Paul finished, and as Linda gave him his change, he said, “Go for a swim this afternoon? If your mother will let you.”
She bit her lip. “Not down there.”
“Of course not. Cove Beach. Cold beer and handstands.”
Her good grin wrinkled her nose. “Love it.”
“Okay. I’ll come to lunch late, and we’ll go from here.”
At two-thirty, he drove her from the restaurant to the court and waited in the sun glare while she changed. He wore swimming trunks and a T-shirt. She came out soon in a dark-green strapless one-piece suit. The look of her made his breath catch in his throat. The faintly chunky look that she had in her uniform was completely gone. Her tan was like pale milk chocolate and honey. She eased herself onto the hot leather of the seat, saying, “Ai! Qué calor, hombre!”
“You speak Spanish?”
“Kitchen Spanish. Twenty words, and I use them all wrong.”
Cove Beach would be jammed during the season. It was the public beach used by all tourists who did not rent waterfront property. It was nearly deserted.
They swam out a ways and floated, letting the waves lift them and drop them gently. They raced to shore, and Paul won by a narrow margin, but at the expense of almost complete exhaustion. Linda was not even breathing hard.
She looked professionally at the color of his back and shoulders, dredged a bottle of lotion out of her beach bag, and made him lie still to be protestingly greased. They lay there in the sun, and he felt the heat of it slowly daze him, take him into that familiar drugged world where all sounds are far away and where the sun is blood color through tightly closed eyelids.
“Give up the restaurant and help me loaf,” he said lazily.
“Oh, fine. Live like a sea gull. Not a care in the world. All I have to do is give up eating.”
“It’s an unpleasant habit, anyway.”
“Will you stay when the week is up?”
“Same question Valerie asked me,” he said. “I haven’t—” And suddenly he sat up, frowning.
“What’s the matter, Paul?”
“That’s funny. She was rambling on, half drunk and not making any particular sense, but she mentioned that week, too. And I didn’t tell her about it. You’re the only person I told.”
“I didn’t tell anybody.”
“She knew about that week, and it had to come from Winkler. I would have sworn — I’ll still swear that he felt me out and decided on one week without having made his mind up before. So word got to Valerie fast. And that makes what she said more — understandable.”
“How do you mean?”
“She came to ask me to get out of the house. And I told her to get out. And then she said something about having known from the beginning the idea was bad. Whose idea? Winkler’s? To have her come and see if she could influence me. She would have known that wouldn’t work.” He frowned. “So take it another step. Winkler could make her do something she thought was pointless. Some hold on her. And if he could do that, maybe he could have made her sell out, even though she didn’t want to sell. And she said crazy things about pain and how she couldn’t stand it.”
He stood up, scuffed at the sand with his bare foot. There seemed to be an electric silence across the world. “No.” he said. “Things like that — things like that don’t happen to people.”
“What is it?” Linda demanded. “What’s upsetting you, Paul?”
He sat on his heels, picked up sand, and let it sift through his fingers. “I couldn’t understand how she could do what she did. Al told me that that Donny character was in one of the cabañas before the sale went through. All right. Suppose Winkler had a good reason for wanting my place. A very good reason. He tries to buy it, and Valerie says no. Donny is planted there to find a weak place, find a way they can get at her. Donny finds out, maybe by accident, maybe by experiment, that she has a deadly fear of being hurt. Under threat of being hurt worse — she said something about a sample, and Marie said her wrist was bandaged — she wouldn’t have gone to the police or to Jerry Dobson. It was almost a psychotic fear of being hurt. You’d have to live with her to know how it was. The thought of having a baby made her go gray and shake all over, but she said we’d start having them, after I got back.”
“But that’s horrible, Paul. To think that they’d coldly find that weakness and—”
“So she sold, and Winkler gave her a good price to ease her conscience and make it look good, and then she felt unworthy. She got the divorce. Jerry told me she handled her share of the money as though she wanted to get rid of it. Downhill and downhill. Ever since. Telling me I shouldn’t have come back. And yesterday. That fits. It all fits. And that’s how they could make her do anything they wanted her to do, and maybe she drove away from here thinking that she’d have to tell them it didn’t work, afraid there’d be punishment for failure.” He wanted so badly to explain it to Linda. “You see, when she was made, they left out the courage to stand pain. She couldn’t help it. And after what she’d done to me, she couldn’t even tell me. Because I would have wanted her back, and she felt dirty.”
“I heard what Marie said. About her saying she had fallen a long way.”
“Do you believe I’m right, Linda?”
“There’s no other way to believe, is there?”
He had been anxious to make Linda believe, anxious to defend Valerie, yet now he barely heard her response. He sat there on his heels, his legs cramped, and he shut his hand on a handful of sand until his knuckles popped.
Her voice came from far away. “Paul! Paul, look at me!”
It seemed a vast effort to turn his head. She was at the wrong end of a lens, her eyes full of concern. “Paul!”
“No way to prove a thing,” he said, and the words felt as though they had edges that scraped the side of his throat.
“Paul. Stop it!” She knelt, and her hand flashed and her small, hard palm cracked hard against his cheek, toppling him over. He sprawled in the sand and stared at her in utter astonishment. She was breathing hard and shallowly, and her eyes were in flame. But the blow had brought him back from some dark place.
“Good Lord!” he said.
“I could see what you were thinking of doing. I could see it in your eyes.”
“I wanted to do it so bad I could taste it.”
“And now?”
“I still want to. In a different way. In a colder, smarter way.”
“That isn’t any good, either.”
“It’s what they’ve asked for. No law covers it. So make your own. And I know how to do it. I’m an expert.”
He moved over to sit on the blanket.
“No, Paul.”
“Why not? I know I’m right. Why not? There isn’t a reason in the world good enough to stop me.”
She was still kneeling, close beside him. He glanced up into her face. She was looking at him oddly. With a motion almost as quick as her hard, competent slap had been, she leaned forward, hands light on his shoulders, and brought her lips down firmly on his. It was an awkward kiss because of their positions, and it lasted but a few seconds before she flung away from him and turned face down on the blanket, her head cradled in her arms, yet there had been a fierce possessiveness in the kiss, an almost shocking immediacy. He sat stupidly and looked down at her. Her shoulders shook, but she made no sound.