By the time she had showered, the tension was almost gone. She brushed her hair, darkened her eyebrows, made her mouth up with care. She studied herself in the mirror. Her mouth looked slightly puffy. She put on an almost-new dress, high-heeled sandals, a touch of her best perfume. She looked at herself in her bedroom mirror, the short skirt swirling at her knees as she turned from side to side. She could think of no simple description of how she felt. She felt rueful about stumbling into one trap, yet smug about evading the second one, no matter how narrow the margin. In retrospect the second trap seemed the more deadly one because it would have made her hostage to the emotions her completion, at his hands, would have made inevitable. And she felt rather prim, as well as smug, filled with the severity of the one unjustly used, the one victimized by her own warm and generous heart.
She felt no shyness until she was a step from the guest room door. She lifted her chin and strode in quite briskly. He had pulled the draperies back, and he was standing at the window, slowly buttoning his shirt. He turned around as she walked in.
“Kat, I didn’t mean...”
“Don’t for the love of God start apologizing. I don’t recall being raped, exactly.” She went to the bed and with housewife dexterity, slapped and smoothed and poked the rumpled spread back to tautness.
“You’re... pretty matter-of-fact about it.”
She sat on the bed, crossed her legs, took one of his cigarettes from the night table and lit it. “How should I act? Grateful? All bashful and trembly? Heartbroken? I’m an adult female, Jimmy. You had your way with me, to coin a phrase. It wasn’t my idea, and it wasn’t an idea I was terribly enthusiastic about, but I couldn’t see fighting a bloody battle over it.” She made herself smile at him. “Let’s just say I felt a lingering little feeling of obligation to you for past favors. And it isn’t every day a girl gets to cure an obsession, does she? Now you’ve had me. Am I too matter-of-fact? When I think of it at all, and I certainly don’t plan to dwell on it, I’ll remember it as an invasion of privacy, Jimmy.”
He moved closer to her. “You reacted.”
She shrugged. “A little, I suppose. You seem to be a good lover. I haven’t known enough men to be able to tell. And what was I supposed to do after we both found out I was willing? Lie there like a stick? I expect I was being decently hospitable, but no more than that. And it was like I warned you in the living room. I’m just another woman. And it didn’t mean much to me, and hardly more than that to you, did it?”
“Kat, you’re being so damned...”
“The least you can do now is to be honest with yourself. If we loved each other we might be able to make something special and magical out of the bed part of it. But this way, it was just a vulgar, sweaty little interlude on a sultry afternoon. And I’m not special to you any more, am I?”
He hesitated, then said, “No, dear. Not the way you were.”
She was unprepared for her own quick sense of loss. She hid it with a smile and said, “So I’ve done you a favor, I suppose. Destroyed the illusion. Poor Jimmy. Pick somebody sexier for your next set of daydreams. It might work out better for you. Right now, all things considered, I think we’re even. Nobody is obligated to anybody for anything. And there’s a little sadness about it. Because there’s no place to go from here. This is the end of us.”
“I know.”
“I did cherish you as my good friend.”
“But that was over too, wasn’t it, before I carried you in here?”
“I guess it was, Jimmy.”
“So, either way, the ending is the same.”
“Not quite the same. I feel sorrier for you than I would have. You have to live with yourself. You have to live with what’s happened to all of us.”
“I’ll manage.”
“I’m sure you will. Jimmy, how can you get that into the paper?”
“I’ve thought of a way. If it doesn’t work, turn your copy of it over to Tom, will you? Don’t try to do anything with it yourself.”
“Tom will have better ideas, I’m sure.”
“But if my idea works, you won’t have to do anything with it.”
“Best of luck.”
They walked out into the living room. The shyness was upon her again when he looked at her. “You mustn’t think it will change the Palmland thing to get this into the paper. It will cut Elmo back down to size, nothing more. Palmland has got too much momentum.”
“I guessed that would be the case. But at least it’s something.” He stood in the middle of the room, looking around. “Did you leave something here?” she asked.
He ran a hand back through his stiff sandy hair and smiled in a rather apologetic way. “Maybe, but it’s no time for cute symbolic answers, is it? I was just feeling... kind of nostalgic. You know. I used to come here and have good times. But that was a different person, I guess.”
“Quite a different person.”
When he was outside the door he turned, frowning, and said, “If you think of anything else I can do, any way I could... help fix things up...”
“There won’t be anything else.”
He looked at her, nodded thoughtfully and said, “No. I guess there won’t.”
She watched him from the window. He sat in his car for long silent moments, then started it and drove away.
The house seemed very empty. When she paced, her heels made noises that seemed too loud whenever she crossed the areas of bare floor. She turned the television set on and turned it off. Suddenly she remembered her other clothing and went swiftly to the guest room. The skirt was across the chair at the foot of the bed. The pale blouse was on the floor beside the chair. She picked them up. The skirt would do for another day. The collar of the blouse was faintly grimed. She found her bra on the floor between the bed and the wall. A gray ball of dust clung to the elastic when she picked it up. Her brief blue Dacron pants lay across the sandals she had worn to work.
She had picked the clothing up, and quite suddenly she felt so weak and faint that she turned and sat quickly on the side of the bed, near the foot of it, the clothing in her lap. She saw herself reflected in the narrow wall mirror, perfectly centered.
She gave herself a quick, vivid, social smile and said politely, “All dressed up and no place to go.”
She gave herself a comic grimace. “Lo the faithful widow lady,” she said.
And then, in her pretty dress and her perfume, she huddled over, hunched herself over the clothing in her lap, and began to cry, in a choking, gasping, hiccuping way, with the tears coming in a thin, scalding, sour way. As she wept she kept remembering that neither of them had said a word. They had made of it a desperate, silent struggle. And that seemed the most shameful thing of all.
Twenty-three
At ten o’clock Jimmy Wing found Brian Haas alone at the counter at Vera’s Kitchen. He went in and sat beside him. Brian gave him a casual and rather guarded smile and said, “Our Leader has been beating the bushes for you, pal. That seems to be happening a lot lately. I seem to find myself doing things you should be doing. Are you goofing a little, maybe?”
“Definitely not! Everything I do is constructive. I have been chugging around in the night, making up parables and fables.”
“You look a little bright around the eyes. You get the needle into a vein?”
“Mr. Haas, if a man suddenly went stone deaf and then suddenly got his hearing back again, he would go around listening to the rustle of every leaf. Right?”