Paul said, “Must you?” His voice was full of hurt, like always.
Matt shrugged, grinning at him. “Just a boyish peccadillo,” he said. “It don’t mean anything, baby.” He turned and took a step over to the wife. He put his hand out. “Come on, Pam, I got the hots to see your house.”
“Don’t touch me,” she said and leaned back against the sofa to keep away from him.
He leaned forward to take her arm, and she slapped at his hand, and he slapped her hard across the face. One of the kids let out a shriek.
Saugherty shouted something and ran at Matt. Everybody always needed convincing. He reached out one hand and held Saugherty with it and used the other hand to start hitting him.
Six
The doorbell woke Joyce Langer from a dream in ‘which seven old crones who smelled like bacon were trying to drown her beside a rowboat on a cold, black river surrounded by fog. She came out of the dream slowly, almost reluctantly, fighting off the bony hands for a long time, her mind confused in its attempt to fit the sound of the ringing into her dream somehow, a black stone church with a bell ringing in its steeple appearing out of the fog just as the fog crumbled away entirely and she was awake, in bed, in a room in a building on West 87th Street in New York City, alone, unhappy, in darkness, with the doorbell ringing.
Her clock radio over on the dresser had a luminous dial, and it read twelve minutes past one o’clock in the morning. Who would be ringing her bell at a time like this?
She thought of Tom Lynch, the strange tough man who’d taken her to dinner this evening. Could he be back? She had a sudden sexual vision, almost physically staggering in its effect, and then it drained away again and she admitted to herself just how unlikely it was that Tom Lynch would have returned at this hour, and how much more remote from possibility that he would be here to have sex with her. She knew the kind of man she attracted, the kind of man she could succeed with, and he wasn’t it.
Then who was it? The doorbell rang again as she switched on the light and got out of bed, smoothing her peach pajamas down over her legs. Various people from the past flickered through her mind as she went to the closet for her robe, and then she thought of George Uhl, and she stopped with the robe half on, knowing that that was who it was.
George Uhl.
She was suddenly terrified. She’d never been afraid of George before, not really afraid, but what she was feeling now was terror, and she quickly analyzed it for what it was. Guilt. Guilt at having helped Tom Lynch, George’s enemy.
Had George found out? Was he coming to get even with her?
Paranoia lies close beneath every skin. She wondered briefly if Tom Lynch had been a trick, a test set up by George to see if he could trust her. Then Lynch had gone back to him and said, “She spilled everything about you, George.” Now George was here to pay her back.
The thumb out there jabbed and jabbed at the bell. She couldn’t ignore it, no matter what.
She ran through the apartment, her throat constricted as though she were wearing a too-tight necklace. She stopped at the door, breathless, panting as though she’d run a mile, and stooped to peer through the peephole in the door, seeing the face there she’d known she would see.
But not the expression. Not anger, not cold rage, not the determination to get even with anybody. As she watched, he turned his head and looked over his shoulder, and she saw how loosely his jaw hung. He turned back this way to ring the bell again, and she saw how pale the skin was around his eyes, how large his eyes looked.
He was terrified. George was terrified.
Now guilt wrapped her completely. She’d betrayed George to Tom Lynch, and the result was now outside her door, frightened, urgent, desperate. Coming to her for protection.
She unlocked the door and opened it, and George burst in, shoving the door so that it smacked painfully into her shoulder. “Took long enough,” he said and slammed the door again.
The only light was the pale line across the floor from the ceiling light in the bedroom. She stood there, unable to think, and he switched on the nearest floor lamp and looked at her. “Still the same,” he snapped as though it were an accusation. He jerked his head at the bedroom. “You got anybody in there?”
She shook her head. She couldn’t think.
“Not you,” he said. His own fear had made him scornful and savage. He turned away from her and strode off toward the bedroom.
She trailed after him, trying to sort out the moods in her head. She got to the bedroom and saw him standing beside the bed, leaning one hand on the wall while he kicked his shoes off. He looked over at her and said, “I’m in a jam. I need to be hidden out for a while.”
She nodded, looking at him wide-eyed.
He made an obvious mammoth attempt to be agreeable to her, sticking a false smile on his face and saying, “You’re the only one I can trust, Joyce. It’s always you I come to when I’m in trouble.”
A dull anger, like the beginning of heartburn, began inside her. It was such a cheap and obvious lie. He didn’t even work very hard to make her believe it. She was supposed to be grateful for whatever dregs she got; she wasn’t supposed to look the gift horse in the mouth. All he had to do was give her the bare outline of the role she was to play, and then she would play it.
Had it always been that way? The anger turned sour because it had.
He was taking off his shirt. “You don’t know how it’s been, Joyce,” he was saying. “On the run like this.” He came walking over to her, that smile on his face. “You were the only one I could turn to.”
She knew it was a lie. She knew it was a lie. She stood there and let him put his arms around her, her body shivering inside the blue robe and the peach pajamas. In the last instant before his face was too close to be in focus she saw the expression change on it, saw it turn scornful and sure of itself. But then he was kissing her, his hands were stroking the bathrobe, and there was nothing to do but close her eyes and not believe or remember what she’d seen or what she knew, close her eyes and put her arms around him and believe whatever she wanted to believe.
His one hand slid down her back, down past the indentation of her waist, down over the curve of her rump, cupping against the bottom of her torso, pulling her close against his body. She felt him against her, and she felt how hungry she was, and she stopped agonizing over it. Even when he murmured her name in her ear, giving her a spurious individuality, she ignored what she knew.
Desire was completely physical and impersonal on both sides, and concentrated that way it made them clumsy with haste. Clothing was in the way, cumbersome and difficult to remove. Their arms were full of elbows, getting in their way. They fell over onto the bed, lying diagonally across it, all wrong, legs hanging out in mid-air from knees down.
She squeezed her eyes shut, and she was very noisy.
In the calm after the storm she opened her eyes and looked up and he was grinning at her. “You’re okay, Joyce,” he said, and she knew it was the first thing he’d actually said to her since coming in here. She smiled bashfully and reached up to touch his chest.
He lifted away from her, looking somewhere else. Kneeling beside her he stretched and yawned and scratched his chest and said, “Boy, I’m beat. You still working up at the college?”
Three words, that was all she was going to get. The moment was past already. She said “Yes.”
“Don’t wake me, okay? I had a rough day.” He crawled over her as though she were a bunched-up blanket and lay down with his head on the pillow. “You wouldn’t believe the kind of day I had,” he said, he eyes closing. “Would you believe I drove from Philadelphia to Alexandria, Virginia, and from there to Washington, and from there to here? All in one day?”