One for the Gods (The Peter & Charlie Trilogy) (52 page)

He rejected the peach and set down the cup with a hand that still shook. Get on with it. He wouldn’t be able to think about anything else until he had found the money.

He came upon her in the garden and his first glimpse of her aroused all his unguarded admiration. He made an effort of will to resent her taking such an unfair advantage of him. She was wearing a crisp white blouse and a freshly pressed blue skirt. Her hair was carefully arranged, her makeup impeccable. Everything about her testified to her blamelessness. One couldn’t reproach this model wife for having been drunk and disorderly. She had scored the first point of the day.

She was bending over the geraniums removing the dead blooms with deft unshaking hands. Love, painful and involuntary, surged up in him, love for the quick grace of her movements, for the lovely line of her body, the arm lifted, the breasts nestled forward against the stuff of her blouse, the firm curve of hip flowing into slim leg. She had offered this beauty to another man. He could maintain her right to do so; fidelity, to have any value, must be voluntary. He knew he wanted her as much as he ever had, but there was no longed-for stir of desire in his loins. It had begun with what had seemed at the time a normal physical withdrawal, an instinctive distaste for sharing her body. When his love had finally prevailed, when his need for her had worn down his outrage, it was too late; his punishment of her had trapped him in his self-righteous celibacy. Life had become a tortuous determination to hide his impotence from her. He had played this comedy for—less than a year? It seemed like a condition of life; he was doomed to his sterile love for Sarah.

It was doubtless bizarre of him to want only his wife after almost twenty years of marriage, and to expect her to be satisfied with him. Infidelity was an attribute of marriage, but he had always thought of the two of them as exceptions in all things. In the early years, in the full flood of his first spectacular success, he had slipped a few times, the inevitable follies that resulted from being lionized, but he had quickly learned that however much he might hurt Sarah, the loss to himself risked being greater. Ties were loosened, and he had needed the ties that held him to Sarah. He could curse them now. He cursed everything that held him prisoner—the children (hardly children any more), the house, the shortage of money, the total
nonexistence
of money this morning. He seemed to have lost all control over life—all because Sarah had been to bed with another man. All because she had committed the perhaps greater crime of not really trying to hide it.

“Hi,” he said cautiously, approaching her without quite looking at her. He caught the brave tender smile she offered him as she turned. He could guess by the glitter in her tantalizingly expressive but often unrevealing eyes that she had already had her first drink.

“Good morning, darling,” she said. Her voice was a musical contralto, self-trained, “affected” to those who didn’t like her, capable of subtly provocative meanings. With three words, she could tell him that she forgave him and that she had a great deal to forgive him for.

“You’re looking very bright this morning,” he said dryly, letting her know that he hadn’t been taken in by her painstaking camouflage.

“I
feel
bright,” she insisted, resolutely fresh and wholesome. “It’s going to be another scorcher.”

Someday, he thought, I’ll probably kill her. There seemed no other imaginable solution. He moved into the shade of the grape arbor and slumped into a chair. The sawing of the cicadas was a thin rhythmic insistent celebration of heat, as nerve-racking as a fingernail drawn across slate. He pushed his hand through his hair. “You have that money I gave you last night, haven’t you?” he asked, instinctively phrasing it so that her responsibility was engaged.

“Money? What money? Why should you give me money?” It was a quick decisive disclaimer, disclaiming in effect any possibility of sharing anything with him.

“I’m talking about
the
money,” he said, no longer caring who scored against whom as he squarely, soberly, faced the appalling possibility of its loss. “Yesterday’s lot. All of it. I didn’t give it to you?”

“No, of course not. You mean——” She began in her brisk unyielding manner, but her voice caught finally on a note of incredulity and alarm. He registered it with harsh satisfaction. She was engaged in this with him whether she liked it or not.

“Are you sure I didn’t put it in your shopping basket?” he asked.

“I haven’t looked. Oh, God, why did——?”

