Puzzle for Pilgrims (6 page)

She glanced at Sally, making no situation out of it at all.

“Hello, Sally. Hello, Peter.”

I don’t think Sally had realized that anyone had come in until she heard Marietta’s voice. She spun around, the gold hair swinging like a bell. She backed up against me, her thin, hot body pressing. I couldn’t see her face, but I could imagine it.

“You!” she said.

Marietta smiled her blank smile. “I never know how to reply when people say ‘you’.”

“I might have guessed.” Sally whirled around. Her grabbing little hands caught my sleeves. She glared up at me, her eyes still hectic. “It’s Marietta. The glass, the cigarette butts. It’s Marietta. You’re just another of Marietta’s—”

“Quiet,” I said.

Her fingers dug into my coat. She was trying to hurt me. She couldn’t.

“You’re on their side. You’re just a goddam complacent husband. Why didn’t I guess it? Marietta got you the way she’s got every other man in Mexico. And you’ve been laughing at me. All the time, you’ve been on their side, laughing at me.”

Marietta was watching her, more curious than anything else.

I said, “I still think you’d better go home, Sally.”

She wasn’t listening. She was abandoned to fury as if to a lover.

“You’ll be sorry.” She lunged away from me, staring at Marietta, including her in her malice. “All of you. You’ll be sorry. Tomorrow, I’ll make you pay. If it’s the last thing I do. I’ll make you pay.”

She swept her hand over her forehead. The gesture was as corny as Matilda, the Beautiful Shopgirl. But it didn’t make her any less authentic and horrible. She started for the door, her high heels tap-tapping. She reached it. She tugged it open. Then she turned to Marietta, the yellow coat swaying capelike around her shoulders. Bare malignancy was in her eyes.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “you’ll be in jail.”

And she laughed.

I could hear the laughter fading as she clattered down the iron stairway to the patio.

Marietta dropped onto the sofa. Now Sally was gone, the springiness had left her. She looked tired and white.

“Nice girl, Sally,” I said.

“Such original phrases.
I’ll make you pay if it’s the last thing I do.
She should copyright it.” Marietta glanced up, shaking the dark hair back. “Got any tequila left, Peter?”

I poured her some. My hand was unsteady. Sally had done that to me. I felt suddenly tired of them all—of Marietta, even of Iris. What did they think I was, anyway, expecting me to work their miracles for them? The Virgin of Guadelupe? Marietta had gone off with her gun-toting citrus-grower. Why the hell hadn’t she stayed with him? Why the hell did she have to come breaking into my house, submitting me to that final, outrageous scene?

Marietta wasn’t drinking her tequila. She was twisting the glass in her long hands.

“Aren’t you going to ask me why I came?”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I’m past caring. I just figure this place has become a seminary for frustrated females and leave it at that.”

“I’m sorry.”

She sounded so doleful that it moved me. I crossed and sat down at her side. I took her hand. After Sally, she was so nice to touch.

“Don’t be sorry, Marietta. What happened? Where’s your gunman?”

She looked up at me. Her eyes were dark. Suddenly she started to shiver.

“He wanted me to go home with him.”

“No.” I kidded her. “A man wanting to go home with you? I can’t believe it.”

“Those hands.” She was shaking now like a thoroughbred terrier. “So big. Red hairs on the wrists.”

The enigma of her had never been more tenebrous to me than at that moment. I thought of Sally’s spat accusation that Marietta had made a fool of every man in Mexico. I thought of Marietta herself, calmly dating Jake to meet us in the Delta without telling me, calmly letting him maul her, calmly going with him when what he wanted was obvious. That fitted with my own conception of her—Marietta, the easy, cosmopolitan sophisticate. But here she was back on my hands, shaking, babbling of red hair on wrists, like a nun who had escaped violation by a pin’s breadth.

I kept her fingers in mine. I said, “Baby, do you English girls have to be told about life? Guys with red hair and fruit farms pick up girls in bars. They want the girls to go home with them. If the girls don’t want to go home with them, they say no.”

She tried to laugh, but her teeth were chattering. She said, “I’m a bloody fool. I know I’m a bloody fool. I’m sorry.”

“Drink your tequila.”

She lifted the glass with difficulty to her lips and drank. “I said no to him. I’m all right.”

