Chapter VII: Part 7

“How do you ever expect to create anything if you get all your experiences second hand?” Carol asked, her voice soft and even, and yet merciless.

Carol made her feel she had done nothing, was nothing at all, like a wisp of smoke. Carol had lived like a human being, had married, and had a child.

The old man from behind the counter was coming toward them. He had a limp. He stood by the table next to them and folded his arms. “Ever been to Holland?” he asked pleasantly.

Carol answered. “No, I haven’t. I suppose you’ve been. Did you make the village in the window?”

He nodded. “Took me five years to make.”

Therese looked at the man’s bony fingers, the lean arms with the purple veins twisting just under the thin skin. She knew better than Carol the work that had gone into the little village, but she could not get a word out.

The man said to Carol, “Got some fine sausages and hams next door, if you like real Pennsylvania made. We raise our own hogs and they’re killed and cured right here.”

They went into the whitewashed box of a store beside the restaurant. There was a delicious smell of smoked ham inside it, mingled with the smell of wood smoke and spice.

“Let’s pick something we don’t have to cook,” Carol said, looking into the refrigerated counter. “Let’s have some of this,” she said to the young man in the earlapped cap.

Therese remembered standing in the delicatessen with Mrs. Robichek, her buying the thin slices of salami and liverwurst. A sign on the wall said they shipped anywhere, and she thought of sending Mrs. Robichek one of the big cloth-wrapped sausages, imagined the delight on Mrs. Robichek’s face when she opened the package with her trembling hands and found a sausage. But should she after all, Therese wondered, make a gesture that was probably motivated by pity, or by guilt, or by some perversity in her? Therese frowned, floundering in a sea without direction or gravity, in which she knew only that she could mistrust her own impulses.

“Therese—”

Therese turned around, and Carol’s beauty struck her like a glimpse of the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Carol asked her if she thought they should buy a whole ham.

The young man slid all the bundles across the counter, and took Carol’s twenty-dollar bill. And Therese thought of Mrs. Robichek tremulously pushing her single dollar bill and a quarter across the counter that evening.

“See anything else?” Carol asked.

“I thought I might send something to somebody. A woman who works in the store. She’s poor and she once asked me to dinner.”

Carol picked up her change. “What woman?”

“I don’t really want to send her anything.” Therese wanted suddenly to leave.

Carol frowned at her through her cigarette smoke. “Do it.”

“I don’t want to. Let’s go, Carol.” It was like the nightmare again, when she couldn’t get away from her.

“Send it,” Carol said. “Close the door and send her something.”

Therese closed the door and chose one of the six-dollar sausages, and wrote on a gift card: “This comes from Pennsylvania. I hope it’ll last a few Sunday mornings. With love from Therese Belivet.”

Later, in the car, Carol asked her about Mrs. Robichek, and Therese answered as she always did, succinctly, and with the involuntary and absolute honesty that always depressed her afterward. Mrs. Robichek and the world she lived in was so different from that of Carol, she might have been describing another species of animal life, some ugly beast that lived on another planet. Carol made no comment on the story, only questioned and questioned her as she drove. She made no comment when there was nothing more to ask, but the taut, thoughtful expression with which she had listened stayed on her face even when they began to talk of other things. Therese gripped her thumbs inside her hands. Why did she let Mrs. Robichek haunt her? And now she had spread it into Carol and could never take it back.

“Please don’t mention her again, will you, Carol? Promise me.”

chapter fifteen

Carol walked barefoot with little short steps to the shower room in the corner, groaning at the cold. She had red polish on her toenails, and her blue pajamas were too big for her.

“It’s your fault for opening the window so high,” Therese said.

Carol pulled the curtain across, and Therese heard the shower come on with a rush. “Ah, divinely hot!” Carol said. “Better than last night.”

It was a luxurious tourist cabin, with a thick carpet and wood-paneled walls and everything from cellophane-sealed shoe rags to television.

Therese sat on her bed in her robe, looking at a road map, spanning it with her hand. A span and a half was about a day’s driving, theoretically, though they probably would not do it. “We might get all the way across Ohio today,” Therese said.

“Ohio. Noted for rivers, rubber, and certain railroads. On our left the famous Chillicothe drawbridge, where twenty-eight Hurons once massacred a hundred—morons.”

Therese laughed.

“And where Lewis and Clark once camped,” Carol added. “I think I’ll wear my slacks today. Want to see if they’re in that suitcase? If not, I’ll have to get into the car. Not the light ones, the navy-blue gabardines.”

Therese went to Carol’s big suitcase at the foot of the bed. It was full of sweaters and underwear and shoes, but no slacks. She saw a nickel plated tube sticking out of a folded sweater. She lifted the sweater out. It was heavy. She unwrapped it, and started so she almost dropped it. It was a gun with a white handle.

“No?” Carol asked.

“No.” Therese wrapped the gun up again and put it back as she had found it.

“Darling, I forgot my towel. I think it’s on a chair.”

Therese got it and took it to her, and in her nervousness as she put the towel into Carol’s outstretched hand her eyes dropped from Carol’s face to her bare breasts and down, and she saw the quick surprise in Carol’s glance as she turned around. Therese closed her eyes tight and walked slowly toward the bed, seeing before her closed lids the image of Carol’s naked body.

Therese took a shower, and when she came out, Carol was standing at the mirror, almost dressed.

