Promised Land (21 page)

“Is it that ugly,” she said.

“Of course it’s that ugly. You don’t screw people to prove things. You screw people because you like the screwing or the people or both. Preferably the last. Some people even refer to it as making love.”

“I know,” she said, “I know.”

“And the two dimwits you took up with. They’re theoreticians. They have nothing much to do with life. They have little connection with phallic power and patterns of dominance and blowing away old men in the service of things like that.”

She stopped looking out the window and looked at me. “Why so angry,” she said.

“I don’t know exactly. Thoreau said something once about judging the cost of things in terms of how much life he had to expend to get it. You and Harv aren’t getting your money’s worth. Thrift, I guess. It violates my sense of thrift.”

She laughed a little bit and shook her head. “My God. I like you,” she said. “I like you very much.”

“It was only a matter of time,” I said.

She looked back out the window and we were quiet most of the rest of the drive down. I hadn’t said it right. Maybe Suze could. Maybe nobody could. Maybe saying didn’t have much effect anyway.

We got to the motel a little after ten and found Susan in the coffee shop drinking coffee and reading the New York Times.

“Was it okay,” Susan said.

“Yeah, just the way it should have been.”

“He warned one of them,” Pam Shepard said. “And he got away.”

Susan raised her eyebrows at me.

“Hawk,” I said.

“Do you understand that,” Pam Shepard said.

“Maybe,” Susan said.

“I don’t.”

“And I’ll bet he didn’t give you a suitable explanation, did he?” Susan said.

“Hardly,” Pam said.

“Everything else was good though?” Susan said.

I nodded.

“Are you going home, Pam?”

“I guess I am. I haven’t really faced that, even driving down. But here I am, half a mile from my house. I guess I am going home.”

“Good.”

“I’m going to call Harv,” I said. “How about I ask him to join us and we can talk about everything and maybe Suze can talk a little.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m scared to see him again. I’d like to see him with you here and without the children.”

I went back to the room and called Shepard and told him what had happened. It took him ten minutes to arrive. I met him in the lobby.

“Is Powers in jail?” he said.

I looked at my watch. “No, probably not. They’ve booked him by now, and his lawyer is there arranging bail and King’s sitting around in the anteroom waiting to go home.”

“Jesus Christ,” Shepard said. “You mean he’s going to be out loose knowing we set him up?”

“Life’s hard sometimes,” I said.

“But, for crissake, won’t he come looking for us? You didn’t tell me they’d let him out on bail. He’ll be after us. He’ll know we double-crossed him. He’ll be coming.”

“If I’d told you, you wouldn’t have done it. He won’t come after you.”

“What the hell is wrong with them, letting him out on bail. You got no right to screw around with my life like that.”

“He won’t come after you, Shepard. Your wife’s waiting for you in the coffee shop.”

“Jesus, how is she?”

“She’s fine.”

“No, I mean, like what’s her frame of mind? I mean, what’s she been saying about me? Did she say she’s going to come back?”

“She’s in the coffee shop with my friend Susan Silverman. She wants to see you and she wants us to be there and what she’s going to do is something you and she will decide. She’s planning, right now, I think, to stay. Don’t screw it up.”

Shepard took a big inhale and let it out through his nose. We went into the coffee shop. Susan and Pam Shepard were sitting opposite each other in a booth. I slid in beside Susan. Shepard stood and looked down at Pam Shepard. She looked up at him and said, “Hello, Harv.”

“Hello, Pam.”

“Sit down, Harv,” she said. He sat, beside her. “How have you been?” she said.

He nodded his head. He was looking at his hands, close together on the table before him.

“Kids okay?”

He nodded again. He put his right hand out and rested it on her back between the shoulder blades, the fingers spread. His eyes were watery and when he spoke his voice was very thick. “You coming back?”

She nodded. “For now,” she said and there was strain now in her voice too.

“Forever,” he said.

“For now, anyway,” she said.

His hand was moving in a slow circle between her shoulder blades. His face was wet now. “Whatever you want,” he said in his squeezed voice. “Whatever you want. I’ll get you anything you want, we can start over and I’ll be back up on top for you in a year. Anything. Anything you want.”

