Separate Beds (35 page)

“Oh, God, Cat,” he whispered in a strangled voice, “this is where we started.”

“Not at all,” came her shaky reply. “We've come a long way since then.”

“You have, Cat, you have. You're so different now.”

“I've grown up a little, that's all.”

“Then what the hell's the matter with me?”

“Don't you know?”

“Nothing's right in my life anymore. Everything's gone wrong since you and I made that damn agreement. The last year has been miserable. I don't know who I am or where I'm going anymore.”

“Is this going to tell you?”

“I don't know. I only know it feels right here with you.”

“The first time we met it felt right, and look where it landed us.”

“I want you,” he half-groaned against her hair, wrapping his arms around her so far she heard old stitches pop up the back of his jacket. She closed her eyes and swam in a warm, wet place of his making, secure enough now to take the plunge, to say that which she'd refused to say during the agonizing months she'd lived with him.

“But I love you, Clay, and there's a difference.”

He pulled back to search her face, and she willed him to say it, but he didn't. He read her thoughts and knew what it was she waited for, but found he could not say it unless he was certain. Things had happened so fast he didn't know if he was running on impulse or emotion. He only knew she looked beguiling, and that she was the mother of his child and that they were still husband and wife.

He came back against her hard, and the momentum swept them to the carpeted stairs. All in one motion he pressed her down and lifted his knee, riding it across her stomach, hip and thigh, caressing her with it while he searched the neck of her robe for the zipper, slid it down and plunged his hand inside to slake it with her breast, then run it down her stomach.

“Stop it, Clay, stop it,” she implored, dying because she wanted nothing more than to turn her body inside-out for him.

Against her warm neck he said throatily, “You don't want this to stop, not any more than you did the first time.”

“Our divorce will be final in less than a month, and you're living with another woman.”

“And lately all I do is compare her to you.”

“Is that why you're here, Clay, to make comparisons?”

“No, no, I didn't mean it that way.” His hand swept down her ribs, down her stomach, heading again for the spot that wept for him. “Oh, Cat, you're under my skin.”

“Like an itch you can't reach, Clay?” She grabbed his wrist and stopped it again.

“Don't play games with me.”

“I'm not the one playing games, Clay, you are.”

He felt her nails now, digging into his wrist. He pushed himself back, leaning on one elbow to see her better.

“I'm not playing games. I want you.”

“Why? Because I'm the first thing in your life that you can't have?”

His face changed, grew stormy, then abruptly he sat up on the step beside her and buried his fingers in his hair. God, is she right, he wondered. Is that all it is with me—ego? Am I that kind of a bastard? He heard her zipper go back up but remained as he was, touching his scalp, which tingled at the thought of all that naked skin beneath her robe. He sat that way a long time, then pulled his palms down over his face. But in them he could smell the fragrance of her perfume, gathered from her skin like spring flowers.

She sat beside him, watching him do battle with himself. After a long time, he stretched his frame back against the edges of the steps, lying there at an angle. With his eyes closed he lifted up his hips and tugged at the crotch of his jeans. She could see the telltale bulge there. He rested the back of a wrist over his eyes, let his other hand lie limply down along his groin. He sighed.

Finally she spoke, but her voice was unangry, reasonable. “I think you'd better decide what it is you want, me or her. You can't have us both.”

“I know that, I goddam know that,” he said tiredly. “I'm sorry, Catherine.”

“Yes, you should be, doing this to me again. I'm not as resilient as you are, Clay. When I get hurt it hurts for a long time. And I have no alternate lover to fall back on for support.”

“I feel like I'm spinning in circles; nothing's in focus.”

“I don't doubt it, living with her, coming here, your parents right in the middle. What about them, Clay? What are you trying to prove by rejecting them the way you have and going to work for someone else?”

She saw his Adam's apple slide up and down, but he didn't answer.

“If you want to punish yourself, Clay, keep me out of it. If you want to go on putting yourself into situations that rub you raw, fine. I don't. I've made a new life with Melissa, and I've proven to myself that I can live without you. When we met, you were the one with direction, the secure one. Now it seems we've changed places. What happened to that direction, that purpose you used to have?”

Maybe it left me when I left you, he thought.

At last he sat up, then pulled himself to his feet and stood with his back to her, staring at the floor.

