Everville (9 page)

Joe could do that to her: Come in and change her way of being in a matter of moments. It was wonderful of course, but it was also dangerous. Sooner or later, Morton would look up at her from his meatloaf and ask her why she was sparkling tonight and she wouldn't be able to keep the truth from her lips.

"Joe," she'd say. "Joe Flicker. You know who he is. You can't miss him."

"What about him?" Morton would reply, his tight little mouth getting tighter as he spoke. He didn't like blacks.

"I'm spending a lot of time with him," she'd say.

"What the hell for?" he'd say, and she'd look up at the face she'd married, the face she'd loved, and while she was wondering when it had become so sour and sad, he'd start yelling, "I don't want you talking with a nigger!"

And she'd say, "I don't just talk to him, Morton." Oh yes, she'd love to say that. "We kiss, Morton, and we get naked, and we do-"

"Phoebe?"

She snapped out of her reverie to find Dr. Powell at her side with the morning's files.

"Oh-I'm sorry."

"We're all done. Are you all right? You look a little flushed."

"I'm fine." She relieved him of the files and he started to pick through his mail. "Don't forget you've got a Festival meeting."

He glanced up at the clock. "I'll grab a sandwich and go straight over. Damn Festival. I'll be glad when it's-Oh, I've referred Audrey Laidlaw to a specialist in Salem."

"Is it something serious?"

He tossed the letters back onto the desk. "Maybe cancer," he said.

"Oh Lord."

"Will you lock up?"

That happened, over and over. People came in to see the doctor with a headache or a backache or a bellyache and it turned out to be something terminal. They'd fight it, of course: pills, scans, injections. And once in a while they'd win. But more often than not she'd watch them deteriorate, week in, week out, and it was still hard after seven years, seeing that happen; seeing people's strength and hope and faith in things slip away. There was always such emptiness towards the end; such bitter looks on their faces, as though they'd been cheated of something and they couldn't quite figure out what. Even the churchgoers, the ones she'd see in front of the tree in the square at Christmas singing hallelujahs, had that look. God wanted them in his bosom, but they didn't want to go; not until they'd made sense of things here.

But suppose there was no sense to be made? That was what she had come to believe more and more: that things happened, and there was no real reason why. You weren't being tested, you weren't being rewarded, you were just being. And so was everybody and everything else, including tumors and bad hearts: all just being.

She had found the simplicity of this strangely comforting, and she'd made her own little religion of it.

Then Joe Flicker had been hired to paint the hallway outside the surgery, and her homemade temple had cracked. It wasn't love, she'd told herself from the start. In fact, it wasn't anything important at all. He was an opportunist who'd taken a passing fancy to her, and she'd played along because she was flattered and she always felt sexier in the summer months, so why not flirt with him a little? But the flirting got serious, and secret, and before very long she was ready to scream if he didn't kiss her. Then, he did, and she was ready to scream if they didn't go all the way. Then they had, and she'd gone home with paint marks on her breasts and her belly, and sat in the bath and cried for a solid hour, because it felt like this was a reward and a test and a punishment all in one.

It still did. She was thirty-six years old, twenty pounds overweight

(her estimation, not Joe's), with small features on a moonish face, pale skin that freckled in the sun, ginger hair (with a few strands of gray already), and a mean streak she had from her mother. Not, she had long ago decided, a particularly attractive package. In Morton, she'd found a husband who didn't know or care what he'd married, for better or worse, as long as he was fed and the television worked. A man who'd decided at thirty that the best was over and only a fool would look beyond tomorrow, who increasingly defined himself by his bigotries, and who had not touched her between her legs in thirteen months.

So how then-how, how?-had she come to her present state of grace? How was it possible that this man from North Carolina this Joe, who'd had a life of adventuring-he'd been stationed in Germany while he was in the army, he'd lived in Washington, D.C., for a while, Kentucky for a while, California for a while-how was it possible that this man had become so devoted to her?

When they talked, and they talked a lot, she wondered sometimes if he was quizzing her about her life the way he did because the same question vexed him; as though he was digging around for some clue as to what it was in her that drew him. Then again, perhaps he was simply curious.

