Bad Desire (28 page)

All evening she had laughed at any trifle, and when she was not laughing she was smiling. Her eyes sparkled. Young and unsophisticated, she had been charming even to the waiters, probably because, Slater thought, without ever being aware of it, she had been trained in trust and decency. Rachel's strict domination had, at least, given her that. “You know what they say about you?”

“No.” Her eyes widened suspiciously. “What?”

“That no one stands a chance with you.”

“Who told you that?” She tried to laugh it off. “Gramma told me that's what you men talk about. I'm beginning to believe a lot of the things she used to say.” Sheila waited for him to reply. Some part of her, schooled in Rachel's caution, was now wary. She shrugged with exaggerated carelessness and smiled uncertainly, not knowing what or how much to reveal about herself. “I …” She looked down at the billions of stars reflected in the water. “Do you think I seem like that? I don't give myself as easily as a lot of the girls, if that's what they mean.”

Again he waited, still watching her.

“Well, now I've told you almost everything,” she said, tossing it off as unimportant. “But let's talk about something else.”

His eyes seemed to her to be softly lit with understanding. “Sheila, don't be afraid to show me how you feel.”

She nodded and fell silent. She fingered one of her earrings. Her frivolity wavered. He could see that she tried to laugh again and couldn't.

“Mr. Slater,” she said, “you shouldn't take me so seriously. I'm just a girl who looks good in a room. That's all.”

Except that he loved her. He knew that now. No one else mattered. At the slightest sign of her discontent, he moved to correct it. In a quiet, humorous voice, he said, “Come on now. Who're you trying to kid? Modesty doesn't suit you.”

Sipping the champagne, she looked at him and lowered her eyes, her long lashes nearly touching her cheek. Then, as if she could read his thoughts and knew his mind, she lifted her eyes and said, “Mr. Slater, tell me the truth: why are you doing this? I mean, what do you want with me? I'm a nobody and you're married.”

And she saw it come fully into his eyes—the sudden taut leap of fire.

She thought, My God, this can't be happening. She said, “Why do I feel like you planned all this and we'll never be like this again?”

“What time do you have to be getting back?”

“I didn't give a time,” she answered. “I said I might be late.”

Slater said, “I don't want to go back yet, do you? What if I said I didn't want to ever go back? What would you do then?”

His eyes were fastened on hers like magnets.

“Couldn't we just go for a walk?” she asked. “Somewhere … maybe out to that point? Unless you'd rather get started driving.”

Most of the huts were dark when they returned along the gangways and across the flagstone terrace. They didn't speak. Sheila glided beside him, her body now and then brushing against his sleeve, but she didn't take his arm. A band was playing in the cocktail lounge; while Slater paid the check, she stood near the doorway, listening.

She was only partly aware of the people around her, except once, when she spied a group of young men wearing fraternity jackets. Denny could look like that, she thought. If he wanted to, he could be one of them.

She was completely unprepared when one of the fraternity men asked her to dance and before she could decline, she was whisked onto the dance floor. The musicians let loose, the congas' rhythm releasing her to the spirit of the moment, and Sheila surrendered herself to it with the same exuberance she had shown all evening. Unnoticed behind the crowd, Slater went to the end of the bar and ordered a double brandy.

“Who are these college kids?” he asked the bartender.

“UCLA,” was the answer. “Guests of Cal Dawkins.”

Slater had never heard of Cal Dawkins—that's good, he thought as his eyes slowly canvassed the crowd. He saw no one he knew.

Sheila danced with an abandon that was mesmerizing, so total was her enjoyment in the music and in the evocative shapes she made of it. As she whirled among the other dancers, Slater saw flashes of the clinging evening gown and he felt his throat tighten.

He saw her now in her world, her young world, lost and immersed in it, irrepressible and resilient and full of life. Once, like a bright ribbon thrown above the music, he heard her ecstatic laughter and it thrilled him. It all seemed so right; Sheila looked completely at home, as if to be dancing among young people was her proper place. And Slater felt drawn to them, wanted to become one of them. Was that what she really meant to him—had she become his last frail link with a world he could never be a part of again?

