Charlie reached the point where he couldn’t tell if Beth ever wanted him or not. She got him, because he didn’t have the strength or the patience to turn monk. But there was none of the old smoldering response that had used to thrill his senses and reassure him of her answering passion. She was quiet and she made the minimum gestures mechanically. As he had blurted unintentionally, it scared him. Dismayed, he had tried once or twice to talk to her about it. Not knowing how to be subtle, he simply exclaimed that something was wrong and she had damn well better tell him what it was before it got worse. But Beth had given him a smirk of half amusement and half contempt that had withered his pride and driven him to silence.
So things rolled along. The business was never quite good enough to get them a bigger house or the flashy sports car Beth wanted. Cleve was never quite drunk enough to botch his job. Beth didn’t have enough love and Charlie didn’t have enough insight. And that was their life.
For Beth it was dismal. She yearned for a diversion, an escape hatch, anything. Travel, a new car, an affair even. But all she had were her boisterous children, her irate husband, and bowling twice a week with Jean Purvis. Her mood was desperate.
Things took an odd turn finally, one night when Jean and Cleve invited Beth and Charlie to a birthday party. It was for Cleve’s sister, Vega Purvis. Beth remembered Vega very well. She had met her shortly after she arrived in California, and though she had never gotten to know Vega well, she was interested in her.
Vega was a model. She was a very tall girl, at least as tall as Beth herself, and excruciatingly thin. Throughout her twenties she had worked at modeling in Chicago and then suddenly came down deathly sick with tuberculosis, ulcers, and Beth had never known what else. Everything. It had meant the temporary finish to her working days and a long trip to the West Coast, where she went directly to the City of Hope for help. She was there for over two years.
Vega had sacrificed a lung to her tuberculosis, a part of her stomach to her ulcer, and perhaps more of herself to other plagues. And still she was stunningly beautiful. Still she smoked two or three packs of cigarettes a day—something that struck Beth as insane but rather wonderful, as if Vega had taken a bead on Death and spat in his eye. Nobody else would have gotten away with it. Vega brushed it off, laughing. “The first thing I asked for when I came out of the anesthetic,” she said, “was a cigarette. The doctor gave me one of his. Tasted marvelous.”
Vega had deep-set eyes, almost black, and fine handsome features, and she was witty and interesting. She was running her own model agency now on Pasadena’s fashionable South Lake Street—mostly teenage girls, with one or two older women who took the course for “self-improvement.” Or, perhaps, self-admiration.
Beth recalled the night she had first met Vega. They waited for her, Cleve and Jean and Beth and Charlie, in a small restaurant near her studio. Vega came late. It was necessary to her sense of well-being that she arrive late wherever she went. So Charlie and Beth and the Purvises waited for her in a small booth in the Everglades, where everything was chic and expensive.
Vega swept in at last, forty minutes late, wrapped in a red velvet cloak, and she was so striking that Beth had stared a little at her. She sat down and ordered a martini—double, dry, twist of lemon—before she greeted anybody.
She had a lovely face but it was, like the rest of her, painfully thin, with the fine bones sharply outlined. It soon became apparent why she didn’t put on weight. Vega rarely ate anything. She drank her dinner, though they had ordered her a steak. She seemed to depend on booze for most of her calories. Cleve persuaded her to take one bite, which she did, promising to finish the rest later—but of course she never did. Charlie and Cleve finally split the meat and ate it, but the rest was wasted.
Charlie was interested in her too. Beautiful women interest almost any man without making much of an effort.
“What do you do here, Vega?” he asked her. “Cleve said something about modeling.”
“I teach modeling,” she said, accepting a fourth drink daintily from the waiter. “Women are my business. Men are my pleasure,” she added, smiling languidly.
Charlie smiled back, unaware of the silly look on his face. Beth saw it, but it didn’t alarm her. It struck her funny, and before she had time to think about it, she was laughing at him. And suddenly the fun and flavor went out of the game for him, and he turned his attention to his meal. Beth saw his embarrassment and rebuked herself.
I should have been quiet, damn it, she thought. I should have let him have his fling. Such an innocent little fling. What’s wrong with me? But it was too late. Charlie was carefully casual with Vega the rest of the evening. It didn’t console him much, when he got home that night, to check his muscles in front of the mirror or stretch to his full six feet two. He was baffled and shamed by his wife, who laughed at even his normal masculine reactions. He was almost defeated by his inability to make Beth’s life mean something. On Vega’s birthday night they waited, as before, at the Everglades for her entrance, drinking whiskey and waters, and talking. Beth felt warm and relaxed after the first two drinks and she squeezed Charlie’s arm. It caused him some concern, instead of reassuring him, because it was unexpected.
“Good whiskey?” he