“It’s not up on top I want, Harvey.” I felt like a voyeur. “It’s, it’s different. They think we need psychiatric help.” She nodded toward me and Suze.

“What do they know about it or us, or anything?”

“I won’t stay if we don’t get help, Harvey. We’re not just unhappy. We’re sick. We need to be cured.”

“Who do we go to? I don’t even know any shrinks.”

“Susan will tell us,” Para said. “She knows about these things.”

“If that’s what will bring you back, that’s what I’ll do.” His voice was easing a little, but the tears were still running down his face. He kept rubbing her back in the little circles. “Whatever you want.”

I stood up. “You folks are going to make it. And while you are, I’m going to make a call.”

They paid me very little heed and I left feeling about as useful as a faucet on a clock. Back in the room I called Clancy in the Suffolk County D.A.’s office.

“Spenser,” I said when he came on. “Powers out of the calaboose yet?”

“Lemme check.”

I listened to the vague sounds that a telephone makes on hold for maybe three minutes. Then Clancy came back on. “Yep.”

“Dandy,” I said.

“You knew he would be,” Clancy said. “You know the score.”

“Yeah, thanks.” I hung up.

Back in the coffee shop Pam was saying, “It’s too heavy. It’s too heavy to carry the weight of being the center of everybody’s life.”

The waitress brought me another cup of coffee.

“Well, what are we supposed to do,” Harv said. “Not love you. I tell the kids, knock it off on the love. It’s too much for your mother? Is that what we do?”

Pam Shepard shook her head. “It’s just… no of course, I want to be loved, but it’s being the only thing you love, and the kids, being so central, feeling all that… I don’t know… responsibility, maybe, I want to scream and run.”

“Boy”—Harv shook his head—“I wish I had that problem, having somebody love me too much. I’d trade you in a goddamned second.”

“No you wouldn’t.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t be taking off on you either. I don’t even know where you been. You know where I been.”

“And what you’ve been doing,” she said. “You goddamned fool.”

Harv looked at me. “You bastard, Spenser, you told her.”

“I had to,” I said.

“Well, I was doing it for you and the kids. I mean, what kind of man would I be if I let it all go down the freaking tube and you and the kids had shit? What kind of a man is that?”

“See,” Pam said. “See, it’s always me, always my responsibility. Everything you do is for me.”

“Bullshit. I do what a man’s supposed to do. There’s nothing peculiar about a man looking out for the family. Dedicating his life to his family. That’s not peculiar. That’s right.”

“Submerging your own ego that extent is unusual,” Susan said.

“Meaning what?”

Shepard’s voice had lost its strangled quality and had gotten tinny. He spoke too loudly for the room.

“Don’t yell at Suze, Harv,” I said.

“I’m not yelling, but I mean, Christ, Spenser, she’s telling me that dedication and self-sacrifice is a sign of being sick.”

“No she’s not, Harv. She’s asking you to think why you can’t do anything in your own interest. Why you have to perceive it in terms of self-sacrifice.”

“I, I don’t perceive… I mean I can do things I want to… for myself.”

“Like what?” I said.

“Well, shit, I… Well, I want money too, and good things for the family… and… aw, bullshit. Whose side are you on in this?”

Pam Shepard put her face in her hands. “Oh God,” she said. “Oh God, Jesus goddamned Christ,” she said.

The Shepards went home after a while, uneasy, uncertain, but in the same car with the promise that Susan and I would join them for dinner that night. The rain stopped and the sun came out. Susan and I went down to Sea Street beach and swam and lay on the beach. I listened to the Sox play the Indians on a little red Panasonic portable that Susan had given me for my birthday. Susan read Erikson and the wind blew very gently off Nantucket Sound. I wondered when Powers would show up. Nothing much to do about that. When he showed he’d show. There was no way to prepare for it.

The Sox lost to Cleveland and a disc jockey came on and started to play “Fly Robin Fly.”

I shut off the radio.

“You think they’ll make it?” I said.

Susan shrugged. “He’s not encouraging, is he?”

“No, but he loves her.”

“I know.” She paused. “Think we’ll make it?”

“Yeah. We already have.”

“Have we?”

“Yeah.”