She said, “I think you'd better go someplace and get sorted out, get your priorities straight. If and when you manage that and think you want to see me again . . .” But instead of finishing the thought, she ended, “Just don't ever come back here asking for me unless it's for keeps.”

She heard the snaps of his jacket, like whipcracks in the silence. Clay's shoulders squared, then slumped, then he waved wordlessly, without looking back at her, and left the house, closing the door softly behind him.

Emotionally, Catherine found herself in that painful, bittersweet state she'd faced and gotten through once before when Clay left her. Again, she suffered reveries from which she emerged to find her hands idle, her thoughts and eyes meandering out the window, across the snowy city to Clay. Clay, whom she'd have on one condition only, thus would probably never have at all. The contentment she'd known from loving Melissa ceased to sustain her. Emptiness crept into her unexpectedly, in the middle of the most everyday activities: studying, folding laundry, walking across campus, giving Melissa a bath, driving in the car. Clay's visage appeared before her constantly, his absence again robbing her of joy, making life seem wan and empty, at times bringing tears to her eyes. And like all lorn loves, she found reminders of him in countless places that were only illusory: in the reddish-gold hair of some stranger on the street; in the cut of a sport coat on a muscular shoulder; in the inflection of someone's laughter; in the way certain men crossed their ankles over their knees, dropped their hands into their pockets or straightened their ties. One of Catherine's professors, when he lectured intensely, had Clay's habit of standing with arms akimbo, holding his sport coat back with his wrists, studying the floor between his outspread feet. His body language was so like Clay's that Catherine became obsessed with the man. It did no good to tell herself she was transferring her feelings for Clay to a veritable stranger. Each time Professor Neuman stood before class that way, Catherine's heart would react.

She counted off the days until Christmas break when she would no longer have to be subjected to Professor Neuman and his similarities to Clay. But Christmas brought its own bittersweet memories of last year. In an effort to stave them off, she called Aunt Ella and wangled an invitation for herself and Ada for Christmas Day. But even having plans didn't help much, for she never turned on the lights of her tiny tree without having to quell the soft, seductive memories of last year at Angela and Claiborne's house. She would walk to the sliding glass door and look out at the snow-laden world and jam her hands into the pockets of her jeans and remember, remember, remember. That magical house with all its love, lights, music and family.

Family. Ah, family. It was so much the root of Catherine's unhappiness, had been all her life. She would look at Melissa and tears would gather, for that family security the child would never know, no matter how much she herself lavished her daughter with love. She fantasized about Clay coming to the door again, only this time it would be different. This time he'd say he loved her, and only her, and they'd bundle Melissa into her little blue snowsuit and when the three of them arrived at the big house it would be just like last year, only better. Catherine closed her eyes, hugging herself, smelling again the tang of newly blown-out candles, remembering soft mistletoe kisses . . .

But that was fantasy. Reality was making it through Christmas alone, as a single parent, with no one to place gifts beneath her lonely tree but herself.

“Let's get a tree and put it up,” Clay said.

“What for?” asked Jill.

“Because it's Christmas, that's what for.”

“I don't have time. If you want one, put it up yourself.”

“You never seem to have time for anything around the house.”

“Clay, I work eight hours a day! Besides, why cultivate interests you never intend to use?”

“Never?”

“Oh, Clay, don't start in on me now. I lost my blue cashmere sweater and I wanted to wear it tomorrow. Dammit, where could it be?”

“If you'd muck the place out once a month or so, maybe you wouldn't lose track of your things.” The bedroom looked like an explosion in a Chinese laundry.

“Oh, I know!” Jill suddenly brightened. “I'll bet I took it to the cleaners last week. Clay, be a darling and run over and pick it up for me, will you?”

“I'm not your laundry boy. If you want it, go get it yourself.”

She picked her way across the littered floor and cooed close to his face, “Don't be cross, darling. I just didn't think you were busy right now.” When she would have teasingly inserted her glittering nail into the smile line on his cheek, he jerked his head aside.

“Jill, you never think I'm busy. You always think you're the only one who's busy.”

“But, darling, I am. I'm meeting the project engineer for the first time tomorrow and I want to look my best.” She tried to put him into good humor with a quick caress. But that was the third time she'd called him
darling,
and lately it had started to bother him. She used the term so loosely it sometimes stung. It reminded him of what Catherine said about the value of affection going up when it was in short supply.

