Then she realized something, and she laughed. The full humor of it hit her and she rolled around on the floor, laughing like a lunatic, holding her sides to keep them from splitting.
This was Sunday morning.
She had to hurry home to go to church with the family.
She took a last drag on her cigarette and ground it out in a copper ash tray already overflowing. She found another cigarette in the crumpled pack and got it going. She sat down — because it was hard to stand up now, hard to keep on her feet — and she tried to make out just what had happened to her.
Everything had happened to her.
Everything, starting with an evening of heavy drinking and sophisticated small talk. Then Craig playing orgy-master with that redheaded Maynor bitch. Then throwing up in the john, going to bed with Craig, getting drunk as a skunk and playing lesbian games with Margo Long on the chaise in the back yard. And waking up.
And now she was sitting alone in the living room and wanting only to go home, where she belonged. She ground out the second cigarette and walked through the house looking for Craig. She tried one room, and there were two sleeping bodies on the bed, but Craig was not one of them. Frank Evans was, and so was Sue Maynor. She had to laugh — suave and polished Frank, the deep-talking pipe-smoker, was just as human as anyone else. He had taken his turn with Slutty Sue like every other man at the party.
She left the room quietly, closing the door. She tried another room, the bedroom where she and Craig had made love so many times. And this time she found him.
He was lying on his back, mouth open, eyes closed. He was snoring, and all at once he did not look romantic or debonair at all. He looked like a bum, a drunken bum sleeping off a wine binge in a pig sty.
For there was a pig with him.
A blonde pig with big breasts and smeared lipstick. April glanced from one to the other. I loved him, she thought. I actually loved the rotten son of a bitch. And she wondered what he and the blonde pig had done, and how many times, and—
She left the room.
She could not talk to Craig, obviously. Not now and not ever, as far as she was concerned. He was rotten and filthy and she would be damned a dozen times before she would try to wake him from his sleep with the blonde bitch to take her home.
But she could not walk, either. Home was too far away. So just what could she do, damn it?
Cars were parked in front. She went from one to the other and finally found a blue Pontiac with Dayton plates and keys in the ignition. She wondered who had been dumb enough to leave the keys, and silently thanked whoever it was for his or her stupidity. She climbed into the car, got behind the wheel, and sat.
She would have to go home. She did not expect a brass band at seven in the morning, but they would have to take her in and they would have to leave her alone. She could make up some sort of story — a car accident, trouble of one sort or another, anything that would placate them for a little while.
She turned the key in the ignition, stepped on the gas and started home. She knew the route. She had driven it often enough in Craig’s Mercedes.
Craig — Craig Jeffers. She had loved him, she knew, and she did not love him any more. She could not understand it — he had always wanted her so much, had spent such a great deal of time with her, had seemed to love her so deeply. And yet he had been able to toss her over and go to bed with other girls. With Sue Maynor, and with the blonde tramp, and with God knew how many others.
Why?
Not because she was no good. She could not believe that. She knew that he had told her repeatedly how good she was, knew how wondrously exhausted she could make him. She remembered how he had cried out one time at the crucial instant, his nails digging into her shoulder, his face contorted in a mixed expression of pleasure and pain. There was nothing Sue Maynor could give him that she could not give him as well or better.
Why, then?
She sighed. She needed a cigarette but there was none around. She kept her mind on her driving, heading toward town and home.
They did not believe her.
When she went through the door her mother was standing with her hands on her hips and a fierce expression on her face. Her father’s face was drawn with worry and anger in more or less equal proportions.
This will have to be good, she thought.
“All right,” her mother said. “Start talking, April.”
She made up her story as she went along, an unlikely story about Craig having a malaria attack and how she had to nurse him through the night and pile him up with blankets and put hot compresses on his feverish head.
“He caught it in Italy,” she explained. “He was there one winter and he caught malaria and he still gets attacks now and then. They say you never get over it. You can be cured and still get terrible attacks years later.”
“And you couldn’t even call April?”
“Well, Mom—”
“We were up all night waiting for you,” he father cut in. “You could have called us, April.”
“Well, Dad—”
“April,” her mother said, “I don’t believe you.”
“What?”
“I said I don’t believe you. This story about malaria. I think you’ve been telling us stories all along. Why, I met Judy Liverpool’s mother the other day and mentioned how nice it was of her to have you over for dinner and she said you hadn’t been there at all. Where were you that night, April?”
“At Judy’s,” she said desperately. “Look, maybe Judy’s mother forgot. I mean, it was over a week ago, and—”
“April.” Her mother stopped, then sighed. “I don’t want to discuss it now. Not today, not on the Lord’s day. Are you coming to church with us, April?”
If you lie, she thought, you have to stick to it. “I can’t,” she said angrily. “I was up all night and didn’t so much as close my eyes. The fever broke finally but it was horrible. Around three in the morning Craig was having horrible hallucinations and everything. I never saw anything like it. Now I’m exhausted. I think I’ll go to bed for awhile, if you don’t mind.”
They said they did not mind, but obviously they did mind. They did not believe her. Once their belief was shattered in one respect, they would question every single thing she told them from then on.
This was going to be bad.
They trooped off to church. April took a succession of hot baths and ate a full breakfast. When they came home she was sleeping soundly, and they let her sleep until dinner time. Dinner was an ordeal, with a good deal of cross-questioning and a generally unhappy atmosphere. The only thing to do, she decided, was to brazen it out.
“I’d better get back to him,” she said after dinner. “I’ll have to take the Pontiac. If he feels okay he can drive me back.”
Her father offered to run her over but she managed to brush the offer aside. She left the house, dressed comfortably now in jeans and a sweater, and drove the Pontiac to Craig’s home.
10
The Pontiac was big and bulky. Cars, she thought, taking the turn off onto the narrow road that led to Craig’s house. You could tell the whole story in terms of cars. A green Oldsmobile a year old, where Dan Duncan had claimed her virginity in the back seat on a Saturday night When was that? Two weeks ago. Just two weeks ago.
And the Mercedes-Benz, the sleek 300-SL that had stopped for her when she had been on her way to Xenia and from there to New York. Craig’s car. And the hot rod — Bill Piersall’s car. And now the bulky Pontiac. And she did not even know to whom it belonged.