He thought this would bring some faint spark of protest, but she had only looked at him in her shy, wanting-to-please way. Her voice had been low and meek and obedient. All tight, Tom.
Pitch it then.
She pitched it. Tom had been in a good humor for the rest of that night.
A few weeks later, coming out of a movie, she unthinkingly lit a cigarette in the lobby and puffed it as they walked across the parking lot to the car. It had been a bitter November night, the wind chopping like a maniac at any exposed square inch of flesh it could find. Tom remembered he had been able to smell the lake, as you sometimes could on cold nights-a flat smell that was both fishy and somehow empty. He let her smoke the cigarette. He even opened her door for her when they got to the car. He got in behind the wheel, closed his own door, and then said: Bev?
She took the cigarette out of her mouth, turned toward him, inquiring, and he unloaded on her pretty good, his hard open hand stroking across her cheek hard enough to make his palm tingle, hard enough to rock her head back against the headrest. Her eyes widened with surprise and pain... and something else as well. Her own hand flew to her cheek to investigate the warmth and tingling numbness there. She cried out Owww! Tom!
He looked at her, eyes narrowed, mouth smiling casually, completely alive, ready to see what would come next, how she would react. His cock was stiffening in his pants, but he barely noticed. That was for later. For now, school was in session. He replayed what had just happened. Her face. What had that third expression been, there for a bare instant and then gone? First the surprise. Then the pain. Then the
(nostalgia)
look of a memory... of some memory. It had only been for a moment. He didn't think she even knew it had been there, on her face or in her mind.
Now: now. It would all be in the first thing she didn't say. He knew that as well as his own name.
It wasn't You son of a bitch!
It wasn't See you later, Macho City.
It wasn't We're through, Tom.
She only looked at him with her wounded, brimming hazel eyes and said: Why did you do that? Then she tried to say something else and burst into tears instead.
Throw it out.
What? What, Tom? Her make-up was running down her face in muddy tracks. He didn't mind that. He kind of liked seeing her that way. It was messy, but there was something sexy about it, too. Slutty. Kind of exciting.
The cigarette. Throw it out.
Realization dawning. And with it, guilt.
I just forgot! she cried. That's all!
Throw it out, Bev, or you're going to get another shot.
She rolled the window down and pitched the cigarette. Then she turned back to him, her face pale and scared and somehow serene.
You can't... you aren't supposed to hit me. That's a bad basis for a... a... a lasting relationship. She was trying to find a tone, an adult rhythm of speech, and failing. He had regressed her. He was in this car with a child. Voluptuous and sexy as hell, but a child.
Can't and aren't are two different things, keed, he said. He kept his voice calm but inside he was jittering and jiving. And I'll be the one to decide what constitutes a lasting relationship and what doesn't. If you can live with that, fine. If you can't, you can take a walk. I won't stop you. I might kick you once in the ass as a going-away present, but I won't stop you. It's a free country. What more can I say?
Maybe you've already said enough, she whispered, and he hit her again, harder than the first time, because no broad was ever going to smart off to Tom Rogan. He would pop the Queen of England if she cracked smart to him.
Her cheek banged the padded dashboard. Her hand groped for the doorhandle and then fell away. She only crouched in the corner like a rabbit, one hand over her mouth, her eyes large and wet and frightened. Tom looked at her for a moment and then he got out and walked around the back of the car. He opened her door. His breath was smoke in the black, windy November air and the smell of the lake was very clear.
You want to get out, Bev? I saw you reaching for the doorhandle, so I guess you must want to get out. Okay. That's all right. I asked you to do something and you said you would. Then you didn't. So you want to get out? Come on. Get out. What the fuck, right? Get out. You want to get out?
No, she whispered.
What? I can't hear you.
No, I don't want to get out, she said a little louder.
What-those cigarettes giving you emphysema? If you can't talk, I'll get you a fucking megaphone. This is your last chance, Beverly. You speak up so I can hear you: do you want to get out of this car or do you want to come back with me?
Want to come back with you, she said, and clasped her hands on her skirt like a little girl. She wouldn't look at him. Tears slipped down her cheeks.
All right, he said. Fine. But first you say this for me, Bev. You say, "I forgot about smoking in front of you, Tom."
Now she looked at him, her eyes wounded, pleading, inarticulate. You can make me do this, her eyes said, but please don't. Don't, I love you, can't it be over?
