He rubbed his palm slowly across his forehead. “It’s how much you are. Like I said. And funny to have it focused on me. I mean what the hell. I’m Joe Kardell. Going bald. Thick in the middle. Two teen-age kids. Young Joe is teen-age. The girl is only twelve.”
“But why me?” he demanded.
She shook her head. “Your word is wrong. Why us? I love you. I can’t tell you why I was vulnerable. I can tell you about you. You are a good man. You are kind and wise and sensitive and funny. But I don’t love you because. I just love you.”
He stared at his fist. “All the choices are lousy.”
“I know, darling.”
He did not dare look into her eyes. “Take Ruthie. Fifteen years married. She’s a good woman. My God, that sounds patronizing. Some of my best friends are good women. It’s more than that. I love Ruthie. We’ve got a good thing going. We always have had.” He looked cautiously at the girl.
“I accept that,” she said.
“But I keep thinking I could do it a lousy way. I could just sort of... turn myself off. You know? Stop all communication. And she would get frantic. Her nerves would go bad. Then I could turn it into fights. And I could turn it into a big enough fight after four or five months so that I could give a very plausible imitation of a guy walking out on a shrew. Now wouldn’t that be nice?”
“To even hear you say it makes me feel sick. If I turned you into that kind of a man, Joe, then neither of us would be very much.”
“I know. What do we want? We want an affair? Just like that?”
“If... if you...”
“Shut up! Don’t you know what you’d be doing to yourself?”
She tried to smile. “Run along, girlie, and find some nice young man. I don’t want some nice young man. I want Joe Kardell.”
“Do me the honor of allowing that maybe I do love you, Jean Anne. I mean maybe I’ve been caught in what you could call an occupational hazard, but you did come along, and neither of us were trying to start anything. Right?”
“Right, darling.”
“So I love you, and I don’t want Jean Anne in an emotional mess with an older man, even if it’s me. In a deal like that I get one of the loveliest girls in the world on a very selfish basis, and you get a bruised heart.”
Still trying to smile, she said, “Falling in love is supposed to be such fun.” But the tears came and ran out of blue eyes, one tracking down to the corner of her mouth where her tongue nipped quickly out and licked it away — a very young and very childish and brutally touching gesture.
“So what we talk about,” he said, “what we have to talk about is knocking it off before it gets a fair start.”
“A fair start,” she said, her eyes going around. “What would a fair start be? I think of you every waking moment, and I’ve never been so wretched in my whole life. How could there be any more of a start than this?”
“You’ll get over it quick.”
She raised a cool eyebrow. “And you too?”
“Real quick. In eighty-eight more years I won’t remember a thing.”
“I wish we had...”
“Don’t start sentences that way. Please, girl. I’ve got sixty of them I can start that way and none of them do any good, because the wishing doesn’t do any good. There’s just one thing clear. We get out now or we get in deeper. There’s no such thing as holding it right where it is. You know that.”
“Of course I know that.”
The tea was gone, the cakes untouched except for one. He sat in silence for a little while and then said, “We better head on back to town.” The lounge was beginning to fill up. Some people had come into the dining room.
“You run along,” she said.
He stared at her. “I can’t just leave you way the hell and gone out here.”
“You have to, Joe. I have only so much strength, and I’m right at the end of it. You just have to walk out right now, and never never ask for me again, because if you do, it will be more than I can take. I have money in my purse and I am used to finding my way from here to there, so just stand up and walk out. Now!”
He stood up slowly. “You’ll be all right?”
She turned her head and stared fixedly out at the gray light of the gathering dusk. They had turned the inside lights on. Her fist rested on the edge of the table, her knuckles white with the strength of her clasp. It was a small wrist and hand, as vulnerable-looking as the hand of his daughter. He picked up the check for the tea and walked away.
When he was out by his car, as he opened the door he looked down toward the motel office. It was a cheap and plausible solution, and, of course, no solution at all. But he thought of all the people he knew who seemed to thrive on such deadening compromises. The irony and impossibility of it bit into him deeply. The deadened people were never loved by such a one as Jean Anne. He gave the roof of his car a mighty smack with his fist, got in, and drove away from there.
He drove back into the city and parked on the street and unlocked the studio and went in. He pawed around in the office and found the test Polaroids of the candy job. They looked all right. He sat at the desk and checked the scheduled jobs. He breathed a deep sigh of mingled regret and relief when he saw that there was nothing within the next week on which he could conceivably use Lya Shawnessy.
She had made it totally clear. Phone me and I come running. But he was safe for a week. And, maybe, at the end of the week, he could endure another week. And then another.
He sat quite still for a little while, a stocky man with dark quick eyes and a blue shadow of beard. He took his hat off and leaned forward onto the desk, his head in his arms. He made a snorting sound that startled him. He sat up, snuffled once, looked at his watch, and phoned Ruthie. He said he was sorry, but he had been too busy to let her know he would be a little late. He told his wife he would be home by twenty past eight.
As he turned out the light he thought it was probably a very ordinary thing. If you could look at it sort of from the outside. And that was the trick from now on. Keep it ordinary. Keep everything very very ordinary.
Triangle
September 1966, Cosmopolitan
She looked at him, and for the first time he realized that the second drink was affecting her. There was an owlish intensity in her gaze. She was a small dark girl, eyes large in a small face, eyes earnest under the dark curl of bangs, mouth showing the small erosions of discontent.
“The lousy stupid things I do to myself,” she said, “I play these games, Johnny. The what-if games. So it’s a hypnosis thing. I know she’d never let you go. Even if you wanted out, which would be a fool thing.”
“Don’t blame yourself, Tina.”
She scowled at him. “The thing is, which you know, the hypnosis thing goes only so far, and then I drag my feet. Sometimes I think I’m the most dishonest person I know. Remember the night we couldn’t get a cab?”
“Of course.”
“Any number of cues I could have given you, and you would have taken it from there, right?”
“I guess so.”
“Oh, you know so, Johnny. You know so. I’ve got no international fame for glamor, but I’m suitable. And you’re a human type male type, and we have this kind of awareness that’s been going on with each other for months and months, and who could fault you? Who blames the guy?”
“His wife.”
“Yes indeed, and that’s our little problem, isn’t it?”
“Mine.”
“Anyhow, I guess you could say the game was called on account of rain that night. And after you went trundling on back to hearth and home, I paced my lonely pad telling myself I was a real smart girl. It went like this. He is Johnny Powell and he is one hell of an attractive man, so attractive that if it ever went one inch past where it’s gone already, you’d be hooked for good, and it’s a lousy thing to do with your life, Tina, to become the sad little town mouse, stealing the suburban husband from time to time. You see, it couldn’t be casual.”