A shooting star, p.10
A Shooting Star, page 10
“I hate it that she doesn’t know,” Sabrina said. “I hate it that she can’t tell.” She was shivering through her whole body.
A car’s headlights touched the tops of trees off to the right, and passed. Against their backs the wind pushed heavy and wet. Ambiguous in the starlight, a paper bag blew along the ground and plastered itself against a clump of weed. “Darling,” Bernard said softly, “she’s only had a day and a half to notice anything.” He opened the car door. “Let’s get inside, you’re cold.”
“I’m a mess,” she said. “I’m a jealous, unreasonable female.”
“You’re in love,” Bernard’s voice said softly in her ear. “So am I.” They were locked mouth to mouth the moment they slid into the seat, and when they finally broke apart he said, clenching his hand up and down her arm, “You’re not in any doubt, are you?”
“No.” She traced his eyesocket, his cheekbone, his mouth, with her fingers, wishing it were light enough to see him. “No. Only we were going to be so big and strong and break it off. What are we going to do now?”
“There doesn’t seem much to do,” he said, and for the second time in two or three minutes a twinge of disappointment made her move a little away. How could either of them accept, in that tone of submissive resignation, the total impossibility of what they both most wanted? There should be more anguish than this; even Oaxaca, and that tortured good-by at the airport, was righter than what she had just heard in his tone. She said, “Burke knows. I told him.”
The slight movement of his body expressed some meaning that she was alert to without fully understanding it. He said, “How did he take it?”
“Clinically. He’d never show anything.”
“No?” he said. “People are different. It would destroy Norma.”
They sat separated by the fact that she had told her husband, but he had not told his wife. But she so wanted things to be right between them, and warm and secure again, that she gripped his hand, saying, “It’s harder for you, with children.”
He was looking out across the lights for a second. Then he made a disgusted exclamation, shook her shoulders with his circling arm, and said, “Do you know what they’d hear and believe, if it came to a break? That I’d thrown them all away in order to marry a rich woman.”
“I suppose,” she said drearily. Out in the starred blackness the Contra Costa lights merged into the sky without a horizon.
“Norma, too,” Bernard said. “I’ve thought of nothing else since I left you. She’s past forty, she’s a nice woman, she’s been a wonderful mother, she thinks we’ve had a successful marriage.… We have, if that makes any sense to you. I can’t get over thinking how unfair, you know? After …”
“Taking the best years of her life?” Sabrina said. “Please, darling. We didn’t fall in love on purpose. I tell you the truth, I can’t cry for her sorrows. My own are enough for me.”
His profile, projected against the valley’s lights, seemed aloof and brooding. The warmth was squeezed out of him. She thought bitterly, Everything I touch I turn to stone! Then his hand came rubbing on her shoulder and the side of her neck, and suddenly she bent her cheek against it and held it there. He bent down over her and his breath beat warm, faintly whisky-smelling, on her face. “And yet I love you,” he whispered. “You make all the rest of it only duty. The trouble is they are a duty. I owe them a responsibility, but I’m also fond of them. The fact that I love you more can’t make me love them less.”
“No.”
“I’m afraid you think I should leave her anyway.”
“Darling, I don’t know what I think. I want you, that’s all I know.”
In an extending silence the wind began to whistle around the car; the unbuttoned flaps of the top creaked and snapped. A trail of vapor wavered almost unseen past the window, and a patch of the valley’s lights was dimmed. Their faces were only a foot apart, but she could see no more than the set of his head, the way he had of holding it a little on one side. His thigh was warm against hers. And she was at once anguished and reassured by the sigh, like a groan, that was wrenched out of him.
“Oh, Christ, I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose I might even learn to dislike her, eventually, if I took the trouble to be unkind, and forced her into nagging and fighting me. Then I could do it, at least as far as she’s concerned, but I wouldn’t like myself much. I’ve always tried to be decent. Doing something like that deliberately would be almost like plotting to murder her and throw her over the Devil’s Slide. And there are still the girls.”
