Thunder and Roses (33 page)

“Never mind that,” said Lois, “we’ll have two weeks to explain ourselves to each other. First of all you’ve just got to get out of those wet things, both of you. I’ll heat some coffee.”

“But-but-but we can’t—”

“But you can,” said Lois. “Not another word. Go on,” she said, crowding them into the hall which led away to the left. “There’s the bath. Take a shower. A hot shower.” Without pausing she scooped thick towels from a shelf and dropped them into Beverly’s astonished hands. She reached past them and turned on the bathroom light. “I’ll get your bag.”

She was gone and back before Beverly could get her mouth around another syllable. “Hurry now, before the muffins get cold.”

“Muffins?” Beverly squeaked. “Oh now, please don’t go to that tr—” but she was in the bathroom with Yancey, with the door closed, and Lois’s swift light footsteps answering her like a laugh as they ran away down the hall.

“Well I—” said Beverly. “Yancey, what can we do?”

“Like the lady says, I guess.” He gestured. “You first.”

“A shower? Oh, I
couldn’t!
”

He pulled her over in front of the basin and aimed her face at the mirror. “Wouldn’t hurt.”

“Oh … oh dear, I’m a sight.” She had one more second of hesitation, murmured, “Well …” and then pulled her soaking dress off over her head.

Yancey undressed slowly while Beverly splashed under the shower. About the time the mirror was thoroughly steamed up she began to hum, high and happy. Yancey’s numbed brain kept re-creating the vision of Lois as he had first seen her, framed in lamplight which
was in turn framed by a hurtling silver halo of rain. His mind formed it and bounced away, formed it again and again retreated. It would only look and look back; it would not evaluate. His world contained nothing like this; he doubted, at the moment, that it could. His only analytical thought came as an academic question, not to be answered by any process he then knew: how could a woman be so decisive, so swift, yet so extraordinarily quiet? Her voice had come to him as through earphones, direct and with fullest quality, yet seeming not to reach the walls. Anyone else in the world, taking charge like that, would certainly have roared like a drill sergeant. “Don’t turn it off,” he said to Beverly.

“All right.” She put a parboiled arm through the curtains and he dropped a towel across it. “Mmm, good,” she said, rubbing briskly as she emerged. “I feel as if we’d been kidnapped, but I’m glad.”

He stepped into the shower and soaped up. The scalding water was good on his chilled skin; he felt muscles relax which he hadn’t known were taut. It was far and away the best shower he had ever taken up to the point when Beverly uttered a soft and tragic wail. He knew the sound, and sighed. “What have you done
now?
” he inquired, his voice carrying a labored patience. He turned off the shower and peered through the mists at his wife. She had a towel round her head like a turban, and her pale blue chenille beach robe hung from her shoulders. “The black one,” she said.

“Give me a towel. What black what?”

“Suitcase. This is all the beach things. There isn’t a thing of yours here but your bathing trunks.”

“This,” he said after a suitable silence, “is just your night.”

“Oh, Yance, I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too.” He stared fixedly at her until she wilted. “I’ll just get back into those wet clothes.”

“You can’t!”

“Got a better idea? I’m not going out there in bathing trunks.”

There was a knock on the door. “Soup’s on!”

Before he could stop her, Beverly called out with a distressed bleat, “Know what I did, I brought the wrong suitcase, there’s nothing here for my husband to wear but his
bathing
suit!”

“Good!” said the soft voice on the other side of the door. “Put it on and come on out. The coffee’s poured.” When they did not respond, Lois laughed gently. “Did you people come to the lake to be formal? Didn’t you expect to be seen in bathing suits? Come on,” she added, with such warmth that in spite of themselves they found some sheepish smiles and put them on. “Coming,” said Yancey. He took the trunks out of the open suitcase.

In the living-room a fire had been lit and was just beginning to gnaw on the kindling and warm a log. A table was set, simply and most attractively—gray place mats, black cups, wrought-iron candlesticks with black candles. There was a steaming glass urn and an electric toaster which clucked once and popped up two halves of an English muffin just as they sat down. Lois came out of the kitchen carrying a black sugar bowl. She glided up behind them as they sat at the table, leaning over them. One long arm put the bowl down; her other hand touched Yancey’s bare shoulder. Something—

Something
happened
.