I was watching her, the way her hair came around her face, the trace of blue under her eyes like the veins in an iris, the wonderful curve of her lips.

“Marietta, tell me something. If you didn’t want him, why did you let him take you away from the bar?”

“I don’t know, Peter. I don’t know about myself. Perhaps because you didn’t want to go with me. Perhaps because I didn’t want to be alone.” She paused. “That’s why I came back here—because I don’t want to be alone tonight. Do you mind?”

I grinned. I held up my hands, letting the sleeves slip back. “No red hair on the wrists.”

She smiled the sort of radiant smile that comes after tears, although she hadn’t been crying. She leaned back against me, relaxing. There was a faint fragrance to her. I didn’t know how cowslips smell, but it made me think of cowslips.

“It’s all right when I’m with you, Peter. The jitters go. I don’t know why. Perhaps because you’re so big.”

I said, “You’re a problem child, too, aren’t you? You and Sally.”

“God,” she said. “I hate problem children.”

“Why don’t you want to be alone? Is it Sally? Are you afraid of what she’s going to do tomorrow?”

“Yes.” She twisted around so that she was facing me. Her eyes were pleading. “Peter, can I sleep here tonight?”

“Carnally?”

“Don’t be silly. You know you don’t want that. I’ll sleep on the couch in here. I’m used to sleeping on couches. When I lived with Martin, I always slept on a couch. There was only one bed.”

“Which he took, of course.”

“Of course.”

Although she was being flippant again, I could trace the undercurrent of need. I had given up trying to understand her, but if she wanted to sleep on my couch it was okay with me.

I patted her arm and got up. “I guess you don’t need pajamas. I guess when you lived with Martin there was only one pair and he used them.”

She smiled. “No. I’ll take pajamas.”

I should have behaved like a gentleman and given her the bed, but I didn’t. I’d lost my wife in Mexico. I could at least cling to my bed.

I got sheets, a pillow, and a blanket from the other room and a pair of cream-colored pajamas. She took the bedclothes and began gravely to spread them over the most un-bedlike Porfirio Diaz couch.

I went to her, put my hands on her arms. “Okay now?”

“Yes, thank you.” She twisted around, looking at me, her lips half parted. “You must be horribly bored with me.”

“You’re difficult, not boring.”

“You’ve been terribly kind.”

“Don’t be so British,” I added. “You’re not going to tell me what it is Sally has against you and Martin?”

She shook her head. “You’ll know soon enough. Everyone will know.”

“Maybe we can fix it yet,” I said. “Maybe we’ll think up something tomorrow.”

Her whole body seemed to sag like a flower wilting.

“No,” she said. “No, we won’t think up anything. It’s too late now.”

She slid her hands up my arms. Her lips brushed mine. They were cool and soft. It was the first time we’d ever kissed.

“Goodnight, Peter. Try not to dream of Iris.”

I didn’t dream of anyone. I lay in my massive French bed, smoking cigarettes and thinking of women. For the last three weeks I had been smothered by women, confused by women’s thinking, tugged at by women’s desires, goaded by women’s malice. I felt impregnated by femininity, like a cigarette from a woman’s handbag tainted with the taste of face powder. I felt rebellious and muddled, because I didn’t understand any of them. I didn’t really understand Iris’s tenacious desire to throw in her lot with Martin. I didn’t understand Sally’s demented desire to cling to a man who didn’t want her. And, God knows, I didn’t understand anything about Marietta. None of them operated the way a man would operate. They made no sense to me. I resented being sucked so profitlessly into their woman’s world.

Through the tall French doors that led from the bedroom to the living room, light still fanned in. That meant Marietta wasn’t asleep. She was probably lying there on the couch, smoking cigarettes, like me, and thinking. Of what? Of how to outwit Sally? No, that was too sensible and masculine. Probably she was shaking at the memory of red hairs on male wrists or yearning for Martin and the orchard on the home farm and the knobbly staffs made out of hawthorn.

I tried to believe in Sally’s vicious threats. I tried to believe that tomorrow, probably, would be vastly and ominously different for all of them. But, for some reason, this feminine danger seemed less real than a scene in the cheapest movie. I wondered where Sally was now. Driving back to Taxco? She was the sort of crazy woman who would leap into a car and drive furiously through the night. I thought of the perilous road to Taxco, snaking through mountains, flanked with canyons. I thought of Sally with her little hands clutching the wheel of the automobile, her hair gleaming dead pale in the moonlight, her eyes bright with relentless malice. She had only to make one false movement of the wrist to plunge herself and the red convertible coupé into eternity.

