Away from Home (46 page)

She in turn spoke about Margie. What could she say about Margie? What was there to say? The only definite clue Margie had given her was the admission “Neil and I hadn’t slept together since Christmas Eve.” But even that was really not an answer, because Helen knew by now that sleeping together was not always a bond; it was sometimes only a habit. It had become only a habit between her and Bert since that night before she had gone away with Sergio. Perhaps it was more to Bert, but not to her, not now. Bert never mentioned the difference. Helen wondered if he cared.

She went to the club several times, and the women were very anxious to hear from her all the details of the Davidows’ separation. She said she knew nothing about it. Two or three of them said, “Of course you do!” and persisted. “Tell us! You know if anyone does. Is it that girl in Neil’s office?”

“Why don’t you mind your own business for a change?” Helen said. “Or is it too boring?” After she said that she was ashamed. The women probably thought she was a bitch. Well, she felt like a bitch. Of course their own business was too boring. If Margie hadn’t been her best friend, if she didn’t love Margie, she probably would have been asking those same nosy questions; the only thing that stopped her was not virtue or self-control but the fact that she knew now how real the pain of the answers was. It was not abstract gossip any more for her; she had come too close to it in her own life.

The only one she said any more to about it was Mort Baker. She met him on the street one day at the end of March, the same day Margie had come to visit her looking alive again. Mort’s new apartment had no telephone and he seemed to have disappeared from everyone’s life after Carnival. He looked very suntanned and good.

“Why don’t you go to see her?” Helen said. “It would cheer her up.”

He nodded without replying, just nodded slowly twice, still looking stunned from her news. At first she thought he was either just stunned or had many other plans which a visit to Margie would interfere with, but then she saw a secret, withdrawn look on his face and she recognized it as an expression she had sometimes seen on Roger’s. It was the elaborate casualness that masked excitement.

“Well, I’m going to split now,” he said, and gave her a half wave of his hand. He disappeared into a café on the corner. It was a sidewalk café and there were several people seated at tables drinking beer or waiting for people. But he went into the back room where the bar and telephone were, and Helen felt pleased. Mort was a good friend. He was slightly crazy, but he was a good friend.

That night Bert went out to dinner with some business people from São Paulo. He told her he would not be home late. At eight o’clock Margie telephoned.

“Can you come to the movies with me?” Margie asked.

“Didn’t Mort Baker call you? I met him on the street today. He said—”

“Yes,” Margie said. “He wanted me to have dinner with him but I was too tired. Please come to the movies. I don’t want to go alone.” Her voice sounded odd.

“All right. I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes.” She left a note for Bert saying, “Going to the movies with Margie. Love, H.,” kissed her children good night, and drove to Margie’s in the car which was temporarily in running order. She was glad to get out of the house herself.

There was no film that both of them had not seen except something in German with Portuguese subtitles about a beautiful blind girl who needed an operation. Neither of them cared, so they went to see that. When the film was over they drove to Bob’s and ate American ice cream at the counter on the sidewalk and they talked casually about things that did not matter.

“I’m going to have dinner with him tomorrow,” Margie said finally.

“With whom?”

“Mort. It’s funny, we know him so well, but I feel funny about going out with him alone. It’s sort of like a … date.”

“That’s why you didn’t go with him tonight, isn’t it? But you can’t go into
mourning
, Margie. You have to see your good friends.”

“I know,” Margie said softly. “But it’s different now. I don’t know why. All of a sudden I’m scared of him.”

“Of Mort? Why?”

“I don’t know,” Margie said. Her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know.”

“Let’s drive around,” Helen said.

They drove along Copacabana Beach with the windows lowered to the warm air and the sound of the surf. There were lovers on the beach, dark humps that sometimes moved a great deal and sometimes did not move at all. “I was sick all evening,” Margie said. “I couldn’t eat dinner and I kept shaking. Feel how cold my hand is.”

Her palm on Helen’s arm was damp and cold. “If it makes you that sick you really shouldn’t go out with him,” Helen said.

