The Deceivers (19 page)

He went around the bed and bent over Joan and kissed her, conscious of Cindy’s eyes on him. It seemed incredible to Carl that there was not some current between him and Cindy so tangible that Joan could not help but detect it and be aware of their relationship.

“Where have
you
been?” Joan said chidingly.

He sat on the foot of her bed. “It seems I took a nap.”

“I could have guessed,” Joan said. “It always makes you look so puffy and grim.”

“I see Rosa regained her freedom.”

“This afternoon, and after the stories she told me, I’m terrified to think of what sort of case they might put in that empty bed. No more private nursing, dear, except Miss Calhoun for a few more days, maybe until I leave.”

“I think you should keep her.”

“It does mean you get a lot better service.”

Cindy stood up and said, “Well, people, I will be running along. It’s good to see you looking chipper again, Joan.”

“Thanks for stopping by, Cindy.”

She smiled at both of them and left. Carl walked back around the bed and sat on the gray steel chair she had vacated. The warmth of her was still in the metal, and even this served to awaken the little clawings of desire.

“Did Cindy come both times today?”

“Yes. She’s been very sweet. I had scads of company this evening, but they all came early and didn’t stay long. So that Gil Sullivan kept you up until all hours so you had to have a nap.”

He realized he had forgotten to get in touch with Gil. “It wasn’t such a late evening. One o’clock maybe. Or two.”

“Or three. Or maybe you didn’t get home at all.”

“Oh, I got home all right.”

“You look tired, darling. Did anything go wrong today?”

“A showdown of sorts with Ray Walsh. We’re out in the open now.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. But he can’t really do anything to hurt you, can he?”

“No, not really.”

“When I get home, I’m going to feel as if I’ve been away for a year.”

“It feels that way to me too, honey.”

“It’s such a different world, being in here. I guess it’s like being on a boat or something. You can’t do anything about it. The world goes right on, but you’re out of it for a little while.

“Did you have a chance to eat yet? I guess not, if you took a nap. You’re not losing weight, are you? You look sort of gaunt, darling.”

“I always do. Remember?”

“Please try to eat properly. Go get a nice meal somewhere. I’d think the neighbors would be feeding you more often.”

“A lot of them are on vacation.”

“I know.”

He looked at his watch. “I sort of goofed off tonight. I’m sorry.”

“Your sleep is more important than spending the whole hour and a half here. You can sleep late tomorrow, dear.”

“And I’ll see you in the afternoon, Joan.”

“Get a good dinner, now, and get lots of sleep.”

He kissed her and left. The evening visitors were leaving, moving out through the main doors to the parking lot in the July dusk. Sunset was vivid over the hills beyond the city and the river. He looked toward his car and saw Cindy standing beside it, tall and quiet, waiting for him.

He did not speak until he was close to her, until they were twenty inches apart. “Why did you do that?”

“A lot of reasons. One was that I thought it might seem odd if I never visited her in the evening.”

“It was a jolt.”

“I know. It was bad before you arrived. Then it was worse.”

“But it went off all right.”

“And that was one of the things I wanted to know.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’ll tell you when we’re alone.”

“You’re acting pretty subdued and kind of strange, Cindy.”

“I feel subdued and I feel strange and I want to talk to you.”

“What about Bucky?”

“He hasn’t phoned again, not that I know of. But I haven’t spent much time home.”

“Well … I’ll see you there.”

“Have you eaten?”

“No.”

“I’ll stop on the way and pick up some food. Don’t forget to tell them at the motel office. About tomorrow.”

“Do you think … we should?”

“Why not? Three days, four days, a month. We were guilty after the first hour.”

“Well …”

“Here’s the key, darling. I’ll take longer than you will.”

   When he went into the motel office after parking the car in front of twenty, the same man came out of the back room and said, “Good evening, Mr. Garroway.”

“We’d like to stay another night. Tomorrow night. The … paint isn’t dry yet.” And he wondered why he found it necessary to make any explanation at all, particularly one which sounded so awkward and feeble.

The man picked up his fifteen dollars and said, “I hope you’ve been comfortable.”

“Yes, we have. You have a very nice place here. Very nice.”

“Your wife has been enjoying our pool.”

“Yes, I know.”

