She kept talking, and he began to chafe; he responded automatically-her lines were as easy to parry as a third-rate tennis player’s strokes-and finally, to his relief, she drew away from him with her eyes moist and said miserably, “I really have to go.”
He headed for his clothes. “I’ll drive you.”
“No-the subway’s much faster, and I have to try to sneak in before they get up. I’ve got to run, darling-kiss me?”
He gave her a long, lingering kiss that left her pulse pounding visibly in her throat when she backed away, snatched up her handbag, and ran out.
Steve heard the door slam. He walked slowly into the bathroom and grinned at himself in the mirror.
Brian Garfield
Villiers Touch
10. Russell Hastings
Wide awake, Russ Hastings lay on his side with his legs scissored like a running man’s, listening with dismal resignation to the racket of trucks that thundered up from the street below his window. Oh, God, of all the stupid, asinine hang-ups. He kept having the feeling Carol was just behind him and all he needed to do was look around into her smiling eyes, reach for her hand, and pull her close, hearing her low laugh, feeling her soft warmth. Whore bitch. Garbage trucks, unspeakably ear-splitting, squatted at the curb with their machinery grinding, gears whining, steel cans clanking. The modern urban sound barrage was enough to induce premature hearing loss and sufficient emotional stress to cause ulcers, heart attacks, mental aberrations-a public-health doctor had said so the other day in the Times. Hastings had spent an hour, sometime between two and six, composing in his mind a furiously worded indignant letter to the mayor concerning noise pollution; but as his fantasies folded and blended and blurred, the letter became a plaintive cri de coeur, a compound of sticky sentimentality and desperate outrage, addressed sometimes to Carol and sometimes to Diane.
He rolled over, cursed, flung himself upright, and batted into the bathroom to slam the door and drown out the racket under the shower. When he came out again, with a trace of shaving lather still drying by his ear, the jackhammers had started at the construction job half a block away across the street. His face closed down; he tried to ignore it, pawed through his drawers, and finally ripped open a string-tied bundle of ironed laundry that had sat untouched on the dresser for a week-he had been here for months but had yet to develop a bachelor’s efficient tidiness; he still all but lived out of suitcases. It had taken three weeks before he had been able to unpack at all: the divorce had stunned him; for a long time his mind had jumped the orderly straight track of his thinking and wandered through a melancholy mist in which decisions, even small ones, paralyzed him. He had had trouble deciding what dish to select from restaurant menus, choosing which sock to put on first, remembering how to spell familiar simple words. In time he had drawn himself up, got a grip on himself; but it was still uphill, like slogging through molasses-decisions still came hard.
He put a pot of water on to boil and swept the room with a bleak glance. It was undistinguished-convertible couch, dreary coffee table, an old TV, a chair with a ruffled slipcover, anonymous gimcracks on the walls. It revealed no personality, not even that of the fat landlord who had rented the place to him, furnished, for three times its value. Russ Hastings had matured with a highborn indifference to tangible possessions and rarely paid attention to his surroundings. It was a trait Diane had rarely understood-except once, he recalled. Early on in the marriage she had said with her lovely laugh, “Fashions and styles-I know it’s all superficial sham, Russ, but I can’t help it, I like it.” Sometimes she would come home exhausted after a lustful fury of shopping and insist he pay attention while she paraded before him her new clothes or antiques or paintings. Even when he feigned enthusiasm, his want of real interest had always incensed her.
He poured his instant coffee and sat down with it, feeling wrung out and angry because he was still going back over it, beating the dead horse, unable to dismiss her. So much of it kept flooding back every time she came to mind.
He had been so sure of himself. He had stalked her patiently for months, bemused by her determined private ambitions, confident they represented only a stage, convinced she would get tired of it, discard it, submit in the end to his masculine domination. With hindsight it was bitterly easy to see how he had deceived himself every step of the way. The time of decision had been the day she had opened her first art gallery. She had a compulsion, which excluded him, to succeed on her own; it had taken him a long time to realize that much, and still longer to know that only in a bad marriage did one’s success mean the other’s failure. The more Nuart grew, the more she regarded his accomplishments with weary boredom. She had begun to patronize, then to avoid, until the competitiveness between them became transparent and they separated into their distinct worlds. When they did meet it was with a cool sense of withering estrangement that made them overpolite with each other, hearty with forced cheer in public, straining for hurried smiles, a pair of actors speaking memorized set-piece speeches to outsiders and speaking to each other hardly at all.
Nothing as intimate as sex could remain unaffected by the drying up of their emotional wells. Gradually Diane had discovered a growing fear and distaste for lovemaking. She had suffered it, more and more, with trembling limbs and clenched teeth. She had tried-he had to give her that credit-she had tried with increasing desperation. But finally she had stopped trying. One night she had stood by the bed and slipped out of her robe, looking away, not at him. Without speaking, she settled down on her back and spread her legs out neatly, not disturbing the sheets, looking mindlessly at the ceiling and waiting with a flat, lifeless expression that promised she would resign herself to doing her sweaty functional duty but she could no longer pretend to like any part of it.
Filled with sudden revulsion, he had put his clothes on and walked to the door. Looking back, seeing the pain in her eyes, he had felt viciously glad: it showed, at least, that it was still in his power to hurt her.
Force of habit was stronger than love; they had kept up the outward pretense of marriage for a time. But one day he had stepped into the elevator, and it had hit him, unmistakable, the scent of her perfume. She must have just gone up to the apartment. He had left the elevator at the third floor and walked down the fire stairs to the lobby, gone to a hotel, and telephoned her. That was how it had ended.
He shrugged into a seersucker jacket and glanced in the mirror; he looked, he thought, like a burned-out reporter, a young-old man with deep creases bracketing his mouth, hair starting to gray, eyes puffy and bloodshot. On his way down to the sidewalk he was thinking of Carol McCloud. My trouble is, I’m just horny, that’s all. But he couldn’t shake her image. He went along Thirty-fourth Street and had a meager breakfast at a lunch counter; stopped afterward to paw through a sidewalk bin of old books. He found nothing but a layer of dirt on his fingers. Suddenly he turned into the street between two parked cars and hailed a downtown-bound taxi, got in, and gave the driver Saul Cohen’s address.
Saul Cohen’s office was in a small brown old building of almost colonial vintage that squatted cringing next to one of the tall Wall Street slabs checkered with glass, steel, and concrete-a nondescript new structure of the kind he had once heard Elliot Judd scorn: “I don’t intend to be put in a box like that until I’m dead. This city complains of vandals and they’re tearing down historic buildings to make room for that!” The new buildings weren’t even ugly; they were only boring, as inhuman as digital computers, and as cold.