Next to Love (35 page)

GRACE DRAWS THE TUBE
of Peaches ’n’ Cream over one side of her upper lip, then the other, then across her lower. Her hand is steady as a surgeon’s. Her cold-bloodedness shocks her.

The phone rings. Her hand freezes. It is Mac, with a case of the scruples she does not have. She picks up the receiver.

“Mrs. Banks,” she hears Naomi say, and exhales in giddy relief.

“Yes?”

“I’m at Mrs. Gooding’s.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“I think you’d better get over here.”

“THE DOCTOR GAVE HIM
a clean bill of health,” Dorothy says as soon as Grace walks in the door. “Just yesterday. And then this morning … at breakfast …” She begins to cry again.

She repeats the phrases to everyone who comes to pay respects, and by noon the house is full. King was an important man. Dorothy has many women friends. “A clean bill of health,” she keeps saying. “And then this morning …”

The clean bill of health, Grace thinks, is what killed him. The prospect of all those years ahead without Charlie, all those years of his own life piling up when Charlie’s was snuffed out before he even got started. That was what stopped King’s heart.

AMY DOES NOT KNOW
why she does it. She knows it’s wrong. She doesn’t even want to do it. If her father could see her, he would know how bad she is.

The monitor from the vice principal’s office comes into the newspaper staff meeting and says she has a note for Amy Gooding. Amy can’t think of anything she has done wrong, except when she goes parking with Eddie, and the vice principal would not write a note about that. She takes the note and unfolds it.

Your mother called to say your grandfather passed away. She wants you to come home right after school
.

Amy stands staring down at the words, trying to figure out what she feels. Nothing. She supposes she’s sorry, but that’s because it’s sad to think of anyone dying. When Karen’s dog died, she and Karen both cried buckets. But now she isn’t even tearing up. Maybe if it was her father, she would be crying, but she was too little to understand when he died. Or maybe she is just a bad person. Only a bad person could not feel terrible about her own grandfather dying.

She must be staring at the note for a long time, because Eddie asks what’s up.

She does not want to tell him. She does not want to tell anybody. Why do these things keep happening to her? There must be something wrong with her. She folds the note in half again, sticks it in her pocket, and says nothing is up.

After the meeting, he asks if she feels like driving around. She puts her hand in her skirt pocket. The note is still there. She’ll have to tell her mother she never got it.

“Sure,” she says.

This time when he takes her hand and tries to put it on the bulge in his corduroys, she doesn’t pull it away. It’s not so terrible. It’s just a lump. Then he unzips his fly, and suddenly it’s in her hand, all hot and sweaty, and it is terrible. She tries to yank her hand away, but he has her wrist and is moving her hand back and forth. She doesn’t know how he can do so many things at once. One of his hands is moving hers up and down, and the other is in her blouse, and his tongue is in her mouth. She closes her eyes. She does not want to see his thing. On the back of her eyelids she sees her grandfather lying in a coffin. She is sorry now she wasn’t nicer to him.

He begins reaching under her skirt. This is where she always clamps her legs together, only now she doesn’t. She is tired of fighting him. She just wants him to like her.

He takes his tongue out of her mouth and his lips away for long enough to say something. It isn’t I’m crazy about you. It isn’t I love you. It’s don’t worry, I have something.

He lets go of her wrist. She takes her hand away. She wants to wipe it on her skirt, but she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings. Her eyes are still closed. She does not want to see it. She does not want to see what he’s doing. She is half sitting, half sprawled on the front seat. The armrest on the door is digging into her neck. He has pushed up her skirt and pulled down her pants. The air is cold on her skin. Her grandfather must be cold too. Once, when she was little, her grandmother went all over the house looking for her, and when she found her reading in her grandfather’s den, her grandmother said she was just like her father, but her grandfather said no she wasn’t.

He is climbing on top of her. She opens her eyes in time to see his face getting closer. He is holding his thing in his hand. He begins pushing it against her. She has a feeling this is not the way it’s supposed to be, but she does not know how it is supposed to be.

