The Insiders (32 page)

"Hmm?"

"David, I—I
do
love you, you know!" She giggled nervously again, and he wished she wouldn't do that, it made her seem too girlish. "God, I'm so
brave,
aren't I? Blurting it out over the telephone because I'm afraid to say it when I'm with you. But David—I didn't want you to think I—that I say that to everyone, or that I've ever said it before. I haven't. I just want you to know that I feel—well, that I trust you, David. Completely."

She was telling him, he knew, that she would go to bed with him. He felt his erection throb, and shifted uncomfortably.

"Wanda, I hope you'll always trust me. I'd never hurt you, honey."

"I know." She sighed softly. "Oh, David, I wish we didn't have to go to dinner after all!"

"I'm beginning to wish the same thing. Think we could figure out some excuse to leave early? What time will your aunt expect you home?"

"Oh, she won't worry if I'm with
you.
We could say we're going dancing afterward, couldn't we?" Her voice sounded excited, tense at the same time.

So she loved him, he thought, after he'd hung up. Damn, but it was so easy to get a woman to say that. All you had to be was good in the sack, hump them like you meant it, and be tender in between. With the exception of bitches like Eve and Gloria . . . His eyes narrowed. Well, Gloria would get a shock this evening when he showed up with Wanda, making the fact that they were a twosome official.

Let Gloria work on Howard for a change; maybe he'd get it up for long enough to give it to her tonight. Because tonight it would be Wanda he'd bring back here. Tonight would be Wanda's night.

Everything had been wonderful
since the baby. Eve supposed that her real feeling was contentment. Having Jeff, who was beautiful and healthy, and learning to be friends with her husband. Enjoying their lovemaking more and more; sleeping together afterward; knowing by now exactly how to turn each other on.

They'd had no more parties since the last one when she was only a few months' pregnant. It didn't matter; she preferred—just
living.
They had traveled all over the island by now, and they could travel anyplace in the world if and when they felt like it—just knowing that made Eve even more content to be where she was. There were so many things to do and to learn. The climate was perfect, and the ocean warm, even at night, which was her favorite time to go swimming. When it grew unbearably hot and humid along the coast, they moved to their other house in the hill country—a former tea-planter's "bungalow" in a town whose name she still had difficulty pronouncing. Nuwara Eliya. There was a golf course there, and she was learning to golf. It came to her with a sense of surprise that she actually hadn't had time to be bored....

Marti had sent Eve a newspaper clipping announcing David's engagement, and though it had given her a kind of pang to read of it, even the thought of David seemed unreal now. She had
loved
him. Well, hadn't she? Or was it a conditioned reflex—was there any such thing? I'm absorbing too much of Brant's philosophy, she told herself. Maybe I'm withdrawing from the real world, too. She'd torn up the clipping, telling herself that she was much more interested in what Marti herself was doing.
Acting
—in the so-called soft-core porn movies—and making a name for herself. She'd written that she was going to France next, and she sounded happy. Or was "content" the operative word for Marti, too? Skimming the surface of life, not going in too deep. It was better to be content than to be caught between the two extremes of being happy and unhappy.

And then Brant, of all people (he told her he never got ill), caught malaria. His own carelessness, he told her, before the fever started climbing. He hadn't taken the pills before he'd gone on that trip to the jungle to track down a rogue elephant—an animal gone berserk, outlawed by the herd, and on a killing spree. Brant had gone on a three-day trip with two of his Sri Lanka friends, a colonel in the Army and a doctor.

It was the same doctor that Eve called, trying to fight down her feeling of panic when she realized he lived sixty miles away; and in
this
country, with the roads as bad as they were, it could take him hours to get here.

She was almost afraid to take Brant's temperature— he was so hot his skin seemed to burn her when she touched him. His sun-bleached hair looked dull and lifeless, and his face was flushed, even under his deep tan.

He didn't seem to recognize her by then, and she saw him helpless for the first time, his body heaving and turning restlessly under the thin cotton sheet. His eyes stared at nothingness, and he muttered hoarsely to her in languages she couldn't understand. She thought he spoke Italian most of the
time, but she couldn't be cer
tain. She heard him speak about people she'd never met, and then, as she leaned over him, trying to keep him covered and hold an icepack on his forehead at the same time, he repeated a name he hadn't mentioned before.

"Syl," he said, and kept repeating the same name on and on, sometimes with love words and sometimes with epithets.

"Syl... Sylvia
cara.
.. Syl darling..."

Eve had never heard him mention anyone called Sylvia before—she couldn't remember meeting anyone by that name. Who in hell was she? What had she been to Brant, whoever she was?

