As Good As Gone (9781616206000) (13 page)

She soon fell asleep—or passed out. When she came around, Tully was gone, or at least he was not near enough for Marjorie to hear his breathing or to reach out and touch him. The blackness she opened her eyes to was so complete she couldn't see if he—if anyone—was also in the cellar. Or had she opened her eyes? Since there was no discernible difference between opening her eyes or closing them, she wondered if her waking was only a dream of waking. She was still drunk enough that the state didn't panic her. She gave in to it, and toward morning when a blade of light was finally able to slice its way through a crack in the farmhouse's foundation, when she could open her eyes and know with certainty that they were open and know with certainty that her waking was real, Marjorie laughed at herself. Potatoes! Why hadn't she relied on her nose to tell her the difference between dreaming and waking? Dreams had no smell . . . or did they?

The experience was unlike anything Marjorie ever lived through again . . . until she struggled free of the anesthetic after her surgery only to find herself in a blackness like that cellar's.

And she finally relaxes into that state too when she determines that it doesn't matter whether she wants to be awake or asleep: Neither condition is susceptible to her will.

FIFTEEN

I
think
I know what's going on here,” Beverly says, “although it's taxing my memory a bit. But isn't it more than a little strange—we don't even call each other by our first names.”

“Beverly,” Calvin says, and tries to tug her a little closer.

“At least you know the name.” She takes a small step forward, easing the strain on her undergarment. She notices now the spicy sweet smell of his after shave. She has to ask, “Did you have this in mind all along or are you just making it up on the moment?”

He brings up his left hand and curves that index finger around her brassiere strap also. When he does, Beverly has a new thought that won't be kept away: He has his hands on the reins.

“This moment or any other,” Calvin says, “I'm looking to take some pleasure out of this life.”

“Well, I asked. I appreciate your honesty. Though I don't believe that answers my question.”

“You must feel the same. Or else you wouldn't be here.”

“To tell you the truth, I'm not sure where I am . . .” Or what I'm feeling, Beverly might have added. But one emotion she's quite sure of: She's relieved, and relief, in Beverly Lodge's view, is a much underrated emotion. For years she has worried that she no longer possesses any of the attributes, qualities, or features necessary to excite a man's desire, and although the attention of Calvin Sidey, considering his age and remove from polite society, is hardly enough to qualify her as one of the world's most desirable women, it's something.

Calvin pokes his fingers deeper inside her brassiere, and when he does, another feeling overtakes her. Beverly's breath quickens and a sudden heat travels through her torso from high in her throat to between her legs. She moves so close to him the tuft of white hair curling out of his shirt's open collar tickles her forehead. Now she catches another odor, this one hiding under his after shave and sweat. It's very faint, but there's no mistaking it. She associates it with the homes of older people she entered in childhood. Later in life she assumed its source was the food the elderly ate—boiled, overcooked, reheated—but with her nose this close to Calvin Sidey's chest she realizes it's the smell of age itself, yet not an overripe rotting as of vegetation or flesh but of something dry, wood or bone perhaps, turning to dust. She has not worn any perfume for this occasion—she had not known there would
be
an occasion—so she imagines she gives off a similar odor, only fainter by the years that separate them in age.

“Do you know if your son has a drink of whiskey or something on the premises?” she asks. “If we're about to do what I think, my nerves could use a little firming up.”

Calvin releases the reins and walks over to the chest of drawers. He brings out a pint of Canadian Club, and although it's difficult to tell in the dim basement, it looks to Beverly as if it hasn't been opened. He unscrews the cap and holds the bottle out to her. “I won't be joining you,” he says.

“You just keep it around for your basement guests?”

“I quit drinking a number of years back, but I want it to be my choice, and not because I can't get my hands on a drink.”

“So you make it easy to take a drink and hard not to . . . Mr. Sidey, you do like a challenge, don't you?”

“I suppose.”

She still doesn't take the bottle. “I'm afraid I'm not made of stuff as stern as you think. Could you water it down a bit? Maybe an ice cube?”

