“I had to. I told you why.”
“I guess you did,” Carver said.
She looked out past the dead plants hanging in the window. The rush of surf was still audible over the hum of the air-conditioner. The place was cooling off fast.
“Edwina Talbot’s more than pretty,” she said. “She’s beautiful.”
“Yeah, she’s that.” Carver thought of Edwina, and, for some reason, of the woman down on the beach.
Laura tilted her head to the side and sighed, then stood up and walked over to stand near him. She moved as if she had no choice in the matter, as if some celestial puppet master were skillfully working her strings. “She can’t give you what you need right now. Sam can’t give me what I need.”
“Maybe not,” Carver said, somehow not surprised by her direct approach. It was all so clear to her, as she must think it was to him. Or would be to him if only he’d open his mind and let the light in. If only he’d read that survey in People. Or was it Cosmopolitan?
He hadn’t wanted this, but then he hadn’t counted on Laura’s candidness, and the effect she’d have on him standing close and looking so honestly, so yearningly, into his eyes. Years hadn’t passed. Acid hadn’t spilled. Fire hadn’t burned. Their son was still alive.
No, he was dead.
Dead forever.
Carver’s throat tightened. He felt his eyes well with tears.
Laura said, “We can give each other what we need. Only you and me. That’s how it is, I’m afraid.”
Carver reached for her before he knew what he was doing and was pressing her to him, feeling her body vibrate as if she were trembling on the edge of an endless drop. Her forehead and cheek were crushed against his chest and her tears saturated his shirt like warm blood. “Oh, Christ!. .” she moaned, and clung to him as if he alone and not Christ could save her. This was shared self-pity, he realized. Maudlin. A staged catharsis. But she was right: they needed it.
On the bed they twisted grief into desperation and desire, and hid from death in the ultimate act of life.
Her sharp cries were still lodged like shards of pain in his mind when Carver rolled exhausted from her, dragging his bad leg across her perspiration-slick thigh. The heated scent of their lovemaking lay over them. He let his eyes slide sideways to study the sweat-gleaming plane of her stomach and the faintly quivering swell of pale breast. Her breathing was shallow and ragged, as if just enough to sustain life. There were distinct dividing lines where her swimming suit had shielded flesh from sun at the Andrew Johnson Motel.
Carver realized he was parched and thirsty. He felt like a man suddenly awakened after sleeping off a long drunk. Hair of the dog, he thought, and said, “There’s a beer in the refrigerator. Want to share it?”
“Sure.” Her voice was slow and drained of feeling. Cold beer time. Cold logic time. The way it had been years ago. He wondered what she was thinking now, lying among the ruins.
He got up and considered leaving the cane and using walls and furniture for support to cross the floor to the kitchen. But his good leg felt rubbery, and he didn’t like the idea of possibly falling in front of Laura. He grabbed the cane, and, barefoot, he padded and thumped across the plank floor.
She was sitting up when he returned behind the folding screen that partitioned off the sleeping area. His bedroom. With Laura in it. Her breasts were bare and seemed larger and more pendulous now as she leaned her back against the oak headboard. She seemed relaxed.
She said, “Don’t worry, I’m up to date on my pills.”
“I should have asked,” Carver said. “Didn’t even think about it.” Or maybe some part of him had thought about it and he hadn’t wanted to ask. But he didn’t want her to be pregnant; God, he didn’t want that!
He took a long swallow of beer, feeling some of it dribble coldly onto his chin, then handed her the can. She tilted back her head and drank deeply. A few drops of beer or condensation from the can rained onto her right breast, and she absently lifted her left hand and rubbed away the glistening dampness without lowering the can. He waited, watching her drink.
Finally she handed the half-empty can back to him.
He placed it on the table by the bed and sat down on the mattress, twisting his body so he could face her. She smiled and said, “So how do you feel?”
“Relieved,” he said. “Not good, though. Not at ease.”
“Why not?”
Carver wasn’t sure he could crystallize the reasons in his mind so he could analyze them and frame an answer for her. Guilt was in there. And Edwina. A part of him felt like a wayward teen who’d cheated on his steady. But it was more than that. It involved so many things, some of them indefinable right now and maybe forever. Uncertainty seemed to be a permanent facet of life. His life, anyway.
He groped in his mind for what he was sure of, found it, and said, “I don’t want you to talk to Adam Kave, Laura.”
She stared at him and something deep in her eyes changed. She seemed to retreat from him without changing position propped against the headboard. As if she were diminishing in the small end of a telescope. Soon she’d be too far away for them to hear each other. “Is that what this was about? An exercise in persuasion?”
It hadn’t occurred to him that she’d think that; he knew it should have. “No! For God’s sake, Laura!” It hurt him physically that she believed that about him, a heavy ache in the pit of his stomach.
She got up, stepped into her shoes, and raised her dress above her head and wriggled into it. Fumbling, she buttoned it up the front, missing half the buttons, and yanked its belt tight. Then she snatched up her underwear and pantyhose from the floor and stood angrily holding them bunched tightly in her right hand, as if they were something dead that she’d loved. She glared at him as if he were responsible for the death.
Carver braced himself on the headboard and stood up, tried to reason calmly with her. “Laura, listen. .”
But she turned and stalked out. He didn’t follow. Instead he stood listening to the tap, tap of her high heels across the cottage floor. Then the reverberating slam of the screen door. The solid thunk of her car door. And the sound of her driving away. He didn’t know what he would have told her if he had managed to stop her and make her stand and listen.
Still nude, he stretched out on his back on the bed, laced his fingers behind his head, and studied the ceiling.
Maybe he’d had nothing to say to her, no words to stop her, because she was right. Maybe dissuading her from talking to the Kave family before he had a chance to find Paul had been what the last few hours were about. Lately he’d come to realize how little he knew about the man he’d become. As if a stranger were wearing his skin.
He began to perspire, beads of sweat trickling from his armpits to play over his ribs and down to the already damp sheet that still smelled of his and Laura’s physical reunion.
Apparently it was only their bodies that had met and merged. The old distance was back.
He reached over, found the warming Budweiser can, and drained the last few ounces of beer. It tasted flat and sour. Yummy, he thought, and tossed the empty can away and listened to it bounce clattering into a corner. Empty.
Chapter 30
Between Emmett and Nadine, Carver thought it was Nadine who was less likely to notify him if Paul contacted her. He decided to watch her, and periodically check to see if Emmett had phoned him.
He borrowed Edwina’s incredibly complicated, many-knobbed answering machine, which had a beeperless remote feature that allowed him to phone his number and punch in a code that would command the machine to play back messages. The microchip was a hell of an invention, he thought. He’d be able to call from any phone to check for messages while he was following Nadine. He wondered if this technology was an offshoot of the space program, all those tons of metal and flesh and fire hurled from a point on the coast, out of Earth’s grace and gravity, and now Carver could hear from a distance people who wanted to sell him time shares and vinyl siding.