Area of Suspicion (21 page)

But as I drove, a little too fast, toward the Lime Ridge house, I had enough fragmented decency to be conditionally honest with myself. I wanted to look at her. I wanted to see her because our sunlit orgy had become unreal and implausible. It was an episode I knew I should try to forget, yet, perversely, I wanted some confirmation from her that it had actually happened.

A time of sleep, even when it is as dream-torn as mine
had been, erects a curious barrier. The memory of that particular kind of frenzy becomes very like the memory of having been very drunk. It is difficult to credit yourself with the remembered things done and said. You say, “That could not have been me! I am not like that! There is some mistake. There is some significant thing I have forgotten which makes all the rest of it excusable.”

Low, misty clouds were moving quickly, sometimes touching the tops of the rolling hills. The air was humid with spring, and warming rapidly.

Victoria greeted me, smiling, and told me to wait in the living-room. I watched her narrowly, alert for any subtle hint that she had learned, somehow, what had happened. Maids can make an entire construction from the smallest carelessness. I wondered if Niki had been properly careful with my stained clothing and with the toilet kit she had provided. Though usually I give less than a damn about what anybody thinks of how I live and what I do, I surprised myself with the extent of my concern for Victoria’s good opinion. She struck me as being, in that only basic and pertinent way, a lady. And she would assess sudden and sweaty copulation between the new widow and the brother of the deceased as a unique vileness. Which it was.

There was no change in her remote, friendly politeness. As she walked away I suddenly knew that if Victoria guessed what had happened after she left, she would no longer be here. She was that sort of a person. So Niki, no matter what other motivations she might have, would be extraordinarily careful for fear of losing an exceptionally good servant.

I waited tensely in the rich silence of the big room. It was a handsome but sterile room. I saw it was a room without sign or stain that life had gone on in it. (This model home is in the hundred-and-fifty-thousand price range. Note the subtle yet effective use of color. The small placards show where each item may be purchased. Please do not touch anything.)

Niki came walking in quickly, brisk and smiling, coming
to me to put the quick light kiss at the corner of my mouth, then say with a housewife’s glib affection, “Hello, my darling. I’ve missed you.”

She wore a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and closely tailored pale blue denim ranch pants. Her hair was latched back with a twist of matching blue yarn. A scab of mud was drying on the right knee of the ranch pants. She carried work gloves and a muddy grubbing tool, shaped like a green steel claw. (And this model represents the lovely mistress of the $150,000 house who loves to work in her garden on warm spring mornings.)

“If you need props, you could wheel a wheelbarrow in.”

She looked at the gloves and garden tool. “I didn’t know I’d brought these in. I can be nervous too, you know. Give me that much credit, Gevan.”

She walked over to place the tool and gloves on the raised hearth. As she did so, the pale crust of mud fell from her knee and broke on the rug. She squatted and carefully picked up every crumb, her back to me. The coarse denim was pulled as tight as her skin. There were no kidney pads of fat, no rope of softness above the stricture of the dark blue belt. There was a long and firm blending of line, from the reversed parentheses outlining the trimness of the waist, down into the reverse curve of the inverted, truncated, Valentine heart of solid buttocks. Even as she sat so effortlessly on her heels, she kept her back so straight, the small of her back was concave. Her figure was strangely deceptive. She was so basically sturdy as to be, in thigh, hip and breast, almost massive. Yet the total impression she gave was of actual slenderness. This was the product of her height, of the long oval of her face—designed for a more fragile woman—of the quick, light way she moved, of her short-waisted, leggy build, and of her lack of any sagging softnesses, any self-indulgent bulgings. She was styled for function, designed with the merciless economy men expend on the weapons with which they kill. There are never many of them in the world at any one time, and fewer who, like Niki, had peaked into such rich and awesome splendor.

Looking at her confirmed every memory of the previous day, and made me willing to partially—very partially—forgive myself. Hers was an earthiness and a primitive readiness that created a response so atavistic, all the intellectualizings and moralizings of a modern man were flung aside, like dust from a spinning disk.