“But I want to,” Margie said. She looked out the window as she spoke and the breeze almost blew her words away because they were so quiet. “I was so happy when he called. We haven’t seen him for such a long time. I realized how much I missed him. I almost said, ‘Come right over this minute if you have nothing to do.’ But then he beat me to it; he said, ‘Can you have dinner with me tonight?’ And I started to feel sick.”

“Why, Margie?
Why?
Think about it. Why? There must be a reason.”

“I don’t know,” Margie said again, her head back against the back of the car seat, her eyes closed, tears showing at the corners of her eyes. “I don’t know. Stay with me for a while. Come up and have some coffee. I don’t want to go to sleep.”

When Helen arrived home it was a quarter past twelve. All the lamps in the living room were out but one, glowing dimly at the entrance. The room was shadowy, the curtains drawn against the windows for the night. It was very still. She felt rather than heard the presence of someone in the room, although she saw no one; it was as if the waves of air that crossed invisibly from wall to wall had stopped and flowed around a vibrating human body rather than an inanimate piece of furniture. She felt a tension that stiffened her and crept up the back of her neck like breath. Then she heard a breath, from the corner next to the curtained windows, the intake of breath from between clenched teeth. Bert was standing there and he was holding on to the wall with one hand.

“You’re home,” he said.

“Why are you standing there in the dark?”

He took two steps to the table, pulled the cord that lighted the large lamp, and flooded the room with light. He was still leaning on the table with one hand and he had accidentally pushed a bottle which had been on the edge of the table ever farther toward the edge, so now she watched with frozen surprize as the bottle tilted and then fell to the floor. It did not break or spill because it was empty. She realized then that Bert was very drunk.

“Did you have a nice time at the movies with your friend?” he asked, trying to enunciate very clearly to cover his slurring speech. The effect this gave was one of enormous held-in rage and sarcasm.

“Not very. She was upset. And the picture was dreadful.”

“What did you see?”

“It … I forgot the name. It was German.”

“Oh, really?”

“It was about a girl who was blind, and a doctor said he could cure her but her mother didn’t want her to have the operation.” She ended the description limply, realizing suddenly that he either did not believe her or was no longer listening. He had been holding a glass in his other hand and now he held it up to the light, saw that it was nearly empty, and drank the rest in one gulp. “I know it sounds silly,” she said.

He walked toward her, slowly. He was wearing the trousers to his dark silk suit and the same wrinkled, damp white shirt he had worn all day at the office and then out to dinner. He had removed his tie and shoes. It upset her to see him so drunk and quietly menacing, and instinctively she drew away a little.

He smiled, a tight smile utterly without humor, and walked closer. With that thin-lipped, slit-eyed grimace, he looked like a giant tiger or cheetah. “What did you do in four hours and five minutes?” he said. “How many
movies
did you see?”

“Did you get this drunk at dinner?” she accused weakly, backing away. He reached out and took her wrist. His fingers did not close tightly enough to hurt her; they were simply an unbreakable band. She smelled the whisky.

“I didn’t go to any dinner. I came home at eight-thirty. I just wanted to give you time to get out. I knew you’d go. You haven’t had a night alone with
Sergio Leite Braga
for a long time, have you!”

She was drowning. She felt blood in her eardrums like the sound of the sea thundering over the head of a struggling swimmer, her heart pounded until it strained and hurt her, and she could not speak. Bert said something else but she did not hear him and then he put his fingers around her neck. She hardly felt them and waited in panic for them to close out the air from her throat entirely, and then she realized that the reason she could not feel Bert’s fingers was that they were cupped very loosely around her throat. He looked at her.

“I could kill you,” he said.

