Denton was dead.
He did not know what to say when V told him. He could only listen to her silently, for when she told him about Denton he knew she had loved her husband, just as he loved Gene.
It was Denton to whom she had gone when she left him in Bakersfield. It was to Denton she had devoted her Sunday nights. Denton had kept her till she could find a job; he had saved her when she might have been lost; he had been her refuge, father and friend. When she had found a job, not letting him get one for her because she was too proud, she had moved into Bakersfield, but every Sunday after work he called for her and took her out to the ranch, and she spent the afternoon, the night and Monday morning with him, riding his Morgan horses, and quail shooting, and playing cribbage with him at night.
She knew it was the same as being hired as a nurse when they were married. But she loved him and she was grateful; she knew what she owed him. He had had strokes before, and he suffered a bad one a month after their marriage. When he was well enough to be moved he had gone to a sanitarium in La Jolla and V had taken the apartment at the Orizaba, where she could be near him. After four months in the sanitarium he had recovered enough to go to Los Angeles on business, and early that summer they returned to the ranch.
In August he had the stroke that killed him. He had collapsed and had fallen from a horse he should not have been riding, and completely paralyzed, he had never regained consciousness.
Her voice had become lower and lower and Jack could not be sure she had stopped speaking until he looked up at her. She was staring back at him with her arms crossed on her chest, one hand to her throat, and after a long time Jack said, “Did he know about us, V?”
She nodded silently. Then she said, “He knew all that before he married me.”
“He didn’t care, unh?”
“No. It wasn’t like that. It was like he was my father. That was how he’d always been.”
He looked at her and she raised her chin defiantly. “That was how he always was,” she said.
That wasn’t what he had meant. That didn’t matter now. “Did he know about us, V?” he said again.
Her eyes looked dark and dull. Almost imperceptibly she shook her head.
It was only something else that must not be thought about. He supposed it was better that Denton had not known all of it, that Denton had been in the sanitarium where he could not know, and Denton was too much of a shadow for him to concern himself with. He had never met him. He had never even seen him. Denton was merely the pale, cuckolded phantom that had been V’s husband.
Denton was dead, as Red was dead, and could fade into the past. But Gene was still present, and suddenly Gene was thrust forward into it again. The first time he ever thought he wanted to die, thought the only way out, the only possible solution, was for him to die, was the night V told him she had talked to Gene.
They were sitting in his car in front of the hotel. He had just parked and switched off the lights, but when he reached across V to open her door, she said, “Wait,” and put her hand on his arm. He stopped and looked at her questioningly. She said, “I talked to your wife today, Jack.”
He stared at her. “What do you mean?” he said. “Where?”
“In the Sky Room.”
There was nothing for him to say. He saw V and Gene together. He felt drops of perspiration start, the cold, quick sweat that came when he had drunk too much and should start worrying about getting sick.
“You bitch,” he said finally, tiredly seeing V and Gene. He saw Gene taking it from V, who was beautiful when she was not, in expensive clothes that Gene could not have, wearing the clothes as Gene could never wear them. Slowly he turned toward V again, but her face was averted. He pressed his hands over his eyes. His hands smelled sour.
“I had to do it,” V said.
“Why did you have to do it?” he said, through his hands. “Why? What’d she ever do to you? Goddamn you, in your hundred-buck dresses and your diamond rings. I’ll bet you really put them on for her, didn’t you? Goddamn you, V.”
When V spoke her voice was unsteady. She said, “I told her she had to divorce you, Jack.” She put her hand on his knee. He saw her eyes shine in the light from the hotel door.
“I had to do it, Jack,” she said. “Will you listen a minute without getting mad?”
“Sure,” he said.
She licked her lips.
“Sure,” he said again, hoarsely. “Take away everything a guy’s got that’s any good…” He stopped, panting, and then he said, “And knock him down and push his face in the mud and then push his wife down with him and tell him not to get mad.
“Sure,” he said. “I don’t get mad. What’s there for me to get mad with? I’m not even a man anymore. I don’t have anything to…” Again he stopped. He was shaking violently. He looked down at V’s hand on his knee.
“You rich bitch,” he said.
“Stop it, Jack!”
He closed his eyes, pressing them tight shut but still seeing V and Gene. V was talking but he didn’t hear what she said. He couldn’t think.
He opened his eyes. “V!” he cried. “Let me be the one who does filthiness like that! Let it be on me. Look,” he said. “Look, I started it all. From the beginning it’s been me who’s done the filthy things. First you, then Red, see? Now let it be my doing about Gene.
“V,” he said. “Oh, Christ, I don’t know how to say it—but if it’s me I can take it because I can suffer for it. I can take it, if it’s my doing. But if it’s you I’ll…”
“Jack!” She raised her voice. “Gene’s just something in the way. I didn’t put her there. It seems like I’ve been fighting for you forever, and I’ve got to think of myself, Jack. Don’t you see?”
“No,” he said. “You didn’t get what I mean. I mean…” He felt the hopelessness of ever saying what he wanted to say, but he tried to speak calmly. “Listen, V: when I think about it— when I think about it right, it’s me who’s done all this. Well, just let it be me. If I got to feel the way I feel about myself about you, I don’t know what I’d do. I couldn’t stand it. I’d have to do something. I…” He looked away from her. The light from the arched entrance to the lobby of the hotel sent a bright stripe across the hood of the car.
“You said it’s been your fault,” V said. “Did you mean that, Jack?”
He nodded.
“Then why don’t you make it right? Get a divorce and we can get married and it’s all all right.”
“What did Gene say?” he said hastily.
