The Followed Man (33 page)

"Was your husband's name
Sturgis too?" Luke asked.

"No, I took my family name
back."

"She kept the alimony,
though," Coleman said.

"I'm not
that
liberated," Louise said. "At least not yet."

She was beginning to make some
money with pots and cups and dishes at the craft fairs, and even had
some retail places that bought her things. "You'll have to see
my studio," she said. "To­night, come back and have a
nightcap with us and I'll show you my wares. It's on your way back up
the mountain."

He thought he would like to see
her wares. Danger seemed an abstraction to him. Freddie came over and
said hello, again invit­ed him to come to the lodge for potluck,
and managed this time to be somewhat unintelligible about trails and
distances without sug­gesting to Luke's ear any stranger
meanings. This left Phyllis alone in her chair, so he went over and
sat on the arm of the sofa next to her.

"Aren't they interesting
people?" Phyllis said.

"Yes," Luke said.
"Very interesting people."

"She's very attractive, I
thought."

Luke smiled at her and Phyllis
looked sly. "Or else George is making these drinks too strong,"
he said.

"Now, Luke!" She
touched his arm with her bent hand, then said, "That little
Freddie's an odd one, though. Can you under­stand what he's
saying? We've known him for years, of course, but I never do catch
half of what he says, he talks so fast."

George had brought a large young
man into the room and was introducing him with obvious pleasure to
Louise and Coleman. Freddie evidently knew him already. The young man
wore steel-rimmed glasses, green chinos and a windbreaker. He was
gaunt, blond, and red-faced from social unease or weather. George
brought him over and introduced him to Luke. "John Pillsbury,
the new game warden," George said. "It was him and me found
Shem that morning, you know. John here used to check on him now and
then, and they got on fine."

"Shem Carr was quite a
man," John Pillsbury said. "I used to like talking to him.
He knew more about that mountain!"

"Shem kind of took a shine
to John," George said. "'Course he'd give up hunting
illegal by the time John come along."

They both laughed. John
Pillsbury said, "He told me he used to need three limits of them
little Zach Brook trout just for break­fast!"

Luke then noticed John
Pillsbury's wife, whom Louise and Coleman were trying to be nice to
and were terrifying. She was a handsome young woman who was so ill at
ease she could not be whatever her self was, just smiled tight
non-smiles at whatever they were saying to her. Phyllis saw this and
went over to her, walking without a cane, and brought her back. Her
name was Mary. Luke evidently terrified her too, so Phyllis took her
off to the kitchen to be her assistant in serving dinner, at which
sugges­tion Mary looked relieved.

At the table Phyllis had Luke
sit next to Louise, with Coleman opposite. Mary Pillsbury, postponing
the time she would have to sit down between Freddie and Coleman,
fussed over the table af­ter the casserole, salad, hot rolls and
utensils were all arranged.

Phyllis finally made her sit
down. George served the casserole, the recipe for which Phyllis said
she had gotten from
Woman's Day.
It contained, among other
things, ham, tunafish, green peppers and raisins. Luke said it was
excellent, especially after his own haphaz­ard meals on the
mountain.

"Single men don't eat what
they ought," Phyllis said. "Statistics prove it. They die
sooner than married men."

"What about single women?"
Louise said.

"Women know better,"
Phyllis said. "A woman takes time to make things. Men just swill
whatever's easy or handy."

George talked with John
Pillsbury. Freddie ate. Coleman ate a little and pushed his food
around, but concentrated mainly on a strong whiskey and water he'd
made himself just before they sat down. When Freddie had eaten enough
he began to talk in tongues to Mary Pillsbury, who didn't understand
a word, though she tried to smile when Freddie laughed.

While Coleman and Phyllis talked
about property taxes, Louise said to Luke, "She's trying to
mate
the two of us. Isn't that sweet?"

"It's what benevolent old
ladies do," Luke said, feeling disloyal.

"Well, how old are you and
what are your bloodlines?"

"I'm a chap in his forties,
of ancient lineage," he said, which she seemed to find
impressive and even funny.

