"I knew you'd say that." She got to her feet, looking aimless and pathetic in her pink slip.
"I'm only saying what's true. Come on, now; let's just take it easy and have a good time." He walked over and gave her a little hug; but his smile froze into an anxious grimace against her ear, because in bending close to her shoulder he had caught a faint whiff of something rancid.
"Oh, I guess you're right," she was saying. "I'm sorry. You go and have your shower, now, and I'll finish up in the kitchen."
"No big rush," he said. "They're always a little late. Why don't you have a shower too, if you want to?"
"No, I'm all ready, soon as I put on my dress."
In the shower, pensively soaping and scrubbing, Shep Campbell wondered what the hell it was that made her smell that way sometimes. It wasn't that she didn't take enough baths—he knew damn well she'd had one last night—and it didn't have anything to do with the time of the month; he had checked that out long ago. It seemed to be a thing brought on by nerves, like a skin rash or a bad stomach; he guessed it was just that she tended to perspire more in times of tension.
But he had to acknowledge, as he toweled himself in the steam, that it was more than just the smell of sweat. That alone, God knew, could be an exciting thing on a woman. And suddenly he was full of the time last summer when he'd held April Wheeler half drunk on the stifling, jam-packed dance floor of Vito's Log Cabin, when her soaked dress was stuck to her back and her temple slid greasily under his cheek as they swayed to the buzz and clip of a snare drum and the moan of a saxophone. Oh, she was sweating, all right, and the smell of her was as strong and clean as lemons; it was the smell of her as much as the tall rhythmic feel of her that had made his—that had made him want to— oh, Jesus. It had happened nearly a year ago, and the memory of it could still make his fingers tremble in the buttoning of his shirt.
The house seemed unnaturally still. Carrying his empty beer can, he went downstairs to see what Milly was doing, and he was halfway across the living room before he realized that he had four sons.
He almost tripped over them. They were lying on their bellies in a row, their eight-, seven-, five-, and four-year-old bodies identically dressed in blue knit pajamas, all propped on their elbows to stare at the flickering blue of the television screen. Their four snub-nosed blond faces, in profile, looked remarkably alike and remarkably like Milly's, and their jaws were all working in cadence on cuds of bubble gum, the pink wrappers of which lay strewn on the carpet.
"Hi, gang," he said, but none of them looked up. He walked carefully around them and out to the kitchen, frowning. Did other men ever feel distaste at the sight of their own children? Because it wasn't just that they'd taken him by surprise; there was nothing unusual in that. Quite often, in fact, he would happen on them suddenly and think, Who are these four guys? And it would take him a second or two to bring his mind into focus on the fact that they were his own. But damn it, if anyone ever asked him what he
felt
at those moments, he could have described it in all honesty as a deep twinge of pleasure—the same feeling he got when he checked them in their beds at night or when they galloped under his high-thrown softball on the lawn. This was different. This time he had to admit that he'd felt a distinct, mild revulsion.
Milly was there in the kitchen, spreading some kind of meat paste on crackers, licking her fingers as she worked.
" 'Scuse me, honey," he said, sidling around her. "I'll get right out of your way."
He got a cold, fresh can of beer from the refrigerator and took it out to the back lawn, where he sipped it soberly. From here, looking down over the shadowy tops of trees, he could just make out the edge of the Wheelers' roof; farther down, beyond it and to the right, under the telephone wires, the endless humming parade of cars on Route Twelve had just turned on its lights. He looked away into the shimmering distance of the highway for a long time, trying to figure it out.
If it wasn't revulsion he'd felt, what exactly was it? An over-fastidious, snobbish disapproval, maybe, because their sprawled staring and chewing had made them look sort of knuckle-headed and—well, middle-class? But what kind of nonsense was that? Would he rather see them sitting at a God damn miniature tea table, for Christ's sake? Wearing tartan kilts? No, it had to be more than that. Probably it was just that the sight of them had broken in on his thoughts of April Wheeler—and he did have thoughts about her! All kinds of thoughts! Wasn't it healthier to own up to a thing like that than to hide from it?—had broken in on his thoughts of April Wheeler and shocked him a little; that was all. And now that he'd faced up to it, he gave himself permission to quit looking up Route Twelve and to concentrate instead on the Wheelers' roof. In winter, when the trees were bare, you could see most of the house and part of its lawn from here, and at night you could see the light in the bedroom window. He began to wonder what April was doing right now. Combing her hair? Putting on her stockings? He hoped she would wear her dark blue dress.
