NO MORE THAN FORTY MINUTES later, when Max’s doctor came out to where Shar was sitting on the stairs, Shar had figured out the trouble. “A miscarriage,” said Max’s doctor, whispering; he bent to Shar with his hands clasped together. Shar, smoking, sucked on his stub of a cigarette.
Max’s doctor had been enlivened by the occasion. He had been easily available, propped up in bed in the room next to Max’s, drinking and apparently staring at the wall. When they came in Shar had noticed his toes twitching inside his brown socks, but nothing else—hardly a change of expression. “Not me this time,” Max had said, waving his flabby arms in a parody of despair. “You must come. Shar says—there is some trouble, the girl that I—that Shar—Some complications,” Max had said. “Get up, get up! What am I paying you for? What have I bought you for? Will you lie there drinking while someone is dying?”
Max, white-faced, had remained at his motel. He awaited a telephone call that the doctor now went to give him. Shar flicked what was left of his cigarette down the dark stairway. “Son of a bitch,” he said. Speaking to Max, the doctor was concerned and urgent, professional, clean—human—Just as Max was refined by his love for Shar, so was the doctor refined by involvement with pain, involvement with suffering. Shar, too, was refined by love and suffering, and he understood now the strange sense of fulfillment he had felt earlier. Fulfilled! He had been betrayed. A warning from Karen would have avoided this, but Karen had not wanted it avoided. She had demanded it; probably it had been her own death she wanted—she would have pulled Shar into death with her. “Do you think you know me?” she had said. What contempt, what scorn for him in that—he had never known her, he would never know her.
“Max wants to talk to you,” the doctor said quietly. He stood by the pay telephone, waiting for Shar. When Shar went to take the phone from him, he saw the man’s intelligent, nervous sympathy—his dark eyes, his forehead crossed with tiny wrinkles, his sagging flesh. Until now Shar had never really looked at him. “A miscarriage is not dangerous,” he said, touching Shar’s arm. Shar turned away.
18
The day before the Fourth of July was bright and clear and the influx of visitors to Cherry River was so great that business was predicted to be more successful than anyone had yet imagined. Though most of the crowd would not arrive until the next day, many of the motels and boardinghouses were already filling up—by noon the roominghouses on a side street by the shabby part of the boardwalk were crowded, with carloads of young men and boys and occasionally high school girls and other young women who had two days off from work, and whose gold-tanned faces and pleased eyes showed they were ready to enjoy themselves. There was some trouble early in the afternoon when a group of boys battered down a wall in one of the roominghouses, stomping through to a big, disorderly room that five or six girls were sharing: in the goodnatured scuffle, furniture was thrown through windows, smashing the glass and bounding to the sidewalk, someone was trapped up on the roof, and the entire length of the stairway railing was knocked down. Police intervened and established order. Another incident took place on the beach, which was very crowded, involving some six or eight young men vacationing from factory jobs and some Negro beach attendants, but the cause of this scuffle was a mystery. Police, who had been alerted to look for racial trouble, were able to stop the fist fights before they involved too many people.
The more luxurious side of the boardwalk was preparing itself for the national holiday. A team of workers struggled to put up a large crepe-paper flag, accurate down to the last five-pointed star, across the front of the largest hotel. It stretched from one side of the building to the other. Banners were strung across the busy street, flags appeared out of nowhere to decorate plate-glass windows and doors. The front of the gigantic racing stadium was a marvel of crisscrossed red, white, and blue banners that waved gaily in the breeze. On the big marquee before the central entrance a Negro was as far as the last word in INDEPENDENCE DAY RACE.
