River Girl (18 page)

There was a later edition of the paper on the street and I bought it, but there was only a different headline on the Korean war. The story was still in its original location on the inside page, unchanged, with nothing new. No mention had been made of the grand jury at all. It’ll be out later tonight, I thought, and then I’ll know how they’re taking it. I won’t quit worrying until I know what they’re going to believe. But I’m not worrying, I reminded myself. It’s all right now.

I went into another bar and sat down at a table in the air-conditioned cool dimness in the rear. I ordered a bottle of beer, but when it came it had no taste and I let it die in the glass, forgotten. Taking the jeweler’s box out of my pocket, I thought of looking at the watch again, but decided not to open it because it was gift-wrapped so well. She doesn’t really want this, I thought. She doesn’t want the clothes I insisted that she buy—at least, not so many of them—and she doesn’t care whether they’re expensive or not. All she wants is peace, and maybe she wants me. I hope she wants me, but maybe she never will in the way that I have to have her. She needs me because she is afraid now when she’s alone, and because she is first and last a man’s woman who needs a man and who could see no point in life without one, and because she likes me and maybe she loves me, but I don’t think it’s the obsession it has become with me.

No, I thought angrily, I’ve got no right to think that about her. How do I know how deeply she feels? Is she some flirtatious idiot with everything on the surface where it shows? And do you expect her to dredge up all her feelings right now when she’s trying so hard to bury some of them? Things are still terribly mixed up for her, and she’s scared, and what she’s gone through would have driven some women out of their minds.

But, on the other hand, I thought, staring straight ahead across the dimness of the bar and seeing nothing but a still-faced girl with tortured eyes and that beautiful, dark, and mutilated hair—on the other hand, hadn’t it been only the loneliness that had driven her to me in the first place? Hadn’t it been just the loneliness and neglect and the sordid way she’d had to live for almost a year, seeing him come apart that way in drunkenness and suspicion? Minutely, step by step, I went back over every one of our pitifully few hours together, looking for something and not even knowing what it was. I saw her again down on her knees scouring the floor with that agonized fury as if it were herself under the harsh scrubbing brush instead of the already whitened planks. Neglect? That was part of it. What was it she had cried out once, almost in self-reproach? “I can’t help the way I am, can I, Jack? Is it my fault I’m that way?” But it wasn’t only that, I thought. It had to be more than that with her. She would have gone on punishing herself until she wore the floor out with the brush before she’d have surrendered to what she would have considered the cheapness of that alone. It had just been little of this and a little of that, all adding up until it whipped her. No, I thought savagely. No, that wasn’t it. I must have been more to her than just a means of escape. But I don’t know. How could I know? How could I ever be sure?

I’ve got to stop this, I thought. Is this the kind of thing I’m going to go through when I’m away from her? Do I have to go on tormenting myself this way? I tried to drink the beer, but it was flat and warm by now and completely tasteless. I lighted another cigarette, forgetting I already had one burning on the tray. Suddenly, sitting still was unbearable again, and I threw fifty cents on the table and went out without waiting for my change. Sunlight blasted into the street and the glare hurt my eyes after the dimness of the bar, and heat boiled up from the sidewalk in suffocating waves. She’ll be back by now, I thought. She must be back.

She wasn’t. I stood outside the door and knocked again, and then a third time in an empty hot eternity of silence before I would admit to myself she wasn’t there. I was cut off, alone, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but sit down in the lobby through the hell of another hour of waiting.

I heard the elevator door and turned around. She had just stepped out of it and was coming toward me down the corridor with her arms stacked high with bundles.

I took them from her while she unlocked the door. We went inside and she closed it and turned to me to take them. “Let me show you, Jack. Let’s open them now, darling.”

“No,” I said. I threw them on the dresser, but there were too many and some of them fell off onto the floor. “No. Later on. They’re not important.”

She looked at me wonderingly. “But I thought you wanted—”

“Yes. I did. I still do. But they can wait.” I was conscious of thinking I must not make much sense to her. Or to myself, for that matter, I thought. She was still regarding me with faint surprise as I reached out and caught her, quite clumsily, and in too big a hurry and almost roughly. Her arms went up about my neck and then she gasped slightly and said, “Jack, you’re hurting me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I raised my head a little and looked at her, seeing the face slightly flushed from the heat and the eyes very large and dark, almost violet now in the dimness of the room. “I couldn’t help it. I can’t help it. Don’t you see how it is?” I went on, wildly now, and knowing I must sound like a madman to her. “I love you so much I get jumpy being away from you and I can’t keep my hands off you when I’m here. God knows, I don’t want to hurt you. Can’t you see how it is? Don’t you see?”

“Yes,” she said softly. “I know. It’s exactly the same with me.”

“Is it that bad with you too?”

“Yes. But I don’t think it’s bad.”

“No. Not bad. It’s only bad when we’re apart. It’s awful then. I didn’t know a man could come unstuck like this. Do you suppose I’m crazy?”

