He was a guy with practically no false modesty, and he was rarely embarrassed, but now he was, and he wished that she would quit talking this way. He wondered how the hell it turned out that he was always having a Lawes get intimate with him. She was looking down into her glass with fierce intensity, and he had the strange, stripped feeling that she was seeing in the pale liquid a kind of mental picture of him and Ed in bed. This he considered an invasion of privacy, and it made him angry as well as embarrassed, and he had a hard time containing his anger. He managed it only by reminding himself that she was a woman with normal needs who was married to a personable dud and that her needs must be unfulfilled. She was starving, he thought, and he was truly sorry for her.
“I love her the same as I always have,” he said.
She shook her head, still staring intently into the glass.
“That’s an equivocation. That is obviously an equivocation.”
“Look, Lisa. I don’t think you want me to give you a clinical description of Ed and me making love.”
She looked up at him across the bar then, and he was shocked by what he saw in her eyes, and what he saw was hate and pain. He realized at once that she had been torturing herself deliberately by speaking as she had, and there was almost, but not quite, a flash of insight into the reason she had done this.
“What I think,” she said, “is that you are a man and are incapable of loving her properly for that reason for no other. Men are by nature dull and coarse and are neither sensitive nor tender enough to love properly.”
“Don’t talk like that, Lisa.”
“And now you are angry with me.”
“No, I’m not angry. I just don’t want you to talk like that about Ed and me.”
She slipped off the stool and stood beside it erect and quite steady in spite of the amount she had drunk.
“Despite your denial, it is quite apparent that you are angry, and it is also quite apparent, as I said before, that you dislike me very much.”
“Damn it, Lisa, do we have to go over that again?”
“If you didn’t dislike me, you would come to our party. You and Ed.”
“What party?”
“The one Avery is having at the country club Saturday night. It is only a small party for a few people.”
“No one has asked us to come.”
“I’m asking you now.”
“Well, I don’t know. Saturday night is a pretty busy time around here.”
“You see? You just don’t want to come. Already you are making excuses.”
“Does Avery know you are inviting us?”
“What Avery knows or does not know is not pertinent. I have the right to invite someone to the party if I choose. The point is this: Will you come or will you not come?”
“All right, Lisa. We’ll come. Thanks for asking us.”
“Not at all. Eight would be a good time. Sometime around eight.”
She turned and walked steadily across the room and outside into the street, and Roscoe walked down to Emerson behind the bar.
“That’s a crazy woman,” he said.
“She’s just had too much to drink, Roscoe.”
“Sure. She’s always just had too much to drink. People don’t drink that way for fun, Em. There’s something crazy in them that makes them do it.”
“She’s hungry, Roscoe. She’s married to a dud.”
“Avery?”
“That’s right. He’s a dud.”
“So that’s why she’s after you!”
“Don’t be silly, Roscoe. She isn’t after me.”
“The hell she isn’t! You just be sure she never gets you cornered, that’s all.”
“Don’t make me laugh, Roscoe. I feel sorry for her.”
“In my opinion, it’s wasted sympathy. She’s the most quarrelsome damn woman I ever saw.”
“I told you, Roscoe. She’s frustrated. Frustrated people get that way.”
“Okay. I’m just a damn dumb bartender, and I don’t know anything about frustrated people or the way they’re supposed to get, but I know a woman on the make when I see one, and this is a woman on the make. She’s a bad one, Em. I’ve got a feeling about her. You take an old man’s advice and keep hands off.”
“You shouldn’t have said that, Roscoe. You know how it is with Ed and me.”
“Sure, Em, I know. I guess I talk too much.”
“It’s all right.”
Roscoe went back to work, and Emerson kept remembering Lisa’s eyes, the hate and pain in them.
It was for me, he thought. The hate was for me.
This was something he could not understand, and it disturbed him very much. He had not intended to have a second drink so early, but he poured it and stood there drinking it.
Section 2
In the street, the dry and searing heat came up around Lisa from the pavement. She went directly home, but when she was there she did not go immediately into the house, but went instead around the house into the back yard and down past the old summerhouse to the edge of the bluff overlooking the river and the wide bottom land. The river below was a gray and withered vein in the blistered body of earth. Beyond the river, marking the far boundary of the bottoms, the ridge was an ugly protrusion of bone with its quondam green flesh darkened and shrunken away. She stood staring out across the river and the bottoms to the ridge, remembering her recent insanity in the bar, frightened and impaired by her perverse penchant for self-destruction, and pretty soon she lowered her eyes to the rocks and tangled brush at the foot of the bluff that fell away almost perpendicularly before her. She began to wonder what it would be like to throw herself down, and she could see quite vividly for a moment her broken body in the brush, all that was left of the hunger and hope and perversity that she had been, and she felt for herself in death a great pity. It would be a great relief to be dead, she thought, but the prospect of dying was a terrifying prospect, because dying was not a part of death but the last part of living, and if she were to throw herself down upon the rocks among the brush there would be to endure the eons of seconds in descent and final pain.
Shrinking away from the thought and the edge of the bluff, she went back a few yards to the garden swing and sat down. It was getting quite late. Sunlight had ascended the ridge beyond the river and would soon slip upward off the crest to leave the last of the visible world in a long summer’s dusk, but there would be little relief in the dusk from the sun’s heat, for that was held in the earth itself and its appurtenances. Even the swing on which she sat was quite hot. She could feel the narrow slats like brands across her body. The oppressive air seemed to swell and contract with the undulating sound of unseen cicadas, and she could hear behind her, approaching on the dry grass, someone moving with slow and heavy footsteps.
It was Avery. He sat down beside her and sighed and let his head rest against the back of the swing.
“It’s so hot,” he said. “It takes the strength out of you.”
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t it be more comfortable in the house?”
“I suppose it would.”
“What are you doing down here?”
“As you see, I am sitting in the swing and looking across the river to the ridge.”
“I used to sit here a lot when I was a kid. I would sit and watch the river and try to imagine what it was like when this was the frontier and the wagon trains were going west.”
“I know. You’ve told me about it.”