She counted his fingers, tested that each one had a nail, felt up along the knuckles and wrist. Streamers of fog went past the corner of her eye. “So it comes down to who gets killed,” she said finally. “I mean, we can have the courage of our affections and somebody else gets killed, or we can be scrupulous and responsible, and it’s us.”
The mere saying of it made her feel as if the top of her head were coming off. She straightened away from the fingers that were fondling her jaw and ear and cried, “Darling, did you think we could have an affair without damaging our marriages? Let me tell you something. I never believed in divorce either. And let me tell you something else. I was a virgin when I married and you’re the only man since. I take this as seriously as you do. I’ve wronged Burke at least as much as you’ve wronged your wife, and I can suffer as much as she can. And I haven’t got three of your children to console me.”
She turned her head, grimacing in the dark against the tears. His hand was fumbling at the back of her neck, and she felt the pins of her hair come loose. He touched her wet face and took his hand away, and she sat despising their wretched condition and their wretched scruples, and then she was twisting toward him, crying, “Bernard, listen, please! I’m no good at this. If you wanted a lover you chose terribly badly. I was brought up wrong, I can’t convince myself that anything I do is justified by my natural urges, and neither can you, obviously. I think we’re dirty and wicked, I really do. Don’t shake your head. But if we’ve been wicked, I’ve loved it, too, darling, see? I’m willing to pay the price. If we’re going to be wicked, let’s plunge, instead of nibbling ourselves to death with little lies and regrets. That’s the only way I can feel even halfway good about it. Otherwise we’d better go back to what we decided in Oaxaca, and cut it out of us like a cancer.”
The fumbling hand came through the falling sheaf of her hair and touched her neck, came around to her face. “Tears,” Bernard said softly. “Poor darling.”
“Don’t you think I’m right?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m trying to think.”
“I can’t go on being an importer of Japanese woollens!” she said. The pressure built up inside her as if every stroke of her pulse was the pulse of an air hose. “Oh, God,” she said, “isn’t it ridiculous what our emotions get us into! I wished I’d stayed in Pasadena and kept my mouth shut and lived forty years as an ornament on the doctor’s mantel. No I don’t. I wish I’d kissed you good-by in Oaxaca and gone straight out and slept with somebody else, anybody, some mule driver or someone in a bar, just to show myself that sleeping with someone isn’t this important. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I came up and broke it open again!”
Both his hands came down to catch hers in her lap. In a choked voice he said, “You’re tearing my insides out!”
“What do you think you’re doing to mine?” But it was only for a moment that she avoided his mouth. Then they were fused, the kiss clung and lengthened, his hands were on her. It was a long time before they separated; the anger was gone.
Laughing shakily, she drew her fingers under her cheekbones. “I never knew I was such a one to cry.”
“I’m feeling that way myself.”
“And there’s no hope for us.”
By the hair he pulled her head back against the seat, and with his lips against hers he said, “Darling, I don’t think I could stand doing what would he necessary for a divorce.”
But he would not let her move her mouth away. “I can’t give you up, either,” he said, and they were fused again. When they came lingeringly apart he whispered, “Some way, we’ve got to see each other. We have to!”
She took that in. “A love-nest?” she said. “Oh, Bernard!”
With his mouth nibbling at her ear he whispered, “How do you like your hell, partial or complete?” Looking past him, down across the bay, she saw the tilted slope of lights on the Contra Costa shore being wiped away as a wall of fog moved southward. The bridge was already gone, the Bayshore below the airport was going. It was coming over the ridge, too; the wisps were thickening past the windows. “Think hard, darling,” Bernard said. “Is anything more important than seeing each other every few days?”
Hopelessly she turned her lips to find his. “I don’t want hell at all, I want you. Maybe even that way, I don’t know. Now I suppose it’s getting late and you have to go home to your wife.”
