Benny watched her hold the tray while Tober bounded back to the house. She stared at him while they waited, staring to see that he didn’t move.
Tober got back then and he poured her a glassful. “Now this’ll jolt you a little, but don’t let it throw you. I’m here to catch you when you land.” He giggled.
Pat lifted the glass and drank.
She didn’t cough or shudder or do any of those things. She drank it and said, “How did you get it so bitter?” and then she finished the rest of the glass.
“Now we need about five minutes of silence while that heavenly stuff starts to pop.”
Was that hophead going to give away the show? Benny started to tremble. He heard Patty say, “I haven’t got five more minutes,” and he couldn’t hold it any longer. He kicked up dust when he started his sprint, dust almost like the cloud that churned up behind the car as the gears crashed again, the car lurched, and Tober weaved to balance the tray. Benny heard the buckling sound of the straining motor, the cough of the exhaust while the car tried to make it in high. Pat’s head was nodding with stubborn jerks, and as the motor died she slumped out of sight. Then Benny was at the car and looking at the blank eves that were not yet quite out. He opened the door, picked her up, carried her into the house. He noticed how limp she was but he hardly gave it a thought.
Chapter Fourteen
Benny stayed in her room for a while, watching her. Finally the sight of her drugged sleep made him turn away. He turned his chair to the window and sat in her room.
That’s why he didn’t hear the phone. It rang for a while with nobody around to answer it Then Tober went back into the hall. The phone was in a niche there and the sharp ringing set his teeth on edge. He picked up the receiver and yelled, “Hello, hello, hello! This is Tober speakin’ and squeakin’. Do I know you?… Do I know you, Fingers? Why, Fingers, if anybody in the whole world were to ask me how many fingers I know, do you realize what I’d say? Do you know-Fingers, I’m not finished. The story isn’t finished. Right now I’d say to you, ‘Yes, dear sir, I know eleven, ten of which I have on my two hands and one of which is you!’-Fingers, I don’t hear laughter. I don’t hear laughter. I don’t hear- That’s better, Fingers. Now, what did you say?”
He listened for a while, saying ooh and aah and of course I know Tapkow, and you say she is a sweet young thing? Then he said, “How should I know, dear Fingers?” and hung up the phone. Right then he had it in mind to find Benny, but he got distracted by a bunch of people in bathing suits who came jumping and singing down the hall. A guy called Harry was hoisting a girl on his shoulders and she had only half of her two-piece suit on. But nobody paid any attention to that. Instead they all started a dance, with Tober providing the music and lyrics. It went, “Harry likes to carry little Mary” and on and on, and by the time that game was over Tober had forgotten all about the phone call. And later that night, when he saw Pat, he didn’t think of it either, because she and the rest were doing handstands on the beach and there was much brushing of sand and drinking of beer from cans.
Benny had awakened after she’d left. He had run down as he was, unshaven and hungry, but when he saw where she was, on the beach, he had gone back to the house and taken a shower. Then he shaved, found some food in the kitchen, and sat on the dark veranda watching the beach. Later, when Pat went to bed, he saw to it that it wasn’t with Tober, and for the rest he left her alone.
They took care of two more days like that, until they hit one of those afternoons when nobody was partying. The sun made a thick heat outside, noiseless, and the cool house was like a tomb. He heard her bare feet padding on the tile of the hall and he followed her out to the back. From the veranda he could see the beach chair farther down, and one brown leg stretched out He sat and smoked. He had been wondering how long she could stand it there when her leg moved out of sight and then her face looked at him, around the back of the beach chair. “Seen enough, Tapkow?”
He didn’t answer.
She got up, shrugging the thick bathrobe over her shoulders, and came to the veranda. “I asked you a question,” she said. Her knee showed bare when she sat down on the railing.
“Don’t waste your talents,” he said. “I’m just the chaperone.”
She laughed. “I forgot. I’m business. And Saint Benny doesn’t mix business with pleasure.”
He flipped his cigarette across the railing and watched it hit the sand. “Pleasure!” he said, and started to get up.
It had stung her. She jumped off the railing and stood in front of him. “How would you know, choir boy?”
“I’m not buying.” He pushed her aside and walked into the house. Even when he heard her come after him he didn’t stop, and all the way up to the room, while she talked at him with her voice like steel bars hitting each other, he never turned or opened his mouth. Then she slammed the door and they were alone in the room.
He turned and his face made her stop short. “What do you want?” he said.
She didn’t answer right away.
“What do you expect?” he said.
“From you? Nothing.” She sat down on the bed, not caring about the bathrobe, and lit a cigarette.
“One dull afternoon,” he said. “It’s one dull afternoon, so with nobody else around, why, let’s go pick on Tapkow.” He went to the bureau and pulled out a shirt “Would you believe it, Pat, I’m sorry that this happened.”
“What a stink!” She got it out like a hiss. “What a stink when you open your mouth! You know something, Tapkow? You don’t know your place. You’re a thing in a gutter and don’t know it” She was standing again when he turned around. “And I’m only trying to help, making it easy, so you don’t have to overreach yourself.”
He shook the clean shirt out and gave her a short look. “Don’t bother,” he said. “Just leave the robe the way it is.”
When she jumped forward to claw at his face, his hands came up fast and she couldn’t move. A short push and she fell back on the bed.
“You don’t understand.” He said it before she was up again. “I don’t go to bed with a machine. Like a cash register where you push a button and the drawers fly open.”
He was changing shirts now and couldn’t see her. And there wasn’t a sound from the bed. Then she was still sitting there. her eyes looking almost white in the tanned face, with no expression that he could place. So her voice, low, came as a surprise to him. “And I’ve always been that. It’s either been business or a machine with a button to you.” It sounded like a question.
“No,” he said.
“No? In the cabin?” But when she said it she left herself a safe half-smile, crooked and hard.
He reached for her face, slowly, and stroked his thumb down her cheek. “Don’t laugh,” he said.
And then she wasn’t laughing; she cried. She cried not showing him her face, until he held it in his hands, close now, and after that close had no meaning because there was no distance any more between them.
When she woke it wasn’t all good. The bed was empty and he wasn’t there to hold her and make it real. She got off the bed, still tired, and through the windows, in the yard, she saw him by the car, leaning across the door and straightening up. He looked dark in the setting sun, and the way he walked back across the yard-a meaningless thing-became a terrible casualness in her anxious imagination. Because why was she here? Because he’d lied, pretended, to make good some large, ugly plan in which she was the button that made the thing fly open.
Her eyes narrowed into nervous slits and she started to pace. A shower, maybe. She took a shower, first hot, then cold, and dried herself hard. When she was dressed it wasn’t any better. The tense and anxious fear was there, unnamed, and even Benny, had he been there, couldn’t have made it go.