"I can't get enough of you," he'd say over and over, and kiss her in ways and places that would have appalled Morton.

She thought of those kisses now, as she let herself into the house. It was six minutes to three. He was always on time (army training, he'd said once); six minutes and he'd be here. she'd read in a magazine a couple of weeks ago that scientists were saying time was like putty; it could be pulled and pushed, and she'd thought I could have told them that. Six minutes was six hours waiting on the back doorstep (Joe never used the front, it was too conspicuous, but the house was the last on the row and there was just wooded land beyond, so it was easy to come in from that direction unseen); waiting for a glimpse of him between the trees, knowing that once he arrived time would be squeezed in the other direction, and an hour, or an hour and a half, would fly by in a matter of moments.

There he was, pushing his way through the thicket, his eyes already upon her and never leaving her, not for a stride, of for a glance. And the clock in the living room that had belonged to Morton's mother and had never kept good time until she died, was sounding three o'clock. And all was well with the world.

they climbed the stairs unbuttoning as they went. By the time they reached the spare bedroom (they'd never made love in the marital bed) her breasts were bare, and he had his arms around her from behind, toying as they went. He loved nothing better than to pleasure her this way, his face against the nape of her neck, his chest hard against her back, his embrace absolute. She reached back to unzip him. As ever, she found her hands full.

"I've missed this!" she said, sliding her hand along his dick.

"It's been three days," he said. "I've been going crazy." He turned and sat on the edge of the bed, pulling her down so she perched on his knees, then opening her legs by opening his own. His hand went into her with unerring ease.

"Oh baby," he said, "that's what I need." He played with her, in and out. "That's the hottest pussy, baby. You got the hottest fucking pussy@' She loved to hear him say the words out loud, the dirty words she only wanted to hear or say when she was with him, the words that made her new, and ready.

"I'm going to fuck you till you're crazy. You want that?"

"Yes-"

"Tell me."

"I want you to fuck me@' She was starting to gasp.

"Now?"

"Till I'm-2'

"Yeah.

"Till I'm crazy."

She fumbled with his belt buckle, but he shoved her hands away and rolled her over, face to the quilt, hoisting up her dress and tearing down her panties. Backside in the air, legs apart, she reached behind her, the words always easier than she'd thought they'd be.

"Give me your cock."

And it was in her hands as though she'd summoned it, slick and hot-headed. She pressed it against her pussy. He held back for a few seconds, then slid it all inside, down to the zipper from which it still poked.

In the tiny committee room above the Chamber of Commerce, Larry Powell watched while Ken Hagenaner went through a full list of the weekend's activities and heard not a word, pre occupied as he was with his return home to Montana the weekend after next. And in the offices below, Erwin Toothaker waited while Dorothy Bullard called around to see if anyone could let the attorney into the old schoolhouse, where the Historical Society kept its collection, because he needed to do some urgent research. And while he waited Erwin eyed the yel lowed tape at the top of the window frames, still holding down an inch of Christmas tinsel, and the faded photographs of the mayor before last with his arms around the Bethany twins on their sixteenth birthdays, and he thought: I hate this place. I never realized till now. I hate it.

And outside, on Main Street, a youth called Seth Lundy-just turned seventeen and never been kissed-halted in the middle of the sidewalk outside the Pizza Place and listened to a sound he had not heard since Easter Sunday: the din of hammers knocking on the sky from Heaven's side.

He looked up, straight up above his head, because that was where the cracks usually began, but the blue was flaw less. Puzzled, he studied the sky for maybe fifteen minutes, during which time the meeting in the committee room was brought to a tidy conclusion, and Erwin decided to tell the truth to the largest audience he could find, and somewhere behind closed drapes in a house on the edge of town, Phoebe Cobb began to quietly weep.

"What's wrong?"

"Don't stop."

"You're crying, baby-"

"It's all right. I'll be all right." She reached behind her; put her hand on his buttocks, pressing him home, and as she did, the three words she'd kept under lock and key escaped.

"I love you."