“What’s the matter?” Carol asked.

“Nothing.”

Carol turned to her, combing her hair that was darkened a little by the wet of the shower. Her lips were bright with fresh lipstick, a cigarette between them. “Do you realize how many times a day you make me ask you that?” she said. “Don’t you think it’s a little inconsiderate?”

During breakfast, Therese said, “Why did you bring that gun along, Carol?”

“Oh. So that’s what’s bothering you. It’s Harge’s gun, something else he forgot.” Carol’s voice was casual. “I thought it’d be better to take it than to leave it.”

“Is it loaded?”

“Yes, it’s loaded. Harge got a permit, because we had a burglar at the house once.”

“Can you use it?”

Carol smiled at her. “I’m no Annie Oakley. I can use it. I think it worries you, doesn’t it? I don’t expect to use it.”

Therese said nothing more about it. But it disturbed her whenever she thought of it. She thought of it the next night, when a bellhop set the suitcase down heavily on the sidewalk. She wondered if a gun could ever go off from a jolt like that.

They had taken some snapshots in Ohio, and because they could get them developed early the next morning, they spent a long evening and the night in a town called Defiance. All evening they walked around the streets, looking in store windows, walking through silent residential streets where lights showed in front parlors, and homes looked as comfortable and safe as birds’ nests. Therese had been afraid Carol would be bored by aimless walks, but Carol was the one who suggested going one block farther, walking all the way up the hill to see what was on the other side. Carol talked about herself and Harge. Therese tried to sum up in one word what had separated Carol and Harge, but she rejected the words almost at once—boredom, resentment, indifference. Carol told her of one time that Harge had taken Rindy away on a fishing trip and not communicated for days. That was a retaliation for Carol’s refusing to spend Harge’s vacation with him at his family’s summer house in Massachusetts. It was a mutual thing. And the incidents were not the start.

Carol put two of the snapshots in her billfold, one of Rindy in jodhpurs and a derby that had been on the first part of the roll, and one of Therese, with a cigarette in her mouth and her hair blowing back in the wind. There was one unflattering picture of Carol standing huddled in her coat that Carol said she was going to send to Abby because it was so bad.

They got to Chicago late one afternoon, crept into its gray, sprawling disorder behind a great truck of a meat-distributing company. Therese sat up close to the windshield. She couldn’t remember anything about the city from the trip with her father. Carol seemed to know Chicago as well as she knew Manhattan. Carol showed her the famous Loop, and they stopped for a while to watch the trains and the homeward rush of five thirty in the afternoon. It couldn’t compare to the madhouse of New York at five thirty.

At the main post office, Therese found a post card from Dannie, nothing from Phil, and a letter from Richard. Therese glanced at the letter and saw it began and ended affectionately. She had expected just that, Richard’s getting the general delivery address from Phil and writing her an affectionate letter. She put the letter in her pocket before she went back to Carol.

“Anything?” Carol said.

“Just a post card. From Dannie. He’s finished his exams.”

Carol drove to the Drake Hotel. It had a black and white checked floor, a fountain in the lobby, and Therese thought it magnificent. In their room, Carol took off her coat and flung herself down on one of the twin beds.

“I know a few people here,” she said sleepily. “Shall we look somebody up?”

But Carol fell asleep before they quite decided.

Therese looked out the window at the light-bordered lake and at the irregular, unfamiliar line of tall buildings against the still grayish sky. It looked fuzzy and monotonous, like a Pissarro painting. A comparison Carol wouldn’t appreciate, she thought. She leaned on the sill, staring at the city, watching a distant car’s lights chopped into dots and dashes as it passed behind trees. She was happy.

“Why don’t you ring for some cocktails?” Carol’s voice said behind her.

“What kind would you like?”

“What kind would you?”

“Martinis.”

Carol whistled. “Double Gibsons,” Carol interrupted her as she was telephoning. “And a plate of canapés. Might as well get four Martinis.”

Therese read Richard’s letter while Carol was in the shower. The whole letter was affectionate. You are not like any of the other girls, he wrote. He had waited and he would keep on waiting, because he was absolutely confident that they could be happy together. He wanted her to write to him every day, send at least a post card. He told her how he had sat one evening re-reading the three letters she had sent him when he had been in Kingston, New York, last summer. There was a sentimentality in the letter that was not like Richard at all, and Therese’s first thought was that he was pretending. Perhaps in order to strike at her later. Her second reaction was aversion. She came back to the old decision, that not to write him, not to say anything more was the shortest way to end it.

The cocktails arrived, and Therese paid for them instead of signing. She could never pay a bill except behind Carol’s back.

“Will you wear your black suit?” Therese asked when Carol came in.

Carol gave her a look. “Go all the way to the bottom of that suitcase?” she said, going to the suitcase. “Drag it out, brush it off, steam the wrinkles out of it for half an hour?”

“We’ll be a half hour drinking these.”

“Your powers of persuasion are irresistible.” Carol took the suit into the bathroom and turned the water on in the tub.

It was the suit she had worn the day they had had the first lunch together.

“Do you realize this is the only drink I’ve had since we left New York?” Carol said. “Of course you don’t. Do you know why? I’m happy.”

“You’re beautiful,” Therese said.

