“Do you know why she broke up with Sam years ago?”
“I’ve always wondered. She would never tell me.” Looking at Kristin, he saw rain begin to fall against the window beyond her.
“This is his version,” Kristin said, carefully enunciating her words. “She accused him of being your father’s lover when he was a young teenager.”
Roy spoke quickly. “Robin is probably capable of something like that. She was the one hardest hit by finding out my father was gay. I can’t say I didn’t care, but I never liked him anyway. I was crazy about my mother. I blamed him for her leaving, which no doubt was true, but in the end he acted more responsibly than she in looking after us. She didn’t want custody. My dad did. When I look back, I think better of him than I did when he was alive.”
“What about the accusation?”
It was as if he had forgotten it. “Oh, that was not true, not true at all! The last thing my father did was ever show us any hint of that, and Sam was like a member of the family. To make a pass at my best friend would have been out of the question. My father was very discreet about his private life. Throughout the years I never saw him with anyone who could conceivably have been a boyfriend, unless some of his business associates doubled as that, and they were as old or older than he. Not to mention that Sam has never shown any gay tendencies as long as I’ve known him.” Roy snorted in derision. “He and I spent all our free time together in those days. When he would have had the opportunity to submit to my father’s, uh, seduction I don’t know—providing my father would have done that under any circumstances.”
“Would he have done it in the case of a sixteen-year-old who wasn’t your friend?”
The rain had increased in force, drumming on the roof and continuously washing the window he faced. “I don’t think so. My father, believe it or not, was pretty straitlaced. He was a reactionary except maybe in being gay. I can’t see him pursuing a minor, which is against the law, isn’t it?”
“What if,” Kristin asked, “Sam confirmed it?”
Roy hung his head. “No, no, that’s not right. There’s nothing right about it.” He punched the dashboard. “He oughtn’t say that sort of thing. That isn’t a joke. He’s in a crazy mood nowadays. I’ve never seen him like this. Maybe it’s the medication. Trouble is, he was wrong when he first accused us, but then events proved him right.”
“I don’t think we can blame it on events,” said she. “It was us—hell, it was me. I can’t blame it on you.” She held his face in her hands and kissed him on the lips but sweetly, not erotically. “I just wanted you.”
“I wasn’t an innocent bystander,” said Roy, savoring the taste of her fragrant mouth. He seized her hands as she was withdrawing them. “God, how I adore you.”
“I could never have guessed how affectionate you are.” She gave him a melting smile and kept her eyes on his. “Oh, my,” she said fervently. “Let’s run inside!”
They dashed through an intense cloudburst, which seemed to be timed precisely for their inundation, as if a great vat of water had been emptied directly overhead. It was the kind of harmless catastrophe that, along with ruining one’s clothes by means of mud or wind or playing with a pet, can be hilarious between lovers, and when Roy could not immediately locate his doorkey, they were further soaked by the even funnier gush from a lofty gargoyle poorly mounted for serious roof drainage.
“This is a great goofy kind of place for you to live,” said Kristin, as they finally gained entrance to the stout door and dripped on the hexagonal tiles of the vestibule below the staircase. “I’ve forgotten what you told us about who built it.”
She and Sam had been there just once. Roy always considered it as a novelty, especially his residence in it, and showed it as such. But he had not wanted to bore them and did not let them stay long. The three of them had soon adjourned to a restaurant. Those were the days when Kristin admittedly had had a low opinion of him. He was now somewhat disturbed that she would bring up an experience they had had that included Sam. And not only included him: Sam was the central figure in the trio, the only one who enjoyed the confidence of the other two.
“I’ll tell you about the guy later,” Roy said as they hustled up the stairs. “I don’t have time now.”
She had never been so beautiful as she was now, swathed in wet clothing, wet hair compressed against her perfect head, waterdrops still dripping from her eyelashes.
By the time they had reached the bedroom, both were naked except for those garments that could not be conveniently shed while holding one’s own in what, on the final lap to the bed, became a sprint.
“I won!” Kristin cried as her knee was first to touch down, and then immediately added, as her entire body followed, rolled over, and lay supine, “You let me.”
Roy was soon in the same position beside her. “Why do you say that?”
“I guess I don’t want to compete with you.” She rolled about, removing her remaining underwear.
“Gee, it’s all right with me if you do,” he said on a rising note. He wouldn’t take that seriously.
She collided with him. He could feel the immanent strength in her long, lithe person, which however slender was not in the least fragile against his bulk.
He lost himself in an act of love that became a continuum, with no remembered beginning and no anticipation of an end. It seemed all of life, now and forever. Then, when it was finally done, it had been but a measureless moment.
Once again the sky had lost its light while they were joined together. Tonight was even darker because of the rain still hurling itself against the leaded, multipaned windows.
They had only just let each other go at last when Roy reclutched her desperately.
“Stay here. Don’t go home.”
“I’d love to,” Kristin whispered. “How I’d love to…. But I can’t. I just can’t.”
“But he knows. He must realize we’re together right now.”
She sat up abruptly. “That clock of yours—Oh, nooo!”
