Area of Suspicion

Chapter 10

The pretty little maid let me in and asked me to wait for a moment. She hurried off and came back and said, “If you would come with me, sir?”

She led me through the house and out to a small flagstone terrace built into an L of the house. There was a low wide wall around the other two sides. Niki, in a scanty, two-piece, terry-cloth sunsuit of bright yellow lay on a rustic chaise longue upholstered in quilted white plastic. She was in the glare of the afternoon sunlight, her body glistening with oil, and her ink-black hair piled high. She was propped up on one elbow and she had taken off her sun glasses to smile at me.

“How nice, Gevan!”

I looked up the slope of the back lawn toward aspen and birch. “It’s nice here.”

“That door opens into the master bedroom, and whenever we could, we’d have breakfast out here. But it doesn’t catch the morning sun, so we couldn’t really use it often. I’ll show you the whole house sometime, Gevan.”

I heard myself murmuring that it would be nice. She put her sun glasses on and lay back. They were the kind that are mirrors. You cannot see the eyes of the wearer. It gave her a blinded look. There was some pink in her skin tone. She lay drowsy in the sun, oiled and relaxed, and it was too easy to stare at the arching lines of her, at warm perfections.

“Sure you’re not getting too much?” I asked, my voice harsh.

“Oh, I never burn.”

I sat on the low wall and lit a cigarette. The mirrored glasses gave me the odd feeling that she couldn’t see me. “Light two, dar — Gevan. How stupid! Almost calling you darling. The heat makes me feel so — very far away from myself.”

“I know that feeling.” I lit two cigarettes and took one to her. She lifted her chin a fraction of an inch and I put it between her lips. She inhaled deeply and took the cigarette from her lips. I sat on the wall again.

“Grief is such a funny thing, Gevan. It isn’t constant, as you’d think. It goes and comes. You forget for a little minute, and then it all comes back smashing you down.”

“I know.”

“Of course you would know, wouldn’t you. I can’t seem to open my mouth without sounding inane. I wish—”

“What do you wish, Niki?”

“This will sound even worse. I wish we hadn’t ever been — emotionally entangled. Then I could lean on you harder. The way it is, I feel — awkward and guilty.” The mirrored eyes reflected the deep blue of April sky.

I did not answer. She sighed audibly. “You hate me, don’t you, Gevan?”

I smiled at the blind lenses. “I was unique and irresistible. It never occurred to me that anybody could turn me down.”

“That is a very bitter smile.”

“Hurt pride.”

She sat up and inspected her long, lithe, sun-reddened legs, poked experimentally at her thigh and watched the white finger-mark slowly disappear, then lay back again, snapping her cigarette out over the low wall into the grass.

“We won’t get anywhere talking about it, I guess.” The sun had moved. An edge of roof shadow touched her shoulder. “Would you roll me out from the wall a little bit, please?”

The chaise longue had two wooden wheels at the head part, and handles at the foot part. I lifted the handles and pulled her out a bit, and knew she watched me through the mirrored lenses as I did so.

“Why don’t you take off your coat, Gevan? Your face is just dripping.”

“Good idea.” I took my coat off and rolled up the sleeves of my white shirt.

The lovely little amber-skinned maid came out onto the terrace, trim in a well-cut spring suit, demure in manner. “Excuse me, Mrs. Dean.”

“Oh, you’re ready to leave, Victoria?”

“Yes ma’am. I fixed a salad for you. It’s in a yellow bowl on the second shelf in wax paper, ma’am, and the dressing is in the bottle next to it. If you don’t need me earlier, I’ll be back about midnight, I guess.”

“Did your young man come for you? I didn’t hear him drive in.”

“He’s parked out there on the road, ma’am.”

“Please tell him again, Victoria, that when he comes to pick you up he’s to feel free to drive in.”

“I’ll tell him again, ma’am. Good-by, Mrs. Dean. Good-by, sir.”

