This was a double bed I had booked and she hadn’t even blinked. That would seem reason to hope. But for Clara Lukaćs there was no necessary significance in sleeping beside somebody in the same bed. She came out of the bathroom without a stitch. I undressed and turned out the light as cool in my assumptions as I could be. A high whine of impatience, a kind of child’s growl, and a poke of her elbow was what I got when I happened to move against her in the dark. Just testing.
She curled up with her back toward me, and those vertebrae which I had noticed and loved were all at once deployed like the Maginot Line.
—
In the morning she woke out of sorts, mean.
“What in hell am I doing here?” she muttered. “Jesus,” she said, looking at me. “I must be out of my mind.”
I was stunned. My first impulse was to appeal.
“Look at him, hunky king of the road there. Oh, this is great — this really is great.” She snapped up the window shade and looked out. “God damn him,” she said. “And his wives and his boats and choo-choo trains.”
She began to dress. She held up blouses, skirts, looked at them, flung them down. She sat abruptly on the bed with her arms full of clothes and she stared at the floor.
“Hey,” I said. “I told you I’d get you out of there and I did. Didn’t I?”
She didn’t answer.
“Hey, girlie,” I said, “didn’t I? You have a complaint? You think you’re some hot-ass bargain?”
“You bet I am, hunky, I can promise you.”
“Well then, go on,” I said. “Go back to your fancy friends and see what they do for you. Look what they already done.”
I got out of bed, pulled on my pants and socks, and stuck my feet in my shoes.
“Where are you going?” she said.
“Here,” I said, taking out my wallet. I crumpled a couple of singles and threw them on the floor. “That and a twitch of your ass will get you back to the loons.”
“You’re not leaving,” she said. “You’re not leaving me here!”
“You can go back to your career fucking for old men,” I said. I put on my shirt and combed my hair in the mirror over the dresser. “It’s probably as good as you can do anyhow.”
The mirror shattered. I didn’t know what she had thrown. When I went for her she was reaching for the Gideon Bible to throw that. I grabbed her arm and we knocked the bedside lamp to the floor. I pinned her to the bed. She tried to bite me. I held her by the wrists and put my knees on each point of the pelvis.
“You’re hurting me!” I moved back and let go of her. She lay still. A queer bitter smell came from her. It was anger that aroused her, confrontation was the secret.
But when I found her she was loving and soft and she shrank away softer and more innocent of her feelings than I had dreamed.
I held her, I loved the narrow shoulders, the small-boned frailness of her, the softness of her breasts against me. I was kissing her eyes, her cheeks, but she cried in the panic of the sensation, her legs couldn’t find their place, she was like a swimmer kicking out or like someone trying to shinny up a pole.
I wanted her to know the sudden certainty declaring in me like God. I was where I belonged! I remembered this!
But she didn’t seem to be aware of how I felt, there was this distracted spirit of her, her head shook from side to side with bursts of voice, like sobs, as if someone was mourned.
Our lovemaking was like song or like speech. “Don’t you see,” I asked again and again, “don’t you understand?” And she shook her head from side to side in her distraction. I couldn’t overcome this. I became insistent, I felt my time running out, I felt I had to break into her recognition. It’s you, I wanted her to say, and she wouldn’t she wouldn’t say the words.
And then the tenderness was gone and I was pounding the breath from her, beating ugly grunts of sound from her, wanting her to form words but hearing savage stupid gusts of voiceless air coming from her.
In my moment of stunned paralytic grief I groan I go off bucking I think I hear her laugh.
For several days we made our life sleeping till mid-morning and getting on the road and driving again till the sun went down and we could find a bed. We drove through boarded-up towns, we ate blue-plate specials and we slept in rooming houses with linoleum on the floor and outhouses in back or in small motor-court cabins with the sound all night of the trucks rolling past. Night and morning we made love it was what we did our occupation our exercise. But always with great suspense in my mind. I never knew if it would happen again. I didn’t have the feeling anything was established in her. She fucked in a kind of lonely self-intensification. She slept without touching me, she slept with no need to touch or hold me, she went off to sleep and it was as if I weren’t there.
I would think about this lying in the dark while she slept. I was there for her, I was what she assumed, and I was willing to be that, to be the assumption she didn’t even know she was making. And then one day she’d discover that she loved me.
Once in a while, usually in the numb exhaustion of daybreak, I’d look into her face and see an aspect there of the acknowledgment I wanted in the gold-washed green eyes. There would be humor in them. The lips slightly swollen and open, the small warm puff of breath. She’d giggle to see neither of us was dead and she’d give me a cracklipped kiss a soft dry kiss with the hot pulp of her lip against mine.
She liked to be inside her appetites and her feelings. Whatever they were. One day in a rainstorm I skidded off the road. I was frantically spinning the wheel, I couldn’t see through the rain, it had turned white, opaque, but Clara was laughing and shrieking like a kid on a carnival ride. We thudded into a ditch. Water softened the canvas top and began to leak through and we sat at a tilt as if in a diving plane, in clouds. I thought we might drown. Then we felt the car rise, somehow the water floated us free, and when the storm passed over, we gently drifted a half mile or so in the flood like some stately barge down a stream. She loved it, she loved every second of it, her fingers gripping my arm, the nails digging into my skin.
Sometimes we went out at night walking some main street to a local movie. She liked to stop in a tavern and drink ten-cent beers, she liked the looks she got, the sexual alert that went off every time she walked into a bar or a diner. One time someone came over to the booth and started to talk to her as if I weren’t even there. It seemed to me unavoidable what I had to do. He was an amiable fellow with a foolish grin, but with the strength in him of belonging in this bar, of being known in this bar, this town, he looked down and saw my knife, the tip making an indentation in the blue shirt and the sprung gut. He was genuinely astonished, they don’t use knives in boondocks of the Midwest, he backed off with his palms up.
She had turned pale. “What’s the idea, do you know what you’re doing?” She spoke in a soft urgent whisper leaning toward me over the table.
“I do,” I said, “and if you don’t stand up and get your ass moving I’ll do the same to you.”
Outside I grabbed her arm. She was in a cold rage but I had the feeling, too, that I had done right, that I had shown her something she wanted to see.
“You know something?” she said as I hurried her along to our room. “You’re crazy, you know that?”
I thought they were the first words of love I’d heard from her.
In Dayton, Ohio, I saw in the rear-view mirror the unmistakable professional interest of a traffic cop as we drove away from his intersection.
“I have not been smart,” I said. “I suppose my mind has been on other things.”
I made a sharp turn into a side street and started looking for the poor part of town.