Area of Suspicion (16 page)

She shifted her position slightly. “After dinner I cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher. By … by the time … by the time I …”

She had begun to lose the thread of her story. Her voice had begun to get deeper and rougher, and the precision of her diction had begun to blur. I knew what was happening. I should have long since capped the little bottle of scented oil and gone back to my seat on the low wall. I had told myself to do just that. I had told myself many times. Her back as amply protected against the sun of late afternoon. But instead of stopping, I was making longer, slower strokes, one stroke for each two beats of my heart.

“By the time I got back into the living-room, he … he had fallen … had fallen asleep on … asleep on … the couch. I … I covered … covered him … with a … covered him with a blanket … covered him …”

Her voice had become a sulky, whispering, rasping sound and her breathing had become long and deep. I had increased the firmness of my stroke, so that each long stroke, from waist to shoulder, moved her, back and forth,
an insistent inch or two, face down on the quilted white plastic of the chaise.

She had begun to arch against each long pressure of my hand. Her back, I swear it, had flowered and luxuriated and changed under my touch, sleek, flexing, hypnotic. I had split into two Gevan Deans who could not communicate with each other. One watched it all, shamed by it, made wretched by this compulsion, wracked by the awareness of immediate guilt and the greater guilt yet to come, the way a child, in the midst of some private act it thinks evil, will yearn to stop and cannot. The other Gevan stroked the oiled, trembling, gasping woman, taking a hard joy in this way of reducing her, through her own need, into a savage helplessness. And throughout that time that could not be measured, after she had lost the ability to talk, there was the knowledge of the empty house, the empty sunny afternoon, bird sounds in the distant spring birches, the sliding sound of my hand upon her, the tearing sounds, like tiny snorings, that had begun to accompany her rough inhalations.

She eeled violently around with a great broken cry, two vowel sounds, as though she were trying to call out my name but could not fit the straining softnesses of her mouth to the consonants. The sun shrank the pupils of her eyes so that they were wide and blind and monstrously blue. She lunged upward, breasts aimed and tumid, to clasp me and pull me down, gasping and whining in her peak of need to accomplish the specifics of my defeat and depletion.

So I took my brother’s widow, violent, oiled and naked, squirming and thrusting on quilted white plastic on a redwood chaise on a walled fieldstone terrace in April sunshine, out of the wind, protected by all the formal stature of the dead man’s house. It was without grace, dignity, tenderness or affection. It was like trapping in some narrow place something hard to kill, then killing it clumsily, violently, in fear and hate, with dreadful weapons, killing it as quickly as you can.

When at last she stirred and made a small sound of irritable impatience, I moved to release her. She got up,
scowling at the sun glare, stooped and picked the two scraps of yellow terry from the stone. In picking them up she lost her balance and had to take a quick step to catch herself. She walked heavily to the big glass door that opened into the bedroom. She pulled it open and walked on into the shadowy room without speaking or looking back, and the last I could see of her, fading like the smile of Alice’s cat, was the almost luminous whiteness of the alternating clench of her buttocks.

I sat on the edge of the chaise. I bent over and retrieved my cigarettes and lighter from the tumble of my clothing, then swept it aside with the edge of my foot. I sat with my arms braced on my knees, staring down at the pattern of the stone between my bare feet. I felt dull, heavy, hairy and degraded, a fleshy animal who had reached the end of all its own precious pretention. I studied the brave beach-boy tan on my legs, and the slight continuous trembling of the fingers that held the cigarette. I heard a distant sound and identified it as the sound of a shower.

A man can acquire a false image of himself too easily. I sat numbed by the collapse of an image. I had sold myself a concept of a certain basic dignity and decency—call it a Gevan Dean ethic. But now I saw the inner sickness. It was a weakness. I repeated to myself that sad rationalization of all hollow trivial men: The libido has no conscience.

I sat in the listless carapace of my traitor flesh, spent, and sticky with Niki’s sun oil and my drying sweat. I thought of Ken, and the vinegary tears of shame and self-pity began to squeeze out of my eyes, weak and stinging.

