LYING FULL LENGTH ON the king-size bed, pillows propped behind her head, she watched the TV screen, seeing figures that meant nothing, hearing sounds that didn’t register. Through the thin door, she was aware of Nick’s bathroom sounds: his urine splashing in the toilet, his flatulence, finally the sound of the toilet flushing, followed by water running as he washed his hands.
After a big dinner, Nick frequently relieved himself. And in the mornings, too. Always, in the mornings. For Nick, regularity was a major preoccupation.
Now he would be standing before the bathroom mirror, carefully combing his hair, wetting the comb under the tap, critically examining the effect, arranging and rearranging, fitfully frowning. At age thirty-six, Nick was beginning to lose his hair. In the year they’d been together, the hair loss had been obvious. And, yes, the rate of loss was accelerating.
And, yes, it bothered him. A lot.
Because, yes, Nick was a vain man, therefore secretly a vulnerable man. In Porterville, a valley town just north of Bakersfield, he’d been a star high-school athlete. He’d been co-captain of the football team in his junior year—the same year he’d scored his first piece of ass. Of course, according to Nick, the girl had been a cheerleader, a blonde sophomore with the biggest boobs on the squad.
The biggest, the best. Whatever it was, Nick had to have it—have it, or believe he’d had it.
It was, she realized, a braggart’s giveaway, a telltale admission of insecurity that would always dog him. When she was a young girl, still in grade school, she’d felt the same need to brag, to make up the stories of classroom triumphs that she would take home to her mother. Even in high school, still searching for an identity, desperately trying to impress others, she had invented petty triumphs. Some of the stories she told to her mother, but most she told to other girls.
God, how she’d envied them, the other girls who seemed so incredibly secure, so supremely self-confident, therefore so blasé. She could still remember the names: Angie Hill, so smart, so vivacious; Helen Patterson, so friendly, so sunny, so popular; Maxine Leamy, so beautiful, so incredibly assured. Once, when she was a junior, Helen Patterson had invited her to a pajama party. She’d been ecstatic, hardly able to believe it would really happen. But then, lying in bed that night, three nights before the party, the terrible truth had struck: If she went to Helen’s, and to Maxine’s, and Angle’s, then she must reciprocate, must invite them to her mother’s small, dark, third-floor apartment, must introduce them to her mother, of whom she was ashamed.
At the thought, the shameful memory, she closed her eyes, bit her lip, fought back a sudden sob. Because it was now, only now, at age thirty-three, that she finally realized how much her mother loved her. Only now, during these last terrible days, these deadly dangerous nights, did she realize, fully realize, that in all the world only her mother really cared for her. That fat woman, living alone with her two cats and her enormous TV and her grotesquely ruffled furniture—someone named Nora, who had briefly loved someone named Charlie Giles—that woman named Nora was all she had. And she was all her mother had. They’d started together, and might end together. Because the clocks were ticking: the temporal clocks and the biological clocks.
And, somewhere, a murderer’s clock was ticking, too.
Because if the wages of sin were death, then the wages of stupidity were—
The bathroom door opened. Wearing only his Calvin Klein jeans, Nick stood motionless for a moment in the doorway. He was a solidly built man, slightly bandy-legged, with bulging shoulders, a short, muscular neck, and strong, short-fingered hands that he carried away from his body, as if he were ready to defend himself. His face was self-indulgent, heavily handsome, with dark, thick eyebrows, a wide, muscle-bunched jaw. The mouth was thick-lipped, the nose was short and broad. But if the face was heavy, often combative, the eyes were a clear, vivid, celestial blue. And the voice was quiet—tight, often, but seldom harsh, almost never loud.
“What’s that?” He gestured to the TV. “I think I saw it.” He frowned, looked at the screen. Charlton Heston was driving alone through dark, deserted city streets. A submachine gun lay on the seat beside him. “I did see it. What’s the name of it?”
She shook her head, shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t been paying attention.”
“I know I saw it.” Still watching the screen, he stepped to the closet, took a plaid sports shirt from a hanger, took a clean undershirt from a drawer. She watched the play of his muscles as he slipped into the undershirt.
