strangers, Pansy Badger wasn’t suited to running a hotel. She kept Merv awake with her quizzing.

“A young man and wife,” Merv said.

What did they look like? What did they talk like? Had they been drinking? Were they really married? Arriving at this time of night? Merv didn’t know. He pulled the sheet up to his shoulder and turned his back on her.

“It’s too hot for a sheet,” she said. “Where did they come from?”

“Trevna.”

“Trevna? If they were married, they wouldn’t need a room here. Merv, I said, if they were married they’d have their own place in Trevna. It’s just down the road, for Christ’s sake.”

“Look, they paid for the room.”

“I won’t aid and abet that kind of thing.”

“I’m asleep,” Merv said.

She thought for a minute. “Tell me about the girl,” she said. But he was asleep. He was already snoring. She could only stay awake and listen for any sounds that might indicate there was trouble down the hall.

During the night Bill made a trip to the toilet to relieve himself of the effects of trying to sleep beside the girl. When he came out of the bathroom, shuddering from the smell he’d labelled
eau de commode
, a crazy woman poked her head out, two doors down. Her chopped grey hair stuck out all over her head, and her face and neck strained out the doorway, the muscles all strung as taut as kite string, as if some cranky wind had yanked her out of her room. Her eyes bored into his.

“What?” he said. As a kid he’d sleepwalk now and then, and get caught outside in his pyjamas. He felt like that, like a kid in a place where he shouldn’t be – and right now he didn’t even have pyjamas on; he had nothing but the dim light clothing him. She pulled her head back in, left him shaking his, watching her door
slowly almost close. He’d bet she still had an eyeball up against it. As he turned back to his room he swaggered a bit – since he was young, after all, and buck-naked.

Bill woke up to discover the girl still dead to the world, and started rehearsing what he was going to do. He was going to get out of bed and get dressed and take off – leave her there for Scrawny to find her and make a royal fuss when he found out she hadn’t a cent to her name, which Bill was pretty sure was the case. But the rest of him wasn’t listening to the plan, and he reached out and put his hand on the curve of her shoulder, where it fit so well he thought he’d remember it for the rest of his life, the bone so strangely solid through the thin fabric, and warm against his palm. His fingers curled over into the hollow between her shoulder and her collarbone, and she stirred. Almost immediately she turned and slid right into him, the full length of her.

“You awake?” he said. It came out like a croak, being his first utterance of the day.

She nodded and whispered something too low for him to hear that sounded strangely matter-of-fact for the situation. Her breath smelled odd, not bad exactly, but different. He noticed it but ignored it. He didn’t know that a sharp, chemical smell is a sign a person is actually starving, and when he did learn it, later, he was still inclined to ask himself how anyone could have expected him to know. Her body was hot against him, pressed against him; her toes arched against his. The silky fine cotton between them slid against his bare skin. He didn’t have to think to peel it off. He did, however, have a policy of using a prophylactic. It didn’t help in these circumstances since it created more friction than he wanted, and there was that knotty little flesh gate to fight past. And sometimes girls would be embarrassed
by the condom, preferring to think you’d had no prior intentions and were just overcome by a sudden unstoppable desire for them and them alone, a desire that would later easily be translated into love. (Elena was the third girl he’d had intercourse with, so he was able to employ this sort of generalization.) Anyway, he wasn’t going to have any little gal or her old man tracking him down, coming after him with a carrot-topped claim against him, so he soldiered ahead with the rubber on his dick and the look of thinking of England on her face.

Afterwards, with the remembrance of the tepid Christmas mornings of his childhood floating through his mind, he reached for his cigarettes. You could still get them in flat tin boxes in those days; these were Black Cats, in a yellow tin with an appropriate picture of a black cat on it, kind of grinning at you. Bad-luck cat. A new thought occurred to him. “So, I guess you got to know me overnight, eh?”

She didn’t answer right away but finally, in the formal way she had, she said, “Yes, I guess I did.”

A little sunny-morning clarity trickled through the grimy windowpane across the room. “Ah, I respected you,” he said.

She laughed, that foreign-sounding laugh again, with the bitter edge. Went on quite long this time, so he offered her a cigarette. She hadn’t wanted one the night before but this time she accepted it, slid it from the package with her small fingers and took it in her mouth. Waited for him to light it for her. The match cracked to life at the first stroke, but he wasn’t any too steady holding it for her, and when she inhaled, the flame went out. The thin paper stuck to her swollen lips, pulling them out a bit when she drew it from her mouth, and then she poked out her little pink tongue and plucked a curl of tobacco off it, and he was on top of her again. This time it was way more like Santa Claus had come to town.

When he rolled off her, she sat up, blinking as if the lights had brightened. She gathered the sheet to her, then seemed to change her mind and got up. She hadn’t taken two steps before she staggered and fell to the floor. Just crumpled while he watched. He lay propped up on one elbow, staring at her. “Hey!” he called, in case there was any possibility she was kidding around, teasing him for some reason he couldn’t understand but could accept if it would mean there wasn’t something really the matter. She didn’t move, just lay there in a naked heap. He started shaking so badly he could hardly crawl over the bed and down to the floor and when he did, sitting beside her on the cool linoleum, he only stared at her white face. He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe his eyes. He’d never seen a face so white.

He wouldn’t look down at her body. He expected he’d see a pool of blood down there and more blood seeping or gushing out. And whose fault would that be? She’d bled a little after the first time, but that was only natural. He prodded her breastbone a couple of times. Nothing. And no, he couldn’t look down. He picked up her hand and started chafing it and whispering to her. “Elena, Elena,” he hissed, over and over, staring into her face.