The shower sound had stopped. The sun began to touch the black tops of the poplars. I saw something out of the corner of my eye, a movement in the doorway. “Gevan?”

I turned my head slowly and looked at her. She held a big blue towel in front of her, covering her from throat to knee. Her mouth was pale without lipstick and she had the grace not to smile.

“You can use the shower now,” she said in the tone she
would use with her maid. “Turn left through the bedroom.” She backed away and disappeared.

A few minutes later I picked up my clothing and went inside. I dropped my things in a heap on the cherry-red carpeting and paused a moment to look at the luxurious room. It was big enough to accommodate two oversize double beds and shrink them to the proportion of twin beds. There was a special quietness about that room. At the far end was a couch, deep chair, low bookshelves, built-in television and music.

It was a bedroom for two people who loved each other. I thought of the tragic euphemism for what Niki and I had just done. It was called making love. Whatever it was we had made, it was not love. When she had ripped my back and bellowed her pain and completion, it was not love. Love has tenderness. What we had done was more suitable for the fetid cave of the Neanderthal after gorging on the steaming meat of one of the great carnivores.

Fluorescence turned the big bathroom into a brightness adequate for brain operations. The air was faintly steamy and elusively fragrant. The top corners of the mirrors were coated with a dwindling mist. She had laid out a big coral towel for me, precisely folded. Resting on the towel was one of those little kits luxury hotels provide the guest who stays over unexpectedly; aseptically packaged in a plastic bubble, shaving things, comb, toothbrush, nailfile, deodorant. The service was, I thought sourly, very complete in every shade of meaning of the word.

The shower, once I had learned the procedure on all the chrome dials and knobs, was superb. Such a shower inevitably makes some improvement in the morale. I was as low as I had ever been in my life. Improvement was the only possibility. I stayed in the shower a long time.

When I walked back into the bedroom with the coral towel knotted around my waist, she was curled in a deep chair by the window, her legs pulled up, a glass in her hand. She wore a pleated tailored white blouse, a narrow navy skirt. Her shining hair was pulled back tightly, and she had
been very sparing with makeup. On a squat table beside her chair was a silver tray, a silver shaker frosted with moisture, a plump fragile cocktail glass like hers.

I realized the cleverness behind the effect she made, and had to appreciate it even though I knew it was contrived. This not only suggested her office costumes of long ago, reminding me of better times than these, but it had a clean and impersonal look that made things a little easier. Had she chosen a sensuous outfit, a revealing housecoat for example, and combed her hair long for me, she could possible have turned my stomach.

“Daiquiri here, if you want one, dear,” she said. “Help yourself.” She smiled at me in a shy, tentative way.

I went near her and poured the drink. It had a tart clean taste. “Good,” I said.

“Your clothes were messy with that sun lotion.” “I’m a mad, impulsive creature.”

“You wouldn’t want to take them to the hotel. I’ve bundled them up. I know where I can drop them off myself and pick them up and keep them here until you can collect them. I … laid some things out on the bed.”

I went over and looked. The things from my pockets were spread out. There were shorts, socks, a white shirt still in its retail cellophane, slacks that would look well enough with my jacket.

“You don’t mind?” she asked in a meek voice.

“Somehow I can’t get worked up about taking over his clothes. I’ve moved in on something more private than that.”

“He wore those slacks twice. They’re just back from their first trip to the cleaners. Everything else is brand new.”

She had laid out my belt, tie and shoes. “I told you it isn’t important. How could it be, now?”

“But you had me first!” she said with such despair I turned and looked across the room at her. Dusk had come into the room. Her face was a paleness against shadows,
just a little duskier than her blouse. “Long before him! You had me first!”

“That gives me special rights?” I said. I dropped the towel. She turned and looked out the window and sipped her drink. I dressed in my brother’s clothing. The slacks were too big in the waist and too short, but not ludicrously so. The shirt sleeves were short. I dressed and put my jacket on and refilled my glass and sat on the couch, facing her.

“Gevan.” she said softly, “we both knew it would happen sooner or …”

“You were saying that he had fallen asleep and you had covered him with a blanket.”