"When he looked at me my
father used to say there was a touch of the tarbrush in my mother's
family," she said.

"You do look a little
Oriental."

"Is that good or bad?"

"It's okay," he said,
thinking about that—about his saying okay and the sexual rise
and tremor in him as he said it.

"What are you thinking
about?" she said. "George says you have a brand-new truck.
I've been thinking about that because I've nev­er, ever in my
life, ridden in a truck. Will you give me a ride in your truck
someday?"

"Sure. Tonight. I'll give
you a ride home in it."

"Now what are you
thinking?"

"I was thinking I always
tend to monitor myself for the truth," he said, "though I
do tend to lie."

"So it's
not
okay I
look like a Slant?"

"A Gook," he said.
"That's the word my enlightened generation used. Anyway, I'm
probably too old for you. How old are you?"

"Twenty-nine. No,
thirty-six. I was married at twenty-six, so there was seven years
there, then three divorced. That's thirty-six.

"Children?"

"My husband had a vasectomy
during his first marriage and neglected to tell me about it. He was
like that. He'd already made three kids. So. Anyway, my nipples are
still pink."

He looked down at the little
points in the material of her dress, she watching him look. She
smiled a crooked little smile, a rather aggressive, bitter look.

Later she went after George
about guns, having overheard part of his and John Pillsbury's
conversation. George manfully re­strained himself, though, when
Phyllis gave him a hard look.

At ten the Pillsburys left, John
a little drunk on George's home brew, so the dinner party was over.
Freddie tried to arrange a date when they would all come to the lodge
for supper, George being quite skillfully slippery about the matter.
As he said good night, Luke told Phyllis he was giving Louise a ride
home in his truck, and Phyllis smiled and pushed him in the chest.

"Is Coleman married?"
he asked Louise as they drove to her house.

"You mean is he queer? No,
Coleman specializes in doomed love affairs. Impossibly young
students, other people's wives, broads that don't like him
enough—like that. God, this truck is
big.
There doesn't
seem to be enough road for it. You could lie down on this seat."

"You could," he said.
"My feet would stick out the window."

She laughed, and he felt like a
schoolboy. He remembered, be­cause he felt it right now, the
nervousness that was the bane of the callow. Would she, or wouldn't
she? Could he, or couldn't he? That was a new question to complicate
things, one that had never occurred to him before. Then came the
warning: they want to in­volve you. They are after you and will
make you care too much.

Coleman came along behind them
in his Toyota and the three of them entered the old house together.
The front hall was cluttered with lumber, lath and sawhorses, the
unplaned sub-flooring exposed. The long room they then entered had
been parlor and dining room before the wall between was removed. The
room was a familiar combination of objects such as wicker peacock
chairs, a modern sofa, cobblers' benches and large, colorful
paintings of crosses, circles and other geometric slashes on vast
whitish back­grounds. There were many books in pine board
bookcases, and a Swedish stove set into one of the high-throated
fireplaces. The decor was, with minor differences in the styles of
the paintings, one his class tended to superimpose upon the rooms of
old New England houses.

They spoke of the paintings,
done by friends, and of course the Swedish stove, green-enameled, its
heating chamber above the firebox arched and embellished with cast-in
designs of leaves and reindeer. Coleman made them drinks, his own
pretty heavy on the bourbon, and they went through a big kitchen,
across dewy grass to the small barn, where banks of fluorescent
lights came on in a room still dusty with ancient hay and cobwebs in
its upper reaches and along its square beams. Here were Louise's
wheels, racks, glazes, crocks of clay covered with polyethylene, and
the cellary damp odor of fresh clay, the floor grayish with clay. On
the racks were unfired rows of monochromatic cups, saucers, dishes
and pots.

Beyond the barn was the kiln
room built within the round ce­ment foundation of the long
disappeared silo. Heat from the gas-fired kiln, that was a cave-like
stack of firebricks almost as light as balsa wood, could in winter be
vented back into the barn-studio, which Louise was in the process of
insulating.

