Chez Cordelia (21 page)

Whit? “Tall, thin guy with a moustache? Black?”

Danny laughed. “Hell, no. Whit's just a little guy, with a bald head. And Irish.”

Was he lying? Could all this be true? Had Danny been in Florida with his parents these ten months? In California with my parents? Working for the CIA? I felt for a moment like the hero of one of those movies who's caught unwittingly in a web of conspiracy and can't trust anyone.

“May and Whit left me off in North Carolina. I decided I didn't want to go all the way to Texas. North Carolina already seemed pretty far.”

“And what did you do in North Carolina?”

He became evasive for the first time—raised his eyebrows, turned down his mouth, and bobbed his head from side to side in a gesture that was new to me. “I managed.”

“What do you mean, you
managed
?”

But it was all he would say. He loosened his hold on my arm and stared out over the fair. His profile was the same—freckled and beautiful—and I wondered why I felt no tenderness for him.

“Danny, you were gone almost a year,” I said finally. “What were you doing all that time?”

“Getting along,” he said cryptically. “Same as anyone.”

We were quiet while the Ferris wheel carried us up and over and down. The sky was dimming, the colors getting smoky. It was nearly dark.

“What are you going to do now?” I asked as we stopped again.

“I want to talk to you some more.” We got off and started to walk around. “I want to hear about you. I want to talk about getting back together. I'm different now. Things would be different now.” I saw that. “Better,” he added. I doubted it. I was glad to get my feet on the ground, to be down where the sky was less visible, where humanity pressed in on all sides. I felt safer there—though safe from what I couldn't tell you—until I glimpsed Juliet and Alan at the ring-toss booth. Juliet looked glum, as if she'd been crying recently. Alan looked determinedly cheerful; he often said how he liked to get out and mix with the people, he felt it helped him in his work.

I backed Danny away and around a corner. The last people I wanted to see just then were Juliet and Alan.

“Let's get out of here and go someplace else to talk,” I said. I had in mind a bar or a coffee shop. I spotted Nina and caught her arm. Danny lurked behind me. “Nina, I've run into an old friend—” I spoke low, lest Danny come up and indignantly insist on being properly identified. “We're going out for a quick beer—is that okay with you? I'll come back later and meet you?”

“I think I'll split anyhow,” she said. “I've watched it enough. Now I feel like writing it.” She grinned at me. “Any good quotes? Hear anything meaningful?”

“Not really,” I said. “The sunset from the Ferris wheel—”

“Yeah, I got that, thanks.” She had her writing gleam in her eye. I knew she would go home and make it all up on the typewriter, and it would be more like the street fair than the street fair itself. “Have fun,” she said, and then she leaned close to me and whispered, “Little did our heroine know when she left the fair early to have a drink with an old friend, that her life would be irrevocably changed from that moment,” and giggled. Nina was always saying things that began, “Little did our heroine know …” or “Who could have foretold …”—as if life were some sleazy book. I never liked her doing it—sometimes what Nina called wit I called plain silliness—but now her words made cold dread sit on me. My head began to ache, and as I watched her walk away toward where her car was parked I was actually on the verge of calling her back, of asking her to join us, to lend her safe, good nuttiness to the coming encounter between Danny and me. But of course I didn't.

“That's my friend Nina,” I said sorrowfully to Danny.

“Nice ass,” he said, silencing me. For a moment or two I debated seriously whether he could be some crude, filthy man impersonating my sweet Danny.

He had a car, which surprised me, and we drove to Juliet's apartment. It was his idea, but, thinking it over, I decided it would be best. I didn't want to be seen with him—not without shame, I admitted this to myself. And I wanted to be on my own ground, where I could kick him out if necessary. If we went to a bar he could strand me there. I foresaw our talk as a battle that would end with one of us walking out on the other.

It wasn't quite like that. The first thing Danny wanted to do was take me to bed. I should have known that was on his mind, but it was so far from mine that he took me completely by surprise when he held me around the waist as soon as we got upstairs and said (panting from the four flights), “Where's your bedroom?”

I didn't try to dissuade him. He scared me, and I pitied him, and he was my husband, once beloved. It seemed enough.