He glanced at the big red numerals of the liquid-crystal display: 9:47. That was certainly unbelievable, but provided even more support for his cause.
He reached to switch on the bedside lamp. Kristin had become even lovelier through the uses of love, with now mostly dried but more disheveled hair and skin very near the pellucidity of pearl.
“You said before that you wanted to tell him—when you didn’t know he knew.”
“Yes.” She sank back on the pillow. “I had made up my mind.” She put her hands across her eyes. “So when I heard he already knew, you can imagine how I felt.”
“You can be proud of the nerve it took to reach your decision. You took the high ground. I didn’t have the guts for it. I lied.”
“You were protecting me.”
“I could claim that if I hadn’t caved,” Roy said in self-contempt. “But maybe it’s better in the long run that he found out before you told him. He’ll have had a little longer to come to terms with it, and you won’t have to face the worst of his rage.”
Kristin’s voice assumed her everyday style, cool and crisp. “That didn’t and doesn’t worry me. He never gets angry with me. When he’s displeased, he whines.”
It made Roy uncomfortable to hear something like that, as it would have done to learn of an intimate physical disorder known only to a bedmate.
He shrugged. “Well…”
“What I dread is he’ll believe this is something other than what it is.”
Roy agreed. “But it’s going to be a tough job to convince him of the truth. And I can’t blame him. He’s known me all my life. To him I’ve always been simply a lecher.”
She caressed his face. “Roy, I hate to, but I’m really going to have to leave. It’s ten o’clock. He’ll still be waiting for his dinner. He’ll be starving.”
That her husband could not feed himself—a hunk of bread, a chunk of cheese—was outlandish. “How you handle this thing between us and him is your busines
s,” Roy said. “You can speak for me in every matter. I’d be more than willing to help in any way, but I think I’d only make it worse. I’ve done too much of that already.”
Kristin sprang up with astonishing energy and began to collect her discarded clothes from the floor. “I’ll tell you how I’m going to deal with it. I’m going home and make farfalle with grilled breast of chicken, dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, kalamata olives, and nonfat half-and-half. I’m not going to say anything about you or why I’m late unless he asks.”
“If he asks?” Roy was up on an elbow in bed, watching her movements, as graceful as a dancer’s.
She bent, with an exquisite sweep of flank, to collect her skirt from the threshold. “He might well not ask. I doubt that he will.” She stepped into the skirt and closed the zipper with a flourish. She still wore nothing above the waist.
Roy at last left the bed to join her in reclothing themselves. It was something to distract him from the matter at hand, which had become more ambiguous than ever. The first garments discarded, out in the room he used as a gym, were the last retrieved. As usual, in her business clothes—today a brown pantsuit with a tan blouse—she was more formally attired than he in his jeans and corduroy jacket.
“Let me go there.” Kristin pointed toward the bathroom.
When she emerged her face was fresh and her hair back to normal perfection, though neither would have needed much restoring. Her makeup had always seemed minimal, and not even the soaking rain had changed the character of the short-cut fair hair that when dry conformed to the elegant contours of her head.
Roy was sitting on the Bowflex.
“Sam is supposed to exercise,” Kristin said. “But I can’t see him using anything as intimidating as that. If only I could get him to jog a little.”
Roy stood up. “He should have tried to cultivate a little self-reliance. You weren’t his mother.”
“He wants kids,” said she. “So do I. But it’s not yet the right time, though we can’t wait forever.”
However he might interpret that remark, he could make no sense of it. So he had no choice but to dismiss it. “The time for that’s gone by so far as he’s concerned. I never really wanted children before, didn’t not want them, just didn’t give the matter much thought. But now, with you, I want children very much, but when will be absolutely up to you. I won’t have any requirements.” He took her fingers. “I can’t demand that you love me. I just ask you to let me adore you.”
Kristin was still smiling sweetly, but with an undercurrent of discomfort. “Roy,” she said, turning his hands so that hers, though so much smaller, were in at least symbolic control. “If we are ever to see each other again—I mean, intimately—we really have to come to terms with just what we are to each other.” She peered keenly into his eyes. “We’re friends, we’re dear friends. We’ve had sex a couple of times, and it’s been heavenly. I didn’t know my body could feel the way you’ve made it feel. You’ve realized all my fantasies. Dear Roy.” She caressed his face again, as she had on previous occasions, all of them memorable to him.
“It’s been like a dream to me,” he said, “in which everything is the act of love, getting rained on, running through this place, leaping into bed. It hasn’t stopped yet. I’m still in a state of ecstasy, standing here with you in this nutty gym I made in the goofy place I live, if this could be called living. I want a real life with you.”
“I’m married.”
“Oh, I know—”
“I want to stay married, Roy. To Sam.”
“You can’t love him!”
“Why can’t I?” She let him take his hands back.
“And make love that way with me?”
Kristin looked sober. “I won’t go into our sex life, I mean Sam and me. I can’t stand it when married women talk about that stuff.”
