He moved his arm beneath her shoulders. Her body was rigid. He would have to let her say it. He was the goddamn priest who would have to hear it.
“I’m pregnant.” Her eyes were shut tight, as if she expected him to hit her. “I’m pregnant and I don’t think by you.”
Her voice was as smooth and anonymous as a recording. She must have rehearsed the words so often that all inflection had been erased. He threw off the sheet and sat up on the edge of the bed, reaching toward the table for a cigarette, stalling less from shock than from a sense of anticlimax. Spoken, the words had lost their power.
Lily had not moved. Well let her sweat it out.
“You don’t think by me,” he repeated finally.
She was sobbing convulsively now.
“Any Mexican would know better.” He could hear the flatness in his voice. “Any West End whore.”
“Leave me alone.” She was choking. “Just leave me be.”
“Crystal on your mother’s place would know better. Crystal Gomez. Or whatever her name is.”
He persisted only because he did not know what else to do, and thought she expected it of him.
“What do you want,” she whispered, her head turned away from him. “What do you want me to say.”
“Nothing.” His voice was gentler now. “I don’t want you to say anything at all.”
She sat up suddenly, as if anticipating a trick, suspecting some incipient violence.
“You want to know who it was,” she sobbed, almost screaming.
You want to know who it was. He did not know whether she meant it as question or accusation. Without looking at her, he reached for the shirt and the pair of khaki pants thrown on the chair the night before. He supposed he knew who it was, if it mattered. He would rather it had been a stranger, someone who came and left. For it to have been someone he knew made the fault more subtly Lily’s: she had at once violated several contracts. That kind of thinking, however, did not apply. No kind of thinking that led to the word “contract” could possibly apply to whatever it was between him and Lily. He would prefer that it had been a stranger but it did not matter that it had not been. It might as well have been.
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear anything more about it.”
He pulled on the khaki pants and left the room, carrying the shirt and a pair of sneakers. When he dropped one of the sneakers on the stairs he did not bother to pick it up.
Mostly because a light had been left burning on the sun porch, he sat down there on the edge of the rattan couch, one sneaker still in his hand, and wondered how long he had been asleep and how long it would be until dawn.
He sat there the rest of the night, occasionally taking a swallow of bourbon from a bottle left on the table, staring blankly at an album of snapshots Martha had left out. She had been showing their pictures to Channing the night before. (Channing, of course, had missed the point about Martha’s showing him the pictures, had studied a snapshot of Martha on a horse at eleven years old and remarked only upon the resemblance in pose to Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet; had examined the pictures of Martha on the beach at Carmel and been struck not by Martha but by the cypress formations. “They just blow that way, Ryder,” Martha explained again and again with more patience than Everett thought either characteristic or necessary. “They just get blown that way and stick.” It had so irritated and saddened Everett to see Martha spreading out their vacations at Carmel before Channing’s disregard that he had gone upstairs at ten o’clock. “Now, Everett, baby,” Lily had said, that deceptive mildness in her voice, “Martha’s baby pictures do not exactly constitute Mount Rushmore.”)
He saw a snapshot taken on the verandah of the Knight place when they were all children: Lily, he and Marth, and Sarah holding Marth by the hand. It looked like a birthday party but he could not think whose. He remembered one party, perhaps this one, when Martha had become sick from excitement. They had found her huddled in the corner of Edith Knight’s bathtub, the daisy wreath Sarah had made for her wilted and down over one eye. Everett smiled now, seeing that on that day they had all worn navy-blue reefer coats in different sizes. Knight had an identical reefer now; Lily’s mother had bought it.
He wished that he could go upstairs to Lily, tell her it would be all right, brush away the physical fact by making her laugh over the snapshot with the reefer coats. Red Rover, Red Rover, let Lily Knight come over. He could remember how Martha had sometimes kept herself hidden for hours when they played hide-and-go-seek; how Lily, who had never liked being It, had never even liked games much, had sat down under the lilac once and cried because no one would come from hiding and it was getting dark. “I thought you’d all gone and drowned,” she sobbed, hiccuping, when they finally ran in from the dry place under the dock where Martha had insisted on hiding. “I thought you’d fallen in and been caught in a whirlpool.” (The prospect of falling in and being caught in a whirlpool had always loomed impressively in Lily’s imagination; he knew that she believed remotely to this day that whirlpools the size and power of the Maelstrom were commonplace in the Sacramento River.) Somehow that day, he could not recall how, he had made Lily stop crying and laugh. He had intended always to take care of her, to make her laugh. But somewhere they had stopped listening to each other, and so he remained downstairs in a paralysis not of anger but of lassitude and pride.
He had stopped being angry months before, if he had ever been angry at alclass="underline" had passed through shock, hurt, and compromise already, and alone. Even then he had been hurt not so much by Lily as by his own failure to see. Have a drink with me, Everett, Francie Templeton had said the night he finally saw; he had gone up to see Joe about buying a used Ford pickup, but Joe was in town.
“We’ll have a drink together this fine June evening because Everett darling,” Francie said firmly, “it’s about to be one dry summer.”
She emptied an ice tray into a pitcher and picked up a bottle of bourbon. Reluctantly, he followed her upstairs to the terrace of the second-floor landing; women who drank made him uncomfortable under any circumstances, and Francie fell besides into the category of women old enough to know better.
“I so enjoyed talking to you the other night,” Francie said, dropping ice into two glasses. With an accuracy which surprised him, she threw one cube into the branches of an orange tree which brushed the terrace wall, tearing apart a spider’s web.