Jack was totally unaware of his wife’s torment. His fascination with Vornan left him no opportunity to observe what was taking place about him. In his desert isolation Jack had had no chance in years to make new friends, and little enough contact with his old ones. Now he took to Vornan precisely as a lonely boy would take to some odd newcomer on his block. I choose that simile deliberately; there was something adolescent or even subadolescent about Jack’s surrender to Vornan. He talked endlessly, delineating himself against the background of his University career, describing the reasons for his desert withdrawal, even taking Vornan down into that workshop I had never entered, where he showed the guest the secret manuscript of his autobiography. No matter how intimate the subject, Jack spoke freely, like a child hauling out his most prized toys to display. He was buying Vornan’s attention with a frantic effort. Jack appeared to regard Vornan as a chum. I who had always thought of Vornan as unutterably alien, who had come to accept him as genuine largely because he inspired such mysterious dread in me, found it bewildering to see Jack succumbing this way. Vornan seemed pleased and amused. Occasionally they disappeared into the workshop for several hours at a time. I told myself that this was all some ploy on Jack’s part to wangle from Vornan the information he desired. It was clever of Jack, was it not, to construct so intense a relationship for the sake of picking Vornan’s mind?
But Jack got no information from Vornan. And in my blindness I was aware of nothing.
How could I have failed to see it? That look of bemused and dreamy confusion that Jack wore much of the time now? The moments when his eyes dropped and he turned away from Shirley or from me, cheeks glowing in unknown embarrassments? Even when I saw Vornan slip his hand possessively onto Jack’s bare shoulder, I remained blind.
Shirley and I spent more time together in those days than on any previous visit, for Jack and Vornan were forever off by themselves. I did not take advantage of my opportunity. We said little, but lay side by side, baking in the sun; Shirley seemed so taut and keyed up that I scarcely knew what to say to her, and so I kept silent. Arizona was gripped by an autumn heat wave. Warmth came boiling out of Mexico toward us, making us sluggish. Shirley’s bare skin gleamed like fine bronze. The fatigue washed from me. Several times Shirley seemed about to speak, and the words died in her throat. A fabric of tension took form. In a subliminal way I felt trouble in the air, the way one feels a summer storm coming on. But I had no idea what was awry; I hovered in a cocoon of heat, detecting uncertain emanations of impending cataclysm, and not until the actual moment of disaster did I grasp the truth of the situation.
It happened on the twelfth day of our visit. We were only a day short of November, now, but the unseasonal warmth was staying on; at noon the sun was like a blazing eye whose fiery stare was impossible to meet, and I could not remain outdoors. I excused myself from Shirley — Jack and Vornan were nowhere about — and went to my room. As I opaqued the window, I paused to peer out at Shirley, lying torpid on the sundeck, eyes shielded, her left knee drawn up, her breasts slowly rising and falling, her skin glistening with sweat. She was the image of total relaxation, I thought, the languid beautiful woman drowsing in the heat of noon. And then I caught sight of her left hand, fiercely clenched, so tightly fisted that it trembled at the wrist and muscles throbbed the length of her arm; and I understood that her pose was a conscious counterfeit of tranquility, maintained by sheer force of will.
I darkened the room and stretched out on my bed. The cool indoor air was refreshing. Perhaps I slept. My eyes opened when I heard the sound of someone at my door. I sat up.
Shirley rushed in. She looked wild: eyes glaring in horror, lips drawn back, breasts heaving. Her face was crimson. Bright beads of sweat, I saw with curious clarity, covered her skin, and there was a shining rivulet in the valley of her bosom. “Leo—” she said in a rusty choking voice. “Oh, God, Leo!”
“What is it? What happened?”
She stumbled across the room and sagged forward, her knees against my mattress. She seemed almost in a state of shock. Her jaws worked, but no words came forth.
“Shirley!”
“Yes,” she muttered. “Yes. Jack — Vornan — oh, Leo, I was right about them! I didn’t want to believe it, but I was right. I saw them! I saw them!”
“What are you talking about?”
“It was time for lunch,” she said, gulping for calm. “I woke up on the sundeck and went looking for them. They were in Jack’s workshop, as usual. They didn’t answer when I knocked, and I pushed the door open, and then I saw why they hadn’t answered. They were busy. With each other. With… each… other. Arms and legs all over each other. I saw. I stood there maybe half a minute watching it. Oh, Leo, Leo, Leo!”
Her voice rose to a piercing shriek. She flung herself forward in despair, sobbing, shattered. I caught her as she lurched into me. The heavy globes of her breasts pressed with tips of flame against my cool skin. In the eye of my mind I could see the scene she had described for me; now the obviousness of it all struck me, and I gasped at my own stupidity, at Vornan’s callousness, and at Jack’s innocence. I squirmed as I pictured for myself Vornan wrapped about him like some giant predatory invertebrate, and then there was no time for further thought. Shirley was in my arms, trembling and bare and sweat-sticky and weeping. I comforted her and she clung to me, looking only for an island of stability in a suddenly quaking world; and the embrace of comfort that I offered her rapidly became something quite different. I could not control myself, and she did not resist, but rather she welcomed my invasion in relief or out of revenge, and at long last my body pierced hers and we fell joined and heaving to the pillow.
SEVENTEEN
I had Kralick get Vornan and me out of there hours later. I did not explain anything to anyone. I merely said that it was necessary for us to leave. There were no farewells. We dressed and packed, and I drove with Vornan to Tucson, where Kralick’s men picked us up.
Looking back, I see how panicky my flight was. Perhaps I should have stayed with them. Perhaps I should have tried to help them rebuild themselves. But in that chaotic instant I felt I had to flee. The atmosphere of guilt was too stifling; the texture of interwoven shames was too tight. What had taken place between Vornan and Jack and what had taken place between Shirley and me were inextricably bound into the fabric of the catastrophe, as for that matter was what had not taken place between Shirley and Vornan. And I had brought the serpent among them. In the moment of crisis I had forfeited any moral advantage I might have had by yielding to my impulse and then by running away. I was the guilty one. I was responsible.
I may never see either of them again.
I know too much of their secret shame, and like one who has stumbled upon a file of yellowed correspondence belonging to some dear one, I feel that my unwanted knowledge falls now as a sword holding me apart from them. That may change. Already, nearly two months later, I see the episode in a different light. We all managed to look equally ugly and equally weak at once, all three of us, puppets spun about by Vornan’s artfully constructed whim; and that shared knowledge of our frailty may draw us together. I don’t know. I do know, though, that whatever Shirley and Jack had shared only with each other lies broken and trampled and beyond repair.