Come Destroy Me (2 page)

“What a boy!” his mother said, again proudly. Charlie was oblivious of her pride; he wished she would not talk about it all the time. There wasn’t anything wrong with him, for Pete’s sake. Was there anything wrong with him?

Evie said something flippant and Mr. Lofton said something unimportant and Charlie did not hear because then he started to think, What if she
is
there!

He thought, Silly good goddamn, what if she
is
at the library? What of that? He wasn’t going there because of her. No, he certainly was not … was
not!

Time enough, eh, boy?

T
HE CLOCK TOWER
on the top of the library gonged seven times as Jake Shaw stood in the doorway of his luncheonette on the corner of Broad Street. He was a man in his thirties who looked older because his head was bald as a rock, and he was wide and gross with a round paunchy stomach. As he stood there scratching his back, the white apron tied at his waist, the stub cigar hanging from his puffy lips, his big yellow-colored eyes watched Miss Jill Latham lock up the Red Clover Bookshop, two stores down.

She’s somethin’, he told himself, for
this
town, and it wasn’t any wonder she left it before she could even walk, because she’s somethin’.

He knew as much as anyone in Azrael knew about Jill Latham. When her mother divorced Bud Latham over thirty years ago, Jill went to live in Europe with Mrs. Latham, and neither of them ever returned until old Bud died. Then
she
came back and moved into the white frame house on Deel Street, bought the shop, and settled down, just like that. Alone. Folks in Azrael said Mrs. Latham was dead too, and wasn’t it nice Miss Jill came home?

Jake Shaw thought it was fine. It was a real pleasure. He liked to watch her the way he was doing now, and he liked to speculate on why a woman like her was satisfied to live here with no one for herself. He saw her turn the key in the lock and try the door to be sure, and he sucked in on the wet edge of his cigar and shook his head, musing.

She had a fine, clear-cut profile, a short, finely modeled nose, and a beautiful mouth, with thin lips, curling rather bitterly. Yet her face was a sweet face, with bright cheeks, girlishly thin for a woman in her early thirties, a pale complexion, and a strong chin. Her hair was black and soft-looking, and her changing eyes were gray and amber-colored, passing quickly from one light to another, greenish and golden like the eyes of a cat. There was something catlike in all her nature, in her apparent torpor, her semisomnolence, with eyes wide open, always on the watch, as though she were nervous and suspicious. She was not so tall as she appeared and not so slender; her body was richly matured with large curved breasts, wasp waist, beautiful shoulders, lovely arms, and fine long shapely legs.

That evening she wore a black linen dress without sleeves, cut low at the neck with white lace trim, sheer nylon stockings, and high black heels. Even in that way she was instinctively catlike, never giving in to the barelegged, sandal-clad fashion of other women in Azrael, instinctively aristocratic. She had the look of a strange, lovely woman, better bred than others, incurably shy and wild.

“Evening, Miss Jill,” Jake said as she walked near him. He took the cigar from his mouth and wiped the perspiration off his forehead with his sleeve. “Must miss the record business with the kids gone for the summer.”

“I don’t miss the noise,” she said. “I don’t miss the roughhouse.”

“Still, you can’t sell many books to people in these parts.”

Jill Latham smiled briefly without offering an opinion on the subject, and Jake said, “I suppose now you’ll go to the library.”

“I suppose so.”

“Think you’d get tired of books, books, books.”

“I like it there.”

“Oh, it’s
quiet.”

“Yes.”

“And if you
like
books, well — ”

“Well, then you go to the library.”

“That’s right.”

“Yes.”

“I guess so.”

“Good night, Mr. Shaw.”

“Good night, ma’am.” He watched her walk, a strut really, as though she were a countess stepping over the heads of dead peasants, and he shook his head again, sucked on his cigar, and went back in behind the counter of the luncheonette.

When Charlie Wright came in to buy a pack of gum, Jake thought all the funny ones were left in Azrael for the summer. Charlie was carrying his books under his arm, and Jake had to laugh when he thought of Evie and Mrs. Wright, both with the strength and pep of ten armies, and this one, as quiet and sober as a priest.

He said, “You and her keep the place open, just about.”

“What?”

“The library. You and Miss Jill keep it open.”

“We’re not the
only
ones,” Charlie Wright said, and he flung an angry look at Jake that Jake did not understand.

Charlie said, “I got to study for my boards.”

“Don’t get sore.”

“I’m not!”

“O.K. Six cents for the gum.”

“Six it is,” Charlie said. He took a stick from its wrapper and folded it over, stuck it in his mouth, putting the pack in his pocket. For a minute he read the songs listed on the jukebox fixed to the counter, but he never played the jukebox. He shuffled the books to his other arm and dug his right hand in his pants pocket. Before he left he said something Jake didn’t hear.

“What?”

“I said, besides, I don’t even
know
her.”

“Who?”

“Miss Latham. I never even go in the Red Clover.”

Jake said, “I didn’t say you did.”

• • •

As he walked along Broad Street toward the library, Charlie studied his own image reflected in the glass of the store windows. Two or three times he looked up to say hello to people who passed him, and most of the time he saw himself. He saw himself angry and resentful, shown in the frown on his tanned face, in the dark V of his black eyebrows above his straight thin nose. He
was
angry, not just at what Jake had said, but at himself too, for feeling excited in his stomach when he recalled the way Jake said, “You and her keep the place open, just about.”

You and her.

You and her.

It was true that he did not know her at all, hardly at all. She had been back in Azrael for a whole year now, and most of what he knew about her, he knew from what Mr. Lofton said.

“She’s a fine young woman, and it’s a shame that there are no young men for her in Azrael.”