“That means that the status remains quo?”

“Nope.”

“What does it mean?”

“Means I’m going to propose marriage.”

Susan closed her book. She looked at me without saying anything. And she smiled. “Are you really?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Was that it?”

“I guess it was, would you care to marry me?”

She was quiet. The water on the sound was quiet. Easy swells looking green and deep rolled in quietly toward us and broke gently onto the beach.

Susan said, “I don’t know.”

“I was under a different impression,” I said.

“So was I.”

“I was under the impression that you wanted to marry me and were angry that I had not yet asked.”

“That was the impression I was under too,” Susan said. “Songs unheard are sweeter far,” I said.

“No, it’s not that, availability makes you no less lovable. It’s… I don’t know. Isn’t that amazing. I think I wanted the assurance of your asking more than I wanted the consummated fact.”

“Consummation would hardly be a new treat for us,” I said.

“You know what I mean,” she said.

“Yeah, I do. How are you going to go about deciding whether you want to marry me or not?”

“I don’t know. One way would be to have you threaten to leave. I wouldn’t want to lose you.”

“You won’t lose me,” I said.

“No, I don’t think I will. That’s one of the lovely qualities about you. I have the freedom, in a way, to vacillate. It’s safe to be hesitant, if you understand that.”

I nodded. “You also won’t shake me,” I said.

“I don’t want to.”

“And this isn’t free-to-be-you-and-me-stuff. This is free to be us, no sharesies. No dibs, like we used to say in the schoolyard.”

“How dreadfully conventional of you.” Susan smiled at me. “But I don’t want to shake you and take up with another man. And I’m not hesitating because I want to experiment around. I’ve done that. I know what I need to know about that. Both of us do. I’m aware you might be difficult about sharing me with guys at the singles bar.”

“I’ll say.”

“There are things we have to think about though.”

“Like what?”

“Where would we live?”

I was still lying flat and she was half sitting, propped up on her left elbow, her dark hair falling a little forward. Her interior energy almost tangible. “Ah-ha,” I said.

She leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. “That’s one of your great charms, you understand so quickly.”

“You don’t want to leave your house, your work.”

“Or a town I’ve lived in nearly twenty years where I have friends, and patterns of life I care about.”

“I don’t belong out there, Suze,” I said.

“Of course you don’t. Look at you. You are the ultimate man, the ultimate adult in some ways, the great powerful protecting father. And yet you are the biggest goddamned kid I ever saw. You would have no business in the suburbs, in a Cape Cod house, cutting the lawn, having a swim at the club. I mean you once strangled a man to death, did not you?”

“Yeah, name was Phil. Never knew his other name, just Phil. I didn’t like it.”

“No, but you like the kind of work where that kind of thing comes up.”

“I’m not sure that’s childish.”

“In the best sense it is. There’s an element of play in it for you, a concern for means more than ends. It comes very close to worrying about honor.”

“It often has to do with life and death, sweetie.”

“Of course it does, but that only makes it a more significant game. My neighbors in Smithfield are more serious. They are dealing with success or failure. For most of them it’s no fun.”

“You’ve thought about me some,” I said.

“You bet your ass I have. You’re not going to give up your work, I’m not going to stop mine. I’m not going to move to Boston. You’re not going to live in Smithfield.”

“I might,” I said. “We could work something out there, I think. No one’s asking you to give up your work, or me to give up mine.”

“No, I guess not. But it’s the kind of thing we need to think on.”

“So a firm I-don’t-know is your final position on this?”

“I think so.”

I put my hands up and pulled her down on top of me. “You impetuous bitch,” I said. Her faced pressed against my chest. It made her speech muffled.

“On the other hand,” she mumbled, “I ain’t never going to leave you.”

“That’s for sure,” I said. “Let’s go have dinner and consummate our friendship.”

“Maybe,” Susan said as we drove back to the motel, “we should consummate it before dinner.

”Better still,“ I said, ”how about before and after dinner?“

”You’re as young as you feel, lovey,“ Susan said.

We rang the bell at the Shepards’ house at seven-thirty, me with a bottle of Hungarian red wine in a brown paper bag, and Hawk opened the door and pointed a Colt.357 Magnum at me.