Cujo

  Camber suddenly smiled. "Regular little spitfire, ain't you?"

  She said nothing.

  He began to slip his belt back into the loops of his pants again. He was still smiling, his eyes still far away. "You suppose you can screw like one of those spitfires? Like one of those little Mexican spitfires?"

  She still said nothing, wary.

  "If I say you and him can go, what about then? You suppose we could shoot for the moon?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "It means okay," he said. "You and him."

  He crossed the room in his quick, agile way, and it made her cold to think of how quick he could have crossed it a minute before, how quick he could have had his belt on her. And who would there have been to stop him? What a man did with--or to--his wife, that was their own affair. She could have done nothing, said nothing. Because of Brett. Because of her pride.

  He put his hand on her shoulder. He dropped it to one of her breasts. He squeezed it. "Come on," he said, "I'm horny."

  "Brett--"

  "He won't be in until nine. Come on. Told you, you can go. You can at least say thanks, can't you?"

  A kind of cosmic absurdity rose to her lips and had passed through them before she could stop it: "Take off your hat."

  He sailed it heedlessly across the kitchen. He was smiling. His teeth were quite yellow. The two top ones in front were dentures. "If we had the money now, we could screw on a bedful of greenbacks," he said. "I saw that in a movie once."

  He took her upstairs and she kept expecting him to turn vicious, but he didn't. His lovemaking was as it usually was, quick and hard, but he was not vicious. He did not hurt her intentionally, and tonight, for perhaps the tenth or eleventh time since they had been married, she had a climax. She let herself go to him, eyes closed, feeling the shelf of his chin dig into the top of her head. She stifled the cry that rose to her lips. It would have made him suspicious if she had cried out. She was not sure he really knew that what always happened at the end for men sometimes happened for women too.

  Not long after (and still an hour before Brett came home from the Bergerons) he left her, not telling her where he was going. She surmised it was down to Gary Pervier's, where the drinking would start. She lay in bed and wondered if what she had done and what she had promised could ever be worth it. Tears tried to come and she drove them back. She lay hot-eyed and straight in bed, and just before Brett came in, his arrival announced by Cujo's barks and the slam of the back-door screen, the moon rose in all its silvery, detached glory. Moon doesn't care, Charity thought, but the thought brought her no comfort.

  "What is it?" Donna asked.

  Her voice was dull, almost defeated. The two of them were sitting in the living room. Vic had not gotten home until nearly Tad's bedtime, and that was now half an hour past He was sleeping in his room upstairs, the Monster Words tacked up by his bed, the closet door firmly shut.

  Vic got up and crossed to the window, which now looked out only on darkness. She knows, he thought glumly. Not the fine tuning, maybe, but she's getting a pretty clear picture. All the way home he had tried to decide if he should confront her with it, lance the boil, try living with the laudable pus . . . or if he should just deep-six it. After leaving Deering Oaks he had torn the letter up, and on his way home up 302 he had fed the scraps out the window. Litterbug Trenton, he thought. And now the choice had been taken out of his hands. He could see her pale reflection in the dark glass, her face a white circle in yellow lamplight.

  He turned toward her, having absolutely no idea what he was going to say.

  He knows. Donna was thinking.

  It was not a new thought, not by now, because the last three hours had been the longest three of her whole life. She had heard the knowledge in his voice when he called to say he would be home late. At first there had been panic--the raw, fluttering panic of a bird trapped in a garage. The thought had been in italics followed by comic-book exclamation points: He knows! He knows! He KNOWS!! She had gotten Tad his supper in a fog of fear, trying to see what might logically happen next, but she was unable. I'll wash the dishes next, she thought. Then dry them. Then put them away. Then read Tad some stories. Then I'll just sail off the edge of the world.

  Panic had been superseded by guilt. Terror had followed the guilt Then a kind of fatalistic apathy had settled in as certain emotional circuits quietly shut themselves down. The apathy was even tinged by a certain relief. The secret was out She wondered if Steve had done it, or if Vic had guessed on his own. She rather thought it had been Steve, but it didn't really matter. There was also relief that Tad was in bed, safely asleep. But she wondered what sort of morning he would wake up to. And that thought brought her full circle to her original panicky fear again. She felt sick, lost

  He turned toward her from the window and said, "I got a letter today. An unsigned letter."

