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Vega sat down between Cleve and Beth, and the waiter, who was an old buddy of hers, came up, as soon as she had adjusted herself, with her usual order: a martini, double, dry, with a twist of lemon. The waiter went up to the bar as soon as she had thanked him for it and began mixing the next. She always took the first three or four on the run. It amazed Beth to watch her. Oddly, Vega never seemed drunk.
Vega was all in black with a single small diamond clip at her throat and diamond earrings. On her they looked real, whether they were or not. Vega looked very very expensive, though she was quick to tell you the price of anything she was wearing. Her clothes were usually bargains picked up at sales in the better shops. Some of the shops gave her discounts, in return for which she told people she bought her clothes exclusively from them. She had this arrangement with at least five shops, all of them unaware of the others, and she lied to them all with charm and grace.
Beth watched her with an interest that intensified as the total of highballs went up. There were two gifts in the center of the table, one from the Ayerses and one from the Purvises. Vega ignored them.
“I’ve been teaching my girls how to walk,” she told them, “to rock and roll records. Are you familiar with Elvis Presley?”
“Polly’s got a crush on him,” Beth said. “I think he’s godawful myself.”
“You’re wrong,” Vega said. “He’s very useful. Especially with a gang of teenage girls. You put one of his records on and suddenly you’ve got—cooperation.” She emphasized the word and smiled. “They walk around the studio like so many duchesses—just what I want. I used to play Bing Crosby for them but all it got me was a slouch and a lot of behind-the-hands giggling. Now I play crap and suddenly they’re ladies.” She turned to Cleve. “Explain that to me, brother,” she said. “You know all about ladies.”
Cleve ran a finger over his moustache in the wrong direction. “Simple,” he said. “You have one rule: treat a bitch like a duchess and a duchess like a bitch. Never fails.”
“What has that got to do with Elvis Presley?”
“You didn’t ask me about Elvis Presley.”
“Cleve, are you drunk?” Vega said. “It’s against the family rules. You can’t be. We never get drunk,” she explained to Beth and Charlie. “Limber, but never drunk.”
“You’re right.” Cleve ordered another round and when the drinks came he stood up and Beth saw that he really was pretty high. “A toast,” he remarked, “to my charming sister, who is thirty-nine years old today. For the fifth time.” He glanced down at her and Vega smiled seraphically at the ceiling. “Her company is charming,” Cleve went on, while heads turned to grin at him from across the room, “her face is beautiful, her manners are perfect. Thank God I don’t have to live with her. Vega, darling, stand up and take a bow.”
Vega stood up with a lovely smile and told him tenderly, “Go to hell.” They both sat down and drank to that while Jean laughed anxiously.
“They’re always like that,” Jean said, “It strikes me so funny.”
Beth wanted to put a gag on her. Jean only wanted to make it seem friendly, teasing. Everybody in the Everglades had heard her husband and his sister. She wanted them all to know it wasn’t serious.
But Beth liked to think they really hated each other, for some weird romantic reason. It gave an edge to the scene that excited her.
They ordered their meal and Vega, as always, ordered with them. Beth wondered why she bothered. Maybe it was just to give the men an extra helping. Maybe it was to ease her conscience about her drinking. At least if she had a plate of food in front of her she could always eat; she had a choice. If she didn’t order anything her only choice would be to drink, and the people with her would take it for granted she was a lush. That would never do, even when she was with her own friends, her own family, who knew the truth anyway. It just didn’t go well with her elegant exterior, her control.
So she ordered food, and ate one bite. It was a sort of ritual that comforted her and shut up the worriers in the party who tried to force French fries or buttered squash down her. When they had all finished she could divide her meal among the men unobtrusively.
Beth yearned to ask Vega how old she really was, but she didn’t dare. She wondered at her own curiosity. Everything about Vega seemed valuable and interesting that evening. The glamorous clothes, the strange feud with Cleve, the dramatic entrance, the illnesses, the modeling.
I wonder how she’d like being a suburban housewife, she mused, and almost laughed aloud. Vega, with kids. Vega doing dishes. Vega, with—God forbid—a husband! On some women all the feminine ornaments and virtues only look out of place. Those women seem complete in themselves, and so it was with Vega. Beth couldn’t imagine her, sleek and tall and with a hint of ferocity beneath her civilized veneer, being domesticated by any man. There was something icily virginal beneath her sophistication that made Beth doubt whether Vega had ever given herself to a man.