After she left the terrace Niki said, “Victoria is a doll. She has two years of college, you know. She’s working for me for a year to save enough to go back in the fall. She wants to be a teacher. The two of us rattle around in this house. It’s so big. Yesterday I had her move from the servants’ quarters to one of the guest suites. It makes the house seem less empty. People seem to be putting gentle pressure on me to move out of here, Gevan, after what happened. But this is my home. I feel safe here.”

“It’s a lot of overhead to house one person.”

“The grounds? I share a gardener with the Delahays, my nearest neighbors. You can just see a bit of their roof through those poplars, Gevan, beyond that ridge. He’s due here again tomorrow. I suppose it is quite a lot for just one person. But if you force me to be vulgar, there is quite a lot of money to go with it, you know. I don’t think I’ll stay here forever. But I won’t leave for the sake of leaving. I’ll have to know where I’m going.”

“Don’t you always?”

“Did you come here just to be nasty?”

“I actually came to ask you about that night Ken was killed, Niki. I’ve read the newspaper accounts. They don’t say much.”

She remained silent to the point of rudeness, then said, “I guess you have the right to ask. I’ll have to give you some background on it, so you can understand just what that night was like.”

“I know I’m asking a lot.”

She stood up and adjusted a latch on the chaise so that the angled part folded down, turning it into a long cot. She picked up the bottle of sun oil from the floor and held it out to me and said, “It’s a long story, so be a useful listener, dear.”

I took the bottle of sun oil from her. She stretched out face down, her long legs angled toward the far side to make room for me to sit. She craned her hands back and unhooked the narrow strap of her halter. With one languid hand she put the mirrored sunglasses on the terrace stone, then sighed and snuggled into relaxation, her face turned away from me, her fingers laced above her head.

I tipped warm oil between her shoulder blades, and it ran down along the youthful indentation toward the small of her back. I caught it and began to spread it and work it into long brown silk of her, feeling the flat firm webs of muscle, the hidden ivory roundness of vertebrae, the clever flexing sheathing of scapula. She had piled her dark hair up out of the way, and the nape of her neck looked tender, girlish and vulnerable. There was a downy pattern of pale hair in the convexity of the small of her back, and the oil flattened it and darkened it.

“For the past six months or so, Gevan, we led the quiet life. I couldn’t say how much choice was involved. Yes, it was quiet. When you don’t return invitations, people eventually stop asking you. Our evenings were all... very much alike. He would come in sometime after seven. I don’t have to hide anything from you, Gevan. He would come home plastered. He was very owlish and solemn when he was drunk.”

“I know.”

“Completely proper, erect and dignified, pronouncing every syllable of every word, but completely blacked out. On... that night we had to eat sooner than usual after he got back because I’d promised Victoria she could leave early. She was going to Philadelphia to see a brother who was in the hospital. I served the dinner and she left before dessert. I read at the table while we ate. That’s a little habit I picked up after we began to find out we didn’t have anything left to say to each other.”

She shifted her position slightly. “After dinner I cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher. By... by the time... by the time I...”

She had begun to lose the thread of her story. Her voice had begun to get deeper and rougher, and the precision of her diction had begun to blur. I knew what was happening. I should have long since capped the little bottle of scented oil and gone back to my seat on the low wall. I had told myself to do just that. I had told myself many times. Her back as amply protected against the sun of late afternoon. But instead of stopping, I was making longer, slower strokes, one stroke for each two beats of my heart.

“By the time I got back into the living-room, he... he had fallen... had fallen asleep on... asleep on... the couch. I... I covered... covered him... with a... covered him with a blanket... covered him...”

Her voice had become a sulky, whispering, rasping sound and her breathing had become long and deep. I had increased the firmness of my stroke, so that each long stroke, from waist to shoulder, moved her, back and forth, an insistent inch or two, face down on the quilted white plastic of the chaise.

