“What do you mean? What are you talking about?”
“It was a pretty good game of pretend. While it lasted. Don’t look so baffled, Oliver. I know you remember very well that night I tried to send you away for good. I should have. It’s more difficult now. But now it has to be done. Garry Staniker is coming back. You knew he’d come back. You knew that would be the end of it. And we’ve come to the end of it. What do I say? It’s been nice? It’s been a ball? There aren’t any words. You know that. So just go, dear. Very quickly and quietly. We indulged ourselves. We took all there was to take and gave all there was to give. We pretended it was forever. But it had a price tag. You know that. You’ll get over me. It won’t take as long as you think. I’ll never never get over you, but that’s beside the point.”
“Crissy. God, Crissy, it can’t...”
“Stay over there, Oliver. Sit down. Don’t come near me. It will just make it harder. And we have to do it. Now.”
He settled back onto the edge of the chair. Sand-colored slacks. Dark blue knit sports shirt. That good slope and weight and power of shoulder, a symmetry of chest, the sun-whitened curl of hair on muscular forearms, narrow taper of the waist, round strong column of the young throat. A beautiful animal, she thought, almost perfectly conditioned to me now, trained to respond to every subtle signal, disciplined to fulfill my urgencies with whatever haste or patience I require. But the face is so tiresome, with that goofy yearning look — eyes set too close, upper lip lugubriously long, underprivileged chin.
“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t leave you.”
“Don’t be dull. There’s no choice. We have no choice.”
“We could go away, Crissy. Right now. Today.”
“I expected you to say that. Deliciously romantic, isn’t it? You can get a thrilling job. Bag boy in a supermarket. I could be a clerk in a store. And the miracle of our love would light up the cruddy furnished room and make me forget how my feet hurt. How long, Oliver, before you’d start hating me for spoiling your life, before you’d look at me and see a tired, dreary, middle-aged woman? I had my dingy years, boy. Up to here. I’m spoiled. I like the way I live. I keep my looks by living just this way. Disappointed in me? Sorry about that. What we’ve had has been too perfect and too beautiful to do that to it. It’s meant too much to me, to have it turn into — resentment and squalor. If we ran, and I tried to sell the house, it would give Staniker a chance to track me down. No, Oliver. We finish it while it’s — beautiful.”
“But it can’t end. Please, Crissy. Let me stay here with you — and keep him away from you.”
She stared at him. “You keep Garry Staniker away from me? Excuse me if I hurt your feelings. You are a strong young man, and you are a brave young man. If you tried to send him away from me, do you know what would happen? First, he would laugh. He’d laugh very hard. And then he would hurt you, terribly. Because he would know you had been — with me. He’s an alley fighter. And he’s not quite sane. It’s possible he might make very certain you — would never be able to have a woman again. And when he was through punishing you, it would be my turn, wouldn’t it? Can’t you understand that I’m an obsession with him? In his mind I belong to him, like his shoes or his toothbrush, and he can do as he pleases with me. I’ve learned not to displease him in any way. When he comes swaggering in, Oliver, I had better be here and you had better be gone forever. We’ve known that since the day I knew he was alive.”
“There has to be something.”
She coarsened her tone. “Like in the movies, kid? Sure. The clean-cut hero whips the bad guy. This is life, baby. Cash in your chips and go find another game. You had your jollies with another man’s woman. Go brag around the docks. Consider it a part of your education, Junior.”
In a choking voice he said, “Don’t talk rough like that. Please. I can’t stand it. I... love you!”
“And I loved you, and now I have to stop loving you or go out of my mind.”
“I don’t even care what happens to me any more. I just can’t let him — come back and do things to you. I don’t care. I’ll kill him. I swear I’ll kill him!”
“How? With the funny little gun your daddy bought you to plink tin cans with? And wouldn’t that be a dandy solution? They’d find out the motive soon enough, and maybe for kicks they’d send me up for twenty years at the same time they electrocute you. I told you I’m selfish, boy. If it was a choice between servicing dear Captain Staniker, or working in the prison laundry daytimes and belonging to some dirty old bull dyke the rest of the time, what would my choice be?”
“My God, this is killing me, Crissy! Please!”
“So let’s stop talking about it and end it right now before it kills us both. You’ve got toilet articles here, and that gun and the ammunition, and a jacket and a tie and swim trunks and your sailboat, so let’s make a clean sweep and get it all over with now.”
She headed swiftly down the hallway to her bedroom, aware of him close behind her. He stopped in the bedroom, looking sick and dazed and miserable. She went into the dressing room and got the 22 rifle and brought it out, started to hand it to him, then walked with it to her desk, took some tissue from a box and wiped the end of the barrel near the muzzle carefully.
“Excuse me for messing up your little rifle somewhat,” she said.
He stared at the pink stains on the tissue with puzzlement and then growing comprehension. “Crissy! Were you going to...”
She made a wry face. “Stop the world and get off? I thought so. It was a real comedy scene. The dumb broad sitting at her dressing table looking at the three reflections of herself in the mirror, tears running down her face, sucking on the barrel of the gun. I could just reach the trigger with the tip of my middle finger, light as a butterfly’s kiss. Very corny and dramatic. Couldn’t do it. So I keep on living, kid. Staniker’s bitch. Very well trained. I’ll collect the rest of your stuff.”
She turned away and heard the gun thud to the floor, heard his great breathy bellow of anguish, and then his big arms went around her and turned her and pulled her snug and close. “Oh darling,” he said, weeping. “Oh, Crissy. Oh God, darling.”
She stood without response for what she considered a long enough time, then softened and returned the embrace, and reached back through memory to find something which would convincingly flood her dry eyes. She used the mutation mink wrap again. Savannah. She’d had it on layaway for seven months before she took the final fifty dollars to the store, had them wrap her cloth coat, and wore the wrap back to the apartment. Ten days later that crazy little Polack had gotten into the apartment somehow, when Crissy was out. That nutty Polish whore who had the idea Crissy was after her man. So she’d gotten in, bringing a pair of Sears Roebuck clippers for homemade haircuts, and had chopped all that beautiful silver-blue fur off, right down to the stubble, with the ugly hide showing through. She remembered how she felt when she walked in and saw that lovely soft fur all over her bed and the floor, and the tears came convincingly.
“Darling, darling, darling,” she said in a tearful voice. “I was trying to be so strong. But we do have to say goodby. Once more, then, my dear. The last time for us. This is our goodby.”
Later, in the drowse and lethargy of passion freshly spent, she lay sweetly sprawled upon him, her head on the firm tanned chest, her ear centered over his heart. With slow fingertips she traced the contours of his lips, and she listened to the deep slow sound of his healthy young heart.