He knew too that the kids from high bought their records at the Red Clover, and said she was crabby to them. Merrill Watkins, Charlie’s friend, said he could hardly blame her because of the way the kids sat in the listening booth all day and ripped through the place. But that was all Merrill had ever said about her. Charlie missed Merrill suddenly, and wished he didn’t go off to that camp in New Hampshire every summer. Merrill was his only friend, a quiet boy who collected stamps and jump-skied, and was sensitive because he had never grown an inch beyond five feet. Evie called him “the midget,” and that was just like Evie, but Charlie’s mother liked Merrill and said he was a good influence whatever that meant.

It was not that he was lonely with Merrill gone; he had plenty to do. He helped his mother at the Gazette until three-thirty and he had to study for the boards. But Merrill was a boy and Charlie thought that so far the whole summer was taken up with women.

‘Nez thinks you’re sex-ee.

If Merrill
were
around, he wouldn’t discuss this thing that was happening to him, but he wouldn’t think about it so much. He was thinking about it too much. He could not think back on when it had all started, but it had started the way a summer storm happens, quickly, without warning, so that there was no process of getting used to the idea. The storm was accepted as swiftly as it broke through the sky, and there was no time, or reason, really, to think why. It was there.

Almost before he was aware of her, he was aware of the smell of her. The reading room at the library was small, with only three tables close together, and when Charlie had first gone there every night in the early weeks of June, he smelled that sweetness. It was like lilacs. It was different from the heavy aroma of Evie’s perfumes, and from the newsprint and machine odor he always associated with his mother.

Lilacs … Sometimes he couldn’t smell them, and that was when he knew it was
her
perfume. Some nights she didn’t come to the library. Gradually, and long before he admitted it to himself, he began to miss her on those nights. He tried to imagine where she was and what she would be doing, and at the end of June he was saying her name to himself. Jill.

Once he had a dream. He was standing on a hill with her watching the sky.

He said, “I would like to go right up on that cloud.”

She said, “Try.”

He said, “Look, I’m not a bird.”

“Try,” she said. “Try to fly.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Try,” she said. “I’ll push you.”

He could feel himself moving off the ground. He circled low, reached his hand out for hers. He was afraid her weight would ground him, but it did not, and together they flew to the clouds.

That morning when Charlie woke up from his dream, he knew he was in trouble. He went to his window and looked out and said to himself, “Not trouble —
love!”
and he had to laugh at that one. He had never even spoken to her. That was a good one.

Charlie came to the end of Broad Street and saw the small gray stucco building and felt something inside him leap up. His knees got liquid and the drummer came in his chest, and he went up the stone steps slowly, prolonging the anticipation. He said good evening to Mrs. Whitmore, the wizened librarian, with her hollow eyes and yellow teeth, and he went on into the reading room.

She was there. Lately, in the past few weeks, there was a tacit recognition between them. She looked up with her wide, pretty amber eyes and she watched him momentarily before she dropped her gaze back to the page of the book she was reading. Charlie could feel the heat rise in his neck, and he put his books on the table opposite the one she was at. Old Mr. Crocker, the town idiot, was in the corner looking at picture books and mumbling to himself, and on Charlie’s left, Jim Prince, a med student at the university, was reading from a heavy black tome. There was no one else in the room, and Charlie could smell the lilac and feel the heat run down the back of his head to his shirt collar, making it damp.

Charlie did math problems because he could do those automatically, and he filled yellow pulpy sheets with his figures, several times not even bothering to check the answers. He was good at math. The sky outside, seen from the long framed windows in the room, got dark, and at eight-thirty Jim Prince sighed, slammed the book shut, and got up to go. Charlie watched him leave and stole a glance at Jill Latham, a fleeting glimpse of her, and he thought, I must be crazy, crazy, but he was not. She really was trying to get his attention. He got up and went across to her and his lower lip was trembling and he was afraid he might stutter.

“Pencil?” she said.

“Sure.”

“I hoped you’d have an extra one. I left my pen home.”

“Sure.” He fumbled in his pocket for the pencil, his fingers clumsy, shaking.

“It was silly,” she said. She talked in a low whisper, watching him as he pulled the pencil from his rear pocket and handed it to her.

She said, “Thank you.”

“O.K.”

She said, “I’ll return it at closing time.”

“Nine o’clock,” he said, for no reason. He stood uncertainly, and then he started to go back to his own table.

“Nine o’clock,” he heard her promise. “Nine o’clock.”

E
VIE THOUGHT
Russel Lofton was handsome for an older man, handsome and almost buoyantly boyish, and she felt superior to him too. She felt as though she could manipulate him in any way she wished, and she decided she knew him far better than her mother did or ever would, for that matter. Her mother was always herself, that was the trouble with her. Emily Wright had no second selves, no acts, no games, no secrets. She served herself to people on a plain, ungarnished platter without apology. That was the way she was, and, Evie decided, that was the reason she had never remarried. That and the fact that she had lived her life in Azrael, Vermont, where single, attractive, rational men were rationed. Even if she had been able to interest one of these men, she would disenchant him eventually with her blunt, steady, matter-of-fact manner.

Sometimes Evie wondered where she got her own warmth. It was more than mere warmth, it was a deep, aching desire to know all about someone, everything! What she wanted to do was to connect with someone, to be herself with someone, all her selves, and to find his selves, and to blend them all together in a grand bleeding passion that only they knew about — the two of them, Evie and this someone. That summer, when she had nothing to do but wait until fall and the new year at college, she thought a lot about Russel Lofton.

“I’m dog-tired,” her mother said at the door, as Evie was leaving the house with him. “Don’t be late, Evie.”

He said, “The meal was tiptop, Em. Tiptop!”

“I like to cook,” Mrs. Wright said. “Always have.”

“Well, you do a good job, eh, E-venus?”

“Real fine,” Evie agreed. “C’mon, let’s hurry.”