She wondered where he was going for a moment, and then she realized he was coming toward her and Tony, and she realized at the same instant that she’d been hoping he would do just that. She wanted very much to talk to him, to be able at last to clear the air, to expose her heart and tell him about what had happened, exactly as it had happened, so that things would be just the way they were that time at Rockaway, before Andy, and before Bud had been taken away from her by the navy. She could feel the hammering of her heart beneath the clinging silk of her dress, and she was sure Tony could feel her heart drumming, too, and then she saw the embarrassed smile form on Bud’s face, and then his hand reached out, and he clapped Tony on the shoulder, and Tony looked up, absorbed and then surprised.
“How about sharing the wealth, mate?” Bud asked.
Tony backed away and bowed from the waist, and then swept his arm across his knees like a cavalier. He reached for the bottle under his jumper and moved off the dance floor to the sidewalk.
They did not speak to each other for several moments. She moved into his arms, and they kept a respectable distance between them because their bodies were strangers now. And, oddly, she did not want to be close to him. Not yet. There was a transparent film hanging between them, and they would have to tear through that first, rip it away, and, until then, until then, they would still be strangers to each other, going through the motions of polite society, making inane remarks about the weather. The big trouble was still between them, and it would not vanish until they sought it out and exposed it to the light, and then there would be time, then there would be all the time in the world.
“Real cornball, isn’t it?” Bud said.
“What?”
“The band.”
“Well,” she said, smiling, “nothing could ever compare to the Tony Banner Boys.”
“You can say that again,” he said.
They swung around the floor awkwardly, the habit of dancing together having grown rusty. “You’ve grown up, Helen,” he said.
“Have I?”
“Yes. You look damned good. When’s the last time I saw you?”
“I don’t know. Last spring, was it?” She knew the date exactly. She could reel off the date and the hour and the minute exactly if she wanted to. “Long ago.”
“You’ve changed.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“You’re prettier now.”
“Thank you.”
“You always were the prettiest girl around, anyway. For my money. Helen, you look damned good. Listen, do we... do we have to stay here?”
“What?”
“I’ve got my father’s car. Can we take a ride?”
She heard his voice, and she heard his suggestion, and the words came to her in a rushing roar, as if he were standing somewhere far off on a crag overlooking the sea, and the sound of his voice was mixed with the thunder of the rushing waves. And then she realized the thunder was only the roar of her blood, and she felt suddenly so elated that she wanted to scream aloud because he was asking her just what she’d wanted him to ask her, and she knew that now they would talk, at last they would talk it all out, get all the festering poison out of their systems, and be the way they were again.
“Yes,” she said. “I would like to take a ride.”
He seemed surprised. She watched his face, and she loved the surprise that spread over it, and she squeezed his hand, but only very slightly because things weren’t really all solved yet, and because the familiarity of squeezing his hand, even this small familiarity was strange to her, and because she felt that so much talking had to be done before they would really know each other again, before their eyes and their hands and their bodies could become familiar again.
They left the block party without telling Tony where they were going. She noticed that there was a quickness to his step, and she marveled at the way he walked, a real sailor’s roll having replaced his earlier loping gait. And the quickness of his step found a responding note in the steady drumming of her heart, and she told her heart, Be still, be still, this is only the beginning, we’ve so much to learn.
They rounded the corner, and she saw his father’s old Chewy, and she thought again of how long it had been, how long since she’d been inside this car, since she’d known the intimacy of its upholstery, the intricacy of the window mechanism on the right-hand door — hit the door first and then turn the handle very very slowly — how long since she had used the glove compartment as a personal storage locker for her lipstick and her tissues and her purse. And seeing the car, she felt that she was finally coming home, and she realized how silly she was being because the car was really just a beat-up old rattletrap, but it belonged to her now, and she wanted to be sitting in it again, alongside Bud, and they would talk, and they would clear this all up, and she would explain what had happened and how...
“Recognize it?” he asked.
“Yes. Oh, yes,” she said.
The car was parked beneath an old tree heavy with leaves. Very little light filtered down through the thick foliage. There was only a mottled lacelike tracing of pale silver on the roof of the car. He opened the door for her, and she climbed in, feeling comfortable at once in the car, leaning over from habit to open the door for him on the other side. He hesitated outside the car for a moment, taking off his hat and flipping it onto the back seat. There was something strangely impatient about the gesture, and a momentary frown puckered her brow, and then he bent, and the frown vanished, and he was inside the car beside her, and she heard the door slam, shutting out the night.
He reached for her instantly.
His fingers caught at her shoulders, and then he pulled her toward him, and she felt herself shaking her head, and then his mouth came down on hers, and the kiss was cruel, a grinding kiss that hurt her mouth. Her lips were not ready for his kiss. Her mind and her body were not ready for this yet.
She pulled back from him, shocked, her eyes wide.
“Bud—” she started, wanting to talk. Couldn’t he see that there was so much to say, so much time to span with words before...
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Do you want to take off your lipstick?”
The words were familiar to her, very familiar, and their familiarity was as jarring as his kiss had been. She couldn’t answer him for a moment. She sat staring at him, speechless when there was so much to say, her hands folded in her lap, her body stiff.
“Come on,” he said.
“No, I—” She shook her head — “no.”
“What’s the matter?”
She was suddenly cold all over. She began shivering, and she hoped her teeth would not rattle. He moved toward her again.