Eve leaned over him, holding his hands when he tried to brush the icepack aside, and diey were curiously hot and dry. With one part of her mind she found herself wondering almost objectively whether he was going to die before Dr. Wickremesinghe arrived, before she could ask him about the mysterious Syl. Whoever she was. It was strange, the feeling she got when he mentioned that name. And kept repeating it. There was a note in his voice when he said it that she had never heard before, not for
her.
He sounded amused, sometimes; angry, tender, and finally pleading. Brant, her husband, the self-contained stranger she had married
—pleading?

He had slipped back into English at last.

"Syl . . . Syl, don't—don't do it, don't go! Oh, damn you, Syl! Don't leave me!"

Eve had never heard him sound so despairing before, either—that almost desperate tone in his voice before he lapsed again into Italian.

Eve leaned over him, and the heat of his body made her start to perspire.

"Brant?" she called urgently, but he didn't hear her. He was somewhere in the past with another woman, with—Sylvia. There was an old song, wasn't there?

Shakespeare. "Who is Sylvia, what is she...What had she been to him?

Oh, God, never mind. Let the doctor hurry—what was he doing, why were the roads so narrow and so badly kept up? And why, why was it Sylvia he called for in his delirium and not
her?

In the end, it was over a month later before she felt ready to ask him about Sylvia.

The doctor had arrived, after what seemed
li
ke an eternity of waiting, and he'd said, smiling cheerfully, that she mustn't worry, her husband had an unusually strong constitution. He'd pull through; there'd be a private nurse to look after him, and Mrs. Newcomb must remember to take
her
pills and make sure there was mosquito netting around all the beds.

Chauvinist! Eve thought unfairly, because the good doctor had implied that now he and the nurse were here, she should go back to looking after the child.

But even with the drugs Dr. Wickremesinghe used to treat him, it took Brant all of three weeks to get back to feeling good again. And in the meantime, Eve had time to rationalize, telling herself that she couldn't fling questions at him while he was still recovering. And later on, her rationalization gave way to a sort of stubbornness. After all, she had no right to question him—he'd never questioned
her
about anyone in her past. She'd married him with her eyes open—hadn't
he
been the one to say that they would be starting off with no illusions?

She had almost decided to let the whole matter drop, to allow their lives to move along smoothly and calmly as usual, but then there was a day when it had been hotter than usual. The kind of muggy heat she couldn't escape, and it made her res
tl
ess and bitchy.

She took the boat out alone early in the morning.
Her
boat; her surprise birthday present from Brant three months before. But today it was too hot even for sailing —hardly any breeze, and the sun was hke a burning brand, reflecting off the polished surface of the sea. So she turned back, and when she came walking sullenly into their cool, book-lined study, she felt herself hate him—lying so comfortably there on the divan listening to Bach, his face as cool and unruffled as the surface of the ocean had been.

Eve threw her big straw hat at him, and at least he had the grace to look slight
l
y surprised.

"You look as though you could use a drink. Want me to fix you one?"

Polite, innocuous words, but why did he always have to be so polite, so
bland,
as if there were no strong feelings at all under the surface he chose to show her? The only
real
emotion she had ever heard in his voice had been for another woman. She felt cheated; why was she supposed to be content with a shadow while the real man stayed hidden?

"I don't want a goddam drink; I want to talk."

She walked across the room and sat at the foot of the divan, staring at him.

He turned the music off and looked back at her.

"All right, Eve. You want to talk. About what?"

"About Syl, that's who. Sylvia. The woman whose name you kept calling when you were delirious with the malaria."

She was close enough to him to feel his whole body grow taut. His eyes narrowed.

"Who?"

"Don't pretend, Brant! You couldn't seem to stop saying her name. You called it over and over. Syl. I want to know who she is, dammit!"

"Cut it out, Eve." The sudden coldness of his voice sounded a warning, but at this moment she didn't care, and she went on recklessly.

"No! No, I won't cut it out, Brant. I want to
know."

She knew she sounded
li
ke a fishwife, but she didn't give a damn. At least it showed that
she
was human.

His mouth looked white and taut with anger.

"All right. She was my aunt. And my first lover. I loved her—and I ended up killing her. Is that enough for you?"

Eve felt suddenly calm, and oddly empty inside. She heard her voice persist.

"Tell me about her. About you, as you were then. How was it you were actually able to feel
love,
Brant?"

"No! Goddammit, that's enough. I won't be
probed,
Eve. Not even by you. Syl was a part of my life a very long time ago—let her be! Just as I let David be."

"Ah, you actually said his name. Why haven't you asked me about him, about how I feel about him, or
if
I feel about him? Or is it that you don't give a damn— about
me,
that is."

"Shut up, Eve! What makes you such a bitch today?"

"You
do. Every now and then, strangely enough, I get this urge to
know
you. To understand what's under the surface. You married me, Brant. Why? You never did tell me the real reasons, did you?"

He stood up and walked away from her.

