Onyx (45 page)

“You were right about the pull of the Pacific's current. I swam out a bit far, that's all. Mr. Sandoz's boat came along and he picked me up.”

Elisse noticed a thickset, Mexican-looking man in a yellow slicker and black waterproof boots who was politely looking the other way.

“I'd like to give him something for his troubles,” Justin said. “Sweet, come on upstairs.”

He returned to the lobby with his wallet.

Elisse took her clothes into the bathroom, hanging them on the door while she showered: she let the sharp jets of water strike her face and her sensitive nipples, let her bobbed hair get wet as she bent to soap the knee that had been grazed in her fall. She was accepting how much she had wanted to be melted, fused, converted into part of Justin.
He needs
me
like he needs leprosy or lockjaw
, she thought,
but being Justin he can't suggest the cure for a bollixed up mixed marriage
. So what if she were crying? The shower washed away her tears.

She was toweling herself when she heard him return: she stayed in the bathroom, dressing in her powder blue costume, straightening the clocks that ran up the sides of her stockings, carefully adjusting her felt hat. In the outfit Miss Kaplan had worn to work on the thirtieth, she emerged.

Justin, who was dressed in gray flannels and a soft shirt, raised one black eyebrow. “Formal?”

“I'm going back to Los Angeles,” she said quietly.

“To make our peace with your parents?”

Would they let her in the door? What did it matter? She could not go back to Rodeo Drive. To return to their house would be treachery to every leap of crazy, unrequited love she bore this large, handsome, composedly smiling gentile, her husband. “
I'm
going back. Alone.”

Getting to his feet, he said, “Because I swam a bit long?”

“It's how you would plan it,” she said in the same dispirited voice. “Work up a swimming routine so it'd look like a simple drowning accident. Proper. Polite.”

“You don't really believe that I …?”

“I'm not stupid, Justin,” she sighed. “It's too obvious to quibble about.”

“The shock, Elisse. You're overreacting.”

“We're an emotional lot,” she said. “Especially when our near and dear try self-destruction.” She was easing off the wedding band. The Tijuana jeweler had sized the ring, his smallest, too tightly, and she had trouble getting it over the knuckle. As she set down the gold band it made a light clink on the glass top of the vanity. “You don't have to make up excuses. Good-bye and good lock—
adiós
, as they say south of the border.”

His eye twitched involuntarily. “You're serious, aren't you?”

“A Mexican judge said a few words over us, another will unsay them. It's no capital crime, an elopement that hasn't worked.”

“You think you're my problem?” he asked, surprised.

“What else?”

“You're the only thing in my life that's right.”

“But you were trying to …”

He sighed, nodding. “I swam out too far every morning, thinking if it happens, then it happens. Today the rip caught me and I couldn't get in. God, I struggled. Elisse, I swam like hell. And kissed Mr. Sandoz for rescuing me.”

“Justin, why now? What is so terrible, if it isn't me? Why on our honeymoon?”

“That's a fine thing to do to you, isn't it?” He stood by the window, which was open so that the cold, salt wind rustled Venetian-blind slats at him. “I always assumed I was one kind of person. Not spectacularly decent or fair, but aiming to be. Now I see that fairness and decency are a luxury of a stable life.” His face was turned from her so she could not see his expression. “Tom Bridger's my father.”

The words made no sense to Elisse, so she interpreted them as symbolism. “Isn't that carrying admiration a bit far?”

“He slept with my mother. He did not marry her.”

In her consternation, Elisse sat down. Her confusion spun irrationally around what Justin had told her outside Verona's: Tom Bridger had never even invited him to lunch in the Onyx executive dining room. “A well-kept secret?” she said finally.

“I found out on Zoe's wedding night. I've tried to tell you, tried often. I couldn't. I don't much like being a bastard.” He pronounced it
barstard
, English-style.

“Oh, Justin, with
me
you're ashamed?”

