Clarkton (12 page)

Carrying the mixer of martinis and two glasses, he entered the living room, glanced casually at the girl who sat there, and then set down his paraphernalia on the piano. In the way he had of acknowledging a person without seeing her, he said:

“How do you do, Miss—”

“Miss Antonini,” she said.

“You had an appointment with my wife, and she's indisposed. Isn't there anything I can do for you? I'm Mr. Lowell.”

“I don't know,” she said.

He had seen her since he entered the room, but now she lived, and she became Miss Antonini. She was twenty or twenty-one years old, and she had a figure that ripped into him, that made him sick not instantly but progressively; so that his want, which had begun imperceptibly when he entered the room, pitched on a key so high that it pumped his heart and pressured his ears and drew sensation down into him like long needles thrust under the skin.

Outwardly, he was no different. This had happened to him before, but it did not happen often. It happened sometimes when he was walking on the street, and then it was something that approached and passed, like a sweet smell that the very laws of nature made unobtainable. It didn't pass this time, and he looked at the girl slowly and intently, meanwhile filling the glasses. She wore a black silk dress and filled it like one of those ripe black plums fills its shining skin. She had high, round breasts, a curved, narrow waist, a slight roll where her stomach was, full hips, and legs that were not slim or yet heavy, and all of this he saw before he really saw her face. She was not an exceptionally pretty girl, but her face extended his hunger until he felt an actual physical ache. Her nose was straight and just a shade too long to fulfill the Hollywood standard. She had full lips, a rather large jaw, and an unusually beautiful and long and shapely neck. Her eyes were dark, as was her hair, which she wore in a heavy bun at the nape of her neck.

He spoke her name out of need now, “Miss Antonini, will you have a drink, please? I'm sorry you had to wait.”

“That's all right.” She neither refused nor accepted the cocktail, and he stood there holding the drink, cataloguing her voice, which except for a certain shrillness would have been rather pleasant, the voice of an Italian working girl who grew up in Clarkton and who had put on her best black silk dress and high-heeled black pumps to come to the Lowell house—for any one of twenty reasons, none of which he cared about in the least, knowing that Lois, in the throes of a headache that signaled her frustration as surely as certain other factors marked his, had forgotten, shelved this factor, put it aside, put it out of her memory with all other matters that proposed contradictions. He wanted his drink desperately, but held it without tasting it and walked over to her and said:

“Won't you have a martini, Miss Antonini? I would have been having one myself, whether or not there was anyone here.”

Now she accepted the drink, saying, “Mrs. Lowell asked me to come here and have tea.”

“For tea?” Something clicked in his mind. He tried to remember; it was something that Lois had said to him, and he tried to remember but for the life of him could not. He stood over her, looking down at her face, at her breasts, at the cleft where the neck of her dress leaned forward, thinking that he would let his hand drop and slide gently over the surface of the silk, and she would not move, would not draw away, as her eyes told him, staring into his, open and calm, her upper lip curled a little, the fine dark down on it glistening with just a fragrance of moisture. But he didn't let his hand drop, and asked her instead if he could help her, if she wished to tell him what she was there for.

“I don't know,” Miss Antonini said, looking steadily at the tall, distinguished looking man who stood before her. “My name is Rose Antonini, and your son, Clark, was a friend of mine. Mrs. Lowell asked me to come here, but I don't know what she wanted to talk to me about.”

It came back now, and he stepped away and drank a good part of his martini. She sipped at hers. ‘The ache in him had become an actual pain, a physical pain that twisted his stomach, tightened his thighs, and gripped at his heart. He had to sit down. He said it to himself, I have to sit down, I have to sit down. He walked over to a chair and sat in it, and the girl said:

“This is a very nice room.”

“You're Clark's girl,” he nodded.

She neither confirmed nor denied the fact. “I don't know what Mrs. Lowell wanted to see me about.”

“I think she only wanted to talk to you—because you had known Clark.”

“I see.”

“Did you know Clark well—for long, I mean?”

“We had some dates. Almost whenever he was on furlough, we had a date.”

He found himself saying, and listening to himself somewhat curiously as he said it, “Clark and I were very close. He was my only son.”

