Black Mountain Breakdown (29 page)

“Hello, Crystal,” he says.

Like a sleepwalker, Crystal walks right past him and unlocks the kitchen door, then hesitates and turns back on the step. “Roger, what do you want?” she asks. Her head is light and very far away. She has papers to grade, things to do. But suddenly she’s conscious of the dirt on the back of her dress, and she halfway turns in the door to hide it.

“I just want to talk to you,” Roger says, standing up. Crystal has forgotten how big he is. “Aren’t you going to let me come in?”

“Come on in, then,” she says, and goes in and leaves the door open behind her. Roger sits down in the armchair in Lorene’s conversation area and Crystal goes over to the sink and washes her hands.

Roger appears calm, watching her, but Crystal almost doesn’t know what she’s doing. She drops the towel on the floor.

“Come over and sit down,” Roger says.

Crystal sits on the edge of the love seat. “Roger, what
are you
doing
here?” she blurts. “You know you haven’t got any business coming over here like this.”

But Roger leans back in the chair. “I’ve waited a long time to come,” he says. “I waited as long as I could. I just want to see you,” he says.

“But I’ve
seen
you!” Crystal finds herself suddenly and embarrassingly near to tears. “I’ve seen you all over the place for months, Roger. I see you at the country club, I see Judy at the book group, I saw you just the other day at Agnes’s store. I was downtown buying some nails for Odell. Don’t you remember that? I was buying some nails.” Crystal’s voice goes up higher and higher and she knows she can’t control it.

“I remember that,” Roger says calmly. He crosses his legs like he has all the time in the world.

Crystal bites her lip and sits back on the love seat, pulling her skirt down as far as it will go. “Well, I’ve seen you,” she says again. “God knows, I’ve seen enough of you to last me for the rest of my life.
Before
, I mean,” she adds. Now she’s really angry and for the first time she looks at Roger directly, her eyes losing for once their deep limpidity, flashing. Roger looks straight back. His eyes are calm. His whole face is calm. She sees that Roger has aged well. When he was younger, his face looked silly to her sometimes, so grave and so thoughtful and conscientious stuck up there on a teenage body, like one of those cardboard cutouts you step behind to get your picture taken at carnivals. When she was a girl, she used to do things on purpose to try to shake up Roger’s face, to disarrange those careful features. Once when he had sprained his back playing football he had to
wear a back brace for two months, and somehow Crystal has kept this image of him, sitting up ramrod straight in any chair with that giant Ace bandage around his ribs beneath the shirt.

She sees that this image is no longer accurate—if, in fact, it ever was. He doesn’t look braced any longer. He still sits up straight, but he is relaxed like that, and his body has filled in and changed to fit his face. Now Roger is handsome in a dependable way, twenty pounds overweight, gray streaking his brown hair, a deep line already there between his eyebrows. Strangest of all, he has a mustache, mostly gray. Suddenly self-conscious, Crystal drops her eyes to the floor and sees his dark-brown lace-up shoes, the kind of shoes Jerold used to make fun of. Size twelve and a half, she remembers. It’s surprising how much she already knows about Roger. He’s like a big aberration, filling up this whole room. Only that’s not right, either. He’s not aberrant, she’s wrong—she is the aberrant one. She was the one who left. Roger has always belonged in this house; just look at him. But Crystal doesn’t know what to do with him there. He is watching her so closely, so kindly. He has such trustworthy light-brown eyes. No wonder he’s making a fortune. Anybody would buy anything from him; anybody would trust Roger Lee.

He smiles at her, warm and slow. “I wish you’d relax, Crystal,” he says. “I’m not going to rape you.”

“Why did you say that?” she snaps. “Don’t be ridiculous.” She lights a cigarette. “Well, what do you want?” Now she’s not mad or frightened so much as curious.

“This is going to take me a while,” Roger Lee says.
“I ought to feel like a fool, I guess, but I don’t. I am a fool. I know it. I’ve thought it all out, but I don’t care. I don’t
care
, Crystal.” Roger Lee says this almost violently, slamming his hand down hard on the TV.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Crystal says.

“Oh, I think you do.” Roger Lee speaks with such patience, with such gentleness and conviction, that Crystal grows alarmed.

