For Gene, the wedding had an unreal quality, as though she had not really lived it, but had dreamed it, or read it in a book: her mother disapproving of Jack; Charley Long being a good sport and wishing her happiness; walking down the aisle of blue ribbon on her Uncle Alvin’s arm, with Mary Ellen playing the wedding march on the piano; so many people watching whom she knew only slightly or not at all. Seeing Jack and Arch Huber waiting before the minister, she had a moment of cold, knotted terror, and she had thought she could not go through with it.
And Jack had been strange that day. He had seemed shaken and unsure of himself. His face was pale under his tan as they drove up the coast to Del Mar.
He drove silently and she watched his hands, which were clenched tightly on the wheel. He still did not speak when he had parked the Mercury in the lot in front of the hotel and carried their bags in under the porte cochere. Gene waited at the elevator while he signed the register and received a key with a red, numbered tag on it, and they rode up in the elevator with the bellhop. In their room Jack tipped the boy and stood facing the door after he had gone.
Gene went over and put her arms around him. “What’s the matter, darling?”
“Nothing,” he said seriously, running his hand over her hair. “I guess I was just thinking I was pretty lucky.” He put his arm around her waist and they walked slowly across to the window.
The room was large and square, with ugly wallpaper and a huge bed that jutted without subtlety from the inside wall. There was a bureau, a closet with a mirror in the door and another door that led into the bathroom, and the window looked out over the lawn and the gardens and the tennis courts to the ocean that was darkening in the early evening, with a lace of surf flickering along the white beach. A long, stilt-legged pier ran out into the water. The piles made flecks of white against the heavy blue of the ocean, and the sun, like half an orange, was crouched on the horizon. Gene felt Jack’s hand move up and press her shoulder against his arm.
“Hungry?” he asked.
She smiled and shook her head. “I’ve got to unpack.”
“I guess I’ll take a walk. Do you mind, Gene?”
She shook her head. “Don’t be long.” She stayed at the window as he turned and left the room.
After a moment she saw him come out on the terrace below her and stride down the path across the lawn and past the tennis courts. He took long steps, his arms and shoulders swinging. She lost him where the hotel gardens fell away to the road, but leaning forward with her hands on the windowsill, she finally caught sight of him again, standing on the boardwalk by the fence that bordered the beach.
He was standing with his elbows resting on the top of the fence, staring out at the ocean. The sun had sunk to a reflected gold line on the water that pointed toward him, and Gene watched until the color was gone. Then she turned and began to unpack the bags, fingering Jack’s unfamiliar belongings as she laid them in the drawers or hung them in the closet.
After she had combed her hair and retouched her mouth she went to the window again. A breath of cold air came in on her face and the beach was dim in the twilight, but she could still see the dark shape that was Jack. She saw him strike a match and light a cigarette, and then he slowly walked toward the hotel. She waved as he came up the path to the terrace, but he didn’t see her.