The Deceivers (22 page)

Carl said, “Sorry, Eunice, but we’ve got to oust you. Regulations.”

“Well, it’s perfectly all right to be sure,” Eunice said. “I’ll tell you all the rest of it tomorrow, dearie.”

“Please don’t bother to come in, Eunice. I’ll be home by Monday.”

“Well, I think you should know.”

After she left Joan smiled at them and kissed Carl and squeezed Molly’s hand. “Honestly,” she said, “that Stockland woman gives me the creeps. Do you know, she’s really … evil. I didn’t realize that before. She’s got some crazy story about Cindy staying out all night every night with a man while Bucky’s away. And I know that’s perfectly absurd, and so do you, Molly.”

“She gave Jane the word yesterday at lunch.”

“Cindy hasn’t come in yet today, but when she does, I’m going to ask her about it.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Carl said quickly.

Joan stared at him in an awkward silence. “Why not, dear? Certainly if Eunice Stockland is slandering her, Cindy should know.”

He floundered in quiet desperation and said, weakly, “I mean I think Cindy knows about it. She … told me about not being home Wednesday night when Bucky phoned her.”

“Did she say where she’d been?”

He suddenly remembered that Cindy had told Bucky that she had been home and that she had heard the knocking and that her car had been in the repair garage. And he knew that was the story Cindy would tell Joan if questioned.

His smile felt clumsily stitched in place. “I may have it wrong, you know. I haven’t been listening too well to what people tell me. Maybe she was home.”

“But she told you she wasn’t home, didn’t she?”

“That might have been some other night.”

“I’m going to tell her about Eunice anyway. I don’t see why you think I shouldn’t.”

“I guess you should, honey. I guess it would be a good idea.”

He glanced sidelong at Molly and thought Molly was looking at him with a rather curious expression.

“Did you play golf, dear?” Joan asked.

“No. Too hot for it.”

“Hell it was,” Ted said. “It was fine out there this afternoon. Rudy and I took a full fifteen-buck Nassau off Quinn and Hallister. I birdied seventeen and Rudy birdied eighteen and afterward we clipped ’em with the bar dice. It was a great day out there.”

Molly took hold of Ted’s arm. “Come on, you big louse,
let’s give the Cardamo kids their chance. We’ll send them right up, Joanie.”

“I didn’t even know they were down there!”

“This has turned into a dinner party for five. Barbecued ribs, a bushel of them.”

“Gee, I wish I could come too,” Joan said, wistfully.

“There will come a day,” Molly said, “and soon.”

As soon as they were gone, Joan said, “Have you had a lot to drink?”

“You know Ted’s drinks.”

“Count them, darling. I worry about you driving around full of drinks.”

“I won’t be driving around. Just from their house to ours. What is it? A half mile?”

“A little longer than that. You’re acting funny. You acted funny about my talking to Cindy about Eunice. Why?”

“I didn’t mean to act funny. I just mean that I think Cindy is … upset about something. Something to do with Bucky. Everybody knows how Eunice is. Nobody pays much attention to her. I just thought it would worry Cindy.”

“I think she should know.”

“Then you ask her about it.”

“Hi, Jane! Paul! How nice of you to come see me, you darlings.”

Jane kissed Joan and Paul grinned at her. They sat and talked about nothing for about ten minutes. Joan insisted that she’d had enough visiting, and they should go on back to the party. Molly and Ted were probably getting terribly bored downstairs.

Carl kissed her good night and they left. He told the Raedeks and the Cardamos to go on out to the car, that he had remembered a call he had to make. He used the pay booth in the corridor. It took longer than he expected for information to find out which exchange the Traveler was on. A woman answered the phone and connected him with room twenty. After it had rung five times he became convinced that Cindy was on her way in, and might stop to see Joan. Just when he was wondering how he could get to Cindy first, she answered.

“Yes?”

“This is Carl.”

“I thought it would be.”

“The phone rang so many times …”

“I was in the shower.”

“You sound pretty abrupt.”

“What do you want?”

“I goofed, slightly. Eunice Stockland has been running a time check on you, the times you’ve come in.”

“That’s typical.”