But our coming-together was bad. Danny couldn't get an erection—he was so nervous he whimpered. And when he did get one finally, with my help, he couldn't keep it. He got just inside me and then slipped out again, limp, and during these clumsy and humiliating preliminaries, in spite of the fact that he needed a bath and that I no longer loved him, I found myself getting excited. I remembered Malcolm Madox and worried: have I sunk so low I can respond only to men who disgust me? Tears ran down my cheeks. I took his soft, cheesy penis between my palms and wept.

“Come on, come on,” Danny kept saying, though whether he was instructing it to perform or me to do something about it, I don't know. At any rate, I tried. I petted and coaxed and stroked. The only thing I wouldn't do was take it in my mouth. I suppose that's what he wanted, but I balked. (He smelled so bad, and Malcolm Madox had soured me on penises in general.) I was remembering, as if it were a previous incarnation (so misty and remote it seemed), the old days when Danny and I had approached, joyfully, all possible parts of each other from every possible angle.

“Maybe we should just forget the whole thing,” I said finally, careful to keep the tears out of my voice. I suppose I said this at the wrong time. The words moved Danny to a frenzy of passion or fury, I wasn't sure which. He pressed his naked body to mine violently, digging into me with his long nails, and thrust his poor penis between my legs, where, miraculously, it got hard enough to function. He worked it into me, frantically and with difficulty—our bodies were such strangers to each other. He pounded against me for a few seconds, and it was over. He sighed deeply and collapsed on my chest and then reached down to his pants pocket on the floor and dug out his cigarettes.

My tears hadn't stopped, not once, but I kept them silent. He was not the Danny I'd loved since I was a kid. I thought as we lay there, with the cigarette smoke drifting around us, that maybe
that
Danny had never existed anyway, except in my head. Maybe the old Danny had been this one all along, and my parents and my sisters and my aunt had seen him plainly. But I put the thought away in some mental closet and I have never taken it out again until now. It hurt me too much—it still does hurt me.

Danny smoked and asked me questions. What had I been doing? What had I lived on? Did I still have my coin collection? Had I had any lovers since he left? Why was I with Juliet?

I wiped my eyes on the pillowcase and told him everything, all except where I worked. I said I was unemployed, blushing and trembling in the dark at the lie. But I told him the truth about my descent into depression after he left, and my mother's attempts to get me to go to college, and my job at Madox Hardware, and my kleptomania, and Malcolm's blackmail, and my being fired. I told him about Alan's health foods and Juliet's oddness, but he interrupted me.

“You're not working now?” He sounded suspicious, and I wondered if he'd tracked me to Grand'mère, but I stuck to it. I told him I was living on my savings and looking for a job.

He was silent for a while, and so was I. I pulled the sheet up over myself, and he pulled it down again, smiling in the dim light. I was afraid he had plans for more … I can't call it lovemaking—more of what we'd just been doing, but he said only, “You don't have to cover up. I'm your husband.”

“I was just cold,” I murmured, edging the sheet up again.

He let it stay. “Delia—” He inhaled enormously, and I wondered where he got the wind for it, after his ragged breathing at Juliet's door; and, watching him lower the cigarette over the side of the bed (where he flicked the ashes on the floor), I saw what looked like sores and scratches on the inside of his arm, and my stomach dropped sickly. Needle tracks? I didn't know, I'd never seen needle tracks. I tried to think: had his eyes been bright? pupils dilated? I didn't even know what to look for. And I couldn't ask him. I was afraid to. But it was a measure of his change, the new capabilities I sensed in him, that the idea of dope leaped instantly into my mind.

“This guy Madox, the son—you never went to bed with him?”

“Never!” I said indignantly—though, if I'd been pressed, I would have had to admit that the horrible Malcolm appealed to me only slightly less than Danny did at that moment.

“You just jerked him off?”

“Yes—please, Danny, I don't want to talk about it.”

“What does this son of a bitch do, work for his father or what?”

“He goes to college and works there on vacations.”