In the other bed, Lois abruptly turned on her side, facing him. She reached over to the night table between the beds, found a cigarette. The wind died just then, taking a deep quiet breath for the next shriek; and in the jolting silence a great sea smashed the cliff below. Lois struck her match, and the light and the explosion of water together plucked Yancey’s nerves in a single shattering chord. He steeled himself and did not start. In the blinding flare of the match, Lois’s face seemed to leap at him—a partial mask, centered on the arch of an eyebrow, the smooth forehead over it, the forehead’s miniature counterpart in the smooth lowered lid beneath. The arches were stable, flawless; things on which could be built a strong and lovely structure if one could only … only …

He lost the thought in the ballooning glow of her cigarette as she lay back and puffed quickly, too quickly for her to enjoy it, surely. She drew the glow into a ruddy yellow sharp-tipped cone, and the smoke must have been hot and harsh to taste. Hot and harsh. He moistened his lips.

A surge of anger began to rise within him, matching again the
sea outside. With an approaching breaker, the anger mounted and swelled and exploded. But the breaker could turn to foam and mist, and disperse, and he could do nothing but clench his teeth and press his head back into the pillow, for he must not wake Beverly.

This thing was so … 
unjust!
Beverly gave him everything he wanted. She always had, especially since that time at the lake. Especially since … Her capacity for giving amazed him, almost awed him. She gave with everything she did. Her singing was an outpouring. She laughed with all her heart. Her sympathy was quick and complete. She gave constantly, to him more than to anyone or anything else on earth. They had—now—a marriage that was as good as a marriage could be. How, then, could there be room in him for this—this
thing
, this acute, compelling awareness of Lois? Why must there be this terrible difference between “want” and “need”? He didn’t
need
Lois!

The anger subsided. He bent his arm and touched Beverly’s hair. She moved, turning her head from side to side, burrowing closer in to his shoulder. This won’t do, he thought desperately. Aren’t I the boy with the Brain? The man who can’t be pushed around, who is never puzzled by anything?

Go back, Yancey. Go back again to where your world was full of Lois and you could control it. If you could do it then, with a tenth of the mind you have now, then why … why can’t you … why is your heart trying to break your ribs?

He closed his eyes against the shouting silver of the night and the bloom of Lois’s cigarette. Back, he demanded, go back again. Not to the hand on the shoulder. Afterwards. The rain’s letting up, and scurrying through the puddles and the sky-drip to their own cabin, the one next door. Hold it. Hold it right there … ah. He had it again; he was back two years, feeling again what it was like to be able to keep Lois to himself, and his heartbeat normal.

Impossible! But he had done it for almost two whole weeks. Lois on the diving platform, then painted on the sky, forever airborne—forever because awareness such as his photographed and filed the vision; in his memory she hung there still against a cloud. And the square
dance, with the fiddle scratching away into an overloaded p.a. system and feet clumping against the boards, and the hoarse, happy shouter: “Alamen
lef
an’ around we go, swing yore potner do-si-do … now swing somebody else … an’ somebody
else
 … an’ somebody ELSE …” and ELSE had been Lois, turning exactly with him, light and mobile in his arms, here and gone before he knew completely that she was there, leaving him with a clot in his throat and a strange feeling in his right hand, where it had taken the small of her back; it seemed not to belong completely to him any more, as if her molecules and his had interpenetrated.

Oh, and Lois breaking up a fight between one of the summer people and a town man, drifting close, ruffling the hair of one and laughing, being a presence around whom no violence could take place; Lois backing the station wagon skilfully among the twisting colonnades of a birch grove … And Lois doing unremarkable things unforgettably—a way of holding her fork, lifting her head, ceasing to breathe while she listened for something. Lois glimpsed through the office window, smiling to herself. Lois reading the announcements at lunch, her voice just loud enough for someone else on, say, a porch swing, yet audible to eighty people.

Lois walking, for that matter, standing, writing, making a phone call … Lois alive, that was enough to remember.

