Next to Love (4 page)

She is shivering. She reaches into the backseat to retrieve her coat.

“It didn’t just disappear.” She tries to keep the edge from her voice. He has been with her every night. He could not have used it with someone else. But things do not just disappear.

He sits turned away from the steering wheel, sifting through the money and license and scraps of paper spread between them on the front seat. Suddenly he stops.

His fist strikes the steering wheel. He leans on the horn. Rage screeches through the darkness. “I’ll kill the little bastard.”

“Who?”

“Marty.”

“Your brother?”

“I wondered what he was doing at my dresser when I came out of the shower.”

He sounds the horn again, a shriek of protest against the injustice of it, then jams the money and papers back in the wallet and sits with his arms crossed on the steering wheel and his head resting on them.

She puts an arm around him and leans close to his ear. “We could risk it. I think it would be okay. I mean as far as timing.” Grace’s book has taught her that much.

He turns to look at her. She has seen him without his glasses before, but he has never looked so naked. The corner of his mouth twitches. A moment goes by.

“I’m too much of a coward.”

Later, she will come to think it is the bravest statement she has ever heard. But that will be later. She digs her bra out from the upholstery and puts it on.

THE FOLLOWING NIGHT
, he is better prepared. So is she. There will be blood. The thought came to her the night before as she lay in bed, her nerves jangling, her skin raw from his touch, her stomach hollow with disappointment. There will be blood on the worn gray upholstery of the front seat. Does he not care, or does he think she is more experienced than she is? What Jimmy Doyle had to tell was damaging but not devastating, but he would not be the first boy to embellish the facts. Claude would not, but Jimmy Doyle had not been Claude, not by a long shot.

Before he comes to pick her up, she takes an old towel and stuffs it in her handbag. It sits at her feet all through the movie, giving off a glow in the darkened theater. She glances around at the audience. Their faces, lit by the reflected light from the screen, hang in the blackness like a galaxy of pale moons. Their mouths open into small holes of laughter. Their eyes, as they follow the action, careen like the steel globes in a pinball machine. They are watching the movie as if nothing is about to happen. Their obliviousness shocks her. How can they be going about their lives as if this is an ordinary night, when she is about to take such a momentous step? Don’t they know? Can’t they see it on her face and Claude’s? Don’t the two of them give off some animal sound or scent?

The first thing she does after Claude comes to a stop at the end of the road, but leaves on the engine for the heater, is take the towel from her handbag and spread it on the front seat.

He looks surprised.

“Didn’t you think we’d need it?” She tries to keep the edge out of her voice.

“I was pretty sure we’d need it, but that wasn’t the precaution I was thinking about.” His grin sparks, then dies, extinguished by nervousness.

In the past, the articles of clothing came off in a slow, tentative ritual. Is this okay? Do I try this? Should I say no? Now they are lightning quick but awkward, unsure whether to undress each other or themselves. He unbuttons her blouse. She pulls out the tie that is tucked into his khaki shirt, military style, and undoes the knot. He unhooks her bra. When he takes off his pants, the metal belt buckle strikes the dashboard like a gong. They stop in guilty surprise as the sound echoes into the darkness. Finally naked, they are almost too shy to look at each other but too enthralled to look away. They pilfer glimpses from under lowered lashes. His dog tags gleam in the dim moonlight.

The front seat is narrow and not very long. They lie with their legs entwined, face-to-face on their sides, so close she can see nothing but those naked eyes, getting closer still. His mouth is tentative at first, but she feels the insistence behind it. His erection is hard against her stomach. She is fascinated, though she has a feeling no nice girl should be. But she cannot help herself. She reaches down to touch it. She sees the surprise in those velvet eyes. She moves her hand. His groan comes from some cave deep within him.

His hand begins to move down her body. She thinks she will howl with the sensation of his fingers inside her, and then she does howl, and the sound tolls through the darkness, religious as a church bell.

After that, it goes exactly as Grace’s book says it should. He opens the packet that he checked before he left the house, and she watches him put it on. She has never seen anything so intriguing. She feels no pain when he enters her, and when he roars his pleasure into the snow-muffled night, she hangs on to him to steal a little more for herself.

Afterward, as they lie stunned and stupid with the wonder of it, she thinks how relieved she is, how glad, how strutting proud that she did not waste this wonder on Jimmy Doyle.

She untangles her arms and legs and props herself up on her elbow. The car is freezing, despite the heater he has kept running, and the upholstery is scratchy against her skin, but his body gives off warmth, and she toasts herself against it as she looks down at him. He is lying on his back, staring at the roof of the car.

She leans down to kiss him. That is when she feels it. His face is wet.

Years later, one of Grace’s granddaughters, to whom Babe is close, will fall in love with a young man who, as the girl will explain to Babe, is so in touch with his feelings—that’s the way she talks; that’s the way they all talk by then—that he can cry. Babe could tell her there is nothing new about that. Fifty years earlier, she was in love with a man who cried because they had just made love for the first time and now he was leaving her to go off to war. But she will not tell the girl. It is nobody’s damn business.

TWO

JANUARY
1942

A
S SOON AS BABE WALKS IN TO GRACE’S HOUSE THAT NIGHT, SHE
smells the fear. It overpowers the aroma of roasting meat, and the women’s perfume, and the Christmas tree that lingers like a broken promise, peace on earth, goodwill to men, and ten days of leave. Grace greets them with the announcement that Charlie wanted to take the tree down before he left, but she made him leave it up for tonight. She makes it sound as if they are having a party, not staving off panic.