“I know.”

“I suppose it must have hurt you too,” he said.

There was a puzzled note in her voice when she answered. “I cried when I heard about it,” she told him. “I had a brother who was killed at Tarawa. That made it worse.”

“What do you do, Miss Antonini?” he asked her.

“I work—at the plant.” Unnecessarily, she added, “I'm not working now.”

“No, I guess not. Are you married?”

She shook her head. Lowell could think of nothing else to say now, nothing that mattered saying and nothing that needed saying. His questions about Clark were formal; he didn't care. In terms of this girl, Clark had no association and no reality and no being, and in the fullest sense he was not talking about Clark at all. He was not talking about anyone or anything.

He saw that she was almost through with her drink, and he rose and filled her glass again. “These are very good,” she said. “It's too early for me to drink, and on an empty stomach it goes to my head.”

“I don't like to drink alone.” That wasn't what he had meant to say, but for the first time since he came into the room, she smiled at him.

“I have to be going,” she said.

“Finish the drink first.”

“All right. But then I have to go. I took the bus out here. Can I get a bus back?”

“I'll drive you back.” He wondered whether Lois would have offered her money. Recalling now what Lois had said, in the car the day before, he realized that she had given him the feeling that she intended to do something for the girl. But Lois had never seen Rose Antonini, and it was questionable whether she would feel the same way after she had seen her. He remembered the girls Clark had brought home that Lois liked; they were not like this girl. Asking himself whether she would expect him to offer money, the sick feeling pervading his stomach, his flesh and bones and spinal column, pushed the question away.

“It's funny about you being Clark's father,” she said.

“Why?”

“I don't know. It's just funny.”

“You're not sorry you came here?” he said.

“It doesn't matter.”

“I have no right to ask you this, I guess. You don't have to tell me if you don't want to. But did you care a great deal about Clark?”

“I liked him. He wasn't my only friend, but I liked him.”

“I see.”

She stood up and said, “I have to be going now. It's getting dark outside.”

He got her coat himself, an imitation seal, and helped her into it. The maid appeared as they were leaving, and he said, “You can tell Mrs. Lowell that I'm driving Miss Antonini back to town.”

13.
A
s soon as he got into the car next to her, he
knew what would happen. She didn't look at him; she looked straight ahead of her, but before he switched on the head-lights, he put a hand inside of her coat, against her breast. She didn't move; his stomach was empty now, the pain deep down in his groin. He switched on the lights, started the car, and wheeled it around. It was quite dark out now, and if she noticed that he turned to the right instead of to the left, which was the direction of Clarkton, she gave no evidence of it. He drove half a mile and then pulled into an empty cowpath, cutting the lights. There was no resistance on her part when he took her in his arms, but no response either. He kissed her with his mouth open, grinding her lips against his teeth until she cried out in pain, and from there she came alive, almost as if the muscles and nerves were live entities, waked from sleep. He pushed the coat down from her shoulders and tore at the dress. She said, “Don't—you're tearing it. Don't you see?” He tore the dress off, the brassiere too, and she whimpered like a puppy. “Not here,” she begged him, “not here.” “It has to be here! Jesus Christ Almighty, it has to be here!” “Not here in the car.” The bottom came out of his stomach, and he turned into fire. Her moans went on, but on a different note, a different key. He was hardly conscious of his fingers in the flesh of her back, his teeth in her shoulder; her body tensed in every muscle and joint, vibrating like a tuning fork.

14.
C
rouched in his corner of the seat, holding a
cigarette, his arm cradled over the wheel, he studied her profile, a black silhouette painted on gray that became flesh and blood only when she drew deep on her own cigarette. Rose Antonini—Rosa Antonini—Rosita Antonini—Rosolita Antonini. His belly was full now; he was like a cup holding sweet wine.

“You tore my dress,” she said. “It's no good for anything now, just torn into pieces.”

“You can have dresses, all the dresses you want.”

“I don't want dresses from you. I don't want anything from you.”

“You want me?”

