James Ellroy - The Best American Noir of the Century

The fear Mark had put into her had seeped and oozed into all parts of her; she not only feared fear, she even feared rescue from fear.

“I don’t want to make a move that’s too sudden,” she said in a smothered voice.

“I’ll be standing by, when you want to and when you do.”

And on that note they left each other. For one more time.

On Friday he was sitting there waiting for her at their regular table, smoking a cigarette. And another lay out in the ashtray, finished. And another. And another.

She came up behind him and touched him briefly but warmly on the shoulder, as if she were afraid to trust herself to speak.

He turned and greeted her animatedly. “Don’t tell me you’ve been in there that long! I thought you hadn’t come in yet. I’ve been sitting out here twenty minutes, watching the door for you.”

Then when she sat down opposite him and he got a good look at her face, he quickly sobered.

“I couldn’t help it. I broke down in there. I couldn’t come out any sooner. I didn’t want everyone in the place to see me, the way I was.”

She was still shaking irrepressibly from the aftermath of long-continued sobs.

“Here, have one of these,” he offered soothingly. “May make you feel better — “ He held out his cigarettes toward her.

“No!” she protested sharply, when she looked down and saw what it was. She recoiled so violently that her whole chair bounced a little across the floor. He saw the back of her hand go to the upper part of her breast in an unconscious gesture of protection, of warding off.

His face turned white when he understood the implication. White with anger, with revulsion. “So that’s it,” he breathed softly. “My God, oh, my God.”

They sat on for a long while after that, both looking down without saying anything. What was there to say? Two little cups of black coffee had arrived by now—just as an excuse for them to stay there.

Finally he raised his head, looked at her, and put words to what he’d been thinking. “You can’t go back anymore, not even once. You’re out of the house and away from it now, so you’ve got to stay out. You can’t go near it again, not even one more time. One more night may be one night too many. He’ll kill you one of these nights — he will even if he doesn’t mean to. What to him is just a thrill, an excitement, will take away your life. Think about that — you’ve got to think about that.”

“I have already,” she admitted. “Often.”

“You don’t want to go to the police?”

“I’m ashamed.” She covered her eyes reluctantly with her hand for a moment. “I know I’m not the one who should be, he’s the one. But I am nevertheless. I couldn’t bear to tell it to an outsider, to put it on record, to file a complaint — it’s so intimate. Like taking off all your clothes in public. I can hardly bring myself even to have you know about it. And I haven’t told you everything — not everything.”

He gave her a shake of the head, as though he knew.

“If I try to hide out in Pittsfield, he’ll find me sooner or later — it’s not that big a place — and come after me and force me to come back, and either way there’ll be a scandal. And I don’t want that. I couldn’t stand that. The newspapers …”

All at once, before they quite knew how it had come about, or even realized that it had come about, they were deep in the final plans, the final strategy and staging that they had been drawing slowly nearer and nearer to all these months. Nearer to with every meeting, with every look and with every word. The plans for her liberation and her salvation.

He took her hands across the table.

“No, listen. This is the way, this is how. New York. It has to be New York; he won’t be able to get you back; it’s too big; he won’t even be able to find you. The company’s holding a business conference there on Tuesday, with each of the regional offices sending a representative the way they always do. I was slated to go, long before this came up. I was going to call you on Monday before I left. But what I’m going to do now is to leave ahead of time, tonight, and take you with me.”

He raised one of her hands and patted it encouragingly.

“You wait for me here in the restaurant. I have to go back to the office, wind up a few things, then I’ll come back and pick you up — shouldn’t take me more than half an hour.”

She looked around her uneasily. “I don’t want to sit here alone. They’re already giving me knowing looks each time they pass, the waitresses, as if they sense something’s wrong.”

“Let them, the hell with them,” he said shortly, with the defiance of a man in the opening stages of love.

“Can’t you call your office from here? Do it over the phone?”

“No, there are some papers that have to be signed — they’re waiting for me on my desk.”

“Then you run me back to the house and while you’re doing what you have to at the office I’ll pick up a few things; then you can stop by for me and we’ll start out from there.”

“Isn’t that cutting it a little close?” he said doubtfully. “I don’t want you to go back there.” He pivoted his wristwatch closer to him. “What time does he usually come home on Fridays?”

“Never before ten at night.”

He said the first critical thing he’d ever said to her. “Just like a girl. All for the sake of a hairbrush and a cuddly negligee you’re willing to stick your head back into that house.”

“It’s more than just a hairbrush,” she pointed out. “I have some money there. It’s not his, it’s mine. Even if this friend from my days in Rome — the one I’ve spoken to you about — even if she takes me in with her at the start, I’ll need some money to tide me over until I can get a job and find a place of my own. And there are other things, like my birth certificate, that I may need later on; he’ll never give them up willingly once I leave.”

“All right,” he gave in. “We’ll do it your way.”

Then just before they got up from the table that had witnessed such a change in both their lives, they gave each other a last look. A last, and yet a first one. And they understood each other.

She didn’t wait for him to say it, to ask it. There is no decorum in desperation, no coyness in a crisis. She knew it had been asked unsaid, anyway. “I want to rediscover the meaning of gentle love. I want to lie in your bed, in your arms. I want to be your wife.”

He took hold of her left hand, raised the third finger, stripped off the wedding band and in its place firmly guided downward a massive fraternity ring that had been on his own hand until that very moment. Heavy, ungainly, much too large for her — and yet everything that love should be.

She put it to her lips and kissed it.

They were married now.

The emptied ring rolled off the table and fell on the floor, and as they moved away his foot stepped on it, not on purpose, and distorted it into something warped, misshapen, no longer round, no longer true. Like what it had stood for.

He drove her back out to the house and dropped her off at the door, and they parted almost in silence, so complete was their understanding by now, just three muted words between them: “About thirty minutes.”

It was dark now, and broodingly sluggish. Like something supine waiting to spring, with just the tip of its tail twitching. Leaves stood still on the trees. An evil green star glinted in the black sky like a hostile eye, like an evil spying eye.

His car had hummed off; she’d finished and brought down a small packed bag to the ground floor when the phone rang. It would be Garry, naturally, telling her he’d finished at the office and was about to leave.