“A little sugar too?”

“I don't need that much help.”

Calvin climbs the stairs, and as soon as Beverly hears him reach the top, she begins to undress. If she hurries, she'll be naked and under the covers before Calvin returns. She's ready to go along with just about anything he has in mind, but she doesn't want her body naked and available for his cold eye to scrutinize. She doesn't bother folding anything but tosses all her clothes and undergarments on the chair. The sheets feel not only cool but damp, and she pulls the chenille spread to her chin.

How long has it been? This is 1963. Burt died in 1938, and not long after, Ed Emshier from the First National Bank began his pursuit of her. Poor Ed. She put him off for a few years, and then out of a combination of pity and exhaustion, she relented. If Ed would have had his way, they would have married, and maybe Beverly would have eventually given in there as well, if the sex hadn't been so god-­awful. And perhaps she could have gotten past that if Ed would have been able to enliven her life in other ways. But the truth was, the man was as bland as baby food.

Since then—nothing.

Beverly thinks of herself as a practical woman who understands—and has always understood—that life frequently means settling for less. And though she's never let it stand in the way of getting through a day, she has sometimes imagined someone—a stranger, she guesses it would have to be—driving into town and carrying her away.

None of her fantasies, of course, have her lying on sheets smelling of mildew, staring up at bare ceiling joists, waiting to spread her legs for an old man who has never even bothered touching his lips to hers. An old man who might have murder in his past. If she isn't going to jump up, grab her clothes, and run away—and she isn't about to—well, she might as well smile about where she finds herself.

She hears his footsteps on the stairs, and she hastily rearranges the bed coverings so her body isn't outlined quite so obviously. Not that she'll be able to fool him much longer.

He carries a water glass more than half full, and from its dark color she guesses he hasn't diluted the whiskey much. Two ice cubes, melting rapidly, swirl on the surface.

“Better sit up,” Calvin says, “and take your medicine.”

A joke? Has he just made a joke?

She sits up, bringing the covers with her, and takes the glass from his hand. “I don't think I'll need quite this much courage.”

“I had no way of knowing.”

She swallows as much as she dares and feels the whiskey scorch a path that ends just below her breastbone.

“Whew!” She fans her face to cool the sweat that has popped out at her hairline. “While I'm priming myself here, you could go turn out that light.”

He walks over and throws the switch, but even with the bulb dark at the bottom of the stairs, the basement dims only to gray. Through two of the tiny underground windows the setting sun has found its way, sending angled shafts of dusty light across the room.

Calvin sits down on the chair beside the bed and pulls off his boots, an action that relieves Beverly. She had a vision of him climbing shod under the covers. He opens the snaps on his shirt and tugs its tails out of his jeans, but he leaves the shirt on.

Beverly takes another sip of whiskey. “You're not going to take out your teeth, are you?”

He unrolls his socks and tucks them inside his boots. “That's the second remark you've made about teeth. No”—he clacks his teeth noisily—“they're all mine.”

“I guess I'm just trying to gauge the amount of romance I'm in for.”

Does this man never laugh? Beverly tries again. “You looked like you were getting ready to bed down for the night is all I meant.”

He reaches down and lifts the bedspread and sheet. The air is not moving in the basement, yet it feels as though a cool breeze blows over her when he exposes her body. Parts of her chill and shrivel—is it only the cool air?—and she covers her chest with her arm.

“I could say the same about you.” He points to her glass of whiskey. “You drunk up enough courage yet to let me between those sheets?”

Beverly takes one more swallow and sets the glass down on the concrete floor. She lies down and pats the bed. “Come on then. I never could resist that kind of sweet talk.”

CALVIN CAN STILL REMEMBER
the first day when he didn't think of his dead wife. Pauline had been gone maybe four or five years, and though he was working for the Slash Nine then, on this particular day he and a few other fellows were loaned out to Willis Ritter's Rocking 3 to help with the branding. For some reason, Willis had been caught short-­handed, and Tom Arndt, the owner of the Slash Nine, sent some of his men over to the Ritter place.