Nearly two weeks of this, waking with Beverly, breakfasting, swimming, boating, hiking with Beverly, and his preoccupation cloaked in the phlegmatic communications of familiarity. What difference did it make if his silence was a rereading of Lois’s face instead of a reconsideration of the sports page? He would not have attempted to share either one with Beverly; then what was the difference? Earlier in their marriage she might have complained that it was useless to have a vacation if he acted just the same during it as he did at home; at this stage, however, he was completely—one might say invisibly—Yancey. Just Yancey, like always.

But there was a line between possible and not-possible in Yancey’s ability to contain his feelings about Lois. He did not know just where it was or what would make him cross it; but cross it he did, and there was no mistaking it once it happened.

It was a Thursday (they were to leave on Sunday), and in the afternoon Yancey had asked Lois to come to their cabin that evening. He blurted it out; the words hung between them and he stared at them, amazed. Perhaps, he thought, he was being facetious … and then Lois gravely accepted, and he fled.

He had to tell Beverly, of course, and he didn’t know how, and he made up, in advance, seven different ways to handle her in anticipation of the seven ways in which she might react. Each, of course, would result in Lois’s coming. Exactly what the evening would be like he could not predict, which was strange in a man who was so ready with alternatives when it came to making a hostess out of Beverly.

“Bev,” he said abruptly when he found her pitching horseshoes back of the lodge, “Lois is coming for a drink after dinner.”

Beverly tossed a horseshoe, watched it land, skip, and fall, then turned to him. Her eyes were wide—well, they always were—and their shining surfaces reminded him at that moment of the reflecting side of a one-way mirror. What would she say? And which of the seven ripostes must he use to overcome her resistance? Or would he have to make up an eighth on the spur of the moment?

She dropped her eyes and picked up another horseshoe, and said, “What time?”

So Lois came; her light, firm knock might just as well have been on the base of his tongue, so immediately did he feel it. If, later on, his will failed him a little, it was because now he sat still using it up, and let Beverly go to the door.

Beverly, he thought, for Beverly’s sake, should not permit herself in the same room with Lois. Lois came in and filled the room, but without crowding; Lois went back and down into an easy chair as if carried by flying things; Lois’s body grew up out of the cushions supported by what she breathed like an underwater plant. And Beverly bounced about with glasses and ice and talked … 
talked
. What Lois did was something different; Lois conversed. He sat dully, contributing little, watching and thinking his own thoughts. He was achingly aware of many things, but foremost was the realization that Lois was making an effort—a completely successful one, as far as he could judge—to
put Beverly at her ease. She made no such effort for him, and he told himself with pride that this was because she had no need to; they understood one another, and must make things easy for poor Beverly.

He lay back almost drowsily, soaking in Lois’s presence as if she were the sun and from her he were gradually acquiring a sort of tan.

Then they were alone in the room, when Beverly went to the kitchen, and then Beverly was wailing something about ice, oh dear, but the Johnsons in nine will have some, no don’t bother I’ll be right back; the screen door in the kitchen slammed and Beverly’s quick feet went bam bam bam down the back steps, and ceased to exist as they encountered pine needles; all this in a brace of moments, and he was alone with Lois.

He rose and went to the couch and sat where its corner touched the arm of the easy chair. It seemed to take all the energy he had; he wanted a cigarette, he wanted to speak. He could do nothing.

After a silent time he felt Lois’s gaze on him. He turned to her quickly and she dropped her eyes. He was glad, because their heads were so close, and he had never examined her this way, slowly. He wet his lips. He said, “Only ten days.”

She made an interrogative syllable.

“Knowing you,” he said. He rose suddenly and crossed in front of her. He put one knee on the broad arm of her chair so that his foot was by the back. He sat back on his heel, his other foot steadying him on the floor. She stayed just as she was, looking down at her long brown hands. “I want to tell you something, Lois.”

A small frown appeared and disappeared on her smooth forehead. She did not raise her eyes.

“It’s something I’ve never told even to … never told anyone.”

Lois moved a little. She did not raise her face, but now he had a three-quarter view of her profile. She waited, still as a dewdrop.