Well, she would find out, and soon.
She could not remember what Bert looked like. She had seen him one time, and she remembered the evening well enough, the drive to Carversville, the solitary drinks, the exploration of possibilities. She remembered vividly the man she had ultimately picked up, remembered even more vividly the ecstasy she had shared with her husband afterward. But she could not remember Bert LeGrand. She did remember his hands, their assurance on the keys, the power of them, and mixed with that memory was the feel of Warren’s hand on her foot. Did a man like Warren touch a male foot and a female foot in the same way? Or was there a difference?
Again she let her mind drift to the scene at the Raparound, her foot in his lap, her toes working to excite his cock. She touched herself for an instant to heighten the memory but it was unnecessary, the memory was vivid enough without such enhancement. She found herself wrapping words around the memory, putting lyrics to its music, the words she would use when she told Sully about it.
For she would tell him all of it. From the overtures on the street to the wildness which she herself was not yet able to imagine. She would tell him all of it
Soon enough.
SEVENTEEN
The last of the sunset glowed red in the west as Karen left the house and headed back into the woods. She had paused first at the door of her father’s study, heard the typewriter chatter, pause, then start tentatively up again. She wished he would finish the book so that she could read it. It wouldn’t be much longer, she thought. He was working steadily, working every day, and sometimes she would stand silently outside his door and hear the typewriter keys click away without interruption for ten or fifteen minutes at a time.
When he was out of the house she was occasionally tempted to peek at the manuscript. Once she had entered the study in his absence but had been unable to make herself look at what he had written. It could do no harm so long as he did not know that she had read it, but still she felt it would be a dishonorable act on her part.
She walked only a few yards into the woods. It was light out now but would be dark before long, and she did not want to be confronted with a long walk in the dark. That might be an unpleasant experience at any time, and would be especially unpleasant stoned. If the grass took her in the wrong direction, she might really find herself imagining that there were bears in those woods, or that the trees and vines were actively conspiring against her.
Her fingers found the little foil packet in the pocket of her jeans. She left it where it was while she smoked a regular cigarette, sitting with her legs crossed and her back against a tree. She smoked the cigarette all the way to the filter, then carefully stubbed it out on the sole of her shoe. In her mind, Smoky the Bear frowned and shook a warning finger at her.
“Only you can prevent forest fires,” she said aloud. “Only forest fires can prevent bears.”
She took out the packet, unwrapped the aluminum foil, let the two neatly rolled joints fall into the palm of her hand. A boy in town had given them to her almost a week ago and she had been saving them. She was in the right kind of mood now and the woods seemed a perfect place to smoke. It was a natural act that ought to be performed in natural surroundings.
She could have smoked in the house. In her own room or in the living room. Her father knew she had smoked, they had talked about it, and he didn’t seem to object to grass. He had smoked himself on occasion, although she gathered he had not had any grass in a long time. Christ, everyone smoked. People on Social Security were lighting up and blowing the tops of their heads off. She had known kids at Northwestern who had turned their parents on, and one kid who had been turned on by his parents. “Families that blast together last together.” Even her mother smoked, and anything that woman could do couldn’t possibly be hip by definition.
Her mother’s words on the subject struck her as one of the most extraordinary cop-out speeches she had ever heard. “Now I know very well that marijuana is harmless, Karen. It’s probably less injurious than alcohol, although the data are not yet conclusive. A lot of testing remains to be done. And Wayne and I have experimented with marijuana. The fact remains that it is against the law. The law may be a bad one but that’s neither here nor there. It’s the law, and violating that law can lead to a great deal of sheer heartache for young people. Also, I think it’s inadvisable in any event for adolescents to become involved with a drug like marijuana before they have the maturity to handle it. It’s the same as with alcoholic beverages. In fact I very much hope the powers that be will legalize marijuana so that its use can be controlled, limited to adults. I don’t suppose I can tell you what to do, Karen, because there are certain decisions you will no doubt make for yourself, decisions you will have to make for yourself, but I would strongly, very strongly, advise you to stay away from ‘pot’ until you’re over twenty-one.”
And of course she called it pot and used pauses to put invisible quotation marks around the word.
What bullshit! What complete and total bullshit! It’s harmless and everybody’s doing it but it’s illegal, so don’t do it until you’re over twenty-one. The advice was not only bullshit. It was also a little late; she had been smoking for almost a year before she got that particular lecture.
Now she put one of the joints between her lips and struck a match. She took a long easy drag, inhaled deeply, leaned her head back against the tree trunk and closed her eyes. She got a hit almost immediately and her mouth relaxed in a smile. The boy who had made her a present of the two jays had said it was dynamite, and it had been no exaggeration. She exhaled through pursed lips, then opened her eyes and wrapped the second cigarette in the foil and returned it to her pocket. She wouldn’t need them both tonight. One would be plenty.
Why had she decided not to smoke in the house? For the same reason, she thought, that she should not have brought the black boy home. Because it was silly to lay any trips on her father. It was immature and unnecessary, and she didn’t have to play those games anymore.