I considered cold-bloodedly whether life would be better for me with Sally dead. It would be better for the others, obviously. Iris would get Martin. Martin would get money. Marietta would get freedom from the fear that haunted her. But what would I get?

Nothing, I decided. But then there was nothing for me anyway. I stubbed my cigarette.

Curiously enough, it was Sally I dreamed of and not Iris. Sally, thin and hot, pressed against me, her metal-heavy hair weighing me down, her lips, unyielding as metal, locked against mine.

I was awakened by sunlight splashing through the window which looked out on the green patio. I opened my eyes and remembered Marietta in the next room. I remembered too what the day had in store for us. I put on a bathrobe and went into the living room. The couch was restored to its normal stiff majesty. There was a neat pile of sheets and blankets on the floor at its side. Marietta wasn’t there.

A piece of paper was propped against a lamp made out of a china blackamoor in pink lackey tights. I picked the note up. In Marietta’s sprawling, oddly ingenuous handwriting was scribbled:

Thanks, Peter. I’d have made breakfast for you if there’d been a kitchen and if I knew how to cook.

Love,

Marietta

If I’d been consistent, I’d have been relieved she had gone, but I wasn’t. I felt hurt. This was a bad day for her. I’d expected her to need me as a sensible, enterprising male—someone to plan for her and decide how to ready herself for Sally’s blow when it fell. I missed her too, and I felt uneasy. I hoped to hell she wasn’t going to try some scatterbrained last-minute maneuver.

I was shaving gloomily when the phone rang. Mexico has two competitive telephone systems. It always confused me. The wrong instrument always seemed to be ringing. This time I hit the right receiver on the first try. A Spanish voice said something which involved my name and Taxco. Then, like every other voice in Mexico, it said, “
momentito,”
which should mean a little moment but means anything up to half an hour.

This time I didn’t have to wait long. I felt quite jittery, because Sally was the only person I knew in Taxco. It was Sally too. The pretty, light voice came across the wire, conciliatory with a faint bubbling of laughter behind it.

“Peter, did I wake you up?”

“Yes.”

“I behaved awfully stupidly last night, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“I’m terribly sorry, really I am.”

“That’s why you’re calling?”

“No. No, Peter. That isn’t why I’m calling.” Her voice sounded stronger, as if she was leaning into the mouthpiece. I could visualize the gold hair, shiny as the composition of the telephone, sliding around it. I could feel hair in my mouth. “Peter, I’m calling because of something terribly important.”

“What?”

“Something you told me. Remember, Peter?” She laughed. It was a stilted laugh, almost as if she were drunk, but I didn’t think she was. “Remember you called me a bitch, a nasty little spoiled rich bitch?”

“I guess I was a bit low, common, and vulgar.”

“Oh, no. No. Not that. You were wonderful. I thought about it. All the way driving home I thought about it. I thought about how you said I should leave them alone—Martin and Marietta and Iris, how I was only trying to make them miserable to satisfy my own egoism. Remember?”

“Unfortunately I do.”

“Don’t say unfortunately, Peter. It’s the truth. I’ve thought and it’s the truth. Can I see you?”

“See me?”

“Yes, can you drive down to Taxco? It’s only sixty miles. You can come down.” She laughed. “You aren’t doing anything, anyway.”

Incredibly, it seemed that losing my temper with her had been more effective than any crafty strategy I could have thought up. I said, “Sure I can come, Sally, if there’s any point to my coming.”

“Of course there’s a point because—don’t you see—I’m not going to the police today.”

“You’re not?”

“No.” She paused. I could hear her breathing, short, fluttery. The connection was that good. “Not today. Maybe I’ll never go to the police if—”

“If?”

“If you come.”

“Why do you want me?”

“Because. Because I want you to know what I know about them.”

“About who?”

“About Martin and Marietta—what they did. I want you to know. I want you to advise me. If you think it’s so bad I should go to the police, I’ll go. If you think I should let them off, maybe I’ll let them off.”

I could hardly believe the Ericsson telephone. “And if I think you should let them off?”