And Carol gave her the derogatory smile that Therese loved, and walked to the dressing table. She flung a yellow-silk scarf around her neck and tied it loosely, and began to comb her hair. The lamp’s light framed her figure like a picture, and Therese had a feeling all this had happened before. She remembered suddenly: the woman in the window brushing up her long hair, remembered the very bricks in the wall, the texture of the misty rain that morning.

“How about some perfume?” Carol asked, moving toward her with the bottle. She touched Therese’s forehead with her fingers, at the hairline where she had kissed her that day.

“You remind me of the woman I once saw,” Therese said, “somewhere off Lexington. Not you but the light. She was combing her hair up.” Therese stopped, but Carol waited for her to go on. Carol always waited, and she could never say exactly what she wanted to say. “Early one morning when I was on the way to work, and I remember it was starting to rain,” she floundered on. “I saw her in a window.” She really could not go on, about standing there for perhaps three or four minutes, wishing with an intensity that drained her strength that she knew the woman, that she might be welcome if she went to the house and knocked on the door, wishing she could do that instead of going on to her job at the Pelican Press.

“My little orphan,” Carol said.

Therese smiled. There was nothing dismal, no sting in the word when Carol said it.

“What does your mother look like?”

“She had black hair,” Therese said quickly. “She didn’t look anything like me.” Therese always found herself talking about her mother in the past tense, though she was alive this minute, somewhere in Connecticut.

“You really don’t think she’ll ever want to see you again?” Carol was standing at the mirror.

“I don’t think so.”

“What about your father’s family. Didn’t you say he had a brother?”

“I never met him. He was a kind of geologist, working for an oil company. I don’t know where he is.” It was easier talking about the uncle she had never met.

“What’s your mother’s name now?”

“Esther—Mrs. Nicolas Strully.” The name meant as little to her as one she might see in a telephone book. She looked at Carol, suddenly sorry she had said the name. Carol might some day—A shock of loss, of helplessness came over her. She knew so little about Carol after all.

Carol glanced at her. “I’ll never mention it,” she said, “never mention it again. If that second drink’s going to make you blue, don’t drink it. I don’t want you to be blue tonight.”

The restaurant where they dined overlooked the lake, too. They had a banquet of a dinner with champagne and brandy afterward. It was the first time in her life that Therese had been a little drunk, in fact much drunker than she wanted Carol to see. Her impression of Lakeshore Drive was always to be of a broad avenue studded with mansions all resembling the White House in Washington. In the memory there would be Carol’s voice, telling her about a house here and there where she had been before, and the disquieting awareness that for a while this had been Carol’s world, as Rapallo, Paris, and other places Therese did not know had for a while been the frame of everything Carol did.

That night, Carol sat on the edge of her bed, smoking a cigarette before they turned the light out. Therese lay in her own bed, sleepily watching her, trying to read the meaning of the restless, puzzled look in Carol’s eyes that would stare at something in the room for a moment and then move on. Was it of her she thought, or of Harge, or of Rindy? Carol had asked to be called at seven tomorrow, in order to telephone Rindy before she went to school. Therese remembered their telephone conversation in Defiance. Rindy had had a fight with some other little girl, and Carol had spent fifteen minutes going over it, and trying to persuade Rindy she should take the first step and apologize. Therese still felt the effects of what she had drunk, the tingling of the champagne that drew her painfully close to Carol. If she simply asked, she thought, Carol would let her sleep tonight in the same bed with her. She wanted more than that, to kiss her, to feel their bodies next to each other’s. Therese thought of the two girls she had seen in the Palermo bar. They did that, she knew, and more. And would Carol suddenly thrust her away in disgust, if she merely wanted to hold her in her arms? And would whatever affection Carol now had for her vanish in that instant? A vision of Carol’s cold rebuff swept her courage clean away. It crept back humbly in the question, couldn’t she ask simply to sleep in the same bed with her?

“Carol, would you mind—”

“Tomorrow we’ll go to the stockyards,” Carol said at the same time, and Therese burst out laughing. “What’s so damned funny about that?” Carol asked, putting out her cigarette, but she was smiling, too.

“It just is. It’s terribly funny,” Therese said, still laughing, laughing away all the longing and the intention of the night.

“You’re giggly on champagne,” Carol said as she put the light out.

Late the next afternoon they left Chicago and drove in the direction of Rockford. Carol said she might have a letter from Abby there, but probably not, because Abby was a bad correspondent. Therese went to a shoe repair shop to get a moccasin stitched, and when she came back, Carol was reading the letter in the car.

“What road do we take out?” Carol’s face looked happier.

“Twenty, going west.”

Carol turned on the radio and worked the dial until she found some music. “What’s a good town for tonight on the way to Minneapolis?”

“Dubuque,” Therese said, looking at the map. “Or Waterloo looks fairly big, but it’s about two hundred miles away.”

“We might make it.”

They took Highway 20 toward Freeport and Galena, which was starred on the map as the home of Ulysses S. Grant.

“What did Abby say?”

“Nothing much. Just a very nice letter.”

Carol said little to her in the car, or even in the café where they stopped later for coffee. Carol went over and stood in front of a juke box, dropping nickels slowly.

“You wish Abby’d come along, don’t you?” Therese said.

“No,” Carol said.

“You’re so different since you got the letter from her.”

Carol looked at her across the table. “Darling, it’s just a silly letter. You can even read it if you want to.” Carol reached for her handbag, but she did not get the letter out.