“Gevan! Darling!”

“What happened after you covered him with the blanket?”

“But this is cruel! I want to talk about us.”

“Baby, I thank you sincerely for the shower, the clothes, the rum and the roll in the hay, but don’t make the mistake of thinking I am going to let you milk it for kicks by talking circles around it. You were telling me you covered him with a blanket.”

She looked down into her drink for a long time. At last she shivered and straightened and lifted her chin and looked at me without expression. “I read until I finished my book. It was midnight. I went in and shook Ken awake and told him the time and told him I was going to bed. He said he had a headache and he was going to go out and see if the night air would help. I told him less liquor was the only thing that could help him. He didn’t answer me. That was the last thing I ever said to him. It’s a very loving farewell, isn’t it?”

“You never know about such things in advance. How could you?”

“Thanks, darling. I came in here and went to bed. The bed on the right is mine. I left his bedlamp and the bathroom lights on. I was drifting off so quickly that when I heard the shot I thought it was part of a dream that had just begun. I began to wonder if he had fallen, or knocked something
over. It’s unbelievably quiet up here at night. I tried to go back to sleep, but I kept wondering what I had heard. I put on my robe and slippers and went through the house, calling him, but there wasn’t any answer. I went outside and called. I knew I could be heard a long distance in the stillness. I walked around the whole house, and finally I was yelling so loudly I got hoarse the next day.

“I got a flashlight and went down the drive toward the gate. He was on the grass just inside the gate, near the lilacs. It isn’t a gate really, just two posts with lights on top that you drive between. You saw it when you came here. The lights were out.

“When I found him I didn’t think it was him. He looked so shrunken and little and flat against the ground, and his clothes looked too big for him. His face was bulging and horrible, and they say that happens because of the pressure of the bullet on the brain and …” She lost control for a few moments. She sat very still with her eyes shut, but when she opened them she continued in the same level voice.

“I can’t really remember running to the house. The police came quickly. I had put a blanket over him. I knew he wouldn’t want people looking at him the way he was. It was the same blanket I’d used to cover him after his drinks knocked him out. A lot of police came, and Lester and Stanley came. There were a lot of questions. I started to go to pieces. My doctor came and gave me a shot, and a nurse stayed here with me. I didn’t wake up until late Saturday morning. I phoned you then but … I couldn’t get you. You know the rest.” She carefully refilled her glass.

“Yes,” I said. “I know all the rest, including your mourning methods.”

She stared at me. I wanted to smash her with my own guilt. But I had pushed it too far. She laughed at me, with derision and amusement. “
My
mourning methods! Oh, you are so blameless, Gevan Dean!” I knew, even in the dusk light, how the blue of her eyes had deepened. I saw the arched lines of her mouth, arrogant and sensuous. “Are you
going to convince yourself you were raped, darling? It was a good trick, if you were, you know. My back was turned, wasn’t it? Were you just trying to do the best job of oiling a lady’s back that had ever been done? For God’s sake, let’s both try to be honest. It might be the only virtue we have left, you know. We’ll call it
our
mourning procedure—for husband and brother. You see, darling, I have less to regret than you. I’m the one who didn’t love him.”

She rose to her feet and took two slow steps to stand tall over me, tall and mocking, sleek and resilient in her skin, smug in the aftermath of satisfactions. Long before, when we had known we would be married, we had found in each other an endless hunger for physical love. She had been marvelous to be with. She had demanded her pleasures with a boldness and a joy which had been a constant source of re-excitement to me. But the Niki I had known then was but an inquisitive emotional girl compared to the woman of riper body who stood before me, laughing at me. This one was in a full torrent of her maturity, aware of her strengths and their uses, her driving needs and just what would be most assuasive to them.

I lowered my face into my hands and felt her sit quickly beside me. She wrapped gentle fingers around my right wrist. “Let’s not try to hurt each other,” she whispered.

“You make it sound easy.”

“Maybe we can do incredible things, darling. Like turning the calendar back a long way. It was all so good once upon a time. If we look for it, maybe we can find it again. Remember me? My name is Niki. I’m your girl.”