10.
Thanks to Deke Simmons, Sadie finally got to find out what it was like to make love after sundown. When I asked her how it was, she told me it had been wonderful. "But I"m looking forward to waking up next to you in the morning even more. Do you hear the wind?"
I did. It hooted around the eaves.
"Doesn"t that sound make you feel cozy?"
"Yes."
"I"m going to say something now. I hope it doesn"t make you uncomfortable."
"Tell me."
"I guess I"ve fallen in love with you. Maybe it"s just the s.e.x, I"ve heard that"s a mistake people make, but I don"t think so."
"Sadie?"
"Yes?" She was trying to smile, but she looked frightened.
"I love you, too. No maybe or mistake about it."
"Thank G.o.d," she said, and snuggled close.
11.
On our second visit to the Candlewood Bungalows, she was ready to talk about Johnny Clayton. "But turn out the light, would you?"
I did as she asked. She smoked three cigarettes during the telling. Toward the end, she cried hard, probably not from remembered pain so much as simple embarra.s.sment. For most of us, I think it"s easier to admit doing wrong than being stupid. Not that she had been. There"s a world of difference between stupidity and naivete, and like most good middle-cla.s.s girls who came to maturity in the nineteen-forties and-fifties, Sadie knew almost nothing about s.e.x. She said she had never actually looked at a p.e.n.i.s until she had looked at mine. She"d had glimpses of Johnny"s, but she said if he caught her looking, he would take hold of her face and turn it away with a grip that stopped just short of painful.
"But it always did hurt," she said. "You know?"
John Clayton came from a conventionally religious family, nothing nutty about them. He was pleasant, attentive, reasonably attractive. He didn"t have the world"s greatest sense of humor (almost none might have been closer to the mark), but he seemed to adore her. Her parents adored him. Claire Dunhill was especially crazy about Johnny Clayton. And, of course, he was taller than Sadie, even when she was in heels. After years of beanpole jokes, that was important.
"The only troubling thing before the marriage was his compulsive neatness," Sadie said. "He had all his books alphabetized, and he got very upset if you moved them around. He was nervous if you took even one off the shelf-you could feel it, a kind of tensing. He shaved three times a day and washed his hands all the time. If someone shook with him, he"d make an excuse to rush off to the lav and wash just as soon as he could."
"Also color-coordinated clothes," I said. "On his body and in the closet, and woe to the person who moved them around. Did he alphabetize the stuff in the pantry? Or get up sometimes in the night to check that the stove burners were off and the doors were locked?"
She turned to me, her eyes wide and wondering in the dark. The bed squeaked companionably; the wind gusted; a loose windowpane rattled. "How do you know that?"
"It"s a syndrome. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD, for short. Howard-" I stopped. Howard Hughes has a bad case of it, I"d started to say, but maybe that wasn"t true yet. Even if it was, people probably didn"t know. "An old friend of mine had it. Howard Temple. Never mind. Did he hurt you, Sadie?"
"Not really, no beating or punching. He slapped me once, that"s all. But people hurt people in other ways, don"t they?"
"Yes."
"I couldn"t talk to anyone about it. Certainly not my mother. Do you know what she told me on my wedding day? That if I said half a prayer before and half a prayer during, everything would be fine. During was as close as she could come to the word intercourse. I tried to talk to my friend Ruthie about it, but only once. This was after school, and she was helping me pick up the library. "What goes on behind the bedroom door is none of my business," she said. I stopped, because I didn"t really want to talk about it. I was so ashamed."
Then it came in a rush. Some of what she said was blurred by tears, but I got the gist. On certain nights-maybe once a week, maybe twice-he would tell her he needed to "get it out." They would be lying side by side in bed, she in her nightgown (he insisted she wear ones that were opaque), he in a pair of boxer shorts. Boxers were the closest she ever came to seeing him naked. He would push the sheet down to his waist, and she would see his erection tenting them.
"Once he looked at that little tent himself. Only once that I remember. And do you know what he said?"
"No."
""How disgusting we are." Then he said, "Get it over with so I can get some sleep.""
She would reach beneath the sheet and m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e him. It never took long, sometimes only seconds. On a few occasions he touched her b.r.e.a.s.t.s as she performed this function, but mostly his hands remained knotted high on his chest. When it was over, he would go into the bathroom, wash himself off, and come back in wearing his pajamas. He had seven pairs, all blue.
Then it was her turn to go into the bathroom and wash her hands. He insisted that she do this for at least three minutes, and under water hot enough to turn her skin red. When she came back to bed, she held her palms out to his face. If the smell of Lifebuoy wasn"t strong enough to satisfy him, she would have to do it again.
"And when I came back, the broom would be there."
He would put it on top of the sheet if it was summer, on the blankets if it was winter. Running straight down the middle of the bed. His side and her side.
"If I was restless and happened to move it, he"d wake up. No matter how fast asleep he was. And he"d push me back to my side. Hard. He called it "transgressing the broom.""
The time he slapped her was when she asked how they would ever have children if he never put it in her. "He was furious. That"s why he slapped me. He apologized later, but what he said right then was, "Do you think I"d put myself in your germy womanhole and bring children into this filthy world? It"s all going to blow up anyway, anyone who reads the paper can see that coming, and the radiation will kill us. We"ll die with sores all over our bodies, and coughing up our lungs. It could happen any day.""
"Jesus. No wonder you left him, Sadie."
