“Then you do have the little suspicion he might forgive you?”
“I... I guess so.”
“And you want to be forgiven, don’t you?”
“It would be the most wonderful thing—”
“Liz, you were absolutely confident you could keep our secret about his big chance in Uruguay.”
“Yes. I know I could have. But this other thing is—”
“Listen to me. You are so anxious to be forgiven, to be understood, you are going to clue him some way, somehow, just enough so that he’ll pry and pry until he gets the whole story. Confession to not only lessen guilt, dear girl, but to create such a terrible series of scenes, you will be punished for your transgression, and then, finally, after many acts of contrition, there will be the forgiveness. Sell it to daytime television, kid.”
“Damn you!”
“I want you to act like a grown-up in a grown-up world, dear.”
“And how do I do that?”
“By measuring and weighing alternatives. Do you think that after he knows what we did in this bed, he’d go on working for me?”
“On no! Never. He just couldn’t.”
“But you have to let him know about us, just because you want punishment and forgiveness?”
“I won’t be able to hide it from him! I told you that!”
“You won’t be able to hide it because you are sure that the act is forgivable because there were so many extenuating circumstances. Liz, my darling, the only way to show your love for your man is to make sure you don’t ever dare give him the slightest clue.”
“How do I make sure of that?”
“You have to do something you know he couldn’t ever forgive and forget. That is a safety device. Then you can’t ever reveal any part of this. It will keep you from cutting him down to the point where he can’t ever know or reach his real potential in the world.”
Her stare was very puzzled, thoughtful. As she started to speak, he moved his right hand with rough, shocking, brutal directness into the most intimate of caresses. She gasped, started violently, pried his hand away. “What the hell are you doing, Aldo?”
He pitched his voice high. “Lee, darling, I’ve got to tell you a terrible, terrible thing. Somehow I got a little drunk and I got reckless and affectionate and I got laid by Mr. Bellinger. Well, darling, I slept and then I woke up in his bed and we decided as long as the harm was done already, we might as well have an instant replay.”
“Aldo! For the love of God!”
“If we do, honey, then you can’t ever tell him any part of it.” He tugged against her resistance, tucked her head into the hollow of his shoulder. “It’s the only insurance you can take out, Elizabeth. Believe me. It’s the only way to protect your marriage and his future from your subconscious wish to have him make you confess. You have to make the whole situation so unforgivable and unconfessable you’ll fight like a tiger to rid his mind of any little suspicion he might get.”
She lay quietly, making no attempt to pull away from him. “You’ve sort of got me confused.”
“Then just think it all out, darling. Think it through. And be honest with yourself.”
“Don’t... touch me or anything, huh?”
“I never will again, unless you give me permission. While you are thinking, dear, you know that there is one question, if you do confess, that he is going to have to ask you.”
“I know.”
“Did you plan to tell the truth about that too?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’d lie a little. Either say I didn’t at all, or it was a real little one.”
“You and I know better than that.”
“God, yes!”
“So the confession itself would be a little dishonest.”
“I guess so.”
“Then you’d make it just to gratify yourself. At his expense and mine.”
“Don’t talk any more. Let me think. I’ve got to figure it all out. It’s so important.”
After a long time she said, “It’s pretty cold-blooded.”
“It has to be, to be unconfessable.”
A minute or so later she sighed and he felt the warmth of her breath against his chest and throat. “I guess technically it doesn’t make a hell of a big difference. Done is done, whatever number of times. I mean faithless is faithless.” Mirthless laugh. “Screwed is screwed.” She sat up slowly, sighed again. “I just don’t know. Be right back.”
She hitched to the edge of the bed and got up. She looked down at him. Her smile was sad and sardonic. “Don’t go away.”
She was in the bathroom about ten minutes. He heard the toilet flush, heard water running. She came back and knee-walked near him and folded down into the same position as before. She had the faint aroma of his special bath soap from Neiman-Marcus.
“Well... don’t expect any reaction this time, Aldo. I feel all tired and dead and dumpy. It’ll be just going through the motions. But I guess that will count. He could forgive once, I think. Not twice. I guess it’s probably better if I’m real dead this time.”
“Permission to go ahead.”
“Yes. I guess so.”
“This is a deliberate infidelity, remember. You have decided, all things considered, that you want me to make love to you again.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up. Please. Just do it.”
He soon confirmed his suspicion that she had decided that she would not let herself feel any pleasure. But she was a strong and healthy young woman. Her nap had rested her. He had given her a rationalization and justification for making love. She made just a few whining complaints, and then she began to let herself be carried along. After a time she began to move ahead on her own momentum, and when he recognized the plateau condition, he began holding her back to give all her tensions time to build to a good peak. When finally she began to pull at him with frantic strength, arching impossibly wider for him, he moved her into it.
When they were both ended, and he lay still between the slack, sprawled bounty of her long handsome legs, and when his head had drowsed heavily downward to within the range of all her soft little blurred kissings, her voice saying a word in half whisper, “Darlee, darlee, darlee, darlee,” he had another memory of that day his grandfather had shot the woodchuck. His grandfather had cut a short sturdy length of branch, and they had tied the back feet of the giant groundhog together and then inserted the stick between his legs. They picked him up that way and carried him back down the road to the farm. Aldo had carried the rifle, and they had each held one end of the stick.
The morning sun had, by then, turned the early dampness of the dirt road back to pale fine talcum dust. As they walked, Aldo saw thick drops of blood fall from the muzzle of the dead beast. They would strike the dust and roll into strange dark little dusty balls, almost perfectly round.
It was on that walk that he suddenly knew, with terrifying finality, that everything and everybody had to die, without exception.
Both these parts of the woodchuck story would have to be told to Anne Faxton, so that she would understand. And there was that final part, of trying to eat the woodchuck stew that evening, then suddenly running out through the pantry into the back yard, bending over in the sunset light under the apple tree and vomiting, then suddenly feeling his grandfather’s only hand on his back, and hearing him say softly, “There, boy. There, now.”
He had managed to so intensify the big girl’s release that she was a long time in softening and fading into her total relaxation and lethargy. He thought of the terrible swiftness of himself, when every bit of consciousness, awareness, identity had turned and folded inward toward the deep hot ecstasy of sensation, demand, and spending. Too swift, too much like the cracking flight of the rifle slug. He lay, awaiting the thong around his ankles, the insertion of the lift stick, the long swaying, head-down journey down the long dusty road for the dead beast.