The Fourth Side of the Triangle (7 page)

As the day wore on he found himself hungering for her voice. Work was out of the question. Suppose by his silence he made her think he was having second thoughts? She mustn't think that, mustn't. Besides … that voice, that deep and husky telephone quality it did not have at other times …

“Sheila! Dane.”

“I know.”

It was like warm honey, that voice.

“I've got to see you. Tonight? This afternoon?”

“No, Dane, I want to think.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“I love you, Sheila.”

She did not reply at once, as if she were fighting him, or herself. “I know, Dane,” she finally said. “Tomorrow.”

She came straight into his arms. There was a nerve in the hollow of her throat that jumped when he kissed it. It was some time before he said anything. Then he held her close and said, “Sheila, I want you to marry me.”

“I know, Dane.”

She knew!

“Then you will?” he cried.

“No.”

It was like setting his foot down where a step should have been, but was not. A scalding wave of humiliation washed over him; and suddenly he thought of his father. This was how his father would feel; this was his punishment for having planned the whole dirty thing. Was she laughing at him? Had she seen through him from the start?

He looked at her wildly.

“Darling, I'm not refusing you,” murmured Sheila, and she took his head between her hands and kissed him on the lips.

“I guess I'm too thick-witted to get it.”

“I love you, Dane. You can have me right now. But not as your wife.”

Not as my wife?
“Are you married?”
She was married …

“Heavens, no!” She laughed at that. Then she looked into his face and without a word went to the bar and splashed brandy into a snifter and held the glass to his lips. He took it from her roughly.

“You mean you'll sleep with me,” he said, “but you won't marry me.”

“That's right, darling.”

“But you just said you love me.”

“I do.”

“Then I don't understand!”

She stroked his cheek. “I suppose you considered yourself a thoroughly seasoned old rip, and here you have to discover that you're just a sweet old square. No, not yet, Dane. I must get this over to you. It's important to both of us.”

What she went on to say was not at all what he was expecting. She made no reference to Ashton McKell; she was not, after all, rejecting a new love in favor of the incumbent. She had known for some time, she told Dane, that she loved him.

“I'm speaking only for myself, dearest—I know my ideas are anti-social, and that society couldn't exist if everyone acted according to my views. I'm essentially a selfish woman, Dane. It's not that I don't care about what happens to people; but I'm most concerned with what happens to me in this very short life we're given. I suppose I'm a materialist. My notion of love doesn't require marriage to consummate it, that's all. In fact—I'm speaking only for myself—I reject the whole concept of marriage. I'm no more capable of being happy as a housewife, or a country club gal, or a young suburban matron than I am of renouncing the world and taking the veil.

“Maybe love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, as the song says,” Sheila went on, taking his cold hand, “but I'm an electronic-age-type dame. To me a ring on the finger is like a ring in the nose. What a mockery modern marriage is! No wonder divorce is one of our leading industries. I can't stomach the hypocrisy of marriage, so I side-step it. Can you picture me billing and cooing ten years after in a vine-covered cottage beside a waterfall?”

She laughed. He looked at her woodenly.

“The trouble is, of course, that I don't need a man to support me. I certainly don't need your money—I have plenty of my own. I don't hanker after social position; I have a pretty elevated position in my own sector of society. And I certainly couldn't subordinate myself to your career, because I have my own—what's worse, mine is made, while yours is still in the making. Marriage is all right for women in a bourgeois society …”

“What about children?” Dane asked her bitterly. “Doesn't your advanced concept include the little matter of children?”

“Not especially. Let those propagate the race who can't propagate anything else; Lord knows there are enough of them. I love children as much as the next woman, but in this life we have to make hard choices. I've made mine, and motherhood has no place in it. So you see, Dane, what you've fallen in love with.”

“I see, yes,” he said.

“We can be happy without marriage. As long as we stay in love. Don't you see that, darling?”