“Damn college boys,” Danny said bitterly, and I wondered what in his ten months away had happened to inspire such vehemence. He used to idolize Ray, who'd gone to Yale. “And you never had anybody else?” he persisted. “No other guys?”

“I told you, no,” I said. I wanted to get up and wash myself. I wanted him to leave before Juliet and Alan got back. I suppose I sounded impatient.

“Don't snap at me.”

“Sorry,” I said shortly. To my horror, he began to cry. He lay on his back and sobbed, screwing up his face, and I could do nothing. I just watched him. His dreadful beard shook. I told myself: hold him, Delia, put your arms around him, let him cry on you. I remembered him crying over the prospect of having to kill people in the war. I made myself say, again, “I'm sorry, Danny,” and at the sound of my voice he stopped, sniffed long, and got out of bed with his cigarette.

“I've got to go to the john.”

I heard the cigarette hiss in the toilet, and then I heard him urinate. When he came back he began putting on his clothes, talking rapidly, with an odd cheeriness. “You don't seem too anxious to get back together with me, Delia. Honey. But I'm ready to settle down, I've got a few projects on. I'm going to get in touch with my parents, make everything up, I hold no grudges. And I'm going to get a job, get some decent clothes—” He laughed, holding out his ragged sweatshirt before he slipped it over his head. “I'm going to start fresh.” He'd developed an arrogant little toss of his head, almost a tic. “The next time you see me I'll be a new man.”

“You're a new man now,” I said. I got up and went down the hall to the bathroom.

His voice followed me. “You wait,” he said. “You're not going to believe it, Delia. I'm going to come and get you and you'll be so impressed—you'll be impressed out of your
mind
. Wait and see.”

I took a clean washcloth and soaped it and washed myself, and then I brushed my teeth and splashed cold water on my face. “Just go—
go!
” I kept saying softly. The running water drowned out his voice. Juliet's bathrobe was hanging from a hook, and as I put it on I heard the apartment door slam.

“Juliet!” I thought in a panic, but when I went out it was Danny: gone. Relief flowed into me with such force I had to sit down, and then I felt ashamed. What had he done, really, that I should exult in his departure? My husband had returned, dirty and down-and-out and probably unwell, had come home with me and made love to me—could he help it if he was nervous and a little brutal? After ten months, in his condition. I thought of the needle tracks—if they
were
needle tracks. Maybe they were flea bites. I thought of his tears, his accusations, his boasting, his childish promises, and I would have broken down and wept again, have writhed on the floor in an agony of grief and guilt, if I hadn't noticed just then my purse hanging open from the doorknob. My wallet stuck out. I opened it. There had been a twenty and a five and some ones and a little change, and all of it was gone, even the pennies.

Later, in bed (on clean sheets), I would say to myself: he got you where it hurts, Delia—right in the old pocketbook. It was my attempt to make light of the theft, to put it out of my mind. But when I found my wallet empty, I was overwhelmingly angry: at his betrayal of my trust, at the lowness to which he had stooped, and at myself for bringing him home with me and letting him violate my body and my bed and my feelings and my purse.

What disturbed me more than anything, I think—and it was this that sent me running to the toilet in the middle of that sleepless night to vomit up the pizza and Coke I'd consumed at the fair—was the fact that Danny was a thief. I had been a thief. The fear that we were birds of a feather, that we belonged with each other, and that when he returned for me I'd be ready for him, burned in me for many days.

When, two days later, Nina called me at work to tell me she had seen in the paper that Malcolm Madox had been shot and killed at the hardware store by an armed robber, I didn't connect it with Danny.

“Shot through the heart,” Nina said. “They found the killer sitting in a chair near the body holding a gun.” Must have been the armchair in the back room, I thought, where I used to eat my lunch. “They found a stolen car parked around the corner. The guy wouldn't give his name, apparently won't say a word. They sent him up to Connecticut Valley state loony bin for observation. Wow, I wish I could interview him! Can't you just see it? We'd sit and look at each other. Neither one of us would say a word! I could do a fabulous story on this guy!” She paused, maybe because I'd said nothing. “Hey, Delia? How do you feel about it, anyway? That a creep like Malcolm Madox is dead? I mean, are you … glad about it?”