Chagrined by the bizarre image the magazine had given him, flushed with embarrassment, Marty surveyed the parking lot to be sure no one was watching him as he read about himself. A couple of people were going to and from their cars, but they were paying no attention to him.
Clouds had crept into the previously sunny day. The wind spun dead leaves into a miniature tornado that danced across an empty expanse of blacktop.
He read the article, punctuating it with sighs and mutters. Although it contained a few minor errors, the text was generally factual. But the spin on it matched the photographs. Spooky old Marty Stillwater. What a dour and gloomy guy. Sees a criminal’s wicked grin behind every smile. Works in a dimly lighted office, almost dark, and says he’s just trying to reduce the glare on the computer screen (wink, wink).
His refusal to allow Charlotte and Emily to be photographed, based upon a desire to protect their privacy and to guard against their being teased by schoolmates, was interpreted as a fear of kidnappers lurking under every bush. After all, he had written a novel about a kidnapping a few years ago.
Paige, “as pretty and cerebral as a Martin Stillwater heroine, ” was said to be a “psychologist whose own job requires her to probe into the darkest secrets of her patients,” as if she was engaged not in the counseling of children troubled by their parents’ divorces or the death of a loved one but in the deep analysis of the era’s most savage serial killers.
“Spooky old Paige Stillwater,” he said aloud. “Well, why else would she have married me if she wasn’t already a little weird?”
He told himself he was over-reacting.
Closing the magazine, he said, “Thank God I didn’t let the girls participate. They’d have come out of it looking like the children in ‘The Addams Family.’ ”
Again he told himself that he was over-reacting, but his mood didn’t improve. He felt violated, trivialized; and the fact that he was talking aloud to himself seemed, annoyingly, to validate his new national reputation as an amusing eccentric.
He twisted the key in the ignition, started the engine.
As he drove across the parking lot toward the busy street, Marty was troubled by the feeling that his life had taken more than merely a temporary turn for the worse with the fugue on Saturday, that the magazine article was yet another signpost on this new dark route, and that he would travel a long distance on rough pavement before rediscovering the smooth highway that he had lost.
A whirlwind of leaves burst over the car, startling him. The dry foliage rasped across the hood and roof, like the claws of a beast determined to get inside.
4
Hunger overcomes him. He has not slept since Friday night, has driven across half the country at high speed, in bad weather more than not, and has experienced an exciting and emotional hour and a half in the Stillwater house, confronting his destiny. His stores of energy are depleted. He is shaky and weak-kneed.
In the kitchen he raids the refrigerator, piling food on the oak breakfast table. He consumes several slices of Swiss cheese, half a loaf of bread, a few pickles, the better part of a pound of bacon, mixing it all together without actually bothering to make sandwiches, a bite of this and a bite of that, chewing the bacon raw because he doesn’t want to waste time cooking it, eating fast and with single-minded fixation on the feast, ravenous, oblivious of manners, urgently washing down everything with big swallows of cold beer that foams over his chin. There is so much he wants to do before his wife and kids return home, and he doesn’t know quite when to expect them. The fatty meat is cloying, so periodically he dips into a wide-mouth jar of mayonnaise and scoops out thick wads of the stuff, sucking it off his fingers to lubricate a mouthful of food that he finds hard to swallow even with the aid of another bottle of Corona. He concludes his meal with two thick slices of chocolate cake, washing those down with beer as well, whereafter he hastily cleans up the mess with paper towels and washes his hands at the sink.
He is revitalized.
With the silver-framed photograph in hand, he returns to the second floor, taking the stairs two at a time. He proceeds to the master bedroom, where he clicks on both nightstand lamps.
For a while he stares at the king-size bed, excited by the prospect of having sex with Paige. Making love. When it is done with someone for whom you truly care, it is called “making love.”
He truly cares for her.
He must care.
After all, she is his wife.
He knows that her face is good, excellent, with a full mouth and fine bone structure and laughing eyes, but he can’t tell much about her body from the photograph. He imagines that her breasts are full, belly flat, legs long and shapely, and he is eager to lie with her, deep inside of her.
At the dresser, he opens drawers until he finds her lingerie. He caresses a half-slip, the smooth cups of a brassiere, a lace-trimmed camisole. He removes a pair of silky panties from the drawer and rubs his face with them, breathing deeply while repeatedly whispering her name.
Making love will be unimaginably different from the sweaty sex he has known with sluts picked up in bars, because those experiences have always left him feeling empty, alienated, frustrated that his desperate need for true intimacy is unfulfilled. Frustration fosters anger; anger leads to hatred; hatred generates violence—and violence sometimes soothes. But that pattern will not apply when he makes love to Paige, for he belongs in her arms as he has belonged in no others. With her, his need will be satisfied every bit as much as will his desire. Together, they will achieve a union beyond anything he can imagine, perfect oneness, bliss, spiritual as well as physical consummation, all of which he has seen in countless movies, bodies bathed in golden light, ecstasy, a fierce intensity of pleasure possible only in the presence of love. Afterward, he will not have to kill her because then they will be as one, two hearts beating in harmony, no reason for killing anyone, transcendent, all needs gloriously satisfied.
The prospect of romance leaves him almost breathless.
“I will make you so happy, Paige,” he promises her picture.
Realizing he hasn’t bathed since Saturday, wanting to be clean for her, he returns her silken panties to the stack from which he had plucked them, closes the dresser drawer, and goes into his bathroom to shower.
He strips out of the clothes he took from the motorhome closet of the white-haired retiree, Jack, in Oklahoma on Sunday, hardly twenty-four hours ago. After wadding each garment into a tight ball, he stuffs it into a brass wastebasket.
The shower stall is spacious, and the water is wonderfully hot. He works up a heavy lather with the bar of soap, and soon the clouds of steam are laden with an almost intoxicating floral aroma.
After drying off on a yellow towel, he searches bathroom drawers until he finds his toiletries. He uses a roll-on deodorant and then combs his wet hair straight back from his forehead to let it dry naturally. He shaves with an electric razor, splashes on some lime-scented cologne, and brushes his teeth.
He feels like a new man.
In his half of the large walk-in closet, he selects a pair of cotton briefs, blue jeans, a blue-and-black-checkered flannel shirt, athletic socks, and a pair of Nikes. Everything fits perfectly.