It would be fun to turn him on, though. Not now, of course. His book was going well, and the last thing he needed was anything that might push his mind in a new direction before he had finished his work. When the book was done, then perhaps they could smoke together. At that stage it might even be valuable for him. A good head-type high might give him some new perspectives, so that when he went over the book, he might be able to see it from a different angle.
And it would be very heavy, too, the two of them sitting around smoking. He had taught her how to drink, and she cherished the time the two of them sat together drinking highballs and rapping. She had never understood the special pleasures of alcohol before, perhaps because she associated it on the one hand, with her mother and Wayne and their friends and on the other hand with the fraternity-type jocks and their vomitous beer blasts. Perhaps she could return the favor by teaching her father how to smoke, how to go with it and let it take him into his head.
There was a time, before she went away to college, when she had had similar hope for her mother. It was shortly after her own initiation to grass, and she had managed to half convince herself that a few tokes was all her mother needed to turn her head around. Further reflection had forced her to realize that there were certain things grass just couldn’t do, and that this was of them. By the time her mother delivered her little sermon and confessed her own “experimentation” with “pot,” Karen had more or less guessed that the woman must have tried the stuff at one time or another, and that it obviously hadn’t done any good.
She took another drag and let herself go with it. Her mother and Wayne—there were two live ones, she thought. And the most depressing thing about it was that they thought they were so fucking hip. They wore the loud elaborately casual suburban clothes straight out of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, they subscribed to Ramparls and the Free Press, they bought and read all the right books, they went to cocktail parties to raise money for Eugene McCarthy and the Black Panthers and whatever Asian country had most recently had an
earthquake or typhoon or famine. They carefully salted their conversation with all the words that had gone out of style about a year ago. Christ, they were depressing.
They thought they were involved. If there was one word her mother would pick to describe herself, that would be the word. Involved. The most totally out-of-it person on the fucking earth, and she thought she was involved.
Too much.
Eyes closed, nape of neck brushing the craggy bark of the tree behind her, she flashed on something she had never put together before. The reason she had taken it for granted that her father had wanted the divorce was that she just couldn’t feature it the other way around. Why would she have wanted to leave him?
She had learned pieces of the answer over the years, and she giggled now at the absurdity of it. Mommy had left Daddy because Daddy was not involved and Mommy craved a life of meaningful involvement. She ran the thought through her brain and worked changes on it and giggled again, hysterical at the whole number. Her father was this enormously together person, doing something was very much his own particular thing, grooving with a beautiful life that all fit perfectly together, and her mother was out in Arizona in the middle of the fucking desert, wearing bells that were too tight in the ass and a peace symbol on a leather thong and running off to Esalen for encounter groups, and that made her the involved one.
And she had an involved husband, too. Wayward Wayne, boy architect. Wayne and Anita got into things together, that was what was supposed to be so beautiful about their marriage. But did Involved Liberal Anita know that Involved Liberal Wayne liked to play cuddle with Karen’s friends? A little fanny patting now and then, and when a girl named Patsy MacGowan had given him a little encouragement he’d had a hand up her skirt and his tongue halfway down her throat before the kid knew what was going down. “I was just flirting a little,” Patsy had told her, white-faced. “I thought, you know, we were just kidding around, then it turns out that he’s not kidding and I thought I was going to get raped.”
She giggled again. The tip of the jay was warm between her fingers, and she butted it carefully against her shoe and tucked it into the foil, refolded the foil and put it in her pocket. She didn’t need any more tonight. She was just about as high as she wanted to be, and with her eyes closed and her muscles loose and easy she would let herself float just a little bit higher. And what a nice high it was. The boy had told her it was happy grass. She wasn’t sure if it worked that way or not. It seemed to her that the mood you were in had more to do with what kind of a trip you took than the grass itself. She was happy now, though, loose and easy and giggly.
Anita and Wayne, so uptight in spite of themselves. She could have had Wayne herself—she had realized as much the last time she was home. There was no grabbing, no coy little tongue kissing, but by then she had learned to recognize the hints in men’s eyes, and they were all present in Wayne’s glance. The prospect held a certain appeal at the time; she’d been fighting with her mother, and the idea of taking a man away from Anita had a degree of charm to it. She never seriously considered it, though. Wayne himself was just too much of a turn-off for her to really think about going through with it. It would have to be a monumental down.
She sat up against the tree for a long time, letting the smoke work on her head, thinking her own private thoughts. At one point she unlaced her shoes and did a little dance in the soft grass. She danced herself into exhaustion, then sprawled full length on the ground. She flashed on an imaginary conversation: “Karen? Yon didn’t hear about her? Like she sold out completely, man. Lives with her father, drinks scotch and soda, even cut her hair. When she had that abortion they must have taken out part of her brain, can you dig it?”
The thought delighted her and she laughed loud and hard, laughed until the muscles in her belly ached wonderfully from the exertion of laughter. Oh, I am so stoned, she thought.