Vega opened Beth’s birthday gift to her while the rest of them ate. “How did you know?” she said, so quietly that Beth almost missed it.
“It’s only a book,” Beth murmured.
“You picked it out yourself. I’ve been wanting to read it, too.”
It was such a personal exchange, almost intimate, that Beth was taken aback. Vega treated the book like a private present from Beth—as if Charlie, who after all paid for it and wrote his name on the card with his wife’s, had nothing whatever to do with it.
Beth found herself oddly drawn to this lovely, rather secretive woman; to the warmth of her voice and the way she spoke. Vega articulated carefully, conserving the small quota of air in her one remaining lung. And yet, her voice carried. She had turned the handicap into an asset, learning to develop and project her voice with the skill of a musician. It was pleasant to hear her talk, and she arranged her breathing so artfully that one was never aware that it was a chore, or that her very life’s breath came to her in half doses.
At the end of the evening the three women went to the powder room together. Beth found herself impatient with Jean, wanting her out of the way.
What for? she thought, amused at herself. And still her impatience persisted. She stood next to Vega at the mirror while Jean leaned against the wall and waited for them to finish with their makeup. Beth wanted to say something, something memorable and witty and complimentary to Vega, but her mind was too busy admiring the woman. She only stared at Vega’s large brown eyes and parted lips and puzzled over her.
“You know,” said Vega, startling her, “you should model. You have a good figure for it.”
Beth was nonplussed. When could Vega have studied her figure? But Vega was adept at observing people without seeming to. She had seen the restlessness in Beth, just as she had seen the ardent mouth and purple eyes and short brown curls, without apparently even looking at her. Now she turned to appraise her.
“I speak purely as a professional,” she said, her mouth showing a humorous twist at the corners. She gazed frankly at Beth now, up and down, stem to stern. “Turn around,” she said.
Beth said, “Vega, I could never model. I’m too old.”
“Nobody’s too old. Except my mother, and she was born fifty years B.C. You have nice hips, Beth.”
The remark, so casual, sent an unwelcome tremor through Beth, who tried to shrug it off. “I’m thirty,” she said. “Who wants to show their clothes on a thirty-year-old when they could show them on a teenager?”
“You’d be surprised,” Vega said. “Me, for one.” Beth stared at her. “Oh, not my own clothes. Only a scarecrow like me can squeak into those. I mean I like the way a woman your age wears her clothes, and so do the men who hire them. They have something no teenager has.”
“A woman my age?” Beth repeated dolefully.
Vega laughed. “You still look like a college girl, Beth. You aren’t, of course, let’s face it. But you look it.”
Beth gave her a wry grin. “I don’t know the first thing about modeling, Vega,” she said.
“I’ll teach you.”
Beth was secretly pleased, very pleased. But she wasn’t thinking of the makeup tricks, or the poise she might acquire. She was thinking, in spite of herself, of the pleasure of spending some time in Vega’s company. She had never been able to bring herself to form a lot of friendships with women. It was not possible for her to be friendly with them, curiously enough, just as it is rarely possible for a man to be friendly with women. Beth had known Jean Purvis for years now and knew her well, but they were still only acquaintances, not friends. And Jean, though she regretted it, understood this, and had given up long ago trying to pull Beth closer to her.
“I don’t know if I could afford it—” Beth began, but Vega interrupted her.
“It’s free, darling,” she said, with an injured air, and Beth, transfixed, felt the “darling” echo through her head with a dangerous delight. She hardly heard Vega add, “Charlie won’t mind. You have a housewife pallor, anyway. You need to get out. Come on down next week and we’ll make you over. Not that you need much remodeling.” Vega glanced again at Beth’s trim torso and smiled. Beth smiled back and there was a single brief electric pause before Vega said quickly, “Everyone all set? Let’s go.” And turned to leave.
The three of them filed out, Beth so close behind Vega that she stumbled against her once.