The fear is not of what will happen to the men—though there is that too, there is always that these days—but that left alone on this last night, two by two, Babe and Claude, Grace and Charlie, Millie and Pete, they will behave badly. That is why Grace, the only one with a house of her own, offers to make the dinner. There will be no scenes if they are all together. She does not add that it will keep her busy, too busy even to glance at the clock.

GRACE SAW IT AS SOON
as she opened her eyes that morning. The two hands of the alarm clock formed a straight line, six o’clock. Twenty-four hours, she thought, all that was left, and resolved not to look at it again.

She manages not to, all day, until Charlie comes up behind her as she is standing at the sink scrubbing potatoes and puts his arms around her waist. He is still wearing his overcoat and smells from the cold and the drink he had with the boys in the newsroom. As he kisses the back of her neck, she bends her head forward. That’s when she sees the watch on his wrist. The brown leather band nestles in among the forest of fine black hairs. The gold-rimmed face screams up at her. Four-twenty.

“I didn’t expect you this early,” she says. “I thought they’d want to send you off with a bang.”

He lets go of her, takes a step back, and shrugs. He is working hard to pretend nothing is happening. That makes two of them.

“They tried, but I said I wasn’t about to spend my last evening on leave with a bunch of newsroom drunks, not when I have two gorgeous women waiting at home for me. She still napping?”

“She went down late.”

He glances at the brown-butcher-paper-wrapped object on the counter. “What did you decide to make?”

“A rib roast.”

“Rib roast,” he sighs. “Who knows when I’ll get that again?”

Whose fault is that? she wants to scream. “The management aims to please,” she says sweetly.

“I think I’ll put some more salt on the front walk. Just to be safe.”

Safe. Surely he is joking. “Good idea.”

She stands at the kitchen window, watching him go down the steps and into the snowy yard. The winter sun sits low in the sky, just above the garage, red as the slab of beef she has bought for dinner. As he stands for a moment, staring into the middle distance, the long slanting rays glint off his black hair, iridescent as a crow’s. He glances over at the hedges separating their property from the Gordons’, then begins to turn his head slowly, like a camera panning a shot, from one end of the yard to the other and back, as if he is memorizing it.

Talk to me, she wants to throw open the window and shout. Tell me. Are you afraid? Are you secretly thrilled, a little boy with a stick playing at being a soldier, a man going off on a great adventure, leaving us behind, breaking my heart? No, that isn’t fair. He is not enjoying this either.

She watches him cross the yard and disappear into the garage. A moment later, he comes out dragging a sack of salt and the shovel. It is the Christmas tree all over again. He will not leave her with a tree to take down or an icy sidewalk. He will leave her, but he will do it neatly.

By the time he comes in, she has brought the baby down from her nap, put her in the high chair, and is standing at the counter, mashing carrots. He comes up behind her again, and puts his arms around her again, and she looks down at his wrist again. Five-fifteen. They have wasted fifty-five minutes salting and shoveling the sidewalk, and preparing dinner, and going through the motions of ordinary life. But what should they be doing? Savoring every minute. That’s the catchphrase of the day, like some silly jingle on the radio. How can you savor every minute when the only twenty-four hours you have left for God knows how long—forever maybe—are running through you like sand through the egg timer on the kitchen counter?

“You smell good,” she says, though in the past the odor of cold air, the sweat he worked up shoveling because he found some patches that needed more than salt, and the whiskey he had with the men from the newsroom who wanted to send him off with a bang would not have made her ache with premature longing.

“I smell, period. Do I have time for a quick shower?”

“All the time in the world.” Oh, God, why did she say that? “They’re not coming until seven.”

His feet pound up the stairs, then begin moving around overhead. She hears the squeak of the metal top to the hamper followed by the faint whoosh of clothes going down the chute, which is behind the kitchen wall.

“All the amenities,” his father said when he bought them the house just a few blocks from the solid Tudor where Charlie grew up. They both felt uneasy about the wedding gift. None of their friends had anything half so grand. It was certainly more than a reporter on a local paper could afford. But she and Charlie got used to it pretty quickly, though she is careful to play it down. She does not want Babe or Millie or her other friends to think marrying into the Goodings has gone to her head.

She hears the shower go on upstairs. He starts to sing. She grips the rim of the sink and closes her eyes. He can sing. He is going off and leaving her and the baby, and he can sing his silly Fats Waller imitation.

You’re not the only oyster in the stew
,

Not the only tea leaf in the tea
,

However, I’m convinced, completely, fully, firmly convinced
,

You’re the only one for me!

Overhead, feet are moving around the bedroom. How long has she been standing here, hanging on to the sink, while the minutes slip away? She will not do this. She will not ruin his last night home.

She carries the small silver bowl with Amy’s initials engraved on the side to the high chair, sits beside it, and begins spooning food into the baby’s mouth. It will be better once the others are here. The company of misery.

She wipes Amy’s face with the bib and gives her a zwieback to keep her quiet while she sets the table. The good dishes are on the top shelf. She has to go up on her toes to reach them. She carefully takes down six plates, carries them into the dining room, and puts them on the sideboard. Then she goes back into the kitchen to get the silverware. She pulls open the drawer where she keeps the sterling. It goes past the stops, comes all the way out, and hits her shin. Forks, knives, and spoons clatter to the floor.