“I don’t want to know about it anyhow,” Roy said hastily. “What I meant was the intensity of our lovemaking—you just said it was unique. How can you have that with someone and then live with someone else?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I can’t. It hasn’t been happening for very long. I haven’t had time to get adjusted. Maybe I won’t be able to.” She hung her head for an instant. “If I can’t, we’ll just have to stop seeing each other—in this way, I mean. We’ll still be friends.”
It was not she who was crazy, tempting as it was to believe that. But what validity did he have if, demented, he called himself mad?
“Stop being lovers?”
Kristin wailed, “I don’t want to, Roy!”
He reached toward but did not touch her. “It’s not the bed that’s important to me.”
Her eyes, gunmetal in the light that came from the several sources—floorlamps, overhead fixtures, sconces—dilated in amazement. “It is to me!”
In panic and chagrin, Roy surrendered to spite. “You can’t possibly want to stay with that queer. Whatever my father did with or to him, he must have liked it because he mourns him to this day.”
“Sam’s your best friend.”
“That’s over now. You should have heard the way he talked to me. I hate his guts.”
“Oh,” said Kristin, “don’t say that. You don’t mean it.”
“What in the world do you have in common with him? He’s wasted all his inheritance. He lives off you, runs up big bills, buying expensive gadgets for his own amusement. God knows he’s no gourmet. Does he appreciate your cooking? He’s a glutton. And you don’t want to say it, but it’s pretty obvious he’s not much good as a lover. As a banker, you know you would never grant a loan for any of his so-called business projects. You even begged me not to lend him any more money!”
“That was for both your sakes. Money is ruinous for Sam. He sees it only in terms of expenditure. He talks of investing, but he would rid himself of any investment that was profitable. He despises money. He would be miserable if he was stuck with too much to squander.”
“What in the hell do you see in him?”
“You’ve been his friend all these years.”
“I guess I’m just dumb,” Roy said. “You told me he doesn’t wish me well.”
Kristin shrugged. “That’s only envy. He needs us, Roy.”
“I don’t care whether he lives or dies.”
“Oh,” said she, coming to him, her arms at his waist and her cheek against his, “don’t say that. You don’t mean it.”
He found her embrace suffocating and hypocritical. “You better get going. Rush home and make his low-fat supper.”
This of course was said bitterly, but Kristin took it as literal. She stepped away. “I don’t even dare see how late it is now.” She gestured at him. “Let’s not say all is lost. Let’s have a little patience when it comes to us. Meanwhile, don’t turn your back on Sam when he’s in this delicate condition. I think we might be able to work something out that we can all live with.” She opened and closed her eyes ritualistically. “I’ve never made any trouble about Maria.”
“Your maid?”
“I suspect he’s been having sex with her for years. She worked for him before we were married.” Her smile was more tender than ever. “I’m awfully fond of you, Roy. I wouldn’t want to give you up. You’re a wonderful man.”
She kissed him quickly on the lips, with a closed, cool mouth, and hurried to the staircase. The heeltaps of her descent on the oak treads seemed to continue to echo even after the closing of the front door, but that, like all else about her that related to him, was obviously an illusion.
14
Roy saw Kristin and Sam at the lavish nondenominational funeral that Dorothea Alt arranged for the late Sy, but only at a distance that both parties were careful to maintain. His own companion was Margaret Forsythe, who had hardly known Alt even as a voice, for when calling on his own Sy preferred to reach Roy directly on the cell phone. But given her importance to Incomparable Cars, Inc., she felt obliged to attend the ceremony. The black dress looked good on Margaret’s figure, which w
as somewhat full but in the right places. She was not an unattractive woman. Roy himself had begun to look older than his years. They were not an incongruous couple. He sensed that such was her opinion as she clasped his arm on arrival and departure.
But though he was almost as sexually prescient as ever, he was now utterly indifferent to what had no bearing on his exclusive purpose, which for the first time was other than making the most of the good fortune that had made it possible for him as an adult to practice an enjoyable, relatively risk-free, and intentionally harmless way of life.
He had too often been in Kristin’s situation in a love affair not, after an interval of anguish, to understand hers. The difference was that he had had no spousely equivalent of Sam to go home to, nobody to look after but himself. On his part there might be regrets to one degree or another—sometimes, as with poor Francine, a regret that the affair had ever started—but his heart had never been broken. There was more than one woman who doubted whether he had a heart. The question had now been answered.
Kristin left a cell-phone message on his home machine several days after he had last seen her. “Things have been hectic at the bank, and I’ve really had to do some work on Sam. I guess he was hurt more than I thought, but you would know more about a male thing like that. But I think he’s coming around. After all, he’s only got one best friend in the whole world. As for us, it’s hard for me right now to find any time I can’t reasonably account for. And speaking of accounts, all the branches are being audited. The whole system is about to be purchased by Downstate, and I couldn’t be happier. I see much greater opportunity for someone like myself. First United has been marching in place for years. You’re with Downstate, aren’t you?…I’ve got to run now, Roy. Please forgive me. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can…. You know, I think if you made some sort of overture to Sam—it wouldn’t have to be much, maybe just call and ask how he’s feeling—you wouldn’t be rejected…. God, I miss you!”