She had begun to arch against each long pressure of my hand. Her back, I swear it, had flowered and luxuriated and changed under my touch, sleek, flexing, hypnotic. I had split into two Gevan Deans who could not communicate with each other. One watched it all, shamed by it, made wretched by this compulsion, wracked by the awareness of immediate guilt and the greater guilt yet to come, the way a child, in the midst of some private act it thinks evil, will yearn to stop and cannot. The other Gevan stroked the oiled, trembling, gasping woman, taking a hard joy in this way of reducing her, through her own need, into a savage helplessness. And throughout that time that could not be measured, after she had lost the ability to talk, there was the knowledge of the empty house, the empty sunny afternoon, bird sounds in the distant spring birches, the sliding sound of my hand upon her, the tearing sounds, like tiny snorings, that had begun to accompany her rough inhalations.

She eeled violently around with a great broken cry, two vowel sounds, as though she were trying to call out my name but could not fit the straining softnesses of her mouth to the consonants. The sun shrank the pupils of her eyes so that they were wide and blind and monstrously blue. She lunged upward, breasts aimed and tumid, to clasp me and pull me down, gasping and whining in her peak of need to accomplish the specifics of my defeat and depletion.

So I took my brother’s widow, violent, oiled and naked, squirming and thrusting on quilted white plastic on a redwood chaise on a walled fieldstone terrace in April sunshine, out of the wind, protected by all the formal stature of the dead man’s house. It was without grace, dignity, tenderness or affection. It was like trapping in some narrow place something hard to kill, then killing it clumsily, violently, in fear and hate, with dreadful weapons, killing it as quickly as you can.

When at last she stirred and made a small sound of irritable impatience, I moved to release her. She got up, scowling at the sun glare, stooped and picked the two scraps of yellow terry from the stone. In picking them up she lost her balance and had to take a quick step to catch herself. She walked heavily to the big glass door that opened into the bedroom. She pulled it open and walked on into the shadowy room without speaking or looking back, and the last I could see of her, fading like the smile of Alice’s cat, was the almost luminous whiteness of the alternating clench of her buttocks.

I sat on the edge of the chaise. I bent over and retrieved my cigarettes and lighter from the tumble of my clothing, then swept it aside with the edge of my foot. I sat with my arms braced on my knees, staring down at the pattern of the stone between my bare feet. I felt dull, heavy, hairy and degraded, a fleshy animal who had reached the end of all its own precious pretention. I studied the brave beach-boy tan on my legs, and the slight continuous trembling of the fingers that held the cigarette. I heard a distant sound and identified it as the sound of a shower.

A man can acquire a false image of himself too easily. I sat numbed by the collapse of an image. I had sold myself a concept of a certain basic dignity and decency — call it a Gevan Dean ethic. But now I saw the inner sickness. It was a weakness. I repeated to myself that sad rationalization of all hollow trivial men: The libido has no conscience.

I sat in the listless carapace of my traitor flesh, spent, and sticky with Niki’s sun oil and my drying sweat. I thought of Ken, and the vinegary tears of shame and self-pity began to squeeze out of my eyes, weak and stinging.

The shower sound had stopped. The sun began to touch the black tops of the poplars. I saw something out of the corner of my eye, a movement in the doorway. “Gevan?”

I turned my head slowly and looked at her. She held a big blue towel in front of her, covering her from throat to knee. Her mouth was pale without lipstick and she had the grace not to smile.

“You can use the shower now,” she said in the tone she would use with her maid. “Turn left through the bedroom.” She backed away and disappeared.

A few minutes later I picked up my clothing and went inside. I dropped my things in a heap on the cherry-red carpeting and paused a moment to look at the luxurious room. It was big enough to accommodate two oversize double beds and shrink them to the proportion of twin beds. There was a special quietness about that room. At the far end was a couch, deep chair, low bookshelves, built-in television and music.

It was a bedroom for two people who loved each other. I thought of the tragic euphemism for what Niki and I had just done. It was called making love. Whatever it was we had made, it was not love. When she had ripped my back and bellowed her pain and completion, it was not love. Love has tenderness. What we had done was more suitable for the fetid cave of the Neanderthal after gorging on the steaming meat of one of the great carnivores.

