Эд Макбейн - Strangers When We Meet

“Tell me,” she pleaded. “Tell me.”

Sure, he thought, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you it’s over, Maggie, finished. It’s over because I can’t understand it any more, it’s too complicated, too involved, it’s strangling me, Maggie, I can’t breathe! I know you all these months, and I haven’t begun to know you, and I’m angry and I’m sad and I want to cry and I want to fight, and I love you, I don’t know how you can do these things to me, how you can rip me up with a dagger, cut out my guts, leave me bleeding and crying and still loving you, still knowing I can’t live without you, still wanting you and needing you, goddamnit why do I need you so much, Maggie, why do I need you, you slut, you bitch, you animal, I love you, I love you.

She sat up suddenly, as if by intuition, as if she had read his thoughts and knew his mind. She yanked the wheel sharply to the right, and the car bumped over the shallow concrete rim at the side of the road, and then rolled to a stop on the grass.

He began to shake his head, but she brought her mouth very close to his lips, and her eyes glowed in the darkness, and she said, “Love me, Larry. Now!”

And he seized her to him roughly.

Lawn talk was in the air. You could smell it. It was not yet April, but lawn talk was just ready to burst from everyone’s mouth.

Felix Anders sucked secretly at the late March air.

The forsythias, encouraged by the mild weather, were banked in yellow fury around the six-room ranch he called his home. The emaciated tree on the front lawn was beginning to bud. White billowy clouds hung in the fair blue sky. Felix Anders sucked at the air, looking very much like a man who’d just returned home after the twelve o’clock Mass. He had, in fact, just come back from church. Felix considered himself a devout Catholic even though he did not believe in confession or birth control. He had made his peace with his faith, and he never ate meat on Fridays, nor did he ever miss Sunday Mass.

On this Sunday in late March he secretly sucked the balmy air into his lungs.

The model was behind Felix now. The parting had truly been a sorrowful one, worthy of a major film by a major movie company, complete with that last long heart-rending sigh, oozing with the terrible bittersweet knowledge of star-crossed impossibility. He could see the final scene now, almost as if it were already in the can and waiting for national distribution. The limpid eyes meeting, the unspoken words I’ll Always Love You . Pause. Even Though This Can Never Be . Double pause.

The model steps sorrowfully out of the Oldsmobile Felix Anders owns. For a moment her thigh winks at him, and he remembers again the finite pleasures of her body, the infinite treasures of her mind, remembers for only a fleeting instant. She walks away from him then, out of his life. He watches her sadly. He waves. Music up and under.

Felix sets the Oldsmobile in motion. He drives down a Cinemascope road lined with tall poplars into a Technicolor sunset. The words THE END, written on the wind, superimpose themselves over the car as it moves into the distance, farther, farther, farther, and is gone.

THE END

The End

The end

The end

The end

It was over.

Felix, the suburban father still wearing his blue Sunday Mass suit walked the length of his property holding the hand of his three-year-old son Bruce. He scrutinized the length and breadth of his seventy-by-a-hundred corner plot with the uncompromising eye of a patroon. He could feel spring pulsing in the air, rushing through his blood, singing in his veins. Felix Anders was ready for love again. Patroon-like, he studied his real estate.

“Brucie,” he said quietly, “spring is coming.”

Brucie, who was walking at the moment with a full diaper, nodded and repeated, “Sp’ing.”

“Stop beating your sister, Brucie,” Felix said “Love her. Spring is coming.”

“Love,” Brucie repeated.

The development seemed alive again after the siege of winter. All around him Felix could see people putting in shrubs and plants, people liming, giving their lawns a pre-seasonal mowing, putting up screens, painting fences. With faint superiority, he looked about him. He glanced at the women only briefly. Everyone in the development knew that Felix Anders was a reticently cold gentleman who was devoted to his explosive wife. Nothing in Felix’s glance contradicted this supposition. God, they look sweet, he thought. No more winter coats now, only sweaters and slacks, nice round little backsides and nice rounded breasts. God, women are sweet!

Across the street, behind the Cape Cod, he could see Don Gault working with a shovel. Felix looked in both directions before he crossed the street, somewhat disdainfully, as if he knew no vehicle would have the audacity to run him down. He walked past the Gault garage and then onto the grass to where Don was digging outside the kitchen windows. He did not say hello. Felix very rarely said hello first.

“Hi, Felix,” Don said, wielding the shovel.

It amused Felix that Larry Cole was having an affair with Don’s wife. It amused him greatly that a Tarzan-muscled he-man like Don Gault had a wife who was running around. It was with remarkable restraint that Felix did not burst out laughing in Don’s face.

“Hello there, Gault,” he said. “Digging a garden?”

“No,” Don said. “I’m putting in a patio.” He rested the shovel against his hip, and then wiped sweat from his forehead. “It sure is hot for March, isn’t it?” he said.

“Very unseasonable weather,” Felix agreed. “A concrete patio?”

“No, bricks. I’m going to lay a bed of sand, and then set the bricks in it.”

“I see,” Felix said.

The situation was rather hilarious. Felix hummed with the secret hilarity of it. He could not think of a more enjoyable situation than discussing patios with Don Gault when he knew Margaret Gault was running around with Larry. The entire concept was almost too comical to contain.

Don put the shovel down and reached into his pants pocket. Pulling out a package of cigarettes, he said, “Smoke?”

“Thank you,” Felix said. “I’m trying to cut down.”

“Live it up a little,” Don said. “Go ahead, have one.”

“No, thank you,” Felix repeated. “It’s my only weakness, and I’m really trying to cut down.”

“It takes a lot of will power,” Don said. “The temptation is always there. Does your wife smoke?”

“Yes.”

“Mine does, too. Not a lot, but there are always cigarettes in the house. It’s a great temptation.”

“Yes, I know what you mean,” Felix said. He thought about temptation, and he thought about Don Gault’s wife, and he had trouble keeping a straight face. He felt somewhat like God. The thought gave him no religious qualms. Today, on this day so close to spring, with his secret knowledge humming within him, talking to Don Gault, he felt somewhat like God.

“How is Margaret?” he asked kindly.

“Oh, just fine,” Don said. “Same as ever.”

“And Patrick?”

“Fine,” Don said. “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?”

“No, no,” Felix answered, “go right ahead.”

Don lighted the cigarette and returned the package to his pocket. “You ought to learn to relax, Felix,” he said. He did not say it unkindly, but immediately afterward he added, “Don’t take offense.”

“No offense,” Felix said, smiling benignly.

“You always seem so... tense.”

“I’m not tense at all.”

“Well, dignified then. That’s what I mean.”

Felix smiled. “I don’t see anything wrong with maintaining a little dignity, Don.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Don said. He picked up the shovel. “You should live it up more. Get to know people. You’re a hard guy to get to know.”