Well, she thought, laying the note on the counter, who can blame her? I wish to hell I could get away from all this so easily. Maybe I should get my paints and brushes out of the attic. How long will it be till Paul gets here? God, I can hardly wait to sign the papers and to see the last, the very last of Lou Archer!
She’d wanted Paul to stay here last flight, but he wouldn’t. “We don’t have to go through the rigmarole of declaring him legally dead now, darling,” he’d told her. “You can simply get a divorce and take everything but his moustache. That, too, if you want it. I’ll draw up the papers tonight, and I’ll bring them over tomorrow as soon as I’ve gotten my afternoon business out of the way. Besides—if I stay the night, he might get the smartass idea of filing a countersuit of some kind, and maybe charging us with adultery. It wouldn’t be more than a joke, in view of his track record, but it would be a complication, and we don’t need any more complications, do we?”
They didn’t, but she had missed him, last night, and she had needed him. Someone to hold her in his arms all night long, to tell her it would be okay. Well, she’d have him tonight. Even if it did embarrass Sheila. Oh, maybe they’d all get drunk. Maybe Paul could find a date for Sheila and they could have a party to celebrate getting rid of Lou. Caron sipped more slowly at her coffee, brightening. The world was beginning to take on a rosier glow.
“Mind if I have a cup?” someone asked, and she whirled, spilling coffee on the floor. It was Lou, shirtless. His hairy chest was broad and tanned. His moustache glistened. She really hated that moustache. He’d not been bald when they were married, but he’d not had that God awful thing either. He had really filled out in the last seven years; muscled where he used to be flabby, thick where he was once thin. He looked more like a lumberjack or some other, kind of really macho character. He was more like a seasoned truck driver than like the assistant professor of English he’d once been. Even his voice was different. He had a street twang to his talk, not the cultivated tones she’d encountered first as his student, then as his wife. First as his student, then as his wife.
(Saxon found herself wishing he had really died during his seven year absence. Maybe, she thought, maybe this is the dream. I’m all tense and nervous because the court proceedings are coming up, and I took a nap and dreamed that Lou had really come back. When I do wake up Paul will be kissing me hello and he’ll have the court decree in his hand and I’ll be a widow instead of a deserted wife, and he and Sheila and I will split a magnum or two of champagne, and… It wasn’t a dream. It was real. His hand brushed hers and she knew it was really real. A fucking mess. And she was in the middle of it, right up to her ass.
“I wouldn’t give you an ice cube if you were burning at the stake.” She picked up the coffee urn, dumped it into the sink. “Swim down the pipes and get some,” she suggested acidly.
He laughed. She hated that new laugh, booming and hearty. “You’re hostile, Caron. Spunky, too. I like it. You’ve changed a lot over the last few years. Want to see the picture I carry in my wallet? You, as you used to be? No? I don’t blame you. Jesus, Saxon, I can’t understand what I ever saw in you then. You were a dog, you know that? A dumb little dog.”
“Fuck you. Up the ass.”
“Did you ever wonder why I left?” he pursued. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of an answer. “Well, it was you, partly… I mean, you were a stone fucking drag. A dishrag in bed. I wasn’t much better, I guess. My nose in a book all the time. My magnum opus. Keats and the Romantic Revolution. I can remember two lines from ’Grecian Urn’. Forgotten all the rest.”
She started to move past him. “I wish you’d also forgotten the address of this house.” He thrust out one arm, blocking her way. She edged to the other direction, but he thrust out his other arm. “Wait a Goddamned minute,” Caron said angrily. Her back was against the kitchen cabinet. She couldn’t move forward, nor to the sides. He was looking down at her, smiling under his moustache. She hadn’t really remembered him as so tall. Had he grown? Or had she forgotten?
“No, you wait,” he said. “I woke up one morning and I was thirty-one years old and I was trapped. I had money, but what good was money doing me? I had a job and a career and they didn’t matter a fart in a hailstorm. I was a paunchy nothing, sick of my life. So I said, fuck it. I’m getting out. And that’s what I did. I got out. Be honest, Caron. Did you ever really miss me?”
She shook her head. “Not once,” she said. It was half true. There was a time when she, had thought she loved him, or they’d never have been married. But it had passed. They had nothing now, nothing except a soon-to- be severed bond.