Fluorescence turned the big bathroom into a brightness adequate for brain operations. The air was faintly steamy and elusively fragrant. The top corners of the mirrors were coated with a dwindling mist. She had laid out a big coral towel for me, precisely folded. Resting on the towel was one of those little kits luxury hotels provide the guest who stays over unexpectedly; aseptically packaged in a plastic bubble, shaving things, comb, toothbrush, nailfile, deodorant. The service was, I thought sourly, very complete in every shade of meaning of the word.

The shower, once I had learned the procedure on all the chrome dials and knobs, was superb. Such a shower inevitably makes some improvement in the morale. I was as low as I had ever been in my life. Improvement was the only possibility. I stayed in the shower a long time.

When I walked back into the bedroom with the coral towel knotted around my waist, she was curled in a deep chair by the window, her legs pulled up, a glass in her hand. She wore a pleated tailored white blouse, a narrow navy skirt. Her shining hair was pulled back tightly, and she had been very sparing with makeup. On a squat table beside her chair was a silver tray, a silver shaker frosted with moisture, a plump fragile cocktail glass like hers.

I realized the cleverness behind the effect she made, and had to appreciate it even though I knew it was contrived. This not only suggested her office costumes of long ago, reminding me of better times than these, but it had a clean and impersonal look that made things a little easier. Had she chosen a sensuous outfit, a revealing housecoat for example, and combed her hair long for me, she could possible have turned my stomach.

“Daiquiri here, if you want one, dear,” she said. “Help yourself.” She smiled at me in a shy, tentative way.

I went near her and poured the drink. It had a tart clean taste. “Good,” I said.

“Your clothes were messy with that sun lotion.” “I’m a mad, impulsive creature.”

“You wouldn’t want to take them to the hotel. I’ve bundled them up. I know where I can drop them off myself and pick them up and keep them here until you can collect them. I... laid some things out on the bed.”

I went over and looked. The things from my pockets were spread out. There were shorts, socks, a white shirt still in its retail cellophane, slacks that would look well enough with my jacket.

“You don’t mind?” she asked in a meek voice.

“Somehow I can’t get worked up about taking over his clothes. I’ve moved in on something more private than that.”

“He wore those slacks twice. They’re just back from their first trip to the cleaners. Everything else is brand new.”

She had laid out my belt, tie and shoes. “I told you it isn’t important. How could it be, now?”

“But you had me first!” she said with such despair I turned and looked across the room at her. Dusk had come into the room. Her face was a paleness against shadows, just a little duskier than her blouse. “Long before him! You had me first!”

“That gives me special rights?” I said. I dropped the towel. She turned and looked out the window and sipped her drink. I dressed in my brother’s clothing. The slacks were too big in the waist and too short, but not ludicrously so. The shirt sleeves were short. I dressed and put my jacket on and refilled my glass and sat on the couch, facing her.

“Gevan.” she said softly, “we both knew it would happen sooner or...”

“You were saying that he had fallen asleep and you had covered him with a blanket.”

“Gevan! Darling!”

“What happened after you covered him with the blanket?”

“But this is cruel! I want to talk about us.”

“Baby, I thank you sincerely for the shower, the clothes, the rum and the roll in the hay, but don’t make the mistake of thinking I am going to let you milk it for kicks by talking circles around it. You were telling me you covered him with a blanket.”

She looked down into her drink for a long time. At last she shivered and straightened and lifted her chin and looked at me without expression. “I read until I finished my book. It was midnight. I went in and shook Ken awake and told him the time and told him I was going to bed. He said he had a headache and he was going to go out and see if the night air would help. I told him less liquor was the only thing that could help him. He didn’t answer me. That was the last thing I ever said to him. It’s a very loving farewell, isn’t it?”

“You never know about such things in advance. How could you?”

