“Then I don’t get it,” Robert said.
She turned more completely to face him, shifting her legs, and her right knee bumped his, and she became briefly — but totally — flustered. She regained control in only a second or two, but it was long enough for Robert to become aware that she was aware of him, and he suddenly became aware in the same way of her, and a touch of awkwardness encompassed them, like a sudden knot in a smooth plank.
“The point,” she said, but she’d lost the thread of her thought, and just sat there frowning and looking uncomfortable and irritated with herself.
Robert had to help her. “It wasn’t,” he said, “that he’d be demeaning himself. Or that you’d be demeaning yourself if you took the job.”
“That’s right,” she said, back on the track again. “The point is, if I am who you say I am and who I think I am, I wouldn’t want that job. Oh, all right, if I think of myself as being in a dead-end here, I’m bored and frustrated and so on, then I might have a moment of weakness and think, wouldn’t it be nice if I could take that movie cashier job? Or run for Congress. Or whatever. But I won’t consider it seriously, not for more than a minute or two. I might go on for months wishing I could take the job, but after the first thirty seconds I would know forever that I couldn’t. And if I didn’t know it, I think that would mean—”
She stopped all at once, and her expression became pained. Her eyes faltered, tried to keep looking at him, and failed. She kept her body facing him, but turned her head away and looked out through the windshield again. The westward lying clouds had moved somewhat closer in the course of the day, and the westward sliding sun was just in the process of sinking down behind them, which changed the aspect of the day — making it less cheery, switching it to a minor key — without lessening the heat.
Robert waited, but she said nothing, didn’t move, so finally he asked, “What would it mean?”
She turned again to look at him. “You don’t know me very well,” she said, “but I think you know me enough. What if I hadn’t told you about the cashier job, and next week or next month you heard that I had taken it? What would you think of me?”
He grinned uncomfortably and said, “Less, to be frank.”
“I mean specifically.”
“Specifically?” He shrugged, and looked out the windshield himself, frowning at the stretch of gravel road ahead of them. “That you’d gone a little flaky, I suppose.”
There was silence. She didn’t say anything.
He turned and frowned at her. “Is that what you mean? You think Bradford Lockridge has gone flaky? Senility?”
“No,” she said. “I hope to God not. I think he’s talked himself into a way of looking at things, that’s all. If he has time, and if he’s argued with by enough people he respects, this thing won’t last, all of a sudden he’ll get his perspective back and he’ll see there’s nothing wrong with being a Congressman unless you’re Bradford Lockridge. Because that’s what he’s forgotten, isn’t it? And that’s the point. All those other reasons I gave you for my wanting the cashier job are so much hot air. I don’t want to earn my own pin money, I don’t want to see movies in Eustace, I don’t want to meet the local townspeople by selling them movie tickets, and if I’m bored and lonely that job isn’t going to do anything about it. Don’t you see the only reason I’d want that job?”
“No,” Robert said.
“Because,” she said, “because it isn’t right for me. Because it isn’t the job, it’s to be somebody else, it’s to be somebody who could take that job, whose life is simple enough and whose options are plain enough and who isn’t locked to a grandfather and a baby and a, a, a status, a code of behavior that just, just stifles, stifles you until you could, until you—”
She was quivering, her voice had gotten steadily louder and shakier, she was about to either scream or cry, and more to contain her than anything else, to limit the explosion, like a Marine falling on a hand grenade, Robert reached out both hands and pulled her in against his chest, holding her tight against him, their knees entangled in the shift lever, her head buried in the crook of his neck and shoulder. “All right,” he said, softly.
“Oh, God,” she said, muffled. But it wasn’t a scream, and it wasn’t a prayer. It seemed mostly a cry of relief. How long, he wondered, had she been bottling this thing up?
She never did cry, though she trembled violently for a minute or two. He held her tight, neither of them speaking, and Robert became aware of a munching sound behind his head, nearby. He couldn’t think what it was at first, and he couldn’t turn to look, but all at once he remembered her horse, still standing there beside the car, waiting to be called on. And having a grass break in the meantime, from the sound of things.
The trembling lessened gradually, then stopped altogether, but Robert didn’t yet let go. The position was beginning to be uncomfortable, mostly because there was nowhere sensible to put his legs, but he stayed where he was, holding her, both arms around her and pulling her in close, his right hand spread against the back of her head, feeling the soft hair and the oddly vulnerable skull as he held her close against his shoulder and neck. He could feel her breath warm and moist on his throat, and a pulse in the side of his neck was beating against her cheek. His arms were aware of the femaleness of the body he held, but that was only a disturbing counterpoint to his main concern, which was how to ease her embarrassment once she had herself under control again.
She was going to be embarrassed, he was sure of that. The illustration she had chosen in explaining to him her objections to her grandfather’s plans had turned out to be too close to the bone. Without either of them realizing it, she had opened a locked door deep inside her mind, and out had come the true intolerability of her life.
She should do something. What? He didn’t know, it wasn’t up to him to know, but something. Move to a city somewhere, New York, or if that wasn’t far enough move to San Francisco. London. Anywhere. She had money, or she could get money from Lockridge, which was the same thing. Move. Hire a nurse for the child. Do something.
“I’m all right now,” she said, the words muffled but very calm. She pulled back gently, waiting for him to release her, which he did. Then she sat far over on the other side, not looking at him, looking out at the woods to her right instead, giving him only a one-quarter view of her face as she said, “I’m sorry, I’ve been under a strain. We had a death here just two weeks ago, and now this Congress business—”
“Would you like a drink?”
“Oh, God, yes,” she said, but faintly, without the force the phrase deserved.
Robert glanced to his left, at the ruminative chestnut, and said, “What about your horse? Will he find his own way back to the stable?”
She turned in surprise, apparently having forgotten about him. “Oh. No, I’m afraid not, not Jester. He really isn’t very bright, he’d just fall down a ravine somewhere or something.”
“Ride him back,” Robert said. “I’ll come after you.”
She hesitated, and he could see that she would like to come with him, but wasn’t sure if she hadn’t made too much of a fool of herself in front of him. “Come on,” he said, “I could use a drink myself. And I have no appointments to keep.”
“No one at home?”
“No one but me. And I’m out.”