No-it could not. Because that was not the bottom of her wanting, and both of them knew it.
Say it.
I forgot about smoking in front of you, Tom.
Good. Now say "I'm sorry."
I'm sorry, she repeated dully.
The cigarette lay smoking on the pavement like a cut piece of fuse. People leaving the theater glanced over at them, the man standing by the open passenger door of a late-model, fade-into-the-woodwork Vega, the woman sitting inside, her hands clasped primly in her lap, her head down, the domelight outlining the soft fall of her hair in gold.
He crushed the cigarette out. He smeared it against the blacktop.
Now say: I'll never do it again without your permission."
I'll never...
Her voice began to hitch.
... never... n-n-n-
Say it, Bev.
... never d-do it again. Without your p-permission.
So he had slammed the door and gone back around to the driver's seat. He got behind the wheel and drove them back to his downtown apartment. Neither of them said a word. Hah0 the relationship had been set in the parking lot; the second half was set forty minutes later, in Tom's bed.
She didn't want to make love, she said. He saw a different truth in her eyes and the strutty cock of her legs, however, and when he got her blouse off her nipples had been rock hard. She moaned when he brushed them, and cried out softly when he suckled first one and then the other, kneading them restlessly as he did so. She grabbed his hand and thrust it between her legs.
I thought you didn't want to, he said, and she had turned her face away... but she did not let go of his hand, and the rocking motion of her hips actually speeded up.
He pushed her back on the bed... and now he was gentle, not ripping her underwear but removing it with a careful consideration that was almost prissy.
Sliding into her was like sliding into some exquisite oil.
He moved with her, using her but letting her use him as well, and she came the first time almost at once, crying out and digging her nails into his back. Then they rocked together in long, slow strokes and somewhere in there he thought she came again. Tom would get close, and then he would think of White Sox batting averages or who was trying to undercut him for the Chesley account at work and he would be okay again. Then she began to speed up, her rhythm finally dissolving into an excited bucking. He looked at her face, the raccoon ringlets of mascara, the smeared lipstick, and he felt himself suddenly shooting deliriously toward the edge.
She jerked her hips up harder and harder-there had been no beergut between them in those days and their bellies clapped hands in a quickening beat.
Near the end she screamed and then bit his shoulder with her small, even teeth.
How many times did you come? he asked her after they had showered.
She turned her face away, and when she spoke her voice was so low he almost couldn't hear her. That isn't something you're supposed to ask.
No? Who told you that? Misterogers?
He took her face in one hand, thumb pressing deep into one cheek, fingers pressing into the other, palm cupping her chin in between.
You talk to Tom, he said. You hear me, Bev? Talk to Papa.
Three, she said reluctantly.
Good, he said. You can have a cigarette.
She looked at him distrustfully, her red hair spread over the pillows, wearing nothing but a pair of hip-hugger panties. Just looking at her that way got his motor turning over again. He nodded.
Go on, he said. That's all right.
They had been married in a civil ceremony three months later. Two of his friends had come; the only friend of hers to attend had been Kay McCall, whom Tom called "that titsy women's-lib bitch."
All of these memories went through Tom's mind in a space of seconds, like a speeded-up piece of film, as he stood in the doorway watching her. She had gone on to the bottom drawer of what she sometimes called her "weekend bureau," and now she was tossing underwear into the suitcase-not the sort of stuff he liked, the slippery satins and smooth silks; this was cotton stuff, little-girl stuff, most of it faded and with little puffs of popped elastic on the waistbands. A cotton nightie that looked like something out of Little House on the Prairie. She poked in the back of this bottom drawer to see what else might be lurking in there.
Tom Rogan, meanwhile, moved across the shag rug toward his wardrobe. His feet were bare and his passage noiseless as a puff of breeze. It was the cigarette. That was what had really gotten him mad. It had been a long time since she had forgotten that first lesson. There had been other lessons to learn since, a great many, and there had been hot days when she had worn long-sleeved blouses or even cardigan sweaters buttoned all the way to the neck. Gray days when she had worn sunglasses. But that first lesson had been so sudden and fundamental-
He had forgotten the telephone call that had wakened him out of his deepening sleep. It was the cigarette. If she was smoking now, then she had forgotten Tom Rogan. Temporarily, of course, only temporarily, but even temporarily was too damned long. What might have caused her to forget didn't matter. Such things were not to happen in his house for any reason.
