“You’re really nuts, you know that?” She awed me. “You and Victor both should be in the hospital. You belong there.”
“You laugh at me,” she said, “and I’ll dig your eyes out. I’m telling you, so you’ll know.”
“Okay.”
Her voice softened. “I knew what you were thinking. There’s only one thing, Jack. Now I don’t want anybody else—ever. I just want you.”
“Sure.”
“I’m in love with you, Jack.”
We sat there like that, watching each other.
Something coarse came into her tone. “I mean all I said. And don’t try to kid me—you’re as bad as I am.”
“How do you mean, bad?”
She ran the tip of her tongue across her lips until they gleamed, and the excitement was in her eyes. “The other part of it,” she said. “Victor. You were right. I thought all the things you said.” She gave a quick sigh, straightened in the seat, and began looking at the windshield again. “But I could never do anything like that. I think about it—but it’s just dreaming.”
“The snow’s getting pretty heavy now, Shirley. You’ll have us drifted in if you don’t watch it.”
She slowly turned and frowned at me. “Just what do you mean?”
“I mean you’re going to do it, Shirley. Someday you’d have to do it, you couldn’t help yourself. So it’s going to be now.”
She stared at me, still frowning. She didn’t speak.
“We’re going to do it together,” I said. “You know that.”
Her lips moved very slightly, and there was no expression on her face at all.
“You mean you would help me?” she said.
“Yes.”
The word hung there between us.
She slid across the seat and knelt on one knee, and put her arms around my neck, and pressed her mouth against mine. She shivered in my arms. I held her that way, then let go, and she slid back on the seat. Dim fright lurked in her eyes.
“I didn’t know what you would say,” she said. “I couldn’t be absolutely sure.”
“How do you feel now?”
“Good—crazy good.”
She was wearing a fawn-colored dress of some slippery material that clung to her shape. Her eyes were very bright now, almost like glass. Her hair was thick and soft and full of light. The hem of the dress had worked far up on her thighs, past the rims of sheer, gartered stockings, twisted into the plump milk-white flesh.
I reached for her. She gave a little gasp and arched her back against the pressure of my hands, her breasts filling with the way she breathed as I pulled her up to me.
“You were here early,” she said.
“So were you.”
And then were locked together, and the car was shuddering in a storm of lust.
Much later we sat far apart and talked. Or Shirley talked.
“Mother was only married to Victor a year and a half before she died. Sometimes, when he’s very ill, he gets the two of us mixed up. He thinks I’m his wife. But, anyway, everything comes to me when he dies. One thing that’s worried me is the way he gives money away.”
“How?”
“Don’t get in a stew. There’s plenty left.” She reached over and patted my lips with her fingers, smiling. Then she got serious again. “Maybe there’s more left now than he figures on giving me, even. He sold out for a frightful sum. But he makes these damned donations, it’s like a disease. He gives to charities. It really scares me.”
“For three years you’ve lived with this?”
She nodded. “Plus the year and a half before mother died. When she died, he just seemed to fall apart. Mother was his secretary for a while.”
“He likes you a lot.”
“He had nobody. I had nobody. It was one of those things.” She smiled from the corners of her eyes. “I always sort of worked on him a little. It looked good to me.”
“I can imagine. How much you figure he has right now? I mean cash in the bank?”
“Three—maybe four hundred thousand. I don’t know exactly. About that.”
“About—” I started to say something else, then stopped. I just sat there. It was my turn to stare at the windshield. It came to me how much money that was. I actually got a chill. In the back of my head, I’d had something like fifty, seventy-five thousand, and a split was there, too—twenty-five, maybe thirty for me. I hadn’t brought it out clearly; it was just in the back of my head. But four hundred thousand dollars. She had said it as if it were three or four dollars.
I looked at her. She was watching me. The front or her dress was still undone. One full breast was bared, shaped like a honeydew melon, and her hair was snarled, the lipstick smeared. Her dress was rucked up in her lap, and her black nylon pants were hanging on the wind-wing handle. She looked hot enough to catch fire, but too lazy to do anything but just lie there and smoke.
The look of her, the smooth white flesh, stirred it all up in me again. I reached for her and kissed the nipple of her breast and then her mouth, and her fingers bit into my shoulders, the nails digging. She thrust herself away. “Not here—not again—somebody might—”
I couldn’t let go of her.
Then she said, “I don’t give a damn,” and locked her arms around my neck. The instant she spoke, I did give a damn. If we were seen together from now on, out like this, the whole thing would have to be called off.
I let go of her, reached over and took her pants off the wind-wing handle and dropped them in her lap.
“Put ’em on,” I said. “We’re as nutty as they come. We’ve got to separate and get out of here.” I told her why.
She lay back, pouting, and looking about sixteen. “I guess you’re right,” she said.
I offered her a cigarette, but she didn’t want one. I lit up, waiting, trying to calm down. She got dressed, covered up, took a comb out of a small purse and began running it through her hair.
“Could he possibly be suspicious of you in any way?” I said. “Any way at all?”
“No.” Her voice was flat now. “He even talks of how he’ll live another twenty years. How I’ll always be at his side. Like that.”
“Shirley,” I said. “We can’t wait on this. We’ve got to pull it off as soon as possible.”
“When?”
“Soon. I’ll think about it.” It was as if we were discussing a get-together between friends. I said, “Listen, didn’t he ever want you to go to school?”
“I went to private schools,” she said. “But when mother died, he wanted me to stay with him.” She paused. “Jack,” she said, turning in the seat, looking at me as she combed the snarls out of her hair. “You can’t begin to imagine what this has done to me. Being with him every hour of the day, the way he is. Seeing him live on and on. Watching months and years go down the drain. Knowing they’ll try to get him into a hospital eventually, maybe any day.” She quit combing and her eyes got that glazed, absent look. “Knowing that even if I manage to keep him out of a hospital, it’ll be bedpans and dirty sheets and giving him baths and all the rest of that stinking that goes with it.” She stared at the windshield and put her hand over her mouth, then took it away. “You can’t imagine. Nobody can.”
“I can. Rugged.”
“He won’t die. He just won’t die. He’s not really supposed to get out of bed, except when he has to—and God believe me, I would make him crawl on his hands and knees.”