When she opened her eyes they weren’t focussed. He could tell she wasn’t seeing. He said her name again and she said something, a word he couldn’t understand, the same word a few times, in some foreign language. Then her eyes cleared and she looked at him and smiled as if she understood his distress, knew it was more for himself than for her, and pitied him.

“Man and wife,” Pansy said with a snort. “When’s the last time you seen a man and wife order breakfast sent to their Christly room?” She’d agreed to toast and coffee. If they wanted anything more, they
could drive themselves someplace else. They wouldn’t get it in Addison on a Sunday morning. But she helped Merv carry it up, not having seen them the night before, or at least not having seen the girl. She’d had an eyeful of the guy, thank you very much. Merv had the tray with toast, jam, cups and cutlery. She carried the coffee pot. Caldwell Kurtz heard them on the stairs and poked his fuzzy old pelican head out his door. Pansy shooed him back into his room.

And there they were, the two of them, sitting up in bed, as downy-headed as a pair of pelicans themselves, and glowing like two light bulbs, side by side. There was nowhere to put the tray. The young man patted the small space between their bodies and Merv leaned over him and set it down.

The girl thanked him. She was wearing a dress, although it might as well have been a nightgown; it was wrinkled and clung to her breasts.

“I’ll settle up later,” the young man said, a smart-assed look on his face, as well there might have been, with Merv practically bowing out of the room so as not to have to take his eyes off the girl.

As soon as the Badgers left the room, Bill and Elena fell on the toast. Make extra, Bill had told Merv, but there were only four dry slices. He offered to let her have it all, but she said it wouldn’t be good for her to have too much at once. She’d finally told him she hadn’t eaten in quite a while. It came out when he’d asked her what foreign language she spoke.

“Finnish,” she said. “But only a little. Did I say something? I don’t recall.”

He said it was
Eeesa
. When she’d come to, she’d said, “Eeesa.”

“Oh,” she said. “
Isä
. It means father. I always think it’s my father, when I hear someone calling my name.”

Bill wasn’t all that interested in her old man. He kept asking her if she was okay, and after she’d told him a dozen times that she was, and finally that it was only that she needed food, he’d gone downstairs and got Scrawny moving on some breakfast.

She was so adorable and weak while they waited. He was fascinated by her weakness. He held her hand and she put her head on his shoulder. It seemed to him this was more than physical closeness; he’d earned this weight on his shoulder. He’d stood by her. He’d done the right thing. He was good to her. And that was why a bond was forming between them – he was sure it was, he could feel it – while they lay propped against the thin, folded-over pillows, waiting for their breakfast. She was different from other girls. She was intelligent in a way he hadn’t encountered before, and he liked that about her. She said things you could make a smart answer to and feel pretty good about, like did you ever think about stars. If only she didn’t laugh sometimes when things weren’t funny, and other times gaze at him as if she had him up against a wall with a measuring stick.

“I could have used bacon and eggs,” he said after he’d devoured the last of his toast. “God, I can see those eggs swimming in bacon grease. I can just about smell that bacon.”

“Baked beans on the side,” she said.

“Pancakes.”

“Mmm. Dripping with syrup.”

He leaned over and kissed her jammy mouth. She stuck an end of her toast into his. “You put me through hell, you know,” he whispered into her ear. She didn’t know the half of it – how scared he’d been that he’d killed her – and he wasn’t going to tell her.

“I thought you were going to back out of the room, bowing all the way,” Pansy said. “You couldn’t take your eyes off the girl. She isn’t
that pretty, you know. It’s that tousled look, that used-but-ready-for-more look that got you going. Not to mention the
Christly
smell of sex in the room. Don’t look at me like that. It’s unmistakable. Huh! If I had ten cents to spare, I’d bet it on feeling your hand on my arse before the day’s over.”

“Aw, you’re too hard on the kids,” Merv said. “I mean the girl, the way she was looking at you, she just wanted a little womanly sympathy. You know, motherly.”

“If I have any
womanly, motherly
sympathy to spare,” Pansy said, “I’m gonna spend it on myself, thank you very much. I seen her signalling, by the way, with that little pale face. I don’t know why she couldn’t see I don’t have an ounce of maternal spirit in me. And if I did, I’m damned if I’d squander it on a heedless kid in a smelly bed.” That seemed to be her last word.

They drove out of town, past the dozen or so vehicles gathered outside a white clapboard building, a Lutheran chapel, small as a family dwelling, marked with just a cross instead of a spire. She turned to watch it get smaller. She’d never gone to church; her father had never gone and when, pressured by neighbours, she’d asked him why, he hadn’t explained. He never did explain about anything. Maybe the note he’d left for her on the kitchen table was the most explaining he’d ever done, saying she was old enough now to look after herself.

“Everything okay?” Bill asked.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Sure?” They were coming up to the highway, and he turned and glanced at her as they rolled towards a stop.

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Swell.”

“That woman at the hotel,” she said. “Wasn’t she strange? The way she glared at us with the coffee pot in her hands. For a minute I thought she was going to dump it on us. Her husband seemed kind.”

Bill was grinning to himself. He was only half-listening to what she was saying. It was the low, weighty sound of her words that he liked. That cute, serious hint of accent, the
w
almost turned into a v.

“I wonder what she’s doing now.”
I vonder
.

“Damned if I know. Or care.” He stretched out his arm and drew her in. “Maybe she’ll clean that room. It could use it. Huh. You can tell neither one of them do bugger-all. They’ve got nerve charging for a bed in that flea hole.”