Bad Desire (31 page)

What's happening to me? She put her purse aside, opened her notebook and took out her pen, trying to give the appearance of being attentive and taking an occasional note. But she couldn't think; she couldn't concentrate.

Mrs. Slater, if you don't believe me, why don't you follow them sometime? You'll see that I'm not lyin'
.

She thought for a moment she was going to faint. Was it possible that Henry was actually involved with a very young girl?

If she hadn't arrived late, Faith might have left the meeting right then, but she sat through it, minute by dragging minute, struggling to pay attention to what was being said in order to filter out the dread, to keep at bay the sense that when she stood and went outside, the thing, the failure of her marriage—whatever it was—would still be waiting for her and would devour her.

Finally, she couldn't stand it any longer. Toward the end of the meeting, she had to get up and leave because if she didn't she knew the tears would run down her face. Only one of the older women, a Mrs. Howell, took notice and came to Faith as she was drinking from the water fountain.

“Mrs. Slater,” she said, “don't rush off so soon. Don't forget we'll be having cookies and punch after the meeting.” And Faith had to explain that she couldn't stay.

She kept telling herself, Nothing's happened. It's just the stress of last night still affecting me. But on her way out, she stopped at the shelf of telephone directories and looked up Marjorie Sanders's address.

1210 Balboa Avenue
.

Starting the car and heading for home, she scolded herself severely,
You said you were going to quit this
. Again she resolved to put it out of her mind, and yet, driving through the old downtown neighborhoods, she began to notice the street signs flashing by. Faith drove slower and slower. There it is, she thought, Balboa Avenue. A sudden surge of anger caused her to press her foot down on the accelerator.

On the deeply shaded street, she watched the house numbers until she saw 1210 on the pilaster of a white stucco house. Taking her foot off the gas pedal, she coasted by the front of Mrs. Sanders's house. A car sat in the driveway, but no one seemed to be home. Balboa Avenue was narrow; the house faced across it, onto a small ornamental park.

Unfamiliar with this part of town, Faith turned and stopped parallel with the house but on the opposite side of the park. She found a gap in the hedges and evergreens where she had an unimpeded view of the stucco house. She checked her watch. It was three-forty-five; she had decided she could wait no more than a half hour.
Why don't you follow them sometime?
What Faith really wanted to do was to follow Henry, but she knew it would be too risky. He would recognize her car.

Twenty minutes later, a white Karmann Ghia convertible swung into the drive at the side of the white stucco house and the figure of a girl ran for the front door carrying a bundle of what appeared to be clothes. Faith was too far away to be certain who it was, even after the girl put the bundle down and fumbled for a key. But she
knew
who it was.

A blonde like that—there was little room for doubt.

They had dinner guests that Friday evening, and in light of the bombings, Faith wondered at Henry's expansive mood. He ate as though famished; he poured and filled glasses and drank wine. When the conversation turned serious, when the only thing anyone wanted to discuss was how to protect themselves from these madmen, Henry cajoled them back into feeling safe again. He razzed; he teased the men's wives. These were their oldest friends, but even so, Faith listened to his reassurances and watched him again become a consummate politician in the face of this crisis.

After dinner, as the men walked out on the veranda with their brandy and cigars, she overheard him offering to loan Jack Sutcliffe ten thousand dollars. She thought, Where did a young girl like that get the money to buy a sports car?

When the last couple sped into the night, Henry turned to her. “Let's get to bed, Faith, what do you say? I'm beat.” He was asleep before she had changed into her nightgown.

In the middle of the morning on Saturday, he said, “Faith, I'm going to run into town and see if I can talk to Reeves. Then maybe I'll find a game somewhere. You want to meet me at the Rod and Gun around six-thirty?”

Faith gave him a ten-minute lead and drove down to Balboa Avenue. The white Karmann Ghia convertible was gone. She pulled away. She could feel the pressure building inside her, drop by drop, but the car's not being there didn't tell her anything. I can't believe I'm doing this, she thought.

