CHAPTER FIVE
Caron Archer spent a lousy night, the rottenest of her life. The sleeping pill went to work, but it catapulted her into dreamland, and the dreams were as bad as being awake. In one of them she was with Paul, on the beach. They were fucking gloriously, the way they’d done this afternoon. He was mounting her from the rear, really giving her the dick, and he leaned close to kiss her on the side of the face and she could feel a moustache. “Oh, God, no,” she moaned, turning her head round, staring right into Lou’s face, the bald head, the big moustache. It was his cock ramming in and out of her, sending messages of delight from her pussy to her brain, and even as she understood she felt herself beginning to come, to come like a bandit, her body shaking and writhing under him, and he could feel it too because he stepped up his fucking and speared her with his tool and she couldn’t stop, she could only lie there and weep and buck and climax, again and again.
She awoke from that dream with a cry of panic, but she was alone in her bed and the house was as silent as a grave. The digital clock by the bed said it was 5:17 and that had to be A.M. because there was only a chilly-looking gray light outside. Caron closed her eyes, sank onto her bed again, and sleep came stealing back. Her dreams were no more pleasant, but at least she didn’t awake until the alarm rang.
She staggered out to the kitchen, loaded up Mr. Coffee, and her hand shook as she poured down the first cup, black and hot. Sleeping pills always made her nervous the morning after. She almost never took them. But last night it was essential. And tonight? Would she have to drug herself again tonight? She didn’t know. She could only swallow the hot coffee in gulps that hurt her throat and shake her head. There was a note on the refrigerator, pinned up by a tiny magnet. Caron took it down and read:
“CARON—I’m sorry I didn’t wait for you, but I had to get out of this house. I’m sorry. I’m desperate. Everything is so awful. Please don’t hate me for not being here. I’m painting, at the cove. If you want to, come up and be with me. I had to go. Love, S.”
Well, she thought, laying the note on the counter, who can blame her? I wish to hell I could get away from all this so easily. Maybe I should get my paints and brushes out of the attic. How long will it be till Paul gets here? God, I can hardly wait to sign the papers and to see the last, the very last of Lou Archer!
She’d wanted Paul to stay here last flight, but he wouldn’t. “We don’t have to go through the rigmarole of declaring him legally dead now, darling,” he’d told her. “You can simply get a divorce and take everything but his moustache. That, too, if you want it. I’ll draw up the papers tonight, and I’ll bring them over tomorrow as soon as I’ve gotten my afternoon business out of the way. Besides—if I stay the night, he might get the smartass idea of filing a countersuit of some kind, and maybe charging us with adultery. It wouldn’t be more than a joke, in view of his track record, but it would be a complication, and we don’t need any more complications, do we?”
They didn’t, but she had missed him, last night, and she had needed him. Someone to hold her in his arms all night long, to tell her it would be okay. Well, she’d have him tonight. Even if it did embarrass Sheila. Oh, maybe they’d all get drunk. Maybe Paul could find a date for Sheila and they could have a party to celebrate getting rid of Lou. Caron sipped more slowly at her coffee, brightening. The world was beginning to take on a rosier glow.
“Mind if I have a cup?” someone asked, and she whirled, spilling coffee on the floor. It was Lou, shirtless. His hairy chest was broad and tanned. His moustache glistened. She really hated that moustache. He’d not been bald when they were married, but he’d not had that God awful thing either. He had really filled out in the last seven years; muscled where he used to be flabby, thick where he was once thin. He looked more like a lumberjack or some other, kind of really macho character. He was more like a seasoned truck driver than like the assistant professor of English he’d once been. Even his voice was different. He had a street twang to his talk, not the cultivated tones she’d encountered first as his student, then as his wife. First as his student, then as his wife.
(Saxon found herself wishing he had really died during his seven year absence. Maybe, she thought, maybe this is the dream. I’m all tense and nervous because the court proceedings are coming up, and I took a nap and dreamed that Lou had really come back. When I do wake up Paul will be kissing me hello and he’ll have the court decree in his hand and I’ll be a widow instead of a deserted wife, and he and Sheila and I will split a magnum or two of champagne, and… It wasn’t a dream. It was real. His hand brushed hers and she knew it was really real. A fucking mess. And she was in the middle of it, right up to her ass.
“I wouldn’t give you an ice cube if you were burning at the stake.” She picked up the coffee urn, dumped it into the sink. “Swim down the pipes and get some,” she suggested acidly.
He laughed. She hated that new laugh, booming and hearty. “You’re hostile, Caron. Spunky, too. I like it. You’ve changed a lot over the last few years. Want to see the picture I carry in my wallet? You, as you used to be? No? I don’t blame you. Jesus, Saxon, I can’t understand what I ever saw in you then. You were a dog, you know that? A dumb little dog.”
“Fuck you. Up the ass.”
“Did you ever wonder why I left?” he pursued. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of an answer. “Well, it was you, partly… I mean, you were a stone fucking drag. A dishrag in bed. I wasn’t much better, I guess. My nose in a book all the time. My magnum opus. Keats and the Romantic Revolution. I can remember two lines from ’Grecian Urn’. Forgotten all the rest.”
She started to move past him. “I wish you’d also forgotten the address of this house.” He thrust out one arm, blocking her way. She edged to the other direction, but he thrust out his other arm. “Wait a Goddamned minute,” Caron said angrily. Her back was against the kitchen cabinet. She couldn’t move forward, nor to the sides. He was looking down at her, smiling under his moustache. She hadn’t really remembered him as so tall. Had he grown? Or had she forgotten?
“No, you wait,” he said. “I woke up one morning and I was thirty-one years old and I was trapped. I had money, but what good was money doing me? I had a job and a career and they didn’t matter a fart in a hailstorm. I was a paunchy nothing, sick of my life. So I said, fuck it. I’m getting out. And that’s what I did. I got out. Be honest, Caron. Did you ever really miss me?”
She shook her head. “Not once,” she said. It was half true. There was a time when she, had thought she loved him, or they’d never have been married. But it had passed. They had nothing now, nothing except a soon-to-be severed bond.
“Interested in where I’ve been?” She shook her head again. He leaned in closer and she shrank back. She felt like a rat in a trap. She could smell the masculinity of him. He’d never smelled like a man before, but he did now. She tried to sink down, slide under his arms to freedom, but he sank with her. “I’ve been everywhere,” he said.
“Europe, Asia, Africa. I’ve done construction work, been a stunt driver in low budget movies ran a chain of massage parlors in Arizona. I’ve grown. A lot. Not only outside, but inside, too, where it counts. And the last year or so I’ve been thinking. About us. I wondered what you were doing, what you were thinking, you know?”
“No, and I don’t care either!” Caron snarled, pulling her dressing gown shut. It had fallen open without warning and she’d been all too aware that his eyes were momentarily taking in the sight of her pink nightie. Thin, almost transparent, a gift from Paul. Nothing that Lou had any right to look at, to get cheap thrills from. She set her lip and pushed at him. Hard. As hard as she could. Christ! He had a body like a piece of worked iron! She rocked back, unable to move him, and his hand came in, seized her wrist. “Aaaaahhhh!” she said, rising onto tiptoes.