There was a wide black strip of leather hanging from a hook inside the closet door. There was no buckle on it; he had removed that long ago. It was doubled over at one end where a buckle would have gone, and this doubled-over section formed a loop into which Tom Rogan now slipped his hand.
Tom, you been bad! his mother had sometimes said-well, "sometimes" was maybe not such a good word; maybe "often" would have been a better one. You come here, Tommy! I got to give you a whuppin. His life as a child had been punctuated by whuppins. He had finally escaped to Wichita State College, but apparently there was no such thing as a complete escape, because he continued to hear her voice in dreams: Come here, Tommy. I got to give you a whuppin. Whuppin...
He had been the eldest of four. Three months after the youngest had been born, Ralph Rogan had died-well, "died" was maybe not such a good word; maybe "committed suicide" would have been a better way to put it, since he had poured a generous quantity of lye into a tumbler of gin and quaffed this devil's brew while sitting on the bathroom hopper. Mrs Rogan had found work at the Ford plant. Tom, although only eleven, became the man of the family. And if he screwed up-if the baby shat her didies after the sitter went home and the mess was still in them when Mom got home... if he forgot to cross Megan on the Broad Street corner after her nursery school got out and that nosy Mrs Gant saw... if he happened to be watching American Bandstand while Joey made a mess in the kitchen... if any of those things or a thousand others happened... then, after the smaller children were in bed, the spanking stick would come out and she would call the invocation: Come here, Tommy. I got to give you a whuppin.
Better to be the whupper than the whupped.
If he had learned nothing else on the great toll-road of life, he had learned that.
So he flipped the loose end of the belt over once and pulled the loop snug. Then he closed his fist over it. It felt good. It made him feel like a grownup. The strip of leather hung from his clenched fist like a dead blacksnake. His headache was gone.
She had found that one last thing in the back of the drawer: an old white cotton bra with gunshell cups. The thought that this early-morning call might have been from a lover surfaced briefly in his mind and then sank again. That was ridiculous. A woman going away to meet her lover did not pack her faded Ship "n Shore blouses and her cotton K-Mart undies with the pops and snarls in the elastic. Also, she wouldn't dare.
"Beverly," he said softly, and she turned at once, startled, her eyes wide, her long hair swinging.
The belt hesitated... dropped a little. He stared at her, feeling that little bloom of uneasiness again. Yes, she had looked this way before the big shows, and then he hadn't gotten in her way, understanding that she was so filled with a mixture of fear and competitive aggressiveness that it was as if her head was full of illuminating gas: a single spark and she would explode. She had seen the shows not as a chance to split off from Delia Fashions, to make a living-or even a fortune-on her own. If that had been all, she would have been fine. But if that were all, she also would not have been so ungodly talented. She had seen those shows as a kind of super-exam on which she would be graded by fierce teachers. What she saw on those occasions was some creature without a face. It had no face, but it did have a name-Authority.
All of that wide-eyed nerviness was on her face now. But not just there; it was all around her, an aura that seemed almost visible, a high-tension charge which made her suddenly both more alluring and more dangerous than she had seemed to him in years. He was afraid because she was here, all here, the essential she as apart from the she Tom Rogan wanted her to be, the she he had made.
Beverly looked shocked and frightened. She also looked almost madly exhilarated. Her cheeks glowed with hectic color, yet there were stark white patches below her lower lids which looked almost like a second pair of eyes. Her forehead glowed with a creamy resonance.
And the cigarette was still jutting out of her mouth, now at a slight up-angle, as if she thought she was goddam Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The cigarette! Just looking at it caused dull fury to wash over him again in a green wave. Faintly, far back in his mind, he remembered her saying something to him one night out of the dark, speaking in a dull and listless voice: Someday you're going to kill me, Tom. Do you know that? Someday you're just going to go too far and that will be the end. You'll snap.
He had answered: You do it my way, Bev, and that day will never come.
Now, before the rage blotted out everything, he wondered if that day hadn't come after all.
The cigarette. Never mind the call, the packing, the weird look on her face. They would deal with the cigarette. Then he would fuck her. Then they could discuss the rest. By then it might even seem important.