When she left the woods and walked back to the house her high was mostly gone, all but a slight buzz that she could easily control.
Did Anita and Wayne go to wife-swap parties? That would probably be just about their speed, she decided. And Anita would go for it, too—all you had to do was tell her it was the latest thing and made for genuinely meaningful interpersonal relations. That would be all the encouragement she would need.
And she could imagine those parties. Wayne and Anita and all their depressing friends. The swapping would really be pointless in that set. Like, how could you tell the difference between them?
She giggled again, but had no trouble getting control of herself as she entered the house. On her way upstairs she paused outside her father’s door. There was silence at first, and then she heard the rattle of his typewriter. She smiled.
EIGHTEEN
At ten minutes past midnight Melanie Jaeger backed out of the driveway, drove through town and headed north along the river toward Carversville. It was a dark night and the road had little illumination once she had cleared the outskirts of New Hope. She itched to drive fast, just as she had itched to leave her house a full hour before she did. She forced herself to drive slowly, just as she had forced herself to delay her departure as much as possible.
She pulled into the graveled parking lot of the Inn, killed the headlights, turned off the ignition. She unrolled the window and sat behind the wheel smoking cigarettes. She watched several couples leave the Inn and drive off into the night. A car arrived and another couple went into the Inn. A young man stalked out, hands plunged into his pants pockets: he gunned his engine before driving off, and his wheels spun fiercely in the loose gravel.
Then another car pulled into a parking place on the far side of the lot and Warren Ormont emerged from it. He stopped to light a cigarette and she watched him outlined boldly in the parking-lot floodlights. He was wearing a long Edwardian jacket and pearl gray slacks. He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket, polished his glasses, put them carefully back on, folded his handkerchief and tucked it back into his pocket. He consulted his watch, then walked across the lot and up the steps and through the swinging doors of the tavern. He did not glance toward her car, did not notice her at all.
All she had to do was turn the key in the ignition and drive home. She could invent an aphrodisiacal story for Sully out of her own imagination. It would be easy enough for her to do this. She had already that evening imagined enough encounters for a dozen stories.
She laughed hard at herself. Then she got out of the car. At least she could get a drink inside, and she seemed to need one.
Couples sat at several of the round oak tables, but the bar itself was almost empty. Warren sat at one end near the piano, and there were three men she did recognize at the other end. She took a stool near the middle of the bar and ordered applejack on the rocks with a little water. The bartender brought her the drink and she sipped at it, fighting back the impulse to drink it straight down. It was commercial applejack, nowhere near as good as the kind Sully drank.
She turned toward the piano. She recognized Bert LeGrand now, remembered his face from the other time she had been here. Odd that she had been unable to remember his face, but she surely recognized it now. She looked at his hands and felt the blood surge to her face. At just that instant Bert looked at her and smiled. It was a very confident smile. A cocksure smile, she thought, and her color deepened at the word.
He played “Love for Sale,” then segued immediately into “The Lady Is a Tramp.”
I could leave now, she thought. I could.
“Why hello there! What luck running into you here!”
She turned, smiled back at Warren’s smile. She said quietly, “You sound surprised.”
“Merely pleased. Superb timing, I might say. One more number and Bert severs his shackles and becomes a free man again. May I buy you another of those?”
“Please.”
He ordered another applejack for her, another cognac for himself. “To our possibilities,” he said.
“Yes, that’s a good toast.”
&nb
sp; “The waiting is difficult, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“I think it enhances things, though. We suffer from an embarrassment of cars, by the way. Bert has his, I have mine, and I assume you didn’t come here on foot.”
“No, I drove.” Bert wrapped up the set with “Lover,” pushing the song along at a dizzying tempo. “My car is outside.”
“I’ll finish my drink now and go outside. I’ll wait in my car. Take you time finishing your drink; then go outside, and start your engine. You can follow me back to our house. Bert will be along in no time.”
“I don’t want to leave my car on the street.”
“It’s recognizable?”
“Very.”
“No problem there. I’ll pull up in front, you run your machine into the garage, and we’ll stack ours in the driveway behind it. It will entail a certain amount of vehicular maneuvering when you’re ready to leave, but we can put up with that.”
She nodded.
“And that won’t be for hours,” he said.
What fascinated her was that she seemed to have no will of her own. This had not been the case before. Even when the men she chose were strong and self-confident, as Hugh Markarian had been, she had always been the one who initiated, and in the course of things she had been more leader than follower. Now, in the living room of Warren Ormont’s house, she felt absolutely powerless and lacking in volition.
“That’s Bert’s car now,” he was saying. “He’ll be with us in a moment.”
She nodded.
“The characteristic putt-putt-putt of Bertram’s Volkswagen. Is your car a Triumph?”
“No, it’s a disaster.” He looked at her as if astonished that she was capable of a joke. “It’s an Alfa-Romeo, actually.”
“Do you like it?”
“Yeah, it’s fine. It needs a cigarette lighter.”
“Oh?”
“It had a perfectly good one but I threw it away this afternoon.”