His growl was unintelligible. His hand was busy at the buttons of her dress. She rocked her head, bruising her lips against his, saying, “No, no,” but she did not stop him. Her flesh jumped at the cold, complete marriage with his hand. Still clinging, not wanting to break the kiss even while they moved, they groped out of the front seat and into the back.
She was panting and stammering with passion, and yet she was not one in whom passion clouded or stopped the mind. While she fumbled in the dreadful awkwardness of finding a position, she was thinking bleakly that she had wasted her youth. A lot of girls she knew would have been handier at this. While she struggled with the clothes, and helped his hands, and heard him groan with impatience and frustration, she was thinking that this was where modern love brought you: to a lover’s lane where in the desperate constriction of a back seat, in a car parked among the beer cans and Kleenex and discarded condoms of clerks and students and juvenile delinquents and the emotionally and sexually dispossessed, you dispelled the fiction that you were much better, much different, or even more fastidious.
Love turned out to be a tall man, taller than she remembered, with a face that only forty-eight hours ago she had searched and memorized but that tonight she had not once seen clearly, a face with olive skin and large glowing eyes and a habit of smiling and easy laughter: a face in which the tenderest thing was the admiration she read there for herself.
His breath beat against her. He moved, and she moved to help and meet him. Instantly he swore, and she was jammed under while the hasty spasm convulsed him. It was so ghastly and unsatisfactory that she almost laughed. It was all right, she said, soothing him. Never mind, never mind.
But she was glad that he could not see her face, nor she his.
“You’re my life,” he said afterward. “You’re all there is. The rest is jail.”
“Ah, darling.” She touched his cheek and meant the tenderness even while she was reminding herself of where they sat, and how outside, on a dirty wind, trash blew past.
“We could get an apartment,” he said. “Where, do you think? The City might be too dangerous, we both know too many people. Berkeley too, I went to school there. What about Oakland?”
“I went to Mills,” she said, and listening to her own words she heard them as a criticism, as if she had said, “Shall we protect only you?” To rescue him, she said quickly, “But I don’t know anybody there. Nobody knows anybody in Oakland.”
They laughed. He said, “Darling, darling, I wish we could be open. But I don’t think, the way things are …”
She saw him loom for an instant into visibility as lights brushed them. He straightened up with an exclamation. “Tidy up!” Confused, she craned to look, and saw headlights bumping down, blurred in the fog, and two red lights on the car roof, one blinking, one steady. The highway patrol. Perfect.
Bernard stepped out and spoke with the policemen outside. They did not bother her except to flash a flashlight in the window—to make sure she was not a corpse, she supposed, or a fourteen-year-old—and move it from her to the registration slip on the steering column. Putting up her hair, which had all come down, she gave them her full face to look at, thinking, Oh, the hell with it, what does it matter?
The police were evidently suggesting that they move on. She could hear Bernard asking angrily if it had become an offense to park and look at the view. Dangerous, they said. Inviting trouble, and waited, one in the prowl car, one outside. Eventually Bernard put his face in the window and said, “I suppose we’d only complicate it arguing with them. Maybe we’d better just go, before they get too nosey.”
“Maybe so. You’re already late, anyway.”
“Can I call you tomorrow? After everybody’s cleared out of the store? Five-thirty, say?”
“Please,” she said, and put up her face to be kissed. He kissed her like a boy kissing his mother.
“Sweet,” he said, and searched her eyes a moment and turned away. The police car backed around, but did not go. Sabrina stepped out into the sudden damp chill and got into the driver’s seat and started the engine. Then Bernard came out after her, and after him the prowl car like a sheepdog. Bernard blinked his lights, she blinked hers in return, they turned opposite ways on the Skyline.
Every circumstance, she was thinking, cooperated to make the passion to which she had committed herself a pitiful parody. She hated the image of the two of them scuttling like interrupted high-school lovers from a lover’s lane. Still, the parody was over, his wife was expecting him home. Stooping, she held her watch under the cowl light: eleven twenty-five. A little over an hour. The importer of woollens had not much out-talked his time.