“Tell me the truth.”
“She didn’t say anything,” V repeated, nodding her head as though to confirm the statement to herself. “She just…She just ran out. She wouldn’t say anything.”
Jack groaned and squeezed his eyes shut against seeing it. “Don’t you understand?” V said. “Don’t you understand this way all three of us are going to go on living in hell? But if you get a divorce at least you and I can be happy. And she’ll be better off.”
“I wish it was that damn easy.”
“It is that easy.” And then she cried, “Jack, you’ve got to do it! You’ve got to! It’s just going on and on and on and on!”
He felt his hands clench, sweating. He tightened his lips. “Oh, no, it’s none of your fault,” he said through his teeth. “You didn’t play it for all it was worth there in Bakersfield, did you? You made old man Denton happy, did you? The old man had heart attacks because he was so happy, did he?”
“Don’t you say that!” V screamed. “Oh, damn you, Jack. Don’t you ever say that!”
He stared down at his hands on the wheel. The tendons made tight ridges on the backs, but the lump where the right hand had been broken had almost disappeared. He was sweating and his breath whispered drily through his lips. “Okay,” he said with an effort. “I’m sorry. Forget it.”
“Oh, damn you, damn you, damn you,” V said brokenly. “We can’t do that anymore. We can’t let ourselves, Jack!”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He put the palm of his hand to his forehead and pulled it slowly down over his face, pressing hard on his eyes and nose and mouth, feeling the pain as his lower lip was torn down. Finally he said, “It’s just that I can’t stand to think of you and Gene.”
She didn’t speak for a long time, her head bent forward, arms crossed on her chest as though she were cold. At last she said softly, “Why can’t you make up your mind? You have to decide. You have to decide now.” Her voice was suddenly hard and dull. “If you don’t, it’s just going on like this. I won’t stop till it’s you and me and nobody else. Don’t you see? I want back what we had once so long ago I don’t think you even remember it. I want that back, not just a wild time in bed once in a while when we can’t stand it any longer, with you feeling like it’s a terrible thing you’re doing to your wife, and hating me for it, and hating yourself, too. I don’t want that anymore; that’s killing us. You have to see that.”
She waited for him to speak, and when he did not, she said, “I don’t want to hurt Gene.” She shook her head and put her hand to the side of her face. “But she’ll get hurt if she doesn’t divorce you. I’m going to get back what we had. It’s stuck inside me like a big hollow ball I can’t swallow or throw up or do anything with. It’s always there, and everything I ever say or think or do or want or don’t want or have or haven’t, sticks on it and can’t get past it or around it. It’s been there since…”
“I know about it,” he said. “I know what it does.”
She put the other hand to her face and bent her head forward. He put out his hand to touch her, but he did not, and finally she said, “Oh, God, Jack,” and her voice broke and he could hardly hear her. “We could be so damn happy.”
He wondered if they could. He wondered if anybody ever could. He remembered what it was she wanted back, but could it ever be the same? So much had happened to them since then, there were so many other people in it; everything changed and went on changing, and the hollow ball that was stuck inside him was now the fear that it could never be the same.
“Jack,” she said. “One night in Bakersfield I went to Ben to ask him if you wanted to get rid of me. He said I had the tools to hold you. He said I had the tools if I just knew how to use them.”
She stopped. Her fingers pulled at the edges of her skirt, arranging it over her knees.
“I didn’t know about many tools,” she went on. “I tried to use one; you know what it was. It ended up with Red Young getting killed and you going away and not wanting to come back. I didn’t know how to use that tool. I almost killed us with it.
“Now, I’ve been using the only other one I know. It works, too, like the other one did for a while. It brings you back to me and every time it does I almost cry because I’m so happy. But when you’re gone again I really do cry because I’m afraid it’ll kill us like the other one almost did. I’m afraid it makes you hate me too; I’m afraid it’s too big a thing for us to handle; I’m afraid that your wanting me so much like that is going to get so big it’ll kill everything else in us, and then if it should die or get killed itself, there’ll be nothing. It’ll have left us nothing, and we could have had so much.”
“V,” he said hoarsely. “Is that the way…? Is it already…? Is that the way you feel when I…?”
She shook her head violently. “No. No, but I’m afraid. We wouldn’t have anything left.”
He stared at her. He had never thought of her as being wise, or profound; he knew she was not. Yet she knew him better than he knew himself. She had realized and was terrified by the danger he had only vaguely sensed sometimes in the moment of drained and saddened truth after the moment of wildness. And now it terrified him too. Was it the only thing that brought him to her?
He slid down on the leather seat until his chest was against the steering wheel and his knees pushed against the dashboard. His coat was bunched tight under his armpits. And when he looked toward her again he knew it was more than that, immensely more, and with a quick movement he raised his hand and she was in his arms. Her hair was soft and fine against his cheek, her wet, cool face was buried in his throat, her arms were tight around him, her body pressed tight, squeezed between him and the steering wheel, her face was pressed tight; but it seemed unreal and impossible. V pressing her wet face into his throat, the feel of her back under his hands, were not real. It was only part of a dream that had been both nightmare and dream.
When she pulled herself away her hair caught the light and shone whitely. Her face was hidden in shadow and her voice was muffled. “Will you ask her to let you go?”
“Yes.”
“Now?”
“Tomorrow. I’ll go see her tomorrow. You go on, now; I’ll be up after a while. I just want to sit here a minute.”
V didn’t move.
“I just want to sit here alone for a while,” Jack said unsteadily. “I’ll be up in a minute.”
“All right,” V whispered. When she got out of the car he could see the tears shining in her eyes.