  He couldn't finish. He crossed the room again, restlessly, and she found herself thinking what a handsome man he was, and that it was too bad he was going gray so early. It looked good on some young men, but on Vie it was just going to make him look prematurely old and--

  --and what was she thinking about his hair for? It wasn't his hair she had to worry about, was it?

  Very softly, still hearing the shake in her voice, she said everything that was salient, spitting it out like some horrible medicine too bitter to swallow. "Steve Kemp. The man who refinished your desk in the den. Five times. Never in our bed, Vic. Never."

  Vic put out his hand for the pack of Winstons on the end-table by the sofa and knocked it onto the floor. He picked it up, got one out, and lit it. His hands were shaking badly. They weren't looking at each other. That's bad, Donna thought. We should be looking at each other. But she couldn't be the one to start. She was scared and ashamed. He was only scared.

  "Why?"

  "Does it matter?"

  "It matters to me. It means a lot. Unless you want to cut loose. If you do, I guess it doesn't matter. I'm mad as hell, Donna. I'm trying not to let that . . . that part get on top, because if we never talk straight again, we have to do it now: Do you want to cut loose?"

  "Look at me, Vic."

  With a great effort, he did. Maybe he was as mad as he said he was, but she could see only a species of miserable fright. Suddenly, like the thud of a boxing glove on her mouth, she saw how close to the edge of everything he was. The agency was tottering, that was bad enough, and now, on top of that, like a grisly dessert following a putrid main course, his marriage was tottering too. She felt a rush of warmth for him, for this man she had sometimes hated and had, for the last three hours, at least, feared. A kind of epiphany filled her. Most of all, she hoped he would always think he had been as mad as hell, and not . . . not the way his face said he felt.

  "I don't want to cut loose," she said. "I love you. These last few weeks I think I've just found that out again."

  He looked relieved for a moment. He went back to the window, then returned to the couch. He dropped down there and looked at her.

  "Why, then?"

  The epiphany was lost in low-key, exasperated anger. Why, it was a man's question. Its origin lay far down in whatever the concept of masculinity was in an intelligent late-twentieth-century Western man. I have to know why you did it. As if she were a car with a stuck needle valve that had caused the machine to start hitching and sputtering or a robot that had gotten its servotapes scrambled so that it was serving meatloaf in the morning and scrambled eggs for dinner. What drove women crazy, she thought suddenly, wasn't really sexism at all, maybe. It was this mad, masculine quest for efficiency.

  "I don't know if I can explain. I'm afraid it will sound stupid and petty and trivial."

  "Try. Was it . . ." He cleared his throat, seemed to mentally spit on his hands (that cursed efficiency thing again) and then fairly wrenched the thing out. "Haven't I been satisfying you? Was that it?"

  "No," she said.

  "Then what?" he said helplessly. "For Christ's sake, what?" O
kay . . . you asked for it.

  "Fear," she said. "Mostly, I think it was fear."

  "Fear?"

  "When Tad went to school, there was nothing to keep me from being afraid. Tad was like . . . what do they call it? . . . white noise. The sound the TV makes when it isn't tuned to a station that comes in."

  "He wasn't in real school," Vic said quickly, and she knew he was getting ready to be angry, getting ready to accuse her of trying to lay it off on Tad, and once he was angry things would come out between them that shouldn't be spoken, at least not yet. There were things, being the woman she was, that she would have to rise to. The situation would escalate. Something that was now very fragile was being tossed from his hands to hers and back again. It could easily be dropped.

  "That was part of it," she said. "He wasn't in real school. I still had him most of the time, and the time when he was gone . . . there was a contrast . . ." She looked at him. "The quiet seemed very loud by comparison. That was when I started to get scared. Kindergarten next year, I'd think. Half a day every day instead of half a day three times a week. The year after that, all day five days a week. And there would still be all those hours to fill up. And I just got scared."

