The Captive (4 page)

She was wholly delightful that night. And that was not the end for she insisted on more, on being playful, teasing, making fun of his newly aroused nervousness at the possibility  of her husband behind the door or the drapes or under the sofa. She would not stop for what seemed hours, her passion rising with his own at each new beginning until they felt totally spent. Barry sat finally in a contented stupor on the floor with his arm thrown over her naked hips, She lay with her eyes closed, arms hanging over the side of the sofa. The living room smelled hot and spermy and reeked with sweat.

"My God, Mrs. Hegel," Barry said in a whisper.

"Mr. Golden, you really are a nice man," she answered without moving.

"Will you run away with me to the ends of the earth?"

"Try and get away from me."

"I really feel," he began. She stopped him, listening, and sat up suddenly. She did have beautiful breasts, he thought in an absent and aesthetic way.

"He's up," she said.

"God damn," he said.

The scramble was pathetic, for nothing could undo the damage to that ugly couch. It was spotted, streaked; smeared, and smelled like Casanova's laundry. They managed  to get into their clothes, listening all the time for him to be walking in and wondering how, if he did walk in, they were going to explain the couch, their wild hair, his  lipsticked face, Renee's torn smock and one lost stocking. But he did not come into the living room. They listened to the scratching and stumbling thing on the stairs as it made its way up and gradually eased away into the distant upstairs. They sat on the couch, dressed again, looking at each other for what seemed the first time that evening.

"You're a mess, Mr. Golden," Renee said.

"And you would be lovely in sackcloth," he said, trying to be gallant.

"Where are you staying?"

"Place in town, the Grand."

"I'd drive you, but ... Or you must have a car, of course."

"No, but I like walking."

"But that's miles!"

"I don't mind, really. It's one of my ways of thinking about things. Now, if I had my horse ..."

"A real cowboy, I'll bet," she said, smiling with those irresistible lips.

He put his arms around her again and began rubbing his lips lightly over hers. He felt the stirrings of desire for her, even now. She responded, but faintly. She was thinking now, and he had no idea what time it was. Perhaps it was morning. He drew back slightly, kissed her one last time.

"Barry?"

"Yes."

"You really have a nephew named Robert Burney?"

"I think so. I had one when I came in." He grinned, happy.

"No, Really."

"I'm not a wandering seducer, if that's worrying you." She felt warm and securely fixed in his arms at that moment He was to remember that feeling, to recall the warmth and tiny movements of her body that made him feel that they were a single unit, two personalities adjusting themselves, tuning the vibrations to make a single dominant chord.

"I'm sorry about all that," she said, making him wonder what exactly she was sorry about, whether about their sudden love, her own mangled marriage, his supposed loss of family, or hers. And then she began to weep, the tears welling up in her lovely dark eyes and running down her cheeks while she simply drew back her head and looked straight at him.

"If I could take you away, now," he began.

She kissed him with soft, teary lips, tasting of salt and making another electric thrill run through him. "Good night Barry," she said, pulling out of his arms.

He stood there feeling that a part of his self had been removed, cold in the open space where Renee had been. "Good night." He walked into the little hallway. "Will I see you tomorrow, during the day? Does he, I mean your husband -?" He stopped.

"Yes, he goes to work, even after he's been dead drunk he goes to work. He leaves around eight-thirty and comes home at six, sometimes. Sometimes not at all."

Barry picked up his hat, dropped on the hall table so long ago that it seemed he was stealing a hat all over again instead of taking something that was his own.

At the door she leaned her head on his shoulder, one arm going around his waist. He felt her fingers slip under his belt.

"We'll work out the problem with Vaire and Mother," she said softly, as if she were going to sleep standing there. "It'll be all right, Barry. You'll see."

He pulled her to face him a last time and kissed her gently. She was almost asleep on her feet. "I'd like to carry you up to bed."

"You will," she said so softly he almost didn't hear. "Sometime."