“Where is it? The basket, I mean.” He was already off, moving toward the house.

“It’s right there on the chair in the entrance.” Her words were breathless and he felt her following him. It gave him a welcome sense of power over her. He cut across the paved courtyard and entered the house and seized the woven-grass basket. It contained some odds and ends from yesterday’s mail, his swimming trunks, a towel, a tin of milk. He fumbled through the things and threw down the basket and stood irresolutely, running his fingers through his hair. He had to think. He had to remember. She stood watching him from the doorway, an accusing but attentive presence.

“You can’t mean you’ve really lost it,” she said in a way that canceled out all hope of finding it.

“Lost it?” he repeated angrily. “How do you mean, lost it? It might have been stolen for all I know. All I know is, it isn’t here.”

“But what are we going to do? Oh, I know, I know. We’re not supposed to worry about money. That’s all very well when you have some, but that was every cent we could put our hands on.”

“That’s putting it in a nutshell.” He curbed an impulse to soften the blow for her. It had been a function of his love to smooth things over for her, help her skirt issues, add a bright false color to a gloomy picture. Perhaps a head-on collision was what they needed. Perhaps the ghastly predicament which faced them would shake them out of their proud reticences.

“I’m glad you can laugh off what amounts to criminal carelessness,” she said, offering battle.

“If it’s gone, it’s gone. What am I supposed to do about it?” There was an unfamiliar mean sad pleasure in rubbing her nose in disaster and he hated it. He knew that to hold her in his arms even briefly would give him strength to face any eventuality and that this was true for her too; they needed each other’s support and sympathy, but an embrace could lead to more passionate contact and reveal what he had been hiding all these months. “It probably dropped out of my pocket at Lambraiki’s,” he said, adopting an optimistic tone in spite of himself. “Stavro will keep it for me.”

“If you think there’s any chance of that, you’d better go right down there.” From her safe neutral position in the doorway, she felt the reverberations of longing passing between them and she steeled herself against them. He had shut himself off from her; he had condemned her to solitary guilt. It placed too great a burden on her nerves to respond to every slight lowering of his guard; the instant she did, the guards were raised higher. She permitted her eyes to linger briefly on the painfully open, vulnerable face and saw the torment in it. Her heart ached with rejected love. Accustomed by these last months to clutching at straws, she was almost inclined to welcome destitution as a promise of relief. They would be stripped to essentials, finally broken or reunited.

“This means losing a whole morning’s work,” he complained, as if he could reduce the loss to a mere nuisance.

“I don’t see—how
could
you have dropped it?” she asked.

“Things have been known to drop out of pockets.”

“But it’s so unlike you.”

“Is it?” He rubbed his hand over his eyes, wiping away sweat. He supposed he was still, to her, a model of self-discipline and purpose and efficiency. He didn’t feel like a model of anything. Was this failure with her a symptom of a larger disintegration, an indication that he was running down generally, growing mentally and physically flabby, “going to seed,” as the transients put it when they were first frightened by the idyllic island atmosphere? “I don’t see how you can live here without just going to seed,” they said nervously, wishing probably that they had come without their wives or husbands.

He took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders to prove to himself that he was intact. “Well, I’d better get going. You might tell Jeff to pump.”

“Oh, dear. I used a lot of water this morning. I needed a real bath.”

“You needn’t make excuses for him. What if I’d wanted a shower? The tank’s supposed to be kept full.” He was seared by hate again, the sweeping hatred that embraced everybody and all of life, locking him in a vast cold solitude. He shoved his hands into his empty pockets and doubled them into fists, trying to regain the sanity of tolerance and compassion.

“Perhaps you’d better speak to him,” Sarah was saying. “I don’t seem to get anywhere with him these days.”