  "So you thought you'd fill up a little of that time by fucking someone?" he asked bitterly.

  That stung her, but she continued on grimly, tracing it out as best she could, not raising her voice. He had asked. She would tell him.

  "I didn't want to be on the Library Committee and I didn't want to be on the Hospital Committee and run the bake sales or be in charge of getting the starter change or making sure that not everybody is making the same Hamburger Helper casserole for the Saturday-night supper. I didn't want to see those same depressing faces over and over again and listen to the same gossipy stories about who is doing what in this town. I didn't want to sharpen my claws on anyone else's reputation."

  The words were gushing out of her now. She couldn't have stopped them if she wanted to.

  "I didn't want to sell Tupperware and I didn't want to sell Amway and I didn't want to give Stanley parties and I don't need to join Weight Watchers. You--"

  She paused for the tiniest second, grasping it, feeling the weight of the idea.

  "You don't know about emptiness, Vic. Don't think you do. You're a man, and men grapple. Men grapple, and women dust. You dust the empty rooms and you listen to the wind blowing outside sometimes. Only sometimes it seems like the wind's inside, you know? So you put on a record, Bob Seger or J. J. Cale or someone, and you can still hear the wind, and thoughts come to you, ideas, nothing good, but they come. So you clean both toilets and you do the sink and one day you're down in one of the antique shops looking at little pottery knickknacks, and you think about how your mother had a shelf of knickknacks like that, and your aunts all had shelves of them, and your grandmother had them as well."

  He was looking at her closely, and his expression was so honestly perplexed that she felt a wave of her own despair.

  "It's feelings I'm talking about, not facts!"

  "Yes, but why--"

  "I'm telling you why! I'm telling you that I got so I was spending enough time in front of the mirror to see how my face was changing, how no one was ever going to mistake me for a teenager again or ask to see my driver's license when I ordered a drink in a bar. I started to be afraid because I grew up after all. Tad's going to preschool and that means he's going to go to school, then high school--"

  "Are you saying you took a lover because you felt old?" He was looking at her, surprised, and she loved him for that, because she supposed that was a part of it; Steve Kemp had found her attractive and of course that was flattering, that was what had made the flirtation fun in the first place. But it was in no way the greatest part of it.

  She took his hands and spoke earnestly into his face, thinking --knowing--that she might never speak so earnestly (or honestly) to any man again. "It's more. It's knowing you can't wait any longer to be a grownup, or wait any longer to make your peace with what you have. It's knowing that your choices are being narrowed almost daily. For a woman--no, for me--that's a brutal thing to have to face. Wife, that's fine. But you're gone at work, even when you're home you're gone at work so much. Mother, that's fine, too. But there's a little less of it every year, because every year the world gets another little slice of him.

  "Men . . . they know what they are. They have an image of what they are. They never live up to the ideal, and it breaks them, and maybe that's why so many men die unhappy and before their time, but they know what being a grownup is supposed to mean. They have some kind of handle on thirty, forty, fifty. They don't hear that wind, or if they do, they find a lance and tilt at it, thinking it must be a windmill or some fucking thing that needs knocking down.

  "And what a woman does--what I did--was to run from becoming. I got scared of the way the house sounded when Tad was gone. Once, do you know--this is crazy--I was in his room, changing the sheets, and I got thinking about these girlfriends I had in high school. Wondering what happened to them, where they went. I was almost in a daze. And Tad's closet door swung open and . . . I screamed and ran out of the room. I don't know why . . . except I guess I do. I thought for just a second there that Joan Brady would come out of Tad's closet, and her head would be gone and there would be blood all over her clothes and she would say, 'I died in a car crash when I was nineteen coming back from Sammy's Pizza and I don't give a damn.' "

  "Christ, Donna," Vic said.

  "I got scared, that's all. I got scared when I'd start looking at knickknacks or thinking about taking a pottery course or yoga or something like that. And the only place to run from the future is into the past. So . . . so I started flirting with him."