“Open your legs,” he says. He sounds angry again, but he can’t be angry. She’s letting him do what he has been trying to do all winter.

One leg is crushed against the back of the seat. She moves the one that’s on the floor. He’s pushing harder now, but he still can’t get in. She doesn’t see how he’s ever going to. He grabs her other leg, the one that’s crushed against the back of the seat, and pulls it up so her foot is pointing toward the roof. Her hips tilt after it. He shoves himself in. The pain goes off like a small explosion. She lets out a yelp. He doesn’t seem to hear her, but how could he above the noise he’s making. He sounds the way Frankie Hart does when he hits the finish line in a race and stands bent over with his hands on his knees, panting like a dog. It doesn’t hurt as much now, but she still wishes it would be over. Then it must be, because he groans, and stops thrusting, and flops down on her.

She wonders if she’s supposed to say something. She waits for him to. She looks past him out the window. A cold mottled moon is rising in the darkening sky. She thinks of her father lying in the cold ground. She imagines her grandfather being lowered into the dirt beside him.

He sits up and twists away from her. His hands are in front of him, and she can’t see what he’s doing, but he must be doing something, because his head is down as if he’s concentrating. He rolls down the window and throws something into the woods. Then she hears the sound of a zipper. He turns back to her. His lips are swollen, but they’re not set in the sullen line. He opens his mouth. She wonders if this is when he tells her he loves her.

“You’ll like it better next time,” he says.

THIS TIME THE WEATHER
does not mock them. A steel-gray sky stretches above the cemetery. The wind works them over like a sparring partner. Patches of snow strew the ground, dirty as old rags.

From time to time, Grace glances at her daughter, who stands between Dorothy and her. Her thick black hair hangs around her face like a shroud. Her creamy skin is mottled from the wind. Her dark eyes are red and raw, as if she has been crying for days. Grace is surprised. Amy was not any closer to King than she was. But he left his mark on them. King is the reason she sleeps alone, untouched and aching.

Something makes her turn her head away from Amy. Her eyes meet Mac’s. He has been watching her. She looks away before she can read anything in his face. No, before he can read anything in hers.

The minister is talking about King, only he calls him Charles. Like Charlie. She will never forgive King for the advice he gave her years ago. But she is grateful to him now, for helping her make up her mind.

“I WAS SURPRISED
Mac came home for the funeral,” Morris says in the car on the way home.

Grace does not answer.

“He says he’s staying for a few days. I think King’s death has him worried about his parents.”

She still does not speak.

“I invited him for dinner tomorrow night.”

Her head swivels to him. “You didn’t!”

He glances over at her, and she reads the surprise in his face, then feels the blood rising in her own.

“I just don’t think we ought to be giving dinner parties the day after King’s funeral,” she says evenly. “He was Amy’s grandfather.”

He turns back to the road and slams on the brakes just in time to keep from hitting the car in front of them.

“Mac isn’t exactly a dinner party,” he says. For the rest of the way home, he keeps his eyes on the road.

SHE HAS TO HEAD
him off, but she cannot imagine how. If he were in Boston, she could telephone him, but if she calls him in South Downs, his mother is likely to answer. Her only hope is to track him down in town. He always turns up at the drugstore at some point when he’s in town. She’ll find him if she has to spend the entire day loitering on Broad Street.

She does not have to spend the entire day. She walks by the drugstore, peers in, sees he is not there, and heads for Diamond’s. When she comes out twenty minutes later, he is driving past the front entrance of the store. He sees her, pulls the car to the curb, and leans over to the passenger side to roll down the window.

She bends until her face is on a level with the car. “I have to see you,” she says.

“I know. Get in.”

“No, that’s not what I mean.” But suddenly she wonders if it is. It would be so easy to open the door, get in, and drive away with him. “I mean I have to see you to tell you I can’t see you.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“You know it does.”

“Get in the car, Gracie, and we’ll talk about it.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. It’s wrong, and we both know it.”

“It’s not wrong. I love you.”

