that. I am like that, whatever that means, and if you don’t like it, you can get away from me. Just get the hell away.”
She turned again and began walking, and he fell into step beside her. “I didn’t mean to make you sore, Kathy. It’s just an expression. Would you like to take a walk?”
“A walk? Where?”
“Oh, out in the country a little way. It’s a swell day for walking, don’t you think? You can actually smell the earth, wet as it is, and there’s a kind of feeling in the air. It would be nice outside of town today. We could walk out to West Creek and back. It isn’t very far. How about it, Kathy?”
Again she hesitated, and again, for what obscure reason she would never be able to say, she made the concession. And though it seemed afterward to have been a great mistake, the cause of intense suffering, perhaps it was not a mistake after all, but rather a necessary traumatic experience that had to come sooner or later and was better to have come sooner.
“All right,” she said, and they walked in silence along the wet street under trees on which there was an early hint of foliage, an almost invisible tinge of emerging chlorophyll. They crossed the western limit of the small town and walked for perhaps a quarter of a mile along the shoulder of a farm-to-market road. The shoulder was spongy from the rain that had fallen, but it was not muddy, being covered with a mat of heavy brown dead grass left over from the last warm days of the year before. Eventually they left the shoulder and cut at an angle across a pasture toward the long wavering stand of scrub timber that marked the course of West Creek. As they walked, the sun, already far down toward the horizon in its descent of the sky, broke through a cluster of clouds and touched with cold white fire the gray remnants of rain and the drab wet growth of earth. It was all at once an expanded world, still and shimmering and incredibly delicate, and Kathy felt within the close confinement of her ribs a vast swelling of pain and pleasure that she thought must surely burst the slender bones.
She closed her eyes, wanting to cry out in hurting ecstasy, and she wished with all her heart that Stella were here to share the shining world. If only it were Stella beside her instead of this ridiculous, bumbling, offensive boy. By keeping her eyes closed, stepping carefully to avoid stumbling in her self-imposed blindness, she almost managed to convince herself that it was true, that it was indeed Stella beside her and that there was no such person is Kenny Renowski to defile the purity of the new world that the sun had casually created in the last hour before it disappeared.
They crossed the pasture and descended a gentle slope through trees to the bank of the narrow, sluggish creek. And there in the shadows of the trees beside the muddy water, her brief, bright, spun-glass world shattered and fell in silence and lay around her in countless jagged and menacing shards. At first, for a few seconds, she was so frozen, so paralyzed by the violence of her reaction, that she made no protest whatever, and her passivity was mistaken for submission. Then, in an instant, she was a sobbing, clawing fury in fierce and disproportionate retaliation to his mild and harmless aggression. Her vision was impaired by a thick, swirling mist, and the first thing she saw clearly after vision was restored was his clawed, bleeding, terrified face.
Turning, she ran. Wildly, still sobbing, she fled up the slope through the trees and back across the pasture to the road, and though she stopped there on the shoulder to recover her breath and quiet the rampant beating of her heart, she had in a way never stopped at all, had run on and on for a long time over a long way from one bleeding face to another. A long time and a long way from Kenny Renowski to Angus Brunn.
CHAPTER 4
Abruptly, she stood up and left the counter. Making her way to the rear of the store, she stood waiting outside the door of an occupied telephone booth, caught fast for a moment between the opposing forces of a suddenly recurring need to contact Jacqueline and an oppressive uncertainty of the wisdom of it. She looked at her wrist watch and saw that it was after nine o’clock. Jacqueline would have left her apartment long ago, would have completed by this time the trip from the apartment to the downtown department store in which she was employed as a personnel manager. She was at this moment, no doubt, sitting behind the huge blond desk with the ivory-colored telephone on it over which Kathy had first seen her and over which the intangible line of communication and understanding had established itself between them from the first moment as surely as it could have been established by spoken words over the telephone itself.
Jacqueline liked ivory. The color, that is. Pale, cold ivory. She surrounded herself with it in the restricted places of her private life, and added a touch here and there, wherever it was possible, in the public areas. For instance, except for the slightest relief of more vivid colors, which only served to emphasize the preponderance, the bedroom of her apartment was entirely in the pale tone—woodwork and walls and rug and drapes and furniture. Entering it was like walking into a kind of sanctuary, a strange temple in which the decor was possessed of esoteric significance for the instinctively initiate.
Kathy stirred and lit another cigarette, waiting for the occupant of the booth to complete his conversation. She watched him through a narrow glass panel in the door. He sat bending forward from the little swinging seat beneath the instrument, his soft felt hat pushed back on his head, smoke from a cigarette that was pasted with dry saliva to his lower lip swirling around his face and clogging the booth with a thin, blue haze. When he talked, the cigarette bobbled so sharply that it seemed about to shake loose. His voice undulated, rising now and then to the level of intelligibility, a word here and there standing out nakedly. He was apparently trying to persuade someone to meet him at a certain place at a certain time, and it seemed to be very important.
Kathy moved away a few steps to eliminate the sound of his voice. She was all at once unreasonably angry with him for delaying her own call, for being a stupid man with a dull problem that was probably no problem at all.
Trying to eject him from her mind, she began again to think of Jacqueline, following her in imagination through the routine of the day thus far. In the beginning she arose from ivory sheets and stood beside the bed on ivory broadloom, and she was herself ivory, black-and-ivory, tall and superbly proportioned by the standards of classic beauty, as if she had been carved by an ancient Greek artist from a giant tusk. Propelled by Kathy’s mind, she moved in a remembered order. First to the kitchen, where coffee was started in the automatic silver percolator. Next to the bathroom for a shower and then back into the bedroom for the swift and simple rites before the mirror of the dressing table. These rites, however simply and quickly done, seemed almost superfluous, because there was about her an appearance of fastidiousness that survived even the usual ravages of a night in bed. Her hair, black and sleek and pulled back to a knot from a center part, looked undisturbed. Her eyes were as bright as if they had been chemically flushed, and the muscles of her face did not sag in tired need of an astringent. Whatever there was in her of deterioration and slow decay existed in secrecy beneath unaffected flesh. This physical impression was supported, was perhaps in some degree established, by a more subtle quality, a kind of emotional purity impervious to violation, and even in passion and the act of passion she seemed to burn with a pure white cauterizing flame.
At the closet, she selected one of the severely tailored suits she invariably wore to work. Which one this morning? The navy pin-stripe? The gray chalk-stripe? The hard brown gabardine? It really didn’t matter, because whichever one it was, it was precisely the right one. It was the very one for this particular day, and no other one could possibly have been quite so appropriate for what the day would bring or for the places the day would take her. Fully dressed, a black string tie at the collar of a tailored blouse, she returned to the kitchen where the coffee was brewed and hot in the silver percolator.
She drank the coffee black and unsweetened, and then she left the apartment, locking the door behind her and going down in the elevator to the lobby and through the lobby to the street, and now she was behind the blond desk with the ivory telephone that would be ringing in desperate supplication just as soon as this man, this Goddamn vindictive, deliberately perverse man, got through with his stupid conversation in the drug store booth.
And he was through. He had finished and gone while Kathy wasn’t looking. The jointed door was folded back, and the thin smoke of his cigarette drifted out. Acting quickly, before she had time to reconsider in fear