"I love you, April," he whispered, just to see what it felt like. "I love you. I love you."
"Sweetie?" Milly was calling. "What're you
doing
out there?" She was standing in the bright kitchen doorway, squinting out into the gloaming, and behind her smiled the Wheelers.
"Oh!" he said, starting back across the lawn. "Hi! Didn't see you folks drive up." Then, feeling foolish, he paused to drink the last of his beer and found he had drunk the last of it some minutes before; the can was already warm in his hand.
It was an awkward evening from the start—so awkward, in fact, that for the whole first hour of it Shep had to avoid meeting Milly's eyes for fear his own expression would confirm her worry. He couldn't deny it: there
was
something damned peculiar going on here. The Wheelers weren't participating; they didn't relax and move around. Neither of them wandered talking out to the kitchen to help with the drinks; all they did was sit politely glued to the sofa, side by side. It would have taken a pistol shot to separate them.
April had indeed decided to wear her dark blue dress, and she'd never been lovelier, but there was an odd, distant look in her eyes—the look of a cordial spectator more than a guest, let alone a friend—and it was all you could do to get anything more than a "Yes" or an "Oh, really" out of her.
And Frank was the same, only ten times worse. It wasn't just that he wasn't talking (though that alone, for Frank, was about as far out of character as you could get) or that he made no effort to conceal the fact that he wasn't listening to anything Milly said; it was that he was acting like a God damned snob. His eyes kept straying around the room, examining each piece of furniture and each picture as if he'd never found himself in quite such an amusingly typical suburban living room as this before—as if, for Christ's sake, he hadn't spent the last two years spilling his ashes and slopping his booze all over every available surface
in
this room; as if he hadn't burned a hole in the upholstery of this very sofa last summer and passed out drunk and snoring on this very rug. Once, while Milly was talking, he leaned slightly forward and squinted past her like a man peering in between the bars of a darkened rat cage, and it took Shep a minute to figure out what he was doing: he was reading the book titles on the shelves across the room. And the worst part of it was, that Shep, for all his annoyance, had to fight an impulse to spring jovially to his feet and start apologizing ("Well, of course it's not much of a library, I mean I'd hate to have you judge our reading tastes on the basis of— actually, they're mostly just the kind of junk that accumulates over the years, most of our really good books have a way of . . ."). Instead, with his jaws shut tight, he collected all the glasses and went out to the kitchen. Jesus!
He gave both the Wheelers double shots in their next drinks, to help things along, and he held Milly's down to half a shot because if she went on putting it away like this, in the shape she was in, she'd be out cold in another hour.
And at last the Wheelers began to loosen up—though by the time their loosening-up was over, Shep wasn't at all sure but that he'd liked them better the other way.
It began with Frank clearing his throat and saying, "Actually, we've got some pretty important news. We're going—" and there he stopped and blushed and looked at April. "You tell it."
April smiled at her husband—not like a spectator or a guest or a friend, but in a way that made Shep's envious heart turn over—and then she turned back to address her audience. "We're going to Europe," she said. "To Paris. For good."
What? When? How? Why? The Campbells, husband and wife, exploded in a ferocious battery of questions as the Wheelers subsided into laughing, kindly answerers. Everybody was talking at once.
". . . Oh, about a week or two now," April was saying in reply to Milly's insistence on knowing how long all this had been going on. "It's hard to remember. We just suddenly decided to go, that's all."
"Well, but I mean what's the deal?" Shep was demanding of Frank for the second or third time. "I mean, you get a job over there, or what?"