“If you are,” she whispered, “I love you for it.”

I raised a jittery hand and started fumbling with the pins with which she had fastened up her hair in that roll behind her neck. In my awkwardness and shaky-fingered impatience, however, I wasn’t making any progress and was only messing it up. “Wait, Jack,” she said gently, and quickly slipped them out. The hair tumbled down and she shook her head, freeing it. It was a dark shadow across her face and throat and I ran my fingers through it. “Is that better now?” she whispered.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. This is how I wanted it.”

I put my face down against her throat and could feel the beating of her heart. The traffic sound down below us grew far away and faint, like distant surf, and I could hear nothing now except the caught, breathless, and then suddenly desperate whispering in my ear, “I love you, Jack. I love you so.”

We were strangely clumsy, as if we’d never made love before, caught up in a dark and ecstatic wildness full of frenzied caress and inexpert fumbling like the very young. It had never been quite like this the other times, and when it had flown away and left us I lay quite still and wondered at it, watching the lovely face so peaceful now in repose with the eyes closed and the lashes very dark against her cheek. Like a child, I thought, or an angel, and wondered why angels never seemed to have dark hair in pictures.

In a little while she opened her eyes and we lay looking at each other for a long time without saying anything. She brought up a hand and gently ran a fingertip along my face, just touching it. I wondered if she knew or even remembered that she was completely nude, or whether it would suddenly come to her and she would be overcome with embarrassment and confusion as she had this morning. She knew, though, for in a moment she looked down at the swelling, dark-centered breasts and then back up at me with a faint wonder in her eyes.

“I guess I have no shame,” she said.

“It’s a ridiculous word to use,” I said. “Why should you?”

“It’s funny, isn’t it? I keep telling myself I should, but there isn’t any. Not at all. I couldn’t get up this way though. Could I?”

“No,” I said. “You’re trapped.”

She smiled very faintly. “Unless you went to sleep.”

“I don’t feel sleepy in the least,” I said. “Or maybe you would be a gentleman.”

“I feel even less like a gentleman than I do sleepy,” I said. “I’m rotten all the way through.”

“Don’t you want me to put on the clothes I bought? You were very concerned about them this morning.”

“I don’t know,” I said. I moved a little and put my face against hers, our foreheads touching, knowing it was a silly thing because I couldn’t see even her eyes then, they were so near. “I think I don’t know what I want. I want you here the way you are, but still I want to see you dressed up and very smart. I want to stand off and look at you and at the same time I want to be so near that there’d be no way of knowing whether there were two of us or only one. I want to talk to you, and still I want to be quiet, just watching you. I want to tell you all about it, how beautiful you are and how much I love you, and still I know there isn’t any way I can really say it and that you shouldn’t try to talk about it too much when it’s like this, because talking takes a little bit of it away, and all the words have been worn out anyway by people who maybe only thought they felt it. I want too many different things and I want them all at once. There’s a lot of it I don’t understand, and maybe I never will. I can see why I want to make love to you the way we did; I can see why touching you or looking at you or being around you should be exciting in that way; but there’s no way to understand why I get angry just thinking about the way you had to live and the way you dressed and at your being barefoot, or why I feel the way I do about your feet and just want to sit there and hold them in my hands. Do I make any sense to you? Could anybody make any sense out of it?”

“Yes,” she said softly. “It makes sense. Weren’t you ever in love before, Jack?”

“I guess not. Anyway, not like this.”

“But you were married.”

“I know. But it wasn’t anything. Even at first.” It was odd I thought now. It seemed to have been years since I’d even thought of Louise.

“Yes,” she said musingly. “I think you’re right. I don’t think you ever have been before. I know it’s a funny thing to say, but you seem to be so completely amazed by it, like a little boy.”

“Now you’re talking as if you were a thousand years older than I am.”

“I think I probably am,” she said gently.

“Have you ever been in love before?’ I asked, suddenly and furiously jealous.

“You want me to tell the truth, don’t you, Jack?”

“Of course,” I said, not wanting her to at all.

“It was a boy who was killed on Guadalcanal in 1942. I was nineteen then, and pregnant. When his parents received the telegram I tried to kill myself with sleeping pills. They didn’t work, but when I went to the abortionist, he almost did it for me.”

“My God!” I said. “No.”

“It had been too long. I don’t know why it didn’t kill me as well as the baby. Maybe it was because I didn’t really care.”

“But,” I cried out angrily, “Why, Doris? Why?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t just because we weren’t married. I wouldn’t have minded that very much then, and wouldn’t at all now. But it was the injustice of it. I hated everything. I wanted to die and I wanted to kill a baby who couldn’t have been responsible for a war that did things like that. And maybe a little of it was because of my father. He was such a sweet old thing, and the disgrace would have ruined him. He’d have lost his church. Oh, I don’t know. After all, I was very young, Jack. We wanted to be married in San Diego before he left, but I looked so young they wouldn’t give us a license without my father’s consent, and by the time I got the letter from him it was too late. He already had been shipped out.”