Sometime that evening, Therese fell asleep in the car and woke up with the lights of a city on her face. Carol was resting both arms tiredly on the top of the wheel. They had stopped for a red light.

“Here’s where we stay the night,” Carol said.

Therese’s sleep still clung to her as she walked across the hotel lobby. She rode up in an elevator and she was acutely conscious of Carol beside her, as if she dreamed a dream in which Carol was the subject and the only figure. In the room, she lifted her suitcase from the floor to a chair, unlatched it and left it, and stood by the writing table, watching Carol. As if her emotions had been in abeyance all the past hours, or days, they flooded her now as she watched Carol opening her suitcase, taking out, as she always did first, the leather kit that contained her toilet articles, dropping it onto the bed. She looked at Carol’s hands, at the lock of hair that fell over the scarf tied around her head, at the scratch she had gotten days ago across the toe of her moccasin.

“What’re you standing there for?” Carol asked. “Get to bed, sleepyhead.”

“Carol, I love you.”

Carol straightened up. Therese stared at her with intense, sleepy eyes. Then Carol finished taking her pajamas from the suitcase and pulled the lid down. She came to Therese and put her hands on her shoulders. She squeezed her shoulders hard, as if she were exacting a promise from her, or perhaps searching her to see if what she had said were real. Then she kissed Therese on the lips, as if they had kissed a thousand times before.

“Don’t you know I love you?” Carol said.

Carol took her pajamas into the bedroom, and stood for a moment, looking down at the basin.

“I’m going out,” Carol said. “But I’ll be back right away.”

Therese waited by the table while Carol was gone, while time passed indefinitely or maybe not at all, until the door opened and Carol came in again. She set a paper bag on the table, and Therese knew she had only gone to get a container of milk, as Carol or she herself did very often at night.

“Can I sleep with you?” Therese asked.

“Did you see the bed?”

It was a double bed. They sat up in their pajamas, drinking milk and sharing an orange that Carol was too sleepy to finish. Then Therese set the container of milk on the floor and looked at Carol who was sleeping already, on her stomach, with one arm flung up as she always went to sleep. Therese pulled out the light. Then Carol slipped her arm under her neck, and all the length of their bodies touched, fitting as if something had prearranged it. Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale-white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered.

“Go to sleep,” Carol said.

Therese hoped she would not. But when she felt Carol’s hand move on her shoulder, she knew she had been asleep. It was dawn now. Carol’s fingers tightened in her hair, Carol kissed her on the lips, and pleasure leaped in Therese again as if it were only a continuation of the moment when Carol had slipped her arm under her neck last night. I love you, Therese wanted to say again, and then the words were erased by the tingling and terrifying pleasure that spread in waves from Carol’s lips over her neck, her shoulders, that rushed suddenly, the length of her body. Her arms were tight around Carol, and she was conscious of Carol and nothing else, of Carol’s hand that slid along her ribs, Carol’s hair that brushed her bare breasts, and then her body too seemed to vanish in widening circles that leaped further and further, beyond where thought could follow. While a thousand memories and moments, words, the first darling, the second time Carol had met her at the store, a thousand memories of Carol’s face, her voice, moments of anger and laughter flashed like the tail of a comet across her brain. And now it was pale-blue distance and space, an expanding space in which she took flight suddenly like a long arrow. The arrow seemed to cross an impossibly wide abyss with ease, seemed to arc on and on in space, and not quite to stop. Then she realized that she still clung to Carol, that she trembled violently, and the arrow was herself. She saw Carol’s pale hair across her eyes, and now Carol’s head was close against hers. And she did not have to ask if this were right, no one had to tell her, because this could not have been more right or perfect. She held Carol tighter against her, and felt Carol’s mouth on her own smiling mouth. Therese lay still, looking at her, at Carol’s face only inches away from her, the gray eyes calm as she had never seen them, as if they retained some of the space she had just emerged from. And it seemed strange that it was still Carol’s face, with the freckles, the bending blond eyebrow that she knew, the mouth now as calm as her eyes, as Therese had seen it many times before.

“My angel,” Carol said. “Flung out of space.”

Therese looked up at the corners of the room that were much brighter now, at the bureau with the bulging front and the shield-shaped drawer pulls, at the frameless mirror with the beveled edge, at the green patterned curtains that hung straight at the windows, and the two gray tips of buildings that showed just above the sill. She would remember every detail of this room forever.

“What town is this?” she asked.

Carol laughed. “This? This is Waterloo.” She reached for a cigarette. “Isn’t that awful.”

Smiling, Therese raised up on her elbow. Carol put a cigarette between her lips. “There’s a couple of Waterloos in every state,” Therese said.

chapter sixteen

Therese went out to get some newspapers while Carol was dressing. She stepped into the elevator and turned around in the exact center of it. She felt a little odd, as if everything had shifted and distances were not quite the same. She walked across the lobby to the newspaper stand in the corner.

“The _Courier_ and the _Tribune_,” she said to the man, taking them, and even to utter words was as strange as the names of the newspapers she bought.

“Eight cents,” the man said, and Therese looked down at the change he had given her and saw there was still the same difference between eight cents and a quarter.

She wandered across the lobby, looked through the glass into the barber shop where a couple of men were getting shaves. A Negro boy was shining shoes. A tall man with a cigar and a broad-brimmed hat, with Western shoes, walked by her. She would remember this lobby, too, forever, the people, the old-fashioned looking woodwork at the base of the registration desk, and the man in the dark overcoat who looked at her over the top of his newspaper, and slumped in his chair and went on reading beside the black and cream-colored marble column.

