“I don’t want the damn drink. Damn the drinks. Let’s go.”
“No,” she said and smiled at him. “You don’t have to drink yours, but I’m going to drink mine.” She drank half of it and leaned toward him. “How do you feel now, Charlie?”
“Beth, you damn little witch,” he said.
“Tell me,” she begged. “I want to know.”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but I’m going to tear this God damn table apart if we don’t get out of here right now.”
She patted his arm. “Drink your drink, dear. Maybe the table will go away.”
“Beth,” he pleaded. He trembled again and pulled her hard against him.
“Charlie, what will the neighbors think? I mean, we have to think of our reputations. I mean, my God, here we are in public, and everything.” She felt giddily funny. Everything was funny. Charlie started to take her drink away from her, but she snatched it back and finished it, and some spilled on her blouse. “Charlie, darling, look what I’ve done. Wipe it off.” She smiled at him like a malevolent siren. “Wipe it off, darling,” she whispered.
He looked at the drops of liquor melting slowly into her cotton blouse and swallowed hard.
“You’re sweating, Charlie,” she said.
“Beth, we’ve got to go—”
“Oh, no!” she said. “Charlie, you can’t.”
“Can’t, be damned. I have to.”
“Your drink. You can’t leave your drink.”
He picked it up and drank it all down, and set the glass hard against the table top. “All right, let’s go.” He got up holding his coat and pulled her after him. He put an arm around her to steady her, and guided her out of the bar.
They walked toward the car.
“Charlie, you’re wonderful when you’re drunk,” she said. “You’re wonderful when you’re excited. I want to kiss you, darling.”
He propelled her sternly toward the car and when they reached it he sighed with relief.
“Can we go back to the apartment?” she whispered when they pulled away from the curb.
“No. Mitch is there. We’ll go out to the motel on Forty-five. Out near the air base.”
“Anywhere,” she said. She put her head down in his lap.
“Charlie, how long will it be? How far do we have to go, darling?”
“Beth, don’t ask me questions. I’ve got all I can do to drive.”
He reached down with one hand and tore her blouse open. Beth chuckled at him and heard the buttons chink on the floor. At stoplights he pulled her up and kissed her violently, nearly crushing her. The tires screamed when he rounded a corner and he drove a wild eighteen miles to the motel.
He pulled Beth out of the car and into the room so fast that he had her laughing again, dizzy and wild and hot, like carousel music. He almost tore her clothes off her. He didn’t even turn the light on. She fell back on the bed laughing, teasing him, pestering him, refusing to help with her clothes.
“Oh, Beth,” he said, and his voice was rough. “Beth, God, I need you. God, I wish I understood you! Oh, darling….” His groan thrilled her. She surrendered passionately to him and for a while she forgot her pain. For a while there wasn’t any pain, there was only a heady purifying madness. She let her mind empty as her body was fulfilled.
For a long time they lay in each other’s arms, half asleep, murmuring to each other, absorbed with each other.
“Feel better, darling?” he said. “Or do you want to go out and get drunk again?” He laughed against her shoulder.
“No. Don’t have to…. This’ll last forever. Oh, Charlie, I don’t know what I’d do without you. I just don’t know.”
“I thought I caused all your troubles.”
“Oh, let’s not talk about troubles. Please….”
“Can’t you tell me about it, honey?”
“Not now. Later. Please, later.”
He lay still for a minute and then he said, with his lips moving softly against her skin, “What am I going to do with you, Beth? You worry me, darling. I don’t know how I’m going to leave you. I guess this is the first vacation I haven’t looked forward to since I started college. I’m—almost afraid to leave you, Beth. I wish to hell I knew what was the matter.”
“Nothing’s the matter. Nothing. Not now.” She cuddled against him.
He stroked her hair. “I wish I could believe that, honey.”
After a while they got up. It was almost nine o’clock. They were slow and sleepy getting into their clothes and often they had to stop and hold each other. Every time they separated, Beth felt the pain a little more. It was coming back, little by ominous little.
“We’ll stop on the way back and get something to eat,” he said. “You must be starving.”
Beth felt herself, as if that might clarify the matter, and said, “I don’t know.”
They stopped at a drive-in on the outskirts of town and got a couple of hamburgers and some coffee.
“Well,” he said, “did you get Laura straightened out?”
“Straightened out?”
“Wasn’t she giving you a hard time? Emmy said something—I don’t know.”
“Oh, she’s just temperamental. She’s just—I don’t know. Let’s not talk about Laura.”
He was silent for a minute, eating his sandwich, and then he said, “Why didn’t she want you to go out with me?”
“Oh—she had a crush on you. That’s all.” The bread and meat stuck suddenly as her throat went dry with alarm.
“No, she didn’t.”
“She did, darling. Anyway, how do you know she didn’t?”
“Oh, hell, I don’t know. I can tell. Can’t you tell when someone has a crush on you?”
“Not always.”
“Well, I can. And Laura didn’t.”
“Well, she did, Charlie. I talked to her. We—sort of had it all out.”
“Why was this so hard to tell me?”
“It wasn’t. It’s not hard. I’m telling you.”
“The last time I saw you you couldn’t. It was so damn difficult you couldn’t even think about it.”
Beth forced herself to swallow; she was beginning to feel edgy with anxiety. “Oh, well—I hadn’t talked to Laura, then. I didn’t have a chance. I didn’t want to say anything until I talked to
