Judge Me Not (2 page)

He squinted appreciatively across the lake at the fading fire-colors of autumn on the slopes of the Adirondack hills, and felt sad that this was nearly the last of the week ends before the camp was taken over by winter.

The distant hiss of the shower stopped and the water pump chugged on for a few minutes before it stopped too. He flipped a mental coin and decided on a swim. His trunks were still beside the bed where he had dropped them. As he stood up to pull them on he noticed how neatly the mayor’s wife had arranged her clothes on the cane-bottomed chair at the foot of the bed. Nubby fall suit, with coat fitted over the back of the chair, skirt folded neatly. High-heeled alligator pumps standing side by side, an inch from the hanging toes of the empty nylons.

A very neat woman. Very careful. Very calmly and carefully sensuous, a quality making this little affair quite safe while at the same time robbing it of the spice which recklessness would have sharpened.

The door of the tiny bathroom swung open and she came out with her faintly, intriguingly knock-kneed walk.
She had her head lowered so that the dark hair, damp from the shower, had fallen forward over one eye. She was biting her underlip and her arms were craned up behind her, fastening the bra. Her breasts were small, her hips tautly narrow, the sheer whiteness of the bra and panties startling against the almost mahogany tan.

“There,” she said. She tossed her head, flinging the dark hair back, standing smiling at him with measured warmth, with only a trace of consciousness of self.

He knew that her pride was in her girl’s body, in her un-sagging tautness, in nut browness that the years—she would not tell him how many, though he guessed thirty-four—had not touched, and so he always felt a strong obligation to make a small salute in the general direction of that pride.

He shook his head, clucking. “Not over seventeen, miss.”

“Great fool! What woke you up? I was going to sneak out.”

“Sun in my eyes. And you floundering and splashing around in there.”

She picked up shoes and nylons and sat on the edge of the bed. She pulled the stockings on, her face intent on this small task, and he stood and watched her, trying to gauge within himself the extent of renewed desire, because this was the measure of how long this thing would last. And, instead of desire, he saw a meagerness about her body. In her face there was a touch of something simian.

Felice slipped the pumps on, stood up and walked away from the bed and looked down and backward around her hips, curving her shoulder out of the way. “Seams straight, Teed?”

“Straight. Say, how about your hair?”

“You mean wet? I’ll leave the top down. It’ll be dry by the time I get back to Deron.”

She took her purse off the high bureau, turned and smiled at him. “If you’re going to kiss me, better do it before I get my face on.”

He tilted her chin up, kissed her lightly, quickly.

“And is that all?” she pouted.

“For the nonce, Mrs. Carboy.”

He sat on the bed and watched her apply the careful make-up, then don blouse, skirt, tailored jacket. She had brushed her hair into shape. The last thing she did was take a pair of tinted glasses with heavy dark frames and put
them on. It was the last touch which always seemed to turn her into a reasonably prosperous librarian. She looked at her watch. “Lots of time.”

She sat beside him on the bed. He took her purse, dug out two cigarettes, handed her one. She detested having her cigarettes lit for her, then handed to her.

He struck the match. He lit hers and then, as he was lighting his own, she said, “What do you think of me, Teed?”

“I think you’re the poor man’s chameleon. Twenty minutes after you leap out of bed, you look ready to be speaker at the luncheon club. Unflattering, I call it.”

“Teed! I don’t mean that way. I mean when you met me.” She swung a crossed leg and pouted.

“Let me see. That was in hizzoner’s office. There I was, a clean young civil servant, looking lustfully at the mayor’s wife.”

“Be serious, Teed.”

“O.K., so I saw a gleam in your eye.”

“Other men haven’t seen it.”

“Oh, I’m always alert for a gleam like that. And frankly, hizzoner didn’t strike me as the sort of old party who could do very much about that gleam.”

She gave him a cool look. “So the perceptive Teed Morrow decided then and there that I was a loose woman. Now who’s unflattering?”

“No. Not then and there. That was just a preliminary survey. I rechecked it that night I bummed a ride home with you after the late work.”

“Rechecked!” she said scornfully. “Masterful type, aren’t you? The subtle approach. Fat chance I had to say yes, no, or maybe.”

“People say no to hesitant people just because they think they should.”