“Thanks, darling. I came in here and went to bed. The bed on the right is mine. I left his bedlamp and the bathroom lights on. I was drifting off so quickly that when I heard the shot I thought it was part of a dream that had just begun. I began to wonder if he had fallen, or knocked something over. It’s unbelievably quiet up here at night. I tried to go back to sleep, but I kept wondering what I had heard. I put on my robe and slippers and went through the house, calling him, but there wasn’t any answer. I went outside and called. I knew I could be heard a long distance in the stillness. I walked around the whole house, and finally I was yelling so loudly I got hoarse the next day.

“I got a flashlight and went down the drive toward the gate. He was on the grass just inside the gate, near the lilacs. It isn’t a gate really, just two posts with lights on top that you drive between. You saw it when you came here. The lights were out.

“When I found him I didn’t think it was him. He looked so shrunken and little and flat against the ground, and his clothes looked too big for him. His face was bulging and horrible, and they say that happens because of the pressure of the bullet on the brain and...” She lost control for a few moments. She sat very still with her eyes shut, but when she opened them she continued in the same level voice.

“I can’t really remember running to the house. The police came quickly. I had put a blanket over him. I knew he wouldn’t want people looking at him the way he was. It was the same blanket I’d used to cover him after his drinks knocked him out. A lot of police came, and Lester and Stanley came. There were a lot of questions. I started to go to pieces. My doctor came and gave me a shot, and a nurse stayed here with me. I didn’t wake up until late Saturday morning. I phoned you then but... I couldn’t get you. You know the rest.” She carefully refilled her glass.

“Yes,” I said. “I know all the rest, including your mourning methods.”

She stared at me. I wanted to smash her with my own guilt. But I had pushed it too far. She laughed at me, with derision and amusement. “My mourning methods! Oh, you are so blameless, Gevan Dean!” I knew, even in the dusk light, how the blue of her eyes had deepened. I saw the arched lines of her mouth, arrogant and sensuous. “Are you going to convince yourself you were raped, darling? It was a good trick, if you were, you know. My back was turned, wasn’t it? Were you just trying to do the best job of oiling a lady’s back that had ever been done? For God’s sake, let’s both try to be honest. It might be the only virtue we have left, you know. We’ll call it our mourning procedure — for husband and brother. You see, darling, I have less to regret than you. I’m the one who didn’t love him.”

She rose to her feet and took two slow steps to stand tall over me, tall and mocking, sleek and resilient in her skin, smug in the aftermath of satisfactions. Long before, when we had known we would be married, we had found in each other an endless hunger for physical love. She had been marvelous to be with. She had demanded her pleasures with a boldness and a joy which had been a constant source of re-excitement to me. But the Niki I had known then was but an inquisitive emotional girl compared to the woman of riper body who stood before me, laughing at me. This one was in a full torrent of her maturity, aware of her strengths and their uses, her driving needs and just what would be most assuasive to them.

I lowered my face into my hands and felt her sit quickly beside me. She wrapped gentle fingers around my right wrist. “Let’s not try to hurt each other,” she whispered.

“You make it sound easy.”

“Maybe we can do incredible things, darling. Like turning the calendar back a long way. It was all so good once upon a time. If we look for it, maybe we can find it again. Remember me? My name is Niki. I’m your girl.”

The room was almost dark. She had created a special mood wherein I could find myself wanting to believe that somehow we could make the four lost years seem like an absurd mistake, and be together again.

I turned and looked at her. Her face was inches from mine. “I remember you very well,” I said.

“And I remember you, Gevan. You are the man who had all the drive and all the energy, and one day you just... came to a stop.”

“Because there wasn’t anything worth working for.”

“Do you feel guilty about that?”

“Why should I?”

“I had to ask. It’s easier to ask things in the dark. Important things, darling. I don’t want you all steamed up to get back into the rat race.”

“What has that got...”

“Hush!” she said and touched my lips. “I have a crazy plan for us. It’s no good here for us. Too much happened here. We’d have to live in a new way to catch up on all we’ve lost. We lost so much, darling. Let’s go away together just as soon as we can. There’s all the money we can ever use. We could get a boat, a motor-sailor we could crew ourselves, and... make a life out of following the sun.”