“Interested in where I’ve been?” She shook her head again. He leaned in closer and she shrank back. She felt like a rat in a trap. She could smell the masculinity of him. He’d never smelled like a man before, but he did now. She tried to sink down, slide under his arms to freedom, but he sank with her. “I’ve been everywhere,” he said.
“Europe, Asia, Africa. I’ve done construction work, been a stunt driver in low budget movies ran a chain of massage parlors in Arizona. I’ve grown. A lot. Not only outside, but inside, too, where it counts. And the last year or so I’ve been thinking. About us. I wondered what you were doing, what you were thinking, you know?”
“No, and I don’t care either!” Caron snarled, pulling her dressing gown shut. It had fallen open without warning and she’d been all too aware that his eyes were momentarily taking in the sight of her pink nightie. Thin, almost transparent, a gift from Paul. Nothing that Lou had any right to look at, to get cheap thrills from. She set her lip and pushed at him. Hard. As hard as she could. Christ! He had a body like a piece of worked iron! She rocked back, unable to move him, and his hand came in, seized her wrist. “Aaaaahhhh!” she said, rising onto tiptoes.
“You’ve grown a lot, too, Caron,” he said. “Unless my eyes deceive me, you’ve turned into a woman since the last time I saw you. I can see it now, the way your eyes sparkle. You’re afraid, but you’re not a coward. You’ll fight me, even if you know you’ll lose. I can see it in the way you move, too, the way you carry your body. You’ve filled out a little since I was home last. Almost thirty, starting to bloom—you’re at your prime, Caron, and I like it. Are you shacking that guy, Paul? Maybe figure to make it permanent once you’ve gotten rid of me?” He twisted her wrist, not roughly, but enough to give her the message. “Well, baby, before you make any rash decisions, maybe you should try out all the angles. Know what I mean?”
“Don’t know and don’t fucking care!” she spat. His face clouded momentarily and his other hand came in. He cuffed her across the face, not brutally, but hard, very hard. No one had ever struck Caron Archer in her adult life and she was shocked. Her dressing gown fell open as she slumped, and when she reached to close it, he caught her other wrist and held her up.
“Don’t be shy, kid. I’ve seen it all before. I used to own it. But I think…” and he tilted his head, eyeing the revelation of her body through the sheer pink nightie, “I think the property values have gone up a little since I was the tenant.”
“If you don’t let go of me right now, you motherfucker, I’ll…”
“You’ll what?” he wondered innocently, just before he grabbed the neck of Caron’s pink nightie and tipped it downward, savagely, tearing the flimsy garment to shreds while she screamed and kicked and went beet-red. She tried to double up, to deny him the cheap peek at her bare body, but he pulled on her hand and, she thought he was going to jerk her arm out of its socket. “Ohmygod, stopppppp…”
“Good tan,” he admired. “I was hoping you’d be tan all over. Jesus, I really hate those pukey white places where chicks are afraid to take off the bikinis and let it all get sunkissed. Golden tits, Caron. Sweet and golden.” He touched them. “Firm, too. And look at the nipples. Little cherries, aren’t they? Mind if I tickle them a little? Of course you don’t mind?” And he laughed, and his hand stroked across her nips. She moaned, and squirmed and sputtered, but there was no way she could get loose, not with that steely hand of his clamped onto her wrist. Her nipples stiffened in fear. What the bloody hell had gotten into him? Did he think he could take a walk, stay away for seven years, then come back and pick up where he’d left off?
“I’ll see you in prison,” she said. “For attempted rape.”
He laughed heartily. “Attempted? Who said I was finished? Anyway, a husband can’t rape his own wife. And as far as the law is concerned, we’re still husband and wife. The little separation doesn’t change it one damned bit. Listen—do you think this is easy on me? It’s hard, Caron, and getting harder. Feel.” And with that, he ground himself against her, his jeans scraping her bare belly, and she could feel it, his cock, starting to bulge inside his pants. She screamed. For Sheila, for Paul, for Jesus. For anyone to come help her.
But no one did, and she didn’t really expect it. Sheila was at the other end of the island, and the only person around, besides Lou and herself, was that blonde tramp of his. Hadn’t he said something about operating a massage parlor? A glorified pimp, in other words. And that little bitch looked as if she’d stepped right out of a massage parlor. Probably a dingy one. She tried to think about that, and not about the fact that Lou was eagerly stroking her naked body, dragging her across the floor kicking and protesting.
They stood in the middle of the kitchen. He jerked her wrist and she snapped upright. Lou was grinning. His