“She was with Joan tonight. I’m phoning from the hospital. The Raedeks and the Cardamos are waiting for me out in the car to go back to the Raedeks’. I said to Joan, without thinking, something about you telling me where you were when Billy Stockland came over to check. I forgot you told Bucky you were home all the time.”

“So?”

“Joan is going to tell you about Eunice. And probably ask you where you were. I … I wanted you to know what I’d said. Cindy, Cindy, are you there?”

“I’m here,” she said in a tired voice. “What do I tell her? What do you suggest? The truth?”

“You know better than that.”

“I know, I know. I’ll tell her I’ve been taking long drives and walks and so on and so on.”

“Deposit thirty cents for another three minutes, please.”

“Good by, Cindy.”

“Good by. And please don’t come back here later.”

The line went dead. He hurried out to the car. She knew damn well he had no intention of coming back later. It was all over. Maybe she got a big boot out of using the tone of voice of a funeral director. Maybe she thought it was dramatic.

He was glad to be back in the screened cage with one of Ted’s strenuous drinks in his hand. Ted had turned on the outside spots and floods, dramatically lighting the plantings that thrived under Molly’s care. A little while before they ate she asked him to come to the end of the yard to look at a new plant.

He admired it and praised it properly.

“Carl.”

Her tone of voice alerted him. “What?”

She turned toward him, one half of her face in shadow. “I was raised on a farm. I guess you know that. We had a spaniel pup that fell into the habit of sucking eggs. My sister and I caught him at it. He knew darn well he was doing wrong. You wore the same expression tonight that Waffle did when we caught him.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I hope you don’t. I hope it’s an overactive imagination. I hope I’m not talking out of turn. I’m no gossip, Carl. You know that. And I don’t meddle. And I’m even a pretty tolerant type. If you and Gil Sullivan went and got yourselves fixed up with a pair of semi-pro cuties down in the city, I wouldn’t applaud, but I think I could understand why you would get into that kind of a deal. But I couldn’t understand you being so stupid and so callous as to get involved with Cindy Cable. I hope to God I’m wrong. I hope you’re not. Because that would be more than dynamite, Carl. That could be an unholy, ungodly mess. The four of you have been pretty close. I … I just hate to think that anything like that could happen to you and Joanie and the Cables. Because you’re all rather nice folks.”

“But I …”

“Now don’t say anything. If my guess is right, I don’t want to put you to the trouble of lying about it. And if I’m dead wrong, then you’ll feel more flattered than abused.” She laid her hand on his arm. “But if I am right, Carl, try to get out of it just as quickly and cleanly as you can. Now let’s go back and get that one last drink before the ribs.”

She wouldn’t let him say anything. And afterward, he was grateful to her. He could not honestly say whether, had he been given a chance to talk, he would have lied with fake indignation, or tried to shift some of the guilt by telling her the whole thing.

He was grateful, but at the same time she had distressed him. For a time he could not understand why her words had left such a sour aftertaste. And finally he realized that, for the first time, he had been privileged to hear the opinion of an outsider. And it gave him a sharper, deeper view of what had happened. It was as though his own vision had been a single beam which, in a surrounding darkness, illumines the figures it shines on, but also flattens them out into a design as stylized as a frieze. And now, off to one side, the second beam of Molly’s perception had been focused on the deed. And the episode had come to life with a dreadful dimensionality. He had been partially drugged by the hypnoid limitations of his own vision, and now for the first time, because of Molly’s comments, he could stand off and look at Carl and Cindy as though he were an outsider, rather than merely looking at her from within himself.

No longer could the incident by the back door of her house, the episode in his living room, the interludes at the
motel be viewed in retrospect with any flavoring of grace or magic. They had become awkward fumblings and sweaty couplings which, through the gilding of delusion and rationalization, they had managed for a time to believe were unique, sensitive and necessary.

Now, like a visitor at a fair or exhibition, he looked down into the little lighted display and pressed the button to activate the exhibit and saw then, with the clarity of sickness, the timeless and comic surgings of the beast with two backs. It gave him a special sharpness of guilt and shame and remorse, because he saw clearly that it was merely but another shoddy gratification of one of the ageless hungers of man. In any historical sense it was meaningless—as empty as the act of animals or savages. But in the immediate and personal context, it was an act of destruction, a violation of faith.