SHAR SPENT THE DAY IN his room with Karen. He had gone over to the track for a while in the morning, but had taken no interest in the car and had stared at people who spoke to him as if he did not understand their language. The mechanics muttered of his breaking down, but only to one another; everyone except Mitch avoided Shar. “Don’t you listen to none of that talk they’re going to put me in instead of you,” Mitch said. “That’s crazy talk. I ain’t ready for it yet and ain’t good enough anyway, not when they got you to do it. You still want to take it around, don’t you?” Shar had been staring at the young man’s smooth, polite face, but he did not seem to have heard Mitch’s question. Mitch took out a folded tissue and wiped his forehead. “I ain’t slept the last two nights for thinking of it,” he confessed. “It ain’t the car that scares me, nor the track, it’s something else—I ain’t so sure what it is. I got to talking to Vanilla—you know—was down at a nigger tavern last night, and he says he ain’t scairt at all; he’s all in a sweat to get going. The last man they had at their garage got in a crash-up and lost his nerve—why they let Vanilla drive it, and him that young. ’Course he’s been in the pit with them for four-five years. I told him you was the same—I told him you knew the car frontwards and back, better than your own body, and could take it apart and put it together better than the guys that built it. I told him—”
“I’m going back now,” Shar said. He touched Mitch on the shoulder and turned away. Mitch, his breath ready for a long, appeasing talk, an effort to draw Shar out of his silence, stared after him. He thought secretly that Shar looked sick or shocked, that something had happened to change him inside; but no one knew about it yet and had better not know. The difference between the Shar who had driven so skillfully a few days before in the qualifying heat and the Shar who now walked away, unaware of eyes following him, was so great that Mitch did not like to think about it. “Love always gets a man into trouble sooner or later,” one of the mechanics told him.
SHAR SAT IN AN OLD straight-backed chair by the open window, smoking as if in a trance; Karen lay in bed with a blanket over her, though the air was warm. The doctor had given her something to make her sleep and she had been sleeping for some time. One arm lay outside the cover; loose about her wrist was Shar’s wristwatch. She had awakened and in a petulant delirium had demanded something of Shar’s to hold so that she could sleep, and they had given her the watch, though the crystal was already cracked and the doctor was afraid she might hurt herself with it. Sometimes Karen murmured, “God, my God,” or “Shar—,” but she did not seem to be in pain.
While Shar sat by the window and watched her, Karen was having a dream. She was running through grass, up the slope before her home to join her father; his face when he embraced her was always rough, sometimes his arms hurt her. She was going to cry to him that it was done, everything was finished, clean, she had come home, but when he gripped her she shrank suddenly in size and the air turned hot and humid, and she was running in the air and waving her short arms and only after a minute was she given, still running in terror, to her father. She was seized by him—how young he was!—and she realized then that someone else had held her, had lifted her through the air—Shar—it must have been Shar—and she turned at once to see him, to see Shar as a child again. But when she turned, the dream ended; she saw nothing. She grated her teeth in anger and dismay. “Shar!” she whispered.
She woke. She saw him sitting a few feet away. They looked at each other. Shar took his cigarette from his mouth; his face was clean, clear in the vivid sunlight, his dark, secretive eyes were clear, turned directly upon her.
He did not say anything for a while. They could hear the roaring of motors from the stadium and the clamor of sounds from the boardwalk. Finally Shar cleared his throat and said: “If you want a baby you can have a baby. We’ll have one.”
He looked at Karen, but she did not reply. They fell into silence again. Shar lit another cigarette and turned to stare out the window into the street.
Some time later, when the d
octor knocked and entered the room, they still had not spoken. Karen fingered the crack on the watch face, and Shar sat and smoked. The room was flooded with sunlight. The doctor’s face was freshly shaven; he looked younger than Karen had supposed him. He smelled of soap. Shar only looked around when the doctor was closing the door behind him.
He got up and stretched his legs. A lean, hard-looking man: if Karen had seen him in a crowd her instinct would have protected her against him, turned her eyes safely away. “A hell of a world,” Shar said suddenly and self-consciously, “but at least it’s my own fault.” He laughed and looked at Karen, who stared at him without expression. His smile turned sour, his eyes showed knowledge of betrayal. He went back to the corner and sat heavily in his chair.
They did not speak again for hours. Karen slept a little, but her sleep was transparent; in the corner of her mind Shar kept his forlorn vigil. He got up and went out once, and Karen heard voices in the hall. He talked there with someone for a while, then he came back, and footsteps—it sounded as if there were two people—sounded on the stairway. He went to the window and leaned out, sniffing at the wind. Karen saw how his fine black hair was touched and burned by sunlight.