“She’s a beautiful swimmer, Mr. Garroway.”

“Uh … thank you.”

“Good night, Mr. Garroway.”

“Good night.”

Back in the room he turned on the bedside lights. Her black and yellow swim suit hung on a towel rack. He touched it. It was slightly damp. Her blue-handled hair brush was on the glass shelf over the lavatory, her yellow toothbrush next to his green one in the rack. He went out and sat on the bed and lit a cigarette. The closet door was ajar and he could see some of her clothing hanging there. There was a
book on the night table. He opened it and read in it at random, flipped it shut.

He opened the door when she knocked. She carried a brown paper sack, and she kissed him on the corner of the mouth as she went by him toward the bureau. “Goodies,” she said. “Monstrous thick hamburgs, and some goopy pecan rolls with a little thing of sweet butter, and some big things of black coffee.”

“You’re gay all of a sudden.”

“I’m a creature of mercurial moods. Haven’t you noticed? Where’ll we eat? Say, pull that luggage rack over here. This is lovely. No dishes to wash. I detest and despise all dishes except the kind you throw away.”

She refused to be serious. As they ate she chattered about the people she had met by the pool that afternoon. His spirits lifted to match her air of gaiety.

After they had eaten he looked across at her as he sipped his coffee, looked into the gray-blue eyes that had become suddenly grave and felt unaccountably uncomfortable.

“Carl, I said I had a lot of reasons for visiting Joan again this evening,”

“Yes?”

“I didn’t tell you the most important one. I had to find out how selfish I am.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

She indicated the room and all that had happened in it with an expressive wave of her hand. “Hasn’t this been perfect?”

“You know it has.”

“Too perfect to let go of, Carl.”

“Now wait a minute, Cindy.”

“Now please let me say all of this, and it isn’t easy to say. I’ve been going over it in my mind all day. My marriage is a farce. I know that so much more clearly than I did before we came here. I love you and I want to be married to you.”

He looked at her and could not deny her terrible sincerity. “But …”

“And I decided another thing too. I decided I would spring this on you, and then I wouldn’t let it turn into a discussion. This isn’t the time for it, darling. Or the place. I know that it isn’t just an attempt on my part to rationalize a situation that might look awfully messy to any outsider. Man creeping off with his neighbor’s wife and all that. It
is a messy thing, but it doesn’t seem messy to me—at least not so messy that I’ve got to build up a big marriage thing. My conscience isn’t hurting me that badly. My conscience is pretty tender, but nothing like I thought it would be. It’s just that I can’t bear to think that all of this will be over after tomorrow night. And it isn’t just the sex thing. That’s been entirely colossal, I’ll admit, but it’s just as importantly the times in between, the talking and the jokes and the fun. We fit together in all ways. And that is something so damn rare, something so few people ever find in life, that only the damnedest of damned fools would let it slip out of their fingers once they find it. Oh, I know how messy it would be—all the scenes and recriminations and how could you do this to me? But your kids are old enough to adjust, and mine are so little it won’t much matter. Don’t say a word. We aren’t going to talk about it now. You do as much thinking about it as I’ve done, and then we’ll talk. But not here. This is the clandestine place. We’ll talk on Sunday in my house or yours, very sanely and objectively. And if you say no …” Her smile was twisted and sad. “… I might survive it, but at the moment I don’t see how. And now finish your coffee, darling, because I’m getting positively feverish just sitting here and looking at you.”

   He left the motel at eleven o’clock on Saturday morning and arrived home at quarter of noon, feeling torpid and drained of all vitalities. After he had showered he put on a robe and phoned Gil Sullivan on the bedroom phone.

“Gil? Carl Garrett.”

“Well, how you doing, boy? Haven’t seen you since we settled the whole school problem in one hour at Herman’s. What’s on your mind?”

“Is Madge still out of town?”

“I’ve got one more week of debauchery, if I can last that long, boy.”

“If it should come up, and I don’t expect it will, I … I was with you Thursday night, Gil.”

After a short silence Gil said, “Oh, no, pal! Not you!” And started to laugh.

Carl waited him out. “Is it all right?”

“Anything for a friend. Where were we?”

“We met at the Brower and started from there.”

“What I want to know is, did we have a good time?”

“Just dandy. Thanks, Gil.”