She shakes her head. Her hair swings in front of her face, blotting him out for a moment. If only it were that easy.

“You don’t love me.”

“Don’t tell me what I feel.”

He has never spoken to her so harshly. That should make it easier. It doesn’t.

“Get in the car, please.”

She starts to shake her head no again, then notices two women from the ladies’ historical society staring at them from across the street. She reaches for the handle, opens the door, and gets in. As he pulls out into the stream of traffic, a horn shrieks.

“Ever hear of looking, buddy?” the driver shouts.

Neither of them speaks until they have left the downtown area and are on a road out of town.

“Where are we going?” she asks. When did it become we? She went looking for him to tell him she could not see him. Now they are driving off into the countryside together. This is not turning out as she planned.

“Somewhere we can be alone.”

“No!” Her voice shrieks like the horn of the car he cut off.

“To talk. I just want to talk to you.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” she says again. “It’s over.”

He swerves onto the shoulder of the road, cuts the engine, and turns to her. She presses herself against the door until the handle digs into her back. He reaches for her hand. For a moment it lies cradled in his on the seat between them. It would be so easy to leave it there. She pulls it away.

“Don’t you see?” she says. “King’s death was a sign.”

“King’s death was a physical occurrence. His heart stopped. It has no moral significance. Death never does.” His mouth twists into a grimace as he says it, and she knows he is thinking of his time in the Pacific.

Her hand begins to lift of its own will. She wants to touch his arm, to caress his cheek, to feel his mouth in her palm. She wants to comfort him and be comforted by him. She makes her hand into a fist and jams it into her pocket.

“All right, it wasn’t a sign,” she admits. “But it made me see things clearly. We can’t do this. It’s not right.”

“It’s right for us.” His mouth caresses the words. She closes her eyes. She cannot look at his mouth. She opens her eyes, and when she speaks, she does not caress the words. She spits them out like stones.

“But not for other people.” She clenches her fist tighter until her nails are digging into her skin. “We can’t do this to Charlie.”

She sees the expression on his face and realizes what she has said. “I mean Morris.”

He turns away from her and starts the car. This time he looks in the side mirror before he pulls out, though there is little traffic.

“No, you mean Charlie.”

On the road back to town, he does not have to glance at her to know she is crying. He doesn’t care. He is too angry at her. He is too disgusted with himself. When Morris asked if he minded, he should have said yes, he minded. Yes, he was mad as hell. But he didn’t. He deserves what he gets, or rather what he will not get.

SHE WAS DRY-EYED
at the funeral, but she cried in the car with Mac, and in the weeks that follow, she finds herself tearing up at nothing. One night she lies in bed crying so bitterly that she cannot stifle the noise.

“What’s wrong?” Morris’s words float across the no-man’s-land between the beds.

“Nothing.” Another sob escapes. “I’m fine, really.”

She hears his mattress sigh as he gets up, then feels hers shift as he sits on the side of the bed.

“This isn’t about King,” he says.

There is something in his voice she has not heard before. Not sympathy. He has always been sympathetic. This is deeper, less facile, more wary, the voice of the human being beneath the cartoon husband.

He lifts the covers and gets into bed beside her. Her body freezes. He is going to console her, but she does not want his consolation, not for the loss of Mac. She knows now it is a loss.

He rubs away the tears with his thumb and smooths her hair back from her face. She waits for one of the anodyne phrases. There’s nothing to cry about. Everything is all right. I’ll take care of you. But he does not say anything. She waits for the kiss-off kiss. But he goes on stroking her hair. A moment later, his hand moves to her shoulder. He slides off the strap of her nightgown and peels down the top.

She is so surprised that she takes a moment to realize what he is doing. When she does, she is embarrassed. I don’t need your pity, she wants to scream. But she does need it. The intimacy shames her but not her body. It presses itself against him. It clings to him. It opens itself to this man who is infinitely gentle, perfectly proficient, and entirely without physical passion.

Afterward he lies stroking her damp hair back from her face again.

“I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you,” he whispers.