“With everybody. At first I was in shock. Well, maybe a more accurate way to put it would be that I wasn't thinking straight. I still can't. Nothing, not one single part about myself, is what I imagined it. I can't get a bead on anything. I'm one solid mass of confusion. A ruddy ogre. I want to dig up her poor bones, Mother's, and scatter them. I hate my fa—Claude Hutchinson. He treated me magnificently, as though I
were
his son. I ache to strangle Hugh and Tom. Hugh's been fantastically generous. Tom's been good. But they lied to me, Elisse, all of them. Every minute of my existence has been a lie.”

The white linen of his shirt went taut against his shoulders as he raised his arms to clench the window frame. He needed comfort, kindness. She had none to give.

“
I
never lied to you,” she said in a tight voice. “In all this mental
sturm und drang
, Justin, what made you decide to come here and marry me?”

“Instinct, pure and simple. I never questioned it.”

“Where would a man be without a loyal little woman at his side while he plays Pacific roulette?”

“Don't—”

“If Mr. Sandoz hadn't come along trolling his nets, you know what I'd've been stuck with the rest of my life? That you'd done yourself in to escape me. How's that for a pleasant memory?”

He made a peculiar grunting noise.

She realized he was weeping.

Her indignation evaporated. It shocked her that Justin, handsome, rich, strong, disciplined, the man with everything, would weep.
Oh, you imbecile
, she told herself,
of course he can cry! He tried to kill himself, for God's sake
! Once again that terror for his safety was melting her bones. She clasped both arms around his waist, curving herself to his quaking back. He turned, burying his wet face in the hollow where her shoulder met her neck.

She was engulfed by a lust so pure that it seemed metaphysical, the desire that a parched, yearning woman experiences when a warrior husband returns from the long wars; it was only by the procreative act that she could assure herself of Justin's survival. She kissed his black hair, which smelled of salt and was still damp, kissed his cheek, then opened her mouth on his. Her hands moved between his buttocks. He was caressing her with the same explicit urgency. Neither of them spoke, there was never a thought of undressing; she pushed off her step-ins while he tore at his trousers, sending a button rolling across the floor. They fell onto the rumpled bed. Her thighs spread, her pelvis arched up. “We're not leaving each other, Elisse, not ever,” his voice rumbled as he went into her. “We belong to each other.”

Involuntary spasms convulsed her womb, shaking along her thighs, her belly, increasing in violence as if she were being torn apart that an unreasoning, mindlessly ecstatic creature might be born. Her pupils swollen, she looked up at Justin in surprise. “Oh, I love you forever and ever, darling,” she gasped, her hands flailing on his shoulders as if urging him to move more swiftly. She rose up and down to meet him, crying incoherently that she loved him, forever.… Oh, forever. With a sobbing cry he collapsed on her.

Chill ventilation from the open window cooled their sweat-glossed bodies. Justin pulled one of the blankets over them.

“Nice Justin,” she said.

“Nice Elisse.”

Shyly, she kissed the arch of his nose.

“The one thing I am sure of is that I belong to you,” he said.

She wondered that even in her anxiety she had doubted this. Justin's innate decency would balk at marrying her, any woman, without love.

“Those
things
,” she said. “You didn't use one.”

“Are you angry?”

“You're the one who always remembered. Was it because you didn't want to leave me with a little one?”

Embarrassment showed on his face, but he said firmly, “That's over. We're going to forget that.”

“No more polar bear swims, Justin.”

“That's the easiest promise I've ever made,” he said. “I don't want to die. Today I proved it to myself.”

They were lying side by side. She twined her fingers in his. “Tell a simple young girl from the sticks, are there other ways of, uh, prevention?”

“I think a doctor can prescribe some gadget for the woman. I don't know much about it either.” He kissed her cheek. “I never realized until just now that the rubber was ruining things for—”

“Never!” she interrupted. “Everything we do is very fine. But that now … it was bliss, sheer bliss.” She looked at him in alarm. “Justin, what if I'm having a baby?”

He smiled. “It's a bit late to worry. And what if you are? We're married.” He flinched. “Elisse, how could he leave Mother in the lurch? He loved her!” Justin's eyes were desperate.

She pulled his face to the rumpled pale blue wool over her breasts.
Thy people shall be my people, darling
, she thought,
but I cannot for the life of me understand them
.