“Jill, why did you want me back?” he asked abruptly.

“Darling, what a question. I was lost without you, you know that.”

“Besides being
lost
without me, what else?”

“What is this, the Spanish Inquisition? How do you like this dress?” She held up a pink crepe de chine and swirled in a little side-step, eyeing him provocatively.

“Jill, I'm trying to talk to you; will you forget the damn dress?”

“Sure. It's forgotten.” She dropped it negligently on the foot of the bed and turned to grab a brush and begin stroking her hair. “So talk.”

“Listen, I—” He hardly knew where to begin. “I thought our life-styles, our backgrounds, our futures were so alike that we were practically made for each other. But, this—this isn't working out for me.”

“Isn't working out? Clarify that for me, will you, Clay?” she asked crisply, stroking her hair all the harder.

He gestured at the room. “Jill, we're different, that's all. I have trouble living with the clutter, the meals in the restaurants, and the laundry that's never clean and the kitchen cabinets that are full of magazines!”

“I didn't think you wanted me for my domestic abilities.”

“Jill, I'm willing to do my share, but I need some sense of home, do you understand that?”

“No, I'm not sure I do. It sounds to me like you're asking me to give up my career to push dust around.”

“I'm not asking you to give up anything, just to give me some straight answers.”

“I would if I knew exactly what it is you're asking.”

Clay picked up a lace-trimmed violet petticoat from a chair and sat down wearily. He studied the expensive garment, rubbing it between his fingers. Quietly he asked, “What about kids, Jill?”

“Kids?”

Her brush stopped stroking. Clay looked up.

“A family. Do you ever want to have a family?”

She whirled on him angrily. “And you said you're not asking me to give anything up!”

“I'm not, and I'm not even talking about right away, but someday. Do you want a baby someday?”

“I've just put in all these years getting a degree; I have a future ahead of me in one of the fastest-growing fields there is, and you're talking babies?”

Without warning, Clay pictured Catherine crying because Grover's baby had died, then in the labor room with their hands together on her stomach as the contractions built; he thought of her cross-legged on the living room floor clapping Melissa's feet together, and the way she'd cried because Melissa had bumped her head.

Suddenly Jill threw the brush down. It cracked upon the dresser top, went skittering off the mirror and landed on the floor inside an abandoned high-heel pump.

“You've seen her, haven't you?”

“Who?”

“Your . . . wife.” The word galled Jill.

Clay didn't even consider lying. “Yes.”

“I knew it! As soon as you came in here complaining about the mess, I knew it! Did you take her to bed?”

“For God's sake.” Clay stood up, turning away from her.

“Well, did you?”

“That's got nothing to do with this.”

“Oh, doesn't it? Well, think again, buster, because I'm not playing second fiddle to any woman, wife or not!” Jill turned back to the mirror, picked up a fat brush and savagely began applying blush to her cheeks.

“That's part of this arrangement we have here, isn't it, Jill?”

She glared at him in the looking glass. “What is?”

“Egos, yours and mine. Part of the reason you wanted me was because you've never had to do without anything you wanted. Part of the reason I left Catherine is because I've never had to do without anything I wanted.”

Her eyes glittered dangerously as she swung around to face him. “Well, we're two of a kind then, aren't we, Clay?”

“No, we're not. I thought we were, but we're not. Not anymore.”

They stood with eyes locked, hers angry, his sorry, in the meadow of strewn garments, coffee cups, newspapers and makeup.

At last Jill said, “I can compete with Catherine, but I can't compete with Melissa. That's it, isn't it?”

“She's there, Jill. She exists, and I'm her father and I can't forget it. And Catherine has changed so much.”

Without warning she flung the makeup brush at him and it hit him on the cheek as she yelled, “Oh, damn you! Damn you! Damn you! How dare you stand there mooning over her! If you want her so bad, what are you doing here? But once you leave, don't think your half of the bed will be cold for long!”

“Jill, please, I never meant to hurt you.”

“Hurt? How could you hurt me? You only hurt the one you love, isn't that how the song goes?”

