walk away before the inner rigidity broke apart).
Besides, I really didn’t need them to be elected congressional representative from my district. The Holland name and my father’s reputation would assure almost any member of my family a political position if he wanted it. Also, people still remembered when I returned from the war as a wounded hospital corpsman, dressed in Marine tropicals with a walking cane, an ex-P.O.W. who had resisted brainwashing for thirty-two months while other American troops were signing confessions, informing on each other, and defecting to the Chinese.
Finally, my Republican opponent was a seedy racist, so fanatical even in his business dealings that his insurance agency failed. At different times he had belonged to the John Birch and Paul Revere societies, the Independent Million, the White Citizens League, and the Dixiecrat Party. He was a mean and obnoxious drunk, a bully toward his wife and children, and I don’t know why the Republicans let him run, except for the fact that he could always raise money from fools like himself and they hadn’t won an election in DeWitt since Reconstruction, anyway.
Verisa had taken a five-room suite with a cocktail bar, deep rugs, oil paintings on the walls, potted rubber plants, and a porch that overlooked the swimming pool far below. The porter set my suitcase down and closed the door behind me. I could see the anger in Verisa’s eyes. She sat on the couch in a white evening gown, her legs crossed tightly, with the tip of one high-heeled shoe pointed into the coffee table. Her auburn hair was brushed to a metallic shine, and her skin looked as bloodless and smooth as marble. If I had been closer to her I could have smelled the touch of perfume behind her ears, the powdered breasts, the hinted scent of her sex, a light taste of gin on her breath. She looked at me briefly, then turned her eyes away and lit a cigarette. The toe of the shoe flicked momentarily into a carved design in the side of the table. She was always able to hold her anger in well. She had learned part of that at Randolph-Macon and the rest from living with me. She could reduce flying rage to a hot cigarette ash or a few whispered and rushed words in the corner of a cocktail party, or maybe one burst of heat after we were home; but the pointed flick of the shoe was a fleshy bite into my genitals for seven years of marriage, broken young-girl dreams, her embarrassment when I brought oil-field workers or soldiers from Fort Sam Houston to the country club, my drunken discussions in the middle of the night about my Korean War guilt, and for the stoic and futile resignation she had adopted, out of all her social disappointments, in hopes of becoming the wife of a Texas congressman on his way to the Senate and that opulent world of power that goes far beyond any of the things you can buy or destroy with money.
“Hack, don’t you give a goddamn?” she said quietly, still looking straight ahead.
“What did I miss?”
“A day of my making excuses for you, and right now I’m rather sick of it.”
“Lunch by the pool with the Dallas aristocracy can’t be that awful.”
“I’m not in a flippant mood, Hack. I don’t enjoy apologizing or lying for you, and I don’t like sitting three hours by myself with boorish businesspeople.”
“Those are the cultured boys with the money. The fellows who oil all the wheels and make Frankenstein run properly.”
I went to the bar and poured a double shot of whiskey over ice. It clicked pleasantly on the edge of the afternoon drunk, and I felt even more serene in the sexual confidence that I always had toward Verisa after whoring.
“I don’t know where you’ve been, but I suspect it was one of your Okie motel affairs.”
“I had to meet R. C. Richardson in Austin.”
“How much do you pay them? Do they go down on you? That’s what they call it in the trade, isn’t it?”
“It’s something like that.”
“They must be lovely girls. Do they perform any other special things for you?”
“Right now R.C.’s working on a deal to patent hoof-and-mouth disease. He has federal contracts for Vietnam that run in millions.”
“Your girlfriends probably have had some nice diseases of their own.”
“Let it go, Verisa.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t say anything to you? Is that it? I should spend a day of congenial conversation with people who chew on toothpicks, and then meet you pleasantly at the door after you return from screwing a Mexican whore.”
Something inside me flinched at her accuracy. I poured a short drink into the bottom of the glass.
“I bet you’ve gone to bed with me, not knowing whether they had given you one of their diseases,” she said.
She was really tightening the iron boot now.
“Do you want a highball? I’m going to change clothes.”
“Oh Christ, you’ve probably done it,” she said, and put her fingers over her mouth.
“I never did that to you.”
“You probably don’t even remember. You have to wait two weeks to know, don’t you?”
“You’re letting it walk away with you.” But she was right. I didn’t remember.
“It happened to a girl I knew in college, but she was a dumpy thing who did it in the backseats of cars with Marines and sailors. I didn’t believe it ever happened with your husband.”
“You’re deliberately upsetting yourself,” I said.
“I wonder that you didn’t give me sulfa tablets.”
I fixed her a drink with a squeeze of lemon and set it on the table in front of her.
“I’m sorry that you got strung out today,” I said. “I thought Bailey would take you to lunch if I didn’t make it.”
“Tell me if you really did it to me.”
“Look, it was a shitty day for you. I should have been here to eat lunch with those bastards, or I should have called Bailey and told him to take care of it. But I’m going to change clothes now. We should go downstairs in a few minutes.”
“You must have a very special clock to go by. It starts to work correctly when you feel the corner at your back.”
“You ought to drink your highball.”
“Why don’t you drink it? It makes you more electric and charming in public,” she said.
“You’ve gotten it out pretty far in a short time.”
“I might stretch it out so far that you ache.”
“Isn’t this just spent effort? If you want to believe that you’ve won the ball game in the ninth inning, go ahead. Or maybe you would like me to kiss your ass in apology.”
“You’ve done that without a need for apologizing. An analyst would have a wonderful time with you.”
“I won’t go into embarrassing descriptions, but as I recall you enjoyed every little piece of it.”
“Yes, I remember those sweet experiences. You tried to enact all the things you had learned in a Japanese whorehouse while you slobbered about two boys who died in a Chinese prison camp.”
“You better shut it off in a hurry.”
“What was the boy’s name from San Angelo and the Negro sergeant from Georgia?”
“You don’t listen when I tell you something, do you?”
“It’s just a little bit of recall from things you brought up. Didn’t you say they were buried in a latrine? In your words, to lend more American fertilizer to the Korean rice crop.”
“Stop trying to fuck me over, Verisa.”
“Are you going to hit me? That would make a perfect punctuation mark in my day.”
“Just ease up on the batter a little bit.”
“Don’t walk away, Hack. If you blow this for us, I’ll divorce you and sue for the home. Then I’ll repay you in the most fitting way I can think of. I’ll cover that historical cemetery of yours with concrete.”
I took the bottle of whiskey and my glass from the bar and slammed the bedroom door behind me. I could feel the anger beating in my head and the veins swelling in my throat. I seldom became angry about anything, but this time she had reached inside me hard and had gotten a good piece between her nails. I drank out of the bottle twice and started to change clothes. My face was flushed with heat in the mirror. I kicked my trousers against the wall and pulled off my shirt, stripping the buttons. I stood in my underwear and had another drink, this time with measured sips. The whiskey began to flatten out inside me, and I felt a single drop of perspiration run down off an
