“Thanks,” he said, hanging up.
Without a car he was more helpless than ever. He walked out onto the sidewalk, and when a cab passed he waved to it. Again he was riding in a cab, and again he had given Pat’s address. In his mind he was positive that they would show up there. Maybe, he thought, they had gone for a ride.
When the cab let him off before the apartment building, he saw the Dodge, moist and gleaming, parked by itself in a slot near the entrance.
He rang the bell by her name, but there was no response. Again he waited. Presently a figure appeared on the other side of the door. A heavyset man stepped out of the building, glanced at Jim, and went on. He caught the door before it shut. Somebody was always going in or out. He climbed the stairs to her floor.
The door to her apartment was closed, and no light showed. He knocked. She did not answer, but he knew that this time they were here. Finally he tried the knob; the door was unlocked.
“Pat,” he said, opening the door. The room was dark . . ..
“I’m in here,” she said.
He went into the bedroom. “Just you?” he demanded, fumbling to find the lamp.
“Don’t turn the light on.” She was lying on the bed. “Wait a second.” In the darkness she rose up and moved; he was aware of her motions. “Okay,” she said, “I wanted to put something on.” Her voice was relaxed, and she sounded drowsy. “When did you get here? I was asleep.”
“Where’s Art?” he said, snapping the light on.
She lay stretched out in the bed, wearing a slip. Her feet were bare . . .. Beside the bed, on the chair, was a neat pile of her clothing; under the slip she had on nothing at all. Her hair, dark and heavy, lay spread out on the pillow. He had never seen her so lacking in turmoil, so content. Smiling, she said, “I sent him home. I gave him money for a cab.”
“Well,” he said, “you’ve destroyed their marriage.”
“No,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about it. I’m a girl he went with before his marriage Do you see? This is what he missed . . . do you know that Rachael is the first girl he ever took out?”
“I took you over there,” he said, “and you wrecked those kids—you went right to work.”
Sitting up, she said, “No, you’re wrong.”
“You wanted to go to bed with somebody, and you couldn’t go to bed with me. So you went to bed with him.”
Pat said, “It isn’t just him. When I saw Rachael, I wanted to have her. Try to understand. I’m in love with both of them, and so are you. When I saw her, I wanted to make love to her; I wanted to kiss her and pet her . . . I wanted to take her to bed and fondle her. But of course I couldn’t. But it doesn’t matter which one of them. I’m glad you took me over there because now I’ve finally come back to life . . . It’s the same with you, too. Isn’t that so?”
“Christ,” he said, “don’t include me in this.”
“They’re our children,” she said.
He sat down on the bed beside her. In a sense she was right. He could not deny what she had said.
“They hold us together,” she said, gazing up at him, her arms loose at her sides. Under her slip, her small unsupported breasts hung forward. At each, pressing against the slip, a dab of shadow rose and fell. Her face had a scrubbed look, and her makeup was gone. “I can’t bring myself to trust you, and I can’t come to you because of that. And you haven’t been able to trust me, have you? Neither of us has any trust in the other . . . but we trust them. You knew this was my fault, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“That’s what I mean. For years we’ve had no confidence in each other. But we love them, and we believe in everything about them. So we can go to them. They’re the only persons in the world we can really go to. I think we get to each other through them. We can let go with them . . . we can get the peacefulness we need.”
“What a miserable rationalization,” he said. “You ought to be weeping in agony instead of lying there.”
“I’m very happy,” she said. “I feel close to you. Don’t you feel you’ve been with me? It was you I was with, here, not somebody else. Don’t you remember how we used to lie together afterward remember when we were up in the cabin, how we used to just lie around—I guess we were exhausted. But there were no tensions, we were just limp and fagged out. I always felt closer to you afterward, even more than when we were actually doing it. To me, doing it is—” She was silent a moment. “Just a means. Isn’t that so? God, and at first, before I got my diaphragm. When you used those awful things . . . we were so far apart. It wasn’t until afterward that we could come together, that we could lie around.”
“I remember what you said,” he said.
“About what? Oh, yes. Those things you used.”
“Before we found out we didn’t have to use anything.”
She said, “It was like having a length of green plastic garden hose inside me. I never got anything from that . . . did you?”
“No,” he said, “not completely.”
“What about now? Have I cheated you again? Do you feel that way?” She caught hold of his arm. “We’re going to have to go on reaching each other through them . . . you know that, don’t you? We’re too involved now. We can’t break away.”
“Where were you?” he said. “Earlier. I came by.”
“We drove up to Twin Peaks and parked.”
“Why didn’t you do it there?”
“If the police caught us, they’d send me to prison or something.
And anyhow it’s ugly in a car. I wanted to do it here, where you were, the other night.”
“You’re really heartless,” he said.
“No,” she said, “I’m not. You’ll see. You’ll get to me through the girl . . . we’ll live through them.”
“What about them?”
Her eyes rose to focus on him. “This will be a great and tremendous thing for them. It already is.”
“How do you figure that out?”
“Because,” she said, “they love us; they admire us. We’re what they want to be. We’ll all merge together . . . the four of us, we’ll be complete. We’ll be able to walk around on the face of the earth again. And we can throw out the trivial people, Bob Posin and all of them. I mean it. I feel so much love for you; It’s inside me, and I feel you got to it tonight.”
“If I did,” he said, “I don’t know it. I was somewhere else at the timed—”
“Hand me my clothes,” she said. “Would you?”
He gave her the pile of clothes. Still lying propped up on the pillow, she sorted through them; she untangled her underclothes and stockings.
“I’m going on with this,” she said. She hugged the clothes to her breast. “It’s going to save both of us, and I’m not going to give it up. Tonight I found what we needed. You knew that, or you wouldn’t have brought me there.”
“That was such a mistake,” he said, “such a terrible goddamn mistake.”
“You know I’m right.”
He said, “This is just a lot of hot air to justify taking that kid and seducing him.”
“Yes,” she said, “I guess that’s what I did—” Now sitting up, she bent forward and tugged her slip off over her head. She stood up, naked. Her body, smooth and pale, disappeared into her underclothes, and then she was buttoning her dress. “If it was wrong,” she said, shaking her hair back from her eyes, “I wouldn’t feel like this. I wouldn’t feel so completely good.”
“A length of green garden hose,” he said.
“What’s that? You?” Standing up on tiptoe, she kissed him on the mouth. “No, you were perfect. Everything I could want, everything I ever hoped for.”