When Clay left Lake Minnetonka, he drove aimlessly for hours. He headed for Minneapolis proper, circled Lake Calhoun, headed east on Lake Street past the quaint little artsy shops at the Lake Hennepin area, farther east where seedy theaters gave way to seedier used-furniture stores. He turned south, caught the strip that cut Bloomington in half and circled west again. The lights of the Radisson South split the night sky with its twenty-two stories of windows as Clay turned onto the Belt Line, unconsciously heading for Golden Valley.

He took the exit of Golden Valley Road without deciding to, and threaded through the streets that once had been his route home, passing Byerly's Supermarket where he and Catherine had first gone grocery shopping. He pulled into the lot beside the town house but let the engine idle, leaving only the parking lights on. He looked up at the sliding glass door and there, shining out onto the snowy balcony were the multi-colored lights from a Christmas tree. As he sat staring at them, they blinked out and the window grew dark. Then he put the car in gear and headed for a motel.

When Clay appeared in the doorway of the study, Claiborne looked up, tried to mask his surprise, but couldn't quite bring it off. He half rose from his chair, then settled down again behind the desk with a bald look of hope.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hello, Clay. We haven't seen you for a long time.”

“Yeah, well, don't tell Mother I'm here just yet. I'd like to talk to you alone first.”

“Of course, come in, come in.” Claiborne removed a pair of silver-rimmed reading glasses from his nose and dropped them on the desk.

“The glasses are new.”

“I've had them for a couple of months, can't get used to the damn things, though.”

They both looked at the glasses. The room was still. Suddenly, as if inspired, the older man rose.

“How about a brandy?”

“No, thanks, I—”

“A Scotch?” Claiborne asked too anxiously. “Or maybe some white wine. I seem to remember that you liked white.”

“Dad, please. We both know white wine isn't going to fix a damn thing.”

Claiborne dropped back into his chair. A log hissed in the fire and shot a tongue of blue flame sideways. Clay sighed, wondering as he had so often recently, where to begin. He sat on the edge of the leather loveseat and pressed his thumb knuckles deep into his eyes.

“What the hell went wrong?” he finally asked. His voice was quiet and searching and pained.

“Absolutely nothing that can't be fixed,” his father answered. And even before their eyes met again, their hearts seemed to drop burdens which each had borne for too long.

The telephone rang for the fifth time and Clay's hopes waned. He angled the receiver away from his ear, leaning his head back against the headboard and shut his eyes. Traffic roared past on the highway outside. He studied his stocking feet stretched out before him, his suitcases lying open, sighed, and was just about to give up when Catherine said hello.

She stood in the dark bedroom dripping bath water onto the carpet, trying to get a towel wrapped around her without dropping the receiver.

“Hello, Catherine?”

Her heart seemed to flip up into her windpipe and her hands stopped messing with the towel. It slid down off her back and she clutched it to her breast, feeling her battering heart through the terry cloth.

At last she said, “H-hello.”

He heard the catch in her voice and swallowed. “It's Clay.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I didn't think you were home.”

“I was in the tub.”

The line buzzed for an interminable moment while he wondered which phone she'd picked up and what she was wearing.

“I'm sorry, I can call back.”

“No!” Then she calmed herself a little. “No, but . . . can you wait a minute, Clay, while I get a robe on? I'm freezing.”

“Sure, I'll hang on.” And hang on he did, clutching the receiver in his damp palm while hours seemed to drag past and visions of a pink hooded robe filled his mind.

Catherine flew to the closet, dropping the towel, scrambling for her robe, frantic, impatient, fumbling, thinking, oh, my God, it's Clay, it's Clay! Oh, Lord, oh, damn, where's my robe? He'll hang up . . . Where is it? Wait, Clay, wait! I'm coming!

She tried running back to the phone and stepping into the robe at the same time, but the zipper went only halfway down the front of the thing, and she stumbled, arriving at the phone breathless.

“Clay?” he heard, and the sound of her anxiousness made him smile and feel warm inside.

“I'm here.”

She released a pent-up breath, got the zipper up and perched on the edge of the bed in the semidarkness, with only the light from the closet easing around the corner into the room.

“Sorry it took so long.”

He figured it had probably taken seven seconds. Still, he was afraid now to ask what he'd called to ask, afraid she'd turn him down, sick at the thought that she might.