When he had got well away from the Hegel house, he thought of shifting so as to make better time along the dark streets, but he wanted to keep being himself, savoring the last hours, resisting that power that tugged at his personality like a magnetic pull on iron. Yes, he thought in response, it would be more efficient, but this is my night. I want this. You have shared it, but this is mine. And he continued walking  as the power surged downward again, relaxed its pull and let him breathe the night air, look upward at the stars that were fading in the east now.

He walked the whole way into the downtown area and paid some of the dollars he had stolen with the clothes for a room at the hotel he had mentioned. Now he was being truthful even about this, he thought, and going up in the gilded elevator cage, he giggled. The wizened elevator man thought he was drunk.

***

The next morning he called, and when he heard that soft clear voice that seemed always to have been somewhere in his life, he felt the passion rising in him again. Yes, Bill had left. She would make him some lunch if he wanted to come out, and they could talk. Mina was there, of course. Yes, it was really all right. He took a cab.

As he stood waiting for her to answer the doorbell, Barry realized he had been smiling all morning and that his face felt strained. He could not remember ever feeling so happy. But then he smiled wryly, for after all, as complete as he seemed, he was only one day old, one day in the world. Then the door opened and Renee stood there smiling at him.

"Barry," she said, "this is Mina. Mina, this is Mr. Golden. He is our good friend."

Mina was a slender six-year-old, tall for her age, quiet and beautiful like her mother. She took his hand briefly in greeting,  and they walked through the living room where he noticed  in passing a gaudy afghan thrown across the sofa. Lunch of tomato soup and chicken salad sandwiches was waiting in the little dining room. Mina entertained them with stories about her animals. She was allowed to show a few of them, tiny glass figures of deer and giraffes and rabbits that Renee said she had kept for more than a month now without breaking one of them. They live in a forest all of glass, Mina said as she ate tomato soup and crackers, and they talk in glass voices, like this. And she made them speak in a delicate soprano tone.

Barry looked at Renee longingly as they sat at the small round table. She smiled and reached across to touch his leg with her toe. When Mina finished the stories about her animals, Renee and Barry agreed that a trip to Cassius on the coming weekend would be appropriate.

"Would you like to see Grandma on Saturday sweetheart?"  Renee said.

"Is this day Saturday?"

"No, dear. Saturday will be in two more days. Two more nights and then it will be Saturday."

"Will we get to see Anne too?"

"I think so," Renee said, wiping off her daughter's  tomato soup lipstick.

They sat over coffee as Mina talked and played with Blocks on the kitchen linoleum, her chatter with her invisible creatures and tiny people forming a background for their loving conspiracy. The plans they made included Renee's husband, of course, but it seemed strange that they should be traeling as a group of four. Barry already thought of Bill's family as his own, as if by a single act he had replaced the husband's years, legal rights, has very person in its house, love, world. He was certain Renee did not share this callousness, however.

"Will he agree to going down to Cassius on Saturday?" He paused. "With me?"

"I think so," she said, and her face took on that absence of expression he had first noticed last night when she spoke to her husband. It seemed a careful erasing of expression so that one could not tell what she thought or felt. "He's likely to go along with a plan that's already made. And besides, we need to go. You need to find out whatever you can."

He felt that she wanted to get that matter cleared up so that they could think about the other, the newer and more intimate matter between them. He listened to her voice with amazement, feeling what the Beast had felt the first time it heard music, that it was the most astounding thing in the world to have missed for so long. Barry reached over and put his hand over hers, and as it had done last night, her hand turned over to receive his.

"Doesn't Mina take a nap or something?" he said, feeling choked and hot.

"She's too old for naps, she says." Renee's smile made her eyes twinkle, and he felt a rush of blood to his face as he noticed her expression softening, coming back to love from the guarded emptiness she had taken on when she talked about Bill. "But we can arrange something." She got up and walked into the living room, where he heard her asking the operator a number. In a minute she had arranged for a neighbor to take Mina for an hour or so while she talked over old times with her "cousin."