The feel of his muscles straining against her naked body was part of her permanent consciousness, she realized, her secret obsession. Constantly, she—
“Soylent Green,” he said, snapping his fingers. “It’s one of those after-the-atomic-war things. Ten, twelve years old, something like that.” As he spoke, he unbuckled his tooled leather belt, unbuttoned his jeans, began tucking in his sports shirt. On the TV screen, Charlton Heston was striding purposefully across piles of rubble, his machine gun cradled in the crook of his arm. She looked away from the screen, away from Nick, who now sat in the room’s single easy chair.
“Why don’t you turn it off?” she said.
Eyes still on the screen, he let a long, deliberate beat pass before he looked at her. “Where’s TV Guide?” he asked. “Maybe there’s something else on.”
“I want to talk, Nick. We’ve got to talk.”
He sighed petulantly, got up, switched off the TV, returned to the easy chair, which he swiveled to face her. As if the dead TV screen had snapped some essential connection with the make-believe world beyond, she saw his face sag, saw his eyes go suddenly hollow. This, she knew, was the face of fear.
And in her face, certainly, he could see the same sag of fear, the same emptiness behind the eyes.
She sat straighter in the bed, drew up her legs. She was wearing a T-shirt, and she saw his eyes drop appreciatively to her breasts. Sometimes she thought her breasts were all that drew them together. Sometimes it seemed that, since her teenage years, the swell of her breasts was her sole definition. Did her identity depend on the stares she could attract? Did any woman’s? Was anything else a self-deceiving illusion? A scholar had once written that, when man began walking upright, the relationship between the sexes began to equalize, because intercourse was then accomplished face-to-face. It was, the scholar had continued, the essential difference between men and the apes. Then he’d gone on to equate the buttocks of apes with the breasts of women, both contrived to invite the male, quicken his sexual appetite, the buttocks inviting intercourse from the rear, the breasts inviting “frontal entry,” as the scholar had put it.
“We’ve got to go back,” she said. “This isn’t any good. We can’t live like this.”
His eyes darkened. “You can go back if you want to. I’m not going back. Christ, they tried to kill me. Can’t you get that through your head?”
“It could’ve been robbery, Nick. Attempted robbery.”
Emphatically, he shook his head. “No. He was going to kill me. That’s all he wanted to do. I was lucky, just plain goddam lucky. But I’m not going to give them another chance. It’s easy for you to say we should go back. You’re not the one they’re after.”
“I can square it, though, make it right. I know I can make it right, if we go back.”
“You’re kidding yourself, Betty. For all you know, you could be next. Me, then you. It makes sense. Perfect sense. Think about it.”
“I’m willing to take the chance. It’s all we can do. It’s either that, or keep running.”
“You might be willing to take the chance. But I’m not.”
“I want to call him. I want to tell him you’re sorry—we’re sorry.”
“Sorry.” Contemptuously, he shook his head. “Christ, you make it sound like a—a kid’s prank, what we did. A game.”
“It’s what you did, Nick. You. Not ‘us.’”
“Christ!” He jumped to his feet, paced furiously to the door, turned to face her. “Is this what it’s going to be like—blaming me, putting everything on me? I thought—Christ, I thought we—” He gritted his teeth, chopped the air with a flattened hand.
“It was a crime, what you did, Nick.” Eyes downcast, she spoke quietly, regretfully.
“Wait. Whoa.” He stepped forward: one coiled, light, stiff-legged step. “It was a crime what he did, don’t forget that.”
“But it didn’t hurt you, what he did.”
“And it won’t hurt him, either, what I did. I—Christ—you talk like I’m a stickup man, or something. A fucking hoodlum.”
Still sitting with her legs drawn up, with her shoulders and back pressed against the bed’s headboard, eyes still lowered, she made no reply. In the silence, she heard voices from the driveway outside—young, eager voices, laughing, cavorting. Had she ever laughed like that, ever felt like that?
Still angry, he was speaking again, belaboring her with words: “I’m thirty-six years old, and I come from a long line of losers. And I decided—really decided—that I’m not going to eat shit for the rest of my life, like everyone else in my family. I decided, by God, I’m going to make people pay attention. Very goddam close attention.”
“They’ll pay attention, Nick. When you go on trial, they’ll pay attention.”
“Jesus, that’s just what I need, you know that? That’s just what I fucking need, right now. Thanks, Betty. Thanks a lot.” He turned, went to his suitcase, took the revolver from beneath the clothing. He thrust the revolver in his belt, grabbed a poplin jacket from a chair-back, slammed the door on his way out. Moments later, she heard the car’s engine come to life, heard the tires squeal as he pulled away.