It seemed to him there was anxiety in her eyes. As for him, the Grand Marnier was gone by now, together with his anger and most of his sickness. Only emptiness was left.

“No, Sheila, I don't. I don't say what you propose is immoral—the hell with that; it's worse. It's impractical. If marriage without love is hateful, so is love without marriage. It has to creep instead of walk, skulk in dark corners, hide—”

“It has to do no such thing,” Sheila retorted. Her head was cocked, her tone cool. “You're talking like a schoolboy, darling, do you know that? Last night—satisfied with a kiss in the dark. Really, Dane! And now this goody-goody talk. What's next? Are you going to tell me you've been keeping yourself chaste for your one and only little wifie? The difference between us is that you're a romantic, and I'm a merchant realist.”

So there it was—the shrew hidden in every woman, the flash of carnivorous teeth, the bite.

He had thought of himself as taking his pleasure when and where he could create it, a reasonably sophisticated man. And here was Sheila, making him feel like a—what had she called him?—a schoolboy! Looking at her, he felt abjectly estranged. No trace of warmth or womanliness seemed left in the symmetrical face before him. It was like a Greek sculpture, smoothly inscrutable with secrets buried in time. Her philosophy was as far beyond him as his was beyond his mother's. Maybe he was still a Yaley at heart: have fun while you're unattached, then settle down with a wife—have fun afterward, too, if you could get away with it.

But Sheila's philosophy seemed contemptuous of any standard. He was sure he could never catch up with her, even surer that he didn't want to. And yet … a line from a poem he had jeered at came into his head:
La Belle Dame sans Merci/ Hath thee in thrall
.

It was as if she knew it, for she chuckled; and even this tiny sound from her throat made him hunger.

“Oh, Dane, don't look so woebegone,” she cried. “Instead of being married lovers, we'll be lovers, period. Dane … don't tell me you've never had a woman!” She looked at him with absolute horror.

He was glad that she was not smiling when she said it, or he might have leaped at her. The brandy had been a mere stopgap; the beginning of the old feared roaring stirred in his ears. Careful, he warned himself; keep control, as he felt his hands become fists.

“Yes, I've had women, but I must seem impossibly old-fashioned to you. Because I'm strictly a one-woman man. Well, I've had my share of disappointments. This seems to be another of them.”

“Oh, Dane.” She moved away a little. “You say you're a one-woman man. Don't you mean you're a one-woman-at-a-time man? And that's just right with me. I shouldn't want it any other way. I've no intention of sharing you with somebody. We're not far apart at all. Isn't that true?” When his mouth clamped tighter, Sheila said, “I don't mean I'd never consider marriage. In a way, it would be up to you to show me that marriage—with you—is what I really want.

“But I don't want it at this particular time, not even with you. I'm a one-man-at-a-time gal, and right now that man can be you. But you must understand that while I'd be yours and yours only, I don't know for how long. A week, a month, five years—maybe forever; how can either of us tell? You notify me when you want out, and I'll do the same.”

Was he, could he really be, in love with her?

Dane began to pace, and Sheila sat back and watched him with that same trace of anxiety. Did this mean she was giving the old man the gate? Or was she playing some sort of game with both of them? Damn this development! It had really fouled everything up. (How could love foul up anything? So maybe he wasn't in love with her after all.)

He stopped before the ottoman and took her hands in his. “All right, baby, we'll let the plot write itself. On your terms. Maybe I've escaped a fate worse than death. Lovers, is it? Let's get started.”

Her arms tugged, and he let himself fall.

The next morning he was in a more comfortable frame of mind. Having savored the taste and depths of her, he could not doubt her. It was not a game—however brief it might turn out to be, it was not a game. He was convinced that she had told him the truth.

So Sheila was a one-man-at-a-time woman, and he had accomplished his purpose. In her forthrightness, Sheila would certainly have told his father, at the start of their affair, what she had told Dane; so it could come as no surprise to him when she broke it off.