Mrs. Childress stood in the back door for what seemed a ridiculously long time, holding onto Mina's hand while the three of them waited for her to stop her chatter and leave. Mina wanted to get to the Childress house where they had new kittens, and Renee and her cousin felt uncomfortably hot and rushed suddenly, as if there were a fast train to be caught and it was just about to pull away without them. The woman talked without taking breath, almost, a constant stream directed first at Renee, then squirted in Barry's  direction, as if she were determined to cover both with her life story before she had to leave. She was delighted he was from New Mexico and wanted to know if it was hard coming back to the States where he had to speak American, but not waiting for Barry's assurance to her that in New Mexico they spoke English, most of them, anyway, and going blandly on with that stream of talk that seemed to uncoil from her gut like an audible boa constrictor that now was suffocating both of them. At last Mina broke from Mrs. Childress's hand and went running out the back gate. Both Renee and the older woman dashed out after the little girl, afraid she would run into the street. Barry had just stepped out the back door when Renee came running back around the corner of the house and put both hands on his shoulders, pushing him back into the kitchen. She slammed the door behind her, panting and flushed.

"Quick," she panted, her eyes sparkling, "before Mrs. Childress gets us."

He grabbed her and they kissed between her panting breaths, his hands moving over her body in a frenzy of  excitement. But in a moment she had broken from him and was running out of the room.

"Hey!"

"Catch me," she called over her shoulder and was gone up the stairs.

He ran after her, feeling his joy burst out in laughter as she did that silly, wonderful thing. Catch me, she said, and ran. He giggled and half fell up the carpeted stairway. On the landing something soft hit him in the face, a white pillow that smelled faintly of perfume. He looked up to see Renee standing at the upstairs bannister laughing. She lifted her skirt lightly and did a little Charleston step. Barry dashed up the rest of the stairs carrying the pillow.

She eluded him in and out of the three upstairs bedrooms until he got her cornered behind the big bed in the light front bedroom, white with curtains, spread, flounces on the  furniture, small rugs, all white and with the sun glazing the white curtains to a dazzle so that the room had the feeling of a magic cavern lighted by some unseen source of  radiance. Renee stood behind the bed, laughing, panting,  shaking her head so that her black hair glistened in the light. And then she came slowly around the bed, holding her arms out to him, and he saw she had unbuttoned all the buttons down the front of her dress, and now it opened, like her arms. As he embraced her, she shrugged out of the dress and put her lips to his ear.

"Is this what you want, dearest Barry?"

"I've dreamed of you since I can remember being alive," he whispered, holding everything in the world he would ever want in his arms.

And then, from a beginning that was almost frantic with haste and wild desire, they went very slowly, savoring each touch, each word of nonsense that was really not a word but a loving mark in the air, an audible beat of the heart that only made sense to the two of them. They stood naked in the white radiance, touching lightly, smoothing over the bodies that urged them on, making it all last for timeless minutes. As if they were inside a translucent cloud somewhere, all the whiteness isolating them above the earth, making it all more than the bodies could stand, so intense was it, so that the souls themselves expanded as they lay on the bed at last and loved each other's bodies until they lost all mind, all lime, and soared into that realm where all  problems solve themselves by wiping out everything but the need that can be fulfilled that moment.

After a long time that could not be measured, they lay in the heat of the room, in the lucent whiteness of the room, where now the sun was changing from a delicate lightness to an afternoon heat. They were twined together in the last position they had used, her head turned over her shoulder, eyes closed, his arm around the curve of her hip, touching the long white leg above the knee. He was watching the dark lashes around her eyes as they lay in perfect still repose, not a flicker, as if she were truly asleep. His other arm was under her, with her right breast resting still in his palm. He felt as purely happy and content as he ever had in any time, any form.

"I have to take you and Mina back with me," he said softly.

"I know," she said without moving her eyelids from their perfect stillness.

"You are everything I've ever wanted," he said.