But he goes on that way. “I don’t care if you think I’m a fool. I’d have to agree with you. But like I said, I’m past that now. I’ve been waiting to talk to you, Crystal. I’ve been waiting a long time—months, years. I know Lorene and Odell are gone right now. I waited for that, too. I don’t want any interruptions. This is what I came to say, Crystal. I love you. I still love you. I guess I never stopped. I guess I never got over you in the first place.”

“You’re kidding,” Crystal interrupts weakly, but something clicks in the back of her mind, and she knows she has always known it.

Roger Lee doesn’t seem to hear her. He leans forward intently, going on, apparently determined to say it all. “I know you didn’t love me back when we were kids,” he says. “You were too young when we started. You were into too many things. You were just a kid, and then later I pressed you too hard. I pushed you. I should have given you time to grow up. I realize I have only myself to blame, and I do blame myself, in many ways, for all the things you’ve gone through.”

“That’s not even true,” Crystal says. “None of it was your fault. It didn’t have anything to do with you. Besides, I treated you terribly. Don’t you remember that?”

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” Roger says. “It should, but it doesn’t. I don’t care. I don’t care about that weirdo you lived with in New York, I don’t care how many men you’ve slept with, I don’t care about anything you ever did to me in the past. What I’m talking about is right now. I love you right now, Crystal. I can’t help it. I wish to God I didn’t, but I do. Sure, I married Judy. Sure, I love my girls. And I was doing all right with that, I guess, until we moved back here, and here you were. I didn’t have any idea. Nobody told me you were here, nobody mentioned your name. Do you know the first time I saw you again, Crystal? I can tell you exactly. I was standing on the street with Lewis Dean after work, at five-thirty, and you drove by in that car of Lorene’s, looking straight ahead. You didn’t even see me. You had a red scarf in your hair.”

“A scarf,” Crystal repeats. Part of her mind is frozen.

“I said to Lewis Dean, ‘I’ve got to go, I’ll see you tomorrow,’ and I just turned around and left. I guess he thought I was crazy.” Roger Lee grins. “Then you know what I did? I went back up in the office and locked the door and cried. I couldn’t stand it, you see. As soon as I saw you, I knew I still loved you, I knew I had never stopped. I probably knew it before then, even—I just wouldn’t admit it to myself. I thought you were unattainable, you see, all those years. But then I came home and you were here, and I could see that you needed me.”

“You’re crazy, Roger,” Crystal says. “I don’t need you at all. I wish you’d go home. I wish you’d quit telling me this.”

“I can’t,” Roger says. He grins again. “I’ve got to tell it, you’ve got to listen. I need you, too. At first I thought, I
won’t say anything, I’ll get over it. I threw myself into my work. But the harder I worked, the worse it got. I took Judy to Mexico—big vacation, just the two of us. Judy had the time of her life. I felt like shit. We came back, I kept on working. I had entered politics in a small way, as you probably know. People tell me I’ve got a brilliant future. I don’t care. I don’t want it. I used to wait and see if I could catch a glimpse of you anywhere. But I wasn’t going to say any-thing.”

“Obviously you changed your mind,” Crystal says. She smiles at Roger, and Roger laughs.

“Well, this part sounds dumb, too. It sounds almost as dumb as the rest of it, but I swear to God it’s the truth. We were watching TV one night and I saw that beer commercial, you know the one I mean. Well, I must have seen it a million times before, but all of a sudden something clicked. It was that one about ‘You only go around once in life,’ you know the one I mean. Schlitz. And I thought, Hell yes, Roger! That’s right. Once is it. That’s the ball game. That’s all she wrote. So here I am.”

“I see.”

“Now,” Roger continues. “That’s what brought me here. All of that is what brought me. I haven’t had a fight with Judy, nothing like that. I waited to come and I came here to say exactly what I’m saying. That’s all. I want you, Crystal,” he says suddenly, more intense than ever. His brown eyes glitter as he leans forward.

“Oh no.” Crystal draws back. “No, Roger.”

“It’s not like you think,” Roger says. “I want you to go away with me. I want to marry you. I don’t care about Judy,
I don’t care about the girls, I don’t care about anything but you. I’ve got the money to do anything I want—you know that, Crystal. It’s really quite simple. I want to make you happy.”

“I am happy,” Crystal says quickly.

“No, you’re not,” Roger says with absolute conviction.

“I am so. I am happy!”
Crystal screams.

