“Oh, we’ve had it since the tenth of this month. When she ordered it last July she just told us to keep it when it came in, until she wanted it. I suppose her father’s . . . death changed her plans some.”
“Things like that do,” Stevens said. “She ordered it in July.”
“That’s right. They haven’t caught the fellow yet, I hear.”
“Not yet,” Stevens said. “Damned nice car. Would like to afford one myself,” and went on, into the open door and up the stairs which knew his feet, into the sitting-room which knew him too. She stood watching him while he approached, dressed for the drive in a freshly laundered suit of the faded khaki coveralls, her face and mouth heavily made up against the wind of motion; on a chair lay the stained burberry and her purse and heavy gloves and a scarf for her head; she said, At least I didn’t lie to you. I could have hidden it in the garage until you had come and gone, but I didn’t.
Though not in words: she said,
“Kiss me, Gavin,” taking the last step to him herself and taking him into her arms, firm and without haste and set her mouth to his, firmly and deliberately too, and opened it, he holding her, his hand moving down her back while the dividing incleft outswell of her buttocks rose under the harsh khaki, as had happened before now and then, the hand unchallenged — it had never been challenged, it would never be, the fidelity unthreatened and secure even if there had been nothing at all between the hand and the inswelling incleft woman flesh, he simply touching her, learning and knowing not with despair or grief but just sorrow a little, simply supporting her buttocks as you cup the innocent hipless bottom of a child.
But not now, not this time. It was terror now; he thought with terror How did it go? the man “whose irresistible attraction to women was that simply by being in their presence he gave them to convince themselves that he was capable of any sacrifice for them”.
Which is backward, completely backward; the poor dope not only didn’t know where first base was, he didn’t even know he was playing baseball. You don’t need to tempt them because they have long since already selected you by that time, choosing you simply because they believe that in the simple act of being selected you have at once become not merely willing and ready but passionately desirous of making a sacrifice for them just as soon as the two of you can think of one good enough, worthy.
He thought Now she will realise that she cannot trust me but only hoped she could so now the thrust of hips, gripping both shoulders to draw me into the backward-falling even without a bed and was completely wrong; he thought Why should she waste her time trusting me when she has known all her life that all she has to do is just depend on me. She just stood holding him and kissing him until he himself moved first to be free. Then she released him and stood looking at his face out of the dark blue eyes not secret, not tender, perhaps not even gentle.
“Your mouth is a mess,” she said. “You’ll have to go to the bathroom. — You are right,” she said. “You always are right about you and me.” They were not secret: intent enough yes, but not secret; someday perhaps he would remember that they never had been really tender even. “I love you,” she said. “You haven’t had very much, have you. No, that’s wrong. You haven’t had anything. You have had nothing.”
He knew exactly what she meant: her mother first, then her; that he had offered the devotion twice and got back for it nothing but the privilege of being obsessed, bewitched, besotted if you like; Ratliff certainly would have said besotted. And she knew he knew it; that was (perhaps) their curse: they both knew any and every mutual thing immediately.
It was not because of the honesty, nor because she believed she had been in love with him all her life, that she had let him discover the new Jaguar and what it implied in the circumstances of her so-called father’s death. It was because she knew she could not have kept concealed from him the fact that she had ordered the car from New York or London or wherever it came from, the moment she knew for sure he could get Mink the pardon.
She had pockets in all her clothes into which the little ivory tablet with its clipped stylus exactly fitted. He knew all of them, the coveralls too, and reached his hand and took it out. He could have written I have everything. You trusted me. You chose to let me find you murdered your so-called father rather than tell me a lie. He could, perhaps should have written I have everything. Haven’t I just finished being accessory before a murder. Instead, he wrote We have had everything
“No,” she said.
He wrote Yes
“No,” she said.
He printed YES this time in letters large enough to cover the rest of the face of the tablet and erased it clean with the heel of his palm and wrote Take someone with You to hear you Will be killed
She barely glanced at it, nowhere near long enough, anyone would have thought, to have read it, then stood looking at him again, the dark blue eyes that whether they were gentle or not or tender or not or really candid or not, it didn’t matter. Her mouth was smeared too behind the faint smiling, itself — the smiling — like a soft smear, a drowsing stain. “I love you,” she said. “I have never loved anybody but you.” He wrote No
“Yes,” she said.
He wrote No again and even while she said “Yes” again he wrote No No No No until he had completely filled the tablet and erased it and wrote Deed And, standing side by side at the mantel where they transacted all her business which required communication between them, he spread the document and uncapped his pen for her to sign it and folded the paper and was putting it back into the briefcase when she said, “This too.” It was a plain long envelope, he had noticed it on the mantel.
When he took it he could feel the thick sheaf of banknotes through the paper, too many of them; a thousand dollars would destroy him in a matter of weeks, perhaps days, as surely as that many bullets. He had been tempted last night to tell her so: “A thousand dollars will kill him too. Will you be satisfied then?” even though he was still ignorant last night how much truth that would be. But he refrained. He would take care of that himself when the time came. “Do you know where you can find him?”
Ratliff does he wrote and erased it and wrote Go out 2 minutes Bathroom your Mouth too and stood while she read it and then herself stood a moment longer, not moving, her head bent as if he had written perhaps in cryptogram. “Oh,” she said. Then she said: “Yes. It’s time,” and turned and went to the door and stopped and half-turned and only then looked at him: no faint smile, no nothing: just the eyes which even at this distance were not quite black. Then she was gone.
He already had the briefcase in his hand. His hat was on the table. He put the envelope into his pocket and scrubbed at his mouth with his handkerchief, taking up the hat in passing, and went on, down the stairs, wetting the handkerchief with spittle to scrub his mouth. There would be a mirror in the hall but this would have to do until he reached the office; there would be, was a back door of course but there was the houseman somewhere and maybe even the cook too.
Besides, there was no law against crossing the front lawn itself from the front entrance and so through the side gate into the lane, from which he could reach the street without even having to not look at the new car again. Until Ratliff, happening to be standing by chance or coincidence near the foot of the office stairs, said, “Where’s your car? Never mind, I’ll go pick it up. Meantime you better use some water when you get upstairs.”
He did, and locked the stained handkerchief into a drawer and sat in the office. In time he heard Ratliff’s feet on the stairs though Ratliff shook the locked door only; here was another time when he could have worked at his youthful dream of restoring the Old Testament to its virgin’s pristinity. But he was too old now. Evidently it takes more than just anguish to be all that anguishing. In time the telephone rang. “She’s gone,” Ratliff said. “I’ve got your car. You want to come and eat supper with me?”
“No,” he said.
“You want me to telephone your wife that’s what you’re doing?”
“Dammit, I told you No,” he said. Then he said, “Much obliged.”
“I’ll pick you up at eight o’clock say,” Ratliff said.
He was at the curb waiting; the car — his — moved immediately he was in it. “I’m not safe,” he said.
“I reckon so,” Ratliff said. “It’s all over now, soon that is as we get used to it.”
“I mean, you’re not safe. Nobody is, around me. I’m dangerous. Can’t you understand I’ve
