“Even Chris?”
“There’s no reason in the world why you should sacrifice yourself for Jack Terrance, Lew. No reason in the wide world.”
“Unless I’m talking to one.”
“Don’t... please!”
He put his big hands flat on the cool damp table and leaned toward her. “I’ve got eyes. What the hell do you think I am? All this time I thought about you. I thought: Stay out, Lew. It’s a good marriage; she is doing fine. A kid and all.
“I come here and I want to look at something good. I want to look at you and feel that it is fine for you. It’s a small thing to want, but it was what I was telling myself... But it stinks. Blind men could see that. It’s in the air. Hurting you, needling you. What kind of husband is that? What kind of marriage is this? For you it should be the best, always. I thought he was giving you what I couldn’t. What would you have had with me? Tough times — scrimping — dime-store dishes. But hell, more than here. Lots more. I have to come here and look at this and all of a sudden I find out I’m the biggest damn’ fool God ever made.”
He stopped suddenly. She had bent forward from the waist, her folded arms against her knees, her head on her arms. In the silence he heard her crying softly.
He went around to her, knelt on the damp grass, touched her shoulder. “I shouldn’t pop off like that. I’m sorry. Forget I said it.”
She straightened up. There was just enough light so he could see the glint-track of tears. “You’re being honest, Lew. More honest than I deserve, I guess. You ran out and I had too much fool pride to follow you and say, ‘Here I am; now what?’ Too much pride — and I married him and it was sort of like getting even with something, like a little kid busting the candy-store window. It was better than this. You’re seeing the worst. This past year has been bad. I’d made up my mind to leave him, and take Chris. It could have been managed easily. He has a little blonde friend, and he’s grown a little careless about the details. I could have obtained custody. Then everything started to go sour, for him. You can’t desert another human being when they’re in trouble, Lew. So I’ve been coasting, hoping he’d come out of it somehow. Instead, it has become worse. He’s like a crazy man most of the time.”
“Would you leave him if he got back on his feet?”
“I... I don’t know, Lew. Maybe it’s too late.”
“I could get him out of it.”
“Not that way, Lew. Not at your expense, ever. Oh, Lew, this isn’t going the way it was supposed to go. I had an act for you, Lew: The happy contented wife. He spoiled all my lines. You see, it isn’t that he’s bad.”
“I know that. He’s weak. I can understand that part of him, and I can still like him, in a funny way. It’s something I can’t explain.”
“I can’t either. But it hasn’t been all bad. You have to know that.”
He smiled ruefully in the darkness. “Maybe I’d like to hear that it had been all bad.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“No,” he said, suddenly very weary, “I guess not.”
“Turn him down tomorrow, Lew.”
“Even if it means you’re trapped from here on in?”
She stood up, slim and tall in the night. “I will tell you one thing — and it is something I can’t and won’t change: If you go through with it and it helps him get back on his feet, I may leave him. I don’t know yet. But if I do leave him, Lew, it won’t be to come to you. I won’t be bought — not that way. I’m not for sale, not at the kind of price you’d have to pay.”
“Pride, Ivy?”
“Not this time. Something else.”
“Don’t people ever earn a second chance?”
“Not people like us, Lew. They only give us one chance.”
“Maybe I’d just like to have the eight thousand. I can use it.”
“Don’t try to kid me or yourself. Good night, Lew.”
“Good night, Ivy.” She started to turn away in the darkness, struck her foot against one leg of the table and stumbled awkwardly against him. He caught her in his arms, held her that way for a frozen and measureless moment, then turned her slowly and bent and found her lips. She leaned warm against him in his arms and she was all he had ever wanted or hoped to have. In their kiss was the heat of longing, and all the sadness of too late.
“That’s no good either,” she said, stepping apart from him.
“I know.”
“I could tell myself it was even-Stephen. Sauce for the goose. Turnabout. But, basically, no good. No good for either of us.”
“Good night, Ivy.”
“Good night, my darling.”
In the morning Jack was full of jokes about bleeding from the eyes, and asking if he had had a good time. Aside from an obviously vicious hangover, he was full of abundant confidence that everything was going to turn out just right. At his insistent invitation, Lew went down to the agency with him.
It was a big establishment with a vast service floor, modern showrooms, and a large staff. Jack led the way into his private office. A petite blonde with a savage-looking mouth gave them a winsome smirk as they went through the ante-office.
“Come on in, Janice,” Jack said as they passed her desk.
She came tilting in on four-inch heels, allowed as how she was thrilled to meet the famous Lew Barry — in a sugary Southern voice — and tilted back out again with a quick flash of a smile over her shoulder, a provocative canting of hip.
“Brains of the outfit,” Jack said expansively. “Couldn’t run the place without her. Little hair of the dog?”
“No, thanks.”
Jack downed a lusty shot, heeled the cork into the bottle, and put the liquor back into the desk drawer. He frowned at his watch. “Sammy will be at the gym at ten and we can go over and watch him work out. Suppose you roam around. I’ve got some detail to go over here. Come back here to my office at about ten of ten. Okay?”
Lew wandered out onto the service floor. He watched a ring job on a truck, watched an overdrive being torn down. He looked through the body-and-fender shop, and watched a trade-in being fixed up for resale. He ambled back to the office at quarter to ten. The blonde was leaning over Jack’s shoulder. She straightened up, gave Lew a slightly guilty look and brushed by him, leaving an almost visible trail of perfume.
“How do you like the place, boy?”
“Offhand, I don’t.”
Jack stared at him. “Hell, it’s one of the best layouts in the city.”
“Your service department stinks. I hope you aren’t paying those plumbers top-mechanics’ pay. It isn’t laid out right.”
“You could do better?”
“Much.”
“Relax, Lew. This is my racket. The service department makes money. That’s good enough for me. Come on, we got to watch a boy working.”
The gym was on the second floor of a brick building that looked as though it had begun life as a warehouse. They walked up the stairs into the stink of sweaty socks and rubbing alcohol and liniment and sweaty leather, into the discord of the staccato bags, the skip-ropes, the electrically-timed bell ringing every three minutes all day long, the harsh yells of encouragement, the smoke haze hanging over a floor littered with butts and cellophane and gum wrappers.
Lew had had thirteen years of it. Thirteen years out of his life — from seventeen to thirty. The amateurs for gold watches and gold medals, and the golden gloves, and the tank towns with their dank basement dressing-rooms and rusty-water showers. Thirteen years of working and learning and dreaming. When you’d never seen the other boy work, you came out and you watched him with that same intentness of the matador watching the banderilleros lure the fresh bull into its charges. You felt him out, and you watched the flex of his thighs and the oiled shoulder joint. You slipped them, and rolled with them and blocked them and watched all the time because, though you had color, and a punch in each hand, you were careful and cautious — a workman. And when you saw what he had, then you went to work at the weak points: A right guard held too low, or a too-slow attempt at a counterpunch.