She turned suddenly to put her head in my lap. She looked up at me. “Let’s do that, Gevan. Let’s really and truly do it, you and me. The hell with all of them.”

She made it sound so good and so easy.

“And leave all this? Mottling says you’ve been taking a big interest in the company.”

“Poo! He’s been trying to bring me into the discussions. It’s therapy, I guess. I can’t contribute anything. He can run the company with my help or yours, dear. We wouldn’t ever have to come back.”

Yes indeedy, off we would sail and in a couple of years we’d be able to speak fondly and tolerantly of good old Ken, and we’d be grateful to good old Stanley for keeping our dividends nice and fat. We’d just rove the blue seas and tie up at the fun places at the fashionable times, and make love, and drink too much, but always with adorable and enchanting people. And when the sex and sensation bit started to go a little dead, we could always give it a booster shot by taking exactly the right sort of couple on a little cruise, some adorable, enchanting pair too vulnerable to tell tales, and with some trading around and with some of the practices of the voyeur, we could put our romance right back on the up-beat, yes indeedy, and we would push the good old machine until finally the parts wore out, at which time the medics could gut her like a trout and carve away portions of me, and we would then want a larger and more comfortable boat and somebody to run it for us while we sat in adjoining deck chairs astern, soft, fat, brown as saddles, and without one bloody word left to say to each other or one itching thing to do to each other, yes indeedy. Bliss without end.

She must have anticipated what I was going to say, because she got up suddenly and said. “I’m restless, darling. Let’s go for a walk.”

We walked in darkness on the soft fresh grass. She found my hand in what seemed a most natural way. An airways beacon swept the south horizon. We walked past the garages and servant quarters, and down a tidied slope of lawn toward a pale caligraphy of young birches at the edge of the woodland. The first stars were out.

We stopped near the woods. “I’m ashamed,” I said.

“So am I, darling! So am I! But we’re the only ones who know about it, aren’t we? Who have we hurt? A dead man? You see, we’re not really ashamed of what we did. We broke a convention, dearest. We violated the code. We jumped the gun. We’re ashamed because we didn’t let what they call a decent interval elapse, that’s all. The act wasn’t shameful. Such a great need can’t be shameful. It was just the timing, darling. Don’t you see? We’re going to be together anyway. Nothing can stop that, and we both know it. I’ve never stopped loving you and needing you, Gevan. So we have no reason to be ashamed.”

“You make it sound reasonable, Niki. You’ve got that wonderful talent for making anything you want to do sound reasonable.”

“You didn’t use to be like this. Gevan. Why do you have to pick at things? Just enjoy, enjoy. You don’t have to think so goddamn much, do you?”

I made a sound like a laugh. “Somebody else told me the same thing a little while ago.”

“Who?”

“It doesn’t matter. You don’t know her.”

She shrugged and turned away from me and looked up at the night sky. “I love the quiet out here. We’re the only two people left in the world, darling.”

“How dandy.”

She spun back and put her hands on my shoulders. “You’re still hostile toward me, darling. God knows I can’t blame you, after the fool thing I did, and the way I almost lost you forever. But don’t I deserve a chance to make it up to you? Isn’t it worth it to you to give me a chance? Try to feel a little bit of kindness, dearest. This hostility is like a sickness, you know. It even carries over to Stanley.”

“Mottling! What the hell has he got to do with this?”

“I’m trying to make you see your own confusion, Gevan,” she said, sliding her hands down to my wrists. I sensed your immediate antagonism toward Stanley, and until I figured it out, it worried me. You see, you know I like and trust him. So now I believe that in some emotional irrational way, you have a compulsion to fight him just in order to spite me.”

“For God’s sake, Niki!”

“I’m trying to get you to be honest with yourself. That’s the only way we can start off right, darling. A second chance is such a rare thing, it’s worth every effort. I hurt you terribly. Yes. But I hurt myself too! Can’t you see that? The four years were just as horrid for me as they were for you. You don’t have to keep on trying to punish me now by... by doing hostile things like working against Stanley, who is really so terribly capable. You really have no real objection to him.”