Oh Lord, what had she said? Now he'd leave her. Run away and find some other desperate woman, who didn't tell him she loved him when all he wanted was a fuck in the afternoon. A younger woman; a slimmer woman.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"So am I," he replied.

There! He was going to pull out and leave right now.

"It's going to cause a lot of trouble, what's happening with you and me."

He kept fucking her while he talked, not missing a stroke, and it was such bliss she was sure she'd missed the sense of what he'd said. He couldn't have meant

"I love you back. Oh baby, I love you so much. I can't think straight sometimes. It's like I'm in a daze till I'm here. Right here."

It would be too cruel of him to lie, and he wasn't cruel, she knew that, which meant he was telling the truth.

Oh Lord, he loved her, he loved her, and if all the trouble in the world would come down on their heads because Of it, she didn't care.

She started to turn in his arms so that she could be face to face with him. It was a difficult maneuver, but her body was different in his arms, lusher and more malleable. Now came those kisses she could feel the day after; the kisses that made her lips burn and her tongue ache; the kisses that brought the tremors that had her shaking and hollering as though possessed. Only today there were words between them, promises of his undying devotion. And the tremors, when they came, rose from some place that was not in any anatomy book on the doctor's shelf. An invisible, unnameable place that neither God nor tumors could touch.

"Oh, I almost forgot-" he said while they were dressing, and fumbled around in the top pocket of his overalls. "I wanted you to have this. And after this afternoon-well, it's more important than ever."

He pulled out a photograph and handed it to her.

"That's my Mom, that's my brother Ron, he's the baby of the family, and that'@) my sister Noreen. Oh yeah, and that'@ me." He was in uniform, and shining with pride. "i look good, huh?"

"When was this taken?"

"The week after I came out of basic training," he said.

"Why didn't you stay in the army?"

"It's a long story," he said, his smile fading.

"You don't have to-" The phone interrupted her. "Oh shit! I'm not going to answer that."

"It could be important."

"Yeah, and it could be Morton," she said. I don't want to talk to him right now."

"We don't want him getting suspicious," Joe said, "at least till we've made up our minds how we're going to handle all this."

She sighed, nodded, and hurried down to the phone, calling back as she went: "We have to talk about this soon."

"How 'bout tomorrow? Same time?" She told him yes, then picked up the receiver. It wasn't Morton, it was Emmeline Harper, who ran the Historical Society, an overwrought woman with a puffed up view of her own importance.

"Phoebe-"

"Emmeline?"

"Phoebe, I need a favor. Dorothy just called, and apparently somebody needs to get into the schoolhouse to look through the records. I can't get over there, and I was wondering would you be a sweetheart?" No was on the tip of Phoebe's tongue. Then Emmeline said: "It's that nice Mr. Toothaker, the attorney? Have you met him?"

"Yes. A couple of years back." A bit of a cold fish, as she remembered. But maybe this wouldn't be such a bad time to talk to a man who knew the law. She could quietly quiz him about divorce, and maybe she'd learn something to her advantage.

"I mean I'm sure he's very trustworthy-I don't think for a moment he'd tamper with the collection, but I think somebody should be there to let him in and show him what's what." "Fine."

"He's over at the Chamber of Commerce. Can I call F: over and say you'll be twenty minutes?"

Society had been a repository for all manner of items relating to the city's past. One of the first and most valuable bequests came from Hubert Nordhoff, whose family had owned and run the mill that now stood deserted on the Molina road, three-quarters of a mile out of town. In the three and a half decades between 1880 and 1915, the Nordhoff Mill had pro vided employment for a good portion of Everville's citizens, while helping to amass a considerable fortune for the Nordhoffs. they had built a mansion in Salem, and another in Oregon City, before withdrawing from the blanket- and fabric-making business and putting their money into lumber, real estate (most of it in Portland), and even, it was rumored, an-naments. Hubert Nordhoff's bequest of some thousand photographs of life at the mill, along with several other pieces of memorabilia, had been widely interpreted as a belated act of contrition for his ancestor's sudden desertion; the years immediately following the closure of the mill had been Everville's darkest hour, economically speaking.