The Rocking 3 wasn't a big outfit, but Willis still had upward of two hundred head that had to be branded. They ran fifty or so calves into the catching corral at a time, and Calvin and Ray Kellogg alternated their work. For an hour or so, one of them would tend the fire and keep the irons hot while the other would rope and drag a calf to the fire. Then they'd switch. Willis and one of his boys would throw and hold down the calves, and another of Willis's sons would slap on that big Rocking 3 brand. The smoke and the smell of the burned hide, the dust and the cow shit in the corral, the calves bawling inside the fence, and their mothers bellering outside—it was work that filled up all of a man's senses and most of his mind.

It was not until Calvin was back at the Slash Nine, in the bunkhouse, and smoking a last cigarette before he collapsed onto his bed, not until then did he realize that he had not thought of Pauline once that day, and then the thought he did have was so minor and so swift, like a bat hunting in the night sky, it hardly seemed there at all. He recalled how annoyed she'd get when he smoked in their bedroom. The smell and the smoke, she said, lingered and became part of the darkness; she'd wake and worry that something in the house was burning. Calvin grumbled something about the odor of her “woman things” in the room, but he acceded to her wishes. If he needed a smoke, he left the room. But when the memory of her came back to him in his exhaustion—and hadn't he taken on the cowboy life so its long days and man-­killing work would keep him from dwelling on grief and loss?—it came with renewed force, as if his grief had hidden from him all day in order to gather its power and devastate him all over again. Better, Calvin realized, and he has lived by this principle ever since, to keep some thought of Pauline Sidey always near at hand and thus prevent the familiar daily sorrow from gathering its strength and growing into ruinous pain.

Even now, as he enters this woman—and my God it feels good, so good, to use his muscles, his entire body, for pleasure, to press down hard on her until it seems as though his flesh and hers, his bones and hers, his blood and hers, fuse—Calvin keeps a part of himself out of the moment, noticing that Beverly Lodge's legs are considerably longer than Pauline's were and that Beverly can bring her heels high up on the backs of his legs. But even the sensation of the calluses on her heels scraping against him turns into the pleasure that's ready to do battle with sorrow.

BEVERLY LODGE LIVES MUCH
of her life in the company of others. Friends, neighbors, colleagues. Her son. And this is the way she wants it. But she hadn't realized the solitude that she's been living in, not having wrapped her legs around a man in so long. She hadn't known that unrequited lust or desire—heat with nothing to burn—could bring on its own brand of loneliness. This closeness, her skin rubbing against his, her heart beating against his, is so unlike all the other moments in her life that she might have been living alone on a desert island until now. She was sure she'd never have this in her life again. And oh God, to be touched there again, and there, and there, and like that, and like that. She can't help it; she thinks of Ed Emshier. Maybe she should have been more patient with him.

And here's another surprise. A ramming, slamming affair was what Beverly expected this to be, not only because all the love­making in her life has been a variation on that theme—hard and quick with her husband, who had no more time to spare in bed than in any other place away from his job, and soft and quick with Ed Emshier—but also because she guessed that would be Calvin Sidey's style, going greedily for his pleasure.

But he takes his time, and though Beverly thought at first, oh hell, of course—a seventy-­year-­old man has accumulated a lot of rust, to say nothing of the inevitable worry over his heart—once she catches his rhythm she realizes this is how an old man takes his pleasure: making last as long as he can what he cannot be sure he'll experience ever again. Sexual urgency belongs to the young; they can rush through the act because they can be sure so many more opportunities lie ahead.

How strange, that on a day when Beverly had been deviled by the heat, the wonderful feeling that suffuses her from head to toe, as Calvin rocks both their bodies on the narrow bed, is heat—a sensation very like lowering herself into a hot bath.

But then the feeling is suddenly not heat but electricity—a current that runs vaguely through her, settles between her legs, and from there—doubled, tripled in power—emanates out through her torso and clamps her tight to Calvin Sidey.