When the doctor brought food for Karen to eat she withdrew into herself and did not answer. The man’s face bobbed before her, he spoke earnestly, he touched her limp arm. Karen shrank away. When she opened her eyes he had left. Shar wandered around the room, still smoking, eating a candy bar. The wrapper was a waxy blue and curled back over his fist.
Karen watched him secretly through her lashes. She saw him with wonder. Her heart went out to him, she felt shame for her emotion. I can’t help it if I have fallen in love, she thought defensively. But the warm dark wall of sleep protected her from Shar’s eyes, and he could not know what she felt. The afternoon sun shrank away from them; shadows touched the wall. Karen saw at the top of the old-fashioned window behind Shar a row of flowerlike designs, delicate and crystalline, tinted pink. There were thin petals, lined with veins, and tiny stems and leaves. In the waning light they were rigid, cold, as though frozen in astonishment, in regret, at never having lived.
She woke when the door opened and someone came into the room. One of the men was Shar, she thought, and the other—maybe—Max; but she did not look up. She feigned sleep. After a few minutes of whispering, the other man went away and Shar remained, looking down at her. Karen heard the stairs sag and creak and supposed that it had been Max. It was dark now, and the only light came from the window: the sky was a vivid, glaring blue. Shar walked restlessly around the room for a while, then he went to sit again in the chair. Karen could hear him breathe. He looked toward her. “Are you awake?” he said.
When she did not answer, he settled back again and lit another cigarette. He tossed the match out the window. “I want to marry you,” he said. His voice was cold and angry. “I don’t want you to go back there. You’re not going back there. You’re staying with me.”
He did not move for a while. Karen must have slept again, for when she woke—her body was throbbing with pain now—Shar had come to the bed and was kicking off his shoes. He lay down beside her, his arms behind his head, his legs crossed. “It’s all right,” Shar said. “Go back to sleep.”
When she woke again, it was close to sunrise. The window was glaring with a cold, restrained light; the tiny flowers etched in the glass bordering the top were frigid. Against the white sky their pinkness seemed touched by blood.
Beside her, Shar slept with his head turned toward her, his mouth open. He had not shaven for some time and his face looked rough. He was still dressed and had taken off only his shoes—he had on white, soiled socks. His toes twitched now and then as he slept. Near his left eye was a small white scar she had noticed many times before. “A stone one of your goddam brothers threw,” Shar had said, touching the mark and rubbing it. His forehead was touched by faint lines. His nose was straight and slender. His eyes, beneath the thin lids, seemed trembling, blinking. Once he moaned softly and seemed about to wake, but did not. His long fingers moved hesitantly against nothing.
When he did wake, hours later, he got up and went into the bathroom. Karen heard the shower. He came out and squatted to take something out of his suitcase, which was set on the floor. Straightening, he got dressed. The room was still cold from the night before; Karen, watching Shar, began to shiver. He turned as if she had called him. “Are you awake already?” he said. “How do you feel?” He did not seem to expect any answer. His fingers slowed and fumbled with the buttons of his shirt.
While the doctor was with Karen for an hour or so that morning, Shar went out. He and the doctor did not speak, nor did he speak to Karen. Karen drank something the doctor gave her and accepted some pills. “I don’t have any pain,” she said. “It’s all over.” “It’s all over, yes,” said the doctor, smiling.
Karen could hear traffic outside. Horns sounded from a distance, and there were voices, music, firecrackers. The boardinghouse must have been emptied and rented by Max, because there were no sounds in it anywhere. When Shar came back, he found Karen sitting up in bed against the pillows Max’s doctor had arranged for her. “How do you feel?” Shar said. Karen nodded slightly. “He wanted to send a girl over here to stay with you while the race was on, but I told him no. I said you’d be all right. The house is taken care of and he’s got a guy downstairs watching it—You’ll be all right. Or would you rather have someone to stay with you?”
“No,” said Karen.