Chapter Four
BETH, RIDING NEXT TO CHARLIE ON THE WAY UP TO SIERRA Bella, put her head back and pondered Vega’s offer with a smile.
“What’s up, honey?” Charlie said, seeing her expression in the red glow of a stoplight.
“Nothing.”
She wouldn’t tell me to save her own skin, he thought resentfully, and a wave of hatred for her secretiveness, her airs, came over him. He tried to swallow it down. He didn’t want to ruin another evening, and this one held promises. Just a few, but still, a few. She had been receptive, pleasant with him, at the Everglades.
“Have fun?” he said, starting the car up again as the light changed.
“Um-hm.” How can I tell him so he won’t say no? she wondered. For she felt instinctively that he would object to her desire. It seemed to Beth that all the things she truly wanted to do, he didn’t want her to do. Travel— “You can’t leave me!” Work— “Your place is at home with the kids.” Hire a nurse— “You’re their mother!” Get a little tight— “Beth, you’re turning into a damn souse.”
She thought he was staid, stuffy; he thought she was wild, or would be if he didn’t keep a tight rein on her.
They undressed quietly by the light of one dresser lamp, and Charlie, watching the clothes slip off her scented flesh, revealing the fluent curves of her back and breasts, felt his body flush all over. He was overcome with tenderness, with a desire for wordless communication.
Just be gentle with me, yield to me this one night, he thought, trying to press the idea into her head with the sheer force of wishing. He would never have spoken such a wish; it would have aroused her contempt, or worse, her amusement.
Beth pulled open the wardrobe door, reaching around the corner for her nightie. But he pulled her arm away. “You don’t need it,” he said. “Not tonight.”
She let herself be held, submitting quietly to his kisses. When he seemed all warm and loving and tractable she whispered, “Charlie, I’m going to study modeling with Vega. Starting next week.”
He only half heard. “Let’s not talk. Let’s not spoil it,” he said.
But she felt that if he didn’t acquiesce now, in the mood he was in, he never would. “If you don’t say yes I’m going to do it anyway,” she whispered into his ear.
“Do what?” he murmured, pulling her closer.
“And we’ll have one hell of a fight over it.”
“We’re not going to fight, darling,” he told her with the confidence of his passion. “Never again. We’re just going make love twenty-four hours a day.”
“Where? The toy factory? That’s where you spend most your time.” Her sarcasm cut through his euphoria and the words registered harshly in his ears. He shut his eyes tight, shifting his weight a little. “Not tonight, Beth,” he begged her. “Please, not tonight.”
The pleading in his voice irritated her. If she had been another kind of woman she might have responded with a wealth of sweet reassurance; she might have been able to respond that way. But instead she felt disdain for him, the sort of scorn most women reserve for a man who shows himself a weakling. Charlie was not a weakling and Beth knew it. And yet it seemed that over the years, as the ominous cracks developed in their marriage, he had made most of the concessions to keep them together, and that too aroused her scorn. It was true that she would have suffered fits of guilt and loneliness if he hadn’t, and she was grateful to him for his “tact.” But the very role she forced him to play and thanked him for in her secret conscience, lessened him in her eyes.
Dimly, Charlie realized this too. But he was caught in the squirrel cage and there was no way out.
Carefully Beth said, “I just want you to say it’s okay.”
With a weary sigh he loosened his embrace in order to look at her. “Say what’s okay?”
“If I model with Vega a couple of days a week.”
His eyes widened then as he heard and understood, and he turned away from her, picking up his pajamas and carrying them in front of him. His unwanted love was too obvious and it embarrassed him. “Vega Purvis is a Class-A bitch,” he said.
Beth’s cheeks went hot with indignation. She whipped her nightie out of the closet and slipped it over her simmering head. If she threw her anger in his face now he would never agree to it. But to call Vega a bitch, when he hardly even knew her!
“I think she’s delightful,” she said haughtily, when the covering of the nightie gave her some pretense to dignity.
“Sure. Delightful. What in hell do you want to learn modeling for? From that winesop?” He climbed under the covers and lighted a cigarette, and there was a flood of misery in him at the sight of her drawn up stiff and chilly in her resentment.
“You say modeling like you meant whoring!” she flashed.