No, you don’t, he thought. He was here when you were panting after your pretty young man. What did he see then? What did Kate see? Hate seethed in him. “If I’m going to do something about the money, I haven’t time for Jeff,” he said. “Just tell him to pump.” He glanced at her as he started to turn away and stood transfixed, once more undone by her. Light enveloped her, striking golden reflections from her chestnut hair, burnishing her skin, caressing the swell of her breast, endowing all of her body with luminous grace. He thought of the way she felt in his arms, the way she folded herself against him, offering herself with passionate generosity, her eyes unguarded and brimming with desire, and he was almost stirred, almost confident that it could happen, but her eyes held him off and, abashed, he averted his own and turned from her. “I better put some decent clothes on,” he muttered as he left.

She waited until his footsteps had receded into the upper part of the house and then fled through the dining room to the kitchen. Her private bottle of brandy stood on the sideboard in among the bottles of vinegar and olive oil and condiments. It wasn’t hidden. She simply kept it here for convenience where it wouldn’t be noticed. She poured herself a generous measure. Her hand shook (what a luxury to allow it to, after the struggle to pull herself together this morning) as she lifted the glass to her lips, but steadied as she drained it. Sweat broke out on her forehead and she shook her hair back and took a quick little gasping breath. Everything was going to be all right. He would find the money. She was free now to go lie on the rocks, where Pavlo was sure to be. Her mind erupted in a burst of erotic images of the young man—strong thigh, smooth chest, muscled stomach, taut heavy pouch of swimming trunks which seemed to swell and strain in her mind’s eye until her legs almost gave way beneath her.

She hunched her shoulders and beat her belly with her fists as if there were something in her she could destroy. A whimpering moan broke from her. She thought of her mother, a sturdy Westerner who had taught school all her life and who had a stock lecture on self-indulgence. Self-indulgence? One didn’t indulge torment; one fought it. There was no pleasure in her thoughts of Pavlo, only compulsion and a debasing need.

George’s doing. At times, she felt that he was intent on destroying her. Sex had never been a problem for her. She had never had any reason to think much about it; it was only one aspect of the love that filled her life with George. Life had always been George. There had been a few intense awkward teenage affairs before him and then she was married to a struggling writer, whose struggle was made picturesque by his being able to take her for weekends to his parents’ great estate up on the Hudson, where there were not only servants but
white
servants. To a girl who had been brought up in a depression-ridden small town, it was quite dazzling—she had read about such establishments but hadn’t believed they still existed—and she was soon dazzled further to find herself the wife of the great literary lion of the day. It was the fulfillment of childhood dreams, dreams nurtured by and inherited from her father, himself an incurable romantic, a failed poet turned occasional journalist. Overnight, George had achieved for her all that her father could have hoped for—freedom from drudgery and routine, friendship with some of the important talents of her time, firsthand knowledge of the world she had read about, a certain reflected fame of her own of the sort poor foolish Zelda could have enjoyed through Scott if she hadn’t been determined to outshine him.

That the dazzle had begun to dim in recent years was the only possible explanation for her having succumbed to Ronnie. Her faith in George hadn’t wavered but the world’s had, making her question perhaps, without even knowing it, her complete and exclusive commitment to him. Whatever the reason, Ronnie had made her feel young and at the same time stirred an acute consciousness of the swift passage of years. George had been away on business in New York, a rare separation, she had caught Ronnie looking at Jeff in a way that made her feel that, as a woman, she could play a crucial role in his life, but nothing altered the fact that she had taken him knowing that he could offer her nothing that George didn’t give her, except physical novelty.

Was it as simple and degrading as that? Was Pavlo the logical next step? Had Ronnie’s rather ethereal romantic quality enabled her to disguise with sentiment what was in fact an animal hunger for new bodies? There was no fooling herself about Pavlo. She was obsessed, quite specifically, with his body, with the part of his body contained in his swimming trunks. His prick. His cock. His dick. She forced her mind to shape the words baldly in an attempt to exorcise its spell, but her lips parted and her breath quickened as she thought of seeing it naked, of holding it, of feeling it inside her, of surrendering to its massive power.