When Therese opened the room door, the sight of Carol went through her like a spear. She stood a moment with her hand on the knob.

Carol looked at her from the bathroom, holding the comb suspended over her head. Carol looked at her from head to foot. “Don’t do that in public,” Carol said.

Therese threw the newspapers on the bed and came to her. Carol seized her suddenly in her arms. They stood holding each other as if they would never separate. Therese shuddered, and there were tears in her eyes. It was hard to find words, locked in Carol’s arms, closer than kissing.

“Why did you wait so long?” Therese asked.

“Because—I thought there wouldn’t be a second time, that I wouldn’t want it. But that’s not true.”

Therese thought of Abby, and it was like a slim shaft of bitterness dropping between them. Carol released her.

“And there was something else—to have you around reminding me, knowing you and knowing it would be so easy. I’m sorry. It wasn’t fair to you.”

Therese set her teeth hard. She watched Carol walk slowly away across the room, watched the space widen, and remembered the first time she had seen her walk so slowly away in the department store, Therese had thought forever. Carol had loved Abby, too, and she reproached herself for it. As Carol would one day for loving her, Therese wondered? Therese understood now why the December and January weeks had been made up of anger and indecision, reprimands alternating with indulgences. But she understood now that whatever Carol said in words, there were no barriers and no indecisions now. There was no Abby, either, after this morning, whatever had happened between Carol and Abby before.

“Was it?” Carol asked.

“You’ve made me so happy ever since I’ve known you,” Therese said.

“I don’t think you can judge.”

“I can judge this morning.”

Carol did not answer. Only the rasp of the door lock answered her. Carol had locked the door and they were alone. Therese came toward her, straight into her arms.

“I love you,” Therese said, just to hear the words. “I love you, I love you.”

But Carol seemed deliberately to pay almost no attention to her that day. There was more arrogance in the tilt of her cigarette, in the way she backed the car away from a curb, cursing, not quite joking. “Damned if I’ll put a dime in a parking meter with a prairie right in sight,” Carol said. But when Therese did catch her looking at her, Carol’s eyes were laughing. Carol teased her, leaning on her shoulder as they stood in front of a cigarette machine, touching her foot under tables. It made Therese limp and tense at the same time. She thought of people she had seen holding hands in movies, and why shouldn’t she and Carol? Yet when she simply took Carol’s arm as they stood choosing a box of candy in a shop, Carol murmured, “Don’t.”

Therese sent a box of candy to Mrs. Robichek from the candy shop in Minneapolis, and a box also to the Kellys. She sent an extravagantly big box to Richard’s mother, a double-deck box with wooden compartments that she knew Mrs. Semco would use later for sewing articles.

“Did you ever do that with Abby?” Therese asked abruptly that evening in the car.

Carol’s eyes understood suddenly and she blinked. “What questions you ask,” she said. “Of course.”

Of course. She had known it. “And now—?”

“Therese—”

She asked stiffly, “Was it very much the same as with me?”

Carol smiled. “No, darling.”

“Don’t you think it’s more pleasant than sleeping with men?”

Her smile was amused. “Not necessarily. That depends. Who have you ever known except Richard?”

“No one.”

“Well, don’t you think you’d better try some others?”

Therese was speechless for a moment, but she tried to be casual, drumming her fingers on the book in her lap.

“I mean sometime, darling. You’ve got a lot of years ahead.”

Therese said nothing. She could not imagine ever leaving Carol either. That was another terrible question that had sprung into her mind at the start, that hammered at her brain now with a painful insistence to be answered. Would Carol ever want to leave her?

“I mean, whom you sleep with depends so much on habit,” Carol went on. “And you’re too young to make enormous decisions. Or habits.”

“Are you just a habit?” she asked, smiling, but she heard the resentment in her voice. “You mean it’s nothing but that?”

“Therese—of all times to get so melancholic.”

“I’m not melancholic,” she protested, but the thin ice was under her feet again, the uncertainties. Or was it that she always wanted a little more than she had, no matter how much she had? She said impulsively, “Abby loves you, too, doesn’t she?”

Carol started a little, and put her foot down. “Abby has loved me practically all her life—even as you.”

Therese stared at her.

“I’ll tell you about it one day. Whatever happened is past. Months and months ago,” she said, so softly Therese could hardly hear.

“Only months?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me now.”

“This isn’t the time or the place.”

“There’s never a time,” Therese said. “Didn’t you say there never was a right time?”

“Did I say that? About what?”

But neither of them said anything for a moment, because a fresh barrage of wind hurled the rain like a million bullets against the hood and windshield, and for a moment they could have heard nothing else. There was no thunder, as if the thunder, somewhere up above, modestly refrained from competing with this other god of rain. They waited in the inadequate shelter of a hill at the side of the road.

“I might tell you the middle,” Carol said, “because it’s funny—and ironic. It was last winter when we had the furniture shop together. But I can’t begin without telling you the first part—and that was when we were children. Our families lived near each other in New Jersey, so we saw each other during vacations. Abby always had a mild crush on me, I thought, even when we were about six and eight. Then she wrote me a couple of letters when she was about fourteen and away at school. And by that time I’d heard of girls who preferred girls. But the books also tell you it goes away after that age.” There were pauses between her sentences, as if she left out sentences in between.