The silhouette nodded. His thoughts were loose now, like pieces of flannel, and he let them slip around and slide and wave and go where they wanted to go, because he didn't give a damn about anything now, didn't care about the thought in his mind that Clark must have been a blundering, passionless, gawky fool with her. As the tension in his stomach, his heart, his groin, and all of his muscles and nerves and arteries relaxed, youth flowed into him and contentment.

“I never was with anyone like you,” she said. “I was afraid.”

“You're not afraid now.”

“Now I'm not afraid.”

He sat up, moved himself into place behind the wheel, turned on the ignition, started the motor, flicked on the lights, and backed out of the cowpath. Once on the road, he drove down the accelerator and they roared through the night.

After a little while, she said to him, “Where are you going?”

He didn't answer. He drove relaxed, slumped behind the wheel, keeping the car at a steady fifty miles an hour.

“Where are you going?” she asked him again.

“I have a place up in the Berkshires, an hour and a half from here.”

“I ought to go home,” she said.

“I ought to go home too.”

“Don't you care?”

“Not a great deal—no.”

“You could have any girl you wanted. Why do you want me?”

“How do you know I could have any girl I wanted?”

“You had them—I know.” And then, after a moment or two, she asked, almost childishly, “Are you like that with them? Are you like that with your wife?”

“How?”

“Mad, crazy, out of your senses.”

“No,” he said. “I'm not like that.”

“You feel better now,” she said.

“Yes. I feel better.”

“I'm glad,” she said, smiling, nestling up to him, her head against his arm.

They drove on, neither of them speaking, Lowell trying to recall something that Gelb had said while they were having lunch, something that related to this—but if slid away like the black road under his tires, like the wall of night, the trees, the star-splattered sky, the increasing roll of the hills, and he gave it up. He was in no mood to think, no mood to probe in himself. Now he was physical, alive and alert. He was becoming conscious of her; all night long, he would become conscious of her like that. He was becoming hungry; mile by mile, his hunger increased, until it forced him to grind on his brakes and swing into a roadside place.

“I can't go in,” she said. “I'm naked under my coat.”

“Keep your coat closed.”

She had opened it to show him. There was nothing left of the dress, and now he wondered where the strength had come from to tear it like that, to shred it like that. He stared at her naked body, at her large, firm breasts that needed no brassiere to hold them erect, and desire came like a wave, like a pulsation. “Not here,” she begged him. He pulled away from the roadside place, drove a mile up the road, and swung onto the shoulder. He was less ravenous now, he could be tender even, and afterward he let the car sit there a full half-hour, cradling her in his arms. Later, he stopped at another roadside place and left her in the car, while he went inside and got a bag of hamburgers and two bottles of cold beer. They ate them and then smoked cigarettes, silent, satiated, full; and then he drove on, climbing into the hills, where the piney northern slopes still held the early winter snow.

The house was built on the edge of a small lake, with a boathouse and dock of its own, a single-story affair of polished cedar logs, insulated for the winter as well as summer. It was damp inside, but he pushed up the thermostat and then set a match to the fire laid ready in the hearth. She came inside gingerly, tensely examining the raftered room, the big, deep couches and chairs, and the shelves of books that lined the walls to a height of four feet, mantling them under a weight of ship models, guns, and sporting equipment. A knock at the door brought her to bay like a startled animal, but it was only the colony caretaker coming to check on the lights, and after a word with Lowell and a ten-dollar bill, he walked off, determined to forget that he had seen anyone there—unless it was worth more to remember.

Lowell left her by the fire while he went inside. When he returned, he was wearing a'robe over shirt and slacks, and he bore on his arm a big, quilted, peach-colored robe of Fern's, which he handed to the girl, along with a pair of knitted Norwegian slippers. He had not felt like this with a woman before, not with anyone, not with Lois. He sat on the couch that fronted the fire, watching her as she slipped out of the cheap imitation sealskin coat, as she peeled down her black rayon stockings and kicked off the high-heeled shoes. She met his eyes and came to him, the peach-colored robe dragging from one hand. It was no longer cold. The fire was a roaring blaze, making a wall of heat between the couch and the hearth; naked the way he had not seen anyone naked before, the girl came to him, and life renewed itself, out of his groin, hammering at his stomach, clenching his heart.…