My God, what am I doing?

I'm in love with that young girl, he thought. Slowly it dawned on him that his plans for the night ahead shouldn't happen. This is wrong, it's all wrong. God, just look at her. How could he hope to hide her away and deprive her of this—this hungry young life? If you really do love her, Henry, you won't draw her into this. You'll let her go. Let her go.

I can't, he thought. I can't. I can't do this.

She danced through two numbers with a succession of admiring partners, and when the set was finally over, she sank onto the stool next to him, her eyes bright, her color high. Sheila leaned against his shoulder, plucking her dress away from her skin. “Oh, that was fun,” she gasped, “just what I needed.” He put his arm around her and she accepted it without a word.

“Could I have a taste of that?” she asked and he gave her the brandy. With a sip and a shudder, she handed it back.

The band started up again. “Let me have one more,” Slater told the bartender, “and we'll call it a night.”

No one saw them go out through the black shuttered door. With her arm wrapped in his, her head resting lightly against his shoulder, they stepped into a night that was warm and damp and luminous. Following the path under the coconut palms, they passed behind a row of bathing huts, which were standing like lonely sentinels, canvas walls swelling and collapsing in the breeze. Gradually the path narrowed to nothing. Sheila perched on the low seawall, crossing her legs to remove her slippers.

“Let me do that for you,” he said and he cupped the backs of her calves, first one then the other, to slide off her shoes. He could feel a shivery ripple run deep into her thighs.

For her, it was one of those inconsequential moments that linger in the mind and take on a kind of immortality. The firm delicacy of his hands seemed to stay there longer than was conceivably possible. Even after he was through and her slippers were removed, she could still feel him holding her legs. A voice inside her said, You'll remember this the rest of your life. Still, he had hardly touched her. This man she had known half her life, and the other man, the stranger, she was sure she could never know.

Telling him to turn his back, Sheila drew aside the slit in her skirt, unhooked her stockings, and took them off, stashing them in her purse. She reached for her slippers. “I know where to put them,” he said, and watched as she walked out on the beach, the sand giving way beneath her feet.

Slater took off his own shoes and put them with hers under the base of a spindly lifeguard's station. He rolled the cuffs of his trousers. With his jacket over his shoulder, Slater went across the sand after her, still watching her go before him, with that slow, sliding kick in her stride. He knew that they would never reach the point.

They were quiet, walking side by side. She was trying to recapture the feelings she'd had only a month ago, before her grandmother's murder, but she couldn't There came into her heart a painful yearning for the world she had lost, irretrievably. The night, the empty beach, the abandoned promenades of palms, only reinforced the emptiness welling up inside her. In front of her, out through the starry dark, stretched the enormous panorama of her loneliness. When she looked around, Henry Slater wasn't looking at the ocean. He was looking at her, and she thought how much she wanted to be with him. She even thought she might do something quite unlike herself, something rash and quite immodest.

She looked down at herself. Here I am, she thought, in this beautiful dress. Gramma would have never let me have a dress like this. Look at my nails; look at my hair. Only he sees me like this. Look what he bought for me. He's made me feel good for the first time since she died.

She waded into the shallow depths, startled by the water's coldness, kicking at it, splashing. Despair washed over her. Now even Denny was leaving her. She walked slowly along, remembering with a strange delectable pain how much she had once liked him too, and how even that was receding from her.

They went along behind an old beachfront hotel, only a few curtained windows burning with lights. Why was he married?

Sheila wondered if maybe it was a mistake to be doing this. She knew what she was supposed to do and think and feel and say—she remembered Rachel saying, “Don't get confused and think you're in love when you're not.” But I'm in love with him, she thought, I've always been in love with him.