Some glazed, finished pots and
platters were on shelves in the barn. One glaze she seemed to like
was milky, and seemed to drip over the sides of pots with a viscous
stopped movement, like pho­tographs of semen. When he examined
one of these pots closely Louise said that it began as a mistake, but
then she'd rather liked the effect. She'd had a difficult time
repeating it, though. "It's hard to reproduce a mistake,"
she said, "because the data's unreli­able."

"We seldom
want
to
reproduce our mistakes," Coleman said, "but we do, we do,
don't we?"

"Speak for yourself,
brother," Louise said with a hardness, or bitterness, or a sort
of expert sarcasm that gave Luke pause. It seemed unhealthy, suddenly
exposed, a disdain that was too heavy.

Back in the long living room,
Coleman made himself another tea-brown bourbon, drank it quickly and
said good night. Luke sat on the modern sofa, deep into brown velour,
while Louise straddled a cobbler's bench, put down her drink and
pushed her black hair back with both hands, arching her chest and
neck as if she were posing for him, showing him how her spine
articulated. Her neat haunches were planted on the dark old bench,
her stock­inged legs exposed. When she got up to get an ashtray
she knew his eyes followed her. She came back and sat next to him on
the sofa, bent forward to reach for her cigarettes on the coffee
table, moving constantly, puffing on her cigarette, tapping it on the
ash­tray, sipping her drink.

"I love Phyllis," she
said. "Don't you? Isn't she real?"

"Yes," he said. Her
nervousness, or whatever it was, somehow calmed his own. He put his
hand on her shoulder, thinking that she had, after all, sat down
right next to him. He was certain of nothing. She let him pull her
back, looking at him quickly with her head bent forward, her olive
eyes wide open.

"That doesn't mean we have
to do what she wants us to, though," she said.

"No," he said.

"Do you really mean that?"

"I'll mean anything you
want me to," he said.

"Are you a
friend,
for
Christ's sake?"

"Sure."

"I never know what a man's
really like until after he's come, and then he's usually a shit."

"Not me, I don't think."

"Are you still monitoring
yourself for the truth?"

"Yes. I don't know what I
can do or not do. I've been carrying this weight around. . . ."

"Your family. I know."

His erection faded, and the room
came sharply into focus, for­eign and somehow casual, as if its
items were on display in a store window he passed with only a glance.
She was a collection of ten­dons, bones, glands and unpleasant
opinions. Except that now she was sympathetic, and put her hand,
which was angular and short—he hadn't noticed before—on
his leg.

"Let's go to my room and
see what happens, anyway," she said.

Her room was across the
unfinished hallway, the bed high and white, brass columns and
flutings like pipe organs at head and foot. There was the going to
the bathroom, he using hers, she finding another somewhere in the old
house. The strangeness and familiarity of preparation, the
acknowledgment of function, the overcoming desire. She came back
still dressed and sat on the high bed, her feet not touching the
hardwood floor that was cool to his bare feet. He helped her off with
her clothes, and put the suddenly tiny, unsubstantial beige dress
over the back of a ladder-back chair, then the silky rope of
pantyhose. For a moment they examined each other in the lamplight.
She was usual, beautiful to his lust, strange in coloration. Her
nipples were not pink, but a light tan, her olive skin not of the
blank clarity of youth, but their naked bodies were of a kind, each
almost unnaturally preserved and firm. This seemed a bond between
them, even at this anticipa­tory moment, and they both said so.
He picked her up, weighing her, and put her down easily on the bed.

"You're examining me,"
she said. He nodded and looked close­ly at her, following his
hands with his eyes. Her hand on his erec­tion was like needles.
He almost laughed, it was so uncomplicated. Her hollows and creases,
the night-black neatness of her small tri­angle there. He took a
long pleasure in knowing her body—lips, textures, planes,
articulations, tastes—until she insisted that he enter her.

They awoke off and on in the
night, neither used to the other. Sometime before dawn they lay
awake, her head in the hollow of his arm, her hand gently and idly
playing with him.

"You do love women, don't
you,' she said.

"Yes, I think so," he
said.

"Oh, you do. Most men
don't. I don't resent you sticking your prick in me. I mean I don't
resent it even afterwards, when we get through."