Roger grins at her. “Crystal,” he says gently. “
Baby.
I’ve known you all your life, remember? I know you, sweetheart, I know everything you’ve been and everything you’ve done. I’ve watched you go through all these changes, one right after another. You might
think
you’re happy now, Crystal, but you’re not. Living with your mother and a stepfather, what kind of a life is that for you? What kind of life is it for your mother either—to be blunt. Don’t you suppose she wants some privacy? What are you going to do, Crystal? Teach junior high school for the rest of your life? Dry up and be an old maid?”

Crystal shakes her head to clear it, but she can’t. Roger goes on.

“This is not any kind of life for a woman like you, Crystal. This is crazy. A woman like you needs a man. You need your own home, children, a position in the community. You need love. I want to make you happy, Crystal. I can do it if you’ll give me a chance. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, all my life.”

“My God,” Crystal says with no expression at all in her voice.

“I want you, Crystal,” Roger Lee says, standing up. Crystal stands, too. Roger kicks Lorene’s hassock out of the way, grabs hold of her and kisses her. A deep shock of feeling
runs all through Crystal when they kiss; it’s almost painful. It’s been so long. It was there with Mack, then Jerold, some other times maybe, but it was never there with Roger before. “I want you,” Roger says again.

Crystal reaches behind her and unzips her dress and for once the zipper doesn’t stick and the dress falls evenly, soundlessly, around her feet onto the floor. Crystal stands in her pantyhose and slip. Very gently, Roger pulls the straps down over her shoulders.

“I always wanted to see your breasts,” he says. “I never saw your breasts before.” He leans over, kissing them, sucking on her nipples. Crystal moans. A feeling she has almost forgotten sweeps over her, closing her in.

“Come on,” she says, pulling him toward the stairs.

But Roger won’t come. “No,” he says, and by his voice she knows he means it and she stops. Roger picks her dress up from the floor and slips it back over her head. “Turn around,” he says and she does, and he zips it up, lifting her hair, and kisses the back of her neck. “Not like that,” he says. “Not now. I want us to do this right, Crystal.”

“For God’s sake,” Crystal says. “There’s no way to do this right. There’s nothing right about it.”

“No, it’s right,” Roger says. “It’s exactly right. I’ll need about two weeks to get everything in order, that’s all. Then we’re leaving.”

“Where are we going?” Crystal asks. “Where will we live?” She is almost chanting.

“We’ll probably live in Bluefield eventually,” Roger Lee says in a matter-of-fact tone. He’s got it all figured out. “I’ve got more interests there than I have here, actually. It’s a
pretty nice town. But before that we’ll take a trip. A long trip. How would you like that?”

“Whatever you think,” Crystal says. Some part of her is screaming, or almost screaming, and then it breaks off and is still.

Roger puts his hands on her shoulders and turns her to face him. “I’ll let you know,” he says. “I won’t see you again before we leave. I don’t want any messiness, any intrigue. I want to make a clean break, do you understand?”

“Yes,” Crystal says. Roger is the only man in the world who would do it this way. “But what about Judy?” she asks.

“I’ll feel some guilt,” Roger says slowly. “Of course. It will be difficult for Judy at first. But I’ll take care of that. You are not to worry about Judy,” he adds forcefully. “You are not to worry about anything.”

“All right,” Crystal says.

He continues to hold on to her shoulders and to stare at her face like he’s memorizing it. Now that things are settled, he seems dazed. “The craziest thing is that I don’t even care if you don’t love me,” he says slowly. “You will love me,” he adds.

“I have to tell you something,” Crystal says.

“What is it?”

“It’s just that I don’t know. I don’t know if I can do it or not.”

“Do what?” he asks.

“All of it. Any of it. Marry you, be your wife. I don’t know if I’ll be good at it,” Crystal says. “Can’t we wait? A little while, anyway? At least until the end of the school year? I’ll never be able to get another job if I quit now.”

“But you’ll never have to work,” Roger says. “Don’t worry, baby, I’ll take good care of you.” Roger pulls her to him and kisses her again. “I’ve got to go,” he says. “I’ll call you. Oh, one more thing,” he adds, and puts his hand into his pocket and gets out a little square box and gives it to her.

“What’s this?”

“A Valentine present for you. Go ahead, open it. Well, go
on
,” he urges when she hesitates, and she does, and it’s a square-cut dark-red ruby with a wide gold band.

Of course.

“It’s just beautiful!” Crystal says.