The moon sailed high, and the strip of sand, broken here and there by upright boulders, curved before them like a long, white tusk, stretching to dark infinity. Far in the distance, across a gulf of water, a bonfire burned like a tiny collapsing coal and the minuscule sounds of laughter and music wafted to them through the darkness. “It's like walking on the moon,” Sheila said, tilting her head to look at him.

“Yes,” he said, “and listening back to earth,” while his eyes explored the terrain. He listened to see if anyone was about, but around them the air had condensed to stillness. Only his heavy heartbeat sounded in it.

He felt the sand sliding and sinking under his feet, enveloping him. Offshore, he could make out an abandoned rig of some kind, lightless, rusting—once in a long while metal clanged with an empty sound. It seemed, then, that his life was like that rig, stark and cut off, floating through a gray universe. Waiting. Decades passing.

The scent of the ocean drifted over them. With a repetitious hiss, the water broke in gentle, ever-running waves, leaving behind traces of froth. Above them, the moon shone so brightly that nothing escaped its pale glow and the infinite roof of the night, shot through with innumerable stars, was like a great and splendid jewel—it was as if they had stepped into the dark, blue, sparkling heart of a sapphire.

“I want to tell you something about myself,” Slater said. “There are so many things you don't understand, Sheila; so much I can't tell you and you'll never know. You have no idea what you mean to me.” Once he had started, his feelings came pouring out, but his words seemed trivial, like bubbles that effervesced as soon as they were spoken. Yet he persisted. “The few times I'm able to see you, it always seems unreal to me. Every morning I wake up and I think about you, I remember dreams about you … I never stop thinking about you. Maybe you can't see it, but for a long time, a very long time, something's been going on between us. I think you must know … you have to know. If I'm wrong about this, tell me to stop.”

Half-turned, she raised her head, and for a long moment she looked at him but with an expression he couldn't clearly see in the dark. Then she looked down again at the sand.

“Tell me I'm wrong about this, Sheila.”

“No,” she said. She tried to sound firm, but fear and excitement undermined her. “You're scaring me a little.”

“I don't mean to scare you.” Surrounding the beach was a snarly mass of cypress and maritime pines and one towering weeping beech tree. “I'd never let anything hurt you. Sheila, don't you know me at all? I would never. I'd die first. No one will ever love you the way I do. No one could. You don't know.”

He had meant to wrap and bind her with all the things a young girl would want to hear; now, he would tell her the truth. It was as if he had known the words all his life, holding them in, waiting for this moment to spend them, but even as he spoke, Slater wondered what she would do. He half-expected her to try to end it swiftly, to demand he take her home at once, but instead there she stood only an arm's length away, listening.

“What I felt for you years ago just never stopped. I don't know what you think of me or even if you think of me at all, but don't hide from me anymore. I don't even care if you can't love me, but I want to know.”

Slater opened his jacket and set it around her. His hands began to caress her shoulders through the jacket with light, slow, hypnotic strokes. “I love your beautiful face. In my dreams, I hear you laugh. I love the way you move: I love your body. Just the fact that you exist fills me with—it fills my life. You could have any man you want, you know that and I know it, but you won't ever find again what I feel for you. I'd give you anything I have and I have nothing you need. You're the only one I've really cared about—for years and years. Sheila, don't you know what I mean? Haven't you felt it?”

“Yes,” she whispered, “I know what you mean.”

But he knew she couldn't know the depths he had gone to and there was no way to tell her. He let go of her shoulders. And he knew he couldn't do it; he couldn't end it. “I brought you something,” he said. In her hand, he placed the gold necklace she'd left dangling for him in the night.

“Oh,” she said. “I had decided you didn't see it.” Sheila opened the tiny clasp and slipped the chain around her neck. But still she wouldn't look at him.

He said, “Don't you know I'd do anything for one of your kisses?”

It was then, when all his words ran out, that he saw how sad she seemed, sad and skeptical, both. She raised her head and took a long breath. “You wouldn't lie to me …,” she said, “would you?”

“No, I never would.”