She dropped the crumbs of mud into an ash tray, walked over and sat on the flat wooden arm of a handsome chair and seemed to study me with care. “I really thought you would come back last night. I thought of cute little ways of keeping you from feeling too awkward about coming back so soon.”

“Would they have worked?”

“Probably not. But five minutes after you were here, it wouldn’t have mattered, would it?”

“I almost came back.”

“You were a stuffy fool not to.” She carefully examined a fingernail. “You should know this isn’t a good time, dear. If you want, I’ll send her off on some errands, but I think it would be too obvious, don’t you?”

“I didn’t come here for …”

“Not so loud, darling!” She stood up. “I’ll go change. Victoria will bring some ice. You make us some drinks and we’ll have lunch.”

“I can’t stay that long, thanks.”

With a waspish look, she said, “You make it pretty damn difficult for me to remember I’m spending the rest of my life with you.”

“It’s all decided?”

“Isn’t it?”

“Yesterday you seemed to be setting up some conditions.”

“Oh, that! Just get over all the hostility, sweet. But don’t take too long, please. I want to be your girl, without all this … disputation.”

I went over and sat on a low windowseat and looked at her across thirty feet of the room’s silence. “We’re trying to move too fast,” I told her.

“I know it. I didn’t mean it to be this way. I was going to be the muted widow, darling, with a carefully calculated sigh and snuffle from time to time, and I was going to be terribly proper about the whole routine. But that very first time I saw you, just before Stanley arrived, remember? My splendid intentions went all to hell. It was … like a spell. I guess I knew then I couldn’t continue the act, but I told myself it was just one little slip that didn’t count. Yesterday, darling, maybe you won’t believe this, but I plotted that little sun-lotion routine just to prove to myself I was a girl of character. I was going to tease you, darling, that’s all. I wanted you to want me and be able to do nothing about it. I thought you’d cap the bottle and scramble back to the wall and try to look as if it didn’t matter, and I was going to be laughing at you, inside. But … all of a sudden there was no turning back for either of us. Yes, we’re going too fast. I know that. I didn’t plan it that way. But we are, and I don’t think there’s very much we can do about it.”

“We can avoid opportunities like that.”

“Don’t be such a fool! We’ll be creating opportunities like that. I will, certainly. Gevan, my darling, there is something you should know. I should have told you yesterday. It could make you feel better about us. For almost this whole past year he was totally impotent. I think it was a traumatic thing—that terrible scene. Maybe the knowledge that I’ve always belonged to you became so strong in his subconscious … When I tried to talk about it, and tried to get him to see a psychiatrist, he’d get almost violent. It … wasn’t much of a marriage, Gevan. You should know that … and you should remember that Ken would want us to be happy. He did love us both.”

Again I found myself resenting plausibility. It accounted for his drinking, weeping, and his loss of interest in his work. Maybe it explained why his interest in Hildy was so platonic. It was all so very neat—and so unlike the Ken I remembered.

“Pretty rough deal for a woman like you,” I said. “Has Stanley been able to perform efficiently in that area too?”

After a momentary blankness of shock, she came striding toward me, her face contorted. “That is a goddamn filthy, vicious, stinking thing to say to …” She stopped six feet from me and closed her eyes. When her face was calm she opened her eyes and smiled and said, “I
must
make myself remember you are a very sensitive guy, my Gevan. You feel guilty about Ken, and you feel guilty about yesterday, and you want to punish yourself, so you keep striking out at me.” She came close and made a soft thud as she dropped to her knees on the carpeting. She took my hand in both of hers, kissed the palm, and then held the palm of my hand against her cheek for a moment.