“Were you in school with her?” Therese asked.

“I never was. My father sent me to a different school, out of town. Then Abby went to Europe when she was sixteen, and I wasn’t at home when she came back. I saw her once at some party around the time I got married. Abby looked quite different then, not like a tomboy any more. Then Harge and I lived in another town, and I didn’t see her again—really for years, till long after Rindy was born. She came once in a while to the riding stable where Harge and I used to ride. A few times we all rode together. Then Abby and I started playing tennis on Saturday afternoons when Harge usually played golf. Abby and I always had fun together. Abby’s former crush on me never crossed my mind—we were both so much older and so much had happened. I had an idea about starting a shop, because I wanted to see less of Harge. I thought we were getting bored with each other and it would help. So I asked Abby if she wanted to be partners in it, and we started the furniture shop. After a few weeks to my surprise, I felt I was attracted to her,” Carol said in the same quiet voice. “I couldn’t understand it, and I was a little afraid of it—remembering Abby from before, and realizing she might feel the same way, or that both of us could. So I tried not to let Abby see it, and I think I succeeded. But finally—here’s the funny part finally—there was the night in Abby’s house one night last winter. The roads were snowed in that night, and Abby’s mother insisted that we stay together in Abby’s room, simply because the room I’d stayed in before hadn’t any sheets on the bed then, and it was very late. Abby said she’d fix the sheets, we both protested, but Abby’s mother insisted.” Carol smiled a little, and glanced at her, but Therese felt Carol didn’t even see her. “So I stayed with Abby. Nothing would have happened, if not for that night, I’m sure of it. If not for Abby’s mother, that’s the ironic thing, because she doesn’t know anything about it. But it did happen, and I felt very much as you, I suppose, as happy as you.” Carol blurted out the end, though her voice was still level and somehow without emotion of any kind.

Therese stared at her, not knowing if it was jealousy or shock or anger that was suddenly jumbling everything. “And after that?” she asked.

“After that, I knew I was in love with Abby. I don’t know why not call it love, it had all the earmarks. But it lasted only two months, like a disease that came and went.” Carol said in a different tone, “Darling, it’s got nothing to do with you, and it’s finished now. I knew you wanted to know, but I didn’t see any reason for telling you before. It’s that unimportant.”

“But if you felt the same way about her—”

“For two months?” Carol said. “When you have a husband and child, you know, it’s a little different.”

Different from her, Carol meant, because she hadn’t any responsibilities. “Is it? You can just start and stop?”

“When you haven’t got a chance,” Carol answered.

The rain was abating, but only by so much that she could see it as rain now and not solid silver sheets. “I don’t believe it.”

“You’re hardly in a state to talk.”

“Why are you so cynical?”

“Cynical? Am I?”

Therese was not sure enough to answer. What was it to love someone, what was love exactly, and why did it end or not end? Those were the real questions, and who could answer them.

“It’s letting up,” Carol said. “How about going on and finding a good brandy somewhere? Or is this a dry state?”

They drove on to the next town and found a deserted bar in the biggest hotel. The brandy was delicious, and they ordered two more.

“It’s French brandy,” Carol said. “Someday we’ll go to France.”

Therese turned the little bowl of a glass between her fingers. A clock ticked at the end of the bar. A train whistle blew in the distance. And Carol cleared her throat. Ordinary sounds, yet the moment was not an ordinary one. No moment had been an ordinary one since the morning in Waterloo. Therese stared at the bright brown light in the brandy glass, and suddenly she had no doubt that she and Carol would one day go to France. Then out of the shimmering brown sun in the glass, Harge’s face emerged, mouth and nose and eyes.

“Harge knows about Abby, doesn’t he?” Therese said.

“Yes. He asked me something about her a few months ago—and I told him the whole thing from start to finish.”

“You did—” She thought of Richard, imagined how Richard would react. “Is that why you’re getting the divorce?”

“No. It’s got nothing to do with the divorce. That’s another ironic thing—that I told Harge after it was all over. A mistaken effort at honesty, when Harge and I had nothing left to salvage. We’d already talked about a divorce. Please don’t remind me of mistakes!” Carol frowned.

“You mean—he certainly must have been jealous.”

“Yes. Because however I chose to tell it, I suppose it came out that I’d cared more about Abby at one period than I’d ever cared for him. At one point, even with Rindy I’d have left everything behind to go with her. I don’t know how it was that I didn’t.”

“And taken Rindy with you?”

“I don’t know. I know the fact that Rindy existed stopped me from leaving Harge then.”

“Do you regret it?”

Carol shook her head slowly. “No. It wouldn’t have lasted. It didn’t last, and maybe I knew it wouldn’t. With my marriage failing, I was too afraid and too weak—” She stopped.

“Are you afraid now?”

Carol was silent.

“Carol—”

“I am not afraid,” she said stubbornly, lifting her head, drawing on her cigarette.

Therese looked at her face in profile in the dim light. What about Rindy now, she wanted to ask, what will happen? But she knew Carol was on the brink of growing suddenly impatient, giving her a careless answer, or no answer at all. Another time, Therese thought, not this moment. It might destroy everything, even the solidity of Carol’s body beside her, and the bend of Carol’s body in the black sweater seemed the only solid thing in the world. Therese ran her thumb down Carol’s side, from under the arm to the waist.