At five-thirty—an hour early and dressed for the Rod and Gun Club—she sat waiting on the other side of the park. The white Karmann Ghia came back at six-fifteen. It seemed an odd, coincidental time for Sheila to be returning—Faith had barely enough time to get to the club.

On Sunday, after a late and leisurely breakfast, she didn't wait to hear his excuse for not staying home. She wanted to see what he would do. “I'm thinking I'd like to drive into San Francisco,” she said, “and spend the day browsing through the galleries and antique shops—would you like to come along?” He appeared to consider it for several minutes before he said, “I've got a lot of things I should do around here. Why don't you go without me?”

At the bottom of Condor Pass, where the hillside met the city, she pulled into the back parking lot of the combination gas station-coffee shop. With her car concealed among other cars, she went inside, took a booth near the large front windows and ordered coffee. Then she waited, watching the hill road for Henry's car to appear. Her fingernails tapped on the Formica tabletop. If he was going to go to the girl, Faith had given him a clear field—to do so. She wondered if she had been too obvious about what she was trying to set up. She waited, sipping cup after cup of coffee, until the waitress became a nuisance. Nearly an hour and a half had passed. He wasn't coming. Convinced that if he was ever going to, Henry would still make a move, she paid, went out and drove to the park across from Balboa Avenue. The white Karmann Ghia sat in the sunny drive.

It wasn't until after lunch that Sheila went out. Faith followed her all that Sunday afternoon. She was clumsy at it, at first. On Canyon Valley Drive, she saw the girl going into her grandmother's house and drove past, thinking, This is stupid. By three o'clock she was trailing behind the little car more easily. Patiently, silently. Faith watched Sheila go into Mary McPhearson's house. Minutes later, the girls came running out and jumped into the car. She's not doing anything out of the ordinary. Stupid. Stupid. But she made herself stay with them.

In his rusty old Bronco, Denny Rivera pulled Sheila over in the late afternoon and Faith quickly stopped at the curb only a few cars back, afraid of driving past and being seen. She saw him grab Sheila by the arm and yell, “All right! To hell with you then! I'm going tomorrow. Don't you think I know what you're doing behind my back?” Sheila pushed him away then, and Denny pushed her back. Faith could hear their raised voices but she couldn't make out everything they said. She didn't want to know what they said. Doors slammed. Tires burned. Denny was gone; Sheila drove away.

Faith couldn't remember ever spending a more miserable or humiliating afternoon. I'm never going to do this again, she thought. This isn't like me. And besides, it's a complete waste of time. Chasing around after a high school girl!
For godsake!
I'm just not going to do this anymore.

On Monday evening, Henry called to say he would be in meetings until late. “Mr. Slater not coming home again tonight?” Luisa asked as Faith sat at the dining room table, looking at his empty place. She could hardly bring herself to answer.

On Tuesday, they had a quiet dinner at home, then he had to leave.

Late Thursday afternoon, when she hung up the telephone after he had called, she said, “Luisa, you can stop making dinner and take the rest of the evening off. I won't be needing you tonight.”

Faith was wearing a black velour sweatshirt and black velour sweatpants and she had her car keys in her hand as she went out.

20

Doing seventy on the interstate, the girl's white Karmann Ghia switched lanes and dropped from sight on the Bay Court exit. A few seconds later, Faith executed the same maneuver, sliding across lanes, cutting dangerously in front of another car and hitting the exit ramp in time to see, at the bottom, the girl's brake lights go dark as the car turned left.

At the bottom of the ramp, Faith hesitated at the stop sign, shifted gears and turned quickly in the direction the girl had gone—to the left, through the underpass. In the distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, she saw the rear of the white car sink into a tree-shadowed curve and disappear.

It was twenty past six—clear, deepening dusk. Faith knew she had to remain far enough back not to be seen but close enough to the Karmann Ghia to keep it in sight. I can't stand it anymore, she thought. I'm going to find out what you're doing or know the reason why.

