How badly had four years of idleness dulled the edge of my judgment? If I felt I had become too stale to take charge, could I not also be too stale to decide who should be in charge? Under Mottling the company was making a profit, a good one. Wasn’t that the definitive index of excellence? Suppose I booted him out and things turned sour? A hell of a lot of people would be hurt.
Suddenly the easy answer became enormously desirable. I could switch to Mottling. I would look like a fool, but what could they expect from a beach bum? I could vote it the easy way and leave at once for Florida, and wait on the lazy beach for Niki to join me.
I sat in a big chair. She came over and sat on the arm of it and laid her arm across my shoulders. “Gevan, Gevan, my darling. Don’t be so troubled. It’s not a case of humoring me, actually. It’s just the wisest decision you can make.”
I looked up into her face, so close to mine. “I keep wondering why you can’t just sit the hell back and collect your dividends?”
“I could have, if we hadn’t gotten so involved in the whole thing, Gevan. I want to be proud of you. I want you to be wise and right.”
“Have you made some kind of a deal with Mottling?”
“Don’t be so damn childish and suspicious! You keep looking for things that aren’t there.”
“I have a hunch, a very strong hunch, I should vote Mottling out.”
She sprang up and stared at me. “A hunch! Good God! You’d make a decision like that on a hunch? And they talk about female reasoning.”
“But I can’t ignore it.”
“We’re both being stubborn and we’re both being silly. There’s an easy way out, Gevan. Abstain from voting. Then whatever happens, neither of us will have any regrets.”
It made sense. I remembered Uncle Al’s estimate of their voting strength. Even my vote might not be quite enough to oust Mottling. It would save Niki’s pride, and mine. I stood up. I was at the point of agreement when some perverse instinct, some final strand of resistance, made me say, “What would it cost me to vote for Granby, anyway?”
She gave me a long and level stare. Her mouth tightened.
“Me,” she said.
I stared at her. I was shocked and incredulous. “Do you really mean that?”
“I love you. I love you very much. But no love is worth spending your life in hell. And I suspect it would be hell, indeed, to live with a vain, silly man who is too stubborn and opinionated to compromise, a man who has your blind need to win all the marbles every time. Look at me, Gevan. Take a good long look. I know what I’m worth. I’m worth a lot more than you’re willing to offer. I yearned for you for four years. I almost got used to it. I guess I can manage to get used to it sooner or later. If you decide I’m worth the price I put on myself, come back and tell me — before Monday.”
Her eyes were somber and cool. She turned away and walked out of the room. I stood in the silence for a few minutes. She had given her ultimatum like a slap across the mouth. I could not pay that price for her, or for anything in the world. I let myself out, got into my car and left.
As I drove down Ridge Road I tried, without success, to make her determination to win the point fit with what I had learned about her during the months of our engagement. Then she had seemed to be a balanced person, free of this obsessive bull-headedness.
I tried some conjectures, just for size. Ken needs help with the firm. Niki recommends Mottling, an old friend or flame. Mottling arrives. They have an affair. Ken learns of it somehow. That is what was tearing him in half. He loves Niki too much to bring it to a showdown, for fear of losing her entirely. At that point the theory began to fall apart. Why should she make Mottling’s keeping his job a condition for our getting together again, unless there was still something between her and Mottling? Yet what could still exist between them if she wanted to go away from Arland and never come back?
I was doing thirty-five on the two-lane road, that slow driving pace you maintain when you are thinking hard. The long hill was about a seven-degree grade down to the valley floor. I heard something coming behind me, coming fast. I looked in the rear-vision mirror and saw the front end of a truck, alarmingly close, too close to give him a chance to swing out around me, too close for me to avoid him by tramping on the gas. Time was measured in micro-seconds. There was no time to examine the shoulder of the road. I turned hard right, rocking the car up onto the left wheels. It seemed to hang there, poised and vulnerable before it lunged down into the wide, shallow ditch. I was tensed for the smashing blow of the truck against the back of the car. But the truck roared by, the engine sound fading to a minor key as my car bounced high over the far side of a shallow ditch, plunged head-on toward a thick utility pole. I fought the wheel, hauling it back so, for a second or two, it rode down the center of the wide ditch before momentum was lost, the wheels sank deep into the rain-drenched earth and the motor stalled.
Silence was sudden and intense. Rain dripped from overhead leaves onto the metal car top. I listened. The truck was out of sight down the slope. I was listening for the brake-scream and long shattering crash as it went into the heavy traffic by the stop lights on the valley floor. I listened for a long time and heard no sound.
I lit a cigarette with the solemn care and formality of a drunk. I opened the car door and got out. It was difficult to keep my legs braced under me. I guessed that the truck had been doing better than eighty. And it had been big. At that speed it would have bunted me end over end. The driver had been asleep — or drunk — or criminally careless — or—
It was like the moment in the hotel suite with that feeling that someone had just left. That same creeping chill along the back of my neck. For a few moments I believed it had been a cold-blooded attempt to kill me in an exceptionally messy way. I felt very alone. It was an instinctive fear. Then I began to reason it out. It had to be an accidental thing. To presuppose intent meant giving the unknown assailant credit for an incredible piece of timing. I was once again giving myself the lead in a melodrama. The part was beginning to feel familiar.
To get back to sanity, I walked around the car, looking at the situation. My shoes sank into the mud. The car was unmarked, but very probably the wheels had been knocked out of line, or the frame wrenched. There was no traffic on the Ridge Road hill. It had been a big, fast gray truck. That was all I knew. I had but one glimpse of it, lasting not over half a second, through the constricted field of the rear-vision mirror. Not much information to give the traffic patrol.
My knees began to feel better. I flipped the cigarette away and got behind the wheel and started the motor. I tried to rock the car out of the mud. I gained about a foot and then it settled in, deeper than before. A pickup truck stopped beside me. It belonged to a farm equipment dealer.
I told the heavy-set driver what had happened. He cursed the local traffic in general and fast trucks in particular. He had a chain and we hooked it to the front left corner of the frame. On the first try it came up out of the ditch and diagonally across the shoulder and onto the pavement, the rear wheels slapping mud up into the fender wells. I tried to pay him, but he refused belligerently, tossed his chain in the back of the pickup, and drove off.
I drove down the hill at a sedate pace. There was no front-end shimmy, but I knew that didn’t mean too much. I took it back to the rental agency and explained what had happened. I borrowed a rag and wiped my shoes off. I had lunch at a diner across the street while the agency checked the alignment. When I went back, they said the castor, chamber, and toe-in were way out of line, and they had a new sedan ready to go, and a new form for my signature.