“He seems too damn plausible. He’s driven too many good men away. I’m dubious about his management policies. What’s that got to do with us?”

“Everything, because those are rationalizations to make your emotional hostility seem based on logic.”

At my slight tug she released my wrists. I lit cigarettes. In the quick glow of flame I looked at the oval flatness and good high bones of her cheeks, and the shadowed eyes. It was getting cooler. We began to walk slowly back up the slope toward the home my brother had built for his bride.

“You’ll have to give me a second reading on this,” I told her. “We talk about us, and we get over into this Mottling running the company. Where is the connection? What the hell difference does it make to you whether Mottling or Granby or Joe Sandwich runs the outfit?”

She walked with her head bowed, scuffing the grass with her sandals. “I want to say it exactly right, because everything I say, you take the wrong way, you know.”

“Take your time.”

After a long silence she sighed, stopped and faced me. “Maybe it’s all too involved and too female to explain. Reasons sort of overlap. In the first place, Ken wanted Stanley to be in charge. And, you can sneer at me if you want to, but I do feel obligation and loyalty toward your brother. It didn’t work, and that wasn’t entirely his fault, and he tried desperately hard to make it work. We both did. He was a good man. We both know that.”

“I’m not sneering.”

“Thank you for that, Gevan. Secondly, it’s... it’s like a test for us. You haven’t been here long enough to learn anything pertinent about Stanley. So if you fight him, it’s because you’re fighting me. And what can we build on that kind of feeling? If you keep on trying to fight me, what will our life together be like? And there’s the last thing, and maybe the most important, Gevan. I do know, more than most people, that grave sense of responsibility you have. So suppose you got Stanley out. You know Granby couldn’t handle it. So you wouldn’t go away with me. You’d stay here and back him up and help him and get more and more enmeshed. And I would have to stay here, because you would be here. But, Oh God, how I want to get away from here forever, with you. This is where I bitched up my life, Gevan. I don’t think we can be happy here. And we need happiness. We need it so terribly.”

I looked toward the dark house. Nothing in the world seemed safe and tangible. I thought of what Uncle Al had said about her motivations. The Lime Ridge house looked like a big, brooding trap. Ken had built it and it had caught him. Something had broken him in a shadowy merciless way, and something else had killed him too cleverly. Everything was shifting, implausible. This woman was someone I had never known and never would know.

“I don’t know,” I said, my voice loud and harsh and weary in the silence. “I have to sort things out. I’ve got to get back to town.”

I expected protestations, pleadings, demands that we talk it all out here and now. But in a voice bright, casual and kindly, she said, as she patted my arm. “Too much is happening too fast, I know. Almost too much to take. And we have all the time there is, darling.”

We walked toward my car. I opened the car door and turned toward her. She was closer than I had expected, and she swayed into me, parted my jacket, hooked the fingers of both hands around my belt and pulled and held us tightly together, her face in the hollow of my throat, her back arched in a way that laid the insistent firmness of her breasts against my chest. I could not stand like a fool with my arms at my sides. I put them around her, my hands light and meaningless on her back.

“It’s a hell of a way to leave both of us,” she murmured. Already there was a muzzy formlessness about her articulation, a roughening of her voice. Her breathing was slowing and deepening and I felt the faint ripening sag of her as her knees drowsed under her tumescent weight.

“Haven’t we said...”

“I don’t mean more talk. Can’t you tell I don’t mean more talk? I mean it could be so much better now the terrible edge is gone. Starving people gobble the food, honey. They don’t take time for tasting. They fill their bellies, fast as they can. Too fast.”

I could feel the heat of her slow exhalations against my throat. “We shouldn’t have let that happen.”

“I know, I know, I know,” she said in a cross blurred voice. “But it did, and it’s done, so what’s wrong with getting all the good of it? Not starving now. Just a good hunger. Les’ go in an be gourmets, darlin’. A slow slow sweet sweet feast. With all the tastes and flavors. No gobbling. All slow and long and sweet...”