"No more questions, Eve. I'm not in the mood. Maybe I'm not ready to bare my soul to you yet. So leave me alone, will you, please?"

"Oh, God! Do you always have to be so—so controlled? So damned
polite
?
Do you have to make me feel I have to be the same way?"

Hating herself and him, both, Eve felt the uncontrollable tears erupt. They gushed from her eyes, and she was shaken by sobs that made speaking impossible.

He came back to her (unwillingly, she thought—and hated him more) and caught her shoulders.

"Dammit, what am I supposed to do now? I'm not used to tears from you. I don't mean to force you into any kind of behavior pattern, Eve. If that's what I've done, then I'm sorry. But sometimes I find that I'm human, too, you see. Stop it, now."

She couldn't stop. At last, words came from her again, gasping and ragged.

"I want to—I have to be
alone.
I have to think—I must
know—"

She knew she was doing everything wrong. She should be more rational; she should not say anything, because he would never understand.

There was a kind of baffled rage in his eyes now, and she was afraid of him again, for the first time since their marriage.

"I don't understand you, Eve. I think you're asking me for something, or trying to push me into something. What is it? Do you want to be fucked?"

He hadn't used that word to her for ages. Something in the way he said it now, so offhandedly, so contemptuously, cut into her hke a whiplash.

She raked at him with her nails almost instinctively, leaving red streaks down the side of his face.

She heard him suck in his breath with shock and pain, and then he shoved her backward off the divan, forcing her. down onto the floor with her arms twisted behind her. When she was lying on her side, moaning with rage and hurt and fear, she felt his free hand rip away her thin cotton shorts—felt him press against her and enter her without warning.

The weight of his body pressing against hers and the cruelty of his grip on her wrists turned her over onto her belly, and she screamed out loud as he went into her roughly and deeply. She found she couldn't move— the breath hissed out of her lungs every time he thrust himself even deeper inside her unprepared, resisting vagina.

"Don't—don't—don't!" she cried out to him, hating him. But it was too late for him to stop now or for her to stop him, and she knew it and finally lay there with her face pressed against the rough matting that covered the floor, accepting his violation of her because she had to, and screaming again only when he pulled out of her and brutally and unexpectedly forced himself into her the other way—the way that Randall Thomas had used her. The pain of his intrusion was excruciating, and she kept screaming until he put his fingers up her vagina at the same time, and suddenly the pain became pleasure, and she stopped trying to pull her wrists from his grasp and cried out instead with excitement and shame that she could obtain such perverse ecstasy from the way he was using her.

He released her wrists and tangled his fingers in her hair, twisting her face around, almost snapping her neck. His mouth burned her earlobes and her cheeks and the corners of her mouth. Finally she lost all consciousness of anything but their bodies—what he was doing to her—what she was feeling—the sensations erupting inside her.

This was being punished and possessed and taken. ... She made wordless sounds of protest and need and lust, and it went on and on for what seemed forever until suddenly it was over and they were lying together, exhausted and shaken and spent. She suddenly started to cry again, helplessly and quie
tl
y.

Eve felt him pull away from her and move off. The smell of cigarette smoke drifted to her, stinging her nostrils. After a few moments, she felt his arms lift her and carry her to bed.

"I'm sorry, Eve," he said quietly into her silence. "I promised I'd never hurt you, and I did. You laughed at my control, and I lost it Which proves. ... I think— I think it would be best if I went away for a while. Until we can sort things out. Maybe I need to get back to the people I used to know so I'll find out once and for all if I miss the old life. Maybe you need the same thing—and you might understand yourself better, too, if I weren't around. I think you've started to get bored and uptight, Eve. I think you're missing what you might have had, and it could be that's what you need, too— to get away, get back...."

Eve felt his weight shift from the side of the bed. She knew he'd gone, and she wanted to speak, to have the last word, to tell him.... But there were no words left in her. Only a cold kind of emptiness that made her wonder if that was the way
he
felt inside all of the time, and if so, poor Brant.

She didn't really want him to go now, but she couldn't stop him, either. She had no strength of will left.

"I'm taking the boat. Guess I'll sail around the coast to Colombo. I'll be in touch later. Take care, Eve. I'll look in on Jeff before I go."

The walls were falling down, everything was crumbling around her, and she couldn't seem to react. She heard the door close behind him, and she had still not found words, nor the energy to utter them. Absurd, the sudden surge of feeling that she wanted to follow behind him and remind him that he hadn't taken any clothes with him, nor even a checkbook. What did it matter? He'd managed before her....

And at least she had Jeff, who had Brant's eyes, but with a difference. There was love and life and humor in her son's eyes—she would see that there always would be. The slow tears slipped out from under her closed eyelids as she began to cry again, softly this time and helplessly, unable to stop.