“I remember Harge was particularly annoyed about a trip I took with Abby to Connecticut. Abby and I went up to buy some things for the shop. It was only a two-day trip, but he said, ‘Behind my back. You had to run away.’” Carol said it bitterly. There was more self-reproach in her voice than imitation of Harge.

“Does he still talk about it?”

“No. Is it anything to talk about? Is it anything to be proud of?”

“Is it anything to be ashamed of?”

“Yes. You know that, don’t you?” Carol asked in her even, distinct voice. “In the eyes of the world it’s an abomination.”

The way she said it, Therese could not quite smile. “You don’t believe that.”

“People like Harge’s family.”

“They’re not the whole world.”

“They are enough. And you have to live in the world. You, I mean—and I don’t mean anything just now about whom you decide to love.” She looked at Therese, and at last Therese saw a smile rising slowly in her eyes, bringing Carol with it. “I mean responsibilities in the world that other people live in and that might not be yours. Just now it isn’t, and that’s why in New York I was exactly the wrong person for you to know—because I indulge you and keep you from growing up.”

“Why don’t you stop?”

“I’ll try. The trouble is, I like to indulge you.”

“You’re exactly the right person for me to know,” Therese said.

“Am I?”

On the street, Therese said, “I don’t suppose Harge would like it if he knew we were away on a trip, either, would he?”

“He’s not going to know about it.”

“Do you still want to go to Washington?”

“Absolutely, if you’ve got the time. Can you stay away all of February?”

Therese nodded. “Unless I hear something in Salt Lake City. I told Phil to write there. It’s a pretty slim chance.” Probably Phil wouldn’t even write, she thought. But if there was the least chance of a job in New York, she should go back. “Would you go on to Washington without me?”

Carol glanced at her. “As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t,” she said with a little smile.

Their hotel room was so overheated when they came back that evening, they had to throw open the windows for a while. Carol leaned on the window sill, cursing the heat for Therese’s amusement, calling her a salamander because she could bear it. Then Carol asked abruptly, “What did Richard have to say yesterday?”

Therese had not even known that Carol knew about the last letter. The one he had promised, in the Chicago letter, to send to Minneapolis and to Seattle. “Nothing much,” Therese said. “Just a one-page letter. He still wants me to write to him. And I don’t intend to.” She had thrown the letter away, but she remembered it, “I haven’t heard from you, and it’s beginning to dawn on me what an incredible conglomeration of contradictions you are. You are sensitive and yet so insensitive, imaginative and yet so unimaginative.... If you get stranded by your whimsical friend, let me know and I’ll come after you. This won’t last, Terry. I know a little about such things. I saw Dannie and he wanted to know what I’d heard from you, what you were doing. How would you like it if I had told him? I didn’t say anything, for your sake, because I think one day you’ll blush. I still love you, I admit it. I’ll come out to you—and show you what America’s really like—if you care enough about me to write and say so....”

It was insulting to Carol, and Therese had torn it up. Therese sat on the bed with her arms around her knees, gripping her wrists inside the sleeves of her robe. Carol had overdone the ventilation, and the room was cold. The Minnesota winds had taken possession of the room, were seizing Carol’s cigarette smoke and tearing it to nothing. Therese watched Carol calmly brushing her teeth at the basin.

“Do you mean that about not writing to him? That’s your decision?” Carol asked.

“Yes.”

Therese watched Carol knock the water out of her toothbrush, and turn from the basin, blotting her face with a towel. Nothing about Richard mattered so much to her as the way Carol blotted her face with a towel.

“Let’s say no more,” Carol said.

She knew Carol would say no more. She knew Carol had been pushing her toward him, until this moment. Now it seemed it might all have been for this moment as Carol turned and walked toward her and her heart took a giant’s step forward.

They went on westward, through Sleepy Eye, Tracy, and Pipestone, sometimes taking an indirect highway on a whim. The West unfolded like a magic carpet, dotted with the neat, tight units of farmhouse, barn, and silo that they could see for half an hour before they came abreast of them. They stopped once at a farmhouse to ask if they could buy enough gas to get to the next station. The house smelled like fresh cold cheese. Their steps sounded hollow and lonely on the solid brown planks of the floor, and Therese thought in a fervid burst of patriotism—_America_. There was a picture of a rooster on the wall, made of colored patches of cloth sewn on a black ground, beautiful enough to hang in a museum. The farmer warned them about ice on the road directly west, so they took another highway going south.

They discovered a one-ring circus that night beside a railroad track in a town called Sioux Falls. The performers were not very expert. Their seats were a couple of orange crates in the first row. One of the acrobats invited them into the performers’ tent after the show, and insisted on giving Carol a dozen of the circus posters, because she had admired them. Carol sent some of them to Abby and some to Rindy, and sent Rindy as well a green chameleon in a pasteboard box. It was an evening Therese would never forget, and unlike most such evenings, this one registered as unforgettable while it still lived. It was a matter of the bag of popcorn they shared, the circus, and the kiss Carol gave her back of some booth in the performers’ tent. It was a matter of that particular enchantment that came from Carol—though Carol took their good times so for granted—seemed to work on all the world around them, a matter of everything going perfectly, without disappointments or hitches, going just as they wished it to.

Therese walked from the circus with her head down, lost in thought. “I wonder if I’ll ever want to create anything again,” she said.