III

The cloudy weather continued, and many of the hotel guests left. Justin and Elisse walked along the deserted beach for hours, he with his trouser legs rolled up, she bare-legged, their purple-tinged feet marking parallels in the wet sand. This was a new Justin, bewildered, with frown lines between his deep-set blue eyes as he spoke about his past. He desired, she understood, to unfold his life to her, and this opening-up served double duty as a catharsis of his morbid inner pressures. He discussed his relationships from a scrupulously fair distance, he omitted damaging evidence, yet even so there were times when she had to pretend it was blowing sand that caused the water in her eyes. The image that rasped most at her heart was Tom Bridger showing Caryll some vast, cacophonous new machinery at the Hamtramck while Justin, a tall, doubtless somewhat gangly, adolescent, trailed, too proud to beg for attention yet bereft at being ignored by a man he admired, a lonely shadow attached to the real substance of parental affection.
Justin was recently orphaned
, Elisse thought in belated partisan grief:
even if the boy weren't his own son, didn't Tom Bridger know there's a constitutional restraint on cruel and unusual punishment
?

“About my financial situation,” Justin said five days after the watery debacle. “I don't have any savings.” He did not mention that Zoe's magnificent trousseau and her wedding had wiped him out. “There's a trust fund from my great uncle. Zoe and I can't touch the principle—our children will be the remaindermen. My share of the interest's no fortune, only about three thousand a year.”

“Sounds big to
me
. I toil for a hundred and twenty a month,” Elisse said. She had telephoned Columbia, and a disgruntled Mr. Briskin had told her that if she were back in a couple of weeks, she'd still have a job. “We're in clover, Justin. Why not wait a bit before you decide what you'll do?”

“I know what I'm going to do.” He halted, squinting at the bleak purple line of the horizon. “Pretty soon we'll go back,” he said.

“To Detroit?”

“I had things set up so they could manage the shutdown without me. But the changeover's a far bigger job. It's never been done on this scale. To build the Seven every single piece of machinery will have to be new. In Woodland alone that's thousands of machines, some of them monsters. There'll be new layouts in every assembly plant.”

“You're telling me—” Her voice cracked with astonishment. “You mean after all that's happened you're staying at Onyx?”

“If Tom wants me.” He skidded a flat stone across a wavelet—the tide was out. “If we can look each other in the eye once things are out in the open. I don't mean publicly, of course, but between him and me.”

“You're not an indentured servant. You don't owe him one red bean, Justin.”

“It isn't a matter of owing, Elisse. I can't run away from what I am.”

She shivered, terrified for Justin, who was returning to the fishbloods who had driven him to within an ace of doing himself in, and she nursed a far lesser anxiety on her own behalf about meeting Justin's sister, who was a gorgeous Society girl who appeared in the news-reels. Yet she did not argue. Justin was responding to that atavistic pull that few, apparently, could resist: he was searching for the ties to his progenitor. She reached her arm to encircle his waist. They sloshed through icy yellow-white spume. “I saw some railroad schedules on the front desk,” she said.

IV

Hugh ordered telegrams dispatched to Onyx dealers around the world:
JANUARY 12 1927/ MAKE WAY FOR THE SEVEN/ TODAY LAST FIVER ROLLS OFF LINE
. Hugh also arranged that the press be at Woodland and that Onyx movie photographers film Tom as he accompanied the last engine block down the main assembly. Tom shook hands with many of the close-standing ranks of his employees, who afterward stared down at their suddenly idle hands as they accepted that they were being laid off in the midst of an exceptionally cold winter. Around two that afternoon the final bolt was tightened on the dark gray car. An eerie silence wadded the endless hall. Almost exactly one half of the cars in the United States were Fivers, and now there would be no more.

Snowflakes drifted from mottled clouds as Tom drove the last Fiver to the Triple E Building. A crowd stood under the canopy that sheltered the replica of the quadricycle. Tom tried to make a connection with the hungry, obsessed twenty-year-old who had driven the original, but peering through the tunnel of the years, he could see only Antonia's enormous, dark glowing eyes. As he halted the executives, engineers, reporters, and guests applauded. A path was made for Maud, bulky in her sable coat, as she came heavily down the shallow steps.