And so it was. Next time a rift opened. At first they simply tested it, to see if it was there. It was almost like a new diversion to them. But it widened, it widened. Before any words were said to confirm that it was there, Georgia felt it widen, she coldly felt it widen, though she was desperate for it to close. Did he feel the same thing? She didn’t know. He too seemed cold — pale, deliberate, glittering with some new malicious intent.
They were sitting recklessly, late at night, in Georgia’s car among the other lovers at Clover Point.
“Everybody here in these cars doing the same thing we’re doing,” Miles had said. “Doesn’t that idea turn you on?”
He had said that at the very moment in their ritual when they had been moved, last time, to speak brokenly and solemnly of love.
“You ever think of that?” he said. “I mean, we could start with Ben and Laura. You ever imagine how it would be with you and me and Ben and Laura?”
Laura was his wife, at home in Seattle. He had not spoken of her before, except to tell Georgia her name. He had spoken of Ben, in a way that Georgia didn’t like but passed over.
“What does Ben think you do for fun,” he’d said, “while he is off cruising the ocean blue?”
“Do you and Ben usually have a big time when he gets back?”
“Does Ben like that outfit as much as I do?”
He spoke as if he and Ben were friends in some way, or at least partners, co-proprietors.
“You and me and Ben and Laura,” he said, in a tone that seemed to Georgia insistently and artificially lecherous, sly, derisive. “Spread the joy around.”
He tried to fondle her, pretending not to notice how offended she was, how bitterly stricken. He described the generous exchanges that would take place among the four of them abed. He asked whether she was getting excited. She said no, disgusted. Ah, you are but you won’t give in to it, he said. His voice, his caresses grew more bullying. What is so special about you, he asked softly, despisingly, with a hard squeeze at her breasts. Georgia, why do you think you’re such a queen?
“You are being cruel and you know you’re being cruel,” said Georgia, pulling at his hands. “Why are you being like this?”
“Honey, I’m not being cruel,” said Miles, in a slippery mock-tender voice. “I’m being horny. I’m horny again is all.” He began to pull Georgia around, to arrange her for his use. She told him to get out of the car.
“Squeamish,” he said, in that same artificially and hatefully tender voice, as if he were licking fanatically at something loathsome. “You’re a squeamish little slut.”
Georgia told him that she would lean on the horn if he didn’t stop. She would lean on the horn if he didn’t get out of the car. She would yell for somebody to call the police. She did lean against the horn as they struggled. He pushed her away, with a whimpering curse such as she’d heard from him at other times, when it meant something different. He got out.
She could not believe that such ill will had erupted, that things had so stunningly turned around. When she thought of this afterward — a good long time afterward — she thought that perhaps he had acted for conscience’s sake, to mark her off from Laura. Or to blot out what he had said to her last time. To humiliate her because he was frightened. Perhaps. Or perhaps all this seemed to him simply a further, and genuinely interesting, development in lovemaking.
She would have liked to talk it over with Maya. But the possibility of talking anything over with Maya had disappeared. Their friendship had come suddenly to an end.
THE NIGHT AFTER the incident at Clover Point, Georgia was sitting on the living-room floor playing a bedtime card game with her sons. The phone rang, and she was sure that it was Miles. She had been thinking all day that he would call, he would have to call to explain himself, to beg her pardon, to say that he had been testing her, in a way, or had been temporarily deranged by circumstances that she knew nothing about. She would not forgive him immediately. But she would not hang up.
It was Maya.
“Guess what weird thing happened,” Maya said. “Miles phoned me. Your Miles. It’s okay, Raymond isn’t here. How did he even know my name?”
“I don’t know,” said Georgia.
She had told him it, of course. She had offered wild Maya up for his entertainment, or to point out what a novice at this game she herself was — a relatively chaste prize.
“He says he wants to come and talk to me,” Maya said. “What do you think? What’s the matter with him? Did you have a fight?… Yes? Oh, well, he probably wants me to persuade you to make up. I must say he picked the right night. Raymond’s at the hospital. He’s got this balky woman in labor; he may have to stay and do a section on her. I’ll phone and tell you how it goes. Shall I?”
After a couple of hours, with the children long asleep, Georgia began to expect Maya’s call. She watched the television news, to take her mind off expecting it. She picked up the phone to make sure there was a dial tone. She turned off the television after the news, then turned it on again. She started to watch a movie; she watched it through three commercial breaks without going to the kitchen to look at the clock.
At half past midnight she went out and got into her car and drove to Maya’s house. She had no idea what she would do there. And she did not do much of anything. She drove around the circular drive with the lights off. The house was dark. She could see that the garage was open and Raymond’s car was not there. The motorcycle was nowhere in sight.
She had left her children alone, the doors unlocked. Nothing happened to them. They didn’t wake up and discover her defection. No burglar, or prowler, or murderer surprised her on her return. That was a piece of luck that she did not even appreciate. She had gone out leaving the door open and the lights on, and when she came back she hardly recognized her folly, though she closed the door and turned out some lights and lay down on the living-room sofa. She didn’t sleep. She lay still, as if the smallest movement would sharpen her suffering, until she saw the day getting light and heard the birds waking. Her limbs were stiff. She got up and went to the phone and listened again for the dial tone. She walked stiffly to the kitchen and put on the kettle and said to herself the words
No. But it seemed that such a phone call would have given her a happiness that no look or word from her children could give her. Than anything could give her, ever again.
She phoned Maya before nine o’clock. As she was dialling, she thought that there were still some possibilities to pray for. Maya’s phone had been temporarily out of order. Maya had been ill last night. Raymond had been in a car accident on his way home from the hospital.
All these possibilities vanished at the first sound of Maya’s voice, which was sleepy (pretending to be sleepy?) and silky with deceit. “Georgia? Is that Georgia? Oh, I thought it was going to be Raymond. He had to stay over at the hospital in case this poor wretched woman needed a C-section. He was going to call me–”
“You told me that last night,” said Georgia.
“He was going to call me — Oh, Georgia, I was supposed to call you! Now I remember. Yes. I was supposed to call you, but I thought it was probably too late. I thought the phone might wake up the children. I thought, Oh, better just leave it till morning!”
“How late was it?”
“Not awfully. I just thought.”
“What happened?”
“What do you mean, what happened?” Maya laughed, like a lady in a silly play. “Georgia, are you in a state?”
“What happened?”
“Oh, Georgia,” said Maya, groaning magnanimously but showing an edge of nerves. “Georgia, I’m sorry. It was nothing. It was just nothing. I’ve been rotten, but I didn’t mean to be. I offered him a beer. Isn’t that what you do when somebody rides up to your house on a motorcycle? You offer him a beer. But then he came on very lordly