The pounding of her heart turned from shock and terror to excitement. His eyes were very close to hers, completely open and filled with grief, his lips were closed and very white. Helen sagged against his cupped hands, allowing him to hold her up, feeling at that moment as if he might strangle her accidentally and for one mad instant not caring at all. She had never felt so weak, nor that Bert was so strong. Unreasoning physical love filled her, weakened her, made her feel faint. His fingers were no longer steel bands around her throat but human flesh, and she could feel his pulse through his fingertips. He had known for a long time, perhaps even weeks, and all these nights that they had sat together in this living room pretending to talk about the car and dull household things he had known. He had known, and he had felt this agony she saw now, and he had not known what to say to her.

Go ahead, she wanted to whisper, kill me; but she could not bring out a word. Her eyes were wide and fixed on his, and what she meant to say she said through them and he heard her. She knew, she saw his face change as he looked at her, and he opened his hands. She put her arms around him to keep from falling to the floor, and then she held to him more desperately because he was trying to get away from her. He reached behind his waist and took hold of her wrists to pull them away from him. Then, with his hands on her wrists, he stopped, and his hands slid around her arms and up to her shoulders, and then tenderly touched her face. Neither of them said anything.

“I haven’t seen him for a month,” she said finally. “It’s all over. I’m never going to see him again. I never even think about him.”

“How long were you sleeping with him?”

“Never. I never did.” She saw that he didn’t believe her; he must have heard gossip, perhaps even about the
fazenda
. “I … went away with him. The last time you went away. I was going to … do it, but I couldn’t. I ran away. I know that doesn’t mean anything, because if I went away with him it was obviously because I
meant
to go to bed with him. But I didn’t do it, and when I decided that I knew it was all over too. Maybe that means something—just something—to you?”

“Something,” he said. “Go on.”

“It was nothing. Lunches; we kissed. I never loved him. I thought I did for a while, but it was only because he knew what to say to me when I felt as if nobody cared for me.”

“That I didn’t?”

She couldn’t look at him. “Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell
me
you thought I didn’t love you? Did you have to tell
him?
”

“I tried to tell you.”

“When?”

“That … night after the party I gave for Mil Burns. On the balcony. And … afterward.”

“God,” he said. He didn’t touch her any more; he sat on the sofa and lighted a cigarette. Helen knelt on the floor at his feet. From below, his eyes were dark and shadowed so she could not tell what he was thinking.

“And other times too,” she said timidly. “It’s much more my fault than yours. I never could tell you really what I was afraid of, or how I felt, so how could you know?”

“You tried to tell me,” he said. He sounded quite sober now.

“You told me once you wouldn’t stop me if I wanted to have an affair. I didn’t want you to say that. It made me feel like the ugliest woman in the world. I wanted you to tell me you would act the way you did tonight.”

“Didn’t you know I would?”

“How could I know?”

“Don’t you think I have pride?”

She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said slowly, “I don’t think pride like that should matter between two people who love each other. Not when one person’s pride matters at the moment more than the other’s.”

“I don’t know if you and I will ever get together,” Bert said.

His words hurt her so much that she felt dizzy again. She imagined herself arguing and struggling with him through all this long night and only becoming farther and farther removed from him. She had never loved or needed him as much as she did at this moment when she was most in danger of losing him.

“If you mean that,” she said, “then you might as well really kill me. I don’t want to live without you. I can’t.”

“Would you ever have told me about Sergio Leite Braga?”

“I don’t know. I never had to live with something that terrible before. Every minute I wanted to tell you, but I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” Bert said ironically. “If you thought I wouldn’t care if you had an affair?”

“I was afraid you’d leave me anyway. That would be the worst; you not caring but leaving me anyway out of pride or distaste or principle, or—”

“Or absolute human agony,” he said. “Leaving you because I couldn’t look at your face any more. I know the way your face looks when you love, and afterward, and every time I looked at you I thought that someone else was seeing that private look too and then you were coming home to me with it all smoothed out. That isn’t pride, darling. That’s much more.”

“Why is it,” she whispered, and her voice caught in her throat, “why is it that people only say beautiful true things like that to each other when they’re saying goodbye?”

“That’s when they’re free, I guess. An exit line is easy. You can walk out and close the door. And they feel they owe it.”