“I don’t know why I said that anyway,” she said. “What I really want is someone to hold me while I fall asleep, share my tears with me, hurt when I hurt, laugh when I laugh. I want someone to believe in me, not laugh at my fantasies.” She looked back over her shoulder at him. “Is that so very much to ask of somebody, Kee?”
“No, it’s a modest request.”
“Don’t you want that?”
“I did.”
“And you lost all that?”
“I stopped caring.”
“Why?”
“When I lost her . . - hell, I don’t know. . . maybe it was never quite as good as I remember it.”
He stopped and sorted through his darkest thoughts, questioning his memory, as he had done many times in the past, always with the same conclusion.
“No,” he went on, “that’s not true. It was, it was a very fine time in my life. It just didn’t last very long. Maybe we all have just so much happiness doled out to us and we used ours up and now we’re paying for it, except the price she’s paying is. . . much
· . . too high.”
“I don’t believe that. I don’t believe God’s that cruel. I haven’t given up yet.”
“You mean with old Turkey?”
“The hell with old Turkey,” she snapped. “I got over him a long time ago.”
“Where’s he now?”
“He has a place in the Dakota, that big gloomy building on the West Side.”
“1 know the place.”
“1 guess that’s where he entertains his show girls,” she said bitterly. “I hear he likes two or three at a time.”
“Are you divorced yet?”
“Twenty-four more days. I mark each one off on my calendar.” She stopped to catch her breath. Tears crept into the corners of her eyes and she tried to blink them away. “I tried so hard, Kee. I tried to be a good wife and make him happy. It was never enough. Lyle never gets enough of anything. His appetite for everything is insatiable. Thank God we don’t have children.”
“That little freak,” Keegan said harshly. “He never had anything going for him. He was a cheat in school—and a liar. He used to lie all the time.”
“Oh, he’s very good at that.”
Keegan tried to soften the dark tone of the conversation. “Hell, he wasn’t any good at it at all, he just lied so much people got tired of calling him down.”
And she laughed and nodded. “Yes! You’re right! That’s exactly what people do.”
“What was it about old Turkey . . . ?“
“Oh God, I don’t even know anymore. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and wonder the same thing. And then I think . . . maybe it’s me, maybe I didn’t
“Stop that.”
“No, I do..
She stared at him with moist eyes. “There’s another thing about it. Sometimes I think. . . we had three years together and I think, there ought to be
“I have a partner named Nayles out on the West Coast. When we were in the war together, he used to say, ‘Pal, we come in buckass naked and we go out buckass naked and everything in between is gravy.’ Maybe that’s the right attitude. Maybe we ought to make the best of whatever comes to us.”
“You’re not doing that.”
She looked up at him and her stare seemed to come from a very private place deep within her; a warm, longing, loving look that pierced Keegan’s armor like a lance.
“Oh, Kee, what’s happening to the world? What’s happening to all of us?”
His anger was like a coiled snake he had kept trapped inside him and suddenly it burst free. It was not a shrill outburst but his fists were clenched and he spoke in a voice that was low and full of rage.
“What’s happening is that we’re living in a world full of people who want us to think the way they do and act the way they do and believe the way they do and if we don’t, if we don’t conform, they destroy us. And you know the irony? They’re always in the minority. We ignore them until we wake up one morning and there isn’t any
“You really think that could happen here?”
He nodded emphatically. “There was a moment, Vannie, when I literally had to run for my life. I mean I literally