"Well—no, not exactly." And all the talking stopped dead while he and April looked at each other again in their private, infuriating way. All right, Shep wanted to say; tell us or don't tell us. Who the hell cares?
Then the talking began again. Leaning forward, interrupting each other and squeezing each other's hands like a pair of kids, the Wheelers came out with the whole story. Shep did what he always tried to do when a great many pieces of upsetting news hit him one after another: he rolled with the punch. He took each fact as it came and let it slip painlessly into the back of his mind, thinking, Okay, okay, I'll think about that one later; and that one; and that one; so that the alert, front part of his mind could remain free enough to keep him in command of the situation. That way, he was able to have the right expression constantly on his face and to say the right things; he could even take pleasure in realizing that at least the party had livened up, at least there was plenty of action now. And he was surprised and proud to see how well Milly was handling the thing.
"Gee, it sounds wonderful, kids," she said when they were finished. "I mean it; it really sounds wonderful. We'll certainly miss you, though—won't we, sweetie? Golly." Her eyes were glistening. "Golly. We're really going to miss you people a lot."
Shep agreed that this was true, and the Wheelers both withdrew into a graceful, polite sentimentality of their own. They would, they said, certainly miss the Campbells too. Very much.
Later, when it was all over and the Wheelers were gone and the house was quiet, Shep carefully allowed a little of the pain to rise up in him—just enough to remind him that his first duty, right now, was to his wife. He could hold the rest of it down for the time being.
"You know what I think, doll?" he began, coming to stand beside her as she rinsed out the glasses and the ash trays at the kitchen sink. "I think this whole thing of theirs sounds like a pretty immature deal." And he could see her shoulders slacken with gratitude.
"Oh, so do I. I mean I didn't want to say anything, but I thought that exact same thing. Immature is exactly the right word. I mean have either of them even stopped for a minute to think of their children?"
"Right," he said. "And that's only one thing. Another thing: what kind of half-assed idea is this about her supporting him? I mean what kind of a man is going to be able to take a thing like that?"
"Oh, that's so true," she said. "I was thinking that exact same thing. I mean I hate to say this because I really do like them both so much and they're—
you
know, they're really our best friends and everything, but it's true. I kept thinking that exact same—that really is exactly what I thought."
But later still, flat on his back in the darkness upstairs, he was of no use to her at all. He could feel the wide-awake tension of her lying there beside him; he could hear the light rasp of her breathing, with its little telltale quiver near the crest of each inhalation, and he knew that if he so much as touched her—if he so much as turned to her and let her know he was awake—she would be in his arms and sobbing, getting the whole thing out of her system into his neck, while he stroked her back and whispered, "What's the matter, baby? Huh? What's the matter? Tell Daddy."
And he couldn't do it. He couldn't make the effort. He didn't want her tears soaking into his pajama top; he didn't want her warm, shuddering spine in the palm of his hand. Not tonight, anyway; not now. He was in no shape to comfort anybody.
Paris! The very sound of the name of the place had gone straight to the tender root of everything, had taken him back to a time when the weight of the world rode as light and clean as the proud invisible bird whose talons seemed always to grip the place where the lieutenant's bar lay pinned on the shoulder of his Eisenhower jacket. Oh, he remembered the avenues of Paris, and the trees, and the miraculous ease of conquest in the evenings ("You want the big one, Campbell? Okay, you take the big one and I'll take the little one. Hey, Ma'm'selle . . . 'Scuse me, Ma'm'selle . . .") and the mornings, the lost blue-andyellow mornings with their hot little cups of coffee, their fresh rolls, and their promise of everlasting life.
And all right, all right; maybe that was kid stuff, soldier stuff, field commission stuff; all right.
But oh God, to be there with April Wheeler. To swing down those streets with April Wheeler's cool fingers locked in his own, to climb the stone stairway of some broken old gray house with her; to sway with her into some high blue room with a red-tiled floor; to have the light husky ripple of her laugh and her voice up there (
"Wouldn't you like to be
loved by me?"
); to have the lemon-skin smell of her and the long, clean feel of her when he—when she—oh Jesus.