This should send his father back to his mother, with no need for a confrontation—no need, when it came to that, for either of his parents to know how the trick had been accomplished. There was no reason for the elder McKell to learn that Sheila's new lover was his son; and let Lutetia think her husband had settled back in the nest of his own volition. It would comfort her.

But something was—not exactly wrong; off-key, perhaps. He offered Sheila a key to his apartment, and she refused it. “Not yet, darling. I'm still enjoying my illicit status.” Instead, she offered him a key to hers.

And when the following Wednesday came, he could not see her. “I'm only human, darling,” she said over the phone, a smile in her voice. “Not tonight. Tomorrow night?”

That Wednesday night, as usual, Ashton McKell did not come home at his other-weekday hour. He was gone all evening.

Sheila had lied to him. It must be that. Yet how could it be? Or was she easing his father off? That was it. He was probably taking it hard, and she had decided to let him down gradually. Still, it meant that he and his father were sharing Sheila's circular Hollywood bed. It left him with a vile taste.

Until Wednesday, September 14th. On that day Dane phoned his mother to ask how she was. She was fine, Lutetia said, although disappointed.

“Your father and I were planning to lunch together downtown,” Lutetia said. “While we were discussing it at breakfast, there was a phone call from Washington. It was the President's appointments secretary. The President wanted to see Ashton today, so there went our plans.” She laughed her tinkly laugh. “I must say Father didn't seem to appreciate the honor. He was actually annoyed. Almost balked at letting me pack his overnight bag. In the end, of course, he went. You don't turn down the President of the United States.”

Overnight bag …

“Sheila.”

“Dane? Hi, darling!”

“See you tonight?”

“Well …”

“How about dinner at Louis's?”

“All right, dear, but let's make it early. I'll have to be back before ten.”

“How come?”

“I still have gobs of work to do on my designs before the collection is finished.”

He could not help wondering what she would use as an excuse after her collection was completed. At the same time, he was puzzled. Overnight bag … Had the whole story of the presidential call been a put-up job? Or just the part about overnight?

They had Louis's special salad, which was not on the menu, but Sheila ate it as if it had been prepared by a diner chef. He was asked please not to dawdle over his coffee. They were on the sidewalk at 9:30.

“How about a nightcap, Sheila? A quick one?”

She apparently could not find a plausible way to refuse. Upstairs: “Would you make it yourself, darling? Nothing for me. I'll just change into my working clothes, then you'll have to go.”

Calmly Dane said, “I'm not going.”

Sheila laughed. “Come on, pardner, have your drink and skedaddle.”

“I don't want a drink. And I'm not going.”

Her laugh turned uncertain. “Dane, I'm not sure I like this. I must get to work.”

“You're not going to work, and I'm not leaving.”

“I don't understand. What do you mean?”

“You're trying to get rid of me. I'm not going to be got rid of.”

For a moment Sheila was quiet, as if weighing certain factors against her temper. Then she said in a light voice, “Listen to the man! Are you keeping me, O Lord and Master? I pay my own rent, buddy-boy, and you stay when I say, and you leave when I tell you to, and right now I want you to leave.” When he stood there, saying nothing, her face turned to ice. “Dane, leave now. I mean
now
. Or you'll be sorry.”

“My father will be here any minute, won't he?”

It was as if he had struck her. “You know!… I suppose you've known all along. I see, I see now. That's why—”

“That's why I'm staying. Yes, sweetie pie, that's why.”

He was disgusted with her and with himself and with his father and even with his mother. He stripped off his jacket and laid it across the back of an armchair, and his silver cigaret case, a gift from his mother, dropped out of the pocket. He picked it up and took a cigaret and found his hands shaking so badly he could not light up.

“I'm waiting for my father,” he muttered, tossing the case on the chair. “What's more, I intend to tell him about you and me.”

With a smothered half-cry, Sheila went to the picture window, to the door, back to the middle of the room. “All right, Dane. Stay and be damned to you. I can't very well put you out by force.”