Cliff got quickly to his feet. “Not for me. I’m on my way. Well, good-bye, Anne, I sure hope you—”
“Wait a minute. Hold on. What’s your hurry? I’m ready, too, I guess. Maybe I’ve had enough.” She settled the big straw hat on her head, snatched up her handbag. She was only a little unsteady, he thought, and as tall as he on her thin high heels, but no wider than a twig.
She smiled and blinked her eyes brightly at him, suddenly quite jaunty. “I feel better now,” she assured him. “I feel fine. Why don’t you walk me part way home? It’s a beautiful night. I was noticing the moon over the water when I — just before I—” She paused, looking down at her handbag. “Well, anyhow, I’ll be all right. Don’t you worry about me. I’ve got the wherewithal.” She laughed, patting the bag. “He had a professor who used to talk all the time about the wherewithal. It was one of our jokes, back in the good days. We did have good days, once.” Her laughter went a little forced and then died.
“I have a bus to catch,” Cliff said.
“Walk as far as my car and I’ll give you a lift. I owe you that much. You did me a good turn. Oh, come along.” She tucked her chin down and looked at him from the tops of her eyes with a sort of bloodshot coquettishness. “I might jump in the ocean if you don’t.”
Cliff thought, Well, maybe she might, at that. Maybe I ought to go with her. I guess she hates being alone. It can’t do any harm to walk always with her. And he was yet young enough to find it hard to say no. He looked at the straw horse and rider cantering gaily along the brim of the straw hat. The bright summer dress looked quite cheerful. She smiled and her lipstick was not on very straight, but it was bright and red.
“All right,” he said.
Of all the sounds, the music of the merry-go-round went with them farthest along the dark highway. At first there were filling stations and used car lots to break up the night, but before long, stretches of vacant lots began and it was like walking through open country between the street lights. Wild mustard grew high here, pale in the moonlight. Where the highway bordered the ocean, they could see the big luminous breakers come threshing in to collapse exhausted on the sand.
“How far is your car?” Cliff asked, beginning to feel uneasy.
In a remote voice she said, “Only a little way more.” She pushed her hand through his arm and he could feel the handbag and the pint bottle flop heavily against his side with every step. Presently, still in the faraway voice, she began to speak.
“I thought about killing him, you know. Do you think that’s terrible? I often thought about it. After all, I invested my life in him. And now it’s paying off, but not to me. Louise is getting the payoff. I told you about Louise, didn’t I?”
“No, you didn’t. Look, Anne, don’t you think—”
“He married Louise.” She spoke quickly, not letting him finish. “He thought Louise was what he wanted — then. Terribly, terribly efficient, for one thing. He used to be mad because I wasn’t efficient. Well, I guess I’m sorry for Louise, at that. I know what’s ahead. He’ll throw her over when he’s ready for the next stepping stone. Don’t think he won’t. He has to be God. He has to have the last word. Louise will find out the same way I did.”
“Now hold on,” Cliff broke in. “Why not just forget about all this?” He looked down at her, but she was not paying much attention to him. She seemed to be looking all around the grassy verge they walked on, as if she had some particular spot in mind and meant to find it. Cars hissed by, each with its flash of light and sough of sound.
“Maybe you made mistakes too,” Cliff said. Their isolation in the dark — with the cars going by and the ocean on the other side closing them in — created a sort of closeness that made him feel at once responsible and wise enough to help.
“It isn’t too late to start over,” he assured her. “You’re young and pretty. You know you didn’t really mean anything about getting even and jumping in the ocean and all that stuff. Why don’t you just face up to—”
“Oh, shut up!” she cried out suddenly. “Shut your mouth!” She jerked her hand from his arm and swung to face him, the heavy handbag flailing from her wrist. “You know so much! You had to butt in. You had to stop me when I might have made it. You—”
“Not from that end of the pier,” he said, shocked but stubborn. “If you’d really wanted to drown yourself you’d have—”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” she screamed at him. “You had to stop me! Now you’ve got to help me get it done, do you hear?” She scrabbled in the handbag. “I told you I had the wherewithal. I’ve got it, all right. But I can’t use it. I can’t, I can’t! I’ve tried. You do it for me!”
And she thrust the wherewithal into his hand. It wasn’t very big — a thirty-eight, maybe, he thought, with a short barrel. Warm from the depth of the bag and the company of the bottle.
The disbelieving part of his mind stood back and knew that nothing like this could possibly be happening to him. The rest of him was jolted to incoherence. He could only open his hand flat and shove the gun back into hers, stammering, “No, no, no!”
“I’m young and pretty!” she was saying, her hard fingers clenched around his, trying to fold his hand shut on the gun. “Here, take it! I know what I am. I know how I look. Take it, you little damned fool, and do what you stopped me from doing! I can’t do it alone. I need help. Help me! Please!”
A wave of the most intense feeling washed over him, pity, terror, disbelief all hopelessly canceling each other out. Things like this can’t happen, he thought, not in real life, not to me. And he remembered with horrified revulsion that he had sat beside her, talked to her, walked with her, actually felt the gun bump against his side, and had not even begun to guess what he was getting into. The cars went by a million miles away, each snatching with it a small, temporary haven of light and safety and leaving him here in the dark, struggling with the woman and the gun.
He said, “No, no, let me go, Anne! Don’t! Anne!” But her fingers were hard as bone and in the desperate, incoherent struggle neither of them quite knew which held the gun.
He thought, Surely somebody will see this. Surely somebody will stop and help me. This can’t be happening — not like this. Not to me!
But he felt the gun hard in his palm, and her finger somehow pressed between the trigger-guard and his, very cold, very strong. No matter how hard he fought to let it go, when the pressure tightened on his finger, somehow, somehow the end of the struggle came and she got what she wanted.
There had been a terrible jolt and flash between them, and he was not sure at first which of them it had struck. Though the noise was loud he felt an immense silence and wondered if it were he who was hit. Because guns kill, he told himself wonderingly. Real guns kill.
Then he felt her fold softly up against him and slide down. It was strange how soft she was, when she had been nothing but hard, twig-like bone before. Her hat fell off and rolled in half a circle, the pale straw horse and rider cantering in the moonlight.
He stood there shaking convulsively, the gun in his hand shaking too. Everything wavered. He had the strange feeling that until a moment ago there had been three of them: Anne, himself, and a transparent, square-jawed William Howard Brewster walking between them. It was that transparent man she was really struggling to kill. And maybe she had, he thought dazedly. Anyway, now he was alone. He looked up at the stars and knew how terribly alone he was, feeling it for the first time. How alone every man is.
The car slid to a stop beside him while he still stood there looking up. He felt the gun in his hand and thought. It could have hit me, not her. I could be dead. It was inconceivable, but it was true. He could begin to believe it, as he could not have done ten minutes ago.