“Well, what does it mean?” he asked with elaborate courtesy. “You tell me.”
“I’d probably go down there once or twice a week,” she said, suddenly softening in an effort to bring him around. “It would be just for fun, not for money. I’d never model professionally. But it would be something to get me out of the house, something really interesting for a change. Not that goddamn interminable bowling Jean dotes on.”
“I can’t see that walking around with a book on your head is so damn much more interesting than shoving a ball down an alley.”
Her fleeting softness vanished. “I knew you’d be this way!” she cried. “Just because I want something, you don’t want it! When in doubt, say no. That’s your motto.” She continued to berate him for a moment until it became clear that he wasn’t listening. He was staring past her, beyond her, at nothing, thinking. And his eyes were dark and heavy. He held his cigarette in one hand, so close to his chest that she had a momentary fear the hair would catch fire and scorch him.
“Charlie?” she said, after a moment’s silence.
“Beth, tell me something,” he said seriously, and his eyes, still aimed at her, focused on her once again. “I want you explain to me what is the matter with our marriage.”
For a long minute neither of them spoke. And then Beth sat down on the bed, at his feet, biting her lower lip. “You explain it to me,” she said.
“I’ll gladly tell you all I know,” he said. “I know we have two lovely children. I know we have a pleasant house to live in, even if it is small. I know I love you.” There was a significant pause, in which she should have said, Of course I love you too. But she didn’t. He sighed. “I know we should be happy. There isn’t anything specific you can put your finger on that’s out-and-out wrong with us. So why do we argue all the time? Why, when we’re still together, we still have each other, and things are going along the right way—why aren’t we happy, Beth? Because we’re not. We sure as hell are not.”
Beth couldn’t look at him, at his frowning face. “If you’d pick up after yourself once in a while,” she said. “if you’d agree, just once, to let me do something I really want to do.” The spite in her voice piqued him.
“Oh! Now I understand. This would be a gloriously happy household if it weren’t for me, is that it? If the husband and father would just get the hell out, the family would be perfect. Right?”
“Cut the sarcasm, Charlie,” she said. She tried to sound firm but her chin trembled.
“I get it from you, dear. It’s catching,” he said. “Besides, I’m not convinced that you’ll swoon happily in my arms if I pick up my socks in the morning.”
She made a helpless gesture with her hands. “All right, Charlie, I’m at fault too. Is that what you want me to say? I fly off the handle, I’m cross with the kids. I—I—”
“You kick me out of bed three or four times a week.”
She turned a blazing face to him. “Charlie, goddamn it, I’m your wife. But that doesn’t mean that any time you feel like having me, I feel like being had. Three or four times a week is too much!”
“It didn’t used to be,” he said, his voice as soft as hers was loud. “What happened?”
Tears started to her eyes for the second time that evening and she turned away. “Nothing,” she exclaimed.
“Something must have happened, Beth. You just don’t want it anymore. Ever. You give in now and then to shut me up—not because you really want me.”
She covered her face with both hands and wept quickly with fear and confusion. “I don’t know what happened,” she admitted finally.
He leaned toward her, hating to hurt her. “Beth, I’d do anything for you,” he said earnestly. “I’d let you go model in Timbuktu if that would make you happy. But it won’t. All these things you think you want so badly—did you ever stop to examine them? What are they? So many escapes. You’re running away. The one thing you can’t stand, you can’t bear to face or live with or understand, is your relationship with me. Your home. Your kids. But mostly me. Are you sorry we got married, Beth? Tell the truth?”
There was a terrible, painful pause. It took all of her courage to admit, “I don’t know. That’s the truth. I don’t know.”
He shut his eyes for a moment, as if to recover a little.
“Do you love me, then?”
She swallowed. “Yes,” she said. Her courage would not stretch so far as to let her hedge on that one. “Do you love the kids?”
She caught her breath and bit her lip. I will be truthful, I’ll be as truthful as I can, she told herself sharply.
“Do you love the kids, honey?” he prompted her.
“When they’re not around,” she blurted, and gave an awful sob, covering her wicked mouth with one hand. When she could talk a little she said, “I love them, I love them terribly, but I just can’t stand them. Does that make any sense?”
