“Watch it,” he said, a little apprehensively. And then she thought, with clarity, that her ambition had been opened to him at last. At once she released him; flustered and embarrassed, she retreated.
My child, she thought. Now he put his shirt back on and began to button it. A sullen boy, she thought, controlling her hunger, permitting the mere dreams, the desires and hallucinations, to gallop through her mind. The scenes fled past and she reviewed them; she identified them as old fantasies that had always been with her but could never be acted out. She waited and remained placid until they subsided. But they were not gone. They would never be gone.
“Maybe we ought to leave,” Art said.
She said, “I want you in the most awful kind of way. So maybe we should. Have you ever seen a woman with a new baby?”
“That’s not me,” he said.
“I won’t hurt you,” she said. “I just want to be close to you; I’ll be careful. But at least let me buy your clothes for you.” She wanted to dress him and comb his hair, but she kept her hands away from him. A great expanding bloom of love and weakness loosed itself inside her, it detached itself from her and rose up. It hovered within her throat, and then it came forth in a muffled shriek; she walked hurriedly away from him, not wanting him to hear. But he was aware, in some dull fashion, so it made no difference. She could not conceal it from him, and anyhow, she thought, he did not care.
“I don’t expect you to give me what I want,” she said.
“You want a baby,” he said knowingly. “That’s what it is.”
“Don’t hate me,” she said, trying not to plead. But it did not matter what she did because she was not going to be able to get what she wanted. He did not have it to give her.
The suitcases were packed in the trunk compartment and in the back seat of the car. She shut off the gas in the kitchen of the apartment; she made certain that the faucets and lights were off and that the door was locked.
“That does it,” she said. They got into the car and she watched the apartment house disappear behind them. They stopped at the bank and then at a men’s clothing store on Market Street. When they, left the clothing store, Art drove in the direction of the freeway. He paid no attention to her he was involved in the driving.
“South?” she asked. “Do you like it better down south?”
Without answering, he made a left turn onto the freeway. Now they were above the houses and streets of the city. Everything was grimy, she thought. Rundown and dismal.
“Art,” she said, “I want to ask you something. If you weren’t married, if you didn’t have a wife and you weren’t expecting a baby, and say you were a couple of years older and I was, say, twenty-four instead of twenty-seven—” She turned to face him. But when it came down to it, she was unable to say it.
“What?” he said.
Struggling, she said, “Would you want to marry me?”
“S-s-sure,” he said, “I want to marry you now.”
“You can’t, Art,” she said. “Don’t even think about it—”
“Why not?”
“Art,” she said, “you’ll just make yourself more miserable.” In that instant she felt like crying; with effort she said, “You can’t leave Rachael. She’s a wonderful person. She’s a lot finer person than I am. I know that.”
“No,” he said.
“It’s the truth. If I were anything at all, I wouldn’t be here with you. I’d have broken it off after that first night. But I don’t have the strength I’m too weak, Art.” And it was true, she thought, it really was true; she could not deny it. “It’s just delaying it. Sooner or later we have to break it off. I keep telling myself: we had to now, right now. I’m too old and you’re too young. But we keep on going along. Someday we’ll have to pay for this.”
“No,” he said, “why do we have to stop?”
“We’ll want to. This isn’t healthy or right. There’s nothing really good between us.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
He listened to her; he heard what she was saying. But he did not agree. Now, turning, he saw her lips, dark and full, moving close to his. She was rising toward him.
Maybe it was true, he thought.
Her lips tingled against his own. With her gloved hand, she touched his face, pressing her fingers to him avidly. Her nostrils flared; out of the corner of his eye, he saw the trembling beneath the layers of powder and lipstick, the quivering of her lips and chin. She smelled like raspberries, a hot, sweet smell, a sticky smell. Her veil was up; she had lifted it aside to kiss him.
And the beautiful long legs, he thought. Nothing in this life was permanent. No sensation, not the most vivid nor the most meaningful. Not even this. She was right. The feel of them was gone already, and one day even the sight would be gone. And, he thought, someday, in a few decades, the legs themselves, the superb body, the arms and face and dark hair and waist would perish and vanish and become ashes.
And he would not remember them because he would be dead, too. All the intricate working parts would stop working; the joints would dissolve and the fluids would dry up and it would be dust, dust.
He thought: If this could go, then anything could and would go. Nothing could be saved. Nothing survived. Where was all the talk, the music and fun and cars and places? Here went the greatest of the sensibilities, here went civilization itself in its blue suit and veil and heels and matching purse and gloves. Thousands of years had gone into the forming of this object. The hell with the buildings and cities and documents and ideas, the armies and ships and societies. They had persons prepared to lament for them. He lamented this. He thought: I was out to get this as soon as I laid eyes on it. And I did get it, and I did have it, and it was every bit as good as I had imagined.
In the vicinity of Redwood City, he left the freeway and crossed to El Camino Real. Near Menlo Park, at the side of the highway, was a motel.
Why not here? he thought.
Starting, Pat raised her head and looked out. “Are you stopping?”
“This looks like what we want,” he said.
“A motel,” she said, reading the sign. “The Four Aces Motel.”
“It looks clean,” he said.
“I’ve never stayed at a motel. We always had the cabin if we wanted to go somewhere. How far is this from San Francisco?”
“Around twenty miles,” Art said.
When he had brought the car up onto the gravel shoulder and had parked, she got out and looked back in the direction they had come.
To the north was San Francisco, too far now to see, but nonetheless there. She felt its closeness. The line of office buildings, like two-dimensional cardboard cutouts, assembled and pasted up against the late-afternoon haze. The air was dry and tasted of cinders. She sniffed; she inhaled the presence of trucks and cars, the sky-borne wastes from factories.
Into San Francisco went concrete ramps, the freeway system over which they had come. The ramps were high off the ground, elevated, remote; the cars whizzed along, and the lines of traffic divided, passed in various directions, passed under the black directional signs with letters as large as the cars themselves. To her this sense of the city, this view of it, was disturbing and at the same time exhilarating. To be here, on the edge of the city . . . to be camped just outside, not in it but beside it, close enough to enter if she wanted, far enough out so that she was away; she was free, on her own, not bound or contained by it.
The trucks rumbled past. The huge diesel trucks. Under her feet the pavement shook.
Ah, she thought, breathing in the air. The freedom, the sense of motion, the trucks, the cars. Everything was on its way somewhere. Transition, she thought; there was nothing stable here. Nothing fixed. She could be anything she wanted. This was the edge.