She kept murmuring but the singsong words had become indistinct. It was a fuzzy droning, like a summer-sound of bees, and her body had begun its soft, inadvertent pulsings. In the ultimate second, just before I was forever lost, I pushed her slowly and firmly away from me. When I released her at arm’s length I saw her waver in the starlight and catch her balance. She stood hunched for a time, her fists against her cheeks, and then straightened herself.

“You’re right of course, darling,” she said in the same tone she probably used for social telephoning.

“One guilt at a time.”

“I suppose I should feel spurned and degraded. But somehow I don’t. You do have a vast talent for turning me into... some unspeakable, panting thing, Gevan. Practically with no warning at all. Doesn’t that stimulate your male ego?”

“Good night, Niki.”

“With a friendship kiss,” she said, and came close. With great wisdom, I kissed her cheek. She laughed at me and called me a coward.

When I was behind the wheel she bent down and looked through the window at me, her expression mischievous in the dashboard lights.

“You do realize you cheated us by being so conventional,” she said. “Because next time we’ll have to be all fierce and fast again before we can be the way we want to be. Do come back soon. You could be terribly weak and inconsistent and come back a little later, or get out of the car right now, and I wouldn’t tease you about it, really.”

She laughed at me and backed away. When I turned in the drive the lights swept across her and left her smiling in the darkness; that smile, caught in an instant of light, grooved forever into the brain’s jelly — proud, strong and mocking.

I drove toward the pink glow of the city by night. I held the wheel stiffly and drove slowly, and tried to keep her out of my mind, tried to keep my mind blank and gray. When I was a boy of ten I spent a summer on a farm my grandfather owned. Ken and I were assigned chores. One sow showed the ingenuity of a demon in escaping the pen. When she was loose, we had to drop what we were doing, and herd her back. She was a savage and knowing animal, and we armed ourselves with stout sticks. It was a game of maneuver. Ideally we would work her slowly back until the nearest one of us could dart in and open the gate and the other would stampede her through it before the rest of them could also escape. But it never worked out that way. If we made the slightest miscalculation, if we left too large a gap to right or to left or between us, she would launch herself through it at a dead run and we would have to begin all over again.

I had the same feeling of trying to herd something that was endlessly alert to break loose.

And suddenly it did. All my desire for Niki came burning and torrenting upon me, spewing into my mind all the erotica of the solid, steady, metronomic surging of her hips while her eyes rolled wild and all of her was supple in her torment and her breasts were burning hardness, and her arms grew awesomely strong, and her broken mouth was lost in a demented babbling, keening and mewling between the whistling gasps that measured, by their frequency, her desperate climb to her peak of urgency. All the bright hotness of her in my mind, coming so strongly and suddenly, brought an icy sweat that soaked my body, and brought a knotted aching tension to my loins, and made me too sick and dizzy with my need to be able to drive. I pulled over onto a wide shoulder, able to despise myself for noting there was enough width for a U turn. I stopped and turned off the motor and had the maniac idea that I should throw the car key out into the darkness. I clenched the top of the steering wheel, my fists close together, my forehead resting on my fists. I rocked my head from side to side. In an abandoned ballroom in my mind, countless naked images of her danced to forgotten music, improvising obscene parodies I could not quite hear.

At one point I started the motor, I was that close to going back to her. But after a time the violence of my need began to fade. I had won, but I had no feeling of victory because I had won but one small skirmish. I had the sour wisdom of the addict who knows that the first episode of self-denial does not make future rejections easier. The need grows. All you can do is pray for increased strength with which to meet the next physiological assault.

I did not want to become the creature she could so easily turn me into. I did not want to release my grasp on pride and fall into the blind arena of sexual compulsion. Yet if there is no provable validity about any activity in which man indulges, if we are indeed but a ludicrous and self-important product of an accident of chemistry in the soupy sea of a brand-new planet...

I knew I could be too agile in such sly argumentation. Weak with emotional fatigue, I started the car and drove on into the city.