Perhaps she sensed that. She turned with a controlled smile and said, “You’re looking preposterously healthy, Gevan.”
“I’m a beach boy. A muscle-flexer.”
“With no dissipations? I’m quite good at martinis these days.” It made me remember the burnt-acid abominations she had mixed for us long ago.
“Prove it.”
I sat and watched her at the small bar. The room was silent. Ice tinkled. She measured with small girl intentness. She swirled the cocktail in the crystal bubble of the shaker, poured carefully, brought me the first drink. I stood up and took it and sipped. “You’re better than you used to be,” I said.
She sat opposite me with her drink. We were walking a polite and formal line. On either side were quicksands.
“You have a very nice home, Niki.”
“It’s too big, actually. Ken wanted a big house. I’ll sell it, I guess.”
“And then what?”
“Go away. Get sort of — straightened out. And come back here. Stanley says I should take an active interest in the company.”
The silence grew. It was not a comfortable silence. There was a tingling to it, a nervous suspense. I liked her hair better the way she used to wear it. The present effect made her face look more fragile, but it also gave her a look of false composure.
“Do you like Florida, Gevan?”
“Very much.”
“You’ll go back, I suppose.”
“Yes, of course.”
And again there was the silence of the big room. She sipped her drink. I saw her round throat work. She looked down into her glass, frowning. “We could talk and talk and talk and never say a thing — if we keep on this way.”
“This is the safe way.”
She looked up sharply. “Is it? Then I’ll say it. I should never have married Ken.”
The silence came back but it was altered. It had changed.
“Don’t step out of character,” I said. “Remember, you’re the shattered widow.”
“I know I hurt you. I know how badly.”
“Do you?”
“Don’t try to hurt back. Not right now. Later, but not right now. Let me say this.”
“I’ll listen to you.”
“Six months after I married him I knew it was a mistake. But he loved me, and I’d hurt enough people. I tried to make him as happy as I could.”
“Not very successfully, from what I hear.”
“Then you know how he was the last few months. I couldn’t help that, Gevan. I tried. God, how I tried! But he — sensed how it had all gone wrong. He guessed I was pretending. But I never told him I regretted marrying him.”
I set my empty glass aside. “That raises a pretty question, Niki. Why did you marry him?”
“For a long time I didn’t know why I did that — dreadful thing to you. To us. Because what we had was so good, Gevan. So right for us. I finally figured it all out.”
“With diagrams?”
She leaned forward. “You and I are both strong people, Gevan. Terribly strong. Dominants, I guess you call it. Ken was weaker. He needed me. He needed strength. He appealed to something — maternal, I guess. You would never need me that way. My strength seemed to respond to his weakness. He made me feel needed.”
“And I didn’t.”
“Not in the same way. It was so queer the way it began. It crept up on us. We weren’t expecting it. And then it got worse and worse and we had to find some time and place to tell you how it was with us. We were going to tell you that same night when you walked in. But having it happen that way made it all sort of nasty. I’ll never forget that night, or the way you looked.”
“It hasn’t exactly slipped my mind, Niki.”
“I want to be honest with you. I’ve had to be dishonest for so long. I’ll tell you how it is. I miss him. I miss him dreadfully. He was sweet. But I didn’t love him. So I can’t miss him the same way I’ve missed you for four years. I can’t look at you while I say this. If things had gone on, Ken and I would have separated. And then — darling, I would have come to you and begged forgiveness. I would have come to you on any basis you wanted.” She lifted her head then and looked directly at me. “I would have come to you, Gevan.”
I looked back into her eyes. They looked darker. “Is that supposed to help?” I asked her.
“It’s too late, isn’t it?” she asked. Her voice was soft and remote. It was less question than statement, an acceptance of a mistake which had forever changed our special world. “Much too late,” she said, turning away from me.
I knew how quickly and how easily I could reach her. The impulse brought me to my feet before I could bring it under control, my empty glass bounding and rolling on the silence of the rug. She sat with her head turned away from me. I saw tendons move in the side of her throat. Except for that small movement, she did not stir for the space of ten heartbeats. Then, with a careful precision she put her glass on the table and rose to her feet with a remembered effortlessness and came over to me, her eyes downcast, smudged by the darkness of her lashes. I heard a hush of fabric and a hiss of nylon. She stopped, inches from me, and slowly raised her glance until, with the mercilessness of a blow without warning, she looked into my eyes.
After that instant of recognition her eyes lost their focus; her mouth trembled into slackness and her lips, wet-shining, seemed to swell as they parted. Her head lolled, heavy, sleepy, on the strong and slender neck, and her knees bent slightly in her weakness. Her body seemed to become flaccid, heavier, sweeter, softer with the inadvertent arching of her back, and there were tiny, almost imperceptible, movements of which I knew she was, as she had told me long ago, completely unaware, small, rolling pulsations of belly, hip and thigh.
With us it had been a strong and a compulsive attraction, a grinding feverish spell that always began in this humid hypnotic way, building to an urgency that made frantic use of the nearest couch or bed or rug or grassy place. It was always beyond thought and plan, and in a shamefully few moments she had taken me back into our rituals as though nothing had ever come between us. I found I was grasping her by the upper arms, in an ancient sequence, closing my hands with a force that twisted and broke her mouth and propelled the heat of her breath against my throat in a long hawing sound of pain and wanting. Under the strength of my hands I felt the warm sheathings of firm muscles as she strained to break free. It was one of our contrived delays. She rolled her head from side to side with an almost inaudible moan. I knew how violently she would come into my arms the instant I released her, how harsh and glad would be her cry, how astonishingly strong her arms would be, how hotly sweet the heavy mouth would taste, how all of her tallness would be in urgent, rhythmic, helpless movement.
Tires made a droning sigh on asphalt and stopped outside. A car door slammed. I held her until I felt the straining go out of her arms, and then I released her. I watched her come back to the objective world. Her mouth healed itself and her eyes became quick and her body straightened and tightened into formality. After a purely animal sensation of fury at my loss, I felt all the gladness come. I knew I would not have stopped. Nor could she. By accident I had been delivered from a sweaty interlude that would have shamed me beyond my ability to forgive or excuse myself.
She touched her hair and looked at her watch. “It’s Stanley Mottling,” she said. “I forgot I’d asked him to stop by.” She tilted her head and looked at me in a challenging way, arched and roguish. “It isn’t really too late, darling.”