She looked down and drew crosses on the back of his hand with a pointed fingernail. From his angle of vision he could look into the curve of her throat, see the slow beat of a visible pulse.

“What’s the matter with me, Teed?” she asked softly. “I ought to feel rotten, all the way through. And my conscience doesn’t hurt a bit. I just don’t want to be caught, and that’s all I care.”

“What are you working up to, Felice?”

She lifted her eyes slowly to his. Her lips were not far
from his. Her mouth trembled, and he felt almost certain that she had made it tremble.

“Would I be too terribly silly if I sort of … kid myself, Teed?”

“In what way?”

“Well … thinking that … doing this with you might help Mark.”

He stared at her and wanted to laugh. “Now wait a minute, Felice! Let’s get back on where I fell off. Item—Mark Carboy is the mayor, and your husband. Item—Mark Carboy is a slightly stupid man, a figurehead for the Raval mob. Item—my boss, Powell Dennison, is the new city manager who is very frankly out to take the city away from Raval. What am I supposed to do? Go up to Powell and say, ‘Please, Mr. Dennison, you got to take it easy on Carboy because I’m sleeping with Mrs. Carboy?’ ”

She winced. “Damn you, do you have to say it that way?”

“Then tell me what you mean.”

She shrugged. “Everybody calls you Dennison’s hatchet man, ever since he sent for you six months ago. If you wanted to help Mark, you could find a way.”

“If I wanted to.”

She looked down again and ran her fingertips up the back of his wrist. “Do you want to take my silly little rationalization away from me, darling?”

“And if I did?”

“I just really don’t see how I could … let myself go on with this. I mean I love you and need you so dreadfully and all that, but …”

“You’d like to think you were really doing it for Mark, eh?”

She didn’t look up. “Don’t be cruel to me, Teed.”

“I suppose you want me to promise.”

“Oh, yes, Teed. Just a little promise. And it won’t hurt anybody. Mark isn’t dangerous.” He saw her mouth twist. “He’s just a fool.”

He felt remote, apart from the two figures sitting on the bed, almost as though he were a third person—judicious, objective, slightly scornful. No matter how soulfully they could manage to look at each other, no matter how suggestively her fingertips nibbled at his arm, it was still a tired little scene that did neither of them any particular credit. He wondered if his sudden desire to humiliate her
arose simply from a feeling of revulsion at this trade she wanted to make.

“That’s something I ought to think over.”

She gave him a wide-eyed stare. “Think? For heaven’s sake, why?”

“I should promise, eh? Like that. Because you ask me to.”

“No. Because I mean something to you, Teed.”

“Sure you do, kitten. You mean a lot to me.”

She took off the heavy-rimmed glasses, leaned back, bracing herself with her arms, looking at him with a shy, inviting smile.

“It isn’t really as late as I thought, Teed,” she said. “Tell me what I mean to you.”

“A near miss, Felice.”

She stiffened. “What does that mean?”

“All along it’s been a good try. But your love-making, my sweet, has been under very precise control. Your little frenzies have been so very exact. Like you have an outline in the back of your mind, a sort of picture of Felice enjoying herself, and you follow it right down to the last semicolon.”

For a few moments her face was utterly expressionless. He felt as though he could actually hear the tiny click as the decision dropped into place in her mind. She pivoted suddenly, kicking her feet up, falling back across his lap, looking up at him.

“Of course it was that way, Teed,” she said. “But now it will be better. I didn’t realize I had that … reserve. Now you’ve explained it to me. Now that I know you’ll help silly old Mark, the … last barriers can drop, Teed. The very last. I’ll be the most perfectly wanton thing. Hold me, Teed. Hold me tight. Maybe now I can really completely forget myself. Please, Teed.”

No, baby, he thought. You’ve never forgotten yourself and you never will. You are a trim, tight, controlled little package, and in your little blindnesses and incoherences, your little love-cries, you’ve been reading your lines off a script in the back of your mind. I’ve heard the pages rattle as you turned them.

He let her wait. He made no move. Something quite close to hate stirred behind her eyes, even as she was making them heavy-lidded. He could sense her surprise that he did not plead for a continuance of this timetabled, double-spaced, rigorously outlined affair in which each posturing,
each body juxtaposition had been as curiously impersonal as the complex figures of an ancient dance with stern rules and forgotten significances. Her little excitements had been doled out by the cc., and her rapt functions had been performed with the practiced economy and elegance of the expert.