The final drink before dinner blurred his reflexes, tangled his speech and shredded his memory. He had a memory of eating, then of blundering into a coffee table and tipping it over, of a disjointed argument with Ted about whether he should drive, of standing in his own bathroom and making faces at himself in the mirror and talking to himself. And then a feeling of alarm as he saw the speedometer needle shimmying above eighty. He dropped it back to thirty miles an hour and sat erect behind the wheel, one eye clenched shut so that there was but one yellow line dividing the lanes of the turnpike.

Then he was pounding on the door. And she opened it, vivid in anger, hushing him, pulling him inside.

He planted his feet and stood swaying and grinning at her, and the room had a swimmy, swarmy look, all a-swing and a-tilt, and then a taste as of sour apricots bulged into his throat and he plunged toward the bathroom, rebounded from the door frame, clattered his knees painfully against the tile floor and was then torn and convulsed by the endless choking spasms.

The first time he awakened on Sunday morning his heart was knocking against the inside of his chest in a hard, fast, alarming rhythm. There was a first breath of daylight coming through the slatted blinds, and his watch said five after six. His body felt grainy with dried sweat. There was a horrid taste in his mouth, and a hard focus of shimmering green pain over his right eye. He turned his head slowly and saw Cindy in the other bed, her back to him, the hip-mound high in the classic pose of the sleeping woman. As he somberly contemplated the vast efforts which would be required to get up and dress and leave, he drifted slowly down into sleep again.

She shook him awake, gently, at quarter after nine. His heart had slowed and the pain over his eye was less acute, but the taste was the same, and the feeling of stickiness was the same, and he felt vastly thirsty. He braced himself up on his elbows and made a grimace of pain.

“Bad?” Cindy asked.

“I might live.” She handed him a glass of cold water. He gulped it down and handed her the glass and said, “Could you do that again?”

She brought him another glass and put a pitcher of cold water on the night stand beside him. She sat on the opposite bed and lighted a cigarette. She was dressed in a full black and white striped skirt, a black blouse with white buttons, collar and cuffs. Her hair was pulled severely back into a plaited rosette, her face carefully made up, her manner cool and efficient.

As he poured a third glass, clinking the pitcher against the rim of the glass, he said, “You seem to know first aid.”

“Bucky’s always thirsty after he ties one on.”

“This isn’t my standard operating procedure.”

“I know. I don’t know how you got here without killing yourself. After you passed out, I went out and moved your car. I’m glad I looked out.”

“Where did I leave it?”

“Up over the curbing with the front bumper against the building.”

“I was pretty bad, I guess.”

“You were stinking drunk. Helplessly, disgustingly drunk. I told you not to come back here. Why did you?”

“I don’t really know. I think I got it in my head that I had something to tell you. Something very important and necessary. But I don’t know what it was. Did I say anything?”

“I couldn’t understand you. You were sick in the bathroom and then you passed out in there. I pulled you out here and finally got you onto the bed and undressed you. Then I cleaned the bathroom.”

“I’m sorry, Cindy.”

“Why did you get so drunk?”

“That’s right. I have to have a reason, don’t I? Maybe I felt so ashamed of myself I sought oblivion. You know. Big escape act.”

“You don’t have to be nasty. You’ve done enough without being nasty.”

“
I’ve
done enough!”

“Oh, skip it, for heaven’s sake, Carl. We just seem to be doing such a wonderful job of ending it on the sourest possible note. Remember, I’m much too young to have mature attitudes. You told me that. Why don’t you take your shower and get dressed? I’m all packed. You can drive me down to my car when you’re ready. Your clothes are dry. I scrubbed the stains off your shirt and slacks an hour ago.”

“Thank you.”

“They’re hanging in the bathroom.” She got up and went to the front windows and stood with her back to the room. He got out of bed, took his shorts and socks from the chair and went into the bathroom. He felt as if he stood too tall on his legs, tall, fragile and insecure.

He was in the shower and had rinsed away the soap and was standing braced against a cold stinging spray, hoping it would renew him, when she said, “Carl! Carl!” and rapped against the plastic sliding partitions sharply.