The Vengeful Virgin

“Get out!” she said. “Get away from me. Leave me alone, you dirty bastard. Get out of here and stay away from me.”

I thrust her slowly back toward the bed, fighting with her every inch of the way, and gave her a shove. She landed on her back and lay suddenly still. She looked beautiful to me then, lying there; beautiful and hot and mad.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll get out.”

I turned and walked from the bedroom, across the living room, and out the front door. I closed the screen door gently, then went out to the truck and drove quickly away.

Four

I waited a week. The thought of losing her now had me crazy. I couldn’t think of anything but Shirley Angela. Days and nights crawled and crept. It was the longest week I’d ever spent in my life and she was with me every minute in my mind, like a ripe taunt. But if she thought I would run to her, she was wrong. This time she had to come to me. I didn’t go near her place. I lashed the tarp over the hoops above the truck-bed, and covered the TV sets and the other stuff inside with a couple of quilts. I told Pete Stallsworth to leave everything just as it was, and not to use that truck, because I was waiting for a call. I prayed she would call.

She was right about time being forever.

Now was forever. My whole life had been forever up until I met Shirley Angela. All the things I’d thought meant something, really meant nothing.

There were the years as a kid on the farm in Louisiana, watching my old man grub and get drunk and thrash around, until the old woman started getting drunk, too, so she could stand it, until he finally ran off with a fat whore who sang “Roll me over, lay me down, and do it again,” in a carnival sideshow. And along about then I ran away, maybe emulating my old man, with a girl named Tess who met a slickhaired mulatto in New Orleans and dropped me. Sixteen and mad at everybody. Working at anything I could get, taking anything I could lay my hands on. And then Ginny, making me go back to school, sweet as honey—hit by a truck and killed outright with me watching from the curb, in Memphis. Something happened to me then. I could never figure it. I didn’t give a goddamn what happened. I felt mean and lowdown. I reckoned I would take the world by the tail and kick it smack in the ass. Only it worked the other way around, all through the years of night school, the war, the drinking and the dames, the brief spell of gas station hoisting, and the cornet blowing in the jive joints, right up to the television school, and finally the store, and Grace. All the time maybe looking for Ginny. I don’t know. Maybe thinking I’d found her again in Shirley Angela.

Only knowing I’d found what I really wanted instead.

Because Shirley Angela was for me—she was mine.

Along with something else that was beginning to eat holes in me.

Shirley Angela. Just like that. And all the rest of the love-guff just a mess of words. With me, that’s how it was. You either understand or you don’t.

If you ever had it like this, you understand.

Nothing happened. Over one hundred and sixty-eight hours of complete vacuum, with me riding the hands of the clock. Just holding my breath.

Grace called twice. I hung up on her both times. She worried me. I knew she was priming herself all the time, and eventually something would happen, but I couldn’t let myself think about that. Not till I could angle something. Grace had been terrific while it lasted. She was a tall, blonde dish, and she’d been in the process of getting a divorce when I met her one evening at the store. She bought a phonograph. She looked good. We talked ourselves into a date for the next night, and after that things were underway with what you might call a bang.

She would say, “Jack, I’ve been married for five years. Believe it or not. I feel as if I’ve been dead all that time.”

“You’re not dead,” I’d say. “Take it from me.”

And she would laugh. I didn’t realize she was serious, possessive, watchful—suspicious. She was fun. In the beginning. She’d always had enough money, she still had plenty to get along with, even though she didn’t tag the ex-husband for alimony. We had a hot time for a while. I told her I went for her in a big way. I was really just trying to make her happy. She didn’t know that. I didn’t think it mattered.

It mattered.

She began to haunt me. On the phone. At the store. At the apartment. She wanted to be with me every minute. She crawled. About that time, I didn’t want to be with her at all. She wasn’t fun anymore.

“When you going to ask me to marry you?” she’d say. Only she meant it. It was all she thought of. She was neurotic, searching for the perfect husband-lover-understander. I’d played it all wrong. I told her so. I cursed her. I hit her. Nothing did any good. Sometimes she scared me, the way she acted, the wild things she said.

And lately, the phone calls, stopping me in the street. “I’ll kill myself. I mean it, Jack. You can’t treat me this way. You love me. You told me you loved me.”

Jesus! She’d been married wrong once; she would never learn.

I was at the apartment when the phone rang. I thought it was Grace again. It was Shirley Angela. It was like getting everything you’d ever wanted, all in one lump.

“I phoned the store. They finally gave me your apartment number.”

“Don’t do that again.”

“I’ve got to see you.”

“All right.” I tried to sound calm.

“It’s four-thirty now. The doctor will be here in a few minutes. I’ll come to your place.”

“No.”

Her voice was strained. “I’ve got to see you.” She paused and I didn’t speak, and she said, “You were right, Jack. Of course, you were right.”

“Yeah. I’ve got to go back to the store for a while. I won’t be free till six.”

“That’s a whole hour and a half from now.”

“One hundred and sixty-eight and a half hours, total.”

Silence.

“That doesn’t give me much time,” she said. “Doctor Miraglia said he can’t stay long tonight.”

I made no comment.

“Where shall I meet you?” she said.

“Drive out to Maximo Point, on the bay. Take the boulevard until it bears right. You’ll see a brick street to the left. Keep on that till it quits. There’s a sulphur spring down there. I’ll see you.”

“I know the place. Jack, are you angry?”

“No. I was, but I’m not anymore. Are you all right?”

“I will be.”

I didn’t have to go down to the store, and I couldn’t figure what made me tell her that. I wished I hadn’t. I wanted to see her so bad I couldn’t even think, and if the days had seemed a long while before she called, it was really beginning to stretch now.

I took the car and drove out to Maximo Point and waited. The sun hung low over the Gulf. I was parked by the sea wall under a sprawling live oak, and the late afternoon was quiet, with only the occasional distant scream of a gull. I sat there, more nervous with every minute. I heard a car.

She was driving. It was only a little after five, which told me the condition I was in. Maybe she had known I didn’t have to go to the store. The car was a new Imperial sedan, sleek and black. She rocked it to a stop beside me, ran around, opened the door of my car, and jumped in. She closed the door and sat there.

She looked straight ahead at the windshield, with her chin up a little. I didn’t say anything and she didn’t look at me. Then she spoke, her voice soft and hesitant and shaded with resignation.

“All right,” she said. “You win. You were right.”

“What do I win?”

She didn’t speak for a moment. Then she said, “It was a shock, having you tell me what I was thinking, like that. To my face.”

“You were pretty obvious.”

She sat stiffly. “I didn’t mean to be.”

Looking at her, I felt the lust crawling in me, a kind of liquid heat that spread in my loins. She was soft and