“How did you get to San Diego in the first place?” I asked.

“I ran away and followed him. After he went overseas I came home. Daddy didn’t say anything. It was after I got back that I realized I was pregnant. Of course, I was very happy about it then, married or not. But when his parents got the telegram—”

“My God,” I said. “What an awful thing!”

“It was a long time ago, Jack. I mean, it’s all over now.”

I saw a little then of what she had meant when she had said she was older than I was. “And it was some time after that when you met him?” I wondered if either of us would ever be able to say his name.

“Yes,” she said. “About a year.”

We were quiet for a long time. Even though I didn’t want to think about it I kept trying to imagine what their life had been like. After a while I turned and looked at her and asked, “Did he hack up your hair like that? Was he drunk?”

“No,” she said. “I did it myself. I tried to cut it by looking in a mirror. I made a mess of it, but it didn’t matter. It was too long, and all I wanted to do was hack it off so it wouldn’t be so hot, and so I could get it inside the cap when I went swimming.”

She certainly lived a wonderful life up there, I thought bitterly. But I’ll make it up to her now.

“Where did he get the money for all that whisky?” I asked. “He didn’t make that much from the fish he sold.”

“No. He didn’t buy it. I think the man who rented boats down at the store was a bootlegger or made whisky or something. He used to give it to Roger for repairing boats and motors and things like that. He was handy with tools. But do we have to talk about it, Jack?”

“No,” I said. “It’s all over now.”

It was dark outside now. The floor lamp in the corner was turned on, and as I sat on the side of the bed, smoking, I could see the litter of opened parcels and the wrapping paper scattered about the floor. She had been in the bathroom for a long time, while I listened to her splashing in the tub, then she had come out, wearing the new robe she had bought, and opened all the other packages. Gathering up some of the things, she had gone back promising to put them on so I could see how they looked. As I sat there now, waiting for her, I suddenly remembered the watch that was still in the pocket of my coat. I’d forgotten to give it to her. When she comes out, I thought.

Thinking of the watch reminded me of the time and I looked at mine. It was after eight. The first editions of the morning papers should be on the street in a little while, if they weren’t already. I should go down to the lobby and get them, I thought, but it was too pleasant just sitting there waiting for her to come out again so I could see how she looked. I’ll pick them up when we go out to dinner, I thought.

I heard the door open, and looked up and whistled softly. She was very tall and smart-looking and cool in a white skirt and short white jacket, with a blouse of frosty blue gathered in some kind of ruffle about her throat. The stockings were very sheer and she had on white shoes that didn’t appear to be much more than high heels and straps.

She turned, holding out her arms. “How do I look, Jack?”

“Don’t come any closer. I might try to bite you.”

“Do I really look all right?”

I got up from the bed, conscious of what a crumby-looking specimen I was now beside her, with nothing on except my shorts and with the stubble of black beard beginning to show, and went over to my coat. I took out the little parcel and handed it to her.

“This is for you,” I said, “because you are the most beautiful woman in the world.”

She took it, looking at me wonderingly. “Go ahead,” I said. “Open it. It’s for you. I bought it while I was waiting for you today.”

She unwrapped it and held the oblong case in her hands a moment before she snapped it open. I heard the little gasp as she looked inside. “Oh, what a lovely thing! Jack, you didn’t have to do this for me.”

“I told you why I did it,” I said.

She looked up at me with her eyes a little wet. “Jack I believe you do think I’m beautiful.”

“Aren’t you?” I asked quietly.

She nodded, not speaking for a moment. “Yes,” she said then. “I feel beautiful, anyway.”

I met her up the street and we went to dinner. It was very dim, with candles, and we had a table in a corner by ourselves. I didn’t buy the papers after all, not before dinner, for I knew I wouldn’t read them before we got back anyway, and the later editions would be out then. I couldn’t sit down across from her and look at a paper, no matter what news I was expecting.

After a while we went back to the hotel. She went in first and I bought the papers and followed her. She had the white suit off and was changing to the robe when I got there, and we spread the papers on the bed and read them. The story was on the front page now, and growing.

“OFFICER BELIEVED VICTIM,” the headlines said. They hadn’t found either of the boats yet, but already the stories were full of the conjectures that I had hoped for, built on just the fact that I was still missing and that Shevlin’s cabin was deserted and his boat gone. Dozens of men were searching the swamp now, and I was sure that by tomorrow morning they’d find the boats, which should clinch it. There was no mention of the grand-jury investigation. It was good news, all of it. I felt better and the strain was beginning to go away. It had been a good job.

There was another thing, though, that we hadn’t outrun. Just before dawn I awoke suddenly, sweating and scared, and she was screaming in her sleep. I got her calmed after a while and lay awake until daylight smoking cigarettes and thinking.