Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [246]
“Thee knows it is,” Susan said.
His silhouette changed; his face had turned toward her. “That’s the first time you ever thee’d me.”
“It’s the way I often think of thee.”
“Is it?”
“Does thee doubt it?”
“Then you renounce too easily,” he said through his teeth.
A wandering dog of a night wind came in off the sagebrush mesa carrying a bar of band music, and laid it on her doorstep like a bone. Her skin was pebbled with gooseflesh. “Not easily,” she said with a catch of the breath. “Not easily.”
“Then come with me!”
“Come with you?” she said in a tiny strangled voice. “Where?”
“Anywhere. Tepetitlán, if you like. There are always jobs for an engineer in Mexico. I know people, I could get something. I’ll get you an estancia where you can have the things you ought to have. You can be the lady you ought to be. In another country, nobody’s going to . . .”
“Frank, Frank, what are you asking? Some sort of disgraceful elopement?”
“Disgraceful? Is that what you’d call it?”
“The world would.”
“Who cares about the world? Do you? Do you care about Boise?”
“That’s different,” she said. “What about the children?”
“Ollie’s set. The girls are young.”
Her laugh was wire-edged. In her own ears it sounded like a screech. “So they wouldn’t understand about their change of fathers?”
In his silence there was something tense and sullen and explosive.
“What about their father?” Susan said. “Would you do that to your best friend?”
“For you I’d do it to anybody. Not because I’d like it. Because I can’t help myself.”
“Oh, oh,” she said, and took her face in her hands, and laughed through her fingers. “Even if I were that reckless, what would the world say to a woman who would leave a bankrupt promoter for his unemployed assistant, and jump with her children from poverty to pure uncertainty?”
“Is it money that holds you back?” he said. She heard the sneer, and then the soft spat of the gloves being slapped into his palm. “I’ll go out and get some. Give me three months. I’ll come back for you, or send for you.”
“And meantime I should live with Oliver, planning all the time to leave him? I live enough of a lie as it is. It isn’t money, you know it isn’t. I only said that to . . .”
“To what?”
“Frank . . .”
“Susan.”
His shadow moved, his boot hit the tiles, he reached a long arm. His fingers closed around her bare foot.
Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed, and betray others. It was probably touch, in some office or hallway, or in my own hospital room while I snored away the anesthetic and dreamed of manglings and dismemberments, that betrayed Ellen Ward–an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands, those surgeon’s hands laid on her shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lied like a thief, that took, not gave, that wanted, not offered, and that awoke, not pacified. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact. And maybe pure accident, maybe she didn’t know she had been waiting. Or had that all been going on behind my back for a long time? So far as I knew, or know, she had no more than met him at a couple of dinner parties before I was referred to him for the amputation.
Perhaps pure accident, perhaps an opportunity or willingness that both recognized at the first touch, and I absolutely unaware. There is a Japanese story called Insects of Various Kinds in which a spider trapped between the sliding panes of a window lies there inert, motionless, apparently lifeless, for many months, and then in spring, when a maid moves the window for a few seconds to clean it, springs once and is gone. Did Ellen Ward live that sort of trapped life? Released by the first inadvertent opportunity, was she? Seduced because she was waiting for the chance to be?