  She looked down and then suddenly buried her face in her hands. Her words were muffled but still understandable.

  "It was fun. It was like being in college again. It was like a dream. A stupid dream. It was like he was white noise. He blotted out that wind sound. The flirting part was fun. The sex . . . it was no good. I had orgasms, but it was no good. I can't explain why not, except that I still loved you through all of it, and understood that I was running away. . . . " She looked up at him again, crying now. "He's running too. He's made a career of it. He's a poet . . . at least that's what he calls himself. I couldn't make head or tail of the things he showed me. He's a roadrunner, dreaming he's still in college and protesting the war in Vietnam. That's why it was him, I guess. And now I think you know everything I can tell you. An ugly little tale, but mine own."

  "I'd like to beat him up," Vic said. "If I could make his nose bleed, I guess that would make me feel better."

  She smiled wanly. "He's gone. Tad and I went for a Dairy Queen after we finished supper and you still weren't home. There's a FOR RENT sign in the window of his shop. I told you he was a roadrunner."

  "There was no poetry in that note," Vic said. He looked at her briefly, then down again. She touched his face and he winced back a little. That hurt more than anything else, hurt more than she would have believed. The guilt and fear came again, in a glassy, crushing wave. But she wasn't crying any more. She thought there would be no more tears for a very long time. The wound and the attendant shock trauma were too great.

  "Vic," she said. "I'm sorry. You're hurt and I'm sorry."

  "When did you break it off?"

  She told him about the day she had come back and found him there, omitting the fear she'd had that Steve might actually rape her.

  "Then the note was his way of getting back at you."

  She brushed hair away from her forehead and nodded. Her face was pale and wan. There were purplish patches of skin under her eyes. "I guess so."

  "Let's go upstairs," he said. "It's late. We're both tired."

  "Will you make love to me?"

  He shook his head slowly. "Not tonight."

  "All right."

  They went to the stairs together. At the foot of them, Donna asked, "So what comes next, Vic?"

/>   He shook his head. "I just don't know."

  "Do I write 'I promise never to do it again' five hundred times on the blackboard and miss recess? Do we get a divorce? Do we never mention it again? What?" She didn't feel hysterical, only tired, but her voice was rising in a way she didn't like and hadn't intended. The shame was the worst, the shame of being found out and seeing how it had punched his face in. And she hated him as well as herself for making her feel so badly ashamed, because she didn't believe she was responsible for the factors leading up to the final decision--if there really had been a decision.

  "We ought to be able to get it together," he said, but she did not mistake him; he wasn't talking to her. "This thing--" He looked at her pleadingly. "He was the only one, wasn't he?"

  It was the one unforgivable question, the one he had no right to ask. She left him, almost ran up the stairs, before everything could spill out, the stupid recriminations and accusations that would not solve anything but only muddy up whatever poor honesty they had been able to manage.

  There was little sleep for either of them that night. And the fact that he had forgotten to call Joe Camber and ask him if he could work on his wife's ailing Pinto Runabout was the furthest thing from Vic's mind.

  As for Joe Camber himself, he was sitting with Gary Pervier in one of the decaying lawn chairs which dotted Gary's run-to-riot side yard. They were drinking vodka martinis out of McDonald's glasses under the stars. Lightning bugs flickered across the dark, and the masses of honeysuckle clinging to Gary's fence filled the hot night with its cloying, heavy scent.

  Cujo would ordinarily have been chasing after the fireflies, sometimes barking, and tickling both men no end. But tonight he only lay between them with his nose on his paws. They thought he was sleeping, but he wasn't. He simply lay there, feeling the aches that filled his bones and buzzed back and forth in his head. It had gotten hard for him to think what came next in his simple dog's life; something had gotten in the way of ordinary instinct. When he slept, he had dreams of uncommon, unpleasant vividity. In one of these he had savaged THE BOY, had ripped his throat open and then pulled his guts out of his body in steaming bundles. He had awakened from this dream twitching and whining.