He lay back on the bed and gazed at the ceiling. The sight of Beth tore his heart. “Not to me, it doesn’t,” he said. And seeing her despair, he added, “But at least it’s the truth, Beth, Thank you for that much, anyway.” There was no sarcasm in his voice now.
Beth got up and walked back and forth at the foot of the bed. “I know I’m not the world’s greatest mother, Charlie. Far from it.” She wiped her eyes impatiently. “Or the best wife. I guess I hound you all the time because I’m ashamed of my own behavior. At least that’s part of it. You’re no dreamboat yourself sometimes.” She turned to look at him and he nodded without answering.
“The trouble is, I just don’t know what I would be good at,” she said helplessly. “I don’t know what I want to do. I wish I could want something, good and hard, and it would be the right thing. Sometimes I wish somebody would tell me what I want. Maybe my ideas about traveling and the rest of it are just daydreams. Escape, or whatever you said. But Charlie, that’s not criminal. I need an escape. I really do.” She felt a note of semi-hysteria pulling her voice higher and higher and she stopped talking for a minute to catch her breath.
“I wanted to go to Mexico last year. You said no. I want to get that MG we saw in Monrovia. You said no. I have a couple of cocktails by myself in the afternoon and you blow your top. You think I’m headed for Skid Row. I ask to go home and visit Uncle John. No again.”
“The last time you visited Uncle John,” Charlie pointed out with heat, “I didn’t see you for four whole months.”
“And those four months saved my sanity!” she cried, thrusting her angry chin toward him.
He lighted another cigarette in offended silence.
After a moment she resumed, trying to keep her voice level, “Now I want to model a couple of days a week. Is that so very awful? Am I really a case for the bughouse because I want to escape once in a while?” She tried, with her voice, to make it seem ridiculous.
“If it were only once in a while,” he said sadly. They were silent again. Beth had stopped her pacing and he look at her lovely figure, shadowy beneath the nylon film of nightie. He wanted her so much … so much. At last he said, quietly, “Well, I guess it’s better than losing you to Uncle John for half a year.”
She turned around slowly and her face was grateful. “Thanks, Charlie,” she said. “I would have done it anyway, but—” She was sorry she had said it. He looked so despondent, utterly stripped of his husbandly influence, almost a stranger to her. “But I wanted you to approve,” she went on hastily. “I wanted to be able to tell you about it and everything.” He refused to look at her. “She—she’s doing it for nothing.” Beth added, hoping to make it more acceptable to him.
He laughed unpleasantly. “She’s doing it for something, Beth. Not money, maybe, but something. Vega’s not the kind of girl who does things for nothing.”
She went around the bed and sat down beside him. “Look at me, honey,” she said. “I want to thank you.”
“I know,” he answered, but the thought of her kiss suddenly made him weak and a little sick. He sat up, turning to give her his back and was suddenly mortified to feel her lips on it in a brief shy salute. He froze.
“Beth,” he said sternly. “Vega is a strange girl. You should know …”
“Know what?” she said eagerly.
“Cleve has told me,” he said reluctantly. “She’s been married a couple of times.”
“To whom? Beth interrupted, astonished. Vega? Married?
“Well, I didn’t know them. The first marriage was ideal, by your lights: she lived in Chicago and he lived in Boston. For eight years. Cleve said she never let him in her bed. His name was Ray something. She calls him ex-Ray.”
Beth had to grin at his back. It began to sound more like the elegant enigma she knew. “Who was the other one?” she asked.
“Some good-timer, backslapping sort of guy. A roommate of Cleve’s once, before I knew him. Younger than Vega. It’s only been two years since she divorced that one. I guess he didn’t get past the bedroom door either, but he did get into her bank account. Spent all her money and then disappeared. Nobody knows where he is. She never talks about him.”
“Well,” Beth said cautiously, “that’s not so strange. I mean, she obviously wasn’t a good marriage risk, but lots of women have behaved that way. Maybe the men she picked weren’t such prizes either.”
He shrugged. “Maybe.” He turned to look at her. “She lives alone with her mother and her grandfather. Cleve says they’re a trio of cuckoo birds. You can’t get him over there. Except Christmas and birthdays, and he only goes because he feels he has to.”