“Don’t thank me. I thank you for brightening up my little sordid day. Is she anybody I know?”

“It probably won’t come up.”

“But if it does, my friend, I will do the most beautiful cover job you ever saw—the kind I expect from my friends and they never come through with.”

After Gil he phoned Molly Raedek, planning to make some excuse. But when she answered, he quietly hung up the phone. It would be just too damn awkward to get out of it at this late hour. It would be better to go and leave as soon as he decently could. Cindy would certainly understand.

He dressed in work pants and a T shirt, made a stale bread sandwich and drank a can of beer with it, then trundled the yellow power mower out of the storage compartment of the garage. It started on the third pull. As he followed it back and forth, settling into the dull rhythm of the work, his mind was freed to think of Cindy.

At one time in the night it had seemed almost possible, a new marriage, a new young bride, an escape from all the established routines, from Mrs. Brisbie and Ray Walsh and the school problem and the mortgage payments. At one time in the long night, when his head was pillowed on her sweet resilient flesh and he could hear, commingled, the steady trudge of her sleeping heart, the depth of her breathing, the whispery hush of the air-conditioning, the barely audible night-drone of transport trucks on the turnpike beyond the locked windows, it had seemed to him that this could be the beginning of a second life for him, a rare chance to live two separate existences, too valuable to miss merely because of emotional scruples. Cindy was a link to all the long-ago dreams that had been given up, making vivid once again all the islands he had never seen, the far places and the magic.

But now, as he walked behind the rackety chug of power mower, that half-asleep man so tenderly cradling the sleeping flesh in tired arms seemed a ludicrous stranger.

He cannot be me. Not as I mow this lawn I planted on this land I own. Not here at this small green place where my children have played, Where I have worked while Joan, kneeling in the sun, has grubbed with green trowel at the roots of the planted things so that I, crisscrossing the lawn behind this whirling blade, have glanced at fabric tight across her and felt the familiar and accustomed pulse and
tingle of contented connubial desires. All this, with Cindy, could not have happened to such a man as I believe I am.

If there was magic with Cindy, it would soon be gone. Nothing could long endure so precariously founded on heartbreak, on remorse and regret. He remembered a couple he had met when they had last visited his parents in Florida. Nelson Helvey had been a life-long friend of Bill and Betty Garrett. At forty-three, after a turbulent and reckless affair, Nelson Helvey had divorced his wife after twenty years of marriage and married a twenty-one-year-old girl employed in his building supply business, a dark and vivid and restless girl named Veronica.

Perhaps, for Nelson Helvey, there had been a time of magic, a resurgence of youthful juices. But when Carl had seen them again in Florida, Nelson was sixty-six, Veronica forty-four. He had retired after his second mild coronary, and he was a feeble and pasty old man, grotesque in shorts and sandals and Italian sports shirt, wearing an empty smile. The provocative Veronica had been dried and withered by the years to a brown little simian woman with a face deeply grooved by discontent and petulance, with the purpled tinge of dye in her black hair, her manner fraudulently vivacious, her speech filled with habitual venom. It was apparent that their time of sexual infatuation twenty-three years before had condemned them to a loveless pact, a dry endurance wherein she despised him for the wastage of her younger years, and he resented her as the symbol of the loss of contact with his children and grandchildren. Bill and Betty Garrett, in their warm and wholesome affection, their time-mellowed little jokes and gestures, had provided a striking contrast. Carl’s mother had told him that though the Helveys lived less than a mile down the key, they had only seen them three times in two years. She said the Helveys traveled with a younger group.

Carl felt alarmed when he thought about Cindy’s compulsion to talk of marriage. He thought that he knew why it was necessary to her. There was a basic decency about her. They had been trapped into the situation by strong physical desire. But once the keenest edge had been taken from that desire, she could not accept this picture of herself as suburban adulteress. She could not reconcile her vision of herself with the kind of motel affair endemic to a Martha Garron or a Gil Sullivan. Since she could not endure being so classified and could not accept such a harsh reappraisal
of herself, then it became a most necessary rationalization to begin to play for keeps. That would justify the affair, and rub out the stain of cheapness. And, of course, it made it much more dramatic. And, in her restlessness, in the disappointments of her marriage, she had a quickening need for the dramatic.