He was encouraged by her answer. He sat on the bed beside her. “It was a hell of a long day,” he said. He touched her shoulder but seemed to forget what he was going to say. She saw a patient, waiting perplexity in his expression. Pretending to yawn, he stretched his arms, made his arms go hard with muscle, and said suddenly: “After the race we’ll pull out of here. You’ll be all right if we drive slow. I’ll take care of you. Then when you get strong we can—we can—”
Karen’s silence slowed his words. She saw his mind racing behind his eyes, racing to rearrange itself, to understand what was happening to him. “I want you with me,” Shar said. He fumbled for a cigarette and matches. “I don’t want you to go back. You aren’t going to go back?”
He lit his cigarette and shook out the match. Karen saw that his face was clean, savagely pale about his nose, and that he had nicked himself shaving by his ear. Tiny ridges of blood had hardened there. “You aren’t going to go back,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”
Karen stared up at the frozen etchings above the window. Behind them the sky glared, vivid with heat, but they were poised in the same brittle tense designs: staring at them Karen felt her heart begin to pound, slowly and gravely and yet with a pleasant nervous anticipation, as if her entire life had led her irreparably to this moment.
“What do you want me to do?” Shar said.
With the knowledge of his love, she faced him as if in that instant she had somehow forgotten about him—Shar with his suspicious narrowing eyes, the tiny lines on his forehead that would soon turn to creases if he lived to be as old as her father. He had been a stranger and now he was familiar to her; she could not have said precisely when this had happened. The finicking nervous strength suggested in his fingers had been transmitted to her. She felt, gazing at him with the mild unhurried look of the possessor, that her tingling fingers would have been capable of touching him, fumbling against his chest, reaching inside his chest to stroke his sweating, pumping heart. Yet she wanted at the same time to embrace him, simply and utterly, as she had imagined she would someday. . . . But she said in the calm, ordinary voice she had despised so in her sister, “You make me sick.”
Shar’s eyes narrowed. Perhaps he did not believe what he had heard. He exhaled smoke and cleared his throat; for an instant he looked very young. Karen saw his boy’s face in that moment—a face within this face, something summoned up out of her own shadowy childhood to appeal to her. Shar’s gaze dropped. “Then what do you want me to do??
?? he said. For a minute at least he seemed not to know. His mind must have flinched before the idea—his lips curled up suddenly in a grimace, showing his teeth, as they had from time to time when the knife he carried inside him lurched against his delicate organs. Then he relaxed. His shoulders slumped. That was the look, Karen thought suddenly, that he hid against the side of her head, the exhausted, betrayed look he had always kept from her. He was old and yet he was a face from her childhood—strange, fragile man, who had disguised for so long his secret wound! She leaned forward, as if to penetrate his flesh, to see the stubborn hard skull beneath it. But if he dies, she thought, then I will die too. If he dies, everyone will die. No one will survive. As if prodded by her thoughts, embarrassed by them, Shar began to speak. His words seemed to come from nowhere. He might have felt the necessity of violating their silence without knowing how to do it. “Well,” he said, “I’ve done a lot of driving. I’ve been at it a long time.” He turned away and picked tobacco off his tongue. “I’ve been a lot of places. . . . There were other ones I wanted to see, but I’ve seen most of them. I measure out how old I am on the beginning of each year,” he said with the slow, modest air of one admitting a secret, “since he never told me when my birthday was. Each January there’s one more. And here I am, almost thirty-one, a half year from thirty-one, and I always said I would never live to be thirty, even; I would never want to. And I knew I would never live to be thirty-one.”
After he had left the room and was on the stairs, Karen put her hands to her burning face. She heard his footsteps. Without him there to keep her still she felt suddenly wild, lost, terrified—she did not know what she would do. She started to get out of bed, then stopped. “Shar,” she said. Was it possible that he would really leave her here, sick as she was, so far from home? She wanted him back, she did not care what he had done—She struggled out of bed, swaying, and went to the door. He was at the bottom of the stairs. She opened the door, her blood pounding so furiously that she could not see, and listened to his footsteps as if fascinated by them. Her vision cleared. She was staring across the corridor at something—it drew her gaze to it like a magnet. A fat cockroach crawling precariously up the wall, its delicate little legs visible at even that distance. Karen’s lips parted as if in awe. Her mind was emptied, her thoughts were sucked out from her. She did nothing. She did not call after Shar, nor did she look down the stairway after him. After a moment she realized that she was listening to nothing, that he had left.