Running beside a stream, the road twisted and curved, crossed a narrow bridge and cut due east through rolling farmland. Now and then, through the frieze of branches, she spotted the white car shooting away before her over a knoll. But the distance between them continued to widen. Faith thought, She's driving too fast for this road. Then it occurred to her: she's got to know this road like the back of her hand. Again, coming up over a rise, Faith caught a glimpse of taillights blazing, dipping from view.

She was trying to keep track of her mileage. She pushed her own speed up to fifty—as fast as she dared to go—and held it there. When she had driven about fourteen miles from town, she came over a hillock and saw the land fall away in a long sweep of fields. In the twilight, the road descended through it like a snail's shiny track. Not a glimmer of taillights met her gaze, not a speck of metallic white paint—the girl and the car had vanished. Only the winding ribbon of pavement lay before her.

What's happened? she thought.

Immediately, she let up on the gas and put her foot on the brakes. Clasping the wheel, she looked around. It's not possible, she said to herself. Nothing moved. Off to her right, at the top of a grassy ridge, she saw a thin veil of dust flying in the wind.
Where did she go?

Did Sheila pull off the road? Could I have passed her without knowing? Not possible, Faith thought, angrily. No, I couldn't have; I would've seen her.

She tried to calculate how far the girl had been ahead of her—half a mile, a quarter—and couldn't.
She has to be down there somewhere
. Faith continued driving for another mile, then two, then three miles, carefully looking for a place where the girl could have pulled in and stopped. She passed entrances to pastures, long rising fields edged with trees, a graveled place beside a big oak—the Karmann Ghia was nowhere in sight.
She got away from me. But how?

An intersection appeared before her, a one-lane dirt road that crossed the pavement at right angles. If Sheila had slowed to take it, Faith would have noticed the boiling up of dust, even at a distance. And yet, as far as she could see down the sandy side road, the air was clear.

Dust, she thought.

All at once she wheeled in the crossroads and went hurtling back. That dust, that damned
dust!
Now she could think of nothing else.

The fence surrounding the old orchard was broken out completely between its posts. She could see what appeared to be parallel indentations in the grass as if, long ago, a lane had been there—a lane that was now completely overgrown with grass. So that's it, she said to herself. That's got to be it. Wherever the girl had gone, it lay over that ridge.

She pulled through the broken fence onto the grass until the car was safely off the paved road. She turned the engine off, set the emergency brake, and taking along her purse and keys, got out of the car. A gust of wind whipped around her.

She discovered two shallow paths beneath the grass, with a slight hump between them—she could feel the topography beneath her shoes as she went up the rise. It left no question in her mind: it was a kind of invisible lane and it led somewhere.

At the top of the ridge, she drew a deep dizzying breath of sweet honeysuckle mingled with wood rot. She had the illusion she could see for miles, like a hawk. In the immediate valley below her, in the hollow between hills, sat an old farmhouse—it was so well concealed among trees that, at first, it appeared not to be there at all. Walking higher along the ridge, Faith could make out a shed or stable adjacent to it. Behind the shed, a stream ran to the ocean through a wide gorge in the hills and there, at the end of all she could see, lay the Pacific. The sun was going down in the west, giving the valley and the farmstead a brilliant patina.

But there was no sign of the Karmann Ghia.

This isn't right, Faith thought. Where could she have gone? If the girl had come this way, the farmhouse was her only possible destination—the creek would have prevented her from going farther.
So where is she?

Faith wiped her eyes. The top of the ridge was worn, sparsely matted with grass, the earth dry and powdery. She kicked up a little puff of dust. I'm not seeing something. She turned, still wondering, still looking around, and started back toward her car.

Maybe it was the nap of the wind-blown grass or the angle at which she looked or the shadow that had fallen across the back of the hill throwing it into stark relief, but she noticed it, then, clearly: the grass chewed in places, bruised by the tread of tires—the unmistakable twin tracks of tires, one of which ran between her feet.
She is here! She did come this way!
Faith whirled and ran back, up and over the ridge.

At the bottom of the long slope, a broken line of hedge flanked the imaginary lane, setting the house and yard apart from the derelict orchard. The evening was very still. Crickets were chirping all over the hillsides—a noise like slow, incessant sleep.