He was a little surprised at the relief he felt that it was now over, as though the shame had come, not from the necessary subterfuges of adultery, but from a sense of misdirected functioning, as though he were an adolescent now giving up forbidden solitary experimentations.

So he shook his head sadly and said, “All for Mark, eh? My lamb, the merchandise is attractive, but the markup is too high.”

He caught her wrist when her curved nails were inches from his eyes. She tore herself free. He sat placidly and watched her pace in restless anger.

“A truly astonishing vocabulary,” he said mildly.

She suddenly fought for control, achieved it quickly. “All right, Teed. I’ll mark it up as a waste of effort.” She gave her flashing simian grin, and he liked her for it. “An enjoyable waste, but a waste.”

“I could ease the blow a little for Mark, but what’s the point? He’s in deep. People generally pay for their deeds.”

“Aren’t you a little righteous, Teed?”

“That business about pots and kettles isn’t written into the statutes yet. We are going to have to see each other around town, Felice. Let’s not end it on too bad a note. Would it look too silly if we shook hands?”

“Like the old joke about the monkeys? It would be silly, but there’s no one here but us chickens.” She walked over to him as he stood up. He had always liked her walk. A taut, brisk little walk, feet coming down firmly. It called attention to the cleverness of assembly of the joints and tendons of ankle, knee, and hip. He handed her the glasses and she put them on, put on at the same time the little earnestness that went with the glasses, a social-worker, Wellesley-graduate, only-the-best-books earnestness.

She shook hands a bit uncertainly, like an actress who discovers that the last sheet of her radio script is unaccountably missing.

There was nothing to gather up, for in all previous visits to the camp she had left nothing. She took her purse and they walked out to the slightly shabby convertible
which was the second car of the honorable Carboy family.

“I shall never forget you, Teed,” she said seriously.

“Take it easy on the way back. The roads are tricky at dusk, Felice.”

“You won’t ever … oh, hint or anything to anybody?”

For one moment her mask of precision and calmness slipped, and there was something naked and afraid in her eyes. She sat behind the wheel, jacket unbuttoned. And looking at her, he knew how he had missed in the beginning, how he had never thought of the very obvious device of extreme roughness, of hands careless of the softness of her. And in the moment of ending all of it, he knew it was possible to begin it again, and on a different and better basis.

So he patted her shoulder very lightly and said, “Take care, honey,” then stood and watched the car bounce on the ruts of the short lane, turn sharply onto the highway. The motor drone faded away down the two-lane asphalt that half circled the lake.

Teed wandered back into the camp, oddly restless. There was little left of her. A towel, still steamy, on the shower rail. Four cigarette butts, red-smeared, in the flat brass tray. Two long black hairs caught in his brush. An indentation in the pillow where she had napped. He hung the towel out on the line, emptied the ash tray into the chunk stove, fluffed out the pillow. He pulled the hairs from the white bristles of the brush and, remembering a childhood trick, held them tightly as he ran thumb and fingernail down the length of them. They sprang into black, tight-coiled springs, and that was supposed to mean that you were healthy.

The last of the sun was gone when he walked down to the dock. He went off in a flat dive, came up snorting, lifting his arms in a slow powerful crawl. A hundred yards offshore he rolled onto his back and floated, thought about Felice. She probably loved Mark Carboy, the fumbling old fool. Felice was a second wife. The children of the first marriage were grown, living far away.

There was prestige in being the wife of the mayor. Even, under the brand-new City Manager Plan, a figurehead mayor. But Felice hadn’t saved him, couldn’t save him.

Teed Morrow felt a hard excitement as he thought of how he and Powell Dennison were going to break the city of Deron wide open.

Powell Dennison had been his faculty advisor when Teed had majored in political science. There had been mutual respect, friendship. Then during the occupation years, Colonel Dennison had wangled a transfer of Captain Morrow to his AMG command in Germany. Together they had broken the hold of the ex-Nazis, given the people a measure of trust and faith and hope, set up a town that later became a model for all military government in the western zone.