"Only after four wasted years. It took me that long to convince myself that I deserved more from life than color-coordinating my husband"s sock drawer, giving him handjobs twice a week, and sleeping with a G.o.ddam broom. That was the most humiliating part, the part I was sure I could never talk about to anyone . . . because it was funny."
I didn"t think it was funny. I thought it was somewhere in the twilight zone between neurosis and outright psychosis. I also thought I was listening to the perfect Fifties Fable. It was easy to imagine Rock Hudson and Doris Day sleeping with a broom between them. If Rock hadn"t been gay, that was.
"And he hasn"t come looking for you?"
"No. I applied to a dozen different schools and had the answers sent to a post office box. I felt like a woman having an affair, sneaking around. And that"s how my mother and father treated me when they found out. My dad has come around a little-I think he suspects how bad it was, although of course he doesn"t want to know any of the details-but my mother? Not her. She"s furious with me. She had to change churches and quit the Sewing Bee. Because she couldn"t hold her head up, she says."
In a way, this seemed as cruel and crazy as the broom, but I didn"t say so. A different aspect of the matter interested me more than Sadie"s conventional Southern parents. "Clayton didn"t tell them you were gone? Have I got that right? Never came to see them?"
"No. My mother understood, of course." Sadie"s ordinarily faint Southern accent deepened. "I just shamed that poor boy so bad that he didn"t want to tell anyone." She dropped the drawl. "I"m not being sarcastic, either. She understands shame, and she understands covering up. On those two things, Johnny and my mama are in perfect harmony. She"s the one he should have married." She laughed a little hysterically. "Mama probably would have loved that old broom."
"Never a word from him? Not even a postcard saying, "Hey Sadie, let"s tie up the loose ends so we can get on with our lives?""
"How could there be? He doesn"t know where I am, and I"m sure he doesn"t care."
"Is there anything you want from him? Because I"m sure a lawyer-"
She kissed me. "The only thing I want is here in bed with me."
I kicked the sheets down to our ankles. "Look at me, Sadie. No charge."
She looked. And then she touched.
12.
I drowsed afterward. Not deep-I could still hear the wind and that one rattling windowpane-but I got far enough down to dream. Sadie and I were in an empty house. We were naked. Something was moving around upstairs-it made thudding, unpleasant noises. It might have been pacing, but it seemed as if there were too many feet. I didn"t feel guilty that we were going to be discovered with our clothes off. I felt scared. Written in charcoal on the peeling plaster of one wall were the words I WILL KILL THE PRESIDENT SOON. Below it, someone had added NOT SOON ENOUGH HES FULL OF DISEEZE. This had been printed in dark lipstick. Or maybe it was blood.
Thud, clump, thud.
From overhead.
"I think it"s Frank Dunning," I whispered to Sadie. I gripped her arm. It was very cold. It was like gripping the arm of a dead person. A woman who had been beaten to death with a sledgehammer, perhaps.
Sadie shook her head. She was looking up at the ceiling, her mouth trembling.
Clud, thump, clud.
Plaster-dust sifting down.
"Then it"s John Clayton," I whispered.
"No," she said. "I think it"s the Yellow Card Man. He brought the Jimla."
Above us, the thudding stopped abruptly.
She took hold of my arm and began to shake it. Her eyes were eating up her face. "It is! It"s the Jimla! And it heard us! The Jimla knows we"re here!"
13.
"Wake up, George! Wake up!"
I opened my eyes. She was propped on one elbow beside me, her face a pale blur. "What? What time is it? Do we have to go?" But it was still dark and the wind was still high.
"No. It isn"t even midnight. You were having a bad dream." She laughed, a little nervously. "Maybe about football? Because you were saying "Jimla, Jimla.""
"Was I?" I sat up. There was the sc.r.a.pe of a match and her face was momentarily illuminated as she lit a cigarette.
"Yes. You were. You said all kinds of stuff."
That was not good. "Like what?"
"Most of it I couldn"t make out, but one thing was pretty clear. "Derry is Dallas," you said. Then you said it backwards. "Dallas is Derry." What was that about? Do you remember?"
"No." But it"s hard to lie convincingly when you"re fresh out of sleep, even a shallow doze, and I saw skepticism on her face. Before it could deepen into disbelief, there was a knock at the door. At quarter to midnight, a knock.
We stared at each other.
The knock came again.
It"s the Jimla. This thought was very clear, very certain.
Sadie put her cigarette in the ashtray, gathered the sheet around her, and ran to the bathroom without a word. The door shut behind her.
"Who is it?" I asked.
"It"s Mr. Yorrity, sir-Bud Yorrity?"
One of the gay retired teachers who ran the place.
I got out of bed and pulled on my pants. "What is it, Mr. Yorrity?"
"I have a message for you, sir. Lady said it was urgent."
I opened the door. He was a small man in a threadbare bathrobe. His hair was a sleep-frizzed cloud around his head. In one hand he held a piece of paper.
"What lady?"
"Ellen Dockerty."
I thanked him for his trouble and closed the door. I unfolded the paper and read the message.
Sadie came out of the bathroom, still clutching the sheet. Her eyes were wide and frightened. "What is it?"
"There"s been an accident," I said. "Vince Knowles rolled his pickup truck outside of town. Mike Coslaw and Bobbi Jill were with him. Mike was thrown clear. He has a broken arm. Bobbi Jill has a nasty cut on her face, but Ellie says she"s okay otherwise."
"Vince?"