“What brought this on?”

“I mean—what was I ever trying to do but this? I’m happy.”

Carol took her arm and squeezed it, dug her thumb in so hard that Therese yelled. Carol looked up at a street marker and said, “Fifth and Nebraska. I think we go this way.”

“What’s going to happen when we get back to New York? It can’t be the same, can it?”

“Yes,” Carol said. “Till you get tired of me.”

Therese laughed. She heard the soft snap of Carol’s scarf end in the wind.

“We might not be living together, but it’ll be the same.”

They couldn’t live together with Rindy, Therese knew. It was useless to dream of it. But it was more than enough that Carol promised in words it would be the same.

Near the border of Nebraska and Wyoming, they stopped for dinner at a large restaurant built like a lodge in an evergreen forest. They were almost the only people in the big dining room, and they chose a table near the fireplace. They spread out the road map and decided to head straight for Salt Lake City. They might stay there for a few days, Carol said, because it was an interesting place, and she was tired of driving.

“Lusk,” Therese said, looking at the map. “What a sexy sounding name.”

Carol put her head back and laughed. “Where is it?”

“On the road.”

Carol picked up her wine glass and said, “Chateau Neuf-du-Pape in Nebraska. What’ll we drink to?”

“Us.”

It was something like the morning in Waterloo, Therese thought, a time too absolute and flawless to seem real, though it was real, not merely props in a play—their brandy glasses on the mantel, the row of deers’ horns above, Carol’s cigarette lighter, the fire itself. But at moments she felt like an actor, remembered only now and then her identity with a sense of surprise, as if she had been playing in these last days the part of someone else, someone fabulously and excessively lucky. She looked up at the fir branches fixed in the rafters, at the man and woman talking inaudibly together at a table against the wall, at the man alone at his table, smoking his cigarette slowly. She thought of the man sitting with the newspaper in the hotel in Waterloo. Didn’t he have the same colorless eyes and the long creases on either side of his mouth? Or was it only that this moment of consciousness was so much the same as that other moment?

They spent the night in Lusk, ninety miles away.

chapter seventeen

“Mrs. H. F. Aird?” The desk clerk looked at Carol after she had signed the register. “Are you Mrs. Carol Aird?”

“Yes.”

“Message for you.” He turned around and got it from a pigeonhole. “A telegram.”

“Thank you.” Carol glanced at Therese with a little lift of her brows before she opened it. She read it, frowning, then turned to the clerk. “Where’s the Belvedere Hotel?”

The clerk directed her.

“I’ve got to pick up another telegram,” Carol said to Therese. “Want to wait here while I get it?”

“Who from?”

“Abby.”

“All right. Is it bad news?”

The frown was still in her eyes. “Don’t know until I see it. Abby just says there’s a telegram for me at the Belvedere.”

“Shall I have the bags taken up?”

“Well—just wait. The car is parked.”

“Why can’t I come with you?”

“Of course, if you want to. Let’s walk. It’s only a couple of blocks away.”

Carol walked quickly. The cold was sharp. Therese glanced around her at the flat, orderly looking town, and remembered Carol’s saying that Salt Lake City was the cleanest town in the United States. When the Belvedere was in sight, Carol suddenly looked at her and said, “Abby’s probably had a brainstorm and decided to fly out and join us.”

In the Belvedere, Therese bought a newspaper while Carol went to the desk. When Therese turned to her, Carol was just lowering the telegram after reading it. There was a stunned expression on her face. She came slowly toward Therese, and it flashed through Therese’s mind that Abby was dead, that this second message was from Abby’s parents.

“What’s the matter?” Therese asked.

“Nothing. I don’t know yet.” Carol glanced around and slapped the telegram against her fingers. “I’ve got to make a phone call. It might take a few minutes.” She looked at her watch.

It was a quarter to two. The hotel clerk said she could probably get New Jersey in about twenty minutes. Meanwhile, Carol wanted a drink. They found a bar in the hotel.

“What is it? Is Abby sick?”

Carol smiled. “No. I’ll tell you later.”

“Is it Rindy?”

“No!” Carol finished her brandy.

Therese walked up and down in the lobby while Carol was in the telephone booth. She saw Carol nod slowly several times, saw her fumble to get a cigarette lighted, but by the time Therese got there to light it for her, Carol had it and motioned her away. Carol talked for three or four minutes, then came out and paid her bill.

“What is it, Carol?”

Carol stood looking out the doorway of the hotel for a moment. “Now we go to the Temple Square Hotel,” she said.

There they picked up another telegram. Carol opened it and glanced at it, and tore it up as they walked to the door.

“I don’t think we’ll stay here tonight,” Carol said. “Let’s go back to the car.”

They went back to the hotel where Carol had gotten the first telegram. Therese said nothing to her, but she felt something had happened that meant Carol had to get back East immediately. Carol told the clerk to cancel their room reservation.

“I’d like to leave a forwarding address in case of any other messages,” she said. “That’s the Brown Palace, Denver.”

“Right you are.”

“Thank you very much. That’s good for the next week at least.”

In the car, Carol said, “What’s the next town west?”

“West?” Therese looked at the map. “Wendover. This is that stretch. A hundred and twenty-seven miles.”

“Christ!” Carol said suddenly. She stopped the car completely and took the map and looked at it.

“What about Denver?” Therese asked.