“Not Stanley, my friend. Not anybody, even though many men seem to have a sixth sense about such situations, and they make little hints about how discreet they could be. Hell, I’m not a hypocrite, Gevan. Certainly I was tempted. I was made to be loved a thousand times a year. There were some highly edgy times around here, believe me, when I’d stalk this house like a randy panther, fighting off that moment when I’d have to shame myself with some nasty, lonely little release or go completely out of my mind. I would ache for you, Gevan. So that’s what happened to us yesterday, darling. So much saved up. Just before I lost the ability to think at all, I was wondering if I was frightening you or hurting you.” She kissed my knuckles and sat back on her heels and smiled up at me. “When I woke up this morning I stretched and stretched. I felt all over silky and warm. I woke into a world full of roses and music and love talk. When I came out of my shower and brushed my teeth, I pretended I was going to crawl right back into bed with you and awaken you in some delicious way. I realized it wouldn’t be long before I
could
do that, and it made me feel so good I laughed out loud. I guess you think we were dreadfully evil yesterday, Gevan. But today I feel like a bride. Nothing that can make me feel like this can be so horrible, can it?”

“I guess we’ll have to talk this way,” I said, “and I guess we will, if things are going to get the way you believe
they’ll be, but right now, Niki, I have to talk about what I came here to talk about.”

“You look so earnest!”

“You made me believe this Mottling thing is important to you, so I decided the fair thing was to come and tell you what I decided. I do not believe Mottling is the man to run Dean Products. That is an objective decision. I’m not trying to spite you or hurt you or show hostility.”

“But don’t you understand that …”

“Let me finish. Walter Granby has certain weaknesses and limitations, but he has a lot of strengths too. I can stay around long enough to bring back the good men Mottling drove off, and get it all running smoothly and solidly, and headed in the right direction. That’s my decision, and that’s the way I vote my stock on Monday.”

Niki came slowly and effortlessly to her feet, frowning. She walked to the coffee table, lit two cigarettes and came back to sit beside me on the windowseat and give me one of them.

“My first impulse is to go up in blue smoke.” she said.

“I expected you to.”

“But if I did you might not listen, and I want you to listen. Will you? This whole thing was botched, right from the beginning. Though our reasons are certainly as far apart as they could be, all of us put pressure on you, Gevan. Lester, Stanley, Colonel Dolson and me. We forgot how stubborn you are. We should have just spread the facts before you and let you make your own logical decision. We should have trusted your judgment. I know you would have backed Stanley.”

“Maybe not, Niki. Maybe he isn’t as sound as you people think.”

She tapped her fist on my thigh. “But are you
competent
to sit in judgment of a man like Stanley Mottling, Gevan? Yes, you ran Dean Products and they all say you did well at it. But the world changes in four years. Stanley has intricate problems you never had to face. So he
did
get rid of some men you liked, and you resent it. Were they really as good
as you thought they were? Or were they just very good at selling themselves to you? In all honesty, you must admit that possibility. Or maybe you made them feel so indispensable, they thought they could afford to ignore the new control methods Stanley introduced. Think about it, Gevan. I know you have a lot of self-confidence. But doesn’t it get close to a sort of … egomania when you judge a man on the basis of rumor, gossip and one trip through the plant? How sound is that, darling?”

I got up from her side and began to pace through the big room. She had touched the source of my uneasiness. I had decided to come out for Granby as a bluff, but I had been getting closer to deciding that it was, indeed, the proper decision. Karch, Uncle Al and Granby didn’t think much of Mottling, but how much of that was just an emotional resistance to change?

How badly had four years of idleness dulled the edge of my judgment? If I felt I had become too stale to take charge, could I not also be too stale to decide who should be in charge? Under Mottling the company was making a profit, a good one. Wasn’t that the definitive index of excellence? Suppose I booted him out and things turned sour? A hell of a lot of people would be hurt.

Suddenly the easy answer became enormously desirable. I could switch to Mottling. I would look like a fool, but what could they expect from a beach bum? I could vote it the easy way and leave at once for Florida, and wait on the lazy beach for Niki to join me.

I sat in a big chair. She came over and sat on the arm of it and laid her arm across my shoulders. “Gevan, Gevan, my darling. Don’t be so troubled. It’s not a case of humoring me, actually. It’s just the wisest decision you can make.”

I looked up into her face, so close to mine. “I keep wondering why you can’t just sit the hell back and collect your dividends?”

“I could have, if we hadn’t gotten so involved in the whole thing, Gevan. I want to be proud of you. I want you to be wise and right.”