She supposed he was feeling mean and humiliated, and yet he had no reason to blame himself. For it had been she who broke the bond and picked up the telephone, she who suggested meeting and named the place, and she who, when he might have said good night and parted from her, challenged him with having to go home to his wife. She did not know herself: ever since this thing began it had been as if she were being pushed from behind in a direction she recognized but would not acknowledge.
When she turned off the Skyline down toward Millbrae the red top-lights of the police car went on and were swallowed up in fog. Now where? Home? To bed? A good cosy re-thinking of everything? Oh, no. She could drive for a while. Or she could—and this was what instantly established itself as desirable—swing down to San Mateo and, whatever the hour, talk to Barbara.
CHAPTER 8
SHE COULD throw out her thoughts as she might have thrown out trash, but then there was nothing left. She felt dead, left-over, strengthless, purposeless, and a cigarette that she put between her lips so nauseated her that she threw it away unlighted.
In fog that was thick and coiling like cigar smoke she felt her way back along shrouded lanes and across the quickly met, quickly lost blaze of El Camino crawling with yellow fog-lights. With little difficulty she located the brick gateposts that had once marked the service entrance of an estate she knew, and that now opened on the tract called Greenwood Acres. Of Barbara’s house, which she had been to only twice, she remembered that it was on a street named for some shrub, that it was on a corner lot, and that it was a flat-topped redwood. In her numb mind lay images of a short driveway, a carport, a walk of round cement pads, an overturned tricycle, an entrance under a flat overhang, a vine climbing a wall.
Turning in the gates, she brought her lights onto a white sign all but lost in the mist: Pyracantha. The street curved down toward the hazed aureole of a street lamp on the next corner. In the whole block there was not one lighted house—only saplings within their triangles of bracing poles, and angles of roofs, and box shapes of darkness melting into fog. Past her, as she drove slowly, flowed a curve of glistening curb and new wet lawns. She came to the corner—Ceanothus—and turned, hesitating, and crept on and peered hopefully at an entrance light but saw nothing surely familiar about that house, and nothing alive in it. The light was probably on to guide home some nocturnal teen-ager, while the parents got their careful sleep against the morning race for the 7:32. It seemed the wrong life for California, an inferior and imported life imposed on the place by immigrants ignorant of how life had been and might still be lived there. Bernard’s life, essentially, even to the teen-ager. His oldest was sixteen. She pinched her frown down around her headache and crept on.
Dim shapes repeated one another, delusive lights appeared and were gone again, until little by little she realized that she hadn’t the vaguest idea where she was. Ulysses buffeted around the whole Mediterranean could not have been more lost than she was now in what during her childhood had been a forty-acre horse pasture.
A street named for a shrub? They were all named for shrubs. From blurred street light to blurred street light the maze led her in circles and figure eights at whose re-entrant curves she found delusive names: Acacia, Laurel, Laburnum, Palo Verde. They were all fictitious—they were all the same street. The dark roofs were the roofs of the same six or eight houses, dismantled behind her and set up again ahead by some smooth stage machinery hidden in the fog. Very few were awake in this watery world. At a corner house, once, she saw the brightness of windows, and headed for them, but just as she rolled to a stop they went out. She crept on.
The windshield wipers squeaked back and forth in their hurrying semaphore. The fog lay over the whole Peninsula, over the whole of California, over the whole of America, over the whole twentieth century, like the sea over lost Atlantis, not blowing, not moving, but still, dense, settling. Her lights made momentary pearls of the fat drops hanging under leaves; a yellow sign that said “Children Playing” was streaked with forked channels of wet. The broken images upon which she had relied for recognition were worthless, for the driveway of each of these identical houses led to an invariable carport, and on every drive or sidewalk there seemed to be an overturned and forgotten tricycle. Each moment she felt “colder,” like a child straying from its object in a blindfold game